Intro
I’m back from summer vacation. It was terrific. I feel rested, rejuvenated, and ready to go. Mostly. On Tuesday I woke up with a cold. I presume it’s a cold instead of the other thing because Jennifer had it before me and she tested negative for covid and for the flu. It’s a little annoying, but *shrugs* whattayagonnado?
Art & Illustration
Books & Reading
Book Review – How to Eat the Future: The consultancy-futurism Jane McGonigal offers in Imaginable is part of the problem it is meant to fix by Cameron Kunzelman.
I was a big fan of Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken when it came out in 2010. I am less of a fan today. C. Thi Nguyen offers a compelling critique of gamification in “How Twitter Gamifies Communication,” a suitable companion piece to the review of her new book by Kunzelman. And while Kunzelman is critical, it the kind of criticism that makes me want to read Imaginable. My gut instinct is that McGonigal’s new book will be scarcely different than the scores of other corporate forecasting books regularly published.
- -Jo Walton’s Reading List for May 2022
Cartoons & Comics
- Bizarro by Wayno (and sometimes Dan Piraro)
- Incidental Comics by Grant Snider – Vicious Cycle
- K Chronicles by Keith Knight – NRA Hostage
- The Nib by various
- Questionable Content by Jeph Jacques
- Strange Planet by Nathan W. Pyle
- Therapy Comics by Mardou
- This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow – Shot Chasers
- You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack by Tom Gauld
Columns & Essays
- “No Lives Matter” by Michael Harriot
Currently Reading
- We Can’t All Be Astronauts by Tim Clare – I started Tim Clare’s “100 Day Writing Challenge” last year (I don’t do it every day) and really connected with his style of teaching (a melange of self-deprecation, self-care, and unpretentious erudition). His memoir is about a young man desperately yearning to be a successful writer, but coming to grips with the reality that his path is not going to unfold as imagines, no matter how fervently he wishes. Through this journey he copes with severe depression, spiraling self-doubt, and finding the first steps toward self-acceptance.
Health
Horoscope
- Free Will Astrology – Week starting June 09, 2022
Movies
Music
- Bandcamp Daily
- Yikes! John Flansburgh was a major car wreck this week and broke seven ribs on his right side. Fortunately it wasn’t worse than that.
News
- NOAA National Hurricane Center – I set my browsers to open pre-set pages upon opening. It’s that time of year to add the NHC page to track hurricane activity.
- Wonkette – I love the cursing and share their love of Molly Ivins.
- Popular Information – independent investigative journalism.
- WikiNews – Wikipedia has a news page. It can be kind of hit or miss, but I always use it when I’m following a breaking news story.
Obituary
- Julee Cruise (December 1, 1956 – June 9, 2022)
Scholarly Article of the Week
We’ll call this one scholarship-adjacent. Long introduction into the life and thinking of Magnus Hirschfield.
- Out on the Town: Magnus Hirschfeld and Berlin’s Third Sex by James J. Conway
“Years before the Weimar Republic’s well-chronicled freedoms, the 1904 non-fiction study Berlin’s Third Sex depicted an astonishingly diverse subculture of sexual outlaws in the German capital. James J. Conway introduces a foundational text of queer identity that finds Magnus Hirschfeld — the “Einstein of Sex” — deploying both sentiment and science to move hearts and minds among a broad readership.”
- The Asian Canadian gay activist whose theories on sexuality were decades ahead of their time by Laurie Marhoefer – An introduction to Li Shiu Tong, nearly forgotten sexologist and activist, who also happened to be Hirschfeld’s boyfriend.
Spirituality
Writing & Creativity
- Aigner Loren Wilson shares her method for spreadsheeting a novel.
Coda
That’s it for this week. With any luck I’ll have a story up on Tuesday.