Sansa is very stretchy.
Holtzclaw has been found guilty of many of the most serious charges against him, and I was really worried he was going to slither off on this one, so this is a relief.
My friend Dave shared this list of closing New York City haunts and was like “I am not usually this person, but I loved a lot of these places,” and I clicked through and saw that The Dove, this bar I used to go to that was three doors down from my first apartment in Manhattan (the fifth-floor walk-up studio apartment illegally converted to a two bedroom) just got priced out of the neighborhood, and I have so many great memories there! They had a really yummy bar mix and I used to order sidecars to feel Fancy. AND NOW I HAVE SO MANY FEELINGS.
look how romantic it was:
Jaya guested on Ask a Clean Person! (TURMERIC STAINS, the struggle is real)
How the penis is disappearing from the sex toy:
Companies like Doc Johnson—a leading novelty company for decades, notorious for its line of Realistic Cocks—offer a good example of the “she wants a big cock” mentality that dominated the industry during the late-20th century. Robert Rheaume, the president of high-end sex toy company JimmyJane, charmingly described these hyper-realistic dildos as the kind of severed penis you’d get if “there was an Orc from Lord of the Rings walking around, and they cut his penis off.”
The extraordinary life of Simona Kossak:
Simona Kossak: they called her a witch, because she chatted with animals and owned a terrorist-crow, who stole gold and attacked bicycle riders.
She spent more than 30 years in a wooden hut in the Białowieża Forest, without electricity or access to running water. A lynx slept in her bed, and a tamed boar lived under the same roof with her. She was a scientist, ecologist and the author of award-winning films, as well as radio broadcasts. She was also an activist who fought for the protection of Europe’s oldest forest.
I am still really taken aback whenever I remember that Justin Trudeau is the Prime Minister of Canada:
Trudeau, who is 43, was still working on getting his staff to call him ‘‘Prime Minister.’’ For years, he was ‘‘Justin,’’ and staff members often still referred to him that way. ‘‘It’s like your really smart friend suddenly became prime minister,’’ Kate Purchase, his communications director, told me.
‘‘People in the street will either call me ‘Prime Minister’ or ‘Justin,’ ’’ Trudeau said. ‘‘We’ll see how that goes. But when I’m working, when I’m with my staff in public, I’m ‘Prime Minister.’ I say that if we’re drinking beer out of a bottle, and you can see my tattoos, you should be comfortable calling me ‘Justin.’ ’’
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Cherished Friend of The Toast Sulagna Misra on finding her own body positivity at the museum:
Many of the figures in both exhibitions resonated with me, but the one that looked most like me was a statue of Parvati, goddess of love, devotion, and divine strength. A sculpture in the Freer and Sackler exhibition also depicts her with her consort Shiva, the god of destruction.
Looking at them, I was reminded of the Hindu concept of darshan, which says that simply seeing the god or goddess in stone is enough for prayer. This is awfully convenient when my family and I go to a temple in India or a puja, a religious ceremony, in New Jersey. Pushing through the crowd, we can quickly back away once we’ve met the eyes of the statues of the goddess Saraswati, the god Ganesh, and so on, depending on the holiday.
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Tressie on affirmative action:
The painful truth about hand-wringing over whether Affirmative Action “harms” racial minorities is that no one cares if Affirmative Action harms racial minorities. The faux concern for the well-being of poor put-upon non-white students who are promoted beyond their ability never extends to concern for the many more white students who are surely promoted beyond theirs.
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This little piece by Jane Hu really worked me over this morning:
“The idea of having one love in your life was not an aspiration for us,” Hal said, when I ask him what it was like to be the primary love object of a queer theorist who wrote so prolifically about the complexities of desire and relationships. Later, Hal referenced D. W. Winnicott’s concept of the “holding environment,” in which the mother creates a safe space for the child that allows the child to then look out into the world, to think about something else beyond the mother’s care. Eve used this idea in her work. Hal offered it as a way of thinking about what they both did for one another.
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The Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog (ALSO, someone just sent me a fancy-ass chef’s knife from Williams-Sonoma and I LOVE it and there’s no name attached, I THINK it was my brother and his wife? Tell me if it was you!):
Copy: “Set of nine.”
Drew Says: Nine? FUCK YOU. Give me more. Let me tell you about BIG CHOCOLATE and how they operate. They move into a city like New York, and then they set up a bunch of very pristine and cute boutique chocolate shops with gorgeous displays of meticulously painted boxed chocolates flavored with lavender and just a TOUCH of goat spice, and then they want to charge you $80 per piece. I’ve had it. These are thoughtless office gifts, and I’m NEVER paying more than 10 bucks for a thoughtless office gift. I hope you all go bankrupt.
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In addition to the pithy prose portraits of restaurants (often at a length almost unthinkable by today’s mobile-centric readership), Britchky’s reviews took pains to ensure their readers never had to experience a bad meal. He grouped restaurants in one section of the index by stars, four to one, then the even-lower “Acceptable” to “Unacceptable.” He calculated costs from “Inexpensive” ($25 or less for dinner for two, beverages, tax and tip in 1976, and in 1990, that covered a three-course dinner for one, coffee, no tax or tip) to “Very Expensive” (1976: over $50, 1990: over $45). Another staple: “Ten Sensible Rules About Going to, Eating in, Paying at, and Departing from New York Restaurants” (No. 10, “Departure: Leave when you are good and ready. It is your right to eat at your own pace, including lingering over a second cup of coffee. Enjoy possession of a table that others are waiting in line for. Later they will.”).
Lyz Lenz on Isabella Stewart Gardner:
Henry James, a member of her coterie, once remarked that Isabella “is not a woman, she is a locomotive—with a Pullman car attached.” James often made such underhanded compliments about Isabella, yet he constantly found himself drawn to her. He didn’t think she was particularly intelligent. He found her to be a little too forceful, yet he wrote, “how fond of her one always is for the perfect terms one is on with her, her admirable ease, temper and facilite a vivre.” As Vigderman told me in an interview, “Whatever else she was, Isabella was fun.” The essayist John Jay Chapman described her as “a fairy in a machine shop.” The famous Sargent painting of her—in a long black dress, with just the hint of cleavage and a patterned background that lends her both a halo and a crown—shocked Bostonians so much that her husband asked that she not have it displayed. After he died, she put it up in the Gothic room, where it looms high over all the other paintings. Her glowing skin seems to hover away from the canvas.
I like to think we have room as a nation for one weirdo who canoes everywhere, and I’m sorry he’s gone (I feel about this guy like a bunch of people felt about the Maine Hermit, I think, prob bc no stealing candy and propane):
If you asked Conant about his experiences on the country’s waterways, he would grin sheepishly, pause, size up your listening capacity, and then let go with a monologue as unstoppable as a river. In recalling a trip that began in July, 2009, and concluded in September, 2010, for instance, he said, “I took a Greyhound bus, like usual, out to northern Minnesota, place called Bemidji. I went to Gander Mountain, bought a boat, got some supplies at—not Walmarts, but that other big one? Kmarts! Got all my supplies ready to go, put in my boat on a lake next to Bemidji, one of a string of lakes that forms the headwaters of the Mississippi. So I took the Mississippi from Bemidji to New Orleans. I got on the Intracoastal Waterway east, going toward where Lake Borgne empties into Lake Pontchartrain, and vice versa. At Rigolets Pass, I ran into a duck hunter who also happened to be a lawyer for one of the parishes, for the sheriff’s department. I was going looking for ice. We got to talking. He goes, ‘Holy mackerel, you already came all that distance?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not even halfway where I’m going!’ He asked if I need anything. I said, ‘If there’s a hardware store nearby, I’d like to get some fixings so I can make a little cart. I got about a hundred miles portage from here to Mobile, Alabama.’ He says, ‘The heck with that, I’ll give you a ride!’ I became good friends with the guy.”
