Classic cute.
Your friend is being a real turd and you should consider poisoning them or instead doing what Captain Awkward suggests:
I have a friend that comes over to my apartment, usually a few times a week. We’re quite close, I often serve dinner and occasionally they spend the night as their workplace is closer to my apartment. In the last few weeks I’ve noticed a pattern that is really starting to grate on my last nerve – they criticize how I keep my apartment, everything from if I’ve cleaned under the heating elements on my stove to how I organize my kitchen. They’ve even done little tours when another friend is over, showing all the things they think I’m doing wrong in a “get a load of this!” condescending tone. Because I allow them this friend into my home for extended periods of time, I feel like they should just be gracious, or at least not embarrass me in front of mutual friends like that.
For the confused:
I am 100% sure that Jon Lovitz and Jessica Lowndes are goofing on us and I will not be swayed (update: I am now on record as a Lovndes Truther in People Magazine):
In my year and change at Jezebel, I don’t think I’ve written the name of this mystery man in a single installment of Dirt Bag, but, knowing what we know today, that’s probably because the Gossip Gods (show idea) were saving him for something bigger—like being the surprise fiancé of a mostly unknown TV star 31 years his junior named Jessica Lowndes, who revealed their relationship to the world after a series of teaser Instagrams suggested she’d become engaged to her “sugar daddy.”
The Unbearable Sadness of Ben Affleck:
Which might explain Affleck’s conflicting impulse to both defend Lopez and transform her. He corrected those who called her “J.Lo” instead of Jennifer, a move that presaged Tom Cruise’s attempt to turn Katie Holmes into “Kate.” He toned down her sexuality: “Jen has had fewer boyfriends than your average high-school junior,” he said. “In the physical sense, she’s extremely chaste. She’s had a much simpler, more easily explainable, more clean romantic history than I have.” He encouraged Lopez to fire her longtime manager, who’d help craft the tabloid-friendly strategy that made her famous. The “popular theory,” according to Newsweek, was that Affleck wanted to “sophisticate his wife-to-be’s image in case his long-rumored aspirations of a political life as a congressman from Massachusetts become a reality.”
Lovely digitized photographs from Virginia Woolf’s Monk House album, courtesy of Harvard’s Houghton Library.
Patricia Lockwood on Trumplandia:
I had touched down in Manchester a few hours before, just as darkness began to fall together with snow. I entered the Verizon Wireless Arena, a 10,000-seat venue, to see a jumbotron projecting a photograph of Melania Trump in a bikini embracing a blow-up doll of Shamu. A hallucination? It was no longer possible to tell. The great crush around me seemed to be made up of two kinds of people: Trump supporters, and people there to goggle at Trump supporters. I flowed between both, listening. The second kind loved concession snacks. The first loved snacks and also hated Muslims.
This is a video of a gentleman in a T-rex costume doing the opening dance from A Chorus Line.
David Remnick on Aretha Franklin:
Franklin has won eighteen Grammy awards, sold tens of millions of records, and is generally acknowledged to be the greatest singer in the history of postwar popular music. James Brown, Sam Cooke, Etta James, Otis Redding, Ray Charles: even they cannot match her power, her range from gospel to jazz, R. & B., and pop. At the 1998 Grammys, Luciano Pavarotti called in sick with a sore throat and Aretha, with twenty minutes’ notice, sang “Nessun dorma” for him. What distinguishes her is not merely the breadth of her catalogue or the cataract force of her vocal instrument; it’s her musical intelligence, her way of singing behind the beat, of spraying a wash of notes over a single word or syllable, of constructing, moment by moment, the emotional power of a three-minute song. “Respect” is as precise an artifact as a Ming vase.
ugh:
A producer from a well-known NPR show gave me a call. Would I come on the air to discuss the recent developments? Of course. But I was soon disinvited when, during a preparatory call, the producer made clear she expected me to talk, and only talk, about my experience reporting an attempted rape to my school five years before as a freshman. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to talk about the policy change my colleagues and I had championed. “We already have an expert,” the producer told me, exasperated. “We need a survivor.”
