Apologies for being slow to post these. 

A good review of Eduardo Porter’s new book AMERICAN POISON.  

“There is something essential about the suffering of black people that can’t be reconciled with the suffering of other people.” Frank B. Wilderson III on his new book, Afropessimism.

If books are your bag, baby, this website, about book series in the twentieth century, may be something special for you, as it was for me:  

The meeting took place just two and a half years ago, but the odd thing about our encounter is that even after such a short time and even though I have thought about it almost every day since, I am unable to remember a single thing he told me about the city before he mentioned the wolves. Once he began to tell that story, everything else was obliterated.

Terrifically gripping story (but I think true, mostly) by Paul Auster about a trip he took to see his ancestral city in Eastern Europe.  “The wolves are not just symbols of war. They are the spawn of war and what war brings to the earth.”

Russia is indeed trying to come back to rival the US, and thereby to recreate the Cold War.  Here’s one arena where they’re trying, not to secure effect, at least not yet.  

Ever since I moved to the edge of Appalachia almost a quarter century ago now, I have been increasingly fascinated with the region.  It’s often presented as populated only by, in one ugly formulation I have heard more than once, “white crackers.”  That is not true.  Here Is the story of the “Affrilachian Poets”—a group of Black writers from Appalachia.  This is so cool.  One day people will realize the richness and complexity and the beauty of this part of the world-truly, it is a place. 

A good remembrance, in two parts, from 2010, of Pierre Hadot.

Enough for now!