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diagonalizable.bsky.social
@diagonalizable.bsky.social
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diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
Author|Maurice Natanson. Title|The Erotic Bird: Phenomenology in Literature. From inside cover|"How does literature illuminate the way we live?...Natanson...draws upon [phenomenology's] unique power to show how fiction can highlight aspects of experience that are normally left unexamined. By exploring the structure of the everyday world, [he] reveals the 'uncanny' that lies at the core of the ordinary." We can say it took Natanson his whole life to write this book since it was finished the year before he dies. I've been off/on reading this very book since the late 90s. Why keep it for so long? It's phenomenology, philosophy, literature all in one, plus Natanson was one of my teachers, plus a memory I have of seeing him walking slowly in the rain without an umbrella & stopping to give him a ride.
December 5, 2025 at 5:03 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
Choose books from your current TBR/TBRA shelves in some general order.
Title: High Adventure. Author credits: Stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Fleming, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, James M. Cain, Edgar Rice Burroughs, & Others. [This tattered old paperback with the obvious Indiana Jones allusions (same font & colors as movie title, hat, leather jacket etc. -- but no man-purse hmm) is one I've read some of but not all so TBR since "read" (past tense) means all pages read. "High Adventure" has a particular meaning that doesn't involve recreational drugs. I'm not sure of the meaning but fear and courage are necessarily involved. What else? Probably something about which you would say "glad that's over" and "hate to go through it" but also "glad I did it".]
December 4, 2025 at 2:53 PM
Reposted
inclusionchick.bsky.social
This is really good news! 📚💙📚
amlibraryassoc.bsky.social American Library Association @amlibraryassoc.bsky.social · 1d
NEWS: The Institute of Museum & Library Services has restored ALL previously canceled federal grants to libraries, following a ruling by a federal judge in Rhode Island last month.

This is a massive win for libraries & communities in every state & territory!

Learn more: www.ala.org/news/2025/12...
ALL IMLS grants restored in every state & territory. In response to a ruling from a federal judge in Rhode Island, the Institute of Museum and Library Services reinstated all previously canceled grants in every state and territory. It's a huge win for libraries and our communities. "The reinstatement of all IMLS grants means that libraries across the country will be able to resume vital services for learning, imagination, and economic opportunity. We are breathing a sigh of relief, but the fight is not over." ALA President Sam Helmick. Show up for our libraries, American Library Association.
December 4, 2025 at 1:07 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Covers of books on your TBR/TBRA shelf.
Title=Lost Cosmonaut: Observations of an anti-tourist. Author=Daniel Kalder. From back cover="...the anti-tourist seeks out the dark, lost zones of our planet, eschewing comfort, embracing hunger and hallucinations, and always traveling at the wrong time of year....Kalder visits locations that most of us don't even know exist---Tatarstan, Kalmykia, Mari El, and Udmurtia. He loves these places because no one else does, because everyone else passes them by..." [I read this years ago, & I'll read it again (hence TBRA) because it's how most of us travel around. We're mostly like everyone else around us and yet not. We're cheap. We're like that person you vaguely remember who stayed a few days in the cubicle of plywood & chain link next to you in Rangoon (speaking old english). If you get noticed you're like Toussaint Charboneau who gets mentioned in some obscure notes, maybe described in a book a century after you die for a few pages. But that's the epitome of fame and high adventure. 99% of us knew and were known by a few good people and the occasional bad one. We arrived, we stayed a bit, we departed. We're happy.
December 4, 2025 at 4:04 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge 💙📚 Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Augie's Revenge. Alex Kudera. Author of Fight For Your Long Day. [And from back cover:] An adjunct teacher who is called "professor" (in the US I think that is really a job title, so "adjunct" is accurate) has been adjuncting for [only] ten years. The teacher joins with 2 or 4 others to plan a "revenge-robbery" for "a pile of cash" -- and "justice" meted out to someone who stole inheritance, beat, molested the teacher. [Theme of book is not my usual cup of tea, this "Breaking Bad" vibe. Nevertheless I suppose even teachers can willfully shade from jedi to gray jedi to gray sith to full on sith. But even Alan Shore stopped at gray sith when he became Raymond Reddington. I haven't read this book so maybe the teacher stops before full sithness.]
December 3, 2025 at 12:10 PM
Reposted
afterdinnerconversation.com
December 2, 2025 at 3:31 AM
Reposted
afterdinnerconversation.com
Are you a writer/reader that dabbles in #philosophy and #ethics questions? Read our monthly magazine and get short stories delivered right to your inbox every month. Just $4.95 for 12 issues! #literarymag #literarymagazine

buff.ly/WdRNlwD
December 2, 2025 at 7:57 PM
Reposted
osintr.bsky.social
NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, on the Kremlin’s cynical “peace plans”:

🔹️“I stopped commenting a long time ago on what Putin, Lavrov, and Peskov say. I’ve met them all, even when I was Prime Minister of the Netherlands: let them say what they want, it’s not always necessary to react.”
December 2, 2025 at 8:25 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves.
Democratic Authority: A Philosophical Framework. David M. Estlund (from 2008){From the inside cover} "David Estlund shows why [a merely] procedural justification of democratic procedure doesn't work, and he offers a groundbreaking alternative based on the idea that democratic authority and legitimacy must depend partly on democracy's tendency to make good decisions. . . . avoids epistocracy, or the rule of those who know . . . [by arguing] that while some few people probably do know best, this can be used in political justification only if their expertise is acceptable from all reasonable points of view . . . [it's] recognizably democratic---laws and policies actually authorized by the people subject to them."
December 2, 2025 at 10:44 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Authors) Paco Ignacio Taibo II & Subcommandante Marcos. (Title) The Uncomfortable Dead: a novel by four hands (what's missing is missing). (from back cover) "In alternating chapters, Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and the consistently excellent Paco Ignacio Taibo II create an uproarious murder mystery with intersecting storylines. The chapters written by the famously masked Marcos originate in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, while those penned by Taibo star his Coca-Cola-and-cigarette-consuming series detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. The two stories collide absurdly and dramatically in the sprawl of Mexico City."
December 2, 2025 at 2:17 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves.
Science and Partial Truth: A Unitary Approach to Models and Scientific Reasoning. Newton C.A. da Costa, Steven French. (From inside cover) Should we regard scientific theories as true or empirically adequate? Authors develop "machinery of 'partial structures'". (This book is over 20 years old and I got it because primarily of da Costa, whose recent death is a huge loss, who was one of the first authors I read that opened the wonderful area of paraconsistent logics etc. for me way back.)
December 1, 2025 at 4:47 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Alain Robbe-Grillet DANS LE LABYRINTHE roman Les Éditions de Minuit A guy is wandering in a city, it's snowing, the rowhouses look the same. Is he lost? Maybe. Details repeat. He has a box and he needs to give it to someone. He belongs there and is not of there. Dead ends, repeating his steps, his observations.
November 30, 2025 at 4:44 AM
Reposted
prospect.org
A judge decided that RealPage doesn’t have to pay back a cent of the $4 billion it stole from tenants. Timid attorneys and timid judges seem determined “to let big corporations run over anything in their path.” From @ddayen.bsky.social: trib.al/PlJbQZ9
The Wrist-Slappers Strike Again - The American Prospect
A settlement with algorithmic collusion facilitator RealPage allows it to keep allegedly ill-gotten profits and continue innovating to raise rents.
trib.al
November 26, 2025 at 8:15 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Zermelo's Axiom of Choice--Its Origins, Development, & Influence. Gregory H. Moore. m=2m=(alephnull)m=(msquared) (from back cover) "The axiom of choice is the most controversial axiom in the entire history of mathematics. . . . This treatment is the only full-length history of the axiom in English . . ."
November 25, 2025 at 4:34 AM
Reposted
shoshana.bsky.social
Boston's Mayor Wu playing with Yo-Yo Ma at Symphony Hall
November 23, 2025 at 5:11 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
Janelle Monáe (author). The Memory Librarian and other stories of dirty computer (title). Cover designed by Paula Russell Szafranski. "Contents" however lists the following "collaborators": Alaya Dawn Johnson, Danny Lore, Eve L. Ewing, Yohanca Delgado, Sheree Reneée Thomas. "Dirty Computer introduced a world in which thoughts --as a means of self-conception-- could be controlled or erased by a select few. And whether you were human, AI, or other, your life and sentience were dictated by those who'd convinced themselves they had the right to decide your fate. That was until Jane 57821 decided to remember and break free. Expanding from that mythos, these stories fully explore what it's like to live in a totalitarian society . . . and what it takes to get out of it."
November 23, 2025 at 4:28 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Title) Deliberative Politics in Action, Analysing Parliamentary Discourse. (Authors) Jürg Steiner, André Bächtiger, Markus Spörndli, and Marco R. Steenbergen. (Series) Theories of Institutional Design. (Back cover) "...This book provides the first extended empirical study of deliberative politics, addressing in particular questions of the preconditions and consequences of high-level deliberation. ..."
November 22, 2025 at 5:05 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order.
(Novel) The Carmudgeon. (Author) J. Hayes Hurley. (Cover art) "Squaring the Circle", Douglas Leichter. (Back cover) "Marty Parrish is a logician whose powers of thinking are most impressive. His mind operates lucidly and systematically. He has full command of any argument presented to him, but only while he is in his classroom at San Francisco State University. . ."
November 21, 2025 at 3:58 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
The Real World of Democratic Theory. Ian Shapiro
November 20, 2025 at 1:29 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Top rectangle holds name of the "collection" or series: Epistemologies of the South. Bottom rectangle holds title: The Pluriverse of Human Rights, the diversity of struggles for dignity. [And editors:] Edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Bruno Sena Martins. Also in the rectangle is the publisher's logo, an R in which the left leg says "Routledge" and the right leg is curved to form two silhouettes, one white, and one that emerges from the background color. Behind the rectangles a 2017 picture by Mário Vitória, Animismo urgente de future. The image contains flying fin-creatures, a luminescent moon, blue and black clouds, a tower with a lengthy chunk missing, apparently.
November 17, 2025 at 10:18 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: Dealing With Dictators -- dilemmas of U.S. diplomacy and intelligence analysis 1945-1990. Editors: Ernest R. May and Philip D. Zelikow. Cover divides into two rectangles white and black. Not quite centered, leaning to right is another rectangle divided into four rectangles: (starting NW quadrant clockwise) pictures of Mobutu Sese Seko, Saddam Hussein, Ferdinand & Imelda Marcos, Jiang Jie-shi (Chiang Kai-shek). (Probably could also be called Dealing With Authoritarians.)
November 16, 2025 at 1:23 PM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: Question Authority --- a polemic about trust in five meditations. Author: Mark Kingwell. The cover shows 8 pin-on buttons, 3 showing pin side, 5 showing comments: "but not your mother", "trust no one", "no, they don't know either", "before it questions you!", "these are not the droids you're looking for". Cover was designed by Michel Vrana.
November 15, 2025 at 11:47 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
November 11, 2025 at 5:39 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Title: On Global Justice. Author: Mathias Risse. Bottom of page: Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford. The cover of this hardback book is blank. Hence the title page. The idea of this book retains local concerns and global concerns in the interests of everyone. If you think inconsistencies make it impossible, think epistemic paraconsistent logics. If that's obscure, think Federation of Planets.
November 8, 2025 at 2:43 AM
diagonalizable.bsky.social
#Booksky #bookchallenge
💙📚
Choose 20 books on your current TBR/TBRA shelves. One book per day for 20 days, in no particular order. No explanations, no expectations, just covers.
Author: Gregory Benford. (partially covered by an old B. Dalton price sticker of $2.95, but I bought it for less than 25cents at a library sale). Title: Timescape. Published in 1980, this printing is 1981 by Pocket Books of Simon & Schuster. I mention that because the cover is remarkable. There's Earth surrounded by 3 rings. The remarkable part is that Earth and the rings are raised (like it was impressed by an old notary public's metal tool), the countries on Earth are raised also. Tactile surprise & pleasure indeed. The context of the book's content is a message is sent from future sucky 1998 Earth to 1962 Earth with information on how to avoid the suckiness.
November 7, 2025 at 4:45 PM