Burnt-out-blueberries - Agatha Christie Enthusiast

you disagreed w me in an intellectually honest way. we're friends now.

I'm reading about the Victorian Aesthetic movement and I was violently reminded of...

...Sherlock Holmes's 'rose monologue' from The Naval Treaty, HI HELLO CAN ANYONE HEAR ME

The number one phrase I have adopted into my lexicon from ACD Sherlock Holmes is all the times Watson says “I cudgeled my brains” when he’s trying and failing to think through a mystery. Huge mood, deeply relatable, I too spend far too much time cudgeling my brains with no real result

The fact that slaves had a different legal status from free men was not considered particularly outrageous: women and minors shared diminished status. In reality, minors still do today.

Now there's an uncomfortable parallel to sit with.

I like that Vivenza included it, though. It made me stop and think for a moment about my own beliefs.

I agree that kids and teens are treated unjustly in my culture. So, what freedoms should minors have that they currently don't? How do you draw the line between protection and suppression? How much child abuse occurs because children are inherently more vulnerable, and how much occurs because we put them in situations ripe for abuse, and don't take their feelings or demands seriously? I honestly don't know.

It also made me look up the children's rights and youth rights movements, which are apparently two different things. And one is much more radical than the other.

I'm gonna have to think on this one for a while...

(Gloria Vivenza, “Roman Economic Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, ed. Walter Scheidel.)

reading any dostoyevski book your main takeaway will always be yeah no i see why every other author was in love with this miserable russian man . and justice prevails slow and greets you when youve changed too much to still be in need of its comfort

I just learned about this passage from The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (book) I'm so sick

Antisemitism Required Reading

I get a lot of ignorant comments & tags on my posts about antisemitism, and I’ve already spent way too much time & energy engaging with them. So to preserve my sanity, I’ve made the decision not to engage too deeply with any commenters who haven’t at least read all of these in their entirety:

“Jewish Space Lasers” by Mike Rothschild

“People Love Dead Jews” by Dara Horn

“Jews Don’t Count” by David Baddiel

"More Than a Century of Antisemitism", GEC Special Report

If you’re not Jewish, please read all of this literature before adding anything to my posts about antisemitism.

Jews, please add any books you think should be on the list!

*it’s

I love when you find an author who just has a good flavor to their writing. It could be the way they handle characters, the way they use certain tropes or themes, even the specific lilt of their words. Its familiar and comforting and carries across different stories, like coming back to a place of comfort and recognizing the furniture.

The mutuals were so right. Reading On Self-Respect by Joan Didion DOES stop you from losing your fucking mind