Nah, actually, this a graph from a survey by Emil Kirkegaard, Bryan J. Pesta, and Joseph Bronski.
The specific prompt was: “Of the following questions, please indicate how taboo you think the question is”, with 5 options from “not at all taboo” to “extremely taboo”. We tried to include a wide variety of questions, some taboo, and some not taboo.
Everybody knows some topics or questions are taboo, but which ones? Do people agree? Decided to find out. We asked 500 Americans online to rate the tabooness of 29 questions, and this was the result.
— Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) April 17, 2024
Race and IQ was the winner, even beating incest, pedophilia, gay germs etc. pic.twitter.com/17MTj6wyfn
By the way, I haven’t been promoting my book Noticing that hard online lately because it’s still sold well enough without an intense push from me lately that shipping is still lagging a few weeks behind new orders. The publishers promise that they will be over the hump by next week. We’ll see.
The good news is that the $29.95 paperback Plebeian Edition is an aesthetically worthy adjunct to the superb but extremely expensive $395.00 leatherbound Patrician Edition. (There are several dozen copies still left of the 500 hardcovers printed, which you can order here.) I signed several dozen copies of the paperback in Austin and everybody, both the customers and I, were very pleased by how it turned out.
If you are in no hurry at present to get the book, please order the $29.95 paperback directly from Passage Press. The promo cheat code for free shipping (within the US) remains STANCIL.
The Amazon page for Noticing is finally taking shape, but… logistically, the Amazon connection is not really ready to do business yet, so I’m not going to link to it yet. (Also, while I have nothing against Jeff Bezos—I think he’s a great businessman who has made my life better over the last three decades—I also think that my publishers and I need money from my book more than Jeff does, so at present I’d rather promote direct sales from Passage than through Amazon, where Jeff takes his not-insubstantial cut.)
