Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Republicans don’t lie to be believed, they lie to be repeated.

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

Fear and negativity are contagious, but so is courage!

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

“Facilitate” is an active verb, not a weasel word.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

You come for women, you’re gonna get your ass kicked.

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

Hell hath no fury like a farmer bankrupted.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

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

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Their shamelessness is their super power.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

You are here: Home / Books / Some Stray Reading For When You’ve Finished Your Luke Cage Binge

Some Stray Reading For When You’ve Finished Your Luke Cage Binge

by | 99 Comments

This post is in: , ,

Hey all,

I’ve got a couple of pieces out in what we might call the mainstream media that might reward your attention.

The first closes the loop on that lovely Royal Society award shortlist we talked about a while back.  The winner was announced a couple of Mondays ago and, alas, it didn’t go to The Hunt for Vulcan (which you should still totally read).

Instead the prize went to Andrea Wulf for her intellectual biography of Alexander von Humboldt, The Invention of Nature.  It’s a very strong book, as were each of the others on the shortlist.  I commend all of them to you.

job_lot_cheap_william_michael_harnett_1878-jpeg

The event itself was great, and the organizers made sure that each of the titles in the finals had a chance to shine, and while I was certainly disappointed, I was also greatly chuffed — and why not?  My work had been recognized as among the class of the year, I got to rub shoulders with some wonderful writers, (including a personal hero, the head judge Bill Bryson), and hey — London! What could be bad.

Nothing — until, as I was getting ready to leave that green and sceptered isle, I came across a piece at The Guardian in which the writer argued that there was something dodgy about Wulf’s win — that she had garnered a feminized prize, one that sought to reward a woman’s interest in people instead of a man’s pursuit of “problem, a mystery or an underexplored scientific field.”

I couldn’t let such arrant nonsense fly unanswered, so I wrote up a response for The Atlantic.  In it I drew both on my experience as one of the competitors in the contest Wulf won, and my prior encounter with prize judging as a Pulitzer juror in 2012.  Check it out, if you’ve a mind.

The other article you might find fun is a book review that I wrote a little while ago that went live yesterday at The Boston Globe — my take on James Gleick’s new book, Time Travel.  The shorter is that the book is great, really fine work, and I commend it to you all.  Here’s a sample:

Mostly, though, Gleick leads us on a thrilling journey of ideas. Augustine talks to Robert Heinlein who talks to Kurt Gödel, all the while someone is trying to connect a call between Marcel Proust and the ever patient Sam Beckett. Alongside the big ideas come the odd facts too delicious to leave out, as when we learn that among the audio selections placed on the Voyager spacecraft is the Bulgarian folk song “Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin’’ or “Delyo the Hajduk Has Gone Outside.” Pity the alien trying to decipher that code!

So, yeah. I’ve been delinquent in my blogging here.  Think of these as peace offerings.

Have a great weekend, all.  I’m going to continue nursing my dread catarrh; nothing like a full 747 to offer a smörgåsbord of viral delights.  Honey-lemon tea (possibly helped by some bourbon) in my future.

Image: William Harnett, Job Lot Cheap, 1878.

Reader Interactions

99Comments

  3. 3.

    Omnes Omnibus

    So this was about ethics in science writing?

    Seriously though, good on you for responding publicly and congratulations again on the honor of making the short list.

  4. 4.

    Amir Khalid

    For that matter, what would that same alien make of Johnny B. Goode? Or, more generally, of that strange yet so precisely ordered cacophony we Earthlings call “music”?

  5. 5.

    Greenergood

    Thank you Tom – I’ve not read the other entries but Wulf’s was reviewed on BBC Radio 4, and I’ve ordered the book and can’t wait to read it. I’m not going to look at the Guardian’s ‘feminized prize’ comments – it’ll make me too angry. Hope your catarrh clears up and let’s hear it for amazing scientific biographies no matter what gender writes them – if they’re good, they’re good. Which is completely separate from ‘Brexit means Brexit’, which is just too much to bear …

  7. 7.

    Tom Levenson

    @Amir Khalid: Indeed. Though I do love the old Leonard Bernstein series of essays (I’m blanking on the title) culled from his Norton Lectures at Harvard aeons ago. There he made a case for the pentatonic scale as a kind of physical universality. So maybe, given the physics of acoustic waves, music might just be a mode of communication quite diverse species might share.

  8. 8.

    Amir Khalid

    I suspect there’s been a lot of outstanding science and other nonfiction books that could have been, that were overlooked for publication, never mind for awards, simply because a woman writer was involved.

  12. 12.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @Tom Levenson:

    Though I do love the old Leonard Bernstein series of essays (I’m blanking on the title) culled from his Norton Lectures at Harvard aeons ago.

    The Unanswered Question.

  13. 13.

    Hal

    I’m saving Luke Cage for later today and probably tomorrow. If I really like it, I’ll purposely drag it out for days like I do with books I really like. I’m think I’ll start out with the Amanda Knox documentary. I heard a reporter on On The Media last year and it seems like a fascinating story.

  14. 14.

    David Evans

    Your book and Wulf’s are the only ones I’ve read on the shortlist. I enjoyed them both greatly, and shall now be seeking out your earlier books. And your response in The Atlantic was excellent.

  16. 16.

    Mnemosyne

    Just finished me first shift of voter registration in NV and I got exactly one (1) person registered. We got stuck at a pretty bogus place, though.

  17. 17.

    MattF

    OK, OK, I’ll read the Gleick book.

    If we’re doin’ book recs, I’ll recommend Mark Lilla’s new book ”The Shipwrecked Mind; On Political Reaction”. Mostly reprints of his NYRB essays; clear and illuminating.

    ETA: Yeah, I know that David Brooks mentioned it. But it really is a good book.

  21. 21.

    dr. luba

    I requested the von Humbolt book for Christmas, and got it. I’d read bits about him in other sources, and he seemed like quite an interesting character. I read a bit, then took off to India for a month, and just didn’t get back to it. It’s now next on my reading list……

  22. 22.

    Mary G

    Both the winning book and Tom’s were on sale at Audible, and they were both great. I requested both be added to the library’s Overtime selection. They get so much dreck it can be frustrating. All of Trump’s atrocious books and RW nonsense.

  25. 25.

    Mnemosyne

    @Phylllis:

    My typing fingers are tired! ?

    @Steeplejack (phone):

    We were able to be in the shade, so heat wasn’t too bad. I ran out of water, but we were outside of a Vons, so I just bought more. This time, I know to grab 2 extra bottles, not just 1.

    The main problem was that there were 5 of us at a single strip mall, so we reached a saturation point pretty quickly.

  30. 30.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @efgoldman:

    And of course the damned Mob Enforcer beat me to it while I was ordering Chinese delivery for dinner.

    GFY

  34. 34.

    SiubhanDuinne, liberal mob enforcer bitch

    @?BillinGlendaleCA:

    I was thinking of trying to get things in balance. But the Quadruple Major tells me that efg is so far out in front of everyone else on the “Go fuck yourself” front that I shouldn’t even bother.

    So it’s back to sweetness and light for me.

  41. 41.

    Baud

    @MattF:

    You can soften it a bit. ‘Go fertilize a nearby orifice’.

    I’m not sure that fully captures the “yourself” part of the original. Could lead to same awkward situations.

  44. 44.

    pat

    Hi Tom, I read and enjoyed Vulcan, then found Einstein in Berlin in our library. Well I want to buy it but it is out of print! Finally found it at one of the used booksellers at Barnes and Noble. I’ve read through WW1 but I want to take it on vacation to finish it in peace. And I’d love to find Wulf’s book about von Humboldt since I will be vacationing in Austria, which I believe has some ties to Alexander.

  46. 46.

    aimai

    Congratulations Tom! And so well deserved! I’m sorry I have not been around much. I started my MSW a few weeks ago and have been blindsided with the work! But I’m loving it and I spend long Mondays and Tuesdays–until 9:00 pm–on your side of the river not too far from you. The rest of the time with my head buried in books or at my internship at a local elementary school. Hope to catch up with you guys in a few years, when I finish!

  48. 48.

    Pogonip

    Congrats on your nomination!

    My current science-y reading is “Venomous,” by Christie Wilcox, about–duh–venomous critters. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. She writes well and packs lots of interesting natural history into her book.

    My current fluff reading is “The Child Thief,” by [Gerald] Brom, a rehash of “Peter Pan.”. Brom says that line about Peter thinning out the Lost Boys scared the bejeebers out of him as a kid, and after many years of musing on how exactly Peter Pan might cull the herd, this is the result. Other than a bit of grrrl power it’s not cliched. (I have resigned myself to grrrl power in all fiction, whether it suits the plot or not, until the next tiresome literary fad replaces it.)

  53. 53.

    Steeplejack (phone)

    @efgoldman:

    He had some complicated plan where he drove his car down to an undisclosed location earlier and had the wife drop him off for the game, so apparently he could leg it a short way out of downtown, get his car and beat the traffic snarl.

    He knew the Vols were favored, but that was a tough way for it to go down—for him. I’m sure Vol eclare is elated.

  57. 57.

    raven

    I’m pretty proud of the team. I’ve been doing this for over 40 years and this was the most exciting game I’ve ever been to.

  61. 61.

    Steeplejack (tablet)

    @raven:

    Jeez, I forgot there was so much pregame bullshit. I should just automatically add 20-30 minutes to the “start” time.

  62. 62.

    Gravenstone

    @MattF: Sounds like this was some previous episode of abuse. Not excusable, but not an indication of a current, expanding meltdown either.

  63. 63.

    Davebo

    Starting to look interesting for Big Game Bob. Sucks having to root for the Sooners.

    On a brighter note. I was fishing this morning baiting my hook when I heard a really loud splash. I assumed it was a gator and looked up to see a large Doe had jumped in the creek and was swimming across just 15 or 20 yards from the boat. Later around 4:00 3 deer came walking out of the woods onto the yard.

    Could be a productive deer season. Still, no way I’m sitting in a tree at 6:00AM freezing my ass off.

  65. 65.

    redshirt

    SWEET CHRISTMAS!

    I’m enjoying Luke Cage alot. Half way through. But then, I love everything MCU.

    The weird/tough/neat thing about shows on Netflix is they come out all at once. Thus, we as a society do not have an implicit time frame to discuss them – unlike traditional shows that air every Tuesday, for example.

    Binge watching itself is a different experience. Better in some ways, worse in others.

  67. 67.

    germy

    the cat man of Aleppo

    As people flee Syria, they leave their cats behind. This man has created a sanctuary for them. One little girl left her cat with him and cried. He sends her pictures of her cat. She hopes to return home someday for a reunion.

  68. 68.

    germy

    @Gravenstone:

    Sounds like this was some previous episode of abuse. Not excusable, but not an indication of a current, expanding meltdown either.

    Maybe his 2016 campaign team is having a meltdown.

  71. 71.

    Suzanne

    Congrats on making the shortlist, Tom, and WTG with your response in the Atlantic.

    “Feminized”. Harrumph.

  72. 72.

    raven

    @Steeplejack (tablet): Oh, I went to the head right before kickoff and they were playing the Georgia Alma Mater. Some old lady was standing at the front of the tunnel with her hand over her heart and she grabbed me by the arm and told me to turn around and put y hand over my heart! I said “Lady that’s not the national anthem and I don’t need you to tell me what to do even if it is”!

  73. 73.

    raven

    @Poopyman: It wasn’t just the score. We threw a 45 yard TD with 10 second to got. We got a “taking you helmet off ” 15 yarder and a 5 year delay of game. Our kick was short ad they threw a 50 bomb with 4 seconds and won.

  75. 75.

    Poopyman

    @raven: I have no words that can help ya, other than been there, done that. And I no longer watch my alma mater, since they seemed to have made a tradition of finishes like that.

  76. 76.

    raven

    @Poopyman: I’m cool, I love this shit and I feel lucky every time I go. When I retire I don’t get these $18 tickets so I have to enjoy it while I can.

  78. 78.

    raven

    @JMG: I have a friend whose kid was a linebacker at Wisc-Whitewater and I went to their National Championship game at the Stagg Bowl in Roanoke.

  79. 79.

    Another Scott

    @Mnemosyne: Thank you for your efforts. Don’t be discouraged. You don’t know who else you have indirectly helped in the process. :-)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  80. 80.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @JMG: Me too. Cheap (if not free) tickets. Easy access. And, for the most part, few besides the players care all that much.

  86. 86.

    Howard Beale IV

    Hair Furor was over an hour and a half late to his rally, and didn’t apologize. Deplorable!

  87. 87.

    raven

    @efgoldman: There were probably 10,000 Vols there. It’s a couple mile walk back thorough downtown and I saw mostly quiet Dawgs and loud Vols. Most people expected us to get our asses kicked and the team played pretty well. It’s about the future right now.

  92. 92.

    planetjanet

    @David Evans: Let me second that sentiment. I really appreciate your article in the Atlantic, especially pointing out how demeaning it was to question why a woman would win. Deftly noting your own biographies as a form of artistry was perfect.

  97. 97.

    Aleta

    On top of all his other preposterousnesses, imagine Trump’s paranoia taking charge of the WH and the armed forces. He watches his staff with surveillance systems, listens in on guests, doesn’t trust anyone except family and a few others. He puts too much trust in too few people he may not know well, and then turns on them and replaces them. Plays employees off against each other to keep the atmosphere paranoid so he will keep all the power. Discloses and defames as needed for the short term. Compulsive about getting revenge no matter how much work it destroys.

  98. 98.

    JR in WV

    @Mnemosyne:

    That one person might make the difference in NV, so don’t let it get you down!

    Phone banking is like that some days. I once did 4 hours, and every person I talked to said they were strong Hillary supporters.

    The next day I phone banked, many of the people I spoke with, when I asked that first question “Can we count on your support for Hillary in the Novenber Election?” said “No.” and hung up.

  99. 99.

    workworkwork

    @Hal: Still stuck in the hospital while they figure out what’s going on. I’m saving Luke Cage until I can watch it with my wife so it’ll be at least a day or two or maybe next weekend.

    In the meantime, I’ve got my laptop, good wifi and last night got more solid sleep than I’ve had in decades.

    Still want to get out of here soonest, though.

Comments are closed.