When I was writing the other day about Bookshop.org’s new ebooks offering, I said ebooks aren’t really my thing and I vastly prefer reading real books.

While that is mostly true, I do tend to keep an ebook on my phone so that I have something to read if I find myself waiting somewhere. I have found it’s a good way to keep myself from the Endless Scroll.

Since I try to avoid—as much as is practical—buying anything from Amazon, I use Libby from the local library system. There are two problems with this strategy, though. The first is that the selection of titles is not great and wait times tend to be really long. The second is that most of the ebooks on Libby can only be checked out for two weeks and I am almost never able to finish any of these books before they are due back.

🔗 To Read or Not to Read Romantasy - by John Warner:

Many of my students had been passionate participants in online fan fiction forums, a genre I’d held in low esteem until reading a student’s paper years earlier (circa 2009) which provided background and critical context that allowed me to see the sophistication and dynamism of the culture churning away in the form of literally millions of words. The fact that fan fiction derived from very specific subcultures and was expected to adhere to particular precepts didn’t make it any different from any other genre, really. Also, the fact that a lot of fan fiction wasn’t very good didn’t make it different from any other apprentice writing either.

I have seen Office Space a billion times, but I only just noticed that on the whiteboard in the conference room where the Bobs are interviewing everyone, it says “Planning to plan” over a huge and ridiculously complex diagram.

My current pet theory is that if we were to inventory and diagram all of the “Waiting for X”-type statuses in all the Jira projects across the organization, we would have a pretty good map of bottlenecks that need to be resolved.

John Ganz has a post up that digs into the seemingly contradictory connections between libertarianism and fascism:

For my part, I’ve always found something unsatisfying about all the explanatory frameworks. I don’t think history, politics, sociology, or psychology provide a satisfactory account. I don’t think this is all an accident. I think there’s something else at the core that determines the affinity between libertarianism and fascism. This was what I was trying to grasp in 2017 when I wrote about Rothbard in the wake of Charlottesville and said that they were both united by the notion of naked, brutal self-interest: radical libertarians believed this on an individual level, fascists, on the collective level, and it was not hard to switch between the two. Many commentators—both pro- and anti-capitalist—have noticed the analogy between the invisible hand of the market and a Social Darwinian “state of nature.”