In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Homophobia] Next week, the US Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on same-sex marriage, and Zack Ford has "Ten Novel, Absurd, and Irrelevant Arguments Made in Supreme Court Briefs Against Marriage Equality." Honest to fuck, anti-equality advocates are really scraping the bottom of the barrel for the most absurd remnants of their fetid bigotry at this point.

[CN: Racism] The Greater Fredericksburg (Virginia) Tourism Partnership, VisitFred.com, has launched a campaign that invites people to "Civil War-ize" themselves by sticking their face on the body of a Civil War General. Virginia is for lovers—and, apparently, for racist Civil War fetishists. (If you'd like to politely let "Fred" know your thoughts about this campaign, their contact page is here.)

[CN: Fat hatred; body shaming; images may be NSFW] Amanda Kate Richards's response to Lane Bryant's #ImNoAngel campaign is terrific. "[T]he campaign features little body diversity. It features plus-size models with similar proportional bodies with small stomachs. She argues that even though Lane Bryant is a plus-size retailer, they never feature a true range of plus-size women in their ads. Plus-size women come in all different shapes and sizes so their campaign should reflect that." FACT. A lack of fat body diversity is a problem with many plus-size retailers and "plus-size beauty" campaigns.

[CN: Racism; police brutality; child neglect] The thing I like about this idea for child support reform is that it better recognizes children as citizens of the State, who are owed having their basic needs met even if their parent(s) can't (or won't) meet them. I also think that directing child support from the State would probably facilitate better co-parenting in a lot of cases, which would also be a net positive for kids.

[CN: Discussion of transmisogynoir; image may be NSFW] Laverne Cox talks about why she posed for Allure's annual nude issue: "Black women are not often told that we're beautiful unless we align with certain standards. Trans women certainly are not told we're beautiful. Seeing a black transgender woman embracing and loving everything about herself might be inspiring to some other folks. There's beauty in the things we think are imperfect. That sounds very cliché, but it's true." Love her.

[CN: Food insecurity; privilege] Gwyneth Paltrow doing the food stamp challenge was "the most Gwyneth Paltrow thing ever," until she wrote about it for GOOP, and now that is the most Gwyneth Paltrow thing ever.

Neat! "After spending more than a month in orbit on the dark side of dwarf planet Ceres, NASA's Dawn spacecraft has captured several views of the sunlit north pole of this intriguing world. These images were taken on April 10 from a distance of 21,000 miles (33,000 kilometers), and they represent the highest-resolution views of Ceres to date."

Fuck yeah! "Better Call Saul proved to have remarkable stamina over the course of its freshman run, solidifying its status as cable's No. 1 new series of the year." See you next year, Saul!

And finally! More evidence that dogs feel something very close to what we call love: "Japanese researchers found that dogs who trained a long gaze on their owners had elevated levels of oxytocin, a hormone produced in the brain that is associated with nurturing and attachment, similar to the feel-good feedback that bolsters bonding between parent and child. After receiving those long gazes, the owners' levels of oxytocin increased, too." And this paragraph, about dogs fixedly looking at us, just made me cry: "'If I was dropped on Mars,' Dr. MacLean said, 'and everyone was speaking a language I didn't understand, and I knew I could never acquire their language, I'd just give up. But dogs don't. They're not reluctant to tune in to us at every moment.'" Dogs never give up. Blub.