Who Reads?
Apparently the US federal government is having difficulties recruiting agents to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). There are a number of reasons, but one important one is that applicants often cannot pass an “open...
Category: history
The Second Sex (book review)
Reading this now, in 2025, was like visiting a site where something astonishing was built some 75 years ago, something that goes on challenging readers even as the terms of that challenge shift and...
Eros the Bittersweet: Book Review
It’s the sort of literary criticism that expands a language, in some sense “rewrites” the text or group of texts under consideration. Reading and translating ancient texts for evidence of a specific experience, namely...
The Years: Book Review
It’s as if I’ve just read my own biography. I haven’t, of course: The Years is clearly ordered and clearly labelled as Ernaux’s autobiography, or memoire, from the date of her birth in 1941...
The Empusium: a Health Resort Horror Story. Book Review
I finished reading a few days ago, and can still feel my admiration building. In many ways traditional in structure, it is a tale of a character transformation, from the point a young man...
Individual Development Repeats Species Development
The title refers to the theory “Ontogeny Repeats Phylogeny”, credited to the German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Since Stephen Jay Gould’s detailed investigation of it in 1977, it has some standing as a framework for...