Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
“Margaret Atwood’s new novel is being greeted as the long-awaited feminist dystopia, and I am afraid that for some time it will be viewed as a test of the imaginative power of feminist paranoia,” the writer and critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1986, soon after the publication of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale. To…
Several years ago, Jordan Peterson told me he wanted to buy a church. This was long before he became known as “the most influential public intellectual in the Western world,” as he was described in the pages of the New York Times a few months ago. It was before he was fancied to be a…
Graphic: Elena Scotti (GMG), photos: AP, Getty Images When political commentator Sally Kohn sent Aminatou Sow, host of the podcast Call Your Girlfriend, a passage from her forthcoming book The Opposite of Hate: A Field Guide to Repairing Our Humanity in which she is quoted, Sow was confused. The quote harkened back to a night…
Image via AP. New York State has launched a new “program” that would severely limit one of the few earthly pleasures permitted to prisoners during their time behind bars: Books. Directive 4911A, which is being piloted at three prisons around the state, limits the items available to inmates to just six vendors, ostensibly to “enhance…
Court documents filed in the US have revealed the editorial concerns of the publisher Simon & Schuster about the manuscript of the “alt-right” controversialist Milo Yiannopoulos’s autobiography Dangerous. Having reportedly secured the book for an advance of $255,000 (£200,000), Simon & Schuster cancelled the deal in February after a recording emerged that appeared to show…
react-text: 137 There may be no more direct metric of social influence than one’s ability to change language. Getting your friends to talk like you, after all, is a hallmark of adolescent power (“Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” barks Regina George, blond queen bee of the 2004 teen…
Image: Thrawn cover from Star Wars Celebration special edition, Del Rey Thrawn, the most anticipated Star Wars book since Disney bought Lucasfilm and declared the old Expanded Universe novels to no longer be canon, is out today. And the things being introduced in it already have Wookiepedia entries. Full disclosure, I am only on page…
Image: By Chris Scalf for The Essential Guide to Warfare (Del Rey) When Disney acquired Star Wars and Lucasfilm announced the all the stories of the Expanded Universe had been jettisoned, it seemed like a galaxy far, far away was getting a fresh start. But that hasn’t totally been true, as pieces of the EU…
Image: Heir to the Empire cover by Rich Kelly (Lucasfilm/Del Rey) Next week, Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn, a book about the rise to power of everyone’s favorite grand admiral, will be released. I’ve never anticipated a Star Wars book more, and now seems like the right time to look back at the books that introduced him…
The vaunted human capacity for reason may have more to do with winning arguments than with thinking straight.CreditIllustration by Gérard DuBois Barrier Status: ‘none’ In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one…