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Broadcasting from the Facebook Bunker Expanded

Broadcasting from the Facebook Bunker Expanded

Information Satire TWE Jacinda Ardern Explainer Editor: Broadcasting from her Facebook Bunker, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced today the transmogrification of her Facebook channel to a fully integrated news outlet. “Traditional news outlets are too negative,” she said, “and are continually asking me things which I know nothing about:

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Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Dead at 101

Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti Dead at 101

The popular image of the Beats – perhaps the last truly great American literary movement – is Jack Kerouac’s description of “the mad ones[ who…]burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding”. Certainly, Kerouac himself died aged just 47, largely as a result of a lifetime of alcohol abuse.

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Why Progressives and Conservatives Can’t Seem to Agree about Justice

Kyla Hatcher fee.org Kyla Hatcher is a freelance writer and editor who recently graduated from New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, ID. Her heroes include John Steinbeck, C. S. Lewis, and Thomas Sowell. Many Americans today continue to talk past each other in their discussions of justice. Progressives often

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BFD Book Review: The Parasitic Mind

BFD Book Review: The Parasitic Mind

Francis Forde The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. Hardcover – October 6, 2020 by Gad Saad In his efforts to stand up to the infantile coddling which is taking place within western institutions, the big bold and beautiful Gad Saad has pulled no punches. In his latest

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‘Dylan Thomas in America’ by John Brinnin

‘Dylan Thomas in America’ by John Brinnin

Sir Bob Jones nopunchespulled.com My reading preference is fiction, particularly authors such as Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Damon Runyan, Alan Bennett etc who wrote humour. Waugh was the all-time master and his 1930s novels are for me, the best fiction ever created. With non-fiction the more esoteric the subject, the

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The Mobbing of a Portland Bookstore Reminds Us Why Fahrenheit 451 Was Written

Brad Polumbo fee.org Brad Polumbo is a libertarian-conservative journalist and Opinion Editor at the Foundation for Economic Education. For three days and counting, protesters in Portland, Oregon have gathered at a local bookstore to demand that it stop selling a new book critical of Antifa. “Far-left activists surrounded Powell’

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From Crime Fighters to Crime Writers

Lili Pâque University of New England In Dervla McTiernan’s book, The Scholar, published earlier this year, women are consistently used as the “fall guys” for men with high aspirations. Two young women are killed when they uncover fraud. Another female colleague is then framed for the murders. Before writing

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The Quick and the Dead

Hiding in a Rotorua bookstore last Wednesday – coward that I am – while the troops were performing the curious female ‘shopping’ ritual, and leafing through the tomes on display I happened upon this passage: “Ross Hayton is a jovial, bearded physician who has done so many colonoscopies in his life that

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Sympathy for Scrooge

Sympathy for Scrooge

As one of The BFD’s Christmas posts noted, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is almost single-handedly responsible to establishing many of the features of our traditional Christmas. It also gifted the English language with a new pejorative: Scrooge. Derived from the story’s protagonist, Ebeneezer Scrooge, a “scrooge” has

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Books: Why the Internet Hasn’t Killed Them Off

Books: Why the Internet Hasn’t Killed Them Off

Dominique Boullier Maxime Crépel Sciences Po Mariannig Le Béchec Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 We stand amazed by the vitality of printed books, a more than 500-year-old technique, both on and offline. We have observed over the years all of the dialogue which books have created around themselves, through 150

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Jeffrey Tucker’s Thoroughly Excellent ‘Liberty or Lockdown’

John Tamny aier.org John Tamny, research fellow of AIER, is editor of RealClearMarkets. His book on current ideological trends is: They Are Both Wrong (AIER, 2019) What better way to begin a review of what is an excellent book than to say that the book’s author always knew.

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Five Historical Romances to Escape into during a Pandemic

Five Historical Romances to Escape into during a Pandemic

Diana Wallace University of South Wales Georgette Heyer kept only one fan letter. It was from a Romanian political prisoner who had raised her cell-mates’ spirits over a 12-year incarceration by retelling the story of Heyer’s Friday’s Child. “Truly,” she wrote, “your characters managed to awaken smiles, even

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Book Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Book Review: The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams

Roslyn Petelin The University of Queensland When a literary luminary such as Thomas Kenneally declares so early in 2020 that he is certain a “more original” novel “will not be published this year”, the reviewer faces a challenge. The book in question is The Dictionary of Lost Words, the debut

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