Your ex-boyfriend’s favourite public intellectual who looks like a bear with sonorous background narration from Werner Herzog finally got around to insulting grad students after insulting everyone else, world reels in horror.
I think it’s unlikely I’ll manage to avoid hearing what happened on Game of Thrones before I get back to my DVR and air conditioning and large bed next Thursday night, so I think I’m gonna pull the trigger and spoil it for myself on my own terms, as captain of my domain.
(brief pause while Nicole googles)
Oh.
I am not linking to the garbage piece the Chicago Sun-Times ran about Laverne Cox (update: they yanked it), which deserved to share space with reptilian conspiracy theories and ads for pieces of the True Cross, but this is a pleasant response:
Back in November, I was following the Illinois gay marriage debate on NPR. I’m mincing garlic when I hear some asshat on the radio say something along the lines of, “homosexuals are an abomination.” ON NPR, YOU GUYS. The thing is, they were clearly just trying to find a voice of opposition to the gay marriage debate. When there are thousands of people holding up equality signs and hugging outside the state capital, they probably thought, “this story sounds a little too ‘rah rah gay rights,’ we better get some balance in there.”
But what balance is being provided here? When did misogynists get to stop telling reporters why women shouldn’t vote? When did racists stop being quoted when news organizations covered the desegregation of schools?
This new kind of fire hydrant looks like it has feelings AND a cervix:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, or maybe he didn’t, but either way vast ribbons of peat came to rest under what became the foothills of Tennessee’s Cumberland Plateau, and in time the peat became coal, and later the railroads arrived, along with mines and coke ovens, and near one lazy arc of the Tennessee River workers built homes to return to after their long days of burrowing and burning, and the homes became a town, and the town was called Dayton.
There were a dozen eggs, three mangoes, and six black plums, and that was a problem. The family in the bodega line would have to cut something from the bags waiting on the check out belt—the modest haul overspent the Women, Infants, Children food-assistance voucher good for only a portion of their appetite. The clerk removed three plums and placed them on the far side of the register, declining an offer of safekeeping from a family member she deemed had other intentions.
Perhaps you’ve seen a similar case of nutritional triage; perhaps you’ve experienced it yourself. In the age of increased economic segregation, though, there’s a good chance you haven’t. If you grow up in suburbia and live in higher-income urban enclaves, as I have, EBT food purchases—and the resulting sacrifices—are likely alien. Following deliberations about food assistance and other poverty programs is no substitute for watching human need contend with stark reality.
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Visually-interesting ways to review excellent books!
Poetry prize from The Walrus!
I don’t even want to think about the mass grave in Galway, but it happened.
