Kathryn Schulz, on our society’s confused feelings about “fuck”:

For as long as some people have fretted about expletives in literature, others have seen fit to laugh at them. […] This idea rests on the assumption that “bad” words really are bad—and ditto writers who use them without exceptional justification. In crime fiction, foul language is justified on the ground that it is lifelike. (Art just imitates that shit.) In Go the Fuck to Sleep, foul language is not simply justified but justification: The whole book is about the taboo status of the word fuck. By contrast, outside of books like Jesse Sheidlower’s The F-Word or Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, it’s difficult to justify profanity in serious nonfiction.

But do we need such a justification, beyond the one a writer might mount for any word—i.e., that it works? There is, after all, no such thing as an intrinsically bad, boring, or lazy word. There is only how it is deployed, and one of the pleasures of profanity is how diversely you can deploy it.

A brilliant essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates about how X-Men: First Class misses an opportunity to incorporate the very relevant civil rights movement into its 1960s plotline:

In print, the X-Men are an elite team culled from a superpowered species of human. The mutants, as they are dubbed, are generally handled roughly by the rest of humanity and singled out for everything from enslavement to internment camps to genocide. As if to ram the allegory home, the X-Men, for much of their history, have hailed from across the spectrum of human existence. Over the decades, there have been gay X-Men, patrician X-Men, Jewish X-Men, Aboriginal X-Men, black X-Men with silver mohawks, X-Men hailing from Russia, Kentucky coal country, orphanages and a nightmarish future.

But as “First Class” roars to its final climatic scene, it appeals to an insidious suspension of disbelief; the heroic mutants of America, bravely opposing bigotry and fear, are revealed as not so much a spectrum of humankind, but as Eagle Scouts from Mayfield.

Inexcusable.

[UPDATE: Thanks for the great, thoughtful comments on this post. At this point, many of the nitpicks in this post have been addressed already, but I’m leaving it up for posterity’s sake. Be sure to read the comments if you’re seeing this post for the first time.]

WARNING: the following post will be extremely nitpicky without discussing anything of actual importance, and contain SPOILERS for X-Men: First Class (listen to our review with director Vincenzo Natali for an actual, in-depth discussion of the film). You’ve been warned:

• In the opening scene, how does Mystique know what Charles’ mother’s voice sounds like? Also, what is the power dynamic in that household? Does Xavier just get to do whatever the hell he wants (including taking in stragglers), regardless of what his parents think? If this is true, does Xavier control his parents using telepathy? If so, what a disturbing thought.
• If Xavier lived in New York as a child (and his family has clearly been there for generations), why does he have a British accent, both as a child as an adult?
• If Emma Frost is really able to convert herself into diamond form, how did Magneto almost crush her throat using the gold bed bannister? Diamonds are harder than gold on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness. Also, how can Magneto control non-ferrous metals in the first place? (And if it was just some random metal that was colored gold, my first point is doubly true, since it probably wouldn’t have been as hard as gold). 
• In the first war room scene, after Colonel Hendry’s encounter with Shaw, wouldn’t Pentagon officials have known that Hendry wasn’t supposed to be there, and found it odd that he showed up suddenly and unannounced? 
• How did the Russians develop a helmet that could resist telepaths? This was before a time when people even had a widespread awareness that mutants existed.
• Why doesn’t Emma Frost use her telepathic or diamond powers to escape the CIA?

Have any answers, or more questions? Feel free to chime in in the comments and I’ll try to update this list. I’m sure that some of these have simple explanations that escape me. Note: I chose not to include any of the retcon stuff in this list because I’m sure the list would be huge.

One of my favorite film writers, Eric Vespe, has been painstakingly putting together amazing behind-the-scenes photos in a daily feature at Ain’t It Cool News. When I spoke to Eric about this collection awhile ago during his most recent appearance on the /Filmcast, he mentioned that he assembled these photos from a variety of sources, including submissions from readers and his own personal collection. Here’s an example of a post in this awesome series.

Today, I was disappointed to find that a blogger (Angus Shamal) had assembled a bunch of Quint’s photos and republished them into a new blog post. This post was then submitted to Reddit, where it quickly became a popular story. Later, popular blogger John Gruber linked to Shamal’s post on his site as well. As a conservative estimate (based on my knowledge of the incoming traffic these two sites receive), Shamal’s blog post probably received at least 100,000 visits today, only a small fraction of which led to visits/hits for Ain’t It Cool News. Currently, the offending site is down from the massive amounts of traffic, although you can visit a mirror/cached copy of it by clicking here.

When I saw the story on Reddit, I was angered that someone had repurposed Quint’s work and was using it to get a ton of traffic. I was about to take to the comments section and insist that Redditors visit the Ain’t It Cool News site directly…except I couldn’t find an easy link at Ain’t It Cool News that assembled a bunch of the photos together in one place. Heck, I couldn’t even find a link that led me to all the columns that Quint had written for this series. Ain’t It Cool makes it difficult to surface this content, even for people who are looking for it. Chastened, I realized that as quasi-sleazy as it was for Shamal to copy all those images onto his blog, it actually served a purpose: it presented a bunch of Quint’s content in an easy-to-read format that Ain’t It Cool News either cannot or does not want to replicate.

Thus, there are several lessons I personally glean from this incident:

Always assume your work can/will be stolen – If you produce awesome material, it’s possible that someone else on the internet will repurpose it in some way, then receive all the credit/pageviews/advertising/money. You can bitch and moan about this, or you can adapt and prepare for this eventuality as best as possible.

Make it easy for social media sites to link to your content – To promote virality of your work, these days, it is not enough to simply produce great content; it is also important to assemble it in such a way that facilitates easy linking from sites such as Reddit. If you don’t do it, someone else will do it for you.

Protect your images – Some kind of watermark ensures that if your work is totally jacked by another blogger, you’ll at least get some free advertising from it.

I always thought there was mean streak to Roald Dahl’s books. Perhaps that’s why I enjoyed them so much as a child; Dahl indulged in that vengeful, immature side of little boys that we hopefully subsume by the time we become young adults.

Now comes this piece from Alex Carnevale explaining that apparently, Dahl was an anti-semitic womanizer. Does this make me think of his books any less? Yeah. It does.

An unhappy and bullied little boy, in adulthood he longed for the kind of dominance he never achieved as a child. Even from his earliest days, he was a hateful little fuck. He began one prep school essay, “Sometimes there is a great advantage in traveling to hot countries, where niggers dwell. They will give you many valuable things.” From a very young age Dahl found himself attracted to older women, cultivating many secret relationships throughout his life, including a variety of affairs with married women.

Amy Fine Collins has produced a staggering piece of journalism on the protracted takedown of several human traffickers in Connecticut. It is lengthy, gripping, and illuminating.