I love perusing the once-yearly Black List of Hollywood’s best unproduced scripts, and there are a few in there right now that made me go WHAT and maybe YES?
And some where I’m just…nah:
If you had to have a totem animal, which one would you choose?
It would be a bald eagle telling me that I don’t have a totem animal because I’m not Native American.
Excellent deep dive on what was so fucked up at American Apparel:
Charney was also said to walk around the office in his underwear, part of the hypersexualized atmosphere he allegedly subjected his coworkers to, whether they liked it or not. Every Wednesday morning, he had a worldwide global conference call where every store dialed in and listened to him dictate how employees should dress and groom — another cult hallmark. (AA’s brand image guidelines discouraged eyebrow plucking, wearing concealer, having more than one earring per ear, and even blowdrying your hair.) And Charney didn’t tolerate criticism. When an ABC reporter asked him about the sexual-harassment lawsuits, he began yelling that it was an unfair line of questioning and almost stormed out. “A lot of people are like wounded children because they put up with this tyrant so long,” an employee told me.
The Spring Valley High School incident is appalling.
How Sexism In The Church Nearly Ruined My Life:
In the last week of July, a week before his ileostomy was set to be reversed, Dan Helland, pastor of the church, and his wife, Sue Helland, director of the school, called him into his office and told him that they would not be renewing his contract. Among his offenses were “differences in beliefs,” things I had been posting to Twitter and Facebook (including articles written for Gawker), and a short video of Daniel drinking a beer while grilling burgers on the Fourth of July—the first he’d had all summer, since he’d been unable to eat or drink real food for nearly two weeks, receiving most of his nutrients through a PICC line.
During this conversation, the Hellands accused me of “throwing them under the bus” by posting controversial things: writing that I think it’s okay for Christians to drink, and that not all Christians are conservative. Daniel said to them, “I signed the contract, not her.” They responded, “Well, you’re supposed to be the head of the household.”
One of my favourite parts of working with the redesign team were the BRILLIANT women spearheading our design stuff, and you can learn more here (this is Libby on the series illustrations she made for us):
My favorite, hands down, is the nesting dolls [used for all community series: Open Thread, Toast Points, and Link Roundup]. I love the colors, the energy, and the idea of it. When I was concepting all of the series, I kept putting that one off, until all of the other ideas were locked down. I had no clue what I should do for that one! I had to stare at the wall for an hour and just start doodling to get to where I went with it. I think it started as a line motif—a sort of abstract design—and then I started seeing the shape of the doll, and then the idea sparked. I loved having this chance to design my own set of modern nesting dolls, all with their own unique personalities and styles. In fact, I really want to start making dolls like this! I love the goth-y girl with her sturdy, fish-net stocking’d legs.
Dedicated Toasties know that I have always been obsessed with HIV denialists and their place in history (and Maggiore and Celia Farber in particular), so this Gizmodo piece was right up my alley:
And in much the same way that Jenny McCarthy became the face of anti-vaccine activists, Christine Maggiore was the most prominent spokesperson for HIV deniers. (And in fact, Maggiore was also famous for not vaccinating her children.) An HIV-positive woman who had been a successful businesswoman and promoted alternative medicine, Maggiore was an appealing presence, and she played well in the media, said Tara C. Smith, a professor of Public Health at Kent State who blogs about HIV at ScienceBlogs.
One of Maggiore’s biggest defenders, the journalist Celia Farber, wrote a 2006 cover story for Harper’s Magazine, in which she more or less accused drug companies of inventing AIDS in order to sell lethal drugs.
“Maggiore appeared in various media outlets after she refused to take medications while pregnant and breast-feeding her children,” said Smith. “She was in the media again when her daughter, Eliza Jane, died of AIDS.” (Law and Order: SVU did an episode loosely based on this case.) And then Maggiore herself died in 2008 of AIDS-related pneumonia.
Back in 1982, the New York Times‘ Nan Robertson got toxic shock syndrome (not tampon-related) and nearly died, and then lived, and wrote this SCARY and GROSS and INSPIRING tale about it, which ran at the time, but is new to me! This is before the main villain in the TSS story (those freaky ultra-absorbent Rely tampons) was taken off the market, so there’s still a lot of floaty paranoia about tampons in general here, which didn’t turn out to be a real issue for basically anyone, but it doesn’t detract from the LUUUURID NARRATIVE at all (I also loved the details about how kind cabbies were to her and her gangrene-y half-hands and how her colleagues banded around her):
I went dancing the night before in a black velvet Paris gown, on one of those evenings that was the glamour of New York epitomized. I was blissfully asleep at 3 A.M.
Twenty-four hours later, I lay dying, my fingers and legs darkening with gangrene. I was in shock, had no pulse and my blood pressure was lethally low. The doctors in the Rockford, Ill., emergency room where I had been taken did not know what was wrong with me. They thought at first that I might have consumed some poison that had formed in my food. My sister and brother-in-law, whom I had been visiting, could see them through the open emergency-room door: ”They were scurrying around and telephoning, calling for help, because they knew they had something they couldn’t handle, that they weren’t familiar with,” was the instinctive reaction of my brother-in-law, Warren Paetz.
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