So sleepy.
When the New York City Public Schools catalog arrived in the mail one day that spring, with information about Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new universal prekindergarten program, I told Faraji that I wanted to enroll Najya in a segregated, low-income school. Faraji’s eyes widened as I explained that if we removed Najya, whose name we chose because it means “liberated” and “free” in Swahili, from the experience of most black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem. Saying my child deserved access to “good” public schools felt like implying that children in “bad” schools deserved the schools they got, too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural — a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations and the machinations of policy makers, of simple inertia. But I also believed that it is the choices of individual parents that uphold the system, and I was determined not to do what I’d seen so many others do when their values about integration collided with the reality of where to send their own children to school.
One family, or even a few families, cannot transform a segregated school, but if none of us were willing to go into them, nothing would change. Putting our child into a segregated school would not integrate it racially, but we are middle-class and would, at least, help to integrate it economically. As a reporter, I’d witnessed how the presence of even a handful of middle-class families made it less likely that a school would be neglected. I also knew that we would be able to make up for Najya anything the school was lacking.
THIS IS HORRIFYING and also pretty rough to read, just FYI:
Early in the rehearsal process, Rick Gilbert and David Bareford of R&D Choreography were brought in to work out ways to make it appear as though Cox was beating the crap out of Benson and Kevin Bigley, who played the Smith son, Chris, in the climactic final scene, without actually hurting them. Gilbert and Bareford would be nominated for a Jeff Award for their work on Killer Joe. But by the time the play opened, after Gilbert and Bareford had left the rehearsal room, much of that choreography had been tweaked beyond recognition without the choreographers’ knowledge. “I didn’t see any indication of the kinds of things that I later found out were going on,” Gilbert says now.
According to Rieck, Cox told the cast that since the theater was so small, the violence needed to be palpable. As stage manager, Rieck’s job was to serve as the liaison between the director and the cast and crew and keep everything running smoothly. Whenever she approached Snyder, the director, with questions about the fight choreography, she says, “I just kind of got treated like I was being too involved or whatever, or I was overstepping my bounds.” Snyder declined to comment for this story.
it’s not me, just FYI:
To support his case, Ketcham refers to and quotes an unnamed editor of an unnamed “major progressive website” who secretly supports Trump:
During one visit to Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, about six writers sat in a conference room with Astro Teller, the head of GoogleX, who wore a midi ring and kept his long hair in a ponytail. “Most of our research meetings are fun, but this one was uncomfortable,” Kemper told me. GoogleX is the company’s “moonshot factory,” devoted to projects, such as self-driving cars, that are difficult to build but might have monumental impact. Hooli, a multibillion-dollar company on “Silicon Valley,” bears a singular resemblance to Google. (The Google founder Larry Page, in Fortune: “We’d like to have a bigger impact on the world by doing more things.” Hooli’s C.E.O., in season two: “I don’t want to live in a world where someone makes the world a better place better than we do.”) The previous season, Hooli had launched HooliXYZ, its own “moonshot factory,” whose experiments were slapstick absurdities: monkeys who use bionic arms to masturbate; powerful cannons for launching potatoes across a room. “He claimed he hadn’t seen the show, and then he referred many times to specific things that had happened on the show,” Kemper said. “His message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ ” (Teller could not be reached for comment.)
Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”
ALL THE KEY AND PEELE SKETCHES INCLUDING UNRELEASED ONES ARE NOW ONLINE
honestly my fav kind of stunt journalism is this kind (also I tweeted about it a lot and now ELLE is trying to figure out what male superhero workout/eating I can take on for them):
All told, I made several dishes for dinner and they were all unsuccessful in different ways. Joanne’s Swiss Chard Summer Rolls were just a series of chopped vegetables held together by Swiss Chard. Joanne’s Pineapple Cucumber Gazpacho was ruined by my pineapple allergy (I swapped in watermelon, mistake). Joanne’s Creamy Coconut noodles were pretty soupy and flavorless, and Joanne’s Coconut Mango Cream Pie wasn’t ready until the next morning. This was pretty unhealthy for the Brady family, too. Look at all the fruit these foods contain! Still, I went to bed so hungry I had a pain in my stomach the next morning. I felt like Tom Brady’s dad, also named Tom Brady, who once said, “Sometimes we’ll go over to Tom and Gisele’s house for dinner … and then I’ll say afterward, ‘Where are we going for dinner?’”
In conclusion, living like Tom and Gisele is hard. You have to live in Boston and you have to eat nothing. You have to do yoga in a tree, you have to take pictures of yourself doing yoga in a tree, you have to wear Uggs everywhere because it’s so cold, like a wind tunnel, and also because you are an Uggs spokesman. But the benefits are also manifold: your house is awesome, you look like gods, St. Francis of Assisi is your personal trainer, and most importantly, Boston.com loves you! This was the top story two days ago!
The Best Of Nikki made me cry.
Leveraging his connections to media executives, Kushner also leaned upon his friendship with media mogul Rupert Murdoch to improve the campaign’s strained relationship with the Fox News Channel. And on policy, Kushner had a large hand in crafting a well-received address to American Israel Public Affairs Committee earlier this year. The speech was also reviewed by the Observer’s editor, Ken Kurson, prompting political reporters at the paper to call for a firewall between the paper and any activities for the campaign.
Kurson told The Associated Press that Kushner has “no role” in the Observer’s content.
“We talk often and share many world views. We disagree about some things as well but are always able to discuss respectfully,” Kurson said, describing him as a calm presence.
Kushner took over his family’s New Jersey-based real estate firm in 2004 around the time his father was sentenced to two years in prison in March 2005 according to the terms of a plea deal negotiated by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a prominent Trump backer who previously served as a federal prosecutor.
YES:
In April 1930, the Los Angeles Times began publishing what would end up being months’ worth of eye-popping details from an exceedingly strange court case. It involved a “comely” woman named Dolly, her murdered husband, and her lover, a man known as the “garret ghost” who, at Dolly’s behest, lived a “bat-like life in hidden rooms.”
The story of how the three were intertwined is worthy of the era’s most lurid pulp novels.
Melissa Gira Grant on Boston’s Combat Zone, money, stripping, and the past:
This kind of club experience is a world away from the Naked i and the clubs like it today that remain on the outskirts of the city. Here there are no neighbors, no all-night cafes—no anything, except a bit of neon signifying something still recognizable against a suburban highway. Dancers may have worked for wages back in the days of the Zone; today they are working for tips, and in many cases, they are paying management to work—“tipping out” sometimes hundreds of dollars per shift. Regarding dancers as independent contractors may have been legit in the pre-chain era, when dancers could just hop from club to club without being fined, could choose a costume without worrying if it violated a dubious workplace contract forbidding anything not “classy,” could select their own music, could leave a shift if the club was dead. Clubs save—which is to say, make—loads more money when they are just skimming it off of dancers’ tips, bossing them around like employees while denying them a wage.
It is precisely because a club chain like Rick’s had placed so many restrictions on dancers’ work that it lost lawsuit after lawsuit brought by dancers, over employee misclassification and tip theft. As clubs have tried to go more legit, they’ve just systematized the kinds of tactics we see clearly now in the Uber age, as they skirt their duties as employers. Strippers have faced this kind of “it’s not a job, it’s just a platform” stuff for a lot longer than other recruits to the so-called “sharing economy.” It’s not a coincidence that Shannon Liss-Riordan, the plaintiff’s attorney who filed the class action Uber suit in California was, years ago, taking the same kinds of cases from dancers.
Dear Prudence,
After a lot of soul-searching, I’ve decided to divorce my wife of five years. All we did was fight, and we had little in the way of sexual intimacy. The problem is that my soon-to-be ex-wife just had a baby a few weeks ago. I was thinking about divorce when I found out she was pregnant but decided to stay for the sake of the baby. It’s four weeks after the birth, and things are worse. We fight constantly and we haven’t had sex for almost four months, so last week I finally got the courage to break ties and move into an apartment.
The problem? My friends and family say I’m horrible—that my wife just had a baby; that we’re in the miserable newborn stage and of course we’d fight; that she’s not even cleared by the doctor for sex yet, so of course we’re not sleeping together. Even my brother says I’m being selfish. What do I say to these people? My wife stopped being the woman I loved almost a year ago, but I only hung around because she got pregnant.
—Sympathy for the Devil
The Swedish Tourist Association recently announced a new service called The Swedish Number. People who dial +46 771 793 336 will be connected with a random participating Swede.
We talked to about a dozen of those Swedes with one question in mind: What happened on September 3rd, 1967?
Those who were alive and in-country during that time took little time to respond. That day was a national holiday of sorts: Dagen H (or “H-Day”), short for Högertrafikomläggningen (“the right-hand traffic diversion”). On that day, millions of Swedes switched from driving on the left side of the road to driving on the right.
