-It’s only been out a week, but there’s been awesome coverage of “Scattered Along the River of Heaven”: Lois Tilton on Locus Online marked it as Recommended, and noted it as a “good story” in her semi-monthly summary (my first time ever Lois Tilton likes something of mine…). Ken Liu posted a few thoughts on it here; John M. Kerr liked it ; starlady38 referred to it as “painfully good” (and reviewed Harbinger of the Storm, too!); the World SF blog showcased it; VarietySF wondered if it was part of a new trend of “helpful” invasive swarms of bots; and various people on twitter (Alex Dally McFarlane, Joyce Chng, Fred Warren, Rochita Loenen-Ruiz…) pointed to it. Wow. Never quite had so much press for one story.
-Fatema Mernissi on “Size six: The Western women’s harem”:

Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old

(I think what Mernissi means here is “time and slenderness”, because “time and light” makes no sense in the context of the article)
(via ideealisme Don’t agree with everything, but it’s an interesting analysis of current standards of beauty)
-Kate Elliott on “Re-reading and the Experience of Narrative”: interesting thoughts on how the sense of urgency can shape certain modern narratives; and on how re-reading can parallel life:

In life, we come back to the same events or choices, back to similar things, and we can never see them in exactly the way we saw them the first time, or the last but one time, when we encountered a similar moment or that same issue.

-Ari Marmell on “The Shared DNA of Steampunk and Epic Fantasy”. Worth munching on, though I’m not entirely sure I buy the premise in its entirety (the basic nostalgia drive is bang-on, but the parallels that are drawn feel a little too neat. Haven’t had time to think about this properly yet).
-And a random food link: thịt heo kho trứng (caramelised/braised pork with eggs) in steamed buns, from Blue Apocalypse. Yum.