“The first thing you should know about sex is that it’s a word,” writes Cory Silverberg, Toronto sex educator and author of Sex is a Funny Word. This educational kids’ book, in bookstores this month, stars four children of different genders, races and abilities. It tackles the usual—changing bodies, fuzzy hair, extra nipples—before it dares go where few other kids’ books have gone. “Having a penis isn’t what makes you a boy,” it reads. “The truth is much more interesting than that!”
I sure did like this thing Haley Mlotek wrote:
My sister works a very challenging, very demanding job. She has often pointed out that being called a saint or angel for her work is not really the compliment people seem to think it is; it’s often accompanied by a shake of their head and a sincere “I could never do what you do.” Her job is really hard, it’s true, and it does require a very particular personality, and sometimes she tells me stories and I can’t say anything, I can only put my tiny hand on her even tinier hand and wait for her to continue, but she is right that a saint is not a compliment so much as a judgement. She thinks they’re saying that she’s ascended to some higher plane of humanity, that her goodness transcends a normal level of decency, that she’s removed from the rest of the population by virtue of her virtue. But for her this is just the only job she ever wanted to do and the job that she excels at. The idea that her job—working with people who have special needs—is suited only for an angel, she says, takes the responsibility away from the other humans.
Jaya on the history of energy drinks:
There came a point, sometime between the mid-19th century and the 1960s, when the “energy” started to come before the “drink.” But we’ve been chasing legal highs since long before that. Energy drinks are the fun of speed without the stress of finding it, a way to get the most energy possible without sliding into “taboo” territory. Another way to define the category is to think of the drinks that seem, even if briefly, one step ahead of regulation and legitimate medical worry—whether fears of mixing cocaine and wine, or worries over the long term effects of taurine. And as governments and regulatory agencies clutch their pearls over ingredient lists, making energy drinks label themselves up and down with safety warnings, or ban them outright, energy drinks have even winked at their status, taking pride in being just on the side of legal. Hell, there is an energy drink straight up called Cocaine.
Jess Zimmerman is on FIRE right now:
There was nothing really wrong with my relationship, on the face of it. My ex-husband was—is—a good man. He was probably the only good man I’d been with to that point, the only one who didn’t try to manipulate or control or belittle me. I was already 25 when we met, 28 when we got married, but in many ways it was my first adult relationship. This turned out to be part of the problem: I wasn’t ready to be an adult. I hadn’t finished making mistakes yet, and so many of my mistakes had been made in someone else’s name.
Sousaphone Man is an honorary Friend of The Toast.
Okay, I’m going to start watching UnREAL.
Hipaa is not what people often think it is:
Hipaa applies only to health care providers, health insurers, clearinghouses that manage and store health data, and their business associates. Yet when I last wrote about this topic, a California reader commented that she’d heard a minister explain that the names of ailing parishioners could no longer appear in the church bulletin because of Hipaa.
Wrong. Neither a church nor a distraught spouse is a “covered entity” under the law.
life is a rich tapestry (I read the whole thing with my mouth like 00000000):
“An airplane is my bedroom,” he says, stretching to reach his complimentary slippers. “It’s my office, and it’s my playroom.” The privilege of reclining in this personal suite costs around $15,000. Schlappig typically makes this trip when he’s bored on the weekend. He pays for it like he pays for everything: with a sliver of his gargantuan cache of frequent-flyer miles that grows only bigger by the day. Hong Kong, he says, is his favorite hub, and “the only city I could ever live in.” The 16-hour trip has become so routine that it’s begun to feel like a pajama-clad blur of champagne and caviar — or, in Schlappig’s terminology, a “two-hangover flight.”
While I was reading that piece with my mouth all 000000000000, Rolling Stone coughed up their old 1976 profile of Linda “Nicole’s Style and Aspirational Beauty Icon But It Does Bum Nicole Out That She Played South Africa’s Sun City During Apartheid But There Were People Who Disagreed That a Cultural Boycott Was a Good Idea I Guess” Rondstadt:
Linda’s fantasy began in Tucson, Arizona, where, at age 14, she began singing in a folkie group with her older sister and brother. In 1964, at age 18, she left for Hollywood with $30 in her pocket and joined a folk-rock group that became the Stone Poneys. After three frustrating years they broke up, just before “Different Drum” became a hit. As a solo, Ronstadt fronted numerous transient musicians, among them Glenn Frey and Don Henley, who went on to form the Eagles. Linda was unable to communicate with them on musical terms, she says, and she had difficulty bossing men around. “When I got to L.A.,” she says, “I was so intimidated by the quality of everybody’s musicianship that instead of trying to get better, I chickened out and wouldn’t work.” She also had problems with her first solo albums — “I didn’t know what I was doing,” she says. Her producers — among them John Boylan and J.D. Souther — would also be managing her or living with her, so that she was at once a singer, a lover, a daughter-figure and a puppet.
Speaking of boycotts, this is one of the most depressing things I have ever read:
But in the past 25 years, the apparel industry, the entire global economy, has undergone a complete transformation. The way our clothes are made and distributed and thrown away is barely recognizable compared to the way it was done in the ’90s. And yet our playbook for improving it remains exactly the same.
This year, I spoke with more than 30 company reps, factory auditors and researchers and read dozens of studies describing what has happened in those sweatshops since they became a cultural fixation three decades ago. All these sources led me to the same conclusion: Boycotts have failed. Our clothes are being made in ways that advocacy campaigns can’t affect and in places they can’t reach. So how are we going to stop sweatshops now?
Comment deleted for being too male:
Just a video of a Russian man shouting at his ducks until they form an orderly clump and march into his barn, no big:
