Review of GIDEON THE NINTH by Tamsyn Miur

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Cover of Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Art by Tommy Arnold

This was recommended to me by the author Karen Eisenbrey, and I’m so grateful. Tamsyn Muir’s novel is a challenge to describe. It’s a sci-fi fantasy in that it’s set in a distant future of what may be our universe, but there are supernatural elements. Specifically, some of the characters can perform necromancy, and the whole structure of their society is organized around that. The nature of that political organization becomes clear over the course of the novel, but it’s dribbled out slowly, so the reader only learns the way life works on the first planet where our characters live, then learns the way that planet fits in with the larger civilization over time. I appreciated the careful way Muir balanced the need to give the reader a lot if information about this universe without any boring data-dumps. 

There are a lot of other things I like more about the book. The choice to have necromancers accompanied by sword fighters makes for great action scenes. Even better, the book becomes a puzzle itself as the characters try to figure out how to achieve a goal without being killed by a mysterious monster who is picking them off. 

But these aren’t the best things in the book, either. The best thing about this book, hands down, is the protagonist, Gideon. Her voice is so funny that scenes which would have been dry become hilarious, and scenes that could have been saccharine become heart-wrenching. I want Gideon to sit with me at every staff meeting I have to attend for the rest of my life and make snide comments to me, shout insults when necessary, and occasionally threaten someone with her sword. Not the rapier. The two-hander.

I had a slight frustration with one of the elements of the ending that I think is sometimes done to death (hee-hee), but some friends assured me it would be complicated by events in the sequels, and I’ve already read far enough to know they’re right. So, you should expect to enjoy Gideon the Ninth, but be prepared to jump to the next novels in the trilogy right away.

Review of WE’LL FLY AWAY by Bryan Bliss

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Hey, it’s February, and I’m still keeping my New Year’s resolution to review all the novels I read this year. I’m as surprised as you are!

Cover art by Matt Roeser

One of my most promising students, Shawn Stewart (keep an eye out for this talented aspiring writer!) recommended We’ll Fly Away by Bryan Bliss as a possible text for my creative writing classes. He correctly pointed to the use of a mixture of letters from one character and toggling back and forth between 3rd person limited points of view, something Bliss employs deftly, as a feature authors can learn from this book. But our larger conversation was about the quantity of hope we like in our books. We’ll Fly Away is a tragedy in the best way; it provides us with endearing but flawed characters who we know will not succeed, and it makes us desperately want them to succeed throughout. I felt too tense as I devoured this book in mere hours. I am very open with my students about the fact that I am not a fast reader, but this book made me one, not because it was written in that pulse-pounding, low-lexical-level prose appropriate for thrillers, but because, despite its rich, beautiful prose, I needed to know when and how the impending doom would befall the characters.  A bit of writing advice commonly misattributed to Vladimir Nabokov is, “The writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree, and then, once they are up there, to throw rocks at them.” (It seems the first framing of this advice came in a review of a play in the Bridgeport Herald of Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1897, two years before Nabakov was born:  “The best advice ever given writers of farce is in these words: ‘In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.’” Thanks, quoteinvestigator.com!) Bliss follows the most brutal version of this advice, giving us Luke and Toby as protagonists who are trapped in multiple ways: by poverty, by abusive or neglectful parents, by a system that has failed them over and over, and shares their dreams of escape as children who find a broken down airplane in the woods, teenagers looking for escape through sports, violence, romance, sex, alcohol, first loves, and often the pure and desperate desire to simply jump in a car and get as far away from their lives as possible. All the right things bring them back: love of family, girlfriends, responsibility, honor, and bravery, and we’re left screaming internally, “None of those things are worth your lives! Go! Go!”

Ultimately, I think I need a little more hope in my literature than We’ll Fly Away provides, but I’m very glad I read it to help me find that line previously held by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Not to spoil the ending, but I think We’ll Fly Away provides a quantity of hope just between McCarthy’s The Road and Blood Meridian (despite being unlike both those books in almost every way), and I’m not sure I have the constitution for anything more hopeless than The Road. But maybe I can find the same hope in We’ll Fly Away that I grasp for when reading Orwell’s 1984: This is a world we must not make! Unfortunately, We’ll Fly Away is a world that’s all too real for so many people, so many of the students I see come into my classroom each day, imprisoned in more ways than I can imagine. But I can hope for them, and We’ll Fly Away demands the reader close the back cover and get to work making a world that’s better than Luke and Toby’s.

Review of NEXT OF KIN by Melinda Mitchell

Cover art and design by Honor MacDonald

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I’m keeping up with my New Year’s resolution to review all the novels I read this year, and I just finished Melinda Mitchell’s Next of Kin, the first in a planned series called Stardust and Ashes. I loved the premise for this book as soon as I heard about it: It’s the Book of Ruth as a space opera. In case you missed the Book of Ruth (it’s in the Bible, a pretty popular and easy-to-find anthology), it tells the story of a woman who comes to a foreign land after her husband has died. She returns to the land of her mother-in-law, finds a new husband, and becomes one of the great matriarchs of her new, adopted people. Mitchell resets the story amid conflicts between groups of humans fighting interstellar conflicts. There’s a lot to like here. It’s a sci-fi story. It’s an action/adventure story. It’s a military story. It’s a love story. It’s a story about a daughter and a mother. But I think the think I appreciated the most is that Mitchell turns it into a mystery. II was reminded of a creative writing master class of Eric Witchey’s. One of his lesson really stuck with me: Every story is a mystery. The question of whether or not the protagonist will succeed or fail (classical comedy/tragedy) should be a question of whether the protagonist will figure it out. “It” may be something about themselves or a solution to some external problem, but we are watching them attempt to reason their way out of some quandary. Mitchell’s story doesn’t seem like a mystery at first, but it resolves into a mystery, and the way it all comes together in the end shows elements from the beginning were essential clues the reader and protagonist needed all along. I also like the way Ami (Mitchell’s Ruth) has this varied but believable skill set, and her abilities all come into play in a believable way to allow her to succeed where no one else would have. 

Plus, it’s a really fun read!

(My other New Year’s resolution [or is it Not a Pipe Publishing’s resolution?] is to give out free ad space for authors on the Writers Not writing podcast/YouTube show, so if you have a book to advertise, send a 30-60 video to notapipepublishing@gmail.com. Be sure to include the title, your name, and where folx can find the book, and bear in mind that it’s also a podcast, so make sure all the important information is narrated. Just trying to help out my fellow authors!)

Review of Babel by R. F. Kuang

Artwork by Nico Delort

Continuing with my resolution to review all the novels I read this year (not counting manuscripts for Not a Pipe Publishing, so don’t worry, authors!), I find myself reviewing another novel that doesn’t need any of my support or praise to find readers. Too bad! I’m going to offer praise, anyway!

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Rebecca Kuang’s Babel is a masterpiece, as you may have already heard. It tells the story of four students who are studying together at Oxford in the 1830’s. If that sounds a bit dry, I should add the students are there to study magic. Yeah, that should pull you back in, but what makes the book so brilliant is the magic system as metaphor. I don’t want to spoil anything, but this novel is not escapist fantasy nor some kind of nostalgic perversion of the past through rose tinted glasses. This is a book about the past and magic, but it’s a novel about the world we live in right now and the world we want to live in tomorrow. 

I know Babel been compared to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a lot, and there are certainly similarities in the scope of the story, the meticulous research required, the blending of history and magic, and the quality of the writing. I loved Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I’m not disparaging it by saying Babel is alternate-history to illuminate our modern world, while Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is alternate history as glorious escapist fun where the deeper meaning is in the characters and their humanity. Babel has those deeply human characters, but it is also commenting on our present political, economic, and social structures. It’s less like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and more like Gulliver’s Travels. Maybe it’s my writer bias, but I think I might compare Babel more to Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, though Cloud Cuckoo Land is not set in one particular era of history and is less fantasy than sci-fi in that it abides by our univer’s laws of physics to highlight the …proverbial? …metaphorical? …literal-but-in-our-universe-and-therfore-not-fantastical? magic role of storytelling itself. Both Babel and Cloud Cuckoo Land are deeply researched, beautifully written, and will stick with you, but I’m struck by the way both are incredibly ambitious. Rebecca Kuang set out to tell a story of enormous scope and power, and whether she came up with the metaphor of her magic system first and endeavored to do it justice, or decided on the nuanced point she wanted to make and conceived of the magic system in order to do that, she has risen above the cleverness of the conceit of the novel to build something greater than the sum of any of its parts.

Be warned: Babel doesn’t let any of us off the hook about the harm we create in enabling and/or resisting colonialism, patriarchy, structural and cultural racism, and hyper-capitalism. To acquiesce is to cause suffering of the most vulnerable. To fight back is to cause suffering of the most vulnerable. None of us escape unscathed from Babel.

Review of Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

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Cover art BY Carson Lowmiller

I didn’t understand the appeal of the cozy trend until I read Travis Baldtree’s Legends and Lattes. I was under the misapprehension that “cozy” meant “low stakes,” and “low stakes” mean boring, meandering, and possibly inconclusive. This was recommended by a handful of authors I admire, and they finally convinced me to check it out. And they are all correct; it’s a delight. “Cozy” might mean we don’t have great armies crashing into one another on battlefields, but nothing feels unimportant in this story of a retired sellsword and adventurer, Viv, trying to start the first coffeeshop in the town of Thune. I wanted her to succeed, I wanted her to make peace with her new life, and I wanted her to find love. This novel felt just as pulse-pounding as some murder mystery thriller, and a lot more exciting than some droning, plodding epic high fantasy because the characters were so well drawn and their concerns were relatable. Highly recommend.

Review: Martha Wells’ System Collapse

Cover art by Jaime Jones, cover design by Christine Foltzer.

This seventh entry in The Murderbot Diaries series doesn’t need my review, but I’m trying to be better about posting reviews of all the books I read and enjoy in order to support my fellow authors, even when, like Wells, they are getting the attention they deserve. System Collapse is a great addition to this series. SecUnit is going through some stuff, so while this book is as action-packed as the previous ones, there’s this added wrinkle which helps develop its character, a character I already loved. As a special bonus (and I don’t think this is too much of a spolier), Wells has this great scene where the creation of art and literature, complete with all the usual stresses an artist deals with when creating, is featured as the strategic move that saves the day in a very high stakes situation. Sure, that was preaching to the choir for me and the many authors and artists who love Wells’ work, but I appreciated it none-the-less.

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Review of Wendy N Wagner’s An Oath of Dogs

I try to encourage my students to move beyond simple reviews of “good” and “bad,” and instead to consider who a work of art is made for. Are they the target audience? When it comes to Wendy N Wagner’s An Oath of Dogs, I suspect the target audience is: Me.

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But maybe it’s for you, too. Are you skeptical of the power of rapacious corporations extracting profit at the expense of the environment and the working class who live in it? But do you also acknowledge the people involved are often conflicted or outright reluctant to participate yet cannot figure out a way to challenge the system? Do you like science fiction that explores highly relevant contemporary social issues while still being smart about technological and biological plausibility? Does the idea of colonizing space excite you while also worrying you because of our human history of colonialism? Do you have complicated feelings about religion, recognizing the dignity of religious people and the beauty of belief systems while also seeing the way religions can be systems of oppression people impose upon themselves and others? Do you like characters who are nuanced, flawed, and believable but ultimately likable and admirable? Do you like carefully constructed mysteries where the clues come together in a thoughtful, satisfying way? Oh, and do you like dogs? Then this book is for you, too!

One of the trickiest parts of writing a mystery on a colony world with a large cast of characters and is that Wagner has to manage an ending that resolves the mystery and lets us know where the characters end up without magically solving all the interplanetary environmental and socio-economic problems in the universe in a way that would feel inauthentic. I felt like all my questions about the characters were answered, but the larger issues still left me contemplating moral dilemmas in just the way Wagner intended. I do have one burning question remaining, though: Which Wendy N. Wagner book should I read next?

Ben Gorman immersed in writing as teacher, author and publisher

I made the paper! Here’s an article by David Hayes of the Itemizer Observer from November 1st, 2023, preserved in case it gets lost in their archives:

Ben Gorman immersed in writing as teacher, author and publisher

by David Hayes

November 1st, 2023

Ben Gorman, a creative writing teacher at Central High School, displays books printed by his company Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated, including his last novel “Don’t Read This Book,” and gives a sneak look at his latest novel, “You Were Warned."

Photo by David Hayes

Whenever Ben Gorman is at a public event, say Independence Days or Rose City Comic Con, inevitably someone will approach him and exclaim a non-sequitur that would leave onlookers not in on the reference scratching their head.

“Somebody will walk up and go, ‘The Magritte painting!’ and they’ll get the reference,” Gorman said, referring to Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated. “I’ll go, ‘I bet you were either a philosophy major or art history major.’ Almost without fail. Nice to have folks make that connection.”

The name of Gorman’s Independence-based publishing company refers to a work by French painter René Magritte, “this is not a pipe,” that represented a thing that is not a thing. An apt epithet, Gorman explained, for a company that features printed works that are all representation.

“It’s not the thing itself. It’s fiction representing our world in some way,” he said.

The first book Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated published in 2013 was one of Gorman’s works, figuring his tome would look more legitimate if it came from a local imprint, rather than going through the self-publishing route.

“I’d made so many mistakes in the publishing of this one book, I thought I can help a lot of other authors avoid those mistakes,” Gorman said.

Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated now has dozens of authors of both genre fiction and poetry, and Gorman’s latest novel has been added to the catalog -- “You Were Warned,” the sequel to his 2019 urban fantasy, “Don’t Read This Book.”

Now in his 19th year at Central High School, 23rd overall in education, Gorman teaches ninth grade English and creative writing for juniors and seniors. He couldn’t enjoy more being fully immersed in the writing industry and passing on his passion to the next generation.

“I get to teach creative writing, which is every writer’s dream. I get to talk about reading and writing all day,” Gorman said.

Tracing the evolution of the publishing industry, Gorman said there used to be very few big companies, and in order to break through, one had to pass through several levels of gate keeping. Gorman, in part, started Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated to circumvent the process, which was timed perfectly with a change in the industry.

“Technology changed, so you could now purchase a book and it could be printed after the fact. So you didn’t have to print a run of 10,000 books and keep these in the garage and hope for success,” Gorman said.

“It allowed for a company like ours to vet and decide who are these really talented authors whose books really deserved to be read then as people buy them they get printed,” he added.

The company has since grown significantly. Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated now features 43 titles in print and 80 authors under contract.

They started with genre fiction, especially by underrepresented authors, women, and people of color, which Gorman said has been important throughout.

Their biggest “get” came from participating in 2018’s Year of Publishing Women, which challenged publishers to commit to publishing only women for a year.

“That was huge for us, because it kind of put us on the map,” Gorman said. “We were one of two publishing companies in the world that participated. We took that challenge and made a big deal of it.

“Authors we signed that year have become our mainstays who keep coming back. That’s been really wonderful for the company, to be an outlet to help folks who otherwise get mistreated by this industry.”

They have published more authors from the Pacific Northwest than anywhere else, including Portland, Seattle and Grants Pass. But they’ve also accepted submissions from authors in England, Norway and Pakistan. Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated has an open submission period every August, when they receive hundreds of books that they winnow down to asking for full transcripts from about 10.

“But we can’t publish 10 a year. It’s a really tough challenge to do three or four in addition to sequels to previous authors,” Gorman explained. “It looks like next year we may publish eight or nine, which is a lot for us, but they’re so good really have a hard time turning these away.”

The small company consists of Gorman, co-owner and fiancé Chrystal Law, who also owns Bricks & Minifigs in Salem, who handles the marketing side. They have a team of freelance folks, editors who evaluate submissions. But the entire paid staff is just Gorman.

“We’re ready to grow. We need to grow. We need more people if we’re going to do more, otherwise we need to stay same size,” he said.

The irony to Gorman’s first novel is he most definitely wants you to read, “Don’t Read This Book.” He calls it the first in a trilogy with a “what if” premise.

“What if all the monsters in mythology actually existed in our world and got together once a year at a convention in Las Vegas to talk about how to keep themselves secret,” Gorman said. “Things go awry when one of them tricks the rest into abducting and forcing this human author to write a book that is so scary, it will kill anyone who reads it. The other monsters think this might be a great idea, not realizing if all the humans are killed, they lose their food supply.”

The sequel, “You Were Warned,” continues the saga of killer monsters.

“It’s a fun kind of adventure, with underneath, I hope, a much deeper book questioning our own mortality and how our identities play into our ability to acknowledge that we are human,” Gorman said. “And this one has baby werewolves. Who doesn’t like baby werewolves?”

He hosted a launch party for “You Were Warned” Oct. 28 at Rose City Book Club, along with fellow Not a Pipe Publishing Ink-Corporated author Kate Ristau promoting the third in her trilogy. Gorman said no local events promoting his book have been scheduled yet.

He added the U.S. culture has entered a time where books and authors are under attack and now is perfect to support those who deserve the public’s thanks.

“Kate Ristau has a wonderful afterword in her latest release thanking librarians. I just encourage everyone, please, support librarians. Support local bookstore owners. Support authors, support people fighting for books and freedom of books,” Gorman said. “There are a lot of forces out there that are trying to stifle what is getting into people’s hands.”

I Made Some Art

I had an old, broken dishwasher in my back yard. I tried to see if someone would come and haul it away for scrap metal or something. No takers. So it was just sitting there being ugly. I also had two toilets I’d replaced sitting on my side yard. So I decided to make something out of them.

I learn a lot when I take on new projects. And then there are things I still haven’t managed to learn. Like how long a project will take. I thought I would get this done in four or five days. That didn’t happen. It always takes me longer than I think. But I got it done by 8pm the night before I needed to go back to work for the school year. Phew!

I did learn, when working with large projects, be very careful where you place them because you won’t be able to move them when they are complete. Luckily, this is roughly where I wanted the piece to go. I do wish I’d oriented it differently. Too late now! It weighs like a thousand pounds.

Basically I made a bowl first. That was harder than I thought. Things don’t really stick to wet cement and stand up on their own. Wet cement likes to move down into a horizontal position like other liquids.

Noah helped me smash the dishwasher initially, and he helped smash the toilets. That was a lot of fun.

Toilets smash in a very satisfying way.

It was probably around this point where I was learning another valuable lesson: Concrete does terrible things to your hands. I wore gloves, but they were not water-tight, and the silt would get inside, dry out the skin of my hands, and then the skin would just split like crepe paper. I had so many little cuts. At the end of the day, my hands would ache like they were on fire. In addition to a lot of band-aids, Chrystal advised me to put on dishwashing gloves under my work gloves. That worked like a charm, and most of the cuts are healed already.

Then, the moment of truth:

And there was enough porcelein to make a matching ring around the fire pit!

Oh, and the jeans I wear to paint and work with concrete didn’t fit at the beginning of the week. I couln’t button the top button. But by the end of the week, they fit fine. Art is good for the waistline, folx!

Think suicide bombings are bad? Then we need to address our mass shootings in the U.S.

Okay, this is grim, but I went down a bit of a data rabbit hole, and what I found is striking.

I was recently at a conference and heard some horrific, racist rhetoric directed at Palestinians. It was literally stomach-turning, but it was also a powerful learning experience.  I cannot imagine what it would be like to say, “I was born in Michigan” and have someone immediately fly into a rage about that part of my identity, but that’s what I witnessed. 

Then, today, I began reading a novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It’s brilliant so far, and this is no criticism and not much of a spoiler, but at one point a character is planning to plant a bomb as an act of political violence.  And I thought, “That’s odd. Bombing isn’t really America’s style. The authorities keep an eye out for people researching bombs, and we track the materials. Meanwhile, we make it as easy as possible to get guns. Many mass shooters are at least partly politically motivated. And many want to be killed, which is why a number of our ideas about deterrents will never work.”

I do not pretend to be any authority on the motivations of Palestinian suicide bombers, but I’ll bet they are complicated and involve a number of factors beyond the two-dimensional portraits we’re often provided. This is by no means a justification for a suicide bombing, but it’s interesting that we’re provided all kinds of theories to explain the motivations of American mass shooters (mental health, politics, bullying, video games, weed, and on and on), but  the closest we get to that when there’s a suicide bombing is a polarized view that the bomber is either a horrible person who hates Israel or a brave freedom fighter trying to liberate an illegally occupied land. I’m not saying it’s somewhere in between. I’m saying it certainly involves other things like mental health, isolation, radicalization, and more. (The video games excuse has always struck me as ridiculous and grasping. Weed is even more absurd.)  

And then I remembered some of the insults hurled at the Palestinians at this conference. And I thought I’d do a little research. If mass shootings are our suicide bombings, I wondered if they are more prevalent than suicide bombings in Israel or in Palestine. 

Guess what I learned?

According to JewishVirtualLibrary.org, a cite that is heavily biased against Palestinians, there hasn’t been a suicide bombing in Israel since 2008. Zero. In 14 years.

Now, I know an absence of a thing isn’t cause for a headline, but this was news to me. It certainly flies in the face of the vitriol I heard hurled at the Palestinian Americans at this conference. 

I’d pulled up the populations of Palestine (4.8 mil), Israel (9.2 mil) and the US (329.5 mil) so I could do some math to try to figure out the danger of mass shootings in the US relative to mass shootings in Israel and Palestine. I thought it would be really tricky to pick out the periods of time. I didn’t want to skew the data by cherry-picking the years, and finding reliable data on mass shootings in the US is incredibly difficult since the Hyde Amendment makes it illegal for the government to research gun deaths as a public health issue. 

Based on what I could find in an archive maintained by Mother Jones, we have lost at least 682 Americans to our version of suicide bombings since 2008. 

Number of Isrealis killed by Palestinians in suicide bombings since 2008? Zero.

It turns out there is no adjusting for population which is necessary or even possible. No matter how you slice it, mass shootings in the United States are more lethal than suicide bombings in Israel. 

This wasn’t always true. During the height of the Intifada, in 2002, 220 Israelis were killed in suicide bombings (according to JewishVirtualLibrary.org) and that coincides with the year, nine years into the Federal Assault Weapons ban, when the number of mass shootings in the US fell all the way to zero. So I completely understand why people in the US, watching the news, have this sense that Israel is a country plagued by frequent suicide bombings. That was the case. Twenty years ago. 

And I’m not trying to explain the causes of the end of suicide bombings in Israel. My guess is that it’s complicated, and the fact that the Israeli military has killed five times as many Palestinians in 2022 than it killed in the same period in 2021 does not bode well for peace for Israel or Palestine. But, again, I am not an expert on Israel or Palestine. 

I’m just a person who lives in a country where I am now far more likely to be killed in a mass shooting than an Isreali is to be killed in a suicide bombing. And I think that’s worth reflecting on.

Because Americans have a remarkable ability to convince ourselves that everywhere else is worse, no matter what the data shows. 

Did you know that, when North Koreans escape to South Korea, they are shocked by the standard of living they find? No matter how bad things get in North Korea, the people are taught that things are worse everywhere else. I’m not trying to draw a one-to-one comparison. We are certainly not North Korea, and the rest of the world relative to the US isn’t South Korea in relation to North Korea. But if we’re going to address any problem in the US, we ought to have a realistic view of it. Yes, repealing the Hyde Amendment and allowing rigorous study of the problem of gun violence would sure help, but we should also consider how our emotions color our perception of the data.

We have been taught to shake our heads sadly and believe the political situation between Israel and Palestine is intractable because of Palestinian suicide bombings or Isreali aggression or both.  And this taps into American anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and racism, since Palestinians are Mulims and Jews and Christians and Druze and atheists but anti-Palestinian sentiment is rooted in Islamophobia or just anti-Palestinian racism, and Isreal is often conflated with Judaism even though it’s a country and does not represent the religion. But even for Americans who don’t hate or fear people from Israel or Palestine, I think there’s a common misperception that suicide bombings are this frequent occurance, and that they are symbolic of a massive political and humanitarian failure on the part of two governments. 

I am not qualified to adjudicate the situation there, but if we have the sense that frequent suicide bombings are emblamatic of a crisis, we need to look in the mirror. 

The United States is not a failed state. We don’t have the murder rate of South Africa or El Salvador, the authoritarianism of Russia or China or the DPRK, the poverty of Burundi or Afghanistan. But we also don’t have the health of Japan or Iceland, the freedom of Singapore or Switzerland, the happiness of Finland or Bhutan.

And we now have frequent and increasing mass shootings while Israel and Palestine have no more suicide bombings. 

I think that’s worth reflecting on.