This might be a lot for Valentine's Day

Read my rage out loud to your lover 💋

Happy Valentine’s Day to my dad, and to my dad only, who came home with a bunch of flowers from ShopRite yesterday and said “there were more roses on sale than potatoes.”

Anyway, years ago, my favorite soccer blog (lol) was Dirty Tackle by Brooks Peck and Carter Daly on Yahoo Sports. It was funny, it was easy to read, and unlike most soccer blogs written by white men at the time (and now tbh), it wasn’t pretentious.

For some reason, I really loved Artur Boruc’s Friday Rage List, where Peck wrote out a list, in all caps, of things that probably could have made the real Boruc (a Polish goalkeeper) angry. I must have been 15 and incredibly jealous of the opportunity to be earnestly angry and funny about it on the internet (teen angst lmao). (Dirty Tackle ended when Yahoo laid off a bunch of staffers but was revived later, though I can’t believe a single rage list wasn’t published in 2020.)

I hadn’t thought about the Rage List in years until this week, and I thought about writing a mini one, but being the reporter that I am, I can’t shake the need to backlink you to every detail that made me very mad in each scenario. So here’s just one:

White House deputy press secretary TJ Ducklo was afforded the opportunity to resign after he threatened and freaked out on Politico reporter Tara Palmeri, who was writing a story about the potential conflict of interest due to the fact that Ducklo is dating Axios political reporter Alexi McCammond. On Friday, the White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Ducklo apologized to Palmeri and that he would be suspended for a week without pay.

Public outcry—in part because the Biden administration ran its campaign on unity and being decent human beings— and not actual protocol or decency, ultimately led to Ducklo resigning on Saturday. The White House wasn’t going to fire him on its own even though Psaki knew about the incident well before the Vanity Fair piece because Palmeri’s editors told her about it. He was afforded the privilege of being able to quit, in the same week that, like, 90 Bloomberg staffers got laid off because they were producing “enterprise stories that nobody wanted.” It’s not the same thing, but the point is that plenty of actually decent and competent people get fired for the stupidest reasons, and yet this actually fireable offense would have gone unpunished if it hadn’t come out in the press.

It’s unfair that two women journalists, one of them a woman of color, have worked hard to be where they are and have probably gone above and beyond what any man ever will to keep their professional reputations intact. I don’t know McCammond or Palmeri personally, but I know what it’s like to have your professionalism and your integrity questioned. It’s wrong that they got pulled into this mess because one man couldn’t handle it when it happened to him.

What I read this week (in no particular order)

How to bring a language to the future by Alizeh Kohari in Rest of World

I had been waiting all WEEK to read this after seeing lots of language nerdy Urdu-speaking folks like me share it on Twitter and it didn’t disappoint. I learned so much about the history and struggle of getting Urdu onto the internet, and immediately downloaded and installed one of the fonts mentioned in the story.

For Urdu speakers to feel fully at home on the internet, work may be required on multiple fronts: on making sure veteran practitioners like Nasrullah Mehr are included in the conversation; on wriggling out, as Ahmed is attempting, from under the shadow cast by Latin-centric tech; on putting popular pressure on major tech platforms, as championed by Azeemi. Much of this is quiet, steady work. As new generations of Urdu speakers come of age, most may not even be aware of the ways in which technology has shaped — and continues to shape — their tongue.

We asked people who lost their taste to COVID: What do you eat in a day? by Jenny G. Zhang in Eater

I think this story made great use out of a Q&A formatting. I don’t know that I would have read through a longform piece about this because it would have made me really nervous and sad, but this worked really well. I also had no idea that contracting coronavirus actually distorted your sense of taste and smell. I kind of just thought you lost the senses all together. I was terrified to learn that the distorted senses can last anywhere from two to 10 months! 

One of the people interviewed for this piece describes losing those senses, and then regaining distorted ones:

I feel like I’m using my imagination when I eat, trying to use my memory of how things smell and taste to recreate the experience, because otherwise I would not want to eat. I had plain yogurt with granola. I don’t think I’ve been eating any fruit at all, so I made myself eat a clementine. It smelled a little weird. Lime is better than lemon, and oranges and clementines are also better than lemon, but lemon smells really blegh. At their best, the distorted smells smell very chemical and fake. Fruit smells to me like NyQuil. To try to eat an apple is as if I’m eating an apple marker or an apple scratch-and-sniff sticker. At its worst, things smell rotten, like propane gas or feces.  

Why were we so cruel to Britney Spears? by Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic

I haven’t watched The New York Times documentary about Britney Spears yet, and I wasn’t planning to after climate change journalist Kendra Pierre-Louispointed out that The Times failed to reckon with its own complicity in this situation. After reading this piece, though, I think I have to. Most of what happened to Britney Spears happened during my childhood, and now, as an adult, it’s my responsibility to make sure I’m not complicit in it happening to someone else.

In the aughts, enabled by the internet and by stigmas surrounding mental health, people reveled in the spectacle of women—particularly beautiful, famous ones—breaking down in public. Women who invoked sexuality as part of their image had to be reduced...to “trash,” diminished not with a scarlet letter but with the crude penises Perez Hilton drew next to their faces on his blog. This country reserves a particular kind of loathing for the people—the women—who get rich because we can’t stop looking at them. Smith was hated because, as Jeffrey Brown wrote in the Feminist Review in 2005, she was “poised to become a financial powerhouse simply because of her cartoonish sexuality.” Kim Kardashian is commonly hated now for the same reason. Both women flouted the rules—regarding sex, class, capitalism, and what is allowed to constitute “work.”

Where does Abby Phillip go from here? by Mimi Montgomery in Washingtonian

Few things during the pandemic have brought me greater joy than watching Abby Phillip win. Ever since she started hosting Inside Politics Sunday on CNN at 8am, I wake up every Sunday at 10am and mutter, “shit, I missed it again.” This piece not only captures how smart and well-poised Phillip is for this new role, but also how exciting and informative it is to watch TV news again. 

But the “Black women did that” clip made Phillip something of a media celebrity. In addition to her name recognition, it led to face recognition—literally: Almost two weeks after the election, InStyle.com ran a story on her skin-care routine. You could also Google “Abby Phillip” and read about her love of red dresses with puff sleeves or her favorite afternoon treat (it’s fruit snacks). Phillip was surprised by all the attention, but her words—which she says were partly planned and partly in-the-moment—were meant to have an impact. “I wanted to give voice to the fact that Black women [have been] a relentless force in American politics throughout our history,” she says. “That needed to be specifically called out. Not just for women, not just for women of color, but for Black women.”

Peggy, an absolute unit by Charlie Warzel in Some Dogs

This is objectively the best Substack on the internet. Charlie Warzel writes about his dog Peggy, her accident, and her come-up with so much love that it makes me miss the dog(s) I never had. 

It took about six months to notice that Peggy was a different shape. The first real indicator was the noise. Peggy’s usual entrance into a room was of the ‘seen and heard’ variety, which is to say you saw her and heard her paws at the same time. But Peggy 2.0 came with an early detection system. The galumph preceded visual confirmation now by a good five seconds. Heard, then seen. One could not help but notice a change in heft. In solidity. Peggy was not getting fat. Peggy was getting swole.

👀👀👀

You’re welcome to write me back and let me know what you think of the stories and the newsletter, or even better: send me a story you wrote that you think I’d like.

Happy reading, 

Hanaa’