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Jess Zimmerman on the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster:

Like any other raving fan of the Hitchhiker’s universe, I have strong opinions about the Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster. It should be pale gold, and positively bristle with umbrellas and curly straws. It should be spicy and astringent in flavor, yet highly drinkable and with surprising depth. But it’s fictional; both Adams and radio show producer Geoffrey Perkins explained to thirsty fans that it’s impossible to mix one under Earth’s atmospheric conditions. I have never really wanted to make one.

On this last point, I seem to be alone.

Jess buries the lede, btw, in that there is a Doctor Who-themed bar in NYC called The Way Station and I want to go to there.


Here is a Kickstarter for a woodsy literary retreat for women! (Anyone who identifies as a woman, I CHECKED.)


Do you have advice needs? Email us at advice@the-toast.net and ask for Ms Proprietypants!


This is a Ronbledore trailer:


Biden is not running and I feel so relieved for him!

Mr. Biden’s decision, announced in the White House Rose Garden with President Obama looking on, ends one of the most public episodes of indecision about a political path since Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York left a plane bound for New Hampshire idling on a tarmac in 1991 as he fretted over whether to run for president.

It also closes the door on one of the biggest potential challenges to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s second attempt at capturing the Democratic nomination.


Why we need more diversity in the writers’ room:

Gray was the only person of color in the writers’ room; the rest of the staff, seven men and one woman, were white. One day, around the time of George Zimmerman’s trial for killing Trayvon Martin, the writers were batting around ideas when a male colleague made a racially motivated joke. (Gray asked me not to retell the joke in question.) Her colleagues laughed. Gray’s vocal reaction was swift, instinctual: “Oh, hell no!”


On the Unclaimed Baggage Center:

Out-of-town visitors come for the big finds in the main building, though. To wit, Unclaimed Baggage Center is one of the most popular tourist destinations in Alabama. Folks plan special trips, as well as venture off I-565 en route to farther destinations, to ogle loot like the men’s platinum Rolex that retailed for $64,000, and sold last year — just two weeks after its arrival on the sales floor — for $32,000.

“Someone was probably pretty sad that he lost that,” says Kayla Wilborn during Tuesday’sBaggage Experience, the six-day-a-week presentation that gives customers a taste of “what it’s like to open an unprocessed bag at Unclaimed Baggage.” The genuine Rolex was originally thought to be fake before it was appraised, and it’s something of a pride point for the Unclaimed Baggage team. I myself am overcome with the flush of awe that gets most visitors at UBC: can you believe they found that? Can you believe someone lost that?


My friend Carrie’s new puppy hates her leash (I think I might have used this one already, but I like her spunk):

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A Cruel Intentions TV show! I mean, I thought that’s what Gossip Girl was, but I’m open to new things!


Friend of The Toast Bijan Stephen on how social media drives #BlackLivesMatter:

Any large social movement is shaped by the technology available to it and tailors its goals, tactics, and rhetoric to the media of its time. On the afternoon of Sunday, March 7, 1965, when voting-rights marchers in Selma, Alabama, were run down by policemen at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the WATS lines were in heavy use. (“Here come the white hoodlums,” an activist said from a corner pay phone at 3:25 pm.) But the technology that was most important to the movement’s larger aims was not in activists’ hands at all: It was in a set of film canisters being ferried past police blockades on Highway 80 by an ABC News TV crew, racing for the Montgomery airport and heading to New York for an evening broadcast. That night, 48 million Americans would watch the scene in their living rooms, and a few days later Martin Luther King Jr. would lay bare the movement’s core media strategy. “We will no longer let them use their clubs on us in the dark corners,” he said. “We’re going to make them do it in the glaring light of television.”


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