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Girlhood is shaking up how we view the French:

Four teenage girls lip-sync to Rihanna’s hit Diamonds in a hotel room, perfectly choreographed, perfectly lit. Even before the official UK release of Girlhood (Bande des Filles), which follows a girl’s teenage journey in Paris’s rough outskirts, this scene has become a major talking point. Why? Perhaps because, in under three minutes, it depicts a celebration of female friendship, strength, beauty and adolescence that is as universal as it is un-stereotypically French; these are four black girls, in a film with an all-black cast, representing a level of attention for non-white characters that is unprecedented in the history of Gallic cinema – let alone in the exclusive French arthouse sector.


How George Takei helped stop that horrible auction of Japanese-American property we talked about a few weeks back:

As word of the Rago auction spread weeks ago, Japanese American groups around the country pushed back in emails and petitions. A Facebook page, Japanese American History: NOT for Sale, had garnered 6,200 followers before the auction was set to take place.

Takei’s potential influence on social media, including more than 8.5 million Facebook followers, didn’t hurt.

“This collection wouldn’t be coming to JANM if it weren’t for the intervention and passion of George Takei,” Kimura said. “He stepped in to ask Rago that the auction be canceled, and, I mean, who can say no to George?”

Rago said the collection’s personal and historical significance took his company by surprise.

“Once it became evident that the community felt it would be disrespectful to bring this material to auction, we realized we had to pull this lot from the sale,” he said.


It’s Nikki Chung’s birthday!!!! Shower her with your love and best wishes! Nikki, you are the reason I can go to the gym without worrying that my broken links and copious errors will go uncorrected in my absence, and everything you write for us is smart and funny and thoughtful, and I cherish you.


While we’re shouting out Toasties, our own lovely @missellabell has finished her dissertation, so all of you should make impressed and congratulatory noises. I watched one of my best friends finish hers, and it was…a hellscape. My husband says that completing a dissertation is not merely an intellectual task, it becomes acutely physical towards the end, the transition occuring once one accepts it merely needs to be finished and gives up on doing it particularly brilliantly. WELL DONE. Yours is brilliant as well as finished, I have no doubt.


8 Minutes is exploitative nonsense! WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED?

“I know what we do is not the most legal thing, but this is my job,” another sex worker who asked to be called Jazzy told BuzzFeed News. She said she was happy with her pimp, who essentially fired her after he saw the broadcast. She also said she requested that her face be blurred, and it was not.

Gina said the production team did not offer face-blurring as an option. “No, they didn’t offer that. I thought that’s what was gonna happen. I would’ve preferred that,” she said.

8 Minutes also did not keep the sex workers’ information particularly discreet: It took less than an hour for this reporter to find contact information for three women using only the information A&E broadcast on television.


I really liked Emily Nussbaum on Amy Schumer:

There’s nothing new about comedy with a feminist bent: one of my most prized possessions is a humor collection called “Titters,” whose cover features a busty woman in a tight T-shirt. Published in 1976, and edited by the few female writers of “Saturday Night Live,” it was the “first collection of humor by women,” with contributors ranging from Phyllis Diller to a pre-Huffington Arianna Stassinopoulos. Like many classic humor anthologies, it’s largely dated and dumb, aside from some bits that are hilariously mean. (If you think feminist infighting is new, check out the parody of Nora Ephron’s “small breasts” essay, which turns that body part into “sharp elbows.”) But it’s a useful relic of a time when feminists were libelled as humorless, a smear that persists. The truth is, the madcap polemicists of the seventies, from Bella Abzug to Valerie Solanas, with her notorious man-hating “SCUM Manifesto,” were often outrageously funny, using gonzo cracks to express their anger. Anti-feminists have always disguised their insults as jokes. (“Can’t you take a joke?”) But a joke can be the slickest response: an expression of savoir-faire in the face of hatred.


Charlotte Shane wants you (well, men) to be better at kissing:

As a sex worker who has done in-person work for a decade, I’ve kissed a lot of frogs. So many, in fact, that I have a theory about why call girls of old had the “no kissing” rule, a rule that is unfortunately uncommon among contemporary escorts: It’s not because kissing is more intimate than other acts, but because it’s uniquely cruel to have to endure bad kissing. And bad kissing is a guarantee.

Now before you try to claim every man who’s ever paid for some sexual service must obviously be a bad kisser, let me assure you that I’ve kissed off the clock as well. This epidemic is not confined to age or income brackets or whatever other categories into which one might like to slot sex consumers. I think it’s safe to say that all mouth-havers have been guilty of this sin at one time or another: when we were sloppy drunk, or a little surly, or just didn’t care what that other music-festival attendee thought of us afterwards. Most stints of bad kissing, though, can be attributed to being young, shy, and radically inexperienced. Some of us grow out of it, but many don’t. The end result is that we’re all in this ugly boat together.


If you have seen the new Mad Men, let’s talk about it! SOMEONE START A THREAD. It’s like Matt Weiner realized he only had three episodes left to cover race and feminism!!! That’s okay, bro, I’m here for it anyway.

I’ll start: JOAN! Joan. jooooooaaaan.


NERDDD ALERT:

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