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doesn’t seem insane to me? Pegg is a good actor not just a comic, Balrog is a powerful malevolent super intelligent entity on the same level as like, Gandalf, so it needs anchor to embody it as it plans and executes the destruction of the dwarves of Moria. Pegg is a big nerd who will do his best?

every day i feel like we're experiencing some kind of societal gas leak

...Also can tell you really did know Ben Bova, Jerry Pournelle etc back in the day and your portraits of them are mostly affectionate and well-done cameos. Very cool to read for me, who saw them mostly as far-off literary demigods.

Yes, I know! That's what adds to it so much! I love how you describe the feel of a cross-country drive in a very different information era, for example, or the feel of telephone-dependent contact with a spouse. I was born in 1983, so I only barely knew that era as an adult.

one of few books I've read twice in less than a year is @hntdove.bsky.social's Three Miles Down. Isn't that the book is a masterpiece of complex literature, though it is good. I found its premise, period-piece authenticity, narrator's flawed but ultimately morally striving attitude, all deeply fun.

I enjoyed vacations and travel much more when I was young, renting an apartment, and with no pets. As an adult with a house and several small dependent creatures I can't take with me, I end up spending a lot of energy when vacationing anywhere a plane ride away worrying about homefront disasters.

This is a really interesting idea, and would certainly mean that states where there is divided control like Arizona would be less likely to idle a lot of their policymaking/governing capacity with partisan warfare.

Clearly a movie theater experience will never truly equal a live performance in a smallish theater. But this was a really effective attempt to capture the energy and momentum without making you feel too much like it was a recording of a show.

Had the chance to go see the in-movie-theaters recording of Hadestown and it's quite a good recorded performance. Really captures a lot of what's good about the staging and energy of the original live show (I was luck to see that cast on broadway). Definitely see it if you're even remotely curious!

There's an alternative route some American localities use, which is highly targeted property tax abatements for small local businesses or businesses where the owner is live-in/space owner. I'm not sure if it's better or worse, but it achieves a similar function of advantaging small local businesses.

And so much….silence? Stillness? The pacing has moments where you the audience have to get taken up short and hold on to think about it all even if you don’t want to.

The original 1954 Godzilla movie is legitimately terrifying to watch in a lot of ways. Almost hard to stick with because of the repeated and relentless exceptionally grim, unguarded images and sounds of suffering it presents. I wonder how a contemporary audience would absorb it if mostly unprepared.

sitting on that precipice point where I'm almost ready to get really excited for next year's classes and students as I re-write syllabi and re-check calendars and readings BUT am also still grumpy and exhausted and just want to play computer games. An unpleasant corner to slowly navigate around.

Been re-reading Alan Taylor's sequential books in reverse order (American Republics, American Revolutions, American Colonies) and strikes me how really excellent they are as overview historical monographs. Detailed and complex enough for specialists, vivid and well-written without jargon for others.

and, just as Lincoln pointed out, that kind of Dred Scott logic is historically wrong in its evaluation of the founding generation's understanding of Black civil rights and Black American's role in the republic! That's in addition to being morally repugnant in its own right!

I don't disagree with your fundamental point - she's not a particularly productive legislator. But I'm also not sure metrics like bill sponsorship are the only or best way to measure a legislator's seriousness or depth, especially in our current policymaking environment.

Also, we live in an era of increasingly leadership dominated lawmaking and decreasing legislative productivity. In that context, even serious and hardworking legislators struggle badly to sole-sponsorship bills into law.

Lists and scripts, a rigid march of books chosen to fit a very specific image of what canonicity ought to mean - that regime, if used alone, is not a path to getting books/novels back in schools sustainably or giving kids a passion for reading deeply, widely, or for fun and discovery.

Most people - even most people who are quite livid about campaign finance -can't tell you what donation limits are, how the lines between a campaign committee and a candidate's personal finances are maintained, the difference between a campaign committee and other expenditure committees, etc etc.

I'm not sure I'd even go that far. On the list of things people don't understand at all in American politics, how campaign finance works and is regulated, much less the relevant Supreme Court precedents and the differences in their implications for camp'n finance regulation, is perhaps near the top.