VICE Draws Ire by Staging Female Author Suicides Annalisa Quinn, NPR 
Trigger Warning: suicide

The stylist and set designer are women. The models are women. But many famous male writers have committed suicide — David Foster Wallace, Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, just to name a few. So why is this spread women only? Is this meant to imply that women are the weaker sex, are frail, are beautiful in their frailness?

I have so many feelings about this piece/this debacle/these issues. I’m not ready to try to articulate them yet. 

To counterbalance that with some actual good art: a lovely story at Recommended Reading:

      Orange is the type of place they recognize. Its downtown is good-natured, doors open, doesn’t judge. There are old people holding hands, and there are children with faces like cherubic peach pies. There is a church on nearly every corner. The cars all stop at the crosswalks and wave pedestrians across. Nobody is in a hurry, but nobody is lazing about either. There aren’t any palm trees. There are maple trees and sycamores. There are valley oaks, blue oaks and black oaks, cottonwoods, aspen trees. She is so sick of palm trees, she thinks, that she could puke. She is so sick of parking lots and freeways and outdoor malls. She is so sick of the dry, flat expanse and how palm trees are just these stupid pillars, holding up the blanched, hot, stupid sky. “I love it here. It makes me want to bake lemon bars,” she says as they walk down the sidewalk. 

 At Tin House: a long-form essay in which Robert Boswell uses the story of how he met his wife to demonstrate different methods of characterization. 

There is a Mystery Book Artist in Edinburgh. 

Heather showed me these Portraits of Grandmas and their Cuisine from Around the World. I think it’s the best thing I’ve seen all week. 

Happy Friday!