Jeff Bezos, Pamela Paul, David Graeber and Me (Or, If You Hate SEO, “Book Reviews”)
I like books. I like writing them. I like reading them. I like reviewing them.
That puts me in strange company. Each year, a record number of books get published, something on the order of four or five million books. Most of them get a handful of readers. A lucky few get read by thousands. Continue reading “Jeff Bezos, Pamela Paul, David Graeber and Me (Or, If You Hate SEO, “Book Reviews”)”
Currently Reading
I’ve started reading fiction again. I’m not entirely sure when I entirely stopped. I never stopped reading (unlike some people), but at some point I convinced myself that I was too busy with research to bother with novels, and that when I wanted to scratch that itch I could invest a long Saturday in watching some epic, corpus callosum-expanding non-linear epic movie, or at least some twisty, buzzy prestige TV mini-series.
Fast forward a few years, and every 2.5 hour “epic” movie could have been a taut 90 minute thriller, every premium streaming TV series could have been a movie (epic or otherwise), and Hollywood’s alliance with dipshit private equity and fascistic Silicon Valley has me boycotting streaming subscriptions in favor of scouring garage sales and used book stores for “new” sources of entertainment. Continue reading “Currently Reading”
Richman’s ‘Meh’ Idea
My eight-year-old daughter wants to enter a thirty year-old trivia contest-cum-lottery she found in the back of the 100th volume of The Baby-Sitters Club. I’m going to help her, because I’m curious about how long a New York book publisher, or its star author, might maintain a P.O. Box in Jefferson, MO to handle fan mail about a book series about an improbably successful small business enterprise run by a cluster of 11-13-year-olds in a made-up Connecticut suburb. Continue reading “Richman’s ‘Meh’ Idea”
This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!
Watching Jeopardy! is one of my daily rituals. But it still doesn’t sit right with me that Ken Jennings won the gig of exclusive host by crossing a picket line.
Recently a decades-old clip of Jennings making a vaguely populist gibe against corporate bosses made the rounds on social media, prompting a lot of “Based Ken” replies. Like a true Debbie Downer, I felt compelled to point out that “Nevertheless, the only reason he’s the sole host of Jeopardy is that he crossed the Writers Guild picket line when Mayim Bialik would not.”
Most of the responses I’ve received were intellectually lazy and dishonest. I’m not going to respond 299 characters at a time, so I’m firing up the old blog.
What most of the posts defending Jennings’ picket line crossing really boil down to is that people on the left hated Mayim Bialik. She’s a Zionist, vaccine skeptic with weird “mommy” politics. I’ll be honest. When she and Jennings split the hosting duties from 2021-2023, I kinda liked her infectious enthusiasm for the contestants and found his ESPN-style commentary about game play and betting (plus his obvious love for incessant tournaments of repeat contestants) to be slightly irksome. Continue reading “This…Is…Picket Line Jeopardy!”