Jane Hu on the history of how modern poetry has been influenced by “Chinese-ness” for far longer than Michael Derrick Hudson:
This impression of Chinese-ness is a Western vision has very little to do with whatever you might call the “Chinese experience.” Instead, it has far more to do with engaging in the real roots of modernist American poetry.
Slowly, often clumsily, white American poets have become more self-aware on this point. Billy Collins, for example, in his rather elliptical Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty, I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles, he explores how writing modern poetry is to be obsessed with the terse and iconic images of China.
Guessssss which kids are actually eating slightly more fast food than the other kids?
There’s a popular narrative about poor families and fast food: They eat more of it than anybody else. It’s dangled as evidence for the high rate of obesity among poorer Americans — and talked about even by some of the country’s foremost voices on food. “[J]unk food is cheaper when measured by the calorie, and that this makes fast food essential for the poor because they need cheap calories,” wrote Mark Bittman for The New York Times in 2011.
But there’s a problem with saying that poor people like fast food better than others. It’s not true.
How the Unabomber’s manifesto helped catch him (this is very interesting and worth a read):
Two decades later, the events surrounding the publication of the Unabomber’s manuscript seem both distant and eerily familiar. Some elements suggest a bygone age. The manifesto, for example, was perhaps one of the last newsworthy documents to appear only in print. Although the Internet was starting to seep into everyday life, few Americans relied on it for news. Within a few years, that would change irrevocably.
I pretty much had to go to bed after this look at the mechanics of telling a ten year old that she’s had HIV since birth, and although all of it is difficult, the details on trying to get a kid to adhere to a rigid medical protocol they don’t really understand might have been the worst; something about the basic KID-ness of candy in the midst of horrible adult-ness:
Kids with HIV can live into their 70s if they adhere to their drugs. It seems simple, but denial, depression and rebellion lead some to refuse treatment, experts say. In the past year, two of Children’s young adult patients have died because they stopped taking their medicine. Others are on the path to that same fate.
Doctors eventually placed JJ on a “holding regimen,” a single, palatable liquid that they hoped would keep the HIV under control until she could manage pills.
At the hospital, she practiced swallowing candies — cake sprinkles, Tic Tacs, Smarties — meant to imitate those pills. At home, Lee had tried everything she could think of: bribing with stickers, cutting tablets, applying a grape “glide” spray to make them go down more easily. If JJ could stay consistent for a single week, her mother often promised, she would get to pick out a treat at the dollar store.
Nothing worked.
Cherished Beloved Friend Of The Toast Jaya Saxena on her #BiracialLooksLike hashtag and why it’s necessary:
There are not many shared experiences among biracial people because the only thing we have in common is that our parents are of different races and heritages. There may not be many lived experiences that I, a woman with an Indian immigrant father and a white mother, would have in common with, say, a man with a Black mother and an Iranian father. Still, among the mixed community (if there is one), there are a few common refrains of everything from pride to alienation and confusion.
I really liked Kate Harding’s response to the Susan Brownmiller interview, because she doesn’t do a OLD PEOPLE CAN’T DO FEMINISM RIGHT thing, and she’s respectful of what Brownmiller accomplished for women, but is also, like, not cool, Brownmiller:
Brownmiller’s absolutely right that today’s young activists have different concerns than feminists did in the ’70s (or in the ’90s, when I came of age). Their mothers and grandmothers taught the country that rape is a crime of power; that rapists aren’t always, or even usually, weapon-wielding strangers; and that “no” always means “no.” With that important groundwork established, young people now have different lessons to teach the rest of us — like that there is no lapse in judgment, including getting knee-walking drunk, that deserves punishment by rape. Or how unfair it is, to both women and men, for us to pretend the average man can’t control the urge to rape when confronted with high heels and a short skirt.
If, 40 years from now, someone asks me what I think about young anti-rape activists, I hope my ego will allow me to profess admiration for whatever work they’re doing to better the new world they’ve grown up in. But honestly, there’s just as good a chance that I’ll respond like Brownmiller, carping about kids’ lack of historical awareness and respect for their elders, then adding a bunch of crap that sounds hopelessly outdated to anyone pre-menopausal. Either way is fine with me, really. If I get to the point where I have no idea what young activists are on about, or why they don’t seem concerned with what most concerns me, it will probably mean they’ve taken what they needed from my generation’s feminism and left the rest behind. I’m pretty sure that’s what progress looks like.
Is it just me, or is this a LITTLE bit hot?
Some mild suggestions for Donald Trump’s hair:
Irina: I think he should get extensions. Or, what are they called… Hair plugs. It’s not his hair but it would look nice. Just nice bangs. Or spike it. He’s gonna be more handsome than his style.
Lana: Maybe he’s scared to get the surgery. People come in here who’ve had it done. They take [the hair] from the back. It grows!
Irina: He has the money to do this. This is the best way.
Lana: This is the best way. Don’t be scared. Any new procedure is scary.
A lot to take in in this piece on a Marine battalion with scarily-high suicide rates and how they are trying to help each other through it:
“Real talk, guys, let’s make a pact, right here,” Travis Wilkerson said. “I don’t want to go to any more funerals. Let’s promise to reach out and talk. Get your phones out, put my number in. Call me day or night. I’m not doing this again.”
His twin brother, Tyler Wilkerson, who had served in the same platoon, stood next to him. After the Marines, he had become a Buddhist and joined Greenpeace. He said he agreed.
Then a three-tour former corporal named Elias Reyes Jr. stepped forward. He had a long ponytail and a degree in philosophy from the University of California, Los Angeles. He was hoping to attend medical school.
Enough of this, he said. One by one, the others joined the pact.
This is A++ sandwich writing:
Stuffed into sturdy French bread, the meat is topped with both hot and sweet Chicago-style giardiniera—a mix of pickled vegetables in oil, an astronomical improvement over giardiniera in brine.
The sandwich itself is, of course, more than the sum of these parts, a precision-calibrated cudgel of flavor, a full-spectrum assault on hunger, a sandwich that, despite its meat-on-meat composition, disappears all too quickly.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy likes to cuddle:
.@MJSchulman on Grace Jones is the best thing since Michael Schulman on RuPaul: http://t.co/dfS2m1ohV1 pic.twitter.com/dQ4LXY4dDV
— Tim Federle (@TimFederle) September 19, 2015
how to attend a catholic mass for the first time as an early 2000s pop punk vocalist pic.twitter.com/Wx0I6MhcMA — merritt death kill (@merrittkopas) September 19, 2015
Deleted comments of the day:
