Here’s a recent nonfiction book with a provocative thesis and some interesting points which nevertheless I give a mixed review of.
Perhaps helpful to consider scoring the book along several independent parameters, like on some of those cooking shows, e.g. Iron Chef.
The author is an adjunct professor at a university in Nova Scotia. This seems to be his first book.
Busy day today, including dialogue about the future of Locus Magazine, so here it is 5:23pm and I have time only for a very brief post.
Jerry Coyne: Why you should read books
The drenching storm anticipated for Sunday was mostly a bust. Intermittent showers, even a squall or two, but mostly dry. We got only a quarter inch in our neighborhood. No rain today at all. (The storm had been predicted to linger into Tuesday.)
Today was the 15-month interval check-in with my cardiologists, in the city. Fifteen months since my heart transplant. All is well.
We were alerted weeks ago that our local water department would be digging up our streets in order to install new water mains. Continue reading
This week’s novella being covered by the Facebook Group that I post about every Sunday is “Forgiveness Day” by Ursula K. Le Guin. It was first published in the November 1994 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, and less than a year later was included in the author’s collection Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995) along with three related stories.
No backlog of links from this morning or yesterday, so I’m sitting down right now (4:30pm PDT) and surfing all my favorite website to see what jumps out. …Posting at 5:20pm.
Slate, Marissa Martinelli, 15 Sept 2022: Deep Space Whine, subtitled “There’s a war over what’s ‘the real Star Trek.’ It’s highly illogical.”
Ockham’s Razor; Randall Munroe; The best time to be alive; nephew of longtermism; political headlines.
Sunday’s New York Times had this front-page investigative article (i.e. not a piece about breaking news, but one involving investigation over a period of time — as it says, “Over more than a year, the reporters interviewed more than 275 people, translated dozens of Yiddish-language documents and analyzed millions of rows of data on failing private schools in the Hasidic Jewish community.”)
NYT, Eliza Shapiro and Brian M. Rosenthal, 11 Sept 2022: In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money
Subtitle: “New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.”
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Lake Anza
Our visit to Lake Anza today, plus the usual daily dose of headline links following.
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