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Tag: Kekla Magoon

Down with the Stanford Prison Experiment: A Links Round-Up

So one of my random but intense opinions is that the Stanford Prison Experiment and its creator, Philip Zimbardo, are unethical as shit and also bad science. If you get me started on the Stanford Prison Experiment, I can expostulate for a good twenty minutes on everything that was wrong with it and how infuriating it is that it continues to garner its unethical creator praise and fame and money. Good, ethical scientists exist! Give them a movie deal, damn! Anyway, here’s a quick run-down on the Stanford Prison Experiment and its many problems. I’m so excited this is in…

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#BBAW: Book Recommendations

Today is the hardest topic of all the topics for Book Blogger Appreciation Week (hosted, again, by me and Ana and Andi and Heather, over at the Estella Society); or I should say rather, the very easiest. To wit: Day 3 What have you read and loved because of a fellow blogger? What haven’t I read and loved because of a fellow blogger? Before blogging, my reading life was on its way to becoming a tragic wasteland. I had exhausted the recommendations of my friends and relations and was reduced to — this is not a joke — examining college syllabi for various…

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It’s the End of 2015 (as we know it)

So here we are at the end of 2015. I had this idea that maybe in 2016 I’ll get really good about writing down all the super-excellent things that happen to me that year, and that way I won’t be struggling to think of them when the end of the year rolls around. My best thing of 2015 (brace yourself for a shock) was the musical Hamilton. Not a full week after I whined to my friends that I feared there would never be another musical that made me feel the way Wicked and Rent made me feel, and maybe…

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In which I am too pensive to write a real review of Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down

I had to read How It Went Down in sections. It’s about a black teenager who is shot by a white man, and all the different characters — the witnesses, the families, friends — tell their perspectives of what happened on the day of Tariq’s death and in the aftermath of it. If any other author in the world had written this book, I wouldn’t have read it. But I trust Kekla Magoon from her wonderful, wrenching The Rock and the River, which is about teenage brothers and their participation (or lack of it) in the Black Panther Party. I read the first third in December, and then the…

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Review: The Rock and the River, Kekla Magoon

If I may borrow a phrase from Renay, this book punched me in the soul. I have a thing where anything about slavery and civil rights struggles and that business immediately makes my heart hurt and then when the inevitable family member dies or gets sold or whatever, I cry and cry, and that’s why I don’t really read that many historical fiction books from those periods. But Jill said The Rock and the River was good, and I happened to see it at the library, so there you go. I had the hugest lump in my throat from page…

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