If you read one thing this weekend, make it Rachel Rabbit White’s ‘I made out with a pick-up artist and then interviewed him’:

Dylan was a DJ with asymmetrical hair and over-sized glasses. I had the same hair with confetti crosses and rhinestones glued to my face, so it wasn’t so weird that our mouths collided in a club. What was weird was learning that this kid  I’d made out with a few times was on a reality TV show…about the “art” of picking up women. (Rabbit Write)

Shed your weight problem here. What do you think of this advertisement? (Fuck Yeah Advertising!)

Ashley Mears on the invisible labour of modeling:

Success in any culture industry is a mix of both hard work and the luck of being the “right” contender at the right moment, which is somewhat arbitrarily decided in any given fashion season. Saying that success is “all in the genes” renders the “look” into a natural state of being, when like all culture industries, modeling is a complex social production. (Jezebel)

Find out what happens to London’s old tube stations. (Londonist)

Spoiler alert: Loved Franzen’s Freedom? You’ll probably also love Allegra Goodman’s The Cookbook Collector. So why did one get so much more press than the other? (The Millions)

Do you feel scared to do your creative work sometimes? You’re not alone. (Becky Hunter)

This one is the kind of fascinating which can only be fully demonstrated with an image. Find out the etymological origins of the names of every country (and ocean) in the world. (Mediaite)

Who’s afraid of radical feminism? (The Guardian)

“Skinny Pepsi” and the problem with diet food:

Big Food and its advertisers trot out the usual “Ooh, this is healthy and will make you fit and skinny” cover story, but concern-trolling about a woman’s health is merely part of the marketing. It’s especially ridiculous in light of the fact that those yogurts and chocolatey cereal are created in labs from over-processed grains and lots of added starch, sugars, artificial flavors and sweeteners. They’re not healthy. They’re hardly even food. (The Pursuit of Harpiness)

How to deal when your life is in shambles. (Yes and Yes)

Check out Leah Dieterich’s thank you notes to her favourite authors. (For Absolute Beginners)

Check out Amsterdam’s new fur-free fashion exhibition. (Lost At E Minor)

Is “feminism” a conservative word?:

Afterwards I spoke to Greer to get her thoughts on it all. “Feminism?” she queried. “Oh it’s such an old-fashioned word anyway.” Cox and Summers went one step further, describing the word as both traditionalist and conservative.

“To be honest, I am not - and never have been - hung up on the word ‘feminism’,” says Summers. ”I never used it when I was young because feminism was seen as very conservative and backward-looking then. Today’s young women have a similarly disdainful attitude. They see feminism as old-fashioned - just as we did when we were the same age. To me, what matters is that women (and men) support women’s equality and all that is needed to achieve that. It’s what we think and how we act that really matters.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

No chicks, no excuses: an awesome new Australian speakers bureau for female speakers. (Howling Clementine)

Six fiction writing techniques to improve your blog. (Problogger)

The over-examined life: on life bloggers, life loggers, and famous diarists:

While I like biographies and sometimes enjoy books of correspondence (especially with senders brilliant and troubled like Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan,) diaries never really appeal to me as literature. If the point is unpack, unburden, unforget… how can anyone else quite understand? Usually when a diary is publishable, there seems a layer of artifice to it, a stagecraft to the self-examination. Now, Franz Kafka’s journal is as meandering and strange as you’d hope, but I found Susan Sontag’s diaries somewhat unpleasant to encounter. So composed and self-aware, so clearly never for her eyes only, at times she even alludes to her hope that someone else might sneak a peak. (Tomorrow Museum)

The ballad of the female “self-promoter”. (Jezebel)

Beauty is not a spectrum. (Eat The Damn Cake)