Rollins's Review, January 14

On my favorite Substack columns this week

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Coming back around

W. McCrae

, an incredible writer and a friend of this blog, turned me onto R. G. Miga. What Miga’s saying may be novel to my readers, but it’s something anyone who’s ever worked in publishing knows—the instituitions in charge of bringing stories to readers have been looted and repurposed, and neither readers nor authors can rely on publishers to do what has historically been their job. The role of Substack and KDP in bringing good fiction to market is both a personal and professional interest of mine, and I’m excited to see more from Miga.

Critical Social Justice in the Era of Large Language Models

I’ve boosted Ives Parr of Parrhesia before, for good reason—he’s smoking the good stuff. He makes the point that A.I. gibberish is more or less indistinguishable from actual Critical Social Justice “scholarship” (which is funded by your tax dollars). I’d take that a step further and suggest that given that what he’s saying does appear to be the case, we might as well just have the robots do the CSJ work and cut out the middleman. Give it a read.

“The Ones Who Build Will Have Names”

Brian Chau is one of the smartest people on Substack. He makes the point that pseudonymity/anonymity works against transparency, and transparency leads to social and professional rewards.

Postcards From Barsoom

and I batted this idea around in July, and I think they’ve both got good points. Personally, I write under the most casual of pen names, and prefer my pseud in social situations, but that’s mostly because I think “Jay Rollins” sounds cool.

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Symbolism All the Way Down

I’m in an Andrew-Tate-bashing mood lately, and so are my friends. Harrison Koehli’s take on the matter is, as always, worth reading. Harrison, for those of you unfamiliar with his work, is The Guy on the psychological and philosophical underpinnings of pathological systems, and he puts Tate in that context here, pointing out that it’s the deconstruction and destruction of traditional social guideposts that got us to a place where Tate would ever by taken seriously by anyone.

Low Effort 1/13/23: Nosegay

Guttermouth of The Gutter continues to put no effort whatsoever into building one of the most hilarious salons on Substack in her comments section.

SMH. So fucking lazy.

Priests and warriors

Closing out the week, I will never not upvote intriguing explications of historical social roles. Lorenzo Warby has a banger on the subject that I will not spoil; it’s short and excellent.

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1. Social pro tip: If you want to put your best foot forward with someone who uses a professional alias, such as an author or an actor, keep in mind that people generally prefer that others call them by whatever name they give when they introduce themselves.