Each week, the Sunday Post highlights just a few things we loved reading and want to share with you. Settle in with a cup of coffee, or tea, if that's your pleasure — we saved you a seat! Read an essay or an article online that you loved? Let us know at submissions@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Need more browse? You can also look through the archives.

“Unlikeable woman” is such a (sexist) cliché that I was startled to hear a colleague use the word unselfconsciously, and especially startled to hear him use it to describe Elizabeth Warren. What could be more of a (sexist) cliché than to call wonky, stubborn, I’ve-got-a-plan-for-that Elizabeth Warren “unlikeable”? As a reason not to vote for her?

“I’ve been unlikeable most of my life,” I told him. “I guess that’s why I like her.” Then waited out the awkward silence — because I had just done something quite unlikeable.

Smart women have already dissected the weapon of “unlikeable” far better than I can, but still, I’ve been thinking about the word: un-like-able. Not just “I don’t like her,” not just “she’s hard to like,” but: nobody could like her. She has failed at an essential measure of a woman’s humanity.

As Rebecca Solnit says (I paraphrase): who asked you, buddy?

It’s an ugly word. Much uglier then we mostly acknowledge. Call a woman “nasty,” and we all run out and rage-buy t-shirts. Call her “unlikeable,” and we shrug. We know what you mean. It’s okay to say it.

“Many of the crimes of our age are predicated on a profound dislike of the other,” writes Teow Lim Goh in the essay linked below. “It is not just women who bear the unreasonable burdens of likability.” “Unlikeable” hides “unlike” inside it. This is what she shows in her 2016 book Islanders, poems on the Angel Island Immigration Station during the Chinese exclusion era.

By looking at who we find unlikeable on the page, Teow Lim Goh has something to say about how deadly it can be, to be unlikeable in the world.

The dehumanizing politics of likability

We are in the third year of the presidency of a man who opened his campaign with a pledge to build a wall on the Southern border to keep out the “rapists.” This same man has overseen gross human rights abuses, such as the separation of children from their parents when seeking asylum. At the same time, he is trying to do away with family reunification policies, insisting that we should let in immigrants based on merit only — that is, well educated, highly employable, likable. This rhetoric of “good” versus “bad” immigrants still resonates with many Americans, and I did not want to buy into it.

Other good reads this week

Mark Athitakis on whether book reviewers enjoy reading:

But we people who "write about books/otherwise work in publishing" aren't the only people who behave this way, who read on two levels. Book club readers, people who write thoughtful Amazon and Goodreads reviews for no compensation beyond likes and follow-up comments, people who chat up the clerk at the bookstore counter about books, are also doing that work, no? For any serious reader, professional or no, the act of reading is about both the book itself and the meaning that we make of it.

Leslie Jamison on how we make strangers' stories part of our own (also cited by Mark Athitakis in the newsletter above!):

This man punctures me. I felt like his mother until he said he was a father. I think of all the fear he’s known—the guilt, and loss, and boredom—and how I don’t know any of it. His endlessness is something I receive in finite anecdotes: big desert skies, a little girl poking crabs. Sometimes I feel I owe a stranger nothing, and then I feel I owe him everything; because he fought and I didn’t, because I dismissed him or misunderstood him, because I forgot, for a moment, that his life—like everyone else’s—holds more than I could ever possibly see.

Courtesy of a late-night reading of Chuck Wendig’s Cormorants, mind-blowing images of gannets diving.

And, finally: Neil Young is not cranky, young NYT writer. He is Neil Young.

“I’m not putting down Mark Zuckerberg,” he continued, his voice taking a turn. “He knows where he [expletive] up. Just the look on his face,” he said, wagging his finger toward a television screen inside Roberts’s living room, where the Facebook chief executive was giving sworn testimony before a panel of lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. “You know, he came to me in a dream the other night, and I felt really sorry for him,” he said. “He was just sitting there sweating and kind of didn’t know how to talk, because he [expletive] up so badly.” There he was, Zuckerberg, on the large-screen TV, sweating bullets.