Sigh. I was the same age when Revenge of the Nerds came out and I (girl) saw it as a harmless “win” for the head nerd, because that’s how the movie presented it. I wish I could go back in time and give young me a lecture about rape culture.

Needs more gumdrops and candy canes.

Or eat them, if that’s your pleasure!

I’m pretty convinced based on what I’ve seen/experienced in the workforce that you could get the job and the office without a full understanding of the location of the one or the exact parameters of the other.

Yeah.  Weird, weird recipe for getting someone to become a better husband and father.

I have such a vivid auditory memory of the way Melanie Griffith says the word “Trask.”

“You hear that?  Tick ... tick ... tick ... It’s my biological clock, Jack.”

It’s cool.  He may have said tons of racist and anti-Semitic things and threatened his romantic partner and so on, but that was a while ago and if you look back over the long-term, his movies made a lot of money.  So, all good, no worries.

As if any middle-schooler needed a novel to tell them that, sigh.

I’m halfway through! I thought I had read all of Hardy years ago but I don’t think I ever made it to Jude. I’m also currently reading David Copperfield to my son and boy do a few decades make a big difference. DC is like “a young woman was alone with a man in a room! her family weeps and she is ruined forever!” and…

I have to admit I left out some of those descriptors when I read LOTR aloud to my son. But I also talked to him about Tolkein’s depiction of “Southrons” etc and why it was racist.

I tried reading it as a kid (not for school) and made no headway.  I read it in my twenties and loved it.  I think it’s a mistake forcing it on teens.

That is delightfully nineteenth-century.

The dislike for that one might have more to do with the pervasive, thematic, titular racism.

The funny thing is both are true—it’s a spooky, atmospheric classic of Gothic fiction, and it is also about horrible people mistaking sexual attraction for love.

Yeah, I hate the cult of Hemingway (manliness! beard! booze! short sentences!) but I have to admit his actual books (bar the late ones) are actually excellent.

*I* suggested a well-known, prize-winning author could potentially have turned down an assignment to write a review that, in its final form, was full of overt doubts about whether she should have written it in the first place. *You* told a woman (me) to “fuck off” online. Jeez. It’s almost like the anonymity of the…

This controversy has been fantastic exposure for Myriam Gurba, no matter how pissed off she was by the book initially.

She should have just declined to review it. She gets plenty of attention and exposure, she could have turned down that one assignment.

Sehgal’s review was badly written, itself. She clearly took issue with *who* wrote the book and the amount of promotional dollars that were behind its success, but instead of being forthright and focusing on that criticism, she cherry-picked a bunch of lines she thought were bad. The bulk of the review was her making…