Thanks to everyone who turned up last night for a stellar event at Austin's Book People! I'm about to head to the airport to fly to Houston, where I'll appearing tonight at 7PM at Brazos Books, before heading to Scottsdale, AZ for appearance at Poisoned Pen (with Brian David Johnson) — Read the rest

Thanks to everyone who's come out for the Walkaway tour so far! Tonight, I'll be appearing at Winnipeg's McNally Robinson bookstore, then it's off to Denver's Tattered Cover, Austin's Book People and Houston's Brazos Bookstore.

My UK publisher, Head of Zeus, has published the official tour schedule for the British tour for Walkaway, with stops in Oxford (with Tim Harford), London (with Laurie Penny), Liverpool (with Chris Pak), Birmingham, and the Hay Literary Festival (with Dr Adam Rutherford). — Read the rest

Dale Beran's been writing about 4chan, /b/ and Anonymous for years, and lurking on their message-boards, and he traces the rise of the self-professed "betas" who embody fragile, toxic masculinity and have been important bellwethers for many internet and real-world phenomena, linking them to Trump as "the loser who won": "Someone who is all brash confidence and then outrageously incompetent at everything he does."

Not since the Reagan era cold war with Russia has apocalyptic awareness been so forefront in the public's mind. Disturbing incidents ranging from nuclear football Facebook selfies to alarming North Korean military activity now accrue weekly. Sometimes hourly. What can one do besides scroll through Twitter before bedtime and let the news populate our nightmares? — Read the rest

Roz Kaveney, Laurie Penny, John Scalzi, and Jo Walton: "Democracy was dead to begin with.

There was no doubt whatsoever about that. The election proclaimed it and the electoral college confirmed it and Trump himself signed off on the note, vaguely annoyed that Clinton had somehow still gotten 2.9 million votes more than he had. — Read the rest

Laurie Penny says we've done enough listening to "real people" — that the working-class whites who deplore racism and were not duped by Trump are done no favors by lumping them in with their neighbors who voted for a confessed rapist and white supremacist who believes in torture and mass deportations.

Laurie Penny's first science fiction book, Everything Belongs to the Future, is available to the public as of today: if you've followed her work, you're probably expecting something scathing, feminist, woke, and smart as hell, and you won't be disappointed -- but you're going to get a lot more, besides.

Doges are done; sneks are so September. What's next? @Hay_Man's Peasant Memes!

Laurie Penny reviews Andi Zeisler's 'We Were Feminists Once' and considers the progressive dilemma of popularity: how do you turn new popularity into change, when the idea of change is so easily turned into an ersatz commercial product?

As a founding editor of Bitch Magazine, which was first published as a zine in 1996, Zeisler understands the fraught relationship between feminism and pop culture.

Laurie Penny's latest, sacrelicious short story on Tor.com, "Your Orisons May Be Recorded," is a hilarious thought experiment about the working conditions for the angels who answer customer service prayers from dissatisfied humans.

It's a good week when we get two new short stories from political science fiction wunderkind Laurie Penny: on Monday, it was The House of Surrender, about a prison in a world without coercion; today it's "The Killing Jar," about the intern to a serial killer employed by an English town council: "Since serial murder was first recognized as one of the English Fine Arts, the trick has always been to keep it original."

Laurie Penny's new science fiction story "The House of Surrender" is a bittersweet little mindbomb about rape (trigger warning), coercion, prison, and what a society without locks would do with the people who hurt others.

The illustrator collaborated with Syrian writer Marwan Hisham (a pseudonym), who sent her mobile-phone photos from Syria that she used as the basis for a striking and moving series of illustrations for a Vanity Fair feature.

Laurie Penny weighs in with an important addition to the discussion about privilege and pain, making the important point that privilege is not the absence of pain, discrimination or hellish conditions — but that doesn't mean that the nerds who suffered through school bullying are without it.

Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution explains "Social Justice Warriors" and why they're winning.

Laurie Penny writes, "What do you give your single friends and ex-partners on Valentine's day?

Cult online journal The New Inquiry has released a product line to help them keep on paying their writers and staff. Their exclusive misandrist totebag, with a design by Imp Kerr, is aimed at all those who want to smash the romantic industrial complex in style." — Read the rest

Two members of Pussy Riot have travelled to London under a cloak of secrecy to speak to the press about the plight of their bandmates in Russian labor camps. Laurie Penny was one of the reporters who got to interview them in a small, no-photos press conference:

These girls are young.

American expat Leigh Alexander has had her first Eurovision party as an embedded foreigner in London. It went well.

"Indifferent cats in amateur porn" a tumblr for people who want to see cats ignoring people who are having sex. NSFW, unless you work at the indifferent cat in a sexual situation factory.

Indifferent cats in amateur porn

(via Laurie Penny)