Not yet, anyway. Maybe they need to run it past a focus group first

The ship is haunted by a human genocide while actively engaged in what Melville I think portrays as a mass murder/ecocide. And it's decorated with whale teeth and bones like a serial killer's trophies.

I don't want to read modern sensibilities into the text too much, but I think it's there.

The ending of Blackadder is genuinely perfect.

Uncle is excellent throughout. Such a good show. (I almost didn't watch it because I thought it was going to be gluey sentimental mess, which it very much isn't.)

Hannibal. I know that it wasn't supposed to be the ending, but it works perfectly. (Which is one reason I've never really wanted a Season 4.)

Or me.

I thought about this entirely too much, and decided that they have 2 pots of hot broth with steamer baskets for the clams or cod. The seafood enriches the broth as it steams, then is removed and finished/assembled separately so it doesn't sit in the broth and overcook.

Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes both seem infected with postwar backlash to me. After a string of great wartime P&P films with complex, active women characters, suddenly there's "women go crazy without a man" and "women go crazy if they try to have a career and a man."

(Plus racism in TBN.)

The thing is, liberals and the left alike need to understand that there is a dark side to collectivism, which fascists readily and loudly express.

You cannot understand Nazi ideas about "the body national" or their current obsession with birthrates and controlling gender without it.

It's very good news. But I worry that we might see a nasty resurgence in a few years, as fewer and fewer people get vaxxed or mask to prevent, and there's a growing cohort of unexposed young children.

Pre-vaccines, many infectious diseases would cycle like that. (However I am NOT an expert.)

He was against marriage equality in the UK; he said men would marry their sons to avoid inheritance tax.

He later apologized, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's been awful more recently.

The experience of reading Moby Dick is like: dubious whale fact, dubious whale fact, wildly homoerotic incident, dubious whale fact, one of the best passages of English prose ever written. Lather, rinse, repeat for 400 pages.

It's utterly unlike other 19thC novels (that I've read, anyway). It feels simultaneously 100-200 years older, like Don Quixote or The Unfortunate Traveller from before novelistic conventions fully formed, and 100+ years later when modernism/postmodernism is ripping the conventions to shreds.

I have the same one, but as an ebook. I love Norton editions.

I increasingly think Newsom just wants to be Trump. Maybe slightly less far to the right, but he wants the cult of personality and the free pass to be shallow and stupid but immensely powerful.

The idea that all men (including queer men) have exactly the same "patriarchal imagination," while no woman does (despite living within patriarchy) sure is a take. Bioessentialism plus some weird toxic secret ingredient I can't even name.

I was about to say that I'm happy it's been quiet here, and then I remembered that it's not midnight yet.

In my view as a random stranger on the internet, it's an interesting argument. The name's associations make Ishmael readable as black (in a book full of reflections on whiteness and darkness, and on the significance of race). It adds so many layers of complexity just that the possibility is there.

I first encountered that line via its reprised version in "Exegetic Chains." Songs For Pierre Chuvin was one of the few albums I could listen to ca. 2020-2021, as we all struggled to get through catastrophe. I wish it hadn't become so relevant again, but I still find comfort in it. Thank you.