Links: Adultery, the age of nonfiction, education, Charles Murray, A Wrinkle in Time, Chipolte, and more

* “46 Women Who Were Not My Wife: A true story of adultery, with more honest lessons you can learn than from the Tiger Woods ‘infidelity’ statement.”

* The Emerging Wisdom Revolution

* Bizarre search query of the week: “dick tattoo down your leg”. Another weird one: “lingwe vidio porno yourn sex”. Does “lingwe” here refer to the only Lingwë I know?

* The Digital Back Catalogue, which I have noticed but never quite articulated in this fashion: “Each day—each hour, even—all previous “newsy” items become obsolete and the demand for new newsy items is robust. But the existing stock of well-hewn blocks of substantial prose is already very large and it no longer depreciates the way it did in print.” Sites like Give Me Something to Read, Longform.org, and even The Atlantic exploit the tendency for substantial nonfiction to endure beyond the 24-hour news cycle.

* Envisioning a Post-Campus America; having now seen the underside (or overside?) of Campus America, the upsides of such a move appear to outweigh the downsides. One possibility: campus will remain thanks to mating sorting. Maybe, but I think there are cheaper ways to accomplish the same thing, like living in cool cities or neighborhoods. Capitol Hill in Seattle, for instance.

* Whence comes this sudden wave of economic determinism? Tyler Cowen on the new response to Charles Murray’s book The State of White America, including this: “I’m struck by how many people are offering negative comment on the new Murray book who have not read it, or who do not appear to have read it.”

* ‘A Wrinkle in Time’ Turns 50: Meg Murry Made Katniss Everdeen Possible. The difference: Madeline L’Engle was a good writer, and Suzanne Collins isn’t. Among people who’ve expressed admiration for The Hunger Games, I’ve always offered this: send me a couple of sentences in the novel that you really admire. So far none have.

* Chipotle Is Apple: The burrito chain is revolutionizing food: Why doesn’t it get more respect? Good question: I actually eat at Chipotle somewhat regularly, and its food is pretty tasty and reasonably good for you, at least by the standards of fast food, especially if you get a “bowl” instead of a “burrito.”

* Car Dealers Wince at a Site to End Sales Haggling; translation: use Truecar.com next time you want to buy a car. Every lawsuit and investigation instigated by carmakers against the upstart gives the upstart legitimacy in the eyes of the market.

* Unsurprising hypocrisy: “Even Critics of Safety Net Increasingly Depend on It.” As a kid, I saw a Mad Magazine cartoon depicting a guy decrying government and its incompetence in one panel, with the second one showing his unhappiness at his social security check being late.

* A Western Diet High in Sugars and Fat Could Contribute to ADHD.

* Building taller should be much, much easier.

Week 33 links: The secret sex lives of teachers, B. R. Myers and A Reader's Manifesto, digital cameras, a book in the home, science fiction writers' picks, adultery and politics

* The secret sex lives of teachers, which notes, “there is clearly something irresistible about teachers with decidedly adult extracurricular activities.”

* The Soul-Sucking Suckiness of B.R. Myers, which I don’t buy. I read A Reader’s Manifesto and loved it. Hallberg says, “It was hard to say which was more irritating: Myers’ scorched-earth certainties; his method, a kind of myopic travesty of New Criticism; or his own prose, a donnish pastiche of high-minded affectation and dreary cliché.” I suppose one man’s weak “method” is the opening of another’s eyes to something he’d long suspected but never quite articulated.

I remember trying to read DeLillo and Pynchon as a teenager, thinking they were incoherent, boring, or both, and putting them back down again—an opinion I haven’t managed to revised.

* Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race.

* A Book in Every Home, and Then Some.

* The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels.

* The stars of modern SF pick the best science fiction. A lot of the choices don’t look very appealing to me; I wonder if this is an example of the values of writers and reading diverging.

* Normally I think the day-to-day of politics is stupid and cruel, but some meta political commentary can be amusing, along the observation of hypocrisy. Like in this New York Times column: “What is it with Republicans lately? Is there something about being a leader of the family-values party that makes you want to go out and commit adultery?”

* The Magician King is done.

* The annoyances of eBooks, and why they will probably win anyway.

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