I hope Ahmed has the greatest fucking life:
His sisters, 18-year-old Eyman and 17-year-old Ayisha, could hardly keep up with the tweets and stunning news about their little brother. Because Ahmed was never much for social media, the girls set up a Twitter account for him, @istandwithahmed, and watched it balloon to thousands of followers within hours.
“We’re trending no. 1!” Ayisha cried to her sister, holding a cellphone over a stuffed coffee table in the living room.
Everyone loves Kate Beaton:
What is it about the Brontë literature that makes it so rich for mining in your comics?
I don’t know. I feel a lot of comradeship with the Brontës. They’re three women writers, and I’m one of four girls. They wrote, they created themselves, and created these stories and worlds, and they had to pretend to be men in order to get their books published at first, with androgynous pen names. And they created these works of fiction that are not really romances, but because they’re women they’re taken as romances. Like,Wuthering Heights is not really a romance, but people believe that it is, partially because it’s about a relationship between a man and a woman, but also because it was written by a woman. But then you read it and you’re like, These people are terrible!
I cannot turn away from articles about competitive eating. Also, I did not know you could eat GYOZA in competition, and now I think maybe I have a second career ahead of me (I do not, but also competitive eating, although stupid, is less stupid and wasteful than climbing Everest):
Miki Sudo is going to lose.
This much seems certain, given the leisurely rate at which the diminutive competitive eater, currently the top-ranked female in the world, is consuming the endless platefuls of gyoza that surround her at the Day-Lee Foods Gyoza Eating Competition. Dwarfed on either side by men twice her size, all of whom are rapidly shoveling fistfuls of dumpling guts into their mouths by any means necessary, 29-year-old Sudo has taken a far more measured approach, popping individual gyoza back like popcorn.
Oh, man, Neil Patrick Harris’ variety show is not looking great.
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NOPE
My friend Carrie’s new puppy is sick and has been staying at the vet’s with weird symptoms, and she would love your thoughts and prayers. Here is a picture of her before she was sick:
What does the future hold for you or me or for any other writer? Uncertainty. Almost all books tank. Every freelance writer alive struggles to make ends meet and has dry spells. All editors ignore almost everyone. Let’s not sit around watching the same four or five authors talk about their enormous successes for the next four decades. Let’s not fear the brand-new dewy-faced ingenues making cool shit and then making big stacks of money. Let’s not let our initial enthusiasm for them curdle into envy. There are always more to envy, coming up behind the last batch.
If you remind yourself of the people who break through too much, you ignore the joy of writing.
Over the years, we have come to a strange compromise: speaking half in Bengali and half in English. The linguistic term is “Benglish”. Benglish apparently operates by easily identifiable rules, but it doesn’t feel like it when you’re speaking and doing the linguistic equivalent of trying to fit star shapes into square holes. Conveniently, Benglish combinations centre mostly on action: To-mah-gessa-explain-korr-muh (exactly: “you explain I’m going to”), or Ah-me-try-korr-muh anyway (“I’m try going to anyway”).
Our friend Laura Passin shared this Michalle Gould poem on FB yesterday, I thought you might like it:
What happens to sex offenders who flee to Israel?
Speaking of everyone’s fav Comanche Johnny Depp, check his new project. Way respectful right? http://t.co/cTOkKv7Cu7 pic.twitter.com/TEYuj9HCt8
— Dr. Adrienne K. (@NativeApprops) September 16, 2015
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Saying “We mistook the clock for a bomb” is a real greasy way of side-stepping the truth: “We mistook the kid for a bomb-maker.” — Jesse A. Myerson (@JAMyerson) September 16, 2015
