Here at Flavorwire, we pride ourselves on not only writing some of the best content on the Internet, but keeping an eye on all of the great writing that other folks on the ‘Net are doing, too.Today we’ve got photos from Appalachia, a sick mom taking care of a sick baby, a scientific tweet-storm, and midwestern YouTube divas.
In Huck , photographer Roger May offers selections from his project, Looking at Appalachia, which compiles images meant to dispel the misunderstood ideas surrounding life in the mountainous Appalachian hills.
Appalachia seems to be one of those places of extremes. It is either portrayed as hopeless, wrought with poverty and beyond help, or it is an overly romanticized land of milk and honey, brimming with thickly bearded mountain men and women who weave, sew and stitch all day to the sound of fiddle music. The truth likely lies somewhere in between, in a calmer middle-ground that’s sadly less conducive to attention-grabbing headlines.
The Cut‘s motherhood expert Laura June recounts the experience of taking care of her sick child while having a stomach flu of her own.
Looking at the apocalyptic weather forecast, I called the doctor. “I just desperately need her to not throw up more,” I said, thinking of an ER trip in a blizzard, of an ambulance unable to rescue us. “This seems like a completely different illness than what we were dealing with even four hours ago.”
Wired uses a recent rash of outrage among scientists on Twitter as a means of entry for a long-standing point of contention among biologists.
So the Great Parsimony Twitter Conflict wasn’t just about scientists flexing their egos (though it was quite a bit about scientists flexing their egos). It was about building the best picture of the natural world as the planet strains under the weight of humanity—and about sleuthing when that humanity goes wrong.
On The Awl, Logan Scherer reports on how indignant midwestern women on YouTube have become a new generation of gay male “diva” icons, beloved for their over-the-top reactions in the face of even pedestrian adversity.
Through the camp lens of gay male culture, debasement is a source of pleasure. When Faye loses it, we lose it with laughter. When Whitney’s at her lowest, we’re at a high. What may seem to others like misogyny is, in reality, self-deprecation. Like Dorothy Zbornak cracking jokes at her own expense, we understand that we are the things we mock. What straight people find so wretched and off-putting about these starlets-turned-monsters—excess emotion, effeminacy, hysteria—are also the things that they hate about gay men.