Book #128 of 2025: Diet, Drugs, and Dopamine: The New Science of Achieving a Healthy Weight by David A. Kessler, MD This is not a weight-loss book. Rather, it’s an overview from former FDA Commissioner David Kessler (no relation) on the current medical understanding of nutrition and dieting, the widespread problem that he calls food …
Author Archives: Joe Kessler
Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
Book #127 of 2025: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt On paper, there’s perhaps not much of a plot to this 700-page winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction: a thirteen-year-old boy acquires a famous piece of artwork under extraordinary circumstances, and then spends the next decade-and-a-half fretting about it while falling steadily into a …
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Movie Review: Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999)
Movie #9 of 2025: Babylon 5: A Call to Arms (1999) This was the first of Babylon 5‘s various TV movies to air after the show ended its regular run, and my understanding is that it functions primarily as a bridge to the upcoming spinoff Crusade, which ran for one abbreviated season later that year. …
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TV Review: The Sopranos, season 1
TV #41 of 2025: The Sopranos, season 1 I’ve never seen The Sopranos before, but my understanding is that the show is widely considered both great on its own terms and very influential on the television industry at large. (Personally The Americans kept coming to mind as a relevant successor program as I watched this …
Book Review: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer
Book #126 of 2025: The Lost Story by Meg Shaffer At the beginning of the fourth Thomas Covenant volume The Wounded Land, the returning protagonist tells the new one, “I’m on the inside of this thing, and you aren’t. I know it. You don’t. It can’t be explained[…] It’s a question of experience. You’re just …
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Book Review: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green
Book #125 of 2025: Paths Not Taken by Simon R. Green (Nightside #5) This is one of the better entries of its urban fantasy series, I think, propulsively moving the major plot arc along while also delivering immediate thrills and significant character work. After several volumes of throat-clearing on that first front, the previous novel …
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Book Review: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic
Book #124 of 2025: Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language by Adam Aleksic I’ve been out of academia for almost a decade now, but back when I was working as a sociolinguist, I studied how people use language on the internet and how traditional emblems of group identity in speech can …
TV Review: Derry Girls, season 2
TV #40 of 2025: Derry Girls, season 2 Another funny year of a show that nevertheless seems like it could be doing more with its distinctive setting and its character work. There are a few recurring bits, but nothing that resembles any sort of ongoing storyline or concern that’s maintained over multiple episodes (though that’s …
Book Review: The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard
Book #123 of 2025: The Redoubtable Pali Avramapul by Victoria Goddard (The Red Company Reformed #2) This is my favorite Victoria Goddard book since The Hands of the Emperor, which was the first one that I ever picked up. That earlier novel is often heralded as a great entry point to the author’s extended Nine …
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Book Review: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters
Book #122 of 2025: Stag Dance by Torrey Peters Author Torrey Peters had a smash hit with the bestselling 2021 novel Detransition, Baby, and I assume her publisher wanted to release something else with her name on it before that recognition had completely faded. Hence this new title collecting four unrelated novellas, two of which …
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