Does anybody have a turkey stuffing recipe that doesn’t call for onions? Seriously. If you do, and you’re willing to share, please put the link in the comments. Thank you!
Z-Library has been seized by the Feds for pirating and copyright infringement.
While overall the election results seem to lean toward support of democracy, in a few places, libraries were defunded. If you think education, reading, and books are important, this might concern you.
It looks like in-person or at least hybrid book festivals returned this fall.
Nerds of a Feather reviews The Peacekeeper, by B.L. Blanchard. It has a distinct world-building premise.
Kevin Conroy, well known as the voice of Batman, passed away.
Wakanda Forever grossed $181 million domestically last weekend. File 770 has a review of it. This (spoilerish) article imagines what might be ahead for the person who ends up being Black Panther.
According to The Mary Sue, the show Manifest (the plane was missing! For five years! And then it landed and no one had aged a day!) won’t fade away. Now it’s on Netflix.
Atlas Obscura provides a wonderful photograph and an explanation for the natural phenomenon that occurs on a small lake in Slovenia.
Daniel Church gives his inspiration for his new novel The Hollows, on Whatever.
Russell T. Davies says David Tennant didn’t generate at Doctor Who in the previous Doctor’s outfit because folks in Britain might confuse it with the Doctor “dressing in drag.” [Shaking my head.]
What would the Wordle editor at the New York Times do? Let Tracy Bennett, the paper’s first Wordle editor, tell you.
I never really thought of the refrigerator as an instrument of revolution, but this interesting Smithsonian article from 2021, about rural electrification and the role of women, is making me rethink that.
Defunding public libraries seems to follow the agenda that one faction follows of, rather than getting involved with and modifying the way some institution works, just trying to destroy it instead. It’s also consistent with the streak of extreme puritanism in public life that rears up very regularly (on both ends of the political spectrum right now) that makes “punishing people we don’t like” a more important social good than materially improving most peoples’ lives. Maybe because, in recent decades, we haven’t seen government used to materially improve most peoples’ lives. The article on Rural Electrification is a good counterpoint: what public initiative have you seen anytime recently that has benefited as many people as the REA did? My father didn’t get to experience home electricity and running water until late childhood, so to him government, while often inefficient and laughably self-important, was still without doubt a source of good.
It’s slightly amazing that public libraries ever became a feature of society (in very large part, in this country, due to Andrew Carnegie and James Bertram). If the current big corporate patent and copyright lobby had existed back then, there would have been much more resistance (and maybe lawsuits). Cory Doctorow’s article (accessible from the front page of Locus) called “The Swerve” talks about how the combination of mergers and copyright oligopoly is both restricting access and cutting the compensation that creative artists and writers get for their works. This kind of legalized predation is, along with the knee-jerk attempts to destroy institutions, a sign of a polity with severely depleted social capital.
It’s been a few decades since we’ve seen the “public good” of the government in a nationwide way. I think the 2021 vaccination mobilization came close, but, again, against the backdrop of a ridiculously polarized and politicized discussion. It was interesting to read about the REA and the difference in approach–although not everyone was for rural electrification at the time, apparently.
I like Doctorow’s columns and I will check this one one for sure.