Primrose Road

An essay in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine: "In Defense of Lurking," by Virginia Heffernan.

Heffernan praises the practice of wandering from message board to message board without posting (or worrying about how to compose a post that won't be attacked as newbielike, trollish, or uninformed), of "read[ing] without writing; tak[ing] without giving." Americans are wracked with guilt over leisure time; we have to reconfigure everything as work, she writes, to the point that even readers of novels have to convince themselves that they're learning something, that they're somehow being productive.

I'd write more, but I'm exhausted from the second-qualifying-exam crunch. To paraphrase a friend and fellow graduate student, some days blogging feels too much like homework.

Let's go a-flaneuring through the Interweb of Unproductivity.