My majestic hound.
I have sympathy for anyone who loses a child they have grown to love, but I am so so tired of reading about families who knew from the BEGINNING that an adoption was contested or flat-out illegal and just figured they could wait it out and seek forgiveness instead of permission. People who literally kidnap children from parked cars are ALSO likely to grieve if the child is recovered years later, and those children may have grown to love their kidnappers, but that doesn’t mean they are allowed to keep them. I sound very uncharacteristically firm on this point, but the ICWA wasn’t created for shits and giggles, and anyone trained as a foster parent who has a kid placed with them who falls under the ICWA has no business being shocked when the letter of the law is upheld. It is neither the state nor the Choctaw Nation which is responsible for traumatizing this poor kid, it has been in litigation since 2011! DO BETTER.
This is a wonderful bad review of Batman V Superman:
2. The plot. Yo, this movie makes no sense. Dream sequences and non sequiturs and red herrings and where-the-hell-are-we-now mini-excursions and false starts out the ass. There’s a suicide bombing and multiple government hearings and a Fight Club and an innocent civilian who gets Lieutenant Dan’d and one of those posh, uncomfortable Batman-movie parties where Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne sass each other until Clark notices live news footage of a little girl stuck in a burning building in Mexico and then flies to Mexico to rescue her, whereupon the people of Mexico (it’s the Day of the Dead, also, which allows for very tight and spooky imagery) embrace him as they would a god.
There’s also a whole thing where Batman visits the set of Mad Max: Fury Roadand fights amid a buncha Moth People. Lois Lane says stuff like, “I’m not a lady, I’m a journalist” and has stuff said to her like, “[In the men’s bathroom] You know, with balls like this, you belong in here.” There’s an Entourage movie-worthy avalanche of celebrity cameos, from Nancy Grace to Charlie Rose to Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I remembered just now that at one point Superman gets nuked in space. There is Wonder Woman, who is dressed in a “Sexy Wonder Woman” Halloween costume and has very little else to do (at one point we get footage of her using an ATM) and mostly is there to provide certain Reddit subforums with a few notably lascivious Blu-Ray screenshots, in addition to setting up future interminable sequels involving additional superheroes, including Aquaman, who is also, briefly, in this movie.
Talking to Laura Mvula about her work and life and her anxiety:
As her music career got busier, Dionne and Themba stopped being able to cope. “Everything was moving so fast.” Mvula finally told her manager. He was “heartbroken”, she says, that she’d waited so long. An assistant, Mariama Abudulai, was employed, so that at least Mvula could lean on someone who was paid to be there, with a smaller measure of guilt. Her manager knew Mvula was more or less “debilitated” by anxiety, “but it didn’t go beyond management. And we all know the machine is huge – you have the record label, you have publishing, publicity, agents. You have the video team, stylists, all the people who are making your career move forward. None of those guys knew.” They still don’t.
We linked to a piece about Amy Reed and Hooman Noorchashm and their journey to uncover the dangers of morcellation a few months back, but here is an extended look at their work (I freaking love them):
The overriding duty of a physician is so well known that it’s a cliché: First, do no harm. But Amy and Hooman say her oncologist knew about the greater risk when she was operated on. That there were other women like her—including one who lay dying at Brigham and Women’s while Amy had her initial operation, performed with the same device that had caused that other woman’s cancer to spread. And that because the device made the operation easier and faster and cheaper, and all of medicine today is geared toward easier and faster and cheaper, no one was looking for problems that device might cause.
Amy’s a doctor herself, married to a doctor—one who worked in the same hospital where she was operated on. If she and Hooman weren’t told the truth about what might happen to her, what are the chances you or I would be? How blind is our faith in physicians, and how daunting our inability to know what questions to ask? That’s the bone that’s stuck in Hooman’s craw, and it’s what turned his email campaign against morcellation into an all-out war against the wobbly, opaque healthcare system that endangers us all.
Michelle Dean on Rob Ford:
How did this happen? my Toronto friends would often ask during the Ford era. They meant, How is it possible that we elected someone like this to public office? At the time, they did something I think Americans will understand in the age of Donald Trump: They simply drew a line between “us” and “them.” The people in the suburbs, the people with big new houses, the people with giant sport-utility vehicles, the people who go downtown only to eat and shop — the consensus was that they were responsible for Ford. “He’s so American,” people were fond of saying, as if to step even further away.
GUTS on Jian Ghomeshi and how you act after being raped:
We walked out of his building, him chattering at me like I wasn’t in a trance, like I wasn’t waiting for the moment I would be out of the violent sphere of space he occupied. When the cab arrived, he said something about having fun and we should do it again.
I think I mumbled yes.
I think I kissed him goodbye.
I can’t remember.
I watched Everything Is Copy, the Nora Ephron documentary, yesterday, and had too many feelings to go to the grocery store so my family ate their shoes for dinner.
Like many moments in history — most notably the Knowles-Carter elevator scene — the immediate reaction is Where’s the audio? But there is no audio, which is where the fun comes in. What on earth happened?
Well, you kind of know. Barack did something, got a little too fresh, and Michelle was all, Nah, and Barack was like, Come on, girl, you know I was kidding. (But was I? You know you like me, girl.)
No:
What do you think about including shared economy activities on your resume/LinkedIn profile and bringing it up in interviews? My husband and I are hosts on Airbnb, which involves a lot of coordination, hospitality, scheduling, and business management/accounting (we receive a 1099 from Airbnb).
We are talking about this election. We’re always talking about this election. I hate this election with every fiber of my being and this is a sentiment shared by most of my friends of color. The host asks a panelist, a conservative-moderate white woman, what she thinks of the rhetoric surrounding Trump’s campaign.
“It’s so fascinating,” she says.
“Fascinating” is a word used for reading about scientific discovery or watching a documentary. “Fascinating” is a word for observers, not participants. Things are declared “fascinating” when you can crouch down and watch the goings-on without getting your hands dirty. “Fascinating” has no skin in the game.
I was going OFF about breastfeeding on Twitter yesterday, and it influenced me to dig up this beautiful note I got from my pediatrician when I finally gave up, and if you are someone who couldn’t breastfeed or didn’t freaking WANT to, please pretend it’s written to you (this was my second kid, my first got way less milk):
love these vintage photos of Staten Island
Islamophobia and representation in YA:
This is what you need to know.
We are not your money makers. We are not your guinea pigs or lab experiments to prod at. We are not your wild child rebels or subdued servants or doe-eyed harem beauties to place about your draft like cardboard cut-outs.
Our children deserve more from the books they read than the same stereotypes used to bully and subdue their souls being painted over and offered up as something new and enjoyable.
This is a really interesting look at how the traditional rallying center of black political and social activism (the black church) is no longer at the heart of the movement, and why:
At least in this city, the “intergenerational beef,” as another organizer called it, between young activists and their elders might be trumped up. “The people who were organizing in the ’60s—we call them our OGs,” Gilliam-Price said. These were the men and women who stood at the front of protests against discrimination in schools, organized rallies after the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and sat at the tables of voter-registration drives. “Organizing through the churches made sense,” said Musgrove, the UMBC professor. Groups like the NAACP tapped into the money and large communities of congregations, and “they were able to run a lot of the campaigns for desegregation for public facilities in downtown Baltimore—from right after World War II all the way until the sit-ins at Morgan.”
The OGs of political activism were church people, but Gilliam-Price and many of her peers are not. Religion is “just not me,” she said. She had harsh words for a class of pastors, including Jamal Bryant, whom she referred to as “poverty pimps”—“nominal church leaders who are definitely just out there for their names and for their brands,” she said. “I went to a protest in Freddie Gray’s neighborhood in Gilmor Homes, and there was a pastor marching with his Instagram handle on his shirt. Church leaders have been exploiting this movement for everything that it has.”
Slate has a very reasonable comment policy. We do not need one, ourselves, as we enjoy deploying our draconian iron fist to crush polite dissent and mild disagreement whenever possible. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
