Reviews and Comments

Observations of a Black Millennial pop-culture junkie who teethed on The Little Mermaid. Ponders successive generations' tendency to produce fewer good/evil narratives in favor of messy relationships. Disney was a shaping force for her; she describes growing into a love-hate relationship with the Mouse. At the end, she's clubbed and dragged by Megyn Kelly. Recommended (the book, not the dragging).

If you came for witches, you're going to get a whole lot more. Witch-hunts are demonstrated to be just one of the mechanisms by which women have been and are held down. We're led through pop culture and the image of the 'old hag' that permeates films and Disney cartoons. Then we're taken to hospital for a critical look at medicine and a particular gaze at obstetrics and gynecology.

But first, motherhood. The front half of the book is a polemic against societal norms for mothering and parenting — only a mutant doesn't want kids — that may turn off readers well before she actually converts them. It's a fine line. I can't say pulling punches would have reached more people. I only know I almost didn't make it.

a more sweeping book than i had expected. the idea of 'witch' comes to represent the power of a woman freed from the shackles of patriarchal society. chapter 1 digs into mothers being held down by societal pressures to eat last and be only supportive, not sentient. quotes corinne maier's 'no kid', which i read back in the day (and found a bit shrill, but it could have been my lack of language aptitude).

The author's voice — earnest and sometimes dad-jokey without hysterics — is the reason you should make room on your shelf for yet another book on the environment. Sure, some of the chapters will cover ground that you may already know pretty well. But the other twenty will open your eyes, like revealing a sick forest behind a felled tree.

And just like that, this returns to the headlines: the founder of HackingTeam, a rival spyware outfit to NSO whose history is intertwined with it, was arrested and jailed on suspicion of attempted murder.

techcrunch.com/2023/11/29/founder-of-spyware-maker-hacking-team-arrested-for-attempted-murder-local-media/

I still insist that @sarahpinsker@wandering.shop was the first to use "the before times" as a pre-pandemic dividing line — because her pandemic book came out in 2019.

The first perhaps ⅔ of the book, which is about one of the author's favourite bands, is a lovely romp down Memory Lane. Eventually it becomes the tale of how one song and one album made him a superfan, and that's rather more relevant to his mates than to fans of Saint Etienne.

Perhaps all you know of Saint Etienne is as vendors of a fantasy London. This certainly is true of their early career. Chapter 4 describes their recalibration and provides a pull-no-punches account of how different UK's two main parties really are not, and how they all serve the same masters. Fan or not, this is essential reading, for the music, the history, and the politics.