I just love this oil painting from Polish painter Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak–the colors, the composition, and the surreality of it. It’s like Lisa Frank meets Salvador Dalí.

From the Still Life Series by Ewa Prończuk-Kuziak

• GeekGirlGoddess on Inappropriate Nice Guys: “So, back to the Inappropriate Nice Guy: the ING is the guy who makes comments that are uncomfortable and often thinly veiled as compliments. They show up wherever you are and to crush and creep on you in a manner that makes it clear they want sex and intimacy from you on their terms.”
• Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
• YA Interrobang will not be covering Irreversible:  “We are not interested in redemption arcs for rapists.”
• And yet another article about “atypical” heart attack symptoms in women. I’d say less “atypical” and more like, “We should spend more time researching this and raising awareness instead of treating men as the default.”
• All 143 Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters On TV, And How They Died This was incredibly upsetting to scroll through. And every time I look at the page, the number is larger.
• I loved this “Ask Polly”: I’ve chosen to live in a cave for much of my life. I lived in a cave because at some point I decided it was wrong to be BIG and loud and arrogant and alive. I lived in a cave because I took my cues from the people who were ambivalent about me instead of taking my cues from the people who loved me like crazy.
• The always-delightful Hanne Blank has an essay about the “lifestyle change” known as Whole30: “Even Oprah, sitting pretty atop her genius bougie apotheosis Mount Olympus, at a height from which she could at any moment reasonably declare transcendent public fuckruptcy about ever going on another destined-to-fail diet and burn her Spanx in a blaze of glory on the White House lawn — you know the Obamas would let her — instead turns, as an investor as well as public face, to Weight Watchers.”
• N.K. Jemisin on Hamilton:
  

  This is what fantasy is for, in my not-so-humble opinion. This is the power of myth — of believing in, of identifying with, of evolving past. By celebrating and interrogating the myths of early America, Hamilton ends up creating something that those old school textbooks tried but failed to do: creating an historical heroic fantasy that we can all identify with. The textbooks just did it wrong; not only did they fuck up the facts, they tried too hard to exclude some and exalt others. Hamilton doesn’t chump out like that. And the result is magic.

• Marcella White Campbell on Hamilton:
  

  Watching Hamilton, I was deeply emotional, and not merely because it is a gripping and moving story. I realized, sitting there, that claiming the story as your own can be as radical and empowering an act as declaring war on a major foreign power and then having the audacity to create a new country whole-cloth. In its casting, in its deft use of uniquely American art forms, in its rich symbolism, Hamilton claims the story of America as every American’s story. My ancestor Newman Ingram’s story is my story and Alexander Hamilton’s story is also my story because they are both Americans and I am an American.

It me.

Reader submissions!

There are enough this week to make an entire section–hurray!

• How architecture changes for the deaf. Lilysea says, “Among other things talks about how ramps (rather than stairs), and wide corridors and wide footpaths, are good for Deaf access as well as wheelchair access.”
• Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s “The singing of the whales, the rising of the waters, the harvest of tears”: Mia believes that this is an amazing story and I agree with her!
• I can’t imagine why Mieneke of A Fantastical Librarian would think of me when she saw this link about adult coloring books in the 1960’s….
• Petrea Mitchell has another suggestion this week, to an article about the difference between pain and suffering and why treatment should focus on the latter. Really interesting and not something I’d’ve found on my own and my main takeaway is that we live in an imperfect world and no system or set of guidelines or even treatments are going to be perfect.

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