Notice anything DIFFERENT? Probably! The redesign team has a cool account of their Herculean labors coming up later today! If you spot something awry (which always happens when you make a change this big) they would love to hear from you.
Chris Christie got bounced from the Quiet Car for talking on his phone, and he generally sucks, but now it’s personal. I freaking LOVE the Quiet Car.
SWEET MERCIFUL JOY:
This guy seems like a bit of a turd:
Extremely smart people read a lot, but they also read quality stuff. Extremely smart people don’t care which friend from high school (whom they haven’t said a word to for more than 10 years) is getting married. Extremely smart people don’t read those magazines next to the candy bars in the checkout lines at grocery stores. Extremely smart people don’t watch much TV, don’t spend all day scrolling through Facebook, and don’t bother with the same repetitive material the rest of the world ingests on a daily basis.
I would have cheerfully linked to this piece by Ijeoma Oluo on her atheism if I were still an atheist, but now I don’t feel like I should be “yeah, this is what atheism means” from the outside, and it’s VERY different for different people. This is what it’s like for her, though, and the VITRIOLIC and also racist/sexist responses she’s gotten from the Dawkins fanboys have not done much for their position:
Perhaps this is not religion, but human nature. Perhaps when left to our own devices, we jockey for power by creating an “other” and rallying against it. Perhaps we’re all part of a system that creates hierarchies based on class, gender, race and ethnicity because it’s the easiest way for the few to overpower the many. Perhaps we all fall in line because we look for any social system – be it Christianity, Islam, socialism, atheism – to make sense of it all and to feel like we matter in a world that shows time and time again that we don’t.
If we truly want to free ourselves from the racist, sexist, classist, homophobic tendencies of society, we need to go beyond religion. Yes, religion does need to be examined and debated regularly and fervently. But we also need to examine our school systems, our medical systems, our economic systems, our environmental policies.
I am VERY fond of George Saunders:
Toby has moved to Stanford. Paula and I buy Toby and Catherine’s house on Scott Avenue. In the garage is the sled that is the real-life corollary of the sled in “The Chain.” On a section of molding is a penciled chart of the heights of his kids. In the basement, on a workbench, in a childish scrawl, in crayon, is written: DOWN WITH THE REPUBLICANS!
One night I’m sitting on the darkened front porch of our new house. A couple walks by. They don’t see me sitting there in the shadows.
“Oh, Toby,” the woman says. “Such a wonderful man.”
Note to self, I think: Live in such a way that, when neighbors walk by your house months after you’re gone, they can’t help but blurt out something affectionate.
I watched the new Amy Schumer special on HBO, and it bummed me out a little! She was so intensely self-deprecating that I started to feel bad about myself, which is a great rarity for me, and the body hatred was more than I was expecting and it just didn’t land. Some of it was SO funny, I should definitely mention that, but it really did make me a little sad.
Are cats domesticated?:
“The cat does not offer services,” William Burroughs wrote. “The cat offers itself.” But it does so with unapologetic ambivalence. Greet a cat enthusiastically and it might respond with nothing more than a few unhurried blinks. Later, as you’re trying to work, it will commandeer your lap, keyboard, and attention, purring all the while. A cat will mew at the food bowl in the morning and set off on a multiple-day trek in the afternoon. Dogs are dependent on us to the point of being obsequious, but cats seem to be constantly reëvaluating the merits of our relationship, as well as their role in domestic life. “Are cats domesticated?” is one of the most frequently Googled questions about the animals, based on the search engine’s autocomplete suggestions.
I’ve never listened to NPR, not having grown up in the States, so I sometimes feel totally left out of things everyone else is very, very familiar with, but I nonetheless found this profile of Terry Gross absolutely captivating:
This fall, Gross marks her 40th anniversary hosting ‘‘Fresh Air.’’ At 64, she is ‘‘the most effective and beautiful interviewer of people on the planet,’’ as Marc Maron said recently, while introducing an episode of his podcast, ‘‘WTF,’’ that featured a conversation with Gross. She’s deft on news and subtle on history, sixth-sensey in probing personal biography and expert at examining the intricacies of artistic process. She is acutely attuned to the twin pulls of disclosure and privacy. ‘‘You started writing memoirs before our culture got as confessional as it’s become, before the word ‘oversharing’ was coined,’’ Gross said to the writer Mary Karr last month. ‘‘So has that affected your standards of what is meant to be written about and what is meant to maintain silence about?’’ (‘‘That’s such a smart question,’’ Karr responded. ‘‘Damn it, now I’m going to have to think.’’) Gross says very little about her own life on the air. ‘‘I try not to make it about me,’’ Gross told me. ‘‘I try to use my experiences to help me understand my guests’ experiences, but not to take anything away from them.’’ Early in her career, she realized that remaining somewhat unknown allows ‘‘radio listeners to do what they like to do, which is to create you.’’ She added, ‘‘Whatever you need me to be, I’ll be that.’’
The racist Brooklyn landlord thing is so fucking shitty and depressing, and I cannot urge you strongly enough to skip the comments:
He lowers his voice again:
If there’s a black tenant in the house—in every building we have, I put in white tenants. They want to know if black people are going to be living there. So sometimes we have ten apartments and everything is white, and then all of the sudden one tenant comes in with one black roommate, and they don’t like it. They see black people and get all riled up, they call me: “We’re not paying that much money to have black people live in the building.” If it’s white tenants only, it’s clean. I know it’s a little bit racist but it’s not. They’re the ones that are paying and I have to give them what they want. Or I’m not going to get the tenants and the money is not going to be what it is.
ugh I am SUCH a sucker for longreads about comedy history:
“There was a night early on when I went one-on-one with Sam, doing blow and burning money,” Maron says. “I was being initiated into what would turn out to be the most disturbing and mentally destructive eight months of my life.” When the coke ran out, he drove Kinison to a dealer’s apartment, where Kinison downed several airplane bottles of Smirnoff before passing out. The dealer insisted Maron drag Kinison home. “He’s like, ‘I don’t want him to pull a Belushi on me.’ I get Sam in my car and bring him back to Cresthill, where he just lays face down on the living room floor and sleeps. He did that a lot.”
Maron quickly became, as he puts it, “the guy who hosted the parties Sam wanted to have. Monday nights, everyone would come from all over the dark crevices of Hollywood to see Sam.” These soirees sometimes lasted days. For Redman, one of the few women who ever lived at Cresthill, this sort of behavior quickly grew tedious.
Deleted comment of the day:
THE REDESIGN IS GLORIOUS I LOVE IT
(tiny quibble, it does not open links in a new tab, which is not a big deal but new-tab-links make life a little easier)
I prefer it this way, myself. This way, you can open a link in a new tab if you want (it’s an easy keyboard shortcut!) but you don’t have to. If it were set up to automatically open links in new tabs, there would be no way to opt out of that feature, and when every link opens in a new tab you can’t use the forward/back/etc. shortcuts that are important to some people for accessibility.
I would also like new-tab-links.
Noo, no new tab links. I am easily (ctrl-click) able to make things new tab if I want to, not so easily able to keep the same tab if the website wants me to go otherwise.
For me, especially in things like the LR, it’s nice for me to have this open for reference while looking at the other links. My tendency to go on link spirals means that I often lose my place if I’m using the same tab for everything.
I open about 95% of links in new tabs on desktop and about 2% on mobile. I really like when I have a choice. I don’t know how to force same-tab easily.
Yes, absolutely! I am a control freak and I want control.
I use new browser windows – I hate tabbed browsing because I can’t see more than one thing at a time. It doesn’t matter as much for this site, but forced tabs drive me nuts when I’m doing something work related.
Is there a reason that every single “i” is capitalized?
I think the font is such that the dot and the stick part read as connected, especially when bolded.
Ah, ok. I was worried that I was missing out on some secret Toast code
(The I is for Illuminati)
I feel the need to invent a secret toast code now.
Do it! Please?
That is something I have been having problems with as well – I find the font really hard to read because of the way the lower-case “i”s look like capitals. (However, on my work computer the dot looks more separate, so maybe it depends on screen resolution and stuff.)
I didn’t notice this and then I realized The Toast wanted me to turn on the netdna-cdn.com javascript source and suddenly all the little i’s are single slabs. is this Gotham? because I’m told that Gotham has “high legibility” but I’ve yet to actually see it in context with high legibility. (Mostly the little i’s always look capitalized!)
I’m going to turn off the netdna-cdn again, and I’ll miss out on the fancy new typefaces, but it’s going to be easier to read :/
It’s actually Proxima Nova. I mentioned in the redesign post that the “ij” problem is probably due to how minutely the font sizes are being specified now. It’s not an inherent feature of the font, just a problem with how it’s being rendered at the sizes it’s being told to. I think it’s much more of an issue on non-retina/HiDPI displays, since those letters look fine when viewed on an iPhone, or if you zoom in a tad on the desktop (even just setting Chrome to 110% zoom helps a LOT).
Yup, I just tried zooming in a bit and the problem is basically gone.
YAY REDESIGN!! Another tiny quibble– this link roundup is showing below last week’s toast points on the front page, making it hard to find//making me temporarily question if today is a public holiday that I wasn’t aware of. Not sure if that’s a feature or a bug.
Also I am clearly one of those people that lines up outside impatiently waiting for the Toast-doors to open at 9am every weekday.
I usually start refreshing at 9:01 by my computer monitor’s clock.
I’m usually sitting at the ready at 3pm, but today, because DST ended last weekend, it surprised me at 2pm!
ME TOO. Columbus Day was truly a nightmare day, where I kept dejectedly refreshing the page and being sad.
Columbus Day is such a stealth holiday too. Unless you got the day off there are no hints that it’s coming up, it took me until Tuesday to realize that it had been Columbus Day, and I live in the US.
Ha ha I use the Link Round-up tweet as a scolding alarm clock. if i’m being lazy in bed and hit refresh and see the Link Round-up tweet, I know I’ve hit my limit for laziness and it’s time to get up and get to work. It was awful last week when the tweet was late! (Even moreso because starting last week, I now have to get up by 8:30, not 9:05, if I want to have time to get breakfast before work. Also also I know I’m living a luxurious life, getting to lie in bed until 8am and still working a full-time job. My Thursdays are 11 hour days though.)
My favorite feature of the redesign is that the puppy picture appears larger on my monitor, thank you for this fantastic adorable puppy gift on a dreary monday.
So happy you linked to the smuggest fitness model ever. And just in case that piece made you doubt yourself: it’s perfectly possible to have enough space in your brain for both the ability to get a PhD AND celebrity gossip – I am the living proof.
I don’t have a PhD but everyone I think is really smart has at some point accused me of being smarter than them, so I think I qualify as “extremely smart” for conversational purposes and my knowledge of celebrity gossip is very much a part of that. My refusal to deem large swaths of knowledge unfit for caring about is precisely what makes me smart. No one has ever been made dumber for being conversant with pop culture.
Hear hear!
Although I did watch a LOT of Kardashians when my kiddo was a newborn, and I do think that actually made me stupider, if only temporarily.
Yeah, I managed to keep abreast of all celebrity gossip whilst completing a PhD, learning another language, and staying abreast of current affairs. Being extremely smart does not mean that you are an uncaring sociopath.
Whatever your primary knowledge bases are, great, keep those, but supplement them with the fun, random stuff too. Trust me: If two equally capable scientists are standing next to each other, but one of them knows how to dress well, plays the guitar, and knows who won the World Series last year, that person isn’t seen as just extremely smart; he’s practically seen as a genius.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND, BRO.
I would also argue that “he’s practically seen as a genius” is the key point, because a very capable female scientist who is stylin’ as hell & has many other talents is often seen as a frivolous dilettante!
Note what kind of frivolity is allowed: guitar (stereotypically a dude instrument), dresses well (the assumption is that a respectable woman is already dressed well) and knows who won the world series (sports aren’t frivolous, it’s participating in the larger culture.) Ugh dude.
In fact, i would argue that it was the magazines next to the checkout stand that got me through doing my PhD. There’s only so much very dense cultural theory I can read before I start wondering who wore it better.
Slate guy is an asshole. “Smart People don’t scroll through Facebook! Also look at all the cool people I associate with!” Really smart people realize that intelligence comes in a lot of different forms, asswipe, and social intelligence including not crowing about your own damn brilliance at having successful friends is its own type of intelligence!
Slate guy would be so obnoxious at a party. Slate guy would put me in the hospital due to side-eye induced ocular trauma.
“I’m not rambling these people off to make myself seem cool.” That’s good, because it’s not working, ya turd.
Is ramble even a transitive verb that can mean to list or enumerate? That just feels really clunky to me. Just me? Guess I’ll ramble off (myself) now.
Definitely not just you. The whole article was clunky. I guess you don’t need to be a good writer to be Extremely Smart.
But, he would protest, I’m not extremely smart! I just happen to someone know exactly what it is that those people are.
I think I read with disbelief until I got to the part where he said he was 25, and it all became so clear.
I’m guessing he meant “rattling off”? Don’t listen to me though; I read the People magazine headlines in the grocery store line last night.
That’s it! There was something about it that made me feel there was another phrase on the tip of my tongue. One of those whet/wet the appetite or peak/pique my attention or weary/wary errors. Like a little grain of sand it was going to bug me, but yes, I think that’s exactly what was meant! My foolish US Weekly mind was never going to have been able to puzzle that out.
except even then, you’re not rattling off the people, you’re rattling off the peoples’ names.
Which is to say, two can play this game, slate guy. (Also your friend is a “doctoral student,” not a “doctorate student, jerk.)
Also, what the hell is this guy reading in the supermarket checkout line that’s so goddamn educational? I was not aware that there were such options!
Uh, pardon you, I read Tolstoy in hardback in the grocery line so that the damnable proles around me understand that I am their intellectual superior.
He averts his eyes and reads nothing. See, he’s already achieved Ultimate Smartness. Now he just needs to guard his pristine mind for the rest of his life (and since he’s only 25, he has a long haul ahead).
Wouldn’t it be “doctoral candidate?”
I believe it depends on the stage of the program that the person is in — you’re not a doctoral candidate until you’ve passed your exams (most schools.) But even at that point you’re still a student, so “doctoral student” is a workable umbrella term for Slate Guy’s friend, about whose academic status we know very little. (We do know that he makes friends with jerks.)
(Was this a rhetorical question? I couldn’t tell. Ignore me if so.)
The most exciting part about passing my quals was changing my email signature from student to candidate. Moving on up in the world.
(Also adding into the chorus of comments about being a candidate in neuroscience and also being really into lots of things slate bro would think are frivolous and not helping me being smarter. Oh well!)
Ah, excellent, this makes sense.
He’s contemplating Weighty Matters of Existence, rather than reading anything. Really smart people can entertain themselves with their own thoughts, rather than needing External Stimuli to occupy their attention.
Holy crap, the comments now put hyphens and carriage returns in words to keep everything justified. This excites me. I make my own fun, you guys.
I love how nerdy the people on this site are.
I am (genuinely) glad someone likes this, because I hate it 🙁
It’s a rich tapestry of layout preferences out there, I guess!
I mean, I’m not sure if I like the hyphenation in and of itself, but the sudden differences intrigues me, and I like old-fashioned-looking typographical choices, for the novelty if nothing else. I may change my mind on how I feel about these hyphens as time goes by and I get more used to them.
The coop grocery near me has a good quarterly about cheese (called culture, naturally) but I suspect that’s not what he’s referring to. I’ve learned a lot about cheese, though.
Maybe he means he’s having ‘a ramble off’. You know, like a dance-off, but for mansplaining. Or something.
Slate guy reminds me of the blowhard in one of my media communications classes in grad school who whined about 90% of TV pandering to the “lowest common denominator.” Um then what are you doing here, guy?
I feel like when Slate needs a writer they just post an ad that says, “Do you like being contrary? Do you begin a lot of sentences with “‘Just to play devil’s advocate…’?” and all those undergrad/grad school blowhards come out in full force.
Hahahaha yes! Or maybe Slate’s recruiter has a twitter account (with feminine name/avatar) that just posts statements of opinion, and every time someone replies with “Actually…” or “But what if…” they get a recuitment DM.
The top of the article mentions that it was a post on Quora, which is just a regular Q-and-A site like metafilter or Reddit or whatever. I’m guessing Quora pays Slate to publish some of their “high quality” posts to attract people to *their* site. Although clearly somebody thinks “high quality” means “person with relatively little life experience giving a lecture on how to best experience life”, so…
I work in PR/communications and do a lot of writing about public policy issues. People occasionally imply things like “don’t you feel bad about dumbing everything down? Why didn’t you mention [dense economic jargon]?” Oh, fuck you. I mean, my job isn’t necessarily noble, but there is a lot to be said for simple, concise, and accessible writing.
Clear, concise writing can be a really difficult skill to acquire. Just because it’s possible to load everything down with jargon doesn’t make it good writing, and I hate when people do that.
YES oh my god. I have a degree in journalism as well as in geology, and in my life as a geologist you would not believe the terrible writing I was a witness to. Engineers are by far the worst. But being able to write clearly and concisely and to communicate difficult ideas simply to our clients turned out to be a really useful skill, imagine that.
Strunk & White forever! The updated editions if you feel you need to, but the principals are still the same.
My boss (atty with 30 years exp) wrote new content for the website that was so dense with jargon that I was able to remove more than 16 pages from the FAQs (out of less than 30) to make it accessible to potential clients. I don’t know how any clients ever understand anything after meeting with him, since he speaks the same way.
Sometimes the lawyers here send me writing that “just isn’t working,” I fiddle with it a little, and send it back, and they are AMAZED. Parallel structure! Punctuation with purpose! Sentences that aren’t trailing five lost antecedents!
I do this for my friends/significant other, who are members of the medical profession, because the mostly-wonderful class of people in white coats who keep us all patched up are goddamn near illiterate and tend to alternate between “This was an awesome experience that I experienced awesomely” and 5 paragraphs consisting of entirely of Latin and acronyms.
Using jargon and unnecessarily long words is just as inarticulate as not being able to use long words. Especially in certain contexts, not suiting your tone and content to your audience is generally considered a failure of communication.
It really is! In grad school, I had a classmate who was extremely fond of spouting off what sounded like very intelligent-sounding theory-laden statements that I couldn’t really follow. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that he usually wasn’t saying anything substantial, regardless of how he sounded. He might’ve had a point in there but his manner of speaking (among other things) was so alienating that I don’t think he ever truly managed to successfully engage in discussion with everyone else. There is a time and place for jargon but it’s still perfectly possible to be clear even in those settings.
(Mind, I’m not sure that he was all that interested in engaging with anyone who didn’t already have a PhD, so maybe he picked just the right tone for his intended audience after all. But that’s a whole other variety of tone deafness.)
Yes! Also in communications here (freelance copywriter) and “more difficult to read” is almost never synonymous with “better written,” except for occasionally if you’re Faulkner or Woolf something.
One of The Partner’s colleagues used to say, “If you can’t explain [whatever concept you purport to know] to a six-year-old, you’re a charlatan.”
There is an art to making it possible for people to follow you, if they don’t already understand and agree with your argument. I teach composition because it’s an art I’d like more people to know.
I’ve heard this and sentiments like it before, and I don’t really think I agree with it. As someone who used to professionally explain things to eight year olds, explaining things really well is hard. That’s why we celebrate people like Feynman or DeGrasse Tyson or Rachel Carlson or any great teacher/popularizer, because that shit is difficult and they’re good at it..
People who assume your job is “dumbing everything down” don’t have a very good idea of what you do (or how good you are at it), is my bet. Conveying complex info without dumbing it down requires clarifying and explaining for lay audiences without treating them like they’re morons. Primo skill to have.
The reason is because he’s not really Slate guy, he’s Quora guy!! Do other people also hate-read Quora? Come here and tell me about it!
That’s the only reason I even look at the site anymore. “Why is Elon Musk better than a freakish clone hybrid of Jesus, Gandhi, and the Buddha?” “How would you describe working at Facebook – awesome or REALLY SUPER AWESOME?”
Maybe because I’m in academia-land, all of the suggestions for me to read are like “How can I still get into Stanford with a negative 2.7 GPA” or “I have a 10,000 GPA why didn’t I get accepted to Stanford” OR “Tell me how to become a computer science professor when asking this question on Quora represents the full extent of the effort I am willing to put towards that task.”
Yeah, I’m a coder, so it’s all masturbatory SV garbage, TopCoder crap, “Who is the best programmer of all time?” shit. And so, so much Game of Thrones. I think it’s my fault though; I told Quora what I was interested in and it did exactly what I apparently wanted: exposed me to other people who care about the same thing.
Finally delurking on this site to tell you YES! I would love to be the kind of person who gets the Quora roundups and immediately looks for perspicacious writing about Big Questions, but instead I click on every ill-conceived gotcha question about evolution, etc., because I love a good demolition.
See Quora flipping its collective shit over an influx of Indians.
“Baywatchnormativism” is such a great word for American Internet-dominance!
“My friends are smart people, but Facebook is full of dumb things, and I can’t possibly see how this is a contradiction.”
(yes, this is the only link I want to discuss, and AT LENGTH, why do you ask?)
Extremely smart people read about what they want to know about, from people smarter than them.
… and that’s where Facebook comes in handy. (I get loads of interesting links to read from my Facebook friends! Am I doing Being Smart wrong? Apparently.)
Slate guy is actually giving me flashbacks to a guy I dated for a hot minute when I was 18 (he was 18 too). We’d bonded over literature in the first few weeks of college, but he deemed me to be “intellectually disappointing” once he discovered I also sometimes had conversations about the weather and the (lack of) quality of cafeteria food. #truestory
I’m going to start telling people they’re “intellectually disappointing” whenever they try to talk to me about shit I don’t care about. Like sports, or Quentin Tarantino movies.
You can tear my ridiculous romance novels about assassin nuns out of my cold, dead hands, Slate guy.
I am interested in the titles of these romance novels about assassin nuns!
Also, related to assassin nuns: I’m continually forgetting the author’s name, but she’s a historian, and writes romance novel spin-offs from the Scarlet Pimpernel, only with lady spies instead of dude spies.
I am assuming the His Fair Assassin series by Robin LaFevers? But I am excited at the possibility that there might be MORE books about assassin nuns.
IT SURE IS THAT SERIES.
If there are more I should find out.
I’m really happy that the Slate guy was published, now, because I did not know there were romance books about assassin nuns in the world, and now I do. The piece has served a worthy end.
I think Lauren Willig is who you’re thinking of? Spy romances!
Yes! I love those.
Extremely smart people can’t possibly be smart about any of the pop culture that mere lesser mortals enjoy on their TV screens or social media feeds. Nope, extremely smart people are all the Highbrowiest Highbrow McHighbrowpants you could ever meet and do not deign to consort with hoi polloi.
I mean, I’m an advanced-degree-holding classics-of-British-literature-reading intellectual who loves opera and art museums and independent bookstores, and even I want to punch Slate guy in his smug face. (And then go back to binge-watching Orphan Black.)
That Ham4Ham continues to give me life more than 12 hours after watching it for the first time.
Also, yay redesign! So pretty! So less flash! Yay! Congrats!
How Renee Elise Goldsberry does Aaron Burr hitting hard on Angelica! Daang, so amazing.
It made me ship it, and I’m not even sure what I’m shipping. Burr/Angelica? REG/Groffsauce? Some kind of amalgamation?
I STARTED CRYING LAST NIGHT BECAUSE THE REDESIGN IS SO BEAUTIFUL.
Any other NPR fangirls out there? Or am I the only one with the teensiest crush on Ophira Eisenberg and a massive one on Peter Sagal?
PETER SAGAL *swoon*
Peter Sagal is a fan of The Toast, fwiw.
He was my first NPR crush at the age of 7.
Also, looking back, Paula Poundstone.
I used to listen to WWDTM every saturday in our pool in our backyard, or in my bunk bed if my siblings were around.
Peter Sagal for sure, and Paula is by far the best, funniest person to ever be a panelist on Wait Wait.
True confession though — I do not care for Teri Gross, like, AT ALL. Her voice, her mannerisms, I dunno, just BUG me.
BRB, have to do a Kermit Flail somwhere not in public.
You might enjoy this: http://www.runnersworld.com/road-scholar/the-fear…
or this: https://twitter.com/petersagal/status/65868858272…
or this: https://twitter.com/petersagal/status/65696919831…
All (or most) of my NPR love belongs to Linda Holmes and the rest of the Pop Culture Happy Hour crew. Also the folks from Code Switch, because really.
Peter Sagal is a bit too much of a Professional Curmudgeon (and not in a good way) for me.
I love the aesthetic of Happy Hour.
Or whatever the auditory version of aesthetic is.
Yes! The little thrill I get every Friday from realizing there’s a new PCHH to download is… everything.
YES. I want my own Pop Culture Happy Hour! I especially love when Linda Holmes a) geeks out on Hallmark movies and b) comes up with stuff like the quiz about identifying Benjamin Moore colors vs. Law and Order: SVU episodes.
NINA TOTENBERG FOREVER and EVER and EVER!
Dude. You are so not alone. I’ve have a crush on Kai Rhysdall since college. I don’t give a shit about the stock market but I will listen to that man talk about the S&P 500 all damn day.
YAS ugh my sexuality is just “Everyone is SO CUTE” I dont know what to call it but I love it.
Did you know he has dreamy hair and is a runner? And probably likes cats? And probably would just want to sit on the couch with me and read? All true.
Eh, Peter Sagal’s alright, but my Wait Wait addiction was based on Carl Kasell’s sonorous tones. <fans self>
I once had a guy contact me from an internet dating profile where in the “celebrity you most resemble” question he’d written “people say I sound like Carl Kassell.” It was true, so I married him.
I always wanted to play “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell me” just for chance to have Carl Kasell record a greeting for my voicemail.
ARI SHAPIRO. I have loved him for a long time.
Can’t with Peter Sagal. I have an embarrassing PS anecdote from when I worked for his brother–which isn’t that big a deal IRL, but I’m not sharing–and haven’t been able to fangirl over him since. (I will say that he seems lovely in person.)
total fangirl here. listening right meow!
i’ve somehow partnered up with a decidedly not-as-geeky-as-me dude so when he asked if i wanted to “go see a live version of that NPR quiz show you love” i knew that he truly DOES find joy in my joy. he scored a zillion awesome points for sitting through a 2 hours live taping with me even if he himself doesn’t get weak in the knees for WWDTM <3
I have very fond memories of singing the All Things Considered theme with my theater friends in a rehearsal break in high school. (I grew up in a college town full of ex-hippies. Everybody’s parents listened to NPR all the time in their Volvo station wagons.)
In my mom’s volvo station wagon we had a choice between NPR and classic rock
All Things Considered has lyrics? Or did you just kick it Petra Haden style?
Just going “DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH DAH” at each other.
Did you ever hear the Phish song “All Things Reconsidered,” which is basically a jam-band version of the same song?
I really feel like that cat v dog thing is a rhetorical trick. When a dog won’t get out of my lap or won’t stop bringing me a toy to throw we call it dependent when a cat won’t get out of my lap or stop doing figure-8s around my legs we call it demanding.
Dogs are lazy when they lay about, cats are assumed to be apathetic towards us.
That cat’s can’t figure out how not to shit on the floor if you don’t have a litter box is some how proof of their independence where as dogs, once they’ve figured out that it’s THEIR house, will try they’re damndest not to shit in it.
Also of course, find me the cat that’s figured out how to commute via subway/bus.
I’d never thought of it that way, but I think you’re right. Just like a girl baby having a temper tantrum is a diva and a boy baby is a leader.
Come to think of it, one of my cats has very “dog-like” attributes: he’s easy to train, comes when you call, etc.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/pets/8958012…
This is just the best. Nomen est omen, indeed.
Fair enough, I retract that bit.
That’s amazing. When I was in high school we realized that during the day when nobody was home, our cat was sneaking out through the cat door, pawing at the neighbor’s door, and spending his business hours with the sweet old lady who lived there. This was also a plot line on the Simpsons at some point so I figure the feline double life is a fairly widespread phenomenon.
Wasn’t there a study a little while ago where they attached GPS trackers to cats to see how they spent their time, where they roamed, etc., and it turned out quite a few of them had double lives?
The asshole neighbor cat (also sometimes known as my cat’s dirtbag friend, depending on how he’s behaving) continually comes here to sleep on our not-that-impressive couch. What do you want, Neighbor Cat? It’s not like I feed you or anything.
there’s a children’s book about this called “six dinner sid” about a very smart (and presumedly chubby) cat smart enough to not live only a double life, but a sextuple life.
Six Dinner Sid is one of my favourites.
Do cats have a sweet old lady sense? Our skittish cat would always go hang out with the sweet old lady two doors down, so much so that whenever our cat hadn’t been by for a few days, the lady would call us to ask whether she was okay.
http://www.pleated-jeans.com/2015/05/18/this-is-n…
I was totally remembering that! I knew there was at least one.
People say that cats are smart, but my wife had to take her cat to the hospital three times because it swallowed a bottle cap on three separate occasions. Also, once it set itself on fire.
So, I don’t know.
But does your cat read quality stuff or facebook?? Does it watch a lot of tv?
It definitely hangs out with two smarter cats, so that is probably to its credit.
It once set itself on fire?! How in the world did that happen?!
It was one of those long-haired cats and was not cognizant of how long its hair was, so it would hang out by the lit candles.
My cat once melted off all the whiskers on one side of her muzzle. But she’s been very cautious around open flame since.
I think we like to tell ourselves cats are smart because we’ve all trained ourselves to associate “I don’t give a shit about your metrics or standards” with intelligence.
My cat loves me, I don’t care what internet articles say. He’s always at the door when I come home, he wants my attention, he sleeps belly-up on my lap. I should probably try training him on his name (which I never bothered with), because he does come in from outside when I say it/anything in that cadence out the window.
Yep, same, I have the most co-dependent cat ever. She knows her name (or at least a particular cadence and number of syllables), she does tricks to get her favorite treats, she follows me out the door in the mornings, and she absolutely glues herself to me if I’ve been gone for too long (generally anything exceeding 2 hours). She is also a damn sneaky genius and does MANY things she knows she shouldn’t.
I feel like KJ would respond to some training for tricks, and also that would be adorable. Maybe I should try. Right now he sort of gets “come up” or “kom op” (very bad Dutch for come on) when we’re heading upstairs, unless he just infers that we are going upstairs because I’m walking up the stairs.
My cat’s name is ‘kitty’ specifically because he started responding to that before we could decide on a name so we just went with it.
I also sometimes call him ‘Buddy’ (which is what I tell the vet he’s called cos I’m too embarrassed to admit I have a cat called ‘kitty’) but he does not respond to this, even though it sounds quite a lot light ‘kitty’ and I say it in the same tone and cadence.
YES! This:
Greet a cat enthusiastically and it might respond with nothing more than a few unhurried blinks.
Maybe the problem is that you don’t know how to communicate with your cat. Those unhurried blinks ARE your cat communicating with you, telling you they like you and are comfortable with you.
Like many other posters, I have social, affectionate, friendly, playful, interactive cats because I don’t treat them like furry doorstops. Sheesh.
I can’t log in to comment! When I click the “Login to IntenseDebate,” nothing happens (tried in Chrome and Firefox).
looking into this!
I was having that problem on my phone (Android using Dolphin) and iPad (using Safari) over the weekend. I am already logged in on my laptop so no problem there.
Yeah, I had to open the intensedebate website in a new tab and login there. When I refreshed The Toast I was logged in to my intesnedebate profile.
ah, genius!
maybe if I hadn’t let my eyeballs stray to so many tabloids in the grocery store I would’ve figured this out myself
We are ON this one. Seems like a bug with IntenseDebate that we will sort out right quick.
I *can* log in to comment, but I need to log in separately for each comment.
This maybe should have the effect of me talking less, smiling more, but I’m a chatterbox.
There are so many great pull-quotes to be had from the ‘how to be smarter’ piece but the most telling is probably “I am 25 years old.” Bless your heart, you beautiful zygote.
I LOST IT at that line. Oh, sweetie, I think the ‘oh shit I don’t know anything what am I even doing’ fairy is a little late getting to your house.
Also, after reading the quote Nicole pulled for the link roundup a couple times, it’s stating to look like a chicken/egg situation. Do I get smart by not reading Facebook and trashy novels? Or once I AM smart, will Deep Thoughts crowd all that stuff out of my brain?
Sadly I think it’s because that fairy has been stuck in my house for the past four years, yuk yuk yuk
I think that unlike that poor unfortunate, we read the Toast and therefore are already served with things much more complexly smart than he has ever dreamed of. So we’re all good.
I was hate-reading until I got to the admission of his age. I said, “Oh!” aloud, rolled my eyes, and stopped right there.
Is he a guy in his 20s? Then he’s the least significant type of person on the planet. A male in their 20s? Run in the opposite direction. Nothing he says matters; his fears, his hopes his dreams are garbage. Men in their 20s are the worst thing happening on our planet.
-Rob Delaney
HEY. I am 25 and we are AT LEAST embryos.
When I was younger I used to dislike it when people said that people of my age were dumb, but now it makes me happy because it means I’ll be EVEN SMARTER in the future.
(Well, also, I’m 27 now, so people mostly assume that my age = competent adult, unlike when you’re in your teens or early twenties and the entire world is hell-bent on telling you that you’re automatically stupid and selfish.)
Yaaaaaay redesign!!! And I have watched that Ham4Ham video at LEAST six times since it was put up yesterday. It is everything that is pure and wonderful in the world.
Toasties, I watched the first two seasons of Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries this weekend as an anxiety-stalling tactic and I AM IN LOOOOVE. THE OUTFITS. THE MEN. JACK’S VOICE. PHRYNE’S ABILITY TO FIND A MAN LITERALLY ANYWHERE. I can’t wait to finish so I can start all over again.
(also, pls send good thoughts this morning- I have my committee meeting in 5 hours and I’m trying very hard not to panic and also not assume they’re going to recommend kicking me out of grad school)
~good thoughts~
(Do you know how much paperwork is involved with kicking someone out of grad school? If they were going to do that, you probably would have heard about it by now.)
YOU CAN DO IT.
I feel the same way before my advising meetings like eeee please dont make me take 8:00 am ballet….
You’ve got this! Sending all the positive thoughts your way ❤️
I DID EXACTLY THE SAME THING WITH MISS FISHER.
Dot and Hugh make me squeal. I love how gently feminist it is. I want to touch Jack’s face.
ahem. good luck and good thoughts for your meeting.
Channel your inner Phryne for the meeting an you will rock it. (But probably don’t sleep with any of the committee.)
First of all, YAY FOR MISS FISHER! It is one of my favorite shows, ever, and I love it when new people become similarly obsessed with it. I met a couple from Perth while on vacation in Edinburgh who went to an exhibit of the costumes from the show and they even got to have a lovely conversation with the costume designer.
Good luck on the committee meeting! I’ve always been told that it’s almost never in the best interest of a department to have a student fail to get their masters or doctorate. It just looks really bad and is considered a failure on their part. So if you’re still working hard (and i know you are from your posts here) and showing interest in finishing, I think you’ll be just fine. The only person I know who got the “perhaps you might want to rethink whether or not you should get a PhD” was rarely in the lab and constantly travelling back to his home state (granted, his then 5-year-old son lived in that state, but I don’t think he communicated that he was still working while he was travelling–just that he’d be out of office). You’ll be fine, even if your committee drives you crazy/doesn’t understand/acts like stereotypical scientists–you can vent about it all right back here before you go back to sciencing like a boss. Go ppyajunebug Go!
I made it through grad school with some pretty dumb mistakes in my experiments (you should do more than one or two weighings to get a good idea of per seed weight for instance) and I didn’t get kicked out, so I’ll send all my good grad school fortune your way.
Miss Fisher is the BEST! I’ve been trying to convince my mother to watch it for months, but she’s hesitant based on my other TV choices (Hannibal, Luther, other really dark things she doesn’t like) I might just have to sit down and start with her, text her gifs? idk
Text her gifs. You have to re-earn her trust. Also any articles about the costumes.
good thoughts good thoughts good thoughts (you are better than those yelling losers and don’t forget it.)
HOW DID IT GO? Well, I hope. <3
It went okay! Sorry, just now getting home from lab/everything I needed to get done. They all acknowledged that I had done a ton of work, but said I need a better understanding of the literature, which I can’t argue with. I did have a mini-breakdown at the end when they were explaining that just because I was so exhausted and overwhelmed, but they were very kind and understanding, so it was fine overall.
Yay redisign! Interestingly, when this post shows up on my RSS reader, it shows the “That puppy is too much” text but the image is the deleted comment. “Wow, they’re being really affectionate towards that deleted commenter,” I thought, and then I clicked through and things made more sense.
Facebook shows “Notice anything different?” text but then the picture is a tiny portion of the puppy picture that is mostly blanket. I think they have some photo issues to work out…
hmmmmmm I can’t seem to log into my IntenseDebate account!
Some people say that I’m extremely smart but am I? I know important people and successful people. I learned a lot of platitudes from them that I repeat. I don’t even own a television. I read quality books and do not look at magazines.
Maybe that is what extremely smart is, maybe it is repeating the things your smart friends say and also reading quality books and saying what you read in the books and also not owning a television like a dummy, idk
–signed, Braak. Fitness model, life coach, success enthusiast, no-TV-owner
I have a tv, but it’s really small. Do I get any points for that?
As long as you don’t look at it. You would only learn TV things if you looked at your TV, and when you said the TV things to your friends, your friends would say, “That is not extremely smart.”
Even on tv you can learn “fun facts”, and fun facts plus “a little bit of everything” is how it works. It was a lot easier to find out who won the world series if you had a tv.
Been around the world and found
that only stupid people are breeding,
the cretins cloning and feeding,
and I don’t even own a TV.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4NRmM2aycU
Also, I thought smart people were past “I don’t even own a TV” as a marker of smartness, because lots of TV-watching dummies also don’t own TVs and use internet devices to mindlessly consume drivel!
In 2015 we declare our smartness by saying “Truly, this is the golden age of TV for intellectuals like myself; Mad Men is in no way a nighttime soap opera that I watch primarily for the pretty dresses.”
No, only regular smart people watch prestige dramas on HBO and AMC, extremely smart people only read books by Dostoevsky and Malcolm Gladwell.
wait hold up, knowing about TV and pop culture makes you dumb, but knowing who won the World Series makes you “practically seen as a genius”?
come onnnnnnnnnnnn
Yes because anyone can know the things that are on TV by watching TV, but only extremely smart people memorize dumb nerd stuff about baseball so if you listen to them and then repeat those things, you will be repeating things that not everyone is repeating and that will make you extremely smart.
See, knowing which of your friends is getting married is a dumb chick thing to keep in your brain, but baseball involves math, and is also manly, so keeping baseball math in your brain won’t get rid of your smartness the way keeping weddings and pop culture and other girly stuff in your brain will. My proof for this is that lots of girls won’t date me because they’re too busy knowing what a Kardashian is, which makes them dumb, which is why they don’t appreciate me.
Everything I know about pop culture I learned from my smart friends, but I don’t know where they learned it, I hope not from “watching tv” or “scrolling through facebook”! The horror! It would be as bad as acquiring wealth through *trade*
+1 to that pair of authors. Well done.
I read this comment before hate-reading the article, and I thought the extremely simplistic writing style was something you’d humorously adopted to further the mockery of the piece. Nope. That’s how he wrote it.
It reads like a high-school freshman’s effort to write an analytical essay that ends up being a list of declarative statements.
Cats are so fickle, haha. One of mine will sit by me and stare forever and reach up and paw at me, but if I pick her up she gets agitated and runs away… and then comes right back two seconds later to sit, stare, and paw at me again. Cats.
Also this layout is lovely but I’m tired so when I clicked the link and saw it, I was like WHAT HAPPENED for a moment or two!
Yay redesign!
Why are some thumbs green and others grey? It doesn’t seem to be a question of whether I’ve clicked on it myself, and it doesn’t seem to be related to number of clicks.
Green are replies to original post, gray are replies to comment
AHA, I was wondering this as well.
I think replies are grey. I miss being able to see whether I’ve already clicked or not, though.
No, I think the ones you clicked are a different shade of green? I noticed it over the weekend on this week’s Fry & Laurie post, when I refreshed the page and it suddenly changed and clicked a thumb. But it’s pretty subtle. I might be imagining it.
EDIT: WAIT NO NEVERMIND I WAS IMAGINING IT
I was pretty tired I guess. Or it changed since Friday night.
I miss that function too. Instead I get the pop-up and then feel a bit chagrined for not remembering that I already liked said comment.
Gray thumbs on replies!
Got it – grey thumbs are replies, but now I can’t tell whether I’ve previously voted on something or not! Oh woe!
The color coding of the thumbs doesn’t make sense to us either! We are going to make this more clear, especially so you can see when you have +1ed a comment.
“I’m pretty smart, but not smart enough to see that Slate is straight-up trolling me by publishing this on a popular website under my real name.”
Maybe since he does not spend time reading about plebian things like social media, he has not caught on that this article is the first thing prospective employers will find when they google him.
I like the redesign but I feel so lost and floaty in a sea of floatiness down in the comments. It’s going to take me a while to get used to not having the grey background! (Another site also recently redesigned their Intense Debate comments section, and they always had the white background, but I have the same “lost at sea” feeling, it’s so odd, reminds me of when LJ redesigned theirs several years ago somehow??)
I feel the same way–I mean, yay redesign, and so far it’s not crashing when I have AdBlock off on this domain, so those are good things. I really liked the gray, though.
that’s what’s going on ! i thought it was the lack of arrows in front or replies. but, yeah. the comments seem untethered and i’m having a hard time following the flow of nested comments.
Are you not seeing arrows? I’m definitely seeing arrows.
I’m just now viewing this on a mobile device* for the first time and here it all makes sense. on my PC, it seems like arrows are missing. or something??? I don’t know :\
( * i’ve never been able to utilize the toast on my phone before. i now own a mobile misandry machine <3 )
*Sees the article on racist landlords*
*clicks on it*
*please don’t let it be a Jewish guy, please don’t–‘Ephraim‘….”
FUCK *cries for the desecration of God’s name committed by my people*
I don’t know why horrible things feel worse to me when they’re done by fellow Jews, but there it is.
Anyway, great redesign!
I don’t know why it does either, but I feel the exact same way. Maybe it’s that Jewish guilt doubling up on me or something.
Oh yeah, no question, I feel that way too.
I have this feeling whenever it’s a minority identity that I share, but Jewishness is particularly horrible because of the historical conspiracies about Jews basically ruining everything for as long as the world has existed. So instead of being just, “ugh, why does this trans person have to be terrible, we get enough shit as it is, sigh” I have to be like “ARGH NO DON’T GIVE THEM ANY MORE AMMUNITION!”
It’s definitely always more painful when it’s Jewish people being dicks. I’d like to think it’s because I hold our people to a higher standard — we should know better, guys! — but it might just be the selfish fear of being blamed for what another Jew did. :/
Yeah, I clicked to see if the landlord was the asshole who stole $2000 from me (it wasn’t), and then I went, “Oh no, this is bad for the Jews,” and couldn’t make myself read any more.
I have to share my humiliating Quiet Car story with you guys. I did not know that the Quiet Car was a thing that existed because I almost never am on a train during Quiet Car hours but one time a few years ago my sister and I were going to visit our parents in the suburbs for the weekend and unbeknownst to us we sat in a Quiet Car (there was a very small sign on the door that we did not see). We sat on the upper level and obliviously chatted about stuff at a pretty normal volume and apparently somebody in our car decided to complain to the train police because the ticket guy came up and chewed us out about it. I was like “Hey, sorry, we didn’t know, we’ll be quiet” but he acted like we had set a seat on fire or something and publicly shamed us further by making an announcement on the loudspeaker about the importance of being quiet in the Quiet Car (which if you ask me is much more disruptive than the mellow conversation we had been having but whatever). We spent the rest of the ride playing a really dumb Jane Austen RPG on my sister’s Kindle and feeling embarrassed.
I used to commute into DC on the train (MARC, not Amtrak), and people are SERIOUS AS FUCK about the Quiet Car. I used to avoid it even though I love Quiet because I was so afraid of accidentally making a sound and getting yelled at by a bunch of angry businessmen.
On some MARC lines, there is also an unofficial “party car” in the evenings where instead of being silent and grumpy, everyone drinks beer and yells. I accidentally sat in it once and could not figure out why strangers kept trying to give me alcohol.
They do the ‘party car’ on the Metra too! At least, after 5pm on the North Central Service Metra line leaving Chicago, all these businesspeople will bust out the beer & snacks (some people even wheel on coolers) & have at it.
Shit, I don’t even need to go out to that part of the burbs, but maybe I’ll hop on just for the rolling party.
They do the party car thing on the Metro North only it’s the entire car and filled with Yale assholes going to Yankees games.
I suppose for your sake people talking on the quiet car can have one warning before being drawn and quartered. And to Christie’s credit, he did leave when he was told it was the quiet car, instead of just pretending like he would be quiet when we all know he’s not capable, like some people do.
I once had a man sit next to me on the quiet car and talk at me for 20 minutes, despite me only saying variations on “this is the quiet car.” “every other car is not the quiet car.” The only time he shut up was when he went to sleep, blocking my ability to leave, and asking me to show the conductor his ticket on his phone (which I did not agree to). Eventually I cold shouldered him so hard he left. And left his charger behind, which I did not point out.
I still wonder from time to time if I should have murdered him for the good of society.
Murder definitely would have been a public good in that case, but what if a jury inexplicably disagreed? You made the right choice.
I have a great embarrassing Quiet Car story too!!
My freshman year of college I was going home for some break or another and I ended up catching one of the crowded commuter trains out of Chicago into the suburbs probably around 5:30 or 6. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast so before leaving school I stopped in the little campus 7/11 type store and grabbed myself something to eat. When I got onto the train I ended up getting into what I soon came to realize was the Quiet Car, as it was completely populated by business people in suits and such with the iPads and newspapers and there was me, 18, with a teddy bear and a lunchable. I think most of them were charmed by it because I looked terrified the entire time, but suffice to say I made extra sure to check the status of a car before committing to a seat from then on.
I don’t care one whit if cats are domesticated or not, I will always feel utterly blessed when a cat willingly approaches me for pettings when I’m sitting in my driveway, just like I feel when a dog does the same.
In fact a little tailless cat did that last night while I was moving my Spokelits to my new bike (and ps: thanks for the tips in the Link Round-Ups last week for the London woman whose name I’m blanking on, but I got an Electra Townie yesterday on deep discount (which was a felicitous event at the bike shop) and it is soooooo much better than my old $89 Huffy from WalMart! I can’t wait to go on a proper ride today!) and he must be a housecat with a family, because I said hello and he walked right up to me for pets and only went away when my parents got annoyed that he was near the garage. They HATE cats. 🙁 I hope he got home alright, because I haven’t seen him around much.
I’ve had my oldest cat for ten years now and I STILL feel utterly blessed when I call her or make the ‘tck tck tck’ noise and she comes prancing over to me to be pet.
When my little guy is wandering around and you call his name, his tail will pop up into a happy question mark and he will trot over for pets. This is all I’ve ever wanted from life.
omgomg i am dying from the cute just reading about that
The ridiculous fluffiness of said tail is just the cute icing on the adorable toast.
My cat’s tail is a permanent question mark, but it does start vibrating like mad when she sees me, which is pretty much the best thing ever.
The happy question mark! And also the quivering exclamation mark! Best. I took this photo for my blog the other day and I am in love with it because you can see the start of the tail as it’s ZOOMING up. The next photo is even more blurry because he’s vibrating it like crazy
https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5820/22454200705_66…
And yep. Still feel blessed and particularly special about it.
That Slate article sounds like a modern-day version of Eleanor Roosevelt’s ‘small minds discuss people’ quote, which I’ve always thought was pretty turd-y.
Oh thank god I am not the only one who hates that quote.
Seriously, it’s like people aren’t interesting or something. People are interesting! And introverts don’t have a monopoly on awesomeness!
(Note: I used to think I was an introvert. Then I married an actual real live one and people, I am not an introvert.)
Yeah my boyfriend is one of those people who can get a little too proud about being an introvert, and I have to remind him every time he starts complaining– wait, do you truly expect your coworkers to start talking to you about Proust when you get on the elevator? How exactly would YOU go about starting such a conversation? Are you just bitching about the fact that you have to get out of bed and go to work in the first place? Yes? Okay, let’s find a way to say that without smearing all the innocent bystanders who try to say hi to you.
Ami I the only one who doesn’t really jive with Amy Schumer? I think part of what she does is funny, and then other, big parts—the woman-who-drinks-too-much tropes, the semi-racist stuff, the body hate—is so off-putting that I just sort of can’t. I wish that comediennes didn’t have to choose between being blowsy and being brittle.
My mother always shakes her head and goes “she is such a CLEVER girl it makes me so sad she has to make fun of herself and do shock humor” and I kinda agree.
She’s no Tig Notaro.
I’ve always thought her show was worlds better than her stand up. Not entirely unproblematic, but it’s presented some really biting and incisive sketches. Maybe all of the stuff I like on her show is Tig’s writing. Hmm.
Agreed. I like a lot of the sketches a lot, but her stand-up falls a bit flat for me–it seems like she leans really heavily on the shock humor in a way that is a little tiring, whereas when the show goes there, it’s brief and in service of a greater point rather than being the joke itself.
Right there with you.
you are not alone.
Not just you. I had no idea how much of her stuff was borderline racist until we started watching Inside Amy Schumer. It’s so hard for me to reconcile the incredibly brilliant stuff with the incredibly problematic stuff. It got to the point where I couldn’t watch the show any longer, though.
I believe she has resolved to stop with racial humor after being called on it.
Nope. I absolutely 100% do not get it and I’m fine if people like her but she is not a feminist role model, come on.
I’m not comfortable with that level of self-deprecation but I understand that she clearly felt that was the only way to build a career for herself. The Trumpesque ‘Latinos are rapists’ joke is just too racist to justify.
I do not find her funny at all. And I hate how much she rags on her own weight, because she is like, not remotely fat.
Yeah, I’m with you. I kind of feel obligated to know her stuff because so many of my friends love her, and her show does have some excellent moments. I try to remind myself that she isn’t obligated to be perfect just because she’s a feminist comic, but in some instances, I feel like she should know better.
Nope. Me too. I just don’t get the love. And a thin girl complaining about being fat makes the actually fat girls feel even worse. I’m not like you, Amy, I’m actually fat, you’re thin enough to wear designer clothes.
And as Joyce Carol Oates said “Audiences will accept attractive female comedian pretending to be unattractive for, if she really were unattractive, laughter would be ugly.”
If I made jokes about my weight everyone would just be uncomfortable.
Me too–I find every once in awhile something really zings, but it’s very hit and miss, and the cringe rate overall probably outweighs the zings. (Although in fairness, I have a very fine-line tolerance between amusing self-deprecation and vicarious humiliation, which doesn’t only apply to her.)
Oooh so pretty and shiny!
My small quibble: in the former version of The Toast, the coloured background on the sides made it easier for me to read the posts themselves. This “1/3 empty white space, 1/3 text, 1/3 empty white text” layout is a bit harder on my eyes.
However, on mobile, where the huge swathes of white space aren’t an issue, it is absolutely gorgeous and, as far as I can tell, flawless. If I click on a post title it actually takes me to that post and not to an ad, over and over again until I give up in despair!
Redesign thoughts:
First:
OVERALL SO BEAUTEOUS. LOVELY. JOYOUS. WOW.
Everything that follows should be read as ways to make it even better, not, like, CRITICISM criticism. Also, Firefox at the moment, but I think everything I’m noting was also a thing with chrome this weekend at home.
Actual Things:
*The top post not being the most recent post is going to confuse the HELL out of people. Like me.
*I can’t for the life of me figure out why, in comments, some of the thumbs are different colors. it’s not if I’ve +1’d or not, it’s not if it has lots of thumbs.
*Also, my inability to figure out if I’ve thumbs up’d in any way is not my favorite.
*The “legal” page tells one to email Nick Pavich. I assume you no longer want people to email him?
*Right below the post a new comment box, it says, twice, “Enter text right here!”.
*Some people’s Comment Accounts had Weird Shit happen— it ATE one of my comments and replaced it with someone else’s comment on Friday evening. So, if you go to my profile, the one that starts “You guys have me so worked up that this is my fourth comment!!! ” …. not my comment. Not a big deal if this is some sort of one time thing. if it’s a thing that starts happening regularly, that’s an issue.
Nitpickier Things:
*I don’t like that intensedebate shows our popularity number or whatever it is. Feels too reddit-ey, not the lovely community type stuff we have going on here.
*The “The Toast” logo being centered on the entire page (rather than the left column) feels wrong to me.
*I miss the masthead.
I plan on posting this, letting people tell me if I’ve missed something obvious, think of anything else, then i will ALSO send this via email.
Also, on the front page, it says she posted it 5 hours ago, but it’s only 10am est, so…. maybe she WROTE it 5 hours ago, but it didn’t post then. right?
Green comments/thumbs are in response to the original post; gray comments/thumbs are in-thread replies to comments.
Yeah, I’m getting that, but I don’t like the lack of any indicator that you’ve clicked it. I tested re-liking something and it pops up a modal letting you know you already clicked it, which seems…not ideal, from a UX perspective.
I also am not a fan of not knowing which things I’ve already thumbs-upped.
AH THE MISSING MASTHEAD!
I knew there was something off and sad, but since I scroll past it so often, it didn’t click. But yes, I miss that anchor at the top of the screen. Everything is so floaty now. It’s going to be a while to get used to.
ooh, yes, I have done a couple accidental double-thumbs-upping already. And I agree about the popularity thing, although one does have to be paying attention to actually read the thingies rather than just seeing lil gray circles, it’s nice that they’re clearly coded “not important” and there’s no “gold star user right here!” labels or anything.
I’m finding the font in comments (and also in the blockquotes in the main post) a little… spindly? and hard to read. The main text of the post is okay, but shrinking it that extra couple of points makes the letters so thin!
Cosigned on all of these. Also, the popularity number doesn’t feel all that nitpicky to me–the lovely community type stuff makes it rather important to me that we don’t have that.
Yeah not feeling the little numbers next to people’s names… what do they mean? What do I mean, as a person, if my number is not as high as other numbers??! Agh!
You’re ok, you’re in the triple-digits. It’s those others you’ve got to watch out for, you know, those damn double-digiters.
but…but why? Why don’t you like me!? *sniffles into tea and considers actually doing some work*
Aw, no, I totally like you, don’t work, that defeats the whole purpose of this comment section.
Thank you from bringing me back from the brink of sending work emails. It’s Monday and rainy out, no one wants to get an email from me!
emails on a rainy monday sound like a terrible idea. just enjoy your tea, dear *pats on head*
Over at another site we spent a VERY LONG TIME trying to figure out the numbers and how they got there. Our best guess is it’s a weird number that comes from an algorithm based on how much you comment/number of upvotes. But yeah, it make zero sense.
The scale in the modal makes me feel pretty good, though. 16 is average? The community here is so bomb.
I think it MAY also be based on how many replies you get? I think that if you post a comment along the lines of “What are your weekend plans?” and get 30 replies, the number goes up.
That makes some sense. Mine was 104 after my first comment, then I posted a comment that didn’t get any responding comments and it dropped to 103. But then that happened again, and it hasn’t dropped since.
(ugh this is why i don’t want the numbers because now i just want to make it go up and i swear to god i’ll just start spamming Hamilton gifs and puppy pictures if that’s the winning formula)
*insert comment that makes your score go up here*
Here you go.
Thanks! I think it’s just posts in the main thread, though – like, if you post a greenbar post, and it gets no responses, that seems to drop you somewhat (I guess the logical justification is that if no one’s engaging with your attempt at starting a discussion, it’s lower value?).
ME TOO. I don’t *like* the fact that I pay attention and care about dumb unimportant metrics, especially ones I don’t understand, and when that little number was ONLY available on my profile, and I didn’t regularly see other people’s, it was easy for me to not spend much time thinking about it, and how it will never ever be as high as it was shortly after I started commenting and had one TRULY SPECTACULARLY POPULAR comment that inflated my rating and now it’s just all downhill from there…… But if you put metrics like this in my face all the time, I will care, very much.
It’s a habit that’s sometimes helpful (fitness stuff, any sort of actual game), but the internet implementation of gamification in social interactions has been, on net, bad for me.
I think it’s your value in pence. Mine’s at about 90, which translates to about 1.3 KitKats; I think that’s probably about what my comments are worth 😉
We are fixing the fixable issues here! The top post thing was a weird logic bug that we will sort out right away.
The Weird Shit on the comment accounts was an problem caused by the upgrade itself—during the 90-120 minutes we were physically upgrading, WordPress and IntenseDebate got out of sync. Sorry about that. It won’t happen again.
We can’t seem to, uh, duplicate the bug with the duplicated text. Let me know what browser/OS you saw that on?
WAIT I see it, it is right there at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
(thank you!)
You and your team have been super fast and responsive to all of our nitpicks and requests! Thank you!
A Nitpicky Thing of my own: the comment textbox has the “name/email/website” fields underneath it, which makes it look at first like I’m not logged in (because why would you be asking me for my display name when I’m already logged in?), though it does confirm that I’m posting as winterbymorning underneath that.
I was literally about to post this! It seems to be associating it all properly but yeah, it made me do a double-take earlier.
Same!
Update on the life/work situation. Husband woke up yesterday with a 9/10 headache and severe nausea and dizziness. Doc said it might be a post-concussive brain bleed and to go to the ER immediately. Thank God a million times it turned out not to be, just a really bad case of post-concussive syndrome. It was really scary, though. It’s the worst pain I’ve ever seen him in, and last week I saw him after falling two stories. Anyway, he got better drugs and we were home by late afternoon. I posted an update on Facebook and thanked friends who have been really supportive this week (crickets from my close personal Facebook friend my boss). I had arranged for friends to come over and watch the kids so I could catch up on work all day, but I didn’t get a chance to work until the evening. I sent an update last night to my boss explaining what had happened and apologizing for not being able to complete some tasks. Now a normal person’s response would be “I understand, I have faith you’ll get these things done this week, I hope he’s okay, etc.” She wrote back just reminding me about some other tasks. Nothing about my husband. I’m done expecting her to be human, but even I was impressed.
I’m sorry about your husband’s scary post-concussion symptoms, my god, and relieved that it was not a brain bleed!! Your boss’s response is TERRIBLE and she desperately needs a visit from the Empathy Fairy.
*hugs* I hope you are doing okay in spite of everything. <3
The Empathy Fairy’s magic wand is a sledgehammer. This manager needs to be on the receiving end of a mighty swing of the magic wand.
I’m growing increasingly convinced that your boss is a cartoon villain. Somehow, I just can’t wrap my head around somebody with such a complete lack of empathy being a boss AT A NON-PROFIT, of all things.
Agreed so much.
I really hope that Frumiosa’s job-hunting-tentacles turn up something good really soon, so that she can settle in before the holiday season (especially if she sticks to non-profit, with the big end-of-year fundraising season approaching).
The thing is, everyone (who doesn’t work for her) thinks she walks on water because she is lovely to them. That’s what’s so crazy-making about all of this. It’s like if Meg Ryan had a heart of coal. And if we would dare inform the Board (HR is not a thing here), there is no question they would believe her over us. I was thinking of writing a letter when I leave (pleeeease God soon) to the Board outlining how fucked up things have gotten, but I know she’ll just twist it around to make me look like a disgruntled employee, and then all I’ve done is burnt bridges with influential community members. Uuuuugh. Okay, back to work.
This makes me suspect that you have never worked at a non profit.
They attract some genuinely lovely people. They also tend to attract people who are addicted to looking good and getting attention for it, and who are prepared to do ANYTHING AT ALL to maintain that image to the outside world.
Rage.
I…. I thought we all agreed you were to set her on fire? No?
I am so sorry you’re dealing with terrible boss stuff on top of your husband’s fall and the physical and emotional aftermath of that. That is not fair or reasonable.
Sending you what fortitude I can spare, plus internet hugs, if you would like them.
The redesign is so great! I can finally be less of a garbage person and turn my ad blocker off! (I am so sorry I used it before, but otherwise it was literally impossible for me to look at the site without my entire computer just ceasing to function for upwards of five minutes)
My girlfriend is taking a General Assembly CSS/Javascript class and is learning all sorts of things that I do not understand in the slightest, but last week she decided to look at the code for the old design. And she kinda just tilted her head and said “Oh wow.” So we are both glad the redesign is here and is so great!
Thank you for the reminder to turn off my adblock on The Toast!
The redesign is beautiful! And George Saunders foreeeever
As we were going to bed on Saturday night, I remarked, “I hope the cats let us sleep in a little.” I woke up very surprised at 8:45 that I had not heard any of their normal routine of scratching the door and yowling.
I got up, went downstairs to the kitchen, and discovered that during the night they knocked an ENTIRE PIZZA (minus the one piece my fiance ate) off of the stove where it had been mistakenly left overnight. Naturally it had landed facedown and they apparently spent ALL NIGHT snacking on pizza. I think that makes them exactly as domesticated as dogs.
That is exactly the kind of thing my dog would do, if she could get up on the stove/counter. She’s so small she can’t even reach a kitchen chair.
Ha, I bet they were happy! My cat steals and eats so much human food. Highlights include a piece of tempeh, english muffins (still in packaging), a whole wheel of brie (was immediately taken from him), piece of cooked egg, a packet of crackers, a chunk of baked pumpkin oatmeal, a bag of pecans, licking pans that were just used for cooking, and licking anything in the sink or the bottom of the sink. He manages all this, even with us being really careful about leaving food out uncovered.
It’s so weird–my cats used to be fairly indifferent to most human food until I moved and now they are sticking their noses in constantly. I don’t know if it’s because for the first time I actually have counter space they feel entitled to, or what.
I always worry about my cats getting sick from eating human food, but they like it SO MUCH. Sometimes I relent and give them a tiny piece of cheese or a dollop of plain yogurt. Or a piece of popcorn, which neither will eat, but will instead lick the salt off of and then use as a toy.
I regularly give my cat bits of egg and (teeny) pieces of cheese. And little bits of meat, if we’re having it. He’s fine so far but I worry that I should maybe worry more?
My other favourite thing to do is, when eating an orange and he shows interest, offer it to him. He will sniff it and then be SO OFFENDED.
Toast. I need to let you know something and it won’t be pretty.
This Hamilton thing is getting too much. You need to stop. Its affecting your relationships.
Your Hamilton obsession is getting so bad, that I, a person who knows jack shit about US history, has never even been there and has not a clue what Hamilton is about, am having dreams about Hamilton.
Seriously, for the sake of my asleep entertainment. (I’m not saying it was a bad dream like, just very confusing having a dream about being in a play you’ve never seen. *whisper* it miiight be that I’m spending too much time on The Toast but I refuse to entertain that possibility.)
I’m sorry but all complaints about Hamilton need to be made in the form of a rap-battle.
*cough cough*
My name is Selma and I’m here to say,
Dreaming about attractive actors in a play I’ve never seen is really hard.
I would like to return to the Batman filled adventures of yester-year please.
(How was that? I feel I may be lacking the required *flow*.)
Flow: 2/10
Sincerity: 10/10
Rap Score: solid first effort. Not quite Phillip’s first rap in “Take a Break”. He was a prodigy though, so don’t be too hard on yourself.
I just feel a little left out and bitter because while I would LOVE to see Hamilton, I don’t have the cash or connections to get a ticket. And I kind of hate the idea that Broadway productions are off-limits for most of us in the middle class.
Oh, I have basically no hope of SEEING it in the near future, but that’s the way I’ve felt about every single popular broadway show ever, and so I’ve had practice in continuing to enjoy the soundtracks without giving a fuck.
Don’t be bitter. I bet 95% percent of us Faniltons here have no hope of seeing it anytime soon and are just going on the soundtrack. I totally hear you though – Broadway prices have gone completely off the rails.
Yeah, Ham4Ham is super nice, if you’re in NYC anyhow. But no one else has a shot at it — most people can’t afford to go to NYC on the off chance that they will get lucky there.
(I know I am lucky to be able to afford a not-very-good ticket and a hotel etc.)
Co-signing those that also won’t get to see a performance, unless it tours to my city, but we’re fangirling over the original cast recording, which is very much accessible! There’s a lot to enjoy without being able to see the show.
Poor 25 year old guy! The burden of being the arbiter of what Really Smart People should do/not do is such a heavy one for a person of his youth.
He didn’t directly SAY this, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the not Really Smart people he is criticizing might be WOMEN he has dated/wanted to date/no longer dates?
Just sayin’
Oooooh yes. And also, the Guys these Women DID end up dating instead of him, Smartypants McSmartCulture of Highbrowhhouse.
THANK GOD he’s brave enough to shoulder the burden of Smartness Gatekeeper. I wish more men would step up and do this for us, so that we know how to live our lives!!
Oh, and one redesign comment: I’d love to have links to automatically open in a new tab like they did before. (I’m on Firefox right now, not sure if this still happens in other browsers)
I totally misread Saunders there and was just like, “Yes. I love George Sanders too. Most classy.”
You’re not the only one. And I was prepared to discuss Psychomania, too.
The first Terry Gross interview I heard was with Allie Brosh who wrote Hyperbole and a Half, and it was so upsetting I haven’t wanted to listen to anything else she’s done. :/ it’s probably unfair, but ugh: she was really pushy about getting Allie Brosh to describe how she’d planned to commit suicide, even though she obviously didn’t want to talk about it and even said “I didn’t even tell my husband this,” and was audibly upset.
I feel the same way. She did something similar when she interviewed Elizabeth Smart–she asked if her kidnapper’s breath smelled bad while he was raping her. Which . . . ? It seemed to unnecessarily place Smart in the position of having to relive the experience, while adding no material information. I thought it was uncalled for and (synonym for gross because that’s the word I want to use but I don’t want to make a pun).
Disgusting.
Yes. I’ve never been a huge fan of her for several reasons, some of which have to do with her interview style and some of which are beyond her control (her voice bugs me), but I kept listening to her for ages because she gets SUCH interesting people to interview. The Elizabeth Smart interview was the one that made me stop listening altogether.
Holy shit. That’s so unnecessary and terrible.
She spoke to a writer about the writer’s mother’s suicide (she jumped off an overpass) and went on for several minutes speculating about what the mother must have been thinking as she fell (there’s so much time to think! the impact! the drama!). It was horrific, and now I shudder whenever I hear her interviews.
WHAT. That is…kind of horrifying and I am also surprised? I feel like I’ve listened to a fair amount of her interviews and she’s always seemed like a very positive presence, but jeez, lady.
I have always felt like this about Terry Gross interviews — I feel like she really pushes hard on very emotionally traumatic topics, and she must know it makes people uncomfortable, so I can’t enjoy them
I think there’s a male interviewer doing Fresh Air interviews too, I heard one he did with Larry Wilmore or Keegan-Michael Key this summer (I can’t remember if he did interviews with both of them or only one of them) who was asking just as intelligent questions but without the trauma.
I have an intense hatred of Terry Gross, to the point where everyone knows to turn it off in the car. Anything else on NPR I dislike, I can just read through it, BUT I VEHEMENTLY HATE HER. She talks to her interviewees like they are children, and like she knows their work/experiences better than they do.
https://instagram.com/prince/
Oh also, Prince is on Instagram.
Just so you know.
I am so confused! I thought Prince was a hermit who eschewed modern technology these days? and was all Kids Get Off My Lawn about it???? what did i miss!
Its probably a staffer running the actual account, its mostly promo photos at the moment. But we can live in hope that Prince starts posting selfies and his bathroom recordings right? right?
This account could just be gifs of Prince posted by an intern and I would be quite satisfied.
I am so glad that when you click on that link, the page title is listed as “Princestagram.” That would have been an unforgivable pun to pass up.
The first person to be followed on Instagram by Prince should become the next President of these United States.
The Chosen One.
(It’d be an improvement from your current Presidential selection process tbh.
Proving that I am not extremely smart, I had to give up reading about the extremely smart because the sheer repetition of the term “extremely smart” in the post had me imagining this fitness model as the “really, ridiculously good-looking” Zoolander.
Now that I’m imagining that this article’s original headline was “Advice for People Who Can’t Read Good and Want to Do Other Stuff Good Too” I am enjoying it 100000% more.
AHHHHHH EVERYTHING IS DIFFER-wait, nope, pretty much the same. It looks great!
Ugh, that landlord thing. Back in the 70s in Chicago my grandfather had a tailor/drycleaners, and once my dad was out of the house he wanted to sell it and retire. He found another European-trained tailor he liked, told his landlord, and everything was fine – until his landlord met the new guy, a black British man. Then suddenly he didn’t want to have a tailor shop any more. My grandfather took it to court and lost, which sucks. Eventually he did retire and move to Florida like he wanted, but it wasn’t the way he wanted. It’s awful.
I have become a full-blown Hamilton convert. I think I listened to “Wait For It” upwards of 200 times this weekend. My girlfriend is not a musical person and is maybe half an hour of the soundtrack/one more “GIVE IT UP FOR AMERICA’S FAVORITE FIGHTING FRENCHMAN” from murdering me. That video is wonderful. I’m trying to see if there’s any way to finagle a trip to NYC to see it this year or early next.
Welcome to the fold.
My husband is like, “uh, I haven’t sat down to listen to the musical once and I’m starting to recognize songs.” sorry not sorry!
We are listening to it deliciously slowly and tonight finished “My Shot.” <3
Nice redesign! Only one question, is the Butter linked somewhere that I just haven’t found yet?
It has its own shiny new “Series” page: http://the-toast.net/series/the-butter/
Awesome, thanks!
Slate guy IS 25 YEARS OLD. *clears throat* TWENTY-FIVE. I am a tender youth and *I’m* a year older than him. Taylor SWIFT is older than him.
call me ageist but you shouldn’t be allowed to write pompous articles about what makes you smart unless you’re
1. gleefully whitehaired, or 2. have some kind of multiple degrees/I-have-been-working-since-I-was-a babe situation to stand in for your lack of life experience.
UGH.
He’s also not young enough to be given any kind of pass for being this much of a blowhard. Like, he’s not a 19 year old college student. (Though of course we have 19 year olds who read the Toast who would never).
*sputter*
TWENTY-FIVE?
And he starts it out, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about intelligence…” People who start out sentences, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned” had better have some pretty badass credentials if they don’t want to sound entirely insufferable. I’m not entirely sure it’s possible to say, “If there’s one thing I’ve learned about intelligence” and not sound ridiculous unless you are, for example, a neuropsychologist.
Taylor Swift is smarter and more articulate than him, too.
yeah, if Taylor Swift wrote a “how to be a multi-million dollar success” you bet I would read the heck out of that charming and articulate article. Not “how to be extremely smart” from “Quora Contributor”.
AN ANON, essentially. It’s like Slate is just trying to get our goat.
This IMO is absolutely everything you need to know about him (from his linked Quora profile): “I’m writing a book about my becoming a famous World of Warcraft player and blogger at age 17. ” He’s going on about what he thinks he knows about extremely smart people, but he also thinks there’s such a thing as “a famous World of Warcraft player.” Aside from the Leeroy Jenkins meme, the only famous WoW players are people who got famous for something else.
I’ve never whitelisted a site so fast, or been so happy about it!
Hahaha. Seconded. That was my first thought. Ghostery is registering a slightly irritating number of JS add-ons, but…I do want the Toast to do well.
Redesign thoughts: hurrah for anything that makes the Toast crash less for people (I am one of the lucky ones who did not have this, but I know it happened a lot). A few minor quibbles:
– the way the font makes lower-case “i”s look like capitals (on some computers, anyway) is quite hard to read – I can’t help interpreting it as a mixture of upper and lower case
– there used to be a drop-down list of all of the categories posts could be filed under, which was quite good for browsing. I can no longer see this; has it been done away with?
– I really liked the way the thumbs-up symbols changed colour after you’d clicked on them – you could see which comments you’d already thumbs-upped and, which meant no wasting time doing it twice (my Firefox runs really slow sometimes, which means a wait of several seconds before my click gets registered and another wait before it brings up the “you have already voted on this comment” message. It is very annoying not to be able to tell at a glance if it’s worth trying or not. And I liked being able to scan the page and see what the density of thumbs-upped comments was like).
I am also currently undergoing a slight downswing in my general mental state, so any and all change is a thing of screaming horror; I am sure I will adjust, though! But these specific things (rather than just CHANGE BAD) are things it would be nice to see addressed.
Am I the only one who doesn’t like this redesign? It looks like it’s trying to be like Medium, whose interface I also don’t care for. Oh, well, I guess.
The aesthetic part of it is secondary, I think, the real MEAT of it was making the ads less intrusive and the reading experience on mobile easier. Has that changed at all for you?
Ads: way, way better. I was happy to be able to turn off my adblockers for the Toast again.
Mobile: way, way better.
This looks amazing! I was one of the people who had HUGE site issues, which is why I waited until now to bother registering for IntenseDebate. You all are DEFINITELY my people though (as my partner commented when I was excitedly reading excerpts from the Crimson Peak movie yelling post to him as he tried to sleep after we saw the movie), so I hope this is the start of something beautiful.
Wow, this new font is really really small. Like, my monitor is 18″ wide, the text takes up the middle 8″ of the screen, and I’m hunched forward, squinting at the tiny specks floating in all the white space. I think they say something; not sure though.
p.s. The comments I have liked show a green thumb, and the comments I have not liked also show the same green thumb. ETA correction: All top-level comments are green whether I have liked them or not; comments below that in threads change color as they should.
Have you tried sizing it up a little? Cmd/Ctrl-+ one or two times makes it much more readable.
Yes, thank you; that’s what I will do.
Yeah, I’m finding it too small as well.
If you feel moved to write an article about what smart people do (while basing this off the premise that you are smart), you are probably not as smart as you think you are.
That article holds together way better if you just replace every instance of “smart” with “pretentious” and/or “smug.”
At a party, I go up to Toby and assure him that I am no longer writing the silly humorous crap I applied to the program with, i.e., the stuff that had gotten me into the program in the first place. Now I am writing more seriously, more realistically, nothing made up, nothing silly, everything directly from life, no exaggeration or humor—you know: “real writing.”
Toby looks worried. But quickly recovers.
“Well, good!” he says. “Just don’t lose the magic.”
I have no idea what he’s talking about. Why would I do that? That would be dumb.
I go forward and lose all of the magic, for the rest of my time in grad school and for several years thereafter.
Just got here in the Saunders piece and man. Just…man. Doug and Toby seem like legitimately good people, and I want to go read their books now.
I spent most of this thinking it was the Slate article about how to be smart.
What I learned from the George Saunders piece:
–wives make dinner.
–some wives also used to be writers.
Slate article: (murmurs to self) it’s doctoral student, not “doctorate student.” Oh god pedantry is contagious! (flees article)
Do uh….do we have commenter points now? Hmmm. It’s not as bad as The Awl’s commenter number based on how old your account is, but it still feels like a step in the commenter-hierarchy direction, which makes me a little wary. I love the redesign otherwise and I know we’re kind of stuck with IntenseDebate, but maybe that “feature” could be turned off?
That’s not new, though – but you could only see it when clicking on somebody’s profile before.
I would also really like that to be turned off (showing the number next to our name in every comment stream). It distracts from just seeing “who wrote this comment?” the important part of which has nothing to do with a number. Also, for some of us choosing to comment can involve enough anxiety without having a ranking associated with it so visibly displayed, even though the number doesn’t necessarily mean anything about the value of your comments.
I think it would be especially nice to have that number turned off, because it’s not particularly clear where the number comes from anyway. Is it an average of something? Does the age of my profile factor in? Does the number of comments I make make a difference? It seems like it should have some clear meaning, but it doesn’t and that bugs me.
I do not believe that is something we have any control over, unfortunately.
That seems unlikely. The old site didn’t have it (I don’t think). And looking at the page’s HTML, it should only take like one line of CSS to hide it. (Not trying to pick fights! Just saying it bugs me too, and it looks trivial to fix.)
Yep, real easy. It’s unquestionably hacky, but if you click
(function(){var reps = document.getElementsByClassName(“idc-rep”); for(var i = 0; i [lessthan] reps.length; i ){reps[i].style.display = “none”;}})()”
here, it should strip the reps off the page. I can’t tell if it breaks anything else, but it’s specifically looking at the “idc-rep” class, which I would assume is only applied to the rep ovals (but, you know, ass out of you and me). The comments get reloaded any time you reorder to look for new ones, though, so you’d have to click it again. I added it as a bookmarklet in Chrome to test it out.
ETA: Nope, the ID text parser isn’t having any of that. Anyways, that’s all the JS needed.
ETA#2: Argghhhh. If you want to use this, write the “less than” sign where it says [lessthan]. IntenseDebate is defeating me right now.
Folks using Stylish or a similar plugin that lets you create custom stylesheets can just add
span.idc-rep { display: none; }
as I have just done.
Oh look, they got rid of it already. Thanks, team! <3
lollllll, me: “it seems like an intensedebate thing, definitely nothing we can do about it”
*is fixed by us somehow*
me: well dont listen to me, i guess
As of Saturday night I have finally succeeded in getting my closest friends into Hamilton! One of them has already sent me the link to that Ham4Ham. I’m delighted that the obsession has passed from The Toast to me to them.
I have a Ph.D. and a tenure track job at a university, speak four languages fluently, and have a resume that ticks off all sorts of major “smart person” boxes. I’m also married to an an aerospace engineer.
Yesterday, on my flight home from an academic conference, I read Us Weekly. When I got home, my husband and I sat on the couch and watched NFL games. I also painted my nails.
Smart people consume “stupid” media, too.
Hmmm, idk, it sounds like you have joy in your life. How smart can you possibly BE?
Shhh! Don’t let them know, they might revoke my Ph.D.!
I just moved to Brooklyn about 3 months ago, not quite the areas that are discussed here, but I almost was in Bed-Stuy and I’m not too far where I am. I could also talk/rant for hours, days, about gentrification, so this article is exactly the kind of thing I love to read. Well maybe not love, but you know. Are there any other toasties out there who are living in Brooklyn in one of the not-yet-gentrified areas that want to talk about this with me because I feel like I have so much I want to say about it but also that I haven’t been living here long enough to really know what I’m talking about.
If you have to spend time and energy telling people that you are a thing (like smart, or kind, or whatever) then you probably aren’t.
That article makes extremely smart people sound like extremely antisocial people, which is probably why I don’t know any of them.
So it’s official that I’m the only one on here who has issues with Terry Gross. She’s a great interviewer but the difference between how she is with male (giggly, flirtatious, and she rarely calls them on their shit) and female (stern, assertive, and a bit judgy/critical) interviewees drives me nuts.
Oh, soundly agreed!
Not the only one at all! I don’t like her, and I don’t understand people who say her questions are so smart. I remember when she was interviewing Werner Herzog and despite being told by him that he grew up in the mountains of Bavaria without electricity or running water, kept asking him how he was influenced by the Nazi propaganda, and he kept being like “I never encountered it, I never saw ANY media until I was 12.”
I will like the redesign when I’m used to it. *hates change, even when warned*
I was late to the Hamilton train, but I am so on board now! Currently on what is probably my 12th listen since Friday, I bought the discs to send to my mommy because her internet is spotty and she MUST LISTEN TO THIS. And I bought tickets for June 1.
(A related aside, what the hell ticketmaster not letting me buy the seats I wanted because it would have left a single seat alone in the row?? I had to buy them a row back instead and I will grumble about it for months. There were most definitely random single seats available, so why couldn’t I leave one single in the row? Smells like bullshit to me. /privileged rant)
I’m just here to note that I knew the cat thing was a New Yorker piece before even hovering over the link because of the adorable umlaut over “reevaluate.” Oh, New Yorker style guide, I cannot quit you!
On Saturday I went to a wedding and got to have a long and excellent conversation about how great the copyediting is at The New Yorker. I love weddings, and it’s partially because I wind up in situations like that all the time.
If weddings ever went like that for me, I would love them too!
So let’s say you’ve been sucked into the Hamilton hype machine enough to seriously consider taking the train up to NY and seeing it, but not so seriously that you’ve listened to the entire musical “just in case” it’s better seen first rather than heard. (Also, you need to space out your podcasts and music so you’re not left with nothing to listen to at work.) Poll: if you plan on seeing Hamilton, do you listen to the cast recording first? Or avoid listening so you experience the musical with no expectations?
(if this has already been discussed, my b).
I’m planning on seeing it, and I am listening to the album relentlessly. The wordplay is fast and furious, and I didn’t want to be spending time going, “Wait, what did they just say?” over and over again. Especially Daveed Diggs’ rapping as de Lafayette, which is both very fast and in his wonderful French accent, which makes it fun, but hard to parse at first.
I saw it without listening to it first (I didn’t have a choice as the soundtrack wasn’t out yet) and personally I recommend that experience if it’s available to you. It’s more impactful getting everything at once, there’s humor in the show that’s a lot funnier if you see what’s going on and don’t know what’s coming, and I think you get a better introduction to the characters if you see them in action.
For me, it’s pretty abstract but the difference between musicals where I do and don’t know the music ahead of time is the difference between “they’re doing a good job putting on this show” and “this is such a good show!”
That said, I had read a fair bit about the show before seeing it (which is why I wanted to see it in the first place) and I enjoyed having that context going in. It prepped me to notice some of the big themes as soon as they were introduced and track them through the show.
Oh, and…bring kleenex.
SO MUCH KLEENEX
I’m listening to it all the time and seeing it in several months. I’m glad I’ll know the words when I get there, because I’m pretty bad at catching lyrics to songs on first listen, and there’s an awful lot of them in here and all of them are important. I think it’ll give me more space to appreciate the visuals, which I hear are amazing, and the layers of interactions between the characters. But sounds like for a lot of people it may be better the other way, so ¯_(ツ)_/¯.
Also, if you do decide to listen to it… your work-listening will probably be set for days. At least. (As has been my experience.)
Yeah. This. I saw Rent with a friend without ever having listened to it, and I genuinely didn’t understand what was going on, at all, because I have trouble understanding lyrics.
The only reason I was willing to give Hamilton a chance is because I knew all the lyrics were typed up and heavily annotated on genius.com. I spent a good portion of my first listen following along.
To OP, I’d definitely listen to it first, but only because that way I could focus on the stage direction, facial expressions, all that stuff; instead of trying to parse the lyrics.
I had a 3-month job review this morning, and apparently everything is going well and I got a raise! Which makes me feel a whole lot better about everything I’m doing, because I still can’t believe I have a real job that I’m good at and is writing-adjacent.
Congratulations!
Hurrah!
I’m so glad for the redesign! I’d always had trouble with the Toast on my Chromebook prior to this. It’s absolutely readable and elegant.
…how is that Slate piece not a parody? What even.
While the subject of this article is but a man, he is to be admired for literally taking to the sea, with cats. http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-selfmade…
If it’s white tenants only, it’s clean. I know it’s a little bit racist but it’s not.
… no, that’s super racist.
My boyfriend shared with his team at work my streak of only seeing films in the cinema that are about people fighting against and/or overthrowing shitty patriarchal regimes (Pride, fury Road, Suffragette). One scoffed at the idea that Fury Road was about overthrowing the patriarachy (was he not paying attention?), so my boyfriend shared the excellent Feminist Mad Max Tumblr with him His response: “Equally, for a highly feminist movie, they sure did have a lot of pathetic victoria’s secret models playing the damsels in distress in need of saving.”
I am so angry I can barely form words. I wanted to share this with the Toast as a I know there are people here who will share in my outrage.
(His kneejerk description of conventionally feminine/attractive women as “pathetic” speaks volumes.)
What a massive jackass, seriously.
I can only hope the rage that just blew the top off of my actual skull also somehow disintegrated this guy into ashes.
I started to rant about it but nope, cannot, words, how, only inarticulate howling at the moon goddess.
Clearly he did not actually watch it.
That’s the only explanation that makes sense. That, or he’s alarmingly stupid when it comes to viewing comprehension.
I have seen several people say variations on that theme. I can’t help but think they weren’t paying attention; or that they think any portrayal of conventionally-pretty women is exactly the same as any other.
CHRLS CHRISTLE once lied about why he hadn't turned in his homework (and was immediately filled with remorse), he certainly would never lie about anything big that might have consequences for other people or make them late for work or close roads or anything. CHRLS CHRISTLE is a nice boy.
See Quora flipping its collective shit over an influx of Indians.
This IMO is absolutely everything you need to know about him (from his linked Quora profile): "I'm writing a book about my becoming a famous World of Warcraft player and blogger at age 17. " He's going on about what he thinks he knows about extremely smart people, but he also thinks there's such a thing as "a famous World of Warcraft player." Aside from the Leeroy Jenkins meme, the only famous WoW players are people who got famous for something else.
This has made my DAY, you have no idea.