Even a lyrical essay about tornado chasing can serve to remind us in an aside about the culture of white supremacy in the United States:
New Orleans to Tupelo, fourteen hours on a near-empty coach, much of it bending across the Magnolia State, the deadliest tornado state, cows and sunshine, McComb and Durant, billboards of lawyers and Jesus. GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION? I SPECIALIZE IN U TURNS. Grenada, where the Greyhound stops for gas and in the shade of a tree with magenta flowers I eat leftovers packed in an old snorkel mask case we’ve been using as Tupperware. Sunset, night bus, night trees, night noises. At midnight I arrive in Elvis’s birth city, where on April 5, 1936, a tornado killed at least 216 people, the fourth deadliest in U.S. history. Many more surely died but at the time black fatalities went uncounted.
Louisa Thomas on Floyd Mayweather’s career in boxing and domestic violence:
I can’t, of course, say what’s behind Mayweather’s serial abuse — physical, verbal, or emotional — of women. Men who are rich beat women; men who are poor do, too. They do it in Alaska and South Carolina, in New York and Oslo and Dubai. They do it when they get away with it, and they do it when they don’t. Every day, an average of three women in the United States are killed by a current or former lover. But the more I watched Mayweather fight, and the more I read about his allegedly violent acts outside the ring, the more I began to see it as all of one piece. The circus that follows him. The bag filled with cash and gambling slips. The entourage. The houses and the women installed in them, the diamond rings as collars. The way he takes the measure of a situation in the ring, determining when it’s safe to punch and when to duck.
I admire Kate Harding as a writer and a person FIERCELY and her new book Asking For It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture and What We Can Do About It is now available for pre-order. It is my goal to move so many copies that people will be forced to put her on all the same panels as Jon Krakauer so we can tag-team the process of educating the American people about sexual assault. You should also buy her older book about chasing the unicorn of dieting and the importance of loving your damn body, because her work has played an important role in keeping me from being the NO EXCUSES douchebag that my evangelical attachment to exercise and half-assed Paleo eating would otherwise turn me into.
this person who wrote in to Prudie is a dick:
Q. Inheritance and Responsibility: My mother is a lifelong substance abuser, and is now close to dying. Her parents left her a lot of money, including sizable funds for my brother and me, and she has been living off the investment income from this money for decades. My father divorced her decades ago, and my brother cut all ties with the family when he turned 18, leaving me the only family or friend my mother has. I know both she and my father were cruel to my brother, but I feel that it is now his turn to take care of her. However, I don’t think he deserves to inherit anything since I am the one who loyally stayed with our mother, to the cost of friends, jobs, and fiancées. Should I hire a lawyer and have both my mother’s and my grandparents’ wills revised to reflect and account for everything I’ve had to sacrifice, then sue my brother to force him to be a man, own up to his responsibility, and do his part to take care of my mother in her last years?
Hawkeye is underrated because he uses a BOW in combat, which is the most useless of weapons and he should have a gun instead, a phrase very rarely uttered in this link roundup. Also, he is just not nearly as cute as Cap or Cobie or the Hulk and I do not enjoy him IRL, so.
if you fiiiiind someone’s sex tooooyyys while snooooping KEEP IT TO YOUR DAMN SELF
The pace of social change in America.
