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Thursday, July 23, 2026
Sue Coe: Paintings, Drawings & Prints A pencil is cheap and can be carried anywhere, behind an ear, along with a scrap of paper. Art can happen, function as visual journalism, a record. I draw every day. If you stand on any street corner for twelve hours making a drawing every ten minutes you are recording social and political life in the way of a witness.
“Work is finding yourself alone at the track when the weather kept everyone else indoors. Work is pushing through the pain and crappy first drafts and prototypes. It is ignoring whatever plaudits others are getting, and more importantly, ignoring whatever plaudits you may be getting. Because there is work to be done. Work doesn’t want to be good. It is made so, despite the headwind.” ― Ryan Holiday, Ego Is the Enemy
Wholegrain Pumpkin Buttermilk Muffins
https://totaste.com/recipe/pumpkin-muffins/
Whole Wheat Pumpkin Muffins
This is a variation of our whole wheat muffins base recipe.
These easy whole wheat pumpkin muffins use one full can of pumpkin, so
they are extra moist AND you won't be stuck with an awkward leftover
amount of pumpkin!
Ingredients
- 1 ½ cups white whole wheat flour*
- ½ Tablespoon pumpkin pie spice
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ cup dark chocolate chips (optional)
- 1, 15-ounce can pumpkin puree
- ½ cup packed brown sugar
- ¼ cup canola oil
- 2 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350° F. Prepare a 12-cup muffin pan with nonstick spray or muffin liners.
- In a large bowl, gently whisk whole wheat flour, pumpkin spice, baking powder, baking soda, salt. Add chocolate chips and toss to evenly coat.
- In a separate large bowl, whisk pumpkin, sugar, oil, eggs, and vanilla until combined.
- Add liquid ingredients to flour mixture. Using a spatula, fold ingredients until just moistened. Do not overmix.
- Portion ~¼ cup batter into each cup. Bake 18-20 minutes or until slightly golden and a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean. Enjoy!
Notes
*Substitute 1 cup whole wheat flour and 1/2 cup all purpose flour.
Our whole wheat muffins base recipe calls
for buttermilk, but we replaced it with the full can of pumpkin puree so
that you're not left with an awkward amount of pumpkin puree in the
refrigerator. You are welcome to follow the base recipe formula and use 1
cup of puree and 1/2 cup buttermilk if that is your preference. Use the
leftover pumpkin puree in our pumpkin pie smoothie!
Nutrition
Serving: 1muffinCalories: 190kcalCarbohydrates: 28gProtein: 4gFat: 7gSaturated Fat: 2.5gPolyunsaturated Fat: 1.5gMonounsaturated Fat: 2.5gCholesterol: 35mgSodium: 190mgPotassium: 150mgFiber: 3gSugar: 12gVitamin A: 700IUVitamin C: 1mgCalcium: 25mgIron: 1.1mg
The Ship That Turned Back David Lundstedt (glitch no sound yet)
'The Ship That Turned Back is a "documemory" film about the acclaimed filmmaker Irving Saraf's dramatic childhood escape as a seven-year-old Jewish boy from Nazi-occupied Poland in 1939. Irving's memories are explored in parallax, through the dual lens of the boy who experienced it and the old man who tells the story to his grandchildren. Childhood recollections merge with family dramatizations, children's illustrations and historical clips in this genre-bending documentary. David Lundstedt
Happy Birthday Raymond Chandler (Writer's Almanac)
And it’s the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, born in Chicago (1888). He wrote seven novels featuring detective Philip Marlowe, including The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Little Sister (1949), and The Long Goodbye (1954). He also wrote screenplays, including such film noir classics as Double Indemnity (1944), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and Strangers on a Train (1951).
Though he was born in Chicago, Chandler grew up in England and Ireland. His parents divorced, and he and his mother moved to London in 1895; her brother, a lawyer, supported them. Chandler went to a prestigious prep school and had dreams of becoming a lawyer, but his uncle couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for his education. So Chandler went to work to support the family, and in his spare time he wrote poetry, which he later described “B-grade.” He managed to publish 27 of his poems, though, as well as a short story called “The Rose-Leaf Romance.” He returned to the United States in 1912; one of his fellow passengers on the ship from England suggested he try California, so Chandler settled in Los Angeles, where he took a series of odd jobs like stringing tennis rackets, picking fruit, and keeping the books for a creamery. He joined the Canadian army during World War I and served on the front lines in France. After the war, he returned to California, married a woman 18 years his senior, and took a job as a bookkeeper for an oil company. Eventually, he worked his way up to vice president of the company.
The Great Depression, job stress, and his wife’s failing health all took a toll on Chandler. He started drinking heavily, and philandering. When he was fired from the oil company in 1932, he started writing again. He decided the best way to make a quick buck would be to write pulp fiction. He wasn’t great at coming up with plots, so he studied stories in detective magazines and tinkered with their plots to come up with his own. But his writing was top-notch; when he sold his first story — the 18,000-word “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” — it was so polished and flawless that editors congratulated themselves on their discovery of the next literary genius. He published 26 short stories in all, and with similar attention to detail. When he broke the rules of grammar, he did so consciously, as he wrote to the editor of Atlantic Monthly: “By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.”
He wrote his first novel in three months. That was The Big Sleep (1939), and it was made into a classic of film noir, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, in 1946. William Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay. The Big Sleep introduced readers to the gumshoe hero Philip Marlowe. Chandler described him as “a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor — by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and good enough for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.”
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Tribute to Film Maker Allie Light
https://vimeo.com/1153248260?fl=pl&fe=sh
https://www.wmm.com/uploads/2019/02/rachelsdaughters.pdf
In Memoriam: Allie Light
We are deeply saddened by the passing of longtime WMM filmmaker, and dear friend, Allie Light, an artist, storyteller, educator whose whose work had a deep impact of the lives of many independent filmmakers, students, and the audiences who saw her film, in the landscape of documentary filmmaking.
Allie was a force of creativity and compassion, known for her generosity, humor, and unwavering belief in the power of women’s voices as well as her award-winning films. Together with her partner, the late Irving Saraf, Allie created a remarkable body of work that gave visibility and dignity to women’s stories often left untold. Their film IN THE SHADOW OF THE STARS won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and she later received a National Emmy Award for DIALOGUES WITH MADWOMEN — a groundbreaking exploration of women and mental health that continues to resonate today.
Over the years, she and Irving made many unforgettable films, including RACHEL’S DAUGHTERS: SEARCHING FOR THE CAUSES OF BREAST CANCER, MITSUYE AND NELLIE, THE SERMONS OF SISTER JANE, and BLIND SPOT: MURDER BY WOMEN. Beyond film, Allie was also a gifted poet and editor, authoring The Glittering Cave and editing Poetry from Violence, an anthology of women’s writings.
Allie was an active member of the San Francisco film community and was known for her generosity and mentoring. Many considered her the “godmother”. As Gary Meyer, founder of Landmark theatres and co-Director of the Telluride Film Festival, said when interviewed about her, “When you went to a film festival, she was always surrounded by other filmmakers. She had influenced so many of them and they just loved being in her presence.”
Allie and Irving deeply cherished Women Make Movies and often shared how much they valued being part of our community. We are honored to have worked alongside her and to distribute 5 of the films that carry her vision forward. She will be profoundly missed.
You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person
Forming new habits isn’t impossible, but it’s much easier for some people than others.
When I was a kid, my dad did something on family vacations that perplexes me to this day: He ran. Every day, at least four or five miles, rising before the sun and before anyone else was awake. He wasn’t training for anything. He wasn’t trying to lose weight. There was no specific goal, no endpoint, no particular reason he couldn’t take the week off while in the greater Disney World metropolitan area, which, in July, is hotter than the surface of the sun. He was just running, like he had basically every day since time immemorial. My dad will turn 75 next week, and whenever you’re reading this, he has probably already been out for a run today.
My dad didn’t always run. He started a few years before I was born. One day he wasn’t a jogger, and the next day he was, even if he didn’t know at the time that the change was indeed permanent. When I asked him why he started all those years ago, there was no great motivator, no epiphany. “It was the cool thing to do at the time for people like me,” he said of the 1980s fitness boom. Now, when my dad doesn’t run, “I feel like I’ve lost something,” he told me.
For a lot of people, this is, without exaggeration, the dream: You decide you’d like to start doing something, you get past the initial phase of this new activity being hard and bad and a huge bummer, and then you do that thing for 40 years. It’s a deceptively simple fantasy—and, so often, an impossible one. Right now, I work out once or twice a week, which is less than I’d like to. I’ve tried to form various exercise habits over the years—I bought the equipment, I made a plan, I got out there and did it—and never quite reached the automatic stage, even though I observed it at close range for my entire childhood. My experience is extremely common among people who want to change how they do all kinds of things: to waste less money, to floss, to quit smoking, to drink less, to learn a new language. And it’s a salient dynamic at the beginning of a new year, resolution or not. New beginnings are seductive, and so is our own capacity for change. You tell yourself that, this time, you’re really going to do God-knows-what differently, but all too soon you’re reminded that forever is a pretty long time to keep it up.
Stories like my dad’s often serve as pop-psychological proof that you, too, could become a runner, if you really wanted to. But we all want things—human longing knows no bounds—and plenty of people do genuinely throw themselves into trying something new, without much success at converting those behaviors into lasting habits. If some people can just get up one day and decide to behave differently for the rest of their life, why do most people fail at it again and again?
The conventional wisdom on changing habits goes something like this: You can change if you really want to. Americans especially tend to see ourselves and one another as individuals with identical reservoirs of willpower, which some people choose to use and others do not. If you can’t figure out how to get up at 4:30 in the morning to make sure you get five miles in before commuting to work every day, which my dad somehow did for 30 years, you’re not trying hard enough, or you don’t want it badly enough, or you’re not motivated enough. Try harder.
Now, as anyone who has ever tried anything might suspect, it sure seems like that idea might be bullshit. Or at least, many researchers have concluded that it does not account for an enormous amount of observed human behavior, according to the psychologist Wendy Wood. In her book Good Habit, Bad Habit, she explains that for the latter half of the 20th century, psychological scholarship more or less affirmed its righteousness. Attitude leads behavior, the theory went, and the circumstances in which you exist aren’t that important to the choices you make. Individuals do certain things and not others mostly because of their own conscious decisions; your fate is largely in your own hands. You can see how this logic permeated culture: The self-help and diet industries boomed, the government slashed the social safety net’s tires, the 1970s became the Me Decade.
In the past 20 years, the field’s tune has begun to change. According to Michael Inzlicht, a social psychologist at the University of Toronto, the most recent research suggests that conscious decision making plays a much more minor role in people’s actions than previously thought, and long-term behavior patterns largely aren’t created by stringing together a series of conscious choices. How people use the phrase self-control, he told me, tends to conflate two different things: a largely immutable element of someone’s personality (a trait) and a way that someone chooses to behave at a particular time (a state). Trait self-control varies from person to person, he said, and the amount you get is probably determined by some combination of heredity, culture, and environment. A person who has high trait self-control might be preternaturally punctual, whereas the timeliness track record of an average person—even one constantly trying hard to make it to things on time—might be more subject to the whims of circumstance.
The key distinction here, Inzlicht told me, is that a person who appears highly self-controlled to others—who is displaying a high level of trait self-control—probably isn’t exercising their behavioral self-control as much as you do. “People who have high trait self-control, they don’t actually engage in more restraint of their behavior and thoughts and emotions in the moment,” he said. Instead, they just aren’t tempted or distracted or diverted from their purpose as often or as effectively as the rest of us. For the small number of people at the far end of the trait spectrum, the things that others have to exercise self-control to resist every single time—sleeping in, skipping the gym, making impulsive purchases, having a cigarette even though they’re trying to quit—often just don’t get recognized as viable options in the same way that they do by the rest of us. This doesn’t mean it’s always easy for these people to sit down to study or to get out the door to exercise, but broadly speaking, they’re less readily pulled away from their plans by the siren song of novelty or opportunity, so they don’t have to rely on their active sense of restraint, with its far less reliable results, as frequently.
My father, I suspect, is one of the people at the far end of this personality continuum. It’s not just the running: He smoked for more than 20 years—back when everyone smoked, he would want me to stipulate—but he quit on his first try and never looked back. After he decided he liked running every morning, he added on an evening strength-training routine several days a week, and has stuck to the two-a-days for decades. He always eats breakfast, and the meal—a big bowl of Raisin Bran and a buttered, toasted bagel for much of my childhood—goes unchanged for years at a time. He is always reading a book, often about history, and has probably consumed hundreds of thousands of pages of dry descriptions of obscure military battles in my lifetime, for fun. He is what happens if you make the whole plane out of New Year’s resolutions.
Inzlicht described the evidence that any given person can increase their level of trait self-control to be more like my dad as “extremely weak,” but said that researchers should nonetheless still keep looking for ways it might be possible. Having the inherent ability to more easily form good habits and jettison harmful ones is enormously beneficial—people who can do that tend to be healthier, happier, and more financially stable. My dad is an easygoing, curious, nonjudgmental guy, and a very good dad. He’s not constantly working against himself to do the “right” thing, or to do anything at all. This is just how he is. “I don’t get out in that lane, I don’t get out in this lane, I stay in my lane,” he said, when I asked him about his routines. “These are the things that I like to do.”
According to Wood, the Good Habit, Bad Habit author, forming new long-term behavioral patterns is possible to some extent for most people, and it’s largely a function of learning to do something so automatically that you perform the task without having to consciously decide to do it, like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. She runs the University of Southern California’s Habit Lab, where she studies how and why people learn to change their behavior. She says that people who go to the gym a lot, for instance, don’t have to decide to go every time—they just sort of find themselves headed in that direction at the appropriate moment.
For those to whom habit-formation doesn’t come so naturally, the circumstances you’re in can make a big difference. Stability, for instance, is an enormous boon: Many people who leave work at the same time every day are able to rely on their routine as a cue to tell themselves that it’s time to go to the gym. If only half your workdays end when the gym is open, converting that choice to a habit can be much harder. Having money to buy the tools that make a new behavior easier or more rewarding is also enormously helpful, as is consistent access to the environs in which new tasks can best be performed. My dad started running on safe, low-traffic streets, which gave him the opportunity to realize that he really, really liked the rush of endorphins that is often called a runner’s high, which reinforced the creation of his new habit in ways that Wood has found to be crucial.
One study Wood described found that people who lived within four miles of a gym went much more frequently than people who lived farther away, even when the difference between the two groups was only a mile or two. Another study found that adding farm stands outside of schools and community centers in a low-income area of Austin, Texas, meant local residents ate more vegetables, even if nothing else was done to encourage people to change their dietary habits, or even to tell them the farm stands were there. “That’s part of the health advantage of higher-income folks,” Wood told me. “They live in environments that are more conducive to exercise; they’re less likely to live in food deserts; they have access to restaurants beyond just fast food.” For many people who make something out of their good intentions and healthy tendencies, those successes have been supported by policy choices that they had nothing to do with. To Wood, the implication is clear: If you want people to behave differently en masse, you’re going to have to change—to improve—the circumstances in which a lot of them live.
I do not mean to sound fatalistic here. It’s not that personal change or self-improvement is impossible—most people can change their habits and create new ones, according to Wood, if they set realistic goals and they’re able to create cues and rewards that effectively encourage repetition. Much of that involves tinkering with the circumstances of your existence that you can affect. For instance, I became a more frequent flosser by taking the package of floss out of my medicine cabinet and sitting it next to my toothbrush, where I could always see it. I used to procrastinate on washing dishes, but now I do them every day like clockwork, thanks to a Bluetooth speaker that I use to listen to podcasts while I stand at the sink. Having a clean kitchen, in turn, means I cook more—an activity I really enjoy—and resort to expensive takeout orders less frequently. I figured out what was stopping me from doing some of the things I knew I could do, and I tried to eliminate the obstacles I could control, to reasonable success. Figuring out how to do something a little less or a little more is likely to yield the best results for most people, even if it’s not going to turn you into a different human.
Before you do any of this, though, or before you decide you’ve failed, it’s probably worth making peace with who you are as a person. My irregular exercise habits don’t really bother me anymore, mostly because I do not take myself as seriously as I used to. I figure that I am who I am, give or take a reasonable capacity for marginal change. I have exercise equipment in my apartment that I could use more often, but I simply do not feel like it. I have never once felt like it, even if I have often wanted to be a person who does. What I can actually do for myself over the next year to make my life better probably will not include a spontaneous dedication to daily exercise. It may include more careful attention to, say, reading or cooking—things that I already love, and that are good for me. Before I left my parents’ house over the holidays, Dad made sure to pass on a few books he thought I’d enjoy. None of them is about war.
Amanda Mull is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
I figured I might as Well Make it Easier
"Okay kids let's drive until we hit snow!" My bio dad said showing up at our house with his 3rd wife and off we went. There was no heat or muffler in the big pale blue Oldsmobile. My sister and I huddled under a quilt in the back seat but we hated each other so we didn't capitalize on each others warmth. The muffler was too loud to be able to talk. I was sure they had a plan to toss me over the mountain at the scenic overlook. It would solve everyone's problems, I thought. When we stopped to see the view of the mountains I didn't bother to put my boots on, instead I asked my father to lift me up out of the back seat. I figured I might as well make it easier. (republished from 2015)
I started writing because I was compelled to. When I was 13 or so, I spent two or three hours a day writing in that adolescent, struggling, angst-ridden way. By the time I was 21 I'd spent so much time doing it that I allowed a small practical idea to enter my thoughts: Well, if I'm doing this so much, maybe I can make something of it. I was learning to write, learning what it took to write.
SUSAN MINOT
Wednesday, July 22, 2026
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