This article on male rape in the military is really, really good and very difficult.
A Scenic Guide to Your Abnormal Pap Smear:
Sorry that I’m not an artist like you but rather a nurse who saves lives with nothing but her bare hands and raw intuition. (Did you like the little bowties?) First, you have to get HPV, which is seriously so easy to do that almost everybody does it at least once, like dropping your cell phone in the toilet. Then, the HPV you get has to be a high-risk strain — especially either #16 or #18, the two strains responsible for 70% of cervical cancers. Ninety percent of infections clear at this point and never go any further. 90%!! The remaining 10% become persistent, which takes years. After this, the HPV has to get all pissed and cause more changes in your cervical cells (dysplasia). THEN the dysplasia has to progress further and further, but it’s still not cancer until it breaks through the bottom layer of the membrane in a process known as “invasion,” because the people who name things in medicine do so from deep within the irony-free zone. Only after invasion is the diagnosis of cervical cancer made. “CIN” stands not for “Cancer Impossibly Near” but “Cervical Intraepithelial Neoplasia,” the fancy name for the cell changes that HPV makes. The number after the “CIN” stages the proportion of cells affected. With all this said, as slow as it is, HPV turns into CIN3 faster than CIN3 turns into cancer. Seriously, do you see how the cancer part doesn’t happen until that very last cervix all the way on the right? At every step there is something we can do to manage or treat it. All of this is how an estimated one fourth of all women in the US age 14-59 have some strain of genital HPV, and 23% a high-risk strain, but there were only about 12,000 diagnoses of cervical cancer predicted in 2011.
Do not talk to me about abusive murderer Oscar Pistorius almost certainly avoiding jail time. Do not look at me in the eyes. Set it on fire. Michelle Dean did a great explainer about how this happened. I hate everything. Except Roxane Gay.
We’re finally watching The Wire and we finished the fourth season on Sunday after averaging, like, four episodes a day, and I’m dead inside now and filled with tears and tooth-gnashing, so. I know there’s a fifth season, but MY HEART.
Then I watched the Miss America pageant, which was…different.
“I always got the phone call that said: ‘I have a great project for you. You’re going to be with, hypothetically, Vanessa Redgrave, Julianne Moore, Annette Bening,’ ” she said, sitting in the living room of her San Fernando Valley home, barefoot on the couch in a gray T-shirt and leggings, her hair wrapped under a black turban. “Then I get the script, and I have a role that lasts for a page or two.”
Please read all of Mark Sanford’s super-emo Facebook whinefest about his ex-wife. Then scroll back through Shrill Cosby’s feed for the play-by-play.
Give my little baby pertussis before my little baby can get his goddamn DTaP bc of your utter nonsense and I will actually kill you. I will literally find you and kill you. And, oh, man, guys, people will say “well, my school won’t enroll without vaccination records, so we’re safe,” but basically all states will accept some form of exemption (thanks for fighting the good fight, though, West Virginia and Mississippi), they just don’t publicize it. And private schools that accept ANY government funding (most do!) have to follow their state’s exemption policies. And LORDDDDDD knows there are plenty of resources online telling parents what they need to say and file and when to weasel out of it. And do not think that you need to point to WORDS IN A RELIGIOUS TEXT to claim religious exemption status! Many, many places you just need to affirm your sincere religious objection.
Canada? Even easier not to vaccinate, weirdly, considering we’re generally more into compelling people to do shit for society.
AMERICANS, lol
From Lucinda Williams’ audio memoir:
That should explain to you why and how I became a writer, because my dad always credited me with that line. He has Alzheimer’s now, and he told me he couldn’t write anymore. It just crushed me, because that was my whole connection with him. We were sitting in the sunroom drinking wine, and very matter-of-factly he goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” I said, “What?” He goes, “I can’t write poetry anymore.” Can you imagine? It was like somebody said “I can’t walk anymore” or “I can’t talk anymore.” And I just sobbed and sobbed. I still can’t believe he said that. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard, since I was fucking born. I love my dad so much.
Richard Lawson and Mike Hogan talk about TIFF, which is very important. There is also a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch, even though people are saying no one is gonna take down Eddie Redmayne this year.
If someone ever steals sperm from my prized stud horse, I will def seek legal counsel from CROMWELL & BLOODSTOCK LLC pic.twitter.com/z39niG4Hi7
— Leslie Jamison (@lsjamison) September 13, 2014
