What does it cost to be a citizen of the literary world?

The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.
— Witold Gombrowicz, who died in 1969


What does it cost to be a citizen of the literary world? Time, for one thing. But the demands we make of women writers are outsize Literary Byron 

WSJ video – Research shows that exposure to nature, even indoors, can help reduce stress. Biophilia expert Rebecca Bullene shows you how to pick the perfect plants for your office and the best ways to take care of them.

Markets in everything, Russian science edition

Our team in Russia received a tip from the local research community to a new form of publication fraud. The tip led to a website, [redacted] set up by unscrupulous operators to serve as a virtual marketplace where authors can buy or sell authorship in academic manuscripts accepted for publication. This kind of peer-to-peer sharing, in “broad daylight” is not something we’ve seen before – so we conducted a quick analysis of the site, and its data, before taking swift action to alert our friends and colleagues in the scientific community.

There are no author names, or journal names indicated on the site – the journal name is available to buyers only. Sometimes as many as five authorships in a single article are offered for sale, with prices varying depending on place in the list of authors.

zmkc: Valuable and Rare.
… one thing I do not doubt is that the fearlessness Stone regularly displayed (not least when attempting to smuggle a dissident across a border, leading to a stint in a prison in Communist Hungary) - a fearlessness he seems to have encouraged in his students as well - is a much needed quality in today's peculiar and alarming world.

Michael W. Maizels (Harvard metaLAB) & William E. Foster (Arkansas), The Gallerist’s Gambit: Financial Innovation, Tax Law, and the Making of the Contemporary Art Market, 42 Colum. J.L. & Arts 479 (2019):

This essay presents an account of an important moment in the emergence of the market for Pop art that was facilitated in part by a distinctly accommodating legal environment. Although Abstract Expressionism is commonly credited with causing American art’s ascendance onto the world stage immediately after World War II, its international acclaim belied a precarious institutional and financial infrastructure for living American painters. It was only with the following generation of Pop and Minimalist artists that the United States developed a self-sustaining market for the work of contemporary American artists. A significant but largely overlooked factor in that continued success was the ability of art dealers to take advantage of the unique legal and regulatory environment of the 1960s. This essay focuses on the efforts of an enterprising art gallerist, Leo Castelli, to aggressively promote his stable of Pop artists through the development of several financial structures, including some designed to leverage the relatively generous income tax deductions and anemic enforcement regime of the time. In doing so, Castelli not only seeded the ground for the international ascendance of American visual art, but also engineered financial arrangements that fostered the development of a lucrative and resilient art market that endures to this day.

What Happens When What You See Gets In The Way Of What You Know?

Most philosophers nowadays think that knowledge is fallible. In other words, they think that you can know something without its being certain for you. – 3 Quarks Daily

BOOK REVIEW: American Predator: The Hunt for the Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century - Washington Times.A big, strong man, Israel Keyes killed at random as he traveled across the country, even to Alaska. He buried his “kill kits,” which included cash, guns, and body-disposal tools, at various locations in the states that he passed through and/or lived. He had no particular M.O., and he covered his tracks well. He killed at least 11 people, but no one knows the exact number of his victims.

Confessions of a Grammar Nazi | Policy of Truth. 

 What motivates me, rather, is a love for useful and beautiful tools that are well-designed to perform specific functions, and a dislike of seeing them used in a way that ruins them. If we misuse a phillips screwdriver (and note that I have no objection to dropping the initial majuscule on “Phillips”) to punch holes in a wall or to chip bits off of rocks, we run the risk of blunting it in such a way that we lose the ability to use it as a phillips screwdriver. Likewise, when we use “decimate” (a term that bears its etymology and associated history on its face) to mean “destroy most of” (something we have many perfectly good synonyms for already – including “devastate,” which is probably what people were aiming for when they started misusing “decimate”), we undermine our ability to use it to mean “destroy ten percent of” – a very specific meaning for which no other term exists (and we also help to render the historical use of the term unintelligible).
I think something that Lord Falkland said applies: “When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.”

IS THERE NOTHING IT CAN’T DO? Dark chocolate lowers risk of depression, study suggests.

To coin an Instaphrase, the science isn’t settled, but why take chances

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: ‘Sex and the City’ creator talks vaginal rejuvenation and finding ‘Mr. Bigger.’

via Instapundit:

"I BELIEVE THE FEMINIST ANSWER IS NO, BECAUSE RAPE IS ABOUT POWER AND MEN ALWAYS HAVE MORE POWER THAN WOMEN BY VIRTUE OF BEING MALE: If a woman forces a man to have sex, is that rape?
Plus, Sexual Victimization by Women Is More Common Than Previously Known.
Flashback: A rape epidemic — by women? New CDC report reveals troubling equality when it comes to sexual assault rates.
Related: When Rape Matters and When It Doesn’t: In the eyes of the media, all rapes are equal. But some rapes are more equal than others.
Also: The Understudied Female Predator.