When you’re writing for the Toast, do you picture an ideal reader?
A librarian. Like, a fun librarian.
Carrie “The Best Editor Nicole Has Ever Worked With” Frye has written the most incredibly brilliant thing for the Gawker Review of Books about Rebecca and Daphne du Maurier, and you are to sit down right away and bask in it, please and thank you:
Daphne had a few romantic relationships with women as well, although she rejected the term “lesbian.” “… by God and by Christ if anyone should call that sort of love by that unattractive word that begins with “L”, I’d tear their guts out,” she warned in one stormy love letter, whose recipient, being a woman, might have felt she had a right to call the love exactly that. This avoidance gets complicated, and her biographer Margaret Forster writes perceptively about it.
Part of it was surely internalized homophobia, a reluctance to acknowledge herself as that way; something, too, to do with her time period’s narrow conventions of what being a lesbian meant. But also mixed up in there is du Maurier’s recognition of herself as a boy—an identification she only allowed herself to make in her 40s—and a boy isn’t a lesbian. This boy was who Daphne had been as a child; she’d put him away as a teenager (“locked him in a box,” she described it), but he emerged in her writing, she felt, giving it its vim and daring. The male narrator of My Cousin Rachel, for example, was a psychological self-portrait of Daphne in love (and behaving badly). He’s there in The Scapegoat, too, a great novel about a man and his more freewheeling, rakish double. (It’s the other of her books I wish Hitchcock had made a movie of.)
lol the men are losing it bc of lindy west gettin’ that job at gq
Kara Brown on the Shonda Shonda (that is a Yiddish joke I just made.)
Super fascinating read about Gary Hart and how his scandal changed politics/journalism:
The Hart episode is almost universally remembered as a tale of classic hubris. A Kennedy-like figure on a fast track to the presidency defies the media to find anything nonexemplary in his personal life, even as he carries on an affair with a woman half his age and poses for pictures with her, and naturally he gets caught and humiliated. How could he not have known this would happen? How could such a smart guy have been that stupid?
I am very happy to read a compilation of childbirth horror stories, as it happens! Are you all familiar with my own magical birth story? I guess I’m doing it again, bc I have booked my doula for Round Two, but feel like I might bail out sooner this time? I dunno. It was kind of cool but also stupid. We’ll see. OH, and all the gold stars for this lady, buried down in pending comments, who pulled off the best long con I’ve ever seen:
So some back story. I was living on a ship with my husband, who was one of the crew in the engine room, and while I hadn’t planned to get pregnant so quickly after the marriage, we were pretty thrilled. I was due in a week or two and we were discussing baby names, so it was a pretty normal morning. I’d had a spectacularly easy pregnancy so we saw no reason to worry about labor.
Then the worst thing that could ever happen to a ship happens. We hit something. I was in the mess hall having lunch and suddenly everything starts shaking, the lights flicker and we lose power. It later turned out that the hull was intact but that hit felt positively bone-shattering. Except it didn’t shatter my bones, it shattered my water.
A week early, trapped in a mess hall with only emergency lighting, half the people in the room already have minor injuries from falling when the ship was hit, and I go into labor. There’s no way to get off the deck at to the medical bay, because we can’t see for shit in the halls and anyway the power won’t run the elevators. I’m not crawling through a duct in labor, and this far along I probably wouldn’t fit.
I tried to tough it out but with no medication in sight and the only person qualified to deliver was the fucking security douche who once took a first aid class. There he is, desperately consulting his PDA for what to do, and I’m screaming, “JUST CATCH IT, I’M DOING ALL THE WORK HERE.”
And that’s how a motherfucking Klingon got up close and personal with my ladybits.
Jamie and Claire finally fucked.
HOLY CRAP, this dude:
Shavarsh Karapetyan’s rescue mission had lasted longer than 20 minutes when emergency workers told him to stop diving. Anyone else left inside the bus would already be dead. “They said, ‘Don’t kill yourself for nothing,’” Karapetyan recalled. The brothers estimate he dragged 30 to 35 passengers out of the water, several of whom were no longer alive by the time they were placed in the boats.
ESPN did a major piece on what the Ravens and the NFL knew about Ray Rice and when, and how they manipulated that information:
The Ravens also consulted frequently with Rice’s Philadelphia defense attorney, Michael J. Diamondstein, who in early April had obtained a copy of the inside-elevator video and told Cass: “It’s f—ing horrible.” Cass did not request a copy of the video from Diamondstein but instead began urging Rice’s legal team to get Rice accepted into a pretrial intervention program after being told some of the program’s benefits. Among them: It would keep the inside-elevator video from becoming public.
For its part, the NFL — which in other player discipline cases has been able to obtain information that’s been sealed by court order — took an uncharacteristically passive approach when it came to gathering evidence, opening itself up to widespread criticism, allegations of inconsistent approaches to player discipline and questions about whether Goodell gave Rice — the corporate face of the Baltimore franchise — a light punishment as a favor to his good friend Bisciotti. Four sources said Ravens executives, including Bisciotti, Cass and Newsome, urged Goodell and other league executives to give Rice no more than a two-game suspension, and that’s what Goodell did on July 24.
Lovecraftian beauty tips.
My brother sent me this link. I…have nothing to add.
