I am in DC today, and I do not know how Claire Underwood never seems to experience the effects of humidity.

Erlich

Rodarte doesn’t even go here:

But Rodarte is not readily accessible. It is possible for an ordinary but well-heeled consumer to walk into a store or log into a website and make a Rodarte purchase — but doing so will be easier if that shopper is no larger than a size 4.

Rodarte tends to be sold by special order or through trunk shows. Nordstrom sells it only in its Seattle store. Neiman Marcus sells it solely in Beverly Hills. And instead of delivering four or more collections a year, as other brands do, Rodarte delivers two.

TNC:

When I started writing Between The World And Me, the only person’s permission I needed was black. He was my editor. He grew up like me. He understood where I was trying to go—even when I didn’t quite understand it myself. My father—who subsidized the self-published blog which is the seed of my presence here—read and critiqued the book before it was published. My mother—who taught me to read and write—did the same. The first stop on the book tour was West Baltimore. The next was Catonsville High School, where my mother works. The next was Howard University. Throughout the tour, we made a specific effort to be in black spaces, and pull in black bookstores. This was not a carefully laid plan to seduce white liberals. It was an attempt to be able to sleep at night. Writing a book from a black perspective is freeing. Seeing it constantly examined from a white perspective is depressing.

Atlas Obscura has like three great things about Canada-adjacent topics, here is the first:

When the linguists Martin Meissner and Stuart Philpott first started visiting sawmills in British Columbia in the 1970s, they thought they’d find workers communicating without speaking, probably with some simple gestures that contained technical information. There was a long history of such communication in the face of extreme noise: For centuries, American mill workers had used systems of hand signals to tell each other, across the unending roar of the saws, how to cut wood.

What they discovered, though, floored them. The researchers witnessed a sign language system complete enough that workers could call each other “you crazy old farmer,” tell a colleague that he was “full of crap,” or tell each other when the foreman was “fucking around over there.”

Here is the second:

Considering the geographical, cultural, and economic closeness of our two countries, it’s almost perverse that Americans take so much pride in their ignorance about all things Canada. Drake? Dan Aykroyd? The new hot prime minister? Is that it? But everyone knows what Canadians are supposed to sound like: they are are a people who pronounce “about” as “aboot” and add “eh” to the ends of sentences.”

Unfortunately, that’s wrong. Like, linguistically incorrect. Canadians do not say “aboot.” What they do say is actually much weirder.

Canadian English, despite the gigantic size of the country, is nowhere near as diverse as American English; think of the vast differences between the accents of a Los Angeleno, a Bostonian, a Chicagoan, a Houstonian, and a New Yorker. In Canada, there are some weird pockets: Newfoundland and Labrador speak a sort of Irish-cockney-sounding dialect, and there are some unique characteristics in English-speaking Quebec. But otherwise, linguistically, the country is fairly consistent.

Here is the third! You already know about this if you have ever met me, because I tell people about French-Canadian swears constantly, so much so that we have an ex-Navy friend from Georgia who now says tabarnak when he stubs a toe:

Then there’s a phrase like this, which I saw on a friend’s neighbor’s front door once: “La doorbell est fuckée.” The word “fuck,” for the record, is fairly common in Québec, but isn’t really a swear; it’s a mutated form of an English, but it’s only barely rude, meaning “broken” or “messed up.”

Québec has few swears that you’d also find in France. Merde, maybe. I’ve heard enculer before, which means something like the verb “to fuck” and is usually paired with something else to enhance it. But the best swears are the sacres.

The sacres is the group of Catholic swears unique to Québec. There are many of them; the most popular are probably tabarnak (tabernacle), osti or hostie or estie (host, the bread used during communion), câlisse (chalice), ciboire (the container that holds the host), and sacrament (sacrament). These usually have some milder forms as well, slightly modified versions that lessen their blow. “For example, tabarnouche and tabarouette are non-vulgar versions of tabarnak, similar to ‘shoot’ and ‘darn’ in English,” says Polesello.

PENTHOUSE BIRDWATCHING:

Though you can see migrating raptors soaring at altitudes well over 800 feet over the city during the day, most species of diurnal birds migrate after nightfall. It’s safer. Temperatures are cooler, and there are fewer predators around. Fewer, not none. Just before I arrived, Farnsworth saw a peregrine falcon drifting ominously around the building. Peregrines frequently hunt at night here. From high-rise lookout perches, they launch flights out into the darkness to grab birds and bats. In more natural habitats, falcons cache the bodies of birds they’ve killed among crevices in cliffs. The ones here tuck their kills into ledges on high-rises, including the Empire State. For a falcon, a skyscraper is simply a cliff: It brings the same prospects, the same high winds, the same opportunities to stash a takeout meal.

The History of Pho:

The original pho was a simple bowl of broth, noodles, and boiled beef. Then cooks began offering slices of rare beef as an optional add-on. In the late 1920s, people debated the merits of pho featuring Chinese five-spice, sesame oil, tofu, and ca cuong (a pear-scented water-beetle pheromone). Around 1930, pho xao don—pan-fried pho rice noodles topped with a saucy beef and vegetable stir-fry—was introduced and received well.

Things got heated in 1939, when pho restaurants began selling chicken pho (pho ga). It usually happened on Mondays and Fridays, and was likely due to the government forbidding the sale of beef in order to control the slaughtering of draft animals for food. Purists initially decried chicken pho as being un-pho-like, but in the end, itprevailed as a worthy and tasty preparation in its own right. In fact, some pho shops eventually decided to specialize in pho ga.

whelp:

Scheduling conflicts seem to be a surprisingly common excuse for missing an event that was announced a year and a half ago. Others offered mushy noncommitments.

“Just as they’re firming up the schedule, it kind of looks like there’s a lot of stuff for me to do,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, explaining why he probably couldn’t make it.

Asked if Mr. Trump had anything to do with his reluctance, Mr. Johnson, who is in a heated re-election campaign, broke into a big smile and said, “Oh, of course not.”

WHELP:

“I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing. If you’re in business for yourself, I really think it’s a bad idea. I think that was the single greatest cause of what happened to my marriage with Ivana,” Trump said.

He said that he disliked hearing her “shouting on the phone” during contentious business deals.