News of the Week/Month/Decade: MALLORY ORTBERG IS THE NEW DEAR PRUDENCE. Rejoice!! Ask her for advice!!! Submit questions for her Monday live chat here!!!!
Last year, a couple in Florida – presumably hoping to distinguish their $45,000 adoption crowdfunding campaign from others like it – came up with a gimmick they referred to as the “Baby Draft”: If you donated, you could vote for your favorite football team, and the adopted child would be raised as a fan of whichever team got the most votes.
This is the week The Toast was born anew! Let's all talk some more about how much we love the redesign. And if you have yet to fall down the rabbit hole reading all the nerdy technical deets / listening to the related podcast, I can vouch that it's a good way to spend your afternoon.
Nicole Chung: In your Author’s Note at the end of Carry On, you wrote that after creating Simon and Baz and telling some of their story in Fangirl, you just weren’t ready to let go of them. Why did these two characters mean so much to you, and were you at all surprised to find yourself continuing their story? Rainbow Rowell: I think I felt like I’d created these characters and this whole world, but…
Our quest to transform The Toast into a Hamilton fanpage continued apace this week with Nicole's ode to Leslie Odom, Jr. and Kendra James' reflection on the show's themes and timeliness. How lucky we are to be alive right now!
A Linguist Explains the Grammar of Shipping
I talked to Arissa Oh, American historian and Friend of The Toast, about the history of Korean adoption and what it can teach us about the rise and…
"We often think of intercountry adoption as this personal, private thing between an adoptee and their adoptive parents and birth parents. But adoption and intercountry adoption are also extremely public acts. They are influenced by large forces like national laws; ideas about race, gender, family; geopolitics, etc. In turn, adoption is used in the public sphere to signify certain things -- like America’s goodness or antiracism. A more complex view of intercountry adoption should lead…
Happy Friday, Toast! Last night I had a lot of feelings and cookie dough before bed and dreamed that Lin-Manuel Miranda was going to run for President and fix all our problems. I was pretty disappointed when I woke up and remembered who's actually running. It's thrown my whole day off. This week, Mallory rewrote the fairy tale The Six Swans, and it was lovely. Leaving a cocktail party early to eat some bison and other…
Hello, Toasties, how are you all this Friday? I'm recovering from a migraine, which sucks. I hear caffeine is good for headaches, though, so I've been drinking coffee and eating chocolate muffins all day; my health is very important to me. This week we were very proud to publish this #longread by Colleen Hele, Naomi Sayers, and Jessica Wood on what's missing from the conversation around missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. SEPTEMBER DAD…
I am so very, very tired today, Toasties. I was up late helping my husband roll grape leaves for his department potluck today (for whatever reason, every single work potluck he's ever had has been a 'bring traditional family foods' party, which in my own case would mean day-old pizza or a box cake frosted with Cool Whip, but in his invariably means the only Lebanese dish he really knows how to make: grape leaves). We…
I had the best time chatting with Celeste Ng about, well, everything. One more time: if you've not yet read Everything I Never Told You, I hope you do, and then I hope you talk to me about it. That novel meant so much to me, and it was a joy to get to talk with Celeste! Siobhan Phillips wrote this terrific essay for us on women and the history of gin. Mallory's…
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications. Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and the ALA’s Alex Award, and was a finalist for numerous awards, including…
