Emily Gould gets maybe too recursive on how she would have responded to her own NYT Mag story:

If I was still working at Gawker or another media blog, rushing to move on to the next post, I probably would have glanced through an article this long for maybe five minutes, skimmed the initial responses and gotten the sense that other people hadn’t liked it, and then started formulating a post along these lines:

a) Aw, poor doddering New York Times, trying to clue us into the niceties of this nutty “Web blogging” trend. What a pathetic attempt to boost online readership. And, like, soooo long!

b) Look at that picture. And she clearly can’t write — hello, that “my life was cozy and safe”? Is she in a freshman-year personal-essay class? — so obviously she is only in The Times because she’s marginally attractive. Or maybe she’s sleeping with someone influential there.

c) And if I’d actually read the article, I probably would have read the part describing Gawker and the self-reflexive world Gawker describes and I would have felt personally attacked, like someone was telling me my all-consuming job and, therefore, my life, were meaningless. So I would have responded defensively. Like, how dare this person position herself as somehow above the stuff she used to do! She’s no better than us, really. In fact, she’s worse.

d) And you know, on some level I would have felt jealous, so I probably would have called me an attention whore or a narcissist, because that’s what you call people who are getting the kind of attention you feel you deserve but are, unfairly, not getting.

NYT made me laugh re the 1001 Books thing:

I appreciate the sense of urgency because I feel it myself. But when Professor Boxall brings death into the picture, he sets the bar very high. Let’s have a look at some of these mandatory titles. Not only is it not necessary to read “Interview With the Vampire” by Anne Rice before you die, it is also probably not necessary to read it even if, like Lestat, you are never going to die. If I were mortally ill, and a well-meaning friend pressed Anaïs Nin’s “Delta of Venus” into my trembling hands, I would probably leave this world with a curse on my lips.

“In Defense of Saccharin(e)” by Leslie Jamison, so an essay after my own heart:

Our capitalist ethos loves a certain kind of legibility—insisting we can read sloth and discipline tallied in bank accounts and inscribed across the body itself—and artificial sweeteners threaten this. They offer a way to cheat the arithmetic of indulgence and bodily consequence, just like sentimentality offers feeling without the price of complication. Oscar Wilde summed up this indignance: “A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it.” This speaks to a privileging of the Horatio Alger ethos within our aesthetic economies: you need to earn your reactions to literature, not simply have easy sentiment handed out like food stamps across the boundaries of the text.

How do we earn? By parsing figurative opacity, close reading metaphor, tracking nuances of character, disseminating real world repercussions.

We are disgusted when anything comes too easily. But also greedy. We want to have our cake without eating it too. Many women describe heaven as a place where food doesn’t have calories. And now we’ve done it here on Earth: liberated our bodies from the sins of our mouths.

(This last via Jezebel, who take the whole sweetener metaphor a kind of literally.)