You tried to be good, in your own small way, and the world smacked you across the face. You’re also angry. You had good intentions, and at least you put in the effort — shouldn’t that count for something?! And you’re discouraged. You can’t afford to do much more than what you did, because you’re not a billionaire who can start some giant charitable foundation, and given everything else we have to deal with in our everyday lives, who has the time and money and energy to think about ethics?
In short: being good is impossible, and it was pointless to even try, and we should all just eat hormone-filled cheeseburgers, toss the trash directly into the Pacific Ocean, and give up.
That was a fun experiment. What now?
The idea of concealing a vegetable in a meal has, of course, been around since the first toddler learned to wail at a plate of limp broccoli. And there have been attempts to coax adults to join in along the way, such as Jessica Seinfeld’s 2010 cookbook “Double Delicious!” geared toward home cooks seeking guidance for slipping blitzed produce into family meals. (“Jerry’s Cinnamon Buns” call for a half-cup of carrot puree in the dough and a quarter-cup of cauliflower puree in the icing.)
A fantasy book can have all the dazzling magic, intricate plotting, and gorgeous prose in the world, but it won't amount to much if there's not a solid main character in there driving things forward. Lucky for us, V.E. Schwab's "Gallant" has one of the best young-adult protagonists I've read in some time, and she's the one leading us through a deliciously creepy world filled with mysterious journals, haunted houses, and gothic magic.
What we have, then, is an interesting historical novel about a family in 19th-century America, whose story begins in theatrical celebrity and ends in notoriety, broken by the Civil War and the irreconcilable convictions it exposed and the bloody passions they unleashed.
“The Second Half” profiles a curated group of interesting women who have hit their stride and used earlier experiences as “compost for what’s growing in the second half,” as one of the book’s subjects, Luisah Teish, a shaman and spiritual anthropologist, aptly describes it. Many of the women have been scarred by wars, coups, poverty, racism and other forms of oppression. While some experienced lives of privilege, all had their share of difficulty. How the women dealt with their challenges is instructive. All look to the future with a sense of equanimity.
This lighthearted book is for anyone who is trying to make sense of their decision making and inner biases while taking a ride through history in a linear narrative with short digestible chapters. It contains meaningful insight on human behavior and people’s less-than rational tendencies.
Our dirtbags, our dirtbags
were medicine men.