Octavia’s brood
This isn’t an Onion article.
Wired doesn’t actually want to hear about women or people of color.
Bill O’Reilly’s family values.
This old post on GOT seems particularly relevant this week. Why are you writing a rape scene?
good explanation on why not to call people things they don’t want to be called. Though he’s dead wrong about “In one short sentence, Sunny Moraine—whoever the hell she is, and we’ll get to that in a moment—has dismissed such novels as Tolstoy’s War and Peace, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick—not to mention the epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s Iliad.” The Illiad has women in it and Joyce and Melville are shitty specifically because they have no women (other than prostitutes whose main purpose is for the main character’s development, like in that other shitty book, catcher in the rye). I was never able to get into Eric Flint for the same reason– no female characters.
His majesty
Dr. Crazy says hello good-bye
This is cool.
It’s always fun to be able to look at someone who is making a lot more money and then go, yeah, I’m glad that’s not my life. What a waste. Tax the 1%!
My FIL just got shingles while waiting to find out if his insurance covered the vaccine. Noooooooooo.
This one is deep.
Sorry not sorry.
Historiann agrees with Katie Roiphe (!!!)
Mallory Ortberg’s comments sections are awesome. Also a kitten. And more kitten.
Mrs. Frugalwoods is having a baby!
I find this article to be quite hilarious.
more delicious
the video on this link is pretty interesting
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
May 23, 2015 at 8:25 am
Thanks so much! We’re quite excited :).
May 23, 2015 at 9:00 am
Ugh, I’m so sorry to hear about your FIL’s shingles. My younger brother got a terrible case of shingles last year, and since he and I had chicken pox at exactly the same time, I toddled off to my doctor to ask about the vaccine. But insurance will only pay for it for people over (I think) 60. Frustrating!
May 26, 2015 at 6:17 pm
I’m just gonna say this, at risk of making people mad. If a vaccine (that can prevent a long-lasting and rather horrible affliction that has the potential for causing serious permanent damage) only costs $200, why not get it? And fight with the insurance company later?
I had chicken pox as a child. I am not yet fifty. I plan to get that vaccine myself within the next few years because WHY would I not?
I know not everyone has a couple hundred bucks lying around, but most of us can scratch that together in not too much time just by a little temporary frugality.
May 26, 2015 at 6:23 pm
A question that FIL is no doubt asking himself right now. (Though it might be $350.) I can’t remember how old they are, but he might even be 60 in which case its really likely he was insured. I don’t think he’s 60 yet though. DH’s parents had him pretty young so FIL might be really close to 60 but not 60 yet.
May 26, 2015 at 8:11 pm
My mother has had a bout with shingles that came dangerously close to her eye. I am scared of that shit.
May 27, 2015 at 10:49 am
Agree with the annoyance at how often people just blink at the dearth of women in novels, but I have to say I consider Moby Dick one of the best novels ever written. It’s efficient, too: you can read the first page IMO and decide up front whether you are going to love or hate it.
May 27, 2015 at 10:52 am
http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/080504.html
May 27, 2015 at 10:52 am
(also: http://www.sheldoncomics.com/archive/080503.html )
May 27, 2015 at 11:10 am
True. For some reason, I still love it, though. I think it’s the sardonic tone intermixed with detailed reflections on the color of whiteness.
May 27, 2015 at 11:20 am
There are a lot of books with a lot of merits, but the weight that we give to those merits over their deficits depends entirely on culture. Personally, not being able to imagine a world with women as people rather than paper dolls/macguffins (if they exist at all), gets a lot of weight as a deficit. But our culture says that’s not a big deal. There are some books without women that are good enough that they’re still readable, but a lot of “great literature” isn’t once I take into account that deficit. And there’s a lot of great literature that isn’t rated as highly by others because it’s you know, got a female main character or been written by a woman. For that group of people, the merits of the book have to be much higher to make up for the perceived deficit that it’s a woman’s book.
June 5, 2015 at 4:04 pm
Re: the “Wife Bonus” op-ed in the NYT… It doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that in rich households this gets incentivised and enshrined in contracts. Truth be told, that arrangement feels a lot more honest than ‘oh it just worked out this way’ and acting like cleaning is emotionally fulfilling.
The piece read to me like pandering to a rather problematic, neoliberal viewpoint that ultimately devalues female caregiving work in general while critiquing Upper East Side, high-SES, stay-at-home mothering in particular, and instead sees women acquiring legitimacy only through marketplace transactions. Something interesting happens by the end of the op-ed: once we learn that a great many of these women are directly paid for their caregiving work vis-a-vis the vaunted “wife bonuses,” the piece makes a mockery of the practice and I think it’s intentional (because: the transaction occurs outside of the capitalist marketplace.) Make no mistake: it’s internalized misogyny to have discomfort about a woman actually being paid for her caregiving work, as the wives in this piece are.
Out of curiosity, what would these women have to change about their lives in order to pass muster as legitimate people with agency in the author’s eyes? If these women instead had paying jobs outside their homes earning them at least the same amount as the “wife bonus,” then the author would have no criticism of them? Just no more volunteering for free, ladies? Again, women cannot win here. Bottom line: we’re not really challenging the patriarchy until we’re questioning the way in which capitalism relies upon a framework of unpaid care, and only legitimizes caregiving work occurring in the marketplace.
June 5, 2015 at 4:34 pm
The way that the husband is the one who determines the “bonus” rather than being a joint decision as partners based on family income is a bit problematic. The author also dislikes societies that have rigid gender stratification rather than mingling between genders.
June 5, 2015 at 7:43 pm
There is a lot of missing information here – we don’t know that the husband determines the bonus so much as it is a percentage of whatever he earns from his employer. Also, I’m a bit skeptical of these claims given the author did not include the names of and quotes from of any actual wives. Maybe they’ll be in her book though.