Quinn: The Ethical Piracy Boiling Point Has Been Reached

Like everyone over Christmas vacation, I got a lot done, and (like everyone over vacation) I didn't quite get EVERYTHING done that I wanted to do.  I love the last two weeks of the year partially because I check out from work and don't do anything related to my day job, and instead do a bunch of projects that I've put off, that I haven't had time for, and that I can finally make time for.  I have talked about this many times, but I'm very focused on resolutions and achieving goals, and I think part of that comes with momentum coming out of the last two weeks of the year, feeling the sense of achievement that you realize when you are doing things that for months you've thought of just in passing.  It means that you start January with a speed, and hopefully can maintain that for a long time until the to do list gets clogged up again.

One of the things that I wanted to do more of over break was watching television, which I am absurdly behind on right now for 2025 series, and a show that I intended to see (but didn't) was Heated Rivalry, which I will surely make time for in January.  The show is getting really solid reviews both from lusty fans and from critics alike, and it feels right up my alley.  I have, however, been watching the press tour featuring Hudson Williams & Connor Storrie, two absurdly good-looking newcomers who have been delightfully lascivious about their characters in interviews, and showing a maximum amount of chemistry offscreen that, if the reviews are any indication, they'll bring to their show, which was already renewed for another season.  It is not surprising, given the newness they both bring, that they would jointly cash in on another project (gotta strike while the lightning is hot), and so they were signed on as celebrity voice actors for the novel Ember & Ice on the erotica audiobook app Quinn.

Williams & Storrie are not the first celebrities to provide voice work for the app (Jamie Campbell Bower, Andrew Scott, and Tom Blyth have done work on the app as well), but given their celebrity is white hot right now, the two of them appearing on Quinn kind of broke the internet.  The Quinn app collapsed within the first 24 hours of the audiobook announcement, seeing record traffic on the site.  It also saw a number of people online talking about pirating and how to get to listen to the product for free, to the point that one of the employees of Quinn (which, she claims, only has 11 employees in total) went viral for chastising people for wanting to take this content without paying for it (you can seen this video here).

The response to this was fascinating to me, and why I'm writing about it before having either watched the show or listened to the audiobook (which, I'll own, I probably won't-I don't really like audiobooks which is a discussion for another day, and if I did listen, it would almost certainly be just to listen to these two actors specifically if I become properly enamored with Heated Rivalry).  Comments ranged from agreement with the employee (her username is Michaela Amanda) to people complaining about the economy & not being able to afford the product.

The latter is, honestly, something you see on virtually every video or commentary online right now.  Unemployments numbers are high, and with tariffs, a number of products ranging from electronics to food staples to home repair supplies are considerably more expensive than they were a year ago.  People are definitely in belt-tightening mode, and in some ways have been since the Covid-19 pandemic quarantine ended.  But this sort of bizarre obsession with chastising advertisements or new products with complaints about the cost is omnipresent online.  Every time there's a new product introduction from a company, or a new commercial for an upcoming sale, or talking about seeing a move or concert, or a cooking video that has ingredients that cost more than bread & milk, or literally anything that might cost some money, you will see dozens of comments in the social media posts complaining about the cost, and how this is completely unaffordable.

And it's gotten to the point where, quite frankly, it makes no sense, and feels like people just complaining to complain (and in the process just being wrong), with the Quinn app being perhaps the best example of this.  In the United States, in order to use the Quinn app for one month, it costs $8 (I'm aware this is slightly different in foreign markets, but it's not that much different in most of them).  $8 is not a lot of money-you would pay considerably more than that to buy a book or to legally watch the TV series Heated Rivalry on HBO...this is a pretty cheap investment if you are truly interested in listening to this story read by these two actors.  It should not require you to have to add in the proviso "I'm aware some people aren't financially in a position to buy this"...it's not a yacht or a trip to France or even a remodel on your house.  This is $8...it's not that expensive, and if people truly cannot afford to spare $8, they likely are not spending a large amount of time on Twitter & TikTok.  You should pay for it if you want it so that the writer, actors, and employees of Quinn can continue to make this available for their listeners.

Amanda pointed out (correctly) that this is not Netflix, but even if it was, I think we've lost the plot a little bit here about what the consumer is entitled to owning.  This is not healthcare or food or housing or clothing or education...it is not something that you must have to live.  It is an erotic novel read by two actors you hadn't heard of a few weeks ago, that costs less than a couple of gallons of gas.  I feel very strongly that we should give access to arts & culture to all citizens (I support free museum nights and public libraries for all), but come on here-pretending it is a hardship to be able to afford this is such a shift in the Overton Window on affordability that it makes arguments about things that are actually unaffordable (like healthcare & college education) feel disingenuous when you complain about them in the same breath.  You don't need this story to live, and this story is being provided at a very fair price.  Complaining about the cost to access or pirating it comes across as super lazy and insulting to the people who created it.  

Piracy conversations have entered a grey area in recent years with subscription services creating essentially an artificial iconoclasm, making TV series and movies completely unaccessible to the public by legal methods, and I think that the ethical implications of that conversation are worth having, but this is not that-this is accessible, affordable, and something you should have to pay to listen to if you want to hear it.  If you don't want to pay for it, that's certainly your right, and if you think $8 should be spent somewhere else, then do that (part of life is admitting you can't afford everything you want)-but pirating it doesn't make you the good guy.  It makes you the bad guy, and those artists you claim you love...you're making sure that THEY aren't getting the money they earned if you steal from them.

Ranting On...the Classics Debate

We're on our third article before I go back into hibernation and work onto some creative writing, and today we're going to do the only article that isn't related to a longtime The Many Rantings of John tradition.  We've done the $1 billion article & our "No Globe/No SAG/No Problem" article, and we've got two more, including my final Oscar predictions, but today we're going to talk about a debate that has been raging on social media recently.

A little over a year ago, I read James Joyce's Ulysses for the very first time.  Joyce's novel is considered one of the best books ever written, and the Modern Library named it the greatest work-of-fiction of the 20th Century.  I am working on getting through said Modern Library list as part of my book club, and so I knew this would eventually become a mountain I'd have to conquer.  As I was going, though, I was finding that I wasn't entirely understanding everything happening.  Joyce's novel is a take on Homer's Odyssey, which I've read (even though it's been a number of years since I tackled it), but it also relates back to a number of allusions to Irish politics and social taboos of the time, and it's a hard read.  The novel is regularly listed on "Banned Books" lists for school libraries, but my take after reading Joyce's magnum opus is if you're smart enough to understand which parts of Ulysses are dirty, you're old enough to read the book.  It was a challenge, and enough to make me think that Finnegans Wake (generally considered to be the most intellectually steep of Joyce's works) will be a good way to end this project rather than tackling it in the near future (for the curious about my current Modern Library progress, I just finished up Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which I loved, and will be reading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net next; I'm going out of order but I'm at 36 books at this point).

I read the book not just because it's part of a project, but also because I firmly believe that classic novels should be read.  There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of decades about the value of the canon, not least of which because the most ardent defender of the Western Canon, Yale Professor Harold Bloom, was generally known to be a jackass in his personal life.  But I think foundational literature and cinema is important, enough so that I devoted one of my final posts before my hiatus to it.  You can debate what qualifies as a classic, but Ulysses is one of those texts that needs to be on the list regardless of how you define the parameters.  And even if it's tough to comprehend sometimes, to quote one of my friends who I texted about halfway through knowing that I might not make it, "just keep reading, because it'll be worth it...even if you don't understand all of it."  He was right-Ulysses was magnificent, the kind of book you could read 50 times and experience something new in its 700-pages every time.

But something has happened in the classics debate that I think is really disturbing: the debate over what constitutes essential reading has laid a path for people just to find it acceptable to not read at all.  This was discussed in-depth online in the wake of Christopher Nolan's decision to make his next film an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey (which, of course, is what Ulysses is based on...see the method to my madness there?).  So many people, particularly younger people, had no concept of what The Odyssey was, and they were receiving public shaming from posters who were stunned they knew so little about one of the building blocks of literature.  This received a backlash, with those who initially didn't know about The Odyssey proclaiming anything from "that isn't taught in my country" (which is a lie if you had a European or North American education, which most of these posters did-even if it's not taught directly you're going to get allusions to Homer's work in at least one class if you're paying attention), and that it was "too difficult" for them to understand.  This led to more reveals of people using AI to understand it, dumbing down the story to simpler language (not just Homer, but everything from Dickens to Shakespeare) to the tried-and-true method of "there are no universal classics" so this isn't "essential" reading.

I'm not going to champion Harold Bloom, who is a blowhard even if I've got one of his books directly behind me right now, but I am going to say this: The Odyssey is a classic of literature.  Bloom's approach, and much of 20th Century studies of creative fiction, oftentimes precluded women, persons of color, and authors who were not from the United States, Canada, or Europe from "the canon."  That's just a fact.  But it's also foolish to backtrack so badly in trying to correct that to pretend that something like The Odyssey shouldn't be considered a classic-most of literature is in Homer's shadow...most of art is in Homer's shadow.  It's influential in a way only The Bible & Dante's The Divine Comedy can manage to trump in cultural conversation.  If you haven't read it, you can own up to it (even more so than movies, everyone has a classic book they've never gotten around to-my copies of Moby Dick and Ivanhoe have done nothing but collect dust since I bought them), but to pretend it's not important or that you can call yourself educated without having at least a cursory understanding of its story is, well, laughable.

Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey are unique in most cultural conversations because, of course, no one is exactly sure if anything their reading in terms of plot and certainly in terms of verse is actually linked with Homer's original story.  Very little is known about his life (and what is is based on people like Herodotus, who lived centuries after Homer), and his poems were carried forward through oral tradition before being published, first in Greek in the 15th Century.  So if you're reading it in English, you are reading a translation.  Same with The Bible and The Divine Comedy.

But other figures that got brought into this conversation online, like Charles Dickens, were written in a very readable language for people who speak English.  People like Dickens have long been translated into baser editions of their books; when I was in 4th and 5th grade, I read the "Great Illustrated Classics" installments of A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations as a way to learn more about these stories.  But those editions, I cannot stress enough, are for children.  They are not intended to be read by adults as definitive editions of these works.  Dickens is an accessible writer-he is not Joyce or even Dante...he is writing for the masses.  I read A Christmas Carol recently for the holiday season, and was struck by how similar it is to the many movie adaptations of it...it shouldn't be hard to read his novels.  If you are struggling with that and you're out of high school...it might not be that these books are "super challenging" for most people.  It's more likely that you are just not a practiced or strong reader.

These debates spark up constantly in the past few years, which is terrifying coupled with the rise in fascist rhetoric from right-leaning parties in the United States and Europe.  Anti-intellectualism is a key component of most rises of fascist regimes through history, one of the reasons that book burning became so synonymous with the Nazis.  But even taking politics out of it, the rise of AI to "do your thinking for you" and skipping the thinking for you, particularly for students who need to have the practice of academic rigor to, well, learn anything (you can only get by with not doing the reading for so long before you've actually not done anything), is also terrifying.  ChatGPT is opening the door to a world of people who aren't smart enough to understand books that have been taught to people much younger than them for over a century.  Reading is meant to be enjoyable and pleasurable-that's why it's a leisure activity.  But as I've said before on here, if you don't occasionally challenge yourself with what you're reading or watching on TV or watching at the movies or seeing on a stage...when are you?  Critical thinking is a skill, and if you don't use it (or let someone else, or some thing, do it for you) you'll lose that skill.

America's Next Top Laureate

Louise Gluck, the most recent American to
win the Nobel Prize in Literature

In the next 48 hours, it is expected that the Nobel Prizes will commence being announced, and with that, we will learn this year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  This is the one category that people tend to get hung up on each year in terms of who will win, mostly because (aside from the Peace prize) it's the one category that you might've heard of one of the contenders...though in an era where less than half of American adults can claim they read at least one book in the last year, this is a dwindling returns situation in terms of celebrity.

The heavy money this year is on Can Xue, a Chinese fiction writer.  The last three winners have all been from Europe, and no Asian writer since Mo Yan in 2012.  The Nobel Committee tends to like to spread-the-wealth with these things (though they do have a European bent), and so Can Xue would be a likely favorite for the prize, and is currently leading in betting markets.

But I will own-I don't know a lot about international authors, and so I am going to write an article today talking about American writers.  In the history of the prize, 12 American authors have won the prize.  They are Sinclair Lewis (1930), Eugene O'Neill (1936), Pearl S. Buck (1938), William Faulkner (1949), Ernest Hemingway (1954), John Steinbeck (1962), Saul Bellow (1976), Isaac Singer (1978), Joseph Brodsky (1987), Toni Morrison (1993), Bob Dylan (2016), & Louise Gluck (2020); sometimes the stat is cited as being 13 Americans have won it due to TS Eliot, who was born in Missouri but was living in the United Kingdom at the time of the award.

I wanted to write today a list of the people who might be next.  Gluck is a relatively recent winner, and Dylan's win courted a lot of controversy, so it's possible we won't have another American writer winning again for 10+ more years, which honestly (given their ages) throws out a chunk of the people I'm about to list as there's no posthumous wins at the Nobels.  But let's assume there's going to be one in the next five years-these are the names I would predict.  I have listed below what I think could and could not be in these authors favor, but I will say before I start that I tended to favor novelists.  While poetry and playwrights are frequently included when it comes to the Nobel, the last two winners were songwriters & a poet...I suspect that the next American to win will probably be a novelist (though I did hedge my bets with mentions of theater & poetry).  Here are the American writers that I think are most likely to get the prize next, with #1 being the most likely.

Honorable Mention: A few names that are just out of reach for the list today.  First is Don DeLillo, whose body-of-work certainly would warrant consideration, but he's been passed over so many times and most of his best work is decades old now-will they want to pick someone who feels like they're past-their-prime (while there are exceptions like Doris Lessing, most winners are younger than DeLillo is now at 87). Richard Ford & Richard Powers both have won major prizes, and have pockets of support, but might not be big enough names on an international scale.  Tony Kushner is quite famous, but after Bob Dylan's win was frowned upon by literary circles (giving it for the first time to a songwriter) his dabbling & success in the movies could be an issue.  And George Saunders would be an interesting option, but does he have a long enough bibliography to stand out against some of these other names?

10. Alice Walker

Born: February 9, 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia

Signature Work: The Color Purple

No Stranger to Awards: Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction & the National Book Award in 1983 for her novel The Color Purple.

Going for Her: Walker is a very well-known author, and her novel The Color Purple is perhaps the most influential (or important) work that has been written by a living novelist (I'm aware those are fighting words, get into it in the comments if you feel the need).  Combined with Meridian, she is certainly a very important novelist, and one whose name frequently comes up when discussions of the Nobel Prizes take place.

Going Against Her: With the exception of Pearl S. Buck, you generally don't win this prize based off of one novel, and while Walker has written other works, they have not gotten the kind of praise of The Color Purple, which was written more than 40 years ago.  It's hard to see the Nobel Committee going for Walker if they haven't already.

9. Rita Dove

Born: August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio
Signature Work: Thomas and Beulah
No Stranger to Awards: Dove has won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Medal of the Arts and was the first African-American to serve as Poet Laureate
For Her: The Nobel Committee isn't shy about giving the award to poets, and Dove is arguably the most well-known living American poet with the death of Maya Angelou.  Dove's won almost every accolade you can think of for a poet except the Nobel, and as the first African-American poet to win the Nobel, the diversity that the committee values could help her in this regard (the Nobel Committee for Literature has increasingly focused on diverse perspectives in terms of gender, geography, & race, particularly in the past thirty years).
Against Her: Dove is more nationally famous in literary circles and less internationally recognized, so it would be a bit of a surprise if they went with her.  In addition, her most famous work came almost four decades ago and she perhaps peaked a little earlier than she should have (timing is a rough one for the Nobel Committee in this regard).

8. Elizabeth Strout

Born: January 6, 1956 in Portland, Maine

Signature Work: Olive Kitteridge

No Stranger to Awards: Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge in 2009, and was nominated for the Pen/Faulkner Award for 1998's Amy and Isabelle.

Going for Her: Strout, unlike a lot of these authors, is actually what the committee is usually looking for.  She's roughly the right age (nearing her 70's), and has the kind of pedigree that you'd expect for a Nobel Laureate, where she's putting out critically-acclaimed books like Olive, Again and My Name is Lucy Barton in the recent past.  I would not be surprised, especially if she can pull off another major award (like, say, the National Book Award or the Booker Prize) to see her name move up these predictions lists in the coming years.

Going Against Her: We'll get into this with another author (specifically #5, but also #2), but there's a certain type of author that generally gets ignored by the committee when it comes to American novelists, and that's female authors who focus on women.  A lot of the novelists on this list are, in fact, in that camp, partially because they're living & celebrated, and also because I do think we're due for a winner from this style of fiction.  However, if you've heard of Strout, it's likely in connection to women like Frances McDormand, Laura Linney, & Oprah Winfrey...her books toe the line into perhaps being too popular with the masses for snooty Nobel tastes.

7. Colson Whitehead

Born: November 6, 1969 in New York City, New 

Signature Work: The Underground Railroad

No Stranger to Awards: Whitehead has won not one but two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama for his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, making him one of only four authors ever to win that distinction (Booth Tarkington, William Faulkner, & John Updike are the other three, so he's in esteemed company).  He has also won the National Humanities Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Book Award.

Going for Him: Whitehead is exactly the type of American novelist that can win an award like this.  He is the kind of old-school celebrity novelist where every new book feels like an event, and where he has crossed over into common knowledge even among people who don't read (he's literally been on the cover of Time Magazine, and the adaptation of his book The Nickel Boys into theaters later this year will only enhance that).  He's important, critically-acclaimed, and someone everyone would agree would be a good choice.

Going Against Him: I think Whitehead is probably too young for the Nobel right now, which is a problem for him in two ways.  First, he's not going to win soon if the Nobels think he needs to, you know, turn 60 before they seriously consider him, and secondly, he risks being someone like Rita Dove-someone whose career peaked too soon, as it's hard to keep up this level of passion as a novelist, especially one who writes as often as Whitehead does.

6. Thomas Pynchon

Born: May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York
Signature Work: Gravity's Rainbow
No Stranger to Awards: He's won the National Book Award, and was due the Pulitzer Prize (he won the jury's vote unanimously for Gravity's Rainbow), but the Pulitzer board dismissed their decision so Pynchon went home empty-handed.
Going for Him: Well, no one's going to argue that Thomas Pynchon doesn't stand-alone in the literary community.  Novels like Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 have entered the lexicon in ways few living authors have been able to do, and Pynchon's is a genius that is quite singular-there's never been anyone quite like him in the literary world (maybe if Salinger had actually decided to publish something at some point during his last forty years he might have come close), and he'll likely show up on lists of missed opportunities for the Nobel Committee if this never happens.
Going Against Him: Honestly, if they could actually get him to show up I think he'd win by unanimous consent.  The infamously reclusive author makes Cormac McCarthy look like Kim Kardashian-it's hard to imagine the Nobel Committee giving the award to a man who will never accept, and possibly not even acknowledge the award (or more damning, mock it through a New York Times editorial).

5. Anne Tyler

Born: October 25, 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Signature Work: Breathing Lessons
No Stranger to Awards: Tyler has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Going for Her: Tyler has steadily become one of the most recognized authors in American letters, having won most of the major literary prizes and been recognized in recent years for her contributions to fiction, getting compared to everyone from Eudora Welty to John Updike.  She's a well-known figure, with several easily name-checked novels, and she's still making significant contributions to literature, getting her Booker Prize nomination for 2015's A Spool of Blue Thread.
Going Against Her: Tyler's work is not without its critics, and the Nobel Committee might not take kindly to the criticisms of Tyler's work, which is frequently considered too "kind" or "feminine."  While the committee made a sport of ignoring the contributions of Philip Roth while he was alive, they aren't exactly clamoring for the softer, warmer prose of someone like Tyler.

4. Joyce Carol Oates

Born: June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York
Signature Work: them
No Stranger to Awards: She's won the National Book Award, as well as the National Humanities Medal, and though she's never won, she's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times.
Going for Her: Oates is the closest thing you get to an author in the vein of Philip Roth, Ernest Hemingway, or Virginia Woolf, where everyone has heard of her, her name is synonymous with quality, and the critics pretty much universally love her work.  Ask anyone who loves books (or writes them), and they'll all name-check her as a genius with prose, and she continually challenges herself (one of those Pulitzer Prize nominations is from the last decade.

Going Against Her: Some will point out she's opinionated (and her Twitter is the stuff of PR nightmares), but I doubt the Nobel committee cares about that.  Her bigger problem is probably productivity.  Honestly that's all I can think of since she's overdue for the Nobel.  There's a stigma against writers who produce a gargantuan body of work, and with nearly sixty novels to her name, Oates has nearly surpassed the body of work of almost every other novelist on this list combined.  Oates has cleverly made fun of this in the past ("more titles and I might as well give up all hopes of a 'reputation'"), but it could be what's holding her back.

3. Jonathan Franzen

Born: August 17, 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois
Signature Work: The Corrections
No Stranger to Awards: He won the National Book Award for The Corrections, as well as was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.  He also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine with the title "Great American Novelist" and was also an Oprah Book Club selection.  Perhaps you remember?
Going for Him: Franzen is surely someone that will be on lists like this for decades, provided his health holds.  He's the exact sort of author the Nobel Committee clamors for, with a novel roughly twice a decade and every one of his books being hailed as an event.  His novels The Corrections and Freedom both were landmarks, and his name attracts attention every time it comes up.
Going Against Him: Franzen's kind of a jackass, which can't help him in this regard though it doesn't preclude him, as jackasses have won this award in the past.  He regularly courts controversy, and is disliked by as many novelists as critics who worship him.  People rarely say he's untalented, but the age of the angry white man channeling his own male-focused point-of-view through his literature and being called a genius is a bit passé.

2. Marilynne Robinson

Born: November 26, 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho
Signature Work: Housekeeping
No Stranger to Awards: Robinson has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and was shortlisted for the National Book Award.  She also won the National Humanities Medal in 2012.
Going for Her: Robinson is one of those authors who somehow manages to keep pumping out critically-acclaimed and celebrated novels even without the added benefit of movies being made of her films or the celebrity of a Jonathan Franzen.  Her work is religiously-inspired, which I think might be something the Nobel Committee thinks stands out (she's by far the most drawn to her faith in her writing of any author on this list), and she's also had a major impact in her 60's and 70's in the literary community with Gilead and Lila.  No one can argue that she isn't producing some of the most important work of her career this century.
Going Against Her: While being prolific has its downside (as we just discussed with Joyce Carol Oates), Robinson only has five novels.  That's hardly the sort of thing that wins a Nobel, even if one of those novels is as good as Housekeeping.  Could someone with such a short bibliography win the Nobel?

1. Louise Erdrich

Born: June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota
Signature Work: Love Medicine
No Stranger to Awards: Erdrich has won the National Book Award & the National Book Critics Circle Award, and just a couple of years ago finally won the Pulitzer.
Going for Her: Erdrich would make history if she were to win (she'd be the first Native-American author to win the award), a huge accomplishment and something the committee might find a compelling narrative for the prize; Erdrich's career has never been hotter, quite frankly (all three of her awards name-checked above came in the past 15 years, despite decades of being a signature figure in the literary world), and a long career with a lot of momentum could be a solid recipe for success with the Nobel Committee.  She's been scooping up lifetime achievement awards left-and-right in recent years-this would be quite the capper.
Going Against Her: I do wonder if Erdrich is famous enough to win, though her recent Pulitzer Prize may have put that worry to rest.  I think Erdrich's biggest issue is the recent wins by Dylan & Gluck...had one of them not won, we'd be primed for another American win soon, and I think she makes the most sense in terms of career heat, reputation, awards base, & age.

The Ugly Reality of Editing Books for the Times

I always find myself in the middle of a project, and that also pertains to how I spend my money.  I have recently been buying (for my library) books that meant something to me as a child, and one of the books I was attempting to buy was McElligot's Pool by Dr. Seuss, which I have not read since I was maybe 7 or 8, but is the only book I remember my grandfather, whom I am named after, reading to my brother & I when we were kids.  My grandpa was a fisherman, and liked to point out which fish in the book he most wanted to catch as color commentary during the reading.  I looked on some book websites, and then Amazon, and to my surprise it was next-to-impossible to find despite Seuss being a very popular writer.  I went to eBay, and was stunned to not see it listed.  The few copies I could find around the web cost on average $50, in some cases into the thousands, but none were as cheap as Yertle the Turtle and The Cat in the Hat, also in my cart (and not remotely in my budget).  I eventually went to the Wikipedia page, and discovered that the book (despite me not realizing it when I first began) was one of several books pulled from print as a reaction to its content.

That Seuss had had some books pulled from print was not news to me (though I hadn't realized that a book I'd grown up with was one of those pulled), as I remember the brouhaha around Seuss's books being discontinued due to its content, but it is part of a pattern in recent history of pulling content from the marketplace, or increasingly, editing books that have already been written to make them more "politically correct."  In the past week, Agatha Christie entered the news as her publishers were striking words, primarily those related to race, from her books, and we have seen this from authors like Roald Dahl & Ian Fleming in the past couple of years as well.  While both sides of the political spectrum were quick to rush to judgment here (neither of them getting this quite right), I think this is an issue that's not easy to summarize into just one tweet, and so I wanted to have the conversation (as I ponder it) on the blog today, where I can weigh in on the complicated issues at stake.

The first thing to acknowledge is that the idea of censoring art after-the-fact is not new, or something that has happened only in recent years.  Both taking a popular item off-the-shelf (rather than relying solely on public demand for it to dictate if/when you are going to stop selling it) and editing a piece of art to fit the morality of the times has happened before, and two good examples come from Disney.  Song of the South, the infamous movie about the South during Reconstruction, has not been seen (legally) in the United States since 1986, when it was last released in theaters and has never been released on home video domestically due to its content being deemed racist.  This isn't because people wouldn't buy it or wouldn't watch it on Disney+ (they undoubtedly would, likely to the point where Disney would make a profit if only because of the curiosity factor), but because Disney does not want to be associated with it.  One movie Disney does want to be associated with and is widely available, Fantasia, is not available in the way it was in 1940.  In the late 1960's, Disney edited the film to not include stereotypical drawings of two Black centaur characters (Sunflower & Otika) were edited out of the movie because they were drawn in the fashion of a Black stereotype (I'm not going to show the photos because they were clearly intended to offend, but you can google if you want).

So at least since the late-1960's, far before the word "woke" because a pejorative word for much of the country, this has been happening.  So we can put to rest on this being a new phenomenon.  But the question comes forward of whether this is appropriate or not.  And I think this invites a complicated question about the duty of corporations to their public and our duty to artistic vision.

The first question, I think, is the easier question even if it's the less-satisfying one because I think it's supposed to remain murky.  McElligot's Pool is not the first book to be taken out of print, and will not be the last.  Most books are pulled from print because they stop selling, but the hope is that libraries and educational institutions are able to keep them alive for future generations.  I think, from an academic perspective, that pulling a book solely because it might be deemed offensive gets into a weird area.  Most of the people who would applaud or celebrate a book like McElligot's Pool being pulled from publication, which features a drawing of a fish modeled after an Inuit person using a then politically acceptable phrase that is now considered offensive, would balk at books by say John Green or Becky Albertalli being pulled from public libraries...even though that is something that has happened in the past couple of years due to their queer or sexual content.  I think, personally, that while the companies and the estates have the right to pull these books from publication (I do think a conversation about corporations sitting on copyrights they aren't using is a convo worth having, but that's an idea for a different day), banning them all-together is the wrong decision, and instead you should look at it, like all books or movies, as an artifact of their time.  So I don't think this is unethical, but I do think it is shortsighted & doing a disservice to artists and our conversation about art.

The second question, though, I'm less ambiguous on even if it puts me on the politically conservative side of this conversation (a place I rarely am).  As a general rule, I don't think that editing art after-the-fact is a good idea once it has become part of the public memory.  George Lucas edited the Star Wars films and Steven Spielberg did this with ET: the Extra-Terrestrial to many complaining fans because they wanted to watch the film they grew up with and loved (South Park even did an episode about it).  But both of these men were living-people like Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, & Agatha Christie are dead, and cannot give consent to these changes.

In the cases of some of these authors, it's not even clear that what they're removing is offensive in the larger sense.  Christie's novels, for example, are removing dialogue spoken by a character, not the author or a narrator.  Are we to pretend or live in a world where we don't think people speak like this?  This, in my opinion, moves beyond trying to protect vulnerable young readers and starts to become revisionist history; Christie's era, like today, had racist people in it, and to edit her novels after-the-fact to remove this feels like you're taking away not only Christie's autonomy as an artist, but you are also trying to associate artistic output with an author's own belief system.  This has become a really gross part of art criticism & art appreciation in recent years, where consumers want to assume that the belief systems of a character (or even the narrative) are the same as the writers or actors who bring them to life, which is simply not the case.  If you want to know what an author thinks, read their essays or memoirs or public interviews.  By all accounts, Roald Dahl was a bigot & an antisemite...he is not a person we should celebrate even if you like his books, and if that means you don't want to buy his stories, you shouldn't.  But someone's books, and especially their characters, do not equal their personal beliefs, and we need to put this to rest because it makes artists too guarded, and in the process, gets us lousy, uncreative, formulaic art.  Art is meant to be complicated, and it means that you can have characters that are not all good or not all bad.

If what these publishers want is non-problematic, genial books, then they should publish them-I'm confident you could find writers that do not use any offensive words in their novels or who can craft characters that are in-line with the times and completely two-dimensional.  That publishers aren't willing to do that is proof that they view people like Dahl, Christie, & Fleming as brands, like Clorox or Oreo, rather than as flesh-and-blood human beings who crafted these tales as is.  They want to capitalize on the goodwill their books created, while also avoiding the involved back stories of their art.  That's wrong, full stop.  It is one thing to stop publishing their work-that's grey, that's ugly-but-reality at some point for all artists.  But to edit their work while they're cold in the ground, stealing away their creations and turning them into Mad Libs for the present time...that feels immoral to me.

Does George RR Martin Owe Us an Ending?

My dad and I both share a love of books, albeit not the same types of books.  That said, occasionally our interests intermingle, and we were discussing one of our shared passions-literature-yesterday, specifically the books of George RR Martin.  My father loves series fantasy (he collects Lord of the Rings in different editions), and I occasionally indulge in this genre, and we both loved the television series (even if we have differing opinions on the ending of the series).  That said, I point blank refuse to read Martin's novels not because I don't have an interest (I think it'd be fun to revisit and relearn different facts about Sansa, Arya, Cersei, and the like), but because I am convinced, as is my dad, that George RR Martin is never going to finish this series, and I don't want to start a series I don't think will ever be done in the way the author originally envisioned.

Complaining about Martin's infuriatingly slow pace of writing is not entirely fair.  Martin, a former English teacher whose career in letters reaches back to the early 1970's (he was nominated for the Hugo Award when he was just 25), should not be confused with someone who simply takes forever in-between novels.  Since 2011, the last time Martin wrote an official title in the Song of Fire and Ice heptalogy, he has written three novellas, a quote book, a short story collection, a young adult novel, and two reference books, a prodigious output for one author.  Martin is hardly just sitting back and enjoying the gigantic payday that came from HBO; he's been hard at work, creating an enviable amount of content.  But he still hasn't finished the final books in the series.

I'm not going to speculate as to why Martin continues to find himself on so many detours, not really embracing the final two books of his series that so many of his fans want to see an ending for; that's between he and a life coach to figure out.  But my question here is what does an artist owe their audience?  Has George RR Martin made a covenant with his fans that they have earned the right to see an end to this series?

Obviously there's no legal ramifications for Martin, but I do think there's an inherent obligation for an author to, as long as he or she is physically able, finish a book series.  Martin is hardly in a situation where Bantam won't put the book out (literally every publishing house in the industry would happily take their place, regardless of the delays), so it isn't that he can't find an editor or publisher (as might be the case for another series), and there is, in my opinion, a moral obligation for a writer to finish a series.  Martin has had fans invest in his world, making him obscenely wealthy, to the point where he can afford to just stop writing if he really wanted to and be fine, but in return they have earned an ending to his story.

Martin isn't alone in taking too long to finish a book series.  Patrick Rothfuss hasn't finished a book in his Kingkiller Chronicles since 2011, and while he isn't as old as Martin, this is an absurdly long time to make fans wait.  Diana Gabaldon hasn't published an Outlander book in five years and counting.   Melanie Rawn might take the cake here-she wrote an entire series of five books while leaving a different trilogy unfinished for 22+ years (she still claims she'll finally finish the series).

The reality is for these authors, though, that while they may finish the series, it doesn't turn out that way.  While every author will probably leave behind an unfinished novel (some of the most famous include The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens and The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald), at least in those cases you haven't already started the story.  Look at an author like Robert Jordan, who kept expanding his Wheel of Time to the point where he died before the final three books in his epic tale were complete (Brandon Sanderson finished the series).  Frank Herbert's Dune, Stieg Larson's Millennium, and Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy are some of the more famous series to not be completed by the original author, but there are countless others.

Which is all to say that Martin should not assume he has the entirety of time to finish, and while he might feel he owes a grand ending to his series, he owes the ending more.  Just like an author needs to know when to let things go and move on with the story (cough JK Rowling cough), an author also should put in the time to finish what they started. 

And I say this as someone who started an eight-part book series 18 years ago (unpublished), and haven't written a new book in the series in 16 years despite most of the manuscript for the third novel sitting on a shelf in my library closet.  So George, if you take this advice, I promise to do so as well. :)

America's Next Top Laureate

Bob Dylan, giving his Nobel Lecture

For many years, we talked on this blog about how no American had won the Nobel Prize in Literature since Toni Morrison's victory in 1993.  This streak ended in 2016, however, with the surprise win of Bob Dylan, the first songwriter to win, and who (despite his obvious genius and place as a profoundly influential lyricist) was not considered to have the "literary credentials" to win the prize.  I kind of wonder if the Nobel Committee, tired of being berated by US-centric critics for not honoring their favorite American authors (or any American authors since Morrison) cheekily decided to honor an American that no one in the US literary community wanted to have the award in the first place.

This year, the Nobel Committee will announce (likely in September/October), for the first time, two winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Last year, due to scandals on the Nobel Committee, the organization wasn't able to choose a winner, the first time that this was not accomplished since World War II.  While it seems unlikely, even with two victors, that the United States will win another trophy so soon (I suspect they'll make the country wait a decade), there is at least a chance with them surely going for two different continents that they'll pick an American author again.  The United Kingdom, after all, saw a win in both 2005 (Harold Pinter) and 2007 (Doris Lessing), so there's some recent precedent for a quick turnaround victory.  Therefore, I'm reviving this ongoing series, hoping if nothing else that I can provide a few ideas for your next beach read before summer finishes.  Listed here are the ten people (obviously all living) who I think are most likely to be the next American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Honorable Mentions: I thought about throwing out someone like Rachel Kushner, Colson Whitehead, Richard Powers, Michael Chabon, or George Saunders, but their careers seem too scant to put on a list like this, or at the very least too recent.  Tony Kushner isn't out of the question, though an American playwright so soon after an American songwriter might be a bit of a stretch (I suspect the next American will be a novelist or poet); you could make the same claim for Stephen Sondheim.  Woody Allen or Junot Diaz both are impossible choices considering the Nobel Committee's scandals last year and their own associations with the #MeToo movement.  Richard Ford & Annie Proulx are both roughly the right age and worth mentioning here, but they seemed just out-of-reach of this Top 10.

10. Rita Dove

Born: August 28, 1952 in Akron, Ohio
Signature Work: Thomas and Beulah
No Stranger to Awards: Dove has won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the National Medal of the Arts and was the first African-American to serve as Poet Laureate
For Her: The Nobel Committee isn't shy about giving the award to poets, and Dove is arguably the most well-known living American poet upon the death of Maya Angelou.  Dove's won almost every accolade you can think of for a poet except the Nobel, and as the first African-American poet to win the Nobel, the diversity that the committee values could help her in this regard (the Nobel Committee for Literature has increasingly focused on diverse perspectives, particularly in the past thirty years).
Against Her: Dove is more nationally famous in literary circles and less internationally recognized, so it would be a bit of a surprise if they went with her.  In addition, her most famous work came over two decades ago and she perhaps peaked a little earlier than she should have (timing is a rough one for the Nobel Committee in this regard).

9. Joan Didion

Born: December 5, 1934, in Sacramento, California
Signature Work: The Year of Magical Thinking
No Stranger to Awards: She's won the National Book Award in 2005, as well as the National Medal of Arts.
Going for Her: Didion is one of the well-respected figures in American letters, and perhaps considering her forays not only into fiction but also memoirs & journalism, the author with the most diverse portfolio on this roster.  She's wildly successful, particularly late in her career which is a change-of-pace from some of the other authors on this list (not to mention, quite frankly, Toni Morrison & Bob Dylan), and is someone who adds something new to the list considering the deeply personal nature of her writing.
Going Against Her: The Nobel committee is more reliant on authors of fiction (it's rare that they go for a memoirist or a journalist, rather than someone who is a novelist or poet), and Didion's peak fame is so recent (by Nobel standards) it might be seen as jumping on the bandwagon and risk being a flash-in-the-pan.

8. Thomas Pynchon

Born: May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York
Signature Work: Gravity's Rainbow
No Stranger to Awards: He's won the National Book Award, and was due the Pulitzer Prize (he won the jury's vote unanimously for Gravity's Rainbow), but the Pulitzer board dismissed their decision so Pynchon went home empty-handed.
Going for Him: Well, no one's going to argue that Thomas Pynchon doesn't stand-alone in the literary community.  Novels like Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49 have entered the lexicon in ways few living authors have been able to do, and Pynchon's is a genius that is quite singular-there's never been anyone quite like him in the literary world (maybe if Salinger had actually decided to publish something at some point during his last forty years he might have come close), and he'll likely show up on lists of missed opportunities for the Nobel Committee if this never happens.
Going Against Him: Honestly, if they could actually get him to show up I think he'd win by unanimous consent.  The infamously reclusive author makes Cormac McCarthy look like Kim Kardashian-it's hard to imagine the Nobel Committee giving the award to a man who will never accept, and possibly not even acknowledge the award (or more damning, mock it through a New York Times editorial).

7. Don DeLillo

Born: November 20, 1936 in New York City
Signature Work: White Noise
No Stranger to Awards: DeLillo has won the National Book Award, as well as was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Going for Him: The Nobel Committee occasionally likes to pick troupers, novelists who have long been part of the literary community but who haven't always been headliners (lest we forget, the likes of Marcel Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald never picked up the Nobel).  DeLillo, long considered one of the great men of letters who admittedly never took the center stage in the way that, say, John Updike or Norman Mailer did, would be an interesting choice, and while he is pretty private, my hunch is he'd still show up to win the prize.
Going Against Him: He's not a flashy choice-if you're going to choose an American and deal with the press of such a thing, why not go with someone more well-known and less press-shy?  Additionally, DeLillo's work post-Underworld has shown a marked decline, and authors rarely win old-age awards; they usually are victorious when they are still producing high-quality prose.

6. Cormac McCarthy

Born: July 20, 1933 in Providence, Rhode Island
Signature Work: Blood Meridian
No Stranger to Awards: McCarthy has basically won it all: the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award are all on his shelf.
Going for Him: Name me a more celebrated American novelist of the past twenty years (except, perhaps, the next guy on this list).  Seriously, between No Country for Old Men (which went on to be a masterpiece cinematically) and The Road, McCarthy's novels have become landmarks in the literary canon, and he proves that authors continue to make compelling, interesting work decades after they initially come onto the scene.
Going Against Him: Doesn't it feel like this should have happened about 6-7 years ago?  I know the Nobel Committee is occasionally slow to react to trends, but McCarthy was such a big deal for so long, frequently showing up on "greatest American novelists of all-time" lists every chance authors could get, and for a brief moment there his reclusive nature was completely out-the-window, doing interviews for Time Magazine and Oprah Winfrey.  He could still win, but at 86 the window is getting shorter and shorter.

5. Jonathan Franzen

Born: August 17, 1959 in Western Springs, Illinois
Signature Work: The Corrections
No Stranger to Awards: He won the National Book Award for The Corrections, as well as was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.  He also appeared on the cover of Time Magazine with the title "Great American Novelist" and was also an Oprah Book Club selection.  Perhaps you remember?
Going for Him: Franzen is surely someone that will be on lists like this for decades, provided his health holds.  He's the exact sort of author the Nobel Committee clamors for, with a novel roughly twice a decade and every one of his books being hailed as an event.  His novels The Corrections and Freedom both were landmarks, and I have another personal bet with myself over whether it will be Franzen or Ian McEwan that wins the Nobel first (I think McEwan, but I suspect they'll both do it).
Going Against Him: Franzen's kind of a jackass, which can't help him in this regard though it doesn't preclude him, as jackasses have won this award in the past.  Perhaps more damning is his relative youth.  While authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez have won the prize at a younger age, recipients tend to be older.  If we're betting solely on 2019, I think Franzen might be a bit young, though honestly he might have the best shot of the bunch here if we're betting on truly the next American victor of this prize.

4. Anne Tyler

Born: October 25, 1941 in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Signature Work: Breathing Lessons
No Stranger to Awards: Tyler has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize
Going for Her: Tyler has steadily become one of the most recognized authors in American letters, having won most of the major literary prizes and been recognized in recent years for her contributions to fiction, getting compared to everyone from Eudora Welty to John Updike.  She's a well-known figure, with several easily name-checked novels, and she's still making significant contributions to literature, getting her Booker Prize nomination for 2015's A Spool of Blue Thread.
Going Against Her: Tyler's work is not without its critics, and the Nobel Committee might not take kindly to the criticisms of Tyler's work, which is frequently considered too "kind" or "feminine."  While the committee made a sport of ignoring the contributions of Philip Roth while he was alive, they aren't exactly clamoring for the softer, warmer prose of someone like Tyler.

3. Louise Erdrich

Born: June 7, 1954 in Little Falls, Minnesota
Signature Work: Love Medicine
No Stranger to Awards: Erdrich has won the National Book Award & the National Book Critics Circle Award, and also was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.
Going for Her: Erdrich would make history if she were to win (she'd be the first Native-American author to win the award), a huge accomplishment and something the committee might find a compelling narrative for the prize; Erdrich's career has never been hotter, quite frankly (all three of her awards name-checked above came in the past ten years, despite decades of being a signature figure in the literary world), and a long career with a lot of momentum could be a solid recipe for success with the Nobel Committee.  She's been scooping up lifetime achievement awards left-and-right in recent years-this would be quite the capper.
Going Against Her: Is she famous enough?  Admittedly the Nobel Committee occasionally exhaustively combs through a nation trying to find a notable author and picks someone no one in the international literary community has heard of, but Erdrich triumphing over Oates?  Over McCarthy?  It seems pretty David and Goliath, and generally the American winners have been more famous than she is.

2. Marilynne Robinson

Born: November 26, 1943 in Sandpoint, Idaho
Signature Work: Housekeeping
No Stranger to Awards: Robinson has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), and was shortlisted for the National Book Award.  She also won the National Humanities Medal in 2012.
Going for Her: Robinson is one of those authors who somehow manages to keep pumping out critically-acclaimed and celebrated novels even without the added benefit of movies being made of her films or the celebrity of a Cormac McCarthy.  Her work is religiously-inspired, which I think might be something the Nobel Committee thinks stands out (she's by far the most drawn to her faith in her writing of any author on this list), and she's also had a major impact in her 60's and 70's in the literary community with Gilead and Lila.  No one can argue that she isn't producing some of the most important work of her career this century.
Going Against Her: While being prolific has its downside (see Number 1 on this list), Robinson only has four novels.  That's hardly the sort of thing that wins a Nobel, even if one of those novels is Housekeeping.  Could someone with such a short bibliography win the Nobel?

1. Joyce Carol Oates

Born: June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York
Signature Work: them
No Stranger to Awards: She's won the National Book Award, as well as the National Humanities Medal, and though she's never won, she's been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize five times.
Going for Her: Everything?  She's an icon in the world of letters (who doesn't like Joyce Carol Oates?) who continues to write vociferously and continues to have gushing reviews (one of those Pulitzer Prize nominations happened this decade).
Going Against Her: Productivity?  Honestly that's all I can think of since she's overdue for the Nobel.  There's a stigma against writers who produce a gargantuan body of work, and with nearly sixty novels to her name, Oates has definitely surpassed the body of work of almost every other novelist on this list combined.  Oates has cleverly made fun of this in the past ("more titles and I might as well give up all hopes of a 'reputation'"), but it could be what's holding her back.

They Both Die at the End...and Why I Love Melancholy Fiction

I recently power-read through Adam Silvera's They Both Die in the End.  Compared to my more literary-minded friends, I'm a notoriously slow reader, someone who views books as something to be consumed at a leisurely pace.  Philip Roth once said you're not really "reading" a novel if you can't finish it within two weeks.  Philip Roth would not approve of how long books sit on my bed stand.

But Silvera's They Both Die in the End was not the kind of book I could put down.  I initially thought this was just because I desperately wanted to know the end, to know if my theory was correct (for the record, it wasn't), and to see where the book would take itself.  I've never read any of Silvera's novels (though I probably will now), and based on online forums, the sadness of the book is not unfamiliar to his bibliography, and he has continually matured as a writer.  I could still see the faults in the novel; it meanders too much, stretching plot that can clearly be foreseen, and the shifting nature of the narrators (it's written in first-person, but a first-person where we have roughly a dozen narrators) caused confusion when the names were too similar (specifically Delilah and Deidre).  But the book is a jolt, and sneaks up on you.  For a novel where he literally tells you the ending in the title, you spend much of the story wondering what the twist will be-how can an author write a compelling work of fiction if you "know the ending" before you hit the copyright page.  That he still crafts a meaningful friendship, that you'll burst into tears around ten pages before it ends, and how the last sentence lingers like a giant ellipsis (a confident move I'm not familiar with seeing in YA fiction) is all terrific.  It's a great read, and (hey Hollywood!) would make a superb movie in the wake of Love, Simon.

In conversations with people, I have discovered two things, one I knew and one I didn't.  First, the book's title, before even getting to its contents, scares off people.  I was shocked by the number of book-loving people I know who instantly wouldn't try the book because they don't want the "sad ending" that the novel's title promises.  I think we all, on some level, judge a book by its cover, but I'm floored that we also would dismiss the title.  I, for one, bought the book based on the title (and a quick survey of LGBT-themed YA lit that produced this as the best-reviewed one on the list...so this literally was a sale wrought by Love, Simon).

The second thing I knew people would say-"why, John, do you always like sad books?"  It's true, and not something I can counter-punch, nor would I want to do so.  After all, I think literature, movies, TV, theater-it all becomes more important when you have some sort of sacrifice.  I'm not a genre snob, but I'll admit that most of the genres that I gravitate away from are subjects where there's little chance of an unhappy ending (sports films, comedies) or ones where a sad ending is likely, but there's rarely emotional sacrifice (horror, where death is inevitable).  In fact, arguably my favorite line in a movie might well be from The Hours, where Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf utters "Someone has to die in order that the rest of us value life more."  I kind of agree with that in fiction-you need to have some sort of tangible, unexpected sacrifice to reach an end goal (a fact that's mostly definitely true in The Hours).

But I thought it would be interesting to test this assessment that I "only like sad movies" because I recently made a Top 100 list of my favorite films and a Top 25 list of my favorite TV shows, and in doing so, I wanted to see how often they end with sad, happy, or ambiguous endings.

I had to make a couple of rules for myself while searching the list.  For starters, romances where the main characters don't end up together is automatically a "sad" ending.  I also included any film where the main character had to die to be a "sad" ending.  This meant that films like Casablanca, for example, qualify as a "sad" ending even though you could argue it was happy in the sense that Rick is better for his experience in the picture.  I initially thought I'd scrap it and just say "if I'm crying when the credits roll" it counts as sad, but then I remembered that for someone who is weirdly closed-off from emotional vulnerability in real-life, I cry at the drop of a hat in movies.  I also discounted the TV shows relatively quickly, as I found that very few shows end with a proper "sad' ending, even if a number of shows end with main characters dying, so I went solely with movies.  So I went with my own subjective analysis and found...

...that I really, truly like sad movies.  55 of my favorite movies, a solid majority of them, despite the fact that (I can't find proof of this, but I'm going based on personal, anecdotal evidence) most of the movies I've seen have had a happy ending.  You have to make it to 18th place on the list (Jurassic Park) before I can give a firm "this is a happy ending," even though there are "ambiguously" ended films earlier on the list like The Tree of Life.  With the exception of Malick's opus, all of my Top 10 have decidedly sad movies, most of them romances (a therapist would call this projection), and my highest-ranked romance with a happy ending, is one where our main characters go through emotional hoops to get to that ending (Before Sunset).  So yes, apparently I like sad endings, which is how I ended up reading a book called They Both Die at the End without reservations.  And I'm glad I did, as it is the sort of affirming novel that hits you in the stomach and makes you want to treasure your time with the characters (and real-life people) all the more.

Everybody's Linking for the Weekend

Anyone else having a good weekend?  I know I sure am, and even though it's Sunday afternoon and there's a presentation I should admittedly be working on on my dining room table, I figured I'd get the link roundup out for you fine people instead.

In Entertainment...

-Bradley Cooper joined the conversation started by his costar Jennifer Lawrence regarding pay and income inequality, and where women are getting paid less than men.  Cooper stated that he will start teaming up with his female costars to ensure that they are getting paid an equal amount, which is a cool and interesting concept, though it also begs a few questions.  For starters, while I have argued in the past that movie stars complaining about this issue makes the issue easier to explain (it's easier to use examples of someone everyone has heard of like Jennifer Lawrence or Amy Adams, rather than a random teacher or office employee), there are limitations here.  For starters, Cooper's argument that Adams made "nothing" on American Hustle is kind of ridiculous and risks being the story here rather than the pay gap.  Adams made $1.25 million plus 7-points off the back-end (assuming that's international gross, it would amount to roughly $10 million, if it's points off of profit, probably closer to $7-8 million).  Either way this is more money that most people could ever dream of, and so while she clearly deserved equal footing to at least Jeremy Renner, and perhaps Cooper, she made more money than any normal human could ever hope to have and calling that nothing makes this look like an ivory tower argument.  Secondly, movie stars are about bankability as much as work, and Bradley Cooper is one of the biggest stars on the planet right now-his costars aren't really guaranteeing the box office insurance that he carries.  Sure, Jennifer Lawrence is also box office dynamite, but Amy Adams isn't.  Neither are Sienna Miller, Emma Stone, or Abbie Cornish.  They're all stars, yes, and this is a noble idea of Cooper's, but one wonders if he's the best person to be making this argument.

-Is anyone else interested in tonight's premiere of Oprah Winfrey's Belief, a 7-part documentary miniseries on her channel that seems very similar to the critically-lauded Planet Earth?  I have become, I must admit, extremely disenchanted lately with television-it's too repetitive, there's nothing new that's interesting to me anymore, and I find that the same plots and ideas are constantly celebrated without anything new (I go through this with film, music, and books from time-to-time as well, but I have to admit that there it's usually a much shorter term and I've felt this way about TV for months now).  I've been trying to research more non-fiction television that I think is worthwhile, and this seems like a possibility-anyone know of anything else?  I don't want Amazing Race or Kardashian style stuff, but documentary-style series that are of worth-share your recommendations in the comments!

- Who else has played the leaked Adele commercial at least a dozen times today?  The Oscar-and-Grammy winner, whose elusive third album is rumored constantly, apparently leaked a snippet of a song during a commercial during The X-Factor yesterday, causing Twitter to erupt not only because the song seems amazing, but perhaps she's finally going to drop the album?!?  I am such a fan, and cannot wait.  And am going to listen once more...

In Politics...

-In a story that just broke this morning, CNN news anchor Jake Tapper grilled former Gov. Jeb Bush about his attacks on Hillary Clinton about Benghazi, particularly going after him because he doesn't give Clinton the same sort of leeway that he gives his brother in terms of 9/11.  While Bush made a few attacks on Trump, the analogy to his brother was a blistering one, particularly considering it's an apt argument and one I haven't really heard a journalist make, and could be a very sore subject during the next GOP debates as I suspect Rubio, Cruz, and Carson will also be weighing in shortly.  While Bush does state that Ambassador Stevens was asking for more security, there were numerous pieces of evidence uncovered by the 9/11 commission that could have prevented the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and while Jeb admits that it was the terrorists that perpetrated both acts, to cite Clinton exclusively and not his brother is cherry-picking in a way that I don't think will fly.  It will also be an interesting thing to see if this becomes a major talking point, period, in the election, as attacking President Bush over 9/11 has been something that most politicians have steered clear of in the wake of the tragedies, instead focusing on the Iraq War for fear of appearing insensitive and not taking the political risk that results from such a move (as President Bush's initial reactions to the 9/11 tragedies were the high-point of his popularity as POTUS).

-Stuart Rothenberg wrote a provocative piece about whom the Republicans should nominate for the presidency.  This is a-characteristic of Rothenberg, who is usually slightly more conservative than this (or at least more blatantly non-partisan), but seems to reflect an exhaustion with the Tea Party elements of the GOP that others have also shared (see also the current debacle in the Speaker's race).  Rothenberg claims that Cruz is the only person who could prove to conservatives whether running a "true conservative" would actually help them win, or as logic would dictate, likely lead to their defeat.  Part of me wonders if some Chamber of Commerce types, realizing that the Democrats can't win the House so they'd still have a seat at the table and that the Senate is up in 2018 with a lot of opportunities (even if the Democrats sweep the competitive seats in 2016 they'll still have a rough go two years later with Heitkamp, McCaskill, Donnelly, and Manchin all headed to the polls) and finally with a Democrat that's relatively moderate like Hillary Clinton in the Oval Office (and the strong likelihood that she'd be a one-termer as it's difficult to see the Democrats winning the White House 16 years in a row), might be willing for the trade of a loss in 2016 if it meant that the Freedom Caucus would get back inline and they could reclaim the party.  They'd never say so out loud, but I think it'd be something they'd discuss behind closed doors.

-In one of the coolest things I've seen in the world of politics in a long time, President Obama met with award-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson (whose book, Housekeeping is currently on my nightstand right now as I have been longing to read it for years and this is my excuse) to discuss his passion for her books.  What I love about this is not just that it's the President asking the questions here, not the other way around, but also that Obama has placed such a value on the written word and on the arts.  For a president that I didn't think would do such a thing eight years ago (I never really saw Obama as an arts guy based on conversations surrounding the subject when he was a candidate), he's definitely found a way to have a strong connection both with pop culture and with culture in general during his terms in office, and this is just one of many ways that he's shared his passions for the arts.  Bravo!

Shameless Self-Promotion of the Week...

-Gov. David Ige makes a laudable push to fight homelessness in his state of Hawaii, the state with the highest homelessness rate in the country.

YouTube Video of the Week...

-The other video I watched on loop this week, I'm still impressed by the Sanders/Clinton moment coming out of the first debate.  Great to see the political opponents on the same side of a contentious issue:

Just One More...

-In your "climate change is still a thing we should be all worrying about" news byte of the week, Climate Central stated this past week that cities like Miami, New Orleans, and potentially even New York are all likely to be submerged by water in the near-term regardless of whether or not we solve the climate crisis.  The study stresses that New York is still salvageable, but action needs to be taken soon.  Keep that in mind when you are looking at the upcoming presidential elections.