Random Notes from a Crank

One of the dangers of having a subscription to The New Yorker is the magazine's "Briefly Noted" feature, which introduces people to recently published books. One issue sucked me into buying The Genius of Birds by Jennifer Ackerman, and now I'm considering other books that the feature introduced me to: Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America and Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first.  

I've been a subscriber to Utne magazine since high school. The spring issue features a number of great articles. Here are three of them:

• "Bee-ware of Neonics" by Nicole Rivard. Considering how our food supply relies on bees and other pollinators, there either needs to be a ban or a multi-year moratorium on these pesticides. 
• "Building with Culture in Mind" by Fernando Pages Ruiz. Home builders are adjusting their plans according to cultural preferences that are not cookie-cutter. 
• "Will Racism Ever End, Will I Ever Stop Being a Nigger?" Just read it.

If you're interested in words that have grammatical versatility, check out "In Which We Get to the Bottom of Some Crazy-Ass Language."