Reading, Writing, and Sourdough

  Jai, the 9-year-old resident of a slum on the outskirts of an Indian city like New Delhi is the most adorable detective I have ever come across. Jai lives in a one room house with his older sister and loving parents. His mother keeps house for a demanding "hi-fi madame" in the fancy apartments towering above their basti; his father is an optimistic construction worker.  His neighborhood is crowded with goats, chickens, bazaars, trash, a single toilet complex with a long, contentious queue, and neighbors too numerous to count. While Jai's parents work all day, Jai and his friends have the run of the place accompanied by all the joy of being an unchaperoned 9-year-old with limitless imaginations. When Jai's friend Bahadur fails to return to his mother and father, Drunken Laloo, Jai appoints himself chief detective. His main qualification is that he has watched nearly every episode of Police Patrol  on TV. His skills will be important because the local police remain s...

What makes me and white supremacy  so effective is it ample accessibility. The book's origin was originally a 28-day instagram challenge. Layla Saad followed with a workbook and then finally this book. There are, with a few bracketing sections, still 28 short chapters. Each chapter is followed with questions designed to stimulate journaling and deep self-reflection. The center of each chapter contains clearly explained bullet points on topics such as white saviorism, white fragility, tone policing, white privelege, and well, another 24 topics we all must address. Saad says at the beginning, and repeats: white supremacy is ubiquitous, systemic, pervasive, largely invisible to white people, and terribly difficult to acknowledge and do something about. She also makes clear that failure to do so, i.e., business as usual, is profoundly denigrating and deadly to BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color.) It is no small feat to get people to read a book that promises to make them feel ...

Steinbeck uses Cannery Row to tell a long yarn about a community of hobos, prostitutes, semi-homeless, store owners, and an amateur marine biologist living adjacent to some Pacific sardine-canning factories. The era is the Great Depression, the ocean and its tide pools are described in minute detail, and Cannery Row's inhabitants receive the same respect, dignity, and more than a little love. Lee Chong runs an all-purpose store where patrons can purchase everything from eggs and butter to firecrackers and hardware. Most people buy beer or whiskey they use to become pleasantly drunk. They pay with scrip or credit, and on one significant occasion, with several hundred recently captured frogs. Doc, the biologist, collects sea creatures for scientific labs, has an open-door, and takes a troubled youth, too slow to learn in school, under his wing.  Mack and his four work-avoiding buddies reside in an abandoned warehouse, affectionately known as the Palace Flophouse, where they spend nea...

Matilde Simpkin is a larger-than-life veteran of England's militant suffragette movement: wise-cracking, verbally combative, and still committed to the rights of women. By 1928, however, women's right to vote is wending its way through Parliament and now middle-aged, Miss Simpkin's retellings of the armed battles with authorities play to bored audiences. A chance encounter with a former militant who in the waning years of the 1920s has taken up with proto-Fascists in the guise of training England's youth to respect order and authority ignites a blaze in Simpkin. In response, she organizes girls and young women into a club called The Amazons, teaching them athletics, hiking, fire-making, throwing, debating, map-reading, and well generally all of the things that girls were forbidden to partake of during the long reign of Queen Victoria. You can see the competition between the two groups in the offing with the underlying (and still wholly relevant) question of how gir...

Aziz Ansari does his best to analyze dating in the age of social media, internet, and cell phones. He discovers it is difficult to find a perfect companion, while overlooking the possibility that there are no perfect mates. Relationships require care and feeding if they are to flourish. Ansari partners with sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, who is an under-acknowledged co-author, and together they run some focus groups to learn more about dating and romance. Their one observation of note is that we are in an age when internet research has persuaded nearly everyone that with enough googling, a shopper can always find a better deal (or having made a final decision, be stuck with regrets when higher quality at lower cost does appear.) This carries over to choosing a partner. Why continue past a first or second date when a dating app contains hundreds, if not thousands, of potentially better choices? Because of the Internet, it may be more difficult than it was before to settle on ...