Sansa is here. You can have one picture now, but there will be a whole Sansa post at 12:30pm. My life has been bullshit all these years, and I never knew until now. She completes me. She makes me feel like a Natural Woman. She makes me want to be a better man. I am commissioning a Christmas-themed montage of our love set to a Carole King song.
Well, we’ll see how that goes:
The Justice Department plans to launch an investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, a wide-ranging review similar to those that scrutinized the police departments in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, according to several law enforcement officials.
The civil probe, which the officials say could be announced early this week, comes as Chicago continues to grapple with protests after the release of a video showing the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, which prompted murder charges for the officer involved and the resignation of the city’s police chief. The Justice Department is already investigating the McDonald shooting, but this new investigation by the department’s civil rights division would focus on the police department’s practices broadly to determine whether any of them contribute to civil rights violations.
Happy Hanukkah, Lilit! Also, Mara Wilson started #HanukkahTzedakahIdeas, and it’s full of great opportunities to support justice.
Too often, “holiday season” is a catchall for “at least I’m not only saying Christmas” rather than a legitimate attempt to make everyone feel comfortable and welcome. Take my office building, which has two large Christmas trees in the lobby and a small one on every floor, but absolutely zero menorahs or references to Hanukah of any kind lying around – even though there are plenty of Jewish employees. The Christmas trees might not make direct references to Jesus – and, yes, I know that they’re a tradition that has its origins in pre-Christian pagan rituals, thanks – that doesn’t make them secular. I’m not about to mistake any of them for a “Hanukah bush” – not that they’re a real thing, anyway.
An apartment building lobby might have a “Happy Holidays” sign, but when there’s a 20-foot Christmas tree covered in gold and crystal ornaments next to a six-inch electric menorah, it’s impossible not to feel slighted. When you send a supposedly secular “season’s greetings” cards but it’s still red and green, you’re not fooling anyone.
I have been obsessed with Carrie Fisher for YEARS and own all her novels (“Surrender the Pink” is about her marriage to Paul Simon, read it IMMEDIATELY) and now that she’s getting a larger platform to entrance America, I’m feeling a little bit like how my dad felt when the Ken Burns jazz documentary came out. He was all “NO” and I was all “but you love jazz more than anything” and he was all “BUT I DON’T WANT ANYONE ELSE TO, JAZZ BELONGS TO ME.”
Our luscious Jane Marie is blogging here when she’s not Bargain Bin-ing for us.
This is a great, tiny little convo with Lin-Manuel Miranda about race in casting, but mostly my brain just lit up with OH MERCIFUL JOY, of course there’s gonna be a London run, and I’m gonna follow the show like Homer and the Ribwich:
“I’m going to know the answer a little better once we set up these tours and once we set up the London run. I think the London cast is also going to look like our cast looks now, it’s going to be as diverse as our cast is now, but there are going to be even more opportunities for southeast Asian and Asian and communities of color within Europe that should be represented on stage in that level of production.
I can’t vote in the US, but I found the Washington Post‘s lil candidate match quiz to be entertaining and also reveals me to be as basic as one might suspect:
Look, Smeagol is no better than Gollum, Turkey, so it doesn’t matter.
Melissa Gira Grant spoke to Stoya for The Guardian:
Stoya says she couldn’t sleep. After arriving in Serbia on 18 November to begin work on a film, she had been woken by nightmares. Just one paparazzo waited for the internationally recognisable porn performer and writer at the airport, and even he had slunk off when the production assistant sent to meet her had told him, after he asked if this was Stoya, that it was not. Stoya couldn’t sleep in the converted attic room with the stark white wood floors where she stayed after 12-hour days on set, making a narrative, non-porn film that would keep her offline and occupied. “There’s no room for anything else,” she said. She spent her time awake rehearsing her role in the film: a woman who would be raped by someone that she knew.
Wonkette broke down the Daily Beast’s San Bernardino fuckup:
We watched as The Daily Beast took down Raheel’s grinning photo, replaced it with a cop car, put Raheel’s photo back up, replaced it with a cop car again. The Terror Rice stayed, even as their explanations for why they were including the scene at Raheel’s home became baroque. After we started tweeting to them NPR’s story naming Rizwan as the suspect, they started adding all kinds of justifications and he-wasn’t-at-the-partys. And in four hours, they never responded.
An hour later, the San Bernardino police chief said oh hey yo, it’s Rizwan, and The Daily Beast went into contortions before finally — after literally four hours — taking down their tweets with Raheel’s picture.
Did this bananas workout at bootcamp, my partner was a Zumba instructor and fuckin’ brought it:
All about the “quiet chair” salon option, especially for those of us who are incapable of saying “I’m not very chatty today” like adults. You can’t just put headphones on, they’re cutting your hair, it’s a nightmare.
Hanson has a beer company called Mmmhops.
Just the beginning of a deleted comment of the day, because who would keep reading? (It was on Jess Zimmerman’s Emotional Labor piece, which is up there with Yellow Ranger and White Dude Books for all-time staying power in terms of generating deleted comments. Brava, Jess!):
…so obviously I re-read all the White Dude Books deleted comments and it reminded me how great that post was. Not the book list itself, which I knocked off in fifteen minutes while eating reheated bolognese, but the deleted comments one. It was such a great, enjoyable group hug for us!
My Ottolenghi cookbooks are the most visually appealing things I own that are not Sansa, and here are some vegetarian-friendly Christmas recipes that may seem terrifying complex, but are almost certainly the bomb.
Our totes are in production! You will have a nifty lil Shopify storefront to acquire them from, and I am not committing to Christmas arrivals (they get to MY house on the 15th and then the UPS store will begin getting them to you) but they are timeless and non-seasonal and you can buy them forever, and they look SO GOOD and are really high quality, and also we put the Toast name on the Take to the Sea one like you wanted. As a reminder of what your three options are (we’re splitting the profits fifty-fifty with our two talented Toastie illustrators):
Big Hair, No Heart:
Misandrist Mermaid:
Take To The Sea:
