I suspect the ratio of Sansa to Red Bone Squeaky Toy will be changing over time. Also, the background is obviously The Ice House, which I am rewatching for the second time in two months, this time with my mom.
This FitzGibbon Media situation is B.A.N.A.N.A.S.
A joint statement from former FitzGibbon media staffers put out Thursday evening said staffers had “reported over a half dozen incidents of sexual harassment and at least two involving sexual assault committed by Trevor FitzGibbon against his own employees.”
“For decades, Trevor presented himself a champion of the progressive movement, claiming to support and respect women and feminist issues, from equal pay to reproductive rights, but his actions prove a hypocrisy so great that FitzGibbon Media closed its doors today, as we could no longer continue working under his leadership,” they said.
Asking for help from a system that literally doesn’t speak your language:
A 2011 University of California study of 20,712 Asian-American elders found that Korean, Chinese, and Vietnamese respondents — most of whom reported limited English proficiency — were more likely to express symptoms like hopelessness, worthlessness, or even major depression; but Japanese respondents — of whom 9 in 10 reported speaking English every well — were the least likely to report those same symptoms. Compared to non-Hispanic white respondents, all groups who were more likely to report distress were also less likely to have seen a mental health professional. Which is to say: Of those Asian-American seniors who might need help, very few of them actually seek it.
A backlash against American Muslims is leaving a mark on some of the nation’s youngest minds.
After seeing presidential candidate Donald Trump call on television for barring Muslims from entering the country, 8-year-old Sofia Yassini checked the locks on her family’s home in Plano, Texas, imagining the Army would take them away. She raced to her room and stuffed a pair of Barbie dolls, a tub of peanut butter and a toothbrush into a bag. She insisted on bringing boots for the long boat ride she imagined was coming.
When her mother, Melissa, arrived home from her work as a human resources manager, Sofia ran into her arms and cried.
Jake Perry, who a reader informs me is a cousin of Rick’s, raises billion-year-old cats, please enjoy every detail of his eccentric nature and crackpot theories BUT MAYBE HE’S RIGHT:
Jake Perry is a cat man. Standing about 5-foot-7 and often clad in workman’s clothes, the 85-year-old Austin, Texas, plumber is also a father and husband. But anyone who’s met Perry will tell you—first and foremost, he’s a cat man.
Perry’s cats broke the Guinness World Record for oldest cat. Twice, actually: The first record, from 1998, was for a part Sphynx, part Devon Rex named Granpa Rexs Allen who made it to age 34; the second, from 2005, is for a mixed tabby named Creme Puff who lived to age 38. Since the 1980s, Perry has adopted and re-homed hundreds of cats, at his peak raising four dozen at once, showcasing the best and brightest in cat shows. According to Perry, it’s not just Granpa and Creme Puff who had unusually long lives: About a third of his cats, he says, lived to be at least 30 years old—about twice the average feline life span.
Rebecca Solnit (Lolita, men, rape, jokes, empathy):
A group of black college students doesn’t like something and they ask for something different in a fairly civil way and they’re accused of needing coddling as though it’s needing nuclear arms. A group of white male gamers doesn’t like what a woman cultural critic says about misogyny in gaming and they spend a year or so persecuting her with an unending torrent of rape threats, death threats, bomb threats, doxxing, and eventually a threat of a massacre that cites Marc LePine, the Montreal misogynist who murdered 14 women in 1989, as a role model. I’m speaking, of course, about the case of Anita Sarkeesian and Gamergate. You could call those guys coddled. We should. And seriously, did they feel they were owed a world in which everyone thought everything they did and liked and made was awesome or just remained silent? Maybe, because they had it for a long time.
This year, a German designer named Phoebe Heess created a fabric that is purportedly 40 percent darker than the existing blackest black. Heess has named this color Viperblack, after the Gaboon viper, itself superlative: It is the world’s heaviest viper, with the longest fangs and the most venomous bite. The Viperblack fabric is made of cotton, crowd-funded on Kickstarter, and contains Kevlar, which cannot be cut with a knife. In an interview with Dazed, Heess’s creative partner, Gabriel Platt, cites as inspiration for Viperblack a Tumblr meme of Wednesday Addams that reads, “I will stop wearing black when they invent a darker color.”
While Heess and Platt aren’t the first to explicitly chase a blackest black, they are the first to develop it exclusively for fashion. They are preceded by researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, who have worked to achieve a black with 99.965 percent absorption, using carbon nanotubes. Called Vantablack (from Vertically Aligned NanoTube Arrays), it renders three-dimensional objects flat. This material isn’t fit for clothing: it’s too crumbly, too carcinogenic. Used in infrared cameras, it has already been sent into outer space.
The worst people in the WORLD are Sandy Hook truthers, and I am so glad this asshole got fired:
“Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image,” the couple wrote in calling for the professor to be fired.
Our own Ella on the joy of having her Tall Man home from the hospital for Christmas:
And so he is: the Tall Man is back in the Tiny Flat, and we are preparing for Christmas together, and it is the purest joy I have ever known in all my life. I’ve found the recipe for happiness, and it’s this: find someone you love with your whole being, and have them taken from you, and snatch them back just in time for Christmas. Snatch them back, and have them sit beside you while you bake gingerbread. Snatch them back, and have them help you manhandle a seven-foot pine tree into your two-room apartment on the second floor. Snatch them back, and have them go ’round Waitrose with you, bickering gently and joyfully over the best kind of fat to do the Christmas roasties in (it’s goose, of course).
I will literally cry if you buy this man a chair:
Dear Prudence,
Last Christmas, when my boyfriend and I were still dating, I gave him a card promising the delivery of a chair he had always wanted. At the time, I hadn’t actually ordered the chair, though of course I intended to do so. Flash forward one year, and you’ll find us no longer together—we amicably parted ways in the spring—and my ex-boyfriend still chairless. Although we remain friends, I’m torn between wanting to honor my original gifting promise and thinking that, at this point, I don’t have to buy him anything! Compounding the problem is that I’ve now moved onto someone new; ordering a belated Christmas gift for an ex-boyfriend feels decidedly unseemly. Do I need to fulfill the material promises I made while still in love?
—A Shady Chair-acter
Oh, the good intentions I have given myself credit for without ever following through on them! I wish I did not relate to your situation quite so much.
Vulture rounded up Leslie Jones’ tweets about finally watching Breaking Bad, and I am dyinggggg:
My contribution to this Billfold piece about our best pop culture purchases of the year will be a surprise to no one.
Please note this very important correction to Mallory’s trashy memoirs piece:
