Friday Reads: Memorial Day weekend edition

I'm not reading these books at this exact moment, because it's the Friday afternoon before a three-day holiday weekend, and I'm plugging away at all the extra work it requires just to be off on Monday (an odd concept — work extra so you can take time "off").

But these are the books I've been reading the past couple of weeks. I don't generally having five books going at once. Three is my preferred number. But this is just how it worked out. The titles:

• Cascadia's Fault: The Coming Earthquake and Tsunami That Could Devastate North America, by Jerry Thompson
• Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat, by Jonathan Kauffman
• Lost Children Archive, a novel by Valeria Luiselli
• Supernatural in Cornwall, by Michael Williams (one of the spooky books I inherited from Mom)
• Monkey Food: The Complete "I Was Seven in '75" Collection, by Ellen Forney (graphic memoir)

Hoping to finish two and make meaningful progress on a couple others this weekend.

Papergreat's whole lotta late-summer reads 2019

Instagram photo by me

OK, I think I went overboard on this big batch of mainstream and less-mainstream reading recommendations. There's more than enough interesting content here to tide you over until Halloween.

Serious stuff

• The New York Times Magazine: "Our democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought to make them true." by Nikole Hannah-Jones [The 1619 Project]
• The Atlantic: "The Great Land Robbery" (The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms) by Van R. Newkirk II
• Pacific Standard: "The Young Hands That Feed Us" (An estimated 524,000 children work unimaginably long hours in America's grueling agricultural fields, and it's all perfectly legal.) by Karen Coates & Valeria Fernandez
• ProPublica: "When Fracking Companies Own the Gas Beneath Your Land" by Mayeta Clark
• Rolling Stone: "The Climate Crisis Is Moving Us Toward a Food Catastrophe" by Eric Holthaus
• Grist: "Climate change’s deadliest effects are unfolding under the sea" by Molly Enking
• Grist: "Trash decisions" (In Seattle, homeowners dump their garbage in homeless encampments and the city uses trash buildup as a reason to clear encampments with no notice) by Erica C. Barnett
• My Inside Voices: "When it’s OK for a hero to stop being a hero" by Susan Jennings
• Los Angeles Times: "For our kids, the white guy with a gun is the face of terrorism" by Mary McNamara
• The Washington Post: "As summer camps turn on facial recognition, parents demand: More smiles, please" by Drew Harwell
• Nieman Lab: "Newsonomics: The 'daily' part of daily newspapers is on the way out — and sooner than you might think" by Ken Doctor
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "Disconnected" (On the farm, spotty internet means trouble selling milk, slow downloads, constant frustration) by Kris B. Mamula & Jessie Wardarski
• The Conversation: "How African American folklore saved the cultural memory and history of slaves" by Jennifer Dos Reis Dos Santos

Less-serious stuff

• The New Yorker: "How Mosquitoes Changed Everything" (They slaughtered our ancestors and derailed our history. And they’re not finished with us yet.) by Brooke Jarvis
• Gizmodo: "What Would Happen If the Whole Internet Just Shut Down All of a Sudden?" by Daniel Kolitz
• Nieman Lab: "Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians" by Laura Hazard Owen
• CityLab: "Why Everyday Architecture Deserves Respect" by Darran Anderson
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: "This Philadelphia woman recorded three decades of television on 70,000 VHS tapes" by Gary Thompson
• NBC News: "Scientists are searching for a mirror universe. It could be sitting right in front of you." by Corey S. Powell
• The Outline: "The end times are here, and I am at Target" (On the strange experience of living through the only accurate doomsday prediction.) by Hayes Brown
• NPR: "Cash Back Guarantee: The U.S. Redeems Damaged Bills Because The Dollar Depends On It" by Josh Axelrod
• The Athletic: "Appreciating the passion and ability of Jayson Stark, the 2019 Spink Award winner" by Ken Rosenthal [Jayson Stark helped spread the word of the Steve Jeltz Fan Club, which I still have to write about, circa 1990.]
• Slate: "Why I Printed My Facebook" by Katie Day Good. Excerpt from this article, which was recommended by Dan Herman:
  

  "All told, my Facebook archive was 10,057 pages long. I decided to discard the 4,612-page document of disembodied 'likes,' which brought the total down to a more manageable 5,445 pages. It took seven phone calls before I found a printing service willing to print a single document that large at a price I could afford."

We have seen lots of birds but no ducks yet. pic.twitter.com/BjGBD5X5lN

— PostcardFromThePast (@PastPostcard) August 18, 2019

Frivolous-yet-still-meaningful stuff

• The New York Times: "What America Gets Wrong About Tracy Flick" (In 'Election,' she's preyed upon by a teacher and almost cheated out of her rightful victory. But somehow she's the villain.) by A.O. Scott
• SKTCHD: "Paper Girls, Giant Days, Squirrel Girl and the Golden Age of the Hang Out Comic" by David Harper
• The Ringer: "Crisis on Infinite Courts" (On Novak Djokovic's confounding marathon win against Roger Federer in the Wimbledon final) by Brian Phillips
• The Guardian: "Theme parks, pubs and 'human zoos': how the Victorians invented leisure" by Peter Watts
• Atlas Obscura: "In England, You Can Camp in Abandoned Medieval Churches" by David Wilson
• Literary Hub: "The Little Known, Much Loved Cookbook That Was Ahead of Its Time" (On Patience Gray's Honey from a Weed) by Adam Federman
• Los Angeles Review of Books: "'Dungeons & Dragons' and Baseball; or, Robert Coover Fights the Robot Umps" by Ryan Lackey
• We Are The Mutants: "The Posthuman Heart of ‘Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons’" by Fred McNamara
• We Are The Mutants: "Devil in the Details: ‘The Occult Coloring Book’, 1971"

Another day another few thousand Cuban Missile Crisis telegrams. pic.twitter.com/2bopzLakxW

— Bill Geerhart (@CONELRAD6401240) July 11, 2019

Given the sheer volume of Cuban Missile Crisis mail, it is amazing and admirable that the Kennedy White House staff made every effort to reply. But sometimes, it was impossible. pic.twitter.com/SBRz2rN9QP

— Bill Geerhart (@CONELRAD6401240) July 13, 2019

Instagram photo by me

Papergreat's summer reads 2019

Instagram photo by me

Here's another batch of things that I've bookmarked or tucked away for rainy days. I hope you find some of these articles enlightening, too...

• The Atlantic: "The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper" by Dan Cohen (University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.)
• Medium: "What I Don’t Tell My Students About 'The Husband Stitch'" by Jane Dykema (The first story in Carmen Maria Machado’s "Her Body and Other Parties" brings up big questions about who we believe and why.)
• Atlas Obscura: "Why Is Iceland So in Love With Licorice?" by Linni Kral
• The Atlantic: "The Adults Who Treat Reading Like Homework" by Julie Beck¹
• The New York Times: "Chinese Railroad Workers Were Almost Written Out of History. Now They’re Getting Their Due." by Karen Zraick
• Salon: "Is the Impossible Burger a threat to vegetarianism?" by Amanda Marcotte
• Mashable: "No one cares about 99% of the photos you take. Not even you." by Chris Taylor
• CNN: "How a cheap, brutally efficient grocery chain is upending America's supermarkets" by Nathaniel Meyersohn
• The Washington Post: "How San Francisco broke America’s heart" by Karen Heller
• LancasterOnline: "Summer reads 2019: Lancaster County book recommendations"
• Columbia Journalism Review: "What if reporters covered the climate crisis like Edward R. Murrow covered the start of World War II?" by Bill Moyers
• York Daily Record: "Silent storytellers: How trees function as nature's pillars for the past, present and future" by Frank Bodani
• New York magazine: "Measles for the One Percent" by Lisa Miller (Vaccines, Waldorf schools, and the problem with liberal Luddites)
• Mother Nature Network: "Why we still need paper maps. GPS may be handy, but there are some serious downsides." by Sidney Stevens
• The Philadelphia Inquirer: "Why the lies my teacher told me about race in America after the Civil War matter in 2019" by Will Bunch
• Forbes: "Fears Grow That 'Nuclear Coffin' Is Leaking Waste Into The Pacific" by Trevor Nace
• The New York Times: "If Seeing the World Helps Ruin It, Should We Stay Home?" by Andy Newman (In the age of global warming, traveling — by plane, boat or car — is a fraught choice. And yet the world beckons.)
• PA Post: "How a Pennsylvania man ended up in an iconic D-Day invasion photo" by Tim Lambert
• Sierra: "We Were Poor, But the Beach Was Ours" by Kaitlyn Greenige
• Pacific Standard: "A generation of hip-hop was given away for free. Can it be archived?" by Jack Denton (They won't be lost to fire, like much of the Universal Music catalog, but who will save the mixtapes?)

Gorgeous old bookplate art. This would make a fabulous tattoo. pic.twitter.com/PB0jnJ7MbP

— Omnivore Books (@omnivorebooks) May 1, 2018

Footnote
1. My Twitter response to this article:

I enjoy the community on @goodreads.
I enjoy the Reading Challenge and the nudge it gives me to read, but I don't set my reading habits by it or stress over my goals.
Books are not stress.
I don't understand the notion or worry of "sucking the fun out of reading" https://t.co/VBC0CbUaNd

— Chris Otto (@Papergreat) June 7, 2019

#FridayReads: May the great reads be with you, Padawans

Ashar with a goat on May 4 at Lancaster Farm Sanctuary in Elizabethtown.

Instead of putting them into some semblance of order, I'll just present this batch in the order in which they were put into the file. Make your own connections. Draw your own conclusions about the endlessly odd pathways of my mind.

• Atlas Obscura: "Remembering When Americans Picnicked in Cemeteries" by Jonathan Kendall
• The Atlantic: "Was Shakespeare a Woman?" by Elizabeth Winkler (The authorship controversy, almost as old as the works themselves, has yet to surface a compelling alternative to the man buried in Stratford. Perhaps that’s because, until recently, no one was looking in the right place. The case for Emilia Bassano.)
• The New York Times: "Why the Cool Kids Are Playing Dungeons & Dragons" by Annalee Newitz (Fighting the dragon queen Tiamat is a much more satisfying way to spend time with my friends than social media ever was.)
• Philadelphia Gay News: "Eastern State adds LGBTQ history to programming" by Larry Nichols. Here's an excerpt:
  

  One queer prisoner’s history particularly caught Anderson’s attention. This person’s name was Isaac Hall, and his story is now on the audio stop.
  
  “He was charged $100 and sentenced to eight years of solitary confinement for what records indicate was a consensual sex act with a male partner,” she said. “But next to every court document and prison record for Isaac Hall was the alias Lady Washington. The warden at the time wrote that Hall was known, in the locality that he resided, as Lady Washington. The specifics of Hall’s identity might be lost to us forever since this person lived 140 years ago, but it’s interesting to navigate Hall’s records, because it seems that if Hall were alive today, he might have identified as trans. And that’s one of the earliest documents I’ve ever seen of a trans or genderqueer person being incarcerated at the penitentiary, and that is the early 1880s.”

• HuffPost: "The Country Winning The Battle On Food Waste" by Max S. Kim. (Hint: It's not the United States.)
• The New York Times: "Hot Topic Is Still Hot" by Paula Mejía (How has an enclave for emo kids and mall goths resisted the retail apocalypse? With merch.)
• CityLab: "The Secret History of the Suburbs" by Amanda Kolson Hurley
• Foreign Affairs: "This Time Is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover" by Daniel W. Drezner
• The Washington Post: "The failure of Reconstruction was a ruthless act of sabotage" by Michael Gerson
• We Are The Mutants: "Signs and Wonders: When We Were Built by Books." An excerpt:
  

  "Discussion of this risks becoming one of those privilege-spewing meditations on The Good Old Days©, and nobody wants that bollocks. But It’s the same thing plenty of people have said, I suppose: housing something physical like books necessitated these habitats that a generation was fortunate enough to grow up around, and the network of ley lines that connected them. Maybe they fostered an engagement with literature and culture — and by extension life — that was slightly less mediated, slightly less implicitly impersonal and results-oriented, slightly more meditative, before those habitats were hollowed out and destroyed?"

• Montgomery Advertiser: "A permanent wound: How the slave tax warped Alabama finances" by Brian Lyman
• Vice: "This City Builder Asks You to Rebuild the World After Climate Devastation" by Cameron Kunzelman ("Lichenia" is an alternative to SimCity that challenges you to experiment in the post-apocalyptic unknown.)
• The Washington Post: "A symbol of slavery — and survival" by DeNeen L. Brown. (Angela’s arrival in Jamestown in 1619 marked the beginning of a subjugation that left millions in chains.)
• The New Republic: "Down and Out in the Gig Economy" by Jacob Silverman (Journalism's dependence on part-time freelancers has been bad for the industry — not to mention writers like me.)
• Grist: "Lawns are the No. 1 irrigated ‘crop’ in America. They need to die." by Eric Holthaus
• Bloomberg: "The Aliens Among Us" by Tyler Cowen. (An uptick in UFO sightings by military pilots raises all sorts of interesting questions.)
• The New Yorker: "The Decline of Historical Thinking" by Eric Alterman. Excerpt:
  

  "Late last year, Benjamin M. Schmidt, a professor of history at Northeastern University, published a study demonstrating that, for the past decade, history has been declining more rapidly than any other major, even as more and more students attend college. ... The decline can be found in almost all ethnic and racial groups, and among both men and women. Geographically, it is most pronounced in the Midwest, but it is present virtually everywhere."

• IEEE Spectrum: "The Lost Picture Show: Hollywood Archivists Can’t Outpace Obsolescence" by Marty Perlmutter (Studios invested heavily in magnetic-tape storage for film archiving but now struggle to keep up with the technology.)
• Science: "Archaeologists find richest cache of ancient mind-altering drugs in South America" by Michael Price
• Longreads: "Critics: Endgame" by Soraya Roberts. (If there's no earth, there's no art. How do you engage in cultural criticism at the end of the world?)

From Lancaster Farm Sanctuary's Facebook page: "Shout out to Annie hen, who we think is the first of all the birds here to climb aboard and hang out on the chicken swing! A few years ago our founder Sarah Salluzzo made the swing for the Cornish Cross birds, for fun and exercise. We wanted to help them stay healthy, despite their genetic programming to be 'meat' birds with abnormal breast and body weight. But we’ve only ever seen them go around or under it like a limbo stick so far! Until last week!!! LFS volunteer Pauline Brown just caught this awesome shot of Annie not only swinging on it, but also snacking on leaves! Go, Annie!!!! Sooo interesting because Annie is usually the last to come in at night, and more likely off doing her own thing away from the flock. As usual, farm animal intelligence and sensitivity is just blowing our minds over here."

A bevy of great reading suggestions for you to bookmark

Serious stuff

• The Washington Post: "Ruined crops, salty soil: How rising seas are poisoning North Carolina’s farmland" by Sarah Kaplan
• Los Angeles Times: "As pigs await slaughter at Farmer John, strangers offer water, love and comfort to the doomed" by Gustavo Arellano
• Philly.com: "My mother doesn’t have many memories left, and most of them are wrong. What’s going on?" by Stacey Burling
• The Washington Post: "Farms aren’t tossing perfectly good produce. You are." by Sarah Taber
• The Atlantic: "Netflix’s Our Planet Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted" by Ed Yong
• The Atlantic: "America Cares About Climate Change Again" by Robinson Meyer
• The New York Times: "Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared." by Matt Richtel
• My Inside Voices: "Everything's still not awesome on the playground: (What #TheLEGOMovie2 says about gender roles and why I wish the kids at recess would just pass my girl the ball already.)" by Susan Jennings
• Wired: "The world's recycling is in chaos. Here's what has to happen." by Cheryl Katz
• Grist: "‘The trees say F you’: Why teens are cursing about climate change" by Kate Yoder
• The New Yorker: "Shrinking Newspapers and the Costs of Environmental Reporting in Coal Country" by Charles Bethea

Not-so-serious stuff

• GQ: "The Secrets of the World's Greatest Art Thief" by Michael Finkel
• The New York Times: "Rediscovering the World of ‘Blue Highways’" by Rich Cohen
• Places Journal: "An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning" (Description: "In its original concept, the Appalachian Trail was more than a hiking path. It was a wildly ambitious plan to reorganize the economic geography of the eastern United States.") Introduction by Garrett Dash Nelson, archival text by Benton MacKaye.
• The Atlantic: "The People Who Eat the Same Meal Every Day" by Joe Pinsker
• NBC News: "The rise of young adult books with LGBTQ characters — and what's next" by Gwen Aviles
• Longreads: "A Three-Day Expedition to Walk Across Paris Entirely Underground" by Will Hunt
• The New York Times: "Depressed and Anxious? These Video Games Want to Help" by Laura Parker
• Atlas Obscura: "The Race to Put Thousands of Miles of English Walking Paths Back on the Map" by Noor Al-Samarrai
• We Are The Mutants: "Grues and Invisiclues: A Personal Remembrance of Infocom" by Michael Grasso
• We Are The Mutants: "Cunning and Logic: The International Imagery of ‘Mastermind’" by Richard McKenna
• Paste: "Wingspan Is About as Perfect as Board Games Get" by Keith Law
• Gizmodo: "The Online Icons That Didn't Survive the Web's First 30 Years" by Rhett Jones
• Philly.com: "In the digital age, zines of the ’90s are making an unlikely comeback" by Hannah Chinn

Some #FridayReads to get your March started

Instagram photo by me

Another motley mix of articles of articles you might find interesting. Subscriptions might be required in some cases; support your local and national media!

• National Geographic: "Eating meat has ‘dire’ consequences for the planet, says report" by Sarah Gibbens
• Tor.com: "Why Science Fiction Authors Need to be Writing About Climate Change Right Now" by Charlie Jane Anders
• The Washington Post: "‘Everything is not going to be okay’: How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble" by Dan Zak
• The New Yorker: "Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua" by Isaac Chotiner
• The Guardian: "Fate of castles in the air in Turkey’s £151m ghost town" by Bethan McKernan
• My Inside Voices: "My life as a museum" by Susan Jennings
• The New York Times: "Her Title: Cryptologic Technician. Her Occupation: Warrior." by Richard A. Oppel Jr. [on the late United States Navy officer Shannon M. Kent]
• Forbes: "How A Medieval Video Game Can Help Us Think About The Past" by Matthew Gabriele
• The New Yorker: "An Unnamed Girl, a Speculative History: What a photograph reveals about the lives of young black women at the turn of the century" by Saidiya Hartman
• The Washington Post: "A hedge fund’s ‘mercenary’ strategy: Buy newspapers, slash jobs, sell the buildings" by Jonathan O'Connell and Emma Brown
• The Atlantic: "How Fancy Water Bottles Became a 21st-Century Status Symbol" by Amanda Mull
• Diabolique Magazine: "Goblin Keyboardist Maurizio Guarini Talks Suspiria and New Dawn of the Dead Commemorative Album"
• Philly.com: "Sorry, Netflix, rural Pennsylvania still likes this brick-and-mortar rental chain" by Jason Nark
• CityLab: "The FBI's Forgotten War on Black-Owned Bookstores" by Joshua Clark Davis
• Philly.com: "The forgotten history of Philadelphia’s early gas stations" by Inga Saffron
• Daily Memphian: "POWER BROKER: Inside a long-shot plan to buy a never-opened nuclear plant and sell its power to a single customer" by Marc Perrusquia
• The Atlantic: "When Kids Realize Their Whole Life Is Already Online" by Taylor Lorenz

Current and recent books I'm reading

• Reservoir 13, by Jon McGregor
• Six Months, Three Days, Five Others, by Charlie Jane Anders
• Saga (volumes 5 and 6), by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples
• We Should All Be Feminists, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A&M Comics and Books in Hialeah, Florida, 1978. The official @WeAreTheMutants dream is to open a shop like this and slowly go broke. pic.twitter.com/rbE9Q1X2xr

— We Are the Mutants (@WeAreTheMutants) February 23, 2019

How can it be that the I, who I am,
didn’t exist before I came to be,
and that, someday, the I who I am,
will no longer be who I am?
:( RIP Bruno Ganz 1941-2019 pic.twitter.com/lbgSuRtyJL

— NLRCreations (@NLRCreations) February 17, 2019

#FridayReads to accompany Winter Storm Harper

Instagram photo by me

It's time again for a roundup of links to interesting articles. At least, I think they're interesting. You might think they're dandy, dull, depressing or daffy — and of course you would be entitled to that viewpoint.

• Elle: "Alyssa Milano Has Always Fought for Justice. Maybe You Just Weren't Paying Attention." by Molly Lambert
• NPR: "Quoting 'The Lorax,' Court Pulls Permit For Pipeline Crossing Appalachian Trail" by Laurel Wamsley
• The Ringer: "The Cost of Living in Mark Zuckerberg’s Internet Empire" by Brian Phillips
• Shelfdust: "The World May Confuse You: The Unforeseen Promises of 'Omega the Unknown' #1" by Osvaldo Oyola
• Atlas Obscura: "Humanity as We Know It Will Be Defined by the Broiler Chicken" by Abbey Perreault
• The Washington Post: "What if someone was shooting?" (Subtitle: "More than 4 million children endured lockdowns last school year, a groundbreaking Washington Post analysis found. The experience left many traumatized.") by Steven Rich and John Woodrow Cox
• Wired: "Why It's Hard to Escape Amazon's Long Reach" by Paris Martineau and Louis Matsakis
• The New Yorker: "How Mark Burnett Resurrected Donald Trump as an Icon of American Success" by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Ars Technica: "Mickey Mouse will be public domain soon — here’s what that means" by Timothy B. Lee
• 
  Motherboard: "I Gave a Bounty Hunter $300. Then He Located Our Phone" by Joseph Cox
• Earther: "I Dug a Green Grave and Learned the Truth About the Dirty Death Industry" by Brian Kahn
• The Atlantic: "Don’t Reply to Your Emails: The case for inbox infinity" by Taylor Lorenz
• NPR: "Kamala Harris' 'The Truths We Hold' Demonstrates What's Wrong With Campaign Books" by Danielle Kurtzleben
• We Are The Mutants: "Atom Bombs and Beauty Queens: Female Sexuality and the Iconography of Destruction" by Miranda Corcoran
• We Are The Mutants: "From Galaxy Explorer to Galactic Enforcer: The Evolution of Lego Space" by Tom G. Wolf
• The Times: "Local dram comes true with Whisky Galore distillery" by Jason Allardyce
• The Guardian: "Welsh farmstead is rare medieval hall house, experts confirm" by Esther Addley
• Atlas Obscura: "Inside the ‘Trend-Free’ World of Wisconsin’s Supper Clubs" by Anne Ewbank [Note: This sort-of teases an upcoming post.]
• Philly.com: "This obscure company is doing more to destroy a free press in America than Trump" by Will Bunch

My current and recent books

• Way Station, by Clifford D. Simak
• The Grid: Electrical Infrastructure for a New Era, by Gretchen Bakke
• The Mother of All Questions, by Rebecca Solnit
• The Strange, by Jérôme Ruillier
• Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
• Brunelleschi's Dome, by Ross King
• The Fifth Risk, by Michael Lewis

Instagram photo by me

#FridayReads to pass chilly days and nights in the final month of 2018

Komsomolskaya metro station in Moscow, 1980. From @SovietPostcards tweet.

I have been collecting a lot of great links for y'all! As I did earlier this year, I'll divvy them up into Serious and Not So Serious. (Some of these may require modest subscriptions. Support the journalism that's important to you!)

Serious

• Slate: "That Beautiful Barbed Wire: The concertina wire Trump loves at the border has a long, troubling legacy in the West" by Rebecca Onion
• Reuters: "Separated by travel ban, Iranian families reunite at border library" by Yeganeh Torbati
• NPR: "'Retreat' Is Not An Option As A California Beach Town Plans For Rising Seas" by Nathan Rott
• Philly.com: "Rotting from within: How water intrusion in new homes turns American dreams to rot" by Caitlin McCabe and Erin Arvedlund
• The Washington Post: "Armored school doors, bulletproof whiteboards and secret snipers: Billions are being spent to protect children from school shootings. Does any of it work?" by John Woodrow Cox and Steven Rich
• The New Yorker: "Why Doctors Hate Their Computers" by Atul Gawande
• CyberScoop: "Mock grid, real threats: DARPA borrows an island for a cyberattack drill" by Sean Lyngaas
• The Cut: "The Watcher. A family bought their dream house. But according to the creepy letters they started to get, they weren’t the only ones interested in it." by Reeves Wiedeman
• NPR: "Mysterious Suitcase Helps Connecticut Man Discover His Grandfather's WWII Service" by David Desroches
• Columbia Journalism Review: "From a Myanmar jail, a children’s book about the power of journalism" by Andrew McCormick

Not So Serious

• Philly.com: "Can being nice to cows save the world? A Hindu man in the Poconos would like to believe so." by Jason Nark
• The Atlantic: "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?" by Kate Julian
• Myth & Moor: "On loss and transfiguration" by Terri Windling
• NPR: "Why Trevor Paglen Thinks About Who's Watching Us" by Andrew Limbong
• The New Yorker: "Ink Foraging in Central Park: The founder of the Toronto Ink Company leads a group of pigment enthusiasts on a hunt for acorns, berries, beer caps, and other ingredients" by Amy Goldwasser
• The New Yorker: "The Wonderful Insanity of Collecting Abandoned Treasures on the Street" by Charlotte Mendelson
• AV Club: "The legacies of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby square off in DC’s Mister Miracle #12" by Oliver Sava
• The Washington Post: "‘Mister Miracle’ turned real-world anxiety into a hit superhero series" by David Betancourt
• The Independent: "Satanism and The Rolling Stones: 50 Years of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’" by Simon Hardeman
• Atlas Obscura: "Before Envelopes, People Protected Messages With Letterlocking" by Abigail Cain
• BBC: "Why does Britain have such bizarre place names?" by James Harbeck
• We Are The Mutants: "Muppets, Weebles, and Cooties: The 1975 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade"

what I loved about being a kid in the pre-internet era was the hours and hours of boredom and how it would drive you to daydream, draw maps, pick a book off the shelf at random and succumb to its quiet magic. wish we could bring that back.

— the library haunter 🦉👻🎃 (@SketchesbyBoze) November 26, 2018

#FridayReads on the verge of the midterm election

It's that time again! Here's an early November collection of links from earlier this autumn for your potential reading pleasure (or displeasure)...

• The Multicolored Diary: "Kindness against darkness: Halloween folktales of caring" by Zalka Csenge Virág (featuring one tale by Ruth Manning-Sanders)
• The Atlantic: "Tech Was Supposed to Be Society’s Great Equalizer. What Happened?" by Derek Thompson
• The Atlantic: "The Teens Who Rack Up Thousands of Followers by Posting the Same Photo Every Day" by Taylor Lorenz
• IEEE Spectrum: "How Programmable Calculators and a Sci-Fi Story Brought Soviet Teens Into the Digital Age" by Ksenia Tatarchenko
• The Guardian: "Growing up in a house full of books is major boost to literacy and numeracy, study finds" by Alison Flood
• The Atlantic: "The Man Who Broke Politics: Newt Gingrich turned partisan battles into bloodsport, wrecked Congress, and paved the way for Trump’s rise. Now he’s reveling in his achievements." by McKay Coppins
• Atlas Obscura: "Villa de Vecchi: The abandoned 'Ghost Mansion' was left to decay in the mountains of Northern Italy" by Emily Linstrom
• Washingtonian: "How a Math Teacher Built a Ludicrously Profitable Escape Room Empire" by Amanda Whiting
• The Atlantic: "It Will Take Millions of Years for Mammals to Recover From Us" by Ed Yong
• The Atlantic: "The Decades-Old Novel That Presages Today’s Fight for Facts" by Dustin Illingworth
• Smithsonian.com: "‘Amazing Dragon’ Fossils Unearthed in China Rewrite Story of Long-Necked Dinosaurs" by Meilan Solly
• The New Yorker: "Fantastic Beasts and How to Rank Them: The relative plausibility of impossible beings tells you a lot about how the mind works" by Kathryn Schulz
• The Intercept: "South Carolina is lobbying to allow discrimination against Jewish parent" by Akela Lacy
• Texas Standard: "Sears Stores Are Going Away, But The Company’s ‘Kit Houses’ Live On" by Michael Marks
• The New York Times: "The Ghost Story Persists in American Literature. Why?" by Parul Sehgal
• The Atlantic: "Why Wild Turkeys Hate the Wild: When the birds were reintroduced to New England after a long absence, they chose to live in cities instead of the forests they once called home" by Yoni Appelbaum
• The Walrus: "America’s Next Civil War: The United States shows all the warning signs of impending social and political collapse" by Stephen Marche
• Medium: "What Happens to Religion When We Find Aliens?" by Shannon Stirone
• Salon: "European social democracies are much better off than the United States" by Cody Fenwick
• PC Gamer: "World of Warcraft's pacifist panda has reached level 120 by only picking flowers" by Steven Messner

Addendum: Books I'm reading

• Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
• Lugosi: The Man Behind The Cape, by Robert Cremer
• Marvel 1602, by Neil Gaiman, Andy Kubert and Richard Isanove

#FridayReads: Autumn 2018

Titan, the newest of our five cats.

Here are some things for your reading pleasure (or necessary displeasure) while sipping on apple cider or a pumpkin-spice latte while sitting under some gloriously colored foliage.

• Narratively: "She Caught Bullets with Her Bare Hands — and Made Magic’s Glass Ceiling Disappear" by Allison C. Meier
• Medium: "Nuance: A Love Story (My affair with the intellectual dark web)" by Meghan Daum
• The Washington Post: "This new museum doesn’t want Instagram or crowds. Does that make it elitist?" by Philip Kennicott
• West Virginia Explorer: "Movie theaters played unique role in rural West Virginia" by David Sibray
• The Guardian: "Dear Mr President: During his presidency, Barack Obama read 10 letters from members of the public every day. He reveals what they meant to him" by Jeanne Marie Laskas
• The New York Times: "Alan Abel, Hoaxer Extraordinaire, Is (on Good Authority) Dead at 94" by Margalit Fox
• io9: "I Tried Giving The Hobbit Trilogy a Chance, But It Just Hurts So Much" by Beth Elderkin
• Vox: "Solving America’s painkiller paradox: Here’s how to fix America’s painkiller problem — without leaving pain patients behind." by German Lopez
• The Guardian: "The Republican party is about to face the wrath of women" by LA Kauffman
• Smithsonian.com: "Would Baseball have Become America’s National Pastime Without Baseball Cards?" by John N. McMurray
• The Guardian: "'This guy doesn’t know anything': the inside story of Trump's shambolic transition team" by Michael Lewis
• Fast Company: "Exclusive: Tim Berners-Lee tells us his radical new plan to upend the World Wide Web" by Katrina Brooker
• The New York Times: "Grimy, Glorious, Gone. The Divergent Paths of 7 Train Stations" by Mitch Smith and Emily Najera
• Longreads: "Mr. Rogers vs. the Superheroes: One of the few things that could raise anger — real, intense anger — in Mister Rogers was the willful misleading of children. Superheroes, he thought, were the worst culprits." by Maxwell King
• PCMag.com: "Here's Why Aliens Will Probably Come in Peace" by S.C. Stuart

occasionally a man shows up in my mentions yelling "do you really want a country of *sensitive* sissy boys who read books and respect women??" and I'm like, "it would be a good start,"

— the library haunter 🦉 (@SketchesbyBoze) September 29, 2018

DANGEROUS COATS
Someone clever once said
Women were not allowed pockets
In case they carried leaflets
To spread sedition
Which means unrest
To you & me
A grandiose word
For commonsense
Fairness
Kindness
Equality
So ladies, start sewing
Dangerous coats
Made of pockets & sedition

— Sharon Owens (@SOwensTeaHouse) September 26, 2018

Fairy tale retelling where the girl befriends the dragon and both proceed to burn the whole kingdom down to the ground for trying to sacrifice her to the dragon in the first place

— Rin Chupeco (@RinChupeco) September 29, 2018

“Stay angry, little Meg,” Mrs Whatsit whispered. “You will need all your anger now.”

— Madeleine L'Engle (@MadeleineLEngle) September 27, 2018

Late summer reads on a sunny Sunday

Gustav Klimt
The House of Guardaboschi 1912
110 x 110 cm
oil, canvas
Private collection pic.twitter.com/6pRDCFiBMA

— Алексей Шураков (@shurackov1755) August 7, 2018

It's late summer, right? We've already had regular-season high school football games here in southcentral Pennsylvania. People are tweeting out Halloween decoration displays from their local stores. And I passed a tractor trailer full of pumpkins a couple of days ago. So it must be nearly autumn.

Here's the latest collection of articles you might enjoy and/or have missed during the hectic days of mid-summer.

Serious

• The Guardian: "'Our memories have vanished': the Palestinian theatre destroyed in a bomb strike" by Hazem Balousha and Oliver Holmes
• Wired: "The New Arms Race Threatening to Explode in Space" by Garrett M. Graff
• Grist: "The world is hot, on fire, and flooding. Climate change is here." by Eric Holthaus
• The New York Times: "Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change" by Nathaniel Rich
• The New York Times: "Kelly Marie Tran: I Won't Be Marginalized by Online Harassment" by Kelly Marie Tran. And here's a good reaction to this piece...
  
  

  When you strike women down, they return more powerful than you can possibly imagine. And they show thousands of other women suffering online abuse that they can survive and thrive too. Thank you Kelly Marie Tran. https://t.co/YObt2S66kC

  — Invincible Alanna Smith! (@AlannaWrites) August 21, 2018

• Longreads: "Finding True North: Thousands of Haitians who fled the United States on foot last summer have started very different lives in Canada" by Amy Bracken
• Sixth Tone: "Better Together? Inside a Village's Embrace of Collectivization" by Liao Yue
• Yes! "For Women, by Women: A Sisterhood of Carpenters Builds Tiny Houses for the Homeless" by Lornet Turnbull
• CityLab: "Parking Has Eaten American Cities" by Richard Florida
• The Washington Post: "Public canneries help food lovers save the season. So why are they disappearing?" by Jane Black

Not as serious

• We Are The Mutants: "From Galaxy Explorer to Galactic Enforcer: The Evolution of Lego Space" by Tom G. Wolf
• We Are The Mutants: “And in the Darkness Bind Them”: The First ‘Lord of the Rings’ Paperbacks and the Making of Fantasy by K.E. Roberts

• We Are The Mutants: "Falken's Maze: Game Theory, Computer Science, and the Cold War Inspirations for 'WarGames'" by Michael Grasso. [Related and also recommended: The episode of the Super Critical Podcast dealing with WarGames.]
• New Scientist: "Weird circles in the sky may be signs of a universe before ours" by Chelsea Whyte
• The Washington Post: "People buried at Stonehenge 5,000 years ago came from far away, study finds" by Ben Guarino
• Vulture: "In Conversation: Kathleen Turner The actress on righting Elizabeth Taylor’s wrongs, Donald Trump’s 'gross' handshake, and the co-star she slapped" by David Marchese
• The New York Times: "Conan O'Brien's Unrequited Fanboy Love for Robert Caro" by John Koblin
• The Verge: "BAD ROMANCE: To cash in on Kindle Unlimited, a cabal of authors gamed Amazon’s algorithm" by Sarah Jeong
• The Sacramento Bee: "He found 15 books in a Sierra dumpster. Then he found out they belonged to Thomas Jefferson." by Jordan Cutler-Tietjen
• Smithsonian.com: "A Brief History of Traveling With Cats" by Jackie Mansky

French soldier (and friend) on the front, WWI. (via @LaContempo_BAM) #MewseumMonday pic.twitter.com/0DdAfXMPpF

— Undine (@HorribleSanity) August 13, 2018

think you’re too old to write that book? Miss Marple was solving crimes in her sixties, Arwen was 2,770 when she married Aragorn, Yzma was *over a hundred* when she turned Kuzco into a llama,

— the library haunter 🦉 (@SketchesbyBoze) August 22, 2018

#FridayReads roundup: Links to important & quirky articles

Instagram photo of Gifford Pinchot State Park by me.

Need some lunch-time, hammock or survival-cabin reads for the summer? Here you go, with Papergreat's latest roundup of journalism and essays from around the Internet.

Heavy Stuff

• The New York Times: "How the Koch Brothers Are Killing Public Transit Projects Around the Country" by Hiroko Tabuchi
• The New Yorker: "Climate Change and the Giant Iceberg Off Greenland’s Shore" by Carolyn Kormann
• Politico: "Meet the guys who tape Trump's papers back together" by Annie Karni
• New York magazine: "Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion" by Jonathan Chait
• The New York Review of Books: "'Studies in Power': An Interview with Robert Caro" by Claudia Dreifus
• The New York Times: "Can a DNA Database Save the Trees? These Scientists Hope So" by Sandra E. Garcia
• ProPublica: "Hundreds of Illinois Children Languish in Psychiatric Hospitals After They’re Cleared For Release" by Duaa Eldeib
• NiemanLab: "Newsonomics: Newsprint tariffs are a Black Swan event that could speed up the death of U.S. newspapers" by Ken Doctor
• BBC News: "Forbidden love: The WW2 letters between two men" by Bethan Bell

Less-Heavy Stuff

• The Washington Post: "US Postal Service must pay $3.5M after confusing Statue of Liberty with 'sexier' Las Vegas replica" by Avi Selk
• CityLab: "The Strange, Enduring Charm of Japan’s Civic Mascots" by Chris Carlier
• Ars Technica: "The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century" by Jimmy Maher
• The Digital Antiquarian: "The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization" by Jimmy Maher
• The New York Times: "Can't Sleep? Let Bob Ross Help You Find Some Happy Little Zzzs" by Laura M. Holson
• 99% Invisible: "MPR Raccoon: Exploring the Urban Architecture Behind an Antisocial Climber" by Kurt Kohlstedt
• We Are The Mutants: "'Olly Olly Oxen Free!': The Generational Politics of 1980s “Fountain of Youth” Films" by Michael Grasso
• TheOutline.com: "Looking back at Chuck Klosterman’s 'Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs'" by Noah Davis
• Atlas Obscura: "Inside the World's Only Sourdough Library" by Anne Ewbank
• The Paris Review: "The Rare Women in the Rare-Book Trade" by Diane Mehta
• LancasterOnline: "Why has a head stared from an attic window in Peach Bottom for more than 100 years?" by Tom Knapp
• Chicago Tribune: "Revisiting a portrait of immigrant life in the Robin Williams film 'Moscow on the Hudson'" by Nina Metz

I lost the first card in the bog. pic.twitter.com/03nHf4StZl

— PostcardFromThePast (@PastPostcard) July 15, 2018

Summer reads, 2018 edition

Instagram photo by me

LNP/LancasterOnline published its "Summer reads: Recommendations from Lancaster County readers" this weekend, and it's full of terrific suggestions from librarians, educators and public officials.

I also have a few picks appearing in the LNP list. Unsurprisingly, when I was asked for my submissions, I wrote way too many words about too many books. Space is at a premium in newspapers these days, so my selections understandably had to be trimmed down. Here, for posterity, is my full original list. Share your summer reads in the comments or tweet them @Papergreat!

• At Home: A Short History of Private Life (2010) by Bill Bryson. If you love general history books that are packed with ideas, famous (and forgotten) figures, outrageous anecdotes, and the kinds of historical connections that would make James Burke proud, this is the doorstop of a book for you.
• The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence (2010) by Paul Davies. I'm only a third of the way through this history and criticism of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Some of the theories and proposals presented here have already blown my mind a little bit.
• The Only Harmless Great Thing (2018) by Brooke Bolander. You can polish off this novella, which is less than 100 pages, in an afternoon. But the alternate-history tale of elephants, electricity and atoms might stick with you much longer than that.
• Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash (2012) by Edward Humes. This insightful book by Humes, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, will educate you on the depths of how much waste (and plastic!) society generates, but it also offers hopeful paths and ideas toward sustainability and shepherding of the environment. [I wrote more about this book on Earth Day.]
• In Such Good Company: Eleven Years of Laughter, Mayhem, and Fun in the Sandbox (2016) by Carol Burnett. I grew up with Mr. Tudball, Mrs. Wiggins, Eunice, and all of the others dreamed up by Burnett, Vicki Lawrence, Harvey Korman and Tim Conway, so this memoir should provide plenty of chuckles.
• 
  Dancing on Blades: Rare and Exquisite Folktales from the Carpathian Mountains (2018) by Csenge Virag Zalka. I grew up on folk and fairy tales, especially those by Ruth Manning-Sanders, and I still seek them out at age 47. This collection of traditional tales unearthed by a young Hungarian storyteller is indeed "exquisite," and fun for all ages.
• The Ladies-In-Waiting (2017) by Santiago Garcia, Javier Olivares and Erica Mena (translator). This one's a gorgeous graphic novel. About 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. With a complex plot that jumps back and forth between about four timelines. At this point, you're either deeply intrigued or quickly skipping ahead to the next book.
• Swimmer Among the Stars (2017) by Kanishk Tharoor. I love short-story collections — I also have volumes by Paige Cooper, Richard Wright, Jamel Brinkley and Carmen Maria Machado stacked up and ready to go. And maybe I'll switch over to spooky short-story scribes Kelly Link and Robert Aickman once Halloween season rolls around.
• Time is the Simplest Thing (1961) by Clifford D. Simak. A newspaper journalist who wrote novels and short stories on the side, Simak is best known for his "pastoral sci-fi." This tale isn't so much in that vein, but is a thought-provoking romp involving witches, space travel, superstitions and an all-powerful commerce-and-innovation corporation that might seem very familiar to today's readers.
• What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2006) by John Markoff. This history book promises hippies and hackers, California living and computer culture. Count me in.

The ephemera of families separated by the United States

For #FridayReads, I recommend that you read The New York Times article headlined "'It's Horrendous': The Heartache of a Migrant Boy Taken From His Father" written by Miriam Jordan and published yesterday.

Here's a short excerpt:

At first, [5-year-old] José was sad and withdrawn. He did not initiate any interaction with the [Michigan foster] family, but followed directions from [foster mother] Janice, who speaks basic Spanish, to do things such as wash his hands and come to dinner. ...

The one thing that animated him was discussing his "photos," as he called the family drawings.

He introduced "mi familia," pointing to the figures of his parents, brother and younger sister. Staring intensely at the sketch of his father, with a slight mustache and a cap, he repeated his name out loud again and again.

It was "just me and him" on the trip from Honduras, he told Janice one night as he lay in bed shuffling the pictures, taking turns looking at one and then the other.

"He holds onto the two pictures for dear life," Janice said, through tears. "It’s heart-wrenching."

Read the rest of the story here.

Related articles and commentaries

• The Nation: "Separating Children From Their Parents Is a New Low for Our Immigration System"
• The Atlantic: "Trump Can’t Disown His Immigration Policies Now"
• Vice: "Trump Has Quietly Cut Legal Aid for Migrant Kids Separated from Parents"
• Axios: "Family separation policies hurt U.S. global standing, leadership"

Latest links to stimulate your mind

Here's another roundup of articles and essays that you might find interesting. Some serious, some frivolous. Because balance, Daniel-san. Always find balance.

• The New Food Economy: "Rural Kansas is dying. I drove 1,800 miles to find out why" by Corie Brown
• Vulture: "The Last Slave: In 1931, Zora Neale Hurston sought to publish the story of Cudjo Lewis, the final slave-ship survivor. Instead it languished in a vault. Until now."
• Philly.com: "A search for native children who died on 'Outings' in Pa." by Jeff Gammage
• The Seattle Times: "Kids still living in shantytowns is the real shame of Seattle" by Danny Westneat
• Chicago Tribune: "The losing war against fake meat" by Steve Chapman
• Politico: "The Puzzle of Sarah Huckabee Sanders" by Jason Schwartz
• Philly.com: "Philadelphians are lonely, and young people feel it the most, says study" by Cassie Owens
• The Washington Post: "The extraordinary life and death of the world’s oldest known spider" by Avi Selk
• The New York Times: "Researchers Uncover Two Hidden Pages in Anne Frank’s Diary" by Nina Siegal
• Columbia Journalism Review: "In an era of disinvestment, how should local news push back?" by Anna Clark
• The Atlantic: "The Problem With Buying Cheap Stuff Online" by Alana Semuels
• The Atlantic: "Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control" by Taylor Lorenz
• Arch Daily: "The Lost History of the Women of the Bauhaus" by Mariángeles García (translated by Marina Gosselin)
• We Are The Mutants: "'It’s All Right To Cry': The Liberatory Potential of 'Free to Be… You and Me'" by Michael Grasso
• York Daily Record: "York County man is walking across America in search of the good in people" by Mike Argento
• Atlas Obscura: "Stone Cats at Nike Missile Site"
• The Baltimore Sun: "Geppi's Entertainment Museum to close as comic and art collection heads to Library of Congress" by Chris Kaltenbach
• The New Yorker: "The Growing Emptiness of the 'Star Wars' Universe" by Joshua Rothman

Page from a 1902 issue of Shin-Bijutsukai, a Japanese design magazine. More of its highlights here: https://t.co/odIcVRJCMN pic.twitter.com/7ccyDL1UYp

— Public Domain Review (@PublicDomainRev) June 2, 2018

Stunning #Haxan embroidery by textile artist Elsa Olsson #FolkloreThursday #FolkHorror https://t.co/hMeRprO9kb pic.twitter.com/IyU3bc0QwM

— Folk Horror Revival (@folk_horror) May 31, 2018

The beauty of damaged daguerreotypes from the collection of 19th-century photographer and “father of photojournalism” Matthew Brady, born #onthisday in 1822: https://t.co/kVwTSUp9Hu #OTD pic.twitter.com/wpnduxenfa

— Public Domain Review (@PublicDomainRev) May 18, 2018