“I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
― Audrey Hepburn

Happy weekend, my poppets. It’s been another wild week of news with a lot of hard stories, but once again I’ve lovingly curated a bunch of links to take you through several of the big stories and even more of the small gems you might have missed. This week we have nature, crime, humor, in memoriam, Black Excellence, and a gem of a short film to wrap it all up. Go forth and read!

Shut up and take my money.

Shut up and take more of my money.

Tiny, jeweled, winged warriors!

Is anyone shocked at this point? Anyone?

In related news, Roger Stone is an idiot. (*shakes head)

Good. More. (And more similar organizations, because it’s abuse it not a monopoly of any one group.)

“What strikes me now as irrational about our response isn’t our ordinary parental instinct to protect our kids from scary stuff. It was our denial.”

“There’s this idea that getting help is somehow cheating…” The communal and familial nature of building wealth is interesting to me, especially given current cultural examinations of wealth and power. There have been a lot of mini pop culture scandals and stories of late wherein individuals are lauded as self-made when they are most definitely not, or some variation thereof. Both Jeff and I had parents who paid for our educations–though we both still earned scholarships, worked jobs (two at one point in my case), and went to a ridiculously inexpensive university for our undergraduate degrees. But privilege is privilege and we have it. Here in the UK, it’s extremely common for parents to help adult children with the down payments that put them on the property ladder for the first time. There are political and policy aspects to wealth building that cannot and should not be ignored. In other words, it is a rare, rare (wo)man who is a financial island and we should probably ditch the myth of the self-made man as it’s inaccurate, unhelpful, and not a little soul-crushing.

Your headline of the week, ladies and gentlemen.

Not holding my breath…

I want this biopic and I want it NOW.

I have not spawned but I know exactly what FOMOG is.

Phryne Fischer, ladies and gentlemen!

RIP to a true fashion maestro who has defined a generation of several fashion houses. I’m curious to see how his successor will pick up the reigns at Chanel and what that will mean for the house, Lagerfeld seems so tied to it in my head that I have a hard time imaging it without him! Adieu, good sir.

Black History Month is not over, and Mr. Obama has some reading recommendations if you are inclined for some self-education. My repertoire of African and black American authors is truly shameful and I’ve been working to correct over recent years.

Oh yes, this is the queer content I want for a weekend reading.

When the history of this current administration is written, I honestly think people will be baffled at how much it got away with due to sheer brazenness. And not in a good way. (Side note, Matthew Whitaker is also an idiot.)

The only Oscars prep I am doing.

I really feel like the recent science reporting on insect biomass collapse has not gotten nearly enough airtime…

What the actual fuck is going on here?!

In better news, put Girl Scouts in charge of everything, thanks.

Let’s end on a sweet note, shall we? Reader, I wept.