Things I Read That I Love #194: She Wrote My Childhood Before It Happened

HELLO and welcome to the 194th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about ! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.


The Wreck Of Amtrak #188, by Matthew Shaer for The New York Times, January 2016

Incredibly thorough and enlightening look at the worst American rail disaster in decades.

In Hokkaido, the Ultimate Japanese Snow Country, by Junot Diaz for Travel & Leisure, December 2015

I would read Junot Diaz write about just about anything, and this is a nice thing that he wrote about a trip to a remote and snowy part of Japan that has been getting increasing amounts of attention from tourists and when the bullet train comes, that attention will explode. He wanted to see the place before all that happened and he did. So much snow!

From Pickup Artist To Pariah, by Rachel Monroe for The Cut, January 2016

Hipster coffee shop owner turns out to have really f*cked up ideas about women! “Jared Rutledge fancied himself a big man of the “manosphere.” But when his online musings about 46 women were exposed, his whole town turned against him.”

The Trials of Alice Goffman, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus for The New York Times, January 2016

About sociology vs. journalism and privilege within the context of Alice Goffman’s book “On the Run,” which is about “the social world of a group of young black men in a mixed-­income neighborhood in West Philadelphia, some of them low-­level drug dealers who live under constant threat of arrest and cycle in and out of prison.” I’ve read an excerpt and was really fascinated by the arguments and hullabaloo around this book revealed in this article.

Everything Is Yours, Everything Is Not Yours, by Clemantine Wamariya for Matter, June 2015

This won a National Magazine Award because it is simply amazing and one of the best things I have read in a very long time. The tagline: “At age six, I ran away with my sister to escape the Rwandan massacre. We spent seven years as refugees. What do you want me to do about it? Cry?”

I Don’t Know Margaret Atwood, But She Knows Me, by Sneha Rajaram for The Ladies Finger, January 2016

“When I first read the book at 20, I realized that someone whom I’d never met knew what my life as a child was – the secret one, with the memories I’d blocked out myself. It was nothing like reading a novel – or even non-fiction. It was like coming across a forgotten manuscript in the attic of your house and finding that your life was inexplicably, eerily written down before it happened.”

Who Poisoned Flint, Michigan?, by Stephen Rodrick for Rolling Stone, January 2016

Everybody should read this, know this, think about this. It’s been news in Michigan (where I live) since last summer, and I hope the news going national will lead to something happening, anything.

The Sex Machine, by Michael Damiano for Boston Magazine, January 2016

Did you ever watch those MTV Real Sex documentaries in the ’90s? I feel like a lot of them were about swinging. Anyhow, like any sexual subculture it’s interesting because I am just a human, ultimately. Also I can’t believe Ron Jeremy is still a thing.

The Strange Case of Anna Stubbelefield, by Daniel Engber for The New York Times, October 2015

Um, yeah, this is a pretty strange case indeed.

“What made them so uncomfortable was not that Anna was 41 and D.J. was 30, or that Anna is white and D.J. is black, or even that Anna was married with two children while D.J. had never dated anyone. What made them so upset — what led to all the arguing that followed, and the criminal trial and million-­dollar civil suit — was the fact that Anna can speak and D.J. can’t; that she was a tenured professor of ethics at Rutgers University in Newark and D.J. has been declared by the state to have the mental capacity of a toddler.”

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Riese

Riese is the 41-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3177 articles for us.

13 Comments

  1. That article about Margaret Atwood is great – one of my favourite things about her books is the way she depicts how complicated relationships between women can get, and how blurry the definition of ‘friendship’ can get. Thanks for the recommendation!

  2. Oh man, i remember reading The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield last october. it’s so so strange and i don’t really know how to process it.

  3. i have such a weird view of Asheville – i’m sure it’s super wonderful but along with this jacob + jared article is an old high school classmate who used to go on rants on her facebook post about how mistreated men were, how feminism was killing society, and not to mention her insane racism

    maybe the crystals make people a little too crazy

  4. Came back to say Everything Is Yours, Everything Is Not Yours was a beautiful, profound and intensely relevant read. I’m grateful for the recommendation.

  5. live-in dogsitting at the moment, and dog-owner came home right as I finished reading all the linked articles in succession, and it basically went as follows:

    DogOwner: HEY HI HOW ARE YOU! I just wasted 8 years of my life on a plane

    Me: *stares intensely at my socks* “OK SO YOU KNOW HOW PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES SOMETIMES USE TECHNOLOGY TO COMMUNICATE?”

    Five Minutes Later

    Me: “BUT CAN’T WE MAKE BRACES OR ROBOTS THAT WOULD HELP ‘FACILITATE’ ARMS WITHOUT THE OUIJI BOARD EFFECT THO?? We Put People On The MOON”

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