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This is the end of the first week for The Hairpin and the Prisoner of Azkaban; it's been quite the ride, hasn't it? We cut through the Aquanet fog and discovered that Mark-Paul Gosselaar was part Indonesian and had to dye his hair to keep up Normal Blond American Male appearances (!!!), got our horoscopes read by a galactic rabbit, almost got rabies, explored the devil's garden, read only the good parts of Vogue, learned a little French with Amour et Turbulences, traveled to distant lands with our distant boyfriends, paired literary figures with their perfumes, questioned the necessity of hygiene, and shut down the blame on celebrities in this week's nude hacking scandal. We did good.

Behind the scenes: Haley kept it together like a goddamned goddess, I asked a lot of questions about Canada, and nobody died. We're happy and proud of what we've done so far, but we want to hear from you too: email or comment or tweet or just show up at our houses, if you want, as long as you have cake.

Meanwhile, across town, in other lady news: Our genius friend Mary H.K. Choi wrote a book; the beautiful and terrifying Mallory Ortberg gave a kickass reading in Brooklyn to throngs of literary minded women in button down shirts and oversized glasses (I was one of them); Heather Havilresky wrote this wonderful, crazypants piece in the New Yorker. I have gone 14 days without a burrito and am growing weaker by the second. Some girls are stronger than others. See you Monday. Here's a photo of my dog.

Twelve years ago I fell in love with Carole Murphy and Mitzi Fitzsimmons, two characters developed and portrayed by Beth Lisick and Tara Jepsen. Like Beth and Tara, Carole and Mitzi are performers. Unlike Beth and Tara, they are also codependent platonic life partners, bath house custodians, and terrible dressers who inhabit a gleeful, carefree limbo that is somehow both geriatric and adolescent. Their reliably hilarious misadventures remind us that there’s something inherently weird about womanhood.

In their new web series, "Rods and Cones", Carole and Mitzi are navigating a burgeoning rivalry. Their opponents are the MILFies, a pair of performance-artists-turned-comedians played by the brilliant Jibz Cameron and Erin Markey. Carole and Mitzi flail while the MILFies strategize, serving as frenemies and perfect comic foils. The resulting interactions between stylish cool girls and blissfully unaware weirdos are both deeply satisfying and totally hilarious.

I sat down to interview Beth and Tara at Beth’s apartment in Brooklyn as they put the finishing touches on "Rods and Cones." We talked about their fifteen-year-long collaboration as Carole and Mitzi, as well as the amazingly detailed backstory they’ve developed for their characters, one which nests quite neatly inside their own. READ MORE

Two weeks ago, my social media feeds were rife with news about Michael Brown's murder in Ferguson. Every night, for too many nights, I sat glued to my computer, watching the livestreams of demonstrations, reading the tweets by the activists and journalists on the scene, listening to a broken city that wanted to capture the world's attention.

We were enraptured: the New Yorker dedicated a cover to it, #iftheygunnedmedown trended on Twitter for days, Lauryn Hill put out a new song dedicated to Ferguson. Though coverage is quieting down, the upheaval is not yet close to resolution. A refresher: Darren Wilson is still in hiding, Eric Holder is investigating the Ferguson police for "routine" racial profiling or excessive force, and public fundraising efforts for Wilson have been shut down, after raising almost half a million dollars, due to the anonymity of each page's founder.

Want more? Nadia Barhoum at Al Jazeera has a great article comparing the rhetoric of racism in Ferguson and Palestine, and how systematic, state-based racism and prejudices stifle empathy, and Newsweek's Pema Levy points out that the already racially divisive city had just seen an election drawn almost exactly along racial lines. Ferguson, we're still with you.

Natalie Eve Garrett is an artist, writer and sea creature. Prints of her paintings are for sale here.

The summer I was 22, I tagged along with a group of samba percussionists to a music festival at an organic farm in southern Ontario. My ride would be free so long as I assumed the role of “Bus Captain” on the decrepit yellow school bus they'd rented for the occasion.

I was about to enter the fifth year of my undergrad degree—an attempt at postponing Real Life. I'd just returned from a summer of data entry temp work in my Midwestern hometown and was not quite a grown-up but definitely, somehow, a woman. The cubicles that had neighbored mine in the office complex were occupied by lifers of secretarial school vintage. There was the meticulous brunette whose current weight loss scheme involved a plot to contract salmonella from that season's national outbreak of contaminated tomatoes, and—my favorite—the whip-smart grandmother who'd introduced herself by verifying that I was, in fact, related to the same long-retired Dr. Korducki who had once been her OBGYN. “He delivered all three of my babies!” she kvelled. “Such a good doctor, so old-school and gentle. Even though, between you and me, he had serious sausage fingers.”

In our break room, our conversations all had the frank familiarity of a group with little in common apart from the intermittent hilarities of being women. Half-hearted exchanges on muggy weather found their stride only after talk turned to boob sweat (“If they don't turn up the AC I'm gonna have the Rio Grande running down my top”) or how much the Pill sucked in the '70s (“Dried you out so bad, you could start a campfire down there”).

So when, on the yellow bus, a girls' school biology teacher in her late-twenties explained that her students' first assignment each year was to take a hand mirror to their buttholes and “really let yourself take it in,” I got where she was coming from. READ MORE

Dear Star Bunnies,

Thank you for your patience and your readership. I am honored to write these star-meditations for you. Each month I take a deep retreat into my bunny-shaped third eye and lure the words for you. This time, more than any other so far, I have felt a love knot in the sky. What I mean is: a circle cast that invokes each planet. The chant? Move or be moved. I believe in our collective power, our ability to change the world as it changes us.
Welcome the new season, sweet ones, as it welcomes you.

Yours,
Galactic Rabbit READ MORE

When I remember AP English classes, I don’t necessarily remember the details of the books I read, but snippets of descriptions. The sickly sweet vanilla decay of Miss Havisham and her wedding despair. Wilted roses and arsenic, the dead romance and salted berries of Hill House. Even when I’m reading a guilty pleasure novel (no pleasure is guilty, though, to be honest)—I like to imagine the smells. Smells promote fantasy; they're all about desire. READ MORE

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. No, jk, today is the first day of New York Fashion Week, which also marks the beginning of Fashion Month – after New York, London, Milan, and Paris Fashion Week follow.

If you'd like to get technical, today is also the beginning of some kind of Fashion Quarter, considering that there are more Fashion Weeks in more cities than ever before. Toronto (hi), Vancouver, Montreal, Los Angeles, Dubai, Tokyo, Brazil, Copenhagen, and even Cleveland have their own Fashion Weeks, although their relevance and necessity are, shall we say, debatable.

This is the month that counts for buyers, designers, octopus-armed conglomerates, the beautiful men and women in attendance and the street style photographers who preserve them in slideshows, because women's ready-to-wear is, I would say, the most important spoke in the ever-turning wheel of fashion. It's more relevant than couture, more established than the men's fashion, more suited to the spectator sport aspect of the fashion industry that thrives during Fashion Month.

I once tried to write an essay about the fashion show and, by extension, the history of fashion weeks and it is, bizarrely, one of the least researched aspects of the entire industry. There are a lot of strange things that happen in fashion that can be explained by momentum—the adoption of a certain model, a certain trend, a certain designer moving like a very, very elegant Slinky traveling down stairs—but the runway has momentum on a whole other level. The people I interviewed were shocked that I had even asked if it was worth it (except, of course, for the people I interviewed because they had chosen to reject runway shows in favor of something more beneficial to their companies). It is just, as they say, what you do. READ MORE

On Sunday night, a hacker leaked stolen nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence (among a host of other female stars) and dumped them into the Internet’s toilet, 4Chan. As a result, this week the media has been even more obsessed with celebrities’ bodies than usual. The pictures were rapidly disseminated, and it wasn’t long before Twitter was thronging with breathless, sweaty men typing one-handed reviews of the pictures, while other people (women, mostly) exhorted them to have some decency. Perhaps awash in pink-cheeked, post-masturbatory guilt, the men began to defend themselves: "She's famous!” they wailed, "What does she expect?", and "The pictures are out now, there's no harm in looking!" Some pointed out that the nudes were high quality, so Lawrence needn't feel bad about them, while other thin-lipped puritans chided her for taking the photos in the first place.

These men vomited out the same victim-blaming horseshit they can be reliably expected to spout in the wake of a woman’s violation. We’re all wading waist-deep in a culture that socializes men to treat women’s bodies as though they are property, so it’s not surprising that men felt entitled to look at the pictures and then loudly absolve themselves of guilt afterwards. Let's look at each of the excuses in turn: READ MORE

It was early fall 2005 and I was driving cross-country in a station wagon I had impulsively bought from a woman in a department store parking lot in downtown Seattle. (What? She had the paperwork. It was fine.) I had given her most of my savings, so I decided, when possible, to car camp my way back home to New York City. In Moab, Utah, at dusty, red Arches National Park, I found a campground by the Colorado River. I would sleep in the shadow of the Fiery Furnaces, and I had even seen signs for something called the Devil’s Garden. I hadn’t meant to get Biblical. I just wanted to save some money. READ MORE