Talking to #carefreeblackgirls and also talking about Karyn Washington, both on Buzzfeed:
I hadn’t heard of Karyn before then, but I quickly wished I had. She was the founder of For Brown Girls and, later, the #DarkSkinRedLip Project, online movements for black women that fought against colorism — discrimination based on how dark the particular shade of one’s skin is. For Brown Girls had accompanying social media channels and a Tumblr, continuous scrolls of photographs featuring black women of all ages, shades, and sizes. Here were Jet magazine covers circa the ’90s, India Arie, Serena Williams, mothers and daughters pulling wide-tooth combs through one another’s hair, Chimamande Adichie, women holding signs as reminders that “Black Lives Matter,” and so on. “Brown Girls, Receive Love!” read the command on my Chrome tab.
Let us finish our read of Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State together next Tuesday, Sept. 2nd, MY BIRTHDAY. Be there.
SO INTO THIS (the piece, not garbage excuses for humans):
After a “Question Time” appearance in the Midlands, in which Beard argued that recent immigrants were not a burden on the local economy, she was repeatedly vilified on an Internet message board. One user described her as “a vile, spiteful excuse for a woman, who eats too much cabbage and has cheese straws for teeth.” (British comments sections can seem to be haunted by the ghost of Roald Dahl.) Less creatively, another commenter posted a doctored photograph in which an image of a woman’s genitals was superimposed over Beard’s face.
OH ONE MORE BLOCKQUOTE
Colleagues at Cambridge say that she was supportive in a very practical manner. Helen Morales, a classicist who now teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says that while she was a junior colleague at Cambridge she spent a period as a de-facto single parent. “The men’s response was sympathy—some of them had the mommy-track idea,” she says. “Mary did things like go to the supermarket and buy ready meals and stick them in the fridge and give me a gin-and-tonic.” Beard was marked by a reflexive egalitarianism, according to Clare Pettitt, a professor of English literature at King’s College London who was formerly at Newnham. She and Beard worked on a Victorian-studies research project at Cambridge. “In one of our first meetings, we were talking about the Victorians and what they thought,” Pettitt says. “And Mary said, ‘Well, the cleaners didn’t think that.’ ”
there is nothing wrong with this and you can tell people whatever you want:
Q. Pet Euthanasia and Can I Lie About It: I have a 6-year-old dog that has mental problems. (Yes, really.) We have tried everything our vet has recommended over the past few years: training, OTC meds, prescriptions, and treatment by a well-respected certified behavioralist. Unfortunately, she is not getting better. My own health is declining and I love her, but the subject of euthanizing her has come up at home and briefly in the vet’s office. Is this wrong? And if we decide to go down this path, am I obligated to be honest about why she was put down when relatives and friends ask?
There was a SUPER LONG deleted comment I was gonna share with you but to avoid burdening you with a curiously irrelevant defense of Zwarte Piet, let’s just go with the inspiring sign-off: “Don’t be victim – be yourself! And remember, men are a minority….. :) – John.”
the actual reason people are having fewer children is the need to explain backdoor sluts 9 to them:
“Real sex is so much better than that,” I told him. “I enjoy watching the Red Sox, too, but I’d much rather play the game myself. It’s way more enjoyable, and nothing compares to the real thing. Make sense?”
Oscar nodded quickly, almost frantically, then added, “Can we stop talking about this now?”
“Sure, we can stop. Are you embarrassed?” I asked.
“A little,” he said, “But mostly I don’t want to hear how much you like sex.”
Life is a rich tapestry:
By the time I reached Lima and asked what she thought was the key to her success (I still don’t know — she stopped returning my email), I had trolled the spectrum of toy unboxings and found what felt like an interesting clue: Unequivocally, the most popular toy unboxings featured totally insignificant junk. The DisneyCollector video mentioned earlier, the one watched more than 90 million times, is nothing more than the slow denuding of six surprise eggs, the sticker price of $1.99 still visible on one of the plastic shells.
A really interesting piece on an attempt to charge scientists in the wake of an Italian earthquake:
Conventional wisdom tells us that people are terrible with numbers. But as Kent realized back in the 1950s, we are even worse with words. In one study that Fischhoff co-authored, people had trouble understanding a 30-percent chance of rain. It wasn’t the probability that tripped them up, but the word:rain. Are we talking drizzle or downpour? All day or just part of the day? And over what area, exactly? (Communicating forecasts in Italian is extra challenging. In English, we can use forecast instead of prediction to convey uncertainty. In Italian, there is only previsione, which has a strong deterministic connotation.)
Thanks, darth!
Here is a pro-tip for you. I have a very, very dear friend who is one of the most generous, loyal, ride-or-die people you will ever meet, and is also extremely Russian (Russian-Jewish, to be exact) and she does literally the most terrifying thing in the world when someone has wronged her (or, more likely, one of her friends) in a way she deems past all forgiveness.
She smiles serenely, lifts her chin slightly, and says, coolly: “I wish him joy.”
And I have spent MONTHS trying to parse why this is so chilling, and final, and have not yet mastered its workings, but I can only say that it is the truest thing there is in this world. It is like being cast into the Outer Darkness. The next time you see a person who has been wished joy by my friend, you honestly expect to see a shadowy figure with a scythe following them around.
Give it a shot, maybe! And it doesn’t work NEARLY as well if the person to be wished joy has jacked YOU up, it is at its most pure when directed at a person who has wounded your loved one.
