Look how long her legs are getting! You would never know that she stole, ate, and puked up soap yesterday.
Jackie Fuchs on what it was like to be the real person at the heart of the Runaways rape scandal earlier this year:
I woke up in a parallel universe. My Wikipedia entry had become the most viral page on the Internet. The number of other outlets reporting on the story multiplied at a rate that I couldn’t quite wrap my head around —The Washington Post, The Guardian, Rockol Italy, Rolling Stone Brasil, Rolling Stone México. Television shows started calling my unlisted home number requesting interviews. Since my wardrobe consists almost exclusively of jeans and long-sleeved black T-shirts, I had to borrow clothes from my sister. We used to be the same size, but after five months of stress, her blouses swam on me. I did one interview with a paper clamp on my back to hold in the excess fabric.
Ijeoma Oluo on her beautiful atheist family at Christmas:
I’m raising my sons in our family religion of Don’t Be an Asshole, and I’m counting on them figuring out the rest. I wasn’t expecting my youngest to have declared himself an atheist at 6, but Marcus isn’t your typical kid. For his 8th birthday, for example, he requested a suit and tie.
So as the holidays approached, I found myself trying to think of ways to avoid an even bigger scandal than the tooth-fairy debacle. How do you tell your kid that he’s not allowed to tell other kids at school the truth? That their holiday and their God is a work of fiction? This was Marcus’s truth, I hadn’t talked him into it, and I wasn’t going to talk him out of it.
After Marcus asked why we celebrate Christmas if Santa isn’t real, his older brother Malcolm replied, “It’s Christ’s birthday.” My 8-year-old literally rolled his eyes. There was no letter in his backpack that was going to make him cry with fear and shame, and if one ever showed up, he’d likely laugh at it. Instead of having to console my son from the rejection of his Christian classmates, or reassure him that he’s not going to hell while he clutches a letter announcing his doom (as my mom had to do for me), I have to get creative to keep my son from leaving notes in his classmates’ backpacks stating “God is dead.”
I am so excited for unREAL season two that I can barely breathe.
this is an excellent Facebook post
Sarah Seltzer on the great male Mary Sues of film history:
After Bane breaks his back in The Dark Knight Rises, Batman gets healed up by amateur criminal doctors in a prison and never has to go to a chiropractor, not once, not even for the occasional therapeutic massage. And he’s not doing yoga, either, let us note. I call bullshit, as does this spine surgeon who was interviewed by a fan site. Epic Mary Sue moment, there.
On a death caused by an illegal abortion in 1955, and what it means today:
Smith’s death and the literal absence of her body enabled commentators to inscribe their own sexual scripts about women, sexuality, and reproduction upon her. Daniel’s defense lawyer characterized his client as “the victim of a girl who pretended to her family and friends that she was a little angel when she was in fact just a girl who like to enjoy so-called free love.” The prosecutor and the media turned Smith into an innocent daughter in need of protection from predators like Daniel. To do so, they used ethnic signposts to contrast “Jackie, the pretty blonde daughter” with “dark Thomas G. Daniel,” “Greek born”; the Puerto Rican nurse Pijuan; and the “Mexican doctor” Mireles. This racial and gendered narrative sought to rehabilitate Smith’s reputation and to convey that she was a good girl who did not deserve her fate,a small-town naïf seduced by the big city. “She actually was a lamb,” stated one co-worker to reporters, “and New York is not the right place for lambs.” Another told reporters, “Jackie was well-equipped in every way, except to cope with the advances of a predatory male.”
Nostalgic about Shy Ronnie:
I learned a whole lot about reindeer herding today:
Kiryak, his wife, Lyuba, and their two sons grew up in a long tradition of reindeer husbandry established by their people, the Evens, a 20,000-strong indigenous group in Siberia. The Evens are one of the smallest of 20 indigenous communities — including Scandinavia’s Sami and Canada’s Inuit — that base their economies on reindeer. Native herders across nine nations slaughter up to 120,000 animals each year to satisfy luxury tastes. Evens’ reindeer meat goes to connoisseurs in western Russia; the venison, harvested from animals that graze across Kamchatka’s pristine earth, sells for nearly $10 a pound. Deer antlers go to China, where they’re sliced or powdered for medicinal purposes.
What a great time to re-up Jane Marie’s classic 1950s Glamour tutorial, for all your holiday party needs!
7 Ways Hillary Clinton Is Just Like My Abuela
Hazlitt’s Year In Innovative Black Women
(gets up, makes a cup of tea, settles in to read):
After the revolution, the Shanghai shuttered. Many of the performers fled the country. Superman disappeared, like a ghost. No one knew his real name. There were no known photos of him. A man who was once famous well beyond Cuba’s shores—who was later fictionalized in The Godfather Part IIand Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana—was largely forgotten, a footnote in a sordid history.
In the difficult years that followed, people didn’t talk about those times, as if they never happened at all. “You didn’t want to make problems with the government,” the mayor’s son said. “People were afraid. People didn’t want to look back. Afterward, it was an entirely new story. It was like everything didn’t exist before. It was like Year Zero.”
And into that void, the story of Superman disappeared.
