Robot Sicardi, 2014
Photo: Tayler Smith
Holy Moly Alison Bechdel Won A MacArthur Genius Grant
Holy Moly Alison Bechdel Won A MacArthur Genius Grant
The MacArthur Foundation awarded lesbian cartoonist Alison Bechdel one of its coveted Genius Grants. The only requirement of the $625,000 award is that Bechdel and the 20 other recipients continue doing the good work they were already doing.
Anonymous Sex Toy Review: The Bootie
Anonymous Sex Toy Review: The Bootie
The Bootie is the perfect beginner butt plug. Also it’s really cute.
Get Baked: Vegan Cheesecake So Good, Even Mey Might Eat It
Get Baked: Vegan Cheesecake So Good, Even Mey Might Eat It
A few months ago, there was an interesting conversation on the staff email thread. We were discussing a cheesecake recipe Rachel had called “super gross” when Mey mentioned that she doesn’t like cheesecake. Specifically, she doesn’t like cream cheese, so any recipe that contains that (frankly delicious) creamy spread is not one she’s interested in consuming. Others chimed in with their ambivalence toward cheese. As someone who has literally kept half a Junior’s cheesecake impaled on a knife in her freezer for a month so she could eat a little bit every night like a cream cheese-and-chocolate popsicle, I was immediately taken aback. Of course, I knew there were people who didn’t eat cheesecake, but I assumed they were vegan or otherwise ethically/religiously abstaining. I mean, there’s an entire restaurant chain devoted to the dessert. It never occurred to me that one could just not like the substance that makes cheesecake (in my humble opinion) vastly superior to all other forms of cake.
Pioneers Press Distro Has Every Zine Your Heart Might Need
Pioneers Press Distro Has Every Zine Your Heart Might Need
Our last A-Camp back in May was a bit of a departure from the usual scheduling structure. Instead of regular hour-long activity blocks throughout the week, we gave ourselves three long hours on Saturday afternoon to really dig into some important things, like community building, self-portraits, canoeing, education and, my personal favorite, zine making! We wanted to go beyond the single-page mini zine, so we challenged the 50+ workshop attendees to help us create a full half-size (that’s when you use 8.5″ x 11″ paper folded in half) that we could compile and print out that very day! We were wildly ambitious and high on altitude.
You Should Go: “Words With Girls” Premiere at Urbanworld Festival
You Should Go: “Words With Girls” Premiere at Urbanworld Festival
If you are in or around New York, you can catch the Words With Girls “Pilot” before it’s available online. The show will be part of the Shorts Programming on Saturday, September 20th at noon as part of HBO and BET’s Urbanworld Film Festival. Tickets are available online now for the screening at the AMC Theater on 34th. Also, I’ll be there.
VIDEO: “Golden Is The New Black” is OITNB’s Love Child with The Golden Girls
Carmen’s Team Pick: Sometimes I feel like people are reading my mind when I watch viral videos on the Internet.
Liquor in the Last Days of Summer: Rhubarb Vanilla Cordial
Liquor in the Last Days of Summer: Rhubarb Vanilla Cordial
When I was a miniature human, like most bespectacled nerdy loners, I was obsessed with the Redwall series. I would often read and reread the giant books cover to cover in only a few days. Aside from the obvious appeal — adorable woodland creatures in cute medieval outfits fighting to the death with swords, etc — a major draw were the totally outrageous descriptions of food, which in my memory…
Comedy Crush: Silicon Valley’s Amy Aniobi
Comedy Crush: Silicon Valley’s Amy Aniobi
Amy Aniobi is a writer whose credits include Silicon Valley, The Michael J. Fox Show, Lisa and Amy, The Slutty Years, and Awkward Black Girl. She’s the bomb diggity and, I think, truly blessed now that she’s been referred to as such on the internet. She likes dancing and baking cookies.
How did you come up with the idea/unorthodox webseries style for Lisa and Amy?
I got the idea after a friend…
Drawn to Comics: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s “This One Summer” is Evocative, Emotional
Drawn to Comics: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki’s “This One Summer” is Evocative, Emotional
by rory midhani
Created by the unfairly talented cousin duo of Jillian (the illustrator) and Mariko (the writer) Tamaki, the same pair who brought us the wonderful graphic novel Skim, This One Summer shifts smoothly between feeling like a cool drink of strawberry lemonade on the beach, the uncomfortable feeling of sand in your shoes, holding hands with someone you love as you lay in the warm sun…
"A Black woman cannot set aside her race to talk of her womanhood, for being a Black woman is an experience that being a white woman is not. Our oppressions are interlinked and cannot be isolated. White women do not have to contend with the painful processes of straightening out kinks and curls with chemicals that burn or poisoning themselves with skin lightening creams. That is, whilst the standards of femininity are harmful to all women, they are particularly toxic to women of colour (especially dark skinned Black women) and we, as non-white women, all must bear the burden of knowing that we will always fall short of the pinnacle of Eurocentric beauty. It is this last point that is of critical importance when it comes to a more nuanced view of why I chose to start doing untold damage to my body and mind. It wasn’t just a lower weight I desired. It was access to the privileges I saw my pretty white friends and peers enjoying. People treated me as expendable, unbreakable, worthless. I was less than a woman. Because I was brash, gay and brown, I was not wholly what I ought to be. I could never be the perfect woman, it did not matter that I’d shrunk my waist to 22 inches. I wanted to be named when the boys played ‘Who’s hot/Who’s not’. I wanted to be free from the torments aimed at me regarding my hair. I didn’t want people to talk about me like I was an animal. I wanted to be seen as delicate, I wanted boys to think that they couldn’t be horrifically cruel to me. But the truth is that they were, and they did not care one bit. Because I wasn’t hot and I wasn’t sweet and retiring. I was rage and I was bitterness, fueled by the unfairness of secondary school — a microcosm of the wider kyriarchical world."
This is very very important in my life right now.
