Time for another installment in this blog’s semi-regular series of posts linking to things that I read that made me think.

In the New York Times, here is Turkish author Orhan Pamuk with a beautiful elegy for a deceased photographer friend, interspersed with the photographer’s images of Istanbul over a lifetime of work.

Camille Paglia, one of the more provocative writers out there on gender issues and trends in the humanities, gives her takes on post-structuralism, academics she hates, and #MeToo in an interview in Quillette.

Amazon, as you may have heard, has chosen its new headquarters location(s) after a long search that was the talk of the economic development field for the past year and a half. They played their cards masterfully, and got a lot of good useful information and fawning attention…only to choose the two most obvious centers of power in the country. Turns out that is far more attractive to a booming, quasi-monopolistic corporation than a cactus or naming rights to the town. Who ever would have guessed? Richard Florida diagnoses Amazon’s decision here.

We just passed the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I. I poked around for something to share to mark the legacy of the Great War, and settled on this Times piece from A.O. Scott, which talks about how we talk about war in literature. No war shaped the modern era more, or helped framed narratives about war and innocence (or its myth) and cynicism than the conflict that drew to a close 100 years ago.

To wrap things up close to home, I’ll give a shoutout to Jana Hollingsworth, who gets a kind sendoff from Duluth News Tribune editor Rick Lubbers as she moves on to new endeavors after 16 years in local journalism. I got to know Jana a little while we both endured school board meetings when they were at a point when they were particularly painful, and we commiserated together for a while. (She had to be there; who knows what masochism drove me to be there.) Her reporting was everything that good local journalism should be, and her departure leaves a hole in the DNT’s newsroom. I hope we can continue to enjoy her writing in some capacity.