* Penelope Trunk: How I got a big advance from a big publisher and self-published anyway, which complements Philip Greenspun’s The book behind the book behind the book…. Notice this, from Greenspun: “Meanwhile, back on Earth: Dead trees publishers (1) don’t surf the Internet, (2) don’t read books, (3) don’t understand the value of a high Internet profile.” Of those, I think number three is less true, but while publishers understand this, they haven’t realized that writers are probably going to get most of the value from high Internet profiles. Notice what Trunk says: “So I sold my book to a mainstream publisher and they sucked. I am going to go into extreme detail about how much they sucked, so I’m not going to tell you the name of the publisher because I got a lot of money from them.”

* I know which one I’d choose, from today’s edition of highly improbable studies: “Facebook Sharing Comparable To Enjoyment From Sex, Food.”

* How Bondage Solves the Problem of Modern Love, on 50 Shades of Grey.

* A Tiny Camera to Rival the Pros: The Sony RX100.

* Class, not race, really divides America today—a point I’ve been making for a while.

* The camera you have with you; notice this:

Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.

The Rebel photos look decent. The 5D Mark II photos look great. But photos from the iPhone 4, and even from the 4S, don’t hold up. They look fine on a 3.5-inch screen, but they look terrible on my big desktop monitor and abysmal on the Retina MacBook Pro.

* United States: The Inevitable Empire. I would add a question mark to the end.

* Why do condos even exist? An important question I’d never considered as such.

* A Northwest Pipeline to Silicon Valley: The role of the University of Washington in Seattle tech.