In a lovely moment of reading serendipity, I happened to pick up Akwaeke Emezi’s memoir, Dear Senthuran, in the same week that I was working my way through Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Emezi is an award-winning writer of literary fiction and young adult literature, with three books under their belt and more to come. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an astrophysicist who’s come to public prominence in part through her accessible science writing for popular outlets like Slate and Bitch magazine. I started these two books thinking that they would be worlds…
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Who here has seen Harvey, anyone? The old movie where Jimmy Stewart has an invisible friend that is a six-foot-tall rabbit named Harvey, and this friendship causes some anxiety to his friends and relations? I ask because there’s a scene late in the movie where Jimmy Stewart says, “In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.” A of all, I am pleased to have quoted him. Secondly, this moment from the movie Harvey exactly sums up my approach to language. For years…
Leave a CommentI recently began reading fairy tales to my little nephew, on the grounds that everyone should know fairy tales and he hasn’t really experienced them before. He was either into it or giving a good impression of being into it because he’s very into me: We read “Snow White” first and then he picked out “Rumpelstiltskin” and “The Frog Prince” from my book, and on another day he asked me for a story and I told him “Rapunzel.” It should be noted that there are no positive messages in any of these stories. The couple in “Rumpelstiltskin” allegedly live happily…
Leave a Comment2019 has been a no-good very-bad year, but the creativity and work of many brilliant people has gotten me through it. As this stupid thankless year draws to a close, I’m writing thank-you notes to some of the people who made things that brought me joy in a dark time. Dear Emma Southon, Thank you for writing Agrippina! My friend Alice of the For Real podcast recommended it to me by quoting small passage from it until I was charmed into acquiring it, and that’s in a year when my nonfiction consumption was heavily regulated (by myself) (I am a…
Leave a CommentTo Tell the Truth Freely was published in 2009, a biography of a journalist and activist who died in 1931, and its applicability to modern-day politics is so acute that I tore through it at warp speed. Her political milieu is described as “a time when the Democrats were increasingly billing themselves as the party of white supremacy and the Republicans had largely abandoned any commitment to racial justice in favor of an alliance with big business.” I defy you not to shudder when you read that. Though Wells’s biographer repeatedly emphasizes her subject’s temper (and intemperance), it’s clear that…
Leave a CommentI am no longer in my memoir phase, my friends. I just am not. When I read Educated last year and recommended it to all and sundry, I added the caveat that I am no longer in my memoir phase, except for weird-culty-religion memoirs, as those are my catnip. But then I saw the synopsis for Sounds Like Titanic, a memoir about a violinist who fake-performed in a professional ensemble for a famous composer who played a loud CD of his music on top of the fake performances the ensemble players were doing. I expected Sounds Like Titanic to feel…
Leave a CommentShow 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 CommentIt 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…
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