January: What I'm Reading this Month
Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash
Happy New Year to Everyone Except Mitch McConnell!
We’ve heard a lot about the government shutdown this month, but we can’t let that stop us from being up to date on the rest of the news. I’m the type of person who floods everyone’s inbox weekly with articles ranging from dumb to not dumb, and I’ll say that it’s equally rewarding and time-consuming to be the friend who always has a pulse on every corner of the internet. So I might as well publish it for the benefit of all my mom’s friends who read this blog (Hi!!!). Kinda like a book club, except everyone gets an A+ just for being here.
So here’s the first month of things I cared to click on, based entirely off my extremely biased media literacy skills. No Fox News, no bigotry, and no explicit content without a clear content warning (CW) for all you toddlers out there who suddenly learned how to get online.
(CW)It's the remix to conviction: Filmmaker dream hampton released Surviving R. Kelly, a documentary exposing the decades-long systems of sexual abuse waged against underaged women. Read what hampton has to say about the movie, and then stop streaming R. Kelly’s music.
Anne Helen Petersen explored How millennials became the burnout generation. And then people got mad because millennials aren't allowed to take credit for ANYTHING hard, so someone else wrote a piece about how millennials don't have a monopoly on killing themselves — only killing entire industries. Side note, if we could really kill industries, can’t we all just agree to kill the student debt “industry?”
The satire heard round the world: I don't hate women candidates, I just hated Hillary and coincidentally I'm starting to hate Warren too. Best quote from this hilarious piece: "I’m no fan of Trump, but that Elizabeth Warren is such a phony. That’s a thought, and thoughts are true, and I will never examine how that thought got into my head."
Remember Cat Person? This is her now. Feel old yet? (JK, thats an article about an ancient skeleton of a woman who wrote manuscripts, and it's really cool because men used to not let women write anything.) Anyways, go read the follow up to Cat Person.
To the girl who always steals her friends' boyfriends: Hate to break it to you, but you're the WOAT friend. "You’re not a fool for unrequited love. You’re an emotional terrorist on a single-minded quest."
Seven Minutes in Heaven (aka videos shorter than 7 mins to distract from your desk job):
The Little Movie trailer, created by Blackish child star Marsai Martin, who is the youngest ever (14 years old!!!) executive producer of a film. See her with Issa Rae and Regina Hall, and get ready to laugh your ass off.
When people get arrested, they're held for bail regardless of whether they get convicted. That cash bail was originally created to make people show up for court hearings, because they'd get the money back. Nowadays, cash bail allows rich people to skip out on being detained, while low-income Americans lose out on their jobs, childcare, and more. Here's why cash bail disproportionately harms working-class people of color, and why the system is extremely complicated to fix.
XXL Magazine's list of Best Hip Hop Music Videos of 2018. Ya welcome.
Netflix shows to watch instead of restarting The Office:
Penn Badgley in Netflix's You. Can confirm this is extremely good and decently scary. Listen to Badgley talk about how serial killers get by with white privilege here. We stan a woke stalker, but we don’t fall in love with them, no matter how handsome they are.
Marie Kondo's Tidying Up reinforces the moral righteousness of being minimalist. But will cleanliness actually fix your life? Messy people struggle with relationship problems, burnout from work, etc., and Kondo purports that "if you could just get organized enough — empty out that junk drawer and clear out that garage — so many larger, more persistent personal problems could be taken care of in the process." Do we think this is true? A buzzfeed writer explores where Tidying Up intersects with late capitalism.
DC-Centric:
Renowned writer of the $20 Diner changes the name of his column for the Washington Post, explaining it does a disservice to the immigrants whose food he's celebrating. By reinforcing that ethnic food should be cheap, we devalue the work of hardworking people who contribute insurmountably to American culture.
Did you know you can donate pet food to the Humane Rescue Alliance?
All the foodie news you need in DC right now.
Hope y’all enjoyed this month’s version of why I have too many tabs open.
XO
Hal