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Oh, my dear friends. Yesterday I had an experience of such radiant joy, such glorious satisfaction, such true and pure delight that I may never recover.

They SAID we were getting a Trader Joe’s, but I was all “pshhhhhhhh sure yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it” and then yesterday I was at the post office and the thought occurred to me: “what if we did get a Trader Joe’s, though?” and I googled and SCREEEEECHED out of the parking lot like:

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…and within seven minutes was walking inside a CAVERNOUS FOOD MUSEUM. It exists! It’s beautiful! I am used to trying to fight my way into a New York Trader Joe’s like:

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…but it was Utah so it was basically:

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…and then I bought ALL THE THINGS and went home with a bunch of food and ate it:

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Thank you for listening to my exciting story about going grocery shopping.


Uzo Aduba and the road to success:

The same holds true, though, for the people who know her and work with her; Brooks, who’s also juggling the now-filming fourth season of OItNB and The Color Purple on Broadway, tells me that Aduba “can be the busiest person alive and if you need her, she will talk to you past midnight through whatever you need… I’m truly grateful to call her a ‘sister friend,’ as we say, because I don’t have any sisters so she’s definitely become that for me.”

Indeed, it makes sense that the themes of compassion and care come up again and again when thinking about Aduba, because at the core of Aduba’s artistry, there’s a strong sense of love and empathy—and gratitude. “I want to tell the stories I’ve been missing,” Aduba says. “I’m interested in portraying and representing people that are missing from the portrait of our lives. I meet and see people from all walks of life, and I wonder why they’re missing from the framework of storytelling and the framework of our narratives.”


Pilot Viruet NAILS binge-watching as self-care:

It’s not a coincidence that my first real foray into obsessive binge-watching happened the summer after I graduated college, during what were easily some of the weirdest, saddest, and most complicated months of my life. When I don’t know what to do with myself, I watch television; when I don’t know what to do with myself for 24 straight hours every day, I watch all of the television.


The bleak future of college football:

In a 2010 piece in The Awl, Cord Jefferson wrote, “Where some see the Super Bowl, I see young black men risking their bodies, minds, and futures for the joy and wealth of old white men.” This vision sounds dystopian but is quickly becoming an undeniable reality, given new statistics about how education affects awareness about brain-injury risk, as well as the racial makeup of Division I rosters and coaching staffs. The future of college football indeed looks a lot like what Jefferson called “glorified servitude,” and even as information comes to light about the dangers and injustices of football, nothing is currently being done to steer the sport away from that path.


I could listen to Teju Cole talk all day:

There’s a universe in what you just said, though: what does that mean, “We’re not animals”?

Well we are animals. We are anxious animals. The word “civilization” has been used oppressively. It has been used in the cause of racial supremacy, for example.

But every human society has brought expression to a similarly profound and high purpose. Our societies all go back thousands of years: Aztec carving, gamelan music, nineteenth-century European art, Chinese painting… every contemporary human is connected to extremely profound and elevated forms of artistic expression. And not to foster that is crazy. And that’s why I say: We’re not animals. We’re not just eating and drinking and material needs.


Women, minorities, and the Manhattan Project


Sarah Galo in conversation with Charlotte Shane:

How did you begin writing online?

I started a blog sometime after I began in-person sex work, though I can’t remember exactly when. Probably 2002 or 2003. It was extremely unliterary, and willfully so. I imitated the loopy, cavalier, purposefully juvenile tone found in other girls’ blogs I liked, but they posted a lot more pictures than I did, which makes that style work better. I wrote about situations that were confusing for me, but treated my life like it was insubstantial at the same time. It was very affected. And I gave everyone really stupid nicknames—not to make fun of them, but because I’m just awful at renaming people.


I cried while reading Tracy Morgan’s talk with GQ, and am unashamed:

You lost him when you were 6?
My mom decided to kick him to the curb because he was using drugs, but he was always in our life. And then when I’ve finally got him, when I was finally living with him, he’s dying of AIDS. So when he died, I got lost, you know, proverbially. I was lost in the world, doing bad things, out here in the streets, because I didn’t have that guidance. It was gone. But then I found my ex-wife, and she provided me with that responsibility because she had two kids already, so I took responsibility and I became a man, and those were like my backup, my support team right there, with my kids—and I never call them my stepkids—my kids and my ex-wife are my support team, and I started making people laugh.

But how did it become a thing, your profession? Because you were dealing, too, right?
Drugs. Say it. That’s what I did, it was part of my life.


I did not cry while reading this Daniel Radcliffe interview, but I enjoyed it just the same:

He goes all wistful for a minute. “I’d always thought in the years after Potter finished that it would die down, but it’s just grown more because the people who were massive Harry Potter fans in their teens are now adults. So you meet them more. They’re not at home with their parents, they’re out in the world. It always amazes me when someone says what a huge part of their childhood it was. I still have a natural reserve that makes me go, ‘Oh don’t be so silly, I wasn’t responsible for your childhood.’ But I think about the stuff that means a lot for me from my childhood, like The Simpsons, and how, when I did a voice on The Simpsons I got a signed thing from Matt Groening and that was so fucking exciting. The thought that I might occupy that space in somebody else’s childhood…”


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