Preparing to take down an author. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

• It’s that time again: the annual Hatchet Job of the Year is coming, and critics have honed their wits all year in anticipation. On the shortlist you’ll find eviscerations of John le Carré, Donna Tartt, and Morrissey, among others.
• While we’re doing things we do every year, let’s mourn the slow disappearance of successful midlist authors.
• When did it become popular to call people losers? Google knows.
• At the MLA conference—regularly touted, no doubt, as the sexiest gathering in academe—a titillating ad for a “mock-interview make-out session” has everyone buzzing and, with luck, making out.
• “I sometimes think of social media as being like the terrible apparatus at the center of Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony.’”