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Evan Shively (Perseus271)

I don’t know what to do with these stars anymore. I give stars to books and then I think, ‘god, you give five stars to everything, people will think you are terribly undiscriminating’ – so then I give four stars or even three stars to some books. Then I look back and it turns out that that I’ve given four stars to Of Human Bondage and honestly, how could I possibly have thought it was a good idea to give that book less than five stars? It is the absurdity of human conventions that has us doing such things.Now, that is what is called a segue, from the Italian ‘seguire’ – to follow. For the last thirty years I have studiously avoided reading this book. I have done that because for the last thirty years I have known exactly what this book is about and there just didn’t seem any point in reading it. In high school friends (one of them even became my ex-wife) told me it was a great book about a man condemned to die because he was an outsider. Later I was told that this book was a story about something much like the Azaria Chamberlain case. A case where someone does not react in a way that is considered to be ‘socially appropriate’ and is therefore condemned.But after 30 years of avoiding reading this book I have finally relented and read it. At first I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it. It didn’t really get off to the raciest of starts and the character's voice – it is told in first person – was a bit dull. He is a man who lives entirely in the present, how terribly Buddhist of him – although, really there doesn’t seem to be all that much to him.My opinion of the book began to change at his mother’s funeral. I particularly liked the man who kept falling behind in the march to the cemetery and would take short cuts. Okay, so it is black humour, but Camus was more or less French – so black humour is more or less obligatory.I really hadn’t expected this book to be nearly so funny as it turned out. I’d always been told it was a ponderous philosophical text – and so, to be honest, I was expecting to be bored out of my skull. I wasn’t in the least bit bored.A constant theme in my life at present is that I read ‘classics’ expecting them to be about something and they end up being about something completely different. And given I’ve called this a ‘constant’ theme then you might think I would be less than surprised when a read a new ‘classic’ and it turns out to be completely different to my expectations. I’m a little more upset about this one than some of the others, as I’ve been told about this one before, repeatedly, and by people I’d have taken as ‘reputable sources’ – although, frankly, how well one should trust one’s ex-wife in such matters is moot.I had gotten the distinct impression from all of my previous discussions about this book that the guy ends up dead. In fact, this is not the case – he ends up at the point in his life where he has no idea if he will be freed or not. The Priest who comes to him at the end is actually quite certain that he will be freed. Let’s face it, he is only guilty of having murdered an Arab, and as we have daily evidence, Westerners can murder Arabs with complete impunity. The main point of the book to me is when he realises he is no longer ‘free’. He needs this explained to him – because life up until then had been about ‘getting used to things’ and one can 'get used to just about anything'. But the prison guard helpfully informs him that he is being ‘punished’ and the manifestation of that punishment is the removal of his ‘freedom’. Interestingly, he didn’t notice the difference between his past ‘free’ life and his current ‘unfree’ one. The most interesting part of the book to me was the very end, the conversation with the priest. The religious often make the mistake of thinking that Atheists are one thing – I’ve no idea how they ever came to make this mistake, but make it they do. Given that there are thousands upon thousands of different shades of Christians – from Jesuit Catholics to Anti-Disney Episcopalians – it should be fairly obvious that something like Atheism (without any ‘organised’ church or even system of beliefs) could not be in anyway ‘homogeneous’.I am definitely not the same kind of Atheist as Camus. To Camus there is no truth, the world is essentially absurd and all that exists is the relative truth an individual places on events and ideas. This makes the conversation with the priest fascinatingly interesting. To the priest the prisoner who is facing death is – by necessity – someone who is interested in God. You can play around with ideas like the non-existence of God when it doesn’t seem to matter (life is long and blasphemy can seem fun) – but surely when confronted with the stark truth of the human condition any man would turn away from their disbelief and see the shining light.Not this little black duck. Now, if I was in that cell I would have argued with the priest too – but I would not have argued in the same way that Meursault argues. No, I do not believe in God, but I do believe in truth, and so Camus’ arguments are barred to me.Meursault essentially says, “Look, I’m bored, I’m totally uninterested in the rubbish you are talking – now go away”. Now, this is a reasonable response. What is very interesting is that the priest cannot accept this as an answer. The world is not allowed to have such a person in it – if such a person really did exist then it would be a fundamental challenge to the core beliefs of the priest. So, he has to assume Meursault is either lying to him or is trying to taunt him. But it is much worse – he is absolutely sincere, he is not interested in this ‘truth’.I don’t know that the world is completely meaningless, it is conventional rather than meaningless. That those conventions are arbitrary (decided by the culture we grew up in) doesn’t make them meaningless, it makes them conventional. I don’t think I would like to live in a world where people go up and kill Arabs pretty much at random and with impunity, but then again, we have already established this is precisely the world I do live in. My point is that it would be better if we did adhere to some sort of moral principles and that these should be better principles than ‘he should be killed because he didn’t cry at his mum’s funeral’. Camus is seeking to say that all of our ‘moral principles’ in the end come to be as meaningless as that – we judge on the basis of what we see from the framework of our own limited experience. And look, yes, there is much to this – but this ends up being too easy.The thing I like most about Existentialism, though it isn’t really as evident in this book as it is in the actual philosophy – although this is something that Meursault is supposed to have grown to understand (sorry, just one more sub-clause) even though this wasn’t something I noticed at all while reading the book, was the notion of responsibility. I didn’t think in the end Meursault was all that much more ‘responsible’ for his actions than he had been at the start. But I do think that ‘responsibility’ is a key concept in morality and one that seems increasingly to be ignored.Better by far that we feel responsible for too much in our lives than too little – better by far that we take responsibility for the actions of our governments (say) than to call these governments ‘them’. I’m not advocating believing in The Secret - but that if one must err, better to err on the side of believing you have too much responsibility for how your life has turned out, rather than too little.So, what can I say? I enjoyed this much more than I expected – but I’m still glad I waited before reading it, I really don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it at 15 as I did now.

Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking is a 2011 cookbook by Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet. The book is an encyclopedia and a guide to the science of contemporary cooking.It is notable for the use of elaborate equipment that many non-professional kitchens lack (sous vide machines, vacuum-chamber sealers, culinary centrifuges, culinary torches, high-precision gram scales) and for its lush photography, particularly its tricky cross-sectional images of ovens, BBQs or woks (and the food being prepared inside), apparently caught in the act of cooking, though this isn't physically possible; each individual part of the apparatus was hand-cut in a nearby metal shop, and the food—already cut in half— was added with hasty, high-speed photography and combined into a finished image in post production.

Taking place in the years leading up to the First Reform Bill of 1832, Middlemarch explores nearly every subject of concern to modern life: art, religion, science, politics, self, society, human relationships. Among her characters are some of the most remarkable portraits in English literature: Dorothea Brooke, the heroine, idealistic but naive; Rosamond Vincy, beautiful and egoistic: Edward Casaubon, the dry-as-dust scholar: Tertius Lydgate, the brilliant but morally-flawed physician: the passionate artist Will Ladislaw: and Fred Vincey and Mary Garth, childhood sweethearts whose charming courtship is one of the many humorous elements in the novel's rich comic vein.

Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

After reading Baudelaire, I suddenly find myself wanting to smoke cigarettes and say very cynical things while donning a trendy haircut. Plus, if I didn't read Baudelaire, how could I possibly carry on conversations with pretentious art students? In all seriousness, though, I wish my French was better, so that I could read it in its intended language. I'm sure it looses something in the translation... but it's still great stuff nonetheless. And with a title like "Flowers of Evil," how can you go wrong?

When you read Proust, and learn to appreciate his extraordinary, dreamy, hypnotic, truly inimitable style (this review is a mere shadow on the wall of a Platonic cave), which succeeds in making the syntax of language, usually as invisible as air, into a tangible element, so that, like literary yogis, we may feel, for the first time, how enjoyable the simple activity of reading, like breathing, can be; and discover the delights of sentences which took the author days to construct and us an hour to read, unpacking layers of subordinate clauses to discover, nestling inside their crisp folds, a simile as unexpected and delicious as a Swiss chocolate rabbit, wearing a yellow marzipan waistcoat and carrying an edible rake, found in its cocoon of tissue paper under a lilac bush during a childhood Easter egg hunt; or, steaming across the calm waters of a limpid grammatical lake in the capable hands of Captain Marcel and his crew, confident that they know the route from generations of experience, and will in due time, exactly on schedule, arrive at the main verb, pointing us tourists to it with justifiable, understated pride; then you will gradually come to identify with the alchemical author, spending twenty years sitting, propped up by pillows, in his velvet dressing-gown, transmuting the lead of his accumulated experience into gold, surrounded by galley proofs which he constantly rereads and revises, pasting in a parenthesis in the middle of this sentence, an apposition in that, so that the papers are gradually festooned, like bizarre Christmas decorations, with loops and curlicues of afterthoughts; and waiting for life, his unfaithful mistress, to leave him, simultaneously knowing that it is inevitable, and also that she will never do so, at least as long as this, the greatest and strangest of all novels, is still not quite finished...

Madame Bovary, originally published as Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners, is a novel by French writer Gustave Flaubert, published in 1856. The eponymous character lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.

An artificial man, who was incompletely constructed and has scissors for hands, leads a solitary life. Then one day, a suburban lady meets him and introduces him to her world.

1990 American fantasy romance film by Tim Burton

A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I.

2014 British science fiction thriller film directed by Alex Garland

Ron Stallworth, an African American police officer from Colorado Springs, CO, successfully manages to infiltrate the local Ku Klux Klan branch with the help of a Jewish surrogate who eventually becomes its leader. Based on actual eve

In 1912 London, a young working mother is galvanized into radical political activism supporting the right for women to vote, and is willing to meet violence with violence to achieve this end.

This is the story of Valerie Solanas who was a 60s radical preaching hatred toward men in her "Scum" manifesto. She wrote a screenplay for a film that she wanted Andy Warhol to produce. After many times of ignoring her, Valerie shot 

Reunited by the death of a college friend, three divorced women seek revenge on the husbands who left them for younger women.

When a pilot crashes and tells of conflict in the outside world, Diana, an Amazonian warrior in training, leaves home to fight a war, discovering her full powers and true destiny.

Alexander Emerick Jones (born February 11, 1974) is an American far-right and alt-right radio show host and prominent conspiracy theorist. He hosts The Alex Jones Show from Austin, Texas, which the Genesis Communications Network broadcasts across the United States (syndicated and internet radio). Jones's website, InfoWars, promotes conspiracy theories and fake news, as do his other websites NewsWars and PrisonPlanet. Jones has provided a platform and support for white nationalists, giving Unite the Right rally attendee and white supremacist Nick Fuentes a platform on his website Banned.Video, as well as serving as a potential "entry point" to their ideology.The conspiracy theories promoted by Jones alleged that the United States government either concealed information about or outright falsified the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the September 11 attacks, and the 1969 Moon landing. He has claimed that several governments and big businesses have colluded to create a "New World Order" through "manufactured economic crises, sophisticated surveillance tech and—above all—inside-job terror attacks that fuel exploitable hysteria".

The Gillmor Gang is a podcast about information technology run by Steve Gillmor, a former contributing editor at ZDNet.
It was originally hosted on ITConversations.com. From May 2005 until November 2006, it was hosted by Podshow. The show then ended until being resurrected in November 2007 as the Gang. In April 2008, the name Gillmor Gang was restored and the show began to be hosted at TechCrunch. In Spring 2009, it switched over to Leo Laporte's TWiT.tv, airing at 3 p.m. on Saturdays. However, on June 6, 2009, Michael Arrington accused Leo Laporte of giving the Palm Pre a good review in return for accepting a 5-day evaluation unit, which Laporte interpreted as an attack on his journalistic integrity subsequently causing Laporte to storm off the air. Later that same day, Michael Arrington and Leo Laporte apologized to each other. After much discussion between Steve Gillmor, Leo Laporte, Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble, it was decided that the Gillmor Gang would no longer appear on the TWiT network due to the "hostile" nature of the show which Laporte didn't agree with. Laporte later confirmed on the pre-show of the June 9, 2009 recording of Net@Nite that future shows of the Gillmor Gang would not air on the TWiT Netcast Network.

Gavin McInnes (; born 1970) is a Canadian writer and far-right political commentator. He is the co-founder of Vice Media and Vice Magazine and host of Get Off My Lawn, formerly on Conservative Review Television. He is a contributor to Taki's Magazine and a former contributor to The Rebel Media, and was a frequent guest on television programs on Fox News and TheBlaze.McInnes was a leading figure in the hipster subculture while at Vice, being labelled as the "godfather" of hipsterdom. After leaving the company in 2008, he became increasingly known for his far-right political views. He is the founder of the Proud Boys, considered by some to be a neo-fascist men's group classified as a "general hate" organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Andreessen Horowitz (also called a16z, legal name AH Capital Management, LLC) is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California.Andreessen Horowitz invests in both early-stage start-ups and established growth companies. Its investments span the mobile, gaming, social, e-commerce, education and enterprise IT (including cloud computing, security, and software as a service) industries.Between 2006 and 2010, Andreessen and Horowitz actively invested in technology companies. Separately, and together, they invested $80 million in 45 start-ups including Twitter. During this time, the two became known as super angel investors.

Death, Sex and Money is an interview-style podcast hosted by Anna Sale that discusses the big questions "often left out of polite conversation." The podcast launched in May 2014 and is produced by WNYC Studios. The podcast features celebrities and experts, as well as guests with little to no name recognition. The podcast covers the topics of finance, grief, love, and relationships.Host Anna Sale describes Death, Sex, and Money saying, “It really came down to having a show that goes right at the things that shape our lives and that we have the most difficulty navigating—that I was having the most difficulty navigating." In addition to stories from guests, the podcast includes stories from Anna Sale's own life, as well as testimonies and voicemails left by the show's listeners.

WTF with Marc Maron is a weekly podcast and radio show hosted by stand-up comedian Marc Maron. The show was launched in September 2009. The show is produced by Maron's former Air America co-worker Brendan McDonald.The show's title stems from the Internet slang abbreviation WTF (for "What the fuck?"). WTF launched in September 2009 following the cancellation of Maron's Air America terrestrial radio program Breakroom Live with Maron & Seder. Maron retained his Air America building keycard and, without permission, used their studios to record the first several episodes of WTF.After the first episodes, Maron moved from New York to California. Most episodes of the show are generally recorded in Maron's home garage, nicknamed "the Cat Ranch", in Los Angeles. He ends most podcasts with the phrase "Boomer lives" in honour of a cat he brought from New York who went missing. The phrase became a hashtag and his production company name.

The Joe Rogan Experience is a free audio and video podcast hosted by American comedian, actor, sports commentator, martial artist, and television host, Joe Rogan. It was launched on December 24, 2009, by Rogan and comedian Brian Redban, who also produced and co-hosted. It has grown to become one of the world's most popular podcasts, regularly receiving millions of views per episode, and includes a wide array of guests.The podcast originates to around 2003 when Rogan hired Brian Redban, a self-taught video editor and an employee at a Gateway 2000 computer store in Ohio, to work for him full time to film, produce, and edit videos for his website. Rogan had noticed video work that Redban did for comedian Doug Stanhope and invited him to film him and his group on stand-up comedy tours. Redban accepted and relocated to California in the process, following Rogan with a camera and "recording everything". After several years, Redban noticed that fans were demanding more content from Rogan and for it to be delivered faster. This prompted the two to seek new ways of quickening what was a lengthy editing process to make their website and content more interactive. Coupled with his interest in popular live video streaming services of the time, Redban wanted "to do the same thing I was filming, but live", and set up live streams on Justin.tv from the green room at Rogan's comedy gigs. Redban had no prior experience with audio engineering, so he taught himself how to operate the mixing board and microphone setups.

At a predominantly white Ivy League college, a group of black students navigate various forms of racial and other types of discrimination.

American satirical comedy-drama television series

A look at the personal and professional lives of a group of women who perform for a wrestling organization in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

When a young boy disappears, his mother, a police chief and his friends must confront terrifying supernatural forces in order to get him back.

American science fiction horror Netflix series

A comedy about the experiences of a group of girls in their early 20s.

A woman is rescued from a doomsday cult and starts life over again in New York City.

A new Fab Five set out to Atlanta to help some of the city's people refine their wardrobes, grooming, diet, cultural pursuits, and home décor.

The Great British Bake Off is a British television baking competition, produced by Love Productions, in which a group of amateur bakers compete against each other in a series of rounds, attempting to impress two judges with their baking skills. One contestant is eliminated in each round, and the winner is selected from the contestants who reach the final. The first episode was aired on 17 August 2010, with its first four series broadcast on BBC Two, until its growing popularity led the BBC to move it to BBC One for the next three series. After its seventh series, Love Productions signed a three-year deal with Channel 4 to produce the series for the broadcaster.

A housewife in 1958 decides to become a stand-up comic.

The apparently perfect lives of upper-class mothers, at a prestigious elementary school, unravel to the point of murder when a single-mother moves to their quaint Californian beach town.

Miss Marple is a British television series based on the Miss Marple murder mystery novels by Agatha Christie, starring Joan Hickson in the title role. It aired from 26 December 1984 to 27 December 1992 on BBC One. All 12 original Miss Marple Christie novels were dramatised. The adaptations were written by T. R. Bowen, Julia Jones, Alan Plater, Ken Taylor and Jill Hyem, and the series was produced by George Gallaccio. In addition to its availability on VHS and DVD, the series began to be released on Blu-ray Disc in October 2014, marking its 30th anniversary.Agatha Christie had never been very happy with most filmed adaptations of her works, and according to her grandson Mathew Pritchard, who handled her estate after her death, she "did not care much for television", either. Producer Pat Sandys of LWT first approached Pritchard and the Christie estate with a researched, detailed plan to film the novels Why Didn't They Ask Evans? and The Seven Dials Mystery in the early 1980s. Although indifferently treated by critics, the projects were popular with audiences and led to the filming of a number of short stories and the Tommy and Tuppence Beresford stories including The Secret Adversary and in the subsequent series Agatha Christie's Partners in Crime. With the success of that series, the BBC received approval to produce the stories of one of Christie's most famous detectives.

Set in a dystopian future, a woman is forced to live as a concubine under a fundamentalist theocratic dictatorship.

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