* The next Houellebecq, Submission, comes out in the U.S. on October 20. I’ve not surprisingly preordered.

* “How Literary Fame Happens;” “luck” and “utility to future teaching priorities” are big parts of the answer.

* Why Millennials may be into food, from the comments.

* “What two religions show us about the modern dating ‘crisis;'” the scare quotes are mind because no “crisis” exists, but the data is interesting throughout. This article could be profitably read with Christian Rudder’s excellent Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity–What Our Online Lives Tell Us about Our Offline Selves.

* Edmund Wilson’s Big Idea: A Series of Books Devoted to Classic American Writing. The result of the Library of America, whose books I really like (as objects, I mean: their contents are wildly variable, unsurprisingly).

* “The Limits of Language: Wittgenstein explains why we always misunderstand one another on the Internet.” I especially like this: “Since pretty much no one can agree on anything about Wittgenstein, I’m going to present things in the spirit of Pears’ interpretation, with the caveat that you could probably find a philosopher somewhere who would disagree with every following sentence.” Literary critics suffer from the same problem. No one can even agree what’s good, let alone right!

* College Calculus: What’s the real value of higher education?”

* “This week, I resigned from my position at Duke University…”