variety meats

Standing inside Stevens Books was like being on a stage set for Stevens Books, Stevens Book, Stevens Book Shop, and Stevensbook — all at the same time. It wasn’t that the bookstore wasn’t real, but rather that it felt reverse-engineered by an online business, or a series of them. Being a human who resides in physical space, my perceptual abilities were overwhelmed. But in some way, even if it was impossible to articulate, I knew that some kind of intersection of Olivet University, Gratia Community Church, IBPort, the Newsweek Media Group, and someone named Stevens was right there with me, among the fidget spinners, in an otherwise unremarkable store in San Francisco.

You will read this story, and you will think it can’t be any more bananas than it already is, but brother, you ain’t know nothin

Yes. Pregnancy, entered into willingly, is an act of generosity, a commitment to share the resources of life with another incipient being. Such generosity is in no other circumstances required by law. No matter how much you need a kidney donation, the law will not force another person to give you one. Consent, in the form of a donor card, is required even to remove organs from a dead body. If the foetus is a person, it is a person with a vastly expanded set of legal rights, rights available to no other class of citizen: the foetus may make free, non-consensual use of another living person’s uterus and blood supply, and cause permanent, unwanted changes to another person’s body. In the relationship between foetus and woman, the woman is granted fewer rights than a corpse. But it’s possible that the ban on abortion has less to do with the rights of the unborn child than with the threat to social order represented by women in control of their reproductive lives.

This is a fucking BARN-BURNER of an essay about the (soon-upcoming) Irish abortion referendum. THE WOMAN IS GRANTED FEWER RIGHTS THAN A CORPSE, haha time to burn this world to the ground

Naturalists hoped to restore a pristine wilderness, but that’s not where the turkeys had once thrived. No one was burning the underbrush for them anymore, or promoting the growth of nut-bearing trees. Turkeys had lived in the New England landscape in tandem with Native Americans, who had carefully tended the environment. And once the descendants of European settlers ceased hunting them at unsustainable levels, they moved right back in.

this starts off being about wild turkeys invading New England cities, but then becomes about the boundary between wilderness and civilization, and whether, in places where humans thrive, those distinctions are even meaningful.

The truly accurate review is the product of a culture of calipers and hairnets: delimit the stimuli and disregard outlier emotions. Equality in pursuit of objectivity. Every new experience approached as though it were a SaniTaco. I believe there is value in the cultivation of this ability, and I’m glad there are people who do it, but I don’t think I need to tell you I have no interest in living my life that way.
Josh, I’ve been really stressed and sad lately. I know you could tell from my last post, and the sob-choked messages I leave on your voicemail every night around 2 AM, which you do not return, but I know that’s just your way of helping me remain strong by teaching me to lower my expectations.

This is a really beautiful review of a peanut butter milkshake from no less than one decade ago, but isn’t it also about love and summer and, well, feelings?

“When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century on, a few minor improvements were necessary.... — “When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century on, a few minor improvements were necessary. Contractors were hired to plug holes, improve access and bring communications capabilities into the 21st Century: swapping leaky tiles for a leaky feeder. Mention the 18 month time frame to someone who worked on the Woolwich Tunnel job and you may be met with a mysterious smile. A year and a half may have seemed a long time to those who relied on the tunnel for their daily commute. But for those who were down there beneath the river, that time-frame has a different meaning. When one contractor tells me he aged 3 years on the Woolwich job, it is not a metaphor. For, deep down beneath river and clay, hidden from those above ground, something was occurring. That something was a time anomaly.“

A group in London is offering to drill holes in fences and garden walls to provide hedgehog highways through the urban fabric. Of course this reminds me of the of nothing more than the Israeli army carving “tunnels” through people’s homes as a means... — A group in London is offering to drill holes in fences and garden walls to provide hedgehog highways through the urban fabric. Of course this reminds me of the of nothing more than the Israeli army carving “tunnels” through people’s homes as a means to move though dense cities, remaining unnoticed from the air. “The tactics of “walking-through-walls” involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very *medium* of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux.” More on that, here.

hoggwarfare walkingthroughwalls

Every Book I Read in 2017

All the books I finished in 2017. As with the movies, an asterisk marks a re-read. Here’s last year’s list.

01 The Children’s Book; AS Byatt - I found this novel (of the sweeping, historical variety) to be a bit of a slog.

02 The Index Card; Helaire Olen and Harold Pollack - Basic financial tips, the sort of thing one reads at the beginning of a NEW YEAR, filled with NEW ME feelings.

03 Caught; Lisa Moore - This felt a bit like an action movie, Michael Bay with more drugs and fewer explosions. The scope is global (or at least, continental) rather than hewing close to the newfoundland coast. I was carried along, but ultimately not taken.

04 A Really Good Day; Ayelet Waldman - a combination memoir/drug policy paper is a rare thing. Waldman tries 30 days of LSD microdosing (1 microdose every 3 days) to see if it improves her mood, marriage, workflow. Each chapter traces a day of those 30, as well as taking on broader topics in the history of psychedelic research. The ongoing thread of her desire for a workspace of her own in her Berkeley house is a little first-world-problem-y, but who am I to criticise a woman’s Virginia Woolf riff?

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