This year has been shit. This month has been shit. This week has been really shit. But there is a single ray of light, and it is Lil Nas X’s new album, Montero, which is getting me through. Craig Jenkins reviews the album for Vulture. (link) I am excited to see songs from Montero turn up in the repertoire of college marching bands.
What does appropriation mean in food culture? (link)
NPR crowd-sourced a list of the best SFF from the last ten years, and it’s a good-ass list. (link)
The Jeopardy! situation was some real fuckin bullshit and I want a recount, I want the recount to consist of everyone egging Mike Richards until he gets down on his knees and begs LeVar Burton to come back and host forever and then Mike Richards retires to, like, Chalmette. (link)
An interview with Silvia Moreno-Garcia, an author who writes a gorgeous, weird, fascinating range of SFF novels and has a new one out about Mexican revolutionaries. (link)
Contestants on the Bachelor franchise are, in fact, there to make friends. (link)
On misunderstanding Thoreau. (link)
I have never read not even one single word of John le Carre and I probably don’t agree with this writer’s final argument about George and Ann Smiley, but I still found this piece a hell of a good read. (link)
Mortgage approvals are systematically racist; which I know we all know, but here’s some more evidence about it. (link)
Welp, I was completely out on Y: The Last Man the series and then I started hearing about how hard the writing room worked to include trans voices and tell trans stories and now goddammit I guess they have lured me back in. (link)
“I simply enjoyed the fundamental separation of church and state.” How RPF and celebrity fandom has changed in the world of the vast internet. (link)
adrienne maree brown talks about the place of Black anger in speculative fiction and stories about Black grief. (link)
This deep dive on classic Black television is terrific, like everything Hannah Giorgis writes! (link)
Urban Meyer sucks. Here is a story of how the Ohio State football system failed a survivor of domestic violence (at the hands of one of their coaching staff). (link)
On editing fascist propaganda out of Wikipedia pages. (link)
It has been a very defeating week. If you have any good news, or anything that’s not news but is making you feel a little bit good, please drop it in the comments and make me smile. Have a wonderful weekend!