HELLO and welcome to the 304th 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 know more about instagram face!!! 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.

This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry, by Emily Flitter for The New York Times, December 2019

Bankers and clients at a Phoenix branch of JP Morgan Chase started recording conversations to have proof of systemic racism in how clients were managed and the results were pretty stark!

How Hallmark Took Over Cable TV, by Sarah Larson for The New Yorker, December 2019

An interesting week for this to come out but like the Christmas Movie Industry is pretty fascinating!

The Year in Healing, by Doretta Lau for Hazlitt, December 2019

Last year in January, when I managed to get out of bed and return to my life, I was determined to be an expert on how to grieve. I was going to fuck grief up so hard.

Will Millennials Be the First Generation to Stop Fearing Death?, by Sam Juric for The Walrus, July 2019

We’re apparently writing our wills, getting death doulas, preparing for our digital afterlife and in general approaching death with a bit more wholeheartedness than our elders.

The Age of Instagram Face, by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker, November 2019

Jia goes to Los Angeles to talk to the dermatologists and plastic surgeons about the rising popularity and social acceptability of having “work done” in the age of social media! Like everything Jia writes, there’s a personal narrative and some Big Questions and some Good Reporting and everything that makes her the incredible writer she is.

The Queering of the Baby Bells, by Carlos A Ball for Longreads, excerpted from The Queering of Corporate America, December 2019

This piece truly blew my mind — there’s so much about activism relating to corporations that I didn’t understand the complexity of and history behind and I wish I had!

Clockbeat, by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya for Autostraddle, December 2019

If you could just freeze time, maybe you could breathe long enough for the panic attack to curl back into itself and never claw forth. If you could just freeze time, you think you might be able to know yourself better. You don’t crave solitude, but you do crave stillness. In five years, you’ve lived in five different cities, and sometimes, embarrassingly, you forget that those cities don’t fossilize when you leave them. Everything keeps moving. Time passes. If you could just freeze time, maybe you could finally have enough of it, especially with the woman you love who lives on the faraway peninsula.

“My Bright Lights Misadventure with the Magician of Manhattan,” by Rachel Deloache Williams for Vanity Fair, April 2018

An essay by the author of a book about Anna Delvey which really made me want to get back to my book!

“This is small talk purgatory”: what Tinder taught me about love, by CJ Hauser for The Guardian, December 2019

This surprised me with where it started and where it went.

I want to pretend that I’m cooler than crying about The Velveteen Rabbit but I’m just not. And if I’m honest with myself, this was what I wanted: for someone not only to prove to me that they weren’t a robot, but that they were real, and would make me real, too. Could I put this in my Tinder bio? CJH, 34: looking to keep it real and love off most of your hair till your eyes drop out <3.

What Future is There for America’s Desert Cities?, by Saritha Ramakrishna for Lit Hub, July 2018

People retreated into their homes and let the air conditioning circulate. They dove underwater, and hoped for the best. Days like these are stagnant, the air immobilizing. It presses against the body and asphalt, radiating through a network of suburban homes in Gilbert, Chandler, Tempe, the Encanto, and elsewhere in the Valley of the Sun. Cul-de-sacs turn ghostly; the sidewalks catch the light, shimmer like water. For those waiting at the light rail or bus stops, shade provides temporary relief, though it’s a landscape not meant for continuous exposure. In order to save on air-conditioning bills, towels are soaked in ice water, dripped across overheated skin.

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