Morning Coffee (12/1/17)

I think we definitely need some Happy Friday links. There's a lot of comforting coziness in here this week. Can't imagine why.

The Fug Girls took a look at royal engagement photos of yore this week, just 'cause, no reason.

They're also completely right about Period Piece Face.

HAHAHA: Heathcliff's Gap-Year Jobs

I'm always interested to see Marilyn Stasio's picks for best crime novels of the year.

I'll absolutely try this new X-Files game.

Into the Gloss pairs candles and sweaters because why not?

I LOVE this idea because I do my best brainstorming in the shower: In a Hotel Shower, There’s Genius in the Mist

Ooh: The Softest, Coziest Robes to Buy This Winter

I'm very excited about the Hottest Heads of State book and they wrote a hilarious post about why to preorder.

You Should Be Following This Dad's Instagram Account About Hotel Carpets

Morning Coffee (1/7/17)

In One Of Latin America’s Poorest Countries, Boosting The Economy Is Women’s Work

Republicans Want Revenge for Obamacare and It’s Making Them Do Stupid Things

Mattis clashing with Trump transition team over Pentagon staffing

Well this is worrisome: The GOP Just Gave Congress the Power to Cut the Salaries of Individual Civil Servants to $1 (Not that EVERYTHING isn't worrisome these days, but.)

Memo to the Media: Stop Giving Trump the Headlines He Wants

Why Vera Rubin Deserved a Nobel

!! A Brand-New Human Organ Has Been Identified

Explaining My Multiracial Identity (So Others Don’t Do It For Me)

This about Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia is interesting: Little Books, Big Books

How Maps Shaped Shakespeare

A Peek Inside the Strange World of Fake Academia

Whoa: The blue screen of death is going green for Windows testers

Morning Coffee (5/31/16)

This may be the best thing I've read about Trump: The Joke That Ate the GOP

Bernie Sanders didn’t play the inside game, and it both helped and hurt him

Related: Talking with Nevada's top political expert about the rift between Sanders fans and party leaders

This is very useful these days, sadly enough: Travelgate to Furnituregate: a guide to the Clinton scandals of the 90s

How Online Harassment Is Setting The Tone For The 2016 Election

The cool girls, good girls and bad girls of modern books

Sexual harassment in academia is, sadly, not a shocking subject at this point, but when the perpetrator is a famous ethics professor, that's... something.

Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel

The people behind Hottest Heads of State have a new site devoted to making fun of New York Times Magazine ads, and now I officially want to be friends with them.

Every Meal Lucy Snowe Almost Eats in Villette

Morning Coffee (4/22/16)

Happy Friday! Time for some lighter links...

Me elsewhere: We have a trailer for The Girl on the Train and Game of Thrones was renewed, plus your Daily Read.

Whoa! Books by earliest women writers in English on display together for first time

Ooh: The only known footage of Louis Armstrong in a recording studio.

NASA Celebrates Hubble's 26th Birthday With Some Spectacular New Space Porn

The palace released pictures by Annie Leibovitz for the Queen's 90th birthday and they're GREAT. (It didn't strike me until I was typing this that she's the same age as my grandfather; we had a big party for his 90th in February.)

I'm very excited that Sally Wainwright is doing a Bronte sisters drama.

Shirley Temple stamps!

73 Questions with Taylor Swift is delightful; I love her house and I LOVE her delivery of "I am a very spontaneous person." I suspect she is roughly as spontaneous as I am, which is to say not at all.

Some of these sound really good: 17 Cocktails Every “Game Of Thrones” Lover Must Try

Disney Channel is marathoning all its original movies! (Let's be honest: I mostly just care about Rip Girls, which held up surprisingly well when I rewatched it a few years ago.)

I haven't had a chance to dig into Julian Fellowes's Belgravia, but I'm intrigued.

Morning Coffee (3/31/16)

(I am traveling and therefore writing this post in advance, so if link selection does not seem to take into account very recent news developments... that's why.)

There hasn’t been a criminal defense lawyer on the Supreme Court in 25 years. That’s a problem.

How Donald Trump Bent Television To His Will

The First Time Party Bigwigs Tried to Stop a Front-Runner From Becoming President It Backfired — Big-time

What Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend reveal about the limitations of the Bechdel test

I always have such mixed feelings about publishing authors' (or other public figures') letters and diaries: Charlotte Bronte and Her Best Friend's Broken Promise

Yes: "The episode itself is the most important single unit of storytelling on TV, not the season or even the series. Without good episodes, shows inevitably end up feeling muddled and aimless."

The Consequences of Resisting a Professor’s Advances

I am fundamentally incapable of believing that anything said in giant closed Facebook groups will remain secret. Am I too cynical? Are these people too naive? Who knows!

Inside Will and Kate’s Privacy Obsession

Not Your Korean Sidekick: The Frustrating Career of John Cho (I miss Selfie.)

The Nine Lives of Isaac Mizrahi

“Oh…No, My Thing Is Happening”: Women Leaving Tactfully In Western Art History

Morning Coffee (3/30/16)

ICYMI: I reviewed Chris Hayes's Twilight of the Elites.

Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump’s Campaign Manager, Is Charged With Battery

We Expect Women to Have Impostor Syndrome. That’s Why We Can’t Handle Hillary Clinton.

Ivanka Trump Makes Donald Even Scarier

This is great: @MichelleObama: An exclusive look at how the First Lady mastered social media

Sent Home From Middle School After Reporting A Rape

"Twenty-first-century feminism’s primary medium, the diversity critique, has as its functional terminus the ‘freedom’ of consumers to purchase a picture of a utopia from a company whose interests lie in preventing any of those utopias from occurring."

Please don't believe anyone who tells you that trolls and online smears don't matter in real life.

Oh: Prominent Silicon Valley investor denies he kept a sex slave for 13 years

I will never tire of reading about Ferrante theories, and am also cynical enough to think that whatever her original intentions, this is a GREAT marketing strategy.

So I kind of disagree with this about how she OBVIOUSLY wants to be left alone but that piece makes some other interesting points. I guess I'm partially saying that I still don't really buy the Death of the Author.

End of an era: Grandchildren of Sound of Music's Von Trapp family announce farewell show

Every Meal In Jane Eyre, Ranked In Order Of Severity

Morning Coffee (3/26/16)

ICYMI, in yesterday's Friday Five I talked about mystery series that should be TV shows.

Here's what's going on with Cruz and the National Enquirer. FWIW, Anne Helen Petersen, who knows whereof she speaks, pointed out on Twitter that the people who investigated things that turned out to be real (like the Edwards story) are no longer AT the Enquirer. So.

And this, about tweets alluding to this story for a while now, almost made me sad that I don't follow more conservative media figures on Twitter. Almost.

UGH: Bernie Sanders’s Hail Mary: maybe superdelegates can save me Hint: If you need the party elite to overturn the will of the people to give you power, you are NOT inspiring a populist revolution.

The one thing he's consistent on: Donald Trump Hates Women

And: White Men Prefer Trump's Overt Misogyny to Clinton's Failure to Center Them Every Moment

"If Kasich wins the nomination after effectively determining that primary voters’ preferences needn’t count, then that establishes primary voters’ preferences needn’t count."

Good Friday and the feast of the Annunciation fell on the same day this year (yesterday) and here is a fascinating post about the history and theological and artistic significance of that.

Kate Spade’s Shiny, Sparkly Success Story

Need a reading list? A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction

Better late than never? NFL acknowledges, for first time, link between football, brain disease

This tragic story brings up a lot of interesting questions about the interaction between cultures; I'm inclined to think that, at least in this case (as described in this article), some of the "they have to be kept isolated to preserve their pure primitiveness" feels like fetishization more than like what the people themselves necessarily want.

Every Meal In Wuthering Heights Ranked In Order Of Sadness

Friday Five: Literary Songs

Books AND music, all at once! What are your favorites I don't know?

1. "Ariel" by October Project A lot of things I liked in high school are a little iffy in retrospect, but THIS ALBUM REMAINS PERFECT.


2. "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush I enjoy making people who have never heard of Kate Bush listen to this without warning them what they're in for.


3. "The Wendy Trilogy" by S.J. Tucker is - let's face it - the only version of Peter Pan worth its salt. "Wendy when she'd had her fill of Pan and the other Lost Boys"? Yes please.


(Here are parts two and three.)

4. "Romeo and Juliet" by Dire Straits I have a lot of questions about this music video. But the lyrics! "The dice was loaded from the start, and I bet, and you exploded into my heart." Perfect.


5. "The Lady of Shalott" by Loreena McKennitt I appreciate McKennitt's commitment to Poems Beloved By Anne Shirley. (See also: "The Highwayman")

Morning Coffee (12/14/15)

Me elsewhere: TV news for the week.

!!!!!! Test Your Smarts With the British Spy Agency's Christmas Card Puzzle

Here's an essential read about Republicans in Congress.

It’s Not Foot in Mouth Disease makes some important points about women in tech (and many other fields).

NPR's annual Book Concierge is always a delight.

I love Williams-Sonoma but I also love the annual hater's guide, because I contain multitudes or whatever.

The Scandalous Legacy of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Collector of Art and Men

Julius Caesar battlefield unearthed in southern Netherlands

C.S. Lewis’ Greatest Fiction: Convincing American Kids That They Would Like Turkish Delight

This Seymour Britchky profile was a great read even though I barely knew who he was.

Hee: Charlotte Brontë’s Most Inexplicable Denominational Burns

Morning Coffee (10/15/12)

This weekend at TheTelevixen: My weekly news round-up (Coulson lives!) and recap of the most recent Castle, "Secret's Safe With Me."

I'm increasingly unconvinced that there's a way to make football acceptably safe, but standardizing concussion evaluations would be a start.

HOLIDAY. PRINGLES.

This Torah fraud case is fascinating.

If TV Shows Were Relationships

You must read Cassie Clare on cyberbullying.

Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights recognizes that it "isn't really a romance at all" and now I can't wait to see it.

Trailer: Wuthering Heights

I had entirely forgotten this movie was evening happening, and while my Bronte preferences come down on the Jane Eyre side of things (and - confession - I've never actually made it the whole way through Wuthering Heights), I am very interested in the choice to finally use actors of color to play Heathcliff, breaking with the whitewashing tradition of (quite fine! not their fault!) actors like Tom Hardy and Ralph Fiennes and Peter Davison and Laurence Olivier. Brava, Andrea Arnold. Maybe I'll even manage to read the book.