Staunchly, vol. 92: Brown Lipstick
The gendered campaign coverage this cycle is turning my stomach. Did I expect anything different? Obviously not. But my tolerance for the boy-wunderkind-fresh-cool-exciting-go-getter-Sal-Paradise-softboi-punk-cowboy vs. ruthless-ball-buster-political-operator-Tracy-Flick-killjoy-silly-young-thing-just-a-waitress narrative is maxed out, and the election is still 573 days away. Help.
How much can we actually trust journalistic institutions to hold powerful men in media accountable? This piece by Irin Carmon about her reporting for the Washington Post on disgraced CBS boss Jeff Fager and the pushback from Post editor Marty Baron (of Spotlight fame and Schreiber resemblance) is incredibly disheartening. But it gives me hope that writers like Carmon feel emboldened to make these shady backdoor dealings public.
“A cookie in place of a poem, a cake in place of a story”: Writing as baking and baking as writing and why the act of creation, the promise of imperfect, comparatively immediate deliciousness, is so seductive to a writer.
Pink lipstick and the act of loving the things we thought we hated because we were told to love them.
When I was younger, being a grown woman meant having a checkbook and wearing brown lipstick. I have no idea what being an adult means anymore.
Slate contrariarism is so tired, but this is a #slatetake I desperately needed: why we as individuals shouldn’t worry about a super fungus (except the one in the oval office! Boom!).
“There’s a ‘nice illusion of variety’ in temp work, she thinks, ‘like how people switch out their cats’ wet food from Chicken and Liver to Sea Bass, but in the end, it’s all just flavored anus.’”
I’m running out of ways to breathlessly describe Jia Tolentino’s work, but every word she writes in her review of Halle Butler’s recently-published novel, The New Me, has me gnawing off my fingernails with excitement to read it. Gloomily-observed millennial office fiction with lines like, it’s all just flavored anus? My cuticles are bald, but my cart is full.
I started Game of Thrones in the middle of February. And I’m on track to be all caught up before the season premiere on Sunday. This is not a brag. This is sick. I’m obsessed with the show, but I’m an obsessive person by nature. It’s also problematic as hell. It’s a brilliant political drama crafted by a bunch of male writers who earnestly (I think) believe that allowing their female characters to emerge triumphant—albeit bleeding, raped, mutilated, covered in shit—after literal seasons of torture porn justifies the exploitive brutality and prurience of their storylines. It doesn’t.