It's Frankenstein's 198th birthday: To celebrate, consider reading "In Defense of Monsters" by Rebecca Brown from 2013: "At first, the creature wants to love and be loved by his 'father.' But when his 'father' sees what he's created, he is repulsed. He runs away 'to avoid the wretch.' Abandoning what he brought forth from pride. Why bring to life a thing you will reject? Why make a thing, belt it, then run out on it? Why make a thing that hates itself? A thing that wishes it was not alive? Who is flawed in this scenario? Whose awful fault is that?" What Brown doesn't mention in that essay, but said in her 2013 essay/performance Monstrous at the Northwest Film Forum, was that teenage Mary Shelley had some deeply personal reasons to be ambivalent about creating—Mary accidentally killed her famous mother just by being born and had had a traumatic, near-death miscarriage of her own. The horror of creation was hot in her head when she wrote that novel on this day 198 years ago.

Pick-up Artists, Meet bell hooks: If you're ever in a situation where someone wants you to hand over your phone number and you really, really don't want that person to have your phone number, you should give out the bell hooks hotline number: (669) 221-6251. The geniuses behind the phone number explain:

when the person calls, an automatically-generated quotation from feminist writer bell hooks will respond for you.

The number is also supposed to respond to texts, but at press time a text sent to the number (the full content of the text is as follows: "Sup") has not received a reply.

Photographer Famous for Sleazy Photos Is a Sleaze: If you haven't read this New York profile of sleazebucket celebrity photographer Terry Richardson yet, you should drop everything and check it out:

Richardson is also famous for another reason: He has cultivated a reputation of being a professional debauchee, a proud pervert who has, outside his commercial work, produced a series of extremely explicit images—often including himself naked and erect—that many find pornographic and misogynistic, and which can make viewers distinctly uncomfortable. In recent years, a number of the models in those images have indicated that they, too, weren’t altogether comfortable, filing lawsuits and, increasingly, speaking up in essays and interviews.

Uh, OK: New Balance is going to release special author-themed sneakers. You can take a closer look at them on the Sneaker News site.

Death and Ultra Violet: One of Andy Warhol's superstars died on Saturday.

See You in the Funny Pages: We're jealous of this one. The San Francisco Weekly put out an all-comics issue. As in, everything was comics: The news, the reader letters, the calendars, and Savage Love. If you can't find a physical copy of the SF Weekly, you can read the issue online here.

"I preferred the ending of The Sopranos to the ending of Breaking Bad." Speaking of comics, here's an interview with comics artist Adrian Tomine.