The Logical Endpoint Of That Trajectory Is Not Good

The most popular link last time was Morgan Housel's list of very bad advice, with this piece about the intergenerational dynamics of being childfree second.

1. I love it when people do serious and considered criticism of genre fiction. This piece asking "Can Emily Henry Write Her Way Out of the Box BookTok Built?" is an insightful look at how one of romance's biggest players is wrestling with her success.
2. I don't listen to ye olde prestige podcasts very much any more, but I have been dipping into Radiolab's "Week of Sharks" and found it quite fun: a week of 20ish minute daily episodes, each about... sharks.
3. I Am Your Body and I Am Done Keeping Score.

4. Despite knowing basically nothing about the field, I like reading about dinosaur discoveries very much. They have just worked out how pterosaurs learned to fly, extremely cool.
5. A helpful website: nolearnings.com.
6. Substack is well on its way to becoming an "Everything App". The logical endpoint of that trajectory is not good, according to Ana Marie Cox.
7. First, they turned Greek myths into romantasy potboilers. Next, it's stories from the Old Testament.
8. Notes on a month spent having a bad time in Florence:

I did not enjoy my time in Florence, and I believe it to be a city uniquely hostile to my temperament, disposition, and mode of life. Florence is a pat of dried clay, webbed with thin, uneven cracks. The city is next to impossible to traverse. Every aspect of living is carried out under a punishing, direct light from which there is no escape. I now understand why Dante found it so easy to think so vividly and elaborately of Hell.

9. A very long but good scroll: The Best Stunts of All Time.
10. I was simultaneously amused and infuriated by Paul Krugman's responses to the Embedded "My Internet" questionnaire. Asked about TikTok, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc, he replied with some version of "Zero idea. Not my department, thank God." Must be nice to just opt out of vast swathes of the web and still "get 350-450K readers for almost every post"!

11. Incredible photos of Socialist Modernism.
12. From this short piece about creators and platforms I learned the magnificent phrase "ventilated prose", which describes the way in which lots of writers on Substack (and elsewhere, to an extent), now put a return after every sentence, as if allergic to paragraphs. It's unreadable and is, to me, the online equivalent of someone making the margins really big to "stretch" their coursework to three pages. Ted Gioia is one of many terrible offenders in this regard.
13. On paranoia, digital hypervigilance and the online life.