This book came highly recommended by pretty much everyone I know when it first came out; it seemed like everywhere I looked, people were talking up Eleanor & Park with great enthusiasm, so I was definitely excited to read it. I don’t read a significant amount of straight contemporary YA (I tend more towards urban …
In Defence of the Urban Car
Periodically, another round of debate over urban cars flares up, with people hotly insisting that no one who lives in a city needs a car. These people are usually urban dwellers, of course, and they’re typically nondisabled with very specific kinds of lifestyles, yet they’re convinced, in their anti-car evangelist fervour, that everyone leads the …
Confusing A ‘Bohemian Lifestyle’ With Poverty
With poverty a growing subject of interest in the United States thanks to the growing numbers of people who live in poverty, there are some intriguing disconnects about what poverty really means and how it works, particularly among middle class people who seem to have a distorted vision of what it means to be poor …
Media Diversity Matters
‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,’ the saying goes, shaming people who aren’t aware of a social or cultural issue. The statement carries a strong sense of superiority; the speaker is informing the listener that she knows about this thing, whatever it is, and everyone else should too. Hand in hand with this …
When Medical Decisions are Predicated by Cost, We All Lose
The first time I saw my father in hospital after his heart attack, he was still in the ICU, and he was sleeping; one thing about being in ICU is that it’s extremely boring, and you feel absolutely dreadful, so sleeping a lot is a reasonable retreat from the world. I was disappointed when the …
Eating as Performance of Moral Superiority
We live in a culture where so much of what we do has become performative, designed to impress others rather than intended to be a pure action divorced of any weighted cultural or social meaning, or a personal choice in line with individual ethics and beliefs. Driving, eating, reading, all of these actions have become …
Book Review: The Sin Eater’s Confession, by Ilsa J. Bick
Ilsa J. Bick’s The Sin Eater’s Confession is a dark, thoughtful look into the heart of homophobia in the US, and the ways in which it can warp the lives of the people around it, not just the immediate victims. It’s also a book that is quite simply fantastic, with clear, lyrical, elegant language, a …
In the Garden: So Much Has Happened!
I hardly know where to begin with this garden update, not least because I’m covering three months at once, and those three months were an exciting time in garden world because they marked the transition from winter into spring. Which meant that everything got tons of water, and then it got sunny, and so the …
‘Manifesting,’ Privilege, and Imposter Syndrome
Manifesting. It’s something that seems to be making the rounds these days; ‘vision’ a goal, an idea, a thought, do it hard enough and long enough, and it will come true for you. The power of positive thinking, covered up in a hippy-dippy term. ‘Manifesting’ sounds like you’re getting the destiny, and the thing, you …
tl;dr: Journalism, Longform, and Attention Spans
I was recently working on a piece that I was told was ‘too long’ for publication because it was 3,000 words; despite the fact that it was intended for publication in the kind of setting where ‘longer’ thinkpieces are to be expected, and where readers could surely anticipate that any essay they might read would …
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