I have summer-theatre-camp related parenting duties today so I’m going to need you to break up into small groups and discuss the tabs amongst yourselves. Here is your syllabus.

 ✦ Did cartoonist Tillie Walden steal the substance of historian Rachel Hope Cleves’s book Charity & Sylvia for her own graphic novel Charity & Sylvia? Absolutely not, writes the proprietor of Witchcraft for Cyborgs, with extensive evidence and after reading both books. It’s rare that a dispute this messy gets a resolution so clear.

Discussion Questions:
☞ Did you know this claim would turn out to be bogus as soon as you compared the two covers and saw that they were not even vaguely the same, let alone identical as Cleves alleged?
☞ What about when Cleves didn’t provide even a smidgen of textual comparison between the two works to substantiate her claim?
☞ And how badly did Drawn & Quarterly screw up their own response, that even the person who concludes their author is entirely in the right still thinks their statement was garbage?

✦ In Defector, Giri Nathan wrote “Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town” and David Hollingshead wrote in defense of the humanities and specifically the practice of critical theory in “Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong.” The first is just solid blogging, the second is one of the finest defenses of the value of critical thinking I’ve ever read.

Discussion Questions:
☞ How good is Defector right now, huh?
☞ Absolutely killing it. Not really a question, I guess, but discuss if you like.
☞ Hey they also just hired Tim Faust as their Director of Revenue, so it looks like the boys are back in town.

✦ RIP Noah “pinion” Smith, roasted to death by Henry Farrell.

Discussion Questions:
☞ Compare the following lines from Farrell’s post:
1. “If Noah thinks that my arguments are driven by resentment, I believe that his claims stem from a Candide-like naivete that renders him unable really to see power relations in the modern economy, or even assimilate the arguments that other people are making about these power relations.”
2. “…I fear that the book that Noah read was not the one that Acemoglu and Johnson actually wrote, but the very different one that he largely composed for himself in his own head.”
3. “Noah is not only at liberty to disagree with my arguments, but is actively encouraged to. This, however, would require him to stop fighting with what he imagines people have written, and engage with what they actually say.”
Q: Which of these statements, if written about you, would cause you to flee into the forest never to be seen or heard from again?

✦ “We Need to Quarantine Aliens on the Moon, Scientists Propose,” by Becky Ferreira in 404. Q: Scientists??????

✦ Hot Herman Melville statue to be unveiled in New Bedford. Q: Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!

✦ “Mushroom behind 'tiny people' hallucinations identified.” Lisa Potter, phys org. Q: You wanna see the tiny people? 😉 🍄

✦ Fill in the blank: “Bro. People are cool as ____.”

Phoebe Bridgers, “Bobby”

Discussion Question:
☞ Can you tell that’s Bo Burnham signing backup vocals?