"Observation," hunh? That's the "Cultural Attache" of time travel.

Go back to Tertiary and tell the Sequential Czar that the Knossos Front will never release the Cahokia palimpsest until the gravissimas is freed.

I am unpersuaded by the "End of History" Theory, preferring the "we all want to be Malcolm Gladwell, including Malcolm Gladwell, but none of us are (including Malcolm Gladwell).

xkcd.com/863/

Something that was lost in adding ethical consumption around authorial character and politics is the readiness to make the distinction.

No one ever talks about how "go touch grass" was a thinktank-crafted effort by Big Poaceae.

IMO, "problematic" encountered semantic drift, where it was more in line with your description, but became 'wrong.'

And to discuss it, I think that you would need a non-pejorative way to say (sigh) "cancel culture" (Manichean?) and other weirdnesses.

In fairness, neither does Oswald, so the banquet is still all you can eat.
bsky.app/profile/adam...

Agreed, but boy howdy does this get harder with age.

The twist is that I think no one cares, but persist in it thinking that others do.

Anyway, hard things are uncomfortable, and sometimes getting that joy means postponing it. But it is best not to play this game at all.

I think that the shelf envy is the bad part. To draw on my inner Tyler Durden, you are not your TBR, you are not your page count.

I think this is one of the bad influences of social media on reading. That things can be so visual. That things can be so metric.

Qualified no. An instructive book can still be bad, or bad for you, or bad for you now. Sometimes it's just not worth it. But it is worth being more self-critical about the choice and why you are making it than it might be for lit fic or something.