PLANK JULY 12, 2012
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Editor’s Note: We’ll be running the article recommendations of our friends at TNR Reader each afternoon on The Plank, just in time to print out or save for your commute home. Enjoy!
The problem with S&M literature is that it is too often written by the sadists. Hence the success of Fifty Shades of Grey.
The Guardian | 5 min (1,276 words)
As Europe teeters, Asian intellectuals and politicians have turned to so-called “Asian Values.” They should be careful what they wish for.
Bloomberg BusinessWeek | 5 min (1,161 words)
Why does the world exist? Jim Holt doesn’t claim to know, which is why his search for answers is particularly illuminating.
NYMag | 10 min (2,539 words)
What will happen to Afghanistan when America departs? An in-depth account of the country’s democrats and minorities provides some tragic answers.
The New Yorker | 39 min (9,764 words)
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1 comments
Last night while on the road past midnight I listened to an interview about Fifty Shades of Grey (a blockbuster with over 30 million copies sold) with a contributor from Slate and a professor from the Annenberg School, both women. According to these experts, the book's popularity is attributable to all those husbands and boyfriends who have lost their jobs and their masculinity as the result of the economic crisis. What women want is a rich and powerful take charge (and no prisoners) kind of guy who showers gifts on his girl and can fix the leaky faucet to boot. A little S&M is a small price to pay. That the guy's name is Christian should make Dan Brown blush. I'm thinking that American culture has gone berserk, then the show moves on to a really insane culture, Japan, where the entire nation is suffering from a mania over akb 48.
- rayward
July 12, 2012 at 4:30pm