Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn – Nancy Pelosi

We have all the best words.

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

Reality always wins in the end.

The house always wins.

Women: they get shit done

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Deploy the moving finger of emphasisity!

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Too inconsequential to be sued

This fight is for everything.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

This is all too absurd to be reality, right?

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

This blog goes to 11…

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

I personally stopped the public option…

Call the National Guard if your insurrection lasts more than four hours.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Verified, but limited!

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

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Recommended Reading: Some Cosmic Perspective

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

Recommended Reading: Some Cosmic PerspectiveSo goes the epigraph of Katie Mack‘s excellent new cosmology book, The End Of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). It is an entertaining and curiously enlightening read about how the universe might end. At 240 pages, it’s a quick and accessible read that somehow manages to cover a great deal of ground. Among its topics:

  • What might the universe be?
  • Where might it have come from?
  • What the heck happened during those first fractions of a second?
  • How might the universe end?
  • Where do universes go when they die?

These first three points are critical to understanding the rest, and Mack, a theoretical cosmologist and science communicator, does an excellent job explaining them. But she spends most of the book drilling down into these last points. She discusses, among other things, the big crunch, heat death, the big rip, bouncing ‘branes, vacuum decay, and life after (heat) death.

I’d always found heat death–the irreversible transformation of all things into tepid soup–to be deeply depressing. Entropy, an unstoppable juggernaut that slowly makes things less organized, will simply have its way with everything. But the things I read in this book really made me reconsider that.

First, heat death is far from guaranteed. The big crunch–a reversal of cosmic expansion–was assumed to be the fate of the universe until George W. Bush was president. Who’s to say this won’t change again? Is another shift in thinking in fact inevitable?

Second, even if the universe’s final form is a uniform just-above-absolute-zero puddle, there’s no reason to believe this is its truly final form. Random quantum fluctuations can theoretically produce any arrangement of particles. At infinite time horizons, one could argue that these fluctuations will produce any arrangement of particles. Including a very temporary consciousness that believes itself to be a human reading this blog post on the Internet. Or a singularity… and we know where those can lead.

Even freaky apocalypse scenarios like vacuum decay, where a change in the Higgs field suddenly creates a bubble of quantum annihilation that spreads inexorably outward at the speed of light, don’t sound so bad in Mack’s telling: there’s plenty of universe out there that’s traveling away from us even faster. In fact, for all we know, this has already happened a bunch of different places. And, at the end of the day, it would be a painless way to go, and literally impossible to see coming.

So, if you’re in the mood for some surprisingly uplifting eschatology, why not pick up a copy? I got mine from the library, but if you’re looking to buy, this Amazon affiliate link will send some scratch to the blog.

What have you been reading lately?

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Later Night Open Thread: Quick, Henry, the FLIT!

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I don’t actually remember the content of And To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street — one of the not-acutally-banned six — but I do remember getting in trouble for publicly criticizing it, back in 1960, when I was in kindergarten. Most of the story-hour books at P.S. 291 were of the genre best described as Worthy Educational Material, designed more to lull the young audience into naptime than to inspire. But one day Mrs. Bookbinder, bless her earnest heart, decided to bring in a copy of the already-vintage Dr. Seuss book that had once inspired her children. And, of course, as a budding literary snob, I was impelled to denigrate it as nowhere near the standards of the author’s later work (not even 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, much less the slyly subversive One Fish Two Fish). Which I probably could’ve gotten away with, if not for the predicatable teacher’s pet…

“I think it was a wonderful story, Mrs. Bookbinder!”

“Yeah, cuz you’re a suck-up.”

So I had to bring home (yet another) Note to My Parents. My poor mother, a nascent English teacher herself, was torn between the honesty of my critique and her immense respect for the social forms. My old man, after explaining (probably not for the first time) that there were many things which were true and yet not to be said in public, introduced me to Mr. Geissel’s original source of fame: the advertising campaign for FLIT, which was popular enough to enter the general awareness as a tag line — I remember it being used in both Pogo and MAD magazine. (And some of those ads, if you click over: hella racist, by 21st-century standards!)

I was also held incidentally responsible, by the educational authorities, for a minor kerfuffle with the parents of a couple of my Italian-American classmates. Apparently the fuss over my brutal emotional assault on Teacher’s Pet impressed those kids enough that, although they’d never mentioned anything about earlier stories, they described the Seuss-inspired scene to their parents. Now, Geissel was talking about his home town in Massachusetts, but in NYC, Mulberry Street was (still is, such as it remains) Little Italy. You find us funny? Are we some kind of joke to you?…

Such is the power of literature, even at its most (pre)elementary level.

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They Have A Book to Sell Open Thread: “Luck Favors Only the Prepared Mind”

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Louis Pasteur, as per the quip in the title, knew a thing or two about succeeding against the odds. Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes are media mudlarks; they make a living rooting through the sewage outflow of politics, looking for nuggets they can resell. Hey, it’s a living!

Lemieux quotes at length from Washington Post book critic Carlos Lozada’s review, “Joe Biden won the presidency by making the most of his lucky breaks”:

… Four years ago, Allen and Parnes co-authored the best-selling “Shattered,” an examination of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign, in which they placed the blame largely on the ineptitude of the losing side. In this sequel, they are only slightly more generous with the Democratic nominee. Joe Biden won, of course, but mainly because he “caught every imaginable break.” He was the “process-of-elimination candidate,” emerging from a crowded set of more exciting Democratic contenders. He was “lousy in debates and lackluster on the trail,” prevailing despite “a bland message and a blank agenda.” Biden, they argue, got lucky.

The fiasco of the Iowa caucuses, where the app designed to report the results failed miserably, temporarily obscured Biden’s fourth-place showing. “This was a gift,” a campaign aide later explained. Luck returned when rival Democrats such as Pete Buttigieg (who ended up winning Iowa) and Mike Bloomberg (who won American Samoa) suffered debate night takedowns by Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren — and when Biden survived his own hit from Kamala Harris over his past positions on school busing and desegregation. (That almost cost Harris the subsequent veep nod, Allen and Parnes report.) Fortune smiled again when the entire Democratic Party establishment rushed to Biden’s side after his victory in the South Carolina primary, even if it was less about devotion to him than panic that Bernie Sanders might secure the nomination. “On Super Tuesday, you got very lucky,” President Donald Trump told Biden at their first debate. The Democrat did not disagree…

A simplistic focus on identity is evident throughout the Democratic field, with new aides often hired to make staffs look young and more diverse — only to complicate things by, you know, having ideas of their own that diverged from those of entrenched advisers. Allen and Parnes portray a Biden campaign split along “deep fault lines mostly based on generation, race, ideology, and time in Bidenworld.” Biden was in the middle of it, in every sense, hewing to centrist positions on health care, racial justice and law enforcement, no matter the pressures from his campaign team and his party. He may not have been “Sleepy Joe,” but he remained “Unwoke Joe,” Allen and Parnes quip. “That was the ugly truth many Democrats had to face in the aftermath of the 2020 election: To beat Trump, they had to swallow their progressive values and push forward an old white man who simply promised to restore calm.”

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Today’s Nontroversy Open Thread: Hunter Biden Has Written A Book

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I heartily endorse this message, at least for Bob Woodward. Political memoirs have a history going back as far as written language, and 95% of the contemporary pearl-clutching over their impropriety seems to come from individuals who wish anybody might be interested in their memoirs, assuming they could ever get down to the hard work of writing them…

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Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Non-Fiction

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In case you’re new to Medium Cool, BGinCHI is here once a week to offer a thread on culture, mainly film & books, with some TV thrown in.

Medium Cool with BGinCHI – Non-Fiction

In this week’s MC, let’s talk non-fiction books.

Reading our own Tom Levenson’s terrific book on the South Sea Bubble got me thinking about good non-fiction books. I don’t read too many non-fic books that aren’t work-related, but I did just order this:

Avi Loeb’s Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth

Read an excerpt and was riveted, so can’t wait to dive in.

What non-fiction are you reading or would recommend?

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Hogfather Reading Club: Talk Amongst Yourselves

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Hello and welcome to a special holiday edition of Recommended Reading! Today we’ll be talking about our Light Solstice Reading Club selection, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather. I’m so happy we could share this reading experience together. I didn’t remember much from my prior read, so this was almost like reading it for the first time. And what can I say? Pratchett is almost always good, but when he’s transcendent, he’s transcendent.

A drawing of Death as the Hogfather
I even made a fanart! Click to embiggen–WordPress made the preview look all mushy.

Hogfather tells the story of the time Santa Cl the Hogfather is, for lack of a better term, killed. By the assassin Mr. Teatime, which is of course pronounced the-ah-tim-eh, though everybody mispronounces it immediately, even if they’ve never seen it spelled. Death must step in and deliver  the presents. Meanwhile a surplus of belief is sloshing around the Discworld, giving rise to the Oh God of Hangovers, the Eater of Socks, and more. We follow various heroes and villains as they navigate this new reality. In the end, balance is restored, reality’s humorless scolds defeated (for now).

Hogfather hits a real sweet spot for me: I’m a sucker for holiday specials, and like Neil Gaiman I think Death is Pratchett’s best character. This book is a pile of contradictions, a god-riddled argument for secular humanism, a rationalist’s paean to irrational belief, where Death is the only character who seems to understand the meaning of life. And it’s so well-engineered that it actually works. In the hands of a lesser author, so many things could go wrong. But they don’t, because this is Pratchett at the top of his very considerable game. Everything comes together in the end for a denouement that I’m not ashamed to admit made me cry a little. Especially Banjo’s fate.

When I read a paperback I dog-ear the bottom corners for favorite passages. I ended up with a lot for this one, sometimes on facing pages. So much to love in this book. As somebody who’s attended his share of Episcopal, Jewish, and Neo-Pagan solstice celebrations, I think Pratchett does a great job capturing the true meaning of Hogswatch–fire and blood, annoying relatives in paper hats, ancient rituals to chase away the smothering darkness with lights and pretty pictures. And big, stupid myths we tell our children. The tiniest worm in the ocean, a red flame in the crushing black depths, speaks volumes in this story. Its life is so irrational, striving against oblivion, and why?

Because otherwise, the universe is just a bunch of rocks moving in curves. Without our sometimes ridiculous applications of the anthropic principle–personified here as a professor–when the sun rises after the darkest day of the year, it’s just a ball of flaming gas. Without the Hogfather–or that silly, pointlessly red worm–we forget ourselves.

And that is why, at this time of the year, we light things on fire. Happy Hogswatch, everyone! What did you all think? Opening discussion question: what does Death sound like in your head?

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Nice Things Open Thread

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I’ve decided we should have an open thread.

I went to Central Park on Sunday to enjoy the sun. (It was maybe forty degrees, but that’s what long underwear is for!) Clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d had this idea; the park was bustling. But that’s the benefit of being outdoors and masked: bustle isn’t too much trouble.

Still, I was surprised and delighted to find a choir of masked carolers performing at Bethesda Terrace. It’s a beautiful space with great acoustics that always has good musicians performing, so they fit right in. I took a short video, and thought you all might appreciate it. Life felt… normal. It was wonderful.

Addendum 1: The Hogfather reading club meeting will be Sunday, December 20 at 3:00pm EST.

Addendum 2: A small bleg, not for myself, pre-cleared with management.

I review submissions for a sci-fi & fantasy magazine called Metaphorosis. It’s up and coming, but it’s got some great stories. The editor would like to do more to emphasize authors from underrepresented groups, while still reading stories blind. The plan is to make special anthologies reprinting stories from said authors, one anthology per ‘group’ (e.g. LGBT, disabled). But paying for reprint rights, commissioning new art, etc. costs money!

So there’s a Kickstarter, and a $15 pledge will get you an ebook of every anthology they end up making.  (Your card isn’t charged unless the goal is met.) Looks like they could definitely use a bit of a boost. If you’d like to see what sort of stories we’re talking about, you can read them all for free at the magazine website.

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