This is a comment for a rather niche audience, but Barth basically had two literary stages: in his mid to late-twenties, he wrote straightforward modernist fiction (The End of the Road and Floating Opera). The bulk of his career was spent writing post-modern fiction, which included the books most often cited in this thread.
I found his earlier work far more diverting: it featured tight, well-written plots with interesting characters and ideas. By contrast, stuff like Giles Goat-Boy was gobbledygook written for other post-modern academics. Gore Vidal actually has a great essay on this: it seems like Barth started out as a great novelist, but turned toward the (again just my opinion) rather fallow field of post-modernism to further his prestige. Which is a shame, because again, The End of the Road is delightful. I guess my point is this: if your introduction to Barth is seeing people recommend the Sotweed Factor, and you find it inscrutable, I recommend picking up his earlier work instead.
Honestly, yes. I had a deep skepticism of a lot of VC-backed moonshots/SPACs in 2021. However, it’s hard to deny that these moonshots were at least aimed in the right direction — way more capital going to EVs, biotech, quantum computing, etc. You get some frauds in the mix (Nikola), but it’s socially utile to have a few of these projects gaining traction instead of highly profitable zombies.
ZIRP also seemed to be shifting investment tides toward green projects and away from oil. The new regime has allowed pollution to continue, and powered tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia.
Do you give any credence to the reports that creatine can cause hair loss? It seems like one study found a link, but nobody has tried to directly replicate it since. Anecdotally, Reddit is filled with stories of people claiming it caused hair loss, though I’m sure there are a ton of confounding variables.
I’d be worried about using ChatGPT for this given its tendency to hallucinate. Did you have to verify each response it gave you, or were you willing to trust the output?
From a legal standpoint, why is it a qualified use of government paternalism to outlaw gambling? We should not be asking the government to set laws based on morality.
Practically speaking, and apologies in advance for how obvious this argument is…when you ban gambling, it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. Criminal actors benefit while the state is unable to enforce any protections or see any recompense. Moreover, it’s unclear what brightline exists between “gambling” and a ton of economic decisions. If I buy a plot of land because I think it might have oil, is that gambling? When I lock in an insurance policy, is that gambling?
I get it’s popular to immediately call for government enforcement whenever you experience personal moral outrage, but the real world contains far more nuance. Making gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries like drug use illegal has never solved the problem, and has exacerbated it for the worst off.
Not just any religion, it’s a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital (an offshoot of the Mennonites, who believed the end of the world was predicted in the Bible). This has all sorts of weird implications; from my memory, they can’t serve caffeine on the premises. There’s a giant painting of Jesus guiding a surgeon’s hands in the front of the Orlando branch when you walk inside.
My hot take is that this story is highly overrated. It’s boring, poorly written, and lacks nuance. The reason people remember it fondly is (1) everyone loves Vonnegut because he’s funny, so they don’t want to criticize it and (2) everyone read this story in middle school and are blinded by nostalgia.
I found his earlier work far more diverting: it featured tight, well-written plots with interesting characters and ideas. By contrast, stuff like Giles Goat-Boy was gobbledygook written for other post-modern academics. Gore Vidal actually has a great essay on this: it seems like Barth started out as a great novelist, but turned toward the (again just my opinion) rather fallow field of post-modernism to further his prestige. Which is a shame, because again, The End of the Road is delightful. I guess my point is this: if your introduction to Barth is seeing people recommend the Sotweed Factor, and you find it inscrutable, I recommend picking up his earlier work instead.