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RIP, Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here is a wonderful Paris Review interview.


I will click on ANYTHING about Action Park, New Jersey’s best/worst dangerous amusement park, and this one has video.

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Oscar Pistorius is an abusive murderer, so this piece, for me, is just an explanation of why some people in South Africa might believe his cover story, which is that he is a paranoid, trigger-happy, irrational loon who is psychologically obsessed with being attacked by black people to the point where he wouldn’t do a quick pat of the bedclothes next to him to locate his girlfriend, and not an abusive murderer.


On growing up without gendered pronouns:

Whenever anyone talked about me, they said kanya, siya, niya, pronouns that did not identify me as belonging to either the longhairs or the shorthairs, the skirtwearers or the pantswearers. I was not a son but a child, not a nephew but a nephew-equivalent whose gender was unspecified.


Sydette Harry on racist friends-of-friends:

No more parties and events where only you feel uncomfortable. If they tell a racist joke, don’t laugh. Make them explain their racism—call them on it. Do not placate the room. If that doesn’t work, keep mad money or the car keys with you. If it gets unbearable, leave and tell them why. Do whatever you feel but make sure that the price of a good evening is no longer your discomfort. Loudly or silently prioritize YOUR feelings.

This is practice for you to get used to knowing what that feels like. Because whatever happens with your partner and Douchebag McRacist, you need to know what it feels like when someone puts your feelings about your culture first. Let that person be you.


Fake Geek Guys: A Message to Men About Sexual Harassment:

“I will find you. I will hurt you. I will physically violate you… for being wrong about Spider-Man.”

Can you imagine, gentlemen, receiving that threat from a potentially dangerous man whose identity you have no hope of discovering but who knows your name, what city you live in, what you look like and where you work?

Now imagine receiving messages like that from men so frequently that you’re no longer bothered by it.

Now understand how f*cked up it is that you’re no longer bothered by it; that you’re no longer bothered by men’s anonymous threats of brutal sexual violence, because they’ve become just as common as a train not arriving on time.


Molly Minturn put this Charlotte Gordon poem on Facebook, and I was BREATHLESS:

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Here is the trailer for season two of Orange is the New Black:


EVERY WORD A DELIGHT:

Aspirin. It’s inevitable.

When asked what medicine they’d want most if they lived in the eighteenth century, the visitors will struggle in silence for few moments. Then, someone will offer, “Aspirin?” Sometimes it’s delivered with a note of authority, on the mistaken notion that aspirin is derived from Native American remedies: “Aspirin.” I modulate my answer depending on the tone of the question. If the mood feels right, especially if the speaker answers with a note of condescension, I’ve been known to reply, “Do you know anyone who’s died of a mild headache?”

I work as an interpreter in the apothecary shop at the largest living history museum in the US.


Fuck:

A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”

All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion.


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