A Working Library 5 days ago

Where there is a wall

In Three Guineas , an essay that expands on her writing in A Room of One’s Own , Virginia Woolf responds to a letter asking her to lend her support to the effort to prevent war. She is writing in 1937, a moment when war is less an abstract notion than an insistent neighbor, knocking loudly on the door. She considers, in light of other requests made to her, whether or not education is an antidote to war-making. But in consulting history on the matter, she is forced to conclude the opposite: Need we collect more facts from history and biography to prove our statement that all attempt to influence the young against war through education they receive at universities must be abandoned? For do they not prove that education, the finest education in the world, does not teach people to hate force, but to use it? Do they not prove that education, far from teaching the educated generosity and magnanimity, makes them on the contrary so anxious to keep their possessions, that “grandeur and power” of which the poet speaks, in their own hands, that they will use not force but much subtler methods than force when they are asked to share them? And are not force and possessiveness very closely connected with war? Woolf writes of the refusal on the part of most university professors to teach at the women’s colleges, of the fact that the women’s colleges are beggarly compared to those of their brothers, that women are still largely precluded from entering the universities. That is, far from the open arms one might associate with an institution committed to generosity or magnanimity, the university seems to have the qualities of a locked door. What would become of women if they acquired the key? And the facts which we have just extracted from biography seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement on their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? It is hard not to read this in light of the present-day assault on universities, of their effusive capitulation to an authoritarian power, of the huge sums of money that make paying such bribes possible—and of the wars being fought daily across our cities and streets. And, yes, on the one hand, the attack on higher education is a crime and a terrible loss, both for the students and professors, the researchers and scientists who are trampled in the process, and for humanity at large, who will no longer benefit from their great work. But so, too, is it a loss that education became so high, so much an enormous business, a place of credentials and prestige, of status and repute, grandeur and power. Anything that grows high must build up ramparts to defend itself, and where there is a wall there is—one day or another—a war. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 5 days ago

A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas

This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf explores women’s exclusion from the systems of education and work on two fronts: first by arguing that women’s creativity depends upon economic independence, and second—and perhaps more radically—by noting that their exclusion from the upper echelons of society affords women an opportunity to challenge the dangerous impulses towards possessiveness, domination, and war. A Room of One’s Own was written as women gained the right to suffrage in the UK; Three Guineas was written on the eve of World War II, as fascism spread across Europe. As a new fascist movement marches its way across multiple continents, Woolf’s writing is more trenchant than ever. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Brain Baking 1 weeks ago

2025 Holiday Gift Guide

This post is inspired by Johnny Webber’s 2024 Holiday Gift Guide that serves as a great starting point if you don’t know what to get for your friends & family. Johnny’s list is broad and includes suggestions from tech to food, arts, gaming, books, and even writing material. Making Christmas wish lists seems to become harder and harder as I get older and already have way too much stuff. When we are young, without access to a disposable income, the holiday period somehow felt more exciting. Flipping through toy store ad leaflets, whipping out scissors to cut and paste the things that drew our attention onto a separate colourful piece of paper for Santa to take a good look at. I want this one , and don’t you dare to buy me that cheap alternative! We try to cut our way through the few ads that still land in our mailbox but it doesn’t feel the same any more—a part of the genuine childlike excitement is gone for good. It took me a while to come up with six items that made it to my list. Like Johnny, I’m only recommending things I like. Here’s a collage representing that list: The 2025 Holiday Gift Guide: six suggestions. First, the UFO 50 Nintendo Switch game—specifically the physical version published by Fangamer.eu , obviously. There’s still a lot on my wish list, so any of the following is great as well: Streets of Rage 4 Anniversary Edition , Unicorn Overlord , The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom , Monster Boy & The Cursed Kingdom . If you happen to come across a copy of Powerslave Exhumed by Limited Run Games that’s been out of print for a while, that would be very nice too. If you have no idea but want to make sure it’s a good game, check out my Top 100 suggestions . Second, a gift coupon to spent at our local book store GRIM . Although my wife reminded me that we still have two coupons lying around that need to be used. I tried to come up with a concrete book title but my wanted list is a mess and I just bought six books that I haven’t touched yet. Feel free to add your own favourite entry. Third, Sailor’s Manyo Ume fountain pen ink: a dark red/brown colour with a unique sheen (see the Mountain of Ink review ). Or add a tint of Pilot Irushizuku ink, but I’ve never tried Sailor’s before and don’t have a colour that matches this range. Hopefully this will entice me to get back into writing on paper more which is a hobby I’ve been neglecting too much lately. Fourth, the Lord of the Rings: Fate of the Fellowship board game. I mentioned in the SPIEL Essen post that I wanted to grab a copy but ultimately left it for the Christmas list, so here it is. Two equally chunky alternatives might be Tea Garden or Creature Caravan . If you’re looking for a lighter game, perhaps check out my modern trick taking suggestions instead. Fifth, Manet’s Bundle Of Asparagus . The original one, please. Enlist the Ocean’s Eleven crew and send them to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne, Germany. Or, if they happen to be busy, order a high quality reproduction, through for example Wahoo Art . I’m unsure about the working conditions and ethical beliefs of that system as I just stumbled on it, but if that’s not an option, just a nice print will do. We’ll have a resin coating added later that makes it look like the real thing. Ever since reading about the painting in Alain de Botton’s Art As Therapy , I’ve wanted to hang a copy in the kitchen. Plus, we’re very fond of asparagus. Lastly, a heavy duty dough mixer, or more specifically, the Italian made Famag Grilletta IM5S . These spiral mixers are not cheap and come in at around so just a donation towards it will suffice. I’ve been kneading by hand for twelve years but with the kids and our increased bread consumption rate it’s getting harder to keep up. Plus, the Grilletta that kneads any dough to windowpane without blinking twice will finally enable me to make smooth buttery dough and up the hydration in the more rustic recipes. The IM5S—contrary to the IM5 model without the S—can be tilted to remove the bowl and more easily clean it. Still unsure? My archives tell me the following things made it to previous Christmas wish lists: Happy holidays! Related topics: / Christmas / By Wouter Groeneveld on 19 November 2025.  Reply via email . WoodWick candles Random Magic: The Gathering boosters An Apple Magic Keyboard I never got and eventually bought myself An authentic Belgian waffle iron (you can’t live without this if you’re living in Belgium) The book Sourdough by Robin Sloan The cookbook Marie Plukt De Dag More Switch games like The Witcher 3 , Dragon Quest XI , and Metroid Dread A GameCube HDMI adapter A lovely pen roll to protect your precious fountain pens on the go A soldering iron

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A Room of My Own 1 weeks ago

Letting Go of My Library

I recently read a few very interesting articles about personal libraries . Here is one that haunts me about Cormac McCarthy’s huge personal library and his vast, chaotic collection of “stuff”. For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved the idea of having a library of my own. But as I get older, something about it has started to feel unsettling. The thought of being surrounded by piles of things—books, objects, layers of accumulated life—now makes me uneasy. I crave order, clean spaces, and easy living unburdened by stuff. Large empty spaces and shelves call to me. I started collecting books when I was a student. They moved with me between different flats, and at one point I had over a thousand titles. I cherish them all, even the ones I haven’t read, because I agree with whoever said that reading and collecting books are two different hobbies. But as the saying goes, we spend the second half of our lives getting rid of the things we so fervently collected in the first half. I’ve been in that situation for several years now. I moved countries with a large container of stuff, only to realize I could probably have left 90% of it behind and never missed it. In fact, it took me years to slowly get rid of it. I wrote once about decluttering my clothes the Marie Kondo way. I’ve done the same with my house—again and again—until I got to a minimalist look and feel that I was happy with. For the past two years I’ve been in a very high-stress role at work, and sometimes taking care of my house, when everything else feels out of control, is the one thing I can do. I’m well aware of it, but it still leaves me with a nice, clean, minimal home. I live with a non-minimalist husband who, thankfully, gets on board every now and then. If it weren’t for him, it would be even more minimalist. Recently, after another round of spring cleaning, I finally got to my library. I’ve decluttered it many times since moving to New Zealand, but books are easy to come by here. There are lots of secondhand shops in town, and every February/March there’s a beautiful book fair where you can stock up for winter. It’s also easy to donate books, and I’ve been doing that. Still, I had too many. Reading those articles, and realizing I now read most of my books on Kindle, I felt the urge to minimize my library again. My criteria were simple: Get rid of books I’ve read and know I’ll never read again. Get rid of books I haven’t read but know I’ll probably never read. Get rid of books on subjects I’m no longer interested in, or that I could easily borrow from the library or download if I change my mind later. Get rid of novels I’ve saved for years, waiting to read, but never did. Having shelves so full was also stopping me from borrowing (but not buying) new books, because I felt weighed down by all the unread ones sitting at home. So I took all the books down. I got my husband to go through his too. Surprisingly, he got rid of quite a few. It was easier than I expected to minimize my library to the point where it now looks almost empty. People commented that it looks too empty. But I’m not worried. I feel like I can finally breathe. The books were gone in a day—donated, given to friends, or put on the book exchange shelves at work. What’s left are my true favorites, the ones I’ll reread. My husband’s books are breathing now too—he loves Bob Woodward and all kinds of political and spy thrillers, and he actually rereads them, so those stay. The goal isn’t to have no books at all, but to keep only the ones that genuinely matter, and to leave room for new interests when they arrive. So while I still appreciate big libraries—and if this were the 90s or early 2000s, when we didn’t have Kindles and books were harder or more expensive to get, I might still keep one—right now, a lighter library just feels better. There are still a few hundred books on my shelves (and I’ll admit to owning a set of about 50 nearly-new hardcover classics I picked up at an auction for $15. They’re currently sitting in the attic, waiting for some imaginary future where we have space to display them purely for decoration, because I doubt I’ll read them again). But my shelves can finally breathe, and so can I. I can happily pick up a book, flip through it, enjoy the moment, and put it back down—without feeling weighed down by the sheer volume of “stuff.” Here is the before, during and after of my library. Arguably, the before is more aesthetically pleasing, but the after makes me feel so much lighter, full of possibility. At this point in my life, I think I’d be completely fine not having any shelves or books at all. But even my kids, who don’t particularly enjoy reading (at least not the way I did when I was younger), were upset when I got rid of so many books—they say they like the feeling of them, the atmosphere they create. I agree. I love looking at other people’s libraries and I always will. Get rid of books I’ve read and know I’ll never read again. Get rid of books I haven’t read but know I’ll probably never read. Get rid of books on subjects I’m no longer interested in, or that I could easily borrow from the library or download if I change my mind later. Get rid of novels I’ve saved for years, waiting to read, but never did.

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Martin Fowler 1 weeks ago

My Foreword to "Frictionless"

I find most writing on software productivity to be twaddle, but Nicole Forsgren and Abi Noda are notable exceptions. I had a chance to take a look at their new book, published today, and liked it so much I wrote a foreword.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Following up on input diet

Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic . It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting for me next to the bed. In my post, I wrote that «the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume.» and that is exactly what I did yesterday morning. The total number of feeds on my RSS reader went down from hundreds to exactly seventeen. I stopped at nineteen initially, but later in the day, I decided to remove two more after realising I should follow two simple rules: Time will tell if this setup works or not, but I think it’s a good starting point to reshape my digital diet. And speaking of ingesting digital content, I will not pass on this opportunity to mention that Jatan — also featured on P&B —has published a poetry book to celebrate his Moon Monday newsletter passing both 5 years of digital existence as well as 10000 subscribers . The book is available pretty much everywhere a book can exist, and in I think all possible formats, which is very impressive, I have to say. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs My RSS consumption should have a hard cap at 25 total feeds. All the content in there should come from people I either know in person or have interacted with directly at some point.

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Andre Garzia 2 weeks ago

Had a good time at Edinburgh Radical Book Fair

# Had a good time at Edinburgh Radical Book Fair Last weekend I went to [Edinburgh Radical Book Fair](https://lighthousebookshop.com/events/edinburghs-radical-book-fair-2025-ecosystems-of-change) with a friend and had a wonderful time. I was having a crap time before going and being there and seeing so much hope and energy for change made my spirit much better.  It was good to see so many interesting books covering intersectional topics and cutting through so many hard challenges we face as a society. My favourite section was the anarchism corner I found tucked away with so many delightful little books. My mischievous grin could probably be seen from Glasgow as I browsed them all. In the end I grabbed three books.  I'm very keen on reading them all. I started with _After The Internet_ by Tiziana Terranova and am already in love with it even though I am barelly into the book. From the back blurb: > The internet is no more. If it still exists, it does so only as a residual technology, still effective in the present but less intelligible as such. After nearly two decades and a couple of financial crises, it has become the almost imperceptible background of today’s Corporate Platform Complex (CPC) — a pervasive planetary technological infrastructure that meshes communication with computation. In the essays collected in this book, Tiziana Terranova bears witness to this monstrous transformation. > > After the Internet is neither an apocalyptic lamentation nor a melancholic “rise and fall” story of betrayed great expectations. On the contrary, it looks within the folds of the recent past to unfold the potential futurities that the post-digital computational present still entails. This page was so good I wanted to highlight it all: > (the internet) It continues to exist, but interstitially, in ways that are almost hardly ever perceptible to those large and powerful entities that have overtaken it. Standards and protocols developed as part of the project of creating the internet as a public and open network still operate, but they are increasingly buried under a thick layer of corporate ones. The internet’s own native subcultures, such as those that formed in the 1980s and 1990s, have gone underground, assembling in the so-called dark web, in IRC chats, in some forums, in pirate file-sharing networks, in websites with no social plugins, in mesh networks and wikis, and maybe also in the chaotic informational milieus of some secure, encrypted, open source messaging apps. > > Reaching out with their data-mining tentacles, the new owners of the digital world have, as Marxists might say, subsumed the internet, that is, transmuted, encompassed, incorporated it, but not necessarily beaten or dissolved it. As a subsumed entity, the internet is not so much dead as undead, a ghostly presence haunting the Corporate Platform Complex with the specters of past hopes and potentials. Thus, whereby the CPC displays an increasing concentration of control, the specter of the internet persists as a much more muted, but perceptible aspiration towards an unprecedented distribution of the power to know, understand, coordinate and decide. Makes me want to dive again into decentralisation technologies and do some good FOSS work.

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pabloecortez 2 weeks ago

Read a book via RSS with lettrss.com

If you picked a book and sent one chapter a day to my RSS reader, I'm sure I'd read it all. I'll be putting this to the test with lettrss.com , a project I built to syndicate books in the public domain via RSS. lettrss - read public domain books via RSS Since the second part of the Wicked movie is coming out on November 21 in the United States, I thought it’d be fun to start this RSS project with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

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Preah's Website 2 weeks ago

Good Evening November 9

I'm not dead, although I have been busy. Working, learning, dog-sitting, reading, the works. I'm trying incredibly hard to learn more about web development without burning out, while also doing school, and reading my books, and studying for a CLEP exam, and studying for my CompTIA A+ exam, and working, and buying my first house, and yeah... I've been continuing to read A Game of Thrones, recently during my work commute (30 min each way). I am finally over the halfway point, lol. I also finished Like a Mother by Angela Garbes on the 30th, which is a book about navigating the culture and science of pregnancy. I didn't know exactly what to expect when I got into it; I am mainly reading to learn more about the science behind it as well as learning parenting advice in preparation for having a family in the next 5 years. What I found was an incredibly written book that is emotional, evidence-based, anecdotal, eye-opening, blunt, raw, disgusting, and beautiful. I never thought one book could throw me around between really looking forward to pregnancy one day and being entirely grossed out by it. It's explicitly feminist (only occasionally in the annoying way), and shows me what a parent could be, and also what one could go through. Next, my fiancé is in a book club with our church, and they're reading For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann . He is an excellent writer and has a lot of deep things to say, but oh man I am not ready. It's about the sacramental life of the church, of life, really, and its contrast with secular life. I decided to switch over to Journey to Reality by Zachary Porcu , which has a lot of the same concepts but at a much higher level, almost too high for where I am as a catechumen. That doesn't matter at all, though, because this book completely changed my relationship with and in Orthodoxy. It answered some of my greatest problems and struggles with religion, God's nature, and Christianity in such a concise and simple way that I feel like a child who has learned to walk. I will probably write more in-depth on that eventually, but wow!! I would recommend this book to anyone who is considering Christianity at all, and especially to new Orthodox people. Zachary does not beat around the bush. I'll be heading home from dog-sitting for my sister tomorrow, and probably go to this one bar in San Antonio with my fiancé and his friend. This morning I finally set up Crafty Controller on my homelab, which is an administrator panel for managing and configuring Minecraft servers very easily. It's been so relieving and I love having it already. More Minecraft to be played later, then. Subscribe via email or RSS

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Jim Nielsen 3 weeks ago

Down The Atomic Rabbit Hole

Over the years, I’ve been chewing on media related to nuclear weapons. This is my high-level, non-exhaustive documentation of my consumption — with links! This isn’t exhaustive, but if you’ve got recommendations I didn’t mention, send them my way. Reply via: Email · Mastodon · Bluesky 📖 The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. This is one of those definitive histories (it’s close to 1,000 pages and won a Pulitzer Prize). It starts with the early discoveries in physics, like the splitting of the atom, and goes up to the end of WWII. I really enjoyed this one. A definite recommendation. 📖 Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb by Richard Rhodes is the sequel. If you want to know how we went from atomic weapons to thermonuclear ones, I think this one will do it. It was a harder read for me though. It got into a lot of the politics and espionage of the Cold War and I fizzled out on it (plus my library copy had to be returned, somebody else had it on hold). I’ll probably go pick it up again though and finish it — eventually. 📖 The Bomb: A Life by Gerard J. DeGroot This one piqued my interest because it covers more history of the bomb after its first use, including the testing that took place in Nevada not far from where I grew up. Having had a few different friends growing up whose parents died of cancer that was attributed to being “downwinders” this part of the book hit close to home. Which reminds me of: 🎥 Downwinders & The Radioactive West from PBS. Again, growing up amongst locals who saw some of the flashes of light from the tests and experienced the fallout come down in their towns, this doc hit close to home. I had two childhood friends who lost their Dads to cancer (and their families received financial compensation from the gov. for it). 📖 Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser Read this one years ago when it first came out. It’s a fascinating look at humans bumbling around with terrible weapons. 🎥 Command and Control from PBS is the documentary version of the book. I suppose watch this first and if you want to know more, there’s a whole book for you. 📖 Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen Terrifying. 🎥 House of Dynamite just came out on Netlify and is basically a dramatization of aspects of this book. 📖 The Button: The New Nuclear Arms Race and Presidential Power from Truman to Trump by William J. Perry and Tom Z. Collina How did we get to a place where a single individual has sole authority to destroy humanity at a moment’s notice? Interesting because it’s written by former people in Washington, like the Sec. of Defense under Clinton, so you get a taste of the bureaucracy that surrounds the bomb. 🎧 Hardcore History 59 – The Destroyer of Worlds by Dan Carlin First thing I’ve really listened to from Dan. It’s not exactly cutting-edge scholarship and doesn’t have academic-level historical rigor, but it’s a compelling story around how humans made something they’ve nearly destroyed themselves with various times. The part in here about the cuban missile crisis is wild. It led me to: 📖 Nuclear Folly: A History of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Serhii Plokhy is a deep look at the Cuban Missile crisis. This is a slow burning audiobook I’m still chewing through. You know how you get excited about a topic and you’re like “I’m gonna learn all about that thing!” And then you start and it’s way more than you wanted to know so you kinda back out? That’s where I am with this one. 🎥 The Bomb by PBS. A good, short primer on the bomb. It reminds me of: 🎥 Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War on Netflix which is a longer, multi-episode look at the bomb during the Cold War. 📝 Last, but not least, I gotta include at least one blog! Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and creator of the nukemap , blogs at Doomsday Machines if you want something for your RSS reader.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The Empusium

In 1913, a young Pole arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountains, a place known to be free of consumption due to the still, cold, dry air. Each evening, the residents gather after dinner and drink a mildly hallucinogenic liquor while they debate the issues of the day: do women have souls? does a woman’s body belong to her or to the public? could a matriarchy exist? Meanwhile, rumors swirl about strange murders, bodies left scattered in pieces in the woods, and the abrupt suicide of a woman chills the new arrival. As they come to understand this place, and come to understand themselves, they find that both have changed, and someone—or some thing —is watching. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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A Working Library 1 months ago

The Dream and the Underworld

“When we wrong the dream, we wrong the soul.” James Hillman here argues that the work of mining dreams for their meaning to the living world is a violation. Dreams are not messages from the nightworld to the dayworld but rather the psyche taking hold of the day’s detritus and composting it into soul-stuff; that is, dreams are the psyche’s work of soul making, a nightly transformative and creative act. Dream-work then is not the work of translation or interpretation but of observation, witnessing, and honoring the dream as it is. As much a book about creative work as it is about dreams, which is perhaps the same thing. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Alice

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alice, whose blog can be found at thewallflowerdigest.co.uk . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Winnie Lim and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I'm Alice, I'm currently 37, I'm from the East Midlands in the UK, and have lived in the region all my life. I live with my husband (whom I married in June) and our two cats. They are the best cats. At university, I studied English Literature because I never had any idea what I wanted to do for a career! I really enjoyed my time at university. Looking back, it was such a luxury to have all the time dedicated to reading books and thinking deeply about them (even if I was always too shy to contribute much in seminars!). I can't say an English Lit. degree has ever been beneficial in a practical sense, but I'm happy that I've started to dust off some of the cobwebs on it with my book blog! My work and my blog are separate, but I think the fact that it exists at all is a result of the way my career went, or rather didn't go! I got a Master's degree in Information and Library Management, but failed to ever get a proper professional job. Plan A was University Librarian, but I didn't get the graduate trainee placement I needed, and, with that, I was forever locked out of university libraries. I never saw a job posting that didn't require "at least 5 years of experience in an equivalent role", and social anxiety hampered the development of networking skills. I was a library assistant at a university for a while, where a good portion of my colleagues were in the same boat as me! Plan B was a School Librarian, purely because it was the only job I got offered. I was ill-suited to it, never really enjoyed and the school I was in had little interest in supporting the Library or developing a reading culture. I did that for about 4 years, the whole time trying to come up with an alternative plan. Eventually, Plan C presented itself, and I ended up in a little niche of library management systems, where I worked on data migrations for special libraries, and eventually moved into archives and museums. This is a job that really suits me. It turns out my true love all along was actually databases, information retrieval and the challenge of solving all the puzzles that involved! If I could go back in time to 18-21 years old, knowing myself as I do now, I would make different decisions! But, for now, I am happy where I ended up, and I'm still making a little contribution to the cultural sector! The Wallflower Digest was born in 2022 because my previous job had stopped offering me stimulating challenges, and I was feeling overlooked, bored and trapped by a lack of opportunities! My self-esteem was taking a real hit, and I just needed something to give me a goal and focus. I have had blogs in the past when bored at work! My library assistant job in my twenties was in a tiny, quiet campus library that involved some lone working evening shifts where there would be nothing to do but sit on the enquiries desk for hours! That was how my first blog started; it was mostly a TV blog called Between Screens. That was hosted by WordPress.com (I did have custom domains, though!) and is now long deleted. I used to write recaps and reviews of my favourite TV shows, movies and video games. This was mostly Made in Chelsea, Game of Thrones, Veronica Mars and Mass Effect ! I also played around briefly with a fiction blog and a sewing blog, but those were short-lived. This time around, I wanted my blog to be somewhere to exercise my writing skills and have a chance to play around with CSS and maybe other website bits if I wanted. When I picked the name, I wasn't sure what the blog was going to be, but I think I managed to nail it. I wanted something that felt like me. I've always been very shy, but I was painfully so as a child, and someone (probably a teacher) referred to me as a 'wallflower', and that term got stuck in my young brain. I don't know if the meaning will translate for those who aren't native English speakers, so as a definition, a "wallflower" can mean someone with an introverted personality type (or social anxiety) who will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight. Plus, I like flowers! I recently planted some wallflowers (Erysimum) in my garden! And then a ‘digest’ is a compilation or summary of information, and my blog is a mess of different topics. I share as I digest the things I read, learn and experience in my life. When I got started, I spun my wheels for a bit in the mud of terrible advice for new bloggers. You know, this strange idea that a blog has to make money, and therefore has to solve problems for an audience! This is why some of my oldest posts have a recognisable Content formatting of SEO friendly headings and keywords! But I eventually realised the fun and mental stimulation I needed came from just doing whatever I wanted, and that an Audience wasn't important to me (actually, I fear that!)! And, more importantly, the blogs I was finding that I enjoyed the most were messy little personal blogs where people shared snippets of their lives. These days, I remind myself that I can do what I want. I see it now as a loosely defined project to help me distil the things that resonate, and help me to understand myself a little better. I share whatever I want to, which currently is book reviews, updates on my life, occasionally progress with my garden (though I've been too busy this year!), and my embroidery or other craft projects. Lately - trying to be less of a wallflower - I've been taking part in more blogging community linkups and tag memes, which have been a lot of fun to answer prompts, but also for "blog hopping" and seeing who else is out there! I'm hoping to branch out from the book-based ones to other topics and blog hop beyond the borders of the book community, or the more tech-focused folks I found on Mastodon. I am toying with the idea of creating my own if I can't find an existing one that feels right! Life has been very busy recently, so the blog has really been ticking over on book reviews and joining in with the book blogger community's Top Ten Tuesday weekly link-up (currently hosted by ArtsyReaderGirl ). It's hard to find the time for more "creative" posts at the moment, but I do try to put really effort into my TTT and try to find something to say about the books I choose to list. Sometimes I get struck by inspiration - usually a topic that keeps recurring in my life somehow - and I'll start a draft, or just jot some thoughts into a note and eventually find the time to work it into something that makes sense! That is the biggest challenge when I work 40 hours a week and have to do all the other responsibilities of life, relationships and health things that come with being an adult. I mean, I've been trying to find the time and mental bandwidth to write a full review with my analysis of the book Rouge by Mona Awad since January (I loved it, and I'm still thinking about it)! But it's still in drafts, and I think I need to read it a third time now. It's like a running joke that I'll forever talk about it and never get it posted! I also post life updates semi-regularly. Those posts are just a catch-up on whatever is going on - how my walking/move more challenges are going, TV or movies, anything else I feel like! I love to read that kind of 'slice of life' content from other people. Now and again, I'll share something about my social anxiety struggles. I'm always battling this, and I find writing out my experiences and feelings helps to work it out of my system. As for the process, my drafts usually get entered straight into the Jetpack app on my phone. I used Obsidian as my digital notes app for general thoughts and inspiration, and all my book reviews and ebook highlights get synced into there, too. What I've got going on with Obsidian is its own little project (essentially as my own personal database!). Most of the time, I post whenever I've finished writing because time is too short to proofread, and that's why my blog is full of typos and errors! I do re-read things later on and correct mistakes I spot, but that's as far as it goes! I also love to use Canva to create graphics. Every book review gets a little graphic with a summary; those originated in my short-lived attempt to get involved with Bookstagram, and I enjoyed making them so much that I've kept them for the blog. I am also a visual person, so it is important to me that I like the look of my website! I think my creativity relies more on my mental state than my physical space! Definitely, my menstrual cycle comes with days where I'm buzzing with ideas and writing is easier, and I wake up with ideas first thing in the morning before the responsibilities of the day have taken over. I do need quite though. I can't think with background chatter, I have no idea how people manage to work in noisy cafes! They make me instantly tired, and my brain shuts down. Writing is easiest when I am on my PC with a full keyboard and dual monitors, but because I work from home full-time at the same desk, I don't like to be pinned in the same spot in my evenings, shut away from my husband, so PC time only really happens on the weekend. More often, I write on my phone; I also have an iPad, but if I'm typing on mobile, I'm faster on my phone. I am hosted by Hostingr, which has been fine and easy to use for a non-techie like me. My CMS is WordPress, it came installed and I find it familiar and easy to use with a big community. I find there is usually a plugin to solve most problems! I have no problem with the block editor, and I love that I can hook my blog up to the wider WordPress.com world to more easily connect with other bloggers. I use the Jetpack app for quick editing and posting, as well as my RSS feed, and to explore and discover new blogs through tags. I honestly think Jetpack gets underrated as a discovery tool! I don't think I would change anything about my blog. With hindsight, I do wish I'd wasted less time down the SEO rabbit hole and removed the pre-installed AISEO plugin earlier! I could also have figured out how I connect my blog to WordPress/Jetpack sooner to find other bloggers. I would not have made my thoughts on Atomic Habits so SEO friendly... it got caught in Google's net and now I regret how well it does search results. There is a crowd of James Clear fans who get upset when you don't praise it as the life-changing work of a genius they hold it up to be. Every few months, I get something that makes me consider turning off the comments. I got a New Year deal with Hostingr for 4 years of hosting at a ridiculous discount, so I paid that all upfront, and I think it worked out about £3 a month. I'm going to have to work out what to do when that's up for renewal! I think my domain is £8.99 a year. That is all the cost; I don't make any money from my blog, nor do I plan to. This is just a hobby, and hobbies (just like my embroidery and gardening) often cost money! Monetising would immediately make it stressful for me and take the fun out of it. I don't mind if other people want to monestise as long as it's not obnoxious. I don't like newsletters where they put some things behind a paywall but not everything, or they put half of it behind the paywall. Those are annoying when they come through my RSS feed, and usually I end up unsubscribing. I've occasionally done a "buy me a coffee" kind of one-off donation to bloggers, or the pay-what-you-like subscription model, where I can just do a couple of quid a month to show support. Or if they're an artist and they have a shop, I buy something small if the postage to the UK is reasonable. My favourite blogs are the ones where I can feel the person writing it, and their personality and passions come through. I want to read human thoughts, not Content! I like details about people's lives with the things they love (books, TV shows, comics, flowers, whatever!), or might share that they're having a hard time with something and how they're coping. Michael at My Comic Relief writes wonderful, passionate and compassionate posts about his favourite TV shows, movies and comic books. When Doctor Who and The Acolyte were on, I was watching my RSS feed for these thoughts every week! I always find his perspective interesting and his enthusiasm infectious. Dragon Rambles is a mix of personal posts and book reviews written by Nic in New Zealand. I think she's been blogging for many years. I really love it when she shares new books she finds for her collection of retro science fiction and fantasy! I have no interest in ever reading any of them myself, but I love to read about them and her collection! I also enjoy reading Elizabeth Tai . She is based in Malaysia and was one of the first bloggers I found on Mastodon in my super early days, and it was through her that I learned popular Indie Web concepts like digital gardens and POSSE. I enjoy the fact that she writes about all kinds of things! I am actually surprised she's not been featured yet! I think Michael, Nic or Liz would be great to interview. Michael and Nic, I found in the land of WordPress, and may not even be aware of this project! My other 3 favourites you've already featured, but I'll mention them because I think they're great! Veronique has been a favourite for a long time! Her writing always feels intimate, and I love the little snippet she shares from her life, her artwork and her passion for zines. She also mentioned my blog in her interview, and I can't tell you how thrilled I was! I had to try to explain the whole thing to my husband, who does not read blogs! Winnie Lim is another long-time favourite of mine. Her blog is also very intimate and thoughtful, and I am always eager to read about her life and little adventures. And also Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden is like what I think I'd like my blog to be, if I had the time and inclination to properly organise myself! I know she's also had a P&B feature because that's how I found her. I love her weekly notes. I don't know why I enjoy reading what music she listened to and what meals she had that week, but I do! This one is a silly one, and maybe a bit of a blast from the past because I used to follow Cake Wrecks way back in the day (like 15 years ago!), and when I was collecting RSS feeds of blogs again a couple of years ago, I was so happy it was still around! Unlike Regresty, RIP (and RIP to what Esty used to be!). Anyway, there is something about badly decorated cakes that I find deeply hilarious (and bad art in general), and these collections of wonky cakes made by so-called professional bakers are a regular source of joy. I don't have anything in particular to share. I am just so excited to have been asked to take part! I hope everyone keeps on doing what they love and blogging about it in the way that they want! I am thankful to have found that the 'blogosphere' is still alive and well, and for me, it's such a peaceful refuge away from the overwhelming noise of social media. I am also hugely appreciative of projects like this that make it easier for bloggers to find each other, so thank you, Manu! Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 111 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Annie Mueller and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

We were angry

In documenting the history of our understanding of trauma, Judith Herman follows the investigations into hysteria out into the battlefield. During the First World War, psychologists began to observe symptoms of what was initially termed “shell shock” among soldiers. An early theory posited that the men suffered from some physical ailment, perhaps a consequence of repeated concussions caused by proximity to exploding shells. But it rapidly became clear that a great many of the men affected had suffered no physical harm and yet had been entirely incapacitated: they wept or howled, sat frozen and speechless, became forgetful and detached. In short, they behaved like hysterical women. The first wave of responses to this behavior was unforgiving: accused of laziness and cowardice, the soldiers were shamed and punished. But another psychologist, W. H. R. Rivers, approached the problem more humanely, and arrived at a different conclusion: [Rivers] demonstrated, first, that men of unquestioned bravery could succumb to overwhelming fear and, second, that the most effective motivation to overcome that fear was something stronger than patriotism, abstract principles, or hatred of the enemy. It was the love of soldiers for one another. In other words, “hysteria” and “shell shock” were the same thing, both the result of psychological trauma, including the trauma of bearing witness to horrors which you were powerless to stop. Moreover, it was love for one’s comrades that offered the greatest defense against that trauma—both during the events themselves and in the days and years that followed. Herman traces the ways that our understanding of trauma was discovered and then conveniently (in Freud’s case, intentionally ) lost again, making yet future discoveries inevitable. Each time, it was survivors who drove awareness of the sources of trauma and its most effective treatments, forcing established practitioners of medicine and psychology to follow their lead. In the middle of the last century, survivors of sexual trauma formed consciousness-raising groups, while veterans of the Vietnam War created rap groups; in both cases, the efforts combined demands for better treatment alongside those for political awakening. The purpose of the rap groups was twofold: to give solace to individual veterans who had suffered psychological trauma, and to raise awareness about the effects of war. The testimony that came out of these groups focused public attention on the lasting psychological injuries of combat. These veterans refused to be forgotten. Moreover, they refused to be stigmatized. The insisted upon the rightness, the dignity of their distress. In the words of a marine veteran, Michael Norman: “Family and friends wondered why we were so angry. What are you crying about? they would ask. Why are you so ill-tempered and disaffected. Our fathers and grandfathers had gone off to war, done their duty, come home and got on with it. What made our generation so different? As it turns out, nothing. No difference at all. When old soldiers from ‘good’ wars are dragged out from behind the curtain of myth and sentiment and brought into the light, they too seem to smolder with choler and alienation….So we were angry. Our anger was old, atavistic. We were angry as all civilized men who have ever been sent to make murder in the name of virtue were angry.” Calls for healing and for reparation are the same call: to heal a wound is to account for the wounding. And anger is the appropriate response when that accountability is withheld. Anger, like love, can be useful: it is a shield against further harm, a defense against erasure. It is a weapon that tears down the curtains of myth and sentiment. It is the refusal to be forgotten, even as each new generation tries so hard to forget. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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David Bushell 1 months ago

RSS Club #004: Ghost of Autumn

The summer solstice has long past which means it’s Christmas soon if the local supermarkets are to be believed. I refuse to eat a mince pie before November at the earliest. Daylight savings time will come to an end (impossible to know exactly when). For the UK that means dark mornings, dark evenings, and grey skies around noon. It’s time to hibernate! I can recommend a bit of entertainment to wile away the winter. Imperium by Robert Harris is the first book of the Cicero trilogy. Although fiction, this novel is based upon real events at the end of the Roman Republic. The series follows the political career of Marcus Tullius Cicero . A fascinating era of human history. Move over Wordle, Connections is the new daily brain teaser. New to me anyway. If puzzle numbers are to go by it’s been around for years. Presumably inspired by the Connecting Wall you must make 4 groups from 16 words. Green is supposed to be the most obvious but I keep finding the blue group first. I’ve just finished playing Ghost of Yōtei the spiritual sequel to Ghost of Tsushima . If I rated Tsushima 5 stars I’d give Yōtei 4 stars. I achieved the platinum trophy for 100% completion in both games. The game is beautifully designed and fun to explore. Fair warning: moderate spoilers ahead. Yōtei is a great game but the story doesn’t hit the same emotional level as Tsushima. The ending fell flat for me and overstayed its welcome. The antagonists progressively lost their mystique until they became boring. Their repeated escapes were eye-rolling. It made Atsu look dumb and the Matsumae clan comically inept. Plot points are forced and pacing is criminally ruined by bad open world design. They front-load the starting area with the most side activities and then almost immediately move the main quest elsewhere. Ignore content, or ignore story? You can fast travel back and forth of course but it ruins the immersion. I played 20 hours and only saw two cutscenes. Most side characters are relegated to vendor NPC level which was disappointing. I’m left confused as to what purpose the wolf served? Despite these issues it was an experience worthy of the hours invested. As we know the true game is finding the tengai hat and fundoshi armour and terrifying the local samurai. I’m afraid I did not dare witness the final cutscene in this attire. Thanks for reading! Follow me on Mastodon and Bluesky . Subscribe to my Blog and Notes or Combined feeds.

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annie's blog 1 months ago

Reading notes: August, September

I need to get back on the monthly routine because I’m squinting back at August like Uuuuuuuuuuh I vaguely remember it  so anyway let’s see how this goes. What could she say? What sentence would pierce him while leaving her intact? She had built her life so carefully around him. To say something, to do something, to feel something, would be to self-destruct. Okay. So. I want to like this book. I love books about food, involving food, including food. And this book has a lot of food. Of course it’s a tool, a metaphor, a… I don’t know, an environment. But still: Food. Hell yeah. Actually maybe that’s what I don’t like. I love the messy earthy good realness of food and people taking pleasure in it, cooking and sharing and enjoying it. Food in this story is not that. It is a measure of control, self-inflicted punishment, purgatory, avoidance, annihilation. And that makes me sad. ALSO I think if we’d moved things along and had the final inevitable explosion happen at, say, page 215 instead of page 300-ish, that would have been better. Also also, I said the writing was good and it was but.   But there were a lot of stretches of text that went like this: She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing). Details of the ingredients. She (did another food thing). Sizzle. She (did a food thing). She (did another food thing). She (did another food thing).  Etc. I don’t know how you’d write it different but it got repetitive. It was too much. I was inwardly screaming OKAY I GET IT I GET IT SHE IS COOKING AS A WAY TO HAVE CONTROL SHE IS EATING AS A SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL THE OTHER THINGS SHE SHOULD BE DOING I GET IT. Also it annoyed me that he (the fiance) did a horrible thing that ruined it all but we treat it like a big mystery and it is never clarified. I know the point is it doesn’t matter what he did . The point is he betrayed her and instead of rising up with immediate willpower and boundaries and hell naw  she just cooks and eats and pretends it’s fine. (Until she doesn’t.) I get that in a really personal way of having done the same thing myself (less cooking, less eating, but just as much pretending it’s fine) and I know it doesn’t matter how  the betrayal happens, what matters is that the betrayal happened and what matters even more is the self-betrayal that happens and then keeps happening. Until it doesn’t. Again: I GET IT. But also: I WANT TO KNOW. Tell me what he did. This book both destroyed and healed me. I don’t want to talk about it. I want to talk about it. It’s beautiful, it’s full of music and connection and fear. It’s a time-outside-of-time book but you know, the whole time, that there is a reckoning, there is an end, and you know it will pluck your heart out and smash it like a grape and you go forward anyway. Because you are there too and the music you can’t hear is carrying you along and the slow threads are weaving together and you are somehow woven in and then your heart is broken and you have no one to blame but yourself. And Ann Patchett. Is there a satisfaction in the effort of remembering that provides its own nourishment, and is what one recollects less important than the act of remembering? That is another question that will remain unanswered: I feel as though I am made of nothing else. First pick for the book club. We had our first meeting the last week of August and I picked this book without knowing anything about it other than I wanted to read it. It wasn’t what I expected. I’m not sure what I expected. Something lighter, I guess. Anyway I loved it but I felt kind of bad about picking it for CBBC because it is weighty. It is depth. It is pondering.  It is kind of bleak. Also beautiful. Also heavy. It’s a book I want to read again in a few years and see how it hits me. Perhaps, when someone has experienced a day-to-day life that makes sense, they can never become accustomed to strangeness. That is something that I, who have only experienced absurdity, can only suppose. I guess this is a stranded-on-a-desert-island book, kind of . But only in the sense that the environment, the context, has been set up to give us this thought experiment, this experience, this long echoing question of purpose and the even more important unignorable thump-thump-thump of loneliness. Anyway this book is excellent. Read it. Or don’t. But do. Also read The Wall by   Marlen Haushofer. I was not sure about this book but Stewart wrote and produced Xena, Warrior Princess so I figured it would be worth a shot. And yes: It was. If you like well-written badass heroines doing cool shit in a dystopian world (I do) you will like this. Really quite gorgeous. I liked the characters, good adventure, good pacing, good story. A satisfying if bittersweet fantasy (don’t worry, the ending is good). Loved this one. Scifi, really, but reads like fantasy. I should say more about it but I’m tired and I have already said a lot of words. Okay thriller. Plot twist was not so surprising. Tolerable writing. Good escape for a few hours.

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Chris Coyier 1 months ago

Media Diet

📺 Wondla — 10/10 kids show. I was way into it. Post-apoc situation with underground bunkers (apparently Apple loves that theme) where when the protagonist girl busts out of it, the world is quite different. The premise and payoff in Season 1 was better than the commentary vibe of Season 2, but I liked it all. Apparently there is one more season coming . 🎥 Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale — The darkest of the three movies? Weird. I love spending time in this world though so I was happy to be there. But honestly I was coming off a couple of day beers when I saw it in the theater and it put me in a weird mood and I should probably watch it again normally. How to proper movie critics review movies without their random current moods affecting the review?! 📕 Annie Bot —  Sierra Greer is like, what if we turned AI into sex bots? Which honestly feels about 7 minutes away at this point. I’m only like half through it and it’s kinda sexy in that 50-shades kinda way where there is obviously some dark shit coming. 📔 Impossible People — Binge-able graphic novel by Julia Wertz about a redemption arc out of addiction. I’m an absolute sucker for addiction stories. This is very vulnerable and endearing. Like I could imagine having a very complicated friendship with Julia. It doesn’t go down to the absolute bottom of the well like in books like A Million Little Pieces or The Book of Drugs , so I’d say it’s a bit safer for you if you find stuff like that too gut wrenching.

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The Coder Cafe 1 months ago

Announcing The Coder Cafe Season 1 (Book)

🔔 This post is in the Announcements section, where we share news and updates related to The Coder Cafe. Notifications for each section can be configured in your settings . TL;DR We turned year one of The Coder Cafe into a 260-page book. Published on Leanpub: DRM-free EPUB/PDF. Works on Kindle, Kobo, iPad: read it anywhere. Pay what you want, min $4.90. Buying a copy is a way to support The Coder Cafe . Get the book Behind the Book Today marks the first anniversary of The Coder Cafe newsletter 🥳. To celebrate, I gathered the core concepts we explored this year into one book. I just published The Coder Cafe Season 1: Timeless Concepts for Software Engineers on Leanpub . If you’re unfamiliar with Leanpub, it’s a platform for DRM-free EPUB/PDF books with pay-what-you-want pricing and free updates. You can set your price (min $4.90) and read it on Kindle, Kobo, iPad, or e-reader/app. Drawn from the first year of the newsletter, it’s a single, carefully sequenced journey. Read sequentially, or jump to the concept you need. I’ve also included a special bonus with the book: my personal algorithms & data structures Anki deck, the support I mainly used to prepare for the Google SWE interviews. Buying the book helps support The Coder Cafe into year two and some even more ambitious projects. Get the book TL;DR We turned year one of The Coder Cafe into a 260-page book. Published on Leanpub: DRM-free EPUB/PDF. Works on Kindle, Kobo, iPad: read it anywhere. Pay what you want, min $4.90. Buying a copy is a way to support The Coder Cafe .

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Heather Burns 1 months ago

Banned Books Week 2025 / nothing new under the sun

Turn right at Utopia and you'll find yourself here.

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A Working Library 1 months ago

Beyond credibility

In the 1880s, a French neurologist named Jean-Martin Charcot became famous for hosting theatrical public lectures in which he put young, “hysterical” women in a hypnotic trance and then narrated the symptoms of the attacks that followed. Charcot’s focus was on documenting and classifying these symptoms, but he had few theories as to their source. A group of Charcot’s followers—among them Pierre Janet, Joseph Breuer, and Sigmund Freud—would soon eagerly compete to be the first to discover the cause of this mysterious affliction. Where Charcot showed intense interest in the expression of hysteria, he had no curiosity for women’s own testimony; he dismissed their speech as “vocalizations.” But Freud and his compatriots landed on the novel idea of talking to the women in question. What followed were years in which they talked to many women regularly, sometimes for hours a day, in what can only be termed a collaboration between themselves and their patients. That collaboration revealed that hysteria was a condition brought about by trauma. In 1896, Freud published The Aetiology of Hysteria, asserting: I therefore put forward the thesis that at the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one or more occurrences of premature sexual experiences , occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood, but which can be reproduced through the work of psycho-analysis in spite of the intervening decades. I believe that this is an important finding, the discovery of a caput Nili in neuropathology. Judith Herman, in Trauma and Recovery , notes that The Aetiology remains one of the great texts on trauma; she describes Freud’s writing as rigorous and empathetic, his analysis largely in accord with present-day thinking about how sexual abuse begets trauma and post-traumatic symptoms, and with methods that effect treatment. But a curious thing happened once this paper was published: Freud began to furiously backpedal from his claims. [Freud’s] correspondence makes clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications of his hypothesis. Hysteria was so common among women that if his patients’ stories were true, and if his theory were correct, he would be forced to conclude that what he called “perverted acts against children” were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he had first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where he had established his practice. This idea was simply unacceptable. It was beyond credibility. Faced with this dilemma, Freud stopped listening to his female patients. The turning point is documented in the famous case of Dora. This, the last of Freud’s case studies on hysteria, reads more like a battle of wits than a cooperative venture. The interaction between Freud and Dora has been described as an “emotional combat.” In this case Freud still acknowledged the reality of his patient’s experience: the adolescent Dora was being used as a pawn in her father’s elaborate sex intrigues. Her father had essentially offered her to his friends as a sexual toy. Freud refused, however, to validate Dora’s feelings of outrage and humiliation. Instead, he insisted upon exploring her feelings of erotic excitement, as if the exploitative situation were a fulfillment of her desire. In an act Freud viewed as revenge, Dora broke off the treatment. That is, faced with the horror of women’s experience, Freud rejected the evidence in front of him. Rather than believe the women he had collaborated with, and so be forced to revise his image of the respectable men in his midst, he chose to maintain that respectability by refusing the validity of his own observations. He would go on to develop theories of human psychology that presumed women’s inferiority and deceitfulness—in a way, projecting his own lies onto his patients. Is this not how all supremacy thinking works? To believe that one people are less human or less intelligent or less capable is to refuse to see what’s right in front of you, over and over and over again. In order to recant his own research, Freud had to cleave his mind in two. We must refuse to tolerate supremacists in our midst because their beliefs do real and lasting harm, because their speech gives rise to terrible violence. But we must also refuse them because they are compromised. They cannot trust their own minds. And so cannot be trusted in turn. View this post on the web , subscribe to the newsletter , or reply via email .

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