Delighted to be 40. Travel at your own speed.
Pleased to meet you!
I was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and I lived in the Boston area until my late 30s. Stuff I have done:
- got degrees in philosophy and journalism
- worked for an investment company for a decade
- trained as a life coach with (and for) gay men
- co-organized a transgender-inclusive open mic series
- volunteered for a peace organization, traveling to Washington, D.C. a half-dozen times for conferences, training, and lobbying
- spent a summer on a canoe expedition and another summer working for the U.S. Army ROTC
- traveled to the bordering countries in North America (Canada and Mexico); South America (Paraguay); Europe (Italy, Greece, England, and Iceland); the Middle East (Israel); Africa (South Africa); and Asia…
The flaws in the assumptions of poet Charles Olson
These authors would love to make a remote appearance by videoconference
These authors from the group Lockdown Lit wrote fabulous books released in 2020. As long as “lockdown” prevents us from gathering in person, they’d be delighted to make a “virtual visit” to your book club in 2021 to chat about their books!
Ralph Adamo, author of All The Good Hiding Places
Kimberly Quiogue Andrews, author of A Brief History of Fruit
Adam O. Davis, author of Index of Haunted Houses
Elizabeth Deanna Morris Lakes, author of Ashley Sugarnotch & the Wolf
Thaddeus Rutkowski, author of Tricks of Light
Tess Taylor, author of Rift Zone and Last West
Read on to learn more about their books. Would these be a good fit for your book club? If you’d like to invite an author to a special session of your group, please contact the author directly. They’d be happy to hear from you. …
These authors would love to make a remote appearance by videoconference
Authors from the group Lockdown Lit wrote illuminating nonfiction released in 2020. As long as “lockdown” prevents us from gathering in person, these authors would be delighted to make a “virtual visit” to your book club in 2021 to chat about their books!
Read on to learn more about their books. There are 19 names and book titles here! Would one of these be a good fit for your book club? If you’d like to invite an author to a special session of your group, please contact the author directly. They’d be happy to hear from you.
Author: Nina Renata Aron
Contact: ninarenataaron.com
Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love
A scorching memoir of a love affair with an addict, weaving personal reckoning with psychology and history to understand the nature of addiction, codependency, and our appetite for obsessive love. …
These authors would love to make a remote appearance by videoconference
Authors from the group Lockdown Lit wrote excellent novels released in 2020. As long as “lockdown” prevents us from gathering in person, these authors would be delighted to make a “virtual visit” to your book club in 2021 to chat about their books!
Read on to learn more about their books. There are 44 names and book titles here! Would one of these be a good fit for your book club? If you’d like to invite an author to a special session of your group, please contact the author directly. They’d be happy to hear from you.
Author: Andrew Altschul
Contact: andrewaltschul.com
The book: The Gringa
Inspired by the true story of Lori Berenson, an American activist imprisoned in Peru in 1995 and sentenced to life as a terrorist, The Gringa tells the story of Leonora Gelb, who travels to Lima as an aid worker but soon gets mixed up with leftist militants hoping to restart the country’s bloody civil war. Narrated by Andres, a failed novelist and “refugee from George W. Bush’s America,” the novel juxtaposes Peru’s struggles against revolutionary violence with the U.S.’s own “War on Terror.” …
These authors would love to make a remote appearance by videoconference
These authors from the group Lockdown Lit wrote fabulous books released in 2020. As long as “lockdown” prevents us from gathering in person, they’d be delighted to make a “virtual visit” to your book club in 2021 to chat about their books!
Jennie Englund, author of Taylor Before and After
Siân Griffiths, author of Scrapple
Sherri L. Smith, author of The Blossom and the Firefly
Read on to learn more about their books. Would these be a good fit for your book club? If you’d like to invite an author to a special session of your group, please contact the author directly. …
Lessons from the book ‘Caste’ by Isabel Wilkerson
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is a 2020 bestseller by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson. If you haven’t gotten around to it yet — it’s a big read — here are some important lessons from it that may inspire you to pick it up.
Why Wilkerson Uses the Word ‘Caste’
All human societies tend to make hierarchies, and these hierarchies risk hardening into caste systems. Depending on the society, the consequences of such a system may be severe and obvious.
Wilkerson’s discussion of racism is innovative for its general replacement of the word “race” with the word “caste.” She argues that, in the United States, racial hierarchy has been, and still is, so entrenched and so powerful that it is a kind of caste hierarchy. “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste,” she writes. …
Explained in ‘Why We’re Polarized’ by Ezra Klein
Ezra Klein’s 2020 book Why We’re Polarized begins with the problem of why Americans handed power to Donald Trump in 2016. The man was crass, greedy, and bigoted, with no real political beliefs. “How did a candidate like Trump — a candidate who radiated contempt for the party he represented and unfitness for the job he sought — get within a few thousand votes of the presidency in the first place?” Klein asks in his introduction.
“Most people who voted chose the same party in 2016 that they’d chosen in 2012,” he points out. How could existing party affiliations remain the same, why didn’t large numbers of traditional Republican voters desert the party when Trump received the nomination? Americans’ treatment of Trump as an ordinary candidate reveals that “we are so locked into our political identities that there is virtually no candidate, no information, no condition, that can force us to change our minds. We will justify almost anything or anyone so long as it helps our side, and the result is a politics devoid of guardrails, standards, persuasion, or accountability.” …
And there never has been
The idea of a War on Christmas may sound laughable, but in the United States we cannot avoid overhearing the complaint of “America’s tragically persecuted Christian super-majority” (to rip off a phrase by J. Daniel Janzen in Flak Magazine years ago). We must pay attention to what the complaint means.
It is antisemitic
Millions of Americans take the “War on Christmas” absolutely seriously. It leads to a form of antisemitism: the targets of the pro-Christmas warriors are Jewish-run businesses.
It is fictitious
For whoever needs to hear it: Christmas is not under siege. The “war” is a deliberate media creation. …
The challenge of calculating the effects of your actions
How do we use our power to achieve the most good in the world? It’s hard to know, and it may not even be possible to approximate an answer. Two books, The Most Good You Can Do by Peter Singer and Upstream by Dan Heath, address this from different perspectives.
‘The Most Good You Can Do’ by Peter Singer
In his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically, philosopher Peter Singer explores “effective altruism,” a small movement of individuals who try to engineer their lifestyles so they can bring about the most possible good for others. They weight reason over emotion in assessing “the most” good. …
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