The Antisocial Socialist

I love about 50% of his fiction (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, didn't really bond with the other two). 100% of the non-fiction I've read by him has been excellent, including the very short but very important one.

I can see it, though for the most part her style works for me, and I love her ideas enough to deal with some of the writing tropes she uses.

It's SO GOOD so far. I mean I have no idea what's going on but in a good way.

grimjim gave it to me when he was clearing out excess books. So not entirely happenstance, but something I'd somehow managed to miss reading until then.

They're both excellent. So are Island of the Day Before and Baudolino, but I didn't bond with those in the same way. Foucault's Pendulum is one I reread several times and got very different things out of it as a teenager trying to be clever, a young activist, and a tired editor.

It's mostly on literary analysis, but the one about his own writing process was one of my favourites.

Say, do you have any comment about the recent news story about rates of non-vaccinated kids at "alternative" schools in Toronto?

I have opinions about that as a headline, because it's very misleading. The demographics of elementary and secondary alternative schools are very different. Elementary alternative schools skew affluent and white; they were by and large started by hippie families and attendance at one is typically also hereditary to a degree (i.e., younger siblings are given preference). They're typically founded around a specific pedagogy, such as holistic education.

Secondary alternative schools are much more diverse and less affluent, and take any student who meets the credit/age requirement. They tend to be "last chance highs" for at-risk kids.

Secondary alternative schools have approximately the same vaccination rate as mainstream secondary schools, at least when you remove the outliers (specific alternative schools with similar demographics to their elementary counterparts, mainstream schools in wealthy white areas).

Teal deer: The problem is rich white people, not alternative education.