Sansa has now finished getting all her puppy shots and has a jingly red rabies tag. In two more weeks, her parvo will be all kicked in and we can finally take her out to mingle at the park.
Great work by Gina Mei:
We were both volunteering at a high school luncheon for the Chinese Parents’ Association, and a few people turned to look and listen. I was wearing my favorite cheongsam: a sheer black dress covered in colorful embroidery layered over a simple black slip. Normally, the garment made me feel powerful, but suddenly, I felt self-conscious.
The girl continued to berate me, asking why I would lie about my ethnicity when I was so obviously Latina. I tried to explain that, contrary to her opinion, I was half Chinese and half mostly Italian.
“Well, either you’re adopted or someone’s been lying to you, because you’re definitely not Chinese,” she said.
I haven’t worn a cheongsam since.
So glad people are talking about what’s wrong with how Reconstruction frequently gets framed:
Clinton, whether she knows it or not, is retelling a racist—though popular—version of American history which held sway in this country until relatively recently. Sometimes going under the handle of “The Dunning School,” and other times going under the “Lost Cause” label, the basic idea is that Reconstruction was a mistake brought about by vengeful Northern radicals. The result was a savage and corrupt government which in turn left former Confederates, as Clinton puts, it “discouraged and defiant.”
The Conversation I’m Tired Of Not Having:
I want to tell you a secret: America really doesn’t care what happens to poor people and most black people. There I said it.
In my position as a Teacher of the Year and a teacher leader (an ambiguous term at best), I am supposed to be a voice and hold positions on a host of ed policy issues: teaching evaluations, charter schools, test refusal, and (fights over) Common Core come to mind. I am so sick of reading about McCleary (Washington’s ongoing intragovernmental battle for equitable funding for K-12) I don’t know what to do with myself. But, increasingly I find myself tuning out of these conversations. As a nation, we’re nibbling around the edges with accountability measures and other reforms, but we’re ignoring the immutable core issue: much of white and wealthy America is perfectly happy with segregated schools and inequity in funding. We have the schools we have, because people who can afford better get better. And sadly, people who can’t afford better just get less–less experienced teachers, inadequate funding and inferior facilities.
Women and weightlifting (so much cool history here, but also the author talks about her anorexia, which may not be your bag today):
In this regard, little has changed in the past century. Toned yet tiny fitness models like Jen Selter and Kayla Itsines are considered athletic and beautiful, while larger—and stronger—professional athletes like Serena Williams and Karyn Marshall, a prominent figure in female lifting in the US, are mocked for looking masculine. In a recent phone conversation, Marshall recalled being asked to appear on a news show at the peak of her fame in the 1980s. The host asked her to rebut the claim, made by a representative of the Ford Modeling Agency, that women who lift weights don’t look good and shouldn’t model. “To have society come down on you and say, ‘you’re too big, you’re too muscular, you’re not feminine,’ is not something you want to hear,” Marshall said, “especially when you’re an athlete. If I’d been a man, I would’ve been praised.”
Mallory got the world’s most difficult question:
Q. Smelly situation: I have a friend (20-plus years) who smells. It is a sickening smell, and I believe that it emits from her ladybits. Whenever I have tried to broach the subject, she gets defensive and won’t speak to me for weeks. Is there another way to help without her taking any more offense?
So, were I a professional advice-giver, which I am not, I would have the two following suggestions:
- Move to a new country and spend over twenty years making a new friend.
- This is basically never the right thing to do, but a very kind, firm anonymous note with some links to WebMD pages and a suggestion to talk to her OB.
- But she’ll probably still know it was you, because you’ve TRIED to talk to her about it already.
- For the love of Pete, if someone tells you that you smell, you DEFINITELY smell, because no one want to tell you that you smell, so please fix it (unless you have a terrible medical thing and you cannot fix it, in which case, email me so I can send you a present.)
The Awl ran a cool take on the Per Se kerfuffle (also, please read all of Ruth Reichl’s books):
But this is all a relatively strange and ahistorical reading of Wells’ reviews, even if he is the most exceptional Times critic—and one of the greatest food writers—in a generation. While a good critic does far more than merely say whether a restaurant is good or bad—there’s always Yelp or Foursquare if that’s all you want and you have a deep and abiding faith in the taste of your fellow man—considering the value of a restaurant relative to its cost is core to the entire proposition of a food critic as a service journalist, especially at a large daily or weekly paper, where their chief task is to answer the question, “Is this restaurant worth your paycheck?” Wells’ review of a restaurant that exists far outside the daily realm of possibility for most New Yorkers is also far from unusual; if anything, such restaurants were more or less the primary domain of the Times’ chief critics until the arrival of Ruth Reichl in 1993, when she began “giving SoHo noodle shops 2 and 3 stars,” which, according to her predecessor Bryan Miller, “DESTROYED THE SYSTEM.”
I am uncomfortable with the fascination I feel for deconstructions of plane crashes and various other disasters, and it’s unlikely I can chalk it up to anything other than my innate ghoulishness, but I read the New York Times Magazine investigation of the recent Amtrak derailment very very avidly:
At around 9:16 p.m., the train crossed the intersection at North 22nd Street. In Reyburn Park, the fluorescent lights gleamed. The skies above were clear, with the temperature hovering at 82 degrees. A westerly wind gusted gently at 20 m.p.h., flattening the trackside weeds. Bostian was less than a mile from North Philadelphia Station, where 188 did not stop, and roughly three miles and three minutes from Frankford Junction, one of the sharpest curves on the Northeast Corridor. The last thing Bostian says he remembers, according to his lawyer, was ringing the in-cab bell as he passed the station house, headed toward the junction.
