The Reality of Being a Parent With a Controversial Past

Lily Burana wrote a bestselling memoir about her life as a stripper. Now she’s the mother of a four-year-old.

Our cultural fondness for outlaws is context-specific: Everyone loves a badass, but no one loves a bad parent.

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we Parents with Pasts plead for the clemency of kindness, for assumptions of our inherent normalcy. After all, we wrestle our kids’ pants on one leg at a time, just like everybody else.

Prisoners use contraband cellphones to educate themselves, get healthcare, earn income in legitimate business, do political activism, and connect with loved ones and the outside world.

Florida teachers face threatened felony prosecution for having unapproved books in classroom libraries.

The Last Days of Hollywood’s Most Reviled Reporter (NYTimes). A profile of the late Nikki Finke, the most hated and feared reporter in Hollywood. She was an internet journalist in the tradition of Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper.

Julie and I went for a walk and saw this house around the corner. It looks nice.

This Guy Noticed Jigsaw Puzzle Companies Use The Same Patterns, So He Made Some Mashups.

“Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”

Seth Godin: Bitterness is “a wall you can lean against, whenever you choose.”

Jacobin: A Marxist View of Tolkien’s Middle Earth

J. R. R. Tolkien’s fantasy world is a medieval utopia with poverty and oppression airbrushed out of the picture. But Tolkien’s work also contains a romantic critique of industrial capitalism that is an important part of its vast popular appeal.

Also: race, gender, and sex in Middle Earth.

Good morning. Here are your daily ducks.

That strange quality of light you’re seeing in this photo is called “sunshine.” We have not seen it here in a while. True fact: San Diego was once famous for it!

Everywhere on Earth, from Europe to China to Africa to Australia and the Americas, is dominated by Europe or its legacy.

The whole world is either Europe, a European colony, or conquered by Europe or the US (a European colony).

That’s all coming to an end now, says Ian Welsh.

And it’s happening so fast we can see it.

The Death Throes Of The World Europe Made:

[Conflict with China] is about whether a non-European power will be allowed to remake the world Europe made. … It is an existential threat to European rule, and it is being treated as such. The “yellow peril” has arrived.

In 30 years, will Mandarin be the the new English? The new lingua-Franca? The language everyone has to know and that you can, if clumsily, get by on almost everywhere?

Absent a major war, likely nuclear, or civilization collapse, I find it hard to see a scenario where China doesn’t become the most important global power.