Have you ever read Sideways Stories from Wayside school? By Louis Sachar. I loved that at that age, it’s about a wacky school and I’m pretty sure each chapter is a different kid’s story, so it doesn't feel like a lengthy novel to tackle.

What an awesome way to combine not being funny with putting down women who are interested in things you are not interested in.

I buy my candles at IKEA. Those are some cheap candles.

Shout out to all my fellow Jezzies who read “inexpensive Yankee candles” and thought about how you only get Yankee candles when they're on the clearance endcap at TJ Maxx.

I know it’s just a typo but for a second there I was pretty excited about the Fairy Conservative South.

DAMN. Are they still together?

Exactly! When I was pregnant I HATED it when people would brush off my worries like, “Oh, women have been doing this for thousands of years.” Well, ya... and they’ve been dying for thousands of years too. How terrible if a woman was forced to carry an unwanted fetus/baby to birth, only to die in the process. UGH.

You are mean and bitter....

Fun fact: not all thin people have eating disorders.

Well, hey, as long as you’re willing to kill people over that. Nothing says “socially well-adjusted” better than a loaded gun smoking over a pile of dead corpses, amirite...

I think the suggestion is that he ought to have been suspended from duty while the investigation took place, not that charges necessarily ought to have been brought earlier.

I know we’re supposed to be deeply grateful that the cops were willing to deal with this piece of shit at all. And sure, yay, baby steps, etc.

Equally, you say? Delight over someone else’s impending doom is the same as raping a bunch of women chosen because of their race and social standing? You have an odd sense of scale.

Stalking is a tough charge to prove, and burglary has some elements that differ considerably from rape and sexual assault charges. It sounds like they threw every charge they could at him in hopes that the jury would convict of lesser charges even if they couldn’t agree on higher ones, and they got the reverse and got…

I would argue that the terminology is inherently skeevy, though. There’s certainly nothing wrong with eschewing processed foods, but to label certain foods as “clean” adds an unnecessary moral component towards eating.

I’d argue that the very language of “clean eating” imbues food with a level of stigma and phobia that’s pretty pathological. In eating disorder treatment, we talk about “disordered eating” versus an eating disorder. I don’t know if it’s safe to argue that clean eating is always an eating disorder (nor do I assume…

I’m defending my dissertation in about a week.

But that’s $200 for something you use all day every day...not a floofy top you wear maybe once or twice a month. You can be trendy, expensive, and well-made, OR you can be trendy, poorly-made, and cheap. You can’t expect people to buy trendy expensive garbage...at least not more than once.

I disagree. Lying to a child about their origins means there’s always a chance they’ll find out in an awful way from someone careless or malicious, or when grandma gets dementia or they get in a fight with their older sibling as a teen or a million other scenarios that can come up in any family. Or in this child’s…