Jeff O'Neill (46:46)
I mean one thing that I think we have been welcomely reminded of in doing zero to well read over the last six, nine months or whatever is to hold our own political ideological judgments in abeyance at least for a little while or you know, keep them in, do not jettison them but like hold them next to rather than mapping directly on to the text at all time and see what's on unravels and what the text may be doing and think about it other than, you know, withhold that judgment so you have some time to experience and see maybe the text itself is complicating or commenting on it may not be as simple as the plain text reading reading but that doesn't necessarily mean that every text is going to do that. And then it's even more difficult as you say, when you are in unfamiliar territory and perhaps you are reacting to extant culture ideas that you want to be careful about judging those on their own terms or maybe you're not and that's that uncertainty can be quite difficult. So I. That is sounds like a very strange experience. Yeah, I've got a couple that aren't out yet or at least one that's not out yet. These are audiobook corners. London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe I think I said before that I was listening to it. I finally finished I think I actually finished it before I was talking about Tom Gennad's in the days of my youth I was told what means to be man but I was so excited to talk about that I skipped over it. This is Patrick Radden Keefe's new long sustained investigative journalism piece. It does Patrick Radden Keefe things did I will say when I read the blurb and then the first part of this I don't know how long Rebecca I'd say it felt a little true crimey for Patrick Radden Keefe because it follows the death of a 19 year old upper middle class young man in London. I think it's 2019 or so is when this actually happens and I, I've got nothing against true crime but like the particular homicide, maybe death of an individual person, I try not to dwell in those spaces. I don't, I don't like it. It's not that and there's other places people could go for that but I gave it credit because of the brand of PRK and I was right to do so because it becomes an, a way of seeing into this particular part of London society in this particular time. Especially the influence of giant oligarchical fortunes coming in from Russia and the way that money has distorted the real estate markets, the social fabric, the school, these, these elite school systems, social media and then regular old family and individual dysfunction and growing and rebellion all at the same culminating in. And this is not spoiling it because this is told to us pretty quickly. This young man in the, in the middle of night is caught on cameras going over the side of an apartment building on the Thames and going into the River Thames and his body's found I think a few days later or there's no other person there, he's not pushed. So what happened? Why did this person come to have do this thing, choose this way? I don't even want to say they were committing suicide because even that was problematized about what he's actually maybe was actually going on there. But the investigation of what their family was trying to do to figure out what was happening, how the police works, where the money goes, the effect of social media on this kid and seeing all these rich and famous as people do things around you and then you may be you wanting to be a part of that. The difference between real and fake. I thought, you know, shock, it was awesome. By the end I will say, and I don't know this is what I want. If I want true crime, this is what I want. I found it. I the say nothing stuff about the Irish troubles is just the nuns robbing banks. Like it's hard to get, it's hard to clone that. And I think the characters in that and these are real people, I shouldn't call them characters. The figures in that are more sort of globally interesting. Like we're talking about people who become eventually the president of Sinn Fein and like negotiate the peace. But these are real people and there's a real mystery. There's an emotional mystery and a psychological mystery insofar there's also a forensic mystery. So anyway, if you like Patrick Radencrief, it's terrific if you like true crime, but you're looking for something that really leans into like the sociology and urbanology and geopolitics, it's terrific. So that my full throated support of London Falling, but if you, if it does feel more true crimeing than you yourself would like for a little bit, I hear you, I see you, I'm one of you. But it, it does widen and complexify and deepen from there. Let's see True Color by Corey Stamper. Corey Stamper. I think I interviewed her a long time ago for her first book. Word by Word was about the dictionary. She's a lexicologist, worked for the Merriam Webster's Dictionary, and as part of writing Word by Word, she even said this to me when I was interviewing her for Word by Word that she already knew with her next book was going to be out. It was going to be about color. And I was like, whoa, okay, color. And we talked about that for a few minutes. But she uncovered this story of when the third edition of the Merriam Webster was being written. She was involved in that. But like, there was a. There was a really important edition of the dictionary when the science of color was really coming to the forest right around World War I. And the uses of color and trying to systemize it and describing it became a scientific pursuit. And then updating the dictionary definitions of color became loaded and fraught and super interesting. And this is the account of a couple of people trying to define color. It has never dictionary occurred to me
