The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller6/26/2023 ![]() ![]() A school psychiatrist recommends urgent action after a visit with Matt proves he feels both suicidal and homicidal. Matt, who is gay, is in dire need of medical and therapeutic intervention for his eating disorder. It’s awful to read about and awful to witness and just plain awful in general. And, while Matt, our main character, believes that power (and superpowers) can come from pain and starvation, his eating disorder is not romanticized. All of that said, I also think this book is important because it shows us someone we don’t see much of in YA: a boy with an eating disorder. I feel like books that deal with eating disorders are so fraught with the potential to be triggering/upsetting/completely done “wrong.” I have no experience with an eating disorder, so I still hesitate to review this just because the subject matter has the potential to be so triggering for readers. Had Miller not had a personal experience with an ED, I probably wouldn’t be reviewing this book. Miller had an eating disorder as a teenager. Miller’s debut novel will resonate with any reader who’s ever craved the power that comes with self-acceptance.įirst of all, I feel like it’s important to know that Sam J. But Matt doesn’t realize there are many kinds of hunger…and he isn’t in control of all of them.Ī darkly funny, moving story of body image, addiction, friendship, and love, Sam J. All he needs to do is keep the hunger and longing at bay. Matt decides to infiltrate Tariq’s life, then use his powers to uncover what happened to Maya. ![]() So what is lunch, really, compared to the secrets of the universe? ![]()
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Suicide Squad, Volume 1 by Adam Glass6/25/2023 ![]() It’s about supervillans so its dark gritty and gory. ![]() The artwork in this was average it did seem a bit inconsistent with Harley's appearance, but at least it wasn't too distracting.Īs I’ve said a few times before I’m new to reading graphic novels and comics, so some of these characters I’m coming in with little to no knowledge of their pasts. It makes me want to continue the series with more motivation than I had previously. It was quick but not forced, and I didn't feel like I was missing something. This issue did a great job at setting up the Suicide Squad (really, the movie should have done it more like this issue). The backstories weren't unnecessarily drawn-out, and the emotions were still there. Unlike the movie, which tried to get the backstories all out of the way at the beginning, this story held my interest more at the start. The in media res beginning was really good, and then getting into the individual backstories later was beneficial. Either way, I'm glad this first issue was included in this year's Free Comic Book Day so I had more drive to read it. I'm not sure if I waited to start this series because of that, or because I already just really love the Amanda Conner Harley Quinn series and am sucked into that storyline more. ![]() ![]() Though I enjoyed the Suicide Squad movie well enough, we all know it had many flaws. ![]() The decline of magic6/25/2023 ![]() ![]() The organizers of the event, Michelle Pfeffer, Robin Briggs, and Jan Machielsen, are grateful to the Society for Renaissance Studies for agreeing to host this video on their YouTube channel. It concludes with a speech by Sir Keith reflecting on the work’s origins. ![]() ![]() ![]() It features Michael Hunter, Alan Macfarlane, Sophie Page, Alexandra Walsham, and Jan Machielsen and was chaired by Paul Slack. This roundtable marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic was held at All Souls College, Oxford on Friday 3 September 2021. Due to a technical difficulty about a minute of video was lost.Ī roundtable marking the fiftieth anniversary of Sir Keith Thomas’s Religion and the Decline of Magic Religion and the decline of magic :: studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Rabb, Princeton University, New Jersey Thirty-eight years after its publication, Religion & the Decline of Magic remains a central influence on our understanding of Renaissance culture. Sir Keith Thomas on the fiftieth anniversary of his Religion and the Decline of MagicĪ speech given at All Souls College on Friday 3 September 2021 by Sir Keith Thomas reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of his ground-breaking Religion and the Decline of Magic, introduced by Alan Macfarlane. ![]() ![]() ![]() The story of the Red-headed League is based on an extraordinary and somewhat implausible detail: Jabez Wilson's red hair. He deduces that Clay has been using the ruse of the Red-headed League to keep Wilson out of his shop so that in his absence he, Clay, along with some accomplices could dig a tunnel to the vault of a neighboring bank.Īlong with a bank executive and a police chief, Holmes sets up an ambush in the bank vault and catches the criminals. ![]() Holmes investigates and concludes that Vincent Spaulding, who had only recently begun working as an assistant at Wilson's shop and who had shown Wilson the Red-headed League's advertisement in a newspaper, is actually the infamous criminal John Clay. For the simple menial task of copying out parts of the Encyclopedia Brittanica for a few hours each day, Wilson was paid a handsome amount by a so-called Red-headed League but suddenly the Red-headed League disappeared. Jabez Wilson, a pawnbroker with a uniquely intense head of red hair, comes to Holmes to ask for help about a mysterious job he, Wilson, had been working. ![]() Phantoms in the brain by vs ramachandran6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() He has shown that the body image is a malleable internal construct and that perception extracts statistical correlations to create a temporarily useful model (p. Armed with a genius for unaided visual observation and inductive reasoning in an era of fine pixel (voxel) resolution and gross computer subtractions, Ramachandran has been able to make significant contributions to the understanding of how the brain represents the body self. In the chapter “Chasing the Phantom,” the authors present Ramachandran’s astonishingly creative experiments with patients who experience phantom limb phenomena. ![]() Ramachandran further argues that most of the discoveries of neurology that have withstood the test of time were based on single case studies. Even in that company, this book does not disappoint. In the preface, Ramachandran defends his writing this popular science book by citing the popular tradition of Galileo, Huxley, Faraday, Sagan, Sacks, and Pinker. ![]() Beautiful world where you are6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Confronting this fact makes me feel I am already dead.”Įven so, Alice and Eileen’s lofty political thinking is not the sort that lends itself to action beyond the making of sweeping pronouncements. And yet when other people read about her, they believe that she is me. ![]() I hate her ways of expressing herself, I hate her appearance, and I hate her opinions about everything. “I keep encountering this person, who is myself,” she writes in an email to Eileen, “and I hate her with all my energy. Alice, like her creator, loathes her celebrity, and the vile double it has spawned, a false version of Alice that some people adore and others detest. ![]() ![]() She still does a certain amount of publicity work, however, treating this, as she explains to Eileen, as her “job.” For all the press junkets to Paris and Rome, however, she finds it a joyless labor. “And yet it’s what I do with my life, the only thing I want to do.” Alice, whose recent history resembles Rooney’s own in several aspects, has become famous thanks to her first two books and now hasn’t written a page in two years. “I find my own work morally and politically worthless,” writes Alice, an Irish novelist and one of the two main characters in Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You?, to the other main character, her best friend, Eileen. Slate has relationships with various online retailers.īut note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change.Īll prices were up to date at the time of publication. ![]() The language instinct by steven pinker6/24/2023 ![]() When a fellow student entered the lab, Pinker explained his strange experience and conveyed his excitement. Like this: (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) HUMPTY – DUMPTY – HUMPTY – DUMPTY.” He double-checked the audio file and confirmed that he really was listening to the same two tones, meaning the effect had to be perceptual. One morning while he was listening to one such set of overlapping tones, the sounds he was hearing suddenly turned into “a chorus of screaming munchkins. His job was to synthesize trains of overlapping tones and categorize them as either one rich tone or two distinct tones. ![]() When Pinker was a student, he worked in a laboratory at McGill University that studied auditory perception. Pinker explains this idea with an enlightening and somewhat amusing story, which I will retell here. The first is the idea that language is nothing more than a series of noises, meaning that our brain can sometimes find language in places we wouldn’t expect it to. Today I’d like to highlight one of the book’s chapters, “The Sounds of Silence,” in which Pinker discusses an interesting phenomenon that we all experience quite frequently but have likely never thought about. It contains an absolutely fascinating explanation of what language really is and how humans interpret it. ![]() ![]() ![]() I recently picked up another one of Steven Pinker’s books, The Language Instinct. ![]() Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() But as the portrait grows, so does the passion between Sophia and the artist and as ambitions, desires and dreams breed an intricate deception, their reckless gamble propels their lives towards a thrilling and tragic conclusion. At the sittings, as a collector of beautiful things, Cornelis surrounds himself with symbols of his success, including his young wife, Sophia. Cornelis, an ageing merchant, commissions a talented young painter to preserve his status and marriage on canvas. But as the p Seventeenth-century Amsterdam, a city in the grip of tulip mania and basking the wealth it has generated. Seventeenth-century Amsterdam, a city in the grip of tulip mania and basking the wealth it has generated. ![]() Ken penders archie comics6/24/2023 ![]() ![]() Where Ken Penders comes into this is decidedly more. These characters were designed by Bioware under contract from SEGA, and were loosly based off the plot of Sonic Adventure and Sonic Battle (of all things, with the reintroduction of Gizoids). Heh, no that's not it. Sonic Chronicles, made by Bioware, had an Echidna tribe as a key part of its plot. Due to this lawsuit, modern Sonic side-media like the IDW comics (and maybe some mobile games) are far more highly regulated by SEGA. I think Penders won that lawsuit (I'm no legal expert, so I can't explain why exactly). ![]() He sued SEGA (or those other companies) because even tho the Sonic franchise belongs to SEGA, those characters were basically plagiarized. Not a Sonic expert, but from what I heard from some Sonic fans a long time ago - The DS game "Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood" had characters in the story that were basically rip-offs of pre-existing characters from the Archie Comic series (specifically ones that Penders created). ![]() Being human in the age of algorithms6/23/2023 ![]() ![]() What matters most: Helping doctors with diagnosis or preserving privacy? Protecting victims of crime or preventing innocent people being falsely accused? Hello World takes us on a tour through the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of the algorithms that surround us on a daily basis. But as we rely on algorithms to automate big, important decisions - in crime, justice, healthcare, transportation, and money - they raise questions about what we want our world to look like. ![]() Already, these lines of code are telling us what to watch, where to go, whom to date, and even whom to send to jail. ![]() If you were accused of a crime, who would you rather decide your sentence - a mathematically consistent algorithm incapable of empathy or a compassionate human judge prone to bias and error? What if you want to buy a driverless car and must choose between one programmed to save as many lives as possible and another that prioritizes the lives of its own passengers? And would you agree to share your family's full medical history if you were told that it would help researchers find a cure for cancer? These are just some of the dilemmas that we are beginning to face as we approach the age of the algorithm, when it feels as if the machines reign supreme. ![]() 393 150, rue Ste-Cath.O - local #113Ī look inside the algorithms that are shaping our lives and the dilemmas they bring with them. ![]() |