Quiz Suffering Succotash author Stephanie V.W. Lucianovic about raisins, tomatoes, and pudding skin TONIGHT! Live chat 8:30 PM ET, Thursday July 26!
The chat window should appear below; it will update to “live” at 8:30 PM ET …

“What do you mean raisins ‘don’t totally suck,’ Jacques?”
Just a reminder that this is a couple weeks away! The freebies have gone out, so if you still need a copy, try one of the links …

A question for you about true-crime books, even if you don’t think of yourself as reading much true crime: Which books would you put in a true-crime canon? If someone comes to you and asks …

Doddsie, who put propriety above everything else, had never forgotten nor forgiven Elias Renthal’s reverberating fart on his exit from the Butterfield nearly eight years earlier, after he had been kicked out of the hallowed …

Institutions are a strange mix of the mass and the individual. They abstract. They behave according to a set of rules that substitute both for individual judgments and for the emotional responses that occur whenever …

(cue “I don’t see what’s so great about it” jokes)
Hey, remember everything that ISN’T the Oscars Death Race? Me neither! Awesome! …I’m so sorry about the protracted service interruption, guys. I’ve missed you, and all …

Plagues and Bible-thumpers hang on from our last poll, plus the Fug Girls, VJs, and a brick of a book about Nixon and Carter. Pick us out a good one!

William Poundstone is pretty good with a low-pH zinger. In Bigger Secrets, a book I’ve reread a hundred times thanks primarily to Poundstone’s “…seriously?” prose, he gives this account of Scientology’s handling of Hubbard’s death:
Finally …

“Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR.”

On this episode of the Tomato Nation Read-Along: Inside Scientology: The Story of America’s Most Secretive Religion, by Janet Reitman. It’s available in print and Kindle formats, as well as on audio, which is how …