And now, some links!

How do you feed the Olympic athletes? Step one: Buy 3 million bananas.

Celebrity book clubs are run by enthusiastic and voracious readers, but that doesn’t make them immune to publishers’ campaigning for their top titles.

“Everything I did on these friend dates was aggressive, pathetic, or insane.” Kelly Stout set out to make a new friend in an (1) month. (That timeline is way too short imo.)

Two humanitarian surgeons, with extensive experience of working in war zones, write about their time in Gaza, “None of [our experience] prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.” This is a hard read, but a very important one. What’s happening in Gaza is straightforwardly genocide, and the US is eagerly supporting it.  I also recommend this piece by a former IDF soldier and scholar of genocide.

“If there’s one fundamental human impulse that the internet has indulged more than anything else, it’s our desire to be huge bitches.” Twenty years of Yelp.

The queerness of monsters.

“When he asks how much we paid for this vacation, he is unable to best the low price that Ramona has given us. This makes me feel like we are in an armored truck of value, impervious to the rest of the world’s scams.” Traveling via Costco.

A big chunk of undersea cable disappeared. Did Russia take it?

“Some of my past times, including Combs’s stalking me at the Vibe office, had to be redacted. I blacked them out in order to keep the lights on.” A really, really stellar piece from Danyel Smith on her own experiences with Diddy.

Oh my God this piece about The Gods Must Be Crazy and its apartheid legacy, oh my God.

Mo Ryan begs her fellow white women not to let what happened to Nicole Beharie on Sleepy Hollow (I’ll die mad about it) happen to Kamala Harris.

“[J.D. Vance is] still really only good at one thing: advancing by slavishly attaching himself to people richer and more powerful than himself, casting them aside when they become inconvenient.” lol

Wake up, babe, new UNESCO World Heritage sites just dropped.

“People don’t just bring their aspirations to the city. They also come with their wounds. The city is a segregator of wounds.” On Sinéad O’Connor.

“Your child does not need a comms strategy.” Linda Holmes does not support AI-written fan mail.

The journalist for this piece deserves a Peabody. What happens when writers break up? I loved this piece so much. I have forced it upon everyone I’ve ever met. They’ll never stop hearing about it. NEVER.

CALL ME BASIC, but this interview with the Supermarket Sweep gays made me feel tender towards the world.

What are we to make of White Women for Kamala and similar events?

Locked cases may prevent products from being stolen from retailers like Target and CVS, but they’re also preventing products from being, like, sold.

Rose Eveleth is doing a terrific new podcast about sex testing in sports, and she writes about the ethical challenges of writing about athletes’ bodies.

What Tim Walz has is tonic masculinity.

Lydia Polgreen on the Cass Report. This piece is so good.

KLAXON KLAXON WE HAVE NEW EURIPIDES CONTENT.

Why do the family members of crime victims show up for events like CrimeCon?

“There is no playbook for a President Kamala Harris because presidential politics has never imagined a Kamala Harris.”

“How sports gambling came to be such a hulking, clanging presence in our life is the ultimate sports media story—which is funny, in a ghoulish sort of way, given there’s not a lot of sports media left to tell it.”

“Believing you have no part in it is as naive as believing that touching a hot stove won’t get you burnt.” Morgan Jerkins can’t turn away from the tradwives.

“Over a twelve-year period from 1989 to 2001, virtually none of the winners of any high-value prizes were legit.” This story about the McDonald’s Monopoly game is Wild.

The news media is—again—utterly failing to meet the moment.

A prominent advocate for accessibility in gaming appears… never to have existed?

Buy physical media, friends! You won’t regret it!

The post I own a lot of DVDs now: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

NPR’s Book Concierge for 2022

Brittle Paper‘s list of 100 Notable African Books of 2022.

The Guardian‘s Best Books of 2022.

Paste‘s Best Fantasy Books of 2022.

Kirkus has a bunch of subject-specific lists of best books of 2022.

The Globe and Mail‘s Best Books of 2022.

Laura Miller’s best of 2022. Dan Kois’s best of 2022. (both from Slate)

Shelf Awareness: Best Books of 2022

Chicago Tribune‘s Best 10 Books of 2022

New Scientist‘s best nonfiction of 2022

Washington Post‘s 10 Best Books of 2022

New York Times‘s Best 10 Books of 2022

Foreign Affairs’ Best Books of 2022

Time‘s 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Barnes and Nobles’ Best Books of 2022

Chicago Public Library’s Best Books of 2022

Vulture’s Best Books of 2022

I am absolutely delighted about Goncharov (1973), and I think you will be too. It is, however, another illustration of how much fandom loves to invest emotions in white characters and whiteness.

“Don’t you want to be able to retire?” How home-reno shows are making us think we want and need home changes we don’t like.

What will writers do without Twitter?

Thank heaven someone has done an oral history of the 12-foot Home Depot skeletons. God bless this Vice article, and God bless the 12-foot Home Depot skeletons. They’re so stupid. I love them so much.

Aubrey Gordon has a new book out and is a national treasure!

An all-spoilers review of what makes Andor so great.

Usually I love the “this industry is completely unregulated!” exposes but this one on hospice is even more of a goddamn bummer travesty than these pieces usually are. Also like… this article takes some turns. You think it’s just “this industry is completely unregulated!” and then some time goes by and there’s a WHOLE ASS SCHEME with a LAWYER IN A WIG DISGUISE and shit. (Seriously, holy shit, I cannot overstate how insane this article is.)

“As the queer content of many of Donatello’s sculptures has been the subject of intense scholarly debate, it would have been intellectually rigorous for the catalogue to address these debates more directly. Instead, silence was observed in deference to the Catholic Church.”

Kavita Das has a new book about writing on social issues, and here she is in a roundtable on the subject with Gaiutra Bahadur and the wonderful Gabrielle Bellot.

The US absolutely owes it to our Afghan allies to adjust the status of refugees now in the US to allow them to stay. Otherwise, they’ll be deported back to Afghanistan. If you take nothing else away from this links round-up, please call your elected officials about this!

Emancipation (the movie!) hadn’t been on my radar until this week, and Valerie Complex has a typically thoughtful review of the movie in itself and the place of Black trauma in cinema.

Always nice to read a story about how romance novels gave someone joy in hard times!

Wesley Morris talks about the crisis of the type of movies that build movie stars.

“Ironically, this is the most personal piece of writing I have ever published.” Isabel Kaplan’s boyfriend (a writer) broke up with her because she’s a writer.

Twitter is awful and being terminally online is awful and everything is awful.

“Our ambulances are simply the entrance to a broken pipeline.” An EMS worker in New York City weighs in on Eric Adams’s shitty new proposal to institutionalize more mentally ill people so that the rest of the New York public won’t have to look at them anymore.

America doesn’t have a polarization problem; it has a white supremacy problem.

Gretchen McCulloch has helpfully standardized how we spell the abbreviated version of the word “usual.” Thanks, Gretchen McCulloch!

Iron Horse asked seven poets about their revision process, and here’s the result.

Have a wonderful weekend! Good luck with your TBR lists! I regret nothing!

The post ‘Tis the Season for Best Books Lists: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW for the second half of 2018 has dropped, bringing joy unto us all in these dark times. I was cranky when I read this and therefore only wrote down, like, six books on my TBR list. SUCCESS.

“The idea that everyone involved is playing a game of three-dimensional chess at all times can be grounds to reinterpret or dismiss even the most contradictory signals as needed, to make sure the theory keeps working.” Zan Romanoff on celebrity relationship conspiracy theories.

Niceness and small towns in romance novels.

How to write about Africa.

The Female Relationship Resume isn’t an actual metric we need to care about.

Sarah McCarry is actually an excellent readalike to Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel Confessions of a Fox, and I love her review. And here’s Jordy Rosenberg himself on writing trans stories and the multiplicity of authorship.

Here is a big list of cult books. Yay. (Books about cults, btw, not books with a cult following.)

Matt Zoller Seitz on Nanette and the future of stand-up comedy.

Here’s some of the reasons I didn’t get on Amazon this past week. (I used Goodreads a bit because I forgot it was an Amazon product. Grrrrrr.)

There’s no such thing as a feminist company. Companies are not your friends. They will never be your friends.

This is an experimental DIY library in Brooklyn!

I LOVE AKASHIC BOOKS. Here is a day in the life of an indie publisher.

If you’re readathoning, follow me on Twitter so we can be readathon buddies! And I wish a wonderfully pleasant weekend to readathoners and non-readathoners alike!

The post The Millions Brings Light to Our Days: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.