Friday Links 11/17

I woke up too early for no reason so here’s a links post, on time for once!

• I’ve started following French Vogue online and I’m really enjoying their “Sunday with…” series. Credit to the Jeanne Damas one for introducing me to this song.
• Love this Classic Film Club idea. I’ve seen most of the film noir on the list, but this selection of Japanese film noir is completely new to me and really peaking my interest! Where to start?
• The Marrying Mr. Darcy board game. Because it is a truth universally acknowledged, etc…
  Truly I have mixed feelings, but I’m curious.
• The trailer for “A Quiet Place“. Spooky. I like.
• The structural inequality within the comedy industry. “The solution is putting people in positions of power who are not male, not straight, not cisgender, not white. This is not taking something away unfairly — it is restoring opportunities that have been historically withheld.”
• You’ve heard of latte art, but how about smoothie art?
• My chosen candidate for the 2020 presidential election.
• My nihilistic sense of humor strikes again, but this time with cats. Super relatable.
• The pajama trend has been taken to its only logical conclusion and we can all go home now.
• The subtle misogyny of male incompetence. I’m surrounded by idiots.
• In at least 34 cases, unusually long Postal Service delays resulted in rejections of DACA applications.
• Choosing a different sperm donor is choosing a different child and a different future. What surprised this couple about their experience.
• I’m sorry, Blake Shelton isn’t even Gwen Stefani’s sexiest husband.
• Karen Brit Chick (who you completely should follow, I’m in love with her) on her favorite vintage shops in NYC. Saving this for my next trip.
• Deadpool mixed with Bob Ross. What’s not to love?
• Honestly it is not Teen Vogue’s time. It’s more relevant now than ever and I wish it had been in my time the politically active and interesting publication that it has been for the past year or so.

Sorry for using up all of your free NYT articles!

How ‘Great Illustrated Classics’ Ruined My Life

Okay, so that is a bit melodramatic and more than a bit unfair.

For those of you who don’t know, Great Illustrated Classics is a series by Baronet Books, a “treasury of 66 classic titles, a collection of books beautifully illustrated and adapted for young readers.” They carried a ton of them in my elementary school and my middle school. And I read a ton of them.

The problem is that they’re really just dumbed down versions of books that are great creations in their own right, true classics that deserve to be read and appreciated for themselves, without having read a scrubbed clean and stripped down outline beforehand.  I read almost all of the Illustrated Classics. I now wish I had waited a few years to read the original works or had read the original works right then and there- some of them are annotations of books that were children’s books to begin with!

That said, my feelings are a bit unfair because I’m very much aware that the Illustrated Classics, all being gathered in one place, facilitated my love of literature, particularly classics. Would I be so into catching up on the classics now if I hadn’t had those easily digestible finger foods back in the day? (To stretch this analogy to the breaking point- if an Ilustrated Classic is a Hostess Ding Dong (another thing I haven’t had since elementary school), the original books are usually Triple Chocolate Tortes- do those even exist?)
You can see the complete library of Illustrated Classics here. But I’m going to break down the ones that I read into two categories: books I wish I had waited to read in their original form and books I wish I had just read in their original form right then and there (late elementary to early middle school)- the books that my kids (Mashallah) will have on their shelves.

“9 Movies Destined To Be Classics!”

Co-opted directly from the youtube channel Screen Junkies because I disagree with essentially all of their picks. Whoops, sorry.  You can’t win them all.  And by you, I mean them. Check back in half a century and see who’s right.

These are movies from the 21st century that I think, decades from now, will be seen as classics.