Good afternoon and welcome to your Daily Links Post, Columbus Day Edition. And while Columbus Day might be rife with not-so-joyous connotations, we will here begin joyfully, with a mysterious man in Tokyo who is walking around with a stroller filled with nine cats.
At Rookie, Julianne Escobedo Shepherd has an enlightening interview with British musician FKA Twigs, who recently made news with her incredible debut album as well as for apparently dating Robert Pattinson. In the interview, she talks with Shepherd about growing up in “the country” (rural Gloucestershire), training as a child to be a dancer, and being the only mixed-race kid in an all-white school. The interview has that raw quality Rookie interviews tend to achieve, so of all pieces on Twigs, this is the one to read.
Associate Editor at Rolling Stone and all-around badass Jessica Machado has a heart-rending essay about grief at BuzzFeed. Machado’s mother passed away twelve years ago—before the explosion of social media and the parsing of loved one’s deaths therein—and Machado excellently discusses the complicated ways we deal with grief, before and during the age of Facebook. “I am still not sure how to navigate grief. It’s a course that feels immeasurable,” she says; it’s something so many of us have experienced. Machado continues to prove herself to be a hilarious (just follow her on Twitter) voice that also understands gravity; she is a writer to watch.
And, with a slightly different, archaeological approach to death, Smithsonian reports that the remains of a man thought, by his 13-century buriers, to have been a vampire have been excavated in Bulgaria. The bones were found with an iron stake hammered through the chest, and a leg removed and placed beside the rest of the body—both, allegedly, in an effort to keep the body from escaping its grave. Sookie was clearly phoning it in that day.