Jane Hu on the history of how modern poetry has been influenced by "Chinese-ness" for far longer than Michael Derrick Hudson: This impression of Chinese-ness is a Western vision has very little to do with whatever you might call the “Chinese experience.” Instead, it has far more to do with engaging in the real roots of modernist American poetry. Slowly, often clumsily, white American poets have become more self-aware on this point. Billy Collins,…
Hello, Toasties, how are you all this Friday? I'm recovering from a migraine, which sucks. I hear caffeine is good for headaches, though, so I've been drinking coffee and eating chocolate muffins all day; my health is very important to me. This week we were very proud to publish this #longread by Colleen Hele, Naomi Sayers, and Jessica Wood on what's missing from the conversation around missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. SEPTEMBER DAD…
Jay Caspian Kang's profile of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is unbelievably fascinating: This is the Abdul-Jabbar paradox: He’s a man who cares enough about his legacy to write two memoirs and eight other books, but he refuses to engage in the usual smoothing, sanding and editing that is required of a public persona. He instead asks you to accept his version of his truth, even if the truth is that at 68, he sometimes has a…
His sisters, 18-year-old Eyman and 17-year-old Ayisha, could hardly keep up with the tweets and stunning news about their little brother. Because Ahmed was never much for social media, the girls set up a Twitter account for him, @istandwithahmed, and watched it balloon to thousands of followers within hours. "We're trending no. 1!" Ayisha cried to her sister, holding a cellphone over…
Okay, now that I've read it, TNC is back on the top of the roundup: I have a friend who has a kid who was caught with drugs at school. The kid is white. The administrators wanted to kick the kid out of school. They were trying to put the kid into one of these schools for kids who get kicked out of schools. The parents went to those hearings, did everything in their…
Ta-Nehisi Coates' MAJESTERIAL piece on mass incarceration in America is out, and I am highly confident it is brilliant, but I am going to bed before I can read it, so I'm linking pre-emptively and we can talk about it in the morning!
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The Awl has a very long and good thing about the rise of adblockers, and how they will murder and destroy my beautiful website that I cherish…
I am WILDLY joyful to finally be able to talk about the sweeping Toast redesign that a dream team of geniuses has been working on for several months now, and will launch in early October. If you were one of the many, many readers we reached out to for feedback during this process, thank you so much for your time and energy on our behalf.
I am so very, very tired today, Toasties. I was up late helping my husband roll grape leaves for his department potluck today (for whatever reason, every single work potluck he's ever had has been a 'bring traditional family foods' party, which in my own case would mean day-old pizza or a box cake frosted with Cool Whip, but in his invariably means the only Lebanese dish he really knows how to make: grape leaves). We…
Everything about the new H. naledi bones is so fascinating I cannot DEAL with it: Most pressing of all: how to get it out again, and quickly, before some other amateurs found their way into that chamber. (It was clear from the arrangement of the bones that someone had already been there, perhaps decades before.) Tucker and Hunter lacked the skills needed to excavate the fossils, and no scientist Berger knew—certainly not himself—had the…
The Victorian-livin' couple, I am not yet done talking about them:
Neither my husband nor I have ever had a cellphone; I've never even had a driver's license. On special outings when Gabriel and I go cycling together, I ride a copy of a high-wheel tricycle from the 1880s. Gabriel has three high-wheel bicycles, and he has ridden them hundreds of miles. On our vacation just last week, we
There is a big profile of Bill de Blasio in Vanity Fair. De Blasio is right about the cops, wrong about lateness: Worse was yet to come: also in December, near the height of tensions, de Blasio told a press conference how, as the father of a black teenager, he had several times cautioned Dante to be careful when dealing with the police. “We’ve had to literally train him,” he said, “as families have…
What refugees pack for the voyage: Houthayfa is not bringing much to sea. First, he hasn’t a lot to take with him – most of his valuables were left behind in Syria. Second, he’s been told the smugglers discourage taking all but the essentials. On such crammed boats, keeping the weight down is vital to keeping the boat afloat. He’ll take a black jacket, to keep him warm during the nights. A big bottle…
