So every time I look at photos of the toxin spill in Hungary, they pretty much make me feel comforted, as I’m used to a home where the mud is red.
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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.
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?
What I Watched in 2017
These are the movies and TV shows I watched in 2017. Asterisk means a rewatch. Here’s last year’s list!
01 *Boogie Nights (97) ease yourself into the New Year - this is a classic hangover watch.
02 War of the Roses (89)
03 *Double Indemnity (44) could (and probably DO) watch this every year.
04 Out of the Past (47)
05 *LA Confidential (97)
06 * The Graduate (67) sometimes you get stuck in a California kind of feeling, a little noir, a little jaded, squinting into the sun.
This was a really interesting read about how map apps may change in the age of the self-driving car, taking into account how a passenger needs to interact with the environment, as opposed to how a driver does.
“There are intriguing similarities, then, between bog bodies and the finds at Alken Enge. What distinguishes between the two is the evidence of “specialness” that is so common in the most spectacular bog finds, and which in Parker Pearson’s view means that we can make out “many patterns which help to define the corpses as a group which is socially distinct from the rest of the population.” These distinctions seem to have had nothing to do with sex; the bodies that we have are almost equally divided between male and female. But age seems to have been a factor – there are almost no children, and only a few bog bodies who were aged under 20 when they died. Social status seems to have mattered, too. A handful of the bog people probably came from the lowest stratum of Iron Age society, among whom the best documented is probably Yde Girl, a Dutch find dating back the 1897; she had been garrotted, and her body was found wrapped in a poorly-made, threadbare cloak. A much larger number, though, had held high status. Lindow Man – who was in his 20s when he died, and who had met an extraordinarily violent end – wore a neatly-trimmed beard and, like Old Croghan Man, boasted well-manicured fingernails that betrayed no sign of manual work. Huldremose Woman had been interred in a Danish bog along with a bone comb and amber beads, both indicators of rank. A German body with a slit throat, known as Der Roter Franz (Red Franz) for his bog-water-dyed red hair, was found to have “rider’s facets” – protrusions on the femur caused by the increased use of thigh muscles that are typically found only in those who spend long hours on horseback. And another German find, the decapitated skull known as Osterby Man, wore his hair elaborately twisted and tied on one side of his head – a style known as a “Suebian knot” that is mentioned by Tacitus as an important status-symbol among the men of the north.”
Oh girl you KNOW you want to read about bog bodies…