Quick Hits: tooling around on the internet edition

• Chuck Klosterman's NYTimes piece on How Modern Life is Like a Zombie Onlsaught has been making the rounds on Facebook this morning. In a piece packed full of cultural insights, this one may have been my favourite: "Zombie love, however, is always communal. If you dig zombies, you dig the entire zombie concept. It’s never personal. You’re interested in what zombies signify, you like the way they move, and you understand what’s required to stop them". 
• Early on in the Klosterman piece was a link to Alice Gregory's Sad As Hell in the literary mag n+1. While I am generally not a fan of "the internet is ruining society foreverrrr", I do enjoy a good piece of criticism on the subject of digital life. This falls into that category for me, as does an earlier NYTimes article by Gary Shteyngart, the author of the novel reviewed in Sad As Hell. 
• And, just because I find it entertaining, check out the book most often purchased in combination with n+1's What Was the Hipster on Amazon. 
• This makes me want to move to San Francisco. 
• Garland of Tiger Beatdown (one of my very favourite feminist blogs) on the Privilege Denying Dude meme: "In social justice, not all tactics that are divisive are effective, but all tactics that are effective are divisive. That doesn’t mean we should set our phasers to “divide,” but when a tactic is labeled as “divisive” or “radical”, there is a chance it might be one worth considering. Effective tactics are divisive because the majority is most comfortable with activism that is ineffective." 
• Sady, whose baby Tiger Beatdown truly is, also on the Privilege Denying Dude Meme: "It’s not like there are no problems with Privilege Denying Dude; our tendency to oversimplify ideological opponents is something I’ve spoken at tiresome length about, whilst being treated like an extremist bitch who subsists on a diet of sensitive dudes’ testicles and wants to personally come over to your house and burn everything you love and yell at you until you cry burning hot tears of shame...But at a certain point, you can’t hold enough public symposiums about your inner conflicts and your ideas about responsibility and your intentions. You can’t ever apologize enough; you can’t ever be careful enough; you can’t ever make enough Sympathy Faces and phrase enough statements as questions and say “that’s a reasonable point, but” enough, because there are always people who want to listen until it turns out they’re implicated."