Here is an anatomy of a clapback. It’s very amusing. I am frustrated, though, by the tone of some of the criticism being lodged against Kylie Jenner. It sounds like slut shaming. Tyga is the one we should be criticizing. Also, Kylie Jenner is Hollywood 17 which is Iowa 33. I kid, mostly.

Laura van den Berg’s Find Me is out this week and here is a great interview with the writer in Salon.

Here is a secret to longevity–raw eggs and no husband.

The very talented Jessica Williams, who is only 25, took to Twitter to discuss speculation that she might take over The Daily Show desk. She said, among other things, that she is under qualified. A writer wrote a strange response basically suggesting that Williams lean in a bit further and abandon impostor syndrome. “All she needs is a pep talk.” Really? For one, Williams is a grown woman. And it’s not impostor syndrome to assess your skillset and know what you are and are not ready for. All too often, marginalized people who achieve success, are then expected to be everything to everyone. They are expected to be able to do everything all at once. Jessica Williams, who can and has certainly spoken for herself on this matter, doesn’t have to take a job just because the public wants her to. And if she were to take the job (assuming she would even want the job), she would be set up for failure, for any number of reasons including that women and people of color are simply not supported in late night television the way white men are. Williams is one of the few interesting non-white men’s names we can offer up as potential heirs to Jon Stewart’s throne. Other names that have been repeated with frequency are Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. All three women are awesome and talented but it’s a damn shame that we only have a handful of potential candidates who readily come to mind. It’s a shame that such an unreasonable burden is placed on their shoulders. I cannot wait to see what Williams does in the next few years and if she so chooses, I cannot wait for her to run her own show. In the meantime, I hope we can look at strengthening the pipeline of women and people of color in comedy so we don’t come to expect so much from so few.

The secret of joy can be found in Minneapolis.

If the American dream has not quite shattered as the Millennial generation has come of age, it has certainly scattered. Living affordably and trying to climb higher than your parents did were once considered complementary ambitions. Today, young Americans increasingly have to choose one or the other—they can either settle in affordable but stagnant metros or live in economically vibrant cities whose housing prices eat much of their paychecks unless they hit it big.

Can veganism save the world? Can we live without cheese?

Can a vegan diet save the world? According to a new report from the UN, the answer is “yes.”The Guardian writes that “a global shift towards a vegan diet is vital to save the world from hunger, fuel poverty, and the worst impacts of climate change.” The report notes that the Western preference for meat- and dairy-heavy diets is “unsustainable,” especially as the population is expected to grow to 9.1 billion by 2050.

Here is an interview with poet Danez Smith who is extraordinarily talented.

The Rumpus: How conscious of politics, even when not overtly political, are you in your poetry?

Danez Smith: Poetry has its place in revolution and protest. But I don’t know if I’m actively searching for that. It’s kind of the only way I know how to create work. A lot of my foundation in the arts—even in high school stuff—was always social justice based. But what that taught me wasn’t necessarily that every poem needs to be a protest song or that every poem has to be political, but that the personal is political. I create art for necessary reasons. It’s not a frivolous act to me or for the people that taught me about art-making. It’s not something that we should take lightly. Everything we write is an opportunity to speak something true or construct or deconstruct something for either the self or for people or community or another person that we love, hate, whatever. I don’t think politics necessarily come into play when I’m writing or when I’m editing, but it’s more just how I know how to be. To have a certain amount of agency, when I’m approaching the work, and I can’t be devoid of feeling. Poetry is kind of moving away from that apolitical, anti-emotional, anti-sense-making thing that popped up in the ’90s. Academia took a grip hold on poetry, and I’m very much anti that. I want to push away from poetry devoid of the “I” or feeling or a politicalness or a meaning.

Emily Nussbaum on Joan Rivers.

Six months before Joan Rivers died, last year, she went on the “Howard Stern Show”: two old friends, serial offenders, knocking down targets. They talked about Mayor Bill de Blasio. (“Rich against the poor!” she sneered.) Stern asked her opinion of Woody Allen, with whom Rivers had come up in the club scene, in the early sixties. “I think he’s brilliant. What Woody does in his private life is his private life. You want to be a pedophile, be a pedophile. I like . . . what’s her name? Ping-Pong. The wife. She wears yellow too much. Too matchy-matchy.”

Online harassment is really terrorism, this article suggests.

How did you wake up? Like this.

The one and only Zadie Smith profiles Key and Peele.

The wigs on “Key and Peele” are the hardest-working hairpieces in show business. Individually made, using pots of hair clearly labelled—“Short Black/Brown, Human,” “Long Black, Human”—they are destined for the heads of a dazzling array of characters: old white sportscasters and young Arab gym posers; rival Albanian/Macedonian restaurateurs; a couple of trash-talking, churchgoing, African-American ladies; and the President of the United States, to name a few. Between them, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele play all of these people, and more, on their hit Comedy Central sketch show, now in its fourth season. (They are also the show’s main writers and executive producers.) They eschew the haphazard whatever’s-in-the-costume-box approach—enshrined by Monty Python and still operating on “Saturday Night Live”—in favor of a sleek, cinematic style. There are no fudged lines, crimes against drag, wobbling sets, or corpsing. False mustaches do not hang limply: a strain of yak hair lends them body and shape. Editing is a three-month process, if not longer. Subjects are satirized by way of precise imitation—you laugh harder because it looks like the real thing. On one occasion, a black actress, a guest star on the show, followed Key into his trailer, convinced that his wig was his actual hair. (Key—to steal a phrase from Nabokov—is “ideally bald.”) “And she wouldn’t leave until she saw me take my hair off, because she thought that I and all the other guest stars were fucking with her,” he recalled. “She’s, like, ‘Man, that is your hair. That’s your hair. You got it done in the back like your mama would do.’ I said, ‘I promise you this is glued to my head.’ And she was squealing with delight. She was going, ‘Oh! This is crazy! This is crazy!’ She just couldn’t believe it.” Call it method comedy.

How silence works… (SHHHHHH)

I am not sure why I keep being interested in Mars but it’s happening.

Winter is pretty terrible everywhere but in Antarctica it’s extra extra, read all about it.

The final flight out of the South Pole was Friday, February 13—the last chance to leave until mid-November. Those 40 or so people staying the winter will have no way out of Antarctica for around nine months. They won’t even be able to venture more than a mile or two off the base, because all the facilities are in a condensed area, and there’s no point in sightseeing during the four months of darkness and two more of twilight.

Troy Wiggins writes about being black in South Korea.

 This doesn’t seem… right.