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Queering Barbie (Kristen Arnett for Buzzfeed)
Barbie is often portrayed as the pinnacle of heteronormative, gender-bound culture. But many people play with their dolls in very different ways, and the experience of exploring queer sexuality safely via a plastic doll with glossy hair and pouty lips is an element of Barbie culture that tends to get less attention.
Barbie’s sexuality relies on anyone who’s willing to do that work for her. She is a passive partner. She lies still. She stands, she sits, she resists any movement that would bring her any level of true relaxation.
The Truth About Wanting to Die (Anna Mehler Paperny for The Walrus)
Many people experience suicidal thoughts at some point in their lives, an experience that can be intensified for mentally ill people. Without talking about it, though, it is difficult to find commonality, and to connect with people who have also been suicidal — and can help.
I wouldn’t have said anything to Facebook Guy in the first place were it not for the tenuousness of our acquaintance and the atonality of online conversation, which left me feeling fairly confident he wouldn’t do anything.
The Rat Spill (Sarah Gilman for Hakai)
Rats have had a tremendous influence on the course of human history. Invasive, ubiquitous, fertile, and hardy, they range far and wide, destroying local ecosystems in their wake. Alaska has, until now, had relatively few problems with rats. That is rapidly changing, and it is bad news for fragile organisms that counted on Alaska as a last refuge and place of safety.
Alaska is one of the few places on Earth where rats are still rare. Only a handful of mainland communities have established populations; Anchorage, the state’s largest city, isn’t considered one of them. Only about a dozen of the larger islands among the 2,500 within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, which stretches from the Aleutians to the Pribilofs to the shores of the Chukchi Sea, are known to have rat infestations.
The Dubious Ways Parents Are Pressured to Give Up Their Children for Adoption (Amy Whipple for Vice)
At some point in US history, the meaning of adoption shifted. It wasn’t about getting babies into loving homes anymore, but rather about helping couples get children, as Whipple writes. That shift turned it into an industry with disastrous international consequences, but grim domestic ones as well; desperate pregnant people find themselves pressured into adoption without understanding the ramification or the consequences, and regret it for life.
Gelin was filled with devastating regret, but had no real legal recourse for getting back her son. She learned that nineteen states, including Florida, do not have revocation periods—except in cases of duress or fraud—and not all that do automatically return the child. Most revocation periods are a month or less, some just a few days.
Primodos: The Secret Drug Scandal (Lucia Binding and Jason Farrell for Sky News)
You’ve heard of thalidomide, but you probably haven’t heard of Primos, because it was kept under wraps. All these patients wanted was to know whether they were pregnant, and at the advice of their doctors, they took a tablet that was supposed to help them find out. In so doing, they may have exposed their developing foetuses to a teratogen that had lasting impact on their lives and those of their families.
It was taken off the market in 1978 amid concerns about the effect on the unborn child of those who were pregnant, but the link has never been formally recognised by regulators or the manufacturer.
Photo: Tony Hisgett