Are you familiar with the Kennewick Man? Spend some time on his Wikipedia page — it’s a fascinating story — and then read about why the scientists should feel like dicks now.

Awesome zookeepers awesomely doing Chris Pratt’s raptor-taming move.

Poetry coopted for Supernatural fanfic: An interview with poet Richard Siken that just fills me with joy for the utter weirdness of the world we live in.

A linguist explains how we convey sarcasm typographically. LANGUAGE FINDS A WAY.

Alyssa Rosenberg on how white supremacists in pop culture largely exist so that other white folks can defeat them. Heroically.

How royalties work on Kindle Unlimited vs. Oyster. (Also, Scribd? What about Scribd? Can we get some information on Scribd?)

Questions about slavery asked of a (white) tour guide at a plantation home.

ZOO (is a show I want to watch)!

The impact of sexist “jokes”:

The evidence, they said, showed that joking reinforces existing prejudice. If you joke about women and get away with it, those who are hostile to women will see this as social sanction for their views and behavior.

Enjoy your 4th of July weekend if you’re in America, and if not, have a very nice and regular weekend!

The post Moral amnesty: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

No Bone Unturned is a love letter to anthropologist Doug Owsley, and in spots it is also the story of Kennewick Man, a 9000-year-old skeleton unearthed in Washington whose ownership was hotly contested by archaeologists, American Indian tribes, and teh government. There is a thing called NAGPRA which says that if human remains are unearthed that can be connected to an existing American Indian tribe, then that tribe gets the remains back to be buried. Archaeologists who inspected the bone structure of Kennewick Man said that it did not resemble American Indian bone structures; the Umatilla tribe said that their oral tradition made it clear that Kennewick Man belonged to them. Hilarity ensued. (Not real hilarity. Angry hilarity.)

The problem with No Bone Unturned is that I felt throughout it that Jeff Benedict thought I was a very, very stupid person. It was full of stuff like “Doug believed that the government was trying to suppress science. To him, this was just plain wrong. The bones did not belong to the Umatilla tribe, and archaeologists should have a chance to prove it.” I am not quoting verbatim from the book but I MIGHT AS WELL BE. The story of Kennewick Man is essentially interesting, and so were many of the stories Benedict was telling throughout the book. But the style of writing irritated the hell out of me. Complicated issues were in play, but Benedict barely touched on them, because he was so wedded to this narrative of Doug Owsley standing up to the monolith.

This isn’t to say that I disbelieved any particular aspect of the story Benedict was telling. Doug Owsley sounds like a cool, smart, good person, and it sounds like the government behaved really, really badly over Kennewick Man. But the simplistic style of Turner’s writing made me feel like I was being sold a bill of goods. I am not having a go at journalists who write books! I know that journalists can write good narrative nonfiction that nevertheless engages with the complexity of the story they are telling, because I have read, for instance, And the Band Played On.

Has anyone read a really good book about archaeological preservation, or looting, or cultural property controversies? I’m interested in those things right now! Share the booky love!

The post Review: No Bone Unturned, Jeff Benedict appeared first on Reading the End.