Colin Dickey
@colindickey
Writer of books, most recently Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy. Also Ghostland, The Unidentified, Afterlives of the Saints, Cranioklepty. Opinions mine, not my employer’s. He/him.
Can anyone help me make out this guy's name? "J. Tombsard"? (Or, if you know a reliable way to search the crew list of a British naval ship circa 1881....)
Putting this on repeat in prep for tonight's talk... www.atlasobscura.com/experiences/...
It’s a really cool place, highly recommend. You think the food will be crap because of the decor but it’s the opposite, and the decor is an insane amount of fun. Also this moose
Also—I couldn’t fit this in my review of JD Vance’s “Communion,” but related to TMT there’s an aside where he brings up Ernest Becker…and *completely* misses the point. Becker’s whole point is that wreckers like Vance do horrific things precisely because they’re *unaware* of their terror of death.
But the signs are still everywhere—literally. And as Philip K Dick says, reality denied returns to haunt. Terror Management Theory is a sub field of sociology that says that our anxiety around death can affect our lives in unpredictable ways, particularly when it’s not faced openly.
We have no communal memorial for the lives lost. No public accounting, no shared history of what happened. The events of those years (which in some ways are still happening) devolved immediately into partisanship and disinformation. And as soon as the lockdown was lifted, we were told to move on.
I was on the subway and this commuter next to me had absolutely no regard for personal space, just look at this bullshit, can you believe the nerve
every hometown's got the ominous megastructure, what's yours? Alt text description: The Winchester Mystery House of San Jose, California
O Horizon is not a great movie, but it was a great chance for me to think through what the future of "grief bots" might mean: an emerging market for addictive products that prey on those in mourning by promising to take away their pain. Which was kinda fascinating, given the film's director.
To give you a little sense of what this book is like, here’s a passage where he suggests, among other things, that the best way to combat anti-semitism is Christianity, the same thing that brought the Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous Americans together.
I wasn’t able to fit in Vance’s Goodreads review of The Year of Magical Thinking but here you go
Wait, genuine question: where is the authors’ lawsuit against Meta? Because knowingly scraping a pirate website is exactly what Anthropic got busted for and I know for damn sure all of our books are on Anna’s Archive. Is something currently in the works? www.404media.co/judge-rules-...
Is @hildur.bsky.social’s Dead Weight the first novel to feature Bluesky? We may need an official ruling from @joshuajfriedman.com….
Honestly, the more often I copy/paste this reply to these book club scams, the more satisfying it gets
Tonight's extremely weird Monster of the Month (now with more cowbell): www.atlasobscura.com/experiences/...