Mallory and Sansa are best friends now. Here is another picture:
“The Funny Thing About Abusive Relationships” (this piece is very, very good):
Offhand, there are maybe three times in my life I can clearly recall laughing at something really terrible. One: when my mother told me my grandfather had a heart attack. Two: when a friend and I were driving to Cape Cod and a huge bird careened into the windshield, instantly bonking itself dead. Three: when my friends tried to keep me from going home from a party because they thought my boyfriend might kill me.
The first two occasions are easily explained by the fickle, wacky human limbic system: In the presence of a big enough charge, the brain shorts out like the wiring in an old house. The physical reactions to “hey, funny ‘Marmaduke’ today” and “potentially dead relative” get crisscrossed. But the third thing, the morbid, in-on-the-joke, for-the-benefit-of-other-people laugh, I’d figured out how to do over time: I’ve been a comedy writer in some capacity for most of my adult life. When anything happens to me, I tend to be a little silly about it, because it’s both my default operating mode, and my DEFCON.
yes (autostraddle on the platonic use of “girlfriend”)
Twitter’s white people problems:
“Not only were we as a company not doing things about diversity, but the employees who did want to take a more active role were denied the resources to actually make anything happen,” says Mark Luckie, another black Twitter employee. Luckie, who worked for three years at Twitter as the manager of the journalism and media department, says he witnessed virtually no executive buy-in for diversity initiatives.
“A lot of the diversity initiatives—community service, guest speakers—originated from within the employee resource groups,” Luckie says. “In some cases, there was executive support, but not many of the initiatives came from the top down. To me, that sends a message to the company that diversity isn’t a priority.”
Erika Sanchez on her experience with colorism in Mexican society:
Colorism in Mexican culture has a long history rooted in colonialism. Many people don’t know that Mexico had a complicated legal caste system in the 1700s, which continues to influence beauty standards today. To exert control over their colonies, the Spanish commissioned paintings to illustrate different racial distinctions. As the cultural historian John Charles Chasteen describes in his book Born in Blood and Fire, a person’s caste was recorded in their baptismal register and those of lower (and darker-skinned) castes were legally barred from, among other things, becoming priests, owning weapons, attending university, and even wearing silk. There were 16 theoretical categories in all, though only six were typically used. Some of the lower castes were derisively given animal names such as Wolf or Coyote. Although the members of these six categories were legally prohibited from mixing, there was a whole lot of boinking and raping going on, so it was inevitable. Ironically, because the Spanish crown was desperate for money, those from lower castes who became successful were allowed to purchase exemptions. You could actually buy your whiteness.
Friend of The Toast Ashley C. Ford on when your dad gets out of prison:
When a parent goes to prison, the lack of straight answers doesn’t only affect the inmate, it affects their families, too. It affects the income and education of their children and spouses, and of course, it strains the familial bonds. My father has been in prison since I was six months old (I’m now 29). He was convicted on rape and sexual battery charges in 1987. He pleaded guilty on all counts. I have no reason to believe he is innocent, and I do not believe he should have served a day less than he was ordered to serve.
I do wish I could have gotten to know him more. There were always so many physical and metaphysical walls between me and him. I have two memories of being in his presence, both times in a prison visiting room. I am nervous to know him outside of prison, and outside of our letters. I am worried my nervousness means something worse than I assumed, that I am not ready or may never be ready to know him as a free man. I’ve only ever known him as he is now: a man who loves me, but cannot reach me.
What the finding of perjury means and doesn’t mean for the state trooper in the Sandra Bland case:
Walk me through what happens now. Is it possible that he won’t go to prison at all?
It’s possible. The charge has been laid against him, so he will have to appear in front of a judge and enter a plea of guilty or not guilty. He may enter a plea in exchange for a more lenient sentence. If the sentence of up to a year in prison and a fine of $4,000 is the maximum penalty that he can be given, it’s entirely possible, and likely if it’s his first offense, that he would get no jail time at all—that he would get community service or some kind of probation and pay a lesser or no fine. Unfortunately, accountability beyond being charged is by no means guaranteed.
the lady who has saved all the peoples of the earth via blackface
I find Gawker’s rundowns of the best deleted Wikipedia articles of the week really entertaining.
The Laquan McDonald emails (a predictable sea of “people want us to release the tape how can we avoid releasing the tape”)
Your husband needs to stop using you as a meat-shield, pronto:
Dear Prudence,
My husband “John” and I are expecting our first child. John’s parents are devout Christians whose lives revolve around their church. They have no idea their son is an atheist, although they know I am. They are assuming that John and I will take our children to church. My husband is extremely nonconfrontational when it comes to his parents. I want him to tell his parents we have no plans to raise our children in a religious tradition, but he won’t do it. Whenever his parents are alone with me, they sneak in questions about my family’s religion and tell me they look forward to John going back to church once he has a family of his own. I don’t want to cause tension with my in-laws, but I don’t want to lie for my husband either. I’d rather have it all out before the baby is born.
—Confirmed Non-Churchgoer
Autistic journalists and activists “cautiously optimistic” about Hillary Clinton’s policy proposals:
In 2007, when she was a senator for New York, Clinton introduced the Expanding the Promise for Individuals with Autism Act. That same year as a candidate, she spoke at an autism event in Sioux City, Iowa.
Clinton’s language has changed over time. At that 2007 event, Clinton spoke frequently about “combating” autism. This was very much in line with the paradigm at the time, as the major legislation focusing on autism was the Combating Autism Act, signed in 2006.
However, since then, as understanding and acceptance of autism has evolved, the concept of “combating” autism has fallen out of favor. When the 2006 legislation was re-authorized in 2014, it was called the Autism CARES Act. Similarly, last week at a town hall in New Hampshire, Clinton talked about “supporting” people on the spectrum and their families.
“Improving support for children and adults on the autism spectrum and their families can vastly improve their lives,” her policy proposal said.
Lydia Brown, an advocate on the spectrum and a law student at Northeastern University, welcomed Clinton’s evolution. “I am glad to see she has evolved,” Brown said. “If you want us to be supporting you, then you should use supportive language.” However, while pleased with many of the policy proposals, what matters is what happens concretely if Clinton is elected, Brown said.
A little observation about submissions that Nikki and I have made:
We frequently get pitches about being in an interracial marriage, but almost EXCLUSIVELY from white people, often in the “I’ve learned a lot about racism since being married to a POC” vein, and we would really like to see more pitches from POC who are in an interracial marriage (especially if they are married to OTHER POC, like black/Asian marriages, etc.) If that’s you, drop us a line!
Russell Tovey and I have more in common than I knew (also, I SAW HIM in “The History Boys” on Broadway, before he was the guy in “The Hounds of Baskerville” Sherlock episode, and never knew it was him):
A decade ago, Mr. Tovey was on Broadway in Alan Bennett’s “The History Boys,” which won the 2006 Tony Award for best play. “We all went slightly mad,” he said. “We were like the One Direction of Broadway.” He told James Corden, his co-star at the time, that he “used to fantasize about getting stabbed on the subway so I could have a show off. Just a surface wound.”
“Total Loss: A Lifetime Erased By Fire”:
“Are you bringing anything?” I’d asked. “I should bring things…”
We both paused, the enormity of Laurie’s predicament racking into focus. She would need everything again. But what now? Snacks? Toiletries? Alcohol?
Then, my mother shouted, “Panties!”
“What?”
“Panties!” she said. “She does not have panties with her, I am sure! Please bring panties!”
I did not like hearing my mother say the word “panties.” More disturbing, though, was the utter delirium in her voice, which rattled in a fragile, desperate vibrato. Laurie had nearly worked from home that day. She was alive.
So, I bought new underwear, and stuffed those into a suitcase of goods that seemed both essential and useless: a split of red wine, sneakers, a loofah, pajama pants, a hairbrush, whiskey, chocolate.
Before hanging up, my mother added, “What Laurie feels, I feel one hundred times more. Umma hurts one hundred times more.”
This parting comment seemed a pinch delusional. Maternal transitive heartache aside, the plain fact was that a fire had annihilated my sister’s home and its contents. How could my mother understand that kind of undoing?
When Dickens Met Dostoevsky (or didn’t):
I have been teaching courses on Dostoevsky for over two decades, but I had never come across any mention of this encounter. Although Dostoevsky is known to have visited London for a week in 1862, neither his published letters nor any of the numerous biographies contain any hint of such a meeting. Dostoevsky would have been a virtual unknown to Dickens. It isn’t clear why Dickens would have opened up to his Russian colleague in this manner, and even if he had wanted to, in what language would the two men have conversed? (It could only have been French, which should lead one to wonder about the eloquence of a remembered remark filtered through two foreign tongues.) Moreover, Dostoevsky was a prickly, often rude interlocutor. He and Turgenev hated each other. He never even met Tolstoy. Would he have sought Dickens out? Would he then have been silent about the encounter for so many years, when it would have provided such wonderful fodder for his polemical journalism?
Facebook comment on the Jessica Jones/moral injury piece that I didn’t delete, but eye-rolled at (idiots continue to pile up in our deleted comments tab for Nikki’s piece on racism, but even mocking them is growing stale):
