Items of interest come across recently in my feed-reader. What did I miss? Leave your own interesting links in comments. Shameless self-promotion entirely welcome!
n.b. Comments threads have not necessarily been read. Some may be NSFW or triggering, so please report back any problems you encounter so the post can be marked.

• Heroine Content | Cowboys and Aliens review

– Posted by Skye in No Stars: Setting Us Back 20 Years

• Unavoidable Comparison Of the Day: Steven Spielberg Vows To Bring Original E.T. To Blu-ray

– “Mentioning specifically that George Lucas can do whatever he wants with his movies, Speilberg confessed that he regrets the edits he made to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for its 20th anniversary.

For myself, I tried this once and lived to regret it. Not because of fan outrage, but because I was disappointed in myself. I got overly sensitive to [some of the reaction] to E.T., and I thought if technology evolved, [I might go in and change some things]…it was OK for a while, but I realized what I had done was I had robbed people who loved E.T. of their memories of E.T.

What you just heard was the sound of hundreds of Star Wars fans leaping out of their chairs and shouting “YES. THIS.””

• Real Women

– “There is no wrong way to have a body.”

• How Long?

– “But look at Reverend Johnson, the son of two slaves. Let’s be blunt. Johnson is not the descendant of one man who sneaked out back. One great-grandfather who acted less than honorably. Or even one grandfather. Johnson is descended from generations of men who kept their own children or the children of their friends and neighbors as slaves, who felt free to force themselves on those children and who felt that some of their own children could then be sold.

I think that’s got to be the ick we can’t acknowledge, let alone begin to shake off. We’re somewhat okay, finally, about acknowledging slavery’s cost to the slaves. But we’re not ready, at all, to look at the ways a slave society like the U.S. tried to make–and often succeeded in making–such monsters of non-slaves that some of us would sell our own children and most of us would turn a blind eye to it.”

• Female Blogger Threatened With Defamation Suit For Writing About TSA 'Rape' – Forbes

– “I have some sympathy for the agent whose name will now be linked with rape in Google results for eternity — though it should surely serve the purpose of making her a bit less touchy-feely during patdowns — but I hope Randazza and Alkon persevere.”

• Making them conform

– “I have long known that schools are sites for reproducing conformity, but it’s rare to have it stated so explicitly.”

• Objectification of Women: Everybody Wins!

– “I’m not sure that quite everybody wins here.”

• Two Moments From The Republican Debates

– “I have not picked these moments as representative of the debates. I have picked them as representative of the audiences of the debates. I have serious problems with identifying myself as belonging to the same species as that audience. “

• Ten years on, the non-reality-based kabuki continues

– “Paul Krugman published a brief column decrying the shameful way 9/11 was hijacked and exploited. That the tragedy was, indeed, hijacked to serve a prior agenda is simply a fact, which all reasonable people understand.”

• Why PR metrics are as much use as a chocolate Karl Stefanovic

– “he fact that a well established PR agency is happy to go public with this methodology demonstrates just how much of a problem the whole industry has.”

• Marie Claire’s Rich tells you how to keep a guy’s attention.

– “You can’t control this shit, ok? Dress how you dress. Act how you act. Fuck when you fuck. Wear what you wear. People will either be into it, or not. There’s no subtle game of psychological warfare that you can use to trick someone into paying more attention to you than they want to. I realize that all women’s magazines live or die on the fallacy that there IS a way to control this if you just (bought stuff)(became thinner than you are now, no matter what you weigh now, you must be THINNER)(bought more stuff), but there isn’t a guaranteed way to fascinate.”

Categories: linkfest

Tags: Read-ems