New York City, July 1, 2014
★★ A house sparrow wallowed on its side in a planter, its gray feathers fluffed and disheveled. The air was institutional plexiglass. Passengers on the platform stepped toward the doorway of a 1 train car and flinched back, feeling the lack of air conditioning. The air conditioning on the B train was working and dripping copiously into the car. Outside, a stagnant patch of shade was no better than direct sun. The heat grew thicker in the streets–nothing extraordinary, just conventionally sweltering. Nowhere was comfortable, even as the sun fell behind the buildings. On the way down Broadway to find gelato, the two-year-old was a squirmy, ever hotter and grumpier burden on the neck and shoulders. The return trip would be by subway: the trains inexplicably late, the station air stupefyingly hot. Dessert was soft in its styrofoam box after one stop.
Jessica Roy flew to Detroit to attend the International Conference on Men's Issues, and while there was, naturally, a "palpable distaste for women," there was something more:
But what I didn’t expect was how it would make me feel: sad and angry and helpless and determined, all at the same time. Moreover, I didn’t expect to talk to so many men in genuine need of a movement that supports them, a movement that looks completely different from the one that had fomented online and was stoked by many who spoke at this three-day conference.
And you'll never guess what they called her.
Quiz: Can You Tell What Makes a Good Tweet? (Corrected)
The New York Times did a "how well do you know Twitter" quiz, pitting readers against a social media algorithm, and it's a lot of fun. I've tried three times and I can't break 19! But there's one problem:
What are these garbage tweets? This isn't the Twitter I know! This isn't the Twitter anybody knows. Here is a new version of the quiz, corrected and adjusted for the realities of ᴛʜᴇ sᴏᴄɪᴀʟ ᴡᴇʙ. Record your answers and check them at the end!
1. Which Tweet Was Retweeted More?
Ask Polly: I Had a Stillbirth and My Husband Totally Lacked Empathy
Dear Polly,
I think my husband is spineless, selfish, and prioritizes his convenience over my emotions.
Background: My husband is from another country. We visit for a month or so every summer, when he catches up with friends and family. I am cool with this. (I do wish he might also, I dunno, set some time aside for his *wife* during our only vacation time, but that's another letter). However, he has this one friend whom I would actually happily feed to rodents of an unusual size.
I had a stillbirth almost five years ago. It took a year to figure out what the problem was, during which I had two more miscarriages. They diagnosed me, I got pregnant again, I was considered high-risk, and I spent the next nine months giving myself shots once or twice a day and getting ultrasounds every week or two. The next time we went to his hometown, his dickweasel friend spent a good half hour merrily lecturing me on how American women abuse the system; how healthy women in *their* country only get two ultrasounds during their entire pregnancies; and how American kids are probably all going to have brain damage.
Assuming this idiot had completely forgotten the stillbirth of one of his supposedly closest friends’ firstborn, assuming he's too fucking stupid to do the math and think, huh, the lady I'm talking to might have some health issues that necessitate additional care, there's the fact I'M AMERICAN, five months pregnant, and he's assuring me my kid will be hideously damaged. I was feeling some pretty severe anxiety about the whole situation at the time. (For context, after a lifetime of avoiding psychotropic drugs, I went on anti-depressants a week after I found out I was pregnant, when my doc asked me if I was happy about the baby and I burst into tears out of sheer terror that something was going to go wrong with this one, too). So the fact that my husband sat there while his buddy went off on his little spiel, missed the fact that I was so upset that I spent the rest of the night on the porch desperately wishing I still smoked, and refused to drive me back to where we were staying so we slept at the dickweasel's house—none of that went over well.
Nevertheless, we came home, and it eventually blew over. Our son was born, and is delightful. Two years have passed, and I'm pregnant again. My husband is planning to celebrate his 40th birthday at the dickweasel's house (in keeping with his charming personality, the dickweasel refuses to go out anywhere during the annual get-togethers and makes people go to his place out in the boonies). I'm not going, and my husband is trying to guilt-trip me by whining about how he only sees his friends once a year.
I've never wanted a knight in shining armor, but I feel like my husband massively let me down by not intervening or speaking up for me after the fact, or even calling me a fucking taxi so I could get out of there. I'm usually pretty mouthy, but I was, a) out of my element in a foreign country where I don't speak the native tongue, b) kind of in shock that anybody would be so fucking cruel and insensitive, and c) vulnerable. Just plain vulnerable and hurt. I feel like he's compounding this every time he tries to bully me into letting it go and just making nice with his bro. I feel like he's placing the convenience of his having a feel-good reunion over the fact that I am PREGNANT again and ANXIOUS again and the thought of having to smile at that douchebag and grit my teeth and try not to punch him/cry if he makes any further cracks on this go-round is giving me massive agita. Hence this letter. Any tips on how I can convince my husband to get his head out of his ass? I will pretty obviously not be going to this party, but I'd like to figure out a way to dredge up some shred of respect or understanding for the father of my children.
P.S. Yes, we are in counseling. No, no common ground has been found on this issue.
The Ultrasound & The Fury
Dear TU&TF,
That sounds terrible and it couldn't be more of a perfect storm. You have PTSD, or similar feelings of extreme anxiety and stress around the stillbirth. Women who've been pregnant before can ALMOST attempt to understand how deeply traumatic and horribly sad that experience might have been for you. But I'm guessing that most of us can't touch the extreme hell of it. The physical and emotional recovery must take so long. And maybe it's never really complete. Because when you're pregnant again, it's pretty easy to conjure it all up: The vulnerability, the fragility, the fear. READ MORE
"Brooklyn is our home and we're already hard at work developing a freaky, space-age utopia that will give today's creative visionaries a place to produce astonishing stories and leave their indelible thumbprint on the annals of history," says a spokesperson for Vice.
Titus Andronicus, "Stranded (On My Own)"
It's a good sign, I think, that even as it becomes clear that every Titus Andronicus song is assembled from the same small bag of parts, they still work well. The fundamentals: they are strong! [Via]
The Cost of Being Exposed to HIV While Uninsured
To spoil the end before the beginning, this is a story about being exposed to HIV while not having health insurance, taking actions to prevent infection, and ending up successfully still HIV negative (several years and counting). Post-exposure prophylaxis (PEP) (taking a combination of anti-retrovirals (anti-HIV) medications as soon as you know you've been exposed to avoid being infected) works in many cases. It worked for me, and I am endlessly thankful that I had access to credit and adequate care to make it happen.
A few years ago, I was seeing someone who was HIV positive. I'm a cis woman; he's a cis man. He was infected either at birth or through breastfeeding, so he's been HIV positive effectively his entire life and has always been forthcoming and careful with his sexual partners. We always used condoms and other barrier methods.
The risk of transmission was higher than usual in his case because of his then-current health status. He'd been through multiple periods of serious depression earlier in life, during which he'd temporarily stopped taking his medication intermittently, and now met the medical definition for AIDS. Even though he'd gone back to taking his medication on time, every time while we were involved, this meant that he had even more copies of the virus active in his body than he had when he was "merely" HIV positive. (I am not a medical professional, so my layman's understanding should be viewed as an approximation and based on my memory of what I learned through this experience.)
We were in the process of mutually breaking up for reasons completely unrelated to his health when, as many people do during breakups, we slept together again one Saturday morning. This time, the condom came off during sex, and he did not notice until afterwards. To preempt a question I've been asked a few times when I've told this story, I've certainly also spent some time wondering how a man who has only ever had sex with a condom on would simply not notice if it came off, but it's a moot point: here we were. READ MORE
It has been more than a full moon cycle since one was able to purchase books published by Hachette in a reasonable manner from Amazon, which—despite selling books largely as an accident of history, and now essentially vestigially—has a forty percent share of new book sales in the U.S. But this hostage situation will apparently see only one resolution: the complete and utter capitulation of Hachette to whatever Amazon is demanding. Russ Grandinetti, a Kindle executive, told the Wall Street Journal that Amazon "was willing to suffer some damage to its reputation and was simply doing what is 'in the long-term interest of our customers.'" Books were nice while they lasted, right?
The Limits of Revivalism
Humans naturally gravitate toward easy chronologies, since it's how our brains work or whatever. So it's logical that after we all secretly teleported back to the vague (and vaguely historical!) era of "pre-Prohibition" to find a fancy booze culture worth restoring and replicating in metropolises across the globe, we would then creep forward in time from those hazy origins of the late eighteen hundreds or early nineteen hundreds, and revivify and adapt what we found next.
But, recently, as we progressed from Jerry Thomas's Improved Whiskey Cocktail through Harry Craddock's Corpse Reviver #2 and Trader Vic's Planter's Punch, we slipped into the hazy era between the fifties and the seventies when our parents, and their parents, finished the long work of Prohibition and ruined cocktail culture completely. In 2013, two places in New York, The Butterfly and Golden Cadillac, revived that particular strain of baroque and often disgusting mid-century food and drink culture, but like you know, with good ingredients and care, man. READ MORE
Nation Loses Game By Default
Game on! #BELvsUSA pic.twitter.com/8BIy7AuVmg
— Cinnabon (@Cinnabon) July 1, 2014
Let’s win this one @USsoccer – and then celebrate with a snack. #tothevictorgotheOreos #USAvsBEL
— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) July 1, 2014
We believe in Better pizza, and #USA! Do you? #BetterIngredients #BetterFutbol
— Papa John's Pizza (@PapaJohns) July 1, 2014
Want a #soccer player on the Wheaties box? You can make it happen! http://t.co/6xnKVqZc1e pic.twitter.com/8fmqV3Wy76
— General Mills (@GeneralMills) July 1, 2014
When we stand together as a nation, it's easier to find the strength to #powerthrough. #USA #BEL #worldcup pic.twitter.com/YmklK0cm2r
— POWERADE (@POWERADE) July 1, 2014
Breathing a minty sigh of relief after that awesome save. Let's GO, #USMNT! #USAvsBEL #PassTheLove pic.twitter.com/QZ8NffG1Bt
— Trident Gum (@tridentgum) July 1, 2014
All we want for #USA’s birthday is a win today! Go #USA! Rules: http://t.co/Dj1Mrj8euN #JCPCup #JCPScoreOnHeaders #GiveMeAYellowCardJCP
— JCPenney (@jcpenney) July 1, 2014
New York City, June 30, 2014
★★★★ What might have been a rural dream broke to twittering birds in the predawn dimness, the sound carrying up to the 27th floor. Out in the real morning, the clouds were interfering with the sun, and a damp breeze from downtown contended against the heat in a low-intensity pushing match. New tar shone wetly at the edge of a repaired patch in the street. In the afternoon, a line of cloud like a wing stretched along the sky in the west. It was hot up on the roof, but a heat cut by breezes, a fine natural heat, superior by far to the grim air conditioning below. A heat for louvered shades and cross-ventilation, for architectural counterrevolution. Dried red Japanese maple leaves lay curled up in the corner like dead insects. Down in the street, the balance of hot sun and breeze was less favorable. On the way toward the river in the late light, the sidewalk texture was overdefined, while everything higher up was impossible to look at. After sunset, the east and west alike were unobtrusively washed with pink, as was the south, at an avenue crossing. Fireflies seemed possible in the twilight, and then there they were, in the deeper shade by Lincoln Towers, brightening as they floated upward.
Children's Books for Young Feminists
Everyone knows there's a gender imbalance in children's literature. From Babar to The Cat in the Hat, kids' books tend to cast put boys in the lead roles, leaving young girls on the sidelines yet again. Here are a few of the most beloved children's books of all time, reimagined to ignite the feminist motors of little girls far and wide.
"When dollar vans first appeared in Queens, they faced significant opposition from city authorities, transit unions, and local police. But Queens is notable for how enmeshed vans have become in the borough’s transportation landscape. There are almost twice as many legal dollar vans in Queens as in Brooklyn and far fewer unlicensed, illegal vans. Vans in Queens have been afforded several loading and unloading spaces. In Queens, vans are starting to function like an official transportation system." -The city's burgeoning gray market van system sounds… kind of great?
Zella Day, "East of Eden"
A track that takes little pieces of all the sounds that you hear everywhere right now, wraps them in a big heavy blanket, and tells them to relax for a few minutes. [Via]
The Burrower, Part II
You discover a solution that saves you from the cockroaches: the Chair-Bed. Making the Chair-Bed is so blatantly easy you wonder, Why did it take ten months to reach this solution? To construct the Chair-Bed, you take four arm-less chairs and line them in a row. The back of the first chair serves as your headboard while the backs of the middle two chairs act as a barrier so you don’t roll over onto the floor in the middle of the night. Sure, it can feel like sleeping in an open casket. But the Chair-Bed is situated between your brightly decorated desk and a row of tall file cabinets which provide the perfect amount of freedom and secrecy you so desire. With your sleeping bag, travel-sized pillow and airplane blankets, you now have a bedroom that can be assembled in less than five minutes and stored away in your bottom desk drawer.
THE BATHROOM
You have patience. You have lived in foreign villages without water and have hiked days in the same clothes, so you know you can go weeks without showering. You have no qualms about not having a private bathroom. You quickly learn though that one of the benefits to squatting at a University is that there is no shortage of public restrooms or showers.
At first you use the restroom close to the Storage Room and it proves to be small, inconvenient and embarrassing. Brushing your teeth in the only sink in the bathroom adds to the desperation aesthetic. You find the pool in the subbasement and you know that where there is a pool there is a shower. The shower room is a small space with broken yellow tiles. Its overhead lights give it a dismal mustard-yellow glow. The smell of chlorine is strong and it makes you feel as if maybe you’re on a vacation in a hotel desperately trying to re-live its glory days. You shower on Fridays as a treat to yourself, and your change in attitude, and appearance, is noticed by many in the office. When somebody asks how your morning is going you reply with an enthusiastic “I showered today,” as if it should warrant a trophy. On days when you don’t shower you resort to your endless supply of wet-wipes for a quick “Military Shower," as your father once dubbed it. READ MORE
"Beginning in July, AP will initially check automated stories before they are published. But the goal is to be fully automated by the end of the year." — Will you care when your news is written by machines? Will you accuse the machines of bias, malice, or ignorance, and do so in the comments? Or will this hallowed national pastime lose its appeal and fade away? It's not the same, throwing rotten tomatoes at a projection screen; who will bother to impugn the robot writers?
Six Essential Hobby Lobby Products (And Where To Buy Them Now)
Hobby Lobby doesn't want its health plans to provide contraception to its employees, and the Supreme Court says that's fine. So where is a conscientious shopper supposed to go now? Some recommendations.
Try DollsPart Supply! READ MORE
Brand Evolves
The New York Times nervously ponders the evolution of a Harlem, a neighborhood whose core now has fewer black residents "than at any time since [Charles] Rangel was first elected in 1970" and is now eleven percent white.
More than ever, Harlem is less a clearly identified voting bloc than an idea. A brand. … Viewed from on top of those tour buses, Harlem is banking on a future tied to its legacy. Its currency is authenticity, a term that Harlem stakeholders added to their conversations as though pouring hot sauce and syrup over an order of chicken and waffles.
Leaving aside the problem with this imagery, this is (in theory!) in part the kind of transformation that every neighborhood with a name sort of desires, the transmutation into a idea that is boundless—a hashtag. But it's curious, in some ways, to marvel at the notion of Harlem as a legitimate branding exercise—that is, one that is more brand than any other function of its identifier—as a new thing. The Harlem brand, one might say, has always been #strong, for better or for ill, and seemingly more elastic than a neighborhood whose name merely signifies "good schools," or "annoying weekend crowd" or "a real estate broker just thought of this."
The fear of a brand planet is rooted in the notion that the transubstantiation from place or thing to Brand necessarily displaces the thing it represents, a fear that manifests most visibly as an obsession with authenticity—the irony being, of course, that the quest for authenticity is the primary marker that a thing has become nothing but a brand.
Compare and Contrast: Emily Gould's "Friendship" and Amy Sohn's "The Actress"
It's publication day for both Amy Sohn and Emily Gould! Because they're both women, we should look inside these two new novels and see what they have in common! Isn't that the totally obvious and meaningful thing to do if you sit back and think about it for a minute???
• Both women.
• Written in English.
• Books are printed on off-white-ish paper with black-ish ink.
• Both contain women speaking out loud sometimes.
• Neither are Lena Dunham somehow???
• The first word of both books is "the."
• Emily's is blurbed by three men and one woman and Amy's is blurbed by all women (ooh and one man! The symmetry!).
• Both authors clearly have loose morals because they have spoken too frankly in public, particularly about sex, and therefore should not be taken seriously.
• Both books seem to be demands for attention, because they were both published.
• Neither are Mira Jacob, who also is a woman with a book out today, called The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, but she gets compared to Jhumpa Lahiri in Kirkus instead, because, whispers, you know, her parents are from India, so she's definitely not Lena Dunham, even though she grew up in New Mexico and went to Oberlin and lives in Brooklyn just like everyone else.
Why not buy all of them—here's Emily's and here's Amy's and here's Mira's—and see just how much these women books have in common! Or just buy one, surely they're totally identical in most ways. READ MORE
"There was more data pushed through on this film than on anything we've ever done." Data always wins. How else to explain Transformers $300 million opening weekend? The people demand data in all forms. So give them more data! Feed it through every available input.
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