When I was a child, I read constantly. My mother had to shoo me out of the house to play, because otherwise I would have done nothing but read. I grew up in house full of books, and I pestered my parents to check out books from the adult section of the public library, because the kids’ library wasn’t going to cut it. I’ve found that over the last decade or so I read less and less. No, I read as much as I used […]
Rack Your Brain
I almost feel bad reviewing this book because it’s so brief, but dammit, it’s a BOOK and I READ IT and so it counts, right? It isn’t possible to imagine a show like Only Connect making a dent in American television, because Americans don’t much mind clever game shows as long as they showcase a really limited sort of cleverness of the Trivial Pursuit variety in which a random piece of knowledge bobs to the surface: there’s a reason Jeopardy! has been on the air […]
Boss Baby
For a long while I’ve thought Donald Trump was the stupidest person ever to be elected President of the United States, but Michael Wolff’s book opened my eyes: now I think he’s one of the stupidest people alive. And not just stupid! Willful, petty, cruel, belligerent, incurious, capricious, infantile, and dogmatic, for starters, a thesaurusful of poisonous adjectives: basically every quality you wouldn’t want in the lowest-level employee, let alone the most powerful person on Earth. “Fire and Fury” isn’t straight reportage: it often has […]
Bad Blood
Is there a person alive who doesn’t love to read a good bad review? (Apart, obviously, from the subject of the review.) Positive notices are all well and good but they’re kind of limiting: a negative review is what really unleashes the critic’s full powers, letting them unsheathe every rhetorical device and bon mot at their disposal. Diana Rigg is probably most famous to North Americans as Lady Olenna in Game of Thrones, or possibly Mrs. Peel in The Avengers, but like many English actors […]
General Ignorance Is Bliss
QI is a British game/panel show in which the host (Stephen Fry for the first 13 seasons*) asks the four guests questions which seem to have a simple, direct answer but never do: they get demerits (and a humiliating klaxon) for blurting out the obvious answer, and points for being hilarious and for eventually coming up with the correct answer. You’re going to need an example, so here goes: How many senses do you have? The obvious response, which everyone knows, is five, but that […]