cool articles & papers

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When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics
> so-comically-depressing-its-funny overview of how woefully dumb the accepted model of climate economics is, explained very accessibly
Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny
> THE piece on body dysmorphia in media
Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: “Boys’ Love” as Girls’ Love in Shôjo Manga
> paywalled (JSTOR)
> really awesome paper on gender-fluidity in yaoi

currently reading

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The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself; Olaudah Equiano
I saw this on a display table outside of used bookstore in Hamilton and picked it up immediately. I've read a lot of stuff from the 19th century, which is unfortunately but unsurprisingly almost always from the white colonial viewpoint. So when I saw an autobiography from 1789 written by an African man who survived enslavement and went on to travel the world and become a successful writer in the abolitionist movement, I knew I needed it. My copy is the Norton Critical Edition, which includes a detailed introduction and supporting documents and essays. I'm not very far into it yet, but this book is worth it for the introduction alone, which illuminates the abolitionist literary tradition that is most often ignored nowadays in favour of the "no one at the time knew better" excuse. Equiano is also just a good writer.

previous book

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Memoirs from the House of the Dead; Fyodor Dostoevsky
I'm a really big fan of Dostoevsky, I first read The Idiot in summer 2021 and I was hooked. So far my Dostoevsky collection includes: The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Brothers Karamazov, Notes from Underground and The Double. Memoirs, the loosely fictionalized account of the author's time in prison in Siberia, is very different from his novels and yet very much the same. I enjoyed it (aside from the usual distasteful 19th century antisemitism).