“Success or failure will not alter it.”

Managing workloads, suffering fools, wishing the days could be longer—medieval people lamented these problems just as often as we do, but they soldiered on. “A thousand skeptic hands won’t keep us from the things we plan,” Charlemagne famously insisted, prompting Alcuin to quip: “unless we’re clinging to the things we prize.”

That’s my favorite passage from Einhard’s Vita Karoli; it invigorates me every time I’m slogging through an endless morass of work. In that spirit, here are links to smart and interesting people whose efforts you can reward simply by reading them.

With all due punctilio, Steven Hart appreciates science-fiction and fantasy writer Jack Vance.

Do you dawdle? Are you stalled? Jake Seliger reads books about learning to focus.

Neil Verma wonders about separating artists from their art.

Dear publishers, Scott Nokes implores you: Stop putting the monk Eadwine on book covers.

Open Letters Monthly reviews The Natural History of Unicorns.

Red in tooth and claw, OLM also steps into a literary feud over the annotated Wind in the Willows.

Enough cromulent problematizing! Vaulting and Vellum grumble at academic language that locks others out.

Bibliographing gets to know Abelard and Heloise.

“You got your manly, economic prose in my pipeweed!” “Your got your pipeweed in my manly, economic prose!” Lingwë asks: “Hemingway’s Silmarillion?”

What might be right be you may not be right for Ephemeral New York, who shows you buildings from the opening credits of “The Jeffersons” and “Diff’rent Strokes.”

Finally, smooth down the epaulets on your Members Only jacket and dance to this: the full-length commercial for the 1985 Plymouth Duster.