Respectfully, serious Title / Content disconnect on this one. “Smut” specifically refers to having the character of being sexually titillating. This piece’s thesis seems much more broadly aimed at an apology for popular chick lit with minimal emphasis on its specifically erotic character.
The Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a redistricting plan that was explicitly endorsed by the voters further radicalizes me against the Republican Party.
This does nothing to settle the intra-Democratic fight between centrists and progressives — and for the record, I remain firmly on the side of the centrists. But it does perversely create a kind of procedural unity: the factional war matters a lot less if the party itself is simply never going to be allowed to win elections on fair terms.
And spare me the lectures about the evils of gerrymandering from a court whose ruling lands at the exact moment Republican-led states are openly moving to eliminate what remains of blue representation. The message is clear: when Democrats try to answer asymmetrical hardball with democratic approval at the ballot box, the rules suddenly become sacred. When Republicans dismantle opposition districts outright, it’s just politics.
Also, I warned against Hakeem Jeffries spiking the football. As I predicted, now he really does look like a damn fool.
The Virginia Supreme Court shouldn't have even let the vote take place. It was pretty clear that they thought it was unconstitutional beforehand, but didn't want to rule on it beforehand because it would be a moot point if it failed. I kind of understand that, but it would have been better to just prevent the vote from happening.
I wouldn't disagree, but the supporters argued strenuously that the court shouldn't hear the case before the vote. (The issue is that it was a constitutional amendment, and those have to be passed twice with an election in between - this was passed after voting had started.)
Democrats (well, the Commonwealth) expressly argued many many times that the court was unable to stop the process and could only comment after the fact.
It is very different. You definitely couldn’t draw smooth looking but effectively gerrymandered maps without computer tools that let you significantly explore the space of maps.
It was duller and uglier to do it with pencils and graph paper in the 1820s, but it was done. Party bosses knew the census data and how different buildings voted back then.
If your primary concern about gerrymandering is the offensiveness of having districts drawn for partisan advantage, then no, it's not that different. But while that is *a* reason to dislike gerrymandering, I think the more important reason is the effect on the fairness and responsiveness of elections. And that really does get worse the more powerful your gerrymandering tools are.
When I looked at from ground level my state's new map it's quite incredible just how much they managed to pack democrats into one district in Orlando by moving the border between 9 and 10 around by a few blocks. They seem to have managed to be down to block level distinctions between where the democrats live and where the Republicans live and been able to draw a Line that includes basically all the democrats in 10 and excludes most of the neighborhoods from 9.
It was hard for me to see how precise they were being in the past but to see it in person was kind of stunning.
It's a lot different and getting worse as the ability to predict how a given individual/household improves. Legislatures can draw far more aggressive gerrymanders that are still safe compared to the past.
Feels relevant than the decision is correct on the merits (though the hyper-technical textualist dissent is colorable, if not usually the way democrats argue statutes should be read).
It’s a disappointing result with bad consequences, but I’m a little disturbed by all lefty friends responding by saying courts are fake and we should destroy them, without engaging in the legal argument at all.
It is incorrect on the merits. Expanding early voting does not change the date of the election, which is the date that is explicitly cited in the relevant part of the Virginia constitution. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/constitution/article12/section1/ Like Charles points out above, if you ask "when is the election" no-one would be confused about how to answer: the election is on election day, even if you can vote early.
I can *imagine* a situation in which "the election" means "the full time period in which someone could vote", but you'd need a very strong reason to think that was intended, since it's a much much lower probability meaning for that phrase (there *is* a common long-timeframe meaning for "the election", which is roughly "the whole period when people are thinking about the election, maybe starting when the primaries conclude", but hopefully no-one is going to claim that's applicable here).
The substantive fairness argument the majority advances is wrong, even if you're open to these kind of arguments in general. The deal with early voting is that things may happen between when you vote and election day that would make you want to change your vote, which is why you should avoid voting early if you think you might actually change your mind. This comes up pretty often (just ask the attorney general!) and, outside of people who think early voting should be scrapped because of it, no-one seems to feel we need to rework the rest of the law to avoid it. The negation of "hyper-technical textualism" is not being maximally gullible about any kind of emanation or penumbra someone wants to propose.
I responded at length above (below? To Charles). But just noting here that adopting a straightforward plain language reading of the text that doesn’t render the relevant constitutional protection completely pointless for 40 percent of voters is not inventing emanations or penumbras.
You can disagree with the majority —I don’t think the dissent is nuts to do so—but that’s just not a reasonable characterization of the opinion.
My beef isn’t really with people who think it’s wrongly decided but with people unthinkingly characterizing it as Bush v Gore level untethered partisanship, which just isn’t so (on either side really).
Can you (or anyone else) expound on this? I haven't read a detailed analysis on the decision (I'll probably search for something later), and it's obviously the case that many outcomes we don't love are nonetheless correct from the standpoint of the law.
Still, my initial reading is that it was decided wrongly. The first legislature vote happened before the election*, just as the Virginia constitution stipulates.
*I realize some (mail) voting had already started before the initial legislature vote was taken. Fair enough. But when most people think of "election" they think of the date when folks go to the polls. Is there anything in the Virginia constitution that defines how far in advance of the actual polling date the legislature vote must occur? It seems like this court is claiming that Virginia's constitution stipulates the first vote must take place before the election "period" (a multi-week process) commences. So what's the trigger that marks when this "period" of time begins? When the ballot language is decided? When the ballots are printed? When they're first made available to voters? When the first ballots are mailed or dropped off? Absent specific, guiding language in the relevant constitutional article, it seems to me the common sense interpretation is that the legislature vote just need to occur before election day.
Anyway, tough break for Dems, but as I note above, they're still overwhelmingly likely to take back the House, and they get a re-do in 2028.
The purpose the intervening election requirement is to allow voters to respond to legislators approving the proposed amendment (by changing the composition of the legislature before the second approval).
That purpose is defeated if the amendment is approved after people have already voted. You can’t vote twice or change your vote. This is not disputed.
Imagine VA had adopted an (honestly more sensible) system whereby you can easily vote online for months before the election, and 99 percent of people vote early online and only weirdos who love queuing show up in person. When would you say the election had started?
In Virginia here 40 percent or so of votes had already been cast, so we are not talking peanuts.
By analogy to other voting situations—a shareholder vote, or bankruptcy voting for example—required disclosures you made before you sent out ballots would not count.
The argument against is (ironically, for Democrats) a “there is no rule that says a dog cannot play basketball, even if it doesn’t make sense” textualist argument which attempts to show that the word “election” should be read as “Election Day”, as the term appears to be used that way elsewhere, even if everyone had already voted. Even though this vitiates the purpose of the protection and even though no prior amendment has been approved this way.
So should we adopt the reading that strips early voters of constitutionally guaranteed protections to prevent amendments they do not like in order to toss out a non partisan districting process to impose an expressly partisan (also not disputed) map which definitely will alter the representation and voting rights of those same voters? The court said no, and has a perfectly reasonable textualist reading of its own that it makes at some length.
If the amendment were doing something obviously nefarious (by the standards of Democrats)—now we remove early voting and hold elections only during working hours and only accept government issued picture ID—and was rushed through before all voters got their say in an intervening election, I can guarantee you that critics of the decision would be (correctly) crying foul.
Democrats just screwed it up. They waited too long because they thought the politics would be better and the vote more likely to be approved if they waited until NC was gerrymandered. They knew they were taking legal risk in doing so. Bit them in the butt (and I’m mad about it!).
This is extremely weak tea, and it shows a lot of chutzpah to go on about how partisan and hypocritical people must be if they don’t accept it.
You are arguing that by passing laws allowing for early voting, the legislature redefined when “the election” happens, in a way that would otherwise be substantially different from the normal english language reading, on the grounds that it is self-evidently absurd that there could be constitutional protections that are unhelpful if you choose to vote by mail instead of voting early. But this isn’t true, even if you take it as given that a constitutional protection implemented in the past could not be made irrelevant by later changes in the context in which it operates (which is also not very convincing).
Each state has a strong set of rules designed to ~guarantee that if you turn up at the polls before closing time, your vote will be counted. We do not (and practically speaking could not, although we should do better) guarantee that for mailing your vote. There are much stronger privacy guarantees to people who vote in-person than who vote by mail. The fact that the state constitution only guarantees you’ll be aware of a legislator’s support for a proposed constitutional amendment before the election if you wait to vote until election day is much less concerning than any of these, because if you were likely to change your vote based on new information it was extremely risky to vote early anyway!
Given the volume of water in Boston harbour, even generous estimates of the cargo capacity of an 18th century merchantman suggest that weak tea is at the foundation of the American constitutional tradition
Taken very literally, it was before the election. I get how it can be interpreted as something looser, but the literal reading is met. If we want to think about the spirit of the idea, then we don't simply want the legislature to impose something and the voters are locked out of the process. That's entirely sensible, but there was a referendum vote after the 2nd legislature vote. So the voters definitely got a chance to weight in. A party line rejection by the state supreme court is not consistent with the spirit.
“Imagine VA had adopted an (honestly more sensible) system whereby you can easily vote online for months before the election,”
If there was a secure, functional online method for voting I don’t think there would be an excuse to have the voting open for more than three days max.
(1) Everything I'v read so far about this decision suggests it won't be enough to derail the coming Democratic House majority.
(2) So, what Dems need to do is not despair, but roll up their sleeves and make sure they win, and also (in Virginia) make sure they re-do the redistricting in time for 2028.
(3) I have no idea if there are other redistricting opportunities for Democrats in time for 2028, but that obviously needs to be looked into.
I'm not sure why Jeffries looks like a fool. Could be that that is deserved in a few weeks, but as it is the other side is essentially cheating on this front.
If they can't find a way to work this into the messaging, I will be more onboard with that. But, as is, it isn't even slander to say that Republican partisan actors are working from the legislative and judicial wings of many states and the fed. Say is loudly.
It has been exhausting that so many votes were pushed as the most significant votes ever. With this evidence, though, it is kind of hard to disagree.
Well, they could ignore the ruling, like Ohio. Or they could ignore the state constitution like Florida. Or they could add 2 new supreme court judges and create a kangaroo court like Utah...
“the factional war matters a lot less if the party itself is simply never going to be allowed to win elections on fair terms.”
The way it actually seems to work is that the left faction says a bunch of crazy shit, makes us lose, and then blames us for everything that went wrong when we didn’t have power. And then we get to read a hundred thinkpieces about “how unpopular Democrats are.” I hope that dynamic is more disrupted than it sometimes seems like it is.
Ah yes, 51% said let's reduce the others representation, in a manner that does not comply with the Constitution, and the Dem cheers when it goes their way, and is unhappy when it does not. This is why we need more a republic, and less of a democracy.
It's no different from the President cheering on the Supreme Court when it rules in a manner he supports, and castigating them when it does not.
That VA actually has a decent system to draw Congressional maps, and that the Dems were unable to do it legally -- that's bad?
If we all had one uniform set of constraints that would be one thing but if Republicans states have more legal room to do this than democratic ones then yes it is bad. If most Republican states can dilute their democratic representation and Democratic states can't reply then there's no reason for Republicans ever to stop and they'll get a majority out of a minority of the votes.
VA can do it, they just need to follow their own law. I don;t think they should, and it would be better if there was a national law to encourage competitive districts. But different states have different laws. A fair number of Dem states with large Republican minorities (New England in particular) draw maps that currently exclude Republicans from any seat. About 40% of the voting population, zero districts. Good old fashioned gerrymandering.
My understanding for New England is that while gerrymandering might explain part of it, it's more that the republican voters are too distributed to be able to put them all in their own districts.
That may be said, but as someone who has seen crazy districts drawn, I just don't give that argument creedence. VA was going to take a 49% Republican state and make it 9-1 Dems to Republicans. (And who knows, perhaps that would have backfired, as the Texas redistricting might.). In some of the New England states the R's have also just not run great candidates. But there is strong gerrymandering going on in the US that is not just Republican. It's a national problem.
A lot of the message of the post seems to be, do what you enjoy don't be judged by obnoxious pretentious people, which is useful advice in lots of fields.
Judgement is God's domain, but also it's essential for separating the chaff from the wheat. If every art is good, no art is good, and no art is bad, which is clearly false (except at the Wobegone School of Above-Average Arts). It's tricky to do proper judgement without coming across as some sort of pretentious obnoxious, to be sure! Yet I am suspicious whenever someone claims to truly have "no judgement", they value all X equally highly/it's all equally valid/etc. Mostly this just tells me they have no Taste. It's important to be able to make an affirmative case for one's preferences, otherwise those choices will be made for you.
(Trying not to ape Freddie too hard here, but he makes this "Elitism in art is Good, Acktually" argument way better than I can.)
I don't disagree,but there is nothing wrong with enjoying bad art. I can entirely believe that bad art is worse for the soul or some type of moral development. But also it is basically fine.
I think you can square the circle somewhat by viewing "tasteful" art and "low" art as "different" values rather than "better" ones. Tasteful art rewards engagement with higher levels of cognitive effort, analysis, and media literacy. "Low" art does not. But engaging in challenging, high effort entertainment and relaxing, lower effort entertainment are both important parts of a life well-lived.
But also, saying everything in a category is bad or to not even try it due to the illusion it's all bad is prejudiced (by definition, I believe). There are enough people in the world with enough viewpoints to have connoisseurs in every medium and genre.
I personally am not a huge fan of the Marvel movies. However, my uncle loves the movies and has enough "taste" to tell me which movies are good and bad within the genre.
Read what you like, ignore the haters, and hopefully develop some taste so that you can enjoy it more thoroughly and encourage more, better work.
(Not sure why Substack didn't notify me of this reply...)
Yes, although I'm still a snobby partisan when it comes to things like music or fashion, it's clearly true that there's "better slop" and "worse slop". Iron Man vs Captain Marvel, for instance. And sometimes things transcend their nominal categories anyway, which is in many ways more surprising and enjoyable than the default expectation of enjoying [one's preconceived highbrow tasteful things]. Enter the Spiderverse was *damned* good, and I'm not even a fan of comics, let alone the MCU.
Or like I'll dunk on pop forever, but also unironically think the track "Unfold Me" by Bandits is pretty good. Wouldn't have discovered if not for my friend who keeps needling me to just give campy pop a chance, it's actually fine sometimes (ironic since he, too, is a giant music snob otherwise). Or, The Avalanches? Well-deserved five-minute famous for the masterful sampling work in Frontier Psychiatrist! Doesn't matter if I don't really care for any of the other work, though the music video for Frankie Sinatra is literally a trip. Gems can be found in all things.
The best argument for not touching entire "bad" categories isn't that it's literally true, it's that one's time is valuable and should be increasingly well-spent with age and responsibility. Tons of time to explore up through about undergrad years, after that...man, I'm tired after putting in my 40 hours for the week, mostly just wanna relax and enjoy the good art I already have. Not challenge myself to sample new art that I may or may not like, especially if the prior odds for not are pretty high. If there was time enough at last, though? Yeah, sure, at some point I'll get tired of Boris and get over my derision of Swifties to actually see what the fuss is about. Haven't been impressed whatsoever thus far, but billions of insanely devoted fans can't all be wrong! (One hopes...)
But Mr. Tree, you don't understand, there are people out there, right now, enjoying media for the *wrong reasons*. It's such a sadness. (https://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0)
So the title of the post refers to smut... and tentatively, I'll say, the actual books named in the post seem to skew entirely towards the exceptionally safe end of the smut spectrum. Is this intended as an all encompassing defense of female targeted smut? Or would Halina draw a distinction somewhere?
Because the Dark Romance/Romantasy smut my wife, and occasionally I, read is genuinely some of the filthiest, most deranged, wildly, violently pornographic media I've ever encountered.
Now I'm happy to extend this defense into the realms of exceptionally fucked up, sexually deviant fantasy content, but I'm always curious just what someone means to encompass when the say "smut".
Had the same thought—when I hear smut I think of books like Morning Glory Milking Farm, a wildly popular series that to my understanding involves human-minotaur sexual relations. In my mind that’s in a whole different category than the entirely human, fairly tame, summer romance beach reads.
There are some real dark crannies of the internet out there. You know, when I'm just surfing AO3 for a light lesbian Legend of Korra romp, I wasn't necessarily in the mood for rape fics involving 13-year-olds.
Obviously it's doing something for someone, and godspeed with that, but it's not for me.
It exists; basically pulpy fiction without a fade to black. I think a lot of the reason why Booktok/Romantasy stories are so much more publicly accepted and widely advertised is that being marketed to women makes the content a little more socially acceptable.
If you mean why don't they make the male equivalent of romance novels where a bland audience stand-in woman is torn between two or more wildly attractive men, and that has fairly safe and vanilla sexual content, they do in Japan. They are called "harem" series (after the large number of competing female suitors the hero has). They tend to feature a fairly ordinary guy who inexplicably attracts the romantic interest of multiple women, most of whom are much more distinctive and interesting characters than he is, and who often have supernatural powers. The anime, "Tenchi Universe," is probably my personal favorite of these, it features a young man who, through a series of humorous mishaps, finds a group of attractive female science fiction archetypes living in his house (space pirate, mad scientist, space princess, etc).
There's a niche genre for it. In reddit there's an r/romance_for_men
A lot of it has covers that will embarrass most people to show but there's a lot of just enjoyable content. A lot of it does end up overlapping with harem lit. Which as a genre is like feel good everyone gets along nearly magically plus power fantasy plus sex and thoroughly enjoyable. Things like bruce sentar's various series (dungeon Diving 303 released today) or warlock by Daniel kensington.
I like this take, and I find it relatable, except for me it's not romance books but instead campy sci-fi/fantasy books. My current guilty pleasure is Dungeon Crawler Carl. Is it high literature? No (though it does sometimes explore more interesting themes than you might think). Is it fun? Yes. Is it good watercooler conversation with friends? Also yes.
I would be unhappy if I only read "easy" books like that, but they're fun and a nice change of pace from more serious fare, and are still more stimulating than swiping TikTok.
Dungeon Crawler Carl reference!!! I started book 6 today. The audiobook by Jeff Hays is a national treasure. Book 5 got into some exceptionally dark and complex stuff. It really succeeds at being both reference heavy silly fun and also surprisingly deep.
It is impressive how the series (and the books themselves) get longer and longer with so far zero decline in quality. It's an affirmation that sometimes more is more; there are sequences that get mechanically complex in a way that brings back and intertwines past material. Carl, Donut, and characters you have yet to meet become deeper as the series goes on which adds real depth to certain sequences.
The big question is if the goal is actually to beat floor 18 - no crawler has gotten even slightly past floor 12 which does imply it's essentially impossible and it presents pacing problems since there should be pretty much zero crawlers left which narrows narrative possibilities. My guess is that the characters are going to have to make a deal and/or go out in a blaze of glory.
Dungeon Crawler Carl is much, much better than it has any right to be... went in thinking it'd be Scalzi-style trash but it blows stuff like Dream Park out of the water.
Scalzi is trash? I had fun reading Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society. Maybe they are "trash" by some definition, but they certainly aren't tedious.
So far as I can tell, he's pretty centrist in his views. There are so many more writers who have much more extreme tastes. What makes him so deplorable politically that you can't bear it?
Years ago, I read "Red Shirts" and "Agent to the Stars," and really enjoyed them without knowing anything about Scalzi, so after finishing the second book, I thought I would look him up on-line and learn more about him. That led me almost immediately to his blog, where he was in the middle of a massive one-sided screaming match with people in the comments. The were commenters who were very politely disagreeing with him and he was posting torrents of obscenities at them, telling them to drop dead, telling them he didn't want *BLEEPS* like them to read his books anymore, etc. It was genuinely the most egregious behavior I've ever seen by any sort of creator, so I decided that, if Scalzi felt like that towards people who I thought were making good points, he probably wouldn't want me reading his books either, so I haven't read anymore.
I was on the college newspaper with Scalzi and am much less successful as an author (as in, I've written fewer novels and published none). So naturally, despite not reading his books (not really my genre), I'm always interested in hot takes on his stuff. What makes his work trash for you?
I'd say DCC is in the far better end of the spectrum within the genre. There's a lot worse out there, I've read it and had fun doing it, but always felt like I need a palate cleanser at the end.
As a man, I generally avoid romance novels (I have read Pride and Prejudice - it's good) and smut written by women for women not because there's something bad or shameful about it, but because they're not FOR me. I've run into women arguing that men avoid reading romance novels out of misogyny or dismissal of things female-coded or fear of intimacy. For some men, I'm sure that is the case, but for a lot of us, it's just that they're not written to please or interest us. And that's fine! Pleasing straight men doesn't need to be the goal of any author. But a lot of the time, we're not dismissing romance, we're avoiding something that's not for us. A romance novel can be very good at what it's doing and still very off-putting to men.
For me, the biggest problem is that the male leads in romance are clearly constructed to be wish-fulfillment fantasy characters for women to enjoy rather than relatable characters for male readers. And if you don't share the wish that a wish-fulfillment story is meant to satisfy, you're not left with much. I think that male romance novel leads come off to me the way the manic pixie dream girl comes off to a lot of women.
The fantasy is just different. Male coded erotica is filled with unserious women who are inexplicably horny for the MC and orgasm at a light breeze. Female coded is filled with very serious women being, through various contrivances, forced to enjoy sex they are reluctant to have with otherworldly dominant men even though they are otherwise totally not into sex with gross old regular men, and which unlike sex with said normals is uniquely mindblowing for Often Magic Reasons.
Absolutely. Male coded erotica is not better, it's just aimed at a different audience. I would not expect women to enjoy erotica specifically made for men.
I'm not even sure that's true, or at least I think it might be relatively rare. Isn't the simpler explanation some version of the rest of what you're saying? My young daughter can't understand why I don't like shopping, and why I'm not especially eager to read her baby-sitters club books, and it's rare that she any interest in some of the things I was most interested in at her age. None of this is fear or closed mindedness or looking down on what she likes.
As a wise and also kind of crazy man once said, if you're reading it, it's for you. Reject standpoint theory, both as an illegitimate form of tone policing, and also as a limiting principle on one's artistic consumption. I thought I hated rap, as a straightedge prudish Asian square who balks at profanity, has retrograde opinions on public order, and generally holds snobbish musical opinions. But, no, it was just finding the right era and subgenres. 90s hip-hop is great, nerdcore is great, my life has been enriched for daring to stick a toe in those troubled waters. "I'm feelin', funkin', amp's in the trunk and I got more rhymes than there's cops at a Dunkin' Donuts shop, sure 'nuff, I got props, from the kids on the hill and my mom and my pops..."
Seeing the world through Perspectives Very Different From One's Own is broadening!
Patronizing much? I read books by women with female MC's all the time. I read enough to know the tropes I don't like. I have not reached this conclusion out of ignorance. I'm not prejudiced, I'm postjudiced
I think it was clear to most people that you meant that reading a few sample passages of the genre is enough for you to know you are not the target audience, not that you must avoid even cracking them as an expression your straight male identity.
I’m a regular lifetime romance book reader and think it’s perfectly normal for a guy to just not get a ton out of them. I agree with you, they’re not generally written with a male audience in mind. There are certainly some romance books my husband has loved as well, but the majority I read aren’t ones I’d recommend to him.
I discovered the hack to enjoying romance novels as a heterosexual man. The problem with most of them is that the female main character is being romanced by a guy, which is boring. You can remedy that by reading romance novels where the sexy person romancing the female lead is also a woman. There are decent number of those.
My favorite fun fact about Gladwell is he was (allegedly) paid by tobacco companies early in his career to argue that tobacco was good because people would die earlier and be less of a burden on social security.
I love Diamond, am ok with Pinker, not happy about Sapolsky, and can’t take Gladwell seriously ever since seeing him talk about “igon values” as some ineffable mystery that only the most advanced social scientists have ever heard about.
The big thing is just that he is so committed to a lot of Chomskyan orthodoxy and my views on that have changed a lot since the success of large language models.
> These points are well-taken; I certainly don’t disagree. And I also don’t begrudge anyone their critical analysis.
Ehhhhhhhhhh. A lot of critical analysis is shallow, dumb, and says more about the reviewer wanting to issue a Hot, Serious Take than it does about the subjective merit of whatever they're reviewing.
Ebert has a quote out there about judging movies by what they tried to be rather than what the critic thought they should be. I think it applies to all media.
But there’s still a question of whether it engages kids through their human faculties or through entrancing them with weird patterns of colors and sounds that don’t mean anything, like algorithmically generated YouTube kids.
Semi-related: what were people smoking with respect to all the love for Marty Supreme?
[VERY MILD AND ABSTRACT POSSIBLE SPOILERS]
In some sense it did a better job than most films of having a narrative that really felt like it could zig or zag at any given point, but lacking anything that could really be called a plot from minutes 20 to 75 was, I think, too high a price to pay. In brief research I did before watching the film I did see one comment that described it as "meandering" and "plotless"--I ignored the internal 'uh-oh' that it sparked based on critical consensus. Turns out that flag was red for a reason...
Moreover, the general problem with having a protagonist who isn't especially likeable or relatable*, is that it just kills any sense of narrative stakes: I do not care about how or whether Marty gets out of this jam because I am indifferent to whether bad things happen to him, because he is an asshole.
On net, there's probably a decent 100 minute cut of Marty Supreme, but unfortunately as released it's more like a reasonably tight 100 minute film shuffling around in 150 minutes of runtime.
*The predominant theme of the film is about the protagonist's relation to people and to his sport as means rather than ends, although this doesn't become clear until the last 20 minutes or so and there's negligible character growth before that, and even that theme is fundamentally filtered through the rather unrelatable lens of "be literally the best in the world at a particular sport."
I absolutely hated it. Here's my letterboxd review: This movie is too chaotic. I almost had to turn it off as it was giving me a headache. I normally like characters who are driven to excellence, but Marty was just an abusive, manipulative asshole. The movie would have been better if he got the shit kicked out of him every time he tried to take advantage of someone. Chalamet is a good actor though.
>Moreover, the general problem with having a protagonist who isn't especially likeable or relatable*, is that it just kills any sense of narrative stakes: I do not care about how or whether Marty gets out of this jam because I am indifferent to whether bad things happen to him, because he is an asshole.
I've always been confused by this point of view. Tons of media have assholes as protagonists and I still found it interesting. I've experienced the opposite: when they insert scenes specifically designed to make them more likeable it's often a turn-off for me.
Haven't watched Marty Supreme so perhaps I'll get if/when I watch it.
>>I've always been confused by this point of view. Tons of media have assholes as protagonists and I still found it interesting. I've experienced the opposite: when they insert scenes specifically designed to make them more likeable it's often a turn-off for me.>>
I think this may just be a YMMV thing. The thing about the protagonist in Marty Supreme is that he doesn't relate to human beings in a way that I register as anything other than "committed social defector with extremely high time-preference. Throw into nearest volcano." I'd actually contrast it with the director's other film Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler's character makes an unceasing series of terrible decisions but most (though not all) of them aren't so much about genuine indifference to others' wellbeing so much as because of hugely motivated reasoning because he's in thrall to his addiction. (Perhaps also not coincidentally, the last 30 minutes of that film are also kind of the best.) Marty's just kind of an entitled prick.
I don't think that asshole or villain protagonists can't be compelling or relatable in all circumstances (I think Walter White is a good example, though the series is *much* better for having the Jesse Pinkman character too), and Catch Me If You Can worked well, but at least the latter had a discernible plot instead of being more of a character study of a character I don't like and have no commonality with even in counterfactual circumstances.
I'll go with that. I also think that for basically all fiction, if any section of your review reads strangely if you prepend it with "I liked/didn't like this book/movie/whatever because...", then you probably need to cool your jets because you are not that special.
Halina should generally not feel obligated to say "yes these other reviewers who are longer-tenured/more-recognized than me are completely correct, but..."
Kafka trapped more flies with honey than vinegar, but I think that says a lot more about him than about the flies.
But, yes, the sheer number of epicycles that go into Professional(tm) Criticism makes me suspicious that it's not just a featherbedding exercise used as a backdoor way to justify things that establishment media/existing cultural hegemons already find acceptable, laundering respectability. You can't just like a work of art, it has to be A Transcendent Message About The Times We Live In, start a National Conversation, whatever. Sometimes a book is just a book.
One of the great revelations in my life was understanding that many very smart people never ever read for pleasure.
In terms of romance novels there seems to be a certain "hoppy beer" crowd thing going on. You can't enjoy a nice Bud Lite after mowing the lawn on a hot summer day - it needs to be something "serious." In presume it's the same way with romance novels - sometimes you don't want heavy. Sometimes your boss is riding your ass and the kids are driving you nuts and...you just want to escape into a world that doesn't ask a lot of you.
I just finished the Cosmere and have been aching for a decent escape series. I tried Joe Abercrombie and it’s too dark for me. Seeing some of the other comments I may start Dungeon Crawler Carl soon!
I liked it but there's definitely a dichotomy. I've met smart people who were surprised I was reading science fiction and fantasy because they thought it was for children. But I've also met many other smart people who like reading those or mysteries/historical/whatever for pleasure. I think there are some smart people who see reading as work and others who truly enjoy it. To each their own.
I do both, and sometimes they merge. I recently joined Footnotes and Tangents, which is a website that guides you on slow reads. It is written by a very down-to-earth, but also very smart man who gives you so much fun context to the book that it makes potentially hard reads relaxing. I recently finished Salman Rushdie'S Midnight's Children with him. I wouldn't have make it past page 50 without the Substack, but found it truly fun with it.
I'm a great reader of the Coors Lights of the book world (although really, why? Drink Coors Banquet, it's much better.) Ilona Andrews is one of my current brain candy favorites, but I've read a great deal of Nora Roberts.
"Blue states have built some of the country’s most generous safety net programs. But in places like California and New York, those gains are being swallowed by the cost of housing.
That’s the core problem: Poverty isn’t just about how much money people have. It’s also about how much it costs to meet basic needs.
Cash transfers, SNAP, and the Child Tax Credit still matter, but in high-cost states, redistribution can only go so far if rent keeps rising faster than income.
Read Zach Parolin on why building more housing is an anti-poverty strategy."
About 5 years ago when we were looking for our first daycare, a woman who ran a Facebook group connecting parents with options said that the floor in the market was generally $1,200/month because that’s what the state pays for subsidized care. I’ve thought a lot about that since then.
That seems incredibly cheap? If I want daycare available for 10 hours a day including my commute and the caregivers to make $20/hour which is the floor on what high school babysitters charge, and a 4:1 ratio is required, that’s $1,000 a month just for caregiver wages, and your tuition also needs to cover rent, supplies, admin, etc. it doesn’t seem very reasonable to want to pay under $1,200 for daycare—we’re paying almost double that in a relatively cheap metro.
But I do think anti-poverty efforts are doomed to fail, in a large percentage of cases money isn't the issue and giving money is counter productive and raises prices.
I find it very frustrating that there really is no let the market run and then have a very generous welfare state for people who can't meet their basic needs. We have it for snap but for basically all other needs we have this weird mesh of regulations of all kinds making the market quite constrained and then pretty terrible patchy safety nets meaning that lots of people just don't get their needs met.
Building housing is an anti-poverty strategy but it still leaves a pretty huge hole for people who can't manage. And states that are generous about helping the poor are bad at the market part and states that are good at the market part are bad at the support.
I think there's a top GiveWell charity that already does that? They hand out safety bednets, preventing millions of poor people from needlessly suffering malaria.
Cut the Gordon's Fisherman knot: just redistribute housing directly. Use eminent domain on portions of large lots, build social housing ADUs. Maybe get some specialists in from NYC, they really know how to build bike sheds there. Call them Sidewalk SROs, maybe?
I don't currently see the value-add in adding another Substack subscription to The Argument, but that looks like a post I'd want to read, yeah. Sadness.
My glib statement was more supposed to be that finding ways to distribute the safety nets of blue states. Largely saying it as a glib view that housing in NYC is not really a safety net problem.
To be clear: A romance novel must have a happy ever after or a happy for now. Yesteryear fails miserably on both accounts. It's the opposite of a romance novel. It shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence!
It's lovely that Slow Boring and the NYT and Slate and so many other sites are now championing, more or less, romance. Those of us who've done so for years and got slammed for it are happy you're here. I hope the genre will continue to garner respect. There are romances that are also great literature and I'm not just talking about Austen or Heyer.
I am the publisher of All About Romance. Here's to love stories!
PS: Many of us still flinch at the word smut for the genre. Others don't. I find it reductive.
Looking at "romance" novels, it's fair to say. much of the genre is smut. Some of it is decent writing with lots of sex. But plenty of what I would consider just female pornography.
Okay but what’s your opinion on Colleen Hoover being called romance? (Kidding, kidding!)
Completely agree, and I actually immediately assumed that Yesteryear was more women’s lit or general lit not romance based on what I’d gleaned about it from the discourse so far.
Me, my brother, and one of my good friends had a Manly Man Book Club for a year or so before we dispersed across the world (long before covid and zoom). I mostly remember reading Vonnegut books. I'd love to do that again.
Going to a book club for some romantasy is like if I got together with the boys for a film club and selected a series of “short films about unusual stepsisters”. Call a spade a spade.
It’s fine to watch porn, but it’s porn. I’m not buying these efforts to pretend otherwise.
If that’s how you and your friends connect with each other around feelings of love and relationships, who am I to judge? Though you may want to unpack that with a therapist.
Seriously though there is a dark irony in how all the social trends that that NatCons were suppose to save us from have only continued under Trump, it's like Hungary didn't actually change it's fertility rate and suffered a major brain drain of young people under Orban.
Smart people don't worry so much about whether a certain kind of media is considered "prestige". I read fantasy novels, watch anime, and play story-driven video games. Those are probably considered less "serious" than even romance novels.
Respectfully, serious Title / Content disconnect on this one. “Smut” specifically refers to having the character of being sexually titillating. This piece’s thesis seems much more broadly aimed at an apology for popular chick lit with minimal emphasis on its specifically erotic character.
It's all about the clicks, baby! [/engagement farmer]
No one ever writes literature about farm fowl, but if they did, I'd cluck a bit at discussing it under the heading of "chick lit".
George Orwell has entered the chat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaHDBL7dVgs
(Tom Lehrer, "Smut")
The Virginia Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a redistricting plan that was explicitly endorsed by the voters further radicalizes me against the Republican Party.
This does nothing to settle the intra-Democratic fight between centrists and progressives — and for the record, I remain firmly on the side of the centrists. But it does perversely create a kind of procedural unity: the factional war matters a lot less if the party itself is simply never going to be allowed to win elections on fair terms.
And spare me the lectures about the evils of gerrymandering from a court whose ruling lands at the exact moment Republican-led states are openly moving to eliminate what remains of blue representation. The message is clear: when Democrats try to answer asymmetrical hardball with democratic approval at the ballot box, the rules suddenly become sacred. When Republicans dismantle opposition districts outright, it’s just politics.
Also, I warned against Hakeem Jeffries spiking the football. As I predicted, now he really does look like a damn fool.
The Virginia Supreme Court shouldn't have even let the vote take place. It was pretty clear that they thought it was unconstitutional beforehand, but didn't want to rule on it beforehand because it would be a moot point if it failed. I kind of understand that, but it would have been better to just prevent the vote from happening.
I wouldn't disagree, but the supporters argued strenuously that the court shouldn't hear the case before the vote. (The issue is that it was a constitutional amendment, and those have to be passed twice with an election in between - this was passed after voting had started.)
This wasn't up to the supporters, who would've been incentivized to ask the court to rule later anyway. The court should've ruled here.
Democrats (well, the Commonwealth) expressly argued many many times that the court was unable to stop the process and could only comment after the fact.
Gerrymandering is terrible but ot is also a perfectly normal part of American politics and has been for the last 200 years.
It's completely different now with the availability of data on voters.
Is it that different? They use computers but they don't seem to account for how voters change
It is very different. You definitely couldn’t draw smooth looking but effectively gerrymandered maps without computer tools that let you significantly explore the space of maps.
It was duller and uglier to do it with pencils and graph paper in the 1820s, but it was done. Party bosses knew the census data and how different buildings voted back then.
If your primary concern about gerrymandering is the offensiveness of having districts drawn for partisan advantage, then no, it's not that different. But while that is *a* reason to dislike gerrymandering, I think the more important reason is the effect on the fairness and responsiveness of elections. And that really does get worse the more powerful your gerrymandering tools are.
When I looked at from ground level my state's new map it's quite incredible just how much they managed to pack democrats into one district in Orlando by moving the border between 9 and 10 around by a few blocks. They seem to have managed to be down to block level distinctions between where the democrats live and where the Republicans live and been able to draw a Line that includes basically all the democrats in 10 and excludes most of the neighborhoods from 9.
It was hard for me to see how precise they were being in the past but to see it in person was kind of stunning.
It's a lot different and getting worse as the ability to predict how a given individual/household improves. Legislatures can draw far more aggressive gerrymanders that are still safe compared to the past.
Politics is a lot less defined by identity than it was in the early 19th century.
Feels relevant than the decision is correct on the merits (though the hyper-technical textualist dissent is colorable, if not usually the way democrats argue statutes should be read).
It’s a disappointing result with bad consequences, but I’m a little disturbed by all lefty friends responding by saying courts are fake and we should destroy them, without engaging in the legal argument at all.
It is incorrect on the merits. Expanding early voting does not change the date of the election, which is the date that is explicitly cited in the relevant part of the Virginia constitution. https://law.lis.virginia.gov/constitution/article12/section1/ Like Charles points out above, if you ask "when is the election" no-one would be confused about how to answer: the election is on election day, even if you can vote early.
I can *imagine* a situation in which "the election" means "the full time period in which someone could vote", but you'd need a very strong reason to think that was intended, since it's a much much lower probability meaning for that phrase (there *is* a common long-timeframe meaning for "the election", which is roughly "the whole period when people are thinking about the election, maybe starting when the primaries conclude", but hopefully no-one is going to claim that's applicable here).
The substantive fairness argument the majority advances is wrong, even if you're open to these kind of arguments in general. The deal with early voting is that things may happen between when you vote and election day that would make you want to change your vote, which is why you should avoid voting early if you think you might actually change your mind. This comes up pretty often (just ask the attorney general!) and, outside of people who think early voting should be scrapped because of it, no-one seems to feel we need to rework the rest of the law to avoid it. The negation of "hyper-technical textualism" is not being maximally gullible about any kind of emanation or penumbra someone wants to propose.
I responded at length above (below? To Charles). But just noting here that adopting a straightforward plain language reading of the text that doesn’t render the relevant constitutional protection completely pointless for 40 percent of voters is not inventing emanations or penumbras.
You can disagree with the majority —I don’t think the dissent is nuts to do so—but that’s just not a reasonable characterization of the opinion.
My beef isn’t really with people who think it’s wrongly decided but with people unthinkingly characterizing it as Bush v Gore level untethered partisanship, which just isn’t so (on either side really).
Can you (or anyone else) expound on this? I haven't read a detailed analysis on the decision (I'll probably search for something later), and it's obviously the case that many outcomes we don't love are nonetheless correct from the standpoint of the law.
Still, my initial reading is that it was decided wrongly. The first legislature vote happened before the election*, just as the Virginia constitution stipulates.
*I realize some (mail) voting had already started before the initial legislature vote was taken. Fair enough. But when most people think of "election" they think of the date when folks go to the polls. Is there anything in the Virginia constitution that defines how far in advance of the actual polling date the legislature vote must occur? It seems like this court is claiming that Virginia's constitution stipulates the first vote must take place before the election "period" (a multi-week process) commences. So what's the trigger that marks when this "period" of time begins? When the ballot language is decided? When the ballots are printed? When they're first made available to voters? When the first ballots are mailed or dropped off? Absent specific, guiding language in the relevant constitutional article, it seems to me the common sense interpretation is that the legislature vote just need to occur before election day.
Anyway, tough break for Dems, but as I note above, they're still overwhelmingly likely to take back the House, and they get a re-do in 2028.
The purpose the intervening election requirement is to allow voters to respond to legislators approving the proposed amendment (by changing the composition of the legislature before the second approval).
That purpose is defeated if the amendment is approved after people have already voted. You can’t vote twice or change your vote. This is not disputed.
Imagine VA had adopted an (honestly more sensible) system whereby you can easily vote online for months before the election, and 99 percent of people vote early online and only weirdos who love queuing show up in person. When would you say the election had started?
In Virginia here 40 percent or so of votes had already been cast, so we are not talking peanuts.
By analogy to other voting situations—a shareholder vote, or bankruptcy voting for example—required disclosures you made before you sent out ballots would not count.
The argument against is (ironically, for Democrats) a “there is no rule that says a dog cannot play basketball, even if it doesn’t make sense” textualist argument which attempts to show that the word “election” should be read as “Election Day”, as the term appears to be used that way elsewhere, even if everyone had already voted. Even though this vitiates the purpose of the protection and even though no prior amendment has been approved this way.
So should we adopt the reading that strips early voters of constitutionally guaranteed protections to prevent amendments they do not like in order to toss out a non partisan districting process to impose an expressly partisan (also not disputed) map which definitely will alter the representation and voting rights of those same voters? The court said no, and has a perfectly reasonable textualist reading of its own that it makes at some length.
If the amendment were doing something obviously nefarious (by the standards of Democrats)—now we remove early voting and hold elections only during working hours and only accept government issued picture ID—and was rushed through before all voters got their say in an intervening election, I can guarantee you that critics of the decision would be (correctly) crying foul.
Democrats just screwed it up. They waited too long because they thought the politics would be better and the vote more likely to be approved if they waited until NC was gerrymandered. They knew they were taking legal risk in doing so. Bit them in the butt (and I’m mad about it!).
This is extremely weak tea, and it shows a lot of chutzpah to go on about how partisan and hypocritical people must be if they don’t accept it.
You are arguing that by passing laws allowing for early voting, the legislature redefined when “the election” happens, in a way that would otherwise be substantially different from the normal english language reading, on the grounds that it is self-evidently absurd that there could be constitutional protections that are unhelpful if you choose to vote by mail instead of voting early. But this isn’t true, even if you take it as given that a constitutional protection implemented in the past could not be made irrelevant by later changes in the context in which it operates (which is also not very convincing).
Each state has a strong set of rules designed to ~guarantee that if you turn up at the polls before closing time, your vote will be counted. We do not (and practically speaking could not, although we should do better) guarantee that for mailing your vote. There are much stronger privacy guarantees to people who vote in-person than who vote by mail. The fact that the state constitution only guarantees you’ll be aware of a legislator’s support for a proposed constitutional amendment before the election if you wait to vote until election day is much less concerning than any of these, because if you were likely to change your vote based on new information it was extremely risky to vote early anyway!
Well I think you are weak tea sir! The weakest! Arizona brand!
Given the volume of water in Boston harbour, even generous estimates of the cargo capacity of an 18th century merchantman suggest that weak tea is at the foundation of the American constitutional tradition
Taken very literally, it was before the election. I get how it can be interpreted as something looser, but the literal reading is met. If we want to think about the spirit of the idea, then we don't simply want the legislature to impose something and the voters are locked out of the process. That's entirely sensible, but there was a referendum vote after the 2nd legislature vote. So the voters definitely got a chance to weight in. A party line rejection by the state supreme court is not consistent with the spirit.
“Imagine VA had adopted an (honestly more sensible) system whereby you can easily vote online for months before the election,”
If there was a secure, functional online method for voting I don’t think there would be an excuse to have the voting open for more than three days max.
Couldn't they just ignore the ruling, like they did in Ohio?
(1) Everything I'v read so far about this decision suggests it won't be enough to derail the coming Democratic House majority.
(2) So, what Dems need to do is not despair, but roll up their sleeves and make sure they win, and also (in Virginia) make sure they re-do the redistricting in time for 2028.
(3) I have no idea if there are other redistricting opportunities for Democrats in time for 2028, but that obviously needs to be looked into.
Let us be united - progressive or moderate, choose politicians who will step on necks.
I voted for a nonpartisan districting commission more than a decade ago, but now I demand blood and fire.
Evelyn Normielib needs her vengeance...
I'm not sure why Jeffries looks like a fool. Could be that that is deserved in a few weeks, but as it is the other side is essentially cheating on this front.
If they can't find a way to work this into the messaging, I will be more onboard with that. But, as is, it isn't even slander to say that Republican partisan actors are working from the legislative and judicial wings of many states and the fed. Say is loudly.
It has been exhausting that so many votes were pushed as the most significant votes ever. With this evidence, though, it is kind of hard to disagree.
I'm with Evil Socrates. The court's decision is correct, and that's unfortunate. But the court isn't in the wrong here
Well, they could ignore the ruling, like Ohio. Or they could ignore the state constitution like Florida. Or they could add 2 new supreme court judges and create a kangaroo court like Utah...
Basically I'm trying to say they have options!
“the factional war matters a lot less if the party itself is simply never going to be allowed to win elections on fair terms.”
The way it actually seems to work is that the left faction says a bunch of crazy shit, makes us lose, and then blames us for everything that went wrong when we didn’t have power. And then we get to read a hundred thinkpieces about “how unpopular Democrats are.” I hope that dynamic is more disrupted than it sometimes seems like it is.
Ah yes, 51% said let's reduce the others representation, in a manner that does not comply with the Constitution, and the Dem cheers when it goes their way, and is unhappy when it does not. This is why we need more a republic, and less of a democracy.
It's no different from the President cheering on the Supreme Court when it rules in a manner he supports, and castigating them when it does not.
That VA actually has a decent system to draw Congressional maps, and that the Dems were unable to do it legally -- that's bad?
If we all had one uniform set of constraints that would be one thing but if Republicans states have more legal room to do this than democratic ones then yes it is bad. If most Republican states can dilute their democratic representation and Democratic states can't reply then there's no reason for Republicans ever to stop and they'll get a majority out of a minority of the votes.
VA can do it, they just need to follow their own law. I don;t think they should, and it would be better if there was a national law to encourage competitive districts. But different states have different laws. A fair number of Dem states with large Republican minorities (New England in particular) draw maps that currently exclude Republicans from any seat. About 40% of the voting population, zero districts. Good old fashioned gerrymandering.
https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/
New England states are among the fairest
My understanding for New England is that while gerrymandering might explain part of it, it's more that the republican voters are too distributed to be able to put them all in their own districts.
That may be said, but as someone who has seen crazy districts drawn, I just don't give that argument creedence. VA was going to take a 49% Republican state and make it 9-1 Dems to Republicans. (And who knows, perhaps that would have backfired, as the Texas redistricting might.). In some of the New England states the R's have also just not run great candidates. But there is strong gerrymandering going on in the US that is not just Republican. It's a national problem.
Sure, both sides are doing it, but I don't think it's controversial to say the GOP has supercharged it, and democrats are mostly just responding now.
A lot of the message of the post seems to be, do what you enjoy don't be judged by obnoxious pretentious people, which is useful advice in lots of fields.
Judgement is God's domain, but also it's essential for separating the chaff from the wheat. If every art is good, no art is good, and no art is bad, which is clearly false (except at the Wobegone School of Above-Average Arts). It's tricky to do proper judgement without coming across as some sort of pretentious obnoxious, to be sure! Yet I am suspicious whenever someone claims to truly have "no judgement", they value all X equally highly/it's all equally valid/etc. Mostly this just tells me they have no Taste. It's important to be able to make an affirmative case for one's preferences, otherwise those choices will be made for you.
(Trying not to ape Freddie too hard here, but he makes this "Elitism in art is Good, Acktually" argument way better than I can.)
I don't disagree,but there is nothing wrong with enjoying bad art. I can entirely believe that bad art is worse for the soul or some type of moral development. But also it is basically fine.
I think you can square the circle somewhat by viewing "tasteful" art and "low" art as "different" values rather than "better" ones. Tasteful art rewards engagement with higher levels of cognitive effort, analysis, and media literacy. "Low" art does not. But engaging in challenging, high effort entertainment and relaxing, lower effort entertainment are both important parts of a life well-lived.
But also, saying everything in a category is bad or to not even try it due to the illusion it's all bad is prejudiced (by definition, I believe). There are enough people in the world with enough viewpoints to have connoisseurs in every medium and genre.
I personally am not a huge fan of the Marvel movies. However, my uncle loves the movies and has enough "taste" to tell me which movies are good and bad within the genre.
Read what you like, ignore the haters, and hopefully develop some taste so that you can enjoy it more thoroughly and encourage more, better work.
(Not sure why Substack didn't notify me of this reply...)
Yes, although I'm still a snobby partisan when it comes to things like music or fashion, it's clearly true that there's "better slop" and "worse slop". Iron Man vs Captain Marvel, for instance. And sometimes things transcend their nominal categories anyway, which is in many ways more surprising and enjoyable than the default expectation of enjoying [one's preconceived highbrow tasteful things]. Enter the Spiderverse was *damned* good, and I'm not even a fan of comics, let alone the MCU.
Or like I'll dunk on pop forever, but also unironically think the track "Unfold Me" by Bandits is pretty good. Wouldn't have discovered if not for my friend who keeps needling me to just give campy pop a chance, it's actually fine sometimes (ironic since he, too, is a giant music snob otherwise). Or, The Avalanches? Well-deserved five-minute famous for the masterful sampling work in Frontier Psychiatrist! Doesn't matter if I don't really care for any of the other work, though the music video for Frankie Sinatra is literally a trip. Gems can be found in all things.
The best argument for not touching entire "bad" categories isn't that it's literally true, it's that one's time is valuable and should be increasingly well-spent with age and responsibility. Tons of time to explore up through about undergrad years, after that...man, I'm tired after putting in my 40 hours for the week, mostly just wanna relax and enjoy the good art I already have. Not challenge myself to sample new art that I may or may not like, especially if the prior odds for not are pretty high. If there was time enough at last, though? Yeah, sure, at some point I'll get tired of Boris and get over my derision of Swifties to actually see what the fuss is about. Haven't been impressed whatsoever thus far, but billions of insanely devoted fans can't all be wrong! (One hopes...)
It's the only way to go about entertainment--it's the most subjective topic out there.
But Mr. Tree, you don't understand, there are people out there, right now, enjoying media for the *wrong reasons*. It's such a sadness. (https://youtu.be/wKiIroiCvZ0)
So the title of the post refers to smut... and tentatively, I'll say, the actual books named in the post seem to skew entirely towards the exceptionally safe end of the smut spectrum. Is this intended as an all encompassing defense of female targeted smut? Or would Halina draw a distinction somewhere?
Because the Dark Romance/Romantasy smut my wife, and occasionally I, read is genuinely some of the filthiest, most deranged, wildly, violently pornographic media I've ever encountered.
Now I'm happy to extend this defense into the realms of exceptionally fucked up, sexually deviant fantasy content, but I'm always curious just what someone means to encompass when the say "smut".
Had the same thought—when I hear smut I think of books like Morning Glory Milking Farm, a wildly popular series that to my understanding involves human-minotaur sexual relations. In my mind that’s in a whole different category than the entirely human, fairly tame, summer romance beach reads.
There are some real dark crannies of the internet out there. You know, when I'm just surfing AO3 for a light lesbian Legend of Korra romp, I wasn't necessarily in the mood for rape fics involving 13-year-olds.
Obviously it's doing something for someone, and godspeed with that, but it's not for me.
She did mention Heated Rivalry a few months back…
Why don't they make the equivalent for men?
The market is smaller but it isn't negligible, especially compared to the hundreds of millions of women who comsume it.
They did; it's called pornhub.
"The plot held my interest, but there honestly wasn't much character development...."
But the addition of new characters definitely kept it interesting...
It exists; basically pulpy fiction without a fade to black. I think a lot of the reason why Booktok/Romantasy stories are so much more publicly accepted and widely advertised is that being marketed to women makes the content a little more socially acceptable.
If you mean why don't they make the male equivalent of romance novels where a bland audience stand-in woman is torn between two or more wildly attractive men, and that has fairly safe and vanilla sexual content, they do in Japan. They are called "harem" series (after the large number of competing female suitors the hero has). They tend to feature a fairly ordinary guy who inexplicably attracts the romantic interest of multiple women, most of whom are much more distinctive and interesting characters than he is, and who often have supernatural powers. The anime, "Tenchi Universe," is probably my personal favorite of these, it features a young man who, through a series of humorous mishaps, finds a group of attractive female science fiction archetypes living in his house (space pirate, mad scientist, space princess, etc).
There's a niche genre for it. In reddit there's an r/romance_for_men
A lot of it has covers that will embarrass most people to show but there's a lot of just enjoyable content. A lot of it does end up overlapping with harem lit. Which as a genre is like feel good everyone gets along nearly magically plus power fantasy plus sex and thoroughly enjoyable. Things like bruce sentar's various series (dungeon Diving 303 released today) or warlock by Daniel kensington.
Have you heard of Literotica?
I've never read them, but my secondhand impression is that the "Gor" novels by John Norman would be the straight male equivalent of "romantasy" books.
I like this take, and I find it relatable, except for me it's not romance books but instead campy sci-fi/fantasy books. My current guilty pleasure is Dungeon Crawler Carl. Is it high literature? No (though it does sometimes explore more interesting themes than you might think). Is it fun? Yes. Is it good watercooler conversation with friends? Also yes.
I would be unhappy if I only read "easy" books like that, but they're fun and a nice change of pace from more serious fare, and are still more stimulating than swiping TikTok.
If you aren’t already, listen to the audiobooks (which are some of the best I have ever listened to)
I was about to suggest exactly this! I am not even a huge audiobook person, especially for fiction, but Jesus is the audiobook good for this series.
Dungeon Crawler Carl reference!!! I started book 6 today. The audiobook by Jeff Hays is a national treasure. Book 5 got into some exceptionally dark and complex stuff. It really succeeds at being both reference heavy silly fun and also surprisingly deep.
I'm just starting book 2 right now! But everyone is telling me it only gets better from here so I'm very excited.
It is impressive how the series (and the books themselves) get longer and longer with so far zero decline in quality. It's an affirmation that sometimes more is more; there are sequences that get mechanically complex in a way that brings back and intertwines past material. Carl, Donut, and characters you have yet to meet become deeper as the series goes on which adds real depth to certain sequences.
I'm skeptical he can maintain it through floor 18, assuming floors aren't skipped. Sure hope so though...
The big question is if the goal is actually to beat floor 18 - no crawler has gotten even slightly past floor 12 which does imply it's essentially impossible and it presents pacing problems since there should be pretty much zero crawlers left which narrows narrative possibilities. My guess is that the characters are going to have to make a deal and/or go out in a blaze of glory.
It starts going off the rails (literally) book 3... so good!
Dungeon Crawler Carl is much, much better than it has any right to be... went in thinking it'd be Scalzi-style trash but it blows stuff like Dream Park out of the water.
Scalzi is trash? I had fun reading Starter Villain and Kaiju Preservation Society. Maybe they are "trash" by some definition, but they certainly aren't tedious.
Yep, I definitely include Scalzi in "guilty pleasure, campy sci-fi/fantasy". You'll like Red Shirts by Scalzi if you liked Starter Villain.
Red Shirts is his best work. There’s a certain sameness about his characters (particularly the leads) that grates after a while.
That's true, partly because he has Wil Wheaton read all of them on audio.
I'm leery of putting Scalzi in the "guilty pleasure" category, but then, I see nothing shameful about well-crafted genre fiction.
Starter Villian was awesome and I remain depressed somewhat it is a stand alone!
Honestly my only complaint about it is I wished it was 100 pages longer.
No one is talking about Forever War and Forever Peace, which I think are by far his most famous novels.
Kaiju Preservation Society annoyed me specifically because of zero physical descriptions of characters...
Scalzi's the only author I won't read for political reasons (long story), but I did a double take on "Scalzi-style trash."
So far as I can tell, he's pretty centrist in his views. There are so many more writers who have much more extreme tastes. What makes him so deplorable politically that you can't bear it?
Years ago, I read "Red Shirts" and "Agent to the Stars," and really enjoyed them without knowing anything about Scalzi, so after finishing the second book, I thought I would look him up on-line and learn more about him. That led me almost immediately to his blog, where he was in the middle of a massive one-sided screaming match with people in the comments. The were commenters who were very politely disagreeing with him and he was posting torrents of obscenities at them, telling them to drop dead, telling them he didn't want *BLEEPS* like them to read his books anymore, etc. It was genuinely the most egregious behavior I've ever seen by any sort of creator, so I decided that, if Scalzi felt like that towards people who I thought were making good points, he probably wouldn't want me reading his books either, so I haven't read anymore.
I was on the college newspaper with Scalzi and am much less successful as an author (as in, I've written fewer novels and published none). So naturally, despite not reading his books (not really my genre), I'm always interested in hot takes on his stuff. What makes his work trash for you?
I love Dugeion Crawler Carl, and consume a decent amount of litRPG.
also cultivation novels like the Cradle series which is probably one of my top 5 series.
Ive probably read or listened to it at least 5 or six times
I'd say DCC is in the far better end of the spectrum within the genre. There's a lot worse out there, I've read it and had fun doing it, but always felt like I need a palate cleanser at the end.
As a man, I generally avoid romance novels (I have read Pride and Prejudice - it's good) and smut written by women for women not because there's something bad or shameful about it, but because they're not FOR me. I've run into women arguing that men avoid reading romance novels out of misogyny or dismissal of things female-coded or fear of intimacy. For some men, I'm sure that is the case, but for a lot of us, it's just that they're not written to please or interest us. And that's fine! Pleasing straight men doesn't need to be the goal of any author. But a lot of the time, we're not dismissing romance, we're avoiding something that's not for us. A romance novel can be very good at what it's doing and still very off-putting to men.
For me, the biggest problem is that the male leads in romance are clearly constructed to be wish-fulfillment fantasy characters for women to enjoy rather than relatable characters for male readers. And if you don't share the wish that a wish-fulfillment story is meant to satisfy, you're not left with much. I think that male romance novel leads come off to me the way the manic pixie dream girl comes off to a lot of women.
The fantasy is just different. Male coded erotica is filled with unserious women who are inexplicably horny for the MC and orgasm at a light breeze. Female coded is filled with very serious women being, through various contrivances, forced to enjoy sex they are reluctant to have with otherworldly dominant men even though they are otherwise totally not into sex with gross old regular men, and which unlike sex with said normals is uniquely mindblowing for Often Magic Reasons.
Absolutely. Male coded erotica is not better, it's just aimed at a different audience. I would not expect women to enjoy erotica specifically made for men.
"For some men, I'm sure that is the case..."
I'm not even sure that's true, or at least I think it might be relatively rare. Isn't the simpler explanation some version of the rest of what you're saying? My young daughter can't understand why I don't like shopping, and why I'm not especially eager to read her baby-sitters club books, and it's rare that she any interest in some of the things I was most interested in at her age. None of this is fear or closed mindedness or looking down on what she likes.
As a wise and also kind of crazy man once said, if you're reading it, it's for you. Reject standpoint theory, both as an illegitimate form of tone policing, and also as a limiting principle on one's artistic consumption. I thought I hated rap, as a straightedge prudish Asian square who balks at profanity, has retrograde opinions on public order, and generally holds snobbish musical opinions. But, no, it was just finding the right era and subgenres. 90s hip-hop is great, nerdcore is great, my life has been enriched for daring to stick a toe in those troubled waters. "I'm feelin', funkin', amp's in the trunk and I got more rhymes than there's cops at a Dunkin' Donuts shop, sure 'nuff, I got props, from the kids on the hill and my mom and my pops..."
Seeing the world through Perspectives Very Different From One's Own is broadening!
Patronizing much? I read books by women with female MC's all the time. I read enough to know the tropes I don't like. I have not reached this conclusion out of ignorance. I'm not prejudiced, I'm postjudiced
I think it was clear to most people that you meant that reading a few sample passages of the genre is enough for you to know you are not the target audience, not that you must avoid even cracking them as an expression your straight male identity.
(“Postjudiced” is awesome)
Wish I could take credit! It's a Carl Saganism
I’m a regular lifetime romance book reader and think it’s perfectly normal for a guy to just not get a ton out of them. I agree with you, they’re not generally written with a male audience in mind. There are certainly some romance books my husband has loved as well, but the majority I read aren’t ones I’d recommend to him.
I discovered the hack to enjoying romance novels as a heterosexual man. The problem with most of them is that the female main character is being romanced by a guy, which is boring. You can remedy that by reading romance novels where the sexy person romancing the female lead is also a woman. There are decent number of those.
I regularly see writers list Gladwell as a serious writer and data people list him as a top tier charlatan
My favorite fun fact about Gladwell is he was (allegedly) paid by tobacco companies early in his career to argue that tobacco was good because people would die earlier and be less of a burden on social security.
I mean, anyone who argues that tobacco is good is ok with me
Kind of how non-anthropologists love Jared Diamond; anthropologists hate the fucker. I’m with the former to be sure
Also Jonathan haidt. Many such cases
His faith-eism is bloody tedious but he's written good stuff.
I'm guessing he cross pollinates with Pinker and Sapolsky fans...
I love Diamond, am ok with Pinker, not happy about Sapolsky, and can’t take Gladwell seriously ever since seeing him talk about “igon values” as some ineffable mystery that only the most advanced social scientists have ever heard about.
Exactly! He doesn’t seem to know any math. Which is tough for a data guy with ridiculous amounts of money who could hire private tutors.
> ok with Pinker
wait, what am I missing!
My impression was that he is absolutely stellar.
The big thing is just that he is so committed to a lot of Chomskyan orthodoxy and my views on that have changed a lot since the success of large language models.
I just read that out loud and realized what you were referring to!
Haha, I guess he's probably both.
> These points are well-taken; I certainly don’t disagree. And I also don’t begrudge anyone their critical analysis.
Ehhhhhhhhhh. A lot of critical analysis is shallow, dumb, and says more about the reviewer wanting to issue a Hot, Serious Take than it does about the subjective merit of whatever they're reviewing.
Ebert has a quote out there about judging movies by what they tried to be rather than what the critic thought they should be. I think it applies to all media.
I especially love this in reviews for children’s movies; it wasn’t intended to be Citizen Kane, you twat.
The online meltdowns over the fact that the Mario movie was, in fact, for children were so intense!
Also the outright online campaign for Steven Universe to make a statement about BLM.
I was more disappointed they didn't use the Nintendo Orchestra...
But there’s still a question of whether it engages kids through their human faculties or through entrancing them with weird patterns of colors and sounds that don’t mean anything, like algorithmically generated YouTube kids.
Semi-related: what were people smoking with respect to all the love for Marty Supreme?
[VERY MILD AND ABSTRACT POSSIBLE SPOILERS]
In some sense it did a better job than most films of having a narrative that really felt like it could zig or zag at any given point, but lacking anything that could really be called a plot from minutes 20 to 75 was, I think, too high a price to pay. In brief research I did before watching the film I did see one comment that described it as "meandering" and "plotless"--I ignored the internal 'uh-oh' that it sparked based on critical consensus. Turns out that flag was red for a reason...
Moreover, the general problem with having a protagonist who isn't especially likeable or relatable*, is that it just kills any sense of narrative stakes: I do not care about how or whether Marty gets out of this jam because I am indifferent to whether bad things happen to him, because he is an asshole.
On net, there's probably a decent 100 minute cut of Marty Supreme, but unfortunately as released it's more like a reasonably tight 100 minute film shuffling around in 150 minutes of runtime.
*The predominant theme of the film is about the protagonist's relation to people and to his sport as means rather than ends, although this doesn't become clear until the last 20 minutes or so and there's negligible character growth before that, and even that theme is fundamentally filtered through the rather unrelatable lens of "be literally the best in the world at a particular sport."
I couldn’t even finish it ON A PLANE
I absolutely hated it. Here's my letterboxd review: This movie is too chaotic. I almost had to turn it off as it was giving me a headache. I normally like characters who are driven to excellence, but Marty was just an abusive, manipulative asshole. The movie would have been better if he got the shit kicked out of him every time he tried to take advantage of someone. Chalamet is a good actor though.
>Moreover, the general problem with having a protagonist who isn't especially likeable or relatable*, is that it just kills any sense of narrative stakes: I do not care about how or whether Marty gets out of this jam because I am indifferent to whether bad things happen to him, because he is an asshole.
I've always been confused by this point of view. Tons of media have assholes as protagonists and I still found it interesting. I've experienced the opposite: when they insert scenes specifically designed to make them more likeable it's often a turn-off for me.
Haven't watched Marty Supreme so perhaps I'll get if/when I watch it.
>>I've always been confused by this point of view. Tons of media have assholes as protagonists and I still found it interesting. I've experienced the opposite: when they insert scenes specifically designed to make them more likeable it's often a turn-off for me.>>
I think this may just be a YMMV thing. The thing about the protagonist in Marty Supreme is that he doesn't relate to human beings in a way that I register as anything other than "committed social defector with extremely high time-preference. Throw into nearest volcano." I'd actually contrast it with the director's other film Uncut Gems, in which Adam Sandler's character makes an unceasing series of terrible decisions but most (though not all) of them aren't so much about genuine indifference to others' wellbeing so much as because of hugely motivated reasoning because he's in thrall to his addiction. (Perhaps also not coincidentally, the last 30 minutes of that film are also kind of the best.) Marty's just kind of an entitled prick.
I don't think that asshole or villain protagonists can't be compelling or relatable in all circumstances (I think Walter White is a good example, though the series is *much* better for having the Jesse Pinkman character too), and Catch Me If You Can worked well, but at least the latter had a discernible plot instead of being more of a character study of a character I don't like and have no commonality with even in counterfactual circumstances.
I'll go with that. I also think that for basically all fiction, if any section of your review reads strangely if you prepend it with "I liked/didn't like this book/movie/whatever because...", then you probably need to cool your jets because you are not that special.
Halina should generally not feel obligated to say "yes these other reviewers who are longer-tenured/more-recognized than me are completely correct, but..."
Kafka trapped more flies with honey than vinegar, but I think that says a lot more about him than about the flies.
But, yes, the sheer number of epicycles that go into Professional(tm) Criticism makes me suspicious that it's not just a featherbedding exercise used as a backdoor way to justify things that establishment media/existing cultural hegemons already find acceptable, laundering respectability. You can't just like a work of art, it has to be A Transcendent Message About The Times We Live In, start a National Conversation, whatever. Sometimes a book is just a book.
Don't forget people trying to justify their expensive but useless humanities degrees.
This is just nonsense. Does putting down people with humanities degrees make you feel better about yourself?
I am tempted to answer this troll, but have to work early on a Saturday, thank goodness.
Mine wasn't that expensive... Definitely helped slightly.
This reminds me of the fuss made by the critic Edmund Wilson made about Agatha Christie’s “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murder_of_Roger_Ackroyd.
One of the great revelations in my life was understanding that many very smart people never ever read for pleasure.
In terms of romance novels there seems to be a certain "hoppy beer" crowd thing going on. You can't enjoy a nice Bud Lite after mowing the lawn on a hot summer day - it needs to be something "serious." In presume it's the same way with romance novels - sometimes you don't want heavy. Sometimes your boss is riding your ass and the kids are driving you nuts and...you just want to escape into a world that doesn't ask a lot of you.
Hello, Brandon Sanderson!
I do love me a good Sanderlanche
I just finished the Cosmere and have been aching for a decent escape series. I tried Joe Abercrombie and it’s too dark for me. Seeing some of the other comments I may start Dungeon Crawler Carl soon!
I highly recommend Dugeon Crawler Carl.
Also the Cradle series by Will Wight
Thanks!
I liked it but there's definitely a dichotomy. I've met smart people who were surprised I was reading science fiction and fantasy because they thought it was for children. But I've also met many other smart people who like reading those or mysteries/historical/whatever for pleasure. I think there are some smart people who see reading as work and others who truly enjoy it. To each their own.
I do both, and sometimes they merge. I recently joined Footnotes and Tangents, which is a website that guides you on slow reads. It is written by a very down-to-earth, but also very smart man who gives you so much fun context to the book that it makes potentially hard reads relaxing. I recently finished Salman Rushdie'S Midnight's Children with him. I wouldn't have make it past page 50 without the Substack, but found it truly fun with it.
I'm a great reader of the Coors Lights of the book world (although really, why? Drink Coors Banquet, it's much better.) Ilona Andrews is one of my current brain candy favorites, but I've read a great deal of Nora Roberts.
https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/you-cant-redistribute-your-way-out
Paywalled, but the summary tweet gets right to the point, and is a regular top tenet of Slow Boring thought: https://x.com/TheArgumentMag/status/2052853596912332906
"Blue states have built some of the country’s most generous safety net programs. But in places like California and New York, those gains are being swallowed by the cost of housing.
That’s the core problem: Poverty isn’t just about how much money people have. It’s also about how much it costs to meet basic needs.
Cash transfers, SNAP, and the Child Tax Credit still matter, but in high-cost states, redistribution can only go so far if rent keeps rising faster than income.
Read Zach Parolin on why building more housing is an anti-poverty strategy."
About 5 years ago when we were looking for our first daycare, a woman who ran a Facebook group connecting parents with options said that the floor in the market was generally $1,200/month because that’s what the state pays for subsidized care. I’ve thought a lot about that since then.
That seems incredibly cheap? If I want daycare available for 10 hours a day including my commute and the caregivers to make $20/hour which is the floor on what high school babysitters charge, and a 4:1 ratio is required, that’s $1,000 a month just for caregiver wages, and your tuition also needs to cover rent, supplies, admin, etc. it doesn’t seem very reasonable to want to pay under $1,200 for daycare—we’re paying almost double that in a relatively cheap metro.
The floor is generally cheap. It goes up from there remarkably fast.
But I do think anti-poverty efforts are doomed to fail, in a large percentage of cases money isn't the issue and giving money is counter productive and raises prices.
I find it very frustrating that there really is no let the market run and then have a very generous welfare state for people who can't meet their basic needs. We have it for snap but for basically all other needs we have this weird mesh of regulations of all kinds making the market quite constrained and then pretty terrible patchy safety nets meaning that lots of people just don't get their needs met.
Building housing is an anti-poverty strategy but it still leaves a pretty huge hole for people who can't manage. And states that are generous about helping the poor are bad at the market part and states that are good at the market part are bad at the support.
I thought that was a great article.
Huge amounts of welfare all gobbled up by higher home prices.
The government could have made people better off by just building more homes instead of spending all that money
Could we work to redistribute more of the safety nets?
I think there's a top GiveWell charity that already does that? They hand out safety bednets, preventing millions of poor people from needlessly suffering malaria.
Cut the Gordon's Fisherman knot: just redistribute housing directly. Use eminent domain on portions of large lots, build social housing ADUs. Maybe get some specialists in from NYC, they really know how to build bike sheds there. Call them Sidewalk SROs, maybe?
I don't currently see the value-add in adding another Substack subscription to The Argument, but that looks like a post I'd want to read, yeah. Sadness.
My glib statement was more supposed to be that finding ways to distribute the safety nets of blue states. Largely saying it as a glib view that housing in NYC is not really a safety net problem.
To be clear: A romance novel must have a happy ever after or a happy for now. Yesteryear fails miserably on both accounts. It's the opposite of a romance novel. It shouldn't even be mentioned in the same sentence!
It's lovely that Slow Boring and the NYT and Slate and so many other sites are now championing, more or less, romance. Those of us who've done so for years and got slammed for it are happy you're here. I hope the genre will continue to garner respect. There are romances that are also great literature and I'm not just talking about Austen or Heyer.
I am the publisher of All About Romance. Here's to love stories!
PS: Many of us still flinch at the word smut for the genre. Others don't. I find it reductive.
I feel smut should be reserved for stuff like shipper fanfics or "erotica".
Looking at "romance" novels, it's fair to say. much of the genre is smut. Some of it is decent writing with lots of sex. But plenty of what I would consider just female pornography.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinion. However, this is so far from what I believe--and I am an expert in the field in many ways.
Yeah--it's a word that was used against romance for ages. It still has bad juju for many of us. But, I'm also a fan of defanging bad words so, eh.
"To be clear: A romance novel must have a happy ever after or a happy for now."
I was going to say that, but you beat me to it. But here's a relevant link from Elisabeth Wheatley anyway: https://youtube.com/shorts/fYsDl2pndiY?si=ikVqZyg-MRe939Fs
Okay but what’s your opinion on Colleen Hoover being called romance? (Kidding, kidding!)
Completely agree, and I actually immediately assumed that Yesteryear was more women’s lit or general lit not romance based on what I’d gleaned about it from the discourse so far.
I'd say Yesteryear is more of a thriller than anything else.
Dudes don't bond over books, they bond over their fanduel picks.
A group chat based on books sounds elite. I hope I achieve that level of friendship with people.
Me, my brother, and one of my good friends had a Manly Man Book Club for a year or so before we dispersed across the world (long before covid and zoom). I mostly remember reading Vonnegut books. I'd love to do that again.
Yes I've been in a guys book club as well, and it was great (while it lasted)! These things are kind of hard to keep going though.
Going to a book club for some romantasy is like if I got together with the boys for a film club and selected a series of “short films about unusual stepsisters”. Call a spade a spade.
It’s fine to watch porn, but it’s porn. I’m not buying these efforts to pretend otherwise.
If that’s how you and your friends connect with each other around feelings of love and relationships, who am I to judge? Though you may want to unpack that with a therapist.
My kids got to use my kindle as long as they were reading. I didn't personally care what, just read.
I probably should have disconnected goodreads from the device. :D Holy crap did they make some choices.
People on Twitter are like "Oh noooooos!" https://x.com/washingtonpost/status/2052803240513728584 and I'm like "Hey buddy, Dark Souls ain't gonna beat itself!"
Seriously though there is a dark irony in how all the social trends that that NatCons were suppose to save us from have only continued under Trump, it's like Hungary didn't actually change it's fertility rate and suffered a major brain drain of young people under Orban.
I would add Sekiro is another great game from From Software, hard but amazing play me mechanics
Great game!
Smart people don't worry so much about whether a certain kind of media is considered "prestige". I read fantasy novels, watch anime, and play story-driven video games. Those are probably considered less "serious" than even romance novels.