My tabs have gotten so extensive that I’ve outsourced the problem and started banishing them to my Pocket queue rather than keep them in the browser. Time to start recording this stuff again. There will be much more of this to come.

  • “Zac Efron and Michelle Rodriguez, Romantic Human Couple” – To start off with something amusing, a brief photoessay from Mallory Ortberg at The Toast. Includes rumination on the placement of the human carapace and the line, “I can love you better from up here, alone.”
  • “40 plus 5” (NSFW) – Following up with something raw and occasionally harrowing, a long photoessay from Ruth Fowler about the birth of her son Nye. She had a complicated home birth, and her photographer husband Jared Iorio captured the whole thing though his lens. The photos are graphic and powerful, and Ruth writes about the experience of giving birth with taught, unsentimental description, which I found incredibly affecting. I’ve also been reading the other essays on Fowler’s site.
  • “On Turning 30” – Molly Crabapple writing in Vice about age and gendered expectations. She and I are the same age. Our experience getting here has been different in important ways.
  • “When Hitting ‘Find My iPhone’ Takes You to a Thief’s Doorstep” – Article in the New York Times that was sent to me by many people. They sent it to me because they know I did this. When my iPad was stolen, I tracked the thief’s location and used some social engineering to spook his roommates into revealing him, then sent the police to his door. I got the iPad back, and the thief was arrested. At no time did I ever consider bringing a weapon with me.
  • “The Myth of the Veneer” – Ursula Le Guin, at the Book View Cafe, writes about the myth that civilized, prosocial behavior is a superficial mask for an anarchic human nature.
  • “The Teaching Class” – Rachel Reiderer writing for Guernica Magazine about the corporatization of higher education and the current state of the things where the janitors make more than the professors. Basically, a long essay about why I’m bailing out of the sad, sucker’s game that is modern humanities academia.
  • And finally, an excellent video about patterns of discourse on the internet: “This Is Phil Fish”