Friendmendations 11.11.19

Hello everyone!

Very good things that happened to me in the past week include listening to Rachel Bloom talk about Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and meal prepping this copycat Sweetgreen Harvest Bowl with this cranberry maple dressing. A not-great thing that happened to me was getting a stupid head cold. May your blessings be less mixed this week.

Onto recs!

A short read

Silicon Valley demon Mark Zuckerberg made the confounding claim recently that he started Facebook… because he thought more people should be sharing information about the Iraq War. That’s demonstrably untrue, but I’m glad he said it because it inspired a very funny response from Alexandra Petri, “The Social Network, rewritten  to reflect the true origin of Facebook.”

A long read

Fran Hoepfner is one of my favorite writers working today, hilarious and vulnerable with a distinct voice and an ability to cut right to the point of a thing that makes you wonder why you never saw it that way before. I revisit her piece “The Year of the Death Wish” a lot to marvel at the simplicity with which she reduces Tom Cruise’s ridiculous career to one idea like an onlooker pointing out that the emperor has no clothes at all.

It’s tough to watch Mission: Impossible — Fallout, and it’s even tougher to watch Cruise motorcycling sans helmet through the frantic roadways of Paris and not think, this guy is going to die making these movies.

I love the different ideas she ties into this piece — masculinity and rock climbing and the Very Online joke of adding “kms” onto anything and everything. It’s good! She’s so good.

This blew my MIND!

This animation style is beautiful and surreal and so damn innovative! I love it!

NSFW, btw, FWIW

This made me laugh so hard.

The first-ever poemmendations

My roommate Tess read me a poem this weekend and it was just the loveliest thing in the world. It’s called “The Orange” by Wendy Cope. You should read it, and then read it aloud to your roommate, maybe.

Another poem that I like and which mentions fruit is “The Leaving” by Brigit Peegen Kelly. I don’t read enough poetry, so if you have a poem you like, please link to it in the comments.

Let’s end on a comic that is pretty relevant to my life (I didn’t like…cry about it last week but I did almost cry, in public, for this exact reason last week.) k byyyyyyeee!