Link Roundup! -The Toast

Daily expenses for a gentleman in Philadelphia, 1772:

In addition to the money given to “Jem Sampson for marketing” (I’m assuming he or she was the cook, though there is also another entry marked “paid to the Cook”), much of the household’s food was bought directly from specialized shops or from individuals. Cadwalader lists items on this sheet for almonds, loaves of bread, yeast, lemons, and squab pigeons. Another page includes “a String of fish” and a payment to “a Woman on the German-Town Road for Eggs.” He bought wine, too: “Mr. Morris for 5 Bottles Frontenacc.”

Of course I was interested in seeing what was spent on clothing. Other pages have numerous expenses for Mrs. Cadwalader’s wardrobe as well as his own, but two of the more expensive bills on this page are paid to “Isaac Parish for a Hat”, and a whopping £4 for a “Muff & Tipit” to keep Mrs. Cadwalader warm. (To put that in perspective: modern estimates are that a common laborer in the 18thc. colonies earned roughly £40 annually, a schoolteacher earned £60, and a minister around £100. Odds are none of them were spending £4 for a muff and tipit.)

Our own Sulagna Misra on why we’re obsessed with Janelle Monae’s “Yoga.”

In fact, shall I count the reasons why this music video is so amazing? 1. Janelle levitating in the first scene. 2. Janelle dancing and looking at herself in the mirror. 3. Crowns are the new yoga accessory. 4. Every coy face Jidenna makes. 5. The line “You cannot police me / So get off my areola.” 6. The fact that the latter line comes with its own dance move. Like, yes, thank you, I did not know I needed this but I will be adding it to my repertoire.

Jacqui Shine on the false equivalencies she sees in Jon Ronson’s work:

That all of these episodes might share something is plausible, maybe even likely, and they all involve some degree of real suffering — certainly, being publicly shamed on Twitter or elsewhere on the internet has very real ramifications — but they are not equivalent to one another. Being shamed doesn’t affect people’s lives equally. Ronson tends to dismiss this, as when Adria Richards, the shamer of Donglegate, suggests to him that the white men she shamed for telling sexist jokes at a tech conference (those with what Ronson calls “supposed white privilege”) hold more power than she does, and they and their peers are more likely to call her reaction to sexist dick jokes “overblown.” This, Ronson says, “seemed like a weak gambit,” a “logical fallacy” of the sort deployed “when someone can’t defend a criticism against them,” and “change[s] the subject by attacking the criticizer.”

At the same time, he doesn’t seem to make much of the fact that Richards’ “victim” has remained pseudonymous throughout the affair, while Richards, a black Jewish woman whose identity was public throughout these events, was not only fired from her job as a developer evangelist for Sendgrid, but faced a barrage of vicious, violent harassment, and whose address and other contact information were publicly released on 4chan and elsewhere. His ostensible concern is with the threat of the anonymous crowd, but it’s Richards he calls an “inappropriate shamer,” and Ronson comes dangerously close to saying that she deserved what she got.

The Babadook is on Netflix now, but I’m not ready.

Why is your Millennial crying?

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