I think he has a strong claim to being up there with Poe in terms of his influence. He had a big idea and it turned out to be an idea that was just coming into its time.

Wilson, I gather, was a racial moderate in his time, which makes him very racist from our current vantage point. As you say, it doesn't seem to have been visceral; I would guess that it was more a matter of him not really questioning the views in which he was inculcated. Rather different from that wacky funster…

I read an article recently that went into detail about racism in "The Call of Cthulhu". Basically, the cults in that story are always primarily or entirely nonwhite and described as "savages". White people affected psychically by Cthulhu are all "sensitive" artistic types who mostly cause minor fusses or perform…

As I recall, a reviewer who trashed that book found that Crichton's next novel had a character named after him. Said character (this is all based on Wikipedia) was a serial baby rapist with a micropenis, which may be where you're getting that bit from. The point is that Crichton was a comically petty man.

Eugene Debs Hartke?

Watch out for his Orange Crusher!

You also need bread crumbs and sugar packets.

I suppose it depends on where you're talking about it. In the US media world, the definition has certainly shifted, but that's been less the case elsewhere in the world (I gather that France hasn't changed its usage, for instance). Even in Canada, which tends to take a lot of cues from the US, it's noticeably less…

As a 32-year-old, the internet has informed me that I may as well start applying for my pension, so I suppose I'm about as ancient and wizened as I'm going to get. Maybe check to see if the chapel has shuffleboard.

Only if we elope to France. I like the way they think.

I'm a guy and I use anal toys sometimes (when I can find the damn thing). I think it's not weird in any situation where toys wouldn't be weird, if that makes sense. I really can't see someone being fine with toys for women and not for men, but that's probably just a lack of imagination on my part. If you get to the…

It's like the Ark of the Covenant.

Sadly, we do live in a society where people do that. I know a survivor who told me about her situation growing up, and it wasn't too far off from that. There was a strange dynamic among the girls about who was going to end up getting abused on a given night.

In a sense, the very conception of being "white" is a form of identity politics. For ages, the "white" people of Europe were fractious and xenophobic against each other. They certainly did not think of themselves as all part of one racial group. Whiteness was invented, I gather, as a way to justify slavery…

Quite a lot of damage has been done to political language. One of the worst blows, in my opinion, was the successful reduction of liberalism and socialism into the catchall term "liberal". They're not the same thing! Socialism and liberalism have points of overlap (for that matter, they both have points of overlap…

There is little more irritating these days than people going on about "burning it all down" and how "the revolution is coming". The most cursory glances at history and the news will put you off revolutionary rhetoric. Violent revolutions are a matter of one group of sociopathic dickbags deciding that they want to…

Did you see Bill Burr's online fanbase flip the fuck out when he started attacking Trump? They have this rigid, dogmatic idea of what "free thought" can be. Step outside of the Free Thought zone and you're brainwashed. Real freethinkers, you see, naturally fall in line behind a strong leader and agree with…

Just searched that. Found the story on a fucking forum thread and nowhere else. What the hell, journalists?

Perhaps it's partially a personal history thing. I'm the opposite way from you, for example; I've grown to absolutely despise having serious conversations over text or IM or whatever. For me, it's face to face or phone, and I once straight-out refused to have an acrimonious discussion with someone over text (I told…

I'm not surprised. I keep thinking of how my client would deal with something like that. He gets stressed if I make lunch the wrong way. Witnessing someone shooting his therapist? How the hell do you even process that? It's not like someone can tell him "oh, it's OK, here's why that happened" because it doesn't…