In my most smooth radio voice, I’d like to say: it is my sister’s birthday today so special shoutout to Jaden, this one is for you. And now, on to the links
A conversation with my crush and yours, Lena Waithe, about Black queerness and the Master of None episode she wrote.
Mitski’s review of Harry Styles’s new album will take you back to high school.
I’m very excited for Janet Mock’s new column Beauty Beyond Binaries!
“A gut has its own intelligence,” she writes in the opening pages of her new feminist guide. “A feminist gut might sense something is amiss.” A review of Sara Ahmed’s new book Living a Feminist Life.
Read about the work queer and trans people of colour are doing in Oakland and Seattle to resist gentrification and displacement.
I know mother’s day has come and gone, but I loved this piece written by Kara Walker’s daughter, Octavia Bürgel, on what it is like to be the child of a successful artist.
merritt k writes about her poem Gay High School AU and the playfulness of fanfiction.
Morgan Jerkins thinks on the implications of writing about your community for people outside of it.
The personal essay is over—it’s sad, it’s a relief, and it says something about our political moment.
This week The Atlantic published this posthumous piece by Alex Tizon about Eudocia Tomas Pulido, his family’s slave. You can read a subsequent series of responses here.
On the violence of the appropriation prize debacle, Alicia Eliott writes about the importance of Canada’s historical context: “forgetting context is a privilege far too readily indulged in by many white politicians, writers, editors and people. They don’t have to live with the knowledge that this country was built through the systemic genocide of their ancestors — because it wasn’t.”
I’d also recommend reading Gwen Benaway, Chelsea Vowel, and Janet Rogers as they each think through the violence of Can lit and Canadian media.
You might want to contribute to an Indigenous literary prize!
There’s a mental health crisis in Nova Scotia.