Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
The “joyful, gossipy, and absurd” life of Virginia Woolf, a biography:
“I caused some slight argument with Leonard this morning by trying to cook my breakfast in bed. I believe, however, that the good sense of the proceeding will make it prevail; that is, if I can dispose of the eggshells.” (13 January 1915) So wrote Virginia Woolf 100 years ago, musing on her latest domestic experiment. This attempt to cook eggs in bed was a light interlude in what was to become one of the worst years of her life. Reading her letters and diaries recently in the London Library, I discovered a more playful side to the modernist writer, who we have come to think of as stern, humourless, even tortured. Virginia’s daily journal and correspondence reveal a sensitive, perceptive young woman who loved a “debauch of gossip” with her friends. And this time in her life, January and February 1915, was a precious lull before the storm: one month later she plunged into a nervous breakdown so severe that she lost the rest of 1915.
The movie Fifty Shades of Grey has produced much debate. Chris Hedges writes on the violent sexuality of men:
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” the book and the movie, is a celebration of the sadism that dominates nearly every aspect of American culture and lies at the core of pornography and global capitalism. It glorifies our dehumanization of women. It champions a world devoid of compassion, empathy and love. It eroticizes hypermasculine power that carries out the abuse, degradation, humiliation and torture of women whose personalities have been removed, whose only desire is to debase themselves in the service of male lust. The film, like “American Sniper,” unquestioningly accepts a predatory world where the weak and the vulnerable are objects to exploit while the powerful are narcissistic and violent demigods. It blesses this capitalist hell as natural and good.
Ross Douthat offers another opinion:
In a society where almost every cultural phenomenon ends up interpreted through an ideological lens, the success de scandale of “Fifty Shades of Grey” — the books, the movie, the branded cuffs and whips — has left culture warriors a little bit confused. Is this another transgressive breakthrough — the latest blow to whatever remains of traditional morality, the mainstreaming of a lifestyle long locked away from view? Or is the now-famous story, with its alpha male gazillionaire and his punished female prize, actually a reactionary fairy tale, encouraging submission to the latest version of the patriarchy?
The Dissolve lists the best movies of the decade so far (Fifty Shades of Grey did not make the list). Part One and Part Two:
The middle of a decade isn’t often a cause for reflection, but maybe it should be. We tend to break time down into whatever segments make sense, especially within art, fashion, and culture, where things move quickly and change significantly: The teen world of 1982’s Fast Times At Ridgemont High, for instance, is markedly different from the teen world of 1989’s Say Anything… Inspired by our friends at Pitchfork, The Dissolve polled its regular contributors and some friends of the site about the best films released since January 1, 2010. We compiled the results in an effort to help give shape to the decade in progress, as the cinematic landscape keeps evolving around us. When the math was done, we found the results surprising, with a No. 1 none of us predicted. (Though we probably should have.) Let’s start from the bottom and work our way up with Nos. 50 through 26; then head to part 2 for the top 25.
Bill Murray played professional baseball:
If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t believe it all happened in the space of about five weeks in the summer of 1978. But it did happen. In those five weeks, Bill Murray played professional baseball and established himself as a bona fide movie star and the Grays Harbor Loggers – representing the twin cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam, Wash. – posted the best winning percentage in America and won the Harbor’s only professional sports championship in living memory.
While arguments of misogyny fill the Internet (see Fifty Shades of Grey discussion above), it may be no surprise that there exists a men’s rights movement:
The internet has made everybody audible. And, as a result, anybody can become a victim of a pitchfork-wielding mob, if you happen to say something online that the mob wants silenced. Nowhere has this reality been clearer than in the backlash against nascent feminism on Twitter. Simply sharing an anecdote or observation has become an invitation to threats of rape and death and torture, especially when these anecdotes and observations suggest that there might be something amiss in the treatment of contemporary women.
Vanity Fair examines “the world’s most enigmatic and unpredictable dictator”:
Does anyone make an easier target than Kim Jong Un? He’s Fatboy Kim the Third, the North Korean tyrant with a Fred Flintstone haircut—the grinning, chain-smoking owner of his own small nuclear arsenal, brutal warden to about 120,000 political prisoners, and effectively one of the last pure hereditary absolute monarchs on the planet. He is the Marshal of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the Great Successor, and the Sun of the 21st Century. At age 32 the Supreme Leader owns the longest list of excessive honorifics anywhere, every one of them unearned. He is the youngest head of state in the world and probably the most spoiled. On the great grade-school playground of foreign affairs, he might as well be wearing across his broad bottom a big KICK ME sign. Kim is so easy to kick that the United Nations, which famously agrees on nothing, voted overwhelmingly in November to recommend that he and the rest of North Korea’s leadership be hauled before the International Criminal Court, in The Hague, and tried for crimes against humanity. He has been in power for a little more than three years.
Christie Davies reviews Slavoj Žižek’s book Zizek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation?
There are many good jokes in Žižek’s book, particularly the Jewish jokes and the old Eastern European jokes ridiculing socialism. This is hardly surprising since these were and indeed remain two of the greatest sources and traditions of joke-telling in the twentieth century. But Žižek’s Jewish jokes are not the best of Jewish jokes and his understanding of them is limited. As a Slovenian survivor of the Tito era, he has rather more insight into the jokes about the now defunct socialist system, which Žižek, socialist though he is, freely recognizes was a complete disaster. But there are many other much better collections of and commentaries on the jokes of socialism by sounder scholars than Žižek, notably the works of Bruce Adams, David Brandenberger, Seth Benedict Graham and Arvo Krikmann—and there is another, but modesty prevents me from naming him. The jokes in Žižek’s book are not even the best of Žižek’s own jokes. His best jokes are to be found on his wonderful YouTube recording “Racist Joke” in which jokes about stingy Slovenians jostle with jokes about dirty, lazy Montenegrins, stupid Bosnians, and foul-mouthed Albanians. In his YouTube recording Žižek, dressed in his trademark plain gray t-shirt, shows himself to be a superb comedian and a gifted joke-teller, an engaging and ebullient person with a naturally funny appearance, voice, and manner—a king among jesters.
This article highlights the NCAA’s most controversial school:
In many ways, attending a game at the lower levels of men’s Division I college basketball is indistinguishable from attending a high school game. The gym often resembles a middle school gym, with retractable bleachers and folding tables shuttered off to the sides, ready to be brought back out to turn the place back into a cafeteria the next day. Fan concessions usually consist of popcorn and cans of soda, often served to you by a multitasking cheerleader. The television camera is a student manager in the rafters with an iPhone. We think of college basketball as this massive enterprise with electric, packed arenas, but that’s only the big schools. There are 351 schools in Division I, and many of them look like Hickory High. You have St. Francis (NY) of the Northeast Conference, whose Generoso Pope Athletic Complex shares a bathroom with the classrooms down the hall. You have NJIT’s Fleischer Center, where they have to roll the volleyball nets off to the side before tipoff. You have Alabama A&M’s Elmore Gymnasium, where you can legitimately jog around the arena on a track while the game is going on. Much of college basketball is played in glorified YMCAs.
According to Megan McArdle at BloombergView, journalist job seekers should find employment anywhere but the journalism industry:
“I’m sure that many people have told you this already, but take it from me as well: journalism is a dumb career move,” Felix Salmon says to aspiring journalists. “If there’s something else you also love, something else you’re good at, something else which makes the world a better place — then maybe you should think about doing that instead. Even successful journalists rarely do much of the kind of high-minded stuff you probably aspire to. And enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living at this game.”