HELLO and welcome to the 305th 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 ArtPrize!! 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.

So You Think You Can Paint, by Matthew Power for GQ, September 2012

Every fall, Betsy DeVos’s son Rick hosts a populist art competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in which anybody can enter and anybody can pick a winner. (It’s still going strong!)

A Few Too Many, by Joan Acocella for The New Yorker, May 2008

What cures a hangover, if anything?

My Life as a Robot, by Emily Dreyfuss for Wired Magazine, September 2015

A Boston-based writer for Wired joins her on-the-ground team via ipad attached to robot body. It is good and weird and good and weird in equal measures. (Also it turns out that she is Richard Dreyfuss’s daughter, although this doesn’t come up in the article!)

The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes, by Sheelah Kolhatkar for The New Yorker, January 2020

As the gap between the wealthy and the working class goes ever-deeper, very rich people like Abigail Disney are banding together in a group called “Patriotic Millionaires” to demand change.

The Grill That Gave ’90s Kids Their Kitchen Training Wheels, by Aaron Goldberg for Taste, October 2019

The George Foreman Grill, according to one source, is the second-most-popular home appliance of all time, and as this article states, was a fixture in every kitchen of every house I lived in as a college student. So here’s a little piece about THAT.

Toward a Theory of American Festival Cuisine, by Meghan McCarron for Eater, August 2019

FRIED FOOD ON A STICK

The Most Stylish Scammer: 20 Years of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’, by Haley Mlotek for The Ringer, December 2019

I think about this guy a lot. It was the first scammer story I ever heard, but it was more than that — it was about how far good looks and charisma can get you, about the lure of magnetic personalities, about how some people can make you feel “like the sun shines on you” and then when they forget you, “it’s very, very cold.” Also some interesting Patricia Highsmith material in here!

The Year in Pivoting to Video, by David Roth for Hazlitt, December 2019

Strangely, for all the ambient hauntedness of that moment, this was also one of the happiest and most productive times I’ve had at any job. Ownership didn’t just not-care about what we were doing, but was actively and obviously not paying attention to any of it; the plugger sent up from Miami to oversee the sites before the sale seemed not to have even heard of them before. But as long as we stayed within the budgets agreed-upon back when everyone was still pretending to care, we could do pretty much whatever we wanted. The lack of institutional support necessarily limited the scope, but the totality of that neglect allowed us to try things, and keep working on them until they got good.

100 Books That Defined the Decade, by Emily Temple for LitHub, December 2019

Firstly, just a tip of the hat to another writer out there with the same level of dedication I have to creating very extensive and very tightly-defined lists. This is a really interesting time capsule of literature! And I have read…. 16 of them.

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