HELLO and welcome to the 204th 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 Kim Kardashian! 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.
What Happens When Life Turns You Into a New Kind of Traveler? by Leslie Jaimson for Afar, June 2016
But I learned something from how Lily traveled as well. She got excited about the parts of traveling that I could easily dismiss as packaging around the actual “experience.” She loved putting our laptops into bins on the baggage belt at airport security. She adored the water taxi, those bursts of spray when it smacked the choppy water. “This. Is. Awesome,” she said, giving each word its own moment. She defeated the notion of child as ego extension. She wasn’t a sculpture we shaped from clay, an incarnation of our vision for what she should be. She was beautifully and inevitably herself—an engine of curiosity running on peanut butter and watermelon juice.
All LinkedIn With Nowhere To Go, by Ann Friedman for The Baffler, 2013
THIS WAS SO GOOD ANN FRIEDMAN IS SO SMART AND PERFECT. How did I not already read this in 2013 though? That’s my #1 question.
LinkedIn merely digitizes the core, and frequently cruel, paradox of networking events and conferences. You show up at such gatherings because you want to know more important people in your line of work—but the only people mingling are those who, like you, don’t seem to know anyone important. You just end up talking to the sad sacks you already know. From this crushing realization, the paradoxes multiply on up through the social food chain: those who are at the top of the field are at this event only to entice paying attendees, soak up the speaking fees, and slip out the back door after politely declining the modest swag bag. They’re not standing around on garish hotel ballroom carpet with a plastic cup of cheap chardonnay in one hand and a stack of business cards in the other.
Hillary Clinton vs. Herself, by Rebecca Traister for New York Magazine, May 2016
I read this on an airplane and afterwards I felt, “That was interesting. I’m glad I read it.” Then Abby took a picture out the window.
The Kim Kardashian West GQ Cover Story, by Caity Weaver for GQ, June 2016
This was so good I almost forgot that I’ve been waiting all night for Orange is the new Black to come on. Caity Weaver is hilarious. I wish I was Caity Weaver.
Kim has so thoroughly monetized the very act of living that the money she earns from being filmed going about her life constitutes a relatively small sum compared with the one she generates from allowing people to see pictures and cartoon drawings of the life she has already filmed. She has figured out how to spin the mundanity of being herself—something billions of people do every day for free—into a more lucrative business than being the most famous rapper in the world.
How Blac Chyna Beat The Kardashians At Their Own Game, by Sylvia Obell for Buzzfeed, May 2016
Obviously after reading that piece, I finally had the motivation I needed to read this piece about Stef’s favorite paparazzi
How Did One Of The Worst Paedophiles In History Get Away With His Crimes?, by Robert Booth for The Guardian, June 2016
Just in case you had like one shred of faith left in the world, here’s this.
The Audition, by Sydney Brownstone for The Stranger, June 2016
JK HERE IS THE THING TO KILL YOUR LAST SHRED OF FAITH IN THE WORLD. No but um, wow this guy is a creep! This is about a guy who is a rapist and a creep.
What Happened to The Most Liberated Woman in America? by Alex Mar for Atlas Obscura, June 2016
Barbara Williamson and her husband started a “radical sex experiment” in the 1970s where they basically bought an estate in Laurel Canyon and made it into a big polyamorous living situation where everybody was nude and had sex with each other. It didn’t work out super-well though really.
Okay but can we agree to never mention boobs and splinters in the same sentence again?
ouch.
That pedophile article is harrowing. But I wonder if not enough credit has been given to the housekeeper who, you know, stole the computer equipment and gave it to the FBI (at least that is how I understood it) and started the process of him being caught.
Man, that Afar article. I’ve taken my daughter to the same island, done some of the same things and had some of the same feelings about all of it. Particularly this part, “our obligations as parents don’t displace our obligations to strangers, and the act of caring for a child doesn’t obscure the inequalities that emerge with clarity whenever Westerners arrive in the developing world—hungry for its beauty, for its difference, for its coral reefs and ancient temples.”
I don’t understand LinkedIn being worth so much money, but maybe it’s because I’m not in an industry where it’s *that* useful?