IntenseDebate

9 years ago @ The Toast - A note on The Toast · 0 replies · +53 points

I just want to say that having to constantly disambiguate between Lin-Manuel Miranda and Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of the things I will miss most about the Toast.

9 years ago @ The Toast - Cocktail Hour: Open Th... · 1 reply · +7 points

I picked up The Blue Sword recently, because I've been reading Naomi Novik's Temeraire books (which I like better than I thought I would - "Napoleon plus dragons" wasn't really speaking to me but they're quite clever) and her voice was really strongly reminding me of Robin McKinley. I wanted to look at the writing and see what it was that made it so similar (answer: mostly semicolon density, I think). But of course I wound up getting distracted and re-reading The Blue Sword. It holds up pretty well, I think.

9 years ago @ The Toast - Cocktail Hour: Open Th... · 0 replies · +8 points

I was in France recently and was reading vaguely connected things such as Proust (I finally made it past the madeleines! everyone should remember exactly where they were when they got to the madeleines in Swann's Way) and the Temeraire books (I mean, Napoleon is in them). But then we were in the Louvre and I was reading wikipedia entries for paintings I liked, as one does, and I wound up getting totally sucked into the memoirs of Elisabeth Vigee Lebrun, who was a portraitist who fled Paris during the Revolution and wandered around Europe painting pictures of rich people and having wacky adventures. It's all online here and I recommend it highly - how can you go wrong with chapter descriptions like:

Naples–A Sleepy Ambassadress–The Remarkable Life of Lady Hamilton–Being the Story of a Frivolous Flirt Fond of Beer–More Royal Models–Excursions to Posilippo–Mlle. Lebrun Writes a Novel at the Age of Nine–The Queen of Naples Sits to the Authoress–The Wedding of the Doge of Venice with the Sea

or

A Queen Who Refused to Be Painted–A Four-Course Dinner of Frogs, Frogs, Frogs and Frogs

I'll miss the Open Thread book conversations - I have read so much great stuff because of suggestions in these threads - thank you all!!

9 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 1 reply · +9 points

Hm, it sounds like this is an "advisory" referendum, so there aren't actually any legally binding consequences of the type I'm talking about? Like it actually is closer to an opinion poll than a vote on a specific action to be taken.

9 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 4 replies · +15 points

I understand the argument for making it really clear which option is which, but from my US POV that does seem like too little information. What are the actual legal consequences of the choice the voter is being asked to make? I'm not totally clear on that, with the Brexit vote, but it's something along the lines of "Should the UK invoke Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon to initiate negotiations to leave the EU within two years?" Now obviously that's more complicated sounding, but it's also more specific about what's being voted on. To me the referendum ballot sounds like a poll question, not a legally binding constituent element of a democratic governance process.

9 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +13 points

She's so great; between her and their Trump coverage I'm now constantly in danger of running out of monthly Washington Post articles, which is a new phenomenon for me.

9 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 2 replies · +12 points

I thought the poem was really interesting! There are a couple of places where I see it nodding at the fact that any any attempt at pretending to quantify a proportion like that will be drowned in subjectivity. The "For every loved child..." line can't really be meant literally for instance, but sometimes it feels that way when the negative news is overwhelming. More interesting to me is "For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird" (which has the same asymmetry; if you take it literally there are of course more birds than stones thrown at birds) - birds aren't inherently good or bad, they just are, so it's the stone-throwing, the human involvement, that introduces a morally evaluable concept. And she chooses to introduce a negative one. I think there's a reading where she's saying that she's trying to let her children hold on to the more-good-than-bad view because she thinks that will help them introduce even more good. In that reading she'd be happy to hear that you hold that view too!

9 years ago @ The Toast - WHY YOU KEEP HAVING TH... · 0 replies · +26 points

I was once broken up with via sinusoidal metaphor: "I just feel like our relationship is a sine curve and we've already passed pi over 2." (I was also ready to call things off so I didn't try to argue that we should stick it out until periodicity returned us inexorably to our erstwhile bliss.)

9 years ago @ The Toast - Link Roundup! · 0 replies · +9 points

Sorry about your shoulder! Two tips re mouse:
1) if you google "keyboard shortcut cheatsheet [name of application/browser/OS]" you can often fine nicely formatted cheatsheets to print out.
2) you can switch the mouse buttons so that they match up with your left hand - I find that slightly less confusing (I've been left-mousing for more than a year and I am still TERRIBLE at it, my left hand does not consider itself 100% part of my body, it's more of an autonomous territory with unreliable communication linkages)

9 years ago @ The Toast - Cocktail Hour: Open Th... · 0 replies · +12 points

I've never been able to figure out why writing tics like that bug me with some authors and are totally forgiveable with others. I think it's a matter of how in control they seem - if I can believe that it was done knowingly and deliberately then I wind up more relaxed about it.

I'm reading Neurotribes, which is quite good - I don't read a lot of topical nonfiction of that ilk, but it's really well done. Recently read The Past (British people in a country house pondering their relationships, which is a genre I've always enjoyed, but this is very contemporary which makes it interesting), and now I have an earlier Tessa Hadley lined up (Clever Girl) but I'm kind of holding out on reading it because I know I'll like it and I don't want it to be over. And slowly making my way through Elizabeth Bishop's letters, which are very enjoyable. Her Brazilian girlfriend came with her to visit Maine and found the landscape artificial because she thought all pine trees look like they've been planted deliberately (EB says: you know, the way we think of palm trees).

IntenseDebate Comment System

Connect with prost

People I'm following

prost