I picked this book up at an anarchist bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. Of all the books I was considering, this one seemed the most likely to give practical advice: How can we practice anarchist forms of living today?

Horowitz never uses the word anarchist—which doesn’t bother me—but it’s also more ruminations and abstract ideas than specific calls to action. I enjoyed the book fine and “appreciate its rhetorical goals” (to quote Dan McClellan), but it wasn’t as helpful as I hoped in terms of concretely imagining better futures.

There are countless GOP politicians and voters who believe Harris is unqualified for the job for lesser (and often exaggerated or fabricated controversies), and yet none of this seems to bother them. gift link

Fascinating look at a controversial element in Mormon history. I wish more of the data here were firm rather than anecdotal—I think this topic is enough that it could be its own book if there were enough data (made) available.

McConnell comes so close to having a conscience and then seems to always bail when it becomes inconvenient to him. That makes him more of a disappointment than if he showed no moral awareness at all.

Like so many other things, this alone should disqualify him. Gift link.

When I was ordained an elder a couple of months ago, my congregation gave me the gift of a full set of the 1976 History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I genuinely love this gift and am excited to one day make my way through all eight volumes! Yet, it’s also gotten me thinking a lot about what I want my service in this denomination—now, of course, named Community of Christ—to look like. In many ways, it’s the history of this church that drew me to it when my faith began to crumble: If it weren’t for its shared history with the church I grew up in, Community of Christ may not be as interesting to me as it is. Yet, I’ve also quipped to friends that while I’m glad to have joined Community of Christ, I don’t know that I ever would have joined the RLDS church (at least, not in the form that it took in 1976). I’ve also written repeatedly on this blog about my feelings about the relative importance of the Independence Temple compared to the Kirtland Temple for this denomination in the years to come: One is an anchor to our past, but the other points to our future.

I have made so many sneering comparisons between sports fandom and blind nationalism as someone who doesn’t really care about sports, but now that I’ve got a team (my kid’s) to be super invested in… yeah, I actually feel the comparison more, just with more self awareness.

This is terrifying—but needs more attention.

I don’t understand why anyone would stay on Twitter at this point, unless they’re staying for the nonsense. gift link

A good, informing read.

Masnick is excellent at balancing “Musk has a right to do this” with “the hypocrisy is shameful.”

This article was a one-two punch for me. I hoped that the death of a Michigander might draw more attention to victims of the conflict, but his daughter’s comment that “The fact that he was an American citizen should not make his story more important than others” quickly called me to task. Gift Link

I appreciate Bible scholar Thomas Römer in an academic sense, but I also sometimes remember that I first discovered him through a French comics podcast where he showed up to say that he thought R. Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis could have been more imaginative, and that’s what really sold me on him.

This makes a bad story even worse. What a joke.

Several years ago, while I was sharing a Bible story with my daughter, she interjected with an urgent thought: “I hope that Jesus knows that I have a pig.”

As I wrote in my journal at that time:

She’s been big on showing people her stuffed piggy recently: the movers, the plumber, anyone we’re Facetiming with, it doesn’t matter. So, it makes sense that if she got the chance to see Jesus, she’d want to show Him her pig, too.

This book was repeatedly mentioned in Scott Branson’s Practical Anarchism, so I’ve wanted to read it for a while. It took me three tries, but I finally followed through and just finished the audiobook.

It is a fascinating book for the way that it dares to imagine a way that society might be different than what we know now. Wikipedia says that the original subtitle was “An Ambiguous Utopia,” and that tracks with what I read, in that the book isn’t blindly naïve about the anarchist society that it lifts up. There are still bad people acting in bad faith, there is poverty and famine, and one of the themes of the book is about the risk of getting entrenched in old ways of thinking, even if those “old ways” are the ones portrayed as being better than “other ways.” (As an aside, the protagonist of the book is also imperfect, most notably in an act of sexual assault that he’s more or less absolved of by the narration, which is the part of the book that least sits right with me).

Worth reading (and bookmarking). I’ve been hesitant to make the “no, actually, Big Tech is biased against liberals” argument, but this seems a compelling datum for that conclusion…

How is this guy a legitimate candidate?

This is the story of when the FBI ran an encrypted phone company marketed to criminals. Working with Australian Federal Police and European partners, they had a glimpse into gangsters’ and drug dealers’ conversations for years before they wrapped it up with a series of worldwide arrests.

It’s a wild story that sounds like fiction but happens to be true. In fact, that’s Cory Doctorow’s blurb on the back—his recommendation on his blog is what got me to check this out. I’m also a fan of 404 Media, so it felt good to support one of its founders.

A number of years ago, I read this blog post, which linked to this podcast episode about intertextuality between the New Testament and the Book of Mormon. The post and episode both focus on the work of Nick Frederick, a BYU professor who argues that:

If we’re comfortable saying that the New Testament is an antecedent text for the Book of Mormon, for the King James English 19th century Book of Mormon, then that opens up some wonderful avenues of inquiry. We can look at how those passages were understood in the 19th century and say, “Okay, is the Book of Mormon pushing back against something? Is the Book of Mormon affirming one of these ideas? What was the impact of these passages on early converts? How might this have changed through trajectories of 19th century theology?” Whereas if we just say, “No, no, no. It couldn’t be. There’s no way the New Testament was on the gold plates,” that just ends the conversation. If we see these as two different texts that are related through translation, then I think that helps us bridge this at least question of the New Testament in the Book of Mormon a little bit easier.

I have recently been (slowly) getting back into my exploration of what a modernized Book of Mormon might look like, which has meant spending some time in the opening chapter of the Book of Mormon and some commentaries on that chapter. One of the most interesting things about I Nephi 1 (by the original and Community of Christ chapter breaks—LDS editions split this into 1 Nephi 1-5) is that the reader is almost immediately forced to deal with a tension between our protagonist and narrator Nephi’s insistence that he is a good guy of whom God approves and Nephi’s willingness to murder a passed-out drunk to steal his clothes and con his way into taking control of some of his property. One of my favorite things to come out of critical readings of the Book of Mormon is trying to understand this episode: not to dismiss it or to justify it, but to wonder how there might be more to the story than our narrator might be letting on.

Posting this as a bookmark. It’s mindboggling how overtly racist this is—and how much work the GOP will do to dismiss it as nothing. I want to be able to return back to this in the weeks and months to come, to remind myself and others just how bad things are. gift link

I put this book on hold at the library after Cory Doctorow recommended it on his blog. It became available at the same time as two other Doctorow-recommended books that I’m now trying to rush through before other holds take them away from me.

This is a book about the great excesses of tech bros and the many tiny excesses of the people using their tech in slightly off ways. It’s about misogyny, both subtle and severe, and (in the background) how scary climate change, American politics, and the Internet of Things are. It is good! It is also dark and weird!

What a wild story.

Compelling metaphor.