Here is a short newsletter full of long articles.

I really enjoyed this Jia Tolentino piece about the internet offence machine and where it gets us (a: not far).

As tired as the Jezebel-as-offense-factory expectation is, we still get a constant stream of emails asking why we haven’t stated our outrage at one thing or another, telling us that not taking umbrage will weaken our general stance. Offense masquerades are seen as so politically useful that there’s a whole subgenre of rhetoric centered on offense taken hypothetically. What if this post were written about a woman, we conjecture, in the light of our own self-approval.

http://jezebel.com/no-offense-1749221642

Please enjoy also this double bill of links about Lolita, published 60 years ago. This is one of my favourite books and lots of women have said interesting things about it in the last ten days or so. We begin with New Republic’s if not page by page, then section by section look at the book:

“I once read a French detective tale where the clues were actually in italics,” says Humbert. Short of putting the relevant sections of Lolita into italics, Nabokov couldn’t do much more to tell us to keep our eyes open as the novel shifts from romance to mystery.

https://newrepublic.com/article/125536/lolita-turns-60

Rebecca Solnit on Lolita and empathy:

And the women who read Nabokov’s novel in repressive Iran, says Azar Nafisi of Reading Lolita in Tehran, identified too: “Lolita belongs to a category of victims who have no defense and are never given a chance to articulate their own story. As such she becomes a double victim—not only her life but also her life story is taken from her. We told ourselves we were in that class to prevent ourselves from falling victim to this second crime.”

http://lithub.com/men-explain-lolita-to-me/

I hope you are having a lovely day,

Alex.