On the feminist/political front:

Wendy Davis is incredible.

And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is notoriously so.

At Autostraddle: queer equality must run deeper than marriage equality and the blow to the Voting Rights Act is a critical blow to civil rights.

On the literary front:

An interview with the excellent Roxane Gay.

Fund socially conscious science fiction lit!

Bookworms cope better with “disorder and uncertainty.” 

Queer literary journals Them and Plenitude Magazine both have submission deadlines next month.

And on the Beautiful Things front: America in rivers. 

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! 

Brittany introduced me to an interesting new writerly blog, MFA Day Job. From their description:

Some of the writers featured here love their jobs. Others are just getting through the day. Some wake up at four a.m. to write, and some squeeze writing time in every few weeks. Some don’t have paying jobs, but depend on parenthood or volunteerism to create balance in their lives. What they have in common, besides a misunderstood terminal (it’s terminal!) degree, is a creative outlook and a belief that their educational background, despite the doomsday warnings, is not a liability.

The New York Review of Books on Wikipedia’s literary subcategories, and their implications.

Bitch Magazine compiled a list of female-hosted comedy podcasts. I’m not familiar with many of these podcasts yet- or comedy podcasts more generally- but this is really relevant to my interests as a broadcast media geek/feminist/human.

No Steubenville coverage this week, but I have been reading about the rape crisis in Syria.  It’s an important story and one that’s been largely ignored — or forgotten? — by the other side of the world even as it’s been happening.

I also did some reading about the trial of Kermit Gosnell and his illegal “women’s health center” of horrors, both via Jezebel’s coverage and The Atlantic.  (TRIGGER WARNING for all links here. I couldn’t finish the latter article; I had to stop when a photo scrolled onto the screen.) I remember reading about this a long time ago, but now the particulars are emerging (slowly, as each media outlet seems to recognize that this should have been talked about two years ago) and it’s horrific.  Which makes it all the more imperative that people need to know about what this man and his staff did.  When reproductive choices are limited by law, that doesn’t allow for a woman’s individual situation (whatever that may be).  It allows for things like this: the deaths of women patients and of innumerable, viable infants.  Obviously, Gosnell’s case is an extreme one, but it’s a reminder that illegal abortions still happen, all over the world.

After those articles, you might need something to decompress:

On Monday, Buzzfeed covered the Trans 100, a list honoring 100 American, trans activists and their work.  It’s the first list of its kind, despite there existing (seemingly) yearly lists for the “best”/”hottest”/”most successful” cisgender men and women in X number of publications at X number of supermarket registers across the U.S.  About damn time trans people had their own!  You can read an abridged version of the list at Buzzfeed or download the full list as a PDF at the second link.  More info on the Trans 100 tumblr.

Buzzfeed also lists 17 Shakespearean insults to use in ordinary life, complete with disapproving pictures of cats.

The DIY Couturier writes on “tips to keep your shit together when you’re depressed.”  It’s easy to scorn yourself when you’re depressed, as if you did it on purpose.  That will only make it worse, in my experience.  I found this helpful; maybe you will too.

And as for lit links:

The Rumpus has an article, transcribed from a panel presentation at AWP 2013, on “Post Black? Culture, Craft and Race in Verse.”  I wish I’d seen this panel. 

At The Atlantic, they renew the debate over the usefulness of teaching creative writing and whether life experience or study is best for writers developing their skills.  Experience, the author argues.  Technical skill is nothing if you have no font from which to plumb.  Your thoughts? Feelings?  Opinions?

And lastly, in other news, have you seen this video?