United States of America
I'm a writer living in the Philadelphia area with special interests in feminism, LGBT issues, fandom culture, and politics. Intern at Philadelphia Magazine and Cleaver Magazine.
On October 29th, Buzzfeed News published a story wherein Anthony Rapp says that Kevin Spacey made a sexual advance at him when Rapp was just 14 and Spacey was 26. That same day, Spacey made a statement on Twitter where he claimed that he doesn't remember the encounter, that he owes Rapp an apology for his "deeply inappropriate drunken behavior," and that he's sorry.
Philadelphia's sisters to the north, Boston and New York, get a lot of flack for their public transportation systems being awful. MTA is having some sort of personal crisis, and Boston's T is no better (there are entire blogs, Reddit threads, and YouTube videos dedicated to why it sucks).
Reading Andrea Jarrell's memoir felt like I was squatting in the bushes outside of her house, fingers perched on the windowsill, watching and listening as her life unfolded, taking comfort in her family's dysfunctions which mirrored my own in asymmetric ways.
Head to City Hall to check out the Octavius Catto statue. A 12-foot bronze statue of Octavius V. Catto - 19th century educator, baseball player, abolitionist, and civil rights activist - was unveiled today on the south apron of City Hall.
Stand at the intersection of 13th and Locust in Center City Philadelphia. All four crosswalks are painted rainbow, signifying that this is the heart of the Gayborhood. From Pine up through Chestnut in between Broad and 11th, the street signs have rainbows on them.
It's been a divisive election that's included tweets sent with vitriol, Spotify ads where Obama calmly tells you "progress is on the ballot, hope is on the ballot" in his soothing voice (please don't leave me), YouTube ads, Facebook posts, open letters to ____ (insert literally any demographic/candidate here), and general internet shenanigans.
Check this out: Could be flirting, right? Yep. The guy in blue is Dean Winchester and the angry one is Castiel, an angel of the Lord, on the TV show Supernatural. Dean and Castiel are not in a relationship, nor are they canonically anything but straight, but moments of flirtation, tenderness, and passion crop up constantly.
When I was about 9 or 10 I had a particularly bad fight with my parents. One of my friends had left a message for me on the phone and wanted me to call her back. I was terrified and begged and screamed at my parents not to make me call her.
A college student's most pressing concerns are usually related to money and school. If a professor assigns a lot of work for their class, they suck, and you hate them. If they pick favorites and you weren't chosen, they suck, and you hate them.
I'm not sure what exactly I expected when I headed into Boulder Spirals, the pole dance studio in Boulder, Colorado. My girlfriend Kayla goes to school at the University of Colorado, and she's been pole dancing since her freshman year as part of their Polefit club.
Warning: Spoilers ahead. Steer clear unless you really don't care. The Gilmore Girls revival was an entertaining way to spend 6 hours of my life. It nestled itself right into the tail end of the worst month of 2016 and watching it felt like being wrapped in a warm blanket and drinking hot cocoa.
On Saturday Night Live the day after Trump's inauguration, Aziz Ansari joked, "Yesterday, Trump was inaugurated. Today, an entire gender protested against him." He was, of course, referring to the Women's March, a global protest (seriously, people showed up to protest on all 7 continents) against Donald Trump.
By five minutes after 5, we decided we really should get going. We started to wander, and this is when we began to worry in earnest, because we were alone in the eeriest ghost town in the world, and it was dark.
Over the weekend, I took the wrong pair of shoes to Cinque Terre. Cinque Terre is a town about four hours north of Perugia by train, and it's a cluster of five towns that climb up the cliff faces like colorful ivy and boast beautiful views of the sea.
There are a lot of things in this society that skeeve me out - large groups of teenaged boys, Senator Mitch McConnell, Halloween masks - but none more than the Purity Culture. The Purity Culture is the idea that sex outside of heterosexual marriage is bad, and that it will reserve you a first-class ticket to Hell.
There's a classic series of family photos of me throwing out socks and underwear at famous locations in the US. In most of these photos, I seem to be unaware of the spectacular weirdness of what's happening. At the time, I probably thought it was normal to go to natural wonders and throw out an old sock or two, just because.