Blogroll

Book Review: Fear by Dirk Kurbjuweit

Thousands of pages and hours have been consumed debating the purposes of literature. Many, myself included, would agree with Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, who says it “enable[s] us to explore and to understand more fully the common human abyss.” And foreign authors like Vargas Llosa enable Americans to see the extent to which elements […]

Book Review: Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind by Jaime Lowe

It seems that memoirs about dealing with mental illness are becoming proportionately as ubiquitous as the conditions themselves. Searching “mental health” in Amazon’s biographies and memoirs category produces more than 5,000 results. At least anecdotally, such works coming into the mainstream seems to correspond with increasing public discussion of destigmatizing mental illness. In recounting her […]

Weekend Edition: 9-23

Bulletin Board

Whether hurricane hangover or whatever, there was no Weekend Edition last week as not much struck me as worth passing along. As a result, a couple items below are a week or so old.

Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez

Snopes and the Search for Facts in a Post-Fact World (“As pretty much […]

The book that didn’t exist — until hundreds asked for it

Trump supporters on Reddit last week tried, but failed, to keep Hillary Clinton’s new book from reaching No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller lists. It wasn’t the first time an effort by a group of people affected the book industry. Perhaps the most interesting one, though, involved demand for a book that didn’t exist.

Jean Shepherd […]

Book Review: A Force So Swift by Kevin Peraino

We’ve all watched with fascination those arrangements where hundreds or thousands of dominoes tumble one after the other to form an elaborate illustration. And who hasn’t somewhat envied the person who got to tip the first domino?

Such concepts aren’t limited to fun or entertainment. Images of dominoes falling were crucial to U.S. foreign policy […]