{"id":5831,"date":"2010-12-03T10:40:41","date_gmt":"2010-12-03T18:40:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=5831"},"modified":"2010-12-03T10:40:41","modified_gmt":"2010-12-03T18:40:41","slug":"book-review-jonathans-franzens-freedom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2010\/12\/03\/book-review-jonathans-franzens-freedom\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Jonathan&#8217;s Franzen&#8217;s Freedom"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry for the radio silence &#8212; Thanksgiving really took it out of me.  (The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vegas.com\/searchagent\/restaurant\/ViewRestaurant.do?restaurantId=3903\">food was excellent<\/a> &#8212; may have eaten too much.) Just got back from a <a href=\"http:\/\/francestanford.stanford.edu\/conferences\/darkenergy\">workshop<\/a> at Stanford, where we had a mini Cosmic Variance gathering, since I saw both Daniel and Risa.  Had JoAnne not been delayed on her flight back to California, we might have been able to get four co-bloggers in the same room for probably the first time ever.<\/p>\n<p>Since today is Casual Friday, I&#8217;d like to put science aside and do a review of Jonathan Franzen&#8217;s new book, <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Freedom-Novel-Jonathan-Franzen\/dp\/0374158460\/\">Freedom: A Novel<\/a><\/em>.  I am hampered in that goal by the fact that I haven&#8217;t read the book, and don&#8217;t plan to any time soon.  (I think Franzen is a great writer, but I&#8217;m very behind in my reading list.)<\/p>\n<p>So instead I&#8217;ll outsource this one to Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles, who <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2010\/08\/24\/AR2010082405326.html?sid=ST2010083102726\">delivers his critique<\/a> in video format.  It gives me some ideas.  (Hat tip to Ariel Kalil.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sorry for the radio silence &#8212; Thanksgiving really took it out of me. (The food was excellent &#8212; may have eaten too much.) Just got back from a workshop at Stanford, where we had a mini Cosmic Variance gathering, since I saw both Daniel and Risa. Had JoAnne not been delayed on her flight back [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5831","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humor","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5831\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}