Jenni Berrett

"I had always pictured myself spending afternoons studying there. I instead found myself curled up on one of those benches at five in the morning, promising the crises hotline operator that no, I did not want to kill myself. I just didn’t know who else to call."

"Disease takes the body over, and, in the cases of the diseases we vaccinate for, moves swiftly on to other bodies. It does not ask permission to enter. "

The premise is pretty simple: We each give you one thing to watch, one thing to listen to, and one thing to read over the weekend.

"...Mental illness isn’t that exclusive. It doesn’t care how your day is going."

[CN: vomit] Having been an unfeeling, sluggish husk of a person with the nap-taking skills of an elderly sloth for the past five months or so, I have reemerged too tender for this world.

If you find yourself feeling hurt, mad, sad, etc. about the election this year, go ahead and feel it. Cry in front of your dad. Eat some queso. When it’s all said and done, feel how you need to feel. The only way to foster a healthy relationship between emotion and politics is to acknowledge that there is one in the first place, and that it probably needs fixing.

I don’t think the bar is low enough. We obviously need a way to work up to the Bechdel Test. Baby steps. And we all know women love babies.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: RuPaul’s Drag Race is the best show on television.

Boy, do we have some great finds this week. Olympic farting and synth-soaked summer jams — what more could you want? If your answer was "a longform piece of investigative journalism detailing Nicki Minaj's appearance at a bar mitzvah," you've come to the right place.

Culturally speaking, though, it’s pretty much set in stone. Even if I left the church entirely, there’s no getting out of my heritage. Cut me open; I’ll bleed funeral potatoes. I’m what you call a “legacy Mormon” — my ancestors migrated across the frontier and settled in Utah (then Mexico) after facing unspeakable persecution from countless communities in the United States. You probably know my ancestors best as the people with the wives.