A Progressive on the Prairie

I’d say good riddance to 2021 but I live where people exercise their “freedumb” believing masks violate their “right to liberty,” not others’ “right to life”

Nonbookish Linkage

• An annotated Emancipation Proclamation

• The five stages of anti-vax angst

• Signifying bullshit

• The year’s six weirdest conspiracy theories

Bookish Linkage

• Happy Public Domain Day

• Only one of the 10 best Russian books published in English in 2021 was by a living author

“Mr. Jones,” Counting Crows, August and Everything After

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez

• Level The Playing Field For Religion and Civil Rights (“[T]he struggle for equality in America has been long, uphill, and brutal. And among its biggest obstacles have been those who have claimed to be acting in the name of God.”)

• Gorsuch’s Crusade Against Vaccine Mandates Could Topple a Pillar of Public Health (“Gorsuch seems to think that unless a disease is actively killing tens of thousands of Americans a month, the state cannot curb its spread in a manner that hampers ‘religious liberty.'”)

Best(?) Children’s Christmas Book Title Ever

• Hookers and Blow Save Christmas

Nonbookish Linkage

• The 2021 Lie of the Year

• Cultures where men and women don’t speak the same language

• Is the Supreme Court the country’s greatest threat to public health?

• Religion in the time of COVID

• A Hubble space telescope Advent calendar

• Russia’s patron saint of nuclear weapons

Bookish Linkage

• Why is there a typeface named Jim Crow?

M.F. Moonzajer, Love, Hatred and Madness

Nonbookish Linkage

• COVID lockdown and a “high-functioning” depressive

• Does democracy exist?

• A truly moronic conspiracy theory

• USD poli sci prof rightfully proud to be “famous & dangerous”

• The cabarets of Heaven and Hell

• When the British couldn’t watch TV at 6 pm

Bookish Linkage

• Why does Dune remain so popular?

• Calling something Bible fan fiction seems repetitive to me

• Is Superman Circumcised? wins Diagram Prize for the year’s oddest book title

• I’ve only read one of World Literature Today‘s list of this year’s 100 notable translations and have one other on my tablet

• Oddly, the only one of the NYTBR‘s 10 best books of 2021 is a translation — and not on the WLT list

[F]reedom of thought on the internet is all the more complete now that it’s clear that people have stopped thinking.

Hervé Le Tellier, The Anomaly