Utilitarian Review 4/18/15

On HU

Featured Archive Post: Sean Michael Robinson on why we need to translate more Adachi sports manga.

An index to the Blog Carnival on Censure vs. Censor on Women Write About Comics.

Nate Atkinson on freedom to speak and freedom from speech.

Domingos Isabelinho on Stefano Ricci’s “The Story of the Bear.”

Michael Carson on the military documentary “Point and Shoot” and overdetermined freedom fighting.

Chris Gavaler interviews Katy Simpson Smith about pirates and literary fiction.

On Ivan Brunetti’s New Yorker cover, gender, genre, and genius.

An interview with anDee of the amazing Aquarius Records.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

In my first piece for Quartz I argued that the internet is making us smarter because we never read anything.

At Pacific Standard I reviewed Allison Pugh’s book on economic precarity and talked about how eroding worker/employer commitments damages personal relationships.

At the Atlantic I wrote about how clones on Orphan Black are really robots, and class war in R.U.R.

At Urbanfaith I wrote about the 20th anniversary of Dead Man Walking and how racism contributes to the death penalty.

I started writing for Playboy.com with articles about:

—why Idris Elba as Bond is only a start if you want diversity in film.

—why getting rid of indie rock doens’t address racism.

Orphan Black, feminism, queerness and biological determinism.

On Ravishly I have a list of rockabilly women.

On Splice Today I wrote about

America’s exceptional authoritarianism.

—the fact that there’s no media conspiracy in favor of Hillary.
 
Other Links

The Calgary Expo seems to have ejected a female MRA group that was disrupting panels there.

Katherine Cross on what’s wrong with Jon Ronson’s book on public shaming.

Arthur Chu on Madonna, Drake, and consent.

Ms. Marvel and female characters sell really, really well on digital.
 

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7 thoughts on “Utilitarian Review 4/18/15

  1. Not only do female superhero comics do well in digital, but they get a much higher percentage of female readers than do the pamphlets.

    My theory is that many woman readers are put off by comics shops. Too many shops give off a sleasy, hostile vibe towards women. Downloading comics over the Internet allows comics-loving women to bypass shops entirely.

  2. Noah,

    We don’t actually have hard numbers of sales on digital comics do we? I was trying to figure out how well Ms. Marvel is actually doing in combined sales by comparison to “big sellers” like Batman or X-Men or whatever, but it’s hard to figure out. We can see trade sales through Diamond only, and floppy sales, but I don’t think there are raw numbers on bookstore sales or digital. It’s kind of frustrating, as this would actually be interesting information to have.

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