Granfalloon

  Mothers Who Can't Love  by Susan Forward Was the Cat in the Hat Black? The Hidden Racism of Children's Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books  by Philip Nel Into the Wild  by Jon Krakauer Flowers for Algernon  by Daniel Keyes Deepfakes: The Coming Infocalypse  by Nina Schick Dune  by Frank Herbert The Man Who Couldn't Stop  by David Adam Egghead; or, You Can't Survive on Ideas Alone  by Bo Burnham, illustrated by Chance Bone Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream  by Harlan Ellison Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  by Robert Louis Stevenson   Death in Mud Lick: A Coal Country Fight against the Drug Companies That Delivered the Opioid Epidemic  by Eric Eyre  In Sunlight or In Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper  edited by Lawrence Block 2021 Favorite:  Dandelion Wine  by Ray Bradbury I was blown away by Bradbury's writing, especially since my only...

 At some point I found a Reddit AMA with Bo Burnham in which someone asked something along the lines of, “What advice do you have for an aspiring poet?” Burnham’s response was something along the lines of, “No need to aspire; if you’re writing poetry, you’re a poet!” Burnham then went on to address the thought that most of us probably have when we see such a response, which is something along the lines of, “Yes, sure, but how do I measure and prove to people that I am, indeed, a poet?” Applying this question to myself, I sometimes wonder: Can I call myself an artist when I draw one doodle on my notepad because I promised myself that I’d draw something every day, but then I don’t draw anything for the next eight days? There’s gotta be a threshold somewhere, right? I think this topic branches off into a lot of different things. There is a reality in Burnham’s half-serious sentiment that if you are actively doing something, then you are technically a doer of that thing. We can all agr...

"Hell-ooooo?" "Heellll-ooohhh?" "... Yes?" "You almost home?" "Uh, yeah. Uh, sort of. Not really." "'S'about to start pourin'." "Is it?" "It looks like it. It's all cloudy and ominous-looking. You want me to come get you?" "No I think it's fine. It's kind of windy but not raining yet." "You sure?" "Yeah. I'll uh, I'll be fine. I'll call you if you should come get me or something." "OK." "Alllrriiiiight?" "ALRRIIIGGHT?" "OK, bye." Cut to two or three minutes later as I'm checking out my item at a darling little record/CD store in Manayunk, and the cashier all but begs me to put my shabby record in a plastic bag because he can see out the window behind me and he's noticed that it has just started pouring. In that case… Cut to like ten minutes prior when I arrive inside the record/CD store, after d...

Do you ever get partway through a book and realize that you seem to have missed a crucial detail or set of details from the beginning of the story? If yes, do you:     A. continue reading anyway and assume that you will catch on to what you’ve missed?     B. skim through the earlier pages of the book and hope to find whatever detail(s) you had missed?     C. completely start the book over again from the beginning? I’ve found that I most frequently go with option A, because I figure that if the book is good I will end up enjoying it even if I’ve missed some details about the plot. Spoiler alert: I read  Infinite Jest,  completely misunderstood a good portion of the plot, and actually thought that a character had died when he really didn’t. I still loved the book, and I give myself a pass for that one considering what  Infinite Jest  is. Any time that I have tried option B I’m pretty sure I have failed to find the exact deta...

When I learned that the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP) houses over 21 million unique materials I really didn’t believe it--I thought maybe their website had been mistaken. The number loses its meaning to me when I try to imagine a building that can hold that many things. But taking a walk through the building’s numerous vaults containing shelf after shelf of boxes upon boxes of manuscripts, books, paintings, photographs, maps, etc. etc. helps one to grasp the reality behind that number. And then you may ask yourself: what do you do with all that stuff? The first thing to do is, well, keep it there. And keep the room cool and dark and somewhat dry and for the most part, all the stuff should stay pretty much intact. But then what? I think most would agree that keeping all that stuff intact is pretty pointless if all it does is sit there in obscurity. And here we arrive at one of the many challenges of being an archivist: the balance between wanting to share archival materials ...

This might sound dorky or cheesy, but a small portion of why I love The Preston and Steve Show is because the hosts and guests often make me feel good about getting older. All of the show’s members are at least a little older than I am, but they wake up before dawn and get on that show every morning and sound like they are just having the best time, and they talk about all their different hobbies and adventures, and perhaps most importantly they continue to learn new things every day even though they frequently revisit the same topics and use pretty much the same formula for every show. Listening to them feels familiar and casual but there is usually at least one moment per show when I hear something I had never before considered, or when one of the show members relates a story about something simple but new that they tried and then I want to try it (like making an edible charcuterie board), and then the cast continues making fart jokes and laughing about goofy nonsense and I remind m...

Video games, and more specifically PC games, hold a special place in my childhood memories. I don’t play games nearly as much now as I did when I was a kid, but I still enjoy learning about and maybe trying out some newer games--usually through my boyfriend who is much more adventurous in his gaming habits than I ever was. When I do attempt to play a game on my own I’ve found that I’m most interested in revisiting the oldies that I played as a kid, if only for the nostalgia.  My PC-gaming habit probably reached its peak around 1998, when my dad plopped a big, loud Dell in his home office and started bringing me along on his trips to CompUSA. Around the same time, I was really into horses and so I developed a strong interest in any game that involved horseback riding. As it turns out, though, most horseback riding PC games of that time were not great, and a blog post I read from The Mane Quest  provides some reasons why. The reason that most deeply resonated with me is the fac...