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The Best Articles of 2026

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse

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Keeping Up Appearances

By · Los Angeles Review of Books · October 2026

Keeping Up Appearances

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"The women taking over the funeral industry."

Read full essay at Los Angeles Review of Books ↗

Added by @colin

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Los Angeles Review of Books

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Book spotlight

In Real Life

In Real Life

Cory Doctorow

14 ratings on Open Library

Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role playing game that she spends most of her free time on. It's a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It's a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends. Gaming is, for Anda, entirely a good thing. But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer -- a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake. From acclaimed teen author Cory Doctorow and rising star cartoonist Jen Wang, In Real Life is a sensitive, thoughtful look at adolescence, gaming, poverty, and culture-clash.

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