A.N

by Edith Zimmerman

I would like to salute the women who created dinosaur erotica this year. Most of the very short e-books are about cave-women-type people who engage in various sex acts with dinosaurs. Not because they have dinosaur fetishes (at least not that they know of, at first! ahhhh I love it), but because they get caught in unexpected hunting situations, etc. (putting aside that people and dinosaurs didn't live at the same time. PROBABLY). For instance, the opening of Taken By the T-Rex:

Drin!! Can you guess what happens? Haha ahhhh, I just love it so much. I love it, I love it; it deserves the Pulitzer Prize. They can rename the Pulitzer Prize the Dinosaur Erotica Prize, for ingenuity and entertainment. Maybe dinosaur erotica existed before, but there’s something perfect about Kindles for making it feel sneakier.

There’s also something feminist about these, maybe?? Because it’s not like porn is going to disappear, and if some women can get turned on by the idea of being fucked by an actual DINOSAUR, then maybe it spreads porn empathy (“Babe? I saw…on your Kindle…? Is that…what …you…?”). Presuming that everyone loves dinosaur erotica, which they should and must, right?! It’s also hilarious.

Anyway, the women who write it, Alara Branwen and Christie Sims (pseudonyms), are students at Texas A&M, supposedly, and they seem fun in this interview on The Cut. “And that is how we became the dynamic duo of monster porn!” It’s also possible they’re just dirty old men pretending to be sweet college women, and the more I look into it, the more that actually does seem like it could be the case (“Hi! I'm just a plain old, everyday Midwestern girl that lives a normal life”), but who cares! Putting joy into the world!

All right, I’m going to go read Taken By the Pterodactyl now. Wait oh my god they have AUDIBLE versions!? Hahahahah oh my god these books. Bless LITERATURE! [time passes] Okay I just read Taken by the Pterodactyl, and it is amazing. It’s about a young woman named Dianne, although sometimes it’s "Diana," who lives in a colony somewhere away from earth, and she has to protect her family’s field of sheep from the pterodactyls that fly past every afternoon. Until one day, etc. My favorite line: “Sure, she loved her parents, and she had a good life at home, but what the pterodactyl had made her feel was unlike anything she’d ever felt before.” Mmm hmm. Yup. Yes. Put that on my tombstone. Please.

Edith Zimmerman is the founding editor of The Hairpin.

0 Comments

Hi,

I’m sorry to be saying this, but I think Elodie owes the first letter writer on 12/19 an apology. I have a parent with a chronic pain condition, and it’s wrenching. (Eventually most of us will, as our parents age and suffer, and it’s one of the hardest things that will happen in our lives). Carrying a disabled parent up and down flights of stairs is terrible and unsafe practice, not an able-bodied daughter’s duty. Asking someone who is obviously not in a position of terrific affluence to buy a house or even a new sofa based on one dreaded yearly visit from a relative they have rocky boundaries with is … surprising, at the least. The letter writer was clearly asking for help setting a different boundary with her dad around visiting, under the clear understanding that she couldn’t meet his physical needs and was exhausted with the emotions of the situation. Instead Elodie straight-up insinuated that she didn’t love her father and then assigned her homework to examine her feelings for prejudice against all disabled people, when she was clearly already suffering terrific pain and guilt. I can’t imagine how I would have felt if someone had said those things to me when I was still freshly dealing with how my mother’s changing health was impacting her needs and my ability to meet those needs. (And yes, I had to change how available I was to her, because it was affecting my own health and ability to work, and I too would have referred to myself as a terrible daughter during that time). To be perfectly frank, I think it would have provoked a crisis. It was terrifically unkind. I appreciate that your website provides a free service, but I also think that as it is a trusted resource for a lot of people, you need to do better in the future.

Best and kind regards, and thank you for all the good stuff,

C.

Dear C, #649, and Others:

C., thanks for writing, I hear you and the others who were very unhappy with the answer to #649, and I appreciate you emailing me directly.

First, ground rules: We have a comment section partly so that people can disagree with the advice offered and offer alternate perspectives. “I think you got this wrong, this is my experience, and here is what I think the LW should do” = always within bounds. This space would not function without that sort of healthy disagreement. The LW may totally disagree with the “column” part of the advice, but if they get something good from the comments we’ve done our job.

Comments that start with “You are a terrible person, here is my analysis of the terribleness of your personality and I poop on all of your life choices, I hate your Tumblr and everything about you, oh, btw you got this wrong” = not within bounds. If you hate-read my site, or you personally dislike Elodie or any of the posters, you do you, but we aren’t obligated to host your thoughts about that here in the interest of “fairness.” Which means that the valid critiques people may have placed among the insults went away when I deleted that shit. In addition, we had people selectively skipping over large parts of the answer and then yelling that certain things were not addressed, skipping over large parts of each other’s comments, arguing with straw version of what was actually said, extrapolating madly, and dropping personal insults to a troubling degree the other day, which doesn’t mean there isn’t room to disagree with Elodie’s take on the post, but it does make moderation into a mess. Closing the thread means some egregious points might go unanswered or un-debated, or some unkind or against-the-rules comments are allowed to stand without answer, or your point might be lost to the spam filter. That doesn’t mean every un-deleted thing is okay and endorsed by the site. It just means “stop now.”

Elodie would post a follow-up of some kind if I asked her to, but some of the comments have become about her, personally this week to a point that I don’t want to put any more of her blood in the water. Please allow me to offer my own take on Letter #649 after reading Elodie’s post and others’ comments and emails:

Dear LW #649:

We’re probably too close to Christmas to make a difference, but of you don’t want your dad to come visit, ask him not to visit. There is no way to do this without hurting his feelings and resetting a lot of unspoken expectations about how your family works, which is uncomfortable.

The script is “Dad, I can’t host you for Christmas this year.”

Why? “Because I can’t.” Why? “I just can’t.” Sorry, I can’t. Nope, I can’t. No, that won’t work. Repeat it until he believes you. Get off the phone and go do something self-care-ish.

Lots of us have to deliver that kind of news to disappointed family. “I can’t make it home this year.” “We’re doing something else this year.” “Husband and I want to fly solo this year.” Reasons, if you must give them: “I’m exhausted and not up to it.” “I’d rather make a plan to visit you another time.” “We’re going to have to make other arrangements for now.” 

He will be sad. He will be lonely on Christmas. You will probably feel really guilty. He may get quite testy and argue with you about it and you may leave that conversation in a very uncomfortable place, where you have to say “But I didn’t invite you, you invited yourself.”  But it can be done, and it sounds like it has to be done. If we didn’t get to you in time this year, you have a year to think about and plan for next Christmas.

Now, let’s address the question of disability. One problem, LW #649, is that to me as well as Elodie, your letter over-justifed not wanting your dad to visit in terms of his disability.People who have walked in the caregiver shoes, like C., recognized this as exhaustion and frustration. Many other people saw that and read one more horrible message about What A Giant Burden People Like Us Are On Our Grudging, Long-Suffering Relatives (fueled by the part where you said while you feel guilty, you see him as a burden). People argued both viewpoints as if they were the ONLY possible read, with NO elements of the other position, which is one of the reasons the comments got so fucked up so fast. Looking at it again today, it looks to me like the over-justifying that is a common thing when people don’t feel like they are really allowed to say no. Whatever it is, “I want to, but it’s just too hard to take care of you right now” is probably not the way to sell your Dad on this decision. He probably can’t be sold on the decision anyway, but for your own sake it’s worth framing it in terms of your needs, and owning the decision. “We can’t because I can’t” > “We can’t because you can’t.”

The big point that I think that Elodie was making in tying this to Letter #650 was that inviting disabled people to activities that you know are inaccessible and impossible for them over time is the same as disinviting them. It makes people feel like they are being gaslighted, like, I told you I can’t climb stairs, so why do you keep inviting me to House of Stairs? (Especially when there’s been a year since last Christmas to talk about a different plan?) It’s a trap where the disabled person is put in the position of declining the invitation for their own self-care, and the non-disabled person can sort of say “Okay, if that’s your decision! We’ll miss you!” and pat themselves on the back because hey, we invited you, it’s your problem if you don’t want to come! Your exclusion is a self-selection thing and not us excluding you at all! It’s a horrible double-bind which is definitely at play in Letter #650.

Back to Letter #649: I think that this part of Elodie’s point is worth holding onto. Your dad has told you that your house is a painful and impossible place for him to stay, and one solution (arguably the best solution) is for him to not invite himself there (for sure) and for you to not invite him there (for the forseeable future). The problem is that nobody is being honest about that as a solution. He thinks he’s telling you what he needs by criticizing you for having stairs, and he’s not taking the “But it’s the House of Stairs and Lumpy Sofas!” condition as the “Maybe…don’t come?” message that it is. His plan is to martyr himself in order to spend Christmas with you and hope you’ll silently martyr yourself in return because that’s the deal you have right now, because faaaaaamily, because Christmas! It takes clarity and honesty to break out of those assumptions and renegotiate something else, but sadly, as long as the prospect of having that honest conversation is scarier than the prospect of actually hosting your dad, you will keep “enjoying” your annual grudging horrible painful visits from Dad. He’s not gonna get there on his own. You’re gonna have to say “Don’t come,” and you’re going to have to say it explicitly.

You aren’t a bad person if you don’t spend Christmas with your dad, this year or any other year. I don’t spend Christmas with my family anymore because traveling at this time of the year is too expensive and too stressful and I need my one little bit of down time the same as you, LW. When I did travel between Chicago and New England, I was bankrupting myself and spending half my break in airports as I waited out Ice Planet Hoth-related weather delays. My family hated it and gave me a lot of guilt about it for a long time but I knew they’d gotten it when I invited them for Thanksgiving last year and they said “Oh, but it’s so expensive and stressful to travel at that time of year” (O RLY?) and now we visit at other mutually convenient times. The first time you change up the family tradition is the hardest time, but it gets easier. Not being a bad person vs. Not hurting anyone’s feelings, there’s a different kettle of fish. Not going home hurt my family’s feelings. Not hosting your dad will hurt his. We’re breaking the meta-narrative of Home For The Holidays and Dutiful Daughters. Of course it hurts. But the alternative hurts, too. Traditions can be lovely, but breaking the “We will do x on the holidays because we have always done x” cycle as an adult can be powerful and taste like delicious freedom.

You are also not a bad person if you keep living in your house that suits you (BTW: NO ONE SAID BUY A DIFFERENT HOUSE, just that the house you bought was a choice, and hosting your dad is a choice, and hosting your dad in such an uncomfortable way is not a good choice, so an honest reexamination of priorities is at hand). You are not a bad person if you don’t spend money that you don’t have, if you don’t rearrange your furniture and your life to accommodate a once-a-year visit from a relative you’re not sure you want to see anyway. I think your Dad had a secret plan to move in with you or stay longer-term someday, and your choice of house messed with that plan (that he never talked about and you never agreed to), and that’s tied up in his reaction to the house. There are so many unasked and unanswered questions between the two of you that are coming out as “goddamn stairs!”

However, if you want your dad to ever visit you, something would have to change, because no real invitation is even possible at the current status quo. I think that’s the point that Elodie was seeking to make re: ableism: Make a real invitation (and invest somehow in his comfort, whether that’s a ramp or a new sofa or a hotel down the road, and don’t treat it like a burden), or make no invitation (which is okay if that’s what you need to do – emotionally, financially, etc). And if you don’t want your dad to come, tell him, because the unspoken “Okay, sure (not really, because it’s physically impossible for you, can’t you see that?)!” half-measure isn’t working for anyone. You kinda want him to disinvite himself from Christmas because of your stairs and his disability, but you don’t want to have to be the bad guy or make the choice or communicate the choice. You say “But he’s got it in his head that I should be adjusting my life to accommodate for him more.” He thinks he’s asking you for accommodations by complaining about the discomfort, and he thinks he’s showing love by visiting you despite the discomfort, and you think that telling him “nothing’s changed, tho!” should make it obvious that it’s not workable. You’re both wrong; you aren’t asking or telling, you are hinting, and as we know, hinting doesn’t work. Then you are super-mad at him for imposing and not getting it, but he can’t read your mind. As much as you are not a bad person for wanting to change it up this year, or for living in your house, he is not a bad person for assuming that “Christmas is something I spend with my kid,” since you’ve done it literally every year of your life. Inviting himself was not the answer, but if you want to change his assumption, you have to actually change his assumption. With words. There’s also a difference between “being a good person” and “never hurting anyone’s feelings, ever.” You don’t have to be a bad person to have incompatible wants with someone, or to disappoint their expectations. There is no great solution here that makes both of you 100% happy.

Good luck having the “Dad, I realize that this sucks and it was not what you planned, but Christmas together isn’t going to work this year” conversation. Above all, I hope you get some rest this week.

Admin Notes:

1. Comments are turned off on this entry. I don’t have the bandwidth or time to moderate further discussion, but I certainly did not want to end the year with the last thread as the last word.

2. Questions are still closed and will stay that way for a while. This next month I have some self-care and other creative projects going on. I have plans to get back to it sometime in January. If you have something time-sensitive or that’s really weighing on you in the inbox, please, please find another outlet: a hotline, a therapist or counselor, the forums, other advice bloggers/givers. If you sent a question and the situation has resolved since then, a quick “Hey, actually, we solved this” would help us prioritize things when we come back to it. Thank you and happy holidays.

3. There’s been some interest in having an open-thread for caregivers, especially of aging parents. I think that’s a great idea. If someone wants to volunteer to take point on moderating that thread, email me and I’ll make a guest-login for you, and we’ll do this sometime in the New Year.

As 2014 comes to an end, I find myself reflecting on the past 12 months, thinking about the journey, challenges, and lessons learned but also to remind myself to be thankful and count my blessings.

2014 had so many highs for me and Skinnytaste – the top of the list was certainly The Skinnytaste Cookbook making the New York Times Best Seller's List – holy cow!!! I also challenged myself to get out of my comfort zone and face one of my fears... public speaking! Still working on that but I've had lots of practice this year with video, TV and radio.

I can't express how grateful and thankful I am for all of your support. Your comments, emails, the photos you share with me on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook mean the world to me. None of this would be possible without you, so THANK YOU!

And now the best part.... here are the TOP 25 Most Popular Recipes from 2014 as well as links to the popular posts from previous years.

Top 25 Most Popular Recipes 2013
Top 25 Skinny Recipes 2012
Top 20 Skinnytaste Recipes 2011
Top 20 Skinnytaste Recipes 2010


Top 25 Most Popular Skinny Recipes posted in 2014:

1. Crock Pot Balsamic Pork Roast
This is so easy, flavorful and practically cooks itself while you're away!

 
2. Amazing Flourless (Black Bean) Brownies
One person commented "I just made this and I have to say that I am amazed! These aren't only delicious, they may be the best brownies I have ever made!"


3. Chicken and Asparagus Lemon Stir Fry
One commenter said "5/5 stars!! delicious meal with the perfect amount of flavor. :)"


4. Three-Cheese Zucchini Lasagna Rolls
Stuffed with zucchini, ricotta and Parmesan, then topped with marinara and mozzarella cheese – delicious, kid friendly and perfect if you want to feed a crowd.


5. Easy Macaroni Casserole
Baked pasta dish made with whole wheat elbows, ground turkey, veggies, marinara sauce and cheese – a great family friendly dish.


6. Cauliflower Fried "Rice"
A delicious low-carb alternative to rice!


7. Slow Cooker French Dip Sandwiches
Slightly modified from the Recipe Girl Cookbook, my husband loves this recipe!!


8. Easy Crock Pot Chicken and Black Bean Taco Salad
Delicious, high in fiber and protein all for under 300 calories


9. Zucchini Noodles (Zoodles) with Lemon and Spicy Shrimp
2014 was the year of the zoodle! Swapping zucchini noodles for pasta is my favorite low-carb swap.


10. Skinny Buffalo Chicken Strips –
One commenter said: "I am addicted. I have made them 4 times already and cannot get enough!!"


11. Chickpea Quinoa and Avocado Salad
This protein packed vegetarian salad is loaded with fiber and healthy fats!


12. Spaghetti Squash Primavera –
Easy, low-carb, gluten-free and perfect for Meatless Mondays!


13. PB&J Healthy Oatmeal Cookies
Made with just 4 ingredients, (bananas, oats, peanut butter and jelly) these cookies are best eaten warm right out of the oven!


14. Orange Chicken Makeover
Lighter in calories, but you won't be disappointed, it's so good!


15. PB2 Flourless Chocolate Brownies
These brownies have no flour, no oil or butter, but they are amazing!


16. Kung Pao Chicken Zoodles for Two
I replaced the noodles with zoodles (zucchini noodles) and the results were fantastic for under 300 calories!!


17. Blueberry Kale Smoothie
Antioxidant rich – trust me, it tastes better than it looks!


18. Quinoa Fiesta Enchilada Bake
My favorite way to eat quinoa!


19. Spiralized Raw Zucchini Salad
Amazing and no cooking required!



20. Spiralized Greek Cucumber Salad with Lemon and Feta
Another spiralized favorite!!



21. Picadillo Quesadillo
One word... YUM!



22. Turkey Meatball Spinach Tortellini Soup
Hearty, kid friendly and delicious!



23. Skinny Garlic Parmesan Fries
Baked with garlic, a little olive oil, kosher salt and black pepper, then sprinkled with freshly grated Parmesan and parsley – to die for!

 
24. Asparagus Egg and Bacon Salad with Dijon Vinaigrette
Sometimes the simplest things can be the best – like this salad...



25. Sweet and Spicy Asian Glazed Grilled Chicken Drumsticks
Marinated overnight, grilled and finished with a yummy glaze

How stunning are these mushrooms? Nature, never ceases to amaze.

(via Hirnverbrandt)

Let's assume you knew absolutely nothing about North Korea and walked into The Interview, which after a very public and protracted to-do, is now showing at a few hundred American cinemas and streaming through a number of outlets online.

Given what's been said about the movie, would you expect it to tell you about North Korea's concentration camps? Or the complexity of the dictatorship's propaganda system in which its leaders are touted as deities? Would you expect to hear (twice) that 16 million of the country's 24 million people are malnourished?

Okay, sure, The Interview might feature North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un wondering aloud about the relative "gayness" of drinking margaritas and affirming his love of Katy Perry. But caricature notwithstanding, the comedy has a surprisingly nuanced streak in its celluloid sea of swears and weiner jokes.

The Interview centers around Dave Skylark (James Franco), a fratty, self-absorbed, and disconnected celebrity TV journalist, and his producer Aaron Rapoport (Seth Rogen), who are pushed by the CIA to turn a massive scoop (an interview with reclusive North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un) into an assassination mission. Rapoport, believe it or not, laments his station as the producer of tabloid garbage and sees the Kim interview as an opportunity to perform an admirable act of journalism.

What happens next is some of what you might expect (sex, drugs, anatomy jokes) from Franco and Rogen, whose recent projects have included Pineapple Express and last year’s This Is the End. (Franco earned a Golden Globe nomination for the former and the latter still enjoys considerable sleeper praise.).

But as Skylark preens as an impressionable outsider, his gullibility and ignorance allow him to be a useful mechanism for explaining North Korea's depravity. He falls dumbly under the sway of Kim and the North Korean rhetoric machine, which paints the regime as an honorable force against the oppressive West. A major plot point turns on the dim Skylark's realization that a lush-looking grocery store he spotted earlier is a total fake. During a live-tweeting of the film on Sunday, Seth Rogen noted, "They actually have fake grocery stores in Pyongyang."

In a master stroke (spoilers ahead), the duo decides to flout the CIA's assassination order, which they determine could bring a possibly worse replacement than Kim to power. Instead, they use the live interview with Kim to destroy his credibility by stating the facts. It's not exactly Mike Wallace's showdown with Ayatollah Khomeini, but what is?

At New York, David Edelstein says that critics of the film who reduce it to a silly and sophomoric bromance, "don't know what the hell they're talking about." He adds:

It means not just to expose Kim Jong-un as a fraud but to emasculate him, which is about the most punk thing you can do to a repressive, totalitarian, murderous, self-proclaimed god of a closed but increasingly porous state.

To that Jay McInerney adds, "Forget what you heard. #TheInterview gets my vote for best picture. Sadly I'm not a member of the Academy."

The film doesn't skate away without some problematic parts. In the end, Kim Jong Un's head does explode when a tank shell fired by Rogen and company hits the dictator's helicopter. As Uri Friedman pointed out, the decision to show Kim's death, in slow motion and while Katy Perry's "Firework" twinkles in the background, was worrisome given that "that leader's government, which presides over nuclear weapons...has described the movie as an 'act of war.'" It probably doesn't matter that Kim's death happens during a getaway battle rather than a result of an assassination.

Nevertheless, on Saturday, as if to prove the movie's point, a spokesman for the National Defense Commission, North Korea's highest governing body had this to say about The Interview, the release of which it blames on President Obama: "Obama always goes reckless in words and deeds like a monkey in a tropical forest."

After all the fuss, it's entirely understandable that many object to seeing the real, living leader of a rogue country killed onscreen. But what surprises is that The Interview also spotlights other truths that North Korea doesn't want people to hear about. Given the stakes involved, that's important too.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/the-interview-is-a-pretty-smart-movie/384082/

Within the great file of my favorite food category, Things I Can Put On Toast, I dare you to find anything easier to whirl up in the minutes before a party than artichoke-olive crostini, the terribly named but unmatched in Mediterranean deliciousness of feta salsa or walnut pesto. Lightly broil a thinly sliced baguette — and I vote for preparing a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough, ready to bake off later, nobody minds — and voila: it’s suddenly a party.

This is my new favorite addition to the category. Although it takes longer to cook, it takes just as little time to throw together. This seemingly simple combination of two ingredients, roasted together, become so much more than the sum of their parts. Personally, I’m not a great fan of either on their own; I find most grocery store grapes too sweet and readily-available olives too aggressively salty and one-note. But in the oven together, these bugs become features. The briny bite of the olives tangles with the syrupy sweetness of the grapes and together, make a juicy mess that’s incredible with rosemary and sea salt, heaped on a ricotta-slathered toast.

... Read the rest of roasted grape and olive crostini on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to roasted grape and olive crostini | 110 comments to date | see more: Appetizer, Photo, Vegetarian

by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Nancy Silberkleit is, by trade, an elementary school art teacher. She worked with kids in New Jersey, helped set up art education programs in schools and group homes and, according to her official biography, "was instrumental in launching the Hudson Valley Children's Museum, located in Nyack, New York." Additionally—in the parlance of those of us who have taken art classes—she emitted hella art teacher vibes. Silberkleit had long grey hair, glasses, with the air of having been a hippie at one point. Most prominently, her demeanor was kind, engendered trust; she spoke patiently and deliberately.

In 2008, when her husband Michael Silberkleit passed away from cancer, Nancy inherited his position as co-CEO of Archie Comics, the company his father Louis co-founded in 1939. In her interviews, she spoke passionately about education, against bullying, about loving words. In July 2012, in San Diego for Comic-Con, she explained to local news station KUSI that she wanted Archie Comics to "engage [children] in the love of reading." Explaining her anti-bullying foundation, Rise Above!, and the accompanying comic book, she said, "One message is, never let anyone define who they want you to be."  

There is no template for the type of woman accused of workplace sexual harassment, although if modern fictional media is to believed, it is not Nancy Silberkleit. Only 16 percent of all charges are filed by men, who are also the most commonly accused. But in fictional media, women sexual harassers tend to be portrayed through a misogynistic lens: they're vixens, or voracious career-mongers. Wuornos types. Think of Sandra Bullock's character, in the 2009 rom-com The Proposal; lithe in power suits, she wields her position as a publishing executive to force a lesser employee, Ryan Reynolds, to marry her to avoid deportation. (Spoiler: they end up falling in love.) Or Jennifer Aniston, America's sweetheart, who plays a conniving sex maniac in 2011's Horrible Bosses: a toned, ferocious dentist who blackmails her charges into sleeping with her, or else. They are feckless male fantasies of sexual harassers by whom some brohams out there would, in theory only, "want" to be approached. Women who are just out there for some action, whose only true crime is their ambition, but who will either pack it in for lurve or eventually get their slapstick comeuppance.

Nancy Silberkleit, the former elementary school art teacher, has been accused by male employees of Archie Comics for sexual harassment, accusing her of referring to them not by their government names, but as "penis." The $32.5 million lawsuit was initially filed in July of 2011, and led to a restraining order against Silberkleit and countersuit in which Silberkleit and co-CEO Jon Goldwater—son of another Archie co-founder, John Goldwater—battled for the future of the company. In 2012, the restraining order was lifted, but this October, the original harassment lawsuit was reinstated.  

The details are labyrinthine, but the pull quote is writ large: as reported in 2011 by TMZ, the lawsuit stated that in 2009, Silberkleit "barged into a meeting, 'pointed to each [attendee] and said, 'PENIS, PENIS, PENIS, PENIS' and then walked out.' Nancy allegedly pulled the same 'penis' stunt again in 2010—but this time she also screamed out, 'My balls hurt.'"

Silberkleit is accused of all sorts of other sordid and dramatic behavior in the lawsuit, including allegedly dispatching a member of the Hell's Angels motorcycle gang as well as a former NFL player to hit up company headquarters and intimidate employees; and various other "destructive, dangerous, and at times deranged behavior"; and telling one employee that, "All you penises think you can run me out."

The complaint is not without its own flair, however; drawing on Archie Comics' squeaky clean image, it reads, "While World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not stop the publication of Archie Comics. The war-like attitude and approach of Defendant may destroy Archie Comics unless this Court intervenes." All hail the greatest fucking generation. Silberkleit has filed her own sexual harassment charges; her lawyer responded to the Archie employees' suit by saying that it has no weight since "white men aren't part of a protected class."

If the accusations against Nancy Silberkleit are true, it's pretty appalling and untenable. No one deserves to be treated poorly in the workplace, especially fearing for their personal safety. And yet. There's something about Silberkleit's story that resonates, a kernel of something under there we can understand. It's not just that her alleged "Penis! Penis! PENIS!" moment sounds like a scripted montage from a feminist movie that counters the mainstream image of the glamorous woman sexual harasser—a sort of workplace answer to Teeth. Silberkleit's story resonates with women because we have seen so much of the behavior that, one suspects, might lead up to an outburst like the "Penis!" incident. Those of us who have been subject to workplace discrimination, harassment or otherwise, have felt the pressure of having to work triply hard and clock longer hours and be eminently smarter than our male counterparts, only to watch them receive the peach appointments and assignments and paychecks. We have felt the humiliation of our ideas being discounted and of being spoken over in meetings; one in five of us has been subject to unwanted advances, to objectification, and other forms of sexual harassment. It culminates into a kind of fury that can bring us to our basest, most animal instincts, the echo of "PENIS! PENIS! PENIS!" resonating in our brains—if not out of our mouths.

While many of the stories on the Archie suit are more than happy to cast her Silberkleit as the crazed villain, objectivity demands imagining the other side of things. For the sake of speculation, imagine the hypothetical alternate scenario: art teacher is widowed and inherits deceased husband's high-end position at male-dominated company; male co-CEO Goldwater doesn't like sharing his job; woman does her best to apply her experience with children to elevating comics geared to children; male employees don't like being bossed around by a woman, who—this part is real—they accuse of aspiring to be their "Dictator." (Fill in your own penis joke here.) Silberkleit's countersuits have barely been reported, perhaps because plain old, man-on-woman sexual harassment doesn't grab the same kinds of headlines until it's large-scale and undeniable, a la the US military. But the statements in her court affadavit are telling: 

Mr. Goldwater insults me both privately and in the presence of others. He has called me 'stupid,' a 'moron,' and 'despicable.' He has told me and others that I am hated by everyone in the company…. Mr. Goldwater long ago and repeatedly has told some employees and also people within the industry that he would get rid of me one way or the other.

And, according to Comics Bulletin: "Silberkleit maintains that Goldwater refused to seek her advice in company matters, that he 'hates the requirement.' Her affidavit goes on to say Goldwater 'chauvinistically seeks to undermine, exclude and not engage in any meaningful consultation with me.'"

Midway through 2013, Silberkleit launched an unsuccessful bid for mayor of Rye, N.Y., against two city council members. The only woman on the mayoral ballot, and with no prior government experience, she was inspired to vie for the position after speaking to residents who went without electricity long after Hurricane Sandy. She ran under the dual platforms of environmentalism and government transparency. In November, she told the Rye Patch, "I am a creative thinker, love people and respect one’s personal perspective. Further, as a teacher I naturally understand one's thinking and am adaptable to all kinds of situations."

 

Photo via tom1231/flickr.

Previously: Hard Out Here for a White Feminist

0 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• A lot of this mess is your husband’s job to clean up, and when you say that he handles this “on your behalf,” it sounds like he’s generally trying to do it.
• He seems to be the one concerned about the consequences of stepping back from the family –  possibly because he’s more informed than you about what the fallout will be? Because the catching point here seems to be his anxiety about the possibility of “DRAMA” and “FRICTION,” which seems to override his apprehension about the pain/exhaustion that will definitely happen. (I’m a pretty conflict-avoidant person myself, but I’d have to be VERY anxious about people’s feelings before I drove for twenty hours for them, and I am able-bodied. I am feeling like there is some stuff happening in your husband’s head, there.)
  • It is slightly possible – I don’t know your exact situation so I’m just spitballing here – that setting boundaries with your family makes your husband feel terrible. It takes at least two surfaces to make Friction.
• I think you know all of this, and I bet you’re being a really supportive spouse.
• His family may never GET IT.  And your husband probably knows this on multiple levels.
• The thing that you have to do, Excluded, is figure out exactly how much of the Household Energy Budget is going to be spent on this, and how much of your portion of the Energy Budget you can commit.
• Because all members of the household contribute to the Budget and draw upon it, you have some say in how your husband spends/uses his portion of it. But if he’s genuinely saying to you that “I have to spend a lot of our Budget this week on my family, because the alternative is spending all of the Budget to cope with my resulting anxieties” then that could actually be something that is Best For Your Husband … even if you hate every second of Catering To His Alien Family.
• If he decides to spend his Budget on his family, it is totally okay for you to say “hahaha have fun with that (you won’t), but I have to sit this round out.”

 

Right. Scripts.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s a straightforward idea that can often work well.

Isolate and repeat a variety of relevant pictograms.

Use the resulting patterns as backdrops for print items.

Not every project needs an elaborate outcome.

Designed and sent in by Philipp Bochkov.

In the past 12 months, the number of movie trailers you've seen is probably greater than the number of actual movies you've seen. Now that the Internet means you don't have to show up to a theater to watch them, previews are more widely available—and widely discussed—than ever. Which means the good ones really deserve to be appreciated.

Like the movies themselves, trailers can be exceedingly formulaic. The best ones either break from that format in one way or another (which is why movies with multiple-trailer campaigns often feel free to get creative with their early clips) or embody that formula so well that you gain a newfound appreciation for why that formula works.

I've put together this list of the year's best trailers as an act of appreciation. Yes, they're crass. Yes, they're advertising at their core. Yes, it's outrageous that you have to watch other advertising on YouTube before you can even watch one. But when they're good, they're good.

---

Best Multi-Spot Teaser Campaign

Some fans found the final trailer for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 underwhelming, but part of that reaction may have been due to the fact that the earlier teasers were just so good. In a one-two punch of unnerving creativity, we got propaganda messages from President Snow (Donald Sutherland) warning the population of Panem against rebellion. In the first clip, the camera pulls back to reveal a stoic, almost complicit Peeta standing at Snow's right hand. Honestly, the look on Peeta's face in that clip (the loyal clenched jaw, the trapped haunted eyes) shows up any of the acting Josh Hutcherson does in the actual film.

The second clip sees Peeta again on Snow's right, this time joined by Johanna Mason (Jena Malone), and much like Hutcherson's best work in the previous clip, Malone's quietly defiant hand-on-hip was quadruple what she was asked to do in Mockingjay Part 1. At the end of this second clip, the narrative advances, with Beetee (Jeffrey Wright) breaking into the communication and sending out a message from District 13. And with those two clips, the story and tone of the film were put on display in an attention-grab that didn't even have to play the Jennifer Lawrence card.

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Best Single Element of a Multi-Spot Campaign

Foxcatcher's trailers appeared to hopscotch around, chasing the pre-release buzz emanating from festivals. First there was an initial trailer that laid out the basics of the movie, or at least the general unsettling themes of the movie. After some of the Cannes reviews singled out Channing Tatum, a Tatum-specific trailer was cut. And then, with the studio perhaps worried about muddying the waters of a Best Actor Oscar campaign for Steve Carell, a third trailer put the spotlight back on Carell's spooky transformation into the eccentric John DuPont. But it was just that second, Tatum-heavy clip that impressed. It didn't manage to say very much about the plot of the film, but the dark, grunting intensity Tatum exhibited in those scenes inspired tidal waves of curiosity.

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Best Single Image from a Trailer

This clip doubles as the best single sequence of Godzilla itself: an artful, eerie, gorgeous moment of skydivers, free-falling into the middle of Godzilla-ravaged San Francisco, trailing red streaks of smoke flares behind them. The clip cuts between POV shots of the skydivers and extra-wide shots with the red streaks descending from the clouds. It's utterly gorgeous and sells Godzilla as a cut above your normal brainless blockbuster, though the patented Godzilla shriek promises tried-and-true thrills as well.

---

Best Single-Scene Trailer

Because the movie-trailer formula usually entails pulling together clips from all across the film and shaking them up into a propulsive montage, one of the best ways to snap the audience to attention is to reject that format altogether and just deliver one scene from the film. It doesn't have to be a scene that spells out the plot. It doesn't have to be a scene that includes all the major characters. It just needs to make the audience want to see what comes next. We've seen this work effectively for movies like The Devil Wears Prada or even early contender for 2015's best trailer, Tomorrowland. This year, the trailer that did this best was for Big Hero 6, Disney and Marvel's fun kiddie superhero flick. What the scene at the heart of this teaser smartly accomplished was to step out of the way of its best selling point: huggable puffy robot Baymax.

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Best Red-Band Trailer

Neighbors has an unfair advantage in this category, perhaps, as it had two red-band trailers. But its first one was especially impressive. Most red-band trailers feel almost duty-bound to cram in every bit of R-rated raunch and nudity and bad language in order to make the best of their opportunity. Sure, Neighbors announces its presence with McLovin sexing a coed up against the porch. But neither that moment, nor any of the partying frat boys or overcompensating Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne, feels like it's straining to meet some standard of look-at-me raunch.

---

Best Use of Dumb Ol' Pop Music to Sell a Fancy Art Film

Xavier Dolan's Mommy is already full to bursting with delightfully odd pop songs like Oasis's "Wonderwall" and Counting Crows' "Colorblind," so it ends up being completely perfect that this French-Canadian mother-son drama is being sold to American audiences via some equally odd pop selections. One Republic's "Counting Stars" could be found on about half the TV ads and network promos in 2014, and Ellie Goulding's "Anything Could Happen" was notably used in the trailers for Girls season 2. The impression given was that Mommy was an incredibly familiar, commercial, sellable movie. Now if someone would just up and release it in the United States already.

---

Best Use of Actually Old Pop Music to Sell a Giant Superhero Film

You have only one place to put the blame for the reason you've had "Spirit in the Sky" and "Hooked on a Feeling" in your head for the better part of the year. Instantly, Guardians of the Galaxy went from an anonymous cog in the Marvel machine, full of characters you've never heard of even a little bit, to the clearly defined oddball cousin to The Avengers that it was always meant to be.

---

Best Trailer for a 2015 Movie

This list is restricted to trailers for movies that came out in 2014. We have to abide by the calendar or else all is lost and chaos reigns and other things that have to do with Robert Redford and Lars Von Trier movies come to pass. That said ... there was a new Star Wars trailer this year, and it'd be foolish not to mention how much pull that franchise still has. Even after disastrous prequels and countless jokes about midichlorians, that one shot of the Millennium Falcon streaking across the (Tatooine?) skyline still has the power to wrap mass audiences around the little finger of, in this case, J.J. Abrams. Celebrate, America! You now have a capacity for disappointment again!

---

Best Trailer of 2014, Second Runner Up

It took four tries to get it right, but the final trailer for Interstellar finally hit all the right buttons, balancing the script's more yearning, poetic tendencies with the space footage fans had been waiting to see. And all wrapped was up in "Final Frontier," composer Thomas Bergersen's trailer-ready piece of music that has a huge impact here.

---

Best Trailer of 2014, First Runner-Up

Attempting to explain Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer's dreamscape-like, sci-fi body thriller in the span of an entire film proves difficult. In the span of two minutes? Impossible. So rather than try to lay out the particulars of Scarlett Johansson's extraterrestrial walking tour of chilly Scotland, the trailer instead lay out a rapid-fire collection of some of the most provocative images put to screen in 2014. The eye! The goo! That fur coat!

---

The Best Trailer of 2014

It might actually turn out that Birdman will win the Academy Award for Best Picture this year, and if so, you can say it started with a trailer that demanded attention from its very first second, with the single-continuous-take aesthetic, saturated backstage colors, and deranged Michael Keaton all adding up to something that looked quite novel. Then kicked in the perfectly off-kilter music choice, with Cee-Lo Green's slow-burn version of "Crazy" guiding us through a series of quick clips that feature comets, drumlines, and Michael Keaton in his underwear, striding through Times Square like a maniac. It's an unforgettable first impression.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/the-best-movie-trailers-of-2014/383975/

Google invited me down to Mountain View to preview the latest generation of their self-driving cars.

View

“I know they’re called fingers, but I’ve never seen ‘em fing.”  — Otto, The Simpsons.

 

I can’t be sure, but I think these two misshapen, detached fingers are indeed “finging.”

Thanks for snapping a picture of this sign and sending it to us, Sara!

The post Urgo: Two Fingers Finging appeared first on PSD : Photoshop Disasters .

May we all find ways to be as happy as this guy.

Read more Look At How Happy This Guy Is To See A Shark at The Toast.

Need an awesome last-minute gift they're sure to love? Try one of these eight super-easy homemade gifts you can make with only one day's notice.


Time is running out and you still need a couple of last-minute gifts, don't you? Well, put down the car keys and stay the freak away from the mall, peeps. The Ninj has got you covered with eight different ideas for last-minute homemade gifts that you can make with only 24 hours notice.

Snacks, condiments, even chocolate treats -- heck, some of them take less than 20 minutes.

Yeah, you heard me right, friend: a homemade gift people will actually want in less than 20 minutes.

Let's get gifting!
Continue reading >>

 

“Witty Meeting Comebacks that Indicate Your Displeasure While Concealing the (Professionally Discrediting) Whirling Dervish of Your Rage”

“Throwing Money at Problems: A Justification”

“Is This Sex Position Degrading or Just Uncomfortable?”

“Age-Concealing Procedures: Talking to Someone While Pretending They Haven’t Had One, or, Injectables: Agreeing to Disagree”

“Strangely Funny Moments in The House of Mirth”

“Women Who Take Care of Too Many People and the People Who Take Care of Them, i.e. Other Women”

“How to Get your Eyebrows Done Without Feeling Weird About It”

“Rules for Wearing ‘Challenging’ Clothing Items, Ankle Boots Specifically”

“I Don’t Know Why I Asked You if You were OK a Third time, Perhaps Because I am Dissatisfied with Your Answer of [Shrug]?”

“Am I the Only One Not Enjoying Delightful, Airy Chitchat with my Hair Stylist? An Investigation”

“Ten Satisfying Ways of Letting Your Enemy Know That You are Ignoring Her, While Still Ignoring Her.”

“Loving Your Disco Bush in the New Millennium: Letters to my Earlier Self”

“10 Things We’d Like to Hear Virginia Woolf Say to Jonathan Franzen”

“Perfecting the Art of the Cocked Head “Really?” Response”

“Perfecting the Art of the ‘HUH’ Response”

“Perfecting the Art of the Inflectionless ‘what.’ Response”

“The Dubious Rag: What Did it Clean Up?”

“Publically Editorializing on Strangers’ Behavior: A How-To Guide”

“Sentimental As Fuck: Having Feelings Doesn’t Mean I Don’t Have Reasons”

“Separately Scrolling Through iPhones on the Couch with Your Partner as Erotic Practice”

“This Investment Sweater Will Probably Not Solve Your Social Anxiety Problems, But Then Again It Might”

“How To Cope With Your Colleague’s Excessive Self-Gratulating: Or, Shut Up Already About Your Productivity, I Have Laundry to Do”

“$80 Is Not Too Much to Pay for the Best of Something, Even A Bra”

“Facing Forward with a Straight Face but Communicating to Your Girlfriends Laterally with your Body: A Woman’s Best Revenge”

“Millenials: Nothing But Love But Also, Take a Minute and Read a Book or a Thousand”

“I Cannot Look Right Now, Sweetie”

“Public Wagon Circling: Not Actually a Useful Feminist Strategy”

“ ‘Split Skirts’ Versus ‘Culottes’ versus ‘Palazzo Pants;’ Also: ‘Wide-legged’ or ‘Wide Leg’: When to Wear?”

“I Have Thoughts About the Revolution, But I Have Not Slept and Can’t Find My Other Shoe”

“Why Have More People Not Read Villette?”

“Not Slouching and Not Wearing Oversized Clothes and Other Victories”

“The PRECISE Length of a Laura Petrie Crop Versus the Weird Mom Clam Digger”

“How to Have a Wedding in Which Nobody has to Wear Wedges”

“Why are There so Many Accidental Pregnancies in Movies when IT IS ACTUALLY REALLY HARD TO DO?”

“Belts: A User’s Guide with Notes on Resisting the Ribcage Cage.”

“How to Phrase Insincere Offers of Help in the Kitchen”

“Plans to Murder my Ex’s Now-Ex, or, Alternately, Take Her Out for Drinks”

“Meals I Won’t Cook for Boyfriends I Will Never Have”

“Margaret Fuller was Totally Right About How One Effect of The Patriarchy is that Women Can Be Such Bitches” [Part One of an Investigative Series]

“Another Effect of Patriarchy is Snack Escalation by Guilty Preschool Moms” [Part Two of an Investigative Series]

“Yet Another Effect of Patriarchy is Women Making Other Women Set out the Cheese and Crackers at Receptions” [Part Three of an Investigative Series]

“Women Explain Things To Me”

“Snacks as Feminist Practice”

 

*Specifically, we would like to see these essays written by Sarah Miller, voice of our generation.

 

–Sarah B., Hester, Claire, Sarah M., & Kyla: Team Sarah Miller

Lead Image ©Barbara Morgan, UCLA  Archives

On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple’s senior vice president of software Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”

As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask to that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they've treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?

Women have tracked their cycles for thousands of years. St. Augustine spoke against timing sexual activity to coincide with periods of infertility (a method that would require period tracking) as far back as 388. “Is it not you who used to counsel us to observe as much as possible the time when a woman, after her purification, is most likely to conceive, and to abstain from cohabitation at that time, lest the soul should be entangled in flesh?” He said, according to one translation, before going on to condemn the method. Despite there being little written documentation of these records, women have long kept notes on their own cycles. Before apps, they used spreadsheets and online calendars. And before that, they used plain old paper. Today, there are hundreds of period tracking apps available in the iTunes store. And yet, in a health app Apple describes as “comprehensive,” there is no way to simply tick on the calendar that your period has started, and when it has stopped.

This, of course, isn’t the first time a tech product has prioritized men over women. The vast majority of tech companies are staffed by men, especially on the development side. Phones are too big for many women’s hands. The newest artificial hearts are designed to fit 80 percent of men but only 20 percent of women. Dropdown menus show “male” over “female” even when the rest of the menus are alphabetical. But when it comes to data tracking, there’s a perceived element of democratization. How could an app or tool that simply lets you track things be biased? Let us count the ways.

* * *

When Amelia Greenhall moved to San Francisco from Seattle, she looked for a Quantified Self meet-up. She had been active in the Seattle QS community, and quickly found the corresponding group in San Francisco. Soon, she was organizing the Bay Area meetings herself. But while she enjoyed the community there, something was missing.

“After each one, women would come up to me and say, ‘I wish we could talk about periods or fertility or dating or anything that wasn’t getting talked about.’ It just felt like there was a lot getting left out,” she said. And the meetings, set in the belly of the Silicon Valley beast, felt like tech meetings. “It was just kind of like a microcosm of the tech world where dudes are willing to speak about the most boring trivial stuff as if it’s the best invention ever, and these women would have these really cool things and they’re like, ‘Oh I don’t know if anybody would be interested.’” So Greenhall started the first ever QSXX meet up—a space for women to showcase their QS projects, talk about what worked for them, and find a smaller community within the larger group.

Soon, QSXX groups popped up in Boston and New York City. “The conversations seemed more real and more interesting and we were talking about the problems with devices and apps and it turned out much as I was hoping,” said Greenhall. Maggie Delano started one in Boston, after having a conversation with another woman about the differences in what some women want to track. “We were talking about how the kinds of things that women need to track are really different, and things can change a lot more throughout the month than they might for other people” she said. The women who attend these meetups discuss what they want to track, present their projects, and form bonds within the smaller community that some say they couldn’t quite forge at the bigger meet-ups.

Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, and active QS member, said it took her a few years of being involved in the QS community before she realized that there was little to no emphasis on women’s issues. Which is weird, she pointed out, because outside the QS world one might think women would be more likely to track personal data than men are, whether that’s calories or menstruation. “So many regular facets of being a woman in a western culture are highly likely to make one track,” Boesel said, “and yet those were things I wasn’t seeing in the QS context.”

I spoke with Boesel, Greenhall, Delano and others about what it’s like to be women interested in the quantified-self movement. Their experiences were similar: They really enjoyed the work, the problem solving, the personalization. But they also echoed that when it comes to forward facing technology—apps and devices marketed for the masses—there was a clear bias towards men’s interests. Even apps developed for women are often designed by men, and it’s not hard to tell. Apple Health, they said, and its mysterious omission of parameters relevant to women, isn’t the exception, it’s the rule.  

Before we go on, a definitional point that many I spoke with asked me to make clear. There is a difference between the quantified self community and movement, and what Boesel calls the “tracking industrial complex,” by which she means the suite of apps and gadgets available in the commercial world. Quantified Self or QS, capitalized, is a collective of people interested in tracking elements of their lives in some way. They have a loose organization, and organize conferences in Europe and the United States each year. Some of them use apps and devices, but some of them don’t. “Lots of people within QS don’t use apps or anything digital,” Boesel said. So QS is the community, and tracking products are the apps and hardware designed for commercial use. Great, let’s continue.

* * *

There’s no better place to look for evidence of quantified self apps designed by men for men than the sex tracking apps on the market. On principle, sex is something that one might guess an equal number of men and women are interested in. And yet looking at the apps out there for tracking bedroom activity is like looking at a caricature of bad porn. Many of them base quality of sex on things like the amount of thrusting that goes on and how loud the partner is. Apps with names like iThrust and Sex Stamina Tester and Sex Counter Tease ask users to place their phones on the bed so that the built in accelerometer can measure “strokes” and offer men a ranking among other users. One app encourages people to share their stamina and determine whether the user is “good enough to compete with the Don Juans in the Top 10.”

None of this is malicious, said Deborah Lupton, a researcher at the University of Canberra, who recently wrote a paper documenting many of these sex tracking apps titled “Quantified Sex.” Sara Watson, another fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, points out that many of these strange measurements come from what the phone is capable of measuring: movement and sound. “That just has to do with the reductive nature of tracking something with an accelerometer,” she said. But the apps do reflect a certain kind of bias. “I think the designers, who are mostly men are, they’re just taking up norms and assumptions that are embedded in our society about women’s fertility and sexuality, and reproducing them,” Lupton said. So sex is judged by thrusting, success is judged by endurance, and pleasure is measured in moans. “Regardless of the type of app, we should view it as a cultural product rather than something that’s just popped up out of the blue.”

If sex tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think sex is, then fertility tracking apps are a caricature of what straight white men think about periods. These apps are still designed largely by men, but now instead of sexual prowess and a Don Juan ranking the goal is pregnancy.

Many of these invite women to give their partners access to the information. The app Glow sends a little note when a user’s partner is entering her fertile period, along with helpful seduction advice like bring her a bouquet. The vast majority of these period tracking apps are pink. Many of them are covered in flowers. The fact that menstrual tracking and fertility tracking are almost always lumped together is, in itself, indicative of how developers think about women, said Lupton. “When you look at those types of apps they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women and making them evermore responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus,” Lupton said.  

Yet the appetite for period trackers is huge. And it has been huge for a long time. Seven years ago, long before apps like Clue or Glow hit the market, Heather Rivers was in college and was tracking her period using an excel spreadsheet. She thought there must be a better way, but when she Googled for period trackers she couldn’t find one. “When I didn’t find anything I decided to just make a simple weekend project version,” she told me. “Thus was born Monthly Info.” The site was simple—users record the start and end to their period and the system extrapolates from their history to guess when their next cycle will start. Trackers could set up customizable reminders, so when it was almost that time they’d get a little email with whatever message they chose.

Monthly Info was really designed for Rivers, but she added a user signup system mostly because it was easy. And people signed up. A lot of people. “It kind of took off on its own from there and grew to over 100,000 users,” she said. “There was apparently a need for something like this, because it didn’t take much energy to make or grow.” Now, there are hundreds of period tracking apps on the market. Considering the gender imbalance in tech, it’s fair to guess most of them are made by men. Rivers joked that it’s not hard to spot a fertility tracking app designed by a man. They focus on moods (men want to know when their girlfriends are going to be grouchy) and treat getting pregnant like a level in a video game. “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”

Not all these apps are made by men, of course. In fact, one of the most popular version, called Clue, was developed by Ida Tin, fueled by a similar problem that Rivers faced. “I was using condoms for contraceptives and I was starting to wonder why there were no better options for me to keep track of my cycle,” Tin said. Much of the design of Clue, which is decidedly non-floral, was natural to Tin. “I just took it totally for granted,” she said, “like of course its as not going to be pink. That seemed very natural. I didn’t want it to be your secret diary… I wanted it to be a very straight natural part of life.”

It took two years for Tin and her team to build the app into something they were ready to release. By the time they finished, they had competition. Glow, a Clue competitor headed by Max Levchin, the founder of PayPal and a chairman at Yelp, launched just a month before Clue. “We were very lucky because about a month before we launched Max announced he was launching Glow,” Tin said. “That was lucky for us because he kind of validated this category of apps, and he could do that because he’s a celebrity and he’s a nerdy guy who knows about data. I think that was a great help for us.”

Had Tin launched the app herself, without Levchin’s male validation, would people have taken her seriously? She’s not sure. “I’ve had investors, really, very good experienced high profile investors who will say, ‘I’m not a woman I don’t understand your product,’” she said. Tin said she’ll sometimes hear investors say thing like “I don’t invest in products I can’t try myself,” which rules out any female health tracking products for male investors. “I’ve never been treated badly,” she said, “but I think it just takes more to have them write the check for a female entrepreneur tackling a female health problem.”

* * *

The promise of Quantified Self, the community, is “self knowledge through numbers.” It’s a broad aim, and one that, in theory, overlaps with the apps and devices in the market. Collecting data can help people better understand themselves, their lives, their needs. But who are those people?

Boesel points to one example of how many even within the QS community assume their users are men: passive tracking apps. These apps run in the background of your phone, and using your movement, theoretically determine things like whether you’re depressed or active or inside too much. This works based on the assumption that your phone is always in your pocket. “Inevitably some dude gets up at a conference and said something how your phone is always on you,” Boesel said. “And every time I’ll stand up, and I’ll be like ‘hi, about this phone that is always on you. This is my phone. And there are my pants.’” Passive tracking apps would think that I stay at my desk from morning to night without once getting up to go to the bathroom. Many apps operate under the assumption that your phone is always connected to you, in pockets that women don’t really have.

Let’s go back to Apple’s Health tracker. They don’t quite say it, but Apple’s premise seems to be that Health will one day be the place for everything. “The Health app lets you keep all your health and fitness information in one place on your device and under your control.” All your information. This is one of the streams that quantified self apps are traveling down—the road to universal data collection. The idea that there is a list of variables that everyone can, and should track.

The thing is, there isn't such a list. How could there be?

There is no universal set of variables that would be meaningful or even possible for everyone to track. The idea that some comprehensive self tracking app could at some point boil down the universal essentials neglects the fact that humans are different—not just in biology, but in needs and habits and interests. Right now, as these apps are developed largely by men for men, the data they collect might seem to men to be pretty comprehensive.

“There is no universal,” Boesel said. “QS is such a radical individual culture overall that you are the ultimate expert.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/how-self-tracking-apps-exclude-women/383673/

I know, I know, we just talked about gingerbread two weeks ago, in a biscotti, hot chocolate-dipping format. It’s too soon! I completely agree with you. But this was a request; a commenter asked if there was a way to transplant the intensity of everyone’s favorite gingerbread cake into a waffle format. Asking me this is like asking a Muppet if they like to count. I live for this; I thought you’d never ask.

True enough, the so-called gingerbread waffles I browsed on the web seemed to be in name only; pale beige specimens, softly spiced, more gingersnap than gingerthud. Proper gingerbread should make an entrance, with no restraint in the ginger or molasses department. It should be dark and a little sticky. It should either be adored or reviled; there’s rarely any middle ground. Lucky for me, my family, both young and old, cannot get enough.

... Read the rest of deep dark gingerbread waffles on smittenkitchen.com

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© smitten kitchen 2006-2012. | permalink to deep dark gingerbread waffles | 207 comments to date | see more: Breakfast, Christmas, Photo, Winter

Political cartoonist Michael Ramirez has waded into the torture debate with his latest at Investor's Business Daily. See it at full size here. We can make due with a smaller version:

Notice that the man being asked the question doesn't reply, as if the answer is obvious. But given how many New Yorkers were murdered on 9/11, as well as the diversity of opinion among survivors of the attack, it's clear to me that if all the dead were given the chance to respond some of them would say something like this:

I'd be horrified if someone used my death to justify torturing prisoners–my country is better than the people who did this to us, and we shouldn't let  their values change ours.

Or imagine that the falling man was a religious Catholic. He might say:

I hope whoever did this faces justice before humankind and God–but an American asked to torture would be risking his eternal soul, which I'd never countenance.

Generally speaking, political arguments that draw on powerful emotional imagery for their resonance are suspect. But even setting that rule-of-thumb aside and judging Ramirez's cartoon on its own terms, the takeaway is not nearly as clear as its creator seems to imagine, particularly now that we know the "enhanced interrogations" perpetrated by the CIA included the torture of innocents.

How would the falling men feel about that?

One more thought on Ramirez's cartoon and the weakness of its implied logic. Let us imagine a different cartoon. A Pakistani woman is covered in blood and dust outside her home, which was just reduced to rubble with her now-crushed infant daughter inside. A U.S. drone is overhead. A radical cleric asks her, "How do you feel about the attack on Fort Hood?" I presume that Ramirez would reject the logic implied in that cartoon, and yet it is exactly the sort he has drawn on in his cartoon.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/a-reply-to-michael-ramirezs-torture-cartoon/383880/

Sorry I murdered everyone at your party, but as an introvert, I prefer one-on-one interactions to group gatherings.

I'm really sorry that everyone is dead. I prefer animals to people.

Sorry I killed everybody! I just really need my alone time.

Read more Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert at The Toast.

A few years back I started a family tradition that would serve to both delight me and mock me for years to come. The Thanksgiving Bakeoff. Sounds innocent enough, right? And it really should be, unless you have inherited the “competiveness gene,” which apparently everyone in my family has firmly encoded in their DNA chain. Let’s just say that each year seems to up-step the last in terms of both masterful entries and sore feelings. There will always be someone whose molten-chocolate lava cakes wasn’t as molten as it should have been, and we’re never going to hear the end of it. Anyway, I have never won this family competition. Not because of my failed black bean brownies in ’09, but because there are allegiances and biases that run too deep for even THESE spectacularly delicious chocolate-covered cookie sticks to penetrate. Take last year for instance, when our first place winner received sympathy votes for getting dumped by her boyfriend the day before the Bakeoff. Tears in the batter do not make for a superior apple cake, people!

In case you still think the Bakeoff is all fun & games, see our elite panel of judges with their complex scoring system.

Unfortunately, they’re system is not foolproof because, truth be told, I should have won this year. There, I said it. These cookies sticks score high on originality, presentation, and overall taste. Crunchy cookie coated in chocolate, almonds, and sea salt. AND, then I did a second version with dark mint chocolate drizzle that was said to give Pepperidge Farm’s Mint Milano cookie a serious run for its money. This should have been my year. Not letting it go…

Okay bitterness aside, and on to the full recipe and details for my 2014 Bakeoff entry—so that you too can come in 2nd place at the holiday dessert table!

The cookie is the key. You need it firm enough to dip and hold, while crumbly enough to fall right apart in your mouth. I think it’s all in the bread flour. I’d never used bread flour for cookies until these, and I’m pretty certain it was the main differentiator. The batter actually comes together very easily (just the bread flour, baking powder, sugar, egg, butter, water, almond extract.) Use a pastry bag to extract the batter neatly on to a line baking sheet for baking. I didn’t have a pastry bag or tip on-hand, so I improvised by cutting the corner off of a zip-top bag. You fill the zip-top bag with the batter and just compress it right out of the tip of the bag the same way you would with a pastry bag. Sorry no pics of that step! I baked the cookie sticks off two trays at a time for about 20 mins (flipping the trays after 10 mins). This recipe makes about 40 sticks.

The chocolate chips are simply melted using a double boil method. Use a double boil pot or improvise again by placing a heat safe bowl in a pot of simmering water like seen here…

Once the chocolate is nice and melty, you can transfer it to a jar that’ll be the right depth for dipping your cookie into. Test the jar before transferring over the chocolate…

Then start dipping! Let any excess chocolate run back into the jar and lay cookie on the parchment to set.

You’ll need to add the chopped almonds and sea salt to the chocolate-covered cookie stick before the chocolate dries. I recommend doing it immediately after each cookie is dipped.

The steps are the same for the mint-chocolate drizzle variety, except for that you’ll need to add the peppermint oil (do not use extract, it must be peppermint oil) to the chocolate during the melting stage. Stir it in evenly and add peppermint to taste. I like it really pepperminty, but some prefer less.

Note: If you want to make both varieties, simply do the almond ones first with the plain chocolate, and then reheat the remaining chocolate and add the peppermint oil to do the rest.

I used a fork for the drizzling. Have fun with it. Go as heavy or light as you want…you can’t really mess it up.

Let them dry for about 2 hours before serving or moving around. You want that chocolate to really harden into a nice shell over the cookie.

Once the chocolate has hardened, you can gently snap off any excess chocolate drizzle that might be popping off the sides of the cookie stick.

What do you do when you draw the Secret Santa name of a guy that has two dogs and loves to hike? You make a dog biscuit wreath...

And find the most perfect book to go with it! Surpreme Secret Santa Success this year.

UPDATE: Secret Santa Success!

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's coalition to bring the Internet to the entire world, a global project known as Internet.org, was recently the subject of a lengthy Time magazine story by Lev Grossman.

Grossman does a superb job of summarizing the many criticisms that have been leveled at the effort: that the Internet is largely irrelevant to people without running water and basic education; that there are dangers to trying to solve human problems with an engineering mindset; that Zuckerberg’s intuitions of the developing world are based on stage-managed, helicopter-facilitated visits to remote villages; that, like a sci-fi nightmare, Facebook’s business model harvests and profits from the captive attention of its users; that Internet.org is a form of colonialism that whitewashes Facebook’s techno-imperialism under a cloak of doing good. At one point, Grossman cries out, “There are still people here on God’s green earth who can conduct their social lives without being marketed to. Can’t we for God’s sake leave them alone?”

These are all damning critiques, but what’s strange about the article is that after carefully lining them up, Grossman finds himself being talked out each one, mostly by Facebook executives. All his protests are for nothing. By the end, he seems taken by the sheer size and apparent inevitability of the vision and calls Zuckerberg one of the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Zuckerberg himself gets (almost) the last word: “I’m pretty confident we can do it. I’m pretty confident it’s going to be a good thing.”

This is not just a problem of false equivalence, in which journalists cover both sides of an issue without taking a stand on hard facts. Rather, Grossman, like so much of the public sphere on both the political left and right, simply finds himself unable to resist the grand ambitions of Silicon Valley late capitalists. After run-ins with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, a Deloitte report commissioned by Facebook, and an anthropologist studying Facebook in Tonga, Grossman pretty much gives up: “Zuckerberg can be both enriching himself and other people, both expanding and consolidating Facebook’s dominance and saving lives, all at the same time.”

Saving lives is a stretch, but Grossman’s conclusion touches the heart of the issue. The larger problem is that we, as both American society and as global elites seem unable to put up any substantial opposition against large corporations and gazillionaires fortifying their skyscrapers of inequality as long as they can make even the flimsiest case that they’re contributing to the public good. Sandberg says, “The next decade is helping connect the people who are not yet connected and watching what happens” [emphasis mine]. We have no meaty critical response to this—no defense against powerful people running hobby experiments that affect millions of others, and “watching what happens.”

“Watching what happens” fits right in the sweet spot of the secular, pluralistic, do-as-you-please individualism that the Western world has so long clamored for, and from which politics—American politics, in any case—is singularly unable to escape.
Yet, secular, pluralistic, do-as-you-please individualism is exactly the problem. Internet.org is development without representation. As Grossman notes, “It’s not as if anybody asked two-thirds of humanity whether they wanted to be put online.” Actually, if you do ask some of them, as I have done many times as part of my research in various parts of South Asia and Africa, what you hear is confusion. Most dollar-a-day people will tell you over and over that what they most want is better earning opportunities for themselves, healthcare for their families, and education for their children. Yet time after time, they will also spend what little income they have on mobile phones and value-added services such as “caller tunes,” in which you pay a fee each month so that the people who call you hear the music of your choice while they wait for you to answer. Meanwhile, many local cultures and church communities oppose the Internet because so much of the dominant use is by young men playing video games and watching porn.

Here again, knee-jerk post-neoliberal kicks in: Well, isn’t that people using the Internet as they please? Who are we (or any religion) to tell them what they can’t do with it? Yes, of course, individual freedoms should be honored, but freedom is the wedge by which the entire machinery of what author Jonathan Franzen calls “neotechnofeudalism” enters in. Freedom is the basis by which corporations seduce unsuspecting consumers so long as it isn’t causing them biological harm. I’m not suggesting that we should forbid poor people from using the Internet if they want to, but not forbidding something is a very different thing from pushing it into their lives unbidden. As those of us who are already online serfs in the developed world know, once all your friends have Facebook, it takes active discipline to avoid it.

Wherever Facebook is used, people get hooked. Hooked, like on tobacco or crack cocaine. And while Facebook’s negative effects might not be as significant as those of narcotics, they are there. In the United States, studies increasingly show correlations between time spent on Facebook and depressed mood. At many successful IT firms in India, the management prohibits Internet use for most employees. You might think that being disconnected from the world’s largest information source would be lethal for knowledge workers, but what these companies have found is the opposite—when you give your employees unfettered access to the Internet, productivity goes down. Could it be that they were spending too much time on Facebook?

Zuckerberg, incidentally, should be praised for his private efforts to boost education. He has made at least two $100-million donations to public education in America, but if he’s truly devoted to education, why not lobby for more egalitarian education in America, in addition to immigration reform? And why not make universal quality education the rallying cry for his world-saving efforts? Why not start Education.org? (And, just in case you think universal Internet access is the path to education for all, think again.) It’s because, after all, Internet.org is just another bid in Silicon Valley’s land grab for the world’s virgin eyeballs. As Facebook’s $22 billion acquisition of cash-bleeding What’s App shows, if you’re willing to acquire 450 million users at $50 per head, what’s a few more bucks to buy the rest?

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/12/the-problem-with-the-plan-to-give-internet-to-the-whole-world/383744/

The Atlantic's editors and writers pick their favorite moments from Game of Thrones, The Good Wife, Looking, and more from 2014. (Spoilers abound; consider this the first and only warning.)

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Adventure Time, “Is That You?”

The seventh season of Cartoon Network’s trippy wonder Adventure Time has continued to plumb stranger and stranger narrative depths, with a host of great episodes shifting focus from heroes Finn and Jake to the show’s deep ensemble. But Adventure Time’s most satisfying 11 minutes were this time-bending wonder, where interdimensional dream god Pismo (voiced by Kumail Nanjiani) engineered his resurrection through dream pickles, time loops, and causality. Yes, if you don’t watch the show, the plot of any Adventure Time episode sounds like utter lunacy. But “Is That You” was the cartoon at its very best—quietly emotional, brazenly hallucinatory, and whimsical without ever seeming cheesy. It’d likely come off as nonsense to a newcomer, but the thriving, complicated universe Adventure Time has created in its seven seasons means it can deliver emotional payoffs like this one.

–David Sims

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The Affair, “Episode 1”

It’s unfair how good the premiere of The Affair is, not just in comparison to the otherwise generic pilots of the fall 2014 season but also in comparison to the show itself, which hasn’t been able to match its opener for edge-of-your-seat captivation since. When it was released online in October, much was made of the Rashomon-like structure and zeitgeisty take on the sobering state of the modern marriage, which followed Gone Girl and The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. The show’s two-points-of-view narration highlights how everything is open to interpretation: Was that a meet-cute or a meet-creepy? A sexual assault—or post-argument coitus? Did Noah initiate or Alison? The conceit could easily be annoying, but instead the ambiguity fosters a constant state of sexy suspense, a climactic tension way more effective than when the pesky murder investigation gets developed later on.

The Affair isn’t dead yet (it’s returning for a second season), and while its pulse has weakened in recent weeks, the pilot remains premium-content television at its best: Sixty minutes of nothing happening, compellingly. I’ll keep watching, hoping the next season will reach the magnificent, baffling heights of its abstract opener.

–Katie Kilkenny

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The Biggest Loser: Second Chances 2, “Finale”

The Biggest Loser is, like many reality shows, based on a premise that is inherently grotesque, even as it touts its credentials when it comes to “transforming” lives and confronting the obesity epidemic. The ultimate goal isn’t a healthy weight; it’s a $250,000 cash prize. It was only a matter of time until one contestant took it too far.

In February, that contestant was Rachel Frederickson, a 24-year-old former athlete who walked into the finale as a gaunt, grinning specter of her former self, visibly shocking a number of the show’s professional trainers in the process. On the scale, she became the first competitor to finish the show underweight at 105 pounds, simultaneously clinching the prize and illuminating the murky morality of mining weight loss for mass entertainment.

–Sophie Gilbert

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Bob's Burgers, "The Kids Rob a Train"

It's sometimes hard to believe our collective good fortune that we're on five seasons and counting of Bob's Burgers, the best family sitcom on TV and very often the funniest show in a given week. In "The Kids Rob a Train," the Belchers take a weekend wine-train excursion, where kids are "allowed but not welcome." Obviously, Linda's the enthusiastic one while Bob just wants to relax. But with their parents slurping and swishing wine in the front, Tina, Gene, and Louise are thrown in the "juice caboose" along with occasional chum Regular-Sized Rudy. The best Bob's episodes see the kids engaging in oversized adventures involving what's essentially kids' stuff, and so it is here.

The prospect of four hours locked away in a no-fun train car is utterly unendurable, particularly with a chocolate fountain so tantalizingly close in the dining car. So the kids plot to defy their smug jailer, Ethan, and score them some chocolate. Where many comedies succeed by going big, Bob's kills it when it goes small, and that's never truer than when the affable, asthmatic Rudy is involved. Contrasting his sweet calm with Louise's agent-of-chaos hollering is nothing short of delightful. Meanwhile, Bob and Linda's sommelier nemesis proves to be a perfectly pompous foil, one who's subject to a nicely disgusting comeuppance.

–Joe Reid

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Broad City, “Stolen Phone”

The greatest trick Broad City pulls every week is coming off as shaggy while simultaneously executing a complex comedy caper that dovetails to a satisfying, messy conclusion. It’s having its pot cookie and eating it too, and we should be all the more delighted for it. “Stolen Phone” tracks Abbi around New York as she tries to recover her lost cell before a cute guy texts her back, while Illana has a one-night stand with a beautiful, airheaded boy (and Lincoln hangs out with a lot of puppies, which gives Hannibal Buress the opportunity to show us he can even have electrifying chemistry with random dogs).

Everything I love about Broad City, probably the best new comedy of 2014, is best encapsulated in “Stolen Phone.” Its perspective on New York felt fresh and grounded without losing the satire (like Illana and Abbi’s bafflement upon visiting the Upper East Side). Its female leads are rollicking, flawed, lovable three-dimensional women, of whom there are still not enough on television. And Hannibal Buress talks to a lot of dogs. Hannibal Buress should probably have a whole talk show where the only guests are dogs.

–David Sims

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The Carrie Diaries, "This Is the Time"

It's been almost a year since The Carrie Diaries left forever, and there's still a short, big-haired hole in the TV landscape because of it. Somewhat improbably, Carrie hitched a ride on Sex and the City nostalgia and created TV's best teen drama. The show was always a bit more than it needed to be: more fun than its competition; smarter; sweeter than expected; far less forced than its predecessor series in its attempts to be shocking or to create a cultural statement.

"This Is the Time," the second-last episode of the series, sees Carrie and her best friends attending prom at the Waldorf. Like all the greatest prom episodes, it sees its characters at various crossroads in their young lives, but it also makes time for the kinds of character moments that separate really good shows from the pack. Mouse and Donna's unlikely friendship gets a nice spotlight, for example. Walt takes a brave step back to Bennet and out of the closet. Carrie takes her own brave step down the road to the kind of self-sufficient city gal that we know she's going to become. One of the tragedies of not continuing with the series is we'll never get to solve the mystery of how this Carrie, surrounded by great friends and close family, ended up losing all these people en route to that big advice column. We get a taste of that here, as her dad cuts her off when she chooses a job over college, but we're only left to imagine the rest.

–Joe Reid

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Cristela, "Pilot"

Cristela is a family sitcom. That both refers to its format—a highly traditional multicam half hour starring a brassy, fun comedienne—and its specific sense of humor, delightfully biting in all its oxymoronic glory. The pilot shows off the best parts of both Cristela and star Cristela Alonzo: good jokes with great delivery by a compelling, lovable lead.

Cristela isn’t afraid to laugh along with its audience—and to make viewers feel like part of the family. The first episodes have been uniformly good, but it’s the premiere that stands out largely because it’s so assured of itself. This is Cristela, staid format and all. It doesn’t care if you like it—but for your sake, it hopes you do.

–Kevin O’Keeffe

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This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/the-best-television-episodes-of-2014/383551/

Enlisted, "Pete's Airstream"

It feels self-aggrandizing to say that the TV shows that you love and that get cancelled never really had a chance, too pure and good and brilliant were they for such an awful, unappreciative world. But that's how it feels for fans of Enlisted, the one-and-done season of heartfelt, army-barracks comedy from Kevin Biegel. It never managed to get off the ground, despite appealing leads (take a look at Geoff Stults, Chris Lowell, and Parker Young as three brothers assigned to rear-detachment duty and try not to swoon even a little) and a heartland-friendly concept. Alas, all we can do now is remember the good times ... like "Pete's Airstream," which deploys a plot about Pete trying to find some solitude away from the doofuses he lives with in service of poking into Pete's PTSD from active duty. It's a story that nails the funny/sweet/poignant/funny again vibe that made the show so great. Even better, the episode gets a boost from a subplot about "lone wolf" Perez learning to loosen up and have fun with the girls.

–Joe Reid

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Game of Thrones, “The Mountain and the Viper”

Even as someone who digested the first three seasons of Game of Thrones the three days before the fourth season premiered, I was ill-prepared for the level of mercilessness that concluded the Oberyn-Mountain trial by combat (it was a cruelty only rivaled by the slew of brain-explosion puns and Princess Bride allusions that followed). And because I had unfortunately heard about the tragedy that would come at the end of “Rains of Castamere,” Oberyn’s death was, essentially, my Red Wedding.

Yes, other things happened in this episode: Sansa finally wised up and proved a worthy (if newly vampy) rival and ally to Little Finger. Reek transformed into Theon to help Ramsay Sn—I mean Bolton capture Moat Cailin. Danaerys uncovered Ser Jorah’s betrayal and banished the heartbroken knight. But because this show is consistently filled with strong moments and plot development such as these, it doesn’t feel cheap to turn to this episode for its most memorable storyline—the jail-cell chat, the battle, the fall of the Red Viper, the chillingly delivered death sentence.

It’s a wound fans (or at least I) will never fully recover from; the best I can do is imagine Oberyn spinning his spear in the land of eternal summer, where the Dornish wine flows as fast as free as blood in Westeros.

–Lenika Cruz

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The Good Wife, "A Few Words"

There were more truly great episodes of The Good Wife this year than can be counted on one hand. Much has been said about installments like “The Last Call” (a worthy wake for a main character) and “Oppo Research” (an hour of thorny personal dynamics, with a brilliant centerpiece performance from Julianna Margulies). But season-five episode "A Few Words" stands out for its ambition—it was easily the best-directed hour of The Good Wife in 2014. It has a playful relationship with time—flashing back and forth as Alicia Florrick prepares a speech about the days of her life just before the first season began.

“A Few Words” changes viewpoints of past events to reveal more; not just events, but feelings and emotions. Director Rosemary Rodriguez did ace work—the resulting episode is an entertaining, thought-provoking, stellar piece of television.

–Kevin O’Keeffe

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Hannibal, "Mizumono"

There is no show like Hannibal on television. Or on streaming services. Or in your worst nightmares. But it's not the violence and gore that sets it apart. ... Okay, it's not just the violence and gore that sets it apart. True, Hannibal gets away with more artfully arranged revulsion than you'd ever expect on network TV, even tucked away as it is on Friday nights at 10 p.m. where no one is watching. But that kind of brazen grand-guignol quality is merely one quality of a show that's been fearless in all aspects, from plotting to characterization and beyond. The second season sent ostensible protagonist Will Graham past the edge of outright villainy, put Hannibal Lecter in genuine peril, and tied up its characters in psychological knots and let them wrangle their own ways out. The audience was put through the wringer repeatedly, whether they were losing beloved characters or having to watch a guest star claw his way out of the belly of a horse.

"Mizumono" is the best episode of the season because it brought all that horror to a head ... and then took it further. As a possible series finale (as all season finales of low-rated network shows must double as) it offered a bold crescendo to Will, Jack, and Hannibal's inevitable three-way collision. As a possible season finale, after which the show is expected to pick up the pieces and resume, it was downright insane.

–Joe Reid

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Homeland, “13 Hours in Islamabad”

It’s hard to think of a show whose pendulum swing between sublime and ridiculous is as dramatic as Homeland’s. The first seven episodes of the fourth season encapsulated everything that has historically irked me the most about Carrie and co., from the manipulation of mental illness for dramatic effect (finger guns, anyone?) to the prioritizing of personal storylines over professional ones.

But then everyone started doing their jobs again and the show remembered it was about counterterrorism and everything culminated in this Benghazi-inspired episode in which the Taliban stormed the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan, killed 36 people, and escaped with the names of all the covert CIA agents in the field. Yes, it was preposterous, and yes, it felt like Die Hard in the best way, but I’m starting to think that this is what Homeland should have been all along: a batshit crazy, well-crafted action drama rather than a subtle analysis of the personal stakes of the war on terror. When you do something so well, why fight it?

–Sophie Gilbert

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House of Cards, “Chapter 14”

No one saw it coming. We could have, because Frank Underwood is nothing if not despicable, but it was viscerally shocking nonetheless when, in the first episode of season two, he pushed his former lover, Zoe Barnes, right into the path of an oncoming Metro train, killing a major character and giving me countless commuting nightmares in the process.

“Chapter 14” embraced brutality wholeheartedly, from Freddie lasciviously describing how his pigs are slow-bled for extra flavor to Claire’s threatening the life of Gillian’s unborn child by withholding her health insurance and outing Gillian to her baby daddy’s wife. Never has the Underwoods’ credo been more visible than in the episode’s closing focus on Frank’s new cufflinks: appropriately engraved with the letters F and U.

–Sophie Gilbert

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Jane the Virgin, “Chapter Four”

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Jane the Virgin has restored my faith in shows with traditional values. In an era of world-weary vigilantes, detectives, and zombie killers, the character Jane arose angelically, bafflingly, from The CW (bless them) with a devotion to honesty, the Catholic Church, keeping her artificially-inseminated child, and sticking to a vow of chastity until marriage. The virgin-birth conceit is preposterous, yes, and that’s the show’s point and pleasure as it repurposes the plot twists, tongue-in-cheek narration, and pop-art sets of a telenovela while proffering some wholesome moral lessons along the way. Jane the Virgin succeeds by balancing grounded family drama with the murder, romance, and pulp, and no episode did that better this season than Chapter 4.

The episode’s a reversal of affairs: Straight-laced Jane’s having pregnant sex fantasies about the father of her child (not her boyfriend) while her flirty mom is struggling to own up to the identity of her father. Which really means we get the best of everything: Jane seeing Rafael with a perpetual halo, Andrea Navedo getting serious, and lots and lots of Rogelio, her self-absorbed telenovela star dad. The way it treats the Catholic Church’s hilarious attempts to stay hip isn’t bad, either. I laughed, I welled up, I literally said “bravo” to my computer at the end of the episode. Get thee to Jane the Virgin, there’s no better, or less guilty, a pleasure.

–Katie Kilkenny

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Keeping Up With the Kardashians, “Kim’s Journey To the Altar”

Despite the dress fittings (in which Kanye West tried to make his mother-in-law’s neckline more revealing) and the scenery (gorgeous shots of Paris at night) and the family drama (in which Rob Kardashian ditched the wedding and flew back to Los Angeles in a huff), for me, the highlight of the KUWTK Kimye wedding episode was seeing a brutally hungover Khloe sitting on the edge of the runway next to a private plane, trying not to throw up. It was an oasis of unglamorous truth in a desert of micromanaged, perfectly made-up Kardashian-West fantasy.

This episode was ostensibly filmed by “friends and family” of Kim and Kanye to get around the latter’s objection to TV cameras invading his private life (to be with the one you love, sometimes you have to love the ones they come with, whether that’s Kris Jenner or an entire E! production team). Although an inordinate amount of time was spent discussing hair (Kylie’s was blue and Bruce couldn’t decide if his should be up or down), ultimately the episode ended with a wedding, which is all any post-modern, paparazzi-infested fairytale can ask for.

–Sophie Gilbert

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Looking, “Looking in the Mirror”

Strangely naïve and a bit self-obsessed, Looking’s protagonist Patrick is the kind of charmed rookie who brandishes the “boyfriend” label before thinking to Define The Relationship. Looking itself, however, is not so oblivious. What initially came off as a low-key tale of San Francisco gay men mumbling turned out to be a pretty daring and hilarious interrogation of sexuality, society, and peri peri chicken.

The sixth episode exposed characters’ dumber, yet typical, assumptions about the world, and the results were both cringeworthy and moving. Dom despairs of turning 40—that’s when Grindr sends you a death certificate, he says—but his older business partner just scoffs knowingly and talks about doing mushrooms. Later at the birthday picnic, Patrick indulges a host of very-2014 prejudices: squealing in mockery of effeminate voices, insisting that his working-class boyfriend harbors greater career aspirations, and tacitly endorsing the idea that he’s dating a Mexican hairdresser to prove something to himself.

That Mexican hairdresser, by the way, is the best thing about Looking so far. As played by Raúl Castillo, Richie wears his various identity markers proudly, rejects every attempt to belittle him, and just seems like a really cool guy. His self-assurance contrasts with Patrick’s friend Agustin, who, while trashing Richie, mentions his own Cuban heritage for the first time all season. When confronted about his racist nonsense, Agustin finally breaks out some Spanish to try and defuse the situation. “Now I'm your hermano?” Richie replies, awesomely. “Man, fuck you.”

–Spencer Kornhaber

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The Leftovers, “Guest”

People griped about its messy structure and its Lindelof weirdness, but I loved The Leftovers, in spite (because?) of its bleak, relentless nihilism. Never was it darker or more enigmatic than in this Nora-centric episode, in which Mapleton’s most bereaved woman bought groceries no one would eat, paid a prostitute to shoot her in her (Kevlar-protected) chest, and took a quick trip to New York for a conference of businesspeople who’d somehow forged careers out of the Departure.

Carrie Coon was perhaps the show’s strongest performer, giving Nora layers upon layers of barely suppressed emotions, from grief to rage to desire. At the conference, which also served as a neat reminder that even the most pointless of human activities will survive the apocalypse, Nora lost her identity (her nametag, and her status as a survivor) then clawed it back again via booze, pills, and a hug from Holy Wayne, for better or for worse.

–Sophie Gilbert

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Mad Men, “The Runaways”

Every time you think you know Mad Men, Matt Weiner shoots off Ken Cosgrove’s eye or unleashes a lawnmower as a not-so-gentle reminder that sexy, sophisticated New York advertising in the ‘60s wasn’t nearly as put-together as Joan’s tailored suit dresses are. That’s the case with the latest season’s fifth episode, which contains a horrifying moment that Weiner’s been building up to. He delivers it in one bold, broad, and terrifying stroke that viewers perhaps should have seen coming.

But far from being an episode about a single twist, “The Runaways” is at its best revealing how its characters are transitioning into new, more mature roles. Sally doles out some of her best sass yet to Betty, while Betty airs a controversial political opinion at an otherwise paradisiacal suburban party. Megan asserts herself and her new California-fabulous lifestyle in yet another glorious, freewheeling addition to the annals of Weird Stuff that Happens When Don Goes West. All in all it’s an episode of well-placed moments showing characters coming into their own in the new era, a dynamic that is just so iconically Mad Men. And throughout, the office’s massive new computer hums ominously, which gives Weiner ample opportunity to make jokes about early tech anxiety, but also to hint that people were right to fear the coming of the machine.

–Katie Kilkenny

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The Mindy Project, "I Slipped"

"I slipped," Danny tells Mindy.

She does not believe him.

Hilarity ensues, as do many double entendres, as tends to happen on a primetime network sitcom. "My office only has one entrance, and I don’t think that’s enough for you anymore," Mindy tells Danny, indignantly.

Let's dispense with the euphemisms. Danny offers his two-worded explanation while he and Mindy are in bed; the "I Slipped" episode of The Mindy Project is about anal sex, a subject that remains mostly taboo on primetime sitcoms. What makes the episode great, though, is that in the end its story has very little to do with the taboo in question. "I Slipped" is mainly concerned not with sex itself, but with sex as a frontier in a relationship. What happens to romance when novelty—all those little firsts—gives way to familiarity? The episode opens with Mindy and Danny settling into the easy domesticities of coupledom; he delivers a nose hair trimmer to her in the bathroom. "I’ll be out in 20,” she informs him.

This is the other side of intimacy, the stuff of comfort and companionship and nose hair, and Mindy and Danny are both eager and terrified to embrace it. And that’s where “I slipped” comes in. Neither one wants to become boring; neither one want to admit this; both go to absurd lengths to avoid the thing they obviously both need: a conversation.

The episode was controversial; many objected to the lack of consent implied by "I slipped." For Mindy Kaling, though, the criticisms miss the point. "There was no sexual peril in there, and it was not a situation where she felt unsafe or was treated as objectified," The Mindy Project’s creator, writer, and star pointed out. The Mindy of the show, rather, “was startled in a common place.” Kaling added: “And that’s where comedy lives, in these uncomfortable places."

–Megan Garber

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Modern Family: “Las Vegas”

There’s something about the use of farce in television comedy that can be very stressful (usually when it’s Frasier Crane-related). But the joy of Modern Family is that you can almost always bank on nothing bad happening, which is what made the fifth season’s adults-only excursion to Vegas such a gift.

The episode featured guest appearances by Fred Armisen, Patton Oswalt, and Stephen Merchant (the latter’s turn as a “bath butler” was one of the weirdest, funniest cameos in recent memory), as well as a climactic final sequence involving endless entrances and exits, mistaken identity, accidental loss of clothing, and the “Kilty Pleasures,” an all-male troupe of Scottish-themed strippers. In other words, all of the fun of the farce with no unnecessary angst.

–Sophie Gilbert

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New Girl, "Landline"

Every once in a while, a show that has hit its stride will step out with an experimental episode that exists not to drive the plot but to be, simply, fun. For New Girl, “Landline” is that episode. The main story goes like this: It turns out that the only area of the loft that gets cell reception is a corner of Nick’s bedroom (the corner, as comedy requires, that is occupied by his bed). Jess decides to solve the problem—and further her ongoing cause of roommate unity—by purchasing a phone the roommates can share. Jess being Jess, the phone ends up being a land line: a bulky, perky specimen of analog uncool.

The landline, perched on a table in the middle of the loft’s massive living room, takes on a mystical quality—a crystal ball of plastic blue—and begins to reveal wacky truths about each character. Nick, at home all day while everyone else is at work, ends up taking messages for the other roommates, and relishing his self-imposed secretarial duties. Winston turns out to have a preternaturally smooth Phone Presence—a fact he uses to give an interview, posing as Schmidt, to the perfectly named magazine Business, Man!. Schmidt, under the phone’s influence, becomes even more Schmidty. (“I'm just excited to have a new number—home, work, and cell. Damn, I'm reachable!”)

Ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the phone’s magic is practical: Having to share the thing—the loft’s connection to the outside world, with all its seductions and confusions and inconveniences—forces the roommates to come together as the pseudo-family they are. Though, per the logic of the Weird Episode, the landline is scuttled come the next episode, and no one ever speaks of it again.

–Megan Garber

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Orange Is the New Black, “A Whole Other Hole”

“Some people collect buttons or Taco Bell Chihuahuas; I collect orgasms.” The words of an Apatow comedy bro? Barney Stinson? No, it’s Nicky Nichols of Litchfield women’s prison, kicking off a competition with Big Boo over who can sleep with more of their fellow inmates. Obsessing over one’s “number” is an old pop-culture trope, but it’s normally the domain of pick-up artists, teenagers, or man-eaters—not bored queer women behind bars.

The sex-off is just one of the raunchy, refreshing throughlines in the fourth episode of the Netflix show’s second season. Another: Some of the less privileged among the inmates apparently missed the sex-ed class that would have taught them where their “pee hole” is, which necessitates a lecture on genital anatomy. The fact that said lecture comes from the transgender woman Sophia isn’t just a clever writer’s room choice—it’s plausible storytelling. “I designed one myself,” she explains.

B-plots like those are amusing reminders of why Orange Is the New Black is so radical. We just haven’t seen these stories told on TV, ever. Same goes for the wrenching centerpiece of the episode, when viewers learn of gum-smacking sweetheart Lorna Morello’s backstory, involving stalking, mental illness, and wild deceptions. At the start of the hour, you root for her because of who she seems to be; by the end, you're sympathetic because of who she actually is; once again, Orange Is the New Black has shown you something new.

–Spencer Kornhaber

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Playing House, "Bird Bones"

After having made six episodes' worth of wonderful, underappreciated comedy for NBC with Best Friends Forever in 2012, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Clair made it back to TV this year with Playing House. Once again, the pair played best friends (Maggie and Emma) helping each other through some life changes. This one looked like it might end in disaster as well, but USA just renewed it for an eight-episode second season. Which is great news, because how frustrating would it have been to lose another comedy blessed with Parham and St. Clair's easy, unforced chemistry, especially in an episode like "Bird Bones."

Maggie and Emma get invited to brunch with Tina, the titular "Bird Bones," wife to Emma's ex and object of Maggie and Emma's high-school mockery. It's a classic awkward sitcom setup made daring by the way it explores an ugly side to Maggie and Emma's close friendship, particularly that they can get mean when cloistered together. Poor high-strung Tina makes herself an easy target, with her surface-perfect life and meek demeanor, and obviously Emma has another agenda in trying to figure out how this simpering thing scored her ex. As happens, however, a series of comedic mishaps brings the women closer together—then farther apart—then closer together at the end. Maggie and Emma's friendship is a force of nature, and those forces can be destructive sometimes. Other times, those forces can be well-versed enough in Oprah's hoarding-themed episodes to help a friend out.

–Joe Reid

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Please Like Me, "Margherita"

Please Like Me, the Australian comedy from young creator Josh Thomas, tried to do a lot at once in its second season. This proved frustrating at times: There was an entire section of the show—basically, any plotline involving the mental hospital and its patients—that felt disconnected, as if it belonged in a different series entirely. Yet creator and star Josh Thomas brought it all together in the second season finale. It was Please Like Me at its best: hilariously sad and sadly hilarious.

Nowhere was that more apparent than in its climax sequence: Josh and current love interest Joel taking care of a very inebriated Patrick—Josh’s previous love interest. In just one scene, Thomas captured two real difficulties: the simple frustrations of dating, and the very serious frustrations of mental illness. “Margherita” is great on its own, but even better in terms of the rest of the season; it was the episode where Thomas finally said what he wanted to say all along.

—Kevin O’Keeffe

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Project Runway, "The Highest Bidder"

Reality TV shows tend to run far beyond their primes, and Project Runway is certainly no exception. Season 13 was a total snooze, filled with bizarre judging decisions that rewarded mediocre talent, all while spinning nonsensical “narratives” for the season. And yet for once, with six designers remaining in the game, all the bells and whistles didn’t drown one another out. Instead, “The Highest Bidder” paired an oddball challenge—bid on storage units in teams to create a mini-collection of three looks—with pure personal drama to great effect.

Korina, the season’s designated villain, wound up in a last-minute sew-off against Char, who had been virtually saved from elimination by series mentor Tim Gunn twice. Korina’s hate for the situation manifested itself in an ugly garment and delicious personal drama. It was uncomfortable, challenging, and painful for all involved. But it was impossible to look away.

—Kevin O’Keeffe

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Review, “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes”

There’s comedy that makes you cringe, and then there’s Andy Daly’s Review, which every week made me gasp in horror and cover my eyes in fear at Forrest MacNeil’s latest endeavor in the name of art. Asked to “review” life experiences by online fans, Forrest begins the episode eating 15 pancakes at a diner—a fairly sickening, pointless experience—then goes back to the studio and gets his next challenge: “What’s it like to get divorced?”

The conceit of Review—Forrest puts himself into embarrassing situations to try and understand what it’s like to, say, be a racist or rob a bank—was funny to begin with. But this episode, the third in the season, raised the stakes in a fascinating way. Review was pitched almost as a sketch series, with Forrest doing three or so “reviews” per week. But when he approached his wife in the kitchen and out of the blue told her he wanted a divorce, it became clear that we were watching a show about a demented man set out to ruin his life for reasons too arbitrary to understand. The episode’s ending gag is too tragically hilarious to spoil, and you might not believe that you could laugh so much at one person’s anguish. But you’d be wrong.

–David Sims

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Scandal, "Randy, Red, Superfreak and Julia"

Like the final product or no, there’s no denying Scandal sped off the rails in its third season. To continue at that velocity would have been a show-killer—so a reboot in the fourth season was necessary. Yet Shonda Rhimes and her team pulled off something far more remarkable: a successful relaunch that didn’t forget what came before it.

Olivia Pope and her team are left nursing battle scars in the season opener—and despite how they all feel about one another, they still come together to bury their fallen friend. After an episode dedicated to making them likable again, Olivia, Abby, Huck, and Quinn stand together for a brief, beautiful moment at Harrison’s funeral. Then, they part. Healing takes time when so much blood has been spilled. This is just the first step—but what a beautiful first step it is.

—Kevin O’Keeffe

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Shameless, "Emily"

Watching Shameless and liking Shameless (not nearly the same thing) requires a delicate balancing act on the part of the viewer. It's so much of a heterogenous mixture that even when it's at its very best, there are entire characters and subplots (usually the Frank stuff) that are pretty terrible. The show's dedication to its own ugliness can feel forced, but the sludge in which this show wallows makes the moments of greatness shine brighter.

"Emily," the season's penultimate episode, saw Fiona sent to prison after a season's worth of downward-spiraling, Lip made into a bad-boyfriend scare tactic for his girlfriend's parents. Frank's storyline isn't even its usual braying, horrid self; in a post-surgery delirium, he mistakes a sick little girl for his own daughter, Fiona, and apologizes for being a rotten dad. But it's Ian and Mickey's defiant coming out in a bar full of drunk old cretins (Mickey's family, particularly his awful dad) that makes the episode special. In the context of all of Shameless’s gloom, the smallest of victories, even those that present as a barroom brawl, can seem downright beautiful. The sight of a bloody-mouthed Mickey, handcuffed on a police-car hood, screaming defiantly to his dad about taking it up the ass was better than any televised gay wedding.

–Joe Reid

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30 for 30, "The Price of Gold"

January's Winter Olympics in Sochi made for the perfect timing, and ESPN's 30 for 30 the perfect platform, for what now stands as the definitive take on the 1994 Nancy Kerrigan/Tonya Harding scandal, a story that remains every bit as riveting today as it was then. While NBC would go on to air its own doc during the course of the Olympics, that one with Kerrigan's participation (and thus her tacit approval), "The Price of Gold" was superior, both as a document and as a piece of entertainment.

What director Nanette Burstein understood was exactly what she had in Harding, an endlessly fascinating subject who maybe still doesn't understand how she comes across. With footage from as far back as Harding's early teen years, the portrait of her is tragic, defiant, off-putting ... and yet strangely endearing. She's positively delusional, thinking if she'd only landed a triple-axel at the Olympics, that's what she'd be remembered for, but her anger at a figure-skating establishment that had always treated her as white trash is palpable and relatable. It's an eye-of-the-beholder thing, but it's also a testament to Burstein finding every bit of humanity, good and bad, beneath the tabloid legend.

–Joe Reid

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Too Many Cooks

The Internet regularly offers up weird, subversive quirks of art that gain rapid followings and just as quickly suffer a heady backlashes. Too Many Cooks somehow transcended that dynamic. Yes, once admiration for this Adult Swim one-off created by Casper Kelly reached fever pitch (it's past four million views on YouTube), there was some mild grumbling that it might be overrated. But by and large, Too Many Cooks felt like an inspiring success story. Airing at four in the morning during the channel's "Infomercials" block, Too Many Cooks is a deceptively simple mockery of overlong '80s TV theme songs that builds up a horrifying throughline before spinning off in all kinds of wacky directions. Also, Snarf the magic cat is there.

If you haven't watched Too Many Cooks yet and you're still reading this description, stop. It's really best experienced with as little information as possible. Don't even look at the runtime on YouTube. Just soak in its charming weirdness. Then show it to someone else, sight unseen. If Too Many Cooks is the future of television, then we have much to look forward to.

–David Sims

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Transparent, “Looking Up”

“I’m just here to make you happy.” It’s maybe the single most beautiful line uttered in Transparent, a tender, funny, and smart show about a family of pathologically selfish people trying to be a little less pathologically selfish. Often their individual journeys don’t align: When one Pfefferman experiences a rare moment of clarity, another may be too deeply self-involved to care. And yet each family member, in his or her own way, struggles to care and be cared about. When they succeed, it’s often in painful and small ways.

In this penultimate episode, Shelly’s “done” with taking care of a bedridden, dying Ed, who seems to be an inconvenience for all. The family handles the uncomfortable question of morality awkwardly, with self-righteousness and, sometimes, bizarre tone-deafness.

And so it’s perhaps fitting that the real gut-punch moment of the episode is preceded by an irony-free, wordless dream sequence: Ed rises, wobbling, from his bed, and stumbles out the front door completely unnoticed; a hazy, gorgeous POV shot follows him ambling out into the soft lights of the early evening, filled with the sound of crickets and splashing of ducks. And then there's a flashback to his earlier days with Shelly, when he tells a goofy joke and says “I’m just here to make you happy.” The utter selflessness of the line feels devastating—and it’s this deft handling of humor and sadness, delusion and self-awareness, regression and growth that makes Transparent the best show to debut in 2014.

–Lenika Cruz

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True Detective, “Who Goes There”

“Easy, easy … 30 seconds in and out, 30 seconds in and out.”

In the way that the episode title “Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency” means nothing to a lot of Mad Men viewers until you say “The one with the lawnmower,” this True Detective episode title means nothing until you say “Six-minute tracking shot.” It may feel unfair to spill more digital ink on an episode with most-hyped scene of the most-hyped show of 2014.

True Detective earned praise and scorn for its grandiose cinematography, bouts of self-serious fatalistic cerebro-babble, a bayou-intrigue plot, and an often-grim but ultimately profound cop-buddy duo at the center of it all. But push this all aside and you get something “Who Goes There” crystallized and negotiated so well, particularly in its final moments: atmosphere. One minute, you’re lulled by the gloomily beautiful palette of colors and Rust Coehle’s throaty drawl; the next, the show’s spun you up in a ring of dread, mystery, and sheer awe that made the series’ debut season so hypnotizing for many.

–Lenika Cruz

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Vanderpump Rules, "I Lied"

Vanderpump Rules plays like the heedless twentysomething child of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills—louder, nastier, but also more aware about things like creating your own narrative on reality TV. At this point, it'd be rather naive to tut-tut about what's real and what's not in shows like these. When you're living your life as if it's a primetime soap opera, where does "real" even enter the discussion? There was a point in the second season when the cast—waitstaff at Lisa Vanderpump's Sur restaurant in L.A.—peered out from the kitchen at Lisa and her Real Housewives pals staging a contentious lunch at the restaurant and commented on what they were doing wrong/right.

Do we need a Bravo-lebrity 2.0, where the participants are even savvier about their own drama? Maybe not. But sometimes the net result is Stassi finding out that Kristen and Jax had sex (twice!) while Tom was asleep in the other room, and Kristen engineered a Haldeman-worthy cover-up before Stassi finally figured it out, staged an ambush, and then backhanded her frenemy with more precise fight choreography than we got in half this summer's blockbusters. In that case, it's worth it.

–Joe Reid

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Veep, "Clovis"

Watching Selina Meyer go through the tedious, often humiliating business of serving as the nation's second in command was already pretty hilarious, but Veep went and topped itself in its third season by taking Selina out on the campaign trail. "Clovis" sees Team Meyer (sans a few members, particularly Dan Egan, who is nearing the end of his angry little rope back in D.C.) make a stop at the titular tech company, an incredibly thin gloss on Google. The brilliance of the episode lies in how it manages to mix the obvious with the surprising. Having earned its reputation as TV's preeminent spewer of hateful barbs, there were high expectations for Veep to skewer tech culture, and from the first Lego station, they don't disappoint.

But rather than rest on cheap gags about hoodies and ping-pong, Veep also pokes at some darker corners of the conflicts of interest between tech, business, and government. "We consider ourselves post-tax," says the Clovis CFO, as her boss lobbies Selina, plying her with free iPads for her education initiatives. That such pointed social criticism sits side by side with porn jokes and the usual Jonah slams ("Jonah with money. It's like if Hitler could fly.") is what makes Veep as special as it is.

–Joe Reid

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The Walking Dead, “Consumed”

The fifth season of The Walking Dead was a surprise from start to finish for its narrative restraint and emphasis on developing character so as to build up satisfying stories. There was no better example than “Consumed,” which spent its entire time with two of the show’s most compelling characters (Carol and Daryl) as they rove through Atlanta trying to find their kidnapped compatriot. It was almost a bottle episode, but set in an entire city, flashing back to critical moments in Carol’s life that informed the haunted, lonesome warrior she had become.

In an earlier season of The Walking Dead, a quiet hour like “Consumed” might have felt like the result of a show stalling for time, but here it came off like a necessary breather in an action-packed arc. It played to all of the show’s strengths, using the empty, apocalyptic Atlanta landscape to generate tension, being as spare with dialogue as possible, and balancing on a knife-edge every moral decision the pair have to make. Pretty much every episode of The Walking Dead was good this season, but “Consumed” was artful in a way the show couldn’t have pulled off even a year before.

–David Sims

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You’re the Worst, “Fists and Feet and Stuff”

It’s tough to pick one episode from You’re the Worst’s splendid first season, so it makes the most sense to take the finale, which demonstrated all the surprising strengths of this under-the-radar anti-romcom. Acidly thumbing its nose at the traditions of the genre, You’re the Worst charted the halting romance of two emotionally crippled narcissists in Los Angeles who slowly realize that their lives have progressed to the point where they might actually want to settle down. Kinda. “Fists and Feet and Stuff” was the final episode in a loose three-parter to wrap up the first season that saw our heroes Gretchen and Jimmy break up (hardly a surprise, given their poor communication skills) and get back together (much more of an accomplishment).

You’re the Worst is not without its swooning romance, it just comes in a different package. In the finale, Gretchen tells Jimmy that they’re like angry pitbulls who can somehow only interact with each other. It’s a harsh line, but delivered by the toxically charming Aya Cash, it makes the heart beat quicker all the same. There’s room for many kinds of love in the world after all—and the best kind of optimism always comes from the most pessimistic sources.

–David Sims

Growth and progress could be this nation's reward for facing the challenge of our times with courage and a demand for equal justice. The American Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Depression, and the civil-rights movement of the 1960s were moments when the United States could have been torn from its very foundation, but a creative response to this turmoil helped move the nation forward.

At its best, non-violent protest is a strategically engineered crisis designed to wake up a sleeping nation, to educate and sensitize those who become awakened, and to ignite a sense of righteous indignation in people of goodwill to press for transformation. That's what the protests galvanized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, and others are trying to accomplish.

Many Americans find themselves at a loss to understand the depth of the anger and frustration of the protestors galvanized by the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin and others. It might be worthwhile for them to read a speech Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on April 14, 1967, at Stanford University. A colleague of mine in Congress reminded me of his words, and I find they ring as true today as they did almost 50 years ago.

In the speech, King describes what he calls the "other America," one of two starkly different American experiences that exist side-by-side. One people "experience the opportunity of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in all its dimensions," and the other a "daily ugliness" that spoils the purest hopes of the young and old, leaving only "the fatigue of despair." The Brown and Garner cases themselves are not the only focus of the protestors' grievances, but they represent a glimpse of a different America most Americans have found it inconvenient to confront.

One group of people in this country can expect the institutions of government to bend in their favor, no matter that they are supposedly regulated by impartial law. In the other, children, fathers, mothers, uncles, grandfathers, whole families, and many generations are swept up like rubbish by the hard, unforgiving hand of the law.

They are offered no lenience, even for petty offenses, in a system that seems hell-bent on warehousing them by the millions of people, while others escape the consequences of pervasive malfeasance scot-free. Some people rationalize that it was unfortunate, but not altogether disturbing, that Michael Brown was put to death without due process because, after all, he allegedly took some cigarillos from a corner store. But who went to jail for the mortgage fraud that robbed his community and other black communities around the country of 50 percent of their wealth?

Should people accused of stealing be held accountable? Definitely. But the justice system entangles the most vulnerable so effectively that even the innocent often find it easier to just plead guilty. Meanwhile the capable, and sometimes the stealthiest and most damaging, are slapped on the wrist and given a pass.

If Americans are to be honest with themselves, they must admit we may never know what actually happened to Michael Brown because of the unusual way the grand-jury process was conducted by a local prosecutor whose independence was in doubt. They must admit that publishing a selective collection of details online corrupts the integrity of grand-jury deliberations and proceedings meant to be held in confidence. It subverts a judicial process designed to air the arguments of both sides—the victim and the perpetrator—exposing them both to challenge and cross-examination.

Denying any victim of homicide the right to a public trial is a painful outcome, but to distort the process and use it to achieve that goal compounds the tragedy of homicide with robbery. It's no wonder then that even videotaped evidence showing Eric Garner pleading to breathe 11 times would lead to no indictment. It proves the protestors' point—in some courts even the worst offenders can go free as long as they wear a badge.  

Don't get me wrong—I work with police everyday. Whenever I see them, I let them know I appreciate their service. The job is difficult, and there are many responsible officers, but does that mean they should avoid scrutiny when they take a human life, especially under questionable circumstances? Isn't that the law they are supposed to defend?

Thousands of people—young and old, black, white, and brown—are speaking to the nation.  They are "dying in" to shake it out of denial. They are saying that American society is blind to hundreds, even thousands of murders perpetrated in its name by agents of governments. They are saying that blood is on the hands of the nation and its people. (Black-on-black crime, or white-on-white crime for that matter, is an important but different discussion, and it does not justify what is done by agents with the presumed consent of society.)

Today's protestors demand that Americans confront several questions as a national community:

Is it all right with them that police kill hundreds of unarmed teens and young men every year without having to account for their actions? Do they mind that a retired veteran who accidentally pressed his medical-alert button is now dead at the hands of police? Or that a 12-year-old boy playing with a toy gun in a park near his home, a 22-year-old man talking on a cell phone in a Walmart, a 17-year-old walking home from the corner store, an unarmed 23-year-old man attending his own bachelor party shot 50 times, or a 7-year-old girl at home asleep in her bed were all killed by their representatives? One recent study reports that one black man is killed by police or vigilantes in our country every 28 hours, almost one a day.

Doesn't that bother you?

Ever since black men first came to these shores we have been targets of wanton aggression. We have been maimed, drugged, lynched, burned, jailed, enslaved, chained, disfigured, dismembered, drowned, shot, and killed. As a black man, I have to ask why. What is it that drives this carnage? Is it fear? Fear of what? Why is this nation still so willing to suspend the compassion it gives freely to others when the victims are men who are black or brown?  

Soon the nation will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the day unarmed, nonviolent protestors were brutalized by deputized citizens and Alabama state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As a leader of that march, I wonder, if the same attack took place in Ferguson today, would Americans be shocked enough to do anything about it? What has happened to the soul of America that makes citizens more interested in justifying these murders than stopping them?

Dr. King declared in his 1967 speech, "Racism is evil because its ultimate logic leads to genocide .... It is an affirmation," he said, "that the very being of a people is inferior," and therefore unworthy of the same regard as other human life. Do Americans accept the deaths of hundreds and thousands of young men and boys simply because they are black? Ignorance of their day-to-day lives is no excuse for what is done in society’s name.

In the presence of injustice, no one has the right to be silent. Members of government and the business, faith, and even law-enforcement communities must stand up and say enough is enough. Let the young lives of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Sean Bell, John Crawford, and Trayvon Martin serve a higher purpose to shine the light of truth on our democracy and challenge us to meet the demand for equal justice in America.

There is a growing discontent in this country. And if the fires of frustration and discontent continue to grow without redress, I fear for the future of this country. There will not be peace in America. I do not condone violence under any circumstance. It does not lead to lasting change. I do not condone either public rioting or state-sponsored terrorism. "True peace," King would tell us, "is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice."

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/12/michael-brown-eric-garner-other-america-john-lewis/383750/

These flour-less almond butter cookies are SO good, and made with only 3 ingredients (almond butter, raw sugar and an egg)! They are so easy to make you don't even need a mixer, so these are perfect for any beginner baker.

I participated in The 4th Annual Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap to raise money for Cookies For Kids Cancer, a wonderful non-profit organization that raises money to help kids with Cancer. I swapped cookies with three bloggers, all of which requested a cookie made with no white flours or white sugar and that could handle shipping without the need for refrigeration. These cookies came to mind because they use no flour and can last for weeks in a cookie tin. They are also naturally gluten-free. I tested them a few times to see how little sugar I can get away with using and found 6 tablespoons was perfect.


I've been making peanut butter cookies for years using these same three ingredients, but this was my first time trying them with almond butter instead. I love Justin's Maple Almond Butter so I used that and they turned out wonderful. Honestly, you can use any type of nut butter you like, try it with cashew butter, pistachio butter, or you can just stick with natural peanut butter.




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by Haley Mlotek

I'm sure by now you've read Zach Baron's profile of Tilda Swinton, unless you spent all day yesterday with your eyes shut and your fingers in your ears, which, listen, it's your life and your business, but I'd strongly recommend that you stop that and read this instead:

"I spent a lot of time thinking that I was some kind of foundling," Tilda Swinton says, answering a better question than the one I asked. "That I had been a changeling, that I had been found under a bush somewhere, and that I couldn't possibly be kin—but the more I live, the more I feel absolutely like I come out of my family. I'm a sort of strange natural progression."

Yes she is. God. Tilda Swinton was a professional gambler before she was an actress. Tilda Swinton made Zach Baron eat haggis. Tilda Swinton has played every kind of part but struggled the most when playing a corporate lawyer. Tilda Swinton's email auto-reply kindly reminds the sender that she is "away until 01/01/2070." Tilda Swinton is a universal treasure. Tilda Swinton makes the world a better place. Can I properly communicate just how strongly I feel about Tilda Swinton? This seems like a good start.

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I realize this might not look like much. It probably looks suspiciously like a salad, which means it’s probably going to be the last kid picked for your holiday cooking olympics. It doesn’t taste like ginger, linzer or crushed candy canes. It smacks of January Food, the stuff of resolutions and repentance, and there’s no time for that now. But I need to tell you about it anyway, urgently, because the preoccupation with this salad has hit me so intensely, so wholly, it’s basically the only thing I want to eat, and since I’m ostensibly the grownup here, this is exactly what I’m going to do.

I had this for the first time two weekends ago, when I got to spring a surprise Miami Beach getaway on my husband as a belated birthday present. We had dinner the first night at José Andrés’ Bazaar, the kind of prolonged, indulgent meal that, I’m sure purely coincidentally, usually only occurs when we’re not simultaneously parenting. I don’t think we had a bite of food that was less than pristine. I’ve been a little obsessed with Andrés’ cooking since I lived in DC, right around the time Jaleo opened. I remember piling in there one night in 1999 with friends in town from New York and one told us that he really wanted to study in Paris the next year, but he needed someone to stay in his rent-controlled East Village apartment and also take care of his cat while he was gone. My roommate and I have never volunteered ourselves so quickly, not that anyone asked me my “welcome to new york” story. Even without such life-changing memories, the food was perfect, and no matter how many pork and scallop products were on the menu, there were always vegetables too, treated as carefully and respectfully as the finest jamón serrano. Our Miami meal was no different, which is why I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise that of everything we ate, it was this seemingly random composition of goat cheese, almonds, oranges, chives, sea salt, endive, sherry vinegar and olive oil that I haven’t stopped pining over since.

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Let's just get this out of the way: Moses was not a badass, at least not in the traditional sense of badassery. In the Bible, he spoke with a stammer, constantly doubted himself, and had a penchant for petulance. It is absurd for Christian Bale, with his perfect pectorals and haughty swagger and gentile face, to play the lead in Ridley Scott's new feature film, Exodus: God and Kings, a retelling of the Jews' liberation from slavery in Egypt.

The movie has many absurdities, as my colleague Chris Orr described in his review. Some characters speak with a British lilt, while others use vaguely Central European/Middle Eastern/stock Orientalist accents, seemingly at random. As many critics have pointed out, almost all of the movie's protagonists are white, even though the story takes place in the Middle East and North Africa (Scott attributes this to the financial pressure to cast big-name actors).

But in spite of itself, perhaps even unintentionally, Exodus manages to be provocative. Every year, Jews revisit the story of the exodus at Passover, remembering how the Hebrews were freed from slavery in Egypt. Throughout history, this narrative has been a foundational part of Jewish identity. But ever so slightly, Scott—who is an atheist—reframes this narrative, highlighting the morally troubling quality of any people being a "chosen people."

The first half of the movie follows the formula of a typical Hollywood blockbuster, with an impressive and basically pointless battle scene that sets up the main plot line. The year Moses was born, Egypt's pharaoh ordered the death of all Jewish baby boys, reacting to a seer's prediction that a new leader of the Hebrews would be born. Fearing for his life, Moses's parents stuck him in a basket and sent him down the Nile, where he was discovered by Bithia, one of the pharaoh's daughters. She raised him as a prince of Egypt alongside Ramses, the pharaoh's son and heir.

A couple decades later, the pharaoh's seer makes another prediction, that a new, great leader will be saved in battle. Shortly thereafter, Moses saves Ramses from death. Even though this bodes well for Ramses, he is suspicious of Moses's motives.

Soon, the pharaoh dies and Ramses takes the throne; Moses becomes his adviser. On a routine visit to one of Egypt's quarries—which are run on the labor of Jewish slaves—he meets the elders of the Hebrews, who eventually reveal his Jewish heritage. A pair of spies overhear this exchange and reveal it to one of the pharaoh's bureaucrats, who reveals it to Ramses. In what appears to be a rage, he banishes Moses to the desert. (This is not how this all went down in the Bible. In the book of Exodus, Moses killed an Egyptian for beating a Hebrew slave and buried the body. When his actions were discovered, "Moses became frightened and ... fled from before Pharaoh." See? Not a badass.)

This is a revealing moment in the movie's plot: Although he feels he has to punish Moses, Ramses hides a sword in Moses's pack before he's sent out into the desert so that he can defend himself. Throughout the movie, Ramses proves himself a less-than-perfect ruler for a number of reasons: He's incompetent, he's vain, he makes abominable chewing noises. But cruel, he is not. Evil, he is not. He's a petty failure, one who has the misfortune of helming an empire at the exact moment in history when God decides to issue a smackdown on the Egyptian people.

Ah, yes, God. In another of the movie's absurdities, God is played by an exceptionally creepy small child, one whose skin tone is disturbingly gray and who dresses like a Buddhist monk. He appears occasionally to encourage and taunt Moses, and, eventually, to bring down a series of plagues on the ancient city of Memphis. As the God of the Bible says in the book of Exodus, "I heard the moans of the children of Israel, whom the Egyptians are holding in bondage, and I remembered my covenant."

Despite his slightly bizarre casting choice, Scott deserves credit for making God a serious character in his retelling of the book of Exodus. God is all-powerful, and vengeful, just as he is in the Bible. "For now, you can watch," child-God says to Moses in Exodus before the plagues begin. "Now, you will see what I will do to Pharaoh," God says to Moses in the Bible.

And what a thing to behold. In terms of cinematography, most of Exodus is generically impressive: panoramas of ancient Egypt, fast-paced scenes of battle violence, shots of the pharaoh standing regally on the steps of his giant palace. But the plagues—they are visually distinctive, and striking, and unsettling. We see terrifying crocodile-like creatures, devouring men in two or three bites; the water of the Nile, turning burgundy with blood; and thousands of locusts, swarming people's faces and hands and food and homes. Frogs jump into people's beds and boils cover their faces; cattle die en masse and hail rains down with fury. Darkness falls, and shortly after, the final plague arrives: the death of every Egyptian's firstborn son.

This is affecting. Whenever children are shown dying in movies, it's meant to be sad; when several dozen children are shown dying, it's devastating. The Egyptians were theoretically culpable for the lives they led at the cost of Hebrew slave labor, yes. But to slaughter innocents because of the actions of their leaders—and because their race was not chosen to be part of an ancient covenant—seems appallingly cruel.

Then again, this idea, that whole peoples should be punished for their sins, comes up repeatedly in the Bible. Examples include Sodom and Gomorrah, cities that were destroyed by God, and Nineveh, which ultimately was not. The consequences of sin in ancient times were total and intense; God wiped out quite a few civilizations in the course of crafting early humanity.

It is this side of God—his cruelty, his capriciousness—that Scott emphasizes with his cinematographic choices. What's interesting about Scott’s portrayal of the exodus is the grief he chooses to focus on. Toward the beginning of the film, there are a few shots of Jews toiling in slavery, building statues in honor of the pharaoh and getting beaten by their masters. But there aren't many. Compared to the grief of the Egyptians—who are shown desperately trying to revive their dead livestock and weeping with the bodies of their sons in their hands—the hardship of the Hebrews seems generic, perfunctory, a necessary plot point without much poignance.

This sets up a difficult moral question: Is the freedom of the Hebrews worth more than the lives of Egyptians? God, after all, did not merely liberate the Jews in the spirit of freeing the oppressed; he wiped out Egyptians, per the Bible and per Exodus, because the nation they’d enslaved happened to be his anointed one. Is one people, even the people God has chosen, worth more than another?

This is an impossible question to answer. It depends upon a theory of justice that assigns blame for the system to the individuals that inhabit it. It depends upon the idea that, by designation of God, certain humans can be more holy, or historically worthy, than others; that the accident of birth is enough to determine which side of God's wrath you deserve to be on. This, perhaps, is why "chosenness" is debated, even within the Jewish community; Reconstructionist Jews, for example, reject this idea.

What's interesting about Scott's portrayal of the exodus is the grief he chooses to focus on.

The story of the exodus happened in a different period of human history, when God supposedly walked the earth and vast seas parted and plagues swept the land upon divine command. Even in this context, God's genocidal favoritism is disturbing, which the movie highlights

Today, it seems inexcusable. Not everyone in the world believes all individuals are equal, that all peoples deserve basic human rights, but to a certain extent, the global community has claimed these as its fundamental values. It's no coincidence that the United Nations wrote its Universal Declaration of Human Rights directly following the Holocaust, history's greatest massacre of Jews and other ethnic groups who were deemed genetically inferior by the Nazis.

And yet, most Jews remember the exodus, this story of being championed as God's chosen people, as an essential part of their identity. We were slaves in Egypt, and now we are free. This narrative structure has been reinforced over and over again throughout the history of Judaism, from the Inquisition to Europe's pogroms to the founding of Israel. The exodus is part of how we Jews make sense of our tragic history. At Passover, we dip our pinky fingers into a glass of wine to symbolize each of the 10 plagues, a brief moment in the seder which symbolizes the price of freedom; the rest is mostly focused on the generosity of God, and celebration. We eat matzo to remember how quickly our people fled from their homes. We sing "Dayenu," meaning "enough"—a song full of lines like: It would have been enough "if God had brought us out from Egypt, and had not carried out judgments against our oppressors."

We go through the motions of these rituals, sometimes with boredom, sometimes in earnest, but always in gratitude to a just God. We do not usually mourn the dead sons of ancient Egyptians, because they do not fit cleanly into a narrative of justice.

This is where Exodus succeeds as a piece of art: Although God's chosen people are saved, viewers are forced to confront the loss left behind them. It's a subtle reworking of the narrative, a shift in emphasis that challenges a deep part of Jewish identity. It would be wrong to call this anti-Semitic; Scott clearly has empathy for the Jews, and for Moses. But as Mel Gibson made choices in The Passion of the Christ that challenged the framing of the death of Jesus, so Scott takes up a central aspect of Jewish identity—one that undoubtedly shapes the community's politics and religious practice today. When one people are chosen, others must suffer.

For some Jews, this may just be part of the truth they embrace as believers—that the world we live in is unfair, and unjust, and unequal, but by birthright, the Jewish people have a covenant with God. For me, at least, it’s unsettling—and an undeniably relevant moral challenge. Must the freedom of the Jews come at the price of others’ lives?

At the end of the movie, Moses sits with his brother, Aaron, on the shores of the Red Sea. He looks out at the many thousands of slaves who just escaped from Egypt, who are about to begin 40 years of wandering in the desert.

"What happens when we start running?" Moses asks Aaron. It's a confusing line, one that seems to imply meaning more than communicate it. But given the history of the Jews, a people pursued, cursed, oppressed, and set apart from others everywhere they've gone, it's a heady implication. Even in ancient Egypt, Scott seems to say, Moses understood that the Jews would be a people who flee—and that this pursuit of freedom sometimes comes with moral complications.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/12/exodus-should-be-morally-troubling-for-jews/383611/

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