Just because you’ve probably already read the Toni Morrison piece by luminous genius Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah is no reason not to link to it, because it’s perfect, and I was expecting it to be good, but no part of me expected it would be THIS GOOD:
On one level, Morrison’s project is obvious: It is a history that stretches across 11 novels and just as many geographies and eras to tell a story that is hardly chronological but is thematically chained and somewhat continuous. This is the project most readily understood and accepted by even her least generous critics. But then there is the other mission, the less obvious one, the one in which Morrison often does the unthinkable as a minority, as a woman, as a former member of the working class: She democratically opens the door to all of her books only to say, “You can come in and you can sit, and you can tell me what you think, and I’m glad you are here, but you should know that this house isn’t built for you or by you.” Here, blackness isn’t a commodity; it isn’t inherently political; it is the race of a people who are varied and complicated. This is where her works become less of a history and more of a liturgy, still stretching across geographies and time, but now more pointedly, to capture and historicize: This is how we pray, this is how we escape, this is how we hurt, this is how we repent, this is how we move on. It is a project that, although ignored by many critics, evidences itself on the page. It has allowed Morrison to play with language, to take chances with how stories unravel and to consistently resist the demand to create an empirical understanding of black life in America. Instead, she makes black life — regular, quotidian black life, the kind that doesn’t sell out concert halls or sports stadiums — complex, fantastic and heroic, despite its devaluation. It is both aphorism and beyond aphorism, and a result has been pure possibility.
I MEAN, AGAIN, THIS PIECE:
Which didn’t mean she wouldn’t speak her heart. She told me about the people she adores fiercely: her son, Harold Ford, and her granddaughters. And her sister, Lois, whose name she says like a prayer. (When I asked Morrison if she and Lois were close, I got an eye roll that was so sharp it chopped down the question and me. “My sister?” she finally said. “I need her.”)
This is a super interesting piece about public corruption in Montreal and how it was exposed, and I know that seems UNLIKELY, but trust:
By 2009, as The Gazette’s civic affairs reporter, Gyulai was investigating another angle to the water meter story. Since her time as a freelancer at the Montreal Mirror, a now-defunct weekly, she’d believed in old-school sleuthing in service of the public interest. “What I love about municipal reporting is that you ride this righteous horse waving your arm in the air.”
While Denis and Gravel reported on the construction industry and Lévesque investigated irregularities within engineering firms, Gyulai sifted through municipal archives. A source hinted that the eventual owners of the water meter system would be a private consortium called GÉNIeau, co-owned by Dessau and one of Accurso’s construction firms, Simard-Beaudry.
Gyulai discovered that the contract usually attached to the service file was missing. This piqued her interest. After all, the $355-million contract was the largest awarded in Montreal’s history. She was dumbfounded that city councillors didn’t have a copy of the contract to review before approving it. Through an access to information request, Gyulai received the documents from a 2007 council meeting. She discovered that the water meter contract passed in a group with other resolutions in 53 seconds without objections or debate.
Bim recast She’s All That, you’re welcome, Hollywood. Bim is amazing at Twitter, by the way. If Twitter ever said “you can only follow ten people,” I would still follow Bim.
Fuck Yeah Tumblrs: A History:
F-yeah Sharks set the early standard. Freelance writer Ned Hepburn cooked it up in 2008, on his day off work, “pretty baked.” From there it took on a life of its own, accumulating a followership in the tens of thousands and solidifying the “f- yeah” blog concept as a staple of Tumblr identity.
According to a 2012 Storyboard article, “it will arguably define the genre.” F-yeah Sharks took a wide-angle lens to the world of sharks on Tumblr, reblogging every gif, posting all shark facts, promoting other shark blogs and basically owning all shark content on Tumblr.
It worked.
Yesterday’s workout! My trainer’s kid was off school for spring break, and we paired up, so I was in SHALL NOT BE DEFEATED BY A CHILD territory, but that kid is STRONG and FAST, yo! Also, all the sexiest music in existence was on during the workout and I wanted to be do not listen to Blurred Lines i know it is a great song to exercise to but do not internalize these messages at a formative age. But mostly we just tried not to collapse into puddles of exhaustion during the loathsome TRX planks.
