Internet’s End

At Salon, Kyle Minor listens to an audiobook recording of Joan Didion's Salvador and finds that it remains "immediately relevant to a new reader whose memory of its context is more the kind of memory that arises from having read books about history than one that arises from having been old enough in 1983 to understand the meaning of phrases such as death squad, or body count, or mechanism of terror."

We've been tracking excerpts from Michael Lewis' just-released The Big Short for a while now; the latest, fascinating installment is at Vanity Fair.

"Everywhere you turn, are you surrounded by fools, by boring nonentities, by faceless masses and foes and suckers and, indeed, jerks?" If so--as this insightful if somewhat confidence-shattering piece at Aeon suggests--the jerk may be you.