Private Citizens
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel’s four whip-smart narrators–idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda–are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.
Private Citizens is a darkly funny book that sometimes is just dark. It follow four supremely unlikeable 20-somethings in 2007 San Francisco in their daily lives for some kind of awful Breakfast Club of modern times. It took me a really long time to start accepting that I hated everyone, that it was intended, that…
The ballad of John and Yoko
The breakup of the Beatles and other things Yoko Ono was not responsible for (and also some things that she was.)
Could have benefitted from actual editing. Very depressing and really hammered the point a bit too much in my opinion. Good nonetheless, of course, because Lindsay Ellis.
This is how you lose the time war
Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, becomes something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean the death of each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win. That’s how war works, right?
This recommendation from Sara and viral sensation really hit the mark for me, with a couple of caveats: I still strongly dislike novellas. They never leave me fully satisfied. Unlike some other reviewers, I’m really glad the vignettes were short and diverse, without an explanation of everything going on. This story follows Red and Blue,…
La mauvaise habitude
Arbres fruitiers à Grenoble
Where have all the websites gone?
So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.
[…]
Open a Linktree account or whatever. And instead of adding your other social media accounts, add three links to your favorite blog posts. Or, add links to a few artists with their own sites. Or your favorite aggregator sites. It doesn’t matter what you include, so long as we make portals to other digital green spaces that exist outside of Instagram.
Chasseurs d’étoiles
Lorsqu’il se réveille seul dans le noir, Frenchie comprend tout de suite où il a échoué. Au fil des ans, l’adolescent métis a vu ses proches disparaître un à un dans ces pensionnats où les siens sont réduits à l’état de cobayes et torturés.
Alors que les épidémies et les catastrophes naturelles ont emporté des millions de personnes et privé les survivants de la faculté de rêver, seuls les peuples autochtones ont su la conserver dans la moelle de leurs os. Depuis, ils sont traqués par le gouvernement, qui les enferme pour nourrir les Sans-rêves de la précieuse substance.
Frenchie, qui a appris à survivre en forêt en compagnie de sa famille d’adoption, est pourtant loin de se douter de tous les sacrifices qu’il devra faire pour retrouver sa liberté, et des terribles vérités qui lui seront révélées en chemin.
On reprend Pilleurs de rêves, dont j’avais écrit ce retour en 2020 : Je ne savais pas à quoi m’attendre. Une dystopie jeune adulte normale. Un divergente, un hunger games. J’ai pris une bonne claque en travers de la tête. Sous prétexte de littérature young adult, Dimaline traite de sujets terribles, et elle n’adoucit rien.…
Pastels and Pedophiles: Inside the Mind of Qanon
Two experts of extremist radicalization take us down the QAnon rabbit hole, exposing how the conspiracy theory ensnared countless Americans, and show us a way back to sanity.
In January 2021, thousands descended on the U.S. Capitol to aid President Donald Trump in combating a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Two women were among those who died that day. They, like millions of Americans, believed that a mysterious insider known as « Q » is exposing a vast deep-state conspiracy. The QAnon conspiracy theory has ensnared many women, who identify as members of « pastel QAnon, » answering the call to « save the children. »
With Pastels and Pedophiles, Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko explain why the rise of QAnon should not surprise us: believers have been manipulated to follow the baseless conspiracy. The authors track QAnon’s unexpected leap from the darkest corners of the Internet to the filtered glow of yogi-mama Instagram, a frenzy fed by the COVID-19 pandemic that supercharged conspiracy theories and spurred a fresh wave of Q-inspired violence.
I have been (relatively mildly, considering what I’m capable of) obsessed with Pastel QAnon in the past few years and of course, when I saw that this book existed, I needed to get my hands on it. I think it’s an excellent overview of QAnon for people who don’t really understand what’s going on (and…