i am ready for (a boston) marriage

platonic living situations

Obviously I don't have kids but I am completely obsessed with how BFFs Ayesha Roscoe and Jasmin Melvin bought a house together to raise their kids in:

With Jasmin, there isn’t the romantic element of, “Do you love me? Do you still care for me?” We just divide up the tasks, right? Jasmin doesn’t want to cook, so I cook. She helps with homework — that’s not my thing. She’s more of a morning person. She’ll take them to school. I pick them up. She does the laundry; I do the groceries. Obviously we’re mindful of the other person’s needs.

I spent three months in a sublet this spring with a random roommate with whom I immediately had this kind of mutual support situation and half a year later we're still trying to figure out if we can live together in the future again—maybe even in another country!—because it was just so fantastic to live with someone who just always has your back, something neither of us has ever had with any man we've lived with in a romantic partnership.

A good friend of mine in her 50s has had a roommate of over a decade with basically this; they've moved together multiple times as renters and are now looking to buy together in the future because they're locked in so solidly. More women, especially younger women, need to know Boston marriages have always been a thing and should be considered just as valid an option as romantic partnerships, since so many of us unfortunate straights are no longer interested in them.

a few other things

Over the summer, City Councilmember Lincoln Restler sent his staffers "across 60 blocks of Downtown Brooklyn, to figure out exactly how many cars were parked illegally each day. There were 457 cars parked illegally on average, and almost two thirds had some type of parking placard or talisman like an NYPD vest on the dashboard to avoid tickets." Anyone who walks by any precinct on the regular could've told you this, it's been a problem for decades because they all drive to work from Long Island or New Jersey thanks to the free parking.

Pope Leo thinks clickbait is "degrading", is very anti-AI, and thinks "transparency of sources of ownership, accountability, quality and objectivity" are musts for good journalism. Which, like, absolutely yes but also as a Cradle Catholic (atheist since high school!), I now need to know if clickbait is a grave sin or a mortal sin, and also how many Hail Marys must a Buzzfeed writer say at confession each week?

Maliyka A. Muhammed on how Black and Brown people in law-enforcement keep getting changed by the system before they can change it: "You don’t get to destroy someone’s life and then wash your hands of the blood when the system you fed kills him. What happened to Kyren Lacy is not an isolated mistake; it is part of a larger, deliberate pattern of how this system operates."

Teen Vogue thinks we're about to be obsessed with Icelandic singer/actor Elín Hall and I quite like her new single Wolf Boy, which is only the second one she's put out in English because: "English can sometimes be a bit more ambiguous, but in Icelandic, for that same sentence, there are five ways to say it, and they all mean different things, and you have to choose."

I lived a few blocks away in Soho when Dean & Deluca closed, which was somehow traumatic for me as a New Yorker even though I left there empty-handed at least ten times as much as I ever bought anything, so this resurgence of Dean & Deluca-style luxury groceries in Manhattan during a recession is extremely hilarious to me. Truly there has never been a better time in history to eat the rich.

song of the day

Even if I hadn't gotten to see Blackpink in July at Citifield, I'm pretty sure their current single Jump would still have been my most-listened to song of the entire summer going into fall because it's such a banger. Written by Diplo, it's somehow completely different from everything else in their discography while also making perfect sense in it.

P.S. My favorite member is Jisoo, who just put out Eyes Closed, a lovely new duet with Zayn Malik of One Direction fame—shot at the gorgeous Eero Saarinen-designed TWA Flight Terminal, which is now a hotel.

(If you're not into current pop, this is like Posh Spice at the height of Spice Girls popularity collaborating with Paul McCartney after the Beatles broke up, because yes, they're both that big.)