Happy New Year!  I have so many things to share! Let’s get this link party going!

• James Gurney makes a really interesting distinction between what constitutes a failure as opposed something that is unsuccessful.
• “It’s about humanization. And I can’t think of another way to imagine how we’re going to get out of the crisis of racial hatred if it’s not through the will to humanize.” Must read more bell hooks this year.
• Being Aaron Burr: A really lovely interview with Leslie Odom, Jr.
• Yet another way for “prosperity gospel” “churches” to make your skin crawl.
• This is a pretty depressing piece about home workers in the textile industry and this practice is a reason why I try not to buy clothing with any elaborate embellishments and I absolutely do not purchase anything that is crocheted (if you didn’t know, crochet cannot be mechanized, so it’s all done by hand).
• Max Gladstone’s year of reading differently.
• I’m just blown away by this poem by M Sereno.
• Time is a feminist issue. Great personal essay on creativity, flow, and how women don’t have a culture of leisure because they’ve been busy providing leisure to everyone else: “It isn’t that women are refusing to do leisure right. It’s that we’re part of a system that requires our unrelenting labour to make the leisure of others possible.”
• “Programming isn’t a job anymore. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a cult.” Speaking of leisure time and second shift work…
• Zeynep Tufekci on public infrastructure. I am completely fascinated by infrastructure and how it is invisible–until it fails and then it isn’t.
• This is about television, but I think it’s also broadly applicable to other areas as well: “The true aim of criticism isn’t to separate bad from good. That’s, broadly speaking, easy. It’s a gut reaction. It’s to separate good from great, and the sheer glut of stuff out there is making that harder than ever, or, at least, making it harder to arrive at consensus than ever.“
• Look at all these public domain images available from the New York Public Library!
• It’s time for Genevieve Valentine’s annual Miss Universe post! Yay!
• Or perhaps you’d like some homoerotic Oregon militia fan fiction? If so, Colin Meloy has you covered.

All hail Queen Aretha: