Links: Tolkien, San Francisco, cops, climate change, love

* “Tolkien, The Force Awakens, and the Sadness of Expanded Universes,” an astonishingly excellent post; if I had to draw one lesson it would be that every successful rebellion must eventually end in governance, which results in problems similar to the ones that drove the rebellion in the first place. Fighting the existing order is fun and sexy, but groups of humans need some kind of order, and when the fight dies down some kind of order must exist (or it will be found eventually elsewhere).

* “San Francisco’s Self-Defeating Housing Activists: Tech companies and workers are vilified while longtime homeowners who fight high-density growth continue to profit from rising rents and property values.”

* “In 2015, the second safest year for cops in modern history, the NY Post used phrase “war on cops” over 80 times.” Hat tip pg.

* “We’ve Already Reached the Tipping Point on Global Warming. I’ve Seen It.”

* “Being a cop showed me just how racist and violent the police are. There’s only one fix.”

* “The Financial Benefits of Buying What You Love,” a perhaps underrated point, but how often do you know what you’ll really love before you buy it? Paging, maybe, Vanhawks, given the original link.

* “Iran’s blogfather: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are killing the web.” Maybe. I’d reframe and say that we’re all killing the web, every day, in the choices that we as individuals make. We are the problem.

* The refragmentation, by Paul Graham, and by definition any essay he writes is worth reading.

An amazing publishing story from Joseph Campbell:

When I finally wrote my Hero [With a Thousand Faces] it was refused by two publishers and it was the Bollingen [Institute Press] that picked it up. If they had not picked it up, I don’t think anyone here would have heard of Joe Campbell. I’m sure of that.

Hero With a Thousand Faces went on to inspire Star Wars and it continues to be standard reading among anyone interested in stories and narratives today. By the time Hero was rejected, Campbell had been working on it for five years. The story reminds me of the publication story for The Lord of the Rings, which hinged on a reader report from the initial publisher’s son, who was around nine or ten when his opinion was solicited.

Stories like those are some of the reasons self-publishing is so exciting. There are no gatekeepers. Getting a firm count of the number of important but unknown works that never happened because publishers  rejected them is impossible. But realizing that they’re certainly out there is important.

Campbell also describes how he kept writing productively for so many years: “You can get a lot of work done if you just stay with it and are excited and it’s play instead of work.”