Our weekly recap highlighting the best feature stories from around the internet.
Photo: Illustration: Emile Holmewood of BloodBros
K’ Rd at the crossroads – by Russell Brown, Metro
“You realise when you’re actually here you can’t just plonk yourself down and say to all the ladies of the night and all the homeless people and all the people selling drugs, ‘Okay, we’re here, you can fuck off now.’ You’ve got to hold hands. So you say, ‘Do you want a cup of tea and can you watch my shop so that no one tags it?’ You integrate rather than take over. And a lot of people who come to K’ Rd today almost want to take over rather than integrate.”
Why Is Kesha’s Abuse Being Used To Shame Taylor Swift? – by Noah Berlatsky, The Establishment
“Sony could let Kesha out of her contract tomorrow, if they could bring themselves to care more about a human being than about money and their relationship with their star producer. Yes, it’s more fun to write about loathing pop stars than it is to focus on faceless executives. But it’s Sony who’s at fault here, and Sony, and its exploitive business model, that needs to change. You shouldn’t have to be a woman, or a feminist, to see that.”
Lexapro, Kanye, & Me: Molly Lambert On The Ghosts Of SSRIs – by Molly Lambert, MTV
“But hearing Kanye talk about going off his Lexapro, I started to reframe his recent run of Twitter sprees as something other than just record promo. By the time the audio of Kanye blowing up backstage at SNL was released, it no longer seemed funny. Any speculation about Kanye’s mental state is just that: speculation, the stuff of a thousand personal essays disguised as thinkpieces like this one. When it comes to mental issues, there’s a stigma, and I’ve always been too ashamed to talk about what happened when I went off Paxil, because I was already ashamed to admit that I needed to go on an SSRI to begin with. People are afraid to talk about mental health because it’s traumatizing, and nobody wants to be seen as a nut.”
Meet The Woman Getting A Degree In One Direction – by Sarah Gooding, i-D
“Because as a young woman there's not a lot being provided to you, no one's really talking to you about your sexuality. It makes sense to retreat into this online community where you can talk about this kind of stuff.”
Building bridges – by Romy Ash, The Saturday Paper
“I don’t feel light and buoyant out in the world. I’ve always associated that with funny people. That they go around with warmth in their heart, and a rose-tinted lens, and of course the truth is that the darkest motherfuckers are perceived to be funny. And it just so happens I’ve only just found out I’m one of those people. I just make everything into a joke, literally to survive.”
The Single American Woman - by Rebecca Traister, The Cut
“Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail. We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.”
