Where are the girls? Why aren’t we getting CNN Breaking News updates about them?
Anna Fitzpatrick on the films of Mary Harron:
American Psycho is a great movie. I say this on my own, without the influence of whatever raves I heard as a teenager. It is stomach churning and at times very hard to watch, but one that maintains corporate masculinity as the butt of its sick joke. It’s both a genuine satire and a genuine horror movie, the real terror coming from the way that female bodies are viewed as disposable. I can’t imagine its satire being handled as intelligently had a different filmmaker adapted it.
Remember that great and infuriating piece on sexual assault at Tufts? Update: Tufts is in troubbbbblllle.
GUTS on unpaid labour:
My childhood friend, Natasha, completed a forty-six week, unpaid internship in a number of hospitals across Ontario as the final requirement before taking the Canadian Dietetic Registration Exam to become a registered dietician. Nearing the end of her undergraduate degree in Nutrition and Food, she was encouraged by her professors and mentors to take on this highly competitive position that required her to travel in a personal vehicle every day without any financial support from her undergraduate university, the Ontario Student Assistance Program, or the Northern Ontario School of Medicine (which oversaw the internship program). Natasha told me that she acquired twice as much debt during one year of interning than she did throughout her four years of undergraduate studies.
Here is a very helpful guide for which onion to use.
Jane Marie’s second column asking people questions about their marriage is up at Cosmo! Don’t miss the first.
How has your sex life changed since you got married? Wait. You guys were so young — were you even having sex before you got married?
[Long pause while they look at each other.]
Jessi: Yes. [Laughs.]
Paul: Yeah.
The perfect Jenny Diski, on age:
Back then, in the early 1970s, we baby boomers threatened our elders with radical change without thinking that we would ever change ourselves. But we have changed, in the ineluctable way, and not, as we assumed, as a result of personal choice. The irony of ‘I hope I die before I get old’ was that we didn’t believe for a second that we could become the old as we knew them. And we weren’t just young, but young in a way no previous generation had been young. We used ‘young’ and ‘old’ as time-free categories. ‘Young’ meant new and different, able to see what the old couldn’t (certain visionaries excepted): we had reinvented the terms to mean us and them. They, the old, would die out: we would change the world and remain forever ourselves, meaning forever young. (Which is not at all the same thing, Segal points out, as the untruism that ‘whatever your age, you are no older than you feel.’) Without the constraints and necessities of war or strong memories of having had to manage austerity, we could believe that there was a single something that we purely were, and always would be. We made a fuss about being young, without understanding how much being young enabled us to make the fuss. Now, we’re going to make a fuss about being old and that’s going to be rather less straightforward.
The secret history of Britney Spears’ lost album:
Over the years, fans have put together mock Original Doll album covers and created their own tracklists culled from B-sides and leaked tracks. Message board threads devoted to the album have stirred speculation and conspiracy theories, and every so often, users claiming to have a friend of a friend who worked at Jive would post an alleged detail.
Cord Jefferson, on why there’s nothing new about Donald Sterling:
In the late 1970s my paternal grandparents told my black father to not get involved with my white mother.
“I’ll be fine,” said my dad, “I’m not worried about racists.”
“It’s not you we’re worried about,” said my grandmother. “Do you have any idea how white folks are going to treat that woman from now on?”
Shortly after that my mother’s parents disowned her. Twenty years later, a couple years after my parents got divorced, a white man who’d gone on a few dates with my mother would stand up from the dinner table and leave after seeing a picture of me, her brown son.
“You didn’t tell me your husband was black,” he said as he rose.
“I didn’t know that it mattered,” she said.
“It does,” he said, and he walked away.
