The Easiest Way to Improve Your Writing: Read the Work of First-Rate Writers

1. Here’s an example from last weekend’s Times magazine:

“Paying to simulate backbreaking labor under the watchful eye of a demanding authority figure seems to be a common desire these days. When I type ‘sledgehammer’ into Google later that day, the first suggestion is ‘sledgehammer workout,’ a search term that pours forth half a dozen enthusiastic re-enactments of life on a steel-driving chain gang. . . .

“CrossFitters represent just one wave of a fitness sea change, in which well-to-do Americans abandon easy, convenient forms of exercise in favor of workouts grueling enough to resemble a kind of physical atonement. For the most privileged among us, freedom seems to feel oppressive, and oppression feels like freedom. There’s also a very American fixation on extremes at play: more is always better. If you’re running just four miles a day and doing a few pull-ups, you’re a wimp compared with the buff dude who’s ready for an appearance on American Ninja Warrior. It’s hard not to feel awe when you watch a middle-aged woman in a Never Quit T-shirt clean-and-jerk huge weights. And it’s hardly a stretch to go from lifting a 35-pound kettlebell to wondering why you can’t run half a mile with it, especially when a CrossFit coach is right there, urging you to ‘crush it.’ Common wisdom seems to dictate that it’s not enough to look good and feel good if you’re not prepared to lift a Mini Cooper off an injured stranger.

“The whole notion of pushing your physical limits—popularized by early Nike ads, Navy SEAL mythos and Lance Armstrong’s cult of personality—has attained a religiosity that’s as passionate as it is pervasive. The ‘extreme’ version of anything is now widely assumed to be an improvement on the original rather than a perverse amplification of it. And as with most of sports culture, there is no gray area. You win or you lose. You leave it all on the floor or you shamefully skulk off the floor with extra gas in your tank.

—Heather Havrilesky

2. And from Nerve.com:

“There are 206.3 million blogs on Tumblr. About 11.4% of the top 200,000 are teeming with porn, adult-oriented videos, and otherwise NSFW content. The streams are filled with limbs, enterings, openings, and finishings—noted, liked, reblogged. It’s a moving menagerie of couples grinding in grainy GIFs, penetrating in JPGs, and topped off by third party-hosted videos replete with the moans and breathy articulations pictures simply don’t capture. Their bed is always open for the curious passersby; all you need to do is click.”

—Kate Hakala