Next Thursday, March 28th, I’ll be sad to see "The Lizzie Bennet Diaries," a brilliant web series that adapts Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice to a modern-day California setting, come to a close with its 100th episode. Created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, both prolific producers of web-specific content, this series has, lamentably, reached the end of its source material.

Its premise is that Lizzie Bennet, a 24-year-old graduate student in mass communications, starts a video blog as a school project. Providentially, she starts this vlog just as rich med student Bing Lee moves to the neighborhood and starts macking on her sister, and everyone’s lives go bananas. [...]

That a Muslim man, regardless of his fortune, must be in want of a nine-year-old virgin wife.1 That a single man in possession of a good fortune must be queer.2 That a Fallen Woman of good family must, soon or late, descend to whoredom.3 That a single girl in search of mysteries must occasionally be in want of a big damn knife.4

That strippers should not want to show preference for any individual customer— that all things being equal, all men behaving equally crudely, and all billfolds being equally sized, they should want to thrust their mounds underneath the noses of as many patrons as possible [...]

Ooh, you know what opens tomorrow at the Morgan Library? The exhibition of Jane Austen's letters! See you there, yo.

This post is brought to you by got milk? Find out what else is fake at scienceofimitationmilk.com.

When I was little, I had a typewriter my parents got at a garage sale for about three dollars, plus the cost in shoe leather of tracking down a place to buy those awful inky ribbon things. And, being seven or eight, I knew that there was no point in writing my own book, because it wouldn't be any good, so I instead attempted to copy out The Lord of the Rings. I never got more than a third of a chapter in, due to my belief that any typo [...]

We're probably a little late to this, but it's too good not to share: Fran Lebowitz discusses Jane Austen. [Via]

Did Jane Austen die of arsenic poisoning? Was Pablo Neruda given a lethal injection by agents of general Augusto Pinochet? Who put that funny looking shirt on Ronnie Devoe?

A British medical researcher has put forth a new theory on the disease that claimed Jane Austen's life. While previous speculation centered around Addison's disease or lymphoma, "Katherine White of the Addison's Disease Self Help Group has written an article for the British Medical Journal's Medical Humanities magazine in which she says that Austen probably died of tuberculosis caught from cattle." This postulation is actually borne out if one reads letters Austen sent to her family at the time, as well as the original ending of Sense and Sensibility, which was changed because it was thought to be too bleak.