Sometimes seeing actual commercials during Jeopardy! makes me declare “well, that’s enough gender for one day.” This brought to you by a commercial for a soap brand called Manlandia.
Cranky queer disabled book nerd. My kid and my cat both move faster than me. Avid romance reader. Writer and researcher. Erstwhile historian of modern Russia and the Soviet Union.
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Sometimes seeing actual commercials during Jeopardy! makes me declare “well, that’s enough gender for one day.” This brought to you by a commercial for a soap brand called Manlandia.
Yeah, someone needs to put together all the recent work on evangelicals and race, and evangelicals and predatory capitalism, into the history of everyday life, for a poplar audience. A smaller scale To Serve God and Walmart, with the history of social media and the post 2002 internet woven in.
Yeah, someone should write a book about how white supremacy culture wants to make suffering into profit, with some chapters on antivax and wellness grifters but maybe also throw the true crime industry and MLMs in there too.
It drives me bananapants that antivax is the perfect ableism begets ableism, because we don’t offer real resources and community to parents and the people telling them not to vaccinate and to give their autistic kids bleach are at least listening to them about being tired.
As a disabled parent who is ADA generation, I think it’s all the misogyny you note plus there was no cultural shift to tell people disability is part of being human and there’s nothing parents can do to change it and they aren’t responsible for it. And having a disabled kid is isolating.
this reminds me that i think people would be less interested in “raw milk” if we called it “poop milk” or “shit milk”
My big problem with the phrase “granola fascism” is that granola is delicious as hell, granola does not deserve to be catching strays like this. “Raw milk fascism” is more appropriate. Thank you.
“Men should read romance because it is a genre that often showcases how durable partnerships are about making someone’s life easier and more fun” is at least sometimes true but has yet to generate an ocean of thinkpieces, because it doesn’t ask anyone else to Fix Men. Sigh.
In the last year or so, I've read several fantasy books that are 1) by & about queer people and 2) set in Appalachia (more or less explicitly). Here they are!
I have some intense chronic pain, and my rule of thumb is that there is a threshold where I *might* pay for a possible placebo affect if it’s not too expensive and no one is going to suggest they can truly cure me. No one into CST has ever passed that test.
I fired a lactation consultant who suggested we needed to try craniosacral therapy to solve my then-baby’s feeding issues. The website mentioned treating cerebral palsy, which I have, and is caused by irreparable damage to the brain. I think some part of me just exploded that day.
We support the plural and singular They Might Be Giants
So many contemporaries since the pandemic are about grief and loss and some have included ghosts; IMO it’s only a matter of time before the vampires come back too.
Positioning myself as “somewhere between Kautsky and Bernstein” is true if I’m talking to nerds, but too many of the Very Online leftists are like the guy who once asked me when he found out what my PhD is in, “how dreamy was Trotsky, really?” but they’ve mostly replaced Trotsky with Putin apologia.
I will relax a bit about Sherrill when I start seeing decent ads during Jeopardy! about protecting abortion access. (I’m in Philly but get South Jersey media market ads).
My classic rock and record player loving husband would probably say Steely Dan’s “Aja” and whatever Elvis Costello era is your husband’s favorite.
I should add that I am white and cis, but I was born disabled so I went into pregnancy knowing some of what I was in for. White women without my background get a huge shock to the system and they…do not use it for good, generally.
Yeah, same. I have a visible disability I was born with, so I understood what was happening, but the pregnancy ableism I had to manage was still A Lot .
The drum I will beat a lot is that you can’t understand either Weimar or Stalinism without the context of entire demographics becoming pretty comfortable with weapon use, violence, and death because of WWI. I’m not chill about any of this, but the analogies are only so useful.
As it is, they are much more likely to blame themselves or look for individualistic solutions from “wellness” culture, which keeps bad systems in place and makes them susceptible to the whole sphere of wellness grifters and RFK Jr.
The hill on which I will die is that if white cis women understood pregnancy as a disability and their bad experiences with pregnancy and giving birth as ableism, we would all be better off.
I’m old enough that my conservative parents never had to face how school school drills often make no real plans for disabled students. In contrast to how every college educated suburban mom I know was radicalized by their kid’s first shooter drill. It breaks you.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Casablanca, after someone posted a great essay on the “Les Marseillaise” scene. The kind of bravery resistance to fascism requires is not just rational, especially when collaboration is right there. Bravery as a feeling is a mode we’re going to need.
I have college friends who introduced me to the HP fanfic responsible for some of our current predicaments about AI as a cult, and I often wonder if they even know what it eventually lead to. And how often I curse myself for being able to type that first sentence.
This plus denying trans kids care clearly satisfies their urge to punish people who actually care for and parent their kids rather than control and abuse them. Getting your kid gender affirming care is parenting over punishment and the GOP can’t have that.
We need a new Dem standard bearer for “there are at least three genders” who says repro rights and trans rights are the same fight. But I agree it’s a hard fight because “we already have best practice standards for trans care” is not getting more media traction than moral panic anytime soon.
The response cannot be, “Oh, that gun is a distraction,” it has real bullets, and the people holding it have been trained to use it without consequence.
I'm genuinely glad for Canada and this is a smart business play by Moderna but it also stings when you consider the Moderna vaccine exists because of $10 billion dollars of US taxpayer money. And RFK Jr. might kill our access.
Yeah, we basically need a language of “your feelings exist, and are sometimes about real problems or frustrations, but also Republicans are using them to accomplish things that don’t address your concerns and will make us all miserable.”
Having a PhD in Russian history and living there for a bit to do research has been a recipe for tearing my hair out at Bad Posts since approximately 2015. (I add to the torment by having also done a field in intellectual history so I know the actual difference between communism and socialism).
My kids at Temple were generally interesting and thoughtful and much more respectful of “there’s stuff I don’t know and that’s why I’m here” than the ostensibly smarter kids I taught at Penn. What they needed was less student debt, not killing themselves to go somewhere “better.”
I grew up in Virginia, where you have to work your ass off to get into the public schools that have small classes and a wide range of interesting liberal arts majors to pick from, so I did. Teaching at Temple while ABD from my Fancy PhD Program taught me to shed my elitism real fast though.
#SHARP just published a new #bibliography of #LGBTQIA #BookHistory. Hundreds of books and articles about #queer authors, readers, and publishing, as wells as some material about #libraries and allied fields. I am proud to be one of the contributors. #LGBTQ sharpweb.org/sharpnews/20...
If these people would leave our transgender cafes and blue haired bike lanes alone the only time we would even think about them is April 15th when we cut the checks that subsidize their entire existence
Yeah, for me hard mode is explaining “your grandparents love us in their way and they don’t like Trump, so we still see them, but they’re never going to agree with most of the rest of our politics.” Why people cling to their bad opinions is not easy for any of us to fix or we wouldn’t be here!
“Why people in Philadelphia are so bad at driving” is also a tough one specific to my daily life.
I am also curious which countries will be vaccinating kids; the new guidelines are bad public health for so many reasons. But I viscerally hate them as a parent with many risk factors and a kid I won’t be able to vaccinate here, judging by the new policy.
there is a new evangelical church-run coffee shop in Durham, and they really did not think through their interior design
Wheeeen theee Bird in your room represents all your gloom Nevermoré When you're trying to grieve but that corvid won't leave Nevermoré It will rap Tippy tippy tap Tippy tippy tap Waking you from naps aaand Your dream-a Then will fly Never tell you why Even if you cry Landing on your sideboard Athena
It took moving to a city that’s around 44% Black and my social world getting a little less white for me to start figuring this out. I always know I’m reading a Black romance or a Black author if there’s attention to braids or protecting hair for sleeping, or not getting hair wet.
I hate it when people misuse the word “decimate” and one tenth of me will die on this hill
My mom still doesn’t fully believe that what they want to do to education means an entire generation of kids like me may not graduate high school, let alone go to college like I did. If I could figure out how to make this break through to her I would weep with joy.
back in the day before you got online you had to listen to the digitized sound of the forsaken child that powered the internet, and it was a lot healthier for everyone.
What it really crystallized for me (as a white woman) is how much patriarchy is about entitlement to people’s bodies as social currency. At its best romance shows us ways to move beyond that…and at its worst it glorifies it. And that extends to how white readers act in community space.
I read that yesterday and I think my face was like, eighty seven different emoji the whole time. The audacity and arrogance and cruelty on display is just so much.
I only learned as an adult that it’s not uncommon for people with CP to struggle with math. Finding a job when you’re visibly disabled and physically can’t do some kinds of work is hard enough—add in inflexible math pedagogy and it’s no wonder so many disabled folks are un or underemployed.
I am and have been surprised by how quickly the folding happened and how naked the cowardice is, but the modern academy failed to fascism proof itself a long time ago—it was never a given that that would prove necessary, but the possibility was definitely not taken seriously.
If you see college students as vulnerable humans with needs you can meet, the more incentive you have to see fighting fascism as totally compatible with your other missions. If they are just elite consumers you give a product to, why not cave. It’s the fight/fold axis in another setting.
Herman Cain will probably be in there somewhere…
People like to compare the US to Russia lately, and one of the places the comparison collapses is Russia’s longtime lack of autonomous local and regional government. For most Americans federal dollars are allowed to be there (if they even know about them), but not tangible signs of force.
You did not. Right down to the tiger and the escaped convicts and the sister’s token gay neighbor. Wow, I apparently remember every detail of this book after over 20 years. Shit like this is why I can’t remember my child’s social security number when I need it.
I think that book can be summed up as “cishet men will do anything to avoid going to therapy, including convince themselves sleeping with their sister’s therapist is like therapy.” With a side of WTF.
What the entire fuck was that. I also never figured out what Pat Conroy had going on in his head about Jewish women (the plot of Beach Music, which I also read, is almost as bananapants), but he could not Be Normal About Them to save his life.
And the National Parks being ADA complaint to the extent they are is a marvel of modernity. (If only we could say the same for all the hotels near them, sigh).
It’s not easy to emigrate to Europe with a disability, but from what I know even if they made it easier I would not especially want to. The ADA is the floor and not the ceiling, but the broader culture it helped grow is worth defending and building on.
Watching a Jeopardy rerun where I grudgingly give the correct response about this website’s least favorite Maine Senator. Glad my kid knows me well enough to ask, “You sound grumpy. Is she terrible?”
It’s a miscalculation as foolish as wearing a Dallas jersey in Philly. Please keep threatening all of us with a good time, Abbott.
Some disabled folks call this sort of thing #CripTax: the ways the US makes being disabled hideously expensive. But it’s also a classic example of how the things that hurt us are not actually *good* for anyone but the super rich. (Why yes, I’m a disabled contract worker, how could you tell?)
I clicked through a few threads and thought placidly “oh, one of those names sounds familiar” and then I got to the title and it all made sense. I love a Tuesday in Romancelandia. We’re just mosying along while everyone else goes “wait, what?”
Sick of everything being Orwellian or Kafkaesque. I demand more Scarrylous situations, where animals drive vehicles and run small businesses.
Bowser voted Kamala and is a pronoun respecter, but Wario definitely voted Trump.
Every time someone posts about burrito taxi, I imagine some kind of amazing Richard Scarry pickle car but a burrito and a taxi and then I'm mad it isn't that.
I got a quick lesson in how much money there is in being right wing when I got to grad school and realized the FIRE co-founder had both an endowed chair and truly massive office. Sigh.
My middle-aged personality is listening to the episode of @thisendsatprom.bsky.social about The Faculty for the second time, because wow did I love that movie in my youth. Also it’s really validating to hear Famke Janssen was key to someone else’s queer awakening.
I’m a regular listener to Sarah’s podcast, so I’m delighted she channeled her Eat the Rich energy into a book. And I have loved various soap opera and soap opera adjacent shows in my life, so I think my romance reader self and family drama reader self will both be happy in the end.
I knew it was generally good when the person whose taste overlaps with mine in my book club was pleased. But she’s Canadian and therefore no help on the RI angle, haha.
Today I came to Bluesky specifically to to see if you had read this yet, and I’m delighted to hear it worked for you. (I’m hoping to get to it soon myself, I think I have a spare Libro.fm credit).
That’s so frustrating! That premise should have inherent stakes, if she’s his first relationship since leaving prison. My book club recently read one where the hero was in recovery and the heroine was probably his first relationship while sober, and that was barely touched on. I don’t get it.
Yeah, I think it is a genuinely delicate balance. On the reader side a grand gesture often fails for me if I feel like the author is imagining the most dramatic movie scene version, but I don’t totally buy it because the gesture isn’t tied to the core problem or doesn’t really solve it.
It’s a weird moment in the genre when dark romance proliferates but contemporary is spending more time than ever going light on conflict, seemingly to spare readers pain. But it’s just as painful to think these people could have real security if they worked harder, only to not see them do any of it.
This thread is already long enough, but I think that’s also why I will forgive a lot in a contemporary if the characters are going to therapy in the epilogue: it’s a way for authors to show the internal work is still happening. And that’s what conflict-light books are skipping over.
To go back to Thomas, I probably wouldn’t forgive Fitz. But I absolutely believe by the end that whatever Millie needs, he will do—because he finally knows her well enough. I cannot imagine them splitting up even when I think she deserves better, because they have the tools to navigate change.
It’s also why external change alone isn’t sufficient—if someone is going to radically change careers for the HEA, it only works if I truly believe they won’t regret it and their new path fits who the love story has made them become. Otherwise I usually think “oh, they could still split up later.”
I’ve read novellas less than a hundred pages that had HEAs or HFNs I believed in. What it takes is the characters realizing what they did before no longer works, because their love needs something else. The grand in grand gesture is in the meaning of the change for the people making it.
When Fitz chooses the house he built, he finally understands himself. Millie usually knows him better than he does—for them to be together he finally has to stand on his own the way she has learned to the whole damn time. And it’s why even if I’m mad at him I believe in their HEA.
I think it’s just as genius we do not know whether Fitz sleeps with Isabelle or not, because that’s not what wounds Millie about her. What wounds Millie is Isabelle meeting his train with his family, or Fitz choosing another house. Because he only lives with people he likes, not his mistresses.
Thomas also does her conflicts on hard mode, because she gives her characters big problems! Fitz is an unfaithful doofus! But Millie can handle it as long as she knows he *likes her best* and their house, like their life, is a team project. Until she can’t, because of Isabelle.
When I think about most of my favorite third acts, they often have exactly this combination Sherry Thomas is so good at: a grand gesture that rights the central wrong and is as romantic to the person receiving it as it is to readers. It says “I know you and what we’ve been through, and I love you.”
The thing Millie wants most in the entire book? For Fitz to see her. She doesn’t need to see he would be helpless without her so much as that he is desperate to be *with* her. Would I forgive him with no groveling? Nope. But I’m not Millie and her opinion counts more.
Which brings me back to Sherry Thomas. We don’t see a single moment of Fitz’s frantic search for Millie at the end. And partly that’s because we’ve already seen him turn down Isabelle. But it’s also because the grand gesture Millie needs is happening as soon as Fitz kisses her.
In the contemporaries I’ve read that haven’t worked for me, it’s usually because the character work is lagging. For a grand gesture to work, I have to know the characters well enough to think “this is not only romantic in general, I am certain this character is swooning more than I am.”
Fitz is just as conflict ridden, even if my sympathies don’t lie with him: as a young man he has no idea how to adult, and as an older one he is gradually realizing he might have been sensible enough to fall in love with his badass wife. The stakes are obvious.
Ravishing the Heiress is a masterclass because there is nothing *but* conflict in both timelines. Young Millie is in love with a man who will never love her, and older Millie has those problems and then some, because Isabelle is back.
The idea of romance being conflict averse lately, as always, comes from my obsessive listening to @fatedmates.net, and my thoughts below on Ravishing The Heiress owe a lot to Sarah and Jen’s deep dive. Because while no one can be Sherry Thomas, that book is a conflict masterclass.
Today I’m thinking about the HEA, conflict, and the genius of Sherry Thomas. Recent romances that haven’t worked for me made me say at the end, “they haven’t really solved this, they could still get divorced in five years.” Because contemporaries these days are conflict averse. #romancelandia
I just got an email with the subject line “Little Caesar’s Hot-N-Ready” and had to ask myself if it was spam, porn, or porn spam, because I haven’t personally eaten Little Caesar’s since Clinton was president. It was a Dem fundraising email. Which explains why I was so busy having 90s flashbacks.
The black bean soup in You Gotta Eat is in regular rotation in my house and helped get my kid into soup. Best cookbook I bought this year, probably.
2025 thoughts: “it seems unlikely that eating frozen pizza bites that expired in June would actually kill me, but honestly some days getting out of bed is more than enough for my risk tolerance.”
We have arrived at the stage of Philly summer one might call Emily Dickinson season: you may die of the humidity, and when you do, you will hear a fly buzz.
how to get to sesame street
Yeah, every single friend I know who left academia and was doing the expat thing in St. Petersburg or Moscow left in February 2022, the idea we should be chill about people joining the Russian Army instead of making it near-impossible to even try is actual imperialist arrogance.
In fascist regimes you are not supposed to be able to ignore the leader for long. That is baked in as much as having secret police and a propaganda arm is. And that’s the part people hate regardless of their ideology. It was a mistake not to play that up as a consequence of a 2024 vote.
sephoraroth is where you go to buy expensive blush and say shit like "all my life i've been fighting for a cream"
I’m no expert but I would’ve got a person to do it.
These guys want to build some dystopian hell-society that has never existed before - reactionary radicals, as it were - whereas I'm here thinking we ought to actually go and build the kind of society that growing up in the 1990s I was told (with some degree of inaccuracy) that we already had.
They finally made the milk from that hotel
Fitzpatrick (or a PAC that backs him) also regularly runs TV ads in the Philly metro media market outside of election season; I’m not in his district but I know exactly how he sells himself to centrists and swing voters because of that.
I think a month in parenting groups of mostly white women is all one really needs to radicalize against MLMs and supplement crankery. Maybe less than that.
My kingdom for a Democrat who runs on “You know how Medicaid stopped covering her nursing home last year and you went bankrupt trying to pay out of pocket? I’m going to punish the people who did that to you.”