Show & Tell: Cloture? We're Talkin' 'bout Cloture?
Unstacked Digest for the week of March 10-16
This is Show & Tell where I tell you some things I loved from the week and the one thing I hated, plus round up everything else going on around these parts. The first half of Show & Tell is free to all. The adoration and hateration are for paid subscribers only.
Is everyone exhausted or just me? I don’t know if it is the news or the fact that the mini’s are now in baseball and tennis, but I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon and can barely keep my eyes open. I want you to know though, I was snack mom for baseball, and I brought three snack options, because I do not fuck around with snack duty. This is what I was made for.
As a reminder, the Trans Rights Readathon starts on Friday of this week. If you don’t know what it is, the TRR website says:
During the 11 days of the readathon (March 21-31), read trans* books and donate to trans* organizations.
This is a decentralized fundraiser, so how you participate is up to you. You can read 1 book or 20 books. You can donate to a large organization or a personal GoFundMe.This year, we will also be sharing calls to action on over social media during the 11-day event.
Pretty simple. I hope, if you’re the readerly type, you’ll join me in being part of this fantastic annual tradition.
This Week in The Stacks
Last week I talked about transphobia in the (book) world and Meghan Markle hate.
Omar El Akkad was on The Stacks to talk about his book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This1.
The second installment of The Nonfiction Files is here, and this week I talked about how to pick a nonfiction book that will fit your tastes.
Books I Read This Week
The Custom of the Country by Edith Wharton
The story of Undine Spragg2, a young woman midwestern social climber newly in New York City with her parents to find a husband and become a socialite. This is Wharton’s giving sharp commentary into the world of the wealthy in the early 20th century. I read The Custom of the Country on the suggestion of
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
Over the course of four years, Goldstone follows five families in Atlanta that are part of a growing class of Americans, the “working homeless”, and shares their stories with us. This one is intense and harrowing. It is extremely readable as far as the writing goes, but the events and traumas suffered by these families because of the failures of governments and the overwhelming power of capitalism makes this book a challenge to sit with. I both couldn’t stop reading it and couldn’t wait to be done. The choice to follow five families feels like one too many, it was hard to keep track of who is who. The details blurred due to the repetitive nature of the events suffered and the number of people we’re keeping track of. I understand the desire to present the redundancy, but at the same time it is tricky for a reader to sift through3. Overall, I really liked this book and think folks should pick it up.
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams
You bet your bottom I read this book. I started it the day it came out and got through this, already infamous, Facebook takedown in three days. My big takeaway: the people at the top of Facebook (Mark Zuckerberg et al.) were (are) deeply egotistical, small minded, consistently overstepped boundaries, and cared about nothing more than their own popularity and pocketbooks. That being said, I felt like I knew this already. There is some juicy stuff late in the book about Trump’s first election and Facebook that was rage inducing and icky as hell. Also, the bits about China and Myanmar and the lack of regard for human rights that were chilling. The book is far too long, maybe 100 pages too long, Wynn-Williams gets lost on if this is in fact a true memoir or a takedown and so we get a lot of filler. I also came out pretty mixed on Sarah Wynn-Williams and her reliability as our narrator. She’s the only one we get, so it will have to do, but she misses the point a few times herself, in my opinion. My verdict, if you’re just curious about the gossipy bits, you can get away with only reading the reviews, but if you need to read it for yourself, it is a solid enough book, go for it.
Housekeeping
I had the best time as a guest on Add to Cart with Kulap Vilaysack and SuChin Pak talking about my favorite things like my Brick and Nerd Clusters.
I am never not excited to be a guest on 2 Black Girls 1 Rose, but to get to vent about this season of Love is Blind, was a real treat.
My all time favorite film is A League of Their Own and I got to do close to an hour on the movie on the Pop Fiction Women podcast. What an absolute dream come true.
They just dropped the lineup for the LA Times Festival of Books, and as usual, your girl will be there. This year I am on The Mainstage4 in conversation with actress, comedian, and author Jenny Slate. This goes down on Sunday April 27, no tickets needed.
Things I Love…
Book News
I already wrote a little about the new Facebook exposé from Sarah Wynn-Williams, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, but here is more. The book is making plenty of news this week. Flatiron Books surprise announced it a week before publication5, it dropped this Tuesday6, and then Facebook7 immediately sued Wynn-Williams to make sure she couldn’t do publicity on the book. Of course, whenever a giant company sues for something to be stopped, it just makes the public want in, so the book was at #3 on all of Amazon last I checked. LOL.
I honestly don’t know that Facebook needed to do all that. Yes, what is in the book is embarrassing and some of it is really icky, but the worst stuff I feel like we already knew, and the other stuff is just gossip. But, the law suits do prove a lot of what Wynn-Williams says in the book about the Facebook higher ups are bad in a crisis and never can see the bigger picture.
Internet Things
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
No caption needed.