I continue to derive so much comfort from reading, and to that end I’ve got some links. I also recommend the brand new television show Abbott Elementary and the quite old television show Star Trek: The Next Generation, as they are making me feel better. I just finished Xiran Jay Zhao’s Iron Widow and loved it, so that’s another rec for you if you’re in the mood for a story about a girl burning shit down. And now, on to the links!

ABBOTT ELEMENTARY. … This show is great. Here are some things about it and its greatness. (link) Plus an interview with Janelle James, who plays the principal. (link)

Lauren Michele Jackson considers appropriation, AAVE, and the artist formerly known as Awkwafina. (link)

“How can we make men care? Does a fear of being disgraced have to be part of the incentive?” This is an interesting article with the really depressing, though unsurprising, punchline that abusers will only think critically about the harm they’ve caused if they can do so while still controlling the possibility of facing consequences; and not often then. (link)

The Crisis Text Line turned out to be an extremely typical tech bro company. Compassionate care for people struggling with suicidal ideation is incompatible with its ethos. (link)

Pregnancy apps are rife with misinformation and propaganda. (link)

I loved this curated list of Black food cookbooks that focus on plant-based recipes. (link)

Norman Mailer hasn’t been canceled — but the uproar about Random House pulling a planned book of his essays says a lot about the state of cancel culture discourse. (link)

“This is not the end. It is a change.” Tiya Miles advises looking to Black history to understand and ameliorate our current fears. (link)

Toril Moi reminds writers not to write for readers who hate them. Write for the people who want to hear what you have to say. (Great reminder in the age of Twitter.) (link)

Morgan Jerkins thinks it’s long past time for Jessie Redmon Fauset to have a literary renaissance. (I am very easily swayed by people being like “everyone should know such-and-such writer from long ago!”) (link)

This piece about the artist Piranesi makes an excellent companion to Susanna Clarke’s latest novel Piranesi. (link)

You’re Going To Italy In A Novel By A Non-Italian Writer! Are You Going To Have A Good Time? (link)

This is a beautiful piece about love, queer love, platonic love, and how queer literature can help us to escape the trap of believing that love only looks one way. (link)

Caretakers are being left to fail. Any conversation about the so-called Great Resignation has to take this into account. (link)

Delighted to learn that Patricia Lockwood was influenced by Emily of New Moon, which I also love. (link)

Take care, and take care of each other, and also Happy Mardi Gras.

The post Happy Mardi Gras, I guess: A Links Round-uP appeared first on Reading the End.

Never doubt that if there is a good article about The Westing Game, I will include that article in my links round-up. The Westing Game 5ever! (link)

Someone has to stop Paul Hollywood. Brian Phillips has a plan. (link)

The bind of being first. (link)

A fact: I will virtually ALWAYS pick up a whodunnit set in India & written by an Indian author. (link)

Catullus is a wonderful, rebellious, vulgar mess. Also, Cy Twombly. Because why wouldn’t Anne Carson write about both? God, I love Anne Carson. (link)

Talia Levin wrote about white supremacist online spaces, and the results are… expectedly horrifying. She talks about it here with ZORA‘s Anjali Enjeti. (link)

Rediscovering women authors from the heyday of ghost stories. (link)

This piece about anonymous Republican critics of Trump is a biting indictment of its own genre. (link)

I am Second Murderer but I did quietly disapprove of Macbeth’s policies. (a companion piece to the above) (link)

DOLLY PARTON. That is all. (link)

An appreciation of Witch Week. (link)

Nisi Shawl is very smart on the topic of what to think about when you’re considering writing a story about a marginalization you don’t share. (link)

This is a wonderful interview with two wonderful romance authors, Olivia Dade and Rebekah Weatherspoon! (link)

And this is an also-wonderful interview with some of my favorite SFF editors, talking about how SFF has changed and where it’s headed. (link)

Dwight K. Schrute kinda typifies our Political Moment, which makes it hard to watch him. I personally stopped my The Office rewatch sometime in season four because I couldn’t take Dwight OR Jim OR Michael, so ban men, basically. (link)

I guess “ban men” is not a bad note to leave things on! Stay safe out there, friends!

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I never liked ironic detachment. Emily VanDer Werff goes in on why it fucking sucks and we should care about stuff. (link)

“You are not permitted to watch a police precinct erupt into flames under a canopy of fireworks and whisper to yourself, “good.”‘ Tochi Onyebuchi on the responsibility of Black writers in America. (link)

Michael Arceneaux makes the case against forgiveness. (link)

In order to fix our country, white women need to face a clear-eyed reckoning about the role we have historically played and continue to play in upholding white supremacy. (link)

Dear Holmes looks so fucking fun and I don’t even like Sherlock Holmes. (link)

Quarantine is a terrific time to rediscover The Westing Game, which is as cynical about capitalism as you are right now. (link)

“Someone at some point has to get down to the business of reading.” Lauren Michele Jackson on anti-racist reading lists. (link)

Angelica Jade Bastien is typically eloquent and brilliant on Michaela Coel’s new show, I May Destroy You. cw for sexual assault. (link)

What does K-pop owe to the Black Lives Matter movement? (link)

Here is a story about racism in NOW. (link)

White writers of crime fiction are complicit in the valorization of police in American culture. They can change how they write. (link)

Lauren Francis-Sharma hoped that quarantine would let her protect her children from American racism. It did not. (link)

A Letter From a Black Woman in Publishing on the Industry’s Cruel, Hypocritical Insistence That Words Matter, by Mariah Stovall (link)

Why we all turned on Glee. (link)

As we all wait breathlessly for the Millions second half of 2020 book preview, Lithub has used math to compile a list of the mathematically most anticipated books of summer. (link)

And now, the JK Rowling sucks links. Kacen Callender talks about staying alive for the Harry Potter books — and why JK Rowling’s transphobia is so deeply harmful. (link) Gabrielle Bellot writes about how JK Rowling betrayed the world and the readers she made. (link) Mallory Yu on why this is so personal. (link) Aja Romano on finding their nonbinary identity through Harry Potter, and realizing that had nothing to do with JK Rowling. (link) Emmet Asher-Perrin on saying goodbye. (link)

Do you think there’s any chance that JK Rowling being an asshole will save us from further Fantastic Beasts movies? The first one was Not good, and I heard the second one was even Not gooder. But maybe that will be the only two we have to suffer through.

The post Down with Forgiveness and Also Ironic Detachment: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Here’s a history of all the times New York Times opinion columnists wrote opinion columns about how unkind the internet is to New York Times opinion columnists.

THE ARCHIVE WON A HUGO THE ARCHIVE WON A HUGO WE ARE ALL WINNERS, look, I’ll be very honest, this video of AO3 winning the Hugo for Best Related Work made me cry.

In other very thrilling Hugo news, Lady Business won for Best Fanzine! Wooooooooo! They are the greatest!

The writers’ room for Friends sounds awful omg how do people live like this?

This story about Robert Pattinson is kinda nuts. What a fucking weirdo.

“In Twelfth Night, I played Feste, the arch clown dressed in a motley coat, full of japes and bons mots. In Call of the Wild: The Musical, I played Spitz, the evil dog with sleeves that had fake tattoos on them.” On being in a traveling Shakespeare troupe.

Demanding likability leads us to dehumanize others.

400 years ago, the first enslaved people arrived in North America. The New York Times has created The 1619 Project to discuss the ways slavery shaped our country.

Here are 5 myths about American slavery that historians would like to see corrected.

“What we’re witnessing today is an [homelessness] emergency born less of poverty than prosperity—occurring not despite but precisely because of the economic boom.” Inadequate affordable housing is putting thousands of families out on the streets.

In spite of the authoritarian government in Uganda, Ugandan literature is thriving.

I’m furious about Amazon moving in across the street from Parnassus. In some communities, Amazon is the best option and indie bookstores are not available, but that’s not the case for Nashville. Fuck these guys. And fuck them even more for releasing The Testaments early.

Also, Amazon-owned company Audible wants to introduce a new “captions” feature that contravenes the rights of publishers. They are now being sued.

After Jeannette Ng’s extremely accurate criticism of the Campbell Award’s namesake in her award acceptance speech, the magazine that gives the award has decided to change its name. Yay! The Tiptree Award is currently considering a name change, and I’ve emailed them to recommend that they do make the change.

This exploration of what gets accomplished when white people are forced to articulate our racial situatedness is very interesting and also depressing.

To close out the week in links, I give you this blessed Twitter thread. It is old but very blessed.

I hope for you that your weekend contains many baby animals and nothing annoying, unless it’s baby animals mildly annoying you by being too adorable and wiggly. In the absence of baby animals, I wish you zillions of excellent books to read!

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Anyway, not that anyone was sitting at home like “huh where is Jenny,” but that is where I have been. Undergoing changes and fretting about them. Not reading very much. I am not at my best, but also (ofc) feeling extremely guilty for not being at my best. Like who am I that I deserve to have days — entire weeks actually! — when I am not at my best? NOBODY, THAT’S WHO.

Oh, you know what’s a book I did read? I read a picture book about a girl who never makes mistakes. I loved it at once and it was #lifegoals but then, can you believe, as the book goes on, the girl makes an enormous, a genuinely mortifying mistake that would scar a real child for life; or if not that, then it would surely create in her a renewed desire to, from there on out, achieve perfection in all things. But in this NONSENSE PICTURE BOOK, do you know what happens? She resigns herself to making mistakes sometimes. HAH. The little girl in the picture book is WEAK and took the COMPLETELY WRONG LESSON away from her awful, humiliating error. What a terrible book.

Whatever. Here are some links.

On the whiteness of craft culture.

Extremist hate groups understood online platforms in a fundamental way long before the New York Times cottoned on, reports New York Times writer who doesn’t listen to black women on Twitter. (I’m being snarky, but this article makes some interesting points about how online platforms function, which is why I’m sharing it.)

Why judging the poor isn’t helping anybody.

Michael Twitty, author of a new book about black heritage and black food in the South, speaks to Hannah Giorgis of The Ringer about his family and his research.

Daniel Heath Justice on the students he teaches and the question of whether they are special snowflakes who don’t live in the real world. And a pairing: Kiese Laymon on people he knew at Vassar and their power and privilege.

MUMSY DO NOT CLICK THIS NEXT LINK. I WANT TO TELL YOU THIS STORY MYSELF. Everyone else, definitely click this next link. Okay Mumsy it is all right, I have now told you this story. Click away.

Watching the YA community doggedly figure out why Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give got bumped down to number two on the NYT Bestseller List by a book nobody had ever heard of was frankly magical. Here’s a YA literary agent breaking down why this story was so bonkers.

Speaking of scams, here’s an author who has lied about pretty much everything, including I SWEAR TO GOD making up an agent, building that fictional agent a website, and using a picture of Ian Somerhalder for that agent’s face. What is this world.

Wesley Morris on white supremacy in the pop culture of this summer.

“Jenny when will you stop linking to everything Ijeoma Iluo writes?” IDK friends but today is not that day. Here she is making me cry on the subject of talking to your kids about race early and often.

Have an amazing weekend! I will be inside my apartment all weekend trying to reconstruct my fractured ego.

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