Tuesday Good Links Because Thanksgiving? It's an Idea!
Doing my part to discourage screen interaction on a national holiday amidst a pandemic.
Featuring health insurance plots, vocal fry, and me pulling the trigger on Christmas Content.
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Talkin’ About Some Generation (18th C. Girls Want Marriage, 21st C. Girls Want Health Insurance)
I’m not a very “forward-thinking” person, so I spent 22 years not thinking that hard about where health insurance comes from. Then I got a job and some other people my age got jobs and I realized that this whole “health insurance til you’re 26” thing that Obamacare had going on meant that after the age of 26 (if you’re lucky and your parents could cover you til then), your health insurance will always be tied to your employment. Like, your job status is the direct line to your health insurance. The moment I realized this was also the moment I realized I was pro universal health care! What a coincidence. Anyways, Electric Literature has a great piece about how the “Health Insurance Plot” has replaced the “Marriage Plot” in literature. The marriage plot, for the uninitiated, is the happy ending of “marriage” common to Jane Austen novels and the like, which offered a life of health and security for women, who were otherwise not allowed to make their own living. Now the “health and security” goal in America is health insurance, and this plot has made its way into many contemporary novels, specifically about our beloved millennials.
Behold: the health insurance plot.
A Less Serious Item (A Delicious Escape to 2013)
Ah, the year 2013. There was no global pandemic, just vibes and a weird, misplaced disdain for women using vocal fry. This LitHub article gives a fun tour of the quote unquote Great Old White Guy Vocal Fry Panic of 2013. Here we get a wonderful glimpse into a 2013 podcast recording for an NPR podcast called Lexicon Valley:
{Bob] Garfield says that in recent years, he’s noticed a vocal fry epidemic in the speech of women in their teens and twenties—nothing but a “mindless affectation”—and he is certain that it’s irreparably ruining the English language. To demonstrate the sound, Garfield beckons his eleven-year-old daughter to the microphone. “Ida, be obnoxious,” he instructs.
Don’t worry, author Amanda Montell explains by the end that this “vocal fry panic” was likely just a manifestation of some old guys’ insecurity about women gaining respect as people. But it’s still fun to reflect on the truly insane stuff that dominated the discourse seven years ago.
This Week’s Theme: Let’s Just Usher in the Freaking Christmas Content
It’s the holidays (technically Thanksgiving, whatever)! They’re selling Christmas trees a block from my front door! Let’s talk Christmas!
First of all, if you’ve never heard of it or you missed it last year, allow me to offer up the singular Drew Magary’s Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog of 2019. We await, with the most bated breath, this year’s catalog, and in the meantime could use a reread of 2019’s version. Or a first introduction. It’s what it sounds like: a hater’s guide to the most ridiculous items being sold in the infamous Williams-Sonoma catalog.
Apparently Carly Rae Jepsen released a Christmas song and you know what else? It bops!
If you managed to miss the discourse about whether or not the Rockefeller tree is ugly this year, allow me to offer a link where the New York Times waxes too poetically about the ugly tree and how that relates to the 2020 of it all. Don’t worry, the article also covers the baby owl who was rescued in the tree.
If you’ve watched Dolly Parton’s Christmas fever dream Christmas on the Square, which is a Netflix movie that came out on Sunday, you might enjoy this lengthy list of questions about the movie from Vulture (spoilers, etc.).
In case you missed it in October, here’s Melania Tr*mp saying “who gives a fuck about Christmas?”
And, finally, here’s Dr. Fauci saying that Santa Clause is immune to the coronavirus. Happy holidays to you!
Politics (Will Br*nch Survive the B*den Era?)
Brunch — sweet, sweet brunch: a bizarre, costly invention that has become a political signpost for the woke everywhere. Are you at brunch when you should be protesting or doing mutual aid or educating yourself? Shame on you. We’ll go back to brunch when the work is done and the work? Will never be done. Vox has the scoop on how brunch became the symbol for “centrist indifference” and “political complacency.” Considering how mad people got when people did literally go back to brunch after Biden won, brunch’s future is looking rocky.
Brunch, like the HBO show Girls, is very Obama-era and therefore? Passé!
P.S. I’m thinking of permanently asterisking B*den like I did with Tr*mp. Do we love that? Do we hate that? Sound off in texts to me/the comments of this post/responses to this email.
A Celebrity Thinger (A Classic GQ Celebrity Profile)
GQ’s Zach Baron interviewed George Clooney and it’s great! That it’s: the profile is great! And you know what else? I think it would be COOL to hang out with George Clooney! Shocking information, I know. But this profile felt like taking a warm bath. George Clooney talks about his chronic pain, a motorcycle accident, acting, directing, being friends with Obama (which is, as aforement, passé now, but it’s George Clooney!), and that time he gave 14 of his closest friends a million dollars. My favorite reveal of the profile is that George Clooney seems to be a total wife guy — incapable of not intermittently discussing his wife and all the impressive stuff she does. He seems as humble as any hunky mega-celebrity could ever be, and he seems like he is striving to be a good person as much as any hunky, mega-celebrity ever could.
It feels redundant of me to say that I enjoyed reading a profile of the above man, but I did and I think you will, too.
Would You Rather? (School Orchestra x West Philadelphia)
Would you rather hear a school orchestra play the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey or be a Real Housepartner of West Philadelphia?
A Recommendation (Someone Has Finally Compiled the Ratatouille Musical Tik Toks)
I am the first person to get annoyed at having to watch TikToks to understand something, but Vulture has done a bangup job of rounding up all the TikToks that have been made related to a fictional Ratatouille musical. As in a musical version of the Pixar movie Ratatouille, about a rat who can cook. Vulture has a timeline to go with the videos, and every single video is amazing: I am NOT exaggerating. First, some people came up with two main songs, including a sort of “typical” Broadway closing number, and then more people came up with choreography and ensemble parts for the closing number, and one person went as far as creating a playbill for the show. Then people made even MORE songs. All in all, it adds up to the TikTok Ratatousical. It is the most fun series of TikToks I have yet to see, and I recommend you watch them!
In case you forgot who Ratatouille is.
Donation Corner! (For You to Ignore or Engage With As You Please!)
Hello! Welcome to the newly established Donation Corner of the Good Links! Which you are free to ignore or engage with as you please — it will live at the bottom of the newsletter!
Here are your donation opportunities for the week (these are the same as last week because it’s still Thanskgiving time and this GoFundMe has NOT hit its goal!):
Philabundance - it’s Thanksgiving time and this is just your classic local Philly food bank.
Philly Community Fridge - keeping on the food theme, you can Venmo @phlcommunityfridge and help keep two South Philly community fridges stocked. If you don’t know what a community fridge is, it’s a type of mutual aid project and you can click here for more.
Help a Haitian immigrant keep her home in West Philly — she’s about $7,500 away from her $10,000 goal!
P.S. If you have an organization/mutual aid fund/individual in mind that you think would be good to highlight, feel free to email me directly with information about it!
P.P.S. Why three places each week?
The first donation opportunity will always be a a 501(c)3 organization that I have done some due diligence around to try and ensure they’re a real non-profit organization that 1) does good work and 2) is tax-deductible!
The second donation opportunity will be a mutual aid fund (s/o to the politics good link!), which FYI is probably not tax-deductible.
And the final donation opportunity will be an individual in need of funds who has a GoFundMe or a cashapp (or however the kids are accepting funds these days) where you can donate. Also likely not tax-deductible. Note: I’m going to do my best to share GoFundMes that have not yet reached their goals!
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
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you know I sent this and what I meant by "discouraging screen interaction" is, like, don't go on your phones, not "don't do Zoom Thanksgiving" ... does that make sense? ok don't spread the virus!!!!! xx Cassandra