HELLO and welcome to the 268th 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 KFC Christmas! 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.
Wanting Bad Things: Andrea Long Chu responds to Amia Srinivasan, by Andrea Long Chu and Anastasia Berg for The Point, July 2018
A fascinating conversation about the politics of sexual desire and so much more. My favorite thing I read this week! I recommend highly!
“I have a lot of sympathy for the separatist position on a personal level because it feels like it’s meaningfully descriptive of something that I felt myself in terms of my own transition. I did feel like it was an act of _defiance_ or an act of just rejection: I have _never_ wanted to spend time with men, least of all myself! And so at some point I just put that into practice. I was my _own_ Second West Coast Lesbian Conference of 1973.”
Living with Slenderman, by Kathleen Hale for Hazlitt, January 2018
This story is the kind that you read about right after it happens and then never again, and there’s so much in here I didn’t know — this piece ends up really being an indictment of how the criminal justice system treats mentally ill teenagers.
The True Meaning of KFC Christmas, by Nina Li Coomes, December 2017
This is a nice essay about family and holidays and the food that brings us all together and it ALSO alerted me to a thing that I did not know, which is that in Japan, the Kentucky Fried Chicken Christmas Barrel is a phenomenon and a Christmas tradition.
How Do You Rebuild Your Life After Leaving A Polygamous Sect?, by Anne Helen Petersen for Buzzfeed, July 2018
Honestly who has not asked themselves this question at least once.
In the Dark All Katz Are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia, by Samuel Ashworth for Hazlitt, February 2018
I was very close to doing that thing I do on instapaper where I accept my truths and admit it’s been sitting there for too long for me to kid myself into thinking I’m ever going to read it. But I thought, let me give it a chance. I was on an airplane at the time. And oh boy, I loved this! I loved it so much! It’s about Dirty Dancing and also like, all this intense beautiful Jewish thought. “With the benefit of hindsight we can see Dirty Dancing for what it is: a Jewish horror movie” = what a perfect sentiment!!
Welcome to Powder Mountain – a utopian club for the millennial elite, by Paul Lewis for The Guardian, March 2018
These guys I just… wow. If you want to feel annoyed and frustrated with a few rich white tech bros today then… have I got the thing for you!
This Is the Girl, by Philippa Snow for The Point, Spring 2018
I would say that a meditation of this nature on Lindsay Lohan is something I didn’t know I wanted or needed but that would be a lie, I’ve said that I want this and now I have it, because the good lord provides. What I didn’t know, however, was that I needed it to also be about David Lynch.
A mystery’s solution is synonymous, in fiction, with the truth. Lindsay Lohan has desired to murder one half of herself for years. I could not say which half was which: which half the would-be murderess, and which the victim. I might say it depended on the host, her mood, the hour, the dawn-blue desperation of the moment.
Three Trials for Murder, by Nicholas Schmidle for The New Yorker, November 2011
Well, this is what it sounds like. A very rare case in which a man accused of murder was tried repeatedly, finally because of a loophole enabled by him being a member of the military.
Alt-Right Troll To Father Killer: The Unraveling Of Lane Davis, by Joseph Bernstein for BuzzFeed News, July 2018
A deep journey into the online alt-right and one man who thrived within it by promoting stories about the left’s ties to pedophilia (apparently this is a thing now with the alt-right? Proving that all left-wing everything is secretly about pedophilia?) and then murdered his Dad.
Bourdain Confidential, by Maria Bustillos for Popula, July 2018
A winding set of excerpts from an extensive interview Maria did with Anthony Bourdain this past February — touching on every topic under the sun, including of course food and travel but also sexual harassment and the inanity of the New York Times Op-Ed pages and, at one point, Joan Didion!
So so good, as always. Thank you. The bits about how far the hosts and contributers on alt right websites think it’s a game… that could definitely use exploring. I think it would also be interesting levelling that question at the left- I’m never sure, especially when reading the NYT or the Guardian, how left the left would be when personally tested. I mean, it seems crazy that people are thinking along the lines of a cultural civil war, when actually, if everyone spent a bit of time dialling back their rhetoric, which I’m not sure how much they believe when challenged anyway, some of the ridiculous things that are happening might be put behind us. I can live in hope.
LEGAL LOOPHOLES ARE SO WACKY omg the Tim Hennis case is such a wild ride every time.
As always, thank you for the public service that is this column, Riese.
I read the Alt-Right murder story yesterday and was absolutely certain you would post it here, and you did not disappoint.
Oh wow thank you that powder mountain story was the perfect hate read for my Friday afternoon, where my plans for a productive end to my work week were ruined by some tech bros.
I used to work for venture capitalists who acted exactly like that. Just- just- AUGHHH!
I read almost the whole thing out loud to a friend and we bitched about them mercilessly.
I couldn’t even finish the article. I wanted to punch them.
Super great reads this week.
Oh wow that first article just really scratched a major itch I have to intellectualize my desires. It was so genuinely interesting!
Powder Mountain : spiritual materialism in action.
It’s great though to have such a breakdown of the people to avoid at all costs.
I’m finally reading that Andrea Long Chu article after having it open in a tab for…5 days, oops. It’s so fascinating.
Also: “it’s very easy to show how lots of things that are not sex are in fact about sex. It’s also very easy to show that sex is very rarely about sex.” Or, as our prophet Janelle Monae put it, “Everything is sex. Except sex, which is power.”