Processing the rape kit backlog in Northern Virginia:
The California partnership with Bode is new, but O’Malley has experience telling rape victims that their kits have yielded DNA matches.
Some of them cry, and some of them shut down in shock, she says. One woman’s attacker had worn a mask. When she learned there was a name to match to her faceless assailant, the woman realized she’d known him all along. He was a friend.
MAVIS STAPLES, on singing “The Weight” for The Last Waltz:
I don’t want to be gloatin’, you know, but anytime I watch it, it’s refreshing. It’s like the first time. You never get tired of it, you know. And I remember everything about it. I remember every moment that we had doing that. Pops said, “Mavis! Baby, you shouldn’t carry it out so long like that,” when I go, “Heeeyyyy yeeeeaaah.” And I said, “Nah, daddy, that’s the good part. That’s what I feel.” He said, “O.K., do what you feel. That’s the best thing. Do what you feel.”
Lesser-known things to say to a dress:
3. “Why don’t you have any pockets?”
4. “I look like when people clothe their pets.”
Another exchange in the IHE comment thread handily brought up a problematic rhetorical strategy that arises often in the discussion of the adjunct bubble: the comparison to fast-food workers. One commenter wrote, “You know what’s demeaning? Earning a PhD and making less money than a manager at McDonald’s.” And another replied, “You know what’s demeaning? A PhD who thinks she’s better than a manager at McDonald’s.” This exemplifies a serious problem in the ways that advocates for better working conditions for adjuncts make their argument. (A related problem is that adjunct advocates sometimes dramatize their argument by using phrases like “slave wages,” “slave labor”). Yes, college-level teachers should make more than cashiers at McDonald’s. Not because they hold advanced degrees—to pay someone for merely holding a degree is naked credentialism; to believe you deserve more money because of your credential itself rather than what you do with it is to misunderstand the value of work—but because as a culture, we value the dissemination of knowledge more than the distribution of hamburgers. Or at least we say we do.
OMINOUS NOISES:
Mayor Rob Ford’s letter to city clerks advising of his planned return. pic.twitter.com/SNyr7P6jSD
— Jackson Proskow (@JProskowGlobal) June 17, 2014
Russian-Jewish American lit goes BOOM (I happen to adore Russian-Jewish American lit):
As contemporary Russia morphs back into the semblance of its old Soviet self, there seems to be no end to stories one can tell that would continue mining this nexus of immigrant experience and Russian mystique. Much of this creative output has already done so successfully, with critically acclaimed or best-selling work by all the writers already mentioned in addition to the books—so far, one from each—by Nadia Kalman, Irina Reyn, and Sana Krasikov, and with two writers of this cohort—Bezmozgis and Shteyngart—making it to The New Yorker’s “20 under 40” list at the beginning of the present decade precisely as writers to watch in the 2010s. Could it be that we are at a point of oversaturation and a critical juncture: How much more is there for this literature to say?
Women as background images in video games:
NOPE NOPE NOPE WUT:
My husband has a wonderful family and we all get along swimmingly. His parents own a boat and often invite us on it for a day on the lake and an annual vacation where we boat all day and only return to our rented beachfront to sleep. I am a very lucky daughter in law and sharing the boat is just one example of the loving generosity my in-laws show, with no strings attached. One of my guy’s immediate family members will almost like clockwork paddle off twenty feet when we are anchored and swimming to poop in the water.
