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Air pollutant linked to year-round respiratory health in Mississippi
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- books,
- books: author: akwaeke emezi,
- books: genre: literary fiction,
- books: genre: memoir,
- books: theme: abuse,
- books: theme: coming of age,
- books: theme: gender & feminism,
- books: theme: mental health,
- books: theme: mythology & folklore,
- books: theme: queer,
- books: theme: religion,
- books: type: novel,
- books: year: 2018
Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi (2018)
This autobiographical novel follows Ada, a young Nigerian who is inhabited by multiple spirits. In Igbo the word for this is ọgbanje, which seems to sometimes refer to the spirits and sometimes the host (or maybe trying to distinguish the two is a failure of cultural literacy on my part). From birth, Ada knows she's different, and sometimes living with the spirits is a struggle. At other times they're a source of comfort and protection as she deals with unsettled family relationships, a move to an entirely new culture in the US, and intimate partner abuse. A lot of the time it's both.
Like Stone Butch Blues, this book is so memoir-shaped and episodic that it's hard to parse it as a novel, but it does have novelistic prose which is quite strong and evocative, and there's a satisfying arc. The use of alternating POVs among the different spirits is effective at establishing them as their own voices with their own motivations and interiority. Ada isn't really the main character—we get the spirits' perspectives on entering her body, being born from her trauma, and making decisions about how to deal with her, long before we ever get Ada's own POV. It's more of an ensemble piece. Conversations between Ada and the spirits take place in an internal mind palace where each entity has a physical form, which helps it feel more vividly concrete rather than an abstract dialogue among inner voices.
The book takes an eclectic perspective on spirituality and mental health. Western psych concepts of dissociative identity are fluidly interwoven with Igbo religious traditions, as well as with Christian spirituality. (Jesus is an occasional visitor to the mind palace.) This feels very honest and unfraid to hold diverse truths, which is refreshing as well as thematically resonant.
Though the character Ada goes by she/her, she does have gender stuff going on, which is presented in the context of one of the inhabiting spirits being male. It was a little startling to me to have this portrayed so frankly, because it's one of those things we talk about in the trans community but not necessarily outside it, and it made me feel a strange mix of comfortable familiarity and high anxiety. Like, yes, there are trans/nb/genderfluid people who experience their gender(s) in whole or in part as plural identity, but you're not supposed to say that in public. But when I take a breath and look past that initial reaction, of course I realize that we can't get where we need to go by sanding the rough edges off our reality in the name of not scaring the straights.
I plan to check out some of Emezi's other books. Since this one is obviously a lightly fictionalized recounting of things that really happened, I'll be interested to see what they come up with when they write outside of their specific personal experiences.
Content notes for the book include: Rape, self-injury, disordered eating, and attempted suicide.
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Another Fantasy Bundle - His Majesty The Worm
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/HisMajesty

Unfortunately I've received this on a day when I'm feeling seriously tired. I've taken a look and it seems to be well-presented and reasonably coherent, but the rule book alone is more than 400 pages and I am not going to be able to give it more than a cursory look any time soon, and a game that starts out by wanting me to buy some tarot cards to play it does not automatically get my seal of approval - I suppose the cards aren't much more expensive than a few dice at current prices, but if I bought this, intended to run it immediately, then discovered I needed cards I didn't have I'd be a little peeved.
The halfling book is mostly about trying NOT to have adventures and firmly avoiding the sort of stress that comes with strange parties of dwarves and wizards on your doorstep, and looks to be a lot of fun. The supplement is about halflings that commit the serious mistake of going out to explore beyond their village, and how to create the surrounding area and have horrible things happen there, like running short of food. Seriously, go home and smoke some pipeweed instead, at least that stuff takes a few years to kill you...
Overall this looks to be reasonable value - I suspect that if I ever wanted to run a fantasy RPG I'd be more likely to go with the halflings than the Worm, but if either appeals it's probably worth a look.
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Giving myself voluntary homework like a very normal person
The pros: This was in many ways exactly the sort of thing I was looking for, an old-fashioned grammar tutorial, organized by grammatical concept, that used the proper names for things (and defined them for you) and laid out what it was talking about in lots of tables and lists and with loads of examples, followed by exercises. Very traditional, very formal. The exercises helped a lot. If I couldn’t remember something by the time I did the exercises, the book was navigable enough that I could go back and look it up. I think even when I had to look up every answer, it was valuable and important for me to take the time to physically write them all down, even unintelligibly on scrap paper that I then threw out.
The cons: For some reason, while most of the answer exercises were in the back, each unit’ “Test Yourself” exercises ended with an exercise “In Context” which did not have answers in the back, but just had the instructions repeated in the answer key. Was this done on purpose or was it some sort of printing mistake? I would have really liked to have been able to check my work after I’d put all this time rewriting paragraphs in different tenses and stuff, since these were usually the hardest exercises and therefore I was the least confident I did them right. Knowing I’d not be able to check my work also made it a little too easy to skive off some of them, doing the answers just in my head and not writing them down. (This was also a lack of discipline on my part, and someday I should probably revisit this book and just do all the In Contexts again in a row, and possibly see if I can press-gang some kind of human into checking it.)
The verdict: Definitely not a read-once-and-be-done-with-it book, and certainly I will keep it around as a reference, but it was quite worth working my way all the way through it and familiarizing myself with what’s in it. Probably I forgot a lot of the finer points of grammar as soon as I was done with the chapter but they’ll be less foreign next time I run into them, or maybe I’ll at least remember that Hey I Read Something About That Once and go look it up. It definitely disambiguated some stuff I’d memorized but not understood via other more “naturalistic” learning methods like Duolingo or listening to dialogues.
I don’t know how the hell Yu Ming learned fluent Irish in six months no matter how bored the wee fella was stocking groceries. This shit is difficult. There are nine units here just on verbs. There are five declensions of nouns. And three separate systems for counting. I gotta step it up if I ever want to get a handle on this.
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72 sick in salami salmonella outbreak, health agency says
Seventy-two people have fallen ill after eating salami recalled due to possible salmonella contamination.
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Election watchdog saw major spike in complaints during spring campaign

The independent body that enforces Canada's election laws is reporting a massive spike in complaints from people concerned about the integrity of this year's election.
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Sask. volunteer firefighter who set hay bales on fire 30 times awaits sentencing

A Saskatchewan judge is scheduled to give his sentencing decision next month in the case of a volunteer firefighter who repeatedly set hay bales on fire.
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two, two, two reviews in one
In the past two months I have been fortunate enough to read not one but two ARCs for upcoming novels by KJ Charles. One was Copper Script, which you'll notice has already been actually published. The other was All of Us Murderers, out in October 2025. So here we go, two reviews, one tardy, one timely, happy to separate them into two different posts if someone official would prefer that I do that.
( Copper Script )
Both titles: A+ would recommend.
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An ant's eye view of the revolution from rural Galway
The first book in this trilogy, Seek the Fair Land, takes place during the Cromwellian ravages and I read it several years ago. Last year I determined to make some progress and read the second book, The Silent People, which is about the years leading up to and during the Great Famine. This one, The Scorching Wind, takes place in the 1910s and ‘20s, during the war for independence and the civil war that immediately followed.
Before I get into the book properly I must point out the things that this book has in common with Ken Loach’s movie The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Loach is an Englishman but The Wind that Shakes the Barley, featuring a not-yet-Oscar-winning young Corkman named Cillian Murphy, is nevertheless one of the most tear-jerkingly powerful movies about Irish history I’ve seen, with bonus socialism and extra bonus Cork accents so thick you could cut them with a butter knife and put them on toast. So. In addition to the general time period, both works feature a protagonist who is initially reluctant to join in revolutionary activity, because he is a medical student who is therefore a) very busy studying to be a doctor and b) more about putting people back together than blowing them apart. In the movie our half-doctor revolutionary is named Damian and in the book he is named Dominic. (One major difference: Damian, being played by Cillian Murphy, is very handsome, and Dominic is frequently implied to be not so handsome–certainly not as handsome as young Cillian Murphy, anyway.) Both protagonists have brothers who, at the beginning, are more militant than they are, joining the IRA first, while our black-haired heroes are still reluctant. By the end, though, it is our younger brothers who have become more militant and take the anti-Treaty side in the war, while the older brothers become Free State officials, pitting brother against brother in a way that makes an extremely heart-wrenching and dramatic ending to a drama about war. Also both stories take place largely in the Western part of Ireland, far from the drama in Dublin–Loach’s movie was filmed largely on location in Cork, and Macken’s story takes place in and around his native Galway.
From thence the similarities end, but it’s enough that I tried to look up if Loach had ever mentioned the book in an interview or anything. I can find some webpages that claim the film was influenced by the book but I can’t find any primary sources where they are getting that claim from on a quick search. Ah well.
Anyway. The prose style is trademark Macken, with a lot of very simple descriptive sentences interspersed by the characters’ unpretentious thoughts and bits of Hiberno-English that someone unfamiliar with the area could spend years looking up. Many of the characters speak in Irish but the book doesn’t generally include it; it translates it to English When an Irish word is used because there’s no real English translation or it’s just one word, Macken doesn’t italicize; it just blends in seamlessly the way Irish words are normally incorporated into Hiberno-English. As far as I’m concerned, a real strength is the way the characters talk about politics, especially as people who have a lot of history but not necessarily a lot of theory–it sounds believable to the way real people at the time would talk about politics, and not like the author is performing educational dialogues for the benefit of the audience. The fights Dominic and Dualta have at the end might not be blindingly original but they sound like real fights people on the opposite side of an issue have.
Another interesting approach here is that Macken doesn’t spend a lot of time on the high-level news–other than everybody getting the news of the Easter Rising in Dublin, the book focuses on the individual experiences of the characters involved, with little in the way of dates, cameos by famous people (except one brief one from John Redmond), or the characters conveniently turning up at high-profile historical events. They ping back and forth between various IRA operations and trying to go back to regular life for various stretches of time. The characters only ever seem to know the bits of things they’re involved in, and sometimes not even that–Dominic ends up on multiple jobs where his acquaintances basically just scoop him up and tell him to do something and he’s not really sure what it is that’s in the bag, or where they are going, or some other type of information that you’d think would be fairly critical to being involved in a guerrilla military operation. But no, everything’s done on such a tight NTK information ecosystem that I sometimes worried it’d actually be a security hole, making people do things they hadn’t agreed to with only your judgment of their character that they’d go along with it.
Dominic’s journey from a reluctant revolutionary who would rather be left alone to study to a hardened veteran of the flying columns involves a lot of pretty nasty stuff. Macken really excels at foregrounding the humanity of everyone involved–including unprincipled mercenaries like the Tans Mac and Skin–without falling into the common modern trap of being like “Sure, the oppression is bad, but isn’t fighting back against it worse if you find yourself losing even one inch of moral high ground by doing anything even a little bit shitty to anybody.” Dominic doesn’t like everything he has to do as an IRA man, like burning a really big lovely house down in reprisal for another house burning, but his doubt and disgust that this is really necessary–his reluctance to accept it as necessary even as he acknowledges that it worked–doesn’t lead to him quitting or renouncing the IRA or deciding both sides are just as bad or anything. It’s just used to show how having to do all these terrible things sucks, and no cause or tactical justification makes it not suck. The exploration of what having to do awful things, as well as having awful things done to you, changes you, is, I think, the essence of what makes the novel so powerful.
One of the other great features is its incredible use of ambiguity, which I will not elaborate on because it would give away the ending.
Overall, I’m very glad I finally read these and I’m not sure what took me so long.
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Qu’est-ce qu’une poète romantique, dans l’air du temps ?
Aurélie, professeure de français, nous fait découvrir une poète romantique méconnue qui était pourtant "dans l'air du temps" de son époque. Nous explorons comment Marceline Desbordes-Valmore a créé à travers ses recueils et ses épigraphes une communauté littéraire féminine au XIXe siècle.
www.onethinginafrenchday.com
#FrenchLiterature #FrenchPoetry #RomanticPoetry #LearnFrenchThroughLiterature #FrenchCulture #AdvancedFrench
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Fraud trial for Ontario's 'Crypto King' set to begin in Oct. 2026

A court in Toronto has set a trial date for Aiden Pleterski, the self-styled "Crypto King" accused of defrauding investors out of more than $40 million.
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Marie-Philip Poulin named PWHL's MVP as Montreal Victoire clean up at league awards

Montreal Victoire captain Marie-Philip Poulin received the PWHL MVP Award at the Hard Rock Hotel in Ottawa on Wednesday, edging out Toronto Sceptres defender Renata Fast and former Boston Fleet forward Hilary Knight.
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Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 5: Clearing the air
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: camphoric
Summary: A riddle turns into a case.
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Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 4: Too many clocks, not enough time
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt:

Summary: A death at a nursing home leaves Sally with more questions than answers.
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Machu Picchu
The story of Machu Picchu, as Wilbert told it to us, was that it was under construction as a district capital when the Spanish arrived. Intimating that things were going badly with the Spanish, the Inca moved 700 people and all their gold from their capital of Cusco along the Inca trail to Machu Picchu, destroying the roads behind them with landslides. They remained there for 80 years but were aware that the Spanish, in search of the gold, were getting closer aided by a generation of half-Peruvian, half-Spanish collaborators. After 80 years, therefore, they hid the gold in the surrounding hills and some moved back towards Cusco where they were captured by the Spanish and others moved east into the Amazon where their descendents were briefly encountered by archeologists in the 1970s. The Spanish eventually reached Machu Picchu but found no gold. This story does not appear anywhere else I've looked (but, as noted, information at the level of detail I'm accustomed to for historic sites is much harder to find for Machu Picchu), but it wouldn't surprise me if it isn't the legend as told among the local Andean people.
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Yahtzee Roll #6: Fill 3: A night in
Fandom: BBC Sherlock
Pairing: Stella Hopkins/Sally Donovan
Rating: Gen
Length: 400
Prompt: extrovert
Summary: Sally suggests a night in.