The Vanishing Present

My goal in life is to become Hokage. I study law and political science and occasionally post snippets from my readings.

[sneezes]

[hanwooz]

190919 fear ✧ vernon

[friends-daily]

A.D.U.L.T.H.O.O.D

[iamjapanese]

Song Yuanwen（宋源文 Chinese, b.1933）

via

[whitepeopletwitter]

[rhaenyradragon]

“I read a quote once that said..friendships are the masterpieces of nature.” 

[missdontcare-x]

All of us as women have a friend, or a relative, or have gone through [some kind of abuse] ourselves. There are all of these playful sort of comments on Big Little Lies about women’s manipulation or women’s dirty secrets, but in fact the biggest little lie is how we carry shame about what men have done. We have to learn to use our voice to protect ourself and each other, because there is no shame in what another person has done to us, and it’s time to defend ourselves and demand to be treated with respect. That’s such a profound thought—I just felt privileged to be a part of that story.

Laura Dern (via missdontcare-x)

[bllsource]

[staff]

A few literary suggestions for Black History Month

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Maybe you know Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from when Beyoncé sampled her TEDx talk, “We should all be feminists,” or maybe you’ve been following her emergence as one of the most prominent voices of African literature over the last two decades. Her latest novel, Americanah, was selected by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2013.

Edna Lewis

Edna Lewis had a hell of a career. She worked her way up as a seamstress, eventually fashioning a dress for Marilyn Monroe. Then she became the first African-American celebrity chef. Then she broke her leg, so she wrote a cookbook. The Taste of Country Cooking was interspersed with personal stories of growing up in a freed-slave settled town in Virginia, and redefined what many thought of Southern food.  

Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (@roxanegay), famed author of Bad Feminist, is a Tumblr favorite, and not just because you can follow her. She writes about what it means to be a woman of color. She’s the first Black woman to write for Marvel, and she’s writing queer WOC into their storylines. She pulled her unreleased book from publishers Simon & Schuster after their deal with Milo Yiannopoulos was announced. It’s easy to admire her actions as much as her writing. 

Follow these too:

Afro Editions (@afroeditions) posts and reblogs all things Black lit, including this bell hooks Valentine’s Day card and these suggestions for Black sci-fi.

The Center for African-American Poetry and Poetics (@caapoetryandpoetics) highlights exactly what you think it will.

Bonus: We highlighted it last year, but Black Children’s Books and Authors (@blackchildrensbooksandauthors) deserves a spotlight on it again. 

Don’t miss our upcoming BHM Answer Times. This week and next week, we have:

2/21—Angelica Ross (@missrosscreative), transgender rights advocate.

2/22—Actress Amandla Stenberg (@amandla)

2/23—Comedian and actor Andrew Bachelor, better known as King Bach (@kingbach).

2/24—Washington Post (@washingtonpost) editorial board member and MSNBC contributor Jonathan Capehart.

[buzzfeedreader]

How To Keep Black People Alive, a visual essay by Charlotte Gomez and Hannah Giorgis

[ethiopienne]

so grateful the incredibly talented charlotte gomez turned my piece from a while back into this graphic essay <3

[whatshouldwecallme]

Whenever I start shopping online

My bank account:

[fabulousfatcupcake-deactivated2]

Tim Gunn on Plus Size Clothing

“Have you seen most of the plus-size sections out there? It’s horrifying. Whoever’s designing for plus-size doesn’t get it. The entire garment needs to be reconceived. You can’t just take a size 8 and make it larger. In my travels, I’ve been an advocate for larger women. I’ve been talking to designers, but only a half-dozen make an effort. Most say, ‘I don’t want a woman who’s a size 10 or 11 wearing my clothes.’ Well, shame on you! It’s not realistic

[tiny-vessels]

Love him.

[cypheroftyr]

“You can’t just take a size 8 and make it larger.” Praise Jesus and all the saints for him saying this because damn, most “PLUS SIZED” clothing is fugly.

[nokki1]

Amen. The plus sized clothing out there is crazy and makes me just…

[trollprincess]

I’m not surprised he said this. Ever since the first season, when they’ve had to do garments for everyday people who aren’t models, there’s always one designer (at the very least) who flips out as though they’ve never in their life considered that people who aren’t a size 0 might wear their clothes. Tim always looks at them like he wants to drown them in a lake.

[gatsbyswidow]

I love Tim Gunn so much and this is just one of the reasons. The other is that he is asexual and has copped a lot of flack for it in the media but he isn’t ashamed of what he is/is completely happy with who is. Next to Diane Von Furstenberg, he is one of my favourite people in the fashion industry.

[ouch]

[academic-illiterati-deactivated]

Conflict theorists are among those who argue that social inequality is neither a societal necessity nor a source of social order. They see it as a primary source of conflict, coercion, and unhappiness. Stratification ultimately rests on the unequal distribution of resources […]. Resources are an especially important source of inequality when they are scarce. Sometimes, their scarcity is natural. […] At other times, however, the scarcity of a resource is artificially created. For instance, in 1890, the founder of De Beers, the South African company that currently controls two thirds of the international diamond market, realized that the sheer abundance of diamonds in southern Africa would make them virtually worthless on the international market. So he decided to carefully limit the number of diamonds released for sale each year. This artificially created rarity, coupled with a carefully cultivated image of romance, is what made diamonds so expensive and what continues to make companies such as De Beers so powerful today (Harden, 2000).

Newman, David M. Sociology: Exploring the Architecture of Everyday Life, Brief Edition. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2015. Print.

Chapter 10: The Architecture of Stratification: Social Class and Inequality

(via socio-logic)

[123layout]

[impishglee]

George Weasley did not celebrate his twenty first birthday. When his mother had sent him an owl inviting him back to The Burrow, all she got back were the words “I can’t blow out the candles alone.” He hasn’t celebrated a birthday since then.

It took George almost two years of therapy before he had the strength to re open Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. He designed a new line of products for the reopening, Trigger Charms that would temporarily block out your senses when a trigger was detected, No Nightmare Nougat, Lethargy Lollipops, etc. Eventually Ron decided that being an auror was too stressful for him, and George offered him a job. It got easier to run once he had a brother with him.

Life slowly got easier, George’s business was booming, his family didn’t have to worry about money as much. Nieces and nephews started cropping up. George reconnected with Angelina and after a few years of dating they wound up getting married. It was harder picking a best man with Fred gone, but George managed. When Angelina gave birth his son, it was all too easy to pick a name.

One day George was sitting at the table explaining to Fred II how fainting fancies worked, Fred looked up and asked,

“Dad, when is your birthday?”

“Oh, in about a week,” George replied glancing at the calendar.

“Are you going to have a party?”

“No, a don’t really do birthday parties.”

“Aw, c’mon! You have to have a party!”

“Okay, I’ll have one on one condition, you have to help me blow out the candles.”

A week later for the first time since George was twenty, Fred and George blew out the birthday candles together.

[hypebeast]

Ta-ku x Repeat Pattern: NO.SLEEP NIHON