Show of hands who all was aware that Hobby Lobby did a crime of smuggling antiquities out of Iraq? Because I remembered when this story broke and was thus distantly aware of HobLob’s weird antiquities situation, but I mentioned it to Friend of the Podcast Ashley and she was flabbergasted. However, HobLob’s religious agenda for America — including but not limited to their smuggling of antiquities — is the subject of my latest nonfiction read, Bible Nation: The United States of Hobby Lobby, so strap in. Candida Moss and Joel Baden break down four areas in which the family that…
Leave a CommentCategory: 4 Stars
It is a true blessing when havers of fancy knowledge, persons whose knowledge of a given complicated subject is at a ten, are willing and able to take time out of their busy schedules to explain their complicated subject to people whose starting level of knowledge is at a zero or one. Robert Sapolsky, fancy scientist and author of Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, is a person like this. Behave ranks up with Daniel Kahneman’s superb Thinking Fast and Slow for explaining complicated science to a lay reader. Sapolsky explores the regions of the brain…
Leave a CommentSomeone recently described the type of fiction that What We Lose is as “modular.” I am in love with this vocabulary word, and I might be at least moderately in love with modular fiction. It’s the kind of story (let’s see if I can actually describe it) that leaves your imagination to fill in some (or lots) of the connective tissue of the plot. Chapters are of varying length — some as short as a few sentences — and may not be strictly chronological. It is a type of storytelling at which fanfiction writers excel, so perhaps that is the…
Leave a CommentDon’t worry, everyone, I have cracked the case of Why Feminists Sometimes Enjoy Watching The Bachelor Franchise, and you will rejoice to hear that it does not suggest that viewers are morally compromised, although we still might be. Or in other news, I stayed up seventeen minutes past my bedtime the other night reading Amy Kaufman’s book Bachelor Nation. Kaufman is a journalist with a long history of covering The Bachelor and its sister shows, which means she gets lots of terrific interviews with contestants and producers and staff. It also means that her book’s a quick and accessible read,…
1 CommentWhen Zélie was small, her mother — a powerful maji — was stripped of her magic, dragged away by the king’s soldiers, and hanged. The same thing happened all across the country Orïsha, and no magic has been seen in the country since then. The children of the maji, marked by their white hair, remain figures of suspicion and terror under the authoritarian regime of the same king who killed their parents. Zélie is one such child. This! Cover! I absolutely love this cover. That steely look is exactly Zélie’s character: Though she sometimes acts rashly, and though she lives…
1 CommentOld and tired: Feeling guilty about reading comics in trades rather than issues because I know issue sales are how comics publishers make decisions New and wired: Feminist righteousness about an outdated sales model that refuses to account for the ways new comics readers tend to consume comics (ie trades and digital). What I’m saying is that I just read four trades of Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s series Descender, and I dug it so much, yet I am making no plans to read it in issues going forward. And I don’t feel guilty about it! I don’t! Reading in…
Leave a CommentHere’s what happened in January: I had to wear this neck brace that made it impossible to ever sit comfortably. In part because of this, I was very, very cranky in the month of January.1 Every time I thought about going out and doing something, I’d be like “ugh I’m too cranky for that so instead I will stay home and read and that will cheer me up.” But because it was impossible to sit comfortably, staying home and reading did not cheer me up. But because I am very stupid, I did not figure this out until I had…
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