HELLO and welcome to the 293rd 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 Buffalo Wild Wings! 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.
The Theory of Visitors, by Sam Lansky for Human Parts, November 2017
I haven’t stopped thinking about this
“All relationships are transient,” she said. “Friends who stab you in the back. People you network with at a fancy party. Relatives who die. The love of your life. Everything is temporary. People come into your life for a limited amount of time, and then they go away. So you welcome their arrival, and you surrender to their departure. Because they are all visitors. And when the visitors go home, they might take something from you. Something that you can’t ever get back. And that part sucks. But visitors always leave souvenirs. And you get to keep those forever.”
Good Faith, by Tina Horn for Hazlitt, July 2019
Um, kinky sex and also cults and also queerness, A BLESSED DAY UPON YOU ALL:
I am now the age my mom was when she gave birth to my younger sister. Like many grown children, I do not want to repeat my parents’ mistakes. Since my love, my friendships, and my work all center around explorations of intimate power through the cultures of kink and the politics of sex work, I find myself considering the questions: what is the meaningful difference between identifying as a Leather queer and participating in a cult? How do you know whether you’re in a kinky polyamorous family or part of an abusive scam? And has settling into a comfortable role within Leather communities helped me to heal from generational trauma that my parents never seemed to have resolved for themselves?
An Epidemic of Disbelief, by Barbara Bradley Hagerty for The Atlantic, August 2019
When the rape kits that had been sitting in Cuyahoga County storage for years — most from cases that had been closed in a day or a week without any investigation — prosecutors were able to indict nearly 750 rapists, revealing new information about how shitty detectives are to rape victims AND how many serial rapists are out there AND that “the space between acquaintance rape and stranger rape is not a wall, but a plaza.”
I Wanted to Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege. So I Asked., by Claudia Rankine for The New York Times Magazine, July 2019
It’s a gift to read any words Claudia Rankine writes, this brief look at academia’s investigation of white privilege followed by her own deliberate interactions with white men on this topic is no exception. I could crawl around in her brain forever.
I found the suited men who refused to fall in line exhilarating and amusing (as well as obnoxious). Watching them was like watching a spontaneous play about white male privilege in one act. I appreciated the drama. One or two of them chuckled at their own audacity. The gate agent did an interesting sort of check-in by merging the newly formed line with the actual line. The people in my line, almost all white and male themselves, were in turn quizzical and accepting.
Buffalo Wild Wings Was My One-Man Gay Bar, by Logan Scherer for Eater, May 2019
This began with a sentence I cannot relate to on any level as I often found discomfort at the Ypsilanti Buffalo Wild Wings (the Ann Arbor one came later) but of course; I was intrigued by this premise and it was interesting for nostalgic and
The Coast of Utopia, by Carina Chocano for Vanity Fair, July 2019
This article put me through so many emotions: first I was listless, like am I really the person reading this, why am I reading this and then I was like UTOPIA, INTERESTING and THEN I was like excuse me Australia’s High Court did what to indigenous land and listen, this takes you to unexpected places.
The Great Race to Rule Streaming TV, by Jonah Weiner for The New York Times, July 2019
All of our screens are now TVs, and there is more TV to watch on them than ever. More dramas, more comedies, more thrillers, more fantasy-adventure series, more dating shows, more game shows, more cooking shows, more travel shows, more talk shows, more raunchy comedies, more experimental comedies, more family comedies, more comedy specials, more children’s cartoons, more adult cartoons, more limited series, more documentary series, more prestige dramas, more young-adult dramas, more prestige young-adult dramas — more, more, more.
Rehearsals, by Leslie Jamison for The Nervous Breakdown, June 2011
This was a nice swift punch to the stomach.
Everyone talks about weddings as beginnings but the truth is they are also endings. They give a horizon of closure to things that have been slowly dissolving for years: flirtations, friendships, shared innocence, shared rootlessness, shared loneliness.
