Jon's Writing in Vintage Seattle

I recently wrote about the fabulous Fox Theatre that was on 7th and Olive in Seattle for Vintage Seattle. I hope you enjoy the small piece here. And for more images of the grand building, you can visit the University of Washington's image collection here.

A Feminist Reading List

Ariel Levy offers it in The New Yorker.

From the brief piece...

It doesn’t have a whole lot to do with the piece I wrote, but as long as we’re talking about feminist memoirs, I highly recommend Andrea Dworkin’s, “Heartbreak.” I think it is her best book, certainly her most accessible. It is the perfect antidote to the myth that Dworkin was a simplistic thinker—and writer—who thought that all sex was rape.

Now this is really a stretch, but just by the by, I think my favorite biography of a feminist icon is Nancy Mitford’s unbelievable “Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” Oof, that’s a good book.

The Bible - X-Box Edition

Thou shalt play games.

Quote of the Week

A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
- Chinese Proverb

Gene FOXP2

It's that gene, that single solitary gene that separates chimps and us in regards to speaking abilities. We can, they can't. It's because of the gene FOXP2. UCLA scientists discuss it here.

From the piece...

"Earlier research suggests that the amino-acid composition of human FOXP2 changed rapidly around the same time that language emerged in modern humans," said Dr. Daniel Geschwind, Gordon and Virginia MacDonald Distinguished Chair in Human Genetics at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. "Ours is the first study to examine the effect of these amino-acid substitutions in FOXP2 in human cells.

"We showed that the human and chimp versions of FOXP2 not only look different but function differently too," said Geschwind, who is currently a visiting professor at the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London."

Robert Mankoff - The Big Think Interview

The cartoon editor of the New Yorker is a wealth of knowledge on all things comedic:

I've Lost My Library Card!

More, at Garfield Minus Garfield.

Friday's Poem

Dorothy Parker's "General Review of the Sex Situation":

I Can Tell By the Pixies...

Letters of Note, which day after day has some incredibly interesting posts, had a post the other day on Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle was an avid spiritualist and believed in faeries, actual faeries, and the like. He wrote a letter to a girl who had taken a "photograph" of a faerie.

A Novel Crime Cure

The BBC recently looked at how reading classic literature can help those in prison from reoffending.

From the piece...

Mr North says literature also helped addicts and other sick people.

He said: "Literature is an incredibly broad thing and heals all of us all the time.

"We're interested in how you deliver it in a highly charged way to get a result."

Mary Stephenson, formerly writer in residence at Channings Wood prison in Exeter, said she had seen at least two prisoners change after reading classic novels.

"It made them realise they weren't thick or stupid and they were just as much an audience for that kind of writing as anyone else.

"That gives them a great boost and a lot of them started to do education."

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck and the modern adventure novel Touching the Void by Joe Simpson all resonated with offenders in different ways.