Sansa and my daughter like to take turns sitting on each other to watch TV. Also, my daughter said “Sansa and I love each other” yesterday morning.
Suicide bombing kills at least 10 people in Istanbul’s Sultanahmet district
Friend of The Toast Jamelle Bouie on why Paul LePage is a proto-Trump, and where his support originates from:
When we talk about the decline of the white working class—and in particular, the dramatic spike in alcoholism, addiction, and premature death among young and middle-aged working-class white men—we’re talking about states such as Maine, where slow growth and isolation have bred struggling towns where many rely on public assistance. These people—as we’ve seen in West Virginia and similar parts of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and other states—don’t vote. And to that point, 55 percent of nonvoters are white, 51 percent are men, 54 percent are between 30 and 64 years old, and 46 percent make less than $30,000 a year. They are estranged from the political system.
LOJ: There’s a lot of famous people who come. And I’m not going to necessarily claw over people to get to them, but every now and again there’s somebody who, it’s like, I need to make my way to that person. Remember when LeVar [Burton] came? It was a big deal for Chris.
CJ: I felt like my insides were going to come out. [Table laughs.] It’s not about being famous. It’s about connection. And that connection was just so real.
JCJ: And it’s not only that, it’s also that we’ve just performed for them for almost three hours. It’s not like we’re just randomly meeting these people.
REG: The blessing for us, when we get to meet some of these people for the first time, it skips several steps in the meeting. Immediately there’s an intimacy because you’ve watched us on a beautiful journey for three hours. We can actually have a conversation — and these are people who usually have to keep their guard up. It’s really a sacred moment.
ANOTHER Friend of The Toast, Lyz Lenz, on growing up in an environment of white paranoia:
I was raised Evangelical in Texas, in the shadow of white paranoia. “Don’t tell anyone you are homeschooled,” my parents told us after Waco. “Tell them you go to private school. Only play in the backyard during the day. Never answer the door if mom isn’t home, even if it’s the police. Especially if it’s the police.”
Newsletters came to us from the Home School Legal Defense, recounting horror stories of parents separated from their children for exercising the right to educate them at home. Stories trickled down at church about abuses of justice—government overreach into the lives of good Christians, living their lives by faith. Once, my sister’s friend showed us how the letters in Hillary Clinton could work out to 666. (According to the numerology, Hillary (248) + Rodham (249) + Clinton (169) = number of the beast.) The Bible and the Constitution were spoken in the same breath. We lived on the edge of an apocalypse. Every moment was the end. With every breath we were fighting a battle against a Godless state. Our very lives as Christians were a protest.
We moved seamlessly between destiny and agency. As white, middle-class Americans, it never occurred to us that it could be different, that our perceived persecution was in another sense chosen. No sympathy was allotted to others who were persecuted for their race or sexuality—or for any other religion besides the right one: ours. It took me years to realize we never were in any danger.
Brian Lehrer did a segment on Nikki’s piece!
Carrie Frye shared this incredible older piece from Lapham’s Quarterly, and I DEVOURED IT:
Through the door could be heard furious clacking and carriage returns: the sound, in fact, of an eight-year-old girl writing her first novel.
In 1923, typewriters were hardly a child’s plaything, but to those following the family of critic and editor Wilson Follett, it was a grand educational experiment. He’d already written of his daughter Barbara in Harper’s, describing a girl who by the age of three was consumed with letters and words. “She was always seeing A’s in the gables of houses and H’s in football goalposts,” he recalled. One day she’d wandered into Wilson’s office and discovered his typewriter.
“Tell me a story about it,” she demanded.
WELL, that’s one way to be a boss:
The Daily Telegraph has installed devices to monitor whether journalists are at their desks, BuzzFeed News has learned.
The newspaper confirmed the move in email to staff after multiple employees said that they had come into work on Monday morning to find small plastic monitoring boxes attached to their desks.
Journalists were baffled by the unannounced appearance of the boxes. Staff resorted to googling the brand name and discovered they were wireless motion detectors produced by a company called OccupEye which monitor whether individuals are using their desks.
Chris Hughes is selling The New Republic (and chose to write about it on Medium instead of his own. damn. site., so):
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook who purchased a majority stake in the struggling title in 2012, said in a staff memo Monday that he had underestimated “the difficulty of transitioning an old and traditional institution into a digital media company in today’s quickly evolving climate,” and would seek to find a new owner.
“After investing a great deal of time, energy, and over $20 million, I have come to the conclusion that it is time for new leadership and vision at The New Republic,” the memo read. “Although I do not have the silver bullet, a new owner should have the vision and commitment to carry on the traditions that make this place unique and give it a new mandate for a new century.”
The Morning News has compiled their longlist for the new Tournament of Books! It reminded me that I do not read NEARLY enough contemporary fiction, which shames me to admit.
As an artist living in Russia, do you feel that your art—your brushes, your paints, your canvas—are constantly at risk of being taken from you?
Until the age of nine I had nothing—just one ancient dress. I went hungry, ran around barefoot from April to October, even begged. We were a family of “Enemies of the People.” That was what they called those who had been accused of political crimes and sent to the camps. Three of my relatives had been accused of spying for the Japanese, and were executed. Later, my great-grandfather was assassinated in the middle of Moscow, pushed under a car. I didn’t have toys and had only one crayon, purple. I found a piece of cardboard and made a purple horse with a purple eye. It seemed too skinny, so I wrapped a rag around its middle and played with it. In the street, I always picked up bits of brick, limestone, and charcoal, and drew on the pavement with those three colors: red, white, and black. Since then I have always valued painting tools: brushes, paints, quality paper. I paint with watercolors—flowers and portraits.
As you know, Mallory and I are at Cornell on April 7th for a Shop Talk. I will be staying at the Statler Hotel for two nights (the 6th and the 7th), and on the night of the 6th I will pick a time to be at the Regent Lounge to meet Ithaca Toasties and do my legendary tipsy-pushups for you. How many of you might attend, do you think? Email me if you don’t have a commenting account! Mallory could quite possibly be present, but I will not speak for her.
I will probably not have another opportunity to hang with Toasties for a while (the puppy, the children!) but am planning a very brief NYC trip for the fall, because I want to see you! I anticipate we will need a larger space than last time.
Donald Trump is wrong about literally everything all the time:
So I’m watching the game yesterday. What used to be considered a great tackle, a violent, head-on, violent. If that was done by Dick Butkus, they’d say he’s the greatest player… if that was done by Lawrence Taylor, it WAS done by Lawrence Taylor and Dick Butkus!…and Ray Nitschke, right? You used to see these tackles, and it was incredible to watch. Now they [effeminate voice] tackle.. head on head collision… fifteen yard penalty. The whole game is all screwed up!
I had never watched the video for “Grown Woman,” and Mallory fixed that:
