If your kids are young enough to be invested, they’re probably young enough that you can just give them the doll to play with and never read them the book or go through the rigmarole at all.

Who the fuck are these people who want MORE emotionally-fraught obligations around holiday time that they have to make up new “traditions,” is what I want to know.

I’m with you. If I ever have children, we’re going to have to be Santa-atheists. “Some people believe these things, Little Llama, but in our family, we do things differently.” Which is kind of how I envision the actually-atheist conversation going down.

Is it really so hard to figure out why she doesn’t like to hang out with women when these are the women? I mean, if she couldn’t manage brunch with me and my group of chill girls, I’d think that was weird, but I’d literally rather die than be stuck on the boat with the people she’s stuck with. I’d be overboard and swim…

Charles Dickens is largely responsible, due to a fluke of history. He wrote a LOT about Christmas, and really cemented the vision of what Christmas “should” be in the Western worlds’ collective imagination. While white Christmases are fairly rare in Dickens’ hometown of London, there happened to be a snow on the…

I quote that skit almost weekly. Unfortunately, because MadTV never had the audience of an SNL, almost no one ever understands why I’m threatening to bury them alive in a box. Everyone can talk about boring motherfucking cowbells and everyone gets it and thinks they’re a genius, while all I get are these dumb…

Right? I wouldn’t want to replace my Mac as my home computer, but I’ll often be using an Apple product at home and find myself thinking how difficult it would be to use the same product at work, for things that actually matter, compared to the Microsoft stuff I use now.

Sorry if I’ve offended you by not speaking about a complete stranger’s man-rod in an appropriately respectful way. I understand that the exact state of Noel Gallagher’s penis is deeply, pressingly important to you.

My brother fucking loves Noel Gallagher. Every time I’m over to his house, he’s reading me quotes from interviews and paparazzi videos, and he’s all hating on this, hating on that, my brother cackling hysterically at every boring, angry comment. Like, yeah, there’s nothing I love more than a grown man who happens to…

You don’t understand why a person who drops out 3 years in isn’t automatically able to be replaced by a new incoming freshmen? That even a school without all the fancy programs still sees a student as so many institutional resources spent, and therefore might not want to see those go to waste for solvable reasons? Why…

I disagree that the fridge in its current state is horrific, but if that was my fridge, with that level of fresh whole vegetables in it, and I was still me, with my “cooking takes time better grab a takeout” eating habits, it would truly be horrible by the end of about a month.

At least the Greeks had some clarity in their lives, having avoided the confusion of the Danes, who taste of dogs, but not of Great Danes but of Labradors (while people from Labrador taste like Great Danes).

George’s Marvelous Medicine is, I think, where Dahl really showed his genius. That story is just viscerally satisfying to the slightly-obsessive, completionist kind of child that I was, but in a way that’s kind of hard to explain. I don’t think anything else ever quite hit that particular sweet spot for me (I was SO…

I love the Princess Bride, but call me crazy, people quoting it at length with no skill to a roomful of blatantly uninterested strangers is a personal hell of mine. NPR played clips of it several times and I had to exert a lot of energy not to just run my car off the road, hoping to die in the ensuing accident as long…

Usually I listen to NPR on my morning commute, and if it just gets too distressing for that early (I can only show up to work with smeared mascara from a story about refugees so many times each week), I switch over to the local radio morning-show blather for a few minutes (Elliot in the morning on DC101) which is…

The only people who benefit from not talking about Trump are the Republican Establishment, who would rather continue to pretend that their party is not the home of the most virulently racist, xenophobic, and reactionary that the U.S. has to offer. The Trump supporters have been there all along, hiding like bedbugs…

Why does anyone in the world get anything tattooed in blackletter? That could be “Autonia” as easily as “Antonio,” and I don’t think most people need to be adding that level of ambiguity to what is already a monstrously bad decision.

I was like, “Oh, how gracious. He’s trying to pull his friend back from literally destroying the world’s foremost democratic power, but he’ll soften the blow by agreeing to come over for dinner if, in fact, his friend manages to get in a position to destroy the world’s foremost democratic power. Because, you know, why…

Those of us who use Pocket specifically to read dirty fanfiction on the subway are happy for the lack of a “discovery” function.

Weird Pocket question, but did Pocket get rid of their toolbar icon to open their reading list? I recently had to backup my computer from a pre-Pocket save, and when I re-downloaded Pocket, the only thing the toolbar icon seemed to do was save the current page to Pocket - to actually access the reading list requires…