This week, a more America-centric set of recommendations than usual, covering: the gargantuan crisis of America’s “health-care-industrial” complex, which is literally killing the nation with galactically inflated prices and substandard healthcare; the Alice-in-Wonderland nature of America’s “sequestration” debacle; how the “personalized” Internet experience created by user profiling and content filtering actually delivers up two different…
Art, Mystery, and Magic: A Fireside Chat with Don Webb
“True mysteries give more energy, more questions every time you find an answer. I truly think that searching after mysteries is the source of the immortalization of the human soul. If I ever write anything that makes someone consider that maybe they donât know everything about everything, then I have succeeded.” — Don Webb Don…
Recommended Reading 34
The Teeming Brain’s “Recommended Reading” series has been on hiatus since last November. And now it’s back, with a slightly altered/streamlined format (read: no graphics, just links and text) that’s more sustainable in the context of your trusty editor’s various other claims on time, energy, and attention. * * * Madrid: Dignity and Indignation Aaron…
Real Succubus Tales: Sleep Paralysis and the Genesis of Erotic Horror
I was struck by Richard Gavinâs recent commentary in which he observed that most horror fiction is rarely horrifying, but rather tends to focus on peripheral unpleasantness, such as nausea, gore, or bloodlust. As I read this, spontaneous images immediately welled up in my mind from some of the most horrifying moments of my life…
Lovecraftian Legacy
A Search for the Heroic in Lovecraftian Fiction, Part Two NOTE: This article is the second in a series. It follows directly on from Part One, which sets the stage. * * * Having established that Lovecraft’s stories can be at least vaguely cheerful and optimistic, and that they can also feature feats of heroism…
The NDAA and America’s looming totalitarian dystopia
Chris Hedges has brought a lawsuit against President Obama for signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Here’s his explanation of what’s at stake. Read slowly and carefully, the better to take it in. The section permits the military to detain anyone, including U.S. citizens, who âsubstantially supportâ — an…
Book Review: ‘Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History’ by Richard Smoley
NOTE: This is a longer version of a review that also appears at New York Journal of Books. The book itself was published just today. Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History, by Richard Smoley. Tarcher/Penguin. Published February 7, 2013. 240 pages. Reviewed by Matt Cardin There’s a handful of writers working today whose books about…
Financial dystopia: “The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own”
In a review of Why I Left Goldman Sachs: A Wall Street Story, the new (October 2012) book by Greg Smith — who also wrote last year’s bombshell piece “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs” for The New York Times — Michael Lewis makes the following cogent, riveting, and frightening observation about the current world…
Book Review: Wiley-Blackwell’s ‘The Encyclopedia of the Gothic’
A couple of months ago I was invited to join the Reviewer Panel at the online New York Journal of Books. NYJB gives their official blessing and permission to reviewers who want to republish their reviews at their own sites, so that’s something you’ll start seeing here at The Teeming Brain in weeks and months…
From Michael Dirda, “an exhortation to read, read, read”
Over at The American Scholar, Michael Dirda is retiring his wonderful “Browsings” column. (In case you’re somehow unaware of Michael Dirda — a crazy thought — he “is a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and the author of the memoir An Open Book and of four collections of essays: Readings, Bound to Please, Book by Book, and…