I BELIEVE SUE SNELL

Like a Civil War Dad, but a childless woman

[larkandkatydid]

[libraryleopard]

why do we always bash girls for poisoning their family with arsenic but never question if the family had bad vibes? or was unpleasant to be around?

[cathkaesque]

It is so disingenuous when supermarkets have "grown by: Farmer X" on their packaging because it's like, I'll be looking at a pack of strawberries grown by farmer x and he'll actually be the managing director of a fruit farm that employs 2,000 people as pickers!

[jambeast]

It feels like the mental idea of what a "farmer" is hasn't caught up with the economic reality of the past 200 years, where people hear "farmer" and think of small, rural, poor, honest (and specifically ethnically and culturally native) subsistance living, and not essentially a factory owner where the factory is made of dirt and manufactures strawberries, staffed by hundreds of cheap immigrant labourers.

Labourers who, it seems, are rarely ever *referred to* as 'farmers', despite being the ones who do the farming, as opposed to being the ones who own the farm.

[digital-magus]

"a factory owner where the factory is made of dirt" is an excellent summation that also gives me a slight but acute pang of existential dissociation

[larkandkatydid]

I agree with this as an accurate description of 21st century agriculture AND I also feel like one should still, in the 21st century, picture the Earl of Grantham and/or Scarlett O’Hara.

[peachfromcmbyn]

Nazis are always posting shit like, "I was told to be quiet in 4th grade by the teacher once, so women shouldn't be allowed to vote." And everybody wants to turn it into a conversation about abusive teachers when it's like no that's not actually what happened. Frankly considering the way they turned out maybe the teachers should have been beating their ass.

[jessaerys]

how do i say "horror novels these days are too woke" without sounding like a right winger. what i mean is: this one is about a woman serial killer who kills Bad Men, that one is about ~anticapitalist activists~, this one is ~queer~, that one is about *spins wheel* someone dealing with the ghosts of their immigrant roots, all of them are about intergenerational traumaaaaa. okay. cool. but is it good though. is it fucking scary

[jessaerys]

something something, losing the ability to convey horror through abstraction, through metaphor, through symbolism, through allegory, through raw unexamined un-psychiatrized feeling. if the real horror is.... dun dun dun! the patriarchy then i just feel preached to. don't use fiction as a vehicle for Saying Something About Society. write with total vulnerability and then see what it says. it will be probably be far more interesting and horrifying than what if the monster was uhh my mom's abuse or whatever. this brand of new horror writers are all so terrified of actually disclosing anything about themselves. it's like if an instagram infographic performance was a mediocre contemporary novel

[some-stars]

YOU ARE MAKING THE TEXT DO THE WORK OF ANALYSIS!!!!!!!

[larkandkatydid]

The two names that I am cursed to eternally mix up are Marianne Williamson and Marilyn Robinson. This is not at all a minor problem because I am a huge fan of the author of Gilead, whose writings have taught me so much about spirituality and American politics and I am therefore at risk of telling people something very different and much worse.

[larkandkatydid]

I saw an actual copy of Poppy Z Brite’s Drawing Blood in a Barnes & Noble full of teens yesterday, and it filled me with such joy that in this, Pride Month, an actual Youth could pick up The-Shining-as-explicit-MacLennon in paperback and be transformed.

[larkandkatydid]

Why do people get mad when you say that you don’t believe in astrology?

Well, it’s because when someone says “oh I’m such a Scorpio” they are telling you something about themselves using a common social tool that allows people to speak about themselves with a little distance. And you responded to this by accusing them of holding an entire elaborate belief system that they almost certainly don’t hold.

[cam1lla]

Y’all do not hate republicans enough.

[roycohn]

happy lottery day girlies!

[larkandkatydid]

It’s our first Lottery Day without Rob Reiner, who made the most perfect movie about how reading The Lottery as a 10 year old will cook your little brain and for putting onscreen the most perfect presentation of a tween boy’s fanfiction of The Lottery.

[larkandkatydid]

Unbridled Evelyn-normie-lib swagger is my 72 year old mother sauntering in at 8am on the first day of early voting, no id, having hotboxed in the parking lot after asserting to me that she would fight anyone who stands between her and voting for a hot Muslim socialist. No one was going to fight her but she’d already had an energy drink so she was kind of wired.

[larkandkatydid]

In related news, my mother also had a kidney scan this morning and, to my great relief, her kidneys are totally normal and what appears to have happened is that she had the blood test results of a dialysis patient because she had been eating too many creatine gummies and I swore before God that if her scans were clear I would never, ever say I told you so about the creatine.

[larkandkatydid]

Unbridled Evelyn-normie-lib swagger is my 72 year old mother sauntering in at 8am on the first day of early voting, no id, having hotboxed in the parking lot after asserting to me that she would fight anyone who stands between her and voting for a hot Muslim socialist. No one was going to fight her but she’d already had an energy drink so she was kind of wired.

[larkandkatydid]

This isn’t a helpful or even informative take because I’m just telling you that the terrible thing is in fact terrible. But the cruelty towards Haitian-Americans is a horrific spiritual wound on all us. And it isn’t to lessen the real suffering of Haitian people but allowing this to happen is such an act ingratitude toward the nation that taught the world how to live the kind of free societies we enjoy, such an act of contempt for the values of a free society. It’s the modern version of the kind of blasphemy that makes the gods wipe your village off the map, the literal sin of sodom, etc. The terrible thing is a terrible spiritual rot.

[larkandkatydid]

Stop complaining! We have hot, socialist, Muslim mayors at home!

(Gestures at the city of Dearborn’s new instagram campaign against hot rods in which the hot socialist mayor repeatedly asks, “hey, why you drivin’ like that?”)

[larkandkatydid]

The six-figure trades story has a catch: The vast majority of non-college jobs pay far less.

Some students can build good lives without a bachelor’s degree. But federal wage data shows those paths are narrower — and often more gender

For much of the last few decades, some young people have heard a simple mantra: bachelor’s or bust. That is, the best and perhaps only path to economic prosperity is through a four-year college education. Now a wide swath of politicians, educators, and philanthropists are rethinking this. Some even suggest that there are numerous lucrative jobs that don’t require a degree.

A New York Times video explained that “Job demand in fields like construction, along with the allure of potential six-figure salaries, have some high schools investing in hands-on classes that are redefining what success looks like for the Class of 2026.”

At the recent Education Writers Association conference, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore suggested high schools are too focused on getting students into college. If a student chooses a different route “and they find something that’s going to make them have economic mobility for them and their family, then right on,” he said.

Amidst this enthusiasm I wanted to take a look at the data to answer a simple but contested question: How likely is it that students can skip a four-year degree and make a good living or achieve “economic mobility?”

The short answer is it’s certainly possible, but the odds are stacked against workers without degrees. “We all want the $70,000 job that a student can access right outside of high school,” says Dom McKoy, executive director of the University of Chicago’s To&Through Project. But those opportunities are rare. “We have to be really clear-eyed about what is a true pathway at scale for young people.”

Some non-college occupations offer solidly middle-class salaries — but the largest ones typically don’t

One of the ways I see this myth, acted upon by wealthy philanthropists whose own children absolutely went to elite colleges, also play out amongst regular people on social media is the idea that there’s an unfair “stigma” against well-paying blue collar jobs like garbage collector or construction worker and only that silly middle-class stigma is keeping kids out of these fields, which are, in reality, physically exhausting and low-paid.

[larkandkatydid]

It’s funny that the guy who really modeled how to be a non-black politician who is able to gain the support of community power brokers in a majority black city is Sri Thanadar but no one wants to claim him because he sucks in ways that are beautiful and unique to Sri Thanadar and that no one political faction can claim.