A Few Words About Breasts |
I have to begin with a few words about androgyny. In grammar school, in the fifth and sixth grades, we were all tyrannized by a rigid set of rules that supposedly determined whether we were boys or girls. The episode in Huckleberry Finn where Huck is disguised as a girl and gives himself away by the way he threads a needle and catches a ball—that kind of thing. We learned that the way you sat, crossed your legs, held a cigarette, and looked at your nails, your wristwatch, the way you did these things instinctively was absolute proof of your sex. Now obviously most children did not take this literally, but I did. I thought that just one slip, just one incorrect cross of my legs or flick of an imaginary cigarette ash would turn me from whatever I was into the other thing; that would be all it took, really. Even though I was outwardly a girl and had many of the trappings generally associated with girldom—a girl's name, for example, and dresses, my own telephone, an autograph book—I spent the early years of my adolescence absolutely certain that I might at any point gum it up. I did not feel at all like a girl. I was boyish. I was athletic, ambitious, outspoken, competitive, noisy, rambunctious. I had scabs on my knees and my socks slid into my loafers and I could throw a football. I wanted desperately not to be that way, not to be a mixture of both things, but instead just one, a girl, a definite indisputable girl. As soft and as pink as a nursery. And nothing would do that for me, I felt, but breasts. |
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Right-Wing Media and the Death of an Alabama Pastor: An American Tragedy |
Bubba Copeland had many secrets. And as a servant to both God and man, the judgments of heaven and earth were the alpha and omega of Bubba's existence. What God thinks of anything, much less any of us, is difficult to discern, if we are honest. But the people of the First Baptist Church of Phenix City, Alabama, unabashedly adored Bubba. He was empathetic and industrious and always seemed to be doing something for somebody. By last fall, he had been the senior pastor at First Baptist for four years and the church's youth minister for fifteen years before that. Bubba was not seminary trained and was not what you might call an intellectual from the pulpit, but what he lacked in academic theology he made up for in his eagerness to answer to the spiritual and material needs of others, no matter the time or expense. According to the people in his church family who knew him best and loved him most, Bubba possessed an enormous capacity to serve, and his sermons were personal, compassionate, and often funny. As a Christian and as a pastor, he thought that in a pinch the Sermon on the Mount was just about all the Bible a man would ever need, and his favorite verse was Matthew 7:1—"Judge not, that ye be not judged." |
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The 57 Best Items For Your Home |
During the pandemic, we all went hard on home-buying binges, looking for hacks that would help us carry on while stuck indoors. Once we returned to the real world, though, we rediscovered feeling good for the sake of feeling good. Treating ourselves. Doing it big, even. After getting back out there again and visiting our favorite hotels as well as brand-new restaurants and bars, we instantly forgot about our Snuggie. Being exposed to so much newness, we wanted to surround ourselves with all things linen, cashmere, marble, velvet, and smart tech—and bring it home this year. Thankfully, our favorite home brands delivered. Soho Home designed beautiful furniture. Four Seasons made bedding. CB2 started churning out club-worthy bar items. It's easier than ever to fill your home with stunning pieces, so where do you start? We know investing is never simple and shopping for home items is overwhelming. With so many retailers, a ridiculous number of influencers hawking paid partnerships, and prices that make your head spin, it can be damn near impossible to know where to spend your precious moolah. That's where we come in. Our team thoroughly tests products, and this year I enlisted our entire staff to lounge on couches, road-test the newest smart-home gadgets, sleep under all kinds of sheets, dry off with organic cotton towels, and drink whatever the hell they wanted from the finest glassware—in order to find the best of the best for you. |
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How an Elusive Graffiti Writer's Work Wound Up on My Leather Jacket |
When I was young, I spent a lot of time in train yards. I was really into graffiti, and freight trains were like rolling art galleries on metal where you could see work by people from across the country. One of the most prolific writers was Colossus of Roads, who scribbled the profile of a cowboy's face on what seemed like every boxcar in America. Under each profile was a cryptic message—"big mistake," "audience expands," "never came back." It was rumored that Colossus was a railway worker who had been at it since the 1970s. He drew his moniker in the folkloric style of hobo art. In the 1930s, during the depths of the Great Depression, a large number of Americans illegally hopped freight trains in search of work. Legend has it that they communicated with one another through pictograms. Each symbol carried a meaning: "this town has work," "doctor here won't charge," "religious talk gets free meal." These symbols were a way to make a dangerous journey safer for fellow itinerants. |
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Why Carrie Is Still Scary as Shit |
There are two great origin stories in the history of horror fiction. The first took place in Switzerland in 1816, but it began with a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world. Ash from Mount Tambora wrapped the planet in shade, leading to "the year without a summer" and forcing a rabble of Romantic poets inside their vacation home on the banks of Lake Geneva. Bored, they took to writing scary stories, and a nineteen-year-old woman wrote down a "tale that haunted [her] midnight pillow." It became Frankenstein, which revolutionized horror, birthed science fiction, and ensured that Mary Shelley would forever reign as the queen of Gothic fiction. The second story occurred 156 years later. It's also an underdog tale, and though it may not include an actual volcano, its impact was no less seismic. As the story goes, sometime in the winter of 1972, another young woman was walking past the trash can in her husband's writing room. Room may be a strong word for what was essentially a cubby in their trailer home, but it was there that the woman's husband pounded out stories on an Olivetti typewriter, sending them to men's magazines to supplement his income from teaching English and working shifts at the local laundry. The woman noticed a sheaf of papers in the trash and, in an uncharacteristic move, she fished the pages out, rolled them flat, and read them. When she asked her husband why he had discarded this particular story, he told her that he knew "jack shit about high school girls." She told him he was onto something and that he should keep writing. Luckily, he did. That woman's name is Tabitha King. Her husband is Stephen. The story is titled Carrie. And it changed the world. |
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Jerrod Carmichael Has Done the Unthinkable |
Jerrod Carmichael has become one of the most popular comedians in America—and an in-demand actor, most recently in the multiple-Oscar-winning Poor Things—precisely for his own ability to put things in very clear terms, even if it takes a few pauses to get there. Reality Show is something he struggles to describe in his own words, maybe because he's too close to the subject matter, maybe because the subject matter is his actual soul. "I'm just a little sensitive to the whole thing. I've been trying to talk about the show and sound articulate, and it's not easy. Basically, I'm one of Cesar Millan's dogs," he says, describing a reality TV show from a decade ago, Dog Whisperer. "It's like interviewing the Chihuahua about why he peed on the rug. Like, I don't know what to tell you. It's not J-Lo's This Is Me…Now." Before my first meeting with Carmichael, I was given access to all eight episodes of Reality Show. I watched them in one sitting, and I was rapt and entertained and left with a low-key feeling of dread and discomfort. Why, I wondered, in a show that includes and involves the parents whose religion will not allow them to engage with his homosexuality even in the abstract, would he pull his sexuality so vividly into the real? What is the purpose of forcing them, Clockwork Orange-style, to see what they strain to avoid? After spending time with him, it becomes clear that the project was made with love and honesty toward a larger goal of more love and more honesty. Carmichael appears to find both liberation and inspiration in the process of radical sharing. Good can come from it. He's not wrong. |
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