You’ve unlocked the repeat contributor badge in r/AskOldPeople! Do you turn to page 89, admit you don’t know anything, and get deluged by green slime, or do you switch over to r/Yellowjackets and lightly cyberbully some zillennials whose concept of the 90s is about as accurate as yours was of the 50s, watching The Donna Reed Show during the Cold War–era Nick at Nite heyday?
Just kidding, you don’t have to answer that. It is a Choose Your Own Adventure joke in celebration of Independent Bookstore Day! Still, I hope you spent your Saturday buying books and not on the phone figuring out whether your otherwise healthy cat will drop dead if she chewed up an unfrozen Nueske’s bacon freezer gel pack,* forgetting to eat anything yourself other than a Hostess Donette from the gas station, and then wondering if Debbie Webster’s early dementia storyline on Coronation Street is closer to home than you’d like to admit.
Though I may be both an ex-librarian and an ex-bookseller, I really cannot shut up about my book recommendations so here are a few from my recently-read pile:
Scrambled Eggs at Midnight by Brad Barkley and Heather Hapler came to me via Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture by Rachel Rubin, a book I eagerly purchased during the Obama era but never finished until I sunk into a period of serious procrastination earlier this year. Toggling between an Asheville, North Carolina Ren Faire and Evangelical fat camp in the early 2000s, this is a sweet love story about two deeply weird, precocious teenage narrators billed as Romeo and Juliet but with a happier ending. Why was this not a bigger hit? Unfortunately I think it’s the title, which alludes to the one act of love Calliope, the female protagonist, associates with her space-case hippie parents, but to me just invokes indigestion and insomnia.
Last weekend was the 30th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. Did your algorithm remind you? My newsfeed didn’t but Netflix did, not that I needed it because (a) I’ve been mired in Time Magazines from 1994-95 for the last three years, and (b) my dad worked at the federal building in Cleveland at the time and this was a terrifyingly huge unspoken source of family stress (is there any kind of Irish-American family stress other than unspoken, lol). Unlike most Netflix docs, this should’ve been a six-part series instead of a 90-minute one-off; although the filmmakers adequately tied McVeigh’s motives to Waco and nailed the terror of the bombing aftermath, it’s crucial to trace how the extreme right-wing cultural milieu of the 90s directly plunged us into our current morass. So, after the credits roll, please start with Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, but for god’s sake, do not stop there.
Bargain-bin right-wing extremism not cheerful enough for you? Try The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley by former Dutch legislator Marietje Schaake, which seems delightfully quaint an idea in the present timeline and never fails to set this earworm upon me:
Don’t believe me how depressing this is? Here is a passage:
In 2019, after serving more than a decade in the European Parliament, I stepped down from politics and moved to the belly of the beast: Silicon Valley and Stanford University. I wanted to help bridge the gaps between the worlds of politics, policy, and technology.
Not long after I arrived at Stanford, I attended a presentation that confirmed just how badly such bridges were needed. The speaker, an engineer who had just left Instagram, shared fascinating experiences about curation of content through algorithms and how [this could shape] taste and culture.
When the time came for questions, [I asked] did the ability to move and create markets…also imply the possibility of influencing, shaping, or moving political beliefs, values, and behavior more widely? … I wanted to know about the discussions among engineers and whether the societal or political impacts were ever considered when designing recommendation algorithms that cater to billions of people. The engineer admitted that they did not understand the question. In a way, that was the clearest answer I could have asked for. [emphasis mine]
OK friends, it’s Saturday night now and I’m sure you have a pizza to order. Remember to breathe, stock up on antacids, and more than anything else, just say no to the 24/7 news cycle.
—CB
*It’s nontoxic; monitor for drunkenness and administer tuna juice as apparently this is the universal standard feline hangover cure. Disclaimer: I am not a vet and cannot administer specific professional advice; please contact your local animal hospital or the Pet Poison Control Helpline in an emergency.