We all owe Rebecca Solnit one:
JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of “mansplaining”? Your now-famous essay– which really gave women language to talk about the condescending interactions they’ve had with men – certainly gave birth to the term, but you write in the book that you didn’t actually make up the word.
REBECCA SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn’t have language for.
The black market for dinosaurs (it makes more sense this way, but at first I thought the dinosaurs were swapping ration books for nylons and stuff):
Prokopi’s cooperation with authorities has led to the recovery and repatriation of not only the T. bataar but also other Mongolian fossils—enough to populate a new dinosaur museum in Ulaanbaatar. In court on Tuesday, Bell reported that “over eighteen largely complete, if not fully prepped, dinosaur fossils will be returned as a result, indirectly or directly, of Mr. Prokopi’s information, to Mongolia, a country which is not only enthusiastic about the possibility of dinosaur tourism based solely on the haul from this case but which badly seems to need it.” The returned specimens included “a second Tyrannosaurus skeleton; a dinosaur called an oviraptor, which is an egg-eating thing,” Bell said. “I think a number of them stampeded in the 1996 movie ‘Jurassic Park.’ It might have been 1992. I was young and awestruck in any event, Your Honor.”
“I missed the movie,” the judge said. “Maybe I should go back to see it.”
“Every now and then it airs on TNT.”
How the US is getting the science of sun exposure wrong, and what they could learn from Australia.
A really long article on sea monsters! FIST-PUMP!
I can honestly say I understand more about (non-menstrual) cramping now:
So why have the scientific myths about dehydration and cramping proved so durable? Partly, it’s because so much of the science surrounding exercise and hydration has been underwritten by Gatorade, which obviously has an interest in pushing the notion of dehydration as a performance killer and hydration as the silver bullet. (In their book The Runner’s Body, Tucker and co-author Jonathan Douglas mention one fear-mongering study that suggests that “dehydration of 2 percent causes performance to decline by up to 20 percent.”)
This piece about the local journalists and photographers covering the Sandy Hook tragedy is beautiful and difficult:
At the firehouse, which is three hundred and fifty yards from the school, Hicks’s colleagues moved seven fire trucks from the garage, so that the school’s survivors could be counted in the empty bays. On her way there, Hicks spotted the seven-year-old son of another firefighter walking along the side of the road with his class. He asked her if there had been a wild animal in the building. “Yes, honey,” she said. As the boy’s class continued to the firehouse, she heard the children whispering to one another down the line: a wild animal, a wild animal, a wild animal.
I hesitated to link to the Nick Denton Vows column, bc it’s such inside-baseball-NYC-new-media-circle-jerkery, but it is really going for a “what are these things called ee-moash-ons?” vibe which is usually found in, like, Sherlock-hugging-Watson scenes, so. Worth a look:
In his vow, Mr. Denton said, “I was always expected to be successful, but I never really believed I would be happy.” Recalling an earlier era when it was thought that gay men led lonely, childless lives, he pronounced, “I want to make my own family with you.”
Mr. Washington told Mr. Denton, “You saved my life and then you changed my life,” and brought the house down after professing, in wildly unprintable language, that there was no one quite like him.
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