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:
