Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments.
- Teen birth rates highest in most religious states
- When You Discover You’re Intersex
- Questioning the boundaries of love and lust.
- Pro-Feminist men#39;s website needs submissions
- The interactive Dan Brown plot generator. – By Chris Wilson – Slate Magazine
- gendered vitamins?
- nostalgia for the good old days, and pretend pro feminists
- Call for submissions: The Fifth Carnival of Feminists
- Question time fail: net filter shapeshifts again
- quot;Mommy Bloggerquot; Heather Armstrong Monetizes The Hate [Crap E-mail From World] | NewsCred, Quality Newspapers amp; Blogs
- Look out! Incoming brain-fart!!
– “Seriously, does this surprise ANYONE?”
– A documentary coming up on National Geographic channel in Canada – check your local listings to see whether it’s coming to your region soon
– “For the most part, when we start a new relationship, it goes without saying that we have now ‘committed’ ourselves to that person, that we will not get up to any sexual mischief with anyone else, and should we be drawn to another person, we will do all we can to fight off those feelings and remain ‘loyal’. But no one ever seems to stop and ask why. “
– check out xyonline and if you can submit an article, do
– Yay! Slate snarks on Dan Brown so I don’t have to! Just plug in a city and a sect, and their program will do the rest.
– “No, the values are pretty clear here, I think. Girls – worry about your skin and being pretty! Guys – worry about being strong and fitting masculinity stereotypes!”
– “Pretty much every feminist community has at least one guy like this.brbrThe dude who proves his feminist mettle initially but slowly, gradually lets the anti-feminism seep out. But he still gets much leeway within the community. Much more than everyone else. He proved himself, see. And he will end up spending a lot of time derailing and exceptionalising and devil’s advocating, and no-one tells him to fuck off, because Hey, I’m one of the good guys! I’m on your side! I just happen to disagree with everything you all say and will waste everyone’s time arguing about it and being contrary!brbrAnd then suddenly you find yourself wondering who the fuck let this MRA in anyway?”
– Bookmark this link so you can submit your favourite posts published between 16 and 29 September
– “The net filtering proposal has been likened to trying to crack down on the drug trade by setting up a fabulously expensive and highly visible blockade at one set of traffic lights. It goes to the question of what the success criteria for this policy actually is, and whether it wouldn’t just be smarter to redirect the funding back to law enforcement, education, net literacy courses at all primary and secondary schools, and direct government engagement with the online community.”
– Kate Harding writes about how so many people hate Dooce
– Deborah’s smackdown of op-ed columnist Greg Sheridan’s piece on women in front-line combat.
Categories: linkfest
The 109th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
The 105th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up! 
Hoyden About Town 
A mysterious code in the monuments of Buenos Aires.
A ruthless cult determined to protect it.
A desperate race to uncover the International Olympic Committee’s darkest secret.
The Dan Brown generator is cool.
This is pure nitpickery, and me being an overly literal geek to boot, but I find that rhetorical technique really annoying. She is, after all, linking to a piece that asks why, and describes the polyamory movement around the idea of sexually open relationships.
@Nick,
Isn’t it? I read the Da Vinci code just because I was sick of the people who got conspiracy-culty about it, and was bemused to discover that so much of it was a rerun of ideas from a genuine conspiracy book of alleged facts called The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, that I had read years ago because I was intrigued by the social niche where conspiracy theory meets religion (Dan Brown even credited the book as a source for the research done for his novel). Then a few years later I was even more bemused when the authors of the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail actually sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement. Not surprisingly, it was tossed out of court on the grounds (paraphrasing) that putative works of non-fiction should not be able to sue the authors of fiction for utilising their putative facts as part of their fictional narratives, which is just as well for the whole edifice of copyright in works of fiction:
I don’t intend to read this latest – Brown’s a barely competent prose stylist and his mystery plotting is fairly prosaic – I have better authors with whom to spend my reading time.
@Mary,
I wouldn’t say that I find it annoying when I read “no one ever” but I find it difficult to let it stand in my own writing. I tend to go for “few seem to” or “people rarely”.
I spent some time today finally putting together a blog post on how concepts like ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are misappropriated, and how this hurts people (especially women). I’d love feedback, if any are interested in reading! 🙂
My blog resides here.
Prepare for your brain to explode. (H/T Whatladder.)
Then a few years later I was even more bemused when the authors of the The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail actually sued Dan Brown for copyright infringement.
I suspect their real beef was that he named the villain after them.
The third author, Henry Lincoln, is the one I respect more – he didn’t play any part in the lawsuit – and he considers the whole thing to be a hypothesis rather than The Secret Truth.
Still, I like the conspiratorial history genre, and I have to give Brown props for revitalising it. A lot of books I like better than his got published because of him. 🙂
@ Helen
Prepare for your brain to explode.
It did. Messily.