Sansa is still small! Sansa can fit under the bed! Sansa needs help being pulled out from under the bed now!
Yes, those are load-bearing book piles.
Usually, the deleted comment of the day goes down at the bottom, but I wanted us all to kick off our morning with “Gary” together ASAP (note that I ALSO woke up to some newly reported comments in my inbox, all of which Gary had flagged for “filth” or “filthiness” or “filthy”):
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Two great new adoption pieces in Nikki’s series for Catapult! Buckle and Sway and Mama.
I loved and treasured the late George Martin, and the New Yorker‘s tribute is lovely:
But Martin’s real genius came to play only in the second half of the Beatles’ absurdly brief career, when McCartney’s growing gift for more expansive musical forms met Martin’s expertise as a professional arranger and connoisseur of baroque sounds. That Martin was there to arrange the larger ensembles has always been noted—what is not noted frequently enough is how brilliant, austere, and original his arrangements were. Every Beatle fan knows the story of how Martin orchestrated a version of “Strawberry Fields Forever,” only to have John Lennon want it joined, improbably, with an earlier electric version, with the two finally put together with a bit of studio magic. What is overlooked is how audacious that orchestral arrangement was on its own: a biting, dark cello and brass setting where almost any other arranger of the time would have done something more conventionally “psychedelic” or syrupy. Martin’s famous string-quartet arrangement for “Yesterday,” perhaps the most famous string arrangement of its period, is equally impeccable: a classical-minded music perfectly accenting a classical-minded song. (The only ones remotely as clean are Nelson Riddle’s Hollywood String Quartet arrangements on Sinatra’s “Close To You.”)
Hilary Mantel on Charles Brandon (!):
The subtitle of Steven Gunn’s scholarly biography describes its subject as ‘Henry VIII’s Closest Friend’. What a prospect of damp-palmed horror that phrase evokes! The knocking of Tudor knees echoes down the years. Can a king have friends? Could Henry VIII have friends? The pertinent anecdote is well known: he walked affectionately with Thomas More, an arm around his neck, but More told his son-in-law: ‘If my head would win him a castle in France … it would not fail to go.’ Charles Brandon fought in showy campaigns to recover those bits of France Henry thought he owned, so he must have felt the truth of More’s words in every shuddering vertebra. He was one of a group of athletic courtiers employed to serve the leisure of Hooray Henry; they overlapped with, but can be distinguished from, the machiavels who served the policy of Horrid Henry, and the poets and priests employed to flatter the intellect and ease the conscience of Holy Henry. Henry came to the throne in 1509. Charles Brandon’s power as a court favourite endured till death removed him in 1545. A long run, on ground slippery with blood: how did Charles do it?
THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF THE PEOPLE V OJ SIMPSON MADE ME WANT TO ROCK MARCIA CLARK GENTLY IN MY ARMS, let’s ask Sarah Paulson about it:
How did you feel when you first read this script?
It just made me cry, actually. That’s a reaction I have, whenever I get really mad—sometimes, I cry. [Laughs.] And the doing of it was even more intense than the reading of it. When I had to stand up and explain to the court that I could not stay late because I had no childcare. And then when I had to face Johnnie [Cochran, played by Courtney B. Vance] saying all of those very derogatory—totally lacking in any awareness or compassion for Marcia’s circumstance, and immediately throwing her to the wolves and accusing her of using lack of childcare as a way of having more time to present something in front of the court. And then I just stand up and do that little speech that she makes to Johnnie and to the court.
That, to me—as much as there are so many other emotional moments in the episode—that I just remember really having to fight through tears. I was so angry that it was making me shake, and because of that I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t want to give in to that feeling I had internally—me personally, Sarah—and I certainly didn’t want Marcia to do that. But at the same time it was making me shake with rage, it really was.
I felt that way when I read it, but when I did it, I just thought I don’t know—I actually don’t know how she woke up every day and dealt with this. With what was going on in her home life, her private life, and her responsibility caring for her children. And being present in that regard, and working as hard as she was working, while not having as much help as she could have. And I don’t even mean childcare help in terms of someone being there. I’m talking about emotional support from her husband, from people within the office. She just had been completely abandoned, I thought, and it was a very, very stark, bleak place to be living for that time we were shooting that episode.
Last night I talked to a religion podcast about my conversion, because I have tried REPEATEDLY to write about it and I can’t pull it off, so you can listen to it on Monday if you want. It was still hard! I think this is why I have only written one thing about my faith on The Toast. It’s so personal and intimate, way more than “lol sex” and I feel very vulnerable around it, and also religion has jacked up plenty of lives, so I’m happy to just direct you to iTunes if you want to know more.
Buzzfeed breaks down all the clues in the new Game of Thrones trailer.
Hazlitt contributors pay tribute to The Replacements:
I think I have spent my entire life looking for a person who is as good as this Replacements song. Who makes you feel this infinite. Who makes the future seem like a dazzling cold plunge into shimmering waters, instead of a low-grade tension headache. I have played this song for strangers to dance to at weddings. I have put it on mixtapes for people to kiss. “Can’t Hardly Wait” is about the dizzying transition from being a child into becoming an adult. It is the only song I know about that makes me excited about the future. If the possibilities were life affirming, this brass-laden, this joyous, no one would be afraid. This song makes me want to get out of bed. —Chandler Levack
Carrie Frye is the best editor I’ve ever worked with, and everything she writes fills me with joy:
Last week, my friend Maud was in town from New York for a funeral, and one afternoon I met her and her stepdaughter Autumn at a teahouse downtown. The conversation turned to what we were each reading, and I mentioned that I was rereading Harriet the Spy. Within a minute, I noticed, we’d all grown extremely animated: three women in the corner of a dark tearoom, waving their arms around and exclaiming “Harriet the Spy! Harriet the Spy!!”
I watch those ingrown hair videos on YouTube sometimes when I’m alone, so I get it:
Lee, like most dermatologists, had never spent much time removing blackheads and whiteheads. In her opinion, performing “extractions” — a mundane, tedious, and nonessential procedure that was rarely covered by insurance — was labor better left for aestheticians. But a surprising number of her followers wrote that they fervently (if guiltily) enjoyed watching these simple dermal exorcisms. (“I love it so much ?????,” moaned a typical commenter.) Sensing an untapped audience, Lee began posting more videos of things popping from the skin, and her audience gradually grew. At first, she was wary of posting anything with too much “ick factor” — giant blackheads, say, or explosive cysts — for fear that she would upset the gentle people of the internet. However, her online fans didn’t seem to mind the ick; in fact, many of them relished it. Some fans reported that their mouths inexplicably watered when they saw a particularly juicy pop; others claimed that they found the videos so soothing that they used them as a sleep aid. Lee began setting videos to punnily titled music, like Duke Ellington’s “Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don’t Tease Me),” Mtume’s “Juicy Fruit,” and French Montana’s “Pop That.” She soundtracked one video to “People Are Strange” by the Doors. In the caption, she wrote, “People are strange. Strange because they like to watch this stuff. But I’ve realized you strange people are not alone — there are many of you!”
Why I Didn’t Run the Caitlin Moran Interview
Please enjoy two bonus pictures of Sansa today:
