As promised when I started writing essays here, all revenue from this site will be donated to charity. This week, subscribers (not including the “free tier,” sorry) were asked to vote among several charities I give to each year.
The winner for this year is Planned Parenthood.
Thanks for reading this year, and for your help in this decision!
All paid subscriptions are on pause, as I’ve been way too busy to write. Before the end of 2021, we’ll return to the issue of charitable donations and I’ll seek your input! For now, as my (lone) November post, I’ll share what I’ve been reading since the last post.
The Prophets, Robert Jones Jr., 2021. A love story about two enslaved men on a pre-Civil War US plantation, but not only that. Captivating.
The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars, Megan Daum, 2019. God do these millennials lack nuance. Daum writes from a feminist perspective that will make sense to the handful of intellectuals from Gen X, even if it’s a bit despairing. If you don’t like it, tough.
The Language Hoax, John H. McWhorter, 2014. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bullshit; every thinking person knows this, but McWhorter says it so much more beautifully than anyone else can.
The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century, Amia Srinivasan, 2021. Impressively lays out different sides of a number of contemporary arguments, rather than just assuming the reader is an expert in the opposing points of view to the author’s own. Really excellent read.
Lost In Summerland: Essays, Barrett Swanson, 2021. Got lost in these on a plane ride. A portrait of the struggles of everyday America in this shitty time.
Words on Fire: The Unfinished Story of Yiddish, Dovid Katz, 2004. History of the language and its speakers, and a central thesis about the existence of a trilingual (Hebrew-Aramaic-Yiddish) thousand-year civilization, mostly stateless, that has undergone constant conflict among vastly different points of view, including the occasional secular outburst (most notably a hundred years ago, now coming to an end), and that is by no means dying.
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