These are heavy. Read something lighter.

Sure, there’s a lot of weird shit on the Internet, but there’s also a lot of really fantastic reading accessible to you.  This week, two excellent works involving Columbia have been put on Longreads’ Top 5 Longreads of the Week.  First, Columbia Magazine put out a fascinating story about Lucien Carr, the man who essentially brought Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs together and set the path for the Beat scene…by murdering a man in Riverside Park after meeting up at the West End — now Havana Central.  (Speaking of Havana/West End, if you haven’t checked out the Blue & White’s article about it, you should.)  Carr and the murder is the subject of the upcoming film Kill Your Darlings — remember when?  Read here.

Meanwhile, over at the New Yorker, check out Simon Rich’s Sell Out, a four-part fiction series about Herschel Rich, a Jewish immigrant to Brooklyn preserved in a vat of chemicals for a hundred years who meets his hipster great-great-grandson and competes with him to have success.  In the final part of the series, Herschel expands his pickle stand by hiring…interns! from Columbia!

“You cannot murder interns, but other than that, they are the same as mules. You can rob them, abuse them, debase them. There are no limits. When a man agrees to be intern, he is saying, ‘I am no longer human being with rights, I am like dog or monkey. Use me for labor until my body breaks and then consume all of my meats.’

I would sooner die than serve as intern. But for students of Columbia University, it is very popular. Within one day, a hundred men and women send me résumés in the hope that I will choose them as my slaves.”

Among the applicants is a former Spec editor.  Read through the rest of the series and see if she gets the job.

A sad reality via Shutterstock