Author Archives

Professional writer, editor, napper, and dog-snorgler. Knows you are, but what is she?

On Being Fat

Illustration by Hana Jang (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Why Am I So Fat?” was one of our top five reads last week, and with good reason — it was honest and cutting in all the right ways. It was brash and unapologetic and funny as hell (and also suggests that perhaps Fader was slightly premature in declaring, earlier this year, that “fat shaming is dead”).

It was also problematic, and many fat women applauded the piece while also wishing it had pushed harder and skirted some problematic tropes. Luckily, many other writers, scholars, and activists have also been publishing wonderful pieces on fatphobia: their experiences, the cultural and institutional ways it is entrenched, and more. They might not have gone viral, but their voices are important — and just as honest, cutting, brash, and funny.

Read more…

‘Booze Is the Oil in Our Motors’

Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body?

I mean, what’s the big deal? Why would anyone want to soften the edges of this glorious reality?

– Newly-sober Kristi Coulter, in Quartz, writes on sobriety, misogyny, and why so many women reach for wineglasses to celebrate their lives — or deflect the blows.

Read the full essay

Obama’s Aesthetic of Cool

barack obama

On stage a young black man, the president of the United States, warmly embraced an older white woman in front of god and all the world. It is now an iconic photograph. If it had occurred on a weed-choked street in Mississippi within the lifetime of many of the people who were cheering the moment, the young man might have been beaten, burned, hung, thrown into a river with a cotton fan tied to his neck. A song began to rise through the history of the moment:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root/Black bodies swingin’ in the Southern breeze/Strange fruit hangin’ from the poplar trees…

But it was not those days any longer. The young man was the President of the United States and he has rung his changes on that song, and on an occasionally baffled democracy.

– Charles Pierce, writing in Esquire, on President Obama’s Democratic National Convention Speech and uniquely American brand of “cool.”

Read the essay

God the Gorilla

silverback gorilla

Not everyone buys into a sky-god with a long white beard, a serious and all-knowing mien, capable of rewarding good behaviour and punishing bad. But it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that God, as worshipped in most of the world, is remarkably humanoid, widely perceived as a great, big, scary, wilful, yet nourishing and protective guy… in short, a silverback gorilla writ large.

-Evolutionary biologist David Barash, writing in Aeon, finds a model for most monotheistic conceptions of god where we might not think to look: in the “harem-keeping alpha male” leaders of gorilla families.

Read the story

A Conversation in the Margins

notes scribbled in the margins
"Marginalia" photo by Shelley.

What they don’t tell you about death—or what you don’t really understand until it happens close to you—is how permanent it is. In the months afterward I kept thinking to myself, all right, I get it. This is too painful. Let’s just take a little break from the loss. Let’s have a weekend off. A day. Or an hour. Just one hour when it’s not true, when she is allowed to speak to me, or to rub an absent-minded hand through my hair. But the wall is high and fissureless. There are no breaks, no time-outs. The loss is final, and the you that you were with her is nowhere, gone.

– Blair Hurley, writing in LitHub, reflects on the loss of her mother, and how she found a path through grief by revisiting the opinions and notes scrawled in the margins of her mother’s books.

Read the full essay

Looking For a Killing: On the Ethics of Longform Reportage

Afghan soliders on patrol.
Afghan soliders on patrol. Photo by Theodore Schmidt.

Now, imagine you’re on a mission with a platoon of Afghan soldiers in a valley that you know to be under the control of insurgents, and imagine your task is to show that fact. On the one hand, you don’t want the soldiers to be ambushed—what kind of person would want that?—but on the other, the only reason you came to that valley in the first place was the high likelihood that they’d be ambushed and your desire to be with them when they were. Which is to say, I think, that you do want them to be ambushed.

Writing in LitHub, journalist Luke Mogelson explores the darker side of what it means to do longform, on-the-ground reporting.

Read the full essay

‘A Uterus Gone Rogue’: Diagnosing Endometriosis

Photo by precidenciamx.

I think of endometriosis as a uterus gone rogue; instead of simply receiving and disposing of eggs, the uterus decides it wants to send things via the fallopian tubes, too. But because ovaries don’t have the capacity to receive anything, the uterus posts the only junky gift it’s got — uterine wall cells — up the fallopian tube. When the ovaries can’t accept those cells, they flow out into the abdominal cavity, where everything is showered in Essence of Uterus, like confetti at a wedding.

– Writing in The Toast, Rosanna Beatrice’s “Reckless and Hopeful Subservience” takes us through the discomfort, confusion, and anger of being diagnosed and dealing with endometriosis, a painful reproductive disorder with mysterious origins, and no cure.

Read the full story

Can Clinton’s Campaign Take Control of the Narrative in Time?

Image by Gage Skidmore

The idea that, at this point, there is some version of Hillary Clinton that we haven’t seen before feels implausible. Often, it feels like we know too much about her. She has been around for so long — her story, encompassing political intrigue and personal drama, has been recounted so many times — that she can seem a fictional character. To her critics, she is Lady Macbeth, to her adherents, Joan of Arc. As a young Hillary hater, I often compared her to Darth Vader — more machine than woman, her humanity ever more shrouded by Dark Side gadgetry. These days, I think of her as General Leia: No longer a rebel princess, she has made a wry peace with her rakish mate and her controversial hair and is hard at work, mounting a campaign against the fascistic First Order.

– Rebecca Traister followed Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail for this profile in New York magazine. With access afforded to few journalists, she saw both sides of the narrative made flesh: the stiff, loud, pedantic arena performer and the engaged, relaxed (yes, relaxed!), nose-to-the-grindstone public servant.

Read the full story

Six James Beard Finalists You Might Have Missed: A Reading List

James Beard
James Beard, photo by Paul Child.

The James Beard Foundation announced the finalists for its 2016 food media awards last week, so it’s a great time to make a cup of tea and cozy up to some excellent food writing. You might have already read some of the nominees featured here throughout 2015 — “The Brief, Extraordinary Life of Cody Spafford,” “Straight-Up Passing,” “Corn Wars,” “The Second Most Famous Thing to Happen to Hiroshima,” “The Chef Who Saved My Life,” and “On Chicken Tenders,” which features some of the most passionate writing about fried snack foods to hit the internet’s tubes — but here are six more you might have missed:

1. “Ham to Ham Combat: A Tale of Two Smithfields” (Emily Wallace, Gravy, December 2015)

Worth it for the title alone, Emily’s piece wends from 350-year-old pro-pig promotional literature to the interstate tensions at the 1985 Ham & Yam Festival — with a pit stop to visit The Oldest Peanut in the World — in service of a single question: is the ham capital of the U.S. in Virginia, or North Carolina?  (And a runner-up question: Why does it matter?)

Read more…

If Oprah Can’t Achieve Permanent Weight Loss, Can Anyone?

scale

Longtime Oprah lover over here. Since my tweens, I’ve admired how she’s made celebrities seem like regular people and turned regular people into celebrities. I read the books her Book Club boosted. Hell, I’m wearing a bra she recommended on her “Favorite Things” episode in 2003. I think she has earned every ounce of success she enjoys, so I am glad for her that she made $70 million on the first day of her deal with Weight Watchers. That amount of money will be heavy, and if she binds it together, she can use it to weigh down stacks of her other money so none of it blows away when she opens a window in one of her many beautiful homes.

But by the ninth or 10th time I heard Oprah talk about how we’re gonna go on this weight loss journey together, I had an epiphany: I have put on my sneakers and jogged down this road with Oprah before.

— Writer and television producer Caissie St. Onge, writing in Vox, on Oprah, diets, and liking (or not liking) yourself — and how all the money and drive in the world doesn’t help.

Read the full essay