June '25 Reading

Starting off with some Roman history then some hard sf. May finally finish NYer backlog as well. We'll see how it goes. 

1. NYer of 3/28/22. Paumgarten on Jimmy Buffet: "A poor man's Gordon Lightfoot grows into a drinking man's Martha Stewart, hardly having to change his tune."
2. NYer of 6/2/25. Sonaran style flour tortillas. Carmello brand out of Kansas (Hannah Goldfield)
3. SPQR by Mary Beard. Lots of good ancient trivia. Did you know that the Emperor usually adopted his successor, often as an adult?
4. A Deepness in the Sky. Something about a big fat space opera in the summer. This one didn't really have a hero--one sadistic torturer, one would-be galactic emperor, one spider-planet disrupting inventor. Lots of cool weird stuff, from the On-Off star to the Focused. Oh, and all along the bad guys are like "once they develop the internet we can take them over." But it's from hacking missile command, not media manipulation.
   
5. The Nation of June 2025. From a review of Guillory's On Close Reading: "But if we embrace a broader definition of close reading, if we take a closer look at how it works and what is required of it when it succeeds, we can teach it better. We can specify the steps of close reading, even if no close reading succeeds by performing the steps alone but requires beauty and grace. We can note that one should delimit the context for the text and one’s reading of it. One should quote a detail worth noticing and construct an argument to persuade one’s reader how to understand that detail, why it matters, and how it changes what we know about the text. Each of these steps entails skills that we can teach and that can sometimes blossom—with, yes, practice and imitation—into beautiful performances. We can, in other words, democratize close reading."
6. Sex Criminals v. 3 It's still good.
7. Sex Criminals v. 4 Robert Rainbow. 
8. NYer of 6/30/25. Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia comes to terms with consent and exploitation. 
9. NYer of 6/xx/25. Merve Emre on history of advice columns, including Reddit's AITA