1. In the light of the moon a little egg lay on a leaf. One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar. He was alone, except for his hunger, and his hunger was a writhing and a hissing thing. He started to look for some food. On Monday he ate through one apple, but he was still hungry. On Tuesday he…

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  2. Previous entries in the DUI series can be found here.  Sara knew what she was doing. “The booze is gonna react with my pills, I bet,” she said in the passenger seat during the journey from Madison to Poynette. Her nonchalant spirit sparked a rumble of excitement behind my heart. This was my first and only high school teenage Can’t Hardly Wait house party. We were gonna get “WOO WOO FUCKINGGGGGGGG WASTED.”…

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  3. September 1st

    Start work tomorrow! E-mailed Olivia yesterday just to make sure everything was set. Hi Olivia! Hope your weekend is going good! Looking forward to joining the P & A team. Just wanted to confirm that my start date is tomorrow—I imagine you want me in by 9? And it’s business casual, right? Thanks!! No, 8. -O That sounds like she’s mad, right? Ugh, she hates me already. I don’t know what to wear…

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  4. Look, here's the deal. Someone has already hooked your pregnant friend up with the usual suspects. Where the Wild Things Are? The Runaway Bunny? She's got one in every room of her house. Those are some solid books! But let's come up with some gift ideas that will make you look like you know how to interact with a small, soft-skulled creature with ease. Or, you know, if you HAVE a baby or…

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  5. "There are a lot of characters that we are inspired by in The Bible. There are a lot of characters that play into coming in and out of the apocalypse — The Seven Signs, what's our version of that and who can we adapt that that's not so obvious? Even the population of Sleepy Hollow is 144,000 — that's a number from the Bible. There are a lot of details from the Bible, but we're not trying to do the…

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  6. Still not worth it: People who regularly eat nuts appear to live longer, according to the largest study of its kind. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, suggested the greatest benefit was in those munching on a daily portion. An alternate study has found results that lead to a different conclusion: Once ingested, an almond will absorb roughly 1000% of the natural moisture found in the human mouth. Do…

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  7. Doris Lessing, and not saying thank you: For Lessing the problem was never the ideas behind feminism; it was the way the name pinned her in place, attached expectations of redemption and deliverance to her work that I think she was never quite sure it could actually bring about. And Doris Lessing, whatever else she was, was not a woman who liked expectations.

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    Roxane Gay, on why

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  8. Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes. An all-woman team of spelunking scientists has retrieved hundreds of fossils from a 100-foot-deep (30-meter-deep) cave in South Africa — including the cranium from what appears to be a prehistoric humanlike creature. Yes. Yes. Of course that is what today needed; an entirely female team of cavers to fling themselves into the steaming, black corners of the earth and retrieve the bones of our ancestors, clawing…

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  9. Too excited to trust that this will happen and be awesome, because MONTY PYTHON and all my emotions and desires. Also potentially reuniting: Outkast.

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    During my days in the exciting, fast-paced world of quantitative hedge funding, an industry whose compensatory excesses made launching this indie feminist nerd site possible, my firm hired John Cleese to entertain and then drink with us (he prepared jokes SPECIFICALLY for a quant-shop audience, because…

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  10. It was still dark out when he got the news. He was alone in his room, and then suddenly, he was not. A slender red-haired woman who had appeared at his side whispered the words, "It's you, Adam. People has chosen you," then quickly and gracefully flung herself out the window. He could hear screams drifting up from the street. He wiped his eyes. "It's me." A grin broke out across his face, and…

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  11. The first time I consciously realized that there was something unique about how we speak on the Internet was when a friend’s post popped up on my newsfeed. It was a link to something awesome and it was captioned: “I have lost all ability to can.” I’ll be honest. I don’t remember what the link was. It's statistically likely that it was either a wittily executed “How the Hetero Capitalist Able-Bodied White Patriarchy Ruined the…

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  12. just got here
    saving you a table

    hey
    you on your way?

    hey
    are you coming?
    You forget what you want to remember
    and you remember what you want to forget

    look
    it's fine if you can't make it
    it's just people are starting to head home
    but if you're on your way
    Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave
    oh

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  13. Previously: bad sex in romance novels. In romance novels, it seems easier for a person of colour to get a date with a were-lion than with a non-shifting human being. I guess if a reader is down with leonine loving, then stories featuring sex with Asian people aren’t so scary. Here’s the crux: As Alyssa Cole notes in the September, 2013, RT Book Reviews, mainstream romance novels featuring non-Caucasian characters generally do not sell…

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  14. Shalom Japan, 310 S. 4th St. [Grabs you by the lapels] "Listen, mister, you've gotta -- well, well sit down, here, now, make yourself comfortable, I've got to tell you something -- listen, there's this little place in New York City, name of Shalom Japan -- can you beat that? Shalom Japan -- and it's just the most terrific little piece of something you've ever seen. This restaurant -- it was started by a swell Jewish fella and a…

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  15. If you do not like the things we approve of, we suggest you revisit your stance. You are still allowed to like and/or engage in the things we dis-approve of, you are just wrong. Previous installments can be found here. – Eds. The Toast Approves of the Following Things: 1. Key & Peele 2. Thanksgiving starches, esp. stuffing 3. Books about fictional characters, a la Havisham or Grendel 4. Cheeseburgers 5. The episode of Archer where…

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