Assistant Editor Samantha Pitchel reads everything so you don’t have to. Here are the links she (and we) loved today:

Musician must-read: Lifehacker’s guide to self-releasing music online.

Slate rounds up the best long-form writing on Saturday Night Live.

Spend some time with Sasha Frere-Jones’ discussion of Lana Del Rey and the Internet:

The weirder strain of criticism concerns authenticity. People seem to feel that Del Rey is trying to trick us, though it’s impossible to figure out exactly what that trick would be, as we are dealing with an entertainer and her audience, not a naturally fractious relationship… Surely no equivalent male star would be subject to the same level of examination.

Next, let Maria Bustillos and David Roth catch you up on the Caitlin Flanagan “controversy”:

[H]er last book, To Hell With All That, caused such a ruckus over what was widely perceived as the author's throwback and essentialist anti-feminist ideology. So not content to get people in a stir with Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker appearances, she's written a new one, Girl Land. Even the cover of which is pretty provoking.

Another oft-debated lady writer, Katie Roiphe, defends John Updike’s reputation.

Check nailinghollywood.tumblr.com for manicure inspiration.

Cool stuff: Making fine art out of dirty dishes; Inflatable steel furniture; Lego Moleskine notebooks.

NPR launches Newspoet, a daily news round up written in verse.

In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik’s “The Caging of America” explores the passage of time and the prison industry:

For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world — Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

Episode 130 of podcast Affirmation Nation with Bob Ducca goes “Behind the Podcast” with guest Jason Mantzoukas.

City University in London launches the world’s first crime writing MA course.

Five books that inspire the most tattoos; 25 comics who have taken Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie Pledge.

Bobcat Goldthwait’s new movie, God Bless America, is an intensely dark (and violent) comedy that asks the question, “why have a civilization if we’re no longer interested in being civilized?”:

I want this clip of a deadpan Nicolas Cage covering LMFAO to be my new ringtone:

Or maybe this '90s megamix, played on a melodica: