This is a GREAT profile of Friend of The Toast Sam Irby:
There is no summing up Sam—no writerly preface, no small-talk tidbits, no rundown of vital stats that can suffice. She is irreducible, like a prime number, or a quark. Mention a recent story about her that she didn’t much like, and she’ll snort. “I told my friend Robbie I wished that thing had been called ‘FAT NIGGA TELLS JOKES.'”
So you’re going to want to watch yourself.
Laura Ortberg Turner on why Junipero Serra shouldn’t be canonized:
“Conversion was not compulsory; rather, Indians chose freely to join the Church and the mission after a period of catechesis,” says the L.A. Archdiocese website. This statement runs in direct opposition to Hackel’s account, which recalls an episode in which Serra gave gifts to a 15-year-old Indian boy encouraging him to convert, telling the boy that those who were baptized would receive clothing from the church. In a place whose native people had almost no material comforts, holding out the promise of clothing and gifts for converts qualifies as coercion.
nicole are you gonna link to EVERY interview Kate Harding does?
One of the things it allows people to do, is that if you can resist commenting, you read things that make you uncomfortable. Your knee-jerk reaction is ‘that’s bullshit!’, [but you] just keep reading and keep learning until you realize, yes, I’ve had my mind changed. You don’t have to go with your knee-jerk reaction.
I’ve had plenty of issues—when someone says “No, Kate, you’re being kind of a blinkered, privileged jerk,” and I’m like “I am not!” And I realize that if I sit with it, and just get through that, maybe I am going to find that this is something that I need to change my mind about and change my thinking about. If you do have that fundamental willingness, that information is there, via the internet, to find the arguments and take them in at their own speed.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy is recuperating on her couch:
Always here for Heavenly Creatures:
So often we think our interpretations are fact. In Jackson’s scheme, the light that bathes Juliet functions as metaphorical illumination, a kiss of truth that transforms her into some splendid creature that only Pauline can recognize. There’s nothing especially bizarre about this dynamic: Literature is dotted with women who seem exquisite byproducts of luxury—and, as a result, bewitch the lesser at their feet. In Jane Austen’s Emma, Emma Woodhouse exerts deleterious influence over pretty, dithery Harriet Smith. Dainty, coddled Ash Wolf elicits Jules Jacobson’s love in Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings. That affection is barbed with jealousy and covetousness—but neither reaches the level of Heavenly Creatures, in which a girl would crush her mother’s skull.
Tyler Coates on how Showgirls became a slow burn hit:
Originally intended to as boundary-pushing as possible, Paul Verhoeven‘s exploitation flick was quickly slapped with an NC-17 rating — but it’s over-the-top nature (and, perhaps, the creative team’s secret self-awareness about the finished product) made it a shockingly effective commercial property. While it’s the only film with an NC-17 rating to receive a wide-release (I personally remember my “cool” aunt and uncle cheekily admitting to seeing it in theaters, much to my 12-year-old’s excitement; it was probably the mid-’90s equivalent of Deep Throat, a honest-to-goodness dirty movie that became a much-talked-about piece of the zeitgeist), its horrendous reviews and, well, adult rating saw it tank at the box office. But no one expected what should have been obvious: everyone was just waiting for it to come to video — it quadrupled its $20 million box office receipts in rentals alone.
Yeah, I’m still tweeting about Hamilton, go fuck yourself.
— Nicole Cliffe (@Nicole_Cliffe) September 23, 2015
