I’m over at Lady Business recommending nonfiction! This is not tremendously on brand for me, but I just need y’all to know that there are people whose job title is “smokejumper” and before they became smokejumpers, their job title was “hot shot.” For real. This is real life. Here is how excited I was to share this news with Whiskey Jenny.\ Once again, I want to really emphasize that we have done nothing to deserve Alexandra Petri. Here’s her recap of the second and third presidential debates. 2016 is not real. Here’s the evidence. The thing about Mike Hookem is…
9 CommentsCategory: Links Round-Ups
Look, I know. I know. You want to read the hot takes on Luke Cage. I understand that’s where you’re at. I am RIGHT THERE WITH YOU. But I have only watched four episodes of the series, and thus I haven’t read that much criticism of it yet.1 You will have to wait for the next one for that sweet Luke Cage talk. Here’s what you can have: A complete history of Addy Walker, who I honestly still can’t deal with the fact that they retired her books and her doll. Hmph. Why clothes for women don’t have any goddamn…
15 CommentsI’m an aunt, y’all! Wooooooooo! Truly it is the happiest of Fridays! Though I can’t transmit my joy directly into your brains, I will nevertheless do my best to give you some happiness in the form of excellent links. Enjoy! In case you missed it, I wrote a fandom vocabulary primer for the Oxford Dictionaries blog. The goddess Alexandra Petri (the woman who brought us Emo Kylo Ren) outlines the Great American Novel. A history of Harry Potter fandom. The Seattle Seahawks made a loud noise about the statement they were planning to make before their opening game, but what…
18 CommentsMorgan Jenkins is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers on the intersection of politics and pop culture, and this article about whiteness in Emma Cline’s The Girls is fire. Pixar has a list of storytelling rules of which one, I believe, is that you can use a coincidence to get a character into, but not out of, trouble. Here’s Alice Mattison on how to write coincidence well. Sexual harassment in the SF world. Did I tell you I’m fascinated with the stories of people who are in (or who leave) fundamentalist religions? So this Gothamist article about a meet-up…
29 CommentsHappy Friday, everyone! How to cull your books: The Awl guide. Let me tell you my method, team. Take all the books. Line them up on the floor, right to left, by how much you love them. Then draw a line somewhere in the middle of that long line of books and cull everything to the left of your line. Boom. Done. More on fan entitlement (and a bit of side-eye for Steven Moffat, which I am never not here for) from The Mary Sue. I’m really digging Maddie Myers’s work on The Mary Sue these days, y’all! Go follow…
11 CommentsI decided to take a break from having sad links and only have happy links. So you can look forward to some gay Sulu, bonkers Oscar Wilde adjacence, and Catullus telling people to go fuck themselves (he does that so well). Bahahaha Constance Holland (nee Lloyd; formerly Wilde) has a fake gravestone at a cemetery in Spain. OF COURSE SHE DOES God I love Oscar Wilde stories. American literature needs indie publishers, says The Atlantic. They don’t exactly go deep on the point that indie presses are an avenue for publishing more marginalized voices, so if y’all have a recent…
9 CommentsAlton Sterling was killed in Louisiana on Tuesday, July 5th. Roxane Gay talks about his life and his death. Rembert Browne on people who don’t want anyone not like them to exist at all. Ijeoma Olua on the tragedy in Dallas and how we should (and shouldn’t) respond to it. Ta-Nehisi Coates on the unbreakable link between violence by police officers and violence against them. In the wake of Black Lives Matter pulling out of the Pride parade in San Francisco due to increased police presence, some thoughts on the disconnect between the two major civil rights fights of our…
8 CommentsI don’t know what to say about the hate crime against queer people of color in Orlando this past weekend. I won’t say the killer’s name because we know that intense coverage of these guys inspires copycats do to the same. Instead I want to link to NPR’s article about the people who were murdered. Here also is a round-up from NPR’s Code Switch of responses from queer Latinx folks. The element of the fantastical in The Boxcar Children is their coherence to a Protestant work ethic. I am THE MOST susceptible to this kind of sadness. Just read enough…
8 CommentsHappy Friday, team! The best news from this week is that the NPR Code Switch podcast has finally dropped. You can read an interview with pilot hosts Gene Demby and Shereen Marisol Meraji about their Process here. Why your brain is not a computer, and calling it one is messing up brain science. Women in sci-fi are reaching new heights (including some discussion of the Hugos and that whole mess). Including a mango (or not) in a novel about Pakistan. In defense of YA love triangles, which represent possible identity choices for the (mostly) heroines. Plus some bonus nose-wrinkling at…
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