It’s weird to rate this so highly given how much anxiety it gives me to read it. Reading it four years ago is what forced me to confront how much baggage I had from my own Mormon missionary experience, but I know the author has her own complicated feelings about the book, and that helps some. At any rate, the book is so well done that I can’t help but rate it highly.

Team Firefox foreverrrrrr

Don’t love the idea of a fickle billionnaire having this much influence in world affairs.

Appreciate Doctorow’s thinking here.

A secular state is good, but French laïcité consistently goes too far.

What a mess this whole thing has been.

I’ll admit that I’ve been wary of Masnick’s hostility to KOSA, but Blackburn’s comments justify his stance. This ought to kill support for KOSA.

Well, this sucks.

This feels like a page out of Gab’s playbook.

C’est bien stupide, une telle interdiction. Je suis pour un état séparé de la religion mais contre un état qui essaie de supprimer une religion minoritaire.

One of this week’s lectionary passages includes Matthew 18:18-20, which David Bentley Hart renders:

Amen, I tell you, whatever things you bind on the earth will have been bound in heaven, and whatever things you unbind on the earth will have been unbound in heaven. Again, [amen,] I tell you that if two among you agree on earth concerning everything they request, whatever it is, it shall come to pass for them, coming from my Father in the heavens. For where there are two or three who have gathered in my name, I am there in their midst.”

It’s not that I didn’t enjoy church, but what really fed my soul today was a family trip to some beloved indie bookstores. And some listening to a radio adaptation of Les Misérables. And, okay, yes, the smores cookies and cream ice cream I snitched from spouse’s cone.

Today, I’m remembering the family friend from a Latter-day Saint congregation I grew up in who heard me in a church settng quote some scripture on the need for the rich to give to the poor and then took me aside to ask how liberal my school friends were and give me some cautionary advice.

Gizmodo’s owner seems way too optimistic about AI.

I’m in no way Team Meta, but this may not be a terrible thing?

Solid post. I think it’s often helpful to ask whether Latter-day Saint logic applies to things that don’t get Latter-day Saint approval.

I just read this earlier this year, but it was too good not to revisit and it’s just as good in epub as it was in audiobook. Love this book.

It’s been less than a month since I read the English translation of this, which I already gave full marks. Yet, the original French version was even better. Delisle captures this city and its conflicts in a comic book better than any news story ever could.

In a way, I’m not in a great position to evaluate this book, because I’ve read shamefully little about indigenous populations in the Americas. That learning experience here, though, was a good one. Treuer doesn’t sugarcoat the past, but he celebrates the indigenous present and is even hopeful about the future. I have a lot more to read and learn, but this was a solid start.

Some important—if disheartening—observations from Marwick.

Ew, gross, no.

A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!

Three cheers for ChatGPT or whatever.

Vanessa Zoltan is great, and I love what she shares here.

Fascinating subject matter, great acting, beautiful visuals, and lots to keep you thinking after you watch it.