I got James and the Giant Peach for Christmas the year I turned 5, and that’s the book that changed my life (because I have no idea what my life would have been like if I hadn’t loved reading, and if reading hadn’t helped me develop an easy, confident writing style). I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you’re not far…

Some of the state GOPs also have unbound delegates - they’re essentially superdelegates.

Exactly. There’s a LOT of reasons why the Democrats have never had an insane Trumpian manchild run in their race (and most of them have nothing to do with Dems being “better” - to my mind, it has more to do with the two-party system setting both groups in opposition on everything, so anything one party is the other…

Right? I’m so glad reviewing looks is not my job. Everyone looks so bad, I’d have struggled to find anything nice to say. Agree on Gigi’s hair AND Farrah’s steez - on someone like Jessica Chastain, looking too big for the event is understandable. On Farrah Abraham, trying the same thing and trying it with a skintight…

I was food-poisoned just last week. The first day, it was all vomit. Vomit, vomit, vomit. I figured I was just going to barf for a few days.

I just got food-poisoned last week! It was pretty home-manageable, so I didn’t go to the doctor and have no idea what version of food poisoning I had, but I definitely had the full day of repeated vomiting followed by like four days of absolutely liquid shits approximately every half-hour. By the end of the first day…

My school had fun dances, held in the barely-dressed-up lunchroom, and the whole high school was invited to all of them, because it was so small. I had a great time at all of them, because otherwise I was a total shut-in, so it was literally my only opportunity to see friends outside of school - and there was music!…

I do love that stuff, but I can’t help but laugh that some parent (possibly even more than one!) was sending something like that to school in their first-grader’s lunches. In Alaska, no less. I thought they all commuted to school by snowmobile with moose jerky in their rucksacks. I guess they’re actually just as…

I love hearing about this! I’ve said like 20,000 times that if I had the money I’d go back to school to train as an osteoarchaeologist - the idea that you can know so much about individuals by looking at their bones soothes the part of me that’s made depressed by how much of the past as it was really lived is just…

The article points out several internationally popular shows with nearly-entirely-black casts, though.

See, you can understand painfully basic comparisons and symbolism when you try! I hope you feel you’ve grown as a person.

Oh, but when you decide that a book you just heard of is “shit” and you want to get in my face about my word choices, we’re all supposed to nod and think that’s reasonable?

I don’t want to question too harshly the places people turn to for help in their darkest hour, but I can’t even get Siri to understand that when I ask it to find me a gas station, I mean a gas station in front of me, in the direction that I am already traveling, and not one that requires a U-turn or long detour…

Sorry, did you struggle in Literature class? Because developing character traits through symbolism, rather than by baldly listing examples, is pretty much a cornerstone of modern fiction. Sorry if that’s too patronising for you, but it’s true.

It’s not an example of entitlement, it’s a way of showing a character’s entitlement through symbolism, which is not the same thing, just like saying something reminds me of something else is not me saying that those two things are the same. Please try to keep up.

I should probably have more familiarity with the source material before I start talking - I grew up in the right era, but in a household where TV watching was not encouraged, so while I know the shows in question a bit from reruns, I’m not deeply knowledgeable about what they talked about over the course of their runs.

I appreciate this response because it jives with an incident in my own life. I was super into Egyptology as a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on, but I’d never seen a mummy because the Smithsonian didn’t have mummies from their collection on display at all when I was growing up (they have, or had recently,…

I haven’t! I hadn’t read any of Atkinson’s books before (I heard her interviewed on the Guardian Books podcast, which is why I wanted to try something) and I got God in Ruins to start with specifically because the Kindle edition was cheaper on Amazon, so less investment if I didn’t like it. I’ll definitely be reading…

I don’t think the Fresh Prince or Cosby franchises were as much about being black as something like Black-ish, though. They were groundbreaking because they positioned black people within the worlds familiar to white audiences. They were popular in part because they showed black people doing “normal” things. These new…

I wonder if it also has to do with the differences between the current and past issues faced by people of color in other countries - like, NCIS could essentially take place under the auspices of any government with a navy, but shows about black people produced by American studios are, necessarily, about what it means…