HELLO and welcome to the 38th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about bath salts and hipster conservatives! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
+ Firstly, two stories on topics I’ve posted TIRTL essays about before because I like these new stories maybe even better than the old stories.
In TIRTL #30 I linked you to Natasha Vargas-Cooper’s SPIN story about bath salts. This month, Rob Fischer at Vice has a great look at how the legal sale of bath salts ravaged this whole area of Virginia in Bath Salts In The Wound.Â
In TIRTL #11, I linked you to a Harper’s story about for-profit colleges. This month, Chris Parker at The Village Voice has a cover story about For-Profit Colleges Only A Con Man Could Love which will make you feel super-pissed at the government and their support of these terrible for-profit college scams, as per ushe.
Spike Lee: The Fix Is In (August 2012), by Andrew O’Hehir for Salon.com – “I did not drink the Kool-Aid, and I did not think that racism would be eradicated at the exact moment he put his right hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible.”
He Hit Send: On the Awkward But Necessary Role Of Technology in Fiction (August 2012), by Allison K. Gibson for The Millions – “I’m interested in novels that render what Gates calls “this new mode of living” — those that successfully incorporate technology into their characters’ experiences.”
Has Dominique Moceanu Flipped? (February 1999), by Skip Hollandsworth for Texas Monthly – After the Olympics, it seemed like the very young Moceanu was on the top of the world… and then she was in court, trying to get a protective order against her parents who she claimed were abusive and thought of her as just a money-making machine.
The Week Social Media Broke My Heart (September 2011), by Manjula Martin for The Rumpus – “Perhaps what we should bring back along with the rest of ’90s culture is sincerity. Forget witty bitterness; show me a critic who believes in music the way that the musicians in Nirvana and R.E.M. believed.”
Are You Worth More Dead Or Alive? (August 2012) by James Vlahos for The New York Times –  So basically you can sell your life insurance policy while you’re still alive, and there are like whole companies just made of doctors determining how long you’ve got left to live to see if buying it is a good investment. So this is the world we live in!
How Your Sweet Valley High Gets Made (August 2012), by Grace Bello for The Hairpin – Interviewing one of the many people who worked with “book packaging” firm Alloy to churn out Sweet Valley High books in the 90’s. Apparently the writing procedure involved smoking a lot of weed.
Attack of the Hipster Conservatives (July 2012), by Eugenia Williamson for The Boston Phoenix – This is terrifying!  Jesus.
Strange Times at the 2012 Gathering of the Juggalos (August 2012), by Nathan Rabin for The AV Club – If this article leads you into a Juggalo k-hole, I apologize, but wow this is some special shit.
I Wish My Mother Had Aborted Me (August 2012) by Lynn Beisner for The Guardian – “This is no ‘I wish I’d never been born’ howl of angst. I love my mother, and having an abortion would have given her a better life.”
