If someone pressed me to name just one film as my all-time favorite, I would probably choose The Princess Bride. Some of my most treasured childhood memories include watching the movie over and over and quoting it with family and friends. To this day, lines from the film or echoes of Mark Knopfler’s gorgeous soundtrack […]
Disclosure: I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review. Jonathan Tepper’s Shooting Up is a memoir of Tepper’s boyhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Tepper’s parents were American missionaries who traveled to Spain in the 1980s and founded a small drug rehabilitation community that eventually expanded and […]
Summary: Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson’s The 12 Levers is the end product of an extensive research project aimed at identifying the best psychological tools for improving human life. The book distills a massive amount of information from self-help and psychotherapy into “12 Levers” that we can pull to cope, heal, learn, grow, and reduce […]
To the Gods I don’t believe in(Which is all of them)Please hear me nowListen with your void-rapt earsAnd answer me this:How can a man tell his beloved dog“The summer of your life is over”? How can I say it?Those long, sun-soaked days we thought would never endGone, spent, never returningHow can I say“Not that toy, […]
Summary: Natalie Y. Gutiérrez’s The Pain We Carry is a guide for people of color who are struggling with complex posttraumatic stress disorder. Gutiérrez organizes the book around a “Cultural Empowerment Approach” and names four cultural legacy burdens: racism, patriarchy, materialism, and individualism. She also outlines four “empowerment steps” that readers can take to address […]
Note: This post is a departure from my usual book review format. It was written when I first read No Bad Parts back in 2024, but I am only just now getting around to publishing it. I hope you enjoy! Cast of Characters: Manager (MN): an intellectual, age 36 Firefighter (FF): a skeptic, age 36 […]
My wife is a librarian, so one of her great joys is finding new books to recommend to people. And she’s damned good at it. She reads widely and has developed a canny ability to internalize someone’s preferences and point them in the direction of something new that they will most likely enjoy. Usually her […]
Table of Contents Three Roads to the Same Door Compulsion or Connection? Where We Are Defining Artificial Intimacy and Attachment Hacking The “Partner” Who Never Takes a Day Off The Differential Question Attachment Paralysis and Relational Atrophy More For Clinicians The Strongest Case Against Takeaways/TL;DR References Three Roads to the Same Door Over the last […]
Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom is a novel about a nightmare road trip across America. The protagonist is Abbott, an anxious, 26-year-old Lyft driver who spends his free time as a small-time streamer. The story starts when Abbott meets Ether, a voluble young woman who offers him $200,000 […]
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Strife is the fourth novel in his Children of Time series. Whenever a series reaches the very upper stratum of my science fiction pantheon, it can be a little scary to learn that a new installment has been published. It’s definitely exciting, but I also fear it might be disappointing. Will […]