YES THAT IS RIGHT IT IS THE BOOK PREVIEWWWWWWWW. (link) I haven’t read it yet because I discovered it’s there approximately thirty seconds before writing these very words. I am saving it as a treat for the end of the work week. Yay. Yay. Yay. I love this book preview. I thank The Millions so much for doing it. I know it is a lot of work.

Okay! On to the rest of the links! A lot of them are about television! Watch Leverage: Redemption on IMDBtv!

LET LEVAR BURTON HOST JEOPARDY (link)

Jeannette Ng unpacks some of the history and political assumptions of the wuxia genre. (link)

Molly Ostertag considers queer readings of Lord of the Rings, and what Tolkien might have meant. Including: a surprise guest appearance by Mary Renault! (link)

“Sex/Life is the most boring and meager of sexual fantasies for straight women stuck in mundane marriages who wish they had something better to cling to.” I love a good pan, and Scaachi Koul’s of this Netflix show I’ve never heard of is excellent. (link)

“I do not want to win someone else’s game.” Nikole Hannah-Jones’s statement on why she is walking away from UNC is excellent, and heartbreaking. (link)

Products that go viral on TikTok are typically a flash in the pan. (link)

NEW LEVERAGE IS HEEEEEEEEEEERE so please enjoy this interview with the cast. Then go watch New Leverage. It’s exactly what I wanted it to be. Except for in my vision there would be more Hardison, but I understand Aldis Hodge is a fancypants movie star with a fancypants movie star schedule, sob. (link)

So-called “pot-hunters” regularly loot Native American graves, removing not just funerary artifacts but even human remains. When will it end? (link)

Surprise! People actually enjoy commutes. I can confirm this: Adding a small commute to my day (like 15 minutes) gives me time to decompress before and after work, and get some dedicated reading time. (link)

The life of an assistant in Hollywood has worsened drastically with the fall of network TV. (link)

Not prosecuting people for low-level misdemeanors turns out to reduce crime all around! Hooray! Let’s all just do that, then! (link)

This joint interview with Juno Temple and Hannah Waddingham, of Ted Lasso, will make your heart sing. What a lovely pair of women. Also you should watch Ted Lasso. It is not a perfect show but it is really great in many ways. (link)

I am crushed to learn that despite the incredible cast, Gunpowder Milkshake is boring and bad. CRUSHED. (link)

In closing, please watch New Leverage. If you don’t know what New Leverage is, I highly recommend repairing to IMDBtv (it’s free!) or Amazon Prime and watching the pilot of Leverage. It is very close to being a perfect pilot. Every time I think about the pilot of Leverage, I want to watch the pilot of Leverage. I want to watch it right now, typing this. It slaps. Thank you for your time.

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(WordPress’s SEO analysis feature right now is like WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT SOME OTHER COMIC IN THIS POST ABOUT STRONG FEMALE PROTAGONIST yes yes good point WordPress, I’ll get down to business so you can relax)

Strong Female Protagonist is an ongoing webcomic the first volume of which my library recently acquired (yay!). It’s about a superpowered girl named Allison Green who has given up on the superhero life and wants to be a normal girl attending a normal college (well, normalish — she goes to the New School). In the aftermath of her life as a superhero, she’s begun to question the very concept of superheroes, whether her work made the world better in the old days, and whether she has the capacity to make the world better now.

(The full run of Strong Female Protagonist is still available for free online, or you can buy the trade paperback.)

The grounding point for Strong Female Protagonist¹ is its belief in the fundamental decency of human beings, which is something I need right now, even if at times it seems hopelessly naive. It’s been hard this year to keep looking for the helpers, and hard to keep being a helper or even believing that there continues to be value in being a helper. Allison faces these same fears, and she continues, throughout the book, to try to find the good in people and to be the best version of herself.

Also, there are jokes! And the comics creator have done something very sweet, which is to retain the hover-over text from the webcomic in tiny captions at the bottom of each page. When Nimona became a book, some of the little extra-features that came from being a webcomic were lost, and I was sad about that. Yay for Strong Female Protagonist for retaining them.

But seriously, please tell me how to keep on top of webcomics. Help me, Obi-Wan Ke-Internet. You’re my only hope.

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