I love Mark Twain. If you haven't read any of his mom fiction, I suggest starting with Roughing It.

I read a few Toni Morrison books in my AP English class and quite a bit of British classics by women writers (Austen, Bronte). We also had Harlem Renaissance periods in our regular high school English classes where your reading requirements were Native Son and Black Boy. Think I read them in 10th and 11th grade…

One can assume that the coroner and relevant parties have the necessary details to make the call. As much as I like learning about true crime, these sorts of details only really serve to entertain the public’s morbid curiosity.

My first memory of The Scarlet Letter was the movie trailer where I'm pretty sure I saw Gary Oldman's dick and was promised a lot of gratuitous Demi Moore nudity. Somehow it also looked more boring than reading the book.

P.S. I was a law school grad and library school student when I attempted to read The Scarlet Letter. I was only about 1/4 through when I said “fuck this impenetrable crap” and went back to P.D. James.

You’re... making... excuses... for... this... guy?

Fuck you hard and sideways.

My high school English teacher incorporated a lot of modern literature into the course. Then had to defend doing so to a pretentious tightass who thought if it wasn’t old and exalted, it was crap.

Not even that. They’re just arguing for actual thought, reflection, and context in the choice of books to assign, rather than reflexively falling back on the same 15-20 books that everyone seems to read in high school over the last 50+ years. To stop and think about what these books actually say to POC instead of just…

The latter, with a side of “maybe the limited number of books we have time to assign in HS should include more books that encourage a love of reading and understanding of diverse lives, rather than just Moby Dick again”. That’s my understanding, anyway.

So, are people arguing that a book like Moby Dick should just go away entirely or be moved to college level where it can be discussed in a more critical way than HS students might grasp?

Proof that Russia is dominated by moronic chuds that will do anything to survive. America, that’s the end game that Trump wants. Why else does he look up to autocrats?

For each act of violence against his girlfriend that got streamed out live to viewers, Reshetnikov received “donations” from viewers to keep his streams going with some dollar amounts attached to specific requests.

After centuries of magicians, carnies, pro-wrestlers, and televangelists, how did it never occur to this guy that you can still make the money without doing it for real?

A version of “cancel culture” is real and has always existed, but the real cancel culture signifies something very different than the nonsense that Bari Weiss and Thomas Chatterton Williams and Glenn Greenwald are always bleating on about.

This is why we can’t trust corporations to do the right thing without regulations... They’ll do enough at a surface level to look good in the public eye, but the moment an insider tries to dig deeper and address systemic issues, they’ll go into denial and get rid of the messenger.

Reading this summary of the research paper makes this even more confusing:

The thing about Dolly you got to admire is throughout her illustrious career , she took grief about her looks and style and you know a lot of it had to hurt...but she kept on being Dolly. She kept singin’ and smilin’. For decades. And she’s still going! She’s still standing being who she is. Fan or not, you got to…

She’s on my list of people I need to see perform before they die.

Saint Dolly was always the realest person in the room. Martha Stewart and a sizable portion of talk show hosts (not just the women hosts ) was biting Dolly’s style long before I could even make the friendly, bawdy, but subdued connection. Heck, she outshined Al Franken in the comedy department.

As the world changed, she built an entire persona on this foundation; she dug ever more tenaciously to the conservative mores of her youth as she aged, waxing louder and louder about how much better it had all been, once upon a time.