Cooking spaghetti at 3am because Milton Friedman was a bastard

It was a night like any other; me reading in bed before going to sleep. I'd finished the longer novel I was reading earlier that day, and at bedtime wanted something I could easily dip into, so I flicked through 50 Years of the Playboy Interview. I settled on the 1973 interview with Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist whose fault it is that everything is terrible today. 

This was a mistake.

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Sort of book review - The Death of a President and the pre-history of childhood

The Death of a President, William Manchester's semi-official account of the Kennedy assasination, had a turbulent journey to publication. In the wake of JFK's death, the Kennedy family realised a deluge of books about the assassination was surely on the way and commissioned Manchester, a journalist who knew and liked Kennedy and whose work the family approved of, to write the official account of the events. Manchester duly spent three years researching and writing the book, interviewing all the key players including Robert and Jacqueline Kennedy. But as publication approached, the Kennedys, deciding the book was unflattering to them, and furious Manchester had sold the serialisation rights, attempted to block publication. They were unsuccessful in this endeavour, allowing us 60 years on to read this sanitised and simpering account of the days leading up to and immediately after Kennedy's death, as seen in the mores of the time. I can't even remember what motivated me to pick this up; the Kennedy assassination isn't a topic that's ever interested me much before, despite the opportunity it offers for endless deep diving and speculation. But reading this now, it's more unflattering that the Kennedys ever realised, and disturbed me for reasons that have nothing to do with who shot why where when. 

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Book review: Starfish by Patty Dann

The film Mermaids meant a lot to me in my early teens, as I guess it did to a lot of women of my generation. Teenage films were pretty much dead as a genre between the John Hughes/Molly Ringwald era of the 1980s and the release of Clueless in 1995. The success of Clueless lead to an explosion in the release of teen movies, from sexploitation (American Pie) to horror (Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer) then cheerleaders (Bring It On) and mean girls (one mean girl in Cruel Intentions, then a whole eponymous film of them). By the time Clueless was released, I was way too depressed for anything that looked as blithe as the poster suggested - though I did watch, and love, the film several years later, then many times since. 

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