Largely Literary Linkage: Intellectual property, rejection letters, your liberal arts degree, and drinking

Goth is all but gone from Queen West. Bookstores are closing. Rob “the Jerk” Ford’s  approval rating is rising. (Seriously?!) What is my poor city coming to?

Forget it. Escapism. That’s what the Internet’s for, right? At least in part?

So, change your Twitter language settings to lolcat, and…Oh, wait. Most of these links are equally depressing. Copyright and intellectual property issues, rejection letters, a short story about how worthless your liberal arts degree really is, American psychos and rampant sexism. So it goes?

Linkage:

• Grace O’Connell interviews John Degen about intellectual property and  Canadian copyright law.
• Giving a TEDTalk can be mortifying.
• Jonathan Lethem on Marvel.
• The seedy underbelly of Amazon warehouse life, the British edition.
• An important lesson in how to interpret rejection letters.
• Then read “The Only Thing That Can Stop This Asteroid is Your Liberal Arts Degree.” Genius.
• Samuel Carlisle on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
• New York asks 28 men and five women to assess Philip Roth. Um.
• A blog consisting entirely of photos of Awesome People Reading. Yes.
• Ann Douglas quits writing for The Toronto Star. For good reason.
• On writing for a living.
• Whatevs, dude. I’m still in favour of the Oxford comma.
• Gendered tech and 1920’s radio.
• The Feminine Mystique turns fifty, and not enough has changed.
• Female reporters repeatedly propositioned by their male sources. WTF.
• More at the Said to Lady Journos Tumblr.
• Men need to start seeing women as human beings, or nothing is going to change.
• Hey guys, cultural traditions that oppress women aren’t worth preserving. Common sense, yeah?
• Not sure where to start? The Toronto Public Library has come up with a list of books examining “the social, economic and political issues facing women around the world.”
• Time get drunk with literary liquor.

Or, for those who abstain, this video on bat orphans will kill you with cuteness. All better?