Bulletin Board
- About the only thing that makes winter bearable is back! The NHL season began Wednesday and tonight is the Stampede‘s home opener. Added bonus: watching hockey is exercise
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubez
- These Are Not Acts of God (“Our politicians mourn, our media serves the familiar narratives, and we end the day in the same place where we started it, bewildered by reducible catastrophes but unwilling to do anything about it.”)
- What Science Says About ‘Thoughts and Prayers’ (“Murphy’s central concern with offering ‘thoughts and prayers’ is not that doing so is ineffective at solving health issues, but rather that prayer is offered in place of actual policy solutions.”)
- The Real Value of Money (“Materialism, by and large, is a psychological trap. No matter how much you own, how much you buy, how much you earn, the disease of more never goes away.”)
Blog Headlines of the Week (Las Vegas edition)
- Maybe we should just have a national kill-a-bunch-of-people day
- Constitutional Rights Do Not Equal Constitutional Insanity
- Tell Us Again How Guns Make Everyone Safe
Bookish Linkage
- The 28 coolest independent bookstores in the U.S.
- A guide to the essential Philip K. Dick
- Patricia Engel (The Veins of the Ocean) and David Wood (What Have We Done) won the 2017 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
- If you haven’t heard who won the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature, you haven’t been online or reading the news (I’ve read one of his books but wasn’t a big fan)
- The shortlist for the National Book Awards also was announced
- There’s now a book collecting award (but only for women under the age of 30)
Nonbookish Linkage
- Inside the Minuteman missile site off Interstate 90
- When do we get to call someone a terrorist?
- Can the First Amendment save us?
- Talking about madness
- When tuberculosis was the prettiest way to die
- The kindled brain
- Why do so many people believe in miracles?
- The Cold War and American record albums
- The Smithsonian is following its crowd-sourced website of rock music photography with a book, Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen
One of course wonders why in the president’s view a black man protesting racial injustice by kneeling during the anthem is a ‘son of a bitch,’ while whites marching along Nazis and the Klan to protest the removal of a statue of a Confederate general is a, quote, ‘very fine person[.]'”
Jake Tapper, September 25
