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Killing Floor Boss Pleased Texas Women Losing Basic Human Rights
5.9.2021
According to a tweet posted yesterday by John Gibson, the president of Tripwire Interactive—the studio behind Maneater and Killing Floor—he is “proud” that the U.S. Supreme Court allowed a new Texas anti-abortion law to stand earlier this week.Read more
There Is No After
14.4.2021
Shortly before Christmas last year, I sent a message to Jeff Sharlet, a writer I don’t know, thanking him for memorializing the dead. It was a Sunday night, past 2 a.m., and though I can’t remember the specific thing keeping me awake I know its basic contours. Most every feeling I’ve had this year...
Care Has Always Been Infrastructure
13.4.2021
The emerging debate over whether care is infrastructure isn’t new or surprising. The question “what is infrastructure?” was triggered by President Biden’s announcement that the American Jobs Plan includes a $400 billion investment to expand Medicaid coverage of home and community-based services...
This Cell Phone Cooking Game Has Me Irate Over Its Slander of New York Cuisine
9.4.2021
I spent so much money on a phone not because I need to have the latest technology in order to live my life and communicate with other people. It’s because I need something that can hold all the memory taken up by the obscene amount of games I have download, even though they are all essentially...
The Weight
8.4.2021
More than 20 years later, I can still remember my grandmother handing me the silver diet book with the cartoon cover and the sense that I needed to do something. I was probably around 13; the specifics have mercifully faded with time, but the cover and the feeling are burned into my brain. And...
'Meat Is Magic': The Women Who Are Committed Carnivores
7.4.2021
There are dozens of photographs of bloody slabs of ribeye and shots of bacon strips sizzling in pools of fat, chunky piles of ground beef, glistening pots of butter, and tallow. These images of meat and fat aren’t much to look at, but to the members of the Women Carnivore Tribe, a Facebook group...
Arkansas Governor Belatedly Realizes Wanting Trans Kids to Die Is Perhaps a Bad Look
5.4.2021
On Monday, in a rather surprising turn of events, Arkansas’s Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson vetoed HB 1570, a bill that would ban gender-affirming care for trans youth in the state, which sailed through Arkansas’s Republican-dominated legislature. Read more
Roses, Blindfolds, and Chopped Wood: Meet the Popular TikTokers Making Romantic Thirst Traps for Women
30.3.2021
Thoren Bradley can be found in dozens of TikTok videos chopping wood in his backyard in rural Northern California, surrounded by evergreen woods with a swimming pool of sky overhead. The 29-year-old is colorfully tattooed with a well-groomed beard and gym-honed physique that frequently inspires...
Yes, People Are Writing Horny Fanfic About the Suez Canal and the Ever Given
26.3.2021
You know the story by now: A massive container ship has been stuck in the Suez Canal since Tuesday, successfully blocking one of the busiest shipping routes on the planet. Ships have been forced to travel around the Cape of Good Hope like it’s the 1700s, global trade has been disrupted, there...
The Strategic Deployment of Basic
25.3.2021
Call Me Max, my early reader that ignited protests from angry parents in Utah and Texas, is written for a first or second-grade audience. It has a carefully controlled vocabulary and short sentences; it’s divided up into four chapters, despite being very short. It’s a book designed for kids just...
The Rise and Fall of 'Bro-gurt,' the Macho, Ab-Obsessed Snack for MEN
23.3.2021
In 2013, a blonde-haired woman in a “sexy nurse” costume (low neckline, high hemline) worked a booth at the Food Expo of Natural Products, pitching a new option: Powerful Yogurt. She offered passers-by ultrasounds of their stomachs so they could “find their inner abs,” the brand’s tagline....
The Undeniable Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence
17.3.2021
It takes at least 30 minutes to drive from Young’s Asian Massage Parlor in Acworth, Georgia, to the nondescript block in the northern Atlanta suburb of Buckhead where one can find another cluster of Asian massage parlors, including Gold Spa and Aromatherapy Spa. On Tuesday, according to local...
Austin Parents Call for Firing of a Teacher Who Read An Anodyne Picture Book About a Trans Kid to Her Class
15.3.2021
Conservatives who rant about cancel culture actually love canceling children’s books that include content that makes them personally uncomfortable. Read more
We Did It, Joe!
10.3.2021
It’s happening, y’all—the Democrats in Congress, with no Republican support whatsoever, have passed the $1.9 trillion covid-19 relief package, and President Joe Biden is expected to sign it on Friday. I am literally crying right now, thinking of all of the people this ambitious legislation will...
Writer Torrey Peters Wants a Punk Utopia for Trans Girls and a Cuisinart Mixer
8.3.2021
My friend and colleague Harron Walker once found it difficult to preface the force that is Torrey Peters. Now, here I am, repeating that confusion, at a loss for how to possibly describe a writer who refuses to be pinned down by other’s expectations. Her debut novel, Detransition, Baby, published...
Before Peloton There Was Spinning®: How 2 Guys Named John Birthed the Unwieldy Fitness Trend
5.3.2021
In 2014, FiveThirtyEight published a story by Mona Chalabi titled “Why Women Don’t Cycle,” examining studies that attempted to answer the baffling question of why a gender gap exists among outdoor cycling enthusiasts. The article found a number of wide-ranging answers, including cost, safety...
These Girls Just Wanted to Run; the Right Wanted a War
3.3.2021
As a young girl in the small town of Cromwell, Connecticut, all Andraya Yearwood wanted to do was run. Born into a family that prized athleticism, she dabbled in soccer, basketball, football, and dance as a child. But one day in the sixth grade, she saw older students running around the track oval...
QAnon, CultTok, and Leaving It All Behind
1.3.2021
“I was impressed that it only took four years,” Danielle, self-identified ex-cult member, 34, said on a phone call. This was a few days after Joe Biden’s inauguration, and we were talking about the previous week of SOS social media posts from wide-eyed QAnon followers, like a TikToker propped up...
Declassifying the Mystery of How Special Agent Dana Scully Looked So Good in Those Giant Suits
26.2.2021
The X-Files premiered in 1993, gifting America with our first glimpse of a 25-year-old Gillian Anderson playing Special Agent Dana Scully, who was somehow both a medical doctor and an FBI agent at an age just five years older than the fictional Dr. Dougie Howser, boy genius, would have been when...
The Rise and Fall of Joss Whedon, and the Myth of the Hollywood Feminist Hero
25.2.2021
“I hate ‘feminist.’ Is this a good time to bring that up?” Joss Whedon asked. He paused knowingly, waiting for the laughs he knew would come at the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer making such a statement. It was 2013, and Whedon was onstage at a fundraiser for Equality Now, an organization...