Before anything else, both of these authors have tremendous passion for the work. Though Emezi’s memoir ranges widely through years of their life and numerous places they’ve lived, the constant in good years and bad is their (sometimes single-minded) commitment to their art:

People can say a lot about me, but everyone knows the work is my beginning. I work myself like it’s a madness and maybe it is. It’s how I world-bend: it is my hammer, my heated metal, my anvil, my forge, my weapon.

(And yes, as you can see, Emezi’s writing continues to be truly gorgeous.)

In an early chapter of Dear Senthuran, Emezi says that they are going to describe the spell they have cast to achieve the success they’ve achieved. The spell is to believe in themself and keep doing the work, and when they achieve one of their dreams, they set a new dream and work like hell to achieve it. They make full use of the flexibility of the word “work”: “work” as an action verb for the effort and drive they put into creation; “work” as a noun that describes the product of their creativity; “the work” to encompass both.

Prescod-Weinstein similarly radiates her love for the work that she does. I have to admit that I…. had a harder time understanding some of what she was talking about (extremely science) versus what Emezi is talking about (litrature and mental illness and relationships). Surprise! I do not 1000% understand theoretical cosmology and astrophysics. Who knew! The first half of The Disordered Cosmos covers Prescod-Weinstein’s work and the questions she’s trying to answer, and they are about ten miles above my head. I read this portion of the book feeling more like I was weaving a brand new net than capturing knowledge in a pre-existing net.

But! What’s very clear, both in the early parts of the book where Prescod-Weinstein is talking about science, and in the second half where she’s talking about the profession, is how much Prescod-Weinstein loves her field. Even when I didn’t understand the science, her devotion to and enthusiasm about it shone through every word.

I still like math and the potential it holds to help us craft a compelling cosmological tale. I still think the times table is a miraculous thing, thirty years after I first learned it. I still love that we can use math to understand and describe the history of the universe itself. And I want little children of every shade, gender identity, sex identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, romantic orientation, (dis)ability, and religion to have access to that cosmos, to have fun with it, to find joy in it…. Access to a dark night sky — to see and be inspired by the universe as it really is — should be a human right, not a luxury for the chosen few.

Perhaps in part by virtue of being marginalized in their chosen fields, Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein are both keenly aware of the importance of different modes of knowing. For Emezi, this centers very much on their physical body and spiritual essence. They identify as ọgbanje, a kind of Igbo trickster spirit that is born into the body of a human child. They feel particularly close to the world of spirits and gods; at times closer, it seems, to that world than to our physical world, where they are read through lenses that do not pertain to them. At times this way of knowing themself can lead to an instrumentalizing view of other people that I found hard to read, in part because I often struggle with the genre of memoir and the way it (perhaps necessarily; certainly often) transforms the people in the writer’s life into side characters in the writer’s story, rather than full protagonists of their own. For instance, in a story they tell about traveling home and being taken to the shrine of the deity Ala:

Back at my human father’s clinic, the pastor exulted over how the day had gone. “God opened the way for us,” he said. “We encountered no problems! I am sure that our purpose was to speak about Jesus to that woman.” I remember marveling at his vision of the story. These four men — my father, the red neighbor, the pastor, the contact — they had all been moved by my deitymother, pawns in a mission they were completely unaware of, thinking they were serving their God when really they were carrying out Ala’s will. The contact had kicked up a fuss when it was time to pay him, emphasizing over and over again that he wouldn’t usually do anything like this, he was a Christian, he didn’t like these fetish things.

I thought, What else could my mother do for me if I asked? Who else could she move, so smoothly that they would have no idea they were even being used?

A theme throughout The Disordered Cosmos is the validity of traditional and indigenous forms of knowledge, which Prescod-Weinstein asserts ferociously from within a field that resists any kind of knowing that doesn’t come through white Western male intellectual history. She uses the example of the Native Hawaiians who have, for years, resisted observatories that have been placed on Mauna Kea, without regard for the indigenous traditions that hold that land sacred. When she was offered an opportunity at a year-long job at Mauna Kea that would have positioned her to get into a good PhD program, counterbalancing her mediocre grades that came as a result of the structural challenges faced by many marginalized folks at universities, Prescod-Weinstein turned it down in solidarity with the Native Hawaiian protestors. Her recognition that other modes of knowing than her own are valid–indeed vital!–and her pursuit of that truth at the expense of her career prospects are examples I hope to always carry with me and aspire to.

Regrettably, trauma has played all too large a role in the lives of both these authors. Prescod-Weinstein speaks with eloquent rage about her own rape by a more senior person in her field, and the lasting damage that experience has wrought on her career and her psyche.

I want to have the power to eject this memory: to force it far, far away from me. By that I mean I would like to have the power to eject this memory into the nuclear inferno that is our sun. The sun is, effectively, a series of nuclear explosions, mostly converting hydrogen into helium. Better this memory blow up inside the sun than inside of me. But this memory is written on my body so instead I have to trace the lines of force that are available to me. I look to see what work is possible. For years, I had nightlong knife fights where I was the only person present.

Emezi is often oblique about their trauma, but they are explicit about its impacts: dysphoria, chronic pain, recurring suicidal ideation. Dear Senthuran is grandiose at times, and at other times it speaks of so much pain that it is very nearly self-annihilating. But it’s clear that Emezi is claiming the space to be grandiose in ways that have rarely been tolerated by people like them–Black, trans, immigrant–though white straight men are given all the latitude in the world to self-mythologize.

In the dark of night, my demons don’t tell me I’m worthless. They tell me I am too powerful, that no one will ever want me for it, that I don’t deserve love or happy endings because I chose too much, I ate too much of the world, I refused to starve and as punishment, I will be starved.

Dear Senthuran (I keep writing Death Senthuran, which feels apt) and The Disordered Cosmos remind the reading public (I hope) of the fact that society’s exclusionary structures come at a cost: the cost of people who did not, like Emezi and Prescod-Weinstein, have the luck and the wherewithal to keep working and writing in their fields. The cost is disproportionately borne by those for whom the system was not made, but in the end, everyone within the system is the poorer for it.

The post It’s the Wanting to Know That Makes Us Matter appeared first on Reading the End.

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 I was smart (by which you should understand I mean prescriptive). I recommend pleasant (by which I mean descriptive). Not only has this mental alteration molded me into the sort of person who is delighted by most shifts in language,¹ but it has also primed the pump most gloriously for Gretchen McCulloch’s book on internet linguistics, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language.

As someone who is Extremely Online, I am definitely the target audience for this book — McCulloch is exploring how we got to where we are in the world of internet language, with Twitter as one of her main sources (because it’s easy to search). But while the book feels pleasantly relevant to my interests when it’s breaking down the reason we like the Distracted Boyfriend meme, it truly becomes fascinating when McCulloch ventures into territory that’s new to me. The stuff I’m familiar with is brilliant, of course, and features the kind of zany inventiveness that I come to the internet for. But when I got to the bit in chapter one where she explains the internet-exclusive Arabic romanization system Arabizi, I was so overcome with delight that I had to close the book and hide it from myself and come back to it later.

(This was in, um, July 2019. As you can see, it is now much much later. The section about Arabizi was just very fucking cool and also I really love linguistic innovation so I don’t know what you want from me.)

(Ooh, would it be funny if I started every paragraph saying “Because Internet is at its best when”? You would understand that I meant it is always at its best because it is, inherently, best.)

Because Internet is at its best when excavating the history of some of our internet linguistic traditions. For instance, she offers a brief timeline of a thing I had never thought to seek a timeline of before, i.e., the use of repeating letters to add emphasis. The earliest example she was able to find comes from an 1848 novel, but it’s wildly an outlier, with the bulk of subsequent examples beginning at the turn of the century. This is astonishing news to me, a person who cannot remember the last time she went longer than 24 hours with using repeated letters to add emphasis. I am not sure I would be able to find a substantial corpus of four waking hours in a row in which I did not use repeated letters to add emphasis. The “awwwwws” alone! And this is but one element that McCulloch explores about how we convey tone of voice in the atonal medium of internet communication. There are, like, zillions more, from glitch-text to ironic capitals to variant punctuation.

Because Internet is at its best (really this time!) when finally goddamn explaining why old people put so many ellipses in their text messages and emails. (My parents do not do this, thank God.) This is a question I have been asking myself for years, and McCulloch just tells you the answer! I won’t spoil it for you. The mystery of why do old people use so many ellipses is the reason I bought the book, and maybe it will work that way for you too.

(I actually hate the jokey repetition plan I came up with. Why would I do that to myself? Ugh.)

In the chapter on memes (there’s a chapter on memes!), McCulloch cites a study on the commonalities among YouTube videos that spawned memes. One of the chief things that meme-spawning videos had that non-meme-spawning videos didn’t was a certain amateurishness, and the study’s author argues that it’s the unfinished, unpolished nature of those videos that made them appealing for reproduction and reuse. McCulloch argues that “incoherent language or bad photoshop accomplishes the same thing” — which is interesting on its own but very interesting with regards to the impulse to make fanfic of a thing. The feeling that the canon has gone wrong and needs to be fixed has to be a driving motivator behind writing fic, no? IT IS EXACTLY LIKE MEMES. God I love the internet.

Maybe the actual best thing about Because Internet (see, I switched up the phrasing) is that Gretchen McCulloch fucking loves the internet. It is a lovely, refreshing change. Much of what I read about the internet and the Extremely Online of this world is very hand-wring-y and distressed, and it was great to have some of the brilliant, creative weirdness of the internet celebrated by someone who hella knows what she’s talking about. “Language,” McCulloch concludes, “is the ultimate participatory democracy…. Language is humanity’s most spectacular open sources project.”

(heart emoji)

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As a child, Amanda Leduc loved fairy tales (like me!). As a child, she was diagnosed with and treated for cerebral palsy and spastic hemiplegia. Disfigured is her attempt to understand why fairy tales are so fascinated by disability and why, at the same time, they so consistently deny the personhood and morals of any disabled character. Leduc blends her analysis of fairy tales with exploration of the personal experience of disability, drawing on interviews with other disabled writers as well as notes and memories of her own treatment as a child and into adulthood.

Leduc notes that fairy tales comprise some of our oldest and most enduring stories, retold over and over down the generations. The protagonists are models of beauty and grace, with a few rare exceptions — and in the case of those exceptions, Leduc notes, the protagonist must always be the one to change. The world will never change to accommodate them. She gives the example of the story “Hans My Hedgehog,” the protagonist of which is half hedgehog (waist up) and half man (waist down), because, sure. Hans advocates for himself, makes a life for himself, and his reward at the end is to be transformed into a complete man. “In fairy tales,” Leduc writes, “the transformation of the individual relies on fairies and magic — or the gods — because it’s understood that society can’t (and indeed won’t) improve.”

By the same token, the longing to fit in pervades fairy tales, not just among the disabled characters, but for everyone. And they offer a model for how to fit in! All you have to do is be normal. Yes, sometimes you can achieve belonging by being just and true for long enough that somebody notices and swoops you away from the meanies you live with. But even if that does happen, your happy ending depends exactly on your conformation with a set of bodily and social standards. You must be normal! Here’s how: You must desire marriage, especially if a girl. You must attain prosperity. You must be good-looking, a category that inevitably encompasses able-bodied-ness. If you fail on any front of this prescription to normalcy, no happy ending for you.

Moreover, moral lapses in disabled fairy tale characters are often part and parcel of their disability. The skinny, scarred lion is the wicked one. The Beast is cursed with monstrosity because of his bad behavior. The implication is that inner beauty is reflected in appearances, and disabled people are a) unbeautiful and b) externally unbeautiful because they are internally unbeautiful too. Even when a wicked character is beautiful, the fairy tales often highlight the disparity: Though she was beautiful, her heart was hard and ugly. Like, can you believe it? Someone hot, but mean? Meanwhile a beautiful protagonist may lapse in her morals but will not be physically marked by it. Her beauty is proof of her baseline goodness.

All of this is deeply personal, and Leduc makes it personal. “Fairy tales and fables are never only stories: they are the scaffolding by which we understand crucial things.” As a little girl whose doctors and parents were working hard to identify her disability and find suitable treatments to keep her healthy, Leduc wanted to be a princess like the ones in her stories. But though she craved their happy endings, she never saw herself reflected in their bodies and lives. Fairy tales and other stories tell us which kinds of bodies are valued, and which are disposable.

I started writing this review before coronavirus really hit hard, and then got distracted. Since then, there has been a lot more talk about which lives to save, in a time of crisis, and it’s reminded me of just how important work like Leduc’s is in countering societal narratives about the worth of disabled lives. I highly recommend this piece by Alice Wong, as well as her work more generally and the work of SE Smith, Vilissa Thompson, Rebecca Cokley, and Sara Luterman.

The post Review: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space, Amanda Leduc appeared first on Reading the End.

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 heavy regulator of myself) and I had to make very hard choices about what nonfiction to read and not read. But I am super glad that I spent a nonfiction chit on Agrippina because it was delightful. I loved it as a book, but even more than that, I loved the project that you are doing of making history accessible, friendly, and funny. I loved the companionable language you used, and how you invited the reader to feel engaged not just with the people from history but with the challenges of uncovering this history. Also, you made me laugh. More people should write books like this, except honestly a lot of classicists aren’t that funny. If any of your peers are going “hem hem she should be more Serious” please know that they are buttheads and you are doing awesome. I loved your book.

Kind regards,
Jenny

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Though Wells’s biographer repeatedly emphasizes her subject’s temper (and intemperance), it’s clear that Ida B. Wells had a right to be angry. When she left organizations, it was in protest of accommodationist tactics that prioritized white comfort over black lives — a tendency that obtains to this day. Wells was born in slavery in Mississippi to parents and fought hard to become a journalist at a time when black voices, and black women’s voices in particular, were being silenced around the nation. She never gave up. She just never did, not until the day she died. The one time Bay talks about her considering leaving a fight for someone else, her thirteen-year-old boy says to her, “Mother, if you don’t go, nobody else will.” So she went. She never gave up.

As a young journalist, Wells was nervous to push back against lynching with all of her strength and eloquence, because she believed the narrative that lynchings were committed against rapists. But when a lynching took place in her own town of Memphis, she began to investigate these crimes more closely, and she realized that she had been deceived. Two-thirds of lynching victims had never even been accused of rape, and many more were accused of rape after the fact, to justify their murders by angry white mobs.

She dedicated the rest of her life to fighting against lynching, in the teeth of white supremacy, violence, and respectability politics. She was the first black woman to own a newspaper, and her newspaper was burned and destroyed, and she just moved to Chicago and started again. When American audiences proved unreceptive, she got letters of recommendation from my dude Frederick Douglass and took her show on the road in England, ginning up international pressure on US lawmakers to prevent mob justice in their jurisdictions. Once, after a major publicity effort around one lynching, she received a telegram from Memphis, from a white supremacist fuck trying to fuck with her, that said a black man would soon be lynched in Memphis, and asked her to come to Memphis to write it up. The actual naked cruelty of that act stunned me, and I live on fucking Twitter.

If Wells failed to play well with others — which I do not concede, although this book kinda did, although it was written in a calmer and gentler time — it’s certainly true that she was faced with unbelievable provocation. She was penalized at every turn for her race, her gender, her class background, and her unwillingness to shut up about injustice. When she criticized leaders of the WCTU for failing to condemn lynchings, leadership on both sides of the Atlantic took her to task for her tone, insisted that white women lived in constant fear of being raped by black men, and passed a resolution that blanket-condemned “lawlessness” but also condemned “the unspeakable outrages which have so often provoked such lawlessness.” Read this book if you want to hate white women. I wanted to go back in time and kick Frances Willard in the shins.

I also lived in dread, as you do when reading biographies of women, of what was going to happen with Ida’s romantic life. She was flirty and social as a young woman, but deeply ambivalent about getting married and starting a family, and I kept thinking that she was going to do like frankly most women in all of history and end up married to someone who seemed nice at first but was a controlling dickbag in the end. Not so! She married a lawyer named Frederick Barnett who sounds like an absolute doll by any standards. Not only did he adorably court her by sending love letters to every train station where her cross-country train stopped (shut up, I can’t, that’s too sweet, I can’t), but he was a lifelong partner and staunch supporter of her writing and activism. When she began a social support agency for newly arrived poor black Chicagoans, he offered pro bono legal services to any members who found themselves in trouble with the law. Barnett also prioritized hiring household help to cook and clean for their family, so that Ida would be free to continue her work. She took his name when they married, but hyphenated, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and she is my hero and I would die for her. I never want to find out anything to her husband’s discredit.

As you can see, I am in a glass case of emotion. Please read To Tell the Truth Freely, it is very good, and I want you to love Ida B. Wells as much as I do. You may assume that you already love her at the maximum setting (which is what I believed before reading this book), but reading this book will reveal to you that your sensors require recalibration and that actually there is much more love that you can feel for this woman, a true national heroine. Let’s put her on the money too. I would die for her.

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I can’t say enough this book. Over the last year or two, I’ve become a little more aware of the ways in which minor crimes, such as driving without a license, can completely derail the lives, housing, credit, benefits, and employment prospects of Americans living in poverty. Punishment without Crime amasses an astonishing amount of data to show exactly how the system works–or doesn’t.

The gist of Natapoff’s argument is that the misdemeanor system as currently constituted inflicts massive financial, emotional, and physical harm on those caught up in its web. It does not improve public safety or even pay much attention to the guilt or innocence of the defendants. What it does do is draw marginalized people into the purview of the criminal system, sap their financial resources, and damage — sometimes permanently — their ability to access jobs, housing, and other resources that would pay the very costs the misdemeanor system is penalizing them for being unable to pay.

In many cases, Natapoff argues, defendants are criminalized only for being poor, and there are very few protections in place to ensure that innocent defendants get acquitted. For instance, if a misdemeanor does not carry the possibility of jail time, the defendant is not entitled to a lawyer; even defendants who are entitled to lawyers do not always receive them; and public defense lawyers carry such a massive caseload that they’re unable to represent their clients effectively. If a defendant cannot pay their bail prior to their case going before a judge, they’re often incarcerated pre-trial, often for a month or more. Innocent people accept guilty pleas just to get out of jail.

Some of this I knew, but Natapoff does a masterful job of pairing data and anecdotes to show both the scope and the human cost of the system. The stories are heartbreaking, and the data is too. Here’s an illustration of how legal financial obligations (LFOs) can mount and mount, creating cycles of debt that poor Americans will never be able to escape:

In California, for example, failing to carry proof of auto insurance carries a $100 fine. In addition, a person will be charged a $100 penalty assessment, a $20 criminal surcharge, a $40 court operations assessment, a $50 court construction fee, a $70 county fund fee, a $50 DNA fee, a $4 emergency medical air transportation fee, a $20 EMS fund fee, a $35 conviction assessment, and a $1 night court assessment, for a total of $490. If the payment deadline is missed, there will be an additional $10 DMV warrant fee, a $15 failure-to-appear fee, and a $300 civil assessment, for a total fee of $815.

Added to that, many states turn such debts over to private debt collection agencies after ninety days. These debt collection agencies are permitted to add massive surcharges (30 and 40% of the total amount owed!) on the uncollected debt.

Because (some) misdemeanor offenses are so minor, police officers have a massive amount of latitude in deciding whom to arrest on such charges. Overpolicing of poor neighborhoods and racial bias on police forces means that cops arrest disproportionately poor and black people for crimes that are poorly defined and/or incredibly common, like traffic violations, loitering, or resisting arrest. And because the legal proceedings for misdemeanors lack meaningful consideration of guilt or innocence, the arrest itself is often sufficient to lead to a guilty plea and a conviction.

Natapoff gives the example of an NYPD initiative wherein cops would go to specific housing projects and arrest massive numbers of people for trespassing, many of whom were there visiting friends or were even residents of the buildings in question. The people arrested frequently did not understand the parameters of the crime with which they were charged (I don’t know what constitutes trespassing!) (well, now I do, but only because I read this book), and few of them had attorneys with the time and energy to fight the charges. This meant that a lot of people pled guilty to charges they didn’t understand and might not have committed; and such convictions can lead to a loss of employment, housing, or welfare benefits.

As infuriating as the contents of Punishment without Crime are, and as exhausting as it is to witness the prejudice and injustice of a system that’s supposed to protect Americans, Natapoff ends on — kind of an up note? She points to recent bipartisan efforts to change the course of mass incarceration, and expresses hope that similar efforts will continue to gain momentum around the misdemeanor system. Honestly, she’s more optimistic about that than I am, but she also knows a lot more about it than I do! So maybe I’m wrong and she’s right! Wouldn’t that be good?

Meticulous, measured, and endnoted to a degree that satisfied even this stringent and demanding reader, Punishment without Crime will forever change how you look at so-called petty crimes. I feel truly fortunate that this book exists in the world, and I hope that everyone in the country reads it. (Seriously.)

The post Review: Punishment without Crime, Alexandra Natapoff appeared first on Reading the End.

I expected Sounds Like Titanic to feel weird-culty-religion-ish, not just because I wanted to preserve my rule, but because I love to read about bizarre personalities and the people in their orbit that they manage to convince their behavior is normal. Hindman is doing something different, however. Sounds Like Titanic is not about the eccentricity of the Composer, who actually is — weirdly normal? Apart from the ongoing fraud he perpetrates at a wide range of shopping malls, plazas, and concert venues across America?

Instead, Hindman has come to talk about artifice. As a native of Appalachia, she is unprepared for the financial realities of the Ivy League school she attends. Not only does she not have the money to pay her tuition, resulting in her selling dozens of her eggs, but she has never before come into contact with the genre of rich people who attend Columbia.

Let us now speak of the children of the American suburbs, a group with its own culture and subcultures, a species as foreign to you as wild chimpanzees, their hometown neighborhoods so stratified and gated and segregated that the kids who lived in million-dollars houses rarely mingled with the kids who lived in $800,000 houses.

She’s exploring the nature of reality in ways that I find particularly fascinating. What is wealth? What is a girl? What is a talented violinist? The thing that seems true in one context twists away from truth in another. Yes, they are really playing the music at these concerts, albeit in front of microphones that are turned off, and drowned out by the CD that’s playing behind them. Yes, she is very talented at the violin in her Appalachian home. Yes, her family is comfortably off. Yes, she’s a girl.

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not. Playing classical music on the violin provides a corrective: The violin is serious. Classical music is serious. An understanding of classical music — something adults say they wish they knew more about but don’t — gives a girl weight in a world that wants her to be weightless, gives her substance in a culture that asks her to be insubstantial. And this, it turns out, is the reeyell gift: It is almost as if, by attaching a violin to your body, you can become a dude.

If I was a scootch disappointed not to get more antics from the Composer — this is not really an antics book, it turns out — I was wonderfully surprised by the slippery complexity of Hindman’s prose and thinking. Sounds Like Titanic made me reconsider memoir, in the best ways.

Note: I received an electronic copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.

The post Review: Sounds Like Titanic, Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman appeared first on Reading the End.

Of course, when I do make time for the books that I own but haven’t read, I rarely regret it. I bought Kassia St Clair’s The Secret Lives of Colour when I was in London with Mumsy and Alice, in the Notting Hill branch of Daunt Books, a shop whose bags Alice and I had seen so many times during our stay in London that we were starting to feel like we wouldn’t be true Londoners if we did not acquire a Daunt Books bag.

Well, for one thing, Daunt Books is a damn treasure — and we weren’t even in the main branch! We were in a satellite branch! When I go into an independent bookstore, the first most important thing that I desire is for its selection to feel curated. Daunt Books had that in spades, plus an organizing principle that nods to its primary function as a travel bookstore and makes a shopper feel urbane as hell: The books are organized by country, where each country’s section begins with phrasebooks, dictionaries, and travel guides, branches out into history, and finishes up with literature from that country. I was so deeply in love that I bought three books I didn’t need and barely had room for; when I got home Mumsy was like “uhhhhhh are you going to be within the weight limit for checked bags?” and I was like “lol we’ll see!” (I was.)

The Secret Lives of Colour was the book I purchased solely because of its beauty, and I rejoice to report that it’s as brilliant as it is beautiful. You can see why Daunt Books, my new favorite indie bookstore,¹ selected it for inclusion in its inventory. St Clair cycles through the color wheel telling stories of colors that stood the test of time, colors history forgot how to make, and colors that would literally kill you.

(Stop spelling the word “color” two different ways, Jenny!)

Some things I learned from this book include: Half of China’s current ivory supply comes from woolly mammoth tusks that have been unearthed because the damn polar ice caps are melting; everyone in ancient Egypt lined their eyes with kohl because everyone looks great in eyeliner;² and people will pay just about any price and kill any number of innocent beetles to have beautiful dyes for their clothes. Oh, and it was a hell of a life trying to be a painter in olden times because half your colors were trash and the other half cost all the money you had in the world.

The Secret Lives of Colour makes perfect bedtime reading in (I swear I use this phrase in every post now, but I want y’all to know that I would be so excited if it no longer applied and I would terminate its use with extreme prejudice if I could) these troubled times. St Clair tells short, charming, weird stories of paints and dyes and pigments, and everything is beautiful and nothing hurts.

PS the margins of each page have a swatch of the color currently under discussion. I love this book. I am so happy I bought it. Thanks, London.

The post Review: The Secret Lives of Colour, Kassia St. Clair appeared first on Reading the End.

Candida Moss and Joel Baden break down four areas in which the family that owns Hobby Lobby and the foundation owned by the family that owns Hobby Lobby are working to increase the Bible’s influence in American culture. The big scandalous one is the antiquities of shady provenance, but the three others — cultivating scholars to work on their antiquities, developing curricula about the Bible for use in public schools, and creating the “nonsectarian” Museum of the Bible –are each their own kettle of fish

The big thing — everything else kind of expands outward from this — is that the Greens, the evangelical family that owns and operates Hobby Lobby, want to acquire a whole bunch of antiquities relating to the Bible and early Christianity. They buy them cheap and donate them to their charitable foundation for massive tax write-offs, and that would be relatively okay in the same sort of not-exactly-okay a lot of tax write-off things are relatively okay, except they are very, very careless about provenance.

WELL I AM JUDGEY. Buying antiquities without a clean provenance massively increases the likelihood that they at some point passed through the hands of illegal dealers. This very much includes groups like ISIS, which raid ancient sites and do horrible hasty digs to find things they can sell to then fund their bad ISIS-y activities. And! The okayer the market makes it to buy unprovenanced antiquities, the more leeway illegal dealers will have to acquire and sell such antiquities — and ultimately, the more vital information about their original location will be lost beyond recovery. This would be very bad for Scholarship even if it didn’t also finance terrorism, which it does. Moss and Baden are careful to say that the Greens probably mean well, and that they have tried to clean up their act somewhat in the past few years. But somewhat is not enough, and they continue to acquire all sorts of cuneiform tablets and papyri and other really important stuff without making sure that those things were bought and sold legally along the way.

So, yeah, there’s that. Feel free not to shop at Hobby Lobby if you have an alternative, just because of that nonsense.¹

Each subsequent chapter of the book is less immediately upsetting than possibly funds terrorism, but let’s not skip being furious about the Green Scholars Initiative, which is the program the Greens have created to study all these antiquities they acquired semi-unethically. Basically they pick scholars at religious universities, or scholars they happen to know — not necessarily the top people in the relevant fields, not even necessarily people in the relevant fields at all — and bestow upon them the exclusive right to study this or that papyrus or tablet. But! (This is the part that makes me want to Hulk-smash.) They make the scholars sign non-disclosure agreements so that they can’t publish anything they find without the Greens’ say-so. Then they, the Greens, go ahead and publish nothing. For years. One book and that’s all.

Also, they try to pick scholars whose beliefs match their own; i.e., scholars who they think won’t find anything in the artifacts that might conflict with what they want to teach about the Bible and Christian history. Luckily, should any of the scholars ever find a fragment that says, like, “this is John the Apostle here to let you know that Jesus never walked on water not even slightly and we just said that to impress people,” they still couldn’t publish about it or even talk about it because of the non-disclosure agreement.

That’s cool, right? To hoard a bunch of ancient knowledge, keep it from the experts in those fields, and not share it with anyone ever? That’s in line with what we want out of scholarship?

YEAH. NO.

The education thing is like, that they keep making an insane curriculum that’s based on nothing and they want to put it in public schools. I decided to put a pin in being mad about this until it seems likelier to come to fruition — so, you know, probably that’ll happen later this year because that is just life in this administration.

And then the Museum of the Bible, okay, like. This museum opened in 2017 and it has a bunch of the Green collection artifacts which they keep saying they don’t personally own but they own the foundation the artifacts belong to so I’m not sure who they think they’re fooling, here. It’s immensely frustrating because they keep saying the museum is “nonsectarian” but they’re coming at it from one perspective only — Protestant and evangelical — and pretending that it’s scholarship instead of what it actually is, which is evangelism.

Baden and Moss are very nice about the Greens and their good intentions, without giving them a pass on any of the unethical and shady-as-shit things they’re doing. It’s great. Now you know everything I know about all this.

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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 responsible for our impulses and actions, the elements of environment that can shift us in one direction or another, and the genetic inheritances that shape us into who we are.

To say I learned a lot was an understatement, although I’m sure most of it will soon be swept away. I feel quite confident in my rudimentary grasp of the idea of heritability vs. inheritability, and that is the main thing that I wanted to make sure to hold onto. I like to criticize journalists for badly reporting scientific studies, and this heritability business seems like a crucial way to do it. (I don’t criticize them to their faces. I just do it inside my own head. Sometimes I go on Twitter and explain what really the study was showing vs what the media about it claimed it was showing.)

Sapolsky covers topics ranging from free will to how brains process dopamine to epigenetics, showing basically that these are all part of the same thing. And that thing — the brain and its ability to change — is understood better with each passing year, but so much still remains unknown to us. Sapolsky considers the example of archaeologists, who often leave the bulk of an important site unexplored, in the faith that those who come after them will have more sophisticated excavation techniques. What we know about the brain twenty years from now is likely to be miles different from what we know about it now — and Sapolsky is fully aware of this. So in the midst of his authoritative explanations about the brain, he’s careful to remind us that this is what we think happens, and that even the things we think happen are enormously context dependent.

Also, to my inexpressible joy, he shouts out Lamarck. Lamarck was a scientist who had this whole idea that you can inherit traits your parents acquired during their lifetimes, not just traits coded into your parents’ genes. Then science decided that Lamarck was wrong and laughed at him very much, and I have always felt that now that we know about epigenetics, some people owe Lamarck an apology. Sapolsky:

Lunatic! Buffoon! Epigenetically mediated mechanisms of inheritance — now often called “neo-Lamarckian inheritance” — prove Lamarck right in this narrow domain. Centuries late, the guy’s getting some acclaim.

THANK YOU SIR.

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