This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

I recently recommended a novel to a friend with my highest form of praise, one I assumed would make her take it from my hands without hesitation. It moved me to tears, I said, holding the book in my palms like a sacred offering.

Crying has accompanied some of the most profound moments of my life. An airport farewell with no promise of reunion. Getting accepted into my dream university. Heartbreak. Daydreaming about the future. Losing a pet. Adopting a new one. 

When I say that a book has made me cry, what I’m really saying is: This is part of the canon of some of the most profound moments of my life. 

And that’s why, when my friend didn’t want to borrow the book based on my recommendation, it hit me like a sucker punch.

But Rachel, you cry at everything, she said with the same matter-of-fact-ness that one might use when saying the sky is blue.

She has a point. I am a bit of a crier. While crying has featured in some of my most life-defining moments, I can also be set off anywhere, anytime, by almost anything. In the last week alone, I’ve cried looking at a social media account of a husky puppy and older cat (who are best friends), watching a sports documentary about a basketball team I don’t even like, and retelling the ending of my favorite zombie movie.

But so what if I sometimes put on a sad playlist so that I can dance around and cry the big ugly tears? So what if I replay Aragorn’s speech before the big battle in The Return of the King (it always gets me)? Does that make my tears less meaningful? 

While my emotions tend to be close to the surface, there are social codes even I hate to break. I’ve tried on sunglasses while shopping post-breakup to shield my puffy eyes from strangers. I’ve pretended to have something stuck in my contact lens when heading to a scary doctor’s appointment. And I’ve lost the ability to speak in front of my Ph.D. supervisor, all too conscious that standing my ground would open the floodgates. Crying can be cathartic in some settings; in others, it’s just plain embarrassing.

I’ve curated this reading list because I want to unpack our cultural and personal attitudes toward crying. Do our tears mean less if they’re free-flowing? How valuable are the movies and books that move us to tears? From where do we develop our attitudes about crying? How do our cultural upbringings, race, gender, and sexuality factor into our individual and collective relationships with emotional expression? What does it mean to cry in communion with others? Can tears be understood through a lens of rebellion and power?

So gather ’round with a box of tissues—then read ’em and weep, fellow criers. 

For Crying Out Loud: Both Personal and Political, Wailing Disrupts the Social Order (Renee Simms, Guernica, November 2020)

“The usual occasion for public wailing is death,” Renee Simms writes for Guernica. While funerals are ostensibly a time for communal grieving, my own experiences have largely consisted of suppressing emotions to avoid making people uncomfortable. When a sob escapes someone’s chest, it echoes throughout the building unanswered, the rest of us politely averting our eyes from the sobber. At funerals, we share in the knowledge that we are all grieving, and yet, within my own communities, there are limits to how much grief is socially acceptable to display in front of fellow mourners.

In this essay, Simms recounts her uncle’s funeral, where expectations of suppressed grief were punctuated by her auntie’s wailing. As the “disgraced first wife,” as Simms refers to her, Simms’ auntie was expected to suppress her pain. Instead, she grieved aloud, wailing so that no one could pretend otherwise. Other women soon joined in. Situating her auntie’s piercing sobs against the backdrop of anti-Black racism and trauma, Simms explores how individual grief is tangled up with collective trauma, and how the vulnerability of public wailing can repair communal ties along with providing personal catharsis. Simms draws from Black feminists like Patricia Hill Collins and Audre Lorde, scenes from Spike Lee films, and religious traditions to explore public wailing as ritual and disruption.

In hindsight, my aunt’s act of wailing at the funeral was an assertion of her standing within our community. She dared to speak about her love for her ex-husband when everyone wanted her silent. Despite attempts to shame her about her failed marriage, she publicly mourned her loss. Her cries proclaimed that what had been done to her had been done to all of us. By piercing the silence of the church and daring to be vulnerable, she made us feel our connection to each other. Within minutes, other mourners began openly weeping or talking, and embracing my aunt. They acknowledged her pain and belonging. Through vulnerability, she asserted her power and reestablished the communal ties that sexism and racism had torn apart.

Crying, a Dissertation (Éireann Lorsung, Memoir Land, April 2023)

What does it mean to exist both as a scholar and as a feeler? Can you even be both, or do emotions and intellect not mix? In this personal essay, Éireann Lorsung reflects on her years as a Ph.D. student—a period when she cried regularly—and wrestles with the claim that there’s an “either/or” when it comes to thinking and crying. She writes:

My tears seemed like a sign that I was unsuitable for serious scholarship. But that isn’t quite right. In my experience, crying was not divorced from knowing; it was simply farther out, past the language I had at the time. I knew; I just couldn’t talk about it yet. 

While Lorsung’s essay resonates with me because I had a similar Ph.D. experience (lots of tears and tissues, lots of justifying human emotions in academic writing), her observations and insights extend beyond academia. In everyday life, people find ways to invalidate emotions, dismiss feelings as irrelevant to knowledge, and ultimately disempower feelers altogether. This is especially true for those of us who are marginalized in some way. Have you ever had an argument and been told you were too emotional? Has someone ever said that you should be more objective? That people would take you more seriously if you weren’t so hysterical? I hope Lorsung’s essay gives you the same permission it did for me—to embrace those parts of yourself that are moved to tears as your most sacred sources of knowledge.

There’s a long tradition of thinking about intellectuals as somehow disembodied, ideal minds that can have ideas about things without being affected by those ideas, or without their ideas affecting the things they think about. Of course, no such person exists: it’s just that certain kinds of people—well, white, educated, cisgender, straight, relatively wealthy, generally Christian men, to put a point on it—get to walk into literature and history and philosophy as if they are that ideal mind. This isn’t about laying individual blame; it’s that if everyone around you speaks like you, you probably won’t notice that you have an accent, but you’ll be able to hear the accents of anyone whose ways of speaking are inflected by some difference in place or family or language. You get the picture. If the model for being a serious thinker is someone who never cries, well, what happens to the person for whom tears are always close to the surface? 

Crying Shame (Carl Wilson, Slate, June 2014)

Droves of teenagers fled to the cinema in 2014 to watch The Fault in Our Stars (TFIOS)—not for fun-filled popcorn parties, but to have an ugly cry. Critics referred to the film as a “tearjerker with genuine emotion” and “exploitative … yet sincere.” 

In this piece of cultural criticism for Slate, Carl Wilson pushes back on the implication in these takes: That movies that make a deliberate attempt to elicit tears are cheap, manipulative, or disingenuous. Wilson asks, “What might we imagine the teens are seeking, and why with this movie in particular, and how if at all do we factor its power as a tear-delivery system into its value as an artwork?” In a challenge to this idea that tears diminish art’s worth, Wilson explores how emotional responses like crying can factor into value. 

You might say that the teen weepie picture is cathartic of all these adolescent anxieties, but theorists are increasingly dubious about whether or not catharsis exists, at least where tears are concerned. Do you actually purge emotions when you cry over art? Perhaps instead you acquire some emotions you’ve never had before, in response to unfamiliar situations, as if in a kind of rehearsal—for instance, for the eventual experience of losing someone you love. Maybe screen sorrow provides practice at both feeling and channeling feeling.

After all, a teenager is at best a few years past phases of childhood when crying fits weren’t something she could consciously manage. What a pleasure, then, to choose to cry, perhaps along with your friends, and then have the movie end and come slowly back to neutral. And then do it again. It might relate to potential emotional trauma the way a climbing wall or a roller coaster can act upon a fear of heights, as a kind of exposure therapy.

While I’ve never seen TFIOS, I’m no stranger to crying in a cramped, dark theater (perhaps one of my favorite places to cry). Most memorable was the time I saw the kid-friendly animated film Inside Out with my mom; with one look at each other, we completely lost it. Good thing she always carries tissues.

Crying While Reading Through the Centuries (Pelagia Horgan, The New Yorker, July 2014)

Inspired by the debate about the merit of Young Adult novels happening at Slate (including the discourse surrounding The Fault in Our Stars), Pelagia Horgan asks in this essay for The New Yorker, “What does it mean to cry over a book?” When I recommended a novel to my friend on the basis that it made me cry, what I was trying to say was that the book was profound, and that’s why she should read it. My friend, on the other hand, took my crying over a book as something about me (namely that I’m a boo-hoo kind of gal).

Beginning with the 18th-century sentimental novel, Horgan approaches the question of what it means to cry over a book through the lens of literary history. 

Tears have had a surprisingly prominent place in the history of the novel. Readers have always asked about the role that emotion plays in reading: What does it mean to be deeply moved by a book? Which books are worthy objects of our feelings? In different eras, people answered those questions in different ways. In the eighteenth century, when the novel was still a new form, crying was a sign of readerly virtue. “Sentimental” novels, brimming with tender and pathetic scenes, gave readers an occasion to exercise their “finer feelings.” Your tears proved your susceptibility to the suffering of others. 

Ultimately, Horgan argues that the books that make us cry reveal something about ourselves, whether that’s who we are or who we want to be. “Talking about what makes us cry is also a way of talking about ourselves,” she writes. I think that’s why others connecting with the same books we do resonates with us; it’s a way of seeing and feeling seen. And it’s why you hope that your friends might click with the books you’re moved by. It’s not because it suggests a shared taste in literature, but rather a mutual understanding of who we are—and who we love and what we fear—in the real world.

Crying in Public (Esme Blegvad, Rookie, February 2016)

A friend once joked that they wanted to make a map of all the places they’d cried in public to create a personal geography of tears. My own geography of tears would use so much ink on the page for Oxford, where I’ve lived for the better part of a decade, that it would look more like a coloring book than a map.

There’s the High Street (voice-noting a friend about an emotional meetup), outside and inside the Sheldonian Theatre (looking enviously upon people in graduation gowns as I applied for another degree extension; then, years later, when donning the scarlet and blue robes myself), my favorite café (probably just hormones), some public toilets (wouldn’t recommend), and on the bus ride home (wearing a mask makes tears easier to hide).

In this tender 13-page comic for Rookie, Esme Blegvad shares her experiences of crying in public—anywhere from the city bus to the nail salon to the bagel shop—in order to contemplate the virtues and hazards of public crying. Blegvad acknowledges that crying is always somewhat public, given that it’s “an outward display of anguish.” So, why does doing it in front of others feel so embarrassing? And why does watching others cry in public make us feel so uncomfortable? Although crying among strangers can be a humbling experience, Blegvad admits that there’s also something freeing about letting go when you’re surrounded by other people but are still anonymous, and ultimately, alone. 

Sometimes it feels like that ‘stark reality’ itself actually facilitates these ‘public displays of anguish’ – there is something a bit liberating about really feeling your shit in front of a bunch of strangers, because despite being physical surrounded by other bodies, you are in fact still technically alone, and totally anonymous. Like sometimes moping quietly to myself among the tangled limbs of rush-hour commuters on the G train … feels like I’m safe and cozy in a sheltered glen in an enchanted forest, or something! Quite the comfy place for a cathartic cry …

I love Blegvad’s sketches, which add a rawness and surrealism to her words. And given my own propensity for crying in public, I’m inclined to agree that there’s something liberating and rebellious about committing this faux pas. Cry, baby, cry!

The Pain and Joy of Rediscovering My Trans Tears (Dawood Qureshi and Editors, gal-dem, February 2022)

Initially, I wanted to curate this reading list to destigmatize crying and demystify the shame that accompanies letting it all out. Crying, to me, feels like a natural outpouring of expression when words are insufficient. Something elemental, natural, even animalistic.

But what about the people who can’t—or don’t—cry? What does this inability say about them?

“Tears are a gift I feel I’m forever watching others granted,” Dawood Qureshi writes in this deeply personal essay for gal-dem. Qureshi, who was socialized as a boy in a South Asian Muslim family, is now exploring their identity as a trans Muslim and grappling with their difficulty performing femininity in the way that cisgender, white women do: Expressing emotions and crying with abandon is a vulnerability (and a privilege) that Qureshi can’t access so easily. They grapple with the question, “If I cannot cry, and I struggle to show my deepest emotions, and if I am only able to rip this sadness from within myself when I am alone…does this make me less…feminine?” 

All these years later, as I explore my identity as a trans Muslim, I am plagued by the harsh words from the men of my past. The identification of crying as a ‘feminine’ trait, and the links this has to being vulnerable, are particularly damning. If I cannot cry, and I struggle to show my deepest emotions, and if I am only able to rip this sadness from within myself when I am alone…does this make me less…feminine? Am I so infected by the male toxicity of my youth that I can never hope to be feminine in the way I choose? Will I ever learn to dance freely through my emotions as I see women on TV and in books do? As I see my white, cisgender friends do? This is as much a race issue as it is a gender issue; people of colour often grow up with a premature set of responsibilities thrust upon them, and this can create a barrier between them and the freedom at which they express themselves.

Qureshi’s essay shatters the illusion that crying is inherently natural and divorced from the ways in which we are socialized. In exploring their personal struggle to cry freely through the lens of gender, race, and religion, Qureshi illustrates how tears are entangled with femininity and whiteness. Ultimately, it is a privilege to access vulnerability. Still, Qureshi doesn’t believe that crying should only be reserved for people with various social and systemic privileges. The real question, then, isn’t why some can’t cry; instead, we should ask, if we live in a world where not everyone can cry freely, what does that say about the world we’ve built? And how can we foster a world where expressing vulnerability feels safe for everyone? 

Rachel Dlugatch is a UK-based writer, researcher, and crier. She holds a DPhil in anthropology from the University of Oxford, and she publishes a newsletter that explores the intersection of power, culture, and the self.

Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copy Editor: Peter Rubin

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | December 2018 | 10 minutes (2,554 words)

On November 30th, Tavi Gevinson published her last ever editor’s letter at Rookie. The 22-year-old started the site when she was just 15, and in the intervening years it had spawned a pastel-hued community of girlhood, which, if not always sparkly, was always honest. The letter spanned six pages, 5707 words. In Longreads terms, that’s 20 minutes, 20 minutes of Gevinson agonizing over the site she loved so much, the site that was so good, that was now bigger than her, that she couldn’t figure out how to save. “Rookie had been founded, in part, as a response to feeling constantly marketed to in almost all forms of media,” she wrote, “to being seen as a consumer rather than a reader or person.”

The market had won, but Gevinson was fighting to the death. It was hard to read. You could sense her torturing herself. And she was. Because in truth there was nothing Gevinson could have done, because the failure of Rookie was not about her, or even about the poor state of media as a whole. It was about what it has always been about, which is that as much power as women have online — as strong as their voices are, as good as their work is, as valuable as it is to women, especially young women — its intrinsic worth is something capitalism, dominated by men, feels no obligation to understand. This is what ultimately killed Rookie. And The Hairpin. And The Toast. And maybe even Lenny Letter too.

***

In her first ever editor’s letter, Tavi Gevinson explained that she wasn’t interested in the “average teenage girl,” or even in finding out who that was or whether Rookie appealed to her. “It seems that entire industries are based on answering these very questions,” she wrote. “Who is the typical teenage girl? What does she want? (And, a lot of the time, How can we get her allowance?)” She claimed not to have the answer but provided it anyway by not asking the question: by not inquiring, like other young women’s publications, whether her readers would like some lipstick or maybe some blush with that. Instead, Rookie existed in a state of flux, a mood board of art and writing and photography on popular culture and fashion and politics and, just, the reality of being a girl. In an interview with NPR in 2011, Gevinson noted the hypocrisy of other teen magazines’ feminist gestures: “they say something really simple about how you should love your body and be confident or whatever, but then in the actual magazine, there will still be stuff that maybe doesn’t really make you love your body.”

Writer Hazel Cills emailed Gevinson when she was 17 to ask if she could join Rookie. In her eulogy for the site, published in Jezebel, Cills described the magazine’s novel concept: “unlike Teen Vogue or Seventeen, we were overwhelmingly staffed with actual teenagers, and were free to write about our realities as if they were the stuff of serious journalism.” Lena Singer, who was in her 30s when she worked as Rookie’s managing editor, thinks the publication deserves some credit for the fact that adults are now more willing to defer to adolescents than they were when it launched. “Part of my role as an editor there was to help protect the idea — and I still believe it — that the world doesn’t need another adult’s opinion about teen spaces, online or elsewhere,” she says. “Teens say what needs to be known about that.” And when they didn’t have the answers, they chose which adults to consult with video features like “Ask a Grown Man,” where celebrities like Thom Yorke answered readers’ questions. The column would have been familiar to Sassy aficionados, particularly fans of its “Dear Boy” series which had guys like Beck offering advice. Which made sense, because Sassy was basically the OG Rookie.

Named by the 13-year-old daughter of one of the heads of its publishing company, Fairfax, Sassy arrived in 1988 and was the first American magazine that actually spoke the language of adolescence. Teen publications dated back to 1944, the year Seventeen launched, but Sassy was different. “The wink-wink, exasperated, bemused tone was completely unlike the vaguely disguised parental voice of Seventeen,” write Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer in How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine. And unlike Teen or YM, it did not make guys the goal and girls the competition — if it had a goal at all, it was to be smart (and preferably not a conservative). Sassy was launched as the U.S. iteration of the Australian magazine Dolly — they originally shared a publisher — and presented itself as the big sister telling you everything you needed to know about celebrity, fashion, and beauty but also drugs, sex, and politics. “The teen magazines here were like Good Housekeeping for teen-agers,” Dolly co-founder Sandra Yates told the New York Times in 1988, adding, “I’m going to prove that you can run a business with feminist principles and make money.”

So she hired Jane Pratt, an associate editor at Teenage magazine, who matched her polka dot skirt with work boots, who donated to a pro-choice organization. Pratt “cast” writers like Dolly did, then went further to reinforce their personalities by publishing more photos and encouraging them to write in the first person, with plenty of self-reference, culminating in a sort of reality TV show-slash-blog before either of those things existed. Sassy became ground zero for indie music coverage thanks largely to Christina Kelly, a fan of Slaves of New York author Tama Janowitz who wrote the way teenagers talk. “I don’t know how to say where my voice came from,” she says. “It was just there.” Like the other writers on staff, she offered a proto-Jezebel take on pop culture, a new form of postmodern love-hate criticism.

At its peak, Sassy, which had one of the most successful women’s magazine launches ever (per Jesella and Meltzer), attracted 800,000 readers. But this was the era of the feminist backlash, where politicians were doubling down on good old American family values. The writers and editors at Sassy weren’t activists, per se, but they were the children of second wavers, they went to universities with women’s departments, they knew about the patriarchy. “Sassy was like a Trojan horse,” wrote Jesella and Meltzer, “reaching girls who weren’t necessarily looking for a feminist message.” Realizing that adolescents were more sexually active, receiving letters about the shame around it, Sassy made it a priority to provide realistic accounts of sex without the moralism. They covered homosexuality, abortion, and even abuse, and were the first teen magazine in America to advertise condoms.

In response, right-wing religious groups petitioned to boycott Sassy‘s advertisers; within several months the magazine lost nearly nearly 20 percent of its advertising. After several changes in ownership, including the removal of Sandra Yates and a squarer mandate, the oxymoronic conservative Sassy eventually folded into Teen magazine in 1997, the alternative press devoured once again by the mainstream.

But Sassy left behind a community. A form of analog social media, the magazine united writers with readers, but also readers with each other. Sassy even had its readers conceptualize an issue in 1990 — the “first-ever reader-produced issue of a consumer magazine” — the same year Andi Zeisler secured an internship at Sassy with a hand-illustrated envelope and the straightforward line, “I want to be your intern.” Six years later, she co-created her own magazine, Bitch, a cross between Sassy and Ms. It had the same sort of intimate community where, Zeisler explains, “there’s somehow a collective feeling of ownership that you don’t have with something like Bustle.”

Bustle, a digital media company for millennial women, is often cited as the counter-example to indie sites like Sassy, Bitch, and Rookie. It has more than 50 million monthly uniques (Bustle alone boasts 37 million) and is run by a man named Bryan Goldberg, who upon its 2013 launch wrote, with a straight face, “Maybe we need a destination that is powered by the young women who currently occupy the bottom floors at major publishing houses.” While Sassy had to struggle to be profitable and sustainable in an ad-based and legacy driven industry, now corporate entities like Bustle manspread sites like Rookie into non-existence. “The one thing that has stayed the same,” says Zeisler, “is the fact that alternative presentations of media by and for girls and young women is really overlooked as a cultural force.”

***

Tavi Gevinson was born the year Sassy died, but Lena Dunham arrived just in time. Recalling her predecessor, she described her feminist newsletter, Lenny Letter, which launched in 2015 as “a big sister to young radical women on the Internet.” Delivered to your inbox, Lenny, backed by Hearst, mimicked the intimacy of magazines past, the ones that existed outside Twitter and the comments section. It included an advice column and interviews (the first was with Hillary Clinton) as well as personal essays touching on various sociopolitcal issues. It was more activist than Sassy, more earnest than ironic, more 20-something than adolescent. It even had a Rookie alum, Laia Garcia, as its deputy editor. Lenny’s third issue launched it into mainstream consciousness when Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay about pay disparity in Hollywood, which provoked an industry-wide conversation. Then three years after launch and without warning, on October 19, a final letter by Dunham and co-creator Jenni Konner claimed “there’s no one reason for our closure” and shut down.

Lenny’s demise came nine months after that of another site that had a loyal female-driven community: The Hairpin. Founded in 2010 by Edith Zimmerman under The Awl umbrella, the site that had also published writing by Lenny editor-at-large Doreen St. Félix claimed “a natural end” — the same words The Awl used for its closure. NPR’s Glen Weldon suggested more specific reasons for their termination: the decline in ad revenue online, the sites’ unwillingness to compromise, their independence. “The Awl and The Hairpin were breeding grounds for new writers — like The National Lampoon in the ‘70s, Spy Magazine in the ‘80s, Sassy in the ‘90s and McSweeney’s in the aughts,” he explained, adding, “Invariably they would find, waiting for them, a comparatively small, but loyal, sympathetic and (mostly) supportive readership.”

Two years before this, a similar site, The Toast, founded by former Hairpinners Nicole Cliffe and Daniel Ortberg, also closed. The publication was created in 2013 to be an intersectional space for women to write basically whatever they fancied. They even invited Rookie to contribute. The Toast published multiple features a day, stating, “we think there’s value in posting things that we’ve invested time and energy on, even if it comes at the expense of ‘You won’t believe this story about the thing you saw on Twitter and have already believed’ link roundups.” In a lengthy message posted in May 2016, Ortberg broke down the financial circumstances that left them weighing their options. “Most of them would have necessitated turning The Toast into something we didn’t like, or continuing to work ourselves into the ground forever,” Ortberg wrote, adding, “The only regret I have is that Bustle will outlive us and I will never be able to icily reject a million-dollar check from Bryan Goldberg, but that’s pretty much it.”

It says everything about the American media industry that Bustle, a site with an owner who mansplained women’s sites to women, a site which acquired the social justice-oriented publication Mic only after it had laid off almost its entire staff, has outlived the ones that are actually powered by women. If you look closely, you will see that the majority of women’s sites that continue to exist — from SheKnows to Refinery29 — have men in charge. Even HelloGiggles, which was created by three women, is owned by the male-run Meredith Corporation. That means that, fundamentally, these publications are in the hands of a gender that does not historically believe in the inherent value of women’s media. Women, including young women, are valuable as consumers, but if their interests cannot be monetized, they are worthless. Yet the same year The Toast closed, Lauren Duca wrote a Sassy-style essay, “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” in Teen Vogue which dominated the news and garnered 1.4 million unique visitors. “Teen girls are so much smarter than anyone gives them credit for,” Phillip Picardi, Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, reminded us. “We’ve seen an immense resonance of political coverage with our audience.” Seventeen and ELLE have also capitalized on wokeness, their spon-con sharing real estate with social justice reporting, blurring the boundaries between protesting and shopping. “The inner workings of those places are not about feminism,” says Zeisler. “They’re about selling feminism and empowerment as a brand and that’s very different from what you would find at Rookie or at The Toast or The Hairpin.”

It seems fitting that a new print teen magazine launched last year called Teen Boss. On the fact that it had no ads, Jia Tolentino side-eyed in The New Yorker, “unless, of course, it’s all advertising — sponsored content promoting “Shark Tank” and JoJo Siwa (both appear in each of the first three issues) and also the monetizable self.”

***

Teen girls are the “giant piggybank of capitalism,” says Zeisler, and it’s an apt metaphor. Their value is their purchasing power and they are sacrificed, smashed to pieces, to get to it. When Ariana Grande obliterates every sales record known to man, man still asks why she is on the cover of BuzzFeed. Man never seems to ask, however, why sports — literal games — are on the cover of anything. This is the world in which Rookie and Lenny Letter and The Hairpin and The Toast attempt to survive, in which all that is left when they don’t are floating communities of women, because the industry refuses to make room. As Gevinson wrote, “that next iteration of what Rookie stands for — the Rookie spirit, if you will — is already living on in you.” As Dunham wrote, “Lenny IS you: every politician, every journalist, every activist, every illustrator, every athlete who shared her words here.” As The Hairpin wrote, “We hope when you look back on what we did here together it makes you proud and not a little delighted.” As Cliffe and Ortberg wrote, “The Toast was never just a chance for people to tune in to The Mallory and Nicole Show, it was also a true community and it will be missed.”

These publications did not die by their own hand. Zeisler notes that to this day, she sees people tweeting about missing The Toast. These sites died because their inherent value did not translate into monetary value in a capitalist system run by men who only know how to monetize women by selling them out. As bright and as hungry as young women are today, they are entering a world designed to shut them down. And the future looks bleak. “If media as an industry doesn’t figure out how to value [independent sites for young women] in a way that really reflects and respects the work that goes into them,” says Zeisler, “we’re just going to have a million fucking Bustles.”

* * *

Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

Honestly, I thought I was handling the Trump presidency okay. At least I wasn’t crying every day. I realize that not crying every day isn’t much of a litmus test. But when Trump codified his transgender military ban, I could no longer deny that I was struggling in other subtle and sinister ways: “I have to sleep more than nine hours a day or I cannot function physically,” or “My finances are shot because I don’t have the will to work and provide for a future that may or may not come to fruition.”

Of course, this is what fascists want for someone like me. They want me fatigued, struggling mentally, and hopeless. They don’t want me alive. Logically then, I should fight really, really, hard to thrive. I am trying, when I sit here to write for the first time in almost two months. I am trying, whenever I bring myself to get out of bed before noon, when I cook for myself. I am trying to imagine a fascism-free future. I am trying to imagine a future where evangelical Christians don’t take time out of serving the poor to disparage and damn the marginalized and their allies. I document the moments I laugh the loudest. I try to be honest with myself and with the people I care for.

Right now, I am clinging to my queer and trans family and the art they create, like Meg Allen’s photography series, BUTCH, the work of Queer Appalachia, and the Electric Dirt zine. Recently, I was listening to Cameron Esposito’s new podcast, QUEERY, when she opened an episode with a message of support for her trans listeners. I stood still in my kitchen and allowed myself to feel it all: my fear, my gratitude, and my sadness.

I’m dedicating this reading list to queer and trans comedians and comedians of color. Their experiences in the world of comedy and the world at large are very different from your average, over-fifty, white-dude comic. They have to contend with the false dichotomy of free speech versus political correctness. They face misogyny, racism, homophobia, and transphobia with superhuman grace and patience.

• It’s so gratifying to see queer and mainstream media rallying around Take My Wife, a sitcom co-created by comedians and wives Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher. The show aired originally on the streaming service Seeso, which announced in early August it would shut down by the end of the year. The second season of Take My Wife has been filmed already. Now, the show — along with an amazingly diverse, inclusive cast, writer’s room, and production team — needs a new home. I recommend reading “Cameron Esposito and Rhea Butcher on Take My Wife,’ The Show Where Lesbians Don’t Die,’” written last year by E. Alex Jung for Vulture. And you can find coverage about the determined fan response behind saving Take My Wife at Autostraddle, Entertainment Weekly, Refinery29, HuffPost, IndieWire, ThinkProgress, and Vanity Fair. From Cameron Esposito’s Twitter feed:

Here’s an excerpt from Esposito and Butcher’s interview on KPCC about why they made the decision to share the statistics of the Take My Wife team and prioritized hiring from marginalized communities. Calling them a comedy power couple is an understatement. Esposito launched QUEERY  with Feral Audio, and and WME signed her. As for Butcher, Variety named her one of ten comics to watch in 2017, and her debut stand-up album dropped earlier this year.

ESPOSITO: I want to stress that this wasn’t a “men-out,” this was a “women-in.” The other thing that I would say about the specific hiring that we tried to do, we looked for people with experience, with vision and with goals. But who needed that next credit to join their guild, or for people who needed that next credit to move into a different pay bracket, because we really believe in training up women, training up people of color, training up queer folks, so that they can change Hollywood. You give those four women jobs and then they go on to other [jobs], and next year you have an opportunity to hire more. You get those people jobs and then they go and they work in other rooms. We’re certainly not the people who have pioneered this. I look at somebody like Ava DuVernay, I look at somebody like Jill Sololoway —

BUTCHER: Issa Rae —

ESPOSITO: Yes, exactly, Issa Rae. This is happening right now in the industry. It’s very exciting not just because of the shows that are going to be made right now but because of the next two to three generations of shows that are going to be made.

Fear not: You’ll see Williams and Robinson together again, even if you can’t make it to New York to see them live. They’ll host and produce four hour-long comedy specials for HBO.

If you Google “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” the top item is her Wikipedia page. The second is an excerpt of a book about the author Henry James.

I hadn’t heard of Woolson until recently. She’s the subject of a new biography by Anne Boyd Roux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. To herald her new biography, a collection of Woolson’s short stories has been published, too.

Until now, Woolson has been an interesting, tragic anecdote in the lives of others. She’s the alleged inspiration for the Lady in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Never mind that she was an accomplished writer in her own right or a world traveler.

I like calling Woolson “CFW.” It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s oft-used nickname, and Wallace is one of those names people gesture at emphatically when they toss out the words “literary genius.” I like sneaking Woolson into the lit boys’ club.

DFW aside, the concept of “Genius” has been abused. Sexual harassment and rape, entitlement and rudeness—these are all excused in the face of “great” art. How do we live with the tension between a movie that makes us cry with joy and its douchebag creator? Or a favorite book, written by a man who committed his wife to an insane asylum when she got to be too much trouble? Why does it often take decades, even centuries, for work by women to be “discovered” and appreciated? I don’t know, but I think each of these pieces gets at an aspect of these questions.

1. “‘Constance Fenimore Woolson’ Gives 19th Century Novelist Second Look.” (Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune, February 2016)

It would be silly for me not to include (one of the only) reviews of Anne Boyd Roux’s biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, and writer Amy Gentry does an excellent job of summing up the double standards Woolson faced in her lifetime.

2. “Srsly.” (Sarah Mesle, LARB, November 2014)

Sarah Mesle uses her review of Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre to analyze the sexist bent of “Genius with a capital G”—that there is opportunity to use modern communications (texting) or “unserious” mediums (Twitter) to dismantle patriarchal grandstanding:

Genius, of course, is not necessarily male, but Ortberg’s work makes us realize the extent to which the idea of genius — let’s mark it as Genius with a capital G — remains strangely masculinized; strikingly available to men regardless of their actual talent…

Ortberg dismantles Male Genius so effectively that she allows her readers to create an imaginative space outside of male seriousness; this is her appeal. In the space she creates, Male Genius is not so much a powerful symbolic order as a self-involved and bumbling habit, one that we might easily leave by the snack table while we get on with the more serious business of living dynamic creative lives.

3. “The Difference Maker: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Women in Tech.” (Molly McArdle, Grantland, January 2015)

To combat the concept of the tech bro, there must be a tech sisterhood. Tech history is not a chain of command, it’s a crazy quilt — no machine is ever really built by one person alone. It would be a mistake to consider Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper as just lone geniuses — the same way it is a mistake to think that way of the men. But they are two avatars of importance for women in tech — the proof that natural talent knows no type.

4. “Quaint Interviews: Madame Clairevoyant on Anti-Genius.” (Soleil Ho, Quaint Magazine, December 2014)

“Shit-talking from a place of love” with Claire Comstock-Gay, fiction writer and creator of the Anti-Genius school of thought.

5. “In Your Own Image.” (Anna Fitzpatrick, Rookie, May 2013)

Anna Fitzpatrick decries the misplaced accusations of narcissism that plague female creatives: “If you’re a guy who makes stuff and you tend to be oblivious to the needs of others because you are obsessed with the inner workings of your own mind, people will call you a genius. A woman with these qualities is more likely to be called crazy, monstrous, an attention whore.“

If you Google “Constance Fenimore Woolson,” the top item is her Wikipedia page. The second is an excerpt of a book about the author Henry James.

I hadn’t heard of Woolson until recently. She’s the subject of a new biography by Anne Boyd Roux, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist. To herald her new biography, a collection of Woolson’s short stories has been published, too.

Until now, Woolson has been an interesting, tragic anecdote in the lives of others. She’s the alleged inspiration for the Lady in Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Never mind that she was an accomplished writer in her own right or a world traveler.

I like calling Woolson “CFW.” It reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s oft-used nickname, and Wallace is one of those names people gesture at emphatically when they toss out the words “literary genius.” I like sneaking Woolson into the lit boys’ club.

DFW aside, the concept of “Genius” has been abused. Sexual harassment and rape, entitlement and rudeness—these are all excused in the face of “great” art. How do we live with the tension between a movie that makes us cry with joy and its douchebag creator? Or a favorite book, written by a man who committed his wife to an insane asylum when she got to be too much trouble? Why does it often take decades, even centuries, for work by women to be “discovered” and appreciated? I don’t know, but I think each of these pieces gets at an aspect of these questions.

1. “‘Constance Fenimore Woolson’ Gives 19th Century Novelist Second Look.” (Amy Gentry, Chicago Tribune, February 2016)

It would be silly for me not to include (one of the only) reviews of Anne Boyd Roux’s biography of Constance Fenimore Woolson, and writer Amy Gentry does an excellent job of summing up the double standards Woolson faced in her lifetime.

2. “Srsly.” (Sarah Mesle, LARB, November 2014)

Sarah Mesle uses her review of Mallory Ortberg’s Texts from Jane Eyre to analyze the sexist bent of “Genius with a capital G”—that there is opportunity to use modern communications (texting) or “unserious” mediums (Twitter) to dismantle patriarchal grandstanding:

Genius, of course, is not necessarily male, but Ortberg’s work makes us realize the extent to which the idea of genius — let’s mark it as Genius with a capital G — remains strangely masculinized; strikingly available to men regardless of their actual talent…

Ortberg dismantles Male Genius so effectively that she allows her readers to create an imaginative space outside of male seriousness; this is her appeal. In the space she creates, Male Genius is not so much a powerful symbolic order as a self-involved and bumbling habit, one that we might easily leave by the snack table while we get on with the more serious business of living dynamic creative lives.

3. “The Difference Maker: Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, and Women in Tech.” (Molly McArdle, Grantland, January 2015)

To combat the concept of the tech bro, there must be a tech sisterhood. Tech history is not a chain of command, it’s a crazy quilt — no machine is ever really built by one person alone. It would be a mistake to consider Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper as just lone geniuses — the same way it is a mistake to think that way of the men. But they are two avatars of importance for women in tech — the proof that natural talent knows no type.

4. “Quaint Interviews: Madame Clairevoyant on Anti-Genius.” (Soleil Ho, Quaint Magazine, December 2014)

“Shit-talking from a place of love” with Claire Comstock-Gay, fiction writer and creator of the Anti-Genius school of thought.

5. “In Your Own Image.” (Anna Fitzpatrick, Rookie, May 2013)

Anna Fitzpatrick decries the misplaced accusations of narcissism that plague female creatives: “If you’re a guy who makes stuff and you tend to be oblivious to the needs of others because you are obsessed with the inner workings of your own mind, people will call you a genius. A woman with these qualities is more likely to be called crazy, monstrous, an attention whore.“

I don’t know where you live, but where I live, it’s 97 degrees on a Friday in June. After a brutal winter, I try to remember this is what I longed for. My commute home liquidates. Drips slide down my spine, disappearing into the waist of my government-approved pencil skirt. Yesterday, I couldn’t take it: I wore shorts. I’m yearning for my grandparents’ swimming pool; its strange shape and dense vegetation are different from the community pools I frequented as a child. Theirs is utterly private, difficult to maintain, and very, very cold. Ready to grab your towel? Take a dip in these six stories about swimming pools.

1. “Who Gets to Go to the Pool?” (Brit Bennett, New York Times, June 2015)

Oasis or battleground? Swimming pools have long been sites of racial tension in the United States–this month, a police officer pulled a gun on a black, unarmed, bikini-clad young woman after she was attacked (physically and verbally) by white poolgoers.

2. “Woman Overboard: How Swimming in a Rooftop Pool Saved Me From Addiction.” (Susan Shapiro, The Observer, July 2014)

Susan Shapiro traded unhealthy habits for a new obsession: swimming laps atop her apartment building. Her fondness for exercise accidentally landed her in physical therapy, where she learned the importance of pacing herself.

3. “Size.” (Leanne Shapton, The Paris Review, July 2012)

Two summers ago, I read and loved Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton’s memoir of her life in pools. Beautiful meditations on training for the Olympic trials as a teen and descriptions of swimming pools all over the world accompany photos of bathing suits and miniature paintings. What better to read poolside? Here, the Paris Review excerpts Shapton’s book.

4. “The Wet Stuff: Jeff Henry, Verrückt, and the Men Who Built the Great American Water Park.” (Bryan Curtis, Grantland, September 2014)

A water park is a swimming pool on steroids, right? Grantland introduces you to Jeff Henry, the Steve Jobs of water parks. (Henry’s latest ride is called “Verrückt”–that’s “insane,” in German. It’s over 17 stories tall; it’s the tallest water slide in the world.)

5. “The Purest Form of Play.” (Miranda Ward, Vela, April 2013)

This award-winning essay is a favorite of Vela editor Sarah Menkedick: “[It’s] one of those pieces I return to when I start to feel cynical and burnt out.” Maybe the summer heat is getting to you, too. Maybe someone pooped in your metaphorical (or literal) pool. Ward’s essay moved and encouraged me, too. It’s about perseverance and acceptance, in or out of the pool.

6. “Too Fat to Swim.” (Ragini Nag Rao, Rookie, October 2014)

I was 18 the first time I swam. I took a step into a sectioned-off part of Calcutta’s biggest lake, and I was scared. Ragini dreamed of performing daring athletic feats and reveled in basketball and cricket. But her size, self-consciousness and the taunts of her family held her back from embracing her true self. After years of struggling with an eating disorder, she shakes off the haters and plunges into the depths of self-love.

I don’t know where you live, but where I live, it’s 97 degrees on a Friday in June. After a brutal winter, I try to remember this is what I longed for. My commute home liquidates. Drips slide down my spine, disappearing into the waist of my government-approved pencil skirt. Yesterday, I couldn’t take it: I wore shorts. I’m yearning for my grandparents’ swimming pool; its strange shape and dense vegetation are different from the community pools I frequented as a child. Theirs is utterly private, difficult to maintain, and very, very cold. Ready to grab your towel? Take a dip in these six stories about swimming pools.

1. “Who Gets to Go to the Pool?” (Brit Bennett, New York Times, June 2015)

Oasis or battleground? Swimming pools have long been sites of racial tension in the United States–this month, a police officer pulled a gun on a black, unarmed, bikini-clad young woman after she was attacked (physically and verbally) by white poolgoers.

2. “Woman Overboard: How Swimming in a Rooftop Pool Saved Me From Addiction.” (Susan Shapiro, The Observer, July 2014)

Susan Shapiro traded unhealthy habits for a new obsession: swimming laps atop her apartment building. Her fondness for exercise accidentally landed her in physical therapy, where she learned the importance of pacing herself.

3. “Size.” (Leanne Shapton, The Paris Review, July 2012)

Two summers ago, I read and loved Swimming Studies, Leanne Shapton’s memoir of her life in pools. Beautiful meditations on training for the Olympic trials as a teen and descriptions of swimming pools all over the world accompany photos of bathing suits and miniature paintings. What better to read poolside? Here, the Paris Review excerpts Shapton’s book.

4. “The Wet Stuff: Jeff Henry, Verrückt, and the Men Who Built the Great American Water Park.” (Bryan Curtis, Grantland, September 2014)

A water park is a swimming pool on steroids, right? Grantland introduces you to Jeff Henry, the Steve Jobs of water parks. (Henry’s latest ride is called “Verrückt”–that’s “insane,” in German. It’s over 17 stories tall; it’s the tallest water slide in the world.)

5. “The Purest Form of Play.” (Miranda Ward, Vela, April 2013)

This award-winning essay is a favorite of Vela editor Sarah Menkedick: “[It’s] one of those pieces I return to when I start to feel cynical and burnt out.” Maybe the summer heat is getting to you, too. Maybe someone pooped in your metaphorical (or literal) pool. Ward’s essay moved and encouraged me, too. It’s about perseverance and acceptance, in or out of the pool.

6. “Too Fat to Swim.” (Ragini Nag Rao, Rookie, October 2014)

I was 18 the first time I swam. I took a step into a sectioned-off part of Calcutta’s biggest lake, and I was scared. Ragini dreamed of performing daring athletic feats and reveled in basketball and cricket. But her size, self-consciousness and the taunts of her family held her back from embracing her true self. After years of struggling with an eating disorder, she shakes off the haters and plunges into the depths of self-love.

I wanted to share these stories about love and music and beauty and family. These stories are also about hair, about plastic surgery, about skin color, about contending with the harmful standards imposed by white privilege. They’re all written by writers of color, whose stories don’t always get the air time they deserve. My inspirations for this list: summer is coming; Arabelle Sicardi’s unique aesthetic; my haircut; Baltimore; and more. I hope you find a writer you love and a story that resonates with you, today.

1. “Hair Trajectory.” (Sharisse T. Smith, The Los Angeles Review, April 2015)

This essay blew me away. Sharisse writes about the history of her hair: the painful braiding process, and how it affects every aspect of her life. The offensive questions from strangers. The nervousness she feels when she finds out she’s pregnant with a girl, and the irony infused in her daughter’s desire to imitate her mom’s many fashions.

2. “Far Away From Me.” (Jenny Zheng, Rookie, April 2015)

Jenny Zheng is a fantastic writer, and this meditation about fetishization through the lens of a Weezer song is no exception: I still catch myself trying to become the object someone imagines me to be, but then there are other times, when I am free, when I am fluent, when I am unimaginable, that I start to feel like somewhere out there is the decolonized love for me, somewhere out there, there is a love that doesn’t let any of us be so lonely.

3. “On Being Fat, Brown, Femme, Ugly and Unloveable.” (Caleb Brown, Black Girl Dangerous, July 2014)

Is it possible to decolonize love and beauty? Caleb Brown has experienced the harmful effects of kyriarchy, most acutely in the realm of romantic love. His appearance and identity deviate deliberately from societally accepted norms (white, heterosexual, cisgender, masculine, etc.), a norm that impedes the queer community, too: I have become anti-romance because I cannot be invested in romantic love, because this investment is dangerous for my mental health. It is perpetual and intimate exposure to the interlocking systems of white supremacy, fat hatred, cissexism and more. Under these systems, my body can’t be neutral, or erotic, or desired without being fetishized beyond context and recognition.

4. “How I Found Myself When My Skin Changed Its Identity.” (Rushaa Louise Hamid, BuzzFeed, April 2015)

When she was 13, Rushaa developed vitiligo: white patterns appeared all over her skin, as her body attacked her melanin. Despite society’s harsh predilections, her parents’ hand-wringing and a series of “corrective” creams and UV rays, Rushaa is determined to see her body as an ever-changing work of art, not a problem to be solved.

5. “A Trip Into the Ethnic Plastic Surgery Minefield.” (Maureen O’Connor, New York Magazine, July 2014)

Is “ethnic” plastic surgery inherently racist, or do the people who seek it out have reasons other than conforming to Western standards of beauty? In this in-depth piece, Maureen O’Connor talks with the doctors that perform these controversial surgeries, as well as several women who’ve gone under the knife or needle to achieve a certain aesthetic.

I wanted to share these stories about love and music and beauty and family. These stories are also about hair, about plastic surgery, about skin color, about contending with the harmful standards imposed by white privilege. They’re all written by writers of color, whose stories don’t always get the air time they deserve. My inspirations for this list: summer is coming; Arabelle Sicardi’s unique aesthetic; my haircut; Baltimore; and more. I hope you find a writer you love and a story that resonates with you, today.

1. “Hair Trajectory.” (Sharisse T. Smith, The Los Angeles Review, April 2015)

This essay blew me away. Sharisse writes about the history of her hair: the painful braiding process, and how it affects every aspect of her life. The offensive questions from strangers. The nervousness she feels when she finds out she’s pregnant with a girl, and the irony infused in her daughter’s desire to imitate her mom’s many fashions.

2. “Far Away From Me.” (Jenny Zheng, Rookie, April 2015)

Jenny Zheng is a fantastic writer, and this meditation about fetishization through the lens of a Weezer song is no exception: I still catch myself trying to become the object someone imagines me to be, but then there are other times, when I am free, when I am fluent, when I am unimaginable, that I start to feel like somewhere out there is the decolonized love for me, somewhere out there, there is a love that doesn’t let any of us be so lonely.

3. “On Being Fat, Brown, Femme, Ugly and Unloveable.” (Caleb Brown, Black Girl Dangerous, July 2014)

Is it possible to decolonize love and beauty? Caleb Brown has experienced the harmful effects of kyriarchy, most acutely in the realm of romantic love. His appearance and identity deviate deliberately from societally accepted norms (white, heterosexual, cisgender, masculine, etc.), a norm that impedes the queer community, too: I have become anti-romance because I cannot be invested in romantic love, because this investment is dangerous for my mental health. It is perpetual and intimate exposure to the interlocking systems of white supremacy, fat hatred, cissexism and more. Under these systems, my body can’t be neutral, or erotic, or desired without being fetishized beyond context and recognition.

4. “How I Found Myself When My Skin Changed Its Identity.” (Rushaa Louise Hamid, BuzzFeed, April 2015)

When she was 13, Rushaa developed vitiligo: white patterns appeared all over her skin, as her body attacked her melanin. Despite society’s harsh predilections, her parents’ hand-wringing and a series of “corrective” creams and UV rays, Rushaa is determined to see her body as an ever-changing work of art, not a problem to be solved.

5. “A Trip Into the Ethnic Plastic Surgery Minefield.” (Maureen O’Connor, New York Magazine, July 2014)

Is “ethnic” plastic surgery inherently racist, or do the people who seek it out have reasons other than conforming to Western standards of beauty? In this in-depth piece, Maureen O’Connor talks with the doctors that perform these controversial surgeries, as well as several women who’ve gone under the knife or needle to achieve a certain aesthetic.

In my not-so-past life as a fashion magazine addict (let’s be real—I bought seven of last month’s fashion mags for a quarter each at a recent library sale), this time of year was crucial to me. What kinds of skirts would appear on the pages of Seventeen? Would I be able to afford them? Would one-piece swimsuits finally be cool? Was this the year I started blow-drying my hair?! Each issue was a mini-New Year’s. Anything was possible.

These days, I love fashion for its feminist and political sensibilities, and I am far more into comfort than trends. I work at a job where I push the style envelope, but hey, no one said anything to me when I wore combat boots every day this winter. (That doesn’t mean I’m going to start wearing shorts to the office, though, much as I crave a temperature-sensitive dapper aesthetic. Even I have my limits.) But style? Style has no limits. Wear socks with sandals. Dress as a different character every day. Admire your reflection in the subway windows. Here are five stories about our connection with the clothes we wear.

1. “Sole Cycle.” (Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, March 2015)

My middle-school peers went nuts for Birkenstock knockoff clogs, which seemed stiff and uncomfortable to me. Little did I know that was the point. Birkenstocks were created hundreds of years ago to strengthen the foot, not to make a fashion statement. Now, everyone from Céline to Givenchy to the women of Vogue are head over heels for ‘Stocks. What changed? Rebecca Mead investigates, with delightful turns of phrase. (I can’t lie—I checked out the website after I read Mead’s profile. There are silver Birkenstocks! Silver!)

2. “Goodbye, Beautiful.” (Arabelle Sicardi, Rookie, 2014)

I wanted to include something about fashion from Rookie because teenagers have such a unique connection to clothing. Recently, I watched Arabelle Sicardi talk fashion with other queer fashion figures, and here I include her love letters to clothes and accessories loved and lost.

3. “How Everlane Turned Hipsters Basic.” (Emilie Friedlander, The Fader, February 2015)

Oh, Everlane. Your simple, finely wrought silhouettes will never look good on my expansive hips. I can admire you from afar, via the Manic Pixie Minimalist Girls I follow on Pinterest. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this profile from The Fader. Everlane doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar presence. It has waiting lists, not overstock, and it operates under radical transparency, posting the costs of every step of production and the conditions of its Chinese factory workers. It caters to a very specific demographic: comfortable, but not wealthy; young and arty, but gainfully employed.

4. “Idle Threads.” (Ann Friedman, The Baffler, March 2015)

Ann Friedman can do no wrong, y’all. Her writing inspired last week’s Reading List, and I couldn’t wait to read her analysis of three recent releases about style. As always, her thesis is on point:

“Women have long been culturally saddled with the knowledge that they are how they look, and that therefore they are what they wear. The pursuit of stylishness is not something they opt into, but rather something they must opt out of at great social cost …If you can’t control the fact that you’re going to be judged on your appearance, why not derive what pleasure you can from conveying to observers how you wish to be judged? The inadequacy of clothes—their inability to express the depth and complexity of female experiences—probably explains both why women invest their wardrobes with so much significance and why their clothes so often fail to satisfy them.”

5. “Wearing the Pants: An Interview with Amber Doyle.” (Sonya Abrego, The Hairpin, March 2015)

Amber Doyle is a tailor, and one of the only women creating custom bespoke menswear. Is tailoring a man’s world? Sure, but Doyle doesn’t mind: “I feel like when you’re in the tailoring community you end up meeting a lot of people, and there are a lot of women who end up doing it. Not as many as men. But to me it’s such a simple idea—I feel like there are so many men designing for women, so to me, it’s something I really don’t think about that much. Why wouldn’t a woman design for a man?”