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!

The post Somehow Only One Link about Cats: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.

Frankly, I think a great parenting move would be for parents of kids of all genders to focus on being attentive to the needs of others. But oh my God, yes, men do not clean up spills or feel responsibility for cleaning up spills.

How to build a kinder online community — or, how polite criticisms en masse can still feel like hostility.

“Feminist researchers have also found that many women don’t feel that they deserve long stretches of time to themselves, the way men do. They feel they have to earn it. And the only way to do that is to get to the end of a To Do list that never ends.”

J. Ryan Stradal talks about the skills shared in common by novelists and reality TV producers.

Soraya Roberts goes deep on the public intellectual and their value to the Discourse.

“Netflix has made heartwarming reality shows central to its brand.” An excellent decision, because if there is one thing I need, it is heartwarming shows. See also Jane the Virgin.

Lord I am exhausted by the Jane Mayer thing about Al Franken but anywhere here’s a follow-up from Jezebel. Meanwhile CBS renewed Bull, because of course they did. The world is a garbage fire.

Apparently everyone on Tinder loves tacos.

The Where the Crawdads Sing lady CAN’T GO BACK TO ZAMBIA BECAUSE OF ALLEGATIONS HER HUSBAND KILLED A MAN.

Speaking of white writers, Anne Tyler adopts “a posture of racial silence” when writing about Baltimore — which Jess Row argues is common for white writers of her generation.

This is a very unsettling piece about a particular kind of work environment. I AM UNSETTLED.

Have a great weekend, friends, and reflect on the peace-giving fact that if you haven’t been kicked out of Zambia for maybe killing a man, you are doing better than the author of a Reese Witherspoon book club book.

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Just kidding! Those things are both incredible! So I’m kicking off this links round-up with Isaac Chotiner’s very magical interview with Bret Easton Ellis, as well as a review of the “old man yells at cloud” book Ellis has, apparently, written. Be blessed.

“It felt hidden, like I said a magic word and there was Prague.” An interview with Helen Oyeyemi.

The rise of publicly thirsty women.

Some thoughts on cultural appropriation, rules, and self-censorship, from Jeannette Ng.

An extremely normal and fine profile of Carmen Maria Machado. (I advise reading it in its entirety.)

How bad is EL James’s new book? SO BAD.

The medical establishment uses men as a baseline for almost everything — which has led to massive health inequities for women.

Katy Waldman found her own experiences in a book (not in a good way).

Celebrating Easter Sunday among the black congregations in Louisiana whose churches were burned by an arsonist this year: an exercise in generosity and forgiveness.

Nathan Robinson attended the Zizek/Peterson “debate” so we wouldn’t have to.

Wesley Morris grieves for the demise of the romantic comedy (and so do I).

Have an incredible weekend, friends! Mine is going to contain brambles and crawfish, so I will be the happiest camper the world has ever known. (Also a little bit of phone-banking but I’m trying not to think too much about that.)

The post Making Fun of Bret Easton Ellis: A Links Round-Up appeared first on Reading the End.