Link Roundup! -The Toast

“Your nap needs are meaningless to me, the dog. EMBRACE ME.”

I am so so excited about Nikki’s brilliant adoption series for Catapult, which she talks about here and please IMMEDIATELY go read her introductory piece, which radiates the warmth and generosity of spirit and keen insight that has made her one of my best friends (we have never met, but she’s coming out here this spring!):

I kept returning to that well-worn adoption story I’d heard and shared over and over when I was a child—wondering again how my parents could have been so certain about the motivations of people we didn’t know, and why I always repeated that story so faithfully to others. Why hadn’t I ever acknowledged all the questions I had, all the complicated feelings that (for me) came along with being adopted? Why had I assumed the role of chipper, unofficial spokesperson for adoption for so many years?

The answer, I realized, was that if I hadn’t, people might have thought I was ashamed of my family. This seemed childish, cowardly; at first I didn’t want to believe it of myself. But as I stared at the words of my draft, I knew I’d hit upon the truth behind every cheery answer I’d ever given to friends and strangers alike. I had waged a lifelong public-relations campaign for adoption, buffing my own story to a shine because some part of me must have believed that I could actually control how other people felt about me and my family. More than that, I had believed this control was a worthy goal, worth betraying my own curiosity and my own feelings.

This is SO much fun:

In 1945, Ebony was founded by John H. Johnson as the go-to lifestyle magazine for black people, and it remains an important resource and asset for black culture. Before other mainstream magazines included people of color in their featured advertisements, ads for brands like Gillette, Lucky Strike, Sears, Revlon, and Avon were featured exclusively in Ebony—with black models. The publication was also where black people could find ads for products made specifically for them, from hair products like Ultra Sheen to makeup lines like Fashion Fair.

We flipped through vintage Ebony magazines from four decades (1949, 1962, 1974, 1977, and 1984) and took note of the hair through the years (voluminous curls, big Afros, clip-on wigs and Jheri curls) and the shift from promoting bleaching creams and straight hair to representing a host of skin tones and hair textures.

OH MY GOD DID YOU KNOW THE @torontolibrary's REFERENCE LIBRARY HAS A SECRET ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE ROOM?? pic.twitter.com/jLGPvN10qD

— Anne Thériault (@anne_theriault) March 1, 2016

Venus wrote about returning to Indian Wells but mostly about sisterhood:

I remember the hurt I felt. I remember my confusion and disappointment and anger. I remember how the coverage of it at the time didn’t seem concerned with me and Serena, as people, at all — but rather only with the story itself. And with the version of the story that would get the most attention, regardless of the truth. I remember feeling that I had been wronged, and that I had done nothing wrong. I remember feeling that I had unfairly gotten the brunt of the blame for a bad situation.

The callous nimrod behind this nonsense has resigned:

Earlier this year, the CEO-president of Mount St. Mary’s University, a venerable Catholic institution in Maryland, faced resistance from the faculty over his plan to push the vulnerable students out of the school. The president, Simon Newman, wanted to juke the stats and boost the school’s reputation by getting rid of the weakest students early, before they could be counted. When faculty rebelled, according to the student paper, Newman told professors they had to get past their qualms, saying, “This is hard for you because you think of the students as cuddly bunnies, but you can’t. You just have to drown the bunnies . . . put a Glock to their heads.” After the report, the advisor of the student paper was fired, along with another faculty member, forviolating loyalty clauses in their contracts (he’s since reinstated them as an act of Catholic mercy).

This Erin Andrews NONSENSE:

ESPN declined to comment on Andrews’s testimony, to both Entertainment Tonight and Deadspin. But the network comes off as unsympathetic, at the very least, to an employee dealing with an extremely upsetting, ongoing situation, as well as unwilling to grant her the benefit of the doubt.

On Monday, Andrews told the Nashville courtroom that she was deeply pained by notions that she had orchestrated the video. “That ripped me apart,” she told jurors in Davidson County Circuit Court (via NBC News). “I’m so angry. This could have been stopped.”

Friend of The Toast Silvia Killingsworth is taking over The Awl and will be helping to midwife The Hairpin back into full swing!

SPEAKING of physically attractive Friends of The Toast, of which there are many on this list, Jazmineeeee:

040 JAZMINE HUGHES
editor at the New York Times Magazine

Hughes first came on our radar a few years ago as a reliably smart and
funny Twitter presence whose writing we found engaging, thought-provoking, and
often hilarious. Before long, Hughes was an assistant editor at
the Hairpin, where it seemed like just about everything she wrote was immensely,
deservedly popular; a blink of an eye later, and she was off to the New York
Times Magazine,
where she’s making her mark writing about Danny Devito among other important things.
Beyond the fact that Hughes is doing great for herself at a
really young age (like, really young), she’s also a huge advocate to other young writers,
and is co-founder of Writers of Color, a group that makes it impossible for
editors to say they don’t hire writers of color because they
“don’t know where to find them.”

okay okay we have a LOT of cherished friends, I admit it, and Jacqui Shine is one of them and this would be amazing even if she was an ENEMY of The Toast, read the whole thing and marvel:

“Building a Disney theme park based on American history seemed like a natural extension of the company’s focus on children and education, a perfect way of marrying our self-interest with a broader public interest,” writes Eisner.

But while Pocahontas might have represented the reinvigoration of the animation unit, no such renaissance awaited company’s Parks and Resorts division. Disney’s America would be one of Disney’s worst ideas and most public failures, a footnote in the company’s official history, one that has been largely forgotten.

Nicole is an Editor of The Toast.

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ppyajunebug 137p · 477 weeks ago

Super Tuesday happened and I'm just gonna lie down under my desk and pretend that this isn't my country and Drumpf is not going to be the Republican presidential candidate.

Please feel free to join me

Link Roundup!

ByNicole Cliffe

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