"Perfectly good at it"

How much does it cost to make a hit song?

(NB not sure how much marketing had to do with it, but this Rihanna song has been played at something near to 100% of all spin classes I've attended in the last year!)

Sleeping with one eye open

Is a weak dollar the best thing for American rock'n'roll?  (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Secrets of style

D. A. Miller, on the perverse relation of style to the marriage plot in Austen's fiction (today I am teaching Jane Austen, or The Secrets of Style): "Though the heroine’s adoption of style may  induce the courtship plot, what brings this plot to fruition—what gets her desire to quicken, too—is a moment of mortification when, the better to acquire the selfhood she had never before wanted, the heroine forsakesstyle; or rather, what is much more demeaning, she flattens it into a merely decorative reminiscence of itself, like a flower pressed into a wedding album."

Also:

A trove of unpublished works by Anthony Burgess.

Phil Hogan interviews Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for the Observer.

"Up to Lexington, 125"

The rock map of Manhattan? (Via Bookforum.)

Surplus footmen

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney lunches (expensively) with Roger Waters for the FT (site registration required).

Miscellanous linkage

Michael Jackson bits from Ta-Nehisi Coates (via The Dizzies), Annalee Newitz, Ed Champion and Phil Nugent. (Also: Martha Southgate's 2006 review of Margo Jefferson's book on Jackson and an interesting interview with Jefferson about the book and its subject.)

Thoroughly unrelated: Reassigned Time explains why it's worth taking longer to write a dissertation if it means laying the foundation for a productive life on the tenure track.