Friday Hodgepodge

Notable Commentary

"Read With Me is a free app I created (available for iPhone, Android, or as a web app) to put the classics, and my guidance through them, at anyone's fingertips." [format edits and more below -- ed] -- Lisa VanDamme, in "Read With Me: Crime and Punishment -- A Sneak Preview" at Medium.

"The real problem is not "Islamophobia", but Islamophilia, which is rampant in the West." -- Bosch Fawstin, in "I Became White After I Left Islam?" at FrontPage Magazine.

"Wealth creation is the answer to global warming." -- Raymond Niles, in "The Power of Compounding and the Power of Scaremongering" at Medium.

"[Trump's] dictatorial traits, displayed in his brutish coarseness, is prepping Americans for future dictatorship." -- Raymond Niles, in "Laying Down the Gauntlet of Dictatorship" at Medium.

In Further Detail

Every once in a while, my near-daily blogging routine turns up a real gem, and the app mentioned above appears to be one of them. Already wanting to resume my reading routine after our move, I will now have even more motivation to plow through all those boxes. I plan to install the app and pick a book.

Here is an excerpt from the Android app description linked above:

If I have a unique talent as a teacher of literature, it boils down to this: I am passionate about great books. Hugo wrenches my heart and makes me weep tears of anguish and of wonderment. Rostand stirs me to noble ambition in work and love and life. Tolstoy challenges me to think -- and to feel -- on planes higher than I had ever known. Ibsen, Dostoevsky, Balzac, Jane Austen, Maupassant, Rattigan, Sinclair Lewis -- all have helped me to see, in the words of English professor Mark Edmundson, "that life is bigger, sweeter, more tragic and intense -- more alive with meaning than I had thought." I derive profound personal joy from literature, and I have a knack for helping others do the same.

That is why I started Read With Me. I know so many people -- thoughtful, intelligent, motivated people -- who avoid reading the classics. And for understandable reasons: they're busy, they don't know what to read, they've never been taught how to enjoy it, they have unpleasant memories of tedious discussions in high school English ...

This sounds exciting and I am looking forward to this.

-- CAV