Mallory is gone this week, but I’m here to protect you from the whims of Jaya and Matt in her absence. Please do not make them feel sad by saying “I miss Maaaaallory” too much, but also do not bother emailing her to tell her, because she has set up a bounce-back message that says “nope, try again in a week if you think it’s important.”
Okay, the MOST important link today, although they are all important in their own way, is Saeed Jones’ interview with Laverne Cox for Buzzfeed:
When Laverne Cox talks about trans women of color, she calls them her “sisters.” “I want to say their names because they’re my sisters and I love them,” she tells me. The dissonance between her personal success and what she calls “a state of emergency for trans people” is something Cox is still figuring out. In what she considers one of the best professional years of her life, Cox has seen two of her sisters die. She laughs a bit to herself as she shares stories about them. It’s a hard-earned kind of laughter, the sound of a woman who knows that breaking through is the only option.
Guys, you all realize that the guy who wrote The Horse Whisperer nearly killed himself and his family with deadly mushrooms, right? Do not ever eat foraged mushrooms on someone else’s say-so. Like, I’m sure they taste amazing, but our official Toast Stance is “farm to supermarket to table” when it comes to fungi.
Where is the plane?
The Hairpin had a GREAT conversation with the perfect Jamelle Bouie!
Do you get exhausted by playing a role in this dialogue?
I do, certainly. This happens in two ways, two reasons. Someone will say or do something stupid, and you could write about it but you don’t—it’s not worth your time.
The other way is Twitter-centered. Sometimes things go apeshit on Twitter, like you’ll be deluged with really angry tweets from right-wing racist Twitter, people who think you’re history’s greatest monster—a couple of months ago, one dude created a bunch of accounts just to tweet racist things at me. That stuff is too ridiculous to annoy me.
But other times—last summer, in an incident that I think is now vaguely infamous, a writer I won’t name sort of opened up a salvo of anger at me after I said something to her about something she tweeted, and much of it was based on explicit misrepresentation of what I’d said, and she was accusing me of being a racist and a misogynist and that I’d be getting my black card revoked for having a white girlfriend. That was a weird day in Twitter.
Go see if any of these events from Women of Letters are coming to your town.
“I, too, am Oxford.”
Star Trek: TNG…the haikus.
Uh, again, here’s My Wonderful Drag Prom.
Our own John Leavitt sent me this, saying “IT’S A MEGACUT OF WITCHES SET TO EARTHA KITT”:
