“What people say about the patriarchy hurting men is true. Men benefit from it, but it also hurts them.”

Anelise Chen’s latest mollusk column, the painful search for Asian American identity, “anti-blah” writing and more are featured in this week’s link roundup.

What the marginalization of Asian Americans in an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery says about the appropriation of “cool.”

Kitamura chats with Hermione Hoby about her new novel, a “collage of colonialism.”