Andrea Pitzer's avatar

Andrea Pitzer

@andreapitzer.bsky.social

1237 followers 297 following 925 posts

Books! Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World. One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. Words in WaPo, NYRB, Slate, etc. Would rather be in the Arctic right now. www.andreapitzer.com

Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Just got a lovely note from someone who read my Nabokov book. He says it sent him back to his own collection to reread everything in light of what he knows now. Such a gratifying feeling to share ideas when someone goes on to kick the tires on them, take them out for a ride, and think for himself.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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It might well come back really quickly! It's not like you've been sedentary. And there's no reason at all to think you can't lift *more* than 130 once you're back in the swing of it, if you end up wanting to do that.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Our bodies do humble us! But as long as you don't have shoulder issues, etc., bench pressing will 100% come back to you, given a little time. You wouldn't expect to be able to write well if you hadn't written in decades.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I visited my mom at the dementia ward yesterday, and they were playing John Lennon's "Imagine." When I was a kid, my mother and stepfather denounced that song as secular humanism—Satan's work on earth. It occurred to me that life always finds a way to bite you on the ass in the end.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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He's moving to a newer house not far away that's in better condition! So whatever he decides to bring along, he should be in good shape...

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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To be honest, if I had to move, all those piles would be books. And my asking him, "When are you going to need this again?" would be someone else asking me, "Are you really going to read this again?"

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I have a friend who’s a hoarder. He was supposed to move out of his house by July 1. I tried to mentally prepare him and get him to organize or hire movers early in the process, to no avail. He finally did hire them. We are now on day 4 of them helping him move with two big trucks. It may never end.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I'm lifting to be able to crank a manual sailing winch to hoist a six-person rescue boat w/outboard motor out of the water and onto deck in the Arctic by myself.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Also hoping today that any other children Gerald Fremlin might have molested will gain some peace from Andrea Skinner coming forward to speak the truth about him and Munro.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I'm thinking of Munro's "Silence," in which the narrator runs into an acquaintance & learns that her daughter (who'd disappeared years before) had begun a new life elsewhere, married with children and wanting nothing to do with her mother. This story has haunted me for 20 years. Now I know why.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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What terrible pain Alice Munro's daughter has suffered. "For years after Fremlin’s conviction, I was estranged from my family of origin... When I was with them, I felt I was on trial to explain myself... Then, in 2014, my sister Jenny reached out."

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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One big advantage in this century is that we have the benefit of hindsight that people a century ago did not. We can cut through propaganda and point to exactly what fascist and reactionary agendas will actually deliver--which isn't what most people want.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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May you always have an open window and the wind in your ears.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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There's a "Less Than Zero" joke to be made somewhere in there.

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chatham harrison is tending a new garden's avatar chatham harrison is tending a new garden @chathamharrison.bsky.social
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Even a tepid choice can be a momentous change when the alternative is evil

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Would donate $5 to a film production in which a gang of lovable retired canine criminals come together for one last caper, teaching RFK Jr. a lesson he'll never forget.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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It's important to keep in mind that these people are bullies and cowards, and that a majority of Americans don't agree with their bullshit.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Just remembered this today, for no reason.

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Lupita Nihongo's avatar Lupita Nihongo @otsumamiboy.bsky.social
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Makes my skin crawl that these people have to spend the twilight of their lives being denied justice by people who weren’t even alive when they were brutalized and that what were supposed to be the best years of their lives was stained by an overt rejection of justice.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Someone should write a poem to her, in tribute.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Made @lollardfish.bsky.social's wife's recipe for biscuits while out alone at a cabin just now, and they're so good I'm tempted to eat the whole batch while they're fresh from the oven.

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Laura Helmuth's avatar Laura Helmuth @laurahelmuth.bsky.social
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This is predictable but so important: Pasteurizing milk kills the H5N1 bird flu virus that is circulating widely in dairy cattle. It's easy to take a 150-year-old technique that has saved countless lives for granted, but don't fool around with unpasteurized dairy products. 🧪

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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"Ghost in You" remains a fantastic song. One of their best. (Once had sushi in DC with Richard Butler and several other people through a weird series of events. His girlfriend was riding support on the Tour de France or somesuch at the time, iirc.)

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Father-in-law, a white boomer engineer working in packaging or teaching his whole life who sees himself as a centrist, said, "For a long time, I wondered what these people were so angry about, what they want. Now I know. They want Jim Crow back. That's what they want."

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I would like to point out that you are delusional! I've averaged 4 years between books so far, and it's likely to be at least 5 between ICEBOUND and the next one, because I've been trapped at home by (first, the pandemic, then by) family crises.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Happy birthday, Anne! You look extremely young for being 163 years old.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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These earliest recognizable concentration camps were in Cuba, southern Africa, and the Philippines, and they built on the legacy of Spanish, German, British, and US government treatment of indigenous people in the Americas and elsewhere.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I am once again suggesting that you read my book. You’re assuming the ongoing existence of categories that tend to dissolve in predictable ways in exactly these settings.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I am pointing out that there is a dangerous historical pattern to these kinds of counterinsurgency measures, one which has devolved again and again into death and atrocities on a massive scale. I wish you would stop pretending I am saying the things you want to be mad about.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Maybe that's the dynamic. It's definitely a kind of very online phenomenon that hardly ever happens to me in real life.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I don't understand people who want to have an argument about something they're pretending I said.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Read my book! Tons of amenities (including food, education, land for crops, & new homes, in some cases) have been promised to detainees in various camp systems around the world across the last 125+ years. There's a pattern to how these offers tend to fall short/deteriorate, leading to bad outcomes.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I mean that literally. Concentration camps rose out of 19th-century military strategies designed to crush terrorists and rebels by creating holding areas for noncombatants, though it was understood even then that their use would cause *civilians* horrific suffering.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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To be clear, this is how concentration camps started more than a century ago.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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My superpower is that I can look into the abyss inside my own head without turning the television on.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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Yes! In my opinion, it pays to let readers recover, so they can be slain again.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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I think what impressed these guys was the leg press. I load 450-500 lbs onto it (10 plates & change). The carriage weighs another 100 lbs--so 4X body weight in all. But I think it's more of a package impression. I hang upside down to do sit-ups & do knuckle & fingertip pushups. I'm a gym eccentric.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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We met doing karate. He’s normal about all of it and thinks it’s great that younger guys would openly praise a woman at the gym. Wouldn’t have happened back when I first joined Gold’s in 1994.

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Andrea Pitzer's avatar Andrea Pitzer @andreapitzer.bsky.social
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We go to the gym together on Sunday but separately during the week. The guy this morning said that he and the other guy had seen me talking to someone they thought might be my husband on Sunday. So when they saw him again on Tuesday, they asked.

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