Allie Brosh, creator of Hyperbole and a Half, has a new book out. Here’s her interview at NPR, here’s her interview at Buzzfeed, here’s a chapter from her new book.
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Word of the day – Boreout – extreme tiredness and depression caused by being bored at work over a long period of time.
“Unlike burnout, boreout can be caused by there being no work or too little of it (rather than being overloaded with it), which can have an adverse impact on an employee’s psychological well-being. Although there are different boredom thresholds, the onset of boreout is directly related to work tasks being too few and far between, off-putting, or meaningless.”
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Feminize Your Canon: Alice Dunbar-Nelson – I had no idea Paul Laurence Dunbar was such a dick. I should have been reading Alice Dunbar-Nelson instead.
“Highly educated, with a strong belief in her own talent and determination to make her own living, Dunbar-Nelson was a New Woman, that protofeminist figure who dominated American culture at the turn of the twentieth century.”
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Douglas Rushkoff riffs on something that annoys me to no end. Significant portions the right-wing cultural playbook is drawn from the subversive antics I adored in my youth —
“Because now it’s the alt-right using pranksterism to promote fascism, and the formerly cheeky Left now stranded in the hall of mirrors it once created to destabilize the Old Guard.”
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I’m currently reading Bread & Wine by Ignazio Silone. It was published in 1936, and is about Mussolini’s fascist Italy. I’m only half-way through, but the first half is about a disheartened Marxist, who has been fighting against fascism for 15 years, returning to a village near his boyhood home, only to realize the peasants are indifferent to politics and political rule. Regardless of who is head of state; life is fear, random pain, and an uncertain future. Page 4 has the following quote (it really stood out since I was reading it the day after RBG died):
“[Truth] was more or less tolerated. But now it is tolerated no longer. Monsignore finds it expensive, primitive, and crude; while hypocrisy is smooth, always up-to-date, and not only cheap but profitable.”