Now seems as good a time as any to post a link to my favorite Slate article, which discusses the history of Traditional Chinese Medicine as Maoist Propaganda. Give it a read!

I was curious, since everyone around here thinks they know who is offended and why they should be. Turns out they're mostly dead wrong on that, go figure, huh? Sure some people will be I guess, but not all

Okay. No one else spoke up, so I'll be the dissent. I'm Russian and have spent plenty of time in Russia. If you're hanging out in Moscow and St. Pete high streets, sure, you'll see this. And a lot of women who come to the U.S. from there (like my stepmother) have certain "ambitions of grandeur", wear ridiculous…

The rape line is not okay, but to trivialize the rest of Nicki Minjaj and her career as just selling out and 'following the steps of Kesha' is wrong. Nevermind her astounding success, listen to her in interviews, watch her, she's in control of herself. She's not a puppet. She's the boss, she's tough, and she's at the…

She's referencing Nas who has a song called Ether. She's basically saying, "Hey Justin, I'm going to give the listeners a rap verse that's as good as Nas's verses."

Hingham Animal Control Officer Leslie Badger

She was allowed to make up to $119,000 in a year (being that she has a million kids). The state is claiming she made more than that & failed to report the additional income. Also, even if it didn't put her over, anyone on public assistance is required to report all of their income.

I'm going to sidestep the whole "fiasco" and just say this: anyone who thinks any photo they've looked at in a magazine is "reality" is fooling themselves.

Their brains were a little touched yesterday to run the pictures despite the negative reaction. Today, they've apparently been retouched.

This, so much this. I also started reading Jezebel as a teenager and the difference between the website I loved and read religiously years ago and its present form are vast. Former writers and commenters never would have allowed for such hateful language about women and their bodies. I remember days when it wasn't…

Brava. I first saw your comment and thought "holy fuck this is long." Then I read it, and it's perfect.

And how does a person respond to something like this? How does a woman who started reading this website as a teenager, who used to seek refuge here when her ideas about gender and equality were shot down by her friends, peers, and sometimes even family, who for some reason imagined this place as being a center for…

Funny, all I see is peaness?

Oh, I say this like a million times in these sorts of articles and nobody cares. Someone at Hahvahd says it and everyone's summoning lentils and shit.

This semester (That's the Japanese semester, which started in September and ends this month), I have been teaching a course (in Japanese, mostly for Japanese students, though there are some non-Japanese students in there, too) on "women and manga." (Manga, for those who don't know, is the Japanese word for…

Can we NOT with "spirit animal"? It's so far from okay. :(

I mean... Discovery Networks just released a movie dramatization of the Challenger Disaster like 2 months ago that exaggerates mundane details for the sake of entertainment, and I don't remember hearing anyone getting in a tizzy over that. And while I'm not offended by either, I find amplifying drama for the sake of…

There's precedent for using audio related to disasters in music, though. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing left six dead, but I've never heard of anyone criticizing Steve Reich for using radio traffic from that day in City Life.

We jus' poor, simple folk trying to make our way in the world, living off the land and doing what we can!