Links: Broadband, sex and culture, France, lifting, science, beauty, and more

* Big Cable says broadband investment is flourishing, but their own data says it’s falling. It will no doubt come as a shock to discover that Comcast and Time Warner are lying.

* “Tina Belcher’s Sexual Revolution,” which sounds stupid but isn’t.

* “Zac Efron Bros Down To Grow Up: Our teen idols are ‘all heart, no libido’ — so what happens when they grow up? Ricky Nelson, Rock Hudson, Zac Efron, and the impossible contradictions of masculinity,” which also sounds stupid but isn’t, primarily because it’s actually about the history of Hollywood.

* “University of Washington researchers: Polar ice sheet doomed, but how soon?

* “Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet.”

* Clarissa: “I Don’t Want to Hire Women,” which is an interesting companion to “It’s Different for Girls.”

* “Are the French Better at Sex?” Usually I would say no. I am surprised none of Maïa Mazaurette’s work has been translated and published in English.

* Everything You Know About Fitness Is a Lie. Short version: use heavy barbells and focus on free weights.

* “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?

* The remarkable Neal Stephenson interview.

* “Check out the parking lot: Hell in LA.”

* “Kathryn Schulz on the Harmonious Contradictions of Geoff Dyer,” which makes me want to read Dyer.

* “‘…it’s fair to say that the presidents and administrators of these institutions are bringing it on themselves.’

* “Thank You for Being Expendable;” I think the painful truth is that men have always been expendable from a society’s perspective, per Roy Baumeister’s book about “How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men” (though I do not endorse everything or even the majority of the book), but no one tells soldiers that before they enlist, and no one tells them that modern American generals don’t get fired for incompetence.

Humanities, writers, money, and sex, which could all be seen as the same subject

* Stop defending the humanities.

* What is Dark Matter?

* “How much my novel cost me: Writing my first book got me into debt. To finish the next one, I had to become solvent,” in which the author learns many things that seem like they ought to be obvious and also mis-prioritizes things in a way that most people grow out of by 30.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Q&A: The Duke Freshman Porn Star,” which is interesting and yet I 1) can’t help by marvel that anyone today thinks they can appear in porn and, given the contemporary appetite for it, not eventually be recognized and 2) think that anyone going to a school costing more than $50,000 a year ought to expect it to be filled with rich kids. In addition, I don’t see the appeal of schools like Duke or USC; yes, they have big sports teams, but the basic experience and structure is similar to that of most public schools costing half to a quarter as much.

* “Goodbye Academia,” which is part of a growing genre and I agree with this comment: “I feel liberated and happy, and this is a very bad sign for the future of life sciences in the United States.”

* “What good are children?

* “The Scary New Evidence on BPA-Free Plastics,” probably overwrought but interesting nonetheless.

* Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle; this is both important and depressing.

* “From bestseller to bust: is this the end of an author’s life? The credit crunch and the internet are making writing as a career harder than it has been for a generation.” Except I’m not sure I’d call it “harder;” I’d call it “different.” Weirdly, neither “self-publishing” nor “Amazon” are explicitly mentioned.

The number and percentage of writers who have ever been able to make a full-time, middle-class living at writing novels is small and has always been small. That’s one reason so many get gigs at MFA programs: for all but the most popular writers, there’s more money in teaching writing than writing.

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