HELLO and welcome to the 127th 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 toys! 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.

Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman: The Two Sides of Miley Cyrus (May 2014), by Tavi Gevinson for Elle Magazine – And then Tavi Gevinson interviewed Miley Cyrus for Elle Magazine? I think the best part is when she mixes up The Sixth Sense with The Shining and Elle acknowledges the mix-up with a “[sic]” but there are a lot of really special moments.

Guys & Dolls: Veteran Toy Designer Wrestles With Gender Divide (May 2014), by Hunter Oatman-Stanford for Collectors Weekly – I think I expected the interviewee to have more radical ideas about gender than she did, but I also think it’s really valuable and important to read the more moderate opinions as well.

The 9/11 Story Told At Bedrock, Powerful As A Punch To The Gut (May 2014), by Holland Cotter for The New York Times – Well, I think this is the piece of the week, the one that so many people are talking about. About the 9/11 museum, which opens this week. I don’t really know how I feel about it, but the article contains a lot of multimedia. I do feel like if I still lived in New York I would go, but I’m not sure what my motivation would be. Well, to be fair, I LOVE ALL MUSEUMS.

This Is Not The Nigeria I Know (May 2014), by Adora Udoji for medium  – “The Nigeria from which I draw half my DNA and where I once lived has great difficulties, but it also has a tremendous passion for life, rich traditions and an enormous respect for educating boys and girls. It is a colorful and dynamic country with great aspirations by the vast majority of hard-working, clever and resilient people.”

Chat Wars: Microsoft vs. AOL (May 2014), by David Auerbach for n+1 – This is super in-depth and gets pretty technical, but it’s also really interesting and you can learn a lot from it if you so desire. The author was on the ground floor of building MSN Messenger in 1999, and there’s lots of interesting stuff about software, and business, and coding, and all the things that go in to why a certain application is designed the way it is besides “what makes the most sense.”

The Nuyorican Revolution (February 2014), by Frederick Bernas for narrative.ly – A Nuyorican Poets anthology was the first book of poetry I ever bought myself as a teenager, so this was super relevant to my interests on multiple levels. It’s a great piece, ’cause it’s got so much history, and also the present, and also POETRY and also beautiful pictures, and tells the stories of a few different performers.

*It Will Look Like A Sunset (April 2014), by Kelly Sundburg for Guernica – This is so beautifully written and so, so terribly sad. It’s about domestic violence (and it gets very graphic) and how it can take a long time to leave and also reconcile the good version of a human with the monster that is also always there.

Haverford Oops! (March 2014) by Chris Ballard for Sports Illustrated – I played basketball in middle school, and I went to a school for gifted kids so we played other private schools, mostly Christian schools, and they always kicked our ass. We lost every single game for three years EXCEPT ONE and it was the most glorious moment of our lives on earth. Anyhow, this is a story about the Haverford Basketball team, who lost and lost and lost and lost and lost and lost some more back in the ’90s.