It’s winter, which means more excuses to stay inside and cuddle up with a book. Refinery29 has a great list of the books from your childhood you need to revisit, including Zlata’s Diary, which I read while in junior high and which captivated me; From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler, which inspired nightly dreams of running away and moving into a museum; and Running Out of Time, which, as the article’s author Laura le Vine notes, “was The Village before M. Night Shyamalan ruined the concept.” If you were a book nerd as a kid, this piece will make you want to read all your old favorites again.
At BuzzFeed, Julia Pugachevsky documented her very important social experiment: trolling Tinder users exclusively with quotes from Sex and the City. The responses are hilarious, from incredulity to confusion to knowing jokes. To all you ladies tired of obnoxious dudes on dating apps: here’s a way to turn the tables.
Finally, the story we’ve all been waiting for: the history of the emoji. New York Magazine published Adam Sternbergh’s “Smile, You’re Speaking Emoji: The Rapid Evolution of a Wordless Tongue” and it’s everything you’ve ever wanted. Such as: Drake has an emoji tattoo, of one of the most contentious emojis in existence:
Drake insists it’s praying hands, not, as others claim, a high-five. ““I pity the fool who high-fives in 2014,” he stated on Instagram. Good to… know?
Brilliant writer Jessica Grose details what it’s like to be the first of your friends to have a baby in an essay for ELLE. “I like to joke that when I told my friends I was pregnant shortly after my 30th birthday, a lot of them reacted as if I were a teen mom,” Grose writes. “‘But you’re so young!’ some of them would say.” The essay highlights one of the overlooked difficulties of being a woman—the judgment we face not only when we forgo motherhood, but when we choose it.