I first heard of Lindy West when she did a segment for This American Life where she confronted a troll who had been so hateful as to create a fake account with her recently deceased father’s information just to hurl abuse at her. She wrote about how much it hurt and the troll actually apologized and took down the site. Later he was willing to be interviewed by her and talk about his motivations. It’s an extraordinary moment in journalism. I follow her on twitter […]
For your Pajiba 10 Consideration: Hunky Hairy Feminist
In the interest of full disclosure and some not so humble bragging, Rob Delany retweeted a tweet of mine. It was from my work account about Medicaid expansion, but nevertheless, I consider it the high point of my professional social media career. This experience alone would have compelled me to purchase his book. But in addition to being hilarious on twitter, Rob is the co-creator of Catastrophe. This show, available on Amazon Prime, is hilarious and heartbreaking and hits too close to home sometimes. Rob […]
There is some strange alchemy associated with gratitude.
This one hit me hard, and I have to admit I’m still processing a lot of it. Drink is part memoir, part investigative journalism, written by Ann Dowsett Johnston, a former editor at “Maclean’s” magazine (Canada’s “Newsweek,” if I may), the story of one woman’s family history and journey of alcoholism, and also an examination of the dangers of (mostly Western) society’s portrayal of the ideal woman and her relationship with alcohol, with is generally supposed to be empowering, equality-driven and rewarding, but has been […]
Light is the smiling blue-eyed daughter of a family of ruffians
Girl in the Dark is an incredibly unique memoir that took me totally by surprise and made my jaw drop just the slightest bit as I read. Anna Lyndsey, a real human woman living in England (but writing under a pseudonym), cannot be exposed to light. Any light. Any light, not just that can be seen by the human eye, but any light at all. Her skin burns, and the pain she experiences is paralyzing. She has essentially been kidnapped by her own body’s condition, […]
Mike Mullane: juvenile ass & proud of it!
Look, I get that things were different in 1978 (things = women in the workplace, and the men who harassed them). And they weren’t greatly improved by 2006 (when Mullane wrote this book) or even now. But this is a 400 page book about going into freaking space, and 75% of it is either Mullane and his cronies acting sexist, OR Mullane pointing out sexism in others (while totally making sexist cracks of his own). When you point one finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back […]
“An end to timidity – the replacement of the philologically tentative by the lexicographically decisive.”
You’d think in a non-fiction book about a professor, a madman and the dictionary, that the driest parts would be about the dictionary. Instead, those parts fascinated me while the biographical information about its two main creators bored me to tears. “In the sixteenth century in England, dictionaries such as we would recognize today simply did not exist. If the language that so inspired Shakespeare had limits, if its words had definable origins, spellings, pronunciations, meanings—then no single book existed that established them, defined them, and […]
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