Dear Readers,
Happy Hanukkah to all who have been celebrating. Combine a fully-lit Advent wreath with a burgeoning menorah and you’ll understand why wecall this time of year “the Interfaith Pyromaniac Festival” in our household. In the newsletter this week: an apology of sorts, a writer referral, and a review of Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. Good news, for all you procrastinators—I recommend two of these as holiday gifts, and one of them can instantly be delivered to your loved ones’ inboxes!
An Apology for Unleashing Glitter Upon the World
I’d like to apologize to my holiday card recipients who received the sparkly UNICEF cards. I’ve always laughed at the jokes about glitter being impossible to clean up entirely. I’ve been concerned about the environmental impact of glitter as a microplastic. But since it’s been a good fifteen years since I last did arts and crafts with glitter, it turns out I’ve let my guard down against Satan’s dandruff. I thought “Ooh, that’s pretty” about the ‘little bit of sparkle’ instead of “That can probably contaminate two football fields.”
So, I sincerely apologize to everyone whose homes, hands, and hair are now glitter-dusted. Ours are too. Even after showering. Multiple times.
To offset my store-bought glitter disaster purchase, I did also source a lot of my cards from a resale shop, where you can often find the spare one or two cards from someone else’s store-bought pack. I first found this out when I volunteered at a thrift shop before my senior year of high school. It’s a good way to find a card that suits the personality of everyone on your mailing list.
Writer Recommendation: Peter Berard of The Melendy Avenue Review
I’d like to give a shoutout to the writer who inspired me to start my substack, Peter Berard. I met Peter when he was in his Ph.D. program and I was pursuing my M.A. He reviews a lot of political theory, history, literary criticism, as well as a lot of genre fiction. In all my interactions with him, in person and online, he’s shown nothing but goodwill and kindness, and is one of those rare people who is very dedicated to their politics without their politics becoming their personality.
Even if you don’t agree with him completely—and you should never agree with any human being completely—I think you’ll find a lot of value in subscribing. There’s also a paid subscription option that you can gift to yourself or your fellow bookworms this holiday. Oh, and he also has a black cat!
Move Over, Charles Dickens: Timothy Snyder’s Work Encapsulates the Reasons for the Season
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
Timothy N. Snyder
Penguin Random House
2017
I will contend that Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is the perfect git for everyone on your list this holiday season. Now, you may think that’s an oddly grim thing to give at what is already the darkest time of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere, but I think that sentiment ignores, to muddle the trite phrase a bit, “the reasons for the season.”
Hanukkah is the celebration of a successful, armed revolution against an oppressive foreign invader hell-bent on erasing the religion and culture of its minority subjects. In other words, it was a fight against tyranny, granted the miracle of the oil as a sign of divine approval.
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