The Pleasure of the Pen, Poisoned or Otherwise

So I guess Roland Barthes occasionally made drawings, one of which you can view here. (Spoiler alert: It looks a bit like the little slips of paper at art or stationary stores where you might test out a pen before you commit to its particular ink and tip, but in a good way.)

Economist and NYT Magazine writer Tyler Cowen's reading list is a pretty good (and wide) one.

In the Globe these past couple weeks, Russell Smith has been indulging in a little meta-criticism, and the paired pieces—here and here—are a kind of nice close to a year where there was a crisis in chattering about criticism, if not in the thing itself.

Mary Albino's Ryeberg debut is, well, full of shit in a very good way: “Your attitude towards shit reveals a lot about your attitude towards life.”