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.

Here’s why the VFX world of the movies is so extremely broken.

Color-blind casting is supposed to create a fantasy world for a broader set of audiences. But it comes with its own problems. See also: “Does colonialism exist in Bridgerton’s world?”

The wonderful Gabrielle Bellot considers Netflix’s Sandman.

Conspiracy theories about celebrity pregnancies are unalloyed misogyny.

The CEO who (allegedly) raised everyone’s salary to $70,000 is an abuser, and he has been known to be one for quite some time. Please stop RTing his content!

What makes a dumpling a dumpling? (Challenge: Read this story without achieving semantic satiation on the word “dumpling.”)

“[She] sometimes converses like she has a tiny Bachelor producer in her brain” is the funniest description I can imagine. Anyway, here is a compassionate and smart profile of Meghan Markle!

I am obsessed with this London Underground-style map of the human body.

Why have US universities let themselves become pipelines to Lockheed Martin and similar defense contractors?

JK Rowling has uh. has written a new book. of sorts.

How Normal Gossip (a newish favorite podcast of mine!) gets made.

Masiyaleti Mbewe considers the state of African millennial fiction — though tragically without mentioning the very millennial (in my opinion) The Eternal Audience of One.

Charlie Warzel reflects on the mistake that led to him being Twitter’s main character for a day, and considers what we can learn from it.

Add this to the list of Scientology’s abuses: It relies on a steady stream of immigrant labor that it acquires by cheating the R1 visa system and abusing immigrant workers.

One of my favorite genres of article is “THIS SYSTEM IS TOTALLY UNREGULATED.” For your consideration today: dog training.

“Hollow moral leadership upheld by a spectacle of extravagant, ill-gotten wealth has enabled Britons to remain proud of rather than reflective about empire and its destructive impact today.”

“The Queen is not entitled to your grief.” Ayan Artan, a Somali-British writer, considers the marketing effort on behalf of the monarchy to conceal and erase the damage of British imperialism.

“People like Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has gone all in on The Rings of Power, have more wealth than they could possibly use in a single lifetime, and in many respects more power than any king could ever have dreamed of; the rest of us face rising rents, inflation, and a gig economy that affords few protections when we get sick or injured.” On the new crop of fantasy TV shows.

Chinelo Okparanto considers the ethics and aesthetics of writing across racial identities.

Sarah Weinman reflects on Serial and all that it did and didn’t do.

Tips and tricks to run a good book club.

It’s always a cause for celebration when Lamar Giles has a new book out! He has a new book out AND he’s writing about social horror, yay!

Scaachi Coul is terrific as ever on the downfall of the Wife Guy. Linda Holmes on audience entitlement re: same.

This is superb TikTok journalism and I think Kady Ruth Ashcraft for doing it.

“The Very Online never leave: they hate it here but they’re never anywhere else.” On the digital afterlife of my beloved Constantine Cavafy.

So-called “secret menus” that go viral on TikTok are making the lives of fast food workers hell.

Hell of a kicker on this piece about how India’s movie industry has been affected by the rise of Hindu nationalism.

Maori polar explorers!

Happy weekend, friends!

The post It’s Scary How Many Links There Are: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

HERE IT IS. (link)

“I doubt Joanna Gaines had ‘Build a Personal Brand Empire Increasingly Reliant on Data Scraping’ on any of her five year plans.” A story of a home renovation show nightmare, and the increasingly surveillance-based world of personal brands. (link)

“Not everything the internet treats as ambiguous actually is. Texts generally do contain evidence that certain interpretations are more valid than others.” (link)

Why are all the TV shows and movies an indeterminate browny-gray these days? (link)

“It feels very much like we’re paying for our freedom — like they have left us to die and are selling us back the right to live.” The cost of at-home COVID tests is a significant financial burden that falls heaviest on poor and disabled people. (link)

This review of Hanya Yanagihara’s latest novel contains many spoilers for A Little Life (and cw discussions of suicide, self-harm, and abuse), and it puts its finger exactly on many of the things I found objectionable about that book, and probably this new one too. (link) (As a caveat, I don’t think it’s appropriate to try to police whether an author is sufficiently queer or sufficiently traumatized to write about queerness and trauma, and I find it very gross that interviewers have asked Yanagihara invasive questions about these things.)

The evolution of book-finding and place-finding. (link)

Joss Whedon’s impact on TV is massive; but his legacy is kind of a mess. (link) He also gave an interview to Vulture, which someone ought to have stopped him from doing but I’m glad they didn’t because he sure says a lot of things. (link)

Elmo vs Rocco and the dubious pleasures of being an adult watching children’s programming. (link)

“We are know-it-alls because we are responsible for knowing everything.” On scams and our constant efforts to avoid them. (link)

How do children’s books address slavery? And what needs to change? (link)

The Gilded Age is really good. On the other hand, how many shows about the adventures of jerky white people does HBO really need? (link)

I loooove to see the Black women of country music get their flowers. (link)

Here is a legitimately sweet and nice interview with the creator of Wordle. (link)

What book previews have you enjoyed so far in 2022? Have you read any 2022 books yet? Are there particular ones you’re dying to get your paws on? I haven’t gone on a proper Netgalley requesting spree in a while, and I definitely oughtn’t do that now, but it is still quite possible that I will.

Also, look. If you read one link from this links round-up, I beg that it will be the Joss Whedon profile in Vulture. It’s just… so damning. There are so many lines in it that made me shriek, not in a good way, and while it’s not necessarily telling you anything you didn’t already know about Joss Whedon’s mindset and behavior as a boss, it’s still fascinating to read it all in one place. My only caveat is that the writer barely challenges Whedon on his racism towards Ray Fisher, either in what she quotes him as saying or when she’s talking about the incident. Which doesn’t seem like a coincidence! In a piece that rebuts moooooost of what Whedon is saying.

The post THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

“At your best, a companion. At your worst, a danger.” Linda Holmes examines white/black relationships (and complicated love) in Do the Right Thing and The Help. (link)

Television loves white suburban criminals. (link)

John Paul Brammer recreates the Left Behind (For Kids!) books from memory. (link)

The National Book Critics Circle has imploded over discussions of racism. (link)

Books that emphasize Black pain aren’t the only Black books worth giving support to. Those are just the books the publishing industry and white audiences choose to uplift. (link)

Alex Brown looks at diversity in YA publishing for 2020 to date. (link)

This actress fell in love with her stunt double! It’s fuckin wholesome! (link)

Why to capitalize Black. (link)

On the allies of whiteness in publishing and journalism. (link)

It’s time for journalists and journalism to be honest about what objectivity is and isn’t. (link)

Can RWA be saved after its moment of racial reckoning? (link)

On Confederate monuments, with a content warning for discussions of slavery and rape. (link)

Hamilton, in our political moment. (link)

Why are so many rich people such assholes? An investigation by Wired. (link)

You may have noticed that although it’s July, this links round-up does not include the second half of 2020 book preview from The Millions. This in spite of my absolutely desperate desire to know what books I should anticipate in the second half of 2020. If my next links round-up does not contain the Millions book preview, you must assume that I have been taken hostage or The Millions has. Happy 4th!

The post A Links Round-Up for the Long Weekend appeared first on Reading the End.

Patricia Highsmith’s diaries are going to be published in 2021. I still haven’t read The Price of Salt, and I am mad at myself about it. Maybe that will be one of my small goals for 2020.

The kids are frankly fucking inspiring.

I was super intrigued by this post about the sexist ways the Austens and Brontes are often portrayed in biographies and fiction.

“Most of us writing now were not educated by that expanded canon.” Alexander Chee on writing stories about people who are different than you.

Dahlia Lithwick hasn’t been back to the Supreme Court since Kavanaugh was confirmed. From the reporter who brought us the Chaos Muppet / Order Muppet theory as part of her Supreme Court reporting, this is devastating. It’s devastating anyway. Fuck the patriarchy.

Listen. Listen. Listen. I have no opinion about whether Jeffrey Epstein was murdered or died by suicide because I am not qualified to assess the evidence. But I do want to be able to depend on people who are qualified to assess the evidence, which, um.

Dialogue from the husbands in every haunted house movie.

Carmen Maria Machado wrote her memoir of surviving a queer abusive relationship because she could not find such books to support her when she was in the midst of the experience. Here’s also a review of her book that I thought was really good.

New English Canaan was a 1637 book that harshly critiqued the Puritan colonizers in America. Sounds fascinating, no?

The demise of Deadspin has been miserable to witness. Anna Merlan reports: Blogging is hard.

“Romance novels are social novels.” Adriana Herrera (an awesome writer!) on the possibilities that diverse romance novels offer.

Attention please, these are all the holiday movies. Brace for incoming.

Malka Older talks utopia, dystopia, and the necessity of imagining better futures for ourselves.

Feminist bookstores are having a renaissance in the South.

That’s all for today! Have a wonderful weekend, please topple the patriarchy responsibly, and I’ll see you back here on Monday, when we will all recommence weeping and tearing our hair over the future (slash, doom?) of the world.

The post I Really Need to Read The Price of Salt Already: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

This article on fanfiction’s rebranding in the past few years is excellent, and features Naomi Novik saying many intelligent things.

What it’s like for women who flee North Korea.

The librarians who track down the books their patrons only sort of remember.

Since I began this links round-up, we’ve fortunately moved on from some of the recent Netflix nonsense, and we are now talking about To All the Boys We’ve Loved Before, which is wonderful. But here’s Linda Holmes going deep on the flaws of Netflix’s everyone-knew-it-was-gonna-be-awful Insatiable; and Smart Bitches Trashy Books on Kristan Higgins’s latest. You should also check out this terrific piece where Samantha Puc talks to some fat activists about Insatiable and the harm it does.

The third report on Black Speculative Fiction has come out. LD Lewis has a postmortem.

The Netflix adaptation of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is pretty delightful. Maggie Fremont watches it while attempting to make her own potato peel pie.

On language and education as tools of imperialism.

You can have as many problematic faves as you want; just be prepared that some people won’t agree with you. (See also: me on Twitter bitching about Kylo Ren.)

SURPRISE the men interviewed in the New York Times‘s By the Book mention male authors almost four times as often as they mention female authors. Women are close to gender balanced. (This is not a surprise.)

And to close with someone trying to rebrand for bad bad jerkface purposes: Louie CK staged a surprise and unwelcome (to the women present) comeback. “The world can live without the comedic stylings of Louie CK,” says Rebecca Traister. Jaya Saxena asks why these men are so convinced we need them back. Roxane Gay considers sexual assault and redemption.

Happy weekend! I wish you joyous cocktails with friends if your heart desires them, or peaceful reading beneath a weighted blanket if that’s your pleasure. I decline to admit which one of those I will be doing.

The post Rebranding, for Good and Evil: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

And now, on to the links.

Drop everything and read this profile of Jonathan Franzen. It brought such joy to my heart. It was everything I wanted it to be.

Heart of darkness: The grim, authoritarian soul of Thomas the Tank Engine. (This is not new but it is new to me and I need y’all to be aware of it.)

Which borough of New York City would win in a civil war?

Misogyny is boring as hell: A profile of writer Carmen Maria Machado.

That time England paid reparations for slavery — to slaveowners. (And other horrifying stories from the British history of slavery.)

“Alabama organizers have literally never stopped fighting.” Imani Perry on her home state.

Roxane Gay on why To Kill a Mockingbird matters (or doesn’t).

About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters.

While I wish this article had talked more about nonbinary folks, who also face a ton of harassment, it was still good to hear from women who have faced harassment as they talk about what they still value about the internet.

The Atlantic’s cover story for Pride Month made me really angry, but Alex Barasch had Slate has a very measured and sensible response to it.

Linda Holmes does not look with favor upon the new Roseanne-without-Roseanne show.

Just read the opening two paragraphs of this piece on women in Luke Cage, even if you don’t want the spoilers from the full article. Because they are a gut punch.

Harassers seem to apologize to everybody except the person they harassed.

Take care of yourselves, friends! Whatever care looks like for you, take the time for it. We’ll all be still here for the fight on Monday. I love y’all.

The post FRANZEN: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

The writers of Deadpool have never heard of fridging so that’s cool. (Spoilers for Deadpool 2 in this link.)

Rebecca Solnit on the idea of sex as commodity. (I.e., women as commodity.)

Living beyond tragedy: The danger of a single story about Native Americans.

Here’s how one chef, Erin Wade, stopped harassment of staff at her restaurant.

This piece about Sephora’s new in-store cosmetics classes for trans folks made me tear up a little bit.

Is fandom etiquette changing? Clare McBride argues that it is (for the worse).

If you missed the Arrested Development interview where Jason Bateman acts like an absolute sack of shit, count yourself blessed. But do check out Linda Holmes on why it was so hard to read (and, apparently, listen to).

The important thing about the Starbucks sensitivity training is the acknowledgement that racial bias is pervasive in American society.

Have a joyous weekend!

The post One Day There Won’t Be Sexist Poops in My Links Round-Up: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

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 reads a lot but never any women makes me want to punch someone.

Why “we made it for the fans, not the critics” is nonsense.

The US is insisting that Cambodia pay off a huge debt incurred by a dictator the US installed via coup. It’s tremendously garbage.

How to counteract gaslighting.

Linda Holmes is predictably fantastic on the “Missing Richard Simmons” podcast.

I loved this Jezebel review of a book called How Not to Hate Your Husband after Kids, which both gets at a lot of intractable gender dynamics and made me want to read this book whose title initially really really put my back up.

Author Karan Mahajan on being brown in Austin.

Jia Tolentino is such a terrific writer. Here’s her piece on the gig economy and how it celebrates overwork.

Belle should have married Gaston: A historical perspective.

Why do dude journalists think lady celebrities want to sleep with them (spoilers: they don’t)?

The post Interrupting Women: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

“We are not in a golden age of nuance”: A really remarkably good review of Marvel’s Civil War, from Linda Holmes at NPR’s Monkeysee.

We really do seem to talk about trigger warnings more than encounter them, don’t we? Laurie Penny responds to Stephen Fry’s outburst of rage re: trigger warnings.¹

Why white people tend to be so terrible about discussing race, and what to do about it.

Okay, I resisted reading this story about a guy adopting a dog in Skyrim, but that was nuts and this story is amazing.

Negotiating a raise while a woman: Advice from McSweeney’s.

Richard Sherman goes undercover as a Lyft driver.

This goddamn election: A frustrated op-ed by Lindy West.

Eurovision is going to be broadcast and streamed in the US for the first time ever, dear God it is all my dreams coming true.

Regarding Asian Americans, representation, and the #whitewashedOUT hashtag.

A thoughtful editorial from Kirkus editor Vicky Smith on identifying character race in reviews.

The post Richard Sherman and Eurovision: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.