At the Pacific Standard, Mark Lukach writes about how mental illness can affect a marriage.

After only a few weeks in her new position, Giulia’s anxiety level rose beyond anything I’d ever seen. She’d always been a bit high-strung, holding herself to impeccable standards. Now, at age 27, she was petrified, actually frozen—terrified of disappointing people and making the wrong impression. She’d spend all day at work trying to compose a single email, forward the text to me to edit, and still not send it. Her mind lost room for anything but worries. At dinner she stared at her meal; at night she stared at the ceiling. I stayed up as late as I could, trying to comfort her—I’m sure you’re doing a great job at work, you always do—but by midnight I inevitably dozed off, racked by guilt. I knew that while I slept, my sweet wife was trapped awake with her horrible thoughts, uncomfortably awaiting morning.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lorelei Lee discusses Nabokov, the porn industry, power, and so much more. It’s one hell of a conversation.

In real life, I was actually the young girl. I was young and blonde and blue eyed and broke. In real life, being the young girl means having a false power. Men are always telling you about the power you have, but it sometimes seems to be a power entirely of their making and control. It’s a power based on someone else’s concept of your innocence. The imagined movie screen power of the young girl is in her naiveté. As soon as she acknowledges whatever power she might have, she fails at being the ideal of feminine youth everyone told her she already was. If she goes further and tries to control that power, there is a social subtraction from both her youth and her beauty. This is associated, of course, with the idea of the sexual potency of the virgin. As a young woman in this country (and in many others, as I understand), you are told that you possess this thing of great value — sex — whose value is only maintained by your not using it. You are told that you possess sex and men want it, and that the power you have is in knowing exactly how much you must offer without ever following through on any of it.

Because the Internet makes all things possible, there is a Larry David Lynch Tumblr.

The University of Pennsylvania is offering a course on the Slave South that looks really interesting in the way atrocities can be interesting.

Speaking of slavery, this one time, a black woman posed as a white slaveowner and her husband posed as her slave and they made their way north to freedom.

A few days before Christmas, 1848, a man named William Craft gave his wife Ellen a haircut—in fact, he cut it to the nape of her neck, far shorter than any other woman in Macon, Georgia, where the Crafts lived. They picked out her clothes—a cravat, a top hat, a fine coat—and went over the plan for what felt like the hundredth time.

Ellen was scared. “I think it is almost too much for us to undertake; however, I feel that God is on our side,” she would later write, “and with his assistance, notwithstanding all the difficulties, we shall be able to succeed.”

Ellen and William were Black, and they were enslaved. The morning after the haircut they would leave Macon forever, disguised—William as a slave, Ellen as his white master.

If it worked, they would be free.

Few things bring me as much unexpected and inexplicable pleasure as reading about real estate in New York City. It is so earnest and demonstrates true empathy for the plight of the wealthy. In this article, some buildings are full of apartments that people use as investments and pieds a terre so the doormen are all alone.

“Twenty-four percent of co-op and condo apartments citywide are not the primary residence of their owners,” said George V. Sweeting, the deputy director of the budget office, who oversaw the research. “Not all of these units are pieds-à-terre; many are likely owned by investors or original sponsors renting out the units.”

The last line of this article about riots in Ohio after Ohio State won a football game is excellent.

No problems were reported in Oregon.

Annie Tressler is an unabashed fangirl and I love her unabashedness.

I love books. And TV shows. And movies and James Franco. (Especially James.) I have trekked city blocks for miles to have books signed by their authors. I have run up to unassuming celebrities while walking to classes. I have asked for signatures on anything from a cardboard box to a napkin. And I’ve been doing these sort of things since the tender age of six. I am seasoned, sharp, and always on the prowl to scout out the whereabouts of bands, the latest book-signing, or the location of a celebrity at any given time. There’s something so intensely gratifying about obtaining that extremely sneaky pic of a tragically underrated B list celebrity, or snatching an almost indecipherable scrawled signature from Zach Braff. This is the heart of fangirling; the unbridled enthusiasm and revelation of self through different forms of art, media, music, and literature.

Here is a job for an idiot. Literally.

Do you have enemies? Ruin them with glitter.