JOINT REVIEW: Class, by Paul Fussell
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (1983; Touchstone, 1992).| www.thepsmiths.com
Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, Paul Fussell (1983; Touchstone, 1992).| www.thepsmiths.com
Imperial China: 900-1800, F.W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 1999).| www.thepsmiths.com
A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard 1930-1932 (eds. S.T. Joshi, David E. Schultz, and Rusty Burke; Hippocampus Press, 2017). In my review of Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories I mentioned his two-volume collected correspondence with H.P. Lovecraft, for which I was of course not going to shell out the $60.| www.thepsmiths.com
Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Timothy P.| www.thepsmiths.com
Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony, Robert B.| www.thepsmiths.com
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, Colin Woodard (Viking, 2011). We once lived for a few years in another part of the country. It was nice in a lot of ways — I have fond memories of that time, and not just because two of my babies were born there — but it was also| www.thepsmiths.com
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I’ve watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I’ve watched the show obsessively because I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space.| ribbonfarm
The Man Who Rode the Thunder, William H.| www.thepsmiths.com
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third, Edward N.| www.thepsmiths.com
How to Read a Tree: Clues and Patterns from Bark to Leaves, Tristan Gooley (The Experiment, 2023). Okay, I admit it: I read this book because I wanted to know more about the trees in my yard. I’m afraid that’s not how Tristan Gooley means it to be used. He’s an expert in what he terms “| www.thepsmiths.com
How To Be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Tudor Life, Ruth Goodman (Liveright, 2016). Ruth Goodman is a reënactor, costume drama and museum consultant, and historian of Tudor England “as it was lived”: not names and dates, nor tables of agricultural production by county, but the practical concerns of daily life from clothing to cooking to ploughing. We’ve already met her in| www.thepsmiths.com
[Content warning: some ideas that might make you feel anxious about your political beliefs. Epistemic status: very speculative and not necessarily endorsed. This post is less something I will defen…| Slate Star Codex
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium mediocre. The food, I opined to my wife, was premium mediocre. She instantly got what I meant, though she didn’t quite agree that Veggie Grill qualified. In the weeks that followed, premium mediocre turned into a term of art for us, and we gleefully went around labeling various things with the term, sometimes disagreeing, but mostly...| ribbonfarm
"The only possible reversal must come from strategy, rather than struggle."| graymirror.substack.com
