Tokyo at night. 

Once again you’ll have to throw together your own pile of links in the comments. I’m sure that by now you know what to do. I’ll set the ball rolling with a new-fangled old fashioned, an interactive sewer map of San Francisco, a parental project for the weekend, and an innovative breakthrough in mid-day “stress relief.” 

Play nicely. I’ll be checking in later.

Those of you with a taste for academic papers that actively resist human comprehension may wish to follow the tweets of Amir Sariaslan, who catalogues some of the more challenging items in supposedly scholarly publishing. 

It’s an acquired taste, I know, but there’s a grim fun to be had in spotting the ostentatious and apparently random use of the word “neoliberal,” as, for instance, when pondering “neoliberal” orgasms and the “technology of sexiness.” Alternatively, music lovers can mull the pressing need for hip-hop to “escape from false consciousness and resist hegemony,” and some of you may be seduced by “queer architecture theory,” specifically, a “theatrical queer feminist interpretation of architecture.” Others may wish to while away their lunch hour with a paper “using straight and white teeth as a metaphor for straight and White identity,” thereby revealing how “straight White identities” are “arrogant and ignorant” and “often problematic.”

No, please. There’s no need to thank me.

Feminist Current is apparently “Canada’s leading feminist website.” Its editor Meghan Murphy tells us that “female students are under constant threat” and that all women everywhere live in a state of unending terror:

And who is it we fear? Is it other women? No. It is a male. A male with a penis that he may or may not use as a weapon.

Armed with a mind of infinite subtlety, Ms Murphy has more than a few ideas on how to combat this throbbing phallocratic menace:

There are solutions: a feminist revolution… an end to masculinity… all of that would help. 

An end to masculinity. Yes, I know, it’s quite a project. But first, baby steps:

It’s time to consider a curfew for men.

One more time: 

While a curfew would not resolve the problem of patriarchy and male violence against women, it does, in a way, address entitlement and privilege… The more I consider the idea of a curfew for men, the more it makes sense.

Why, it almost sounds like a gratuitous power fantasy, the product of an unwell mind. Of course a curfew will make dating rather difficult if you’re not a lesbian, and overnight motorway maintenance will have to be done exclusively by ladies. And there’ll be no more working nights to support your family, you indecently privileged patriarchal shitlord. Happily, however, our collective punishment as menfolk may not be eternal: 

The only power we have as authors is if we unionise and go on strike.

Amanda Craig, novelist, mouthing what I fear may be another classic sentence for our series.

Via Tim Worstall, who has more.

Update:

Spotted by Chester in the comments – Fintan O’Toole, literary editor of the Irish Times, calls for a “national arts strike” to extort further cash from the taxpayer. “The public has to be reminded that it really does care,” says he. And until more wallets land on the bonfire of publicly funded art, the nation’s creative titans should “close the arts centres” and “hold no poetry readings.”