Please read Michelle Dean’s “A Brief History of Botched Executions in America”:
In other words, in these executions these days, states are actively experimenting with the technology of death. The methods of killing people are unusual in the basic definitional sense: There is no established protocol. If our Founders, as conservative jurisprudence assures us, took the rightfulness of capital punishment for granted, they expected it to happen by gallows and the firing squad. They weren’t making up the method of death on the fly.
Junot Diaz’s “MFA v. POC”:
Some of you understand completely. And some of you ask: Too white … how?
Too white as in Cornell had almost no POC—no people of color—in it. Too white as in the MFA had no faculty of color in the fiction program—like none—and neither the faculty nor the administration saw that lack of color as a big problem. (At least the students are diverse, they told us.) Too white as in my workshop reproduced exactly the dominant culture’s blind spots and assumptions around race and racism (and sexism and heteronormativity, etc). In my workshop there was an almost lunatical belief that race was no longer a major social force (it’s class!). In my workshop we never explored our racial identities or how they impacted our writing—at all. Never got any kind of instruction in that area—at all. Shit, in my workshop we never talked about race except on the rare occasion someone wanted to argue that “race discussions” were exactly the discussion a serious writer should not be having.
Lindy West ranked everyone in Mean Girls:
14. Girl Who Just Has a Lot of Feelings
FEMINIST ICON.
I would have read a much, much longer piece on Dean Ripa’s Serpentarium, but will settle for just making YOU read the longest paragraph from it:
I learn that the Egyptian cobra, whose festive yellow and black stripes evoke Charlie Brown’s shirt, is believed to be the asp that killed Cleopatra; in ancient Egypt, the sign reads, these snakes were awarded to royal prisoners as a means of suicide. The Asiatic spitting cobras, meanwhile, which never seem to run out of venom, are like a “SORT OF ENDLESS POISONOUS SQUIRT GUN.” The bite of the Central American fer-de-lance feels like having your hand slammed in a car door and then seared with a blow torch. As the placard helpfully elaborates, “THE BITTEN EXTREMITY SWELLS TO MASSIVE PROPORTIONS, THE SKIN BURSTS OPEN, AND YOUR EYES WEEP BLOOD.” The fifteen-foot king cobra, the longest venomous snake in the world, can kill an elephant with a single bite, and is known to rear up six feet in the air, hood flared, and look a man in the eye while growling like a dog. For some reason, perhaps a primal one, the male king cobra’s eerie, flat dirt color is scarier to me than some of the flashier patterns on display here. Likewise the look of the steely black mambas, who are long, skinny, and, according to their description, “EXCITABLE”—and indeed each time I’ve visited they were wide awake and slicing around their enclosure like a gang looking for some action. Most disturbing of all, perhaps, are the puff adders, whose odd, fat cigar-shaped bodies make them grotesquely evocative, like nightmare shapeshifter snakes. We are snakes, they seem to say, but we are on the verge of becoming something else.
AND now I’m even more freaked out about the public school trip to the Church History Museum in Utah I mentioned earlier this week:
Worse still, Museum staff falsely portrayed the Book of Mormon as actual history. One docent claimed — again, falsely — that this history wasn’t only a Mormon belief, but was generally accepted by secular professional historians and secular museums.
Fail. Not surprisingly, when asked, the docent was unable to name a single one.
But the docent had plenty else to say — presented as historical fact.
In my conversation with the individual, as historical fact, the docent claimed that black skin was a curse from God. As historical fact, the docent claimed that God drowned every baby on earth during the Noachian flood.
awwww the dirtbag queer teens of 1970s Atlanta speak!
Some undergrounders, like me, were the spawn of exhausted, former flower-child single moms. These moms’ laissez faire “trust in the universe,” plus unforgiving work schedules and/or willful blindness, meant they let their kids twist in the wind. A few moms, despite seeming “cool” until our adolescence, freaked out when our hormones kicked in, and they were more than ready for us to get our stinky, pimply, sex-glazed selves out of the house, where perhaps the world would kick our asses in a way they could not. None of us, however, felt like victims of “benign neglect,” at least not consciously. We were free. Frequently scared, but free. We pretended we were orphans, or that we’d been stolen by the Faeries, like children in Celtic folktales. The Fae loved us so, they’d taken us from distracted parents and spirited us away to … 688.
NEW HYPERBOLE AND A HALF. Well, kind of? I’ll take what I can get.
