‘The fair maid who, the first of May, goes to the fields at break of day.”

illustrated by Arthur Rackham

this minute long clip from make some noise made me feel more emotions than any oscar bait drama i've ever seen or ever will see

March 1958.

The Supreme Court v. Jack Benny

One of the things I’ve noticed working in a bookstore is that a surprising number of people are completely unfamiliar with the normal way books are organized.

(I mean, in the part of the store where we keep the used books, I frequently have to assure people that the books are organized at all, but that’s because we have way more books than we have shelf space and there’s no way to handle that without it looking a bit of a mess.)

On one hand, we get customers who are apparently a completely blank slate in this area. I frequently have to walk people through, like, “Okay, it’s organized by subject / genre, then by author. Oh, ‘by author’ means in alphabetical order by the name of the author. No, their last name.” (Most of the people I give this talk to are, I think, college kids — it’s a bit strange to me that you can reach that age without knowing how bookstores work, but then again, I can kind of see how these days it’s possible to mostly get your books online where you just use a search function.)

One customer responded to the above explanation with “oh, it’s the Dewey Decimal System!” and I had to be like… no. Similar in broad concept, yes, but the Dewey Decimal System is a very specific thing (involving… decimals) and it’s really only used in libraries, not bookstores, because it kind of requires you to label the spines of your books, which bookstores generally don’t like to do for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, we also get customers with pre-existing incorrect assumptions, which are so often similar that I think they’re being imported from other media (though I’m not sure what).

People seem to expect the organization of Fiction to be much more granular — e.g., “where’s historical fiction?” “oh, that’s just in with general fiction.” I think some of that comes from movies (people ask where the “rom-com” section is, and that’s definitely a movie thing), but I’m not sure that’s always the reason.

(Admittedly the fiction organization is a bit more granular in the Used Books area than it is in the New Books, but that’s because there are certain genres that we get tons of from people selling us their old books, but we don’t buy enough of on purpose to justify giving them their own section in New Books.)

At the same time, people have the opposite assumption about Non-Fiction — i.e., they expect there to be one singular section labeled “Non-Fiction”, which is not the case. I’ve had multiple conversations that go like:

I try to be nice about it, but I don’t think I always succeed, just because I’m so often legitimately surprised and confused when someone just doesn’t know How Do You Books. I’m getting used to it now, but I’ve been working there for almost five years, so there’s been quite a long adjustment period in between.

Anyway. Just some observations.

Interesting, because in my experience, used bookstores have always had their fiction organized by genre; but that might just be selection bias, since the only genre section I care to locate is the fantasy/sci-fi section, which... presumably that's much easier to sort out, just from a cursory look at the cover, than other genres of fiction. (I've been to places that sort out "fantasy" and "sci-fi" separately, but it's not common; because, listen, I sort my own personal bookshelves by sub-genre, these are books I've read and I liked them enough to keep, and I still have to have a section for "things that are kind of in-between fantasy and sci-fi".)

It is organized by genre, but the only fiction sections in the New Books area are:

Which are, you know, broad categories, but it’s about as granular as I generally expect from a bookstore of this size and generally accords with my experience of other stores I have patronized in the past. I can see an argument for there being more categories (though not, e.g., “rom-com”), but it would require a lot of reorganization effort and basically make people less likely to find specific genres like “historical fiction” by isolating them in small, easy-to-overlook sections. One of the ways in which physical and digital organization present different challenges.

Down in the used books we also have:

In all cases, we do have new books in those genres too, just not a lot of them, so they’re filed in with either General Fiction or Sci-Fi/Fantasy. But we get so many of them from people selling their old books that we give them their own categories in the Used section.

what you describe seems intuitive to me but I've definitely been in bookstores that had a historical fiction section or even a historical YA fiction section. But that was bigger new bookstore. My feeling was that new book stores are more granular because they'll have many of the same and likely a tagging system for their website so it makes more sense to sort them by genre. But even the English section in small Lithuanian bookstores had Alice oseman next to Ali hazelwood and Terry Pratchett and Harry Potter one shelf lower. I'm gonna investigate the sorting system in every bookstore now tho.

Yeah, I think that particular one is a matter of scale. If you’re, say, Barnes & Noble, your fiction section can get as granular as you want because you have practically a whole city block of space and your own custom digital inventory system to keep track of what goes where. So I wouldn’t be that surprised to see a dedicated Historical Fiction section there — i do think it’s still taking the risk of customers not finding it if they don’t realize it’s a separate section, but i’m sure they can trial-and-error that out to figure out what level of granularity to employ.

(I would still be surprised to see a Rom-Com section, but I think I have seen pictures of “BookTok” displays, so… maybe not that surprised.)

I work at an independent bookstore with no digital inventory system, where shelf space is at a premium. So for us it doesn’t make sense to employ that same approach.

Honestly, I’m going to give the customers that one. They might just be more used to big chain stores that do do that kind of thing. That seems pretty reasonable. (And would also explain why they occasionally ask me if we sell coffee.) And if we take that as an explanation, then the issue really boils down to “why not read the signs to see what’s in each aisle instead of asking the clerk,” and that’s kind of just a hazard of retail generally.

Back in the early 2000s, the Barnes and Noble by me *sort of* had a rom-com section.

By which I mean, they had a romance section, but it was shelved like a comic book store: books were grouped by publisher, then by imprint, and only then by author’s last name. So if someone had asked for romantic comedies, a bookstore employee could have theoretically told them which Harlequin imprint specialized in contemporary romance that was also supposed to be funny, and which imprint from Avon did the same; showed them the two sections each could be found in; and let them browse.

(I don’t think that particular Barnes and Noble has a romance section at all anymore - a lot of it used to be taken up with direct-to-mass-market-paperback books and I expect ebook only publications have mostly replaced those, especially with traditional romance publishers being such early adopters. Any remaining print romance novels get shelved with the general fiction or other genres (like paranormal romance is in fantasy now instead of getting its own little imprint spots in the romance section.))

reblog to save a liFE

Up to now, I have been drawing random generic suit jackets.

Never again.

cc: @petermorwood

"Maybe it’s because our political discourse swings between deranged and abhorrent on a daily basis and we would like to combat our feelings of powerlessness by insisting on moral simplicity in the stories we tell and receive. Or maybe it’s because many of the transgressions that flew under the radar in previous generations — acts of misogyny, racism and homophobia; abuses of power both macro and micro — are now being called out directly. We’re so intoxicated by openly naming these ills that we have begun operating under the misconception that to acknowledge each other’s complexity, in our communities as well as in our art, is to condone each other’s cruelties."

(sigh)

The Boy and the Hooded Crow (1884) by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931, Finnish)

attn: @petermorwood (per your inquiry)

Some of you need to hear this. And remember, a phone is just a tiny computer

Oh look, it's the manul version of Shouting In Your Ear Person. :)

UMMMMMM THIS IS. HEART POUNDING DEVELOPMENT.

@dduane I have no idea how I came onto your radar but I'm extremely shook, I have so much respect for your work and love your blogging besides and uhhh just thank you?? I just clocked into work and I've just been walking around in circles, I literally want to be you when I grow up (and I'm not even embarrassed about the verklempt Transformers OC rant so I guess I AM growing up!) so a reboggle is utterly boggling

THANK YOU HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY

You're completely welcome! You have a good one too.

...And now I just want to add a word about why I reblogged @demyrie's original thread of posts:

Because as I read it I immediately recognized something very familiar... that being persistence. And persistence is worth honoring, especially in this business where you're likely to hear a hundred "no"s for every "yes".

It's all too easy to get ground down by the naysayers: by the people who irrationally accuse you of Mary Sue-ing—and yeah, believe it or not, I've had those; by those who're scared of success, and therefore distrust it and are willing to freely vilify people who admit to striving for it; by people who hate when other people appear to love what they're doing "too much." (And those who hold and voice this opinion seem to do so with vehemence that scales up along a curve closely matching your refusal to stop doing whatever it is that offends them.)

What's sometimes really hard is to just keep pushing through all that noise and keep doing what you love: especially when there's not a lot of support among the people watching you do that.

And what is specifically vital here is the persistence. The Calvin Coolidge quote on this subject is so brutal and succinct, but it sums up the situation perfectly.

Now far be it from me to disagree with Silent Cal (she said, preparing to do so. A little). I'm still not sure "omnipotent" is necessarily the word I'd have chosen. But "really, really effective", sometimes far more so than mere talent or genius or education can make you"? Yeah. That.

It's the Spider-Man virtue. When the naysayers beat you down into the pavement and say "Stay down", you refuse to stay down. You get up and stagger a little, sure, because pain does hurt. But then you get back to doing what you love... because (as the Rihannsu say) "Love is unreasonable."

The haters are inevitably full of reasons why what you're doing is all wrong, won't get you anywhere, won't matter in the long run. There's nothing you can do to stop this. All you can do is keep working on the stuff you love, and invite the non-haters to come along with you and see how it goes. ...And then you get back to persisting: fixing the thing that didn't work last time, doing your best to get it to work this time, looking ahead to trying something new the next time.

Sometimes life or personal circumstances mean you need long pauses in this process. Take them. If people mistake them for failure, let them. When the energy comes together properly for you, you'll prove them wrong. Meanwhile your job is to keep that love alive in you for as long as your heart's in it, and persist.

Anyway: go get 'em, @demyrie. We're on the same road. Wave as you pass. :)

ETA for @hyperdragon97: You find ways to persist that do not imperil your status as a corporate being. Sometimes this can take a long while. No reasonable person will blame you for this. Ignore the unreasonable ones, take your time, and find your own way.

(Adding for clarity: persistence takes many forms that do not necessarily involve unusually significant energy outlay*. The chronically ill person I private-duty nursed some decades back, who routinely greeted me in the mornings with “Still breathing, go away now”, was already exercising the Persistence Art in a mode that amazed me… as on any given day, that was what pretty much what they had to work with. And they never gave up. One day they finished breathing, and I was nonetheless left with the certainty that, in this particular hand of the game, they had won.)

*Not to suggest that the routine outlay of the individual described below wasn't already at a level that translated into routine heroism.

Cigna’s nopeinator

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me THURSDAY (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Cigna – like all private health insurers – has two contradictory imperatives:

Now, there's a hypothetical way to resolve these contradictions, a story much beloved by advocates of America's wasteful, cruel, inefficient private health industry: "If health is a "market," then a health insurer that fails to keep its customers healthy will lose those customers and thus make less for its shareholders." In this thought-experiment, Cigna will "find an equilibrium" between spending money to keep its customers healthy, thus retaining their business, and also "seeking efficiencies" to create a standard of care that's cost-effective.

But health care isn't a market. Most of us get our health-care through our employers, who offer small handful of options that nevertheless manage to be so complex in their particulars that they're impossible to directly compare, and somehow all end up not covering the things we need them for. Oh, and you can only change insurers once or twice per year, and doing so incurs savage switching costs, like losing access to your family doctor and specialists providers.

Cigna – like other health insurers – is "too big to care." It doesn't have to worry about losing your business, so it grows progressively less interested in even pretending to keep you healthy.

The most important way for an insurer to protect its profits at the expense of your health is to deny care that your doctor believes you need. Cigna has transformed itself into a care-denying assembly line.

Dr Debby Day is a Cigna whistleblower. Dr Day was a Cigna medical director, charged with reviewing denied cases, a job she held for 20 years. In 2022, she was forced out by Cigna. Writing for Propublica and The Capitol Forum, Patrick Rucker and David Armstrong tell her story, revealing the true "equilibrium" that Cigna has found:

https://www.propublica.org/article/cigna-medical-director-doctor-patient-preapproval-denials-insurance

Dr Day took her job seriously. Early in her career, she discovered a pattern of claims from doctors for an expensive therapy called intravenous immunoglobulin in cases where this made no medical sense. Dr Day reviewed the scientific literature on IVIG and developed a Cigna-wide policy for its use that saved the company millions of dollars.

This is how it's supposed to work: insurers (whether private or public) should permit all the medically necessary interventions and deny interventions that aren't supported by evidence, and they should determine the difference through internal reviewers who are treated as independent experts.

But as the competitive landscape for US healthcare dwindled – and as Cigna bought out more parts of its supply chain and merged with more of its major rivals – the company became uniquely focused on denying claims, irrespective of their medical merit.

In Dr Day's story, the turning point came when Cinga outsourced pre-approvals to registered nurses in the Philippines. Legally, a nurse can approve a claim, but only an MD can deny a claim. So Dr Day and her colleagues would have to sign off when a nurse deemed a procedure, therapy or drug to be medically unnecessary.

This is a complex determination to make, even under ideal circumstances, but Cigna's Filipino outsource partners were far from ideal. Dr Day found that nurses were "sloppy" – they'd confuse a mother with her newborn baby and deny care on that grounds, or confuse an injured hip with an injured neck and deny permission for an ultrasound. Dr Day reviewed a claim for a test that was denied because STI tests weren't "medically necessary" – but the patient's doctor had applied for a test to diagnose a toenail fungus, not an STI.

Even if the nurses' evaluations had been careful, Dr Day wanted to conduct her own, thorough investigation before overriding another doctor's judgment about the care that doctor's patient warranted. When a nurse recommended denying care "for a cancer patient or a sick baby," Dr Day would research medical guidelines, read studies and review the patient's record before signing off on the recommendation.

This was how the claims denial process is said to work, but it's not how it was supposed to work. Dr Day was markedly slower than her peers, who would "click and close" claims by pasting the nurses' own rationale for denying the claim into the relevant form, acting as a rubber-stamp rather than a skilled reviewer.

The ProPublica article is worth a read.

The Princess Chained to a Tree by Edward Burne-Jones, 1866

I’m sorry this is a beautiful painting and I love Edward Burne-Jones/the Pre-Raphaelites but I couldn’t help myself