Luke > Recent Status Updates

"While these critiques differ from one another, [...] they all rely on a similar gender artifactualist logic: 1) Gender is a cultural artifact; 2) Transsexuals mistake gender to be something real (rather than recognizing it as artificial); 3) Therefore, transsexuals reify the gender system."

(PS: If you're thinking of coming after a trans person for quoting another trans person using the word 'transsexuals': don't)

I'm glad past me was able to read enough that I've already cleared my real reading goal of reading 100 pages a day/ 36500 in a year. It's a lot easier to focus on finishing/reviewing two more books before the year is through when page count isn't a concern.

I pushed through the last 100 pages of this in my fourth day of first post-chemo haze cause my brain valued finding real hope over taking it easy.

But as with the lack of critique concerning the need for more prisons, there was no discussion, either, about what it would mean for a small city dominated by a single-industry oligopoly to deal with inequality by bringing in an enormous new employer outside the direct control of anybody; nor did people ponder what might happen should the prison fail to do the economic job.

What we as feminists should be challenging is compulsory femininity, rather than femininity itself.

Glad to get back to this. Still want to make sweet sweet love to this book (important feeling to hold on to during my first bout of chemo).

Well, reading this certainly confirmed that I need more credibly written fantasy adventures in my reading life. Erotica-centered ones not so much.

[In 1783, Yale president Ezra] Stiles fathered a new metaphor: the United States was "God's American Israel." Filled with allusions to superior blood and other suggestions of European supremacy, President Stiles['] sermon exposed the tight braiding of eighteenth-century natural rights philosophy, science, and theology.

Come out of surgery, immediately hop on here. What can I say, time waits for no reader.

This is the one book that's passed due due to a hold on it, but it's also the one book that's almost 30% end notes, so it'll be fine.

Throwing off my reading schedule (among other things) with this, but it's been taunting me from atop the shelves at work for weeks and my god do I need a break from dealing with cancer.

In 1973, one in 944 people in California was in prison. In 2000, one in 213 people in California was in prison.

As the multigenerational abandonment of California's children to poverty shows, wealth does not circulate the way it used to.

I'm sorry, but if you voted Haidt's 'The Anxious Generation' the best of anything, get out.

Got a lot of nonfiction reading coming up courtesy of my public library stockings, but considering all of them are anywhere between 3 to 30% endnotes + bibliography, it's not as weighty pagewise as it looks.

Oh goody, a cancer plotline. I'm just glad I'm at the time of my life where I'm the only deciding factor on whether I get my tits chopped off or not.

Here I am veritably enjoying myself when all of a sudden Ford has to take a great big shit of bigotry in the middle of the page. C'mon dude, work with me here.

But in every profession there must be at least one man who lives in deep doubt and comes into conflict.

This would be a stronger book if the author didn't drop a LinkedIn profile every time character description was involved.

I do wish the local populace paid more attention to recent releases like this. On the other hand, more queer for me.

I'm sorry, Soyinka, but you're really wilding on this religion business.

You might also say that, as an example to the world, an empire, along with its practices and tactics embellished with ideas, was expelled from history.

I'm sorry, any edition that 'jettison[s] the notes and glosses present in the earlier version' because the Internet exists is pathetic at best and self-annihilating otherwise.

Muddled through to the point of actually enjoying this rom-com pseudo-antagonistic flirtation scene, which certainly eases the reading process but does make me roll my eyes at my own proclivities.

In light of recent events both political and health related, I am taking a next step in my transition and changing my name to Luke. Thank you for your patience.

Ford would've loved Reddit.

Rest in peace Dorothy Allison.

Whoever devised the six Indian seasons took into account this nuance and play; they knew the year, like a day, is not only a progression, a movement from one phase to another, but a passage through echoes, reminiscences, and expectation, through intermediary periods that recall one another, as dusk and twilight do in the day's twelve hours.

"Indians don't like fresh olives," says chef Mukherjee, making it pretty clear he doesn't like them himself. "They're extremely salty." Briefly at a loss, he breaks into Bengali—"Ki rokom ekta kash achhe na?" ("Don't you think they have an acidic aftertaste?") It's an aside: as if we are sharing a little-conceded but incontrovertibly plain fact.

There's not much that separates this from the by rote creative writing classes and dull as ditchwater history books it was drawn from. I'll admit that I'm not looking forward to trudging through the next 310 pages.