The Death of Socrates and What We Athenians Should Do About It

One argument that will surely trigger me in 2024 and beyond goes something like: “For all we know, Ed suffered from depression and was already suicidal.” If you have the temerity or foolishness to run this notion past this 62-year-old cartoonist, you had best be on the other side of the table and prepared to run like hell and disappear into the crowd when you do so. And make sure somebody’s ready to capture all this on their smartphone, too—the video will surely go viral.

'S Prose, Not Superheroes: Recently Read Real Books

I'm going through my second childhood--only this time, I'm reading prose fiction instead of wasting my time with dumbed-down ol' comic books!

Here's a snooty selection of what I've read over the past year or so, in no apparent order:

Harry Potter by J.K. Rowling--I read all seven books and watched all eight DVDs in eight weeks in the summer of 2015. I'm a late adopter--having worked at Border's in the early 2000s and probably handled (conservatively) some 10,000 individual copies of the various HP editions through the end of 2005 as a part-time bookseller. I never read a single sentence at the time, being exclusively interested in non-fiction (which lead to me returning to college for a decade-long stint). But I've read pp. 317-421 of The Prisoner of Azkaban (the Shrieking Shack sequence) a total of eight times--it's the most brilliantly orchestrated piece of storytelling I am aware of in any media.