Misc.

Book: Jackie Lau’s The Stand Up Groomsman (reread)

Book: Nadia El-Fassi’s Love at First Fright

Poetry chapbook: Violet Lea Devotion’s My Heart is a Bloodbath

Live: The Soiled Dove

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Music

Chanel & Abraham Mateo’s Clavaito

Cordae’s RNP (NPR Tiny Desk Contest)

FORAGER’s Split Lip (NPR Tiny Desk Contest)

Aretha Franklin’s You Send Me

Leslie Grace’s Day 1

Juvenile’s Back That Azz Up (NPR Tiny Desk Concert)

Kehlani ft. Toni Braxton’s Folded

Kelis’ Feed Them

Megan Thee Stallion’s LOVER GIRL

Audrey Nuna’s Damn, Time, Baby Blues (NPR Tiny Desk Concert)

Parisalexa’s Lucky

Rusowsky’s MARIA (NPR Tiny Desk Concert)

Jordyn Simone’s HOLD ME

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Articles

Eli Cahan’s Long Covid Is Real — And It’s Changing an Entire Generation

“as the country throttles past the pandemic’s fifth anniversary, those for whom Covid looms very present are feeling increasingly forgotten, subject to pervasive skepticism and a kind of cultural fatigue when it comes to their illness.”

“since the earliest days of the second Trump administration, the dollars that could help those suffering from the illness have quietly faded away”

“unvaccinated children are up to 20 times more likely to develop long Covid”

“Covid has done serious physical and emotional damage. It’s also hindered their ability to participate in school — something that becomes an all-encompassing source of frustration for children and parents alike.”

“Those struggles are despite a July 2021 joint statement from HHS and the Department of Justice clarifying that long Covid is a protected condition under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But early actions under the second Trump administration stand to further jeopardize their ability to access special education.”

“According to the patient advocacy group Long Covid Alliance, there are fewer than a dozen long-Covid pediatric clinics across the country, compared with 400 adult clinics”

“Recent reporting suggests that kids’ access to special education may worsen further following widespread cuts to the DOE”

“The longer-term consequences on a generation of struggling children taught without adequate support — or via hybrid education — are also not yet clear, says Susan Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics. But, based on what she’s seen, she’s afraid that “every community is going to pay the price in the long run.””

Kai Cheng Thom’s Cancel culture favours punishment over solidarity. It’s time to let it go

“Where have we failed to build a sustainable movement capable of building broad coalitions and winning the power of governance as effectively as our right-wing counterparts? Where do we stand today on the issue of free expression, diversity of tactics and divergence, now that we find ourselves subject to ever-increasing censorship and repression? And not only that, but without a rhetorical leg to stand on, given our own participation in anti-freedom of speech rhetoric? Why did we ever cede freedom of expression, historically a central value of liberatory and particularly queer movements and allow it to be weaponized against us by the Right?”

“What is particularly striking to me as a trans woman of colour is that regardless of whether it is right-wing populists or left-wing radicals practising cancel culture, the end result always seems to be the same: Regardless of guilt or innocence, the wealthy and powerful remain wealthy and powerful, while the vulnerable are damaged and disappeared.”

“…cancel culture does not defend the weak or uphold justice. Rather it is a collective practice of punishment and censorship that has never been and cannot be a tool of liberation for queer communities”

Emma Copley Eiesnberg’s The “Unhinged Bisexual Woman” Novel

“And so too do Big Swiss and Milk Fed. The queer relationships in these books are plot devices meant not to say anything new about queer love or intimacy but meant rather to pit the bisexual or straight-proximate characters against themselves.”

“I am thinking now that I may not be the target audience for the Unhinged Bisexual Woman Novel after all, since the target audience may be people for whom lesbian sex is a curiosity, a reverie, a joke, or an unfortunate bodily necessity.”

“Authors have little to no control over the way their books are marketed and sold as objects, of course. But what does it mean that even if a novel’s characters do not claim queerness — or claim it ambivalently — queer content can still give a book a sales boost? What kinds of queer stories get plucked from literary obscurity and sold to mainstream, straight audiences? Those that satisfy straight appetites, of course.”

“While they struggle with the drastic tendency to deny themselves what they want because of the disgust they feel for their needs and appetites, the books do not deeply grapple with, or illuminate, the source or workings of that disgust: our old friends misogyny, homophobia, fatphobia, classism, and white supremacy. To look at these bigger forces would be to shatter that deadpan voice, to spoil the joke, to put the mad in madcap. No fun at all.”

“For whom is it possible to read as nobody, as a body that brings no identities that would rupture that rapture? #Unhingedwoman novels assume a white reader willing to indulge in the “off kilter” and “deranged” and “obscene” behavior of the thin, white, rich, straight-proximate characters. Should queer, poor, or fat characters, or characters of color, partake in these same acts, mainstream audiences would consider them disgusting, mentally ill, or criminal.”

Jean Hsu’s Ask vs guess culture

Margaret Killjoy’s Revolutions Are Built on Failures

“But what I’ve come to understand over the years is that revolutions are built on failure. We fail, over and over again, until one day we win. It’s our tenacity and endurance that sets us apart from our enemies.”

What Kin-Building Actually Looks Like, Anne Helen Petersen interviews Sophie Lucido Johnson

“Communication is about noticing out loud — a practice that is both revealing and vulnerable. This isn’t something that should be reserved just for your significant other; nor is it a truth that everyone in your life has automatically earned. Instead, I’m suggesting you make intentional choices about the people in your life who deserve your truth, and then structure your time to prioritize your friends at the same level as you prioritize romantic partners and blood relatives. This is all very heady-sounding on the page, but I’m basically talking about loving more people in your life by choosing to show them the less-put-together parts of yourself. That builds intimacy, and ultimately, safety.”

Anne Helen Petersen’s The Reaction is Assymetrical

Behind a paywall.

“He didn’t want Democrats to have less power; he wanted anyone who didn’t believe what he believed to have no power. That’s the natural extension of this sort of political asymmetry: totalitarian dominance.

As much as I want a world much different than this one, I don’t want one without dissent — and I don’t think emulating Kirk’s argumentation style, which was never rooted in persuasion, but humiliation, will get us there. Not just because viscousness corrodes those who practice it, but because humiliation does not work on those within that ideology the way it works on others. You cannot shame the shameless — that’s part of it. But conservatism writ large is well-practiced in transforming criticism into persecution, ridicule into elitism; MAGAism is particularly adept at understanding itself as somehow always winning and also assailed on all fronts.

You cannot fight asymmetrical power by pointing out logical fallacies, or violence, or politeness, or compassion. You can only fight it by refusing to abide by its logic — and, over time, by offering a vision of a different way of living, a different way of orienting ourselves towards the world and others, that is more compelling. Not just for people who believe exactly what we do, but for everyone. I’m not suggesting we give up on the fight. I’m suggesting we start fighting a very different one.”

Sanjana’s Romance Physics

“Part of the magic of their romance is that Holly Black never requires them to stop being enemies for their happily ever after to be persuasive. Cardan loves his ruthless, manipulative wife. Jude loves her slippery, crafty husband. A reader can leave the trilogy assured that they will bicker for as long as they love each other, content to be both enemy and lover in the ever-after.”

“there’s a crucial moment where the enemy kind of does move from enemy to lover. For me, it’s the moment when all the characters arrive at the realization that they aren’t fighting with each other, they’re playing with each other. That means they aren’t pursuing victory or conquest or an end. They’re pursuing endless, infinite, tumultuous play into the ever-after.”

“The terms of engagement have shifted. Characters go from being defined by their repulsion from the Other to being defined by their capitulation to the possibility of being made endlessly vulnerable and open and different and strange by entanglement with an/other.”

Mia Tsai’s Liner Notes #21: No, I Won’t Tell You My AO3

“I honestly don’t know where we go from here. In America, the trend is to think less and less. It’s cool to eschew education and expertise. It’s cool to outsource your thinking to genAI. It’s easy to lose skill and hard to build it up, and so many people are not willing to do that work. Discipline is tough and doesn’t always come with rewards, after all. Product over process, which is antithetical to me both as an author and a Dalcrozian. I want to believe that we can be more complex, that we can find value in earnest criticism. I want to believe that I and other authors can sell the next book and make enough money to pay bills without having to take on a gajillion extra jobs.”

Poem: Andrea Gibson’s Love Letter From The Afterlife

“I am more here than I ever was before.”