Behold: the North American Cuddlewolf in her natural habitat.
Our beloved Ella and her Tall Man have sold a Cancer Memoir to Picador, and everything you need to know about their respective delightful personalities is in this screenshot (it’s subscriber-only.)
I’ve told John he should try to die after the hardcover but before the paperback, so Ella can tack on a heartwrenching epilogue and will get to do all the morning shows a second time looking wan and beautiful in her grief and it will be GREAT for sales (John firmly encourages me in making incredibly dark jokes about his imminent death, I CHECK IN ABOUT THAT REGULARLY.)
No amount of praise is sufficient for Jenna Wortham’s look at Cher’s Twitter feed:
Eventually, you realize that Cher uses Twitter in its purest and most organic form: a catchall for any and every thought that might drift into her brain. Her methodology is messy and strange in a way that feels borderline extinct at a time when celebrities and aspiring celebrities treat their social-media presence as endless personal infomercials, vehicles for inciting envy and lust as a means of increasing visibility, and in turn, popularity. Most celebrities’ social-media feeds feel painfully self-aware and thirsty — revealing their desperate desire to seem relevant, in on the joke, caught up on the latest Internet memes and trends. (A classic example: When Katy Perry invoked Pepe, a creepy cartoon frog favored by 4chan users, to describe her jet lag last year, some Internet users complained that the meme had become too mainstream.) In her own way, Cher is an outlier, perhaps the last unreconstructed high-profile Twitter user to stand at her digital pulpit and yell (somewhat) incomprehensibly, and be rewarded for it.
The awards-targeted films today that get a minority protagonist tend to be about the most amazing person of that race who’s ever lived. But award movies with white protagonists are just about a white person who did a thing: It’s a white dude who fought a bear, it’s a white lady who lives in Brooklyn, it’s a white lady who invented a mop …
Here is a GREAT roundtable by autistic women (many of them mothers of autistic daughters) about how we can do better for women on the spectrum:
And a lot of forms of attention that a parent or teacher might presume are positive, can be torment. (I have avoided doing things conspicuously in order to avoid being praised for them.)
Emotional sensitivity: we can feel a lot more than we might be able to tell you about, identify, or explain. And more than it might look like we do.
We can also look very emotionally vulnerable or volatile. Little things can mean a lot to us. Sensory issues can have emotional effects. This can be very confusing and hard when paired with Alexithymia, which is the inability to identify or verbalize emotions, or to distinguish between emotions and physical sensations. A girl could be going through a lot and not know any way to tell or show it to you. Just because she behaves well and gets good grades doesn’t mean she’s not having trouble. Quiet girls may be sublimating a lot.
Here is a fun Storify of this WILD conversation we had on my timeline about what we would do first in heaven (whether or not they think heaven is a thing, people seem to have pretty clear ideas about what they would WANT to do in heaven: see loved ones, hug dead pets, eat a LOT of cheese, cloud naps, ask Queen Katherine of Aragon if she and Arthur consummated their marriage…) It all started here:
Oh, and if that’s not your thing, this became one of the most bizarrely life-affirming and fascinating conversations of my life, and you can make a bunch of new friends through it:
People who are tripping balls are often super annoying, but I kind of had a total crush on Cheyenne during his trip.
Bosnia, twenty years on:
Satire has been a part of Bosnia since the start of the warring years. When the bombs started falling in Tuzla, Sarajevo and surrounding cities in 1991, the Surrealists created a satirical sketch, about ethnic divides and the lack of food and water, which eventually became the grim reality.
The attitude perfected by the Surrealists survived the death and carnage of the nineties. Decades later, I can still hear its echoes in not only my family’s vernacular, but also the country’s. You can hear it in the streets: in the way that people greet each other, in casual conversations. Even now, Bosnians like to joke about how great it will be when they finally get a pay cheque someday. The young people here do what they learned from their parents: make the best of any situation, laugh it off and be thankful that the bombs are not dropping.
THIS CHICK FOR PRESIDENT, PLEASE:
“I made a plan that Dan would show up with Yeva at the 2nd checkpoint for breastfeeding,” said Sveta. The checkpoint is located at a cabin resort about 80 miles along the trail.
In addition to the mandatory winter-survival gear all racers are required to bring on their bikes, Sveta had packed a portable breast pump so that she could continue pumping along the wilderness route.
The new UN peacekeeping sexual assault scandal is horrible, and it also reminds me of Canada’s conduct in Somalia:
The United Nations human rights chief said on Friday that new allegations of sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers had surfaced in the Central African Republic. The reported crimes involved the troops from the European Union contingent deployed in the country during a period of instability in 2014.
A statement from Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said both boys and girls had been interviewed by UN staff, and told stories of rape and of being paid for performing sexual acts.
“Four of the girls said their abusers were attached to contingents operating as part of the European Union operation,” Zeid said.
An online documentary on how the New York Times failed to report the Holocaust:
While many Americans assume that the Holocaust was a well-kept secret until the concentration camps were liberated, anyone with a New York Times subscription could have read about the atrocities during the Second World War. Regrettably, though, the persecution and murder of Jews was frequently buried by the ‘paper of record’. Of more than 23,000 front-page articles between 1939 and 1945, just 26 were about the Holocaust. This powerful documentary from the US director Emily Harrold recounts how and why the genocide of Jews was neglected and euphemised by the Times.
This LA Times investigation of America’s elderly poor ripped my heart open:
She endures what is for many aging Americans an unforgiving economy. Nearly one-third of U.S. heads of households ages 55 and older have no pension or retirement savings and a median annual income of about $19,000.
A growing proportion of the nation’s elderly are like Westfall: too poor to retire and too young to die.
