River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy talks with WQUD GM Aaron Dail about the contents of, and items related to, the November edition of the River Cities’ Reader, Issue N° 1027. With Hugh Grant’s wide-eyed visage adorning the cover, and a review by Mike Schulz of Heretic, the film HG made with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, the film poster’s tagline, “Question Everything,” remains as pertinent as ever. They are certainly words to live by.

Other words worth keeping in mind are those of Kathleen McCarthy’s: “’Incurious’ is synonymous with ‘judgmental.’” They go further than the usual connotations (eg, inaction being a form of action, indecision decision, et al) and say that if you’re not doing anything to find out exactly what kind of world you are living in, then you are, in effect, content with the status quo, so why shouldn’t things be the way they are? You may not be Voltaire’s Candide and declare this being “the best of all possible worlds,” but your lack of curiosity about the way things work speaks a lot louder than, say, your opinion on the outcome of this election cycle.

Meanwhile, Todd McGreevy questions the dominant narratives about environmental decline and asks, “Is Geoengineering Saving Our Planet or Is It Our Biggest Health Threat?”; and Stuart Cooper‘s article “Federal Court Rules That Water Fluoridation Poses an ‘Unreasonable Risk’ to Children” focuses on the ill-effects of fluoridation, a practice that has persisted down the decades.

Elsewhere, the Reader‘s political cartoonist, Ed Newmann, asks the question, Who Is Uncle Scam?! The short answer is that it’s a darker version of the 1917 recruiting poster J M Flagg contributed to the nation’s imaginative life. An even shorter one is, Declare your status as a clear-sighted individual and post this baby! Better still, wear it on your person!

Finally:

Reader Events Calendar

Find out what’s going on in the cultural life of the QCA at the link.