Yeah I feel the same way. If you're not personally affected by the tragedy, just shut up unless you have been asked to comment. Anything you say about it is really just to call attention to yourself, to seem like a serious person with feelings, to get sympathy and attention for your misappropriated and imaginary…

Fuck I had no idea E.L. Konigsburg died! How did I miss this! (I mean, I know exactly how, but I'm still shocked.)

I'm in the Medford-Somerville area, which I love. JP is great too. I would express my condolences for moving to New York from Boston, but presumably you moved there volitionally. . . .

@avclub-9acf7344ec50993b012999f76196c4c6:disqus This is totally not true. Discussing the fact that you've each gotten yourself off thinking about the other person, while having sex with that person for the first time, is a rare delight.

Oh my god. Why only six likes? I am dying at the last one.

@avclub-6a2ec3076bb494e5c64eb1a422d9fe3d:disqus Thanks!
Yes it's well worth it. It's the scene where [SPOILERS] they get turned into arctic foxes and all get into a sex-crazed frenzy. My favorite parts are how he's attracted to how she smells pheromonally and how they're biting each other and stuff. Now I feel like I'm…

Some people just find them boring. One of my mom's colleagues, who studies children literature, always found them boring whereas my mom and I both loved them. I really adore procedural things and extensive detail of how things are built, chores are done, etc. so it's probably more because of that.

I challenge you to a duel over this remark!

"Making a potentially valid point sound ridiculous or vulgar" is a perfect summation of Harry Crane.

Oh, also another recent non-David Grann New Yorker crime story is the one about Amy Bishop (the professor who shot her colleagues at a department meeting, and earlier in life, accidentally shot her brother). They did a podcast with that story's author, Patrick Radden Keefe, and David Grann talking about crime writing,…

Those three and "True Crime" are his four best stories, to my mind. The rest are kind of forgettable. I guess the sand hogs story is pretty good because I do remember it, but I definitely read the whole book and, looking at the table of contents, I barely even remember most of the others. But I'm probably…

The most terrifying part of the books to me is The Long Winter, and how cold it was, and how they almost starved. I think about that all the time, mostly when I'm convincing myself to get out of bed when it's, like, 50 degrees in my room and then I can remonstrate myself about how much worse Laura had it.

The grad students at the school I work out "get" the same breaks in the sense of not having class, and professors are frequently away so it's a low pressure time. Of course many people who work in labs stay through breaks to keep the stuff running, so it really depends, but I think people do perceive it as a break in…

I think everything went pretty much as well as can possibly be expected. Of course it is terrible that people died, but in the big scheme of things I can't see anything more that could have been expected from the emergency response or police action. I know much has been made of errors in news reporting but these too…

Read Repeat After Me by Rachel DeWoskin. Or her other novel Big Girl Small. She's maybe my favorite contemporary author.

The Devil and Sherlock Holmes is great but there are some bad stories in it. The one about the squid is a non-starter and I have yet to understand the point of the 9/11 story. The one about the sand hogs should be incredibly cool but somehow misses the mark. I actually think David Grann is a little inconsistent.…

To me Laura Ingalls Wilder absolutely holds up as an adult - they're even more resonant to me, because I can now see from the perspective of her parents what it would have been like, how scary it must have been to strike out into literally unknown territory, struggle to maintain a living and to be responsible for…

Underground is awesome, but it has absolutely nothing to do with Dostoevsky as far as I can tell. It's a pretty specific story/satire about the history of Yugoslavia - I'm not sure he is making a general point about societies with skewed world views, just specifically about Yugoslavia.

My favorite book sex scene is the fox scene in The Magicians. Described like that, I realize it sounds disturbing, but if one has read it I hope he or she'd agree that it is really fucking hot.

Mister Roger's Neighborhood is great. I love factories and machines and assembly lines and when they'd visit factories was pretty much the greatest to me. What a great show. I really liked Daniel Striped Tiger in particular.