maria bustillos

brianvan:

Hey, Maria Bustillos says that it’s status quo for inexperienced writers to not get paid for their work, so keep on working for free, youngins, until all those editors out there decide that you’re “experienced enough”. 

I’ll hold my breath for that.

Not quite; I said ‘nobody gets paid much at first, in almost any industry.’

At The Volokh Conspiracy, Orin Kerr makes some compelling points in a long and thoughtprovoking post about prosecutorial discretion, but this is really problematic:

In plain English, here’s the key question: What punishment was the minimum necessary to deter Swartz from continuing to try to use unlawful means to achieve his reform goals?

According to this reasoning, we’d wind up having to throw practically every political dissident in jail.

barthel:

Lawrence Lessig has written a post comparing Aaron Swartz to Martin Luther King Jr., so just, you know, heads up on that one.

Lessig clearly states in the post that “King’s cause was greater”; the comparison is made principally with reference to the relative leniency with which political dissidents were treated by the federales in King’s time. A salient point:

How many felonies was Martin Luther King, Jr., convicted of? King, whose motives were political too, but who, unlike Aaron, triggered actions which caused real harm. What’s that number? 

Zero. 

And how many was he even charged with in the whole of his career?

Two. Two bogus charges (perjury and tax evasion) from Alabama, which an all-white jury acquitted him of.

This is a measure of who we have become. And we don’t even notice it.

philipchristman asked: OK. I just read your essay on the Awl about romance novels as underground lit. And it rhymed with this idea that I've had for a long time that there HAS to be--somewhere--a writer working for Harlequin or Mills and Boon, or who is at least habitually shelved in "Romance" at bookstores, who is writing unnecessarily beautiful sentences or subverting the assigned structure in an awesome way or something. I have faith that this person exists. Have you read him/her? Any genrecommendations in romance?

Thank you for this very interesting note, and for reading the Awl piece. In answer to your question it seems to me that beauty may be found anywhere; the determining factors are personal, and to do with a kind of harmonic resonance between reader and author.

Just like with any other kind of fiction, the stuff that really moves me might do nothing at all for you (?)