Link Roundup! -The Toast

Where is their buddy cop movie?

This was posted yesterday, but here is the story behind 30 Rock‘s Leap Day episode:

We were always creating a universe that was a little sideways, a little parallel to the one we experience every day. I remember this being one of the easiest episodes to break ever, because we realized it was a whole buffet of stuff the audience already knows. Suddenly, you’re handed everything associated with any holiday, and you get to recast it. “Oh, great, we’ll do a Scrooge conceit.” “We’ll go to a Leap Day party.” “We’ll write songs.” “We’ll come up with traditions.” You just saw the whole thing immediately, even though I think we were telling four full stories in it. The hardest part was the three-line exchange explaining how this had never been discussed before, why it was such a big deal, and why Liz Lemon didn’t know about it when we saw her four years ago during the previous Leap Day.

The curious case of Lyle Stevik (there are a lot of surprisingly grim crime scene photos, so if you prefer not to see suicide-related stuff, I would nope out):

Months passed by, then years. The investigation went cold. Then, in 2006, Lyle’s case gained traction online. Armchair detectives had started to painstakingly comb through the available evidence — trading thoughts, theories, and facts with other sleuths on internet forums. It didn’t take long before Lyle went global, his case attracting readers from Florida to Finland. And everyone had an opinion. But they also shared a collective goal: To identify the Doe and bring him home.

Over the next decade, his myth grew to unimaginable proportions: twoFacebook groups, a Wikipedia page, and a dedicated subreddit. He became the subject of haikus and fan fiction, even an unlikely crush.

Most importantly, Lyle had a sub-forum on Websleuths, a hodgepodge of speculation, postulation, and possible matches collected from missing person databases like NAMUS and the Doe Network. They cross-referenced his vital statistics, hoping to uncover someone with a similar height, weight, and Lyle’s attached earlobes: not quite rare, but still, something distinctive.

HERO:

“We have murders around here,” they said. “Well, he murdered my dream of going to Hamilton,” she retorted.

So Posner put on her Serpico hat. As the New York Post reports, Posner set up a sting to catch this nefarious Killer of Dreams, this Buffalo Bill of ticket-scalping. Posner’s boyfriend “responded to the same deceptive Craigslist ad and planned a ticket-pickup rendezvous with the fraudster that very afternoon.” The police eventually agreed to help and assigned ten anti-crime unit officers to the sting. They caught the guy, who had a history of selling phony tickets.

“I was so happy,” Posner later said. “Losing $350 to get somebody who has probably done this to so many people was worth it.”

A friend of a Toastie is drowning in medical bills as a result of cancer, could some of us help her out?

NOPE and NOPE and NO and SUPER ILLEGAL (basically nothing terrible your employer does to you is illegal ever but THIS ONE IS, I’m kind of excited now!):

My employer requires that female, and only female, employees have a male employee escort them to their car after their shift is over. I am a 40-year-old woman and have been threatened with being terminated for leaving without an escort who is younger than my own children. I am often times required to wait up to 45 minutes after my shift ends (and off the clock) before I’m allowed to go home. I would think it should be my choice when I could leave work after I am off duty. Please advise?

When he whispers Octavio Paz poems but he's using the Eliot Weinbgerger translation & you prefer Muriel Rukeyser's pic.twitter.com/7ViCltyXWK

— Drake Dick Book Club (@DrakeDickBC) February 23, 2016

When homesickness was a diagnosis (I never had a successful sleepover until I was a grown woman staying over at dudes’ houses, so I feel this):

Nostalgia, of course, has come to mean something different now, and the meaning began to change around the start of the 20th century. But for about 200 years after Hofer wrote that initial paper, the word was a medical term that meant an intense, and potentially dangerous, longing for home, although doctors never quite agreed upon the symptoms, explained Susan Matt, a historian at Weber State University and the author ofHomesickness: An American History. “Not all homesickness was necessarily going to kill you, but if you had a really acute case, it would qualify as nostalgia,” she told Science of Us. “There are lots of different sets of overlapping descriptions: a shortness of breath, palpitations of the heart, dysentery, fever, problems with the lungs. Or it was feeling an acute yearning, and then your body would start to close down.”

Your coffee is fine, but if you’re in NYC for like, a DAY, and want something amazing, this is a good list and also this place was a couple of blocks from my last NYC apartment and I went there constantly):

Abraço (East Village)
Its minuscule size, total lack of indoor seating, and somewhat limited hours (though it now thankfully stays open until 6 p.m.) didn’t stop Abraço from developing an outsize, devoted following willing to squeeze in for a cappuccino or freshly brewed drip coffee. Owner Jamie McCormick, a former Blue Bottle barista whose appearances behind the La Marzocco regulars follow closely, takes a focused approach to both roasting, which he does in Greenpoint, and brewing, favoring blends and consistency of flavor — which explains why fans still flock here like they do.

As someone who would love to be a spy and could NEVER DO IT (practically, of course, but also it would never be for the US, I would have to be a Canadian spy), this was my everything last week:

Cover is partly about what you say—that you are applying for a job with the State Department—and partly about how you say it. I described my prospective position as “stamping visas”—making a point of sounding a little ambivalent about the job and embarrassed by the rigmarole, but excited about traveling to adventurous places (all of which was true). Then I’d change the subject.

But it couldn’t actually be that simple, could it? I asked this in one of my interviews (a few months after my first round of assessments, an invitation came for a second: dazed, I went). I was sitting across from a genial older former intelligence officer. I was still being vigorously invited to ask questions, which I did, though I was beginning to have the sense that my real questions were the ones not worth asking. Out in the real world, I said, was it really just a matter of changing the subject? Yes, he said, a lot of the time, it was: what people everywhere really want to talk about is themselves.

this is good:

Visually, and in terms of their friendships, the world of “Broad City” is racially inclusive. For a while, this diversity was regularly used as a snotty wedge against HBO’s “Girls,” as if Abbi and Ilana were the pure Elizabeth Warren to Lena Dunham’s tainted Hillary Clinton. But, in fact, Abbi and Ilana, just like Hannah Horvath, aren’t generic young women: they’re college-educated white kids from the Northeast, artsy urbanites who aren’t rich but also aren’t poor, even if they can’t afford much. They’re also secular Jews in a way that network sitcoms never allowed characters to be, in the nineties, when “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” and “Mad About You” smooshed New Yorkers into an ethnically vanilla, network-friendly neutrality.

Like many people in this demographic, the characters on “Broad City” are deeply into hip-hop. This is particularly true of the fictional Ilana, who dates a black guy, Lincoln (Hannibal Buress), a supremely chill dentist. (“Hey, bwah,” she says when she calls him. “Hey, grah,” he replies.) But Ilana’s not just a girl with a diverse social circle, a taste for Lil Wayne, and graphic fantasies about Rihanna backstage at the Barclays Center. She’s legitimately obsessed with the notion of herself as a bi-poly-cross-ethnic sexual adventurer; at times, she seems to believe that she’s not white, accusing her boss, say, of white privilege. When she hooks up with a doppelgänger (played by the Glazer doppelgänger Alia Shawkat), Ilana explains that, in bed, she craves difference: “Different colors, different shapes, different sizes. People who are hotter, uglier. More smart; notmore smart. Innies, outies! I don’t know, a Catholic person.” It’s a mixture of idealism and solipsism that reminded me of a German ex of mine, who insisted on calling himself “a citizen of the verld.”

Please to enjoy Kate McKinnon and Kumail Nanjiani’s Carol parody:

< https://youtu.be/_QljnNIBtaI >

Literal genius Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on James Baldwin (also work, and race, and family):

So I was in London when a check with four digits and one comma hit my account. It wasn’t much but to me it seemed enormous. I decided if I was going to spend any money, something I was reluctant, if not petrified, to do, at the very least I would feel best about spending it on James Baldwin. After all, my connection to him was an unspoken hoodoo-ish belief that he had been the high priest in charge of my prayer of being a black person who wanted to exist on books and words alone. It was a deification that was fostered years before during a publishing internship at a magazine. During the lonely week I had spent in the storeroom of the magazine’s editorial office organizing the archives from 1870 to 2005, I had found time to pray intensely at the altar of Baldwin. I had asked him to grant me endurance and enough fight so that I could exit that storeroom with my confidence intact. I told him what all writers chant to keep on, that I had a story to tell. But later, away from all of that, I quietly felt repelled by him — as if he were a home I had to leave to become my own. Instead, I spent years immersing myself in the books of Sergei Dovlatov, Vivian Gornick, Henry Dumas, Sei Shogonan, Madeline L’Engle, and Octavia Butler. Baldwin didn’t need my prayers — he had the praise of the entire world.

Nicole is an Editor of The Toast.

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firstmute 116p · 474 weeks ago

Every time I see a crowdfunding page for someone's medical bills, I'm overcome by a wave of white-hot rage. Not at the people raising money, of course--at the fact that we live in a country where you have to RAISE MONEY from your friends to afford your goddamn medical treatment. And, of course, the very ability to use crowdfunding is only useful for certain people--people with large networks, people with Internet savvy, people with stories that are likely to go viral ... it makes me want to go nuclear on someone, but I don't even know where to channel all my anger.

Link Roundup!

ByNicole Cliffe

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