HELLO and welcome to the 150th 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 Nicki Minaj! 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.
Arrested Development (May 2014), by Virginia Hughes for Mosaic Science – A scientist desperate to figure out a medical solution to the aging process has focused his research on children who show signs of a rare and specific disorder that prevents them from aging — like Gabby Williams, who at age 9 still only weighed 12 pounds, or Brooke Greenberg, who died at age 20 weighing only 16 pounds and still looking like a baby. It’s pretty interesting w/r/t also the ethics and societal consequences of actually figuring out how to delay aging.
The Split (October 2014) by Michael McKnight for Sports Illustrated – “Twenty-five years after Donnie Moore’s death, it’s time to dispel the myth that the pitcher killed himself because of a playoff home run. The truth is both darker and more relatable.” You should read this on the Sports Illustrated website because it’s got a lot of pullquotes that show up in weird places when you’re reading it offline.
Two Undocumented Kids Made It To Connecticut But That’s Only the Beginning (September 2014), by Nicolás Medina Mora for Buzzfeed – A very intense piece following two young people who made it out of Central America and into the United States against all odds, but obviously things weren’t so easy from there.
*The Price of Black Ambition (October 2014), by Roxane Gay for The Virginia Quarterly Review – “I have achieved a modicum of success, but I never stop working. I never stop. I don’t even feel the flush of pleasure I once did when I achieve a new milestone. I am having a moment, but I only want more. I need more. I cannot merely be good enough because I am chased by the pernicious whispers that I might only be “good enough for a black woman.”
The Underpaid Grunts of TV Talk Show Land (October 2014), by Aitana Vargas for Narrative.ly – I always thought that the audiences in TV Talk Shows were people who desperately wanted to be there and had waited outside in the cold all morning, but I guess that’s not true for all the shows, only for shows like Oprah and The View. The rest of them pay people barely minimum wage to sit in seats and pretend to be happy, it’s like a whole industry, and it’s also an industry that takes advantage of undocumented workers.
This Place Makes Everyone a Gambler (June 2014), by Alice Bolin for The Believer – This is about Los Angeles, and Joan Didion, and Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan, and gambling, and nothing, and nothingness, and depression, and the highways, and high-profile Hollywood murders, and the desert, and Hollywood, and Play it As It Lays, and crime stories, and Dateline NBC, and murder in Los Angeles suburbs.
Nicki Minaj: Cheeky Genius (November 2014), by Taffy Brodesser-Akner for GQ – “You heard it here first. “Anaconda” is about a snake, and also about a woman’s ex-boyfriends, and the video is just one big slumber party. You can release a record cover into the atmosphere that makes all who see it so shocked and discomforted that their only way to metabolize it is to turn it into the world’s fastest-spreading meme, to the point where her squatting form ends up on a polo shirt, right where the little crocodile usually goes. You can do all this, and still you can look someone in the eye and say that it’s not cynical in the least, that it’s not a comment on gender or sex or the culture or anything. Double shrug. These are not the droids you’re looking for.”
Heil Hipster (June 2014), by Patrick Schroeder for Rolling Stone – Well, this look “inside the tote-bag friendly “Harlem Shake” happy world of Germany’s nipsters” is horrifying.
Um, so, everything about the, “nipster,” movement is mildly (to wildly) terrifying. For serious, yikes. Yikes all around.
Also kind of a different note, but I’m SUPER bummed that Total Nightmare Neo Nazi Guy Number One has a sidekick who goes by Vendetta whilst wearing a Guy Fawkes mask.
Because roses.
Isn’t it scary to think about the possibility that they find out how to stop ageing…but when our generation (whatever your generation is) is, say, 70. So we have aged, as naturally as one does by, say 2085. But the people younger than us have stopped. So there’s this dying breed of the last generation of proper wrinkly oldish people! And maybe they’d study us, with microscopes.
haha you don’t think they would have applied this thing to the old people too? so they’ll be perpetually 70? not that aging will be eradicated, i’m sure cost will come into it :/
any time an economy struggles, i find, the citizens will become intolerant and divisive. Once i finish my bachelors i hope to get my masters in Germany. Its free education is an incredibly attractive deal. But if the economy continues its fluctuation, i predict these “nipster nazis” gaining even more members. As a gay African, needless to say, its something i have to consider if i want to go there to get my masters
I don’t think I could tolerate listening to the radio for more than 10 minutes at a time if Nicki Minaj didn’t exist