Artist Alyssa Boni has been doing the Lord’s work for Elle UK, photoshopping men out of photos of politicians to prove what should be an obvious point: we need #MoreWomen in politics. For example:
Over at The Cut, Meaghan O’Connell talked about taking baths and the patronizing questions women writers face: “I’m sure that ‘So, how much of this character is autobiographical?’ would get annoying fast, but anything would be preferable to the question I keep getting about my actual, nonfiction writing lately: ‘What’s your son going to think?’”
Maddie Crum reviewed Rebecca Schiff’s debut short story collection, The Bed Moved, for Huffington Post: “The women in Schiff’s stories are realer than real; armed with wry humor and strong opinions, their quips are as funny as their insights are tender.”
Over at Literary Hub, Israeli writer Ayelet Tsabari talked about her decision to write in English instead of Hebrew: “Hebrew was a dead language for 17 centuries. It was revived to serve a purpose: to unite Jews from disparate places who had no way of communicating but through the language of prayer…. Writing in Hebrew, therefore, comes with a challenge: one must find a way to describe the ordinary, the secular, and the profane in words once considered holy. And though it is what makes Hebrew fascinating and unique and utterly loveable, there was something in English’s relative newness, in its inclusiveness and accessibility, in our lack of shared history, that I found liberating. English was a clean slate, an amusement park, with a vocabulary that seemed endless.”
Emma Rault interviewed musician Imani Coppola for Bitch: “I’m considered difficult. Would you ever call a man with an opinion difficult? I’ve been pigeonholed so many times. Like, because I’m brown I do hip-hop. I’ve been dealing with this shit my entire life, and I’m so over it. When someone expects me to be what they think Black people are like based on the TV they’ve been watching, I just tune out. I have no time for that shit.”
Siobhan Fahey made a documentary about the rebel dykes of 1980s London and chatted with Matthew Whitehouse for i-D: “What’s interesting,” she says, “is that when you look at the images, it looks like people today but remember, we were the first ones to dress like that.” Check out the documentary here.
Check out this NPR review of Monique W. Morris’s new book, Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools: “Recent research has documented that black girls are punished at school at rates that are even more disproportionate than those experienced by black boys. For example, they are suspended six times more often than white girls. Morris calls this ‘a story untold….’”
For Bust, Lisa Marie Basile wrote about her experience watching Room: “I don’t need to avoid the painful, because I already have the power to say, ‘I’m free.’ I know this because all the closed spaces, all the locked doors, all the abuse is something I can choose to say goodbye to, especially in confronting it.”
Treat yourself to a copy of Girl Talk Triptych, a collaborative poet’s play by Weird Sister’s own Caolan Madden, Becca Klaver, Marisa Crawford, and other members of (GIIRL!
And last but far from least, if you love (or even sorta like) bowling, and you’re looking for a good cause to back, you can stop now, because this is it. The National Abortion Access Fund has organized a Bowl-a-thon fundraiser to raise money for abortion access. You can find and register for your local Bowl-a-thon here. If bowling really isn’t your jam, you can still donate here.
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
