This open letter to the Springer Editors has been emailed to the editors in response to a chapter that included offensive language and highly problematic claims about deaf communities and signed languages
https://t.co/2r9GEez5Ic

cc: @SpringerEng @SpringerNature

1) My Stan Lee story happened when I was in 5th grade. I was visiting NYC with my Dad and had read the address for Marvel in the comics I read constantly. I begged my Dad to take me and to his credit he did. And guess what? It was just an office.

2) We were down in the lobby and I was kind of crushed. I don’t know what I expected, The Thing and the Yancy Street Gang to be sitting around smoking cigars? Anyway, my Dad was taking a beat to figure where we were going next and a guy came up to us.

3) He was wearing a white shirt and tie and said to Dad “Is he disappointed because. The Marvel offices were just offices?” My Dad said yes and then the guy who had gray around his temples and a mustache said “hold on a second” and opened one of those office mailboxes with a key.

4) He then handed me a thick stack of EVERY SINGLE MARVEL COMIC COMING OUT THE NEXT MONTH. “Here you go. Keep reading Marvel comics” he said and then walked off. I left in a daze and about 15 minutes later it hit me “Gray around the temples, mustache... That was Stan Lee!”

5) Later when I wrote on the Ant Man movie I told Kevin Feige the story, the year, look of the guy etc and Kevin said “That’s exactly the kind of thing Stan would do and he would have been there then. That was him.” Rest In Peace Stan Lee and thank you for the comics.

At it's #NewYearsEve we're going to end the year by playing the Agatha Christie game!

I'll show you the book cover artwork by Tom Adams, and you guess the Fontana edition Agatha Christie novel it's from.

Here's your first one...

A little bit trickier for question 2...

A lot trickier for number 3, but the clues are there if you know your Christie...

And here's your last Agatha Christie cover for this round - quite a famous one.

I'll post the answers in a bit, so get your guesses in now please!

Here are the answers to round 1 of the Agatha Christie game. I hope you got a few right, as round 2 will exercise your little grey cells a little bit more...

A quick primer on the #MorganWallen fallout for country radio:

To those stations that have pulled Wallen's music: You've done more than I expected the country industry to do at all. That matters.

But you have taken only the *first* step here. You do not get to now act as though you've washed your hands of a problem that is bone-deep.

This is, as our friend @AndreaWillWrite has noted, a moment for action. Not for hashtags or vague social media posts about how "this" is "not who we are."

Because you, country radio, know damn good and well that it is who "we" are. And it always has been.

So now you have giant racist sized holes to fill in your playlists.

What you do *not* do right now is fill those holes with other white dudes. Particularly not other white dudes you know are exactly like Chucklefuck McMullet but just haven't been caught on video.

You do *not* fill those holes in your playlist with callow calls for "unity" or bridging a "great divide" that come from white dudes who benefit most from the status quo because you, country radio, protect them at the expense of literally everyone else.

Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

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The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

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Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

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Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

4/

When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

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