Link Roundup!

Hello, our dear friends! Mallory has been living at my house for the entire month of July AND we got Nikki out here for a visit AND Marco sends us the greatest pics you have ever seen and I miss him constantly, so we were feeling very nostalgic and thought: wouldn’t it be fun to do one day of new content for literally no reason? So we did. Comments may or may not be working, we planned on having them off but it’s kind of hard to do without hiding ALL PREVIOUS COMMENTS and people get very sad when that happens. Maybe you can comment? I dunno. If you can’t, don’t, if you can, great!

You may have heard about this, but the election turned out very badly. I don’t have a link for this, I’m just sorry. I hope you’re doing okay.

Update: Well, the healthcare vote happened, so I guess I do have a terrible link after all.

LISTEN, you’re lucky to be alive:

1. I was fired after disabling my coworker’s caps-lock key I just finished my sophomore year of college. For the summer, I got a three-month internship at a company that does work in the field I am getting my degree in and want to work in after I graduate. This was my second job, after the internship somewhere else I had last summer. I was hoping to get some good experience like last summer. I was paired with the same person for two-thirds of the work I was doing. She has lots of skills, but I noticed when she types she uses the caps-lock key each time she needed to make a capital letter instead of using the shift key. She is only five years older than me, and she is very good with technology and computers. I didn’t understand why she would type this way, because even though she does type fast and efficiently, using the caps-lock key would slow her down. I mentioned it to her and even showed her, and she said she had no idea but she would keep on using the caps-lock key. I thought she just needed to see how efficient it was so when I was using her computer I disabled the caps-lock key. She was very upset when she found out that it didn’t work and I explained what I did and why she should give the shift key a chance. She complained to the manager, and even though I was just trying to make things more efficient, the manager sided with her and I was let go a month into my internship. HR sided with her too when I went to them. I’m confused because I was only trying to help and make things more efficient. Did I really do something wrong or did the company overreact?

I'm gonna let you in on one of my biggest lifehacks: I try not to publicly & confidently opine on subjects in which my knowledge is shallow — The OTHER Ultimates (@theshrillest) July 21, 2017

Nikki wrote a beautiful essay for Hazlitt about representation and parenting:

Perhaps it’s not so surprising, then, that when I had the chance to take my daughter to see a company teeming with Asian American Shakespeareans, I grabbed it—even if it was “too weird” and “too old” for her; even if the original source material wasn’t written with her in mind at all. She didn’t know anything about the play, but she knew she would get to stay up very, very late, so of course she wanted to go. I bought her an abridged version of The Winter’s Tale written for children, dreamy fairy-tale illustrations filling every page, so she would go in with a basic grasp of the plot. She might not know Shakespeare yet, I thought, but she would—she’d be assigned his plays in school and see them performed onstage, on film. And now she would always be able to look back and recall that the first time she ever saw a Shakespearean play, many of the people bringing the story to life before her eyes were Asian American. Just like her.

I left Twitter back in…January?…but I still look at a few individual timelines, chiefly @JuanPa, because he is the funniest person in the world (his original tweets AND his RTs):

friend: haha I love your jokes about Mothman

me: [sets down non-alcoholic piña colada] that is not what they are — JuanPa (@jpbrammer) July 22, 2017

Percy Ross Wants To Give You Money:

Ross received thousands of letters a week, and his staff read them all. A trusted employee, aided by other paid readers, would winnow the week’s mail down to around 200 letters; then Ross and his assistant would handpick 30 or 40. Ross read and replied to each of these, often privately fulfilling requests for money. (Only three or four would appear in print.) Frequently he sent cash; sometimes he arranged for donations to be made by others or paid merchants in a writer’s hometown directly. Off-the-wall stuff was his favorite, which is probably less reflective of Ross’s beliefs and opinions than of society’s. Cat ladies, for example, took a hit when Ross wrote to Ms. V.W. of Oklahoma, who wanted money to build a dwelling for her twelve felines, “If I paid for your ‘cat house,’” Ross replied, “my wife would put me in the doghouse.”

Please pre-order The Wedding Date, the first novel by dearly cherished Friend of The Toast Jasmine Guillory, which is funny and sweet and VERY romantic. Jasmine is another person whose Twitter is worth following, I went back through two solid months of it while she was literally on the couch next to me.

Alexander Chee’s very personal history of gin:

In Cambodia, in the bar of a Phnom Penh gay sex hotel, I was presented with a European martini just like the one I was given in Leipzig. And just like then, I gave my second lesson to a bartender on how to make the American dry martini. He waited patiently through my explanations and I tipped him heavily for his patience—and I think all patrons should tip heavily when giving lessons of this kind. It is, after all, an intrusion.

When your straight friend Jean makes a funny joke pic.twitter.com/o180oOeqye — joey (@joeyz95) July 23, 2017

When librarians are also first responders:

Checking in with online librarian communities about opioid usage they’ve seen on the job was polarizing, with some commenters eager to vent (“I’ve been trying to get Narcan and the accompanying staff training for my library for months, and I keep getting shuffled from agency to agency. It’s incredibly frustrating”) and others annoyed by what they saw as an overblown problem (“Ooh yeah, we totally watch ’em shoot up right at the front desk . . . I checked out a needle and spoon to a gaggle of teen girls who wanted to shoot up together”). Annoyed Librarian, an anonymous Library Journal contributor, spoke for many when they expressed concerns about stepping into a first responder role. “Is the goal just to make sure that people don’t die of overdoses in the library? Or is it to help them before they overdose?” they asked. “Or is that the social worker’s job? It’s hard to tell anymore.”

Samantha Powell, another Toastie who has become one of my most cherished IRL buddies (and is one-third of my SPRIGHTLY royals group text) wrote this fantastic little thing about J. Crew:

In the late ’90s, I interviewed at my local J.Crew store the summer before my junior year of high school. I spent most of the group interview wondering if my Birkenstock knock-offs were the right choice and staring at my feet, the latter likely part of the reason I wasn’t asked back. But in the late fall of 2009, when I sat down for another interview at the same location, my footwear choice was the only thing that I was sure about. I was over a year into full unemployment, a state which had sent me crawling back to Boston from New York City and now found me outlining the long history that J.Crew and I shared to a stranger. I turned my interview charm up to full blast to distract from the desperation wafting off of me and was rewarded at the end of it all with a holiday sales associate position.

I have never done this to avoid talking to a man, but maybe this is the year I start living my best life. https://t.co/L8fllF509U — Nicole Chung (@nicole_soojung) July 20, 2017

Speaking of Jasmine Guillory, when she was in town visiting Mallory and I this week we went to see Girls Trip (the NUMBER TWO MOVIE IN AMERICA) which was funny and sweet and about the power of female friendship while also being dirty as HELL in the best possible way and we had a great time. And then Mallory showed us the original grapefruiting video (this is the most NSFW thing imaginable) and then we got embroiled in the ensuing drama. It’s not really drama, Tiffany was totally joking and credits Auntie Angel in her Vanity Fair interview, we just enjoyed briefly getting overly-invested in the argument.

FOOTBALL IS SO DANGEROUS AND SOMETHING’S GOTTA GIVE

(Mallory here to add some links of her own) WHY HAVE I NOT BEEN HIRED FOR THIS YET

here is a GIF of my dad saying WAY TO GO during a sermon that a friend sent to me a while back and I still really enjoy, feel free to use it as a motivator if you’re in need of a pick-me-up

here is a suggested video that YouTube wants me to watch based on my previous viewing history

my book is in copyedits and I just got a first look at the dedication page

I think this is a funny standup routine about apricots