My friend Roseanna lent me A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by @anthonyfmarra, and I told her I wouldn't get to it for a while. Then I devoured it in a weekend. It's brilliant. It's also particularly haunting because ...

... it's set in the wake of the civil wars in Chechnya, and it has exaggerated my fear that Americans are completely naive about civil war. I've read people on Facebook casually talking about how it might be an option. We have no idea how horrible these wars are ...

... how hard they are to stop once they've begun, and the level of barbarity, depravity, and misery they produce. Please don't even joke that a civil war is any kind of solution to any problem. It's exponentially worse than any problem we have.