Things I Read That I Love #34: Frontierland

HELLO and welcome to the 34th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about sex in the Olympic village and Mormons! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.

The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.

Unmasking Horror: A special report, Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity (March 1995), by Nicholas Kristoff for The New York Times“Half a century after the end of the war, a rush of books, documentaries and exhibitions are unlocking the past and helping arouse interest in Japan in the atrocities committed by some of Japan’s most distinguished doctors. Scholars and former members of the unit say that at least 3,000 people — by some accounts several times as many — were killed in the medical experiments; none survived.”

You’re Addicted To What? (July 2012), by Marty Klein for The Humanist – Sex addiction: not actually a thing.

How The Mormons Make Money (July 2012), by Caroline Winter for Bloomsburg Businessweek – You know, whomever thought up the “prosperity gospel” idea, like the idea of preaching to all your followers that making lots and lots of money is doing the Lord’s work, and then made it into a religion and got people to follow it is a very wise entrepreneur.

Related: What’s So Effective About Stephen Covey? (December 2004), by Timothy K Smith for Fortune – About the (Mormon) guy who wrote the best-selling book “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People.”

The Chickens and The Bull (July 2012), by William McGowan for Slate – This is really something –> “The rise and incredible fall of a vicious extortion ring that preyed on prominent gay men in the 1960s.”

On Ladyblogs (July 2012), by Molly Fischer for n+1 The article this girl wrote in February sent us all into a tizzy, mostly because our website is a primo example of what she was talking about yet we weren’t in the article because we never are in articles about lady-blogs or feminist blogs, because we’re gay. Anyhow, I found her second piece really, really interesting, with lots of stuff to think about!

Nan Goldin Interview (Fall 1991), by Stephen Westfall for BOMB Magazine – “But that was a lot of the power of the work; that I was in the exact same state that I was recording. These were the people I lived with, these were my friends, these were my family, this was myself. I’d photograph people dancing while I was dancing. Or people having sex while I was having sex. Or people drinking while I was drinking. There was no separation between me and what I was photographing.”

A Fine Balance (June 2011), by Emily Gould for Intelligent Life – This is book review of a memoir about yoga, but it’s really interesting even if you don’t want to read the book about yoga.

War is Betrayal (July 2012), by Chris Hedges for The Boston Review – “The disillusionment comes swiftly. It is not the war of the movies. It is not the glory promised by the recruiters. The mythology fed to you by the church, the press, the school, the state, and the entertainment industry is exposed as a lie. We are not a virtuous nation. God has not blessed America. Victory is not assured. And we can be as evil, even more evil, than those we oppose. War is venal, noisy, frightening, and dirty. The military is a vast bureaucratic machine fueled by hyper-masculine fantasies and arcane and mind-numbing rules. War is always about betrayal—betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics, and of soldiers and Marines by politicians.”

Will You Still Medal In the Morning? (July 2012), by Sam Alipour for ESPN – In the Olympic Village, all the athletes party and have sex, etc.

An Interview With A Person Who Has Been to Disney Parks 40 Times (July 2012), by Claire Zulkey for The Awl – I love Disneyworld, and also am somewhat constantly fascinated and intrigued by regular people whose lives revolve around a commercialized entity.

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Riese

Riese is the 43-year-old Co-Founder of Autostraddle.com as well as an award-winning writer, video-maker, LGBTQ+ Marketing consultant and aspiring cyber-performance artist who grew up in Michigan, lost her mind in New York and now lives in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in nine books, magazines including Marie Claire and Curve, and all over the web including Nylon, Queerty, Nerve, Bitch, Emily Books and Jezebel. She had a very popular personal blog once upon a time, and then she recapped The L Word, and then she had the idea to make this place, and now here we all are! In 2016, she was nominated for a GLAAD Award for Outstanding Digital Journalism. She's Jewish and has a cute dog named Carol. Follow her on twitter and instagram.

Riese has written 3271 articles for us.

20 Comments

  1. Nan Goldin’s book “Couples and Loneliness” changed the way I thought about photography as a medium.

    She took pictures of herself with her partner, who was abusing her, and then a picture of herself after she was abused so that she would remember and remember never to go back.

    What’s amazing about her work is that she documents drag queens and gender-non-conforming folks not in a way that makes it seem like she is a tourist in their world, but in a way that shows that she loves and understands them as her friends and lovers.

    Basically, go to the library and check out that book.

  2. I just read Fischer’s articles and liked them both. Very interesting, yes. (I’d say more but I feel as if I’m about to explode due to radioactive meta self-consciousness of the ego or what have you.)

    Now I’m off to read that Covey article. I was once given a copy of ‘The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens’ and I never read it (even though the cover was engagingly youthful and even had a pair of denim trousers on it). Now I want to see if I missed out on achieving more fulfilling life.

    • The Jill Lepore article about the history of the second amendment mentioned in that article is really good as well

      • What startles me about the gun control debate is how conservatives have successfully framed it as a false dichotomy: if you support gun control at all, you want to take every single person’s gun away. But I don’t think I’ve met many people (in the US) who actually support outright banning all guns; we just want to keep them out of the hands of people with long criminal records or histories of violent mental illnesses, i.e. people who have a high chance of using that gun to hurt other people. I fail to see how that threatens the everyday, normal person who just wants it for hunting or self-defense. And I know a lot of people who want to ban assault weapons, but you don’t use those to kill deer. Even if you’re owning guns for self-defense, you don’t need something that’s designed to kill a lot of people quickly to protect your family against one or two burglars.

  3. New life goal: Sneak into the Olympic Village, get in Hope Solo’s pants.

    (Also letting you know that the link to the last article doesn’t work)

  4. I’m excited especially to read the Mormon articles 1)because I am (morbidly? is that the appropriate word to use here? because it’s the sami feeling I have when I read about Scientology or Jonestown) fascinated with Mormons and Mormon culture (Mormon mommy blogs: secret addiction. And I’m SO SAD SecretlySoBlessed is over) and 2) because my boss is amking us read 7 Hbaits and I find it so obvious and reductive, almost, and I’m pretty annoyed by all the religious undertones (and overtones) in it, but I can’t say anything because I’m pretty sure my boss doesn’t notice.

  5. I have so many feelings about that article about sex addiction I can’t even parse them. Fuck.

    It’s like saying bisexuals don’t exist because you’ve only ever dealt with hetero or homosexuals in your private practice and nobody can agree on the definition.

    Aawerpaerajerawelrae;r

    • I don’t think it’s a fair comparison. Even if you’ve never dealt with bisexuals in your own practice, there is consensus among the psychological community that bisexuality is real, and abundant proof that people can be attracted to multiple genders.

      Sex addiction is much more controversial and does not have this body of proof behind it, so people would have more room to be skeptical based on personal experience alone than they would with bisexuality.

  6. I liked Emily Gould’s review, witty and well-written, although yoga culture distresses me. Was also surprised that she refrained from discussing her spiritual experiences :s she wrote an article on guardian.co.uk last week that was mildly serious about the rent being “too damn high” and such. It lacked almost entirely any details of her private life. I thought, “Where is the oversharing Emily that I’ve grown to love?”

  7. I remember that I read about the Japanese government’s “medical experiments” on Chinese prisoners on Wikipedia once, and even their matter-of-fact, dispassionate description was enough to make me ill. World War II was horrible in so many different ways. It bugs me how Americans idealize it as some “golden era” when it showed us some of the worst examples of humanity.

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