Sansa rolled in something unspeakable and was given a bath, thus ruining ALL her good work at becoming thoroughly vile and smelly.
Jenny Diski, who was just a brilliant, brilliant writer, has died of cancer, and the LRB has lifted the paywall on all her writing, please spend an hour (or four!) here.
On Mississippi’s (lack of) open container laws:
If you ask someone from Mississippi how long it takes to drive from Jackson, the capital, down to the Gulf Coast they might tell you “about six beers.” Walk into most gas stations there and you’ll find waist-high barrels filled with tallboys (sixteen to twenty-four ounces) and hog legs (thirty-two ounces) covered in ice. The beers are located near the door, sold individually, and placed in brown paper bags for a reason.Mississippi is the only state that doesn’t have an open-container law that prohibits drivers or passengers from drinking inside a motor vehicle. And while some counties and cities have passed their own ordinances to ban the practice, Mississippi still has an abnormally high rate of alcohol-related traffic fatalities.
These days, there are only a handful of workplace taxonomies in scripted television. We’ve got police precincts, crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas. NBC’s “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.” are a virtual sexy-calendar night. These shows might know what a blue collar is, but they’re class-unconscious: Their characters don’t usually work for the explicit maintenance of their livelihoods. They work for comedy, for suspense, for sport. For the most part, TV cops, lawyers, bureaucrats and doctors inhabit the same kinds of toothsome residences and wear the same exquisitely tailored clothes, all showing off how fabulously art directors and costume designers earn a paycheck. Sometimes we see more of their work than that done by the people who inhabit it. Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely upper-class class.
More on the Syrian hospital hit by an airstrike:
A two-month-old cease-fire had brought a brief respite to areas of Syria racked by fighting. But in a 24-hour period between Wednesday and Thursday, at least 60 people — including children and doctors — were killed in rebel-controlled neighborhoods of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city and once the country’s commercial center.
Airstrikes Wednesday night collapsed a hospital supported by Doctors Without Borders and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), killing patients and staff members, including one of the city’s last pediatricians, the two aid groups said. The strikes were the latest in a series of increasingly violent attacks that have violated the truce, raising fears of a complete breakdown of efforts to end the years-long conflict.
Good news from my hometown:
Over 100 community members demanded the Kingston Frontenac Public Library revise its new Code of Conduct at a meeting of the Library Board on April 27. And the community got what it wanted.
The meeting had such a large attendance that, even after it had been reassigned a larger room, all chairs were filled and some community members had to stand outside the doors to listen. Many had signs with messages like “Libraries are for everyone.”
The community was responding to concerns raised last week that the Library’s new Code of Conduct was meant to exclude marginalized community members including the homeless.
More than a million people in the UK are so poor they cannot afford to eat properly, keep clean or stay warm and dry, according to a groundbreaking attempt to measure the scale of destitution in Britain.
A study by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) found that 184,500 households experienced a level of poverty in a typical week last year that left them reliant on charities for essentials such as food, clothes, shelter and toiletries.
More than three-quarters of destitute people reported going without meals, while more than half were unable to heat their home. Destitution affected their mental health, left them socially isolated and prone to acute feelings of shame and humiliation.
This is a really solid piece on Tina Fey:
The beauty of “TGS Hates Women” is that Fey isn’t lashing out at her own critics. In fact, she was operating as a pop culture critic herself by taking the situation and exaggerating it for comedic value. In order to pull off something like that, you gotta hear both sides. Which makes Fey’s Achilles’ heel on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt even more apparent. When the show was heavily criticized for its problems with race in its first season, Fey didn’t listen and hear both sides like she did on 30 Rock. No, the criticisms were lobbied at her this time and she was not here to get clocked by anyone’s Twitter fingers.
The cultural impact of banning shisha establishments in Toronto:
For shisha smokers, many of whom are Muslim or raised in Islamic environments, these establishments offer a halal setting for recreational activity that doesn’t conflict with religious or cultural values. “I think smoking shisha is just another everyday thing that you can do,” said Ali. He laughed softly: “I don’t drink alcohol, so what am I supposed to do now? Go hang out in parking lots?”
Toronto isn’t the only municipality cracking down on shisha. Vanderlinden said she recently gave a testimony to the New York City Department of Health with regards to Toronto’s bylaw and enforcement. And in the U.K., Birmingham professional football club, Aston Villa F.C, recently dropped one of its players for smoking shisha during a trip to Dubai.
Speaking of cancer, our lovely Ella on magic and blood and sickness and lipstick:
And I think of our friends, and I think of all the strangers who have given so generously of their money and their love; all the strangers who tell me they are thinking of us, and praying for us, and hoping for us; all the strangers who have given their blood and their bone marrow and their time. Five people have told me, now, that they joined the register because they read about us, and that they are now a match to save a stranger. What’s that, if not real magic?
The blood of a stranger, willingly given: Voldemort couldn’t dream of that kind of power. Which, of course, is exactly the point. The realest kind of magic (as per Harry Potter, Matilda, and all the rest) is practical, everyday love. The kind that manifests as a lipstick, or as someone doing your washing up, or as a text “just checking in”. The kind that manifests as recommendations for books, and parcels of books, and laughter and not talking about cancer, the kind that manifests as turning up at your house with the things for dinner or a bag of expensive hand cream, the kind that manifests as a hundred tweets expressing love and solidarity.
A Quora poem about Silicon Valley:
Why is Powdered Alcohol not successful so far?
How does UberX handle vomiting in the car?
Is being worth $10 million considered ‘rich’?
What can be causing my upper lip to twitch?
< https://youtu.be/bruTOQoNtO4 >
she is not wrong, and also if you hire Ralph Lauren, you’re gonna get Ralph Lauren, so let’s start there, maybe:
The United States is already struggling to maintain any respect in the world, and now Ralph Lauren, who is always tasked with designing the USA Olympic uniforms, is trying to portray us all as Hamptons-humping WASPs just off an outing on a yacht. Well lookie here, old Gatsby, old boy, our athletes will sneer before ashing their cigars on the winner’s platform. This ceremony’s a real gas!
Rio 2016, on behalf of America: I’m sorry.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that other countries’ closing ceremony uniforms are so much better. I mean, South Korea is out here innovating fabrics, infusing their uniforms with mosquito repellant to protect their athletes from Zika; meanwhile, we got Unkie Ralph and the boat shoe brigade feckless and bare-skinned in linen freaking shortpants.
