It’s fun, it’s easy, and it’s a great way to add some delightful home-grown nutrition to your meal planning — I hate gardening. I also hate healthy eating. What a shock it was, then, when my husband was diagnosed with coronary artery disease (CAD). And when I say “diagnosed,” I mean, he had some chest pains one day, had an artery catheterization test wherein the doctors discovered a 99% arterial…

A review of “The Whistleblower,” by Kathryn Bolkovac and Cari Lynn — I warn you: once you start reading whistleblowers’ stories, you won’t be able to stop. I am fascinated by whistleblowers, so I have been steadily working my way through every book my local public library has about or by these brave souls who see wrongdoing and…get this…REPORT IT. The book…

A review of Rosa Brooks’s “Tangled Up in Blue” — I’m a total sucker for police procedurals, in both book and TV form (hello The Wire, best TV program ever), so it should come as no surprise that I found Rosa Brooks’s new book Tangled Up In Blue: Policing the American City, to be a fascinating read. Brooks, a journalist…

But you’re going to fail — I used to say that my favorite things about living in the twentieth century were antibiotics and indoor plumbing. Those are pretty much still my favorite things about existing in the twenty-first century. Fuck the Internet. …

A review of Debora Harding’s Dancing with the Octopus — I read a lot of True Crime. I know. People think it’s weird. I don’t. I actually have several good reasons for reading True Crime. But one of the biggest and most valid reasons to read this nonfiction genre, in my opinion, is simply that they are often really thoughtful…

Corey Pein’s “Live Work Work Work Die” examines Silicon Valley’s start-up “culture” — My spouse saw this book, Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley, by Corey Pein, in our living room and he said, “Kudos to you, another depressing nonfiction book.” (I read almost exclusively investigative journalism, true crime, and sociology books, and my husband…

Then consider reading this oral history about the show — If you knew how much of my mental energy in the past few years has gone to thinking about the collected works of David Simon (including his fantastic True Crime classic Homicide, his more personal and sociological book The Corner, and of course, the TV show he wrote and produced…

Before you do all your holiday shopping there — Over the last few weeks I spent some quality time reading Alec MacGillis’s new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. It is about Amazon, but more broadly, it is about how Amazon is ruining many aspects of American life. It is a super-depressing read. I absolutely adore journalism…

There are so many other better books to read — I used to be a librarian, so I pay attention to what books people are reading and what books are talking about. I was also kind of an old-school snobby-about-reading-material librarian, so let me just say that I usually thought people were not actually reading or talking about the books…