Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers.
Loveyoumeanitblog — A Life in Books Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers. Browse Latest Posts Books deserve better than star ratings and summary paragraphs. We write about what we’re reading — novels, essays, history, science, poetry — with the kind of attention that treats literature as the complex art form it is. You won’t […]
The shirt says 1000 in letters tall enough to read from across a parking lot. Underneath, in a lighter weight, POUND CLUB, and beside or behind it a weightlifting graphic, pale against the dark fabric. That is the whole design. No asterisk, no fine print, no date of induction. Just a number and a noun, […]
The exhibit It is 9:47 on a Tuesday night. The laundry is in the dryer, which means it is technically done, which means it has been done for two days and is now a warm wrinkled brick I will re-fluff at 11:15 and then ignore again. The rent check is on the counter where I […]
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. There is a period at the end of the word. That is the first thing I notice about the shirt. Not an exclamation point, not a question mark, not a winking emoji or a little shrug rendered in punctuation. Just meh. — lowercase, bold, […]
The shirt is almost aggressively unremarkable. On a dark background, centered, in very small lowercase letters, it says: meh. With a period. No animal. No rainbow. No ironic wolf. Just the word, the period, and a lot of dark fabric around it. The period is doing more work than the word. The word shrugs; the […]
There is a yellow triangle on this shirt. Inside it, a hand is crossed out. Above it, in the flat, unbothered lettering of a warning sign, are the words NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. The whole thing is a piece of graphic design doing what graphic design does best: pretending a feeling is a policy. […]
On a Tuesday in October, I found myself staring at a shirt that says LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The words wrap around four smiling root vegetables—a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion—their roots visible in soil. They look like they’re at a party I wasn’t invited to. […]
On the shirt, a small tan chihuahua stands in red boxing gloves in front of a brick wall. Above it, in cream lettering, I GOT THAT DOG. Below it, IN ME. Behind the chihuahua, much larger, is a black wolf-shaped shadow. The shadow is not a second dog. It is the chihuahua’s own shadow, drawn […]