Quillette is bad and people who write for it should feel bad.

We do not know what Baby Yoda’s first words are going to be, but we should not assume he will talk like Grown Yoda.

The BBC endeavors to identify some of the bookish trends of the last decade. I particularly like the first one.

This Arielle Gordon piece on a music fandom (fandom?)’s teen girl message board is… it’s a lot.

Fast Color is the small superhero movie we need. I am unbelievably excited for this movie to come out on DVD so I can watch it. Gugu Mbathu-Raw is gorgeous and great and should be in everything.

“I sit and ask myself: Does anyone else in this room know Jane Austen is… white? Do they even know they are all white?” I feel genuinely fortunate to have studied Mansfield Park in a class that was specifically devoted to Literature of Empire, because I think it made me more aware of like, what the fuck is going on in the background of a lot of these white classics (slavery! empire!), but anyway, this Marcos Gonsalez piece is about experiencing the white literary canon as a person of color, and it’s excellent.

Here is a weird and slightly surrealist piece about what the internet does to us all. (It’s surrealist because it’s so fucking real. What is this world.)

The worldbuilding of the A Christmas Prince franchise has… raised some questions.

Are brands ever just doing the right thing because it’s the right thing?

TIL Lurlene McDaniel was inspired to write all her tragic books after her son was diagnosed with NOT KIDDING juvenile diabetes.

Cancel culture isn’t a real thing: By the numbers.

“I’m pretty behind on every single geek franchise out there.” Keidra Chaney, formerly of The Learned Fangirl, considers herself geek-adjacent these days. Lightly geeky.

Here’s what your phone is really doing when you do those autocomplete memes.

“Ultimately the commercial kind of seems like the brother and sister are going to have sex. That’s why we’re talking, right?” A very blessed oral history of that Folgers coffee ad.

The memes that defined the 2010s.

Common Sense Media and their ratings system are enormously comforting for parents. Here’s what’s behind them!

Ruth Wilson left The Affair under mysterious circumstances. Now it appears that it may be down to the show pressuring her to do nude scenes well past her comfort level.

“This year I picked up a pastime I thought was reserved for white people: fighting with my family about their terrible politics.” Scaachi Koul on talking to her family about Kashmir.

This Jia Tolentino essay on Cats is broadly excellent but you WILL have to live with the knowledge that Known Racist and Anti-Semite TS Eliot and Entire Fascist Ezra Pound used to write to each other “in black dialect for fun.”

Kelly Marie Tran and Naomi Ackie have such a beautiful friendship, I adore them, I want them to be in a buddy cop movie together. A buddy cop franchise!

Have a wonderful weekend, friends!

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Jerry Falwell Jr. runs Liberty University like a dictator.

I am SO obsessed with weird shit around writers’ estates and who controls the rights to a writer’s work and all that shit; I read this article about Harvard’s stranglehold on Dickinson scholarship and had to smoke a cigarette after because it was so good for me.

OH WAIT there’s MORE ESTATE DRAMA, this time about John Steinbeck. I live for this. I LIVE for it.

Over on Ask a Manager, a trans woman in tech talks about how her work experiences differed before and after her transition. As you’d expect, it’s infuriating and fascinating.

This list of “the hardest props I’ve ever made,” where prop masters talk about movie prop challenges they faced and overcame, is actually more like “the hardest props I’ve ever tracked down” — but it’s still very cool and interesting to read.

I have wanted to kick Malcolm Gladwell in the shins for YEARS for his sloppy citation practices, so I am glad The Atlantic has noticed that most/all of what he says is based on nonsense.

Here’s Keidra Chaney on how to be a fan without being coopted into serving corporate interests.

This jewel thief grandma is my hero.

Wow: A Virginia man is suing a reporter and a UVA professor for defamation because they talked about his family’s slaveowning past.

For years we’ve bought into the claim that our brains are already in motion on Doing an Action before we consciously decide to Do the Action. (I have never felt this conflicts with free will, but whatever.) Apparently, it may have fallen victim to the classic science mistake of inadequately distinguishing signal from noise.

The problem with brands that market themselves as progressive is that we’re all still spinning round and round the capitalist whirlpool. ThirdLove is a shitty place to work.

It is the 25th anniversary of Friends, and Rachel Handler made Rachel’s fucked up trifle and forced her family to eat it.

Here is the cutest, most heartwarming Little Free Library in the world.

Leah Price considers the much-vaunted “death of the book” over the ages. The happy news is that the book has never died yet, so its prospects are solid.

A penguin came to Random Penguin.

Tell me some links you’ve encountered around ye olde web this past fortnight! And have a wonderful weekend!

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