When my wife told me she wanted to open our marriage and take other lovers, she wasn’t rejecting me, she was embracing herself. When I understood that, I finally became a feminist. 

Says New York magazine’s Michael Sonmore. And so, 

As I write this, my children are asleep in their room, Loretta Lynn is on the stereo, and my wife is out on a date with a man named Paulo. It’s her second date this week; her fourth this month so far. If it goes like the others, she’ll come home in the middle of the night, crawl into bed beside me, and tell me all about how she and Paulo had sex. I won’t explode with anger or seethe with resentment. I’ll tell her it’s a hot story and I’m glad she had fun. It’s hot because she’s excited, and I’m glad because I’m a feminist.

I don’t think Mr Sonmore is quite making the persuasive case he presumably hopes for. Still, his children, aged six and three, must be thrilled by their parents’ progressive, self-embracing relationship, and delighted to hear that Mommy is out all night shagging strangers again.

Via Ace, who shares a few thoughts on this. 

Sadly, I didn’t have time to compile the usual smattering of oddments and I’m off to see Ant-Man in a few hours. But by all means feel free to improvise in the comments. If anyone’s unclear on the high aesthetic tone of these weekly link dumps, let me set things rolling with this. 

Play nicely. I’ll be checking in later. 

A few words from the borderline personality cult Deep Green Resistance:  

Franklin Einspruch on the Great Boston Kimono Outrage of 2015: 

Just when you think we’ve reached Peak Sensitivity, the scolds of social justice sprinkle more sand into their underpants… This incident — call it Kimonogate — demonstrates just how far the new puritans are willing to reach to impose their version of politics upon all of our pleasures. Watching Chinese and South Asians lump themselves into an aggregate for the sake of claiming offence on behalf of the Japanese, when that conflation of Asian identities is an established microaggression, is weird enough. Worrying that someone might touch a robe Orientalistically is out there in tinfoil-hat territory. Is that the kind of person you want deciding which activities you’re allowed to enjoy at the art museum? 

Franklin also has a message for the modishly indignant.  

Thomas Sowell on favoured narratives and unintended consequences: 

To many on the left, the 1960s were the glory days of their movements, and for some the days of their youth as well. They have a heavy emotional investment and ego investment in the ideas, aspirations and policies of the 1960s. It might never occur to many of them to check their beliefs against some hard facts about what actually happened after their ideas and policies were put into effect. It certainly would not be pleasant to admit, even to yourself, that after promising progress toward “social justice,” what you actually delivered was a retrogression toward barbarism.

And Katherine Timpf reports from the throbbing edge of academic enquiry: 

Sociology researchers are now insisting that we as a society start accepting people who choose to “identify as real vampires” – so that they can be open about the fact that they’re vampires without having to worry about facing discrimination from people who might think that that’s weird… Dr Williams [director of social work at Idaho State University] explained that no one should be bothered by a person wanting to drink another person’s blood because “it is generally expected within the community that vampires should act ethically and responsibly in feeding practices,” and it’s not their blood-drinking that’s the real problem here — it’s the fact that they have to worry that other people will judge them for their blood-drinking.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

Twitter exchange of note. // The acid should kick in any moment now. // I’m no expert but I think that’s a shark. // I’ve been playing this quite a lot. // There’s whittling and there’s whittling. // Grow new teeth in nine weeks. // So.Much.Guardian, a tumblr. // An interactive atlas of world history. // The props and miniatures of Blade Runner. // Baby storage. // Storm near Rapid City. // Sticky page markers of note. The markers are sticky, not the pages. // “In the small village of Vrontados, there is unrest.” // Soho Square, London, 1956. // Beware the stealth cucumber. // Because you need to be told when to buy new shoes. // At last, a centrifugal fragrance diffuser. // A website you have to queue for. It’s terribly exclusive. // And finally, four minutes or so of daddy-daughter time.