Whenever her book came out a friend of mine mentioned that she was reading Mindy Kaling’s, I guess, memoir?, and I was all, “How is it?” and she was all, “She is the most self-satisfied person in the world,” which I kind of discounted because, Women: Who knows what crazy reasons they choose that day to hate somebody for? But then yesterday I read that profile of her in New York and I was also all, “Oh my God, SMUG,” which then made me think, WOULD YOU FEEL THE SAME WAY ABOUT A MAN? Because men do that shit all the time (although, if bad social science is to be believed, they need to) and I never give it a second thought. Which is when I did give things a second thought: Why am I wasting so much time thinking about Mindy Kaling? And I am a person who spends most of his day trying to figure out what the people at Huy Fong put in their chili garlic sauce to make it so goddamn addictive (at this point I have narrowed it down to either garlic or chili), so I certainly have plenty of time to spare. At the end of the day, it is still TV, which, I’m sorry, is not Shakespeare, no matter what you tell yourself to justify your investment in that show where Claire Danes plays the crazy chick working for the CIA or whatever. Anyway, Mindy Kaling? It doesn’t matter! Good for her. The first episode of her show seems amusing. It’s nice that Ivy League grads are allowed to run shows in our racist society. Let’s all do our best to be happy with what we’ve got. Also, this is probably right.

“I felt really bad when I saw all the non-coverage this morning.”
 — Yup. That’s an actual comment on the New York Times’ public editor blog today. Meet the one person who felt “really bad” not having 9/11 in her face this morning.

Andrew Rice’s Times mag story on UVA and the firing and unfiring of Teresa Sullivan sheds a bit more light on the BIZARRE STUFF that happened there.

What had the board so worried? In late May, as she prepared to remove Sullivan, Dragas e-mailed a board colleague a link to a Wall Street Journal column, beneath the subject line: “Why we can’t afford to wait.” The article described a joint venture that offers free, open online courses. In the last year, Harvard, Stanford, M.I.T. and other elite schools have moved aggressively into this arena, drawing significant global audiences, if no actual revenue. While many veteran professors roll their eyes at predictions that online learning will transform the structure of universities, to certain segments of the donor community — the Wall Street and Aspen Institute types — higher education looks like another hidebound industry awaiting creative destruction…. This discussion has been influenced by the ideas of Clayton M. Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor and guru of “disruptive innovation,” the concept that established companies are often overtaken by upstart competitors because they are incapable of embracing new technologies.

LOL! It’s true, newspapers, for instance, became so cutting edge and important and financially successful when they started putting everything online for free. Most industries, in fact, become most successful when they start serving people who aren’t already paying customers with a new free product — you know, just like taxis, and food service, and book publishing, and recorded music, and dairy farming, obviously.

Stress is actually good for you. At least today.

“A film review on Friday about ‘The Words’ referred incorrectly to the manuscript of a novel found by the character Rory. It has no title; he decides to call it ‘The Window Tears.’ The review also misidentified the character to whom Rory presents the novel as his own writing. The character is a colleague at the literary agency where he works, not the agency’s ‘chief honcho.’”

Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “Time To Be Clear”

“My mind isn’t a sponge, it’s a parasitic death-starry glob that is big and wet and angry much of the time, feeding on itself and allowing only the choicest and most-vulnerable bits in when its blood sugar gets low.”
 — MTV Hive editor Mike Ayers, “pessimistic cartoonist” Dustin Glick and art director Nicklaus Deyring helped Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy) make this video to accompanying a song from his most recent album, Wolfroy Goes to Town, and the wonderful essay”To Hell With Drawers,” that he wrote for The Poetry Foundation this year. It’s about bunny rabbits. That is all, nothing more. Just nice little bunny rabbits.

So, uh, can you swim?

“Wouldn’t it be tragic if some future expedition were to discover life on Mars only to discover later that it had actually discovered life from Earth?”
 — discusses the disturbing possibility that

, in the event that the Mars Curiosity Rover discovers water or ice, a few of the 250,000 bacterial spores with which human scientists contaminated one of its drill bits could just settle in and set up shop. That’s probably how life started here on Earth, when you think about. Some brainiac alien from the Andromeda Galaxy sneezes on a piece of the shiny tech equipment he’s loading on to a Milky Way Explorer Pod. 3500 million years later, Charlie Sheen has a hit new show.

We’re not gonna make a huge deal out of this, but today is kind of a thing.

F/M/K: A tale of three readings. I made my choice, now you make yours.