Books
Elaine U. Cho’s Ocean’s Godori (Alliance #1)
Tricia Levenseller’s The Darkness Within Us (Shadows Between Us #2)
Mimi Matthews’ Rules for Ruin (Crinoline Academy #1)
Taylor Robin’s Hunger’s Bite
Books, rereads
Heather Guerre’s Hot Blooded (Tooth & Claw #2)
Lilian Lark’s Entranced by the Basilisks (Monstrous Matches #3)
Courtney Milan’s The Devil Comes Courting (Worth Saga #3)
Alisha Rai’s Be My Fantasy (Fantasy Duo #1)
Music
CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso’s IMPOSTER & EL DÍA DEL AMIGO
Chayanne’s Bailando Bachata
Devon Cole’s Play House
Daniela Darcourt’s La Sinvergüenza
Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere (Live), You Make Loving Fun (Live)
Chloe Flower ft. JoJo’s The Very Thought of You (Nat King Cole cover)
Ginuwine’s Pony
Sinéad Harnett’s If You Let Me (Live)
Angel Haze’s Candles
Juliana’s Bienvenidos a La Pista
Juliana & Opa!’s La Primera Vez
Lawd Ito!’s Aguanile (Bomba Version)
Oliver Richman, Joy Woods, and Grant Stellar’s The Ballad of Phil and Phyllis
Opa!’s A la Disco, Pierdo el Control, Noches de Cristal, Vale la Pena, Vale la Pena (pt.2)
Opa!’s Amando con Dudas (En vivo @ImanMusicTV)
Parisalexa’s Flygirl
Teyana Taylor’s Long Time
Third Reprise ft. Darren Criss and Helen J Shen’s When You’re in Love
Misc.
Couples Therapy S4B
Articles
Violet Affleck’s A Chronically Ill Earth: COVID Organizing as a Model Climate Response in Los Angeles
“But our bewildered response to crises like the LA fires tell us we may still be accustomed to addressing the climate crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic: as a question of how fast we can get back around to pretending like the problem is gone.
After all, the promised end to the pandemic has been more a matter of public relations than public health.”
“the climate resilience our society needs to build relies upon the skills and systems of pacing that disabled and chronically ill people have built to manage both their own symptoms and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic”
“Though widespread N95 masking is indisputably the most effective tool43 for individuals to prevent COVID transmission, masking alone is both more resource-intensive and more reactive than collective interventions like paid sick leave for all workers, universal healthcare, and clean air standards requiring HEPA filtration and far-UVC light44 to kill airborne virus in public spaces.
Climate disasters cannot be prevented or mitigated as easily as airborne disease transmission. But the experience of chronic illness is relevant here, too: many pwME reject the framework of total “recovery” as irrelevant to their day-to-day lives, preferring instead to celebrate the life-changing benefits of even tiny improvements.”
Sesali Bowen’s Fat Black Girls Are, First & Foremost, An Unsavory Idea
“I have a theory that Black women’s visibility is only measured through extreme narratives and images. Black women only warrant attention when we are perceived as icons of excellence or as degenerates. We are a series of ideas that are either good or bad, assigned to bodies that are read as Black and female. While there is a lot of variation amongst the good and bad ideas, there is no in-between. In trying to categorize and validate the subject of ‘Grounded in the Stars’ people needed one of those ideas to pull from. She’s 12-feet + made of bronze that has darkened because of oxidation + has Black features + standing idly. She must be a fat, Black woman. And fat Black girls are, first and foremost, an unsavory idea.”
Melissa Febos’ Publishing Day
“the reward for making art is the work, and the practice of building a life around art. That publishing won’t complete them, because they are already complete. That the best thing they can do for their art is to separate their relationship to it from the concerns of publication, reception, reputation—all the places where the ego creeps in to do its dubious work.”
Orna Gurnalik & Christine in conversation, Garth Greenwell’s Taking Offense: Reading through bad feeling, and Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger
Not a typical link, but metaphorically linking these three pieces. Especially when Christine says “I’m getting riled up, but I am trying to move from a place of curiosity rather than judgment,” which reminded me of Kaur’s work. The conversation as a whole also reminded me of Greenwell’s article, which the following quotes are from.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being offended by art, anything unilluminated or shameful or gauche in it. The challenge is that offendedness, like disgust, doesn’t draw us nearer to an object but instead triggers a reflex of rejection”
“I think about this often in class, when students sometimes shut down in response to offensiveness in a work of art I see as having this kind of value. I find myself using two metaphors that are a little contradictory—or maybe not contradictory; maybe they’re two steps in a process. One is a metaphor of suspension. I don’t want to shut down my students’ offendedness, I don’t want to repress it. But maybe we can try to hold it in abeyance, suspending it long enough to see if there are things to value in the work, or (if we’re in a writing workshop, say) things to learn. Such value doesn’t cancel out the offense, which is only suspended, not dismissed; we may decide that our instincts were right and the work’s value doesn’t, for us, balance out its offensiveness. That’s a perfectly appropriate response to some works of art. The second metaphor is helpful in the case of art that I think intends its offensiveness, wants to put it to work. In this case, I say to my students, what if we don’t suspend our offense but instead try to stay in it, to find a way of engaging with the art not despite but through our offendedness? I’m interested in this as a response to bad feeling, because sometimes we can find something of immense value, maybe of transformative value, on the other side of bad feeling. This is always a gamble; there’s no knowing if you’re going to find it or not; you might just be letting yourself in for the kind of unredeemed unpleasantness I find in that scene from Persuasion. But some of my most powerful experiences of art have been the result of this strategy: of dwelling in bad feeling to see if it might turn into something else.”
Rebecca Nagle’s Long-COVID Care is Disintegrating
“Many of the long-COVID clinics that popped up during the pandemic have closed. As part of my reporting for this story, I compiled a list of 171 clinics, drawing from the Survivor Corps website, a patient-led resource-and-advocacy group, and from searching online for long-COVID clinics by state. I then called each clinic to verify which ones were still operating. Of those, 79 were still open and accepting new patients, five were not accepting new patients or outside referrals, 61 had closed, and 15 were unreachable after two attempts. Eleven more were advertised as long-COVID clinics but don’t have a medical doctor or nurse on staff; they provide services such as speech or occupational therapy. (My assistant Sydney Anderson and intern Cheyenne McNeil, who have been helping me work through my illness, contributed to this reporting.)
Based on the list we assembled, 22 states have no long-COVID clinics accepting new patients. Given COVID rates in those states, we estimated that almost 3 million people who currently have long COVID reside there.”
Britten Piers’ Eric Bogosian Just Came Out as an Elder Queer Legacy Artist
“For fandom, bottoming is rarely just about the act. It’s not simply a kink, though it can be that too: it’s a kind of symbolic grammar for a masculinity that’s capable of change. In the 1980s, bottoming became a synecdoche for death: a target of moral panic, public health anxiety, and internalized shame. To be penetrated was, for many, to be pathologized. But in queer fan cultures now, especially those formed around stories of vampires — a dense symbol for transformation through not despite penetration, surrender to what’s true, seeing the otherwise taboo and disavowed elements of oneself as beautiful, maybe even powerful, inhabiting and at the same time beyond identity categories — bottoming has become something else entirely.
It’s a celebration of openness. Of transformation. Permeability is an ethic encompassing something more powerful: willingness to let go of ego, of status, of control — of the cultural performance of masculinity itself — and to be bottomed by what is right, real, and most of all kind. It’s in the sex, and it exceeds the sex. If there’s orientation, it’s to truth. And for many fans, especially those who live in bodies that have been made porous by love, grief, or change, this is the language through which redemption and recognition arrive. That’s the deep structure beneath the shipping. That’s the real fantasy: not dominance or submission, but transformation without shame.”
“But what happens when someone like Bogosian, as Interview with the Vampire actor, Daniel Molloy avatar, AIDS-era art-world peripheral, simply says something that doesn’t resolve according to the usual script of PR-mediated coming-out? What if, at 72, he just doesn’t care to resolve it?
Maybe coming out, when you’re a legacy artist, doesn’t have to follow the rules. Coming out can look like storytelling. It can look like grief. It can look like a refusal to name the thing because the name isn’t the point. In fact, it might be the most authentically queer thing possible to say: Here’s a window into what shaped me, and will continue to shape me. Do with that what you will.”
Tori’s The Dramione Dilemma
A thoughtful take on the intersection of the following: Dramione fanfic being converted to traditionally published novels; J.K. Rowling’s transphobia; fans divesting from Rowling, her books, and her transphobia; and how fans interact with Harry Potter fanfic and now-Harry-Potter-adjacent novels.
Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ profile of Martha Wells, Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?
“For some reason, I pressed the issue, pointing out that the TV show, unlike the books, depicts Murderbot’s favorite program—“The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon,” with amusingly over-the-top performances from guest stars John Cho and Jack McBrayer—as what I unadvisedly called “pure schlock.” She said, “I don’t care if my entertainment is schlock or not if I like it. I loathe the phrase ‘guilty pleasure.’ Is it child porn? No? Then it’s not a guilty pleasure. It was created by people to be enjoyed.””
Esther O. Lee 