"The dragon saves the town."

Even if you have only a dim idea of what Dungeons & Dragons is or how a D&D game works, the #GOPDnD Twitter stream is comedy gold, imagining how Trump and his party might be inserted into a game. A couple of articles summarizing it are at Gizmodo and Distractify.

Suggestions for 2018

I'm dropping these here so I don't forget them.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World by Tim Marshall

Yacht Rock

All twelve episodes of Yacht Rock collected in one spot. I think this is one of the underappreciated gems of online comedy. It's worth watching them sequentially (and contemporaneously). Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Yacht Rock. And here's the series on YouTube:

Yacht Rock 1

Yacht Rock 2

Yacht Rock 3

Yacht Rock 4

Yacht Rock 5

Yacht Rock 6

Yacht Rock 7

Yacht Rock 8

Yacht Rock 9

Yacht Rock 10

Yacht Rock 11

Yacht Rock 12

Syrians play Risk too.

Who knew we were so cutting edge?

Coates on Obama

A bit more from Ta-Nehisi Coates to round out this week's book club meeting. If you haven't read it, Coates' piece in The Atlantic assessing the Obama presidency is profound, especially in his efforts to reconcile Obama's innate optimism with the outcome of the 2016 election. For more on this same topic, listen to Coates' interview with Ezra Klein.

Punching Nazis

And I'm not referring to Nazis who engage in punching, but rather to the activity of hitting Nazis with fists. The question du jour is whether Captain America should punch Nazis and what would Jack Kirby think of a Cap who did not. Steven Attewell has some thoughts.

Prince Jones

Prince Jones plays a not insignificant part in Between the World and Me, this month's book club book. I was living and working in DC back in 2000 when he was shot and killed by PG County police. The killing dominated news in DC for quite a while, so I thought I'd go back and dig up some of the stories for context. The one I recall best is this article from the Washington City Paper, the DC alternative weekly. That article is contemporaneous with the shooting. A year later, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this article for the Washington Monthly, in which he takes a deeper look at policing in PG County. Finally, two years after the incident, the City Paper published an additional article with significant new facts gleaned from depositions given by the police officers involved in the shooting. Read together, it's a deeply depressing catalog of race and policing that underscores what I take to be Coates' pessimism about whether America will ever accord black men equal respect, both culturally and legally.