Uh-oh. The Millions and Lithub both have their big second-half-of-the-year book previews. RIP me and my admirable resolution to read my own damn books rather than constantly checking out huge stacks of 15 books at a time from the library.

What’s happening to sex workers is a warning about algorithmic content moderation.

My pledge to you is that I will always, always share content about reborns. Always. Trust.

The always-brilliant Gita Jackson wrote about Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

“There’s a book I love that no one else knows about.” Molly Templeton on the pleasure and sadness of being a fandom of one.

“The term ‘salmon farming’ yields 2,698 titles, 95 of which are works of fiction.” On the real and fictional salmon falmers of Norway.

Why are the networks siding with the streamers?

AI isn’t going to disrupt books because the people making AI don’t understand what people want from books.

Clio Chang, a hero for our times, researches what exactly is in that subway water that drips on your head when you’re waiting for the train.

This is an incredibly cool visualization of how a translator approaches her work, the different iterations she tries on a passage, and how she makes her decisions.

I have clearly not been using my copywriting powers for evil enough. This is the story of a copywriting scammer who made millions sending scam psychic letters.

“In our risk-averse climate, a lot of what is exciting, original and untested is being published by independent publishers.”

The Ann Landers / Dear Abby feud is one for the ages.

America’s Next Top Model turns 20. The Cut speaks to former contestants about their experiences.

Rafia Zakaria on passport freedom.

Et vous? What have you been reading on these here internets that you’ve enjoyed? Please share!

The post What If a Links Round-Up, But on Tuesday? appeared first on Reading the End.

Here’s the definitive update on the indie romance writer who faked her own death. It is, perhaps not unexpectedly, a pretty sad story.

On the resemblance of dinner to a magic show.

There’s a growing conspiracy theory on the right about asexuality. Unsurprisingly, it has its roots in anti-transness and white supremacy.

How travel influencers use their white privilege to make their money.

This is an article about people who own super-yachts. I hate everyone in this bar. All of them, without exception. As one of the people quoted in the article jokes, it really HAS made me want to bring back the guillotine.

What it’s like to go to Antarctica on your honeymoon.

A review of Spare by someone who doesn’t give a damn about the royal family.

Pamela Paul wrote about American Dirt, for some reason. Here’s some edits for her piece.

The marvelous Gina Apostol explains the unexplainable José Rizal, and it is just as delightful as you’d expect.

“We’ve come to think of art–all art–as commercial goods that warrant this calculation of the ‘Moral Nutrition Facts‘ to ensure we’re not feeding anything ‘bad’ to our brains.”

Extreme content warning for sexually violent content, but this article on rape and child sexual abuse in Amish communities is really important.

How gig workers have become care workers.

When women gain financial or reproductive independence, backlash always follows. That’s where we’re at now.

LitHub has their giant list of books to look forward to in 2023. GO NUTS.

“‘People are stupid’ is the gateway drug to a lot of worse ideas.”

“This is like The Purge, if The Purge was solely about committing crimes against North American marsupials.” For five days a year in North Carolina, you can do anything you want to possums.

W h e n will there be justice for Gina Prince-Bythewood. ANSWER ME THAT.

Is there an end in sight to the New York Times trans panic? A massive group of NYT contributors wrote an open letter to the newspaper requesting more journalistic integrity when reporting on trans issues. The next day, the New York Times published an opinion piece by (again, inevitably) Pamela Paul entitled “In Defense of JK Rowling.” So like, yeah. No end in sight, I guess.

This article on Justin Roiland of Rick and Morty includes a quote from someone who describes his behavior as “the eccentricity of a genius weirdo.” Ha ha I hate it here.

The always-excellent Wesley Lowery talks about the racial reckoning that never came.

There is an enormous battle going on about How To Botanical Garden Correctly. I love this shit.

Stitch discusses the power of collective grief in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

What happens to our online presence after we die? The Archive of Our Own can point the way for other sites.

Speaking of the archive, they’ve introduced new muting and blocking functions, which is great!

“RICO charges have become a go-to strategy for taking down hip-hop artists.” (This is the first of a two-part article about crime, gentrification, and Cop City in Atlanta, so make sure to click through!)

I will DIE MAD about Sleepy Hollow. Here’s a look back at a buddy cop supernatural procedural that should have run for fifteen seasons, and how the showrunners did Nicole Beharie so, so wrong.

Dang, Pablo Neruda was poisoned?

“Bring back the oil paintings that fuck.” A history of the clinch cover on romance novels.

Andrea Long Chu’s reviews are always a good read, and here’s the latest, on the new HBO adaptation of The Last of Us.

Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey is… a win for creative freedom? (Seriously, though, it is.)

As a closer, I recommend subscribing to this newly launched queer epistolary romance, which you can get in installments in your inbox!

The post Lies, Conspiracies, and Scandalous Emails: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

How to cull your books: The Awl guide. Let me tell you my method, team. Take all the books. Line them up on the floor, right to left, by how much you love them. Then draw a line somewhere in the middle of that long line of books and cull everything to the left of your line. Boom. Done.

More on fan entitlement (and a bit of side-eye for Steven Moffat, which I am never not here for) from The Mary Sue. I’m really digging Maddie Myers’s work on The Mary Sue these days, y’all! Go follow her on Twitter, I like where her head’s at.

Speaking of things I’m never not here for, Jonathan Franzen gave an interview to Slate and it’s everything I could have asked. He has never been in love with a black woman and he suspects poors don’t like him because he enunciates and wears glasses. What a great world.

Mm, Elizabeth Minkel gets real on why she doesn’t believe that The Cursed Child is fanfic.

Holy crap, y’all, Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes went on a road trip one time. They had funsies. Let’s turn that into a movie.

Aaron Sorkin’s online screenwriting class is everything you want it to be. Ben Lindbergh reports for The Ringer.

Matt Zoller Seitz on the decline of the serialized TV drama.

Why Twitter attracts trolls.

Diversity in book publishing. The last two years have seen a marked increase in books by POC authors, but the staff of the publishing industry remains overwhelmingly white.

Being stuck without a book is the worst. I believe we can all agree on that. When was the last time you needed a book and didn’t have one?

The post Demand the Hurston-Hughes Road Trip Movie We All Deserve: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Bahahaha Constance Holland (nee Lloyd; formerly Wilde) has a fake gravestone at a cemetery in Spain. OF COURSE SHE DOES God I love Oscar Wilde stories.

American literature needs indie publishers, says The Atlantic. They don’t exactly go deep on the point that indie presses are an avenue for publishing more marginalized voices, so if y’all have a recent article that gets to that point, link me and I’ll add it!

The wonderful and attrrrrrractive John Cho on gay Sulu and his concerns about same. What a cool guy John Cho seems like.

Speaking of Star Trek, CBS/Paramount recently released new, draconian guidelines for Star Trek fan films; KJ of Lady Business goes in on why these are terrible.

I cherished Natalie Portman and Jonathan Safran Foer’s unbearable fake email exchange, of course. The Millions has uncovered a correspondence between Portman and Cormac McCarthy — what a treasure — and Jezebel shared the emails of two of its own staff people as well. What a great, not at all not-real, trend.

Daisy Dunn loves Catullus. And just — y’all, I just love Catullus so much. Okay that’s all I have to say. I really love Catullus.

First-time authors Yaa Gyasi and Hua Hsu interview each other about book ideas and racist grade school teachers.

The fab Elizabeth Minkel breaks down what’s so silly about those peril-peril-fan-entitlement articles, over at The New Statesman.

Have a wonderful weekend, you beautiful people! There is a tiny tiny papillon puppy in my neighborhood, and I plan to lurk the neighborhood pretending to be hunting for Pokemons but actually in hopes of catching a glimpse of this tiny preposterous puppy.

The post Honestly Some Joy in Link Format: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

The short history of spoiler warnings.

You should just assume that I’m going to link to everything Elizabeth Minkel ever writes. Here she is talking about the gendered reaction to responses to Zayn Malik’s departure from One Direction vs. responses to Jeremy Clarkson’s departure from Top Gear.

Foz Meadows, being typically fascinating about the way gifs are changing critical discourse. She does seem to think that academic journals are profit-making beasts. Are they? I do not know. I have only worked on the books and online side of academic publishing, where we are all broke and well-intentioned.

Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak, and Courtney Summers, author of All the Rage, are in conversation at Book Riot about stories of sexual assault. It’s really good.

Pop culture genius Adam Sternbergh invents the term “purge-watching” for when you’re watching a show unlovingly just so you can have it off your docket. This is a term we needed. Well-played, sir.

There is an open-access journal called Neo-Victorian Studies, and that’s pretty much all I did on Tuesday.

Ta-Nehisi Coates fears that the movies have ruined X-Men (I know, dude), but he’s got a lot of other thoughts on the rise of superheroes.

What it’s like to be a first-generation scholarship student at an Ivy League.

Oh, you may have missed it, but there’s a new Star Wars teaser. It ends by trying to make every Star Wars fan in the whole world cry. But my heart is made of stone.

The post Who-all’s being brilliant on the internet: A links round-up appeared first on Reading the End.

Kate Elliott discusses female friendships on television at The Book Smugglers, and recommends some forthcoming fantasy books, thus lengthening my TBR list for 2015 even further. Seriously, my 2015 list is out of control. I need help.

An article on Pamela Colman Smith, the wonderful artist of the classic Tarot deck. Hers is the only Tarot deck I will condescend to use. Others are beautiful, but Pamela Colman Smith’s has all the symbolism.

Rembert Browne of Grantland and Joel Anderson of BuzzFeed had an excellent conversation in December about the movie Selma and its parallels with protests of today. They have a ton of great things to say about oppression and how it reverberates into today, and in particular about the behavior a historically oppressive group should display to the historically oppressed.

The digital revolution is going to make film preservation a bitch to keep up. New York reports.

Elizabeth Minkel has become one of my favorite writers about fan culture, and here she is at The New Statesman being brilliant about writers and fanfic.

Obviously there are problems here, but this animation of a dad and his five-year-old discussing the Leia slave costume in Star Wars is nevertheless SO CUTE. (I am less sad that she wants to keep wearing this outfit than I am that she plans to be rescued.)

An article about the financial problems of open access journals. Cause really. I work in publishing. It costs money to create these things, and it is uncool to make submitting scholars pay for it. (Or in other words, I don’t know what the answer is.)

Laurie Penny on nerd entitlement.

Here is Nicole Kidman telling Jimmy Fallon a version of a story that he absolutely did not expect. It’s the best.

This is going to have a very niche appeal, but you guys: The Bachelor is back, and I don’t know if I’ve told you, but I am addicted to recaps of The Bachelor. This year (maybe all years! have I been missing out on this all along??), the incomparable Lily Sparks is recapping. I anticipate a glorious season.

The post Clearing out my rounded-up links appeared first on Reading the End.

Oh, except for this one: Lory of Emerald City Book Review is kicking off an awesome new blogging event, Witch Week! This year, we’re celebrating the inventor of Witch Week (the week between Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day) with a week-long appreciation of Diana Wynne Jones. Lory will be hosting guest posts from me and a number of awesome fellow bloggers, and we’ll be doing a readalong of Witch Week as well. Don’t forget to join in! It’s going to be awesome!

Slate has a new podcast called Working that’s about people’s jobs and how they do their jobs. I have no proof of this, but I theorize that Slate invented this podcast just to make me happy, since this is exactly in line with my interests. Thanks, Slate! You’re a doll!

Pixar’s rules for storytelling remain excellent.

This article about the American diner made me terribly homesick for my favorite New York diner, Tom’s. Next time I go to New York I shall eat at Tom’s twice.

“I’m pregnant so why can’t I tell you?”: A piece about the silence around miscarriages.

Alyssa Rosenberg wrote an excellent article about how Gone Girl and 50 Shades of Grey are both basically stories about women who make their lovers change completely while they do not change at all. Reading this I thought: “Wait, they stop having kinky sex in the second and third 50 Shades books? Then what are people reading for?” If you know the answer to that question, please tell me in the comments. It’s definitely not the scintillating dialogue; I have read excerpts.

Speaking of fan fiction, here’s Elizabeth Minkel — a writer I’m swiftly growing fond of, over at the New Statesman — tsking over Benedict Cumberbatch’s snotty remarks about Watson/Sherlock slashfic. I tsk over that too, Elizabeth Minkel!

Vulture, as usual, is doing the important investigative work of our time: If you recreated the cast of Friends in The Sims and then took away their bathroom, who would be the first to pee on the floor? In gifs. I sent this to some of my friends along with some nostalgic comments on the fun of murdering Sims, and they clearly thought that I was a psychopath. Please back me up: Half of the fun of the Sims is killing off your Sims in inventive ways. Right?

A marker of mourning: On the occasion of an exhibit at the Met, the New Republic makes the case that we should bring back mourning attire. I am so on board with this (like, as an optional but accepted and widely known thing).

In praise of the feminism of Veronica Mars.

A snotty review of Chuck Palahniuk’s newest book, Beautiful You. I don’t think anyone should dedicate themselves full-time to writing negative reviews or anything, but the occasional nasty review can make a girl’s heart sing.

Interesting: Liberal cities tend to have more intense income inequality.

The whole mess with Jian Gomeshi is ongoing. I found this post particularly enlightening, because my own experience of creepers is that oftentimes everyone knows. Not necessarily that they’re a rapist or an abuser, but everyone knows that they push boundaries and make people uncomfortable. When I was in high school, I don’t think I had even finished the orientation events before I knew exactly who the creepy art and math teachers were that I should not be alone with. Word spreads.

The post Links for Halloween haters appeared first on Reading the End.