• sara reads the feed

    Back pain, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and link spam

    Back pain is such a problem that the subreddit /r/backpain is one of the top 3% communities on Reddit. I could be a member; I’ve been suffering from severe sciatic pain ever since my first pregnancy almost fifteen years ago (!). Although it’s not as bad as the time I had a bulging disc, it’s consistent and virtually nothing helps. I’ve tried.

    It doesn’t surprise me that the CEO shooter known by some as The Adjuster may have been radicalized by his back pain. (Scientific American)

    Mangione was reportedly not taking any medication for his back pain. But he had posted in spondylolisthesis-related Reddit threads and talked on the site Goodreads about reading books on back pain, according to CNN. He told a friend in Honolulu, where he had been living the year before the shooting, that he needed back surgery. In the summer of 2023, his friend texted him to ask how the surgery went, and Mangione sent back x-ray scans of his spine. The friend told CNN that the images “looked heinous” and that he fell out of touch with Mangione after that.

    It’s not clear if or how Mangione’s back condition or surgery may have been connected to the UHC CEO’s shooting death on a street in Manhattan last week. When police arrested Mangione, he was reportedly carrying a handwritten manifesto that mentioned UHC and accused health insurance companies of “[abusing] our country for immense profit.”

    Reading about this is reminding me of how cold and judgmental the dude who worked on my back was. He was so smug that I gave myself a bulging disc by doing good mornings without a sufficiently strong posterior chain. It was so upsetting. Medicine in America is so upsetting.

    ~

    Some generally interesting scientific news without commentary:

    E-tattoos could make mobile EEGs a reality (Ars Technica)

    For Orcas, Dead Salmon Hats Are Back in Fashion (Scientific American)

    These Endangered Wolves Have a Sweet Tooth—and It Might Make Them Rare Carnivorous Pollinators (Smithsonian Mag)

    Living without mental imagery may shield against trauma’s impact (Psyche)

    ~

    I’m homeschooling my 14yo. Usually we’re doing age-appropriate math or reading literature, but sometimes I print off articles to share. This was the latest:

    All Life on Earth Today Descended From a Single Cell. Meet LUCA. (Quanta Magazine)

    LUCA does not represent the origin of life, the instance whereby some chemical alchemy snapped molecules into a form that allowed self-replication and all the mechanisms of evolution. Rather, it’s the moment when life as we know it took off. LUCA is the furthest point in evolutionary history that we can glimpse by working backward from what’s alive today. It’s the most recent ancestor shared by all modern life‚ our collective lineage traced back to a single ancient cellular population or organism.

    “It’s not the first cell, it’s not the first microbe, it’s not the first anything, really,” said Greg Fournier (opens a new tab), an evolutionary biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In a way, it is the end of the story of the origin of life.”

    The main takeaway we got from this article is that LUCA coexisted with viruses; LUCA needed to have a rudimentary immune system.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about LUCA since we read it. There were other cells around at the time that didn’t result in the life we know now. It makes me reflect on the different human species that no longer distinctively exist, like Neanderthal and the Denisovans.

    There are so many paths untaken throughout history, mostly by total happenstance.

    ~

    Some entertainment news without commentary~

    The Power of Positive Fandoms: A Reminder That Not Everything Is Terrible (tsfka Tor dot com)

    ‘Watson’ First Look Explores What Happens to the Sidekick After Sherlock Holmes’ Death (Variety)

    A Must-Read Sapphic Take on COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO (Bookriot)

    The queen of suspense: how Ann Radcliffe inspired Dickens and Austen – then got written out of the canon (The Guardian)

  • publishing

    A dark winter for publishing

    It’s been a rough week for publishing.

    Although sometimes it feels like everyone and their brother is in publishing, the truth is that it’s a small community. Most everyone knows most everyone else. Every loss is felt keenly.

    Lou Harper of Cover Affairs was a cover designer whose work appeared on thousands of novels. She was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; after a short time in hospice, she passed away.

    An associate of Lou’s made a statement on Facebook.

    The news took a while to reach me, so this update is late, but I am sad to report Lou passed away early in the morning on November 19th after being in Hospice for only a few days. The cancer that started in her pancreas had effectively taken over her liver as well, and by the time she was diagnosed and met with an oncologist, the only thing they could really offer was to help manage her comfort.
There was lots of love and support in the days leading up to Lou’s passing, and the doctors did a reasonable job managing comfort. She did not suffer long, and that is a blessing.She worked with a lot of my friends, who praised her professionalism, kindness, and consistency. What a huge loss.

    ~

    We also lost MJ Rose, one of the founders of 1001 Dark Nights.

    From her Publisher’s Weekly obituary:

    Melisse Shapiro, also known as M.J. Rose, an early self-publishing advocate as well as bestselling author, died unexpectedly on December 10 while in Florida visiting her father. She was 71.

    […] Liz Berry remembered Rose best for being “innovative, and brave, and fierce, and an icon. She will be sorely missed.” Jillian Stein also said her partner will be missed. “M.J. was a force of nature both in the industry and out,” Stein said. “She was both bold and tender hearted and she was always happy to share her experiences and use what she’s learned in her long career to help anyone who asked. The amount of people she’s touched over the years is incredible.”

    ~

    Author Jana DeLeon also tragically, unexpectedly lost her husband this week.

    As posted publicly to her Facebook profile:

    Last month, my husband, Rene’, got an infection which turned into septic shock, and he had to spend 3.5 weeks in the hospital. They controlled the infection and stabilized everything that was off kilter due to it, and he was discharged to rehab on Saturday, which he was thrilled about. 
A couple of his good friends and I were with him while he ate dinner and joked and talked about cars. After that, we got him settled to rest then his friends left. He was exhausted from all the day’s activities, so I told him to take a nap while I ran home to feed our dogs and grab a few things for him then I’d be back. I’d barely gotten home, about twenty minutes later, and rehab called. I can’t believe I’m having to say this, but Rene’ passed away. The paramedics tried to revive him for about 20 minutes but couldn’t get a response. I have no idea what happened but I’m having a private autopsy to find out. 
I can’t begin to describe the devastation I feel. For 30 years, he was my best friend, partner, and biggest fan. We had big plans for another 30 more. 
Please pray for our families as we navigate an impossible time. 
JanaThere’s no real comfort to offer when such tragedy strikes, but I know that so many of us are thinking of her family.

    Again, publishing is such a small community. Losses like these hit so hard.

    Please keep everyone in your thoughts through these difficult times.

  • John McClane hangs over the city. image credit 20th Century Fox
    movie reviews

    Movie Review: Die Hard (1988) *****

    I decided chronistic should be in use as an antonym for anachronistic. Die Hard is intensely chronistic. It’s so 1988, it couldn’t have existed at any other time without dramatic differences.

    A year later and the Berlin Wall fell — deeply relevant in regards to attitudes towards German characters.

    Three years later, Rodney King faced police brutality; in the movie, a prominent Black police character has been working the desk beat, so to speak, for killing a child. Attitudes would shift.

    Thirteen years later and terrorism is synonymous with 9/11, Al Qaida, etc. The fight up and down a tower would be different.

    Witty, clever John McClane is also in conversation with earlier action heroes, meaning he wouldn’t have been the same at an earlier date. I mean, literally, he couldn’t have been the same – he was originally intended to be played by Frank Sinatra. But he also fundamentally inverts certain stoic hero tropes.

    The technology in the movie – the novelty of early touch screens; Argylle’s car phone – is just so darn 1988.

    Attitudes toward California and hero cops is perhaps a bit more timeless in America (or at least not as narrow). Demonizing the federal level police while lionizing local police is interesting. But the way McClane just laughed off a man kissing him as being gross gay California stuff (homophobic, but not violently so, very good-natured) is also a microcosm.

    Of course this is probably my favorite Christmas movie, warts and all. It might be the very best example of traditional screenwriting. It’s executed like clockwork. Everything matters. Causal chains are incredible.

    Alan Rickman is the most delicious villain. I wouldn’t have been mad if he won.

    My sibling and I watch this every Christmas season. It’s a holiday essential. This year was the first time my teenager watched with us, and they didn’t say they especially liked it, but they were RIVETED. Die Hard is extremely not-boring. The one thing my teen said they liked was the intensity of the gay-ass vibes between McClane and Gruber (very much my child). You could write entire essays just about McClane and Gruber as foils, but if I tried to do it, it would quickly devolve into naughty fanfic, so I shall resist.

    (image credit: 20th Century Fox)

  • A shirtless male lead in The Merry Gentlemen. image credit: Netflix
    movie reviews

    The Merry Gentlemen (2024) *

    I went through a phase where I became a male revue connoisseur. In my defense, going to male revues is a great way to see a lot of hot women dressed up for a night out, drunk and having a great time. I developed a hierarchy of male revue quality, from least to best: Thunder from Down Under, Chippendales, and Magic Mike in Vegas.

    The thing about Thunder and Chipp is that these aren’t really interesting shows at all, period. A bunch of beefcakes wear costumes and take their shirts off and dispassionately thrust. They can’t really dance. (Bear in mind this opinion is from around 2017 and may no longer reflect reality.) It’s pretty well sexless, all things considered. At least Magic Mike has a narrative, the guys can dance, and there’s some excitement to it.

    If I were to place the revue in The Merry Gentleman in those rankings, I’d put it dead last. The dudes barely dance, much like Thunder, but there are fewer of them, and they seem to be having even less fun. Or am I having no fun because I’m not drunk among a bunch of hot middle aged women?

    There’s never any sense of fun in this, period. The romance is also not very romancey. The male lead is kinda wounded because…his girl left him to go back to the city. And the female lead wants to maybe…go back to the city. He is SO HURT and BETRAYED. She chooses to stay so he won’t be all hurt. That’s…kind of the whole thing.

    It feels like it was written by someone who doesn’t actually understand how romances work. It’s not really enough for two ostensibly attractive people to coexist until they decide to Be Together. Not all conflicts are created equally. This genuinely would have benefited from being a lot more tropey and formulaic!

    I won’t be revisiting this one on future Christmases. If I want to be bored watching shirtless men, I can just swipe TikTok for a few hours. At least they have some energy.

  • Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt in What Women Want. image credit: Paramount Pictures
    movie reviews

    Movie Review: What Women Want (2000) ***

    What Women Want was one of the three biggest movies of the year 2000, so it’s to be expected that I watched it a lot with my mum when it hit DVD. I used to really enjoy it! I stopped watching it when we learned Mel Gibson’s a trash fire of a human, and it’s skirted my romcom-watching periods since.

    I’ve got a lotta work to do at my desk and Netflix is trying to push Hallmark romances on me, so I went for something familiar, easy, and old. What Women Want. I was prepared to loathe it. “This definitely aged badly,” I thought resentfully as I hit play.

    Resentfully, I give it three stars because that’s all I can abide giving it. But I still pretty much enjoyed it.

    This turns out to be one of those Stealth Queer movies I clung to in adolescence because of insufficient queer representation in media. Although it has extremely limited, binary ideas of what it is to be a Man and a Woman – and the whole movie hinges on “sociopath learns women are human” – the way that the main character moves through his understanding of gender is extremely queer.

    At one point, he actually wishes aloud that he were a woman. If you hang out with trans people much, you’ll already know “I wish I were a woman” is enough to be a woman. Like…that’s it. If you want to be a woman, you can be. Gender is a social construct with different meanings at different times in different cultures with no basis in biology. Once you decide you want to be A Gender, you can Be The Gender.

    Somehow this old romcom with Mel Gibson helped form my identity as a nonbinary afab. I always saw myself as a stereotypical masculine force, swaggering and aggressively sexual, but I also wanted to look like a hot woman. I was born into a rather blobby androgynous body. I look worse than Mel Gibson in pantyhose. Somehow Mel Gibson in pantyhose is getting pretty close to my personal visualization of my gender: someone who isn’t female enough messing around incompetently with the set dressing of femininity.

    All the sexism in the movie – of which benevolent sexism upholding a specific form of femininity is narratively approved – still feels like the kind of silly genderfuckery that I just happen to love. I’d like to see a drag remake.

    What Women Want is also interesting if you think about how neatly it fits into capitalism. It struck me how much studios must love movies about ad agencies because they get to do a lot of sponsored material in the movie. Half of this thing is a Nike ad appealing to third wave feminism. I’m gonna have to make a playlist of romcoms with different perspectives on American capitalism at this point – the way romcoms show success in capitalism as a failing (Pretty Woman), how capitalist success demands distancing from femininity (Kate & Leopold), and the inevitability of small business being crushed by corporations (You’ve Got Mail).

    I’m glad I ended up appreciating this movie, warts and all. It’s easy to ignore all the crappy stuff when it gives me warm buzzy gender feelings. Now I’m going back to not watching Gibson movies anymore.

    (image credit: Paramount Pictures)

  • Hot Frosty credit: Netflix
    movie reviews

    Movie Review: Hot Frosty (2024) *****

    We are so back, baby! Merry Christmas!

    Normally I’ve watched about a thousand more Christmas movies and romcoms by this time of year. It’s nearly American Thanksgiving! But I watched Two Weeks Notice and was extremely lukewarm, then tried to watch another Lacey Chabert romcom (something Scottish Christmasy) and got bored out of finishing it. The struggle is real, y’all.

    Thank you to Netflix for another marvelous Christmas miracle!

    Hot Frosty is what it sounds like: Frosty the Snowman, except he’s a hot guy. Dustin Milligan plays an amazing himbo. For his sake, I hope the movie took two days to film. I can’t remember the last time I saw a beefcake as dehydrated as this one. It was funny how they were trying to get him to look sweaty when he looked like he’d had nothing but a couple sips of water for the duration of filming. The striations, y’all! Frosty is three layers of spray tan away from a physique competition. Somehow, even though he must have had nigh zero energy, he was an incredibly cute and charming example of the Born Sexy Yesterday trope.

    I like 00s/10s sitcoms, so the appearance of Joe Lo Truglio (aka Charles Boyle from Brooklyn 99) and Craig Robinson (Doug Judy/B99 and Darryl Philbin/The Office) would have made the whole thing watchable if the main couple wasn’t. Honestly, every romcom should just grab a couple comedians and let them mess around on set for our entertainment. These two are evergreen.

    Speaking of evergreen, does Lacey Chabert ever stop working? Although Lindsay Lohan has definitely earned a Holiday Romcom Queen crown of her own, she’ll never be able to touch Lacey’s intimidating IMDB page. Thirty Hallmark romcoms! I watched her being warm and sweet in this movie and had to wonder how many random guys she’s “fallen in love with” over the course of her career. What a dream.

    I mention in my review for Two Weeks’ Notice that romcoms can be formulaic without being rote. Hot Frosty is a great example of this. It hits all the normal marks you expect, but it does it with joy and energy. Everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. It’s silly and fun. All the frisky older ladies cracked me up. Is that so much to ask for?

    Five stars for another great Christmas romcom doing all we want and nothing we don’t.

    (image credit: Netflix)

  • sara reads the feed

    Disease, raw eggs, and raw billionaire

    I’ve been watching *so* many movies lately, but I haven’t been writing longer reviews for them. I’ve been too busy doing the actual work required in fulfilling a Kickstarter, launching a new horror novel, and editing another book of mine…while trying not to burn out. That means aggressively allocating time to Normal Life as well as Work and Work-like Things. That means fewer reviews!

    Still, I am watching lots of new-to-me favorites! I loved the original Night of the Living Dead. Although it wasn’t as good as the first one, Scream 2 was a hoot that made me want to watch the rest of the franchise. And I can’t stop thinking about Rec!

    Also on my list of worky stuff: trying to get a TikTok account to the size that I can actually put links in my bio.

    ~

    There’s a new 4K restoration of Tarsem Singh’s The Fall that we need to watch. (The Film Stage)

    ~

    Apparently Cape fur seals have an outbreak of rabies. (AJE) This is kinda scary to read. The seals bit five people before they identified them as rabies-infected. Luckily, no humans contracted rabies from the bites, but still.

    The interaction between diseases in animals and diseases in humans is generally scary. Smithsonian Mag notes that infant mortality is higher in places where bats have white nose syndrome.

    Also, someone caught H5-type bird flu without animal contact in Missouri. (Ars Technica) Bird flu has reached California dairies. (Ars Technica)

    And salmonella has been found in some eggs (NPR), but not in Nevada, so I’m still eating raw cookie dough.

    ~

    A study suggests that vaping screws up your lungs just as much as smoking. (The Guardian)

    As a piece of total anecdata, I definitely found this was true for me. Sometimes vaping was way worse for my lungs. Kinda depends on the vape.

    ~

    “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” almost stayed on the cutting room floor of the Lion King. (Variety) It’s bananas to consider we almost didn’t have the sequence with the horny lioness gaze.

    Other strange cinema history: The sexy piano scene with Julia Roberts and Richard Gere in Pretty Woman was improvised. (Vanity Fair)

    ~

    Selena Gomez is a billionaire so we gotta eat her too. (Variety)

    ~

    We might as well note that The Graveyard Book has been delayed (Variety) because of allegations against Neil Gaiman because I predict there will actually be no long-term consequences for his predatory behavior.

    ~

    Bad news for publishing. Apple Books has had one of the best teams in the industry, but Apple failed to recognize it and laid off a bunch of staff. (Ars Technica)