One of my favorite writers has a new book out and was interviewed by The Cut. He talkes about his transition, gender identity, bylines, and the new context of his past work.

Daniel Mallory Ortberg:

A: This is not a situation where you need much of a strategy beyond "acknowledging reality." Talk to your boyfriend. "Hey, it's clear that this hits a really deep nerve for you, but I'm not sure why you keep bringing up your height and insisting that you're 6 feet tall.

Ayn Rand's personal life was an unmitigated disaster, fueled by personality cultists who literally, legally, changed their names in tribute to her and her fiction, whom she alternately possessively clutched to herself or expelled in purges worthy of Josef Stalin.

A classic Mallory Ortberg humor column sets out a day in the life of an "empowered female heroine," a fictional staple on whom society (and literature) project a huge amount of aspirational demands.

Anyone who's paid close attention knows that the series should really be called "Hermoine Granger and the Repeated Rescue of the Lazy, Glory-Hogging Boys," but as usual, Mallory Ortberg (previously) brings it all home with some scathing and witty fanfic:

"Do you ever see a super-old guy…with a super-young girl…and wonder, how the hell did that happen?" Here's what we're calling it now.

Mallory Ortberg expertly skewers the weird de-cluttering dogma of Marie Kondo's bestselling Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: "It's important to be very rich but have almost no items in your home."

Mallory Ortberg on The Toast: 10. "I used to like your work, but I don't now. Have you considered doing the things I like again?" (via Kottke)

Fanfic can take you down some peculiar roads. But in Mallory Ortberg's imagined Ayn Rand fanfic of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the the tenets of ruthless self-interest are shouted to hilarious effect.

The New Yorker's "Ayn Rand Reviews Children's Movies" is less funny than it should be (most of the jokes are pretty obvious), but it's not bad.

In a beautiful essay on The Toast, Mallory Ortberg argues that while Bart, Lisa and Millhouse are kids, Ralph Wiggum is the only child on the Simpsons, full of childishness that's endearing and true.

Mallory Ortberg interviews her little brother, a physicist, about the scientific documentary, The Core.

Mallory Ortberg (who created the excellent Squicked out alien describes human sex story) has done it again with Erotica Written By Someone With An Appropriate Sense of Privacy.

At The Toast, Mallory Ortberg has a list of films from the 1920s and 30s — prior to the widespread adoption of the Hollywood Production Code and its morality guidelines — that are actually worth tracking down through Amazon, Netflix, and other sources. — Read the rest

Here's a nice use of science fiction's trick of describing cherished human behaviors and institutions through the ironic distance of an alien observer: Mallory Ortberg's short story Erotica Written By An Alien Pretending Not To Be Horrified By The Human Body:

High concept from the Hairpin's Mallory Ortberg: "Text-messages from a ghost:"

hey im gaunting you ok

Do you mean haunting

yeah sorry i don't have any fingers
so im poltergeisting a stick to help me text this

Who is this?

oh sorry im a ghost

So do you live inside this phone

yeah kind of

Text Messages From a Ghost

(via Making Light)

(Image: Ghost Dance Texture, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from oddsock's photostream)