Links of the week, 9/23/2011

This week: Facebook is annoying, Louis C.K. is brilliant, and more.

• Farhad Manjoo is right: Setting privacy considerations aside on the assumption that they’re being handled (ha!), the real problem with Facebook’s plan to ask users to share every single damn thing they read, listen to, or watch is that every single damn thing is not worth sharing.
• A.V. Club published a four-part interview with Louis C.K. on the second season of his incredible (if deeply uncomfortable) show Louis, and this part, about the episode that tackles the friction between him and Dane Cook, is particularly candid and fascinating.
• The buzz and backlash over retro-chic singer Lana Del Rey, who hasn’t even released her first single yet, exists in a tiny, self-important bubble, but it interests me anyway, mainly because I hate the whole slippery concept of “authenticity.” Trying to divine anyone’s “true” self—and whether that contrasts with the self they project—is inherently foolish. All that really matters is what people do. That’s what we can see, and that’s what we should judge. (As for Del Rey, I kind of like her songs, but her videos are poorly edited, pseudo-artsy crap.)
• Everything I know about superheroes I learned from the movies, so I don’t have the background to fairly weigh Julian Sanchez’s marvelously provocative post about the comics’ tendency to make heroes of those who inherit their vast wealth and villains of those who earn theirs. All I know is that parts of it sound like something a Quentin Tarantino character would tell me, which means I love it! (Via Alyssa Rosenberg.)
• For some reason, it makes me sad that people apparently don’t approach Brad Pitt to ask him to hit them as hard he can. I mean, I’m sure Brad appreciates that failing, but it’s a sad waste of wonderfully quotable film.