Go read the first letter in this Dear Prudie column and then come back and discuss. No, hang on, we can discuss any of the letters, this is AMERICA. Or these!
The actor who portrayed a certain recently-deceased character on Scandal has written about it for Buzzfeed, and it’s GLORIOUS:
I soon moved into BARGAINING…with a series of emails to Shonda and the writers: “What if [redacted] was just injured? Kidnapped by aliens and dropped in the woods, left to gnaw on his restraints and drink his own urine till he claws his way back to the White House on hands and knees? Too much? Oh! [redacted] could have a twin! Yes?? Hello?”
A reader pointed me towards a cool trans* chestfeeding blog, Milk Junkies.
O, frabjous day!
Laurie Colwin ALWAYS, Laurie Colwin FOREVER:
Acolytes like Ms. Stein and Ms. Gould don’t merely read Laurie Colwin. They revisit her passages over and over again, and develop a guardian-angel-style attachment to her. When Ms. Reichl arrived at Gourmet as editor in chief, in 1999, she discovered in her office a cache of about 400 letters from mourning fans who had written to the magazine after Ms. Colwin’s death. Ms. Reichl’s “very first act” as editor, she said, was to have the letters messengered over to Colwin’s husband, Juris Jurjevics, a founder of the Soho Press publishing company who lives these days in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Mallory and I are wondering what the absolute apex of Young Leonardo DiCaprio’s beauty was. Please insert images into the comments to support your claims. If you are selecting a picture of him after the age of 23, you are wrong. He was like an orchid that lives only for a day.
Jamilah Lemieux herself, on #IStandWithJamilah.
Sady Doyle has things to say about the HIMYM finale (I didn’t see it, but I think it would be an honor and a privilege to die and give my husband to Cobie Smulders):
The ideal role for a woman, according to How I Met Your Mother, is as a wife, a mother, a corpse, an anonymous conquest who provides babies, an infant who can’t talk back when an avowed misogynist makes her the latest woman responsible for “changing him forever,” or— most importantly—an ultimately passive goal for some guy to win.
Anne Helen Petersen on the visibility of celebrity labor:
Recent and historical examples suggest that the most successful celebrities fall on one of two opposing ends of the labor spectrum: they either make their labor incredibly visible, effectively inviting us to respect it and the celebrity apparatus more broadly, or else they efface it entirely, thereby contributing to the illusion of charisma as a natural, God-given trait. One extreme emphasizes the ways in which stars are “just like us” (working, tired, hustling); the other suggests they’re nothing like us at all (naturally blessed).
Did you miss Mallory’s post about her book? Read it either way.
TA-NEHISI COATES, people:
I think now, four years after watching that video, and having read A History of White People, that I am a writer. And that is not a hustle. And this is not my “in” to get on Meet The Press, to become an activist, to get my life-coach game on. I don’t need anymore platforms. I am here to see things as clearly as I can, and then name them. Sometimes what I see is gorgeous. And then sometimes what I see is ugly. And sometimes my sight fails me. But what I write can never be dictated by anyone’s need to feel warm and fuzzy inside.
