Christina Thompson

Started a new book. Here’s a sample of some of the source material: 😳

Malcolm Gladwell explaining why some people succeed and some don't.

Albuquerque turned a wall of its airport bookshop over to its local university press, and goddamn, now I want this in every airport.

@jozefandrew1 Follow that with a couple of postdocs and you can do this (with modest funding) for almost a decade. So fun. The only problem is what happens next 😐

Enrol in a humanities or social sciences PhD program; take your time doing it and get paid to read books, travel the world, interview cool people, live the life of an aristocrat. Postpone the ‘real world’ as long as possible.

Just six days of war in Iran cost us $11.3 billion. ‘What the [expletive] is wrong with us?’ bostonglobe.com/2026/03/12/met…

Becca Rothfeld offers an astute reflection on the @washingtonpost bloodbath & the state of cultural criticism. What she says about newspapers fostering incuriosity, pandering to readers & chasing clicks sadly jives with what I put up with on a daily basis. newyorker.com/books/page-tur…

@DanFriedman81 @InternetGrape @HowRYouBud Blake Bailey and his biography of Roth, also Dr Seuss.

@InternetGrape @HowRYouBud Sherman Alexie, Junot Diaz and Tao Lin are big ones.

The reason book criticism is dying off is because books no longer have the cultural cachet or influence to be the center of the cultural discourse. The last novel people that was significant enough to drive any cultural discourse was “The Goldfinch,” which came out in 2013. This is the result of a number of decisions the publishing industry has made over the last 15 years. An ideological group attempted to change what literature was, who produced it, who read it and how it was discussed, and instead, they simply destroyed it and destroyed the capacity of their own industry to shape or influence culture.

Spotted by my former intern in London @WaterstonesTraf — not just Sea People but Come on Shore. Wow and thank you, you excellent booksellers!

8 history books from different places and periods: 1) Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson ( Polynesia )

@BookNoteApp @BoMandeville Sea People was such a great read. clairemcalpine.com/2021/06/14/sea…

@clairewords @BookNoteApp @BoMandeville ❤️ Thank you!

@PTogekiss @Trey_Explainer 😂

@Trey_Explainer They're a 9/10 people. They would be 10/10 if they hadn't eaten all the Moa.

One of the best history books I’ve read all year I now believe more than ever that Ancient Polynesian navigators were some of the bravest and smartest people in human history

@rind_guardian @Trey_Explainer “Original Moonshot” see @KeoluFox

@Trey_Explainer I can't remember who said it but I remember reading someone say they basically underwent the greatest voyage in human history until the moon landing

@LawrenceOVok @thatcommiecunt @Trey_Explainer 😂

@thatcommiecunt @Trey_Explainer The Peloponnesians were really Polynesians this entire time.

@Trey_Explainer 🙏 glad it found you

And, she’s done it again! theguardian.com/books/2025/sep…

A lesson you have to continuously relearn: you can read and read and read and read, but at some point you just have to start writing.

@Arby_K @NicholasMorto11 Interesting list. Happy to be included!

So, 12 down, one more to go. Got @NicholasMorto11 's The Mongol Storm, @cathompsn 's Sea People and JLA: Tower of Babel by Mark Waid and Howard Porter

After buying only three (technically four) books online ever, I decided to buy half a score since I needed to encash son's birthday present. (It is easier to buy things offline for a one year old).🤷‍♂️

@conor64 @AttorneyJPo I grew up in the 60s and 70s and yeah shit happened, but the experience of being alive for most people was not of wild and crazy or constant violence. Also the 80s were pretty scary in some places — i.e., crack city.

@AttorneyJPo I mean, I'm not sure, but I lived through them, and they seem very different from what I read about the late 1960s and early 1970s.

For those old enough to remember it: How did America get from the assassinations of the late 1960s and the political violence of the early 1970s to the relative calm of the 1980s and 1990s?

@wessiedutoit 😂

Maybe it’s a distinctive feature of our present times that they seem afflicted by fear and boredom simultaneously.