More from Tiger Beatdown on manlit: This time, Garland Grey on the role of privilege in co-opting Jane Austen, a la Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

Austen had to work very hard to hammer out a structure and a flow and a rhythm to the story, and you pull up next to that process in your giant SUV of male privilege and start plugging your electricity and water into it, taking all the work that Austen did to get the thing published, all of the work that made her writing world famous, and you make YOURSELF world famous. . . . it seems that when a woman works with a man’s material, they are given a more restrictive license to do so; their work is always assumed to be “less than” than a man’s work. And HEAVEN FORFEND that a BLACK WOMAN recombine the work of a white woman such as Margaret Mitchell, like Alice Randall did in The Wind Done Gone. Remember what a pointless shitstorm all that was?

Also, there weren't hardly any zombies in it!

* Seconding this New York Times op-ed urging Attorney General Eric Holder to enact strong standards to help end prison rape: "Predictably, state and local corrections officials determined to preserve the disastrous status quo are pushing back. Mr. Holder must hold the line." In related news, "Immigration and Customs Enforcement is investigating allegations that a guard at a central Texas detention facility sexually assaulted female detainees on their way to being deported."

* In defense of Lynn Hirshberg's devastating MIA profile: Alyssa Rosenberg on the narratives celebrities create, and the value in dismantling them:

Queasy but great entertainment—and great entertainment journalism—have often come out of the disjunction between established celebrity narratives (at least the ones that are meant to be taken seriously) and reality, or the breakdown of a once-true narrative. Vanessa Grigoriadis's 2008 Rolling Stone profile of Britney Spears came as the former teen pop star was punishing her handlers, America, and herself for imposing a restrictive, virginal life story on her by going publicly, shockingly crazy. But the piece also exposed that story as false in the first place. Britney was sexually active before her breakout album, and she'd had breast implants. What was interesting was less that she and her management team lied about those events, but how she succeeded, and then failed, to live out the history that was retroactively created for her.

* Via the Curvature: Watching an ultrasound of a fetus does not deter women from having an abortion.

* SAFER Campus on the testimony of a woman who was raped at UV A in 1984, and the strange sexual assault policies that remain at the school today:

[N]one of the rapes reported to UVA (and consequently reported to the federal government) has resulted in sanctions. There is something wrong with all of the different pieces of this picture. I would add that the procedures for UVA’s sexual assault board include two options that are basically mediation—one literally called mediation, and a “structured meeting” that seems to be the same as mediation except the discussion is more structured? What? Notably, if a student chooses a structured meeting, they must waive their right to a formal adjudication before the Sexual Assault Board. (Oddly enough, students are allowed to pursue formal adjudication if the are unhappy with the results of a mediation…as long as they don’t sign anything that says they can’t…) Neither the mediation or strcutured meeting can result in sanctions. Perhaps this speaks to why the 52 reported rapes at UVA resulted in no sanctions? I would really like to know what channels UVA’s sexual assault cases go through most often.

Photo via daniel.julia, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In this week's paper, I reviewed Seth Grahame-Smith's foray into undead Jane Austen adaptation, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:

With his first novel, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Seth Grahame-Smith invents a genre: In an undead Jane Austen adaptation, there must be brains, and there must be braaaaains. Unfortunately, Grahame-Smith is already breaking the rules.

Read the review here.

Topics discussed: Jane Austen, morality, ballet studio, Pootie Tang, Edward Cullen, Zac Ephron unlike Edward Cullen, Mike Riggs unlike Edward Cullen, feasts of flesh

* okay, ten minutes.