HELLO and welcome to the 102nd 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 Paris Hilton! 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.
I read so many things I didn’t love this week you guys, it was weird. I read like the first three paragraphs of like 15 articles.
Cowboy Scholars (June 2004), by Evgenia Peretz for Vanity Fair – My friend Toby went to this school, when he told me about it I was like what that cannot be real. “Imagine an academically elite college whose 26 male students work a 2,500-acre cattle ranch, aren’t allowed to drink, do drugs, or leave their isolated desert valley, but control admissions, discipline, and faculty hiring and firing. That’s the Utopian legacy of maverick electric-power tycoon Lucien Lucius Nunn, who founded Deep Springs on the California-Nevada border in 1917. Visiting a campus that has hovered on the brink of lunacy and collapse, the author learns why Deep Springs is the most successful experiment in higher education in U.S. history.”
Dallas Buyers Club and The History of AIDS on Film,(November 2013), by Noel Murray and Scott Tobias for Dissolve – This is really interesting w/r/t how gay men are treated in films about AIDS and how the narrative gets framed.
Hello, Welcome to Blockbuster, May I Help You (November 2013), by Erik Bryan for The Awl – For a significant portion of my life, I went to Blockbuster every single day. Every.single.day. Every day! Eventually I cut back to like once a week. I liked indie video stores better but those started shutting down and also Blockbuster was close to my home.
The Last Word On First Editions (January 2010), by Ben Marks for Collector’s Weekly – I found this really interesting, it’s about book collecting!
To Paris, With Love (November 2013), by Mitchell Sunderland for Noisey – We’re all friends here, right? I mean, you won’t judge me for the fact that I was obsessed with Paris Hilton for a few years, during which she unapolagetically and easily was named as my fashion icon, so as you can imagine I spent a lot of time in those tiny skirts she always wore in bubblegum colors. Good, good, I’m glad everybody here is so open-minded.
A Discourse on Brocialism (November 2013), by Laurie Penny for The New Statesmen – “On Brand, iconoclasm, and a woman’s place in the revolution: a dialogue with Richard Seymour on the question of how to reconcile the fact that people need stirring up with the fact that the people doing the stirring so often fall down when it comes to treating women and girls like human beings.”
The Real O.J. Simpson (Spring 2004), by Bruce Jackson for The Antioch Review – So this is about OJ Simpson, a trial of course I remember vividly because it was all anybody talked about (and yes, we did what this guy did — inventing our own narratives), and I remember when he was acquitted I was in Biology class and someone in the hallway yelled THE JUICE IS LOOSE and then we all knew. Anyhow, this is about OJ Simpson but it’s also about creating narratives, and all the ways in which fiction and real life have absolutely nothing in common, and how that plays out in the courtroom, which is about one story versus the other.
The Prophet (October 2013), by Helanie Olen for The Pacific Standard – “Meet Dave Ramsey, the most important personal finance guru in America. Millions of people follow his biblically inspired advice. It goes like this: 1. Purge yourself of debt; 2. Live on cash; 3. Pretend economic trends don’t affect you; 4. Blame yourself when they do.”
All Linked In With Nowhere To Go (November 2013), by Ann Friedman for The Baffler – I’ve never really gotten into LinkedIn, is it a thing people really use to get jobs? I’m confused. Anyhow, I would read Ann Friedman talk about anything, because everything she says is genius, and her interrogation of the network’s “thought leaders” and “prosperity-through-connectivity” is no exception.
Texas’ Other Death Penalty (November 2013), by Rachel Pearson for The Texas Observer – The most shocking statistic in this piece about a doctor working at a clinic forced to serve thousands of uninsured Americans, including many who’d be insured were it not for Rick Perry’s decision to restrict Medicaid, is that the University of Texas Medical Branch “accepted 77 percent of charity referrals in 2005, it was only taking 9 percent in 2011.
Tig Notaro and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad, Yet Somehow Completely Amazing Year (August 2013), by Sandra Allen for Buzzfeed – Tig Notaro!
