Doris Lessing, and not saying thank you:

For Lessing the problem was never the ideas behind feminism; it was the way the name pinned her in place, attached expectations of redemption and deliverance to her work that I think she was never quite sure it could actually bring about. And Doris Lessing, whatever else she was, was not a woman who liked expectations.

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Roxane Gay, on why we need internet outrage:

Whenever there’s a new wave of responses to something online, we start to see exclamations of “outrage exhaustion.” People rush to judge the way others choose to express their outrage. Some ask, “Why must you exhaust me with your unruly emotions?” when the better question might be, “Why can’t I look away from your unruly emotions?”

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“I’m already fat, so I might as well be smart.”

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Denmark. Royal. Family. Demons.

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An intensely entertaining Reddit thread by former groupies on their best conquests. I mean, entertaining to me.

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Ohhhhh:

Everyone would like to be Joan Didion sitting on the floor while Ray Manzarek tools around on the keyboard. Everyone would like to be Joan Didion, full stop.

But there is something lost in the pursuit of this coolness. So often you’re telling a story because you want to be the one telling it, and too rarely you’re asking why. Yeah, yeah: we tell ourselves stories in order to live. But we tell other people stories for different reasons. Reasons other than wanting to be heard, being cool, and being there.

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There is no form of communal living I could tolerate, least of all this one.

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Go home, Walmart, you’re evil.

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Here is an x-ray film of a snake swallowing an egg.

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When Sarah Rees Brennan asked me to write a companion essay to her piece on the many issues women face in self-promotion, I had just returned from a trip to Austin, Texas, where I was promoting my most recent novel, Inheritance, at the Austin Teen Book Festival. I was about to leave for Wordstock, a book festival in Portland, Oregon, to continue this promotion. I began writing this essay in my friend’s house near Seattle, where I had just done a bookstore event, and was about to drive back to the Portland area for another book festival.

It seemed weirdly meta to write a post about self-promotion while in the midst of self-promotion — and kind of disturbingly appropriate.

In Sarah’s essay, she wrote about the criticisms and flat-out threats that she and many other women writers receive, partly in reaction to their promotional efforts. I’ve been fortunate in that I haven’t received threats of violence, although I have been on the receiving end of various mean-spirited messages via social media outlets. Because of this, I’ve learned to avoid Googling myself, and I never read reviews of my books that haven’t been vetted by someone I trust. This is a self-defense mechanism, because frankly it hurts my feelings when someone attacks me and my books, and I’d like to avoid feeling bad about myself.

I can already hear someone on the internet saying, “What a wimp. Criticism is good for you and you should grow a thicker skin.”

I will freely admit that I’m a wimp when it comes to criticism. I have to save my ability to take it (and what a loaded phrase that is) for people who are criticizing my work with an eye to helping me improve it.

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Ariel Levy’s piece in The New Yorker. I want to make it very clear that this is the saddest story in the world, and it will be a very long time before you may also be able to understand how it is also a work of great beauty, and you do not have to read it unless that sounds okay to you. Mom and Aunt Peggy, I know you read The Toast, please do not click through.

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Also in the new issue of The New Yorker, Simon Rich’s “Guy Walks Into a Bar.” It’s paywalled, but what a great opportunity to remind everyone that The New Yorker is still the crowning achievement of high-quality journalism in our nation, and you can subscribe at any time. I can honestly say that I envy Simon Rich’s extraordinary talent over his connections. Go buy Ant Farm and Free-Range Chickens and The Last Girlfriend on Earth.

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LIST ALERT: Entertainers who died during performances, and inventors who were killed by their inventions.

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Thanks for the whooping cough, Jenny McCarthy:

At this writing, I have been coughing for 72 days. Not on and off coughing, but continuously, every day and every night, for two and a half months. And not just coughing, but whooping: doubled over, body clenched, sucking violently for air, my face reddening and my eyes watering. Sometimes, I cough so hard, I vomit. Other times, I pee myself. Both of these symptoms have become blessedly less frequent, and I have yet to break a rib coughing—also a common side effect. Nor do I still have the fatigue that felled me, often, at my desk and made me sleep for 16 hours a night on the weekends. Now I rarely choke on things like water, though laughing, which, it turns out, I do a lot of, is an easy trigger for a violent, paralyzing cough that doctors refer to not as a cough, but a paroxysm.

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