Obviously it’s obnoxious to publicly complain that someone isn’t hot, but I also think it’s weird to expect someone to respond to “Is she hot?” with someone else’s opinion rather than their own.

The Way He Looks (2014) - cute gay teen romcom set in Brazil

Wild Nights with Emily (2018) - about Emily Dickinson’s queer relationship, but it’s funny, not the stereotypical Sad Lesbian Period Piece

Plan B (2021) - Two teen girls go on a road trip to buy Plan B

The Human Development Index is *inversely* correlated with the fertility rate. The higher the standard of living you can achieve without kids, the greater the opportunity cost of having kids. That’s why Norway has a lower fertility rate than Niger.

It’s kind of funny that the right has made this into a culture war issue, because all that does is negatively polarize everyone else against it. It makes not having kids feel like striking a triumphant blow against your political enemies rather than just a personal choice.

It doesn’t address the root problem. The Human Development Index is *inversely* correlated with fertility rates. The higher the standard of living people can achieve without kids, the greater the opportunity cost of having kids.

But there’s evidence that many people want more kids than they have. Ofc some people might mean “ideal” in an abstract hypothetical way, not that they personally want to have 2-3 kids, but it does seem like there are people who *would* choose to have more kids under certain circumstances

I think there’s no point trying to convince people who don’t want any kids to have a kid, but I do think there are people who have 1-2 kids who would be open to having another one under certain circumstances, and we could try to make those circumstances happen.

And I say this as a woman who doesn’t have kids and will probably never attempt to have kids.

I often see people assume that if you acknowledge that declining birth rates could possibly have any downsides whatsoever, you must be a misogynist and a white supremacist. I’m glad you haven’t seen them, but they very much exist.

The problem is that most people *only* push back and *don’t* acknowledge the problem. And I say this as a woman who doesn’t have kids and will probably never attempt to have kids.

I suspect it was to spike the football.

I’ve seen people talking about it but I didn’t watch it

It just happened yesterday, and there have already been multiple protests near me, 1600 miles away from Minneapolis.

I attended a pro-Palestine protest, and one of the organizers there complained that the other organizers there were using the word “people.” She said we should only say “workers” instead of “people.”

Which is fascinating because she didn’t say that seedless watermelons *cause* cancer; she seemed to be implying that in the pre-seedless era, people still *got* cancer, they just survived it, and that somehow seedless watermelons destroyed our natural ability to recover from cancer.

My dad once predicted that I would like onions when I was older. I was skeptical, but he was right.

Also one time I considered becoming an egg donor, and the application form asks what your favorite book is, and I decided that Idlewild by James Frankie Thomas would give people the most accurate idea of what kind of person I am, but that that would be a little *too* honest as an answer.

Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight