RICH PEOPLE! (I mean…. what?)
Speaking of rich people, Pretty Woman turned 25 this week. It’s my favorite movie. Yes, it is. It is the best.
Here is some legislative bullshit from Indiana.
I’m too old to understand One Direction. I barely know what the group is. This isn’t a point of pride. There’s only so much room in my brain. That said, this is a lovely essay on One D over at Hobart. And here is one from Leesa Cross Smith about boy bands, oh boy bands.
Here are three amazing New Yorker essays:
Carmen Maria Machado on adjuncts.
Adjuncts are generally hired on semester-to-semester contracts, given no health insurance or retirement benefits, no office, no professional development, and few university resources. Compensation per course—including not just classroom hours but grading, reading, responding to student e-mails, and office hours—varies, but the median pay, according to a recent report, is twenty-seven hundred dollars. Many adjuncts teach at multiple universities, commuting between two or three schools in order to make ends meet, and are often unable to pursue their own academic or artistic work because of their schedules. In the past four decades, tenured and tenure-track positions have plummeted and adjunct instructor jobs have soared, second only in growth to administrators. Adjuncts have always had roles to play: filling in for a last-minute class, covering for a professor on sabbatical, providing outside expertise for a one-off, specialized course. But the position was not designed to provide nearly half of a school’s faculty or the majority of a person’s income. It’s estimated that adjuncts constitute more than forty per cent of all instructors at American colleges and universities.
Emily Nussbaum on the Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
The credit sequence for “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is a variation on a familiar viral meme: an excitable trailer-park resident gets interviewed on local TV, only to have his words Auto-Tuned into a catchy jingle. The witness describes a bizarre rescue: four women emerge from a concealed bunker where they’ve been held captive for years by the “weird old white dude” next door—the leader of a doomsday cult. “Unbreakable!” the resident shouts, waving his arms, flooded with emotion. “They alive, dammit. Butfemales. Are strong as hell.”
Elizabeth Alexander on grieving the death of her husband.
The story begins on a beautiful April morning when a man wakes exhausted and returns to sleep in his thirteen-year-old son’s trundle bed, declaring, “This is the most comfortable bed I have ever slept in!” Or it begins when the wife says goodbye to the man a few hours later, walking in front of his car switching her hips a bit, a kiss blown as she heads to her office and he continues on to his painting studio.
Bonus: opera drama realness.
As someone who travels a lot (too much), I am obsessed with Trip Advisor. I’m not alone.
The Koryo Hotel does pretty well on TripAdvisor, all things considered. The Internet never—and I mean never—works. The towels are “thin,” the sheet thread count low, and the milk powdered. Watch out for the “giant mutant cockroach snake hybrid“ in the shower. Guests even have to pay for the pool.
Still, the Koryo, a pair of dull beige towers connected near the top by a sky bridge, is the number-one-rated hotel on TripAdvisor for Pyongyang, North Korea. Despite its many faults, it garners three and a half out of five “bubbles,” in TripAdvisor parlance (so as not to be confused with the star systems that signify quality in hotels and restaurants), across nearly 90 reviews.
Is virtual fortune telling a thing? Maybe.
My fortune for the day says I’ll never understand selfies with the boys. I press a button and the machine produces another one: “you will make a new instagram mayb.”
Zach Gage’s latest app, #Fortune, is doing the prognostication for me. It culls strangers’ Tweets from the ether and regurgitates them as tiny fortunes. Sometimes they foretell heartbreak (this one says “You will PROBABLY MOST LIKELY cry for him”; this one says “you will make him a sandwich lol jk”). Other times, disaster (“You will make your life hell. Just a friendly reminder”). Here, the bot promises a querent that cuteness lies ahead.
The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill will be archived in the Library of Congress. I listen to this album on repeat, regularly. You should too.
Let’s go visit this bar in Los Angeles.
Can you imagine a castle carved into stone? I want to visit this so very much.
This place, in China, is also intriguing.
Are you a writer? Do you need a website? Jane Friedman offers a great primer on getting started.
How do you celebrate romantic anniversaries?
