I sure hope you’ve already read Friend of The Toast Ezekiel Kweku’s piece about the police:
If stopped by the police, I thought to myself, I would set my phone to record audio and put it on the passenger seat. I would send a tweet that I was being stopped and had every intention of complying with the police officer. I would turn on Periscope and livestream the stop, crowdsourcing witnesses. I would text my family and tell them that I was not feeling angry or suicidal, that I was looking forward to seeing them soon. There would not be time to do all of these things, but maybe if I prepared in advance I could pull off one or two of them. What all of these plans had in common were that none of them were meant to secure my safety, but rather to ensure that my death looked suspicious enough to question.
I was figuring out how to enter evidence into the inquiry of my own death.
Ella’s Tall Man on the process of going to a fertility clinic to preserve his chance at giving Ella some science babies after he kicks it (I have been clear with him that I want him to have lots of almost-dying incidents to up the pageviews for Ella’s series before a miraculous recovery in time for the December ad-buys, and he is going to try to accommodate us):
…and yet. However anti-breeding I feel as I type this, it seems futile not to acknowledge that something as lifechanging as a cancer diagnosis has the potential to alter your opinions not just now but down the line. I cannot imagine ever wanting kids – not least because if I survive this palaver I intend to live, devoted entirely to my own pleasure, in a castle made of roughly-hewn Turkish delight – but if Future John develops incorrect opinions about fatherhood then he must be left to deal with them as best he can.
The other great thing about getting ahead of yourself re: production, of course, is that you can basically palm off (ahaha) the decisions onto someone else. If I turn out to be dead by Christmas but I’ve taken the appropriate steps to safeguard my legacy, Ella can always conceive and raise my not-even-technically-fatherless child; possibly in the manner popularised by the horrendous film Clone (formerly Womb), in which Eva Green plays an absolute monster who clones her dying boyfriend (Matt Smith, for some reason) and raises him as her son. (I spent six solid hours editing a review of Clone (formerly Womb) in 2012, and I feel like it owes me something. If I want to superimpose its dreadful plot onto the lives of those I leave behind, I damn well will.)
You may now tear into shreds this pathetic, douchey little man for my amusement. (Smiles beatifically, leans back in her chair.)
I was on a gym hiatus because my baby was no longer little enough to be happy at the gym, but now I’m baaaack and went with my bestie yesterday, this workout was great:
Laura Ortberg Turner, on anxiety:
Anxiety is a small man who wants to have tea with you while you work, and you tell him not now and please come again later, and he says okay!, and then he comes back in twelve seconds and says, now?
Anxiety is a schoolkid who rings your doorbell at precise, seven-second intervals so that you can never quite settle into your writing chair and your dog keeps barking and your heart is on alert.
Steve Silberman’s new book is great, and so is Elon’s thing about it:
But the damage done by Kanner, intentionally or otherwise, is inescapable. For far too long he perpetuated ideas about autistic children that were simply not true. And for too long no one was the wiser. “By burying Asperger in history, Kanner obscured the breadth and diversity of the spectrum,” said Silberman. This, in turn, meant “many children who would have been eligible for a diagnosis under Asperger’s more expansive model of autism were left to struggle along on their own in a world not made for them.”
Here is a picture of my friend Carrie’s new puppy (my husband and I have decided that we will agonizingly wait until spring and then get a new dog – we are on like a two-year waiting list for an experimentally long-lived direwolf creation bc Big Dogs Who Live Forever is the dream but we’re going to crack and just get some hard-luck shelter mutt like always):
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This is one of the first interviews with Stephen Colbert that I feel really digs into the question of his faith a little more deeply, like he has some THEOLOGICALLY COMPLEX shit to say here:
He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I’m grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
“It’s not the same thing as wanting it to have happened,” he said. “But you can’t change everything about the world. You certainly can’t change things that have already happened.”
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This true crime story is almost unimaginably difficult to read, but I had to keep going because a) it’s very good, and b) I HAD to know if they found out who did it and if he’s in prison now (THEY DID, HE IS, FUCK THAT GUY, RIP JO, MICHELLE, AND CHRISTE. He’s actually on death row, but I do not support the death penalty, and want him to just be miserable.)
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I’m currently interviewing Liam for the site, he does a lot of great work smacking down this (incorrect, ridic) statement:
Experiment. If you are African American and have endured “the Irish were slaves too!” retort when discussing racism or slavery, please RT.
— Liam Hogan (@Limerick1914) August 16, 2015
