Boomers Are Trying To Kill Us, And How To Be Better To Your Fat Friends

Dear Pulpits,

It’s raining, and my kitchen is full of rising dough in preparation for a Friendsgiving tomorrow. While I don’t subscribe to celebrating genocide, I do subscribe to baking for those I love, and the rain is making it dreamy as hell to do so.

When I was a kid, I had grandmothers who were kind and beautiful, and pretty hilariously bad cooks. One year, I went to visit my grandmother in Tucson, and she decided to make me a pumpkin pie because it’s my favorite. Except she didn’t really know how to measure things, and we ended up with four pies instead of one.

They were a lethal combination of half-raw, half burnt. And even though we ended up composting them and going store-bought, it’s still one of my favorite memories of her — chain smoking, cursing at a measuring cup, knocking ash into an empty pumpkin puree can in a kitchen full of aghast-looking pale pies.

This last week in PULP, we focused on publishing just a few pieces, rather than our usual smorgasboard. This is due to a few things: 1) we are humans who deserve some time off, 2) we want you to have content to sneak off from family time to read, but don’t want to overwhelm your already overloaded selves, and 3) the pieces we do have are heavy-hitting.

Enjoy, my lovely brainy babes.
July (+ Katie)

Being Better To Your Fat Friend This Thanksgiving by Your Fat Friend

In that way, comments about food are a performance: a scripted moment of humility, designed to pardon us for our indulgences and perceived shortcomings. We assign moral value to food, then self-flagellate for our lack of piety. Often unintentionally, we create a hierarchy of bodies, assuming that our devotion is visible in the shapes and sizes of our skin. Who has kept the faith? Who needs to confess?

The Taste Of Memory, by Katie Tandy

In wandering through the beautiful bowels of the internet I discovered that there were many different kinds of synesthesia — in addition to the “most common” and studied, Grapheme-color synesthesia (every letter or numerical has a particular color — people also taste words.

Not So OK, Boomers, by Alex Foley

The Boomers have looked at the gulf between their values and those of their children and responded not with the usual hand wringing and agony aunt letters, but a concerted, if mindless, effort to bring their children into line.

They are punishing us for our perceived cultural excesses, our bottomless mimosas, and soy milk lattes, by attacking the seat of millennial pleasure: the body.