Rachel Vorona Cote

One might say that Donald Trump’s gender causes a mess of…trouble.

🗣️🗣️🗣️

Shuttering women’s and gender studies programs across the nation so that people will smile and nod at this shit with smooth, unbothered brains.

When I was sixteen years old, I interviewed someone professionally for the first time. The person? Usher.

(I did a bad job.)

I think that is such a keen insight

Grief is the endurance of love, despite absence. My mom died in 2017. I grieve her because I will love her for the rest of my life, knowing that I’ll never see her again. I’ll take the ache inherent to this form of love, which lacks a ready recipient, over indifference to my memories.

Really dislike the question “Can AI cure grief?” not only because I reject AI in most contexts, and certainly therapeutic ones, but also because framing grief in diagnostic terms is such an impoverished and frankly dangerous way to think about the ways we register and respond to loss.

Hello! I am a trans journalist looking to speak with trans kids and parents of trans kids across the US who have been impacted by the clinic closures---please get in touch or share!

I need to check her out

I'm giving this piece a final bump, in case you'd like some literary counterprogramming that still involves a healthy heap of moral anger.

All those DBQ (document-based question) exams in high school, seemingly for naught. Seriously, though, the extent of willfully poor reading comprehension amongst the ostensibly well-heeled and educated is pretty pitiful. Op-ed sections are not populated by magic! Someone is making those decisions.

Incel schoolboys with missiles, murdering seven-year-old schoolgirls to feel like big big hero men

Israel, immediately after vaporizing a bunch of little girls:

Has Contemporary Fiction Ignored the Working Class? Claire Baglin’s bracing On the Clock gives its readers a close look at work behind the fry station, and in the process asks what experiences are missing from mainstream letters.

I wrote about Claire Baglin’s seething debut novella for @thenation.com and spend considerable time interrogating how literature depicts working class labor (especially amid so many books/tv series/films set in the corporate workplace). I hope you’ll read! 🍟

www.thenation.com/article/cult...

A new sentimental flash from me at the amazing @lostballoon.bsky.social

Has Contemporary Fiction Ignored the Working Class? Claire Baglin’s bracing On the Clock gives its readers a close look at work behind the fry station, and in the process asks what experiences are missing from mainstream letters.

“Baglin’s emphasis on the bodily dangers of working-class labor can feel unrelenting... for it never turns an eye from the indignity and filth that is inherent to so many physically demanding occupations.” @rvoronacote.bsky.social on Claire Baglin’s *On the Clock*: www.thenation.com/article/cult...

It’s so good!

This one is *so* good. Hope you love it.

Thanks as always to my wonderful editor @kevinlozano.bsky.social, and to my grad school pal @jamacintosh.bsky.social, whose work on labor in contemporary fiction was crucial to my thinking.

Has Contemporary Fiction Ignored the Working Class? Claire Baglin’s bracing On the Clock gives its readers a close look at work behind the fry station, and in the process asks what experiences are missing from mainstream letters.

I wrote about Claire Baglin’s seething debut novella for @thenation.com and spend considerable time interrogating how literature depicts working class labor (especially amid so many books/tv series/films set in the corporate workplace). I hope you’ll read! 🍟

www.thenation.com/article/cult...

Ha! And yours!

You didn’t come off as snippy or defensive at all! Not even a little bit. I ought not have made a thing of it. In any case, I’m very glad you posted about this, because I’ve fallen down a Pure Moods wormhole and am listening to Enigma. What a specific cultural moment that was.

Not a correction! I had no idea until I stumbled upon the track listing one day, and it really clarified some things!!

I used to steal my mom’s Pure Moods compilation to listen to it! Relatively recently I realized the title is spelled “Sadeness” — I don’t actually know Enigma’s motivation for that; I just automatically accepted “Sade,” like “Marquis de,” as fitting, given the song’s weird eroticism.

Yes, I think playing with the unreliable narration could potentially be very cool

💯

Would also love to see Shirley, Mill On the Floss, The Woman in White, and Our Mutual Friend either get the feature film or prestige miniseries treatment.

No disrespect to ALW, who is fantastic and will likely be a great Jane, but where is the intrepid director who will adapt Villette? I’m looking at you, Jane Campion.

Kind of sounds as if this was the night he became Grand Wizard, tbh.

I was reading cozily on the couch so please fill me in — was tonight the night that he became president?