Tag Archives: Links

Links: Toni Bentley on “50 Shades,” MFA madness, global climate change, media politics, and more!

March 4, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “Fifty Shades of Grey Is an Ode to Female Sexuality, but There’s One Thing Missing” by Toni Bentley, whose amazing and amazingly lascivious book The Surrender I often want to recommend and yet rarely do, for reasons that will probably be obvious to readers of said book.

* “Things I Can Say About MFA Writing Programs Now That I No Longer Teach in One,” though it’s false that “Writers are born with talent” and that people who didn’t start as teenagers are probably doomed. The rest, though, are true, especially this: “If you aren’t a serious reader, don’t expect anyone to read what you write.”

* “Scientists know there are more giant craters in Siberia, but are nervous to even study them,” which may be the most important article you’re going to skip.

* The Robots Are Coming: John Lancaster, brilliantly, on Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over and Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s The Second Machine Age. Both are good but if you’re a non-specialist be biased towards Average is Over.

* “Dave Barry: The Greatest (Party) Generation.”

* “Mercedes Carrera Explains Why Cytherea’s Rape Was Not Covered By The Feminist-Dominated Media.”

* “Are landlords the future global plutocracy?” See also Yglesias, The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think; I find it fascinating that many superficial liberals claim to be concerned about income distributions but also favor heavy land-use controls that exacerbate inequality. One or the other, people!

* “University labour strife underscores cost of tenured academics;” tenure costs much more than its distortionary effects are worth. But I would say that, wouldn’t I?

* “Finding the Dense City Hidden in Los Angeles,” which surprises me too.

Links: Child payment nightmares, Houellebecq, Hanson, publishing, 50 Shades, and more

February 26, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “Man Ordered by Judge to Pay $30,000 in Support for Child That Isn’t His.”

* “The Next Thing: Michel Houellebecq’s Francophobic satire.” Though this may not seem related at first, Salon.com’s “ Sex orgies of the 1 percent: What really happens when the rich and powerful gather for group sex” could be compared and contrasted with the Houellbecq article. The second link is SFW, at least in photo terms.

* Hanson on “Ian Morris on Foragers, Farmers, Industry, & Ems.”

* Read the full title: “Brontosaurus BDSM, Werewolf Marines, and Serious Social Issues: Self-Publishing in the Wild.”

* “Why GM Hired 8,000 Programmers.”

* “Lenovo installs ghastly spyware on all its laptops,” in a move that is shocking, dangerous, and cruel.

* The bizarre opposition to due process on campuses.

* “The Accurate Erotics of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey,’” which is perhaps overgenerous; see also my essay.

* Someone found this blog by searching for “technology wrecks relationship.”

* Why so-called “digital natives” prefer to read paper.

* Silicon Valley’s War on Sex continues as Google bans adult blogs.

Links: The power and beauty of design, the great software revolution, sex workers, Minneapolis, and more!

February 19, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

* “The Shape of Things to Come: How an industrial designer became Apple’s greatest product,” my favorite piece of this batch, about Jonathan Ive—who has improbably done more to shape the modern world than all but a handful of other people.

* Nurse throws down in the comments section of “Why you should become a nurse or physicians assistant instead of a doctor: the underrated perils of medical school.”

* “The Great Software Revolution,” which is similar to “Software is Eating the World” but with different emphasis.

* “Meet the [Washington] Sex Workers Who Lawmakers Don’t Believe Exist,” from The Stranger and SFW.

* “Why Authors Walk Away From Good, Big 5 Publishers.”

* “The Days and Nights of an NBA Groupie: Meet the ladies who will do anything to bed a pro baller.” There is a novel here, something like Jay McInerney’s Story of My Life; I don’t think I’m the right person to write it. The mental contortions sometimes evident here are also amusing.

* An unintentionally hilarious comment from David Brin, from the post about his post on characters in fiction; the comment is guilty of the very thing he accuses me of doing!

* “The Miracle of Minneapolis: No other place mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth so well. What’s its secret?” Land-use controls are an underrated driver of many ills in the contemporary U.S.; if you meet someone who complains about income inequality but doesn’t want to remove urban height limits and parking limits, they’re either not serious or don’t know much about the issue.

* Lesbian takes testosterone, feels shocked when her whole worldview changes.

* Employers want better technical writers but aren’t getting them.

Links: Phones and markets, publishing, DNA tests, lying, murder, and more!

February 15, 2015 By in Links Tags: Leave a comment

* “An outfit called Midtraffik is trying to address [the image problems of busses] the old-fashioned way — with advertising.”

* You can now unlock your phone, which should lead to a more robust second-hand cell phone market.

* The Faces of Publishing.

* “Your DNA Is Nothing Special: It’s time to relax about genetic testing,” a terrible headline and great sub-head.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* “Good Lovers Lie,” by Clancy Martin of, perhaps not coincidentally, How to Sell fame.

* “How We Write About Love,” interesting throughout, though if the genders were switched and the generalizations remained I predict the author would either have not written the piece or would get blowback because of it.

* The Internet makes questions of meaning more salient, not less; one man’s boring is another’s interesting; and I’m struck by how many ways we have to say things and how little many of us have to say.

* College students use social media to be anti-social.

* Cops murder a guy on camera.

* “Keep typing until it turns into writing.”

Broadband, sports! go sports!, dirty writers, illiberalism, human flourishing, and more!

February 6, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , Leave a comment

* “FCC on verge of killing state laws that harm municipal broadband,” file this under “great news.”

* What life is like for non-sports fans; a shockingly good metaphor.

* “American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist.”

* Another unhappy University of East Anglia (UEA) Student opines.

* On Andrew Jefferson Offutt V, who you probably haven’t heard of and I hadn’t until this article, who was a writer of more than 400 books and is now headlined as “My Dad, the Pornographer.” Article goes to the NYTimes.

* Secret Confessions of the Anti-Anti-P.C. Movement, which contrary to the sound of the title is hilarious, and which demonstrates a massive inability to closely read and interpret an argument.

* “The internet is full of men who hate feminism. Here’s what they’re like in person,” a topic about which I’ve often wondered. See also “Confessions of a Pickup Artist Chaser — Clarisse Thorn.”

* Let’s Talk About Sex—in English Class.

* “Legal Weed Is Making Colorado So Much Money The State Has To Give Some Back;” all drugs should be next.

Morcock, Melville House, school, boundaries and norms, the greatest NCY pictures you’ve ever seen, and more!

January 13, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , 2 Comments

* “The Anti-Tolkien,” about Michael Moorcock, is quite good and worth reading but it does one thing that consistently annoys me: it doesn’t tell new readers where we should start. Any piece about a long-established and/or prolific artist should have a suggested starting point. Few if any artists are equally good across dozens of works. In the case of Elmore Leonard, for example, I’d suggest starting with Get Shorty and Out of Sight in that order.

* Melville House on publishing The Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture. You “should” read it, though you probably won’t.

NYC_Skyline* Don’t be a full-time adjunct and don’t go to grad school, which ought to be obvious.

* The Unappreciated Success Of Charter Schools.

* Dr. Ali: On sexual boundaries, exotic lovers and three ways I answer your dating questions

* It’s always been hard to make a living in art.

* Incredible NYC pictures taken from 7,500 feet.

* Heat Death: Venture Capital in the ’80s is unexpected and well-cited.

Links: Flying torches the planet, Birdman, books, crazy creative people, fertility, and more

January 10, 2015 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* “Every Time You Fly, You Trash The Planet — And There’s No Easy Fix,” an underappreciated point; I know many people who see SUVs as environmentally evil and travel as virtuous, when their love of the latter more than offsets their hatred of the former.

* Oliver Peters on Birdman, which is an unusual and very good movie.

* Mark Zuckerberg discovers books.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA* English PhDs can’t get jobs, which would-be English PhDs ought to know.

* The messy minds of creative people.

* “How California Bested Texas“—except in terms that arguably matter most, population growth.

* “Why do women know so little about their own fertility?” And that this issue gets mixed up in politics is itself depressing. The facts, people! Start with them.

* This Guy Took a Photo Every Time He Saw Someone Reading a Book on the Subway.

Links: Tech changes culture, beyond the salacious, IKEA, pulp fiction, business, and more!

January 4, 2015 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* “Sex and the Industrial Revolution,” though this has already made the blog rounds.

* “Beyond the Simply Salacious: Five Stories on Adultery,” though is it gauche to link to links posts? Tony Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression also covered related grounds many years ago. It is striking how few modern works of criticism could be of interest to the general reading population.

* “Is the IKEA ethos comfy or creepy?” Both, though I have a special hatred of IKEA, plus an amusing-in-retrospect story that takes place in one. It relates to this: “Alan Penn [. . . ] conducted a study of the IKEA labyrinth and deemed it sadomasochistic.”

* “The birth of Pulp Fiction,” which is interesting for many reasons, one obvious one being between paperbacks and ebooks. I do think ebooks are vehicles for “for social and cultural enlightenment” and that they will further “de-provincialize the American public.” One can already see this in 50 Shades of Grey, for example, despite the bad prose. The intellectual elite is already mostly de-provincialized but political correctness and some related movements have re-provincialized large precincts of it.

* “On Triangl, maker of the ‘world’s [allegedly] hottest bikini’?” This is actually about making it in the apparel business and fulfilling customers desires.

* “Actually, Our Military Keeps Winning,” an essay contrary to current dominant narratives. If you aren’t reading James Fallows you should be! On New Year’s Eve we saw American Sniper, which was incredibly intense and whether it can be read as a pro- or anti-war movie probably depends on the viewer’s outside knowledge.

* People now move to the Southeast from California and the Northeast, not surprisingly since the Southeast is where the cheap housing is. While Californians and New Yorkers endlessly debate supposed income inequality they perpetuate it by forbidding new housing supply. I want to move to Austin or perhaps Denver. My parents left California for Seattle when I was a kid due to housing costs and crap schools, and now Seattle and environs are following California’s lead by pricing people out of the market. See Matt Yglesias.

* Behind the scenes of Australia’s prostitution boom.

Links: Bogus authenticity, radicalizing the romanceless, universities, destiny, and more

December 28, 2014 By in Links Tags: , Leave a comment

* “Realer than you: How did authenticity become the hot new status symbol?” The contemporary obsession with travel as a somehow soul-enhancing experience is my favorite example of this general trend. Here is my review of The Authenticity Hoax.

* “Radicalizing the romanceless.” Maybe. Though this is my favorite link from this patch.

* “Promising solution to plastic pollution,” an underrated problem.

* “U.S. Is No. 1, China Is So Yesterday,” which is another underappreciated problem: demography is destiny.

* A totally indecent, untraditional, radical proposal: “universities should prioritize academics.” This may also ameliorate some of the current elite university admissions madness.

* “Kindle Unlimited pisses off Amazon authors;” note that this is one danger of competing on price.

Links: Demography, arrests, books as art, are marriage and porn substitutes?

December 21, 2014 By in Links Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

* The Shit Test Encyclopedia; note as always that linking does not imply endorsement and that often the most interesting pieces are ones in which I do not find plausible many claims. Adam Phillips’s book Becoming Freud falls into this category, though it is the only book by or about Freud that I’ve found palatable.

* “Demography Is Rewriting Our Economic Destiny,” an underappreciated and significant issue; this can be read profitably in tandem with Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think.

* “Decades-long Arrest Wave Vexes Employers: Companies Struggle to Navigate Patchwork of Rules That Either Encourage or Deter Hiring Americans With Criminal Records;” if a third of Americans have arrest records something is seriously wrong with our society.

* “The Innovative Art of the Book-Preserving Underground: How do illustrations for new editions of Fahrenheit 451 or Breakfast at Tiffany’s stay fresh? Artists for The Folio Society remain true to the text.” I’ve bought Folio Society books.

* “Americans aren’t getting married, and researchers think porn is part of the problem,” which must be read skeptically.

* “The Henry Ford of Books,” about James Patterson, who is not good at sentences but perhaps he knows as much: “he is philosophical about his critics, in particular critics of his craft. Patterson decided long ago that he’d rather be a successful popular novelist than a mediocre literary one.” I have often been told that I should be writing nonfiction, and perhaps my own smaller circle of critics are correct. I’ve started a couple of Patterson books without finishing them.

* “How to be an expert in a changing world,” which, like many Graham essays, is about more than it appears to be about; this for instance applies to artists: “Good new ideas come from earnest, energetic, independent-minded people.”

* “The Birdcage: How Hollywood’s toxic (and worsening) addiction to franchises changed movies forever in 2014.” Here is me on Birdman and note too that the author is nostalgic for a time when movies were central to the culture, which hasn’t been true for at least a decade.