Sansa will miss Matt and Jaya, her beloved friends.
Literature has known many divisive characters. The dubious morality of Humbert Humbert, the disreputable spikiness of Holden Caulfield, the judgment and snobbery of Emma Bovary—all have pitted readers against one another since time immemorial. That said, there’s one character more controversial than all of these put together: Friedrich Bhaer.
Bhaer is a character in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and its sequels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. If you’re unfamiliar with him, here are the broad, spoiler-filled basics of the controversy. Little Women’s heroine, Jo, having devotedly fulfilled her readers’ expectations for years, confounds our hopes by ending up not with the dashing, boyish Laurie but with Professor Bhaer, a somewhat older, less glamorous, rather didactic German tutor. To anyone steeped in the conventions of romance—not to mention conventional plotting—the gesture has for generations felt almost vindictive on Alcott’s part. It was, at the very least, a true surprise.
Beloved Friend of The Toast Pilot Viruet on TV’s attractiveness gap:
More recent, we have Modern Family, where the entire joke with Jay (Ed O’Neill, who once had a similar role when matched with Katey Sagal onMarried … With Children) and Gloria’s (Sofía Vergara) relationship is that he’s unattractive and geriatric while she is young and impossibly hot. Modern Family does occasionally include somewhat heartfelt moments punctuated by poignant music or fourth-wall-breaking segments to explain that Gloria really does love Jay and that she’s not only with him for his money, but it usually feels more forced than natural. The Big Bang Theory’s Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Penny (Kaley Cuoco) spent the first few seasons mostly making jokes about how nerdy and unattractive Leonard is in comparison to how ditzy and hot Penny is, and therefore, how they would never really work as a couple. Yet, by building their relationship over multiple seasons, they do.
This interview with a Duke oncologist about Lyme disease was shared by two of my Lyme-having friends as being reasonably good (there’s a lot of woo-woo stuff AND a lot of dismissive stuff about Lyme out there):
Like so many of us, your Lyme was missed by multiple physicians. What were your symptoms?
I don’t recall a tick bite, but I first started having symptoms in 1993, mostly cardiac arrhythmias. I had unprovoked palpitations that lasted fifteen to twenty seconds. There was something ominous about the way they felt and came on, but they were never captured because by the time I got to the ER, they’d resolve. And because I had just moved to a new state and was extremely busy with my career, the easy diagnosis was that I was just stressed. Doctors were saying I looked and seemed fine, but I wasn’t.
Ask a Manager on what to do with a good employee who is actually a terrible employee:
My direct manager recently resigned and, until I hear an answer from higher up, I am the acting manager. I’ve been receiving complaints from some of my employees about another employee, let’s call her Leah.
The final moments of Germanwings Flight 9525 (unsurprisingly, this is a very upsetting read):
The Airbus sat at the gate for 26 minutes past its scheduled departure time of 9:35, then taxied to the runway and took off, rising over the city and banking gently toward the Mediterranean Sea. From the cockpit, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, a veteran with 6,000 hours in the air, apologized for the delay and promised to try to make up the lost time en route. At one point, Sondenheimer mentioned to his co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, that he forgot to go to the bathroom before they boarded. “Go any time,” Lubitz told him. At 10:27, after the Airbus had reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, Sondenheimer told Lubitz to begin preparing for landing (it was only a two-hour flight), a routine that included gauging the fuel levels, ensuring that the flaps and landing gear were working, and checking the latest airport and weather information. Lubitz’s response was cryptic. “Hopefully,” he said. “We’ll see.” It’s unclear if Sondenheimer noted his co-pilot’s odd language, but he said nothing in response. A minute later, Sondenheimer pushed his seat back, opened the cockpit door, closed it behind him, and ducked into the lavatory. It was 10:30 A.M.
Q. Teacher tattoos: I had a professor last semester who I am really, literally in love with. She’s married with a kid and I think straight, so it’s not something I would ever even attempt to act on. I’m fairly sure she knows I have a crush on her—it’s not subtle—and my guess would be that she finds it flattering. She just offered to be my adviser, and I was obviously ecstatic and said yes. The problem is, I have a couple of tattoos related to her. One is a small word in her handwriting, which is really cute, distinctive handwriting, that I got sort of in the spirit of unrequited love, and because it was a positive affirmation she’d written on some of my work, and having her say something like that about something I wrote just meant a crazy amount to me. The other is a line from some of her published writing; I’d sent an artist friend of mine a list of poems and articles and essays and other things that meant a lot to me, including some of this professor’s work, and asked her to turn it into a tattoo, which she did. My question is: Do I need to make sure to keep them covered whenever I know I’m going to be seeing her? (They’re on my foot and ankle, so not super difficult to hide.) Will she be creeped out and hate me if she sees them?
A: Oh, honey. I wish I could hug you out of your recent decisions. I have a lot of sympathy for your feelings, but there’s nothing we can do about those now; let’s go ahead and tidy up your actions.
A black police officer’s struggle with the NYPD (from last week, but new to me!):
Every morning before his shift, Edwin Raymond, a 30-year-old officer in the New York Police Department, ties up his long dreadlocks so they won’t brush against his collar, as the job requires. On Dec. 7, he carefully pinned them up in a nautilus pattern, buttoned the brass buttons of his regulation dress coat and pulled on a pair of white cotton gloves. He used a lint roller to make sure his uniform was spotless. In a few hours, he would appear before three of the department’s highest-ranking officials at a hearing that would determine whether he would be promoted to sergeant. He had often stayed up late worrying about how this conversation would play out, but now that the moment was here, he felt surprisingly calm. The department had recently announced a push to recruit more men and women like him — minority cops who could help the police build trust among black and Hispanic New Yorkers. But before he could move up in rank, Raymond would have to disprove some of the things people had said about him.
Over the past year, Raymond had received a series of increasingly damning evaluations from his supervisors. He had been summoned to the hearing to tell his side of the story. His commanders had been punishing him, he believed, for refusing to comply with what Raymond considered a hidden and ‘‘inherently racist’’ policy.
