Sansa is so sleepy. Probably because dogs have been us for even longer than we thought.
I have not put tote pics in this roundup, bc I was taking my daughter to appointments ALL DAY and didn’t open the boxes yet. I apologize. ALSO, we finished showing my mom Die Hard last night, and she loved it but we totally GAGGED together when Holly said “Holly MCCLANE” at the end bc her husband is sooooo sexy she no longer wants to use her birth name. Get woke, Holly.
Canada’s residential schools TRC report is out. I’m making my way through it slowly. It’s pretty rough. You should read it.
Mistrial in the Freddie Gray case.
The Marshall Project’s “An Unbelievable Story of Rape” is incredible, and brutal:
To Marie, it seemed the questioning had lasted for hours. She did what she always did when under stress. She flipped the switch, as she called it, suppressing all the feelings she didn’t know what to do with. Before she confessed to making up the story, she couldn’t look the two detectives, the two men, in the eye. Afterward, she could. Afterward, she smiled. She went into the bathroom and cleaned up. Flipping the switch was a relief — and it would let her leave.
As someone who has watched every horrible video available online, I found this account by the dude who used to run Portal of Evil fascinating (if you are EVEN A LITTLE SQUEAMISH or do not enjoy gross gore videos, probably because you were not raised by my gore-loving dad, skip this one):
I raised this possibility with Dr. Strohminger recently — the idea that, as a culture, we are starting to become inured to disgusting things. She disagreed. “Hundreds of years ago, people attended executions for entertainment. The thought of watching someone be killed is beyond the pale for most people. I’d resist the notion that we’re becoming less sensitive to disgusting things.”
She wasn’t wrong, even in my case. I was maybe less sensitive to the immediate sight of the disgusting, but I was getting more sensitive to the ramifications of what I was doing. In 2005, users of the site took a concept album written by “the DragonGuyver,” a prematurely balding amateur philosopher in Maine, and put all of the lyrics to music, even getting some of the songs played on the radio; others Catfished an NYC slam poet into sending dick pics and showing up for a fake date. Stunts like this felt too far, and I started to move away from the site.
In a similar vein, the INCREDIBLY NSFW Buzzfeed list of the 50 worst internet things of the year. So many dicks! So many Minions! The occasion Minion IN A DICK. I dry-heaved repeatedly. What is WRONG with me?
To be black and from Newark in the mid-1970s and get plucked from a model casting call for Italian Vogue by Irving Penn — it was the kind of success story that was unheard of, especially for someone like her. She was signed by a top agency, photographed multiple times for the pages of Essence magazine. She landed an exclusive contract for Avon skin care, and another for Clairol’s Born Beautiful hair color boxes: No. 512, Dark Auburn, please. She went to Paris and became a house model in the Balenciaga showroom, wearing couture and walking the runway twice a day. Norman was never as big as Iman, Beverly Johnson, Pat Cleveland, or the other models of color breaking barriers on international runways or on the cover of Vogue. But she was riding that wave. It was more than she could have ever hoped for when she was a kid in New Jersey. Back when she was a boy who knew that, inside, he was a girl.
I am weirdly obsessed with Fashion Santa.
Exploring the Shaun King controversy as it plays out:
To be honest, I have long been aware of the suspicions some harbor about how he manages charitable donations. I have groused privately about the veracity of some of his reporting and whether his body of writing met the publishing standards that so many in this business work under. I heard the whispers, the back room talk from people who did not want to be seen as “racist” or acting like “crabs in the barrel” for criticizing King.
“What do you think about Shaun King…” the conversation almost invariably opens. “I want to be fair,” I generally respond. “People haven’t always been fair to me.”
Alana Massey’s Christmas newsletter is full of surprises:
Uncle Zayn came to visit and he brought with him dolls made of corn husks for the children and jewels that were purportedly pried from the cold dead hands of the Romanovs for Harry and me. His career in hip-hop is going well and he is elbow deep in doe-eyed heiresses as the fates always intended for him. Liam has agreed to be our gardener and we so appreciate his arrangements of the morning glories. Niall brought an acoustic guitar into the manor in October and began to play “Wonderwall” and we have not spoken to him since. Louis is in Boca Raton and living it right up!
The New Republic has a series of ten mini-essays on Lolita by smart female writers (I am more of a Pnin woman than a Lolita woman, but I think it’s a great, imperfect novel):
When I was a few years older than Lo is supposed to be, I adored Lolita for its word games. I longed to be as sophisticated as its narrator, smart enough to get his private jokes. Twice the age now, I am struck rereading it how many fancy words I must have learned here first. Limpid! Alembic! Concupiscence!
Today, my feelings about Lolita are more ambivalent. Not because it celebrates sex abuse but because it fervently believes in the autonomy of art from life. Nabokov insists that a private, even hermetic experience of literature is enough to redeem the horrors of real history—the fallen continent Humbert fled. I disagree. Yet the skill with which Lolita creates and sustains its double vision, still impresses and affects me deeply, even as the Old World that produced Humbert shrinks ever smaller in the rearview mirror.
