In a Letter of Recommendation for the New York Times, Jenna Wortham spoke of her experiences getting best friend tattoos: “I don’t regret any of the ink. When I look at it, I smile and think about the feverish throes of friend-love and how lucky I was to have felt it more than once.”
Leigh Kolb reviewed Starless Dreams, a documentary by Mehrdad Oskouei about teenage girls serving time in Iranian prisons, for Bitch.
Cara Buckley wrote about the forthcoming Hidden Figures, a film based on a true story, starring Taraji P. Henson and Octavia Spencer as mathematicians in NASA’s space program in the early 1960s.
Over at The Toast, L. C. Thompson wrote about the case of Thomas/Thomasine Hall, exploring intersex and genderfluid identity in seventeenth-century America.
Rebecca Solnit’s recent commencement address to UC Berkeley’s class of 2016 was adapted for Literary Hub: “Part of the job of a great journalist, a great storyteller, is to examine the stories that underlie the story that you’re assigned, maybe to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making in this kind of writing.”
Also at Literary Hub, Nikki Giovanni reflects on race, hope, and fatherhood, discussing the fortieth anniversary of Alex Haley’s Roots: “Alex Haley did a good job. He reminded us of hope. All I’m saying is that everything has Roots. Our only question is, do we pull them up like weeds to be destroyed, or do we nurture them to allow them to blossom?”
Elena Sheppard put together a list for Hello Giggles of 25 books to read this summer.
This week in Hell No, apparently anti-abortion groups are now sending targeted smartphone ads to women in abortion clinics. I think this is the most complete and succinct argument I could ever make for burning the entire internet down.
At The Atlantic, Saidat Giwa-Osagie wrote about the importance of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in her childhood as a UK-born Nigerian girl living in Scotland: “If my white friends related to Lizzie McGuire, then Ashley Banks, the family’s younger daughter, was my Transatlantic counterpart. She avoided the one-dimensional tropes common among black female characters—she was neither the Loyal Best Friend With Sage Advice, nor the racially codified Sassy Sidekick.”
What did we miss this week? Let us know in the comments! <3
