My bestie got to meet Sansa this weekend. It was very convivial.

A lot going on here (the highs and lows of California’s work to get more inmates out of the system):

Gonzalez had just served a long stint on a life sentence for his role in a grisly 1996 murder. Until his release last April, Gonzalez had no doubt he would die in prison: “If you had a life sentence . . . you were going to do life. No one was getting out.”

But Gonzalez, 36, returned to society and is now answering phones in downtown Los Angeles as a paid intern for the Anti-Recidivism Coalition and Human Rights Watch, two nonprofit groups that sponsored the law that cleared the way for his release.

Gonzalez is among thousands of felons benefiting from a grand experiment, an act of mass forgiveness unprecedented in U.S. history. In California, once a national innovator in draconian policies to get tough on crime, voters and lawmakers are now innovating in the opposite direction, adopting laws that have released tens of thousands of inmates and are preventing even more from going to prison in the first place.

“My Top 100 Episodes of 2015” (this is a very worthy endeavor)

You can stream this incredible documentary on PBS for another week or two, please do.

THIS WOMAN:

Watkins was an instrumentalist, not a singer, which made her even more of an oddity. The images of black men playing guitar and black women cradling a microphone long ago became our ubiquitous hieroglyphs of the blues, and even now the image of a black woman playing guitar still registers as something crackling and new. It’s not that Watkins had no one to look to as she was coming up—in the thirties and forties there had been Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie; in the fifties and sixties, Peggy Jones was performing as Lady Bo in Bo Diddley’s band and Odetta was modestly popular on the folk scene. But the path cut before her by these women was faint, and mostly uphill.

Not that Watkins needed a path. The greats rarely do. In the first verse of “John Henry,” the steel-driving man is just a baby with a hammer in his hand, singing, “Hammer’s gonna be the death of me.” As John Henry was always John Henry, Beverly Watkins was always Beverly Watkins. Sometimes fate just makes itself known.

You know I love Lisa Hix at Collectors Weekly, and “Out Of the Shadow of Aunt Jemima” is fabulous:

Tipton-Martin first picked up on the Jemima Code as a food writer at the “Los Angeles Times” in the late 1980s. While sorting the newspaper’s culinary library she noticed “the cookbooks attributed to African Americans in our collection did not reflect the images of the women that I knew in my community,” as she tells me over the phone from Houston. “Instead, I saw a stereotype, the way black women have always been portrayed. So I started collecting African American cookbooks as a way to hear the voices of real people.”

One obstacle she encountered was that throughout American history, black people have had less access to publishing than whites. Of the roughly 100,000 recipe collections that have been produced in the United States since the late 1700s, she’s managed to hunt down and collect around 300 cookbooks written by or attributed to African Americans, many of which are rare, self-published volumes. In addition, her research included deep dives into the archives at the David Walker Lupton African-American Cookbook Collection at the University of Alabama—which documents 450 volumes—as well as the Culinary Archive of the Clements Library at the University of Michigan and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. All told, she reviews 160 cookbooks in The Jemima Code.

Friend of The Toast Carmen Maria Machado over at Catapult:

On the afternoon the dance began, English and chemistry and P.E. instructors and vice principals all stood cross-armed in a semicircle around the cafeteria, like spectators in a gladiatorial contest. It was here that the veil between faculty and students was the thinnest, those weekend hours when we were each temporarily released from our identities. The teachers were there not in their capacity as teachers—instead, they were dressed casually, comfortably, watching with the sort of glazed disinterest you’d probably see on their faces while they watched TV and sipped from giant glasses of Chardonnay in their living rooms.

And we, the students, we danced. At first, we had real energy, and the DJ’s music kept us going through the afternoon light. Around dinnertime, we flagged a little, as if we only then understood the monumental task ahead of us. But once the sun set, we caught a second wind, as if our bodies now recognized the night and the music both, and reached for that school-dance feeling.

The history of dating shows (so interesting):

The Dating Game began its initial run in 1965 and ended in 1973, followed by several different syndication revivals (including one in the ‘90s that was presented back-to-back with The Newlywed Game for “The Dating-Newlywed Hour”). Leading up to The Dating Game, competition-based series like What’s My Line? and The $64,000 Question, wherein the prizes were monetary, had become commonplace. Here, people had the chance to compete for people.

The Dating Game was simple: three contestants would compete for a date with a person of the opposite sex. Each contestant was introduced to the audience before the bachelor or bachelorette (way before The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, this is how dating shows referred to those seeking love on TV) was brought to the stage, seated out of his or her eyesight behind a rotating wall. After several rounds of questions, the bachelor or bachelorette would make a decision. There wasn’t much more to it than that.

The perfect Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah on Chirlane:

Each time McCray and I talked, she was keen to give me what she called ‘‘context’’: photos of her family life, the brown cloth dolls her mother made, stories about tables full of fruits and vegetables from the garden her father tended. McCray was born in 1954 in Springfield, Mass. It was clear that she was not at all comfortable with how her childhood had been portrayed by the press. McCray was too guarded to linger on the hardship of growing up a black girl in an all-white world, but it seemed to bother her that her childhood was perceived as evidence of some unique damage. She repeatedly stressed that her parents worked hard to provide for their three girls. ‘‘They were both coming from families who were broken or missing, and they didn’t know how to do it right, and they were very smart, and they put pieces in place,’’ she said.

I am quoted on adblockers in The Observer, and thank you so much for all the donations we’ve received since last week! I was touched by your support, and so was Mallory:

“There’s nothing you can do about people who find your site via social media, etc., and those people are way more likely to have and use ad blockers than regular readers,” Ms. Cliffe said in an email to the Observer. “With regular readers, we’ve had great response from just being honest about how it impacts revenue, and asking that they make a small monthly donation to offset it or to whitelist our URL.”

According to Ms. Cliffe, it’s working well so far. After she “Got Real about revenue last week,” she said, the company’s “PayPal lit up with very gratifying $5 monthly donations.”

God gave you the letter “y” and the letter “o,” why dost thou reject His gifts?