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I read the Dee Barnes piece on Straight Outta Compton, oh man:

That event isn’t depicted in Straight Outta Compton, but I don’t think it should have been, either. The truth is too ugly for a general audience. I didn’t want to see a depiction of me getting beat up, just like I didn’t want to see a depiction of Dre beating up Michel’le, his one-time girlfriend who recently summed up their relationship this way: “I was just a quiet girlfriend who got beat on and told to sit down and shut up.”

But what should have been addressed is that it occurred. When I was sitting there in the theater, and the movie’s timeline skipped by my attack without a glance, I was like, “Uhhh, what happened?” Like many of the women that knew and worked with N.W.A., I found myself a casualty of Straight Outta Compton’s revisionist history.


A history of lesbian bars in the US:

Harlem in particular was a destination for wild nightlife. “Queer districts blossomed in black areas with less policing,” says Cookie Woolner, a historian who has written about African American queer women in the early 20th century. While white women could go to a bar in Harlem and be relatively safe from exposure, black women risked running into their neighbors. For that reason, they socialized in more private settings–mainly apartment parties.


Love this senior beauty shop:

For these senior citizens, it’s not really about the makeup or the hair, it’s about the activity of getting ready. As a young person who cultivated her beauty routine at a college on a nowhere-to-go farm in central New York state, this is something I know well. We’d cheat our lip size with purple crayons and craft elaborate braids, only to realize hours later we’d rather stay in and watch TV instead. The ritual of beauty, rather than the look itself, is often most important. It’s no different between twentysomethings and ninetysomethings. “The seniors here will get dressed up for doctor’s appointments,” a stylist at the Hebrew Home told me.


Cosmopolitan has been doing so much interesting shit these last few years:

Every year, thousands of women like Nicole seek help at what appear to be secular medical clinics but are actually Christian anti-abortion centers. Throughout the United States, there are at least 3,000 crisis pregnancy centers, many of which belong to two religious anti-abortion organizations — Care Net and Heartbeat International. Some women arrive at those centers in search of Christian counseling or free diapers, but the vast majority are looking for professional advice to help them navigate unplanned pregnancies.

Increasingly, pregnancy centers are what’s available. Around the country, access to abortion has eroded dramatically. As abortion regulations shutter medical clinics offering the full range of options, a woman facing an unplanned pregnancy finds herself in a very different landscape, one in which a pregnancy center is her most visible, most affordable — and sometimes the only — place to turn.


This is quite a paragraph:

Probably every American who has eaten a hot dog has eaten Townsend trimmings. Ted’s father, Ray Townsend, died in 2014 at the age of 97 holding more than 120 patents — most concerned with meat processing — including a profitable device that could strip rind from pork and stuff a hot dog at fantastic speeds. At one point, 95 percent of all U.S. hot dogs were plumped with Townsend’s pork. The family became very wealthy.


I MEAN, come ON, this is NOT A NORMAL PART of TV magic! (The Good Wife people are all shocked! that people care about Split Screengate).


This is my friend Carrie’s new puppy watching The X-Files (because our late dog was a boy dog, Steve insists that we get a girl dog this time so he will not feel like he’s being disloyal to the profound pair-bond he and Denali shared, which is okay by me, because now I can insist on naming her Sansa):

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I watched the entire final table read of The Office (US) finale:

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