Tell me you read the story about the hermit:
Knight thought for a bit, then asked when the Chernobyl nuclear-plant disaster occurred. He had long ago lost the habit of marking time in months or years; this was just a news event he happened to remember. The nuclear meltdown took place in 1986, the same year, Knight said, he went to live in the woods. He was 20 years old at the time, not long out of high school. He was now 47, a middle-aged man.
The ways in which white people talk over music.
It’s that time again! Time for me to state a position which I then cloak in an large number of equivocations and enough self-doubt to render it meaningless, which is why I state so few positions:
Oh, man. Okay. You know, it’s not that I don’t think there’s a place for writing pieces like this for large audiences about your minor children (she’s definitely TRYING to make it more about her, less about her kid, which is a good rule of thumb, too), I get that this stuff is valuable to other parents in similar positions (see also: here), the internet has been a wonderful haven for parents trying to figure stuff out, but I think you should strongly consider using a pseudonym if you do. I think it’s a privacy violation. Making up a different first name for your kid is not meaningfully preserving their privacy. I think we’re going to start to see a huge amount of blowback over the next ten years from kids who are reaching adulthood and discovering the details of their life and struggles are all over the internet. There are people who get super upset (which is their right) about “what if some random perv in a different state saw this pic of my daughter in the background of a birthday party in a bathing suit on her Aunt Jean’s facebook” but who will literally broadcast their living, minor child’s private medical information and teenage bitchiness and mental health status for the eventual perusal of friends and lovers and college counselors and potential employers, and there is NO reason you need to splash your byline over that stuff. That’s for you. That is not to create awareness of anything. If you’re in a position, because you’re a big name baller, to be “my kid has x terrible disease the public is under-informed about, please give money for research,” I can get behind that. You can do that without sharing a billion personal details about another human being. You want to have a blog where info about your child’s autistic behaviors and the strain they put on your marriage gets updated daily? USE A PSEUDONYM.
Like, it shouldn’t be illegal, you can do it and be a great parent, and we all find our own comfort zone for what we will and won’t disclose as parents (the old George Carlin bit about people who drive faster than you are maniacs, people who drive slower are morons comes to mind), but…tl;dr: maybe don’t assume your kid will grow up to be a person with an identical relationship to yours towards online transparency. Assume your kid will be, like, at minimum, 25% more conservative about their privacy than you are. There is literally no downside to that.
Yes, I have now been inside every cranny of the Odgen temple. I have many thoughts, and will marshal them in due course. For now, I will merely say that it was very beautiful and they had a team of young women placing paper booties over everyone’s shoes on the way in, and when I saw the carpet in the Sealing Rooms AND the carpet in the Celestial Room, I GOT IT. Nicest material my feet have ever indirectly touched.
super cool profile of Julia Morgan, who was California’s first licensed female architect and her work on (amongst other things) YWCA buildings:
Morgan’s belief that women paying nominal fees to live in these residences should have more than just a bed and basin often put her at odds with the powers that be. Women on the boards of the organizations for which Morgan built “were very much entrenched in the class system,” McNeill says, “so they didn’t feel the need to create entertainment opportunities—that’s just fostering sin. But Morgan had been there” as a young woman and respected the residents’ requests for kitchen and entertaining spaces. So she put in cheap, reliable Pullman kitchens, normally used on trains.
omigod the washington post wrote about my literal favourite part of being alive, which is playing in this league (and getting my ass kicked by anna quindlen earlier this week):
Admittedly, it wasn’t a fair fight. Bushfield is the one-man impresario behind LearnedLeague, a booming, invitation-only, underground trivia competition I joined two years ago. As the creator and host, he is more Alex Trebek than Ken Jennings — who, incidentally, has been a member for three years, along with other trivia fanatics like Carter Bays (co-creator of “How I Met Your Mother”), Daniel Okrent (a historian who invented Rotisserie Baseball and served as the first public editor of The New York Times) and the novelist Anna Quindlen.
NEVER CHEAT (no seriously, how would you live with yourself and what would be the point?) NEVER FORFEIT (forget to play your match.) If you don’t know the answer, get it wrong with FLAIR and VIM. I have only ever referred one player, and he is a towering force in his rundle.
In misandry news, yesterday my husband borrowed Dracarys without asking, set his phone to go straight to voicemail, and made me LATE to the GYM. TO THE GYM. I used my anger to fuel my workout, and am now only fake-mad, but it was TOUCH AND GO for a minute there.
Our own Laura Passin wrote some gorgeous poems.
