(1) CORE FOR RAVENCLAWS. At BookRiot, Rachel Brittain offers “A Hogwarts House Reading List: 20 Books for Ravenclaws”.
It’s also about creativity and individuality, originality and acceptance. All Ravenclaws value learning and curiosity, but not all Ravenclaws are traditionally book smart or love school. Like all the houses, Ravenclaw is home to a wide and diverse group of students. Admittedly, most of them have aced arithmancy, potions, transfiguration, care of magical creatures, DADA, and received OWLs so good it made Professor Flitwick cry, but still. No two Ravenclaws are alike. Except in one thing: Ravenclaws. Love. Books.
So set down your Self-Spelling Quill and your charms homework for just a moment, friends, and check out these twenty books for Ravenclaws that are sure to spark your imagination and make you a little smarter along the way.
Two of the books on the list are:
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
About: the letters written between Juliet Ashton and a group of friends from Guernsey who survived the German occupation by concocting a fake book club after being caught breaking curfew.
Because: it’s all about books and the friends you can make because of them, even in the midst of chaos and crisis.
The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida
About: Naoki Higashida, who describes what it’s like to be autistic in his own words.
Because: learning how other people think and process the world around them is something you find endlessly fascinating and important.
(2) STAR CROSSED (OUT). Slate’s “Browbeat” blog tells how Kirkus Reviews changed their review after fierce criticism – from people who can’t have read the book yet: “YA Novel About ‘Mob Mentalities’ Punished After Online Backlash”.
American Heart won’t be published until January, but it has already attracted the ire of the fierce group of online YA readers that journalist Kat Rosenfield has referred to as “culture cops.” To them, it was an irredeemable problem that Moriarty’s novel, which was inspired in part by Huckleberry Finn, centers on a white teenager who gradually—too gradually—comes to terms with the racism around her. On Goodreads, the book’s top “community review,” posted in September, begins, “fuck your white savior narratives”; other early commenters on Goodreads accused Moriarty of “profiting off people’s pain” and said “a white writer should not have tackled this story, and neither should a white character be the center of it.”
The backlash escalated last week, when Kirkus Reviews gave American Heart a coveted “starred review,” which influences purchases by bookstores and libraries. Kirkus’ anonymous reviewer called the book “by turns terrifying, suspenseful, thought-provoking, and touching,” and praised its “frighteningly believable setting of fear and violent nativism gone awry.” The book’s critics were not pleased with the commendation.
Author Laura Moriarty commented on Facebook:
Dear friends, I write this with a heavy but hopeful heart. If and when you have time, I would appreciate your thoughts on this (longer than average) post. And feel free to share.
My new novel, American Heart, is a crossover novel (for both older teens and adults) that imagines a United States where American Muslims are deported to “safety zones” in Nevada. The main character is a young non-Muslim who believes the deportations are necessary until she meets an American Muslim headed to freedom. You may or may not have noticed, but even though the book isn’t due out until 1/30/18, it already has a very low rating on Goodreads. This is because a group, profiled in Kat Rosenfield’s “The Toxic Drama on YA Twitter” for Vulture, has been bombarding American Heart with one-star reviews because they don’t approve of the idea of the book and because they are assuming it is a white-savior narrative. (Actually the main character realizes, accurately, that she alone can’t save anyone, but you would only know that if you’d read the book.) Most of reviewers on Goodreads openly admit to not having read the book.
I was encouraged last week when Kirkus Reviews gave American Heart a starred review (starred as in ‘this is great!’ not one star like the mad people on Goodreads), calling it a “moving portrait of an American girl discovering her society in crisis, desperate to show a disillusioned immigrant the true spirit of America.” The Kirkus reviewer, an observant Muslim and a woman of color, called the book “sensible, thought-provoking, and touching . . and so rich that a few coincidences of plot are easily forgiven.” (Okay, okay, fine, I’ll take it.)
As one may have predicted, the book’s very vocal critics (again, this group is made up almost entirely of people who have not read the book) were outraged by the starred review. That’s fine. That’s their right to free speech. What has both surprised and disturbed me, and what I think would be surprising and disturbing to anyone concerned about censorship and free speech, was that this morning, Kirkus announced it was: retracting American Heart’s starred review.
Kirkus offered this explanation in “A Note From The Editor In Chief”.
It is a policy of Kirkus Reviews that books with diverse subject matter and protagonists are assigned to Own Voices reviewers—writers who can draw upon lived experience when evaluating texts. Our assignment of the review of American Heart was no exception to this rule and was reviewed by an observant Muslim person of color (facts shared with her permission). Our reviewer is an expert in children’s & YA literature and well-versed in the dangers of white savior narratives. She found that American Heart offers a useful warning about the direction we’re headed in as far as racial enmity is concerned.
The issue of diversity in children’s and teen literature is of paramount importance to Kirkus, and we appreciate the power language wields in discussion of the problems. As a result, we’ve removed the starred review from kirkus.com after determining that, while we believe our reviewer’s opinion is worthy and valid, some of the wording fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity, and we failed to make the thoughtful edits our readers deserve. The editors are evaluating the review and will make a determination about correction or retraction after careful consideration in collaboration with the reviewer.
(3) INDIE. SFWA President Cat Rambo completes her series about what the organization has to offer indie writers: “SFWA and Independent Writers, Part Four: What Lies Down the Road”
Going forward, I expect more and more indies to enter the organization as it proves that it’s giving them solid valid for their membership in the form of:
- Community
- Knowledge sharing
- Publications like the Bulletin and the Singularity
- Chances attend and sell books at places like Baltimore Bookfest, ALA, and other book-related events
- Marketing opportunities for themselves such as the Speakers Bureau
- Promotional opportunities for their work such as the New Release Newsletter
- Reading material (there’s a lot on those internal forums)
- The wealth of networking and information available via the SFWA Nebula Conference
- Existing programs like Griefcom, the Emergency Medical Fund, and the Legal Fund
(4) CHECKMATE. A recent episode of The Post Atomic Horror Podcast, which appeals to fans with an interest in filking and other poetic diversions, featured a guest who summarized the Enterprise’s episode “A Night In Sickbay” to the tune “One Night in Bangkok”. The summary begins about 2 minutes into the episode and proceeds for roughly 4 minutes.
Come for the filk, stay for the commentary!
(5) VIEW FROM A GANTRY. Rocket Stack Rank’s October 2017 ratings are live, and Jeremiah Tolbert’s novella The Dragon of Dread Peak was the highest-rated story.
(6) REMODELING COMPLETE. Locus Online’s lovely redesigned website went live today.
(7) HOT OFF THE PRESS. An institute for design in Holland has come up with an experimental edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 which requires you to nearly burn the book to read it: “Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: This edition can be read only if you apply heat to the pages”. See it in action —
(8) TODAY IN HISTORY
- October 16, 1995 – Candyman was released in theaters in the U.S.
(9) EYE SPY. At Fantasy Book Critic, Tom Doyle considers “The Unreliability of Magical Surveillance”.
In my American Craftsmen trilogy, psychic spies (farseers) can view intel across the distances of time and space (farsight). Their visions guide the missions of magical and mundane soldiers, and they play against the farseers of hostile powers. I want to look briefly at some of the popular stories of magical surveillance. The use of magical or psychic means to view across space and time is an old idea. Yet few of the stories that come immediately to mind view such power as an unambiguous good for the wielder. In the story of Snow White, the evil queen uses a magic mirror for scrying. Like many such devices, the mirror is a two-edged weapon. On the one hand, the mirror demonstrates what powerful surveillance can accomplish; for example, the attempt of Snow White and the huntsman to fake her death fails because of it. On the other hand, the mirror seems to be driving the queen to her eventual destruction by doling out only as much information as she requests and no more. In The Lord of the Rings, we have the Mirror of Galadriel, the palantíri, and the Ring itself. All of these are in their own way unreliable. The Mirror of Galadriel shows Sam a vision of an industrializing Shire that momentarily discourages him from his mission, when his mission is the one hope of Middle Earth. Denethor’s palantir gives him true intel, but only what Sauron wants him to see, and so he goes mad with despair. In turn, Aragorn is able to use Saruman’s palantir to nudge Sauron into rushing his attack. The Ring seems to serve as a sort of tracking device, but only when Frodo puts it on does it work well enough to zero in on him….
(10) SPEAKING UP. AudioFile is campaigning to get a Grammy Award nomination for Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. Those eligible to vote will do so between October 16-19.
What is the nature of space and time? How do we fit within the universe? How does the universe fit within us? There’s no better guide through these mind-expanding questions than acclaimed astrophysicist and bestselling author Neil deGrasse Tyson.
But today, few of us have time to contemplate the cosmos. So Tyson brings the universe down to Earth succinctly and clearly, with sparkling wit, in digestible chapters consumable anytime and anywhere in your busy day.
(11) BALLS. Motherboard takes readers “Inside the Most Exclusive High-Powered Rocketry Event in America”.
“We might be digging a hole to get at this thing, man,” Joshua Allen told me as we barreled across Nevada’s Black Rock Desert in the back of a covered pickup truck.
Allen and his peers from Oregon State University had just launched their homemade rocket at Big Ass Load Lifting Suckers (BALLS), an annual gathering of rocketeers that showcases the most powerful amateur rockets in the US. It was their first time at the event, held late in September, and they hoped that their two-stage rocket would fly to 100,000 feet, about one-third of the way to space proper. The Oregon State students, many of whom graduated in May, had spent the last year designing, building, and testing the rocket we were hunting from a pickup. Allen estimated that it contained over $20,000 of purchased and donated materials—and after a malfunction during its flight, he wasn’t sure they would recover it in one piece, if at all.
Every September for the last 27 years, the Tripoli Rocketry Association—one of the two amateur rocketry groups in the US—has hosted BALLS as a showcase of the rockets built by people like Allen that are too powerful to be safely flown anywhere but the middle of the desert. Black Rock is a well-worn stomping ground for amateur rocketry due to its expansive, barren lake bed that lacks any signs of life or flammable materials. This was the location that the first civilian team launched a rocket into space in 2004 and is frequented throughout the year by local high-powered rocketry groups in the southwest.
In order to bring hundreds of rocketeers together for a weekend of punching holes in the sky, Tripoli must obtain a flight waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that allows the organization to fly over 100,000 feet. It’s the highest flight waiver granted to amateur rocketeers by a federal administration anywhere in the world.
(12) TOURIST ATTRACTION. Just how many tourists will be attracted is the question “A Giant Concrete Orb in Northern Iceland Moves With the Arctic Circle”. (Say what you like, it looks like Rover from The Prisoner to me.)
On Grímsey, a remote island 25 miles off the northern coast of Iceland, sits a massive orb of concrete that marks the Arctic Circle. The artwork, called Orbis & Globus (“Circle & Sphere”), weighs 8 metric tons (almost 9 tons US), and will be physically moved a short distance each year because the Arctic Circle is moving, too.
“The Arctic Circle marks a point where the Sun never sets in the summer and never rises in the winter,” Steve Christer, a partner with Studio Granda, which created the work in a partnership with artist Kristinn E. Hrafnsson, told me over the phone from Reykjavik. “It isn’t just a point on a map.” At 66.5 °N, the Arctic Circle moves a little bit each year as the Earth travels through space, shifting on its axis. (Earth’s axial tilt can vary by about 2° over the course of a 40,000-year cycle.) This giant orb will have to be repositioned every year by an average of 14.5 meters. Christer told me they’ll hire a contractor to do it.
The orb was commissioned by the nearby town of Akureyri, which was seeking “a symbol for the Arctic Circle on the island of Grímsey,” he said. Getting the work there was no easy feat.
(13) HALLOWEEN REVIVALS. Joel Ryan, in the Yahoo! TV piece “TV’s Lost Halloween Classics: Six Specials From Beyond The Grave”, introduces a new generation to “Mad Monster Party,” “Halloween is Grinch Night,” and the Cartoon Network adaptation of “The Halloween Tree.”
- The Worst Witch The Tim Curry Halloween movie for the whole family, about a boarding school for aspiring broomstick types, also boasts the fabulous Diana Rigg, Fairuza Balk (The Craft), the post-Facts of Life Charlotte Rae, and production design that screams HBO in the mid-1980s. (Yes, we know The Worst Witch was a British coproduction, but then again, that’s what HBO originals looked like in the mid-1980s: things that were not quite of Hollywood.) In any case, the movie is a charming reminder of those simple days before the Hogwarts Express rolled into the creative space.
(14) GULLIVER’S CREATOR. Nature’s Greg Lynall, in “In Retrospect: Gulliver’s Travels”, looks at the science in Gulliver’s Travels, in a piece commemorating the 350th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s birth. (Apologies – I can’t make my computer pick up excerpted text.)
(15) HAMIT SCRIPT RACKS UP ANOTHER AWARD. Francis Hamit has won a third screenwriting contest with his screenplay for the forthcoming feature film Christopher Marlowe.
The Elizabethan-era historical thriller is slated to be produced primarily in the United Kingdom by famed Producer Gary Kurtz. On September 16, 2017 the screenplay won the “Best Thriller Screenplay” prize at the GO International Independent Film Festival in Washington, DC. Hamit’s previous awards for this work were at the 2016 Hollywood Book Festival and the 2017 New Renaissance Film Festival in London.
(16) WOKE-O-METER. Motherboard offers a solution: “Want More Diverse Entertainment? A New Site Has You Covered”
When it comes to movie reviews, there are plenty of resources that can tell you the most critically-acclaimed films and popular flicks. But what about when it comes to how woke they are?
Enter Mediaversity, a website that reviews TV and movies based on how well they represent diverse gender, race, and LGBTQ characters and stories, created by Li Lai, a graphic designer from New York.
“What really solidified this idea for me was last year when I was watching Oscar nominees and critically-acclaimed TV shows,” Lai told me over the phone. “Right in a row I watched Narcos, Game of Thrones, and The Revenant. All of them had awful portrayals of women.”
She was surprised that all of these highly-praised works were so tone deaf. Lai hopped online to look up reviews that might elucidate this aspect of media, as well as diverse representations of race and LGBTQ characters and stories. But she realized there was a dearth of information. There are plenty of resources if you want to know how entertaining a movie is, or how artistic, or how clever the dialogue is. But it’s a lot harder to find out whether or not the only time women appear onscreen is in rape scenes.
So, nine months ago, Lai decided to create Mediaversity, a labor of love which she said she currently has no plans to monetize. Though, like all reviews, the ratings are subjective, Mediaversity has a guideline for how Lai and her fellow reviewers—a diverse team of friends and bloggers—measure a show’s representation success, and uses a letter grading system from A+ to F.
(17) ANOTHER HALLOWED BREW. A gigantic “monster” IPA with just the right balance to bring palates back from the dead: “Stone Brewing’s Concoctions Go Wild and Dr. FrankenStone’s Monster IPA is Born”.
Late one evening, into the deepest vaults of Dr Frankenstone’s steaming lab – a monster IPA was born. This morbid creation was the result of our brewers pushing the hop limits (most of which are successful) to an insane level that would unleash an IPA like none other from the brewery. It was a creature that haunted our brewers for many nights, as this beaker-buster was something they could not explain, yet was such a balanced delight to taste. Unbeknownst to our brewers, the horrific beast of a beer was a result of their blending sessions that got out of hand! After the first taste of the fresh liquid, our brewing team of mad scientists knew they had to re-create this experiment for October only in draft form.
[Thanks to JJ, Martin Morse Wooster, Cat Eldridge, Harold Osier, John A Arkansawyer, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Rob Thornton.]
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12) Definitely looks like Rover
Yay! Title credit! Thanks.
2) I have to admire Kirkus for reaching new heights (or depths) in mealy-mouthed deniability.
[godstalk]
“Scroll up, bowl a ball, a Pixel a Fifth” (from “I’ve got a lovely File of Commenters”).
Did anyone else see the article about P. K. Dick and Kanye West in the Washington Post recently https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/philip-k-dick-was-a-sci-fi-prophet-did-he-predict-the-unraveling-of-kanye-west/2017/10/11/e7366ffe-ad78-11e7-be94-fabb0f1e9ffb_story.html?utm_term=.838f1535a4e7
7) The article doesn’t say if the pages stay readable after heating, or if they return to black once cool again. And it may make for a better video to use an open flame to heat the pages, but I would think a hot air gun might work just as well and enlighten the pages much more quickly and completely.
(6) The new Locus website is really nice. Crisp and clean and easy to read.
@7: that’s certainly novel; I wonder how far down the line something practical will come of it?
@11: that’s a long ways beyond the Estes Industries model rockets I flew in my high-school years….
@12: I see your point, although ancient recollection says Rover had no variation in color while never being perfectly round. But it’s definitely cool.
@Bruce Arthurs: ISTM that the videos show the page starting to revert (the not-quite-white area in the lower-middle of the converted part of the verso of the 2nd leaf becoming slightly darker). If I’m seeing correctly, my next question is how many times the material can be cycled.
#7: I am thinking they used the same technology that is used on novelty coffee cups. When a hot liquid is added to the cup an image appears on the otherwise black cup. Then when it cools down it reverts back to black.
Bruce: Ray’s firemen did not use hot air dryers. 🙂
While its subject is OT, this is a nice graphic work:
http://brianfies.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-fire-story-complete.html
He’s reporting on last week.
(16) An apparent glutton for punishment, I had to check out their site. Now my head hurts.
i knew it wasn’t going to go well when the highest rating is for “This is some woke shit”.
I’m obviously not the target audience.
Andrew: The piece about Kanye West and Philip K. Dick was in the Pixel Scroll two days ago!
@Martin: Thanks. I must have missed that – I was out of town over the weekend, and skimmed those Scrolls when I got back.
Sad story but glad they got away safely.
And the paperboy shouted “Pixel! PIxel! Scroll all about it!”
In the event you don’t actually have a copy yet, todays Meredith Moment on Amazon UK is The Martian for 99p.
7) Stupid stunt. A book that becomes readable after being heated doesn’t seem to fit with the theme of the book, this would be more appropriate for a spy novel.
2) -Really, Kirkus?
if you want to “read” Fahrenheit 451 the proper way, you’ll have someone remember it for you.
So apparently Carrie Fisher once went a little bit Godfather on a Hollywood exec:
(2), (16) I’m “glad” to see people working hard to make rightwing stereotypes true.
(12) “The Arctic Circle marks a point where the Sun never sets in the summer and never rises in the winter,”
I’ll note that the Arctic Circle is the edge of where this happens, and then only for a brief period. If you really want to experience midnight sun (and polar winter) you should go further north.
(2) THIS is what happens after 30 years of identity politics being the primary focus of higher education, culture, and politicians. (16) is just a further illustration of the problem.
@Johan P
Well…yes!
Regards,
Dann
2) @Dann: Hyperbole much? I’ve got criticisms of identity politics, too. Heck, I pointed up this story! But identity politics is by no means “the primary focus of higher education, culture, and politicians”. I’m sure it seems that way, since a) identity politics proponents are so very vocal about it, and b) identity politics is corporate-approved, but it’s not.
I should add that the most successful living American proponent of identity politics has been working at it for at least thirty years now. He’s done incredibly well in politics with it. How well? He’s the President of the United States. That’s how well it works. So you do have a point. Just maybe not the one you think you have.
Wow, what was Kirkus thinking? All this manages to do is heighten the controversy, and it makes all future reviews suspect.
@John A Arkansawyer
Hyperbole? On occasion, but only in moderation.
I agree with your a and b, FWIW.
While Mr. Trump may be a proponent of identity politics, his electoral popularity is a response to the identity politics illustrated in Kirkus kerfuffle.
Regards,
Dann
Apropos of nothing…
I downloaded the ibook version Vallista this morning and was disappointed to discover that the formatting is messed up on my iphone, to the point that it is almost unreadable. The margins are much wider than most ibooks, so if I have the font set at a reasonable size, the text is a narrow column, just a few words wide, running down the center of the screen. The formatting seems fine on my ipad, but I don’t have my ipad at work to read at lunch time.
I checked Hawk, which is also on my phone. The margins of that are narrower and the text wider.
Grumble, grump.
Dann: While Mr. Trump may be a proponent of identity politics, his electoral popularity is a response to the identity politics illustrated in Kirkus kerfuffle.
His electoral popularity is the result of people being able to act out a combination of their racism, sexism, homophobia, and general vicious, childish attitude of “If I can’t get everything I want, I’ll just see that everyone else gets fucked over, too”.
No one made Trump’s supporters vote for him, not liberals, not anyone else. They chose to do that, and the responsibility for it is ALL on them.
Your repeated attempts to shunt the blame for their actions to others are contemptible. 🙁
@JJ
Thank you for the further illustration of my point.
Had the Democrats run a competent and qualified candidate, we might not be in this mess.
Regards,
Dann
@Dann
While Mr. Trump may be a proponent of identity politics, his electoral popularity is a response to the identity politics illustrated in Kirkus kerfuffle.
WTF? You keep spouting this stuff, and it’s absolute nonsense.
Read this and get back to me.
Dann: Thank you for the further illustration of my point.
In other words, you are claiming that these people were “forced” to vote for Trump because of people like me who oppose racism, misogyny, homophobia, and a$$holes.
Nope. They alone are responsible for their choices. They are accountable for their actions. Neither you, nor they, gets to place that accountability on others.
The Democrats did run a competent and qualified candidate — one who had a thoughtful, workable jobs plan and other concrete plans to improve the state of the country. The problem was that she was a woman — a strong, capable woman — and there was no way that the Trump contingent could stomach that.
@Dann
Had the Democrats run a competent and qualified candidate, we might not be in this mess.
Excuse me? Come on. You are getting ridiculous. I would rather have Hillary Clinton in the WH every day and twice on Sundays than the know-nothing asshat that currently resides there. She WAS competent and qualified, and if you can’t see that, you are deliberately blind.
Was Hillary a perfect candidate? No; she had plenty to criticize from both left and right. Did she run a good campaign? Not really, and it’s been analyzed to death how she could do better.
Was she incompetent? Not by any stretch of the imagination. Like her or not, she was a highly capable woman, smarter than her husband by far. Was she qualified? Yes. Period. Was she electable? Quite likely yes. She won the popular vote by a large degree, so of those inspired to vote, there was no big issue.
If I were American, would I have voted for her in the last election? In a heartbeat.
@Bonnie McDaniel
I get a lot of good from reading Mr. Coates. But not an unalloyed good.
There are rejoinders to Mr. Coates thesis that are worthy of consideration.
Regards,
Dann
Trump picked up a lot of votes from people who are disgusted by the sort of stuff in (2) and (16), although I suspect most of those people would have voted Republican anyway. Being in Chattanooga this week and reading the local papers, it’s clear that much of what motivates them is perceived injustices done in the name of diversity. For a really extreme example of the sort of thing that drove people to Trump, have a look at “The Uncomfortable Truth About Campus Rape Policy,” by Emily Yoffe (The Atlantic, September 6, 2017).
No matter how worthy your cause, there will always be people who go too far, and if you don’t stop them, they’ll do as much harm as any enemy could do. Progressives have been too slow to speak out against our own extremists, and that continues to hurt us. (But it works both ways; as far as the 2018 elections go, Trump is the best player on our team right now.) 🙂
Sometimes we’re “too slow to speak out against our own extremists” because we don’t accept the right-wing applied definition of extremist.
For instance: 2 in the scroll above looks to me like it’s a case of extremism, and I’m a pretty fiery leftist.
16, otoh, looks like a useful site — if read in conjunction with other sites that write more traditional reviews. I definitely don’t mind it if a review actually comments on the skill of representation within a story, or even focuses on it – there are hundreds of reviews and reviewers out there giving a more usual take on the merits and demerits of a story. Would I want it to be my sole review locale? Not even a little. But if I’m not sure if a story is going to be “let’s rape all the women all the time but do it for titillation” I don’t mind having a pace to go I know will address that straight out.
Probably worth noting that – quite apart from any question of its merits as an argument – “identity politics caused Trump” is a classic example of the “perversity” narrative identified by Hirschmann in The Rhetoric of Reaction.
(I’d very much recommend “The Rhetoric of Reaction” and “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty” , by the way. They’re easy reads that have really helped my understanding of politics, fandom, and fannish politics.)
@Dann: THIS is what happens after 30 years of identity politics being the primary focus of higher education, culture, and politicians. 30 years? You’re forgetting George Wallace, Lester Maddox, …. The U.S. has always had strains of identity politics; cf discussion here recently of how (e.g.) Italians used not to be considered White, or the ~1830 cartoon showing a drunken Irishman and a drunken German (carefully labeled in case the drawings weren’t recognizable) running off with a ballot box. The “problem” is that some of the more-recently-active identities are more-obviously minorities; it takes a peculiar kind of tunnel vision to see acknowledging their existence as being a “primary focus”.
@Greg: But it works both ways; as far as the 2018 elections go, Trump is the best player on our team right now. Not necessarily; Bannon may do more to flip seats if he actually succeeds in getting sitting (but not kowtowing) Republicans primaried by righter-than-thou jackasses.
Thought I mentioned this yesterday, but it seems to have been lost to time, like tears in the rain … Anyway, the University of Iowa’s Hevelin Collection is hoping to crowdsource transcriptions of scanned ‘zines from the 1930s & 1940s. Here’s a link to the scans in question:
http://diyhistory.lib.uiowa.edu/collections/show/18
Dann is clearly in a trolling mood, having just dropped a comment about gun use in a different thread. I mean, I suppose you can indulge his trolling if you want, but why?
@nickp
If you have calibre then it’s possible to reconvert a book with device-specific settings that may fix the problem with a bit of experimentation. (I imagine that won’t have been a helpful suggestion at lunchtime with a new book and no way to read it though.)
@Ghostbird – That Hirschmann theory reminds me of a quote from Middlemarch that’s stuck with me:
2) Ugh, cowards.
7) Cool!
16) I don’t really have any objections to this, although it wouldn’t be anything like a go-to source for me. (Although expecting strong female roles in The Revenant, a film explicitly about the effect toxic masculinity has *on men* is a bit absurd.)
I’ve had a couple of posts, one yesterday & one today, that seem to have gone into limbo. Are they being caught in a filter? Was I transgressing?
Not to inject a bit of pedantry into the heavy duty discussion today, but it was FRODO who was shown the vision of the Shire that almost discouraged him.
AND WRT ‘identity politics’ and Hillary Clinton’s worth as a candidate, it is becoming clearer and clearer that Russian interference and propaganda, along with (possible, not yet proven) actual manipulation of voting machines, made just enough difference in 3 key states to tip the election to Trump. Along with voter suppression. In Wisconsin, she lost by 77,000 in spite of the last 8 polls there showing her winning. Over 300,000 voters were kept from the polls by the draconian ID laws, most of them targeted Democratic voters.
The GOP apparently can only win when it cheats with gerrymandering and voter suppression.
@Chip Hitchcock
I’m not forgetting them. They were wrong too. Wrong from a different perspective, obviously. The pendulum….it swings…..
@Greg Hullender
I agree.
One of the (as yet) unexplained trends from recent elections is how 200 counties (out of 700 total) that voted twice in favor of Mr. Obama as President turned around and voted for Mr. Trump as President. That is a pretty significant swing in electoral preference. Those that reflexively reach for the “racist/sexist/homophobe/etc.” rejoinder as an explanation are marginalizing and dismissing a fairly large group of people.
@Bonnie McDaniel
And but for an incompetently run campaign, I might be expressing precisely the same sentiment about a President Clinton.(1)
Well, blinders are certainly involved in that evaluation. Just not where you infer.
Her primary achievement was marrying well. Absent that she would have been just another mid-grade lawyer in Arkansas. Most (I hasten to add “not all”) of the “accomplishments” listed in the glowing hagiographies offered in support of Mrs. Clinton from 2014-2016 include items that are not achievements that qualify a person for the Presidency (i.e. winning two senatorial elections, introducing a bill that never became law) or are outright disasters (i.e. Libya, Syria, the Iran “deal”). She also has a pulse. She has other significant flaws, but I suspect those are known if not acknowledged.
One of the reasons why we got Mr. Trump is because the mainstream media failed to offer any critical evaluation of Mrs. Clinton. Saying “she’s just too nice of a person” is not a critical evaluation.
(1) I think I’d be a little less forceful. While I approve of appointing judges that will apply the Constitution as written (as opposed to interpreting it via modern dance or whatever one does with a “living” document), focusing on reducing the number of rules/laws on the books, and simplifying the tax code, there are a bunch of other behaviors that are downright scary. Such as:
–Thinking that the President can demand that a private citizen be fired from a private company.
–Thinking that the President can deny broadcast licenses for partisan reasons.
–Being another President “Pen and Phone”. Congress exists to pass laws for a reason.
–Most of the Twitter bluster.
Regards,
Dann
@Kathodus
Absolutely, though I’ve caught myself falling into the same patterns in a work context. They’re easy to grab for when you need a reason to be against something but don’t quite have an argument yet. (See: every contrarian Hot Take by a journalist about a new law or initiative.)
@Dann: Now this is just silly:
First, it’s Bill who got the better half of that deal. Ain’t even close. He’s surface smart but smarmy the rest of the way down. She’s the real brains of the outfit.
Second, if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton, what would have brought her to Arkansas?
Joe H.: That’s disturbing. I have now retrieved your comments from the spam and posted them.
I get a thousand spam comments a day and manually reviewing them finally wore me down, so a few months ago I turned on Askimet to deal with it. While the program is very good, unfortunately, it makes a mistake now and again. I’m sorry your comments fell afoul of its net.
@Joe H
Anyway, the University of Iowa’s Hevelin Collection is hoping to crowdsource transcriptions of scanned ‘zines from the 1930s & 1940s.
Thanks for the link. I knew that they were planning to do this but hadn’t followed up.
Mike — Thanks! I’m guessing it’s something to do with the link I was including?
To repeat myself (without the link, so as to avoid more filtering): The University of Iowa’s Hevelin Collection, which includes many old fanzines from the 1930s & 1940s, has scanned a number of them and is hoping to crowdsource some transcriptions. The link in my earlier message leads to the site in question.
@Joe H et al: Slate did a nice story on this yesterday.
@John — Yep, that’s what led me to the site originally. 🙂
@John A Arkansawyer
I’m not really inclined to get into the relative merits of either of the Clintons. I think they both represent a great deal of squandered potential.
As with most marriages, I suspect they both have their respective strengths and weaknesses that compliment one another. Individually or together, they lack sufficient character to be responsible for more than a Little Free Library, IMHO. (While I am sure that you will not do a “Whatabouttrump…”, for the benefit of those that might, I’m not endorsing Mr. Trump’s character in any way. He has his own barrel-full of issues.)
Mrs. Clinton might well have been capable of climbing to the heights of political power on her own. As she opted for a different route, I guess we’ll never know. Based on what she actually did, marrying well seems to be at the top of her list, IMHO.
Regards,
Dann
@Dann: As politicians go, Hillary Clinton has a pretty good character. The only real mark against her is that piece of human shit she’s married to. I realize the well-funded festival of lies about her has been very effective. That doesn’t make your participation in it any less shameful. Bless your heart.