IT IS FRIDAY. Every week is a thousand years long, and I have a weird SF video thing to share with you first: What will football look like in the future (the far, far future)? SB Nation has a go at figuring it out. Following the death of Otto Wambier, journalist and Korea expert Suki Kim argues that tourism to North Korea serves no legitimate purpose. Some people get very mad when JK Rowling says stuff about Harry Potter. My pal Ben Lindbergh argues at The Ringer that there’s no point being mad about it. This movie review is magical.…
16 CommentsTag: Karan Mahajan
A man named Ben Blatt analyzed — among other things — the gendering of certain terms and descriptions in fiction. My favorite finding is that male writers were 75% more likely to depict female characters interrupting male characters. TYPICAL. On diversity in historical romance. Given the history of Nazi appropriation of medieval studies and folklore, I was particularly interested in this February series at the Public Medievalist about people of color in the medieval world. The introduction to the series is here, and you can click through to the other pieces in it. Well this story about a doctor who…
15 CommentsOr, that time I read a book about male violence right after a rapist in Stanford got a six-month jail sentence because a longer sentence would negatively impact his life and prospects. I felt intense frustration with The Association of Small Bombs, for reasons that are probably more to do with reading it in proximity to other infuriating things than the book’s actual merits. So let me say up front that I read this book when I was already angry, and that I had the specific expectation that it would be about the aftermath of violence for the people affected…
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