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Norman is a kid with no close friends at school, but he does know a lot of dead people. Of course, neither his parents nor his older sister nor his schoolmates believe he can talk with the departed, but it … Continue reading
Gary
In the late 1990s a writing student named Jim Butcher was urged by his teacher (author Deborah Chester) to set aside the medieval fantasies he’d been working on and try something in a modern setting. As Butcher said in a … Continue reading
John Oliver once again tackles an important subject with intelligence and humor. This time the target is standardized testing, something kids are apparently now subjected to literally every few weeks. As he points out, in theory it makes a great … Continue reading
Jack Pearl is little remembered today, but in the early days of radio he was famous for playing Baron Munchausen, a character with a thick German accent who would recount ludicrous adventures he claimed to have had, responding to skepticism … Continue reading
I’m normally a fan of Hank and John Green’s YouTube empire. Granted, their Mental Floss channel occasionally gets things wrong or at least wrong enough that one can reasonably complain about it, but rarely do they commit an error of … Continue reading
Something I just read pointed me to an interesting opinion piece by New York Times columnist David Brooks published in early February under the title “Building Better Secularists” (link). In it, Brooks favorably remarks on a book by Pitzer College … Continue reading
A number of independent opinion polls conducted over the past several decades have noted a significant increase in the fraction of adult Americans who don’t consider themselves members of any religion. For example, in 2014 the nonreligious accounted for 21 … Continue reading
(Update: I see I managed to post this review twice in slightly different form. The later version is here. I’ll leave both in place to avoid possible broken links.) One of my numerous character flaws is a tolerance for cheap … Continue reading
(Update: I see I somehow managed to post this review twice, more recently here. I’ll leave both in place to avoid possible broken links.) This is the first of a series of movies adapted from a popular trilogy of young … Continue reading
A piece from Talking Points Memo (link) gives reason to think that an ill-considered pre-emptive police action helped provoke the violence and destruction seen in Baltimore. Quoting: … The police assumed that black youth in local gangs were targeting them … Continue reading