Our culture has weaponized virtue.
Her ex-husband changed his mind at the last minute. He wasn’t going to let their daughter spend the weekend with her friends after all. Instead, they were going to bond. When she asked him why, he said the girl needed to spend more time with her father.
“We’ve been neglecting our family values,” he said. Of course, my friend’s ex wound up not spending any time with his daughter at all. He took his new girlfriend to an indoor fun park, and she tagged along. Eventually, his daughter disappeared. …
They’re building them like there’s no tomorrow.
I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
— Jay Gould, railroad magnate
In 1893, George Pullman was one of the richest men in the world during one of the worst financial depressions in history. Now he lies in a steel vault eight feet underground, in a coffin sealed with lead. He was buried at night, in secret, to keep his employees from desecrating his corpse. I guess that’s what happens when you pay starvation wages, and overcharge your workers for rent in a private city you built with no government.
The world’s billionaires…
They have one thing in common.
My life took an unexpected turn when I was 19. After my first year of college, I dropped out. Sure, I could blame the stress of dealing with a mentally-ill parent or having to support myself with part-time jobs. The truth was that everything just felt pointless.
For some reason I gave college one more shot, and decided to take a seminar on Malcolm X. He was the focus of the entire semester. We did nothing but read work by him or about him.
It changed my life.
The heroes you choose say a lot about you, for obvious reasons…
Humor
by H.P. Lovecraft and Dr. Mehmet Oz
Your life’s a wreck, and there’s one simple reason. It’s not because you’re unemployed or divorced or broke. No, it’s because you haven’t been thinking about Megan Fox enough.
Shame on you.
You’re skeptical, as you should be. It sounds like utter nonsense that Megan Fox could be the key to unlocking your true potential and living a happier, more productive, and more meaningful life.
Very well.
Did you know looking at Megan Fox for ten minutes a day cures most forms of cancer? …
You can learn the signs.
Rebecca Solnit inspired the term mansplaining in 2008, after a professor tried to explain one of her own books to her at a party.
He seemed to think she was just another faculty wife or traveling spouse. Another woman tried to point out that he was literally talking to the author of the book in question. He didn’t listen. When he finally realized what he was doing, he didn’t apologize. He made an excuse, admitting he actually hadn’t even read her book, just a review of it.
Mansplaining is now one of the hallmarks of covert sexism. These men aren’t…
We need something better.
Well, here we go again.
We’re gearing up for reentry into society. We’re starting to plan vacations and date nights. We’re doing the laundry that’s been piled in a corner for six months, and making a list of which of our favorite restaurants didn’t go out of business. We’re psyched and nervous at the same time. We have no idea how we feel. One word sums it all up:
It feels weird.
The old normal looks like a distant memory, a bygone era. We’re going to be feeling our way forward for a long time.
Some things will feel natural.
…
And it’s a sign of emotional fragility.
“Smile.”
That’s what the shiny happy stranger said to me in the middle of a coffee shop on one of the worst days of my life.
He didn’t know we’d just committed my mom to the mental health clinic again, or that it was the first time in 36 hours I’d had a few minutes to collect my thoughts over some coffee.
He didn’t care.
He stood there, waiting.
So I did my best. Then he gave me a thumbs up and walked off, leaving me to feel even more drained than before. …
It matters how you treat people.
They were going to fire me.
“She didn’t go to the right school,” the vice-chancellor said in a meeting where I wasn’t present. The meeting was about changes he was making to the tenure process. He wasn’t just talking about me, but all the other applicants who had PhDs from less prestigious universities.
He went on to explain how raising our university’s ranking and profile would mean building more prestige.
That meant hiring more professors from “elite schools” like Harvard and Yale. To him, it didn’t matter how many books or articles his professors had published, or how many awards…
We have to correct course.
My mother-in-law cried when the Sandy Hook shooting happened. Like me, she’s a teacher. She asked me to pray with her.
I did.
Four years later, she voted for Donald Trump.
She’s voted republican since she was 18. She does it because she thinks anyone who holds a bible and talks about Jesus is a better person than someone who doesn’t. That includes politicians like Lauren Boebert, who constantly demonizes any attempt at gun regulation as an assault on human rights. Meanwhile, she does stuff like this:
And she lied about being a billionaire.
Kylie Jenner has made a gigantic fortune by doing something millions of women secretly fantasize about. She hangs out at home all day, posting selfies in her underwear and asking for money.
Hey, I would do it.
Of course, there’s nothing casual (or harmless) about what Kylie Jenner does. Her Instagram feed flaunts a highly curated lifestyle and promotes unsustainable living. She’s spent the last five or six years crafting a level of flawless beauty that even she couldn’t attain without plastic surgery, a team of makeup artists, and a phone full of beauty filters.
