Where are the girls? Why aren’t we getting CNN Breaking News updates about them?
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Anna Fitzpatrick on the films of Mary Harron:
American Psycho is a great movie. I say this on my own, without the influence of whatever raves I heard as a teenager. It is stomach churning and at times very hard to watch, but one that maintains corporate masculinity as the butt of its sick joke. It’s both a genuine satire and a genuine horror movie, the real terror coming from the way that female bodies are viewed as disposable. I can’t imagine its satire being handled as intelligently had a different filmmaker adapted it.
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Remember that great and infuriating piece on sexual assault at Tufts? Update: Tufts is in troubbbbblllle.
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GUTS on unpaid labour:
My childhood friend, Natasha, completed a forty-six week, unpaid internship in a number of hospitals across Ontario as the final requirement before taking the Canadian Dietetic Registration Exam to become a registered dietician. Nearing the end of her undergraduate degree in Nutrition and Food, she was encouraged by her professors and mentors to take on this highly competitive position that required her to travel in a personal vehicle every day without any financial support from her undergraduate university, the Ontario Student Assistance Program, or the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (which oversaw the internship program). Natasha told me that she acquired twice as much debt during one year of interning than she did throughout her four years of undergraduate studies.
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Here is a very helpful guide for which onion to use.
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Jane Marie’s second column asking people questions about their marriage is up at Cosmo! Don’t miss the first.
How has your sex life changed since you got married? Wait. You guys were so young — were you even having sex before you got married?
[Long pause while they look at each other.]
Jessi: Yes. [Laughs.]
Paul: Yeah.
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The perfect Jenny Diski, on age:
Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable way, and not, as we assumed, as a result of personal choice. The irony of ‘I hope I die before I get old’ was that we didn’t believe for a second that we could become the old as we knew them. And we weren’t just young, but young in a way no previous generation had been young. We used ‘young’ and ‘old’ as time-free categories. ‘Young’ meant new and different, able to see what the old couldn’t (certain visionaries excepted): we had reinvented the terms to mean us and them. They, the old, would die out: we would change the world and remain forever ourselves, meaning forever young. (Which is not at all the same thing, Segal points out, as the untruism that ‘whatever your age, you are no older than you feel.’) Without the constraints and necessities of war or strong memories of having had to manage austerity, we could believe that there was a single something that we purely were, and always would be. We made a fuss about being young, without understanding how much being young enabled us to make the fuss. Now, we’re going to make a fuss about being old and that’s going to be rather less straightforward.
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The secret history of Britney Spears’ lost album:
Over the years, fans have put together mock Original Doll album covers and created their own tracklists culled from B-sides and leaked tracks. Message board threads devoted to the album have stirred speculation and conspiracy theories, and every so often, users claiming to have a friend of a friend who worked at Jive would post an alleged detail.
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Cord Jefferson, on why there’s nothing new about Donald Sterling:
In the late 1970s my paternal grandparents told my black father to not get involved with my white mother.
“I’ll be fine,” said my dad, “I’m not worried about racists.”
“It’s not you we’re worried about,” said my grandmother. “Do you have any idea how white folks are going to treat that woman from now on?”
Shortly after that my mother’s parents disowned her. Twenty years later, a couple years after my parents got divorced, a white man who’d gone on a few dates with my mother would stand up from the dinner table and leave after seeing a picture of me, her brown son.
“You didn’t tell me your husband was black,” he said as he rose.
“I didn’t know that it mattered,” she said.
“It does,” he said, and he walked away.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I haven’t been a church-goer in a decade and I mostly identify as agnostic now, but you better believe I’m praying for those Nigerian girls. Holy. Shit.
I was just reading an article that says they might have been sold as brides. D:
http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/outrage-…
I do not pray but I sure do hope they are found and brought home.
I strenuously object to the media’s use of the word “bride”. These girls are not brides. They are sold into slavery and forced to have sex and cook and belong to the militants to do their bidding. They are in no sense brides. They are girls, they were stolen from school and their families, there was no consent.
I’d never heard of Mary Harron before, sounds like I should look into her stuff. Still not convinced to give American Psycho a go though – we read an excerpt of the book in class once, and I NOPE NOPE NOPED my way out of there.
Somewhere linked to an interview with her a couple of days ago – I thought it was here but it might have been one of my facebook friends. Really interesting stuff. I’ve never tried to watch American Psycho – I read about the first chapter of it once and similarly went NOPE.
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201403/?read=in…
Thanks, that was a really interesting interview.
I read it because I thought I should, and I saw what he was going for but ultimately it seemed… engineered and flat, to me.
Like… there weren;t any real people in it. And that wasn’t just an artifact of the characters world view, but more a writing failure cleverly disguised.
I thought more or less the same about the other books of his I’ve tried to read. I just haven’t cared what happened to any of the characters and I am not sure I’ve made it all the way through any of the ones I’ve started.
I just don’t think he’s that good a writer. He’s very good at writing surface-shock, but no good at actually making me believe in any of it.
You definitely should: it’s one of those rare movies that improves on the book.
You can watch the beginning of it if it’s on TV sometime and get a pretty good sense of when the blood is going to start and stop there. It’s funny up until then as well as after.
[Disclaimer: I don’t hate Bret Easton Ellis — as a writer; I’m sure I would hate him as a person, if he were one — although Glamorama is not as good as Zoolander (comes close a couple times) and the violence in it was more nauseating than anything in American Psycho, not that that is pleasant either. ]
I hated the book (though to be fair, it’s been at least a decade since I read it; perhaps I would be more accepting of it now but I DO NOT THINK SO NOPE), but Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner transformed it into a statement not only on the narcissistic time and social class and, more universally, a meditation on how power and privilege transform people into monsters, but also made it into an examination of the text.
The book is so vile, and so explicitly so, that it tempts the reader to skim and skip and gather impressions of the pervasive horror mixed with boredom, the intermingling of scenes so physically vicious that I won’t even describe them here and scenes where Patrick Bateman drones on and on about the tritest pop as high art. I’m a seasoned horror-flick fan and I read the book in a way that approximates the horror-movie cliché of watching through your fingers.
But the film denies that possibility. You cannot skip. It also tones down the physical horror, making it at once more concrete and more cartoon-like. When Bateman chases after a woman who escapes his murderous attack, there’s an element of Wile E. Coyote to the scene. It’s horrible, but it’s also weirdly funny and a little disruptive of reality.
And that may be the thing that elevates the film above the book for me: there’s an ambiguity to the movie that I didn’t see in the book. It’s not entirely clear what Patrick Bateman has done, and what he has imagined, and that question drives the film.
I’m still not wholeheartedly suggesting you watch the film; it’s got some gruesome scenes and is laced through with self-conscious misogyny (though I would argue that the misogyny is the characters’ and not the films, plenty of people disagree), and you’re the best judge of whether you’re game for that or not. But I felt like the film made Patrick Bateman more an object of fun than the book did, and I vastly prefer the film.
Also, it makes watching the Batman films starring Bale nine million times better.
I can’t lay my hands on the link right now, but somewhere in the archives of the VideoReport, I suggest renting the Nolan Batman flicks and American Psycho for a weekend marathon during which you’re going to sit on your couch in the dark, croaking to yourself in a breathy, husky voice, and imagining that the scion of Gotham and the scion of American Psycho are the same fella.
C’mon: Bateman? Batman? The parody writes itself.
Hmmm, your description makes me think that maybe I could watch it. I’ve only read one passage, one of the explicitly vile disgusting ones (for a philosophy of literature class, we were told we didn’t have to read it, but I did anyway), and I’ve never felt such a physical reaction to a piece of writing.
But… I like certain blood & guts & gore movies, precisely because of the cartoon-ey way they depict violence and the escapism/detachment you can find. I might think about giving the movie a shot.
I hope I’m not misleading you: the depiction of the blood & guts is not tame, but Bateman’s disaffected approach is cartoonish in its absurdity and audacity, and the film is self-aware about that aspect of its depiction.
Though some people feel the film is misogynistic, I think it’s obviously a deadpan indictment of the narcissism and empathetic failures of the nouveau riche elite of the Reagan 80s (and by extension, of any socially and economically privileged class), which in Patrick’s case is heightened to such sociopathic extent that he cheerfully, voraciously kills people for his own convenience, arousal, and entertainment. It’s hard to watch, but it’s a trenchant satire of an era, and of privilege in general.
Oh, and I meant to add: American Psycho was the movie of the week at The Dissolve a few weeks ago, so you can read some great analysis of it in their archives. Some (all?) will be spoiler-y, so take warning.
I saw “I Shot Andy Warhol” while at college during my very angry feminist phase and oh man, it left SUCH an impression on me. I do believe I still have The SCUM Manifesto on my bookshelf to scare off potential suitors.
Oof, my stepbrother goes to Tufts and is on their football team. I keep sending him these articles but I honestly have no idea if he reads them, because he is 19 and hates reading.
The first rule of onions is to never use white onions. The second rule of onions is to use more shallots. There is no third rule of onions.
*chanting* SHALLOTS SHALLOTS SHALLOTS
I pretty much only use red onions and shallots. Red onions for salads and putting on sandwiches, etc., and shallots for everything else. I feel like this might be ok?
But, shallots are so much harder to chop! I’ve got my onion cutting technique locked down, I’m too old to change
HOW DO YOU CHOP ONIONS??? I am so bad at it. Help me!
I know everyone’s down on the Pioneer Woman, but these pictures are super helpful: DICING AN ONION
Why are we down on Pioneer Woman? Isn’t she great?
Too many dang pictures, and they’re all ENORMOUS. I know what an egg looks like, just write “add an egg.” I don’t need a giant photograph of you stirring an egg into your cookie dough. /crotchety
That said, I like a lot of her recipes.
Get a good knife, a wooden cutting board, learn to sharpen it and take care of it, learn to hold it and watch some youtube tutorials! It really needs to be sharp, but that isn’t too big of a deal. If you take care of your knife it will take care of you.
I got this knife http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Cutlery-Centurion-8…
from walmart, and a decent pull through sharpener. You might like http://www.amazon.com/Chicago-Cutlery-Centurion-S…
more to your liking if you have small hands though.
Chop off both ends, then run your knife from end to end, pressing slightly, so you just cut a few layers. This allows you to grab the papery skin to get it off. Now slice your onion in two from end to end – following the previous mark if you can, if not, meh. Grab one half, put it flat on the board.
Now, are you slicing or dicing? For sliced onions, slice either way, if you want onions that retain their shape, slice latitudinally (if the ends are the poles, slice parallel to the equator), if you want them to mush a bit, slice longitudinally.
To dice, firstly slice longitudinally, AND THIS IS THE KEY, hold the sliced onion as together as possible. i.e. you want it to look like it’s sliced-half state. Then slice latitudinally. Often I find the final dices get a bit messy, nobody’s perfect.
Oh, and a big sharp knife is important – small knives just make everything messy.
YOU GUYS thank you! This is a game changer for me… Especially as guacamole season begins soon (I know, it is always guacamole season)…
Cut the shallot to make a flat edge, then proceed onion-style. It helps to have a really sharp knife.
I’m taking my knife to the sharpener this week, I always get so excited when the edge is all new and shiny!
Looks like I’ll have to try some shallots this weekend then.
Also, Asian shallots are a lot bigger and easier to slice (plus usually cheaper) than Dutch or French ones so try picking some up in a Asian market if there’s one near you. Thai or Vietnamese markets will also often have fried shallots in jars that are pretty amazing on top of salads or whatever.
plus visalias are good as heck!
I think green onions have been unfairly neglected. They are so delicious. Since they didn’t say, I’ll advise:
Green onions are part of the holy trinity of asian cooking along with garlic and ginger.
They are an integral part of Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex cuisines as an ingredient and garnish. Good both raw and cooked
Chop and add to green salads
OR make them into green onion cakes. For me. All for me. Don’t invite anyone else over.
OMG, I’ve got a Chinese cookbook with a recipe for these little fried green onion pancakes, and I have to force myself to forget I own it or I would be dead of a coronary already.
My in-laws took me to their friends’ restaurant where I was plied with these for the first time http://feistychef.ca/blog/green-onion-cakes and I ate so many I couldn’t eat the rest of the meal. NO REGRETS A+ WOULD DO IT AGAIN
uh oh, now i think I’m gonna have to get some green onion cakes for lunch. Mmmmmm green onion cakes.
And Mex (??) (okay but actually probably more like Central, but someone challenge me if I’m wrong) cuisines. You don’t want my grilled cebollitas next to my arracherra? YOUR LOSS. Also Dona Lupe on my corner, which is a bummer because she’s criminally underpriced.
LEEKS GUYS. LEEKS ARE GREAT.
TEAM LEEKS FOR LIFE
YES, THE NOBLEST OF THE ALLIUM FAMILY.
Leeks are great except for, as Jacques Pepin calls it, the saaahhhnnd you have to clean out before you use them.
I use yellow for cooking everything but TexMex, white for TexMex, shallots if it’s fancy or a big piece of meat, and red for uncooked things.
ETA: Have now read the actual article and apparently I’m doing everything right! Woo Me!
I know this stuff rots your brain, but if anyone would like to get a relatively un-varnished glimpse into how institutional racism colors this whole Sterling-Silver NBA fiasco, I highly recommend listening to the people calling in to a Chicago sports radio station regarding the hammer being dropped on Donald Sterling yesterday (link below). One of the first calls they received was a guy pretending that he was a constitutional lawyer and saying that Sterling’s first amendment rights were being violated. It went downhill from there. At the end of the show (I know that not many people will make it more than a few callers deep, if they click over at all), the hosts were accused of purposefully screening for racist callers and they said that, if anything, they screened out more racists because what they had was just too incoherent and/or noxious to put on the air (that exchange comes at the end of Hour 5).
These people believe deeply that they are not racist, yet they almost always employ such tropes as “I’m not racist, but…” and “My black friends….”
It’s really quite remarkable. Sorry that the interface isn’t good. I’ve queued up the first hour so that all you have to do is hit play. Please consider giving this a few minutes of your time. These are real people, and their views represent a pretty large segment of the population. The fun starts a ~8:00 in Hour 1.
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/audio/988-the-boers-a…
I am not sure I could listen to this without falling into despair for the entire human race. Also WHO pretends to be a constitutional lawyer? Did they then call him out and figure out he wasn’t an actual lawyer? Also, I have known some pretty dumb lawyers in my day and it honestly wouldn’t surprise me to hear some of them spout that nonsense.
Oh, they were calling everyone out. It was pretty wonderful. The constitutional lawyer dude starts at 2:30 here: http://chicago.cbslocal.com/audio/988-the-boers-a…
I listen to a lot of local sports talk radio, and I always have to change the station when issues of race, gender, or sexuality come up. Between the hosts’ (2 white dudes, of course) blindness to their own privilege–encapsulated nicely in their repeated declarations of “I really don’t think we live in a predominantly racist/sexist/homophobic society”–and the outright racists and “devil’s advocates”s calling in, I just can’t bear it without my blood boiling. I just want to call and be like, “Institutional injustice is a real thing, dudes. You are college-educated men and it makes me sad and angry and a bit hopeless for the world we live in that you’ve lived on this earth for as long as you have and yet still seem to be completely unaware of how the deck is stacked against people who don’t look like you.”
I heartily support you calling in sometime and saying those exact words.
I’m pretty sure Boers and Bernstein have made a career out of screening calls for the dumbest and most toxic Chicago meatheads ever to walk this earth, and I ALSO believe they screened out worse (haha, “worse”) racists. I’m not sure sometimes if they have a reasonable view on sports controversies (i.e. Joe Paterno, baseball player going on paternity leave during a game, etc. etc.) or if the human garbage that calls in just makes me THINK they are largely reasonable?
(HOWEVER, the best thing to do with that show is practice your most intense Chicago accent and pretend you’re an idiot caller. “Ahhh, hi, dis is Steve from Evergreen Park, and I think da Bulls are gonna win da championship without D.Rose”)
What is the deal with self proclaimed “constitutional lawyers” calling into radio shows? I have listened to maybe 3 radio shows in my life and I swear a constitutional lawyer calls in to dispute any rational claim being made. I’m pretty sure they are trained by Fox News and given a cubicle with a phone.
“But in a statement on Monday, Tufts called this an “unsubstantiated finding” — one that led the school to revoke a voluntary agreement it made with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to work toward compliance on April 17.”
Am I reading this right? Tufts gets called out for violating civil rights, so in a bratty response they decide that they aren’t going to do whatever stuff they were going to do to not violate civil rights?
I think what they are doing actually is saying: “don’t publicly announce we are not in compliance. We are going to get rid of your federal observers so that you have no one in place and cannot credibly say whether we are in compliance or not — you will just have to take at face-value whatever we say we are doing.”
I work at a university, and I am sure that 1) they do want to do something to improve their process in handling rape cases, if only in order to avoid further bad publicity in the future like this, and 2) they want to immediately put a lid on the current bad publicity that they are getting, because they deathly in earnest don’t want parents to think this is not a good place to send their children, and they don’t want to discourage alumni donors.
In other words, they probably do want to be in compliance, but they REALLY don’t want anyone checking up on them and pointing it out in public letters when they are not — they want things to be nice and murky. I have seen all sorts of amazing things covered up in this way by universities. Often they do address the problem, often by booting out troublemakers/wrongdoers, but booting out said wrongdoers in a way that covers everything up and makes completely opaque to anyone on the outside what has just happened.
Woah woah woah that piece on Mary Harron was so good. I loved the journey of the author from her earlier “you’re right or you’re wrong” brand of feminism to a more critical and balanced view of the world. Reading about that alongside the work of a woman who strove to bring that balance to her movies was excellent; it perfectly underscores the evolution in thinking that makes for good critical dialog instead of viewing things in absolutes.
I love the first Married article. I like most of the second as well, but I am really really really really uncomfortable with the whole “give your husband what he needs because that’s what God wants you to do” part.
Yeah that part was so weird but I guess that’s one of the interesting things of interviewing a wide variety of people? But that kind of logic will never not make me uncomfortable. That said I loooove this series and if anyone could get me to read about what being married is like it’s Jane (also, her blog, omg, friday bargain bin is back and now my budget is goonneee).
Joke’s on you, Buzzfeed! I use yellow onions raw, in salads, and I LOVE EVERY BITE. (Though I do usually make sure the salad has a savory component, like goat cheese).
I had an onion on my belt, because it was the style at the time.
But what kind of onion, Buzzfeed article? WHAT KIND OF ONION?
Yeah — I’ve had really varying experiences with red onions. Sometimes they have less of a bite than yellow onions, and sometimes they really. do. not. And are pretty inedible raw. Would be interesting to know why.
It may depend on the time of year? Keeper onions (those bred for storage) have a higher sulfur content and are therefore stinkier/spicier, and that is related to their storability. Most storage onions are yellow, at least as far as I have seen. Maybe the spicier red onions are off-season and have been stored longer? I only know about hyper-local seasonal onions though, not sure what the Global Onion Market does in terms of providing year-round crops — whether they store them or if they just come from a different location each month, or a year-round onion-producing location, or what.
The flat ones are much better (not nearly so in-your-face-onion-y) than the round ones, for reasons which I do not know. They’re also harder to find, though admittedly my main grocery store is terrible (they don’t even sell peas!!!) so maybe they’re readily available in more sensible places.
“Why aren’t we getting CNN Breaking News updates about them?”
You know damn well why.
My supermarket started selling pink oninons recently. I think they’re a crossbreed, maybe? But I like them, and they don’t make my eyes water so much.
Cord Jefferson’s piece hits you right in the gut, in a good way. Oof.
I think of “American Psycho,” the movie, like I do about “Starship Troopers,” the movie, in that they are both wildly subversive ways of handling the text, and improve it. I once read a review of “American Psycho” that said that Mary Harron had managed to make it into a movie about male vanity, which I think is an extraordinary achievement. I liked “Bettie Page,” too, I had forgotten that was Harron!
I liked Bettie Page too – I didn’t know that was her. It was slyly subversive as well.
I have done THREE unpaid internships and apparently that’s still not enough experience to get a job, so burn all unpaid internships to the fucking ground. Oh, and one of them was possibly illegal.
i want a wall of shame for every posting I find that requires a bachelor degree BUT IS UNPAID
I hear you! I did two before I got my current job, since it’s basically impossible to get a job in my industry (publishing) without internships. The second place basically used interns as entry-level employees to do essential (if administrative) tasks — they just had to retrain people like every six months as interns moved through. It’s such a fucked up, bullshit system. My current boss has been talking about possibly hiring an intern this summer, and I told him that I would have nothing to do with it unless we paid at least minimum wage. It hasn’t come up again, but I will absolutely have that fight if I have to.
Yep. When I got rejected from an entry-level 20k/annum job in the area in which I have my MA, and had already also done three unpaid internships, I was told by the person who rejected me that I just did not have the same amount of experience as other candidates and that “unfortunately you need more (invariably unpaid) experience” and perhaps a PhD. Fuck that shit right up a tree, dudes, I’m gonna make beer instead.
So I made a counteroffer on my job offer yesterday asking for a slightly higher salary and they haven’t responded yet and I’m freaking out a little. Taking deep breaths, reminding myself over and over that they won’t revoke the offer just because I tried to negotiate a little. Ugh this is so hard and I just want to get out of my current job. ugh ugh ugh
The worst part of job searching/new job-iness is the great disparity in the perception of time/urgency. You’re on Job Offer Woo Let’s Do This time and they are on This Is A Normal Wednesday At The Office time (which moves significantly more slowly). I hope they get back to you quickly and accept your higher number and everything goes quickly and smoothly!
I know, it’s different for them. But they want me to start May 12 so we have to get this figured out 🙁 I just hope they’re not not responding so they can try to get someone cheaper. Thanks for your good wishes!!!
Stay strong! They are evaluating their whateverness (finances, HR department, you name it) and will get back to you! Remember, they want you at this job, and negotiation is totally expected! Don’t second guess yourself, you’ve got this. (And I have totally been there–made a counteroffer, they completely refused, but I still got the job! It’ll be okay.)
Thanks, that’s good to hear! Appreciate the words of support 🙂
Ok, wow, worries were unfounded! They were having e-mail issues which is why she didn’t respond. Gah. Anyways she said I could push back my start date and they are trying to see if they can offer more! Huzzah! Thanks all for the moral support 🙂
Yay! Glad I came back to check on this. Maybe you’ll have some firm news in time for Cocktail Hour tomorrow!
Can I make this the general job-application thread? Because I have a question. I applied for a position by email a few weeks ago. I really want it, and I think I have a good shot at it. The thing is, I didn’t get a reply to confirm they had received it. I should have followed up sooner, but I didn’t send the follow-up email asking if they got it until yesterday. I haven’t heard anything back and the position closes today. Is it weird and pushy if I call a day after I email?
Yes, weird and pushy. Email generally works fine, and a lot of people don’t acknowledge applications [bad form, but common]. Email follow-up is ok, but phone is disruptive, especially if they have a lot of applicants. They’ll call you if they are interested. Employer time is always way longer than job-seeker time.
Wait, it closes for applications today? If they have a close date on applications, there’s a very real possibility they just don’t look at anything related to the applications until after the close date. Look again at your sent mail box, triple-check the address you typed against that on the job posting, and then leave it there.
Of course, I work for/am job hunting with the federal government. Where it’s totally a normal thing to get a call about an interview where the job posting closed two months ago.
Cord has been incredible this wk and … always… Hi Cord, this biracial misandrist adores you; I would create a polyamorous relationship for you.
I’m really interested to see the “required for this certification” type of internship/practicum included in the discussion of unpaid labor. When I student-taught, I wasn’t just working unpaid; I was paying tuition and fees for a 15-credit-hour course titled “Teaching Practicum” so that I could… do unpaid labor. If I had my way all unpaid internships/practicums/whatever would be scrapped and replaced with either actual paid entry-level jobs (in most fields) or paid/stipended apprenticeships (in fields where the practicum-to-certification model makes sense, like teaching).
Today, on this holy Wednesday, the tenth anniversary of Mean Girls, I completely forgot to wear pink, even though I reminded you guys of this yesterday. #shame
Ooh, you are NOT sitting with me at lunch.
We’ll put you in the Burn Book for that. I’m wearing a pink shirt, and since I work at home, pink kitty sock-slippers. (so CHIC)
I am wearing my hot pink blazer today because all my other blazers need dry cleaning. I didn’t even make the Mean Girls connection, even though I just re-watched Mean Girls the other night for the first time since it came out!
Incidentally, on my re-watch I found all the jokes in Mean Girls very funny, but I didn’t think the plot hung together all that well! It was okay, but not the Clueless of the 2000’s that the internet has made it out to be.
I’m with you on that. Plotwise, I much prefer Easy A, but Mean Girls is still sharp and funny and great. A+ job on the hot pink blazer!
I’m wearing a pink checked shirt and I’ve never even seen Mean Girls. You can have my pink karma.
That Britney article is actually fascinating. And like everything else, makes me so sad for the (admittedly wonderful) performer she is when compared to the artist she could have been.
I accidentally read the comments on the Tufts piece and now I’m shooting flames out of my eyeballs oops
You can always get me to click on a link with a Britney Spears picture. Always. I cannot explain why she is my Achilles heel, but she is, without a doubt.
Would you say your relationship is…toxic?
I’ll see myself out.
This was an excellent Link Roundup.
Uff to the Cord Jefferson article, sadly his commentary hits home. When I was a sophmore in high school a black friend asked me to homecoming. My mom and dad grounded me because of it. My dad sat me down and very seriously discussed how I would never be desirable to any other man if I were to be seen dating/hand holding/etc this boy. Commence severing all emotional ties with my parents.
This is horrible. One of my HS boyfriends was black. We even go out for that long but the tiny taste of the racism specific to interracial couples that I picked up from various people has stayed in my mouth forever. I’m thankful none of it came from people I was related to. His mom however wouldn’t let me in her house. We didn’t really talk that much about it, as we were 16, and terrible at talking about things. I’m just now wondering what that felt like for him- to have the women who is supposed to have your back say, “no white girls in my house”. Ugh. People are so horrible. I’m really sorry your family is like this.
People are so horrible. Whenever I hear “But faaaaamily…” my fists clench. The worst part, and there were obviously several bad events occurring here, was having to lie to my friend. He let me tell my stupid lie and the whole time knew it was my parents.
Holy cats, that Mary Harron article is GOOD. And so is the Guts piece.
“I’m smarter now, and after spending countless hours on Google, have become a self-described expert, and have made a better decision for my second daughter: we will not be using car seats. I know, it’s a little unorthodox, and a little crunchy, and I’m sure there are bureaucrats who would throw a conniption fit if they knew (which is part of how I came to my decision, as you will see) — but I refuse to put my children at risk. Here’s why.”
I hope I'm not misleading you: the depiction of the blood & guts is not tame, but Bateman's disaffected approach is cartoonish in its absurdity and audacity, and the film is self-aware about that aspect of its depiction.
Though some people feel the film is misogynistic, I think it's obviously a deadpan indictment of the narcissism and empathetic failures of the nouveau riche elite of the Reagan 80s (and by extension, of any socially and economically privileged class), which in Patrick's case is heightened to such sociopathic extent that he cheerfully, voraciously kills people for his own convenience, arousal, and entertainment. It's hard to watch, but it's a trenchant satire of an era, and of privilege in general.