The Audacious Roundup
For the week of August 11th
AUDACIOUS BOOKCLUB HAPPENINGS
Book club news! We’re partnering with the lovely people at Allstora for the Audacious Book Club. Now, you can sign up to have the monthly selections delivered to your doorstep each month!
Our August selection is Nice Girls Don’t Win by Parvati Shallow. We will have a live book club discussion with the author on August 28th at 8pm EST/5 am PST. Registration is open! I hope to see many of you there. I’ve put together an Audacious Book Club storefront if you want to buy current or forthcoming book club titles. There is a bookclub FAQ if you have questions about how it all works.
THE NEWSLETTER WEEK IN REVIEW
Chimeras Live Among Us
Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “Chimeras Live Among Us” by Leilani Graham. Leilani is a writer and healthcare consultant based in the Bay Area, California. Having survived four cardiac arrests and a complicated heart transplant, Graham uses her arts background to teach, write, and spe…
PERSONAL & PROFESSIONAL NEWS
On October 18th, from 11 am to noon, I will be appearing at the Chicago Humanities Festival, talking about a decade of Bad Feminist. Come through!
Thanks to you guys and other readers, The Portable Feminist Reader is a NYT bestseller! So thank you! And if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, there’s still time! (And there will always be time, it’s a book.) And check out Love Letter to a Garden, by Debbie Millman.
Book and project buying links: Books I’ve Written, RGB Imprint Titles, Rebind: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton.
READING MATERIAL
A starred review for Tochi Onyebuchi’s Racebook: A Personal History of the Internet, out on October 21st.
Trump met with fellow war criminal Putin in Alaska and got EMBARRASSED on the international stage. One of the very competent aides in the Trump camp left documents in the hotel business center. It was just an all around success.
He has also basically taken over Washington D.C., sending in the National Guard to patrol safe streets under the guise of making the streets safe. It is only making residents feel unsafe.
One of the secdef’s freaky friends is a pastor who preaches that women shouldn’t be able to vote. These motherfuckers!
The idiot running NASA wants to stop studying earth science.
Fruteros are a lovely part of Los Angeles culture, but with the menace of ICE, they may well disappear from our streets.
A new job for women just dropped—mankeeping.
The US getting a cut of chip sales to China seems like extortion.
Billionaires are bad neighbors. They also have ridiculous ideas about reinventing basic things like… schools.
Some unwashed folks have created an all white community in Arkansas and, you know, congratulations to them isolating themselves away from the rest of us. To be clear, this sort of thing is dangerous because these people are virulent bigots but it is always useful when they identify themselves, without ambiguity.
Most Texas Democrats abandoned their colleague Nicole Collier who was essentially taken hostage by state Republican leaders. So much for solidarity and governance. How is something like this happening? Well…
NewsMax has to pay another legal settlement for their fictional reporting.
What’s that? Store foot traffic has actually gone down since the American Eagle Sydney Sweeney ad for very ugly jeans? Oh dear!
As if the news wasn’t terrible enough, there’s no “song of the summer” this summer.
In Mauritius, we may be able to see the future of the climate crisis in the present.
A majority of the people in Copenhagen commute via bicycle!
Each sentence in this story gets progressively more unhinged. Just wild and terrible all around. There is never a good story where crypto bros are involved. But also, how do men get away with SO MUCH bad behavior????
Air Canada flight attendants are on strike and refuse to go back to work. Power to the people! Pay them! I fly enough to know that whatever they are asking for isn’t even enough.
There are mass shootings every day. In Austin, at a Target.
Who doesn’t enjoy a story about a scammer? They really are so bold! And yet so obvious! It’s amazing how gullible people are. And here’s a minor heir to Anna Delvey!
As we all knew would be the case, the Supreme Court is going to reconsider marriage equality. This is being initiated by the infamous Kim Davis, who is on her fourth marriage.
AI is becoming more and more central to contemporary discourse (AND IT IS SO RIDICULOUS AND BAD) but this was an interesting piece about AI and how we frame the future. Also, it doesn’t help science.
A conversation with Michaela Coel, who has new work coming!
New book Born in Flames is reviewed in The New Yorker. And a review of Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs in the NYT.
RIP Danielle Spencer. RIP Terence Stamp, who was an amazing actor but particularly good as Bernadette in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. RIP Tristan Rogers.
I am enjoying Law Roach on Project Runway. And speaking of Law Roach, he styled… Travis Kelce (?!) for a GQ profile.
What is with sculptors doing so poorly in representing MLK Jr?
If you’re on TikTok and have dipped into RichTok, you may be familiar with Becca Bloom, who is profiled by the Wall Street Journal.
Jennie C. Jones talks about her commissioned sculpture on the roof of the MOMA in NYC.
Who among us has not wanted to sweetly suckle a pacifier during a stressful moment?
There’s some rich white people drama on Nantucket.
A nepo baby is in line to take over Vogue. I don’t really care about nepo babies but I do think the phrase is super cute.
Sarah Jessica Parker doesn’t care about the And Just Like That haters. Allegedly. That may be true! Why would she? But it is also true that the show abandoned its original premise because of a cast rift and could never, ever overcome trying to make us believe that THEE Samantha Jones would miss Big’s funeral and not be there for her best friend. It would not happen and trying to spend four seasons making us believe Samantha was just a phone call away as Carrie went through such a major life change is just silly. It’s beyond silly. The new show should be a new thing but it cannot completely disrespect the source material.
A froyo renaissance.
An essay from Kate Zambreno’s forthcoming collection Animal Stories.
My friend Brad Listi, who I affectionately call “Mr. California,” has started a new business venture, an online learning company called Deep Dive, and their first offering is on novel writing!
