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The Friend Zone sounds like a place with lots of hot dogs and trampolines! LET’S GO!”


“quinoarmageddon”


Francine Prose and Leslie Jamison discuss the ethics of mining real relationships for literary content:

A recent surge of media interest has involved the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose multivolume memoir-novel “My Struggle” has been criticized for revealing too much about his close relatives. In a Paris Review interview, Knausgaard says the question of whether a writer ought to use his family as material is akin to asking the question: Would you save the cat or the Rembrandt from the burning house? He says we must save the cat, choose life over art — a somewhat surprising answer from a writer who portrays his own family in such intimate detail.


Chanel and Jane Marie’s latest “Oh, You Pretty Things!” column over at Rookie!


This essay in The Paris Review by Ruth Curry hits a lot of the what-thinking-about-your-high-school-friends-does-to-you buttons today:

Tracy was my Rayanne. She had long, frizzy-curly hair like Rayanne, and, like Rayanne, she was a little weird and crazy. Tracy was a dancer, with a dancer’s compact build and a dancer’s peculiar walk, like her feet weren’t quite part of the rest of her body. She wore the same plaid button-down shirt almost every day over a rotating collection of baby T-shirts and smoked Marlboro Lights. The popular/athletic kids at our horrible, tiny public high school ignored Tracy because they thought she was dumb, but she wasn’t. She just was spacey in a way she didn’t particularly bother to hide, and not good at science. My parents didn’t like her either, in part because Tracy actually knew who Rayanne Graff was, which implied Tracy watched TV—cable TV, even!—which further implied a familiarity with sex, drugs, Michael Jackson, and the Delia’s catalog, all of which were forbidden in my house. This, of course, made me like her more.


Jesus in everyday situations:

jesus-in-everyday-situations-17


As I type this, my power has been out for 14 hours. Perhaps I will update this from my own, power-having home, tomorrow morning! Perhaps! Perhaps! Perhaps!


I would not usually link to a Buzzfeed list of “60 Pictures That Perfectly Capture the 2000s,” BUTTTTTTTT:

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Bodega cats: in their own words


Shopping and class and moms:

On the steps of Marni, a place which I had long fantasized about, I broke. “I can’t go in,” I told them. “OK,” they said, looking bewildered as they walked inside without me. I lingered outside on the sidewalk, looking in at the security guard looking back at me through the glass. I assumed that his job was working-class and that his lifestyle was similar to the one in which I was raised, and in that moment, he felt like “my people” more than my friends did. I realize now this was (slightly unfair) projection on my part, but I still felt my class issues more viscerally than ever before. And it unmoored me.


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