For my last day on Angle duty, another assortment of interesting Slate articles for your reading pleasure. Thanks for joining me, and please welcome Rebecca Onion back to your inbox tomorrow!
A few weeks ago, Old Navy released a promotional photo that seemed to endorse interracial marriage, and a familiar cycle ensued for anyone who remembers the Cheerios wars of 2013: the backlash, the backlash to the backlash, and the media coverage of it all. Ruth Graham takes a look at the phenomenon of the liberal ad campaign and the trolls that love to attack it and concludes: “No matter how the fracas plays out, everybody wins in the end: The trolls get attention, responders get the warm and fuzzy pleasure of combating hate, and the brand comes out looking like a crusader for justice.” And mainstream advertising is proving the pretty radical fact that “[i]t’s profitable to endorse interracial marriage, and interfaith friendship, and families headed by same-sex couples.”
Is it similarly profitable to rail against the patriarchy? Nora Caplan-Bricker reviews Lindy West’s new book Shrill, the ladyblogger’s nonfiction collection about sexism, fat-shaming, period stigma, and more. Drawn from previously published and new writing, “[t]he book’s many shrewd insights sometimes feel strung together in a way that’s less than artful,” Caplan-Bricker writes, but “they are always a pleasure to read.” I especially liked, as Caplan-Bricker noted, West’s reclaiming of Ursula from The Little Mermaid as a fat female role model: “History is written by the victors, so forgive me if I don’t trust some P90X sea king’s smear campaign against the radical fatty in the next grotto.”
From the grotto to the garden: Ferris Jabr decided to record every single reference to a living creature in Emily Dickinson’s 1,789 poems and found one overarching theme: her love of her backyard. “Dickinson is often portrayed as some white gossamer recluse, completely divorced from the world outside her bedroom—but that is not really true. The physical circumference of her adult life was small, but its psychological terrain was boundless,” Jabr writes. “The more time I spent immersed in Dickinson’s poetry and biographies, the more convinced I became that her skills as a poet, gardener, and naturalist matured in tandem, feeding off of each other.”
The theme of feeding—and fat-shaming—recurs in Jessica Winter’s article revisiting the time Donald Trump humiliated a Miss Universe winner for gaining weight: “[I]n all fairness to Trump, he was only the ringleader; then as now, he needed willing followers.” Those followers were the press, who joined right in on the gleeful commentary about Alicia Machado’s expanding size. At the time, the Associated Press reported the following: “Miss Universe hit the gym Tuesday, trying to control her expanding dimensions before the Big Binge turns her career into a black hole.” Makes you think: How will we look back on the current cycle of Trump coverage?
For fun: The New York Police Department went on Facebook Live to smash a bunch of illegal dirtbikes with bulldozers, and the video footage is just as satisfying as that sounds.
Crushing it,
Heather
