We should know more about the Charleston shooting by the time this runs.
My college friend Pete Buttigieg is the very, very popular Democratic mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and was just elected to his second term, and has decided to come out of the closet! I am very very happy for him, and for South Bend. He is a real stand-up guy, and if he ever runs for national office, I will have to break my policy of always assuming politicians are secretly evil lizard people who are filming us in our bathrooms. Here is the article in which he told his constituents about his sexuality:
My high school in South Bend had nearly a thousand students. Statistically, that means that several dozen were gay or lesbian. Yet when I graduated in 2000, I had yet to encounter a single openly LGBT student there. That’s far less likely to be the case now, as more students come to feel that their families and community will support and care for them no matter what. This is a tremendously positive development: young people who feel support and acceptance will be less likely to harm themselves, and more likely to step into adulthood with mature self-knowledge.
I was well into adulthood before I was prepared to acknowledge the simple fact that I am gay. It took years of struggle and growth for me to recognize that it’s just a fact of life, like having brown hair, and part of who I am.
Putting something this personal on the pages of a newspaper does not come easy. We Midwesterners are instinctively private to begin with, and I’m not used to viewing this as anyone else’s business.
I am now watching the 1979 Tinker Tailor miniseries, and it is like a parody of slow-moving British things, and I love it more than life itself. There will be scenes that go on for ten minutes that consist of nothing more than moving papers around a desk or leaning against a wall, grimacing, then leaning against a different wall. It is, however, not nearly as sexy as the new movie, which I think I am alone in finding sexy anyway. Also, Ann Smiley is a feminist hero.
Jaya wrote this thing which, as half of a working-from-home couple, I find very very interesting.
I also only just now saw the season finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and IMHO it is far more controversial and shocking than the Game of Thrones finale. Also, Captain Holt made me cry (I did, I literally cried during his speech), and Diaz is a Gilmore Girls fan.
Anne Helen on In Touch, the Duggars, and the future of tabloid journalism:
Over its 13 years on newsstands, In Touch has cultivated a mixed reputation. In the beginning, it vied for a slice of People Magazine’s audience, building its circulation to 1.2 million in just four years, making it one of the fastest-growing weekly magazines in recent memory. But what started as a People clone, publishing a mix of sunny celebrity stories and tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, shifted course over the 2000s, establishing its identity through endless Kardashian covers, pregnancy “bump” speculations, and Brangelina breakup rumors. It became, in other words, a tabloid, with the corresponding willingness to narrativize facts in a way that pleased an audience hungry for celebrity entertainment, however implausible.
THIS is a good roundtable discussion!
HENSON I hate that bitch. She’s stolen my identity! (Laughter.) My friends don’t want to talk to me unless it’s about Cookie.
She quickly has become iconic. Did anything worry you about taking the role?
HENSON Cookie scared the hell out of me. Just before I got the role, I’d said, “F— it all, I’m going back to theater.” I felt lazy and like I needed to sharpen the tools. So I did theater at The Pasadena Playhouse. Then my manager said,”You have to read this script.” I’m like, “Hip-hop? Oh my God, what are they trying to do? Fox is going to pick this up? This isn’t HBO?” And then I got nervous and started pacing the floor. “Oh my God, Cookie is bigger than life. You will love her or hate her.” Empire has forced people to have conversations that they were afraid to have. And that is what art is supposed to do. I just didn’t know it was going to shake things up this much! (Laughs.)
Chicago’s South Side is in desperate need of a trauma center, and I really hope they get one:
Chicago is served by six trauma centers sprinkled around the city and nearby suburbs — none on the city’s South Side where some areas suffer high rates of violence.
The University of Chicago closed its adult trauma center in 1988 after two years. Officials say the hospital lost $2 million annually serving patients without health insurance.
The effort to reopen U of C’s trauma center gained additional attention last fall when the school bid for the Obama Presidential Library. Then this March there was a big protest near the Ritz-Carlton hotel where the university held a $4.5 billion fundraiser.
“That money could fund a trauma center for years and years. I wouldn’t say we’re in a very desperate moment right now but I think we’re at a very important moment,” Morris-Moore said.
I learned some cool stuff about sign language yesterday:
I have had variations of this conversation about a thousand times in my life. As the hearing daughter of a deaf dad and hard-of-hearing mom, I’ve been a staunch pro-ASL activist and have written on issues related to the Deaf community. And while some topics — legally mandated TV captioning, the fact that knowing ASL and English means I’m bilingual — have gotten much easier to explain over the years, there’s one thing that everybody keeps sticking on: the fact that sign language is not universal.
Predictably, Hollywood did not think a movie with two black leads was gonna work, thank God for Gina Prince-Bythewood:
Prince-Bythewood was passionate about making a film focusing on a young woman pushing to find her authentic self and trying to appreciate who she really is, all while finding true love for the first time. And she wanted this love story to feature two black main characters. But Hollywood had other plans. When she pitched the film, executives loved the idea that Noni’s British, biracial background made her a bit more complex than what we normally see, but they wanted to tweak her story and change her love interest to a white male.
According to Prince-Bythewood, studios were having a difficult time finding the marketability in black-on-black love.
Transphobic doctors gotta go. This is also why doctors who actively educate themselves on trans health issues are so, so important.
Yesterday my lil son turned six months old, which is just…what? He is the most chill person who has ever lived. He makes Jack Johnson look like Woody Allen. I love him very much. BE HONEST, though, do you think he’s a ginger? Is Mallory’s personality that powerful?
Deleted comment of the day which is definitely trying to be helpful, just weirdly so and seven months late:
