1. To start, here’s a bunch of things that I would file under, “Food - it’s complicated”: Matt Hartman on consuming the “New South”; Serena Dai on food colonialism and when notions of food poisoning are racist; Food & Wine magazine has named its first Black Best New Chef, Seattle’s Edouardo Jordan; this First We Feast article on the problem with rap being played in restaurants (you already know how I feel) touches on some interesting points even though it largely misses the mark for me (Gee isn’t rap music LOUD?! Like, too loud for FINE DINING?!), but their roundtable on the state of soul food was great; you can now order Taco Bell via Slack; pomegranatesssssssssssss; I'm tired of explaining to people that it's highly, highly unlikely that they've eaten authentic Kobe beef in America (shout out to a former co-worker who tried to argue that Umami Burger's nine dollar ass burgers were made from a Kobe beef blend); I really enjoyed Pelin Keskin's Cooking in America episode on Uzbek food; Chinese culture without Chinese people; hierarchies of taste, hierarchies of interest, and how Americans pretend to be into "ethnic food"; and lastly, because I'm obsessed with what politicians eat, I enjoyed this Bernie Sanders profile. TRIGGER WARNING: contains the words "millennial-friendly blueberry smoothie" just sitting on the page together being annoying.
2. "Lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances": Hito Stereyl on shitpics
3. I was too indie to shop at Kitson (even though I lived nearby and frequented the also-shuttered WESC store across the street from their Robertson Blvd location), but I appreciate it as a fixture of my Los Angeles girlhood, however removed from it I was ideologically. Philippa Snow offers a eulogy of sorts at Vestoj.
4. "I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."
5. "Using [the sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, I studied dogs as a new social marker. Dog ownership is a way of appropriating public space. Firstly, because you have to walk dogs and secondly, because they make you feel safe in the neighbourhood. Dog ownership is a way of inscribing very specific social norms onto public space. So I look at the way dog owners really use their dogs, not in a conscious way, to signal their socio-economic status. Like having a certain kind of dog, not those 'ghetto' dogs, but rather by owning poodles or Labradors. They buy accessories for their dogs and go to dog bakeries. These social activities are used to create a new lifestyle and new way of consolidating social bonds."
6. You've probably read David Remnick's home run Aretha Franklin profile already, right? Right???
7. "When vigilance becomes a game, the dangers posed by injustice begin to feel arbitrary. The Woke Olympics, in turn, operates both as sport and false consciousness, championed by the faulty belief that eradication is the natural result of recognizing hate’s existence."
8. This article on the "weird teens" of Tumblr exposed me to the world of One Direction-President Obama slashfic ("a love room with a love bed").
9. Why does L.A. insist on wasting time and money addressing non-issues? We don't have the man-spreading problem on public transportation that New York seems to have. You know who takes up extra seats on the bus? People who can't afford to transport their shit any other way. I'm pretty sure they won't have a spare $100 for this dumb ass ticket, either. As for the people who put their regular-sized purses and backpacks in adjoining seats, that's nothing a finger pointed at the seat coupled with "Can I sit here?" won't fix. Proposing a whole ass law because people don't know how to speak up is ridiculous to me, especially because I can guarantee a certain kind of person won't be getting these tickets.
10. "The formulation has been diluted to something representational and bloodless — an architectural rendering of a building that will never be built." Jia Tolentino on the commodification of "empowerment."
Bonus: automating emotional labor via Chrome extensions
But also: "Let’s get rid of the 'I' in fiction and memoir too. If that means no more fiction and memoir, well, it is a small price to pay to make all those people who think they are too highly refined and emotionally gifted stop talking about themselves for just a few minutes, and if you’re going to tell me that I’m using the personal pronoun an awful lot in this piece decrying it, well, oh my God, what an amazing point you raise, I never thought of that."
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