Jizo statues at Zōjō-ji Temple in Tokyo. Photo: Jakub Hałun

• Mainly writers are paid for cleaning your gutters, vacuuming under the seats in your car, and standing in line for you at the DMV. But sometimes, for reasons that few understand and even fewer are willing to discuss on the record, writers are paid to write. A new book, Scratch, collects essays about this legendary experience. Laura Miller thinks it’s in more urgent need of demystification than anything else in the profession: “Few connections are more mysterious than the one between writing books and making money … For authors, money, however obscurely, is always entangled with legitimacy because writers have for centuries equated publication with professional and artistic anointment. Anyone can call themselves ‘a writer,’ but to be published (by somebody other than yourself) is to be a real writer. It’s indeed a significant testimonial when someone else wants to invest their own money in a writer’s work, so it’s easy to forget that a publisher is actually the writer’s business partner, not a conferrer of literary worth … Publishing isn’t literature: Literature is literature. Publishing is a separate, if related enterprise.”

• Mark Greif aspires to join the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau—examining the reasons behind our self-presentation and directing readers toward a moral good. Jon Baskin writes of the “new unfreedom” that Greif beliefs has captured us: “In the more privileged parts of the developed West, we have largely emancipated ourselves from biological necessities (hunger, disease) and even from moral ones (God, the old taboos), but, perplexed by our unprecedented liberty, we have fabricated a new set of necessities to take their place. We no longer suffer from food scarcity, so we devise a baroque maze of taboos regarding what we can consume. We no longer prohibit any one form of sex, and yet, in making sex an all-important component of our self-esteem, we bow down to a new set of norms (namely, that we should always want sex, and with different partners) nearly as coercive as the old. We squander our ‘free time,’ a relatively recent gift of history, at the gym, in ridiculous outfits, on primitive machines, in order that we may have a little more free time to spend in a future that perpetually recedes.”

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