Good reads this week
- Tori Telfer, Toxic Shock: Why This Woman Is Suing a Tampon Company After Losing Her Leg
- Boris Kachka, The Last Human Robot
- Boris Kachka, 7 Books You Need to Read This December
- Ariel Levy, Dolls and Feelings (Levy’s article makes me wish I had talent for writing.)
- “This was the beginning of a downward slide. “It starts with: You’re fired from ‘United States of Tara.’ You’re fired from ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ because Shonda”—Rhimes, who went on to create “Scandal”—“doesn’t really feel like you’re giving it your all. But, O.K., wait, you’re going to go work with HBO! No, you’re not—they’re actually going to work with this person Lena Dunham, and everybody wonders if you guys are related. Or: ‘She really seems like she was sprung from your rib, Jill.’ People were, like, it’s you, but younger and better.” It was then that Soloway had the doomed meeting about “Glee”—in what, as it happens, is now her office on the Paramount lot.” *
- ““Femininity is like alcohol,” Soloway told me. “I never know how much to take before I throw up.” In “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants,” a book of essays that she published in 2005, she wrote, “Pointy shoes make me want to cry. Anything Sarah Jessica Parker ever wore makes me want to cry.” She describes “an elemental nausea about the very fact of my gender,” brought on by “a truth I wanted to hide from: that being a woman meant being watched. I wanted to be a watcher.” Soloway talks a lot in that book about her fascination with women who are “dick candy,” like strippers and porn stars: women who are watched because they have mastered—or are mastered by—the appearance of flawless femininity.”*
- “She says aloud what so many virgins have said in their minds: “I don’t know what to do.””*
- Faine Greenwood, The Hot New Development in Falconry
- Katy Waldman, There Once Was a Girl
- Joanna Goddard, How Did Your Parents Embarrass You?
- Sarah Jacoby, 10 Poignant Photos Show What It’s Really Like To Have Schizoaffective Disorder
- Rebecca Onion & Aymann Ismail, Watch American Yearbook Photos Evolve Over 108 Years
- Julie Beck, The Linguistics of ‘YouTube Voice’
- Scott Slovic and Paul Slovic, The Arithmetic of Compassion
- Lisa Rubisch, Style Wars
- “All the things my mom did to embarrass me—the juice-can-sized hot rollers in front of my teenaged boyfriends, her penchant for Capri pants, the Walk Like an Egyptian move she still does when she scores a sale or wins at Scrabble? I don’t do that.”*
Feature photo my own.
XO,
H
Hannahloulou 