Sansa is too big for her baby chair (please note that I submitted her to WeRateDogs and she was justly and rightly awarded an 11/10 for this picture.) Let us briefly stroll down memory lane:
What it takes to run an abortion clinic:
The stigma around abortion prevents Burkhart’s nonprofit from performing many of the everyday transactions essential to businesses. She and other clinic owners have had trouble securing mortgages, medical insurance, contractors, and someone willing to deliver Band-Aids and bottles of water. Especially in rural and conservative regions, a wide range of companies and organizations decline to work with abortion providers, either for reasons of personal conscience or because of fears that being associated with abortion will cost them business.
“You Will Be Tokenized” (a great addition to the ongoing conversation on diversity in publishing, featuring various Friends of The Toast, including our beloved Morgan):
Morgan Jerkins
writer and editorial assistant
CatapultDuring senior year, I was applying for all kinds of editorial assistant positions, missing class and paying $33 roundtrip from Princeton Junction to New York Penn Station. The whole trip would take about three hours for an interview that lasted less than 30 minutes most of the time. When I’d go to these places, I would always be greeted by a white editorial assistant. I’ve never shook hands with an editorial assistant who was not white.
I didn’t understand why I couldn’t get even an entry level job. While I was back at home, I just started to write on the internet and the bylines I accrued led me to getting the job I have now. It took 15 months.
During the interview, my boss asked me how was I able to write for so many places and I told him, “Because as a woman of color, I know I can’t ask for permission. Either that train is gonna come and it’s gonna be full or it’s not gonna come at all.” I left there thinking that I said too much, maybe I was too honest. But less than two weeks later, I didn’t get the internship role but an editorial assistant role.
I wouldn’t be in this business if I were cynical.
A great profile of Dr Betty Deas Clark, the female pastor now shepherding the Emanuel African Methodist Church:
“Indirectly I always knew I had a special relationship with God,” she says. But it wasn’t until she was an adult that she “felt an unction” to be part of the ministry. “While I had pioneers before me,” Clark says about being a woman in the AME church, “I saw myself as a pioneer in my own world.”
It’s Valentine’s Day, and the church is packed. Congregants and visitors are festooned in red hats, ties, shirts, skirts and dresses. Clark presides over the room with a maternal, unmistakably female energy. “For the Apostle, martyrs, heroes and sheroes of the faith,” she says in the Founders’ Day Litany, adding in the word “shero” to the written text provided to churchgoers.
Clark is unabashed about being a woman at the pulpit. During a part of service where visitors to the church introduce themselves, one particular gentleman calls out, “I’m going to ask, like I do every year.” She begins to fan herself. “Will you be my valentine?” The church erupts into laughter and cheers. “The answer is yes,” she says to her husband. More laughter and clapping.
With the premiere of Netflix’s Fuller House comes a classic conundrum: How do you mercilessly criticize a product while encouraging the instinct that led to its creation? Because despite the plaintive catchphrase of one Uncle Jesse Katsopolis (John Stamos), which reappears along with every other vaguely recognizable zinger from the original series, Fuller House doesn’t deserve mercy. The show isn’t just bad, it borders on the obscene, as much an affront to those bemused by a reboot of the sitcom that anchored ABC’s once-mighty T.G.I.F. comedy block as those receptive to it. But to attack Fuller House on conceptual grounds is wrongheaded, considering the same blindfolded nostalgia led the deep-pocketed streaming service to order a Wet Hot American Summer series, reconstitute Mr. Show as With Bob And David, and green-light four new Gilmore Girls movies. Netflix’s reboot magnanimity has been such a blessing, it’s heartbreaking to seeFuller House emerge as the perverse result.
I personally would not have sex with Donald Trump if he dropped out of the race immediately afterwards, because it’s not like Ted Cruz is such a gem either, but the question is an intriguing one, and here’s Anna Merlan’s take:
For that reason, I would, if called upon by my country, if caught on a day when I’m feeling particularly patriotic, consider having sex with Donald Trump. I would need an excellent glass (bucket) of wine beforehand, I would need to be high as hell, it would have to be in a position where I didn’t have to see his face, and I would need a guarantee that it wouldn’t last longer than like two minutes. (I don’t think it would.) And then I would need a six-week vacation, hiking alone through a jungle somewhere and weeping at night alone in a tent, a gentle rain battering the sides. A cleansing rain. A healing rain.
Who has seen The Witch and should I see it? (numerous spoilers, which I always read)
In The Witch, the locus of abjection is Thomasin’s maturing female body, anxiety over which overflows in the most unsettling ways. It’s in the heavy incestual undertones, in the weird, demi-adult form of the twins, who, with their adult clothes, tiny bodies, and sophisticated language, confuse the Puritan delineation of child and adult. It’s in the blood that spatters, never splashes, in a way that suggests the drip of menstruation, and the rotting corn, and the wide gaping woods, readily aligned with the unknowable, dark expanse of the vagina. These things are dangerous, scary, abject because they threaten established ways of understanding the world and humans’ place in it: They’re existential terror made manifest.
I am currently reading and reviewing Faye Resnick’s 1994 biography of Nicole Brown Simpson for a Real Publication, which I have all sorts of feelings around, but also think I can do skillfully and without being cartoonish, so let’s catch up with Resnick’s last appearance (she’s played by Connie Britton) in The People V OJ Simpson:
Connie Britton was back to do a hilarious sendup of Faye Resnick, who is now in the midst of writing her book, “Nicole Brown Simpson: The Private Diary of a Life Interrupted.” She tells her collaborators that she doesn’t want the book to be exploitative, but goes on to reveal tales of clubbing, how much Nicole loved her breast implants, a sexual act Nicole loved called the “Brentwood Hello,” and how much cocaine they did together. She flits around the conversation as if she’s recalling a grocery list instead of sensational facts about a newly murdered friend, all while absent-mindedly munching on carrot sticks. The most explosive thing Resnick revealed was the violent nature of the Simpsons’ marriage and divorce. Resnick claimed Nicole and O.J. reconciled constantly, and were “the most undivorced divorced couple” she’d ever known. Why would she add such an air of romance to the physical violence Nicole suffered, particularly in the wake of the 911 tapes going public?
Jay Caspian Kang, who is wrong about Hamilton, writes beautifully and cogently on the tensions he feels as an Asian-American over the Peter Liang verdict:
On Feb. 11 this year, Liang became the first N.Y.P.D. officer convicted in a line-of-duty shooting in over a decade. Many Asian-Americans felt that Liang had been offered up as a sacrificial lamb to appease the ongoing protests against police violence that started two summers ago in Ferguson, Mo. The pro-Liang protests, in turn, sparked small counterprotests by black activists, who argued that justice had been served and that a killer cop was a killer cop, period. A discomforting paradox lay beneath the whole confrontation, one that cut straight across the accepted modern vision of Asians and their adjacency to whiteness: If Liang (and, by extension, all Asian-Americans) enjoyed the protections of whiteness, then how do you explain his conviction?
The Liang protests mark the most pivotal moment in the Asian-American community since the Rodney King riots, when dozens of Korean-American businesses were burned to the ground. The episode is often said to have been precipitated by the horrific killing of Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old black girl who was shot in the back of the head by Soon Ja Du, a Korean store owner, after a confrontation over a bottle of orange juice. In reality, the tensions between Asian store owners and the black neighborhoods they served had been simmering for years; they began well before Rodney King became a household name, and they continue today.
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