By Cory Doctorow at 6:08 am Thursday, May 24
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Artist (and Boing Boing favorite) Molly Crabapple is just as clever with crowdfunding as she is with a Sharpie. For her 28th birthday, she Kickstartered the budget for a week locked in a NYC hotel suite whose every surface was covered with drawing paper. She spent the resulting "week in hell" drawing over every inch of that paper. The art she produced is documented in Week in Hell, a lovely slim volume from IDW, which features spiffy photos of Crabapple's work, some notes on the production, and a hell of an introduction by Mr Warren Ellis. It's a great look inside an utterly gonzo project.
Art of Molly Crabapple Volume 1: Week in Hell
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By Mark Frauenfelder at 10:44 am Tuesday, May 22
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I haven't read much by science fiction author Jack Vance, but the one or two books I read, long ago, I enjoyed greatly. One thing that stood out about Vance's writing was the way he occasionally used fancy words combined with a deadpan delivery that would be very hard to imitate ("The Green Chasch loped up on their massive beasts, holding yellow and black flags afloat on their lances, signifying truculence and bellicosity. -- Planet of Adventure")
I'm not sure why I never read more of his work, but I've stored a mental note for years that said, "Read more Vance." Last week, I got the chance when I received this graphic novel adaptation of a classic Vance short story called "The Moon Moth," beautifully adapted by Humayoun Ibrahim.
The story takes place on a planet with a post-scarcity society in which everyone wears elaborately constructed masks appropriate to their social status. The inhabitants also carry a bunch of different musical instruments with them, because instead of talking to each other, they sing and play a particular instrument suited to the content and context of the conversation. (Ibrahim begins the graphic novel with a two-page spread describing a dozen or so of the musical instruments used on the planet Sirene. I referred to the spread several times as I read the story.) The characters' word balloons are rendered in a way that makes them look like they are being sung with a particular emotion.
"The Moon Moth" is about a man (I think he's from Earth), who gets sent to Sirene as a kind of emissary. He isn't prepared to live in this society, where a minor social gaffe can easily result in an instant beheading by the offended party.
"The Moon Moth" is the name of the story, but it is also the name of the low-status mask the Earthman ends up wearing. Initially he chose a high-ranking mask but was warned he would be killed quickly because he wouldn't know how to comport himself like a person worthy of such a mask. The society's paper-thin layer of over-the-top politeness, covering a draconian code of honor and punishment, reminds me of the Samurai culture (at least the way I understand it from reading James Clavell's Shogun.
From what I've read about Vance as an author (there's a good good forward in this book about Vance by Carlo Rotella), he's not interested in elaborate plots. Instead, he is able to create very weird, but completely believable, worlds, and write about them in such a way that you feel you are in them. This comic book version of "The Moon Moth" did that for me, and it also had a very satisfying conclusion. I'm not going to wait to read more Vance -- I bought Tales of the Dying Earth, an omnibus volume with four Vance novels: The Dying Earth, The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga and Rialto the Magnificent.
Buy The Moon Moth on Amazon
By Cory Doctorow at 5:49 am Tuesday, May 22
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Cecil Castellucci -- indie-rock star, young adult author, and all round cool-ass polymath -- has joined forces with illustrator Nate Powell (Swallow Me Whole) to produce The Year of the Beasts, an extraordinary hybrid of young adult novel and graphic novel. Beasts is the story of Tessa and her younger sister Lulu, townie girls in a place where holidaymakers come for the summer, and the year they discovered boys. The carnival comes to town every June, and Tessa and Lulu go, and it is young Lulu, not Tessa, who finds herself kissing Charlie, the boy that Tessa has had a crush on forever. The summer yawns before them, as the sisters and their friends navigate the stormy, irrational seas of romance and hormones and coming of age, in a prose narrative that lays its characters' hearts raw and bare in that way that Castellucci is so good at.
Interleaved with these prose chapters are chapters from an allegorical graphical story, a comic about a girl who has become an avatar of Medusa and must attend high-school, despite the fact that when the scarf covering her snake-hair slips, she turns her schoolmates to stone, just as she has done to her parents. These comic-book chapters are a mystery to be solved by the riddle, which comes together in the final chapter.
Year of the Beasts is one of those stories whose earlier chapters are a kind of greased slide that makes the reader hurtle faster and faster toward an unseen landing, hinting at different possibilities until the climax is revealed in a thunderbolt, and it is at once inevitable, unforeseen, and terrible.
Year of the Beasts
By Cory Doctorow at 7:58 am Thursday, May 17
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Julian Cash's The People of Burning Man is a beautifully produced photo-portrait book shot over many consecutive years at Burning Man, the giant, weird, delightful art and culture festival that takes place every summer in Nevada's Black Rock desert. Cash -- who's quite an accomplished and experimental portraitist -- does a wonderful job of bringing out the decadence and playfulness of Burning Man. There's plenty of the nudity that often comes to mind when people think of Burning Man (this is, after all, the home of the Critical Tits topless bicycle ride), but Cash manages the fantastic trick of allowing his nudes to be sensual and sometimes sexy without ever being pornographic or salacious. These aren't "tasteful" nudes -- but they are exuberant and above all, fun.
People of Burning Man is to be celebrated also for its admirable lack of text. There's very little narration here, because very little is needed. The pictures tell their own stories -- sometimes in a frozen snapshot, and sometimes over time, as we visit with the same Burners over consecutive years (including one woman who appears first in a very pregnant state, and then with a babe at her breast). What little text there is -- a bit of background on the art of shooting portraits in a harsh desert, a little bit of biography supplied by the subjects -- complements the images without upstaging them.
Cash was good enough to supply a gallery of (NSFW, naturally) photos that are included below. There's plenty more -- and lots more material, besides -- at his The People of Burning Man site. The book was independently published with the help of a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it's both a beautifully made thing and a thing of beauty.
The People of Burning Man
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By Cory Doctorow at 8:41 am Wednesday, May 16
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Our own Ed Piskor's Wizzywig -- a graphic novel that is a fictionalized account of a Kevin Mitnick-type hacker and his run-ins with the law -- will shortly be available as a beautiful hardcover from the good folks at Top Shelf Comix, who put together the excellent book trailer you see above. Here are my reviews of the original single-chapter volumes:
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the first two volumes of Ed Piskor's comic-book historical hacker drama, Wizzywig. Wizzywig is the story of Kevin "Boingthump" Phenicle, a fictional hacker who's part Mitnick, part Poulsen, and part mythological. Boingthump is a preternaturally bright, badly socialized kid who discovers a facility for technology that's egged on by his only pal, "Winston Smith," a would-be Abbie Hoffman who is obsessed with the potential to use Boingthump's discoveries to monkeywrench the machine.
But soon enough, their roles are reversed, as Kevin's relentless pursuit of knowledge and power scares Winston so much that he tries (without success) to put the brakes on Boingthump's crazy ride through the phone system and the nascent Internet. The story blends fiction and fact, dropping in a Blue Box-selling Jobs and Wozniak (Boingthump picks the trunk-lock on their car and steals a Blue Box) and Cap'n Crunch, along with plenty of fictional BBS scenesters and grumpy computer-store owners. The backgrounds are filled with nostalgia PCs -- Atari 400s, Apple ///s -- and old Bellcore manuals.
The illustration and storytelling style reminds me a lot of Harvey Pekar (with whom he's collaborated on American Splendor), jumping backwards and forwards in time, switching points of view, going inside and outside of the characters' heads. The first two volumes are PHREAK and HACKER, with two more (FUGITIVE and INMATE) planned. Piskor prints and sells the comics himself (the books are quite handsome) and he's got extensive free previews online. At $15 each, with all the money going straight into the creator's pocket, what's not to like?
Wizzywig
By Cory Doctorow at 4:28 am Tuesday, May 15
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Tom Watson and Martin Hickman's Dial M for Murdoch is a timely, informative, infuriating insider account of the News International phone-hacking scandal that has occupied the news-cycle, off and on, for several years now (and shows no sign of slowing down). Watson, a veteran Member of Parliament -- and frequent target of the Murdoch press and its hackers and snoops -- was an early and consistent voice of alarm over the scale and illegality of the Murdoch tabloids' investigative methods. He's uniquely well-situated to tell this story. His co-writer, Martin Hickman, is a veteran investigative reporter who covered the story for the Independent. They make a good pair, and the narrative is relatively smoothly told and, at times, is very powerfully written.
The Murdoch papers -- and other UK tabloids and papers -- wield tremendous influence in the halls of British power. Dial M traces the intimate connections between the press and senior ministers, elected officials, and -- crucially -- the police in the UK. As the flagship Murdoch tabloid, News of the World attained the highest circulation of any English-language paper, and seems to have led the world in illegal investigation techniques as well. The early inklings of the scope of the company's criminality were systematically understated by the press, underrated by the police, pooh-poohed by officials (from every party), and buried.
But the story wouldn't die. There were just too many victims, a sympathetic poster-child for everyone -- dead soldiers and their families, terrorist bombing victims, royals, the families of murdered children, and so on. It was impossible for Scotland Yard to maintain its "nothing to see here" posture, not with so many different stakeholders and so many upwellings of outrage. It didn't help that the most senior police officers on the case were doing various kinds of business with Murdoch, or retiring into cushy sinecures as high-paid columnists and consultants. Neither could the impotent Press Complaints Commission maintain the fiction that it had investigated, censured, and cleaned house.
Murdoch's many enemies were willing to bring the fight, risking their private lives, risking their personal fortunes. Vindictive Murdoch executives drew up enemies lists, ordered deep background checks on Parliamentarians and attorneys, sent high-powered lawyers to lean on witnesses, set private eyes to follow Murdoch's opponents in secret, or dispatched obvious PIs to watch them openly and intimidatingly. Watson and Hickman are exhaustive in documenting the slimy depths plumbed by Murdoch's high-placed lieutenants and their thugs in their efforts to maintain the years-long suppression of the investigation.
They were ultimately undone by their own arrogance. You can't defend yourself by throwing your accomplices under the bus forever. Eventually, some of the minions on whom you've pinned the blame will start whispering your secrets to others. Likewise, you can't pin the blame on your fancy lawyers, insisting that they investigated your operation and gave it a clean bill of health -- they won't sit still for it. You can't just hack everyone who accuses you of hacking.
Indeed, the scale and arrogance of the Murdoch companies' illegality was both their undoing, and is the major problem with Dial M for Murdoch. Despite the authors' valiant efforts to be both exhaustive and engrossing, sometimes the sheer litany of the names of the hacked, the officials who participated in the coverups, the bribes and corruption -- well, it gets a little repetitive. This is the banality of evil, 350 pages' worth. The fact that it's hard to keep it all straight when it's delivered in sequence, with the benefit of hindsight, tells you a lot about how this managed to slip off the front pages so many times over the years. The revelations can be so similar that it's hard to remember that this is actually a fresh outrage, not just a re-reporting of last week's lies and crimes.
My other problem with Dial M is its unwillingness to set out an explicit agenda in defense of a free press. For all that the tabloids have gotten away with murder for decades, Britain has one of the most censorious and litigant-friendly environments when it comes to press freedoms. This is the land of the "superinjunction," where corporate criminals can order the news of their misdeeds to be vanished into the memory hole. This is the land where spurious libel claims can be used to silence science writers like Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre, who document the (sometimes literally) murderous quackery of "alternative medicine" gurus. Britain has the unwelcome distinction of being the world's center for "libel tourism," a place where despots can come to punish journalists who reveal their misdeeds.
One consequence of the Murdoch scandal has been a renewal of the call for "press regulation," to rein in the tabloids. But what the tabloids did was already illegal -- it didn't just violate a "code of conduct," it violated the actual statutes on the actual lawbooks. The problem wasn't that they slipped through a legal loophole: the problem was that they had the cooperation of crooked prosecutors and cops, and the collusion of highly placed officials, both elected and appointed. The problem wasn't the absence of a law, it was the absence of legal enforcement.
For example, Dial M paints Max Mosley as something of a hero of the fight against Murdoch. Mosley, a wealthy celebrity who'd been libeled by the tabloids, refused to settle and refused to back off, and spent a fortune bankrolling much of the legal action against Murdoch. For this, he is justly lionized by the authors. But Mosley also proposes far-reaching Internet censorship rules, and advance notice and "arbitration" whenever the press publishes stories about public figures, and an opportunity for those figures to seek injunctions against publication. I kept waiting for the authors to point out that one risk of the Murdoch scandal is that Britain's moneyed and powerful will seize on the opportunity to reverse the trend toward libel reform and other free-speech rules, and to demand expansions to the already onerous censorship and libel regime the country labours under.
Instead, Watson and Hickman walk a fine line between praise and condemnation of the press, without ever articulating what a "good" press should do, or what regulation they favour. There are plenty of opportunities for this, too: after all, the Guardian's Nick Davies was a key investigator of the scandal, and the authors credit him with bringing Murdoch to heel, at real personal risk. I wanted them to explain how they would create a policy or precedent that would let Davies investigate Murdoch at full tilt, but not be so broadly defined as to legalize the investigative techniques used by the Murdoch press. Indeed, the book opens with a quote from Bob Woodward, who brought down a president by publishing illegally leaked confidential material -- what system would protect Woodward and not Andy Coulson?
The other "other shoe" that never dropped in Dial M was a critique of the way that our IT systems are designed to be such juicy and easy targets for scumbags and crooks. It goes without saying that there's no excuse for the Murdoch invasions. But what on Earth are all these rich and powerful people doing sending unencrypted emails? Why do ministers of the government use voicemail servers operated by big, dumb phone companies like Vodaphone, instead of privately maintained Asterix instances run by Parliament's IT department (who, presumably, couldn't be tricked into resetting a voicemail PIN merely by calling up and saying, "It's Bob in tech support, and I'm on the other line with the Home Secretary and she's forgotten her PIN, can you reset it for me, mate?"). How is it that lawyers and clients send cleartext documents to one another, and how is it that ministers and civil servants keep the nation's most important information on unencrypted hard drives? It's one thing for an individual celebrity (or the bereaved parents of a murdered child or a felled soldier) to lack the wherewithal to protect themselves, but when it comes to officials and their staff, it's both inexcusable and inexplicable. Maybe the Murdoch snoops would still have gotten something on them with long lenses and PIs who shadowed them from home to work. But the fact that a crew of creepy dolts were able to sit in their basements hacking thousands of important and official phones and computers at a time is not merely an indictment of their employers at the tabloids. It should be a wakeup call to the establishment to put its house in order, get some training, and use the decades-old technology (that comes stock on every GNU/Linux box) in their official dealings.
Leaving aside those omissions, Dial M is a fabulous and infuriating read. If you have been trying in vain to keep all the crooked dealings straight, here, at last, is the scorecard you've been looking for. It's the perfect background reading for the nightly news, and I can't wait for a sequel once this business has been resolved (however long that might take!).
Dial M for Murdoch
By Cory Doctorow at 6:29 am Monday, May 14
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Forming is Jesse Moynihan's ultra-weird graphic novel about the creation of the universe, filled with cursing, inexplicable violence, grotesque sexual acts, and primitive and strange illustrations. Set in the "Third Age of Total Bullshit," the story tells the tale of powerful aliens who visit Earth in the time of giants, set up camp in Atlantis, and enslave the indigenous giants to mine rare minerals for the galactic empire. These aliens are also involved with Noah, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Lucifer and the Archangel Michael, and a cast of personages more obscure and weird than any book of the apocrypha.
To understand Forming (assuming "understand" is the correct verb here), picture some lost Gnostic text translated by Jay (of Jay and Silent Bob) at his cussin-est, under commission by a delusional would-be cult-founder who cut his teeth on the work of Fletcher Hanks and who really liked drawings of weiners and boobies.
Moynihan walks a fine line between "weird" and "incomprehensible" and between "clever" and "dumb," and manages to stay on the right side of it through almost every one of these bizarre, demented panels. I can't say that I've ever read anything quite like this (though it did call to mind the weirder bits of The Incal). I'm glad I did.
Forming is published by London's NOBROW, whose books are fantastically well-made, beautifully cloth-bound and printed on high-quality, sustainably produced paper (they also publish the much-more-kid-friendly Hilda comics). It's a quality product.
Forming (Amazon)
Forming (Nobrow)
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By Cory Doctorow at 4:27 am Friday, May 11
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Darryl Cunningham's Science Tales is a fantastic nonfiction comic book about science, skepticism and denial. Divided into short chapters with simple layouts and graphics, Cunningham's book looks into belief in chiropractic and homeopathy; denial of moon landings, climate change and evolution, the anti-vaccination movement, and related subjects. It concludes with a tremendous piece on the forces that give rise to anti-scientific/anti-evidence movements, which Cunningham attributes to the deadly cocktail of cynical corporate media-manipulation and humanity's built-in cognitive blind-spots.
Cunningham has a real gift for making complex subjects simple. If you're a Mythbusters fan, admire James Randi, enjoyed Ben Goldacre's Bad Science, and care about climate change, you'll enjoy this one. More to the point, if you're trying to discuss these subjects with smart but misguided friends and loved ones, this book might hold the key to real dialogue.
To get a taste of Science Tales, click through below for the first five pages of the MMR story, courtesy of publishers Myriad Editions.
Science Tales
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By Cory Doctorow at 2:00 pm Thursday, May 10
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Jeff Vandermeer sez, "As part of our celebration of weird fiction, centered around the release this week of The Weird -- 800,000 words of weird fiction from the past century--we've posted weird writer Stephen Graham Jones's flowchart showing the differences between weird fiction, horror, surrealism, and more...we're soliciting opinions. Did Jones nail it?"
The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
(Thanks, Jeff!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:09 am Thursday, May 10
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I just got around to reading Endangered Species, the fourth volume of Jeff Lemire's outstanding, post-bio-apocalyptic graphic novel Sweet Tooth (here's reviews of the previous volumes). Damn, this is good stuff.
In Sweet Tooth, a plague has swept the planet. Babies are born as human-animal hybrid "monsters." Adults die off in huge numbers, killed by what is assumed to be the same disease. "Sweet Tooth" is a young boy with deer antlers who is raised in a shack in the woods with his father, a mad (?) holy-man who is consumed with visions. When Sweet Tooth's dad succumbs to the plague, Sweet Tooth ventures into the world and meets Jepperd, a violent rover who seems to take him into his care, but whose motives we readers know to be suspect.
Four volumes in, and Lemire has proved that he can toy with our emotions with the best of them. The characters are flawed and likable, the mystery deep and compelling, the action fast and rough. Most of all, though, is Lemire's incredible ability to instill and sustain a sense of dread in the reader, a delicious horror-movie feeling that something bad is coming, something lost in the shadows and unknowable but dreadful. I've powered through each of these four volumes in less than an hour, unable to put them down. As DMZ draws to a close, it's great to know that there's another graphic novel series in the chute that's so utterly compelling.
If you haven't been keeping up with Sweet Tooth, there's no better time to start -- here's volume one.
Sweet Tooth Vol. 4: Endangered Species
By John Alderman at 10:30 am Tuesday, May 8
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Image: Imperfect Publishing, with permission
A magazine called “WET” is difficult to explain. Particularly when you have, as I do, a stack of them. When snickering friends dig into the brittle pages, they soon discover something amazing: an artifact from the misunderstood era of the late 70s early 80s that cleverly combined hedonism, pop culture, and a great, iconoclastic sense of humor. Then they get it. Still, some wonder about the subtitle: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing. Seriously? Read the rest
By Cory Doctorow at 6:23 am Monday, Apr 30
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Gone to Amerikay is a masterfully told tear-jerker of a graphic novel that tells the stories of multiple generations of Irish immigrants to New York, skilfully braided together. There's a storyline from 1870, the tale of Ciara O'Dwyer and her baby daughter who arrive in the Five Points slum ahead of Ciara's husband, who is meant to catch the next boat, but does not arrive. There's a storyline from 1960, in which a merchant seaman named Johnny McCormack jumps ship to become an actor, but instead ends up in folk-music-saturated Greenwich Village, discovering turbulent truths about his calling and his sexuality. Finally, there's a 2010 timeline in which a stratospherically wealthy Celtic Tiger CEO named Lewis Healy touches down in New York in his private jet so that his lover can give him a gift for the man who has everything: the secret history of a song that changed his life when he heard it as a child.
Writer Derek McColloch and illustrators Colleen Doran and Jose Villarrubia make this three-way narrative sing (literally, at times) by exploiting the unique visual storytelling capabilities of comics in ways rarely seen. Their masterful treatment boosts an already fine -- if sleight and sentimental -- tale into a higher orbit, giving it a velocity and a mass that makes the book both unstoppable and heart-tugging.
This is a sensitive treatment of race and class, sexuality and art, betrayal and gender, and above all, the immigrant experience in America. Like a great folk song, it is at once simple and complex, a paradoxical confection that could only have been rendered in graphic form.
Gone to Amerikay
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By John Biggs at 5:38 am Monday, Apr 30
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Sometimes enough is enough, and memoirist Paul Carr exemplifies this maxim. His previous books - Bringing Nothing To The Party
and The Upgrade
- were tales told from the bottom of a champagne glass. The first book, a rollicking story about how Carr started and destroyed an Internet business, was punctuated by drunken antics that seemed to define the Carr character: part imp, part jerk, and part Lost Boy. The second book, a treatise on how to live in hotels rather than renting an apartment, is really more about drinking too much at all the wrong places.
In short, over time, Carr became his own character and his only job as a writer was to try to remember what went down the morning after the bottles of beer, whiskey, and champagne finally dwindled down to a raft of empties floating in the slush of ice at the bottom of a VIP bucket. Well, goodbye to all that.
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By Cory Doctorow at 7:46 am Friday, Apr 27
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I've just finished Rebecca MacKinnon's Consent of the Networked, and now I'm kicking myself for letting it languish in my review pile for as long as I did. It is an absolutely indispensable account of the way that technology both serves freedom and removes it. MacKinnon is co-founder of the Global Voices project, and a director of the Global Network Initiative, and is one of the best-informed, clearest commentators on issues of networks and freedom from a truly global perspective.
MacKinnon does a fantastic job of tying her theory and analysis to real-world stories. She illustrates how governments are figuring out how to use networks to take freedom away, to control debate, to find and crush dissent. She shows how Internet corporations -- even the ones with a good track-record on protecting their users -- are prone to cooperating with the worst, most repressive instincts of governments (including supposedly liberal western governments).
But she also describes how technology contributes to freedom, and how savvy use of technology, combined with activism in the realm of Internet governance, lawmaking, and corporate affairs can turn technology into a force for liberation, accountability and freedom. She teases out the good and the bad of technology, working from recent examples like the Arab Spring uprisings, and names names and cites facts and figures when it comes to companies and governments who worked to undo the liberating power of technology.
Most of all, MacKinnon lays out a roadmap for tipping the technological balance towards freedom. She describes how diverse groups, including ones she works with, provide opportunities for all of us to work for positive change, in our capacity as citizens, employees of corporations, members of government, and as clued-in techies.
MacKinnon is a realist, but never a cynic, and provides a much-needed straight-shooting, levelheaded account of how the Internet changes power-relationships. This book should be read by anyone who cares about freedom today and in the decades to come.
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom
Official book site
By Maggie Koerth-Baker at 8:10 am Thursday, Apr 26
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When Howard Carter opened the tomb of the boy pharaoh Tutankhamen in 1922 he found a series of chambers piled high with “wonderful things.” For nerds of a certain age, this is a story we’ve heard many times before. King Tut was a part of our lives from childhood. On the list of “Dead Things Small Children Get Really Excited About”, he ranks just below dinosaurs and just above Pompeii. By the time we reached junior high, we had explored the Valley of the Kings through diagrams in National Geographic, catalogued Tut’s treasures in the pages of glossy DK picture books, and watched innumerable actors recreate Carter’s day of discovery on TV documentaries.
Given all that you already know about the Tutankhamen story, why should you bother reading Joyce Tyldesley’s new book Tutankhamen: The Search for an Egyptian King
? Because Tyldesley asks (and answers) questions those old familiar sources seldom bothered with. Her book takes a popular kid’s history and fleshes it out with grown-up levels of depth and context. For instance: Why exactly was King Tut buried with all those grave goods to begin with?
The answer isn’t as simple as you might suspect. The golden couches, ornate game boards, food, and flowers are all usually presented as things Tutankhamen thought he’d need in the afterlife. But that doesn’t match up with what we know about ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, Tyldesley writes. Kings were supposed to spend their afterlives away from the tomb—reborn as a star, or merged with the god Osiris. It was non-royal elite who, at one point, thought they would need to deck out their tombs to be eternal vacation homes. By Tut’s time, though, even they were granted access to Osiris’ kingdom. Technically, there was no religious reason to bury anyone with as much stuff as Tut had, let alone a king. Howard Carter’s “wonderful things” were probably a function of cultural tradition, rather than religious necessity. It was about wealth and appearances, an effort to keep up with the Joneses which spiraled so out of control that real treasures were eventually replaced by representations of treasure. More important, Tyldesley says, there’s no reason to suspect that an older king would have been buried with more grave goods than Tutankhamen got.
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, my book about the future of energy in the United States, will be published April 10th.