Advice That Is Both Aspirational And Practical

Welcome to Thursday Thirteen, my weekly digest of links to things I have found interesting and which I think you might be intrigued by as well.

The most popular link last week was xkcd's take on the "features of adulthood", with this essay about women's crafts as a form of resistance coming second.

What I'm up to: I'm attempting calendar blocking this week properly for the first time. I certainly enjoyed the planning process, but I don't know that I love the feeling of being on a school timetable of my own creation. I would be interested to hear readers' thoughts about this technique.

1. A very serious guide, with flow charts, for working out whether the book you're reading is literary fiction or genre fiction. A handy rule of thumb: are the monsters hot, or do they have metaphorical resonance?
2. Last Saturday's Blind Date column was one of my favourites ever to appear because the two people discovered when they arrived at the restaurant that they had already dated eight years ago, and it had ended when one of them declined the option to go on a third date. Justin Myers' review is, as ever, essential companion reading.
3. A handy little tool that helps you maximise your time off work. You tell it what country you live in, whether you work on weekends, and how many days of leave you have to take. Then it spits out a calendar for the year that gives you the most consecutive non-work time.
4. An impeccable rant about the awfulness of February. "Something great happened here but it's over with, and that's the way February is."

5. I can't believe I've only just learned about Puzzmo, a well-designed page of thoughtful daily puzzles. Includes a crossword, several word puzzles, a poker problem, and more. My favourite is Really Bad Chess.
6. Combination obituary and explainer for the 2000s "horny profile", an icky by- product of the "fetid atmosphere" prevailing in the media at the time. This digest is full of can't-look-away details, including the fact that not one but two Esquire profiles of Penelope Cruz, published years apart, spent hundreds of words dwelling on how hot she looked while eating steak.
7. Somewhat related: an extract from Josphine Baker's memoirs, giving her first impressions of Paris and reflecting on the experience of doing her revue show there. "Buttocks exist. I don’t know why we dislike them. There are also buttocks that are terribly silly, of course, terribly pretentious, terribly mediocre. All they are good for is sitting on, if that."

8. The correct question to ask when you first see an Italian cityscape is "where did all the towers go?". As the above reconstruction of Bologna shows, the cities of northern Italy were once "implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers". During the Guelph-Ghibelline wars of the 10th and 11th centuries, it was apparently a popular tactic to retreat into your fireproof stone tower with your family and valuables, while watching the homes and businesses of your enemies burn below. But as this exploration demonstrates, more of them have survived than we might have expected — they're just blended into the city now.
9. Feed your vertical scrolling addiction with WikiTok, a TikTok-esque tool that feeds you a different fact from Wikipedia upon every swipe.
10. Reading advice that is both aspirational and practical (I am fast becoming a dedicated Celine Nguyen fan).
11. Please don't ever show me another greige "makeover", this is the kind of DIY content that I want, ideally done by a very energetic Norwegian woman:

12. Cool, if unsettling: a robotic exoskeleton for the hand can help a pianist practice more without injury.
13. On separating work on the internet from emotional labour:

"Now I’m at a point where the constant mining of myself for daily tidbits to offer has drained me dry. I have mined my last diamond for the mirror world. I am actually full of diamonds, but I’m reserving these for real life.