Collection

I'm not sure I've linked to Reider Amy Shaefer's blog before, but she is a wonderful and witty storyteller. Please enjoy The Incident of the Broken Stick - and a couple other stories! (Other Reiders: when she says she's going back to the reef, does that mean *our* little home on Teh Intarwebs?)

My chocolate-covered espresso beans were getting a bit existential on me this morning, with only a punctuation mark ...

It might have been too much for me, pre-caffeinated: but still it was funny!

All thought of current events aside (and I feel the headline is extremely shoddy/misleading), Vanity Fair has a great historical look at Russia. If you care to think of it as contextualizing the present, that's fine, but in itself this article provides literary and history lessons well worth reading.

Okay, and in closing - this next link is NOT safe for work, and for some readers it might be distasteful in any setting.

The sexual advice column Savage Love has a very interesting look at the psychology of the golden shower, sex more generally, and whether the most famous golden shower in history, currently in the headlines, was about sex at all. (It seems explicitly not to have been; assuming it occurred at all; sources and facts are all still under intense review.) The piece provides an intelligent view on what so far has been referred to as "perversion" - but the reason for it may be much more disturbing than that. It's also an intelligent view of the mental and biological facts of (a) how icky sex is, and (b) how human beings get past that. ON at least two levels, this is truly an intriguing read.