So after being on tour, of sorts, I understand riders.

I actually looked at the rider. He was asking for things like having a clean, dry dressing room in close proximity to the stage, couches to sit on, really simple food and beverages for his crew. I've been at some back stage thingies, and the ones I have been to have been pretty simple as well. He's asking for…

I'm a tremendous connoisseur of high quality snark. Absolutely love it. However, I'm thinking that Jack White's open letter was a genuine response to the release of the rider. The attempted pile-on strikes me as a bit excessive. I'm not seeing one-tenth the diva potential of Kanye West in Jack White's reply. No…

I really don't think this would look anywhere near as bad without the crowbarred wisecracks telling me what I'm supposed to think between every paragraph. I'm struggling to find anything wrong with this, and I'm not even a Jack White fan.

Wow, I never thought I'd say this, but — Team White

I propose that we all start referring to commercial fiction written by men as "dick lit." I'm guessing it would take approximately .02 seconds for men across the world to feel outraged.

His work is very pretentious and self-aware. I found it pretty much the usual up-your-own-arse kind of book written by rich white New York males of boringness but other opinions are available. I could forgive all that if he didn't have the gall to call out other authors - female particularly - and slag them off. …

For a woman and a feminist, it's more than a little disturbing that your wholesale dismissal of Chick Lit is so anti-feminist and privileged. It's a legitimate genre read by millions of women, and it's as diverse a genre as any other. To say it "doesn't deserve respect" because it doesn't fulfill YOUR definition of…

Well-stated. But you're prolly a woman, so I'll just put that in the chick-lit category.

Really? I find him a writer of beautiful sentences. So he's good if you go line by line. But if you rear back and look at his characters, it's clear he has no idea about how human beings genuinely behave, especially women. He writes women as if he's posing them for his own pleasure. Now Jennifer Egan. She's the real…

No, but Pamela Anderson deserves as much respect as David Hasselhoff. But he's the more well respected, despite them both acting horribly in the same damn show. And despite the fact that both are also famous for extra videos outside of their body of work. With Ms. Anderson having consensual sex with her husband being…

I think it's important to discuss the racism and sexism that leads to white, middle-aged, upper middle class men getting a disproportionate amount of acclaim and canonization, but we shouldn't confuse the symptoms with the cause. It's primarily the industry's fault, not Eminem's fault, that Eminem gets…

I dunno. I'm a fan of the living well is the best revenge school, but I also think — buckets of money or no — it would get old being treated like poor relations when you and others like you pretty much keep traditional publishing afloat so that the so-called serious authors can also ply their trade.

In Her Shoes was very cathartic for me - as the sibling of a mentally ill person.

Sometimes the "literary" fiction argument confuses me. Like, Shakespeare and Austen were far from literary in their time but people really liked their writing and now they're super literary. So I'm not sure being an airplane read disqualifies you from being great

YES you said this so much better than i just did.

The crucial question to follow should have been "Do you know anyone who has read Jennifer Weiner's books and given you a thoughtful analysis?" Because (Do I even need to point this out?) he's basically saying that the Literary Darling Machine, which refuses to accept books printed with pastel colors on the cover, has…

It isn't in Franzen's power to say what deserves attention or not. I've read his works and find them pretty pedestrian reads, but that is def not how he is reviewed. Really the whole diversity issue is out of his hands, so he should just shut the fuck up about it, as he is not proving himself thoughtful or interesting…

"Formulaic". LOL. Nicholas Sparks anyone? And yet his books still manage to get reviewed.

Here's my actual problem: I LOOOOOVE Franzen's writing and don't really like Weiner's (although her first few books up to and including "Goodnight Nobody" were better than her newer stuff, but...