I had roughly 89 feelings while I read this “bail bond queen” piece. The dead first husband! The pictures! The structural inequality and systemic racism! The prison-industrial complex! The opportunity for redemption! That one guy named Hollywood! Her weird blend of self-determination, contempt for others, and the fact that she talks like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas (“Esquenazi lost interest in school because, as she put it, she had ‘places to go and people to see'”)!
I’ve dealt with a bail bond company exactly once; the woman was incredibly kind and incredibly responsive and the entire situation was incredibly predatory and fucked up.
OKAY: 5 Denver Spots Perfect For Pretending To Be A Cowboy
“Wait, what? Yes. Naomi Campbell.” Roxane keeps recapping Empire for the Wall Street Journal, and I am continually here for the reading of it.
I will read every single article about every single major plane crash that anyone sees fit to write. I have to know how every single plane crashes, that I might be more accurately terrified every time I board a plane (“But Mallory, flying is statistically safer than –” IT’S FLYING DON’T COME AT ME WITH STATISTICS, THE SKY IS WHERE THE GODS LIVE AND THERE IS NO REASON FOR ME TO BE UP THERE). Anyhow, it turns out that stalling is different from engine failure, so there are at least two ways for a plane to fall entirely out of the sky without warning.
“They act like they care, but they don’t.” Soft on Segregation: How the Feds Failed to Integrate Westchester County
Oh my God, I wish this article was a billion words long:
Not so before the 18th century, when smiling widely in portraits meant that you were probably destitute, indecent, or mentally ill. As Colin Jones shows in a new book, “The Smile Revolution in Eighteenth Century Paris,” most European smiles of the time were hardly attractive—rotten teeth and empty gums gave even royalty sunken cheeks. In the context of art, the gesture often indicated condescension or scorn; a painted smile could make viewers pout. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that social custom relaxed and dental hygiene improved enough to make the smile popular, creating a “revolution” in expression between the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Physically, the smile is simple. It comes from the contraction of the zygomatic major, a muscle in the face. Babies smile soon after birth, some say hours after delivery, and engage in social smiling by the time they’re a few months old. People have always used a smile to communicate across linguistic barriers. Even animals, from apes to dogs, produce expressions similar to the smile.
But, as Jones describes, what the smile means changes with the mood of the time—and can even be different for men and women in the same culture. In France, for instance, Jones identifies a split that came at a specific moment in history. Whereas both men and women might have smiled in the free-spirited salons of the Enlightenment, after the Revolution, smiling became a primarily female function, along with childrearing and housework. “Men in dark suits would keep teeth and smiles out of their public repertoire,” Jones writes, “making the benign, white-tooth smile a quintessentially female attribute, best indulged in the domestic calm of the home.”
Never listened to Bjork! Have no strong feelings either way, but I know you’re all going to keep sending me links to that “female auteur” quote in her Pitchfork interview, so here it is.
After being the only girl in bands for 10 years, I learned—the hard way—that if I was going to get my ideas through, I was going to have to pretend that they—men—had the ideas. I became really good at this and I don’t even notice it myself. I don’t really have an ego. I’m not that bothered. I just want the whole thing to be good. And I’m not saying one bad thing about the guys who were with me in the bands, because they’re all amazing and creative, and they’re doing incredible things now. But I come from a generation where that was the only way to get things done. So I have to play stupid and just do everything with five times the amount of energy, and then it will come through.
When people don’t credit me for the stuff I’ve done, it’s for several reasons. I’m going to get very methodical now!
***
“We’re in the rectangle of what?” he asked, his voice rising.
“War!” his players shouted in high-pitched unison.
“That’s right!” he said. “We’re in the rectangle of war, and we’re in it to win it!”
Undefeated fifth-grade all-girls basketball team.
***
If you don’t follow her then you’re a damn fool.
