The man who murdered Jordan Davis has been found guilty of it:
Dunn testified on Tuesday he was sure he saw a gun as a teenager appeared to emerge from the SUV making verbal threats against his life. Davis was unarmed, prosecutors said, and no weapon was found in the youths’ vehicle.
During the weeklong retrial, prosecutors argued that Dunn’s actions went far beyond self-defense.
Davis was struck by three bullets while leaning away from the gunfire, an expert testified during the trial. Dunn faced intense questioning as to why he did not call 911, which he blamed on fear and shock.
On unsatisfyingly contacting your old bully:
When I finally felt I’d buttered her up enough—and how painful it was to have to feign sweetness and sympathy with her!—I asked the Big Question. “Do you remember leaving calendar reminders for me to kill myself?”
“Omg no! That’s horrible,” she wrote. “I’m really sorry.”
She has still never admitted to leaving the calendar reminders. Later, she said they “sound plausible”—plausible that she could have set them—but she also wondered if someone else might have been in on it, too, because she couldn’t recall doing it. How would I know? “Did you share my information with anyone else?” I asked.
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wait wait i could MAKE THIS at HOME
I know it appeared in the comments yesterday, but a new Scandals of Classic Hollywood on Anna May Wong deserves a place of honour in the real link roundup:
Wong’s roles may have been shit, but the fan magazines loved her, unlike black actors, who were either relegated to even more demeaning bit parts and/or ghettoized in black films shown only in black theaters for black audiences. For various complicated reasons that have a lot to do with American racial history and the way that Orientalism actually weirdly celebrates the people and civilizations it fetishizes, it was OK for the fan mags to profile her, run pictures of her, and generally acquaint American audiences with her — but not put her on the cover.
Will read anything about Marine Todd:
The marines among us are, as the ads say, few and proud, but in right-wing memes they’re notably more accessible — not just as a rhetorical shortcut for Conservative Christian Bad-Ass of Uncommon Valor and Unassailable Virtue, but as an identity that the reader/liker/sharer can assume. To read Just Filling In as it was intended to be read is to indulge in a very specific sort of fantasy. It is to step into the body of a muscular, untouchable, reliably righteous violence machine, to knock a liberal out from within that body, and to still be the good guy.
Despite the positive vibe, egg freezing doesn’t necessarily stop the biological clock, not when the average age of egg freezing in the United States is 37.4. By that time, the eggs being frozen have already suffered a lot of the chromosomal breakage and genetic replication errors that make later childbearing iffy to begin with. Yet if the women at the cocktail party had their suspicions, they weren’t being addressed at the information session that followed. After all, EggBanxx had billed the event as an evening of “The Three F’s: Fun, Fertility, and Freezing”—no F’s left over for “Failure Rates.”
Michelle Dean talked to Eula Biss about her new book on vaccination and ethics:
One of the medical ethicists that I was speaking to, she said something along the lines of, “I just believe that when you’re a member of society there are certain things you owe that society.” In this case we have the tools to prevent our bodies from being vectors for disease. And if we have the tools, and they’re good tools and highly effective, which [vaccines] are, that it is our responsibility to make our bodies invulnerable to disease. Or to make our bodies not vectors for disease to other people.
There’s this tendency to think of the individual and the collective are somehow at odds or separate. But I think that’s really false. We’re all both. And when the individual suffers, the collective suffers, and vice versa. And that’s not just a point I believe philosophically, but it’s also something that’s been observed by mathematicians who look at vaccination, and do mathematical modelling of it. They observe that statistically speaking, you are benefiting both yourself and the collective when you vaccinate yourself against something like the flu. So it’s not like we have to make a sacrifice as an individual in order to protect the collective.
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The finalists for the Kirkus Prize, with some glaring omissions in non-fiction!
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I AM HERE FOR MORE TALES OF THE PAULA DEEN CRUISE and also Paula’s general future:
Paula Deen locked her eyes with mine across the Lawn Club Grill. The white-haired crowd parted as she cut through them, a Red Sea to her Israelite, and when she arrived in front of me, she took my hand, which contained an ice cream cone (ice cream cones are available around the clock on this cruise, availability I tested at many hours), and licked my cone. She backed away, vanilla soft-serve on her chin, cone still in my hand, eye contact still intense. In her eyes is everything she wants to tell me to make me love her, which I sort of do for a minute. This is her specialty, getting people to love her despite it all.
