HELLO and welcome to the 242nd installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about working at Uber! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
Is British Fast Fashion Too Fast?, by Chavie Lieber for Racked, May 2017
Did you know that ASOS originally stood for “as seen on screen” and it started out as these guys selling clothes that matched clothes seen on tv shows and movies? All of this information and more could be yours if you take the time to read this fantastic piece on Racked.
How Gotham Gave Us Trump, by Michael Kruse for Politico, July/August 2017
How Donald Trump, who made his dubious fortune in cities, has kind of also always hated cities and the people who live in them and has always been terrible and a joke HAHAHAA AND NOW HE’S PRESIDENT WHAT HAPPENED
Trouble in Paradise, by William Prochnau and Laura Parker for Vanity Fair, December 2007
THIS. IS. BONKERS. I don’t even know how to explain this to you, so here’s how Vanity Fair did it: “Settled in 1790 by mutineers from the storied H.M.S. Bounty, Pitcairn Island is one of the British Empire’s most isolated remnants, a mystical hunk of rock that was largely ignored until 1996. Then Pitcairn’s secret was exposed: generations of rape and child molestation as a way of life. Delving into the South Pacific island’s past, the authors chronicle its 10-year clash with the British legal system, which ripped apart a tiny society.”
How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace, by Jon Billman for Outside Magazine, March 2017
This is also bonkers! Apparently lots of people go missing from National Parks for reasons that typically remain unclear and this uses the story of one of the disappeared to tell the larger story of so many disappeared.
Why the Emoji Was Inevitable, by Vyvyan Evans for Nautilus, July 2017
This makes a good case for itself and then afterwards you’re like, “wait a second, written communication is as old as the hills and has functioned for centuries without emojis?” and then you don’t know what to think about anything really, ever, maybe never again.
Inside the Pied Piper of R&B’s “CULT”: Parents Told Police Their Daughter Is Being Held Against Her Will In R. Kelly’s “Cult”, by Jim DeRogatis for Buzzfeed, July 2017
I’m only human and therefore will behave as humans do, reading this article and being upset about it.
“What Are You Doing Here, Sister?”, by Lamya H for The Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2017
It will not surprise you to hear that I would like this person to write for Autostraddle. (UPDATE: RACHEL REMINDED ME THAT THIS PERSON HAS WRITTEN FOR AUTOSTRADDLE, SO IN FACT WHAT I WOULD LIKE IS FOR HER TO WRITE MORE FOR AUTOSTRADDLE)
I’m ready to be back in this city, in this fragile balance I know. In this city where anonymity is not a luxury, where queerness thrives, but brownness is marginalized, criminalized, surveilled.
Teen Zine Queens, by Britta Lokting for Narrative.ly, July 2017
Apparently, ‘zines are COMING BACK, even though we have never stopped loving them and talking about them right here on this website. This gets into the history of ‘zines and talks about some teenage girls who are making kickass and super popular ‘zines right now!!
A Mother’s Death, a Botched Inquiry and a Sheriff at War, by Walt Bogdanich for The New York Times, June 2017
If you wanna meet somebody who definitely without-a-doubt voted for Donald Trump and is one of the few people who still approves of his conduct, meet this terrile Sheriff! Trump isn’t part of this piece, or even mentioned in it, but reading it I kept thinking of him, due to my theory that a lot of the men who voted for Trump did so because they have the same insufferable personality that Trump does, and his rise affirmed their own sense of themselves as good people despite lying all the time, abusing women, and not caring about anybody besides their own damn selves!
The Wife of the Accused, by Arthur Bell for Esquire Magazine, November 1975
This is some serious murder business, my friends. Joseph Kallinger and his 13-year-old son Michael were charged with “a series of bizarre and ugly crimes that terrorized suburban housewives in Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey for two months and ended with the murder of a young woman in New Jersey.” This article is focused on his wife, and on the trial, and doesn’t get into the full scope of this man’s life and prveious crimes and also the abusive home he grew up in. It’s a brutal and sickening story.
Youth From Every Quarter, by Kirstin Valdez Quade from “Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation,” July 2017
It’s a worthy, essential aim to seek “youth from every quarter.” Institutions and individuals have a responsibility to work against centuries of structural inequality. And I’ve seen both as a student and a professor the myriad ways diverse voices do indeed make for a richer learning environment. But it should go without saying that it’s not enough for elite institutions to accept students from racially, ethnically, and economically diverse backgrounds if those students are then told in a thousand ways—ways tiny and large, oblique and direct—that they are only there at the whim of the powers that be, that they haven’t paid for the privilege to err or falter, that, at root, they don’t belong.
How Uber’s Hard-Charging Corporate Culture Left Employees Drained, by Caroline O’Donovan and Priya Anand for Buzzfeed News, July 2017
This is FUCKED UP. Basically it’s a company run by assholes and the company rewards assholes for being assholes and everybody else is having panic attacks and working 80 hours a week and buying their own plane tickets to “workcations” and slowly losing their minds and bodies and will to live.
That article by Lamya H is so good!
Riese!!!! You have outdone yourself. I am inordinately interested in ALL OF THESE.
Also, I keep thinking about how R. Kelly is literally lurking in the background of Aaliyah’s “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number” album cover. I can’t stop. Ugh ugh ugh ugh.
Yeah, and knowing he wrote the song and the lyrics *barf*
Another tale of search and rescue in wild lands:
http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hunt-for-the-death-valley-germans/
I thought the show Gotham gave us Donald Trump and was about to get very upset at Fox
The NY post and the NY Daily news gave us Trump. He lived on every word they printed about him good or bad.
One of my college aquaintences went missing three years ago, so the missing persons article hit very close to home. It was perversely comforting to read how poorly organized these searches are, because then there’s actually a reason for the pervasive sense that people aren’t doing anything–they might not actually have money for it, or the skillset, and there’s no standards for searching at all??? I am not politically savvy enough to know what kind of legislation might fix the problem, but if anyone knows of any projects to get some passed I am gonna be behind it 100%.
I remember reading about Pitcairn when they passed a law to allow gay marriage a couple years ago and I thought it was such a nice ideas, having destination weddings on this beautiful accepting little island in the Pacific. Turns out reality is a little more bleak.