Emily St. James
@emilystjams
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America's 83rd favorite Emily. Writer: Yellowjackets S3, podcasts, books, criticism. Literary rep: @litagentmarini . Mostly on BlueSky now! (she/her)
Los Angeles, CA
Joined March 2009
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America, your long national nightmare is over.
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Gender isn't binary, except for the two (2) shows about soccer. The boy show (Ted Lasso) is about what happens when boys play soccer (crying), and the girl show (Yellowjackets) is about what happens when girls play soccer (murder). Both shows are accurate.
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"You hate him more than you love your own family" is such an amazing distillation of this whole phenomenon. The need to have an out group to endlessly punish is driving people to miss moments in their own lives they'll never get back.
NE State Sen. Lou Ann Linehan (R) complains filibusters of anti-trans bills made her miss her grandson's preschool graduation.
Sen. Megan Hunt (I): “You won't come off this bill that hurts my [trans] son. You hate him more than you love your own family. That's why you're here."
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"Hey, I'm Cillian Murphy."
"And I'm Robert Downey, Jr."
"Robert and I are so, so psyched you chose to see Oppenheimer the way it was meant to be seen: on the biggest screen you can find."
"Because movies are... the bomb."
*politely smile until screen goes dark*
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In my experience, a lot of people who are not incredibly online have no idea J.K. Rowling has become a rancid transphobe. If they are aware of "controversy" around her, it's just "people are mad at her on Twitter."
This number includes my (very supportive) mom and sister.
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After a long tenure at Vox, I will not be working there any longer. The decision wasn't mine.
I am furious for my other talented colleagues, worried for myself, and very tired, as I am on maternity leave and am having trouble processing emotions other than "baby."
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Fabelmans is not a movie about the magic of the movies. It's a movie about the terrible curse that is only processing your life via the magic of the movies.
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this is literally just what happened with my relationship with my parents, except it took a little longer. It grew strained until it snapped, and now it doesn't exist.
They could have had me in their life by calling me Emily and using the right pronouns. They refused.
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I'm fascinated by the portion of the romcom audience that wants low-conflict, largely chaste fluff, like the entire genre is defined by Hallmark, Lifetime, and Netflix Christmas movies for them.
It's likely a consequence of studios abandoning the genre for so long!
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A weird thing I see keep cropping up is "The last writers strike made reality TV more popular!" in a "be careful what you wish for!" way.
Except this is just completely untrue?
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this is legitimately how I found out this news
‘Home Alone 2: Lost in New York’ star Donald Trump has been indicted on criminal charges.
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I do want to say thank you to my colleagues in the Vox Media Union. The terms of my severance are generous (and don't begin until after my leave is over!), and that is entirely because of how hard they fought for that. Unionize your workplaces.
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More 2007-08 strike myths debunked by someone who covered it
OR
No, all your favorite shows aren't going to get worse.
A thread on the actual stories behind what happened to many SCRIPTED shows in 07-08.
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Late 20th century TV has a bunch of moments like this where the characters meet a trans person (usually trans fem), their identity is a minor "twist," and then the characters are, like, "Well, that's cool for you! Great!"
Plenty of shitty jokes, too. But also moments like this.
Love Boat and how they addressed transgender issues back in 1982.
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This situation creates an environment where a journalist who gives someone a very cursory "Well, people are mad at J.K. Rowling for defending women's rights!" explanation to an interview subject can get an answer along the lines of "I support J.K. Rowling of course!"
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On Andor, Diego Luna is quietly giving one of the best TV performances rn. He rarely speaks much (a rarity on a show that loves a great speech), but it's like you're watching his political consciousness and revolutionary zeal grow inside him with every scene. A great eye actor!
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Yesterday, I worked my first day in a TV writers room, a lifelong dream.
Now I'm on strike! It's a tremendous amount of upheaval. It's also necessary. The constant across ALL my writing careers is that writers deserve better from those who use that writing to enrich themselves.
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Fran Drescher becoming one of the consequential union leaders of our time is an arc I am absolutely delighted by as both a union gal and a '90s kid.
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A lot of people know how Rowling is using her political and social capital of late and just don't care.
There are still plenty of people who have no idea, and when the quotes are as vague as Judy Blume's, and she's being interviewed by Hadley Freeman, I have _a_ grain of salt.
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Was genuinely baffled this blew up.
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The Good Doctor becoming Twitter's Main Character has returned "Why don't TV critics write about the shows people ACTUALLY watch?" to the top of discourse mountain.
As an ex-TV critic and (more importantly) the ex-TV editor of The A.V. Club, I can explain!
(Let me explain.)
🧵
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If you want to work with me full-time or on a freelance basis, you can DM or email me. I write all number of things -- non-fiction, fiction, podcasts, scripts! I just got nominated for WGA and GLAAD Awards!
But I think I will take a few weeks to hang out with my baby. Who rules.
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(Most of my friends hate this post-Covid trend of thanking you for watching a movie in theaters, and I don't LOVE it, but I WILL love it if EVERY movie is forced to do it! I want Leo and Jesse thanking me for watching Killers of the Flower Moon on my couch!)
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The notion from certain corners of Oscar punditry that EEAAO is some sort of niche woke film Twitter winner nobody likes is so weird to me. It made over $100 million worldwide and is liked by basically every mother over 60 I know! It is a deeply accessible, broadly popular hit!
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(Also, writers work on reality shows and should be compensated fairly for their work. Please don't forget this.)
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Point is: "The strike made reality TV popular" is false knowledge that SOUNDS true but isn't. It also subtly serves the interests of enormous entertainment corporations by rattling one coin around in a can marked "REALITY TV" and hoping you're terrified.
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The resolution of the strike marks one of the most creatively fertile periods for scripted TV in TV history. Mad Men and Breaking Bad hit their peaks, and there were terrific scripted shows popping up all over the programming grid, on networks who'd never mounted them before.
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Yes, the most popular show on TV during the strike was American Idol, a reality show. But it was the most popular show in the years before and after the strike, too. It was a juggernaut hit! Same with Dancing With the Stars, The Bachelor, etc. All predate the strike by years.
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@HarmlessAvocado
We need a show about soccer for every possible gender expression and every possible outcome of human interaction. We need infinite soccer shows.
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Plenty of trans kids have supportive parents who will walk through fire for them, but too much of the media is obsessed with chasing the parents who stand in the way of their child at every turn, for reasons that are inscrutable to me.
You cannot solely rely on parent narratives about trans youth or their health care when the reason trans youth are overrepresented in homeless shelters, juvenile detention, and foster care is because they are more frequently abused and rejected by their parents.
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I don't need you to understand the strange and labyrinthine mysteries of gender as I perceive them. I just need you to treat me with the same modicum of respect you would grant anybody else.
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I have grown semi-frustrated by cis critics writing about I Saw the TV Glow in a way that either sidelines or ignores the film's transness, even in pieces I otherwise loved.
So I wrote about it! On the film's ending, nostalgic poison, and egg cinema!
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learning a lot of you don't know what yellowjackets is about, and you call yourselves my followers!!!!!!!
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If you think (as I do) that the opening Adam Gopnik interview in Tar is designed to point out how full of shit she is, the rest of the movie plays very much as dark comedy.
If you think it's building her mythos to tear her down, then the movie probably plays very differently!
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This is in contrast to my in-laws, my sister, my bio mom, etc., etc., etc., all of whom occasionally screwed up my name/pronouns for a while there, but would correct themselves and move on, and all of whom I still have strong relationships with. This is not fucking difficult.
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Dearly hope RRR gets a Best Picture nomination, so the usual "Wow a boring foreign language movie got nominated at the OSCARS again, lolol" brigade sounds extra ridiculous.
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Breaking Bad: Jesse, who was meant to die at the end of the first season, lived because the strike shortened that season, then Vince Gilligan and a few writers decided during the strike that maybe he should. This made the show much better!
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*Right wing TikTok posts a shitty scene from The Good Doctor as an anti-trans thing.
*Twitter discovers the show
*Someone finds the "I am a surgeon" clip
*Surgeon is our main character
*Centuries from now, Surgeon and Dr. Han have become archetypes, trapped in an eternal struggle
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If there was a point when reality TV gained a foothold, it was well _before_ the strike, in the early 2000s. Survivor debuts in 2000, Idol and Bachelor in 2002. Those built the templates for the reality shows that followed.
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Leave me and mine alone, and I will be so fucking happy for you to attend your grandson's preschool graduation. I'll even snap a photo for y'all if I happen to be passing by and you ask.
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The networks tried a LOT of things to win over viewers while the writers were on strike. Most of those were unscripted, and the vast majority of them vanished without a trace. Only Fox's game show The Moment of Truth was even briefly a hit. I'm betting you've never heard of it.
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If Twitter goes down, look to my coming on the first light of the fifth day. At dawn, look to the east.
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wow they just ended up right back at cable, who could have foreseen this in 2016 in an article for vox dot com?
David Zaslav Says Content Companies Are Talking About Building New Bundles
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(Please note that this thread is not me saying, "Welp! Them's the breaks!" It's an attempt to talk about how little understanding of the issues facing trans people has penetrated the mainstream, largely because there's so little broader advocacy for us outside of what we do.)
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(I wish to note that The Apprentice debuted in 2004, several years before the strike, not DURING the strike. The weird spin of "But the strike made NBC greenlight Celebrity Apprentice, therefore Trump!" makes no sense.)
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Some personal news of a professional nature: I sold a dang novel. Can't wait for y'all to meet Erica, Abigail, and especially Megan Osborne, a 17-year-old politics nerd Swiftie who is not in any way autobiographical.
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It's amazing how many movies are about Michael Douglas losing his fucking mind because he met a hot woman one time.
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The 2007-08 strike didn't uniformly impact shows. For the most part, the shows on good trajectories stayed on them and vice versa.
"Shows are about to get worse" is another weird piece of anti-writer spin.
Now, I'm going to go disappear in an alternate timeline.
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(That said: When it's someone like Judy Blume or Margaret Atwood who seems to have said something devastating, and they said it in a UK newspaper... I think that is a situation where the benefit of the doubt can be extended a little bit. Until proven otherwise!)
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When you know where Lost is heading and rewatch the show, a lot of its mysteries add up. I am not a crackpot.
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Today was Libby and my last day in the Yellowjackets S3 room. I like to think people liked having us around, and we also wrote an episode! Anyway, if you wanted to hire us for the next few months, that might be cool, idk!!!!!
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These kinds of tax loophole shenanigans are the most craven bullshit, but it's particularly the worst when there are actual kids involved, who were presumably really excited to see themselves onscreen.
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One reason I'm pivoting away from journalism as my main income source is because I genuinely think it's made things worse for my community, and too much of the industry refuses to do any self-reflection on this fact.
"I don't oppose trans rights, I just think it's important to hear from all sides" is about to become "I don't oppose trans rights, I just think they're a political liability."
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One of the worst things to happen to arts discussion in the past 15-ish years is the rise in the idea that if you can just catalog all the elements of the story, you can therefore become smarter than it. And if you're smarter than it, then it can't be _good_, right?
One thing I have taken away from watching a lot of movies from era where tropes were constantly used and relied on and remixed is that there really is nothing wrong with using tropes and embracing genre as long as you know why you’re using them and for what purpose.
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I'm sorry. I have seen SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE GETTING MINOR DETAILS WRONG, and I am a PEDANT.
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"Would you care about any of this if it weren't about Steven Spielberg?" is a fair criticism, but the film stands on its own quite nicely as an exploration of artistic dissociation as coping mechanism. What if the thing you were best at also kept you from your life?
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"Once you read 'Succession' as primarily about how abusive cycles replicate themselves across generations, so much of what it’s saying about wealth and power snaps into focus."
(I wrote this.)
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The way the "just asking questions" brigade talks about autistic children and children with mental illness as though they possess no agency and can't be trusted to know if they're trans -- or that doctors won't know how to treat neurodivergent trans patients -- is really gross.
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Heroes: This is the most famous "the strike ruined it!" show. Yes, the strike abbreviated S2, famously leaving a character stranded in an alternate timeline. Yet look at reviews of S2 BEFORE the strike, and critics are complaining about how directionless the show has become.
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I made a list when I was unemployed in 2009 of the jobs I most wanted, and "critic for The A.V. Club" was second. I've always been so honored to be a small part of its legacy, and this is just the absolute worst. Fuck G/O Media!
NOT satire. NOT an ironic headline.
@TheOnion
, WT actual F. Sickening. Saw you go from scrappy Madison paper to more self-aware city paper before screwing over employees, nixing the print version, changing owners, screwing over more employees, & becoming pure corporate grossness.
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Succession is HBO's riff on the primetime family soap, like Dallas, Dynasty, etc., and viewed in that context, it's so good both as an example of its genre and a subversion of it.
Like Sopranos with the mob story or The Wire with the cop show!
my favorite definition of the soap opera as genre is that it's never about what happens, it's about how information moves between characters - who knows, who doesn't, how they react, who tells who, how things are revealed.
this is a thing succession understands SO well
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THE NEWSROOM (9 pm, HBO): NEW. In hour one of a two-hour crossover event, it's election night. Will and Mackenzie discover someone on ATN's decision desk is cooking the books, and the conspiracy goes to the top. Also: Maggie gets stuck in an elevator with Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook).
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Everybody keeps talking about what the Daniels should do next, and if I were them, I would decide as a duo which of us from now on would speak only truth and which would speak only lies.
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If you do not know what Yellowjackets is about, what do you THINK it's about? Honestly curious!
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I try to keep this account a chill place where we vibe and talk about Yellowjackets, but I need to remind y'all that shit's terrifying out there for trans people right now, even in "safe" blue states. Your support, even if it's just reaching out to say hey, means everything!
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If somebody is mad at you for inviting a queer person/group to participate in your thing, you should assume they are a handful of arch-conservative cranks who don't reflect your actual audience and just go about your business.
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Basically all half-hour comedies at the time (The Office, 30 Rock, etc.): They shut down in the fall and went back up in the spring. You can tell which seasons are the strike seasons because they're shorter. But I'd argue that's 30 Rock's best season.
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This movie's screenplay just feels like Tony Kushner asking Steven Spielberg "Do you want to dig into that a little bit?" and Spielberg saying, "Oof, do I have to? I try not to think about ANY of this stuff!"
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Vox told me they would no longer require my services in January, but today's the day I was officially laid off, for various reasons.
So! I am LOOKING FOR WORK in a VARIETY of FIELDS.
Here is a THREAD.
(And a photo of TWO DOGS IN NECKTIES to take this to THE NEXT LEVEL.)
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I use "women" when discussing the gender I belong to.
I use "people who [X]" when discussing anyone with certain body parts, like a uterus.
I use "gals and pals" when discussing my book club that's mostly girls but also one cis guy who just loves to read.
It's not that hard!!
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Pushing Daisies: The show was not canceled because of the strike. It was renewed and came back for a second season in the 2008-09 TV season.
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Lost: It had already been renewed for three final seasons in May of 2007. The strike caused S4 to lose a couple of those episodes, but they were added into S5 and S6. S4 and S5 are, arguably, the show's peak.
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This piece makes an important distinction: Trans people are not advocating to gain rights we have not previously held. We are advocating to retain rights we have held for decades in some cases.
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Some part of me thinks we'll learn there was a dinner party on the Upper West Side in 2016 where one of the attendees said, "There are three girls in Jenny's class who say they're they/thems! What's next? Jenny?!" and the course of mainstream trans coverage was set therein.
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If a 14-year-old wants to use some new pronouns or play around with genderfluidity or try on aspects of queerness and doesn't feel shame around that, who the fuck cares, you know? Even if they go on to realize they're just cishet. Why would we so limit children's experiences?
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That Succession ep might have been their best yet, and when I watched it last week, I stayed up until 2 am with something very like PTSD yay.
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Genuinely would have preferred the honesty inherent in something like, "We obviously don't agree with Rowling's bigoted views, but we like money and can't make this without enriching her, and there aren't _actually_ a lot of trans people so... sorry, suckers!!!!"
Casey Bloys declined to comment on Rowling’s views/how they may affect casting: "No, I don’t think this is the forum... That’s a very online conversation, very nuanced and complicated and not something we’re going to get into."
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AN IMPORTANT THREAD SOUND ON:
What if Ted Lasso had the Yellowjackets theme song? An investigation.
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You see, the thing is, you put a guy's name in the title of your movie, and everybody knows that means you think he was the best guy who ever lived. If you want me to think otherwise, you gotta name the movie, like, "Oh Boy, That Guy Did Some Bad Stuff, Don't Get Me Started!"
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You forget how casually people tossed around the f-slur in the early '90s until you watch a bunch of 1992 movies for a podcast.
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I started HRT at 37. I had great insurance and the backing of one of the top therapists dealing with gender stuff in LA. I had a classic presentation of gender dysphoria.
I STILL had to jump through many hoops.
The idea kids are just being handed hormones is ridiculous.
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Hey, I came out publicly five years ago, and because I did so in a review of The Handmaid's Tale, TO THIS DAY, transphobes think I named myself after a character on that show! Which is not true!
It's been a nice time. Best thing I ever did for myself.
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It is hard to overstate how thoroughly our politics of transness have been scrambled in the last decade. Yes, a lot of stuff was driven by a desire by the cishet mainstream to fit queerness into a heterosexual box. But curiosity and acceptance were still surprisingly common.
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"I think it is sad that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn broke up," I say, smiling tightly. "No matter how amicable the breakup, when you are in a relationship for that long, you need a mourning period." My eyebrow twitches. "I wish them all the best." I close my laptop and start SCREA
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I wrote a whole essay about this exact point (Lost actually solved the vast majority of its big mysteries) in Back to the Island, out september 17 from Abrams Books
People always point at the polar bears as something Lost did not explain but no, they actually definitely explained that too (Dharma Initiative brought them over to test out electromagnetism and push the wheel)
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Twitter is now just angry transphobes and endless quote-tweets of posts that are, like, "What's the best movie where the guy makes you go, 'NNNNNGHHHH,' and the girl makes you go 'WOO WOO WOO' like an ambulance?"
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Friday Night Lights: The second season starts in a famously odd way; the strike actually allowed that show to shut down and reboot for S3 in a way that fixed many of those issues.
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The trans panic is newer and less natural than trans people. The default for cis people seems to be a natural curiosity that gives way to acceptance, as you'd expect, and we have a whole lot of history to back that up.
And also an episode of The Love Boat.
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Tremendous deal. So proud of our negotiating committee.
Genuinely: Joining the union -- a thing I didn't think much about when I did so at Vox -- has completely changed my life in nearly every way. I'm so happy to be a tiny, tiny, tiny part of this wonderful organization!
The WGA reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP. Today, our Negotiating Committee, WGAW Board, and WGAE Council all voted unanimously to recommend the agreement. The strike ends at 12:01 am. Check out our deal at .
#WGAStrong
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One unexpected offshoot of Twitter's Good Doctor fever is the girl in that one anti-trans clip (now 19) swatting down every transphobic dork on here by not conforming to their narratives of our existence.
Also, she seems like she's having a great time being alive. Good on her.
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Important Last of Us question: Who in the George W. Bush White House ate the most cake and got infected first?
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24: This show just didn't air in the 2007-08 TV season! It completely skipped and waited for the 2008-09 season, completing the run of episodes it had started filming in the fall of '07.
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