Friday links! It’s only fair edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
Senator Randy Paul (R–KY) invites you to watch him take a dump.

Senator Rand Paul (R–KY) invites you to watch him take a dump.

After children have lost their other innate abilities—when they can no longer recognize facial expressions or manipulate objects, but instead swipe feebly at whatever images they hope to change—they will still have a keen sense of what’s fair. Fair is I get what you get. If you are, for example, one of a numerical minority of Americans whose parents were legally kept as slaves five generations ago, and you are twice as likely to be born into poverty and roughly one fifth as likely to successfully hail a cab, it’s unfair that I don’t get to say the n-word. I thought racism was supposed to be over, but here we are giving people special privileges. Today is Friday, which is totally unfair to Thursday, when you think about it. Won’t you forget where we came from with me?

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Friday links! Captive to others’ rights edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment
Mexico City seen from above—photo by Pablo Lopez Luz

Mexico City seen from above—photo by Pablo Lopez Luz

More than seven billion people live on planet Earth right now, and each of them is as important as you are. I haven’t checked his math, but Gabor Zovanyi of Eastern Washington University has something sobering to say about population growth:

“If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and increased by one percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light.”

To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, I suppose they will all want dignity. Today is Friday, and your rights end where my nose begins. Won’t you find yourself enclosed in a thicket of sharp elbows with me?

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Friday links! E-C.R.E.A.M. edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
David Koch tries not to look rich.

David Koch tries not to look rich.

E-CREAM, dog: elderly caucasians rule everything around me. While the country scoffed at one Montana legislator’s proposal to ban yoga pants, thousands of very rich people were about their father’s business, figuratively and literally. The Koch brothers announced plans to spend $889 million on the 2016 election cycle, more than twice the amount the actual Republican Party spent in 2012. That’s a lot of speech. It’s weird because I can’t remember what either of their voices sounds like, or even reading anything they wrote. Today is Friday, and the most powerful forces in America are not ones you can interact with. Won’t you pan forebodingly across the horizon with me?

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Friday links! Propaganda states edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 2 Comments
A $2.5 million Bugatti with a penis painted on it. Kombat! Kids: Can you find the komposition mistake in this photo?

A $2.5 million Bugatti with a penis painted on it. Can you spot the composition error in this photo?

According to a website called The LAD Bible, someone parked his Bugatti Veyron on the streets of Seattle, where someone else—presumably a rival Veyron owner—spray-painted a penis on the hood. The LAD Bible says that’s bad. Its 200-word article does not say who owns the car, the date this may have happened, whether the police are involved or how LAD Bible came to know about it, but it does describe the act of vandalizing a sports car as “unthinkable.” Today is Friday, and you don’t need a government to run your propaganda state. Won’t you relentlessly enforce the values of the ruling class with me?

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New Yorker rejects New Yorker story

By Dan Brooks in Literature 20 Comments
How did I miss this cover?

How did I miss this cover?

As a New Yorker subscriber, I am constantly A) reading Talk of the Town pieces from six weeks ago and B) enraged by the stories. The New Yorker is the best place you can publish your short story. Yet The New Yorker story is also its own recognizable brand of lame—the exemplar of what Michael Chabon called the “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story.” For writers of literary fiction, The New Yorker is Harvard: everybody knows it’s overrated, and everybody wants to get in. I was therefore extremely pleased to read this blog post in which several literary magazines, including The New Yorker, reject a story published in The New Yorker.

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