“Pornography has changed unrecognizably from its so-called golden age—the period, in the sixties and seventies, when adult movies had theatrical releases and seemed in step with the wider moment of sexual liberation, and before V.H.S. drove down production quality, in the eighties. Today’s films are often short and nearly always hard-core; that is, they show penetrative sex. Among the most popular search terms in 2015 were ‘anal,’ ‘amateur,’ ‘teen,’ and—one that would surely have made Freud smile—’mom and son.'” The New Yorker attempts to make some sense of modern pornography.
Softcore No More
New Joyce Carol Oates Story
Recommended Reading: “Sex with Camel” by Joyce Carol Oates. As she tweeted, “Never thought, when I was a child in wilds of upstate NY, that I would grow up to write a story with such a title.”
●
●
Stark
Recommended Reading: A series of short pieces by Rumpus readers on the subject of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
●
●
Tuesday New Release Day: Bachelder; Mendelsohn; Penkov; Yun; Dutton; McGuire
Out this week: The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder; Burning Down the House by Jane Mendelsohn; Stork Mountain by Miroslav Penkov; Shelter by Jung Yun; Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton; and The North Water by Ian McGuire. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2016 Book Preview.
●
●
“Friedlander’s portraits do not feel celebratory”
In his review of Lee Friedlander’s collection, Playing for the Benefit of the Band: New Orleans Music Culture, Nathaniel Rich remarks on the “unsettling beauty” of the artist’s photographs.
●
●
This Calls for a (Left-Handed) High Five
People laugh when I tell them: everybody’s born right-handed, but the best overcome it. But now, take heed my Southpaw brethren. Science may be on our side. One recent study indicates that left-handedness may lead to “a boost in a specific kind of creativity—namely, divergent thinking, or the ability to generate new ideas from a single principle quickly and effectively.”
●
●
Between a Rock and a Bookless Place
As libraries struggle to survive in the UK, community-based lending libraries are sprouting up to fill in the gaps. The Society of Authors is threatening to take legal action against these libraries after discovering that they are not required to pay any royalties to authors.
●
●