The Biden Trap

late to this article, assume everyone has already read it

Recently, when Gillibrand endorsed Biden and called him a “champion for women,” she was criticized for it.

That criticism may have been fair, but it is also an illustration of the grim tax women are expected to pay, always in reaction to the more powerful men whose authority they don’t get to challenge without being pilloried for it, but that they always must carefully reflect and correctly comment on.

Essential Workers Want Real Hazard Pay. Most Of Them...

one of our hospital groups has refused hazard pay because “we do not calibrate pay and benefits based upon the patients’ condition and for this reason we do not offer hazard or crisis pay.”

my brother works at a grocery store, and he also lives with and supports (not financially, but helps with her errands, &c) my 80 year old grandma

he gets $2 an hour extra

he would make more money on unemployment, but if he left his job out of worry for my grandma he probably wouldn't be eligible

(he wouldn't want to do that, I don't think, and I'm sure if he wanted to the rest of our family would support him!! but not everyone facing that decision has the same outlook or luxury.)

yeah it's dire. i'm on the unemployment right now but i'm starting a job and i had to be like ....is it worth it to maybe lose out on what i know is better money

a friend of mine lives with an older (70s) woman and they were working grocery and took an LOA at first and then just left the grocery because they were like, I cannot bring this home to roommate, if she got sick the guilt would end me

& their employer was being extreme trash about ppe etc.

What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American M...

Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman's Public Split, and th...

i just saw this and i

y e p

I think it might be fake tho

Neil Gaiman claims Goodreads account was hacked to d...

imo, this adds to the drama

like I know he's been asked for book recs a bunch of time and always says he's too busy to read outside of work, I believe that he doesn't use goodreads

his tumblr is mostly just answering reader's questions and p interesting imo

God, I hope they split up. But she is definitely going to turn it into a public drama if they do. He was not actually all that open about his personal life before he got involved with her.

yeah outside of their collaborations he sounds like every other writer guy

And that’s not a value judgment for either side (like the Pajiba article implies), just... she is a lot more known for oversharing on social media than he is.

like I think.....part of the problem for him is that he's been online online a lot longer than most writers his age and the toxic social media atmosphere sort of formed around him without him ever really changing his Internet Style or whatever

referring to the few times he's actually misspoken rather than him not commenting on amanda palmer's fuckups which twitter seems to hold him extremely accountable for

Yeah. I will say that at a certain point he got very invested in his blog and started blogging more, and that was really before social media sites were popular, so he was one of the first pop-culture writers who was super accessible (let’s say, before stuff like Stephen King on Twitter).

also having achieved enough mainstream success to earn resentment and not really being old enough to be an elder statesman,

yeah like I used to read his blog in high school and he still kind of has one but I don't really pay it much attention, it's still very chill and like.....you would get the impression that he is married to a normal and not embarrassing person

Yeaaaaaah

I checked it out today after people were complaining about him flying out of new zealand to see where they were getting it? which, like, ok, but also it's not that much different from moving yourself somewhere less far away,

I've also seen him talk about the steps he takes to avoid getting sick on book tours (using alcohol wipes between signings, etc) again on tumblr and I'm sure he did it as safely as possible

lmao it just bugs me bc my sisters had to fly out from la to chicago bc their LEASE WAS UP.............

people still have to move sometimes!!!

the blog post I looked at today made it sound like he hadn't even been planning on living in new zealand for any amount of time and ONLY WENT THERE AS A FAVOR TO AMANDA....................

It happens! I don’t know the specifics so I can’t comment on them, but I do know that when he and Mary broke up (iirc that’s his ex’s name) he was pretty silent about it for a long time even to casual friends.

So if THE WHOLE WORLD KNOWS IMMEDIATELY because Amanda posted about it to Patreon, it’s just like... sigh

the hot goss is she posted it before telling which..............ok

S I G H

it just bothers me that if I say any of this on twitter people will think I'm a crazy stan???

the only thing I stan is the TRUTH

It’s probably not worth getting into it with people on Twitter but... it seems like a really yikes situation

so: my friend went to college with one of his daughters, and from that era of gossip I heard that he was a jerk to his first wife, in some way

though that could be just normal "my parents are breaking up and I'm upset about it" from the perspective of a nineteen year old

I never actually got specifics

Maybe, maybe not. I’ve heard other rumors. There is also just the fact that, afaik, they got together as teenagers, there was religious stuff involved, etc.

yeah idk he seems to have a good relationship with his daughters now tho

It sounded at the time like there were a lot of plausible reasons and infidelity most likely was one.

idk I just follow the one that makes hats on twitter bc that's an interesting job

also apparently he helped improvise the beelzebub fly hat on good omens when the actor got an eye infection and couldn't use the prosthetics with millinery skills he must've picked up from her and idk I think that's kind of neat

yeah I don't want to speculate too much b/c his first wife isn't amanda palmer aka a public figure and chronic oversharer

Yeah they were all pretty normal and quiet about the whole thing at the time, I recall

but!! that old gossip from his first marriage definitely colored my opinion of him from way back, partly because, at nineteen, I was excited to be getting cool gossip

looking back now, I realize that being that age and angry about your divorcing parents is to be expected even if they actually aren't being total assholes

the only insider gossip I have is that my friend told me ivan brunetti had to pick him up for some comics event and in ivan brunetti's estimation he talked about himself too much

but, I think ivan brunetti was picking him up from the airport, and he could plausibly have been very jetlagged

yeah

also gary panter is always telling you weird stories about his life and I love him

I think all old comics dudes are kind of like that

anyway, the "I was hacked" defense being played is still top tier messy breakup material, even if he was actually hacked

If that was the post then he was definitely not hacked by her, LOL, which would honestly be my first uncharitable suspicion.

But yeah, that kind of goodreads post honestly seems out of character to me, unless one of his kids did it or something.

Vast Early America | National Endowment for the Huma...

alison roman drama takes:

Just Give In to Alison Roman

(I lied, this isn't a take, this was just published right before the drama and it's aged interesting)

My working theory was this: Roman’s recipes are a record of hungers correctly identified and sated; she conveys the authority of knowing exactly what she wants, and she is credible in part thanks to the extreme clarity of all she does not like.

this is a take

My favourite part of the drama is her saying 'please to be buying my chopping board' wasn't making fun of the japanese but eastern europeans.

yes, that was wild

also, pretty clearly racist

preeeetty clearly.

though I'm less interested in deep-diving the "colonization of food" discussion because it always strikes hits me uncomfortably someone who grew up in a mixed household

still, THAT WAS BAD.

yeah I haven't really explored the matter more than a twitter skim but that was a spectacular excuse.

there is some value in the "are you racist if you use cardamom in your cooking" discussion but wow, the "I'm just making an obscure Eastern European cookbook reference" was on another level

plus apparently other people in food media have noticed she's especially mean to asian women so that's very bad

but the cancel culture phenomenon where people come out and say "I never liked her but I couldn't figure out why" is interesting to me, and I'm interested in the why of that

cancel culture is not a thing I love and I often think it attacks people who try but fail slightly while not going after bigger and more deserving fish. And I suspect this girl's comments were just ignorance - I don't think she even thought about the implications of going after two women from asian backgrounds. But she was definitely attacking two

successful women in order to get clicks and that's shitty enough without the ignorance in the mix.

yeah, I also don't think Alison Roman will suffer much from this

she works at NYT and they still employ Bret Stephens

aside from possibly losing an exec producer, yep.

yeah and you can't really say cancel culture is at fault there!!

haha nope.

I don't object to it in this specific case, I should say. She went out to attack people in order to boost her own name, she has to deal with the fallout of that

what did she think would happen when she came for chrissy teigen?? like?? even if she didn't know chrissy was executive producing her show, she must have known that teigen is very much on twitter

I'd guess she was banking on Teigen responding and that boosting reads of the article and maybe she'd lose a few Teigen fans but in general people would agree with her and her cool artisan spoons. Something of a misjudgement.

no, you're right, that's exactly what she was thinking

& I think that's the real reason why she didn't go after goop, because goop people don't shop at target but will buy artisan spoons

and like that about themselves

I mean, I'm not gonna deny subconscious racism may have played a part but I believe that was her actual, thinking strategy there

I don't like the term cancel culture but also I feel some frustration that known predators and racists continue to get work and paid,

there needs to be a word for the general pile-on people do for small mistakes that is separate from people actually trying to remove dangerous people from communities

I do think a lot of the 'I never liked her but I couldn't figure out why' is misogyny bc it's so deeply internalized in people/our culture and also, is never said about men

and also bc the level of vitriol released when a woman fucks up is still so disproportionate,

and how the 'I need to speak with your manager' form of racism/entitlement is so heavily feminized even tho men will literally yell and insult you when they express it

yeah, see also: who is a karen, really?

like I get it, and it's valid, I just think there should also be maybe, a kevin

I do think having a term that defined a "actually morally justified and necessary protective shunning" vs "internet pile-on" would be really useful but also inevitably misused

lmao I always think of when someone pointed out the privilege denying dude meme introduced a girl to specifically talk about what white women say to women of color within a few months all the memes were the girl

like gaslighting... but that's not really an argument against trying to develop more precise language

tru but I also noticed people like britney packnett complaining about 'cancel culture' being misapplied aave slang

that's also fair

*brittany packnett I knew I should have checked first

people will always abuse progressive language to make themselves seem like they have the moral high ground but 'cancel culture' comes directly from the handwringing centrists so like I think it's valid to not use it

ANYWAY

nobody is ever thinking when they go after chrissy teigen

going after Chrissy is like “this is not a good look... BUT I’M GONNA WEAR IT ANYWAY”

ongoing by Tim Bray · Bye, Amazon

okay back to the food media drama, alison roman apologized, but, uh the nyt cooking section is having a time

YIKES

I kind of have the feeling that the NYT guy assumed they meant “capo” like a mafia don, which isn’t much BETTER, but... this is the point at which I have to facepalm so hard that the back of my hand winds up on the back of my head,

.

In summary, this whole thing is 😒 all around

yeah I think the tweeting op has it right with the "all this drama is silly" take

I think Alison Roman definitely has a race problem but at the same time I read a lot of commentary on Metafilter about this last night that started to come off as misogynistic

I think the current moment is contributing a lot, too

“I just don’t like how she looks or speaks or carries herself and I haven’t since I first saw her a few years ago” which is one persons opinion when it’s one person saying it but when it starts to aggregate and become a referendum about her “likability”

(her likability prior to all this, I mean)

Her likability post all this is obviously way down for much better reasons

yeah, "I always knew I hated her, but now I know why"

YEAH

no, buddy, that’s your confirmation bias

I will say that being performatively mean is a huge part of her persona and I think it's good to question the allure of performative meanness

I agree there

(see also, that tweet sam sifton liked)

(like whoa, what is really being accomplished, there?)

(besides performative meanness for the sake of cool points)

(forming an in-group of the non-offended, where have I seen that before)

I did a tweet series about how performative meanness creates a toxic environment where people are afraid of success

then I started to see people being performatively mean about alison roman

also youtube tried to show me a video about what she 'brings to a seder' and I'm very afraid she's jewish

What Exactly Is Going on Between Chrissy Teigen and ... this is a good take

not sure how I feel about the critique linked in the article tho, I feel like if you want to talk about how a person approaches different cultural influences on their cooking you should at least specify their actual cultural background

'“I’m like y’all, this is not a curry...I’ve never made a curry, I don’t come from a culture that knows about curry,” Roman explains, with an air of exasperation.“I come from no culture. I have no culture. I’m like, vaguely European.”' OR IG NOT

Yeah, that curry quote was one of the things taking a lot of justified criticism in the threads I read last night

I mean I can understand not wanting to call something you made a curry when you don't feel it would be authentic but I've seen victorian english recipes and that ship has sailed

I just thought from her name she would at least be italian,

apparently she's half-jewish

she's from los angeles, and we all know there's no culture there (she says in an extremely northern california voice)

like yeah ig some people marry gentiles and instead of blending cultures they just cease

Alison Roman, Bon Appétit, and the ‘Global Pantry’ P...

okay this is also a take I like

except: But to speak of a mainstream North American culture that isn’t neatly “white” in both its logic and its aesthetics is to envision something that doesn’t yet exist, and that we don’t know how to articulate.

I think this is less neat than this sentence implies, but it could also be my context coloring my perception

I think you’re correct, but that article also reads like a parade of things I want to eat right now. They’re getting at a point, but they are listing so many dishes in the process. Fair warning to anyone else who reads it.

I literally just ate dinner, it was decent, and I’m hungry again.

I ate pizza while reading the article

The Unbelievable Tale of Jesus’s Wife

He’d seen the movie adaptation of The Da Vinci Code, he said, but there were no links between their “hotwife” fetish, his wife’s automatic writing, and the papyrus. “Probably highly coincidental,” he said.

anyway a possible companion to the jesus romance novel that thatoneblonde plurked about

this is a pretty wild story but wild in a different way

Thank god for that at least

I'm sorry but jesus said unto them my wife??

borat voice

but in coptic

what am i reading omfg

there are many layers…

it just keeps GOING holy shit

A Feud in Wolf-Kink Erotica Raises a Deep Legal Ques...

The Black American Amputation Epidemic

She was supposed to be working on a scholarly book about her research, but started writing intensely erotic Batman fan fiction instead. - relatable

I enjoy that they think ABO originated with the SPN fandom

i'm obsessed with the omegaverse legal drama

is there an alternate theory of omegaverse? i've only heard the SPN explanation

You know I posted that and then looked it up and I think the formalisation of it did happen within SPN which is wild. It feels like madness to me because I remember a/b/o being around when I played neopets

I think the tropes have been around a long time but SPN developed its own thing with them.

yeah i think the parts of it existed pre-spn but then a spn rpf fic spawned the ~omegaverse~

but honestly i don't see much of a difference between the parts of the trope and the trope itself because... you cannot have one without the other so

I feel like I saw it happen in spn

also wow that other article is heartbreaking

I feel like I watched it slowly spread in horror like a movie epidemiologist

I am sure the tropes existed beforehand

they definitely did

but the concept of an "Omegaverse" is relatively recent

yeah i think the idea of worldbuilding is the newer thing

like having a dedicated au setting where it was A Thing rather than it just being a thing

I will be honest I didn't know enough about it to know the omega verse was an actual world building thing rather than just an umbrella term for the tropes so we have all learned something today (or me, I have)

this plurk is an educational resource

valuable to the community

the worldbuild being a formal thing is the only aspect i think might be new, mostly i think this trope has been around forever and spn just gave it like

a boost

yeah I thought that happened on an SPN kinkmeme

and they should file a trademark claim, apparently

that woudl go over so well i'm sure

tho i also feel like some argument arose about that semi recently

An Unauthorised Fan Treatise

this is a novel in online fandom drama format

A Biblical Mystery at Oxford

more papyrus drama!!!

MORE PAPYRUS DRAMA