When I was in elementary school, my parents would get me abridged versions of great books from Walmart. They were little paperbacks with lots of illustrations. I loved many of them and read them over and over. Then when I got older, I read many of the originals.

I think that some good stories can be retold in many different ways. One telling will be better than another but even an abridged telling can preserve they key pieces and convey them to a different audience.

Edit: consider folk-tales. They don’t have a canonical version and so for example we can have Robin Hood in both Water Scott’s Ivanhoe and in the Disney movie with the foxes. Or Greek mythology, which can be enjoyed even if you’re not reading Hesiod.

My theory is that psychosis due to self-imposed sleep deprivation causes some of the crazier things Elon Musk does.

lots of ads and mailers before the election that when they show their ID to vote they’ll be arrested and taken away

I’ve seen a mailer providing false information that a certain very liberal group (out-of-state college students) wasn’t allowed to vote, but I’ve never seen something like this. Do you have a link to an example of it?

The funny thing is that a basic understanding of the Bible is actually important for making sense of American history - the people making that history were strongly influenced by the Bible and so unless you know at least the major “plot points”, their actions (and a lot of literature) won’t make much sense.

With that said, I don’t trust Oklahoma to teach about the Bible in a manner appropriate for historical analysis rather than religious dominance.

the Catholic Church is their competition when it comes to running private schools and otherwise lucrative community support institutions

I generally agree with what you’ve written, but I think you’re assuming more pragmatism here than is actually present. Bitter hostility between Protestants and Catholics is as old as Protestantism (and much older than the institutions you mention).

Also, as a side note, there are plenty of Catholic Republicans. (37% vs 44% that identify as Democrats, according to Pew.)

Then it becomes “okay, call this prick the c-word. Now I need to also cite this fact that is part of my border security answer. And then I need to talk about… jesus christ are we actually talking about global warming right now?”

That would be an understandable reaction from the average person but the president should be a lot more capable than the average person. Even if this specific sort of thing isn’t something he needs to be able to handle, he still needs to handle things a lot harder than this and his performance here isn’t reassuring me that he can. Trump is so predictably rude that Biden should have been totally ready for it.

I should clarify. I’m not saying that most people who distrust the justice system are going to like Trump more after his conviction. I’m also not saying that I think he’s likely to reform the justice system in a way that helps people affected by racial bias.

However, many of Trump’s supporters consider his conviction evidence that he’s genuinely an anti-establishment candidate rather than proof of wrong-doing. (See the variety of “I’m voting for the convicted felon” merchandise.) This attitude requires a distrust of the justice system. We’ve already seen that Trump’s conviction hasn’t hurt his poll numbers very much and that he currently has more black support than he did in '16 or '20 so I’m saying that his conviction might actually lead to a small increase in support for him from black people (the majority of whom are still never going to support him) because more of them distrust the justice system.

I like both, although yours is technically superior. The washed-out colors in the “before” picture combined with the snowy base give it a neat “walking through a blizzard” look. (I don’t know if this was intentional or accidental.)

No, I’m saying that we know black people are less likely to trust the police than white people are, and so it seems reasonable that they might also trust the courts less too. That doesn’t imply some supervillain-like love of crime.

I wonder if there’s actually some truth to his claim. The experience of blacks with the justice system is quite different than that of whites, so I wouldn’t be surprised if their attitude towards a candidate with felony convictions would also be different. Perhaps they’re more likely to believe the narrative of an unfair prosecution than white people are.

The funny thing is that $15 million dollars is not a lot of money for some people. There are a hundred billionaires living in New York City and if $15 million could “buy an election” then at least a few of them would be doing it all the time. They don’t do that because it doesn’t work.

Bowman lost because he was genuinely unpopular in his own district. Being a leftist celebrity didn’t help him much since most of the people he was popular with weren’t actually eligible to vote for him.

Aren’t souls canonically real in the Marvel universe? I expect that only the piece with the soul regenerates.

I’m not old and I think I might forget some of the words, especially since I would be so anxious.

I don’t know if I would call this ruling a mistake since I’m not an expert in matters of standing, but I regret that the court will not act against a serious threat to free speech. Members of both parties have made statements directed at social media companies which I consider well over the line between a request and a threat.

I had the bottom bunk and there was no monster next to me…

Was I the real monster all along?

Not the same thing, but I still have my old Voodoo 2 3D-accelerator card (not the same thing as a video card back then).

TLDR version: not actually 11 commandments, just an extra line break in the shall-not-covet commandment.

When I bought my Windows 11 laptop a month ago, I was able to set up a local account after turning on airplane mode. (I had entered my wifi password in an earlier step since I thought it was just for installing updates.)

I have no idea why the USA spends money on training international students until they get their PhD and then doesn’t automatically give them permanent residency. One guy I know came from Iran to get his physics PhD and although he has managed to stay in the USA with a work visa, by default the USA would have sent him back to Iran!

Dibs on being the palm tree.