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.

Two articles about burnout: one here, one here.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a tremendous writer on Black politics, and this profile of her is terrific. (link)

Nadya Agrawal talks about what the movie Bend It Like Beckham meant to her as a kid, and what it means to her now. PS that movie should have been gay. (link)

“This is how a misogynistic culture is conceptualized, created, cultivated and codified. It doesn’t happen because one dude does a bad thing. It happens when like-minded dudes are allowed to be one another’s gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers of broader culture, when faults are allowed to go unexamined, and so they instead spread: Harvey Weinstein dictated the content of movie theaters for decades; it turns out he was abusing women all along. Roger Ailes, Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer shaped coverage and discussion of sexual misconduct scandals throughout the 1990s and 2000s; they were later accused of sexual misconduct themselves.” (link)

And further to the Philip Roth bio: (link).

I ALSO MISS SMALL TALK, and I’m saying that as an introvert so introverted that other introverts are like “geez, dude, lighten up.” (link)

On opening a brick and mortar bookstore during a pandemic. (link)

What makes time loops so eternally alluring? (link)

Bravo and its array of Real Housewiveses has faced a racial reckoning. (link)

Sophie Haigney considers the practice of citation and what it gives to us in this endlessly googlable world. (link)

The landscape of historical romance remains very white, but some authors are trying to change that. (link)

“It’s like being a kid in a candy store, if candy were ebooks.” On the Libby app. (link)

The hot new thing in campus novels is ADJUNCT CAMPUS NOVELS. They have everything: precarity, absurd dissertation topics, not quite nihilism, vengeful hares. (link)

The COVID crisis in India is a direct result of Modi’s primary focus on dismantling Indian democracy and persecuting non-Hindus. Meanwhile, thousands of people are dying. (link)

We remain in scary times, but I hope that you are able to carve out some space for comfort and joy this and every weekend. I myself am doing a puzzle. And reading. And talking with friends, and eating cake. And I hope those things for all of you too.

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

THE MILLIONS BOOK PREVIEW for the second half of 2018 has dropped, bringing joy unto us all in these dark times. I was cranky when I read this and therefore only wrote down, like, six books on my TBR list. SUCCESS.

“The idea that everyone involved is playing a game of three-dimensional chess at all times can be grounds to reinterpret or dismiss even the most contradictory signals as needed, to make sure the theory keeps working.” Zan Romanoff on celebrity relationship conspiracy theories.

Niceness and small towns in romance novels.

How to write about Africa.

The Female Relationship Resume isn’t an actual metric we need to care about.

Sarah McCarry is actually an excellent readalike to Jordy Rosenberg’s new novel Confessions of a Fox, and I love her review. And here’s Jordy Rosenberg himself on writing trans stories and the multiplicity of authorship.

Here is a big list of cult books. Yay. (Books about cults, btw, not books with a cult following.)

Matt Zoller Seitz on Nanette and the future of stand-up comedy.

Here’s some of the reasons I didn’t get on Amazon this past week. (I used Goodreads a bit because I forgot it was an Amazon product. Grrrrrr.)

There’s no such thing as a feminist company. Companies are not your friends. They will never be your friends.

This is an experimental DIY library in Brooklyn!

I LOVE AKASHIC BOOKS. Here is a day in the life of an indie publisher.

If you’re readathoning, follow me on Twitter so we can be readathon buddies! And I wish a wonderfully pleasant weekend to readathoners and non-readathoners alike!

The post The Millions Brings Light to Our Days: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.