Fugs and Pieces, July 1st, 2016

Happy Canada Day, Fug Nation! It is also GFY’s 12th birthday, which is an amazing thing for me to contemplate. I cannot tell you how happy we are to still be here, and to have gotten to hang out with you guys for a dozen years. Thank you for making that possible.

And, in honor of our birthday, Canada’s birthday, and America’s birthday (which is Monday), we are going to be taking the long weekend along with…well, probably a LOT of you. Enjoy it, and we’ll meet you back here for Business As Usual on Tuesday, July 5th. Until then, please enjoy the following — and, if you need a book to read over the long weekend, um, I have a very self-serving suggestion? (IT’S OUR BIRTHDAY. I’M ALLOWED.)

– I will miss The Toast, which stops publishing today, very very much. For a lot of reasons, but in great part because they published pieces like this one, which is absolutely delightful: If Barack Obama Were Your Dad.

– Also, Hillary Clinton wrote a really lovely piece for them today, saying good-bye. No, THE Hillary Clinton. No, for real. It’s pretty amazing.

– I thought this, at Slate, was really interesting: Why Is the New York Times Crossword So Clueless About Race and Gender?

– Also at Slate is this wonderful oral history of Angels in America.

– We talked about this Mother Jones piece in the comments of last week’s Fugs & Pieces, but I wanted to link to it here in case you missed it: My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard. It’s a very long piece, but extremely worth your time.

– The Atlantic had a wonderful tribute to Pat Summitt, who died this week.

– This year has been so awful for celebrity deaths. Cathy Horyn penned a wonderful piece about Bill Cunningham for The Cut. I loved Bill, as I think everyone who went to Fashion Week did, whether we knew him personally or not — which I did not, although I did once screech at at a security guard who wasn’t letting him into the tents for Richie Rich (of all things), “LET HIM IN, IT’S BILL CUNNINGHAM!!!!!!” for which he very sweetly thanked me. (Bill did, not the guard. That dude must have been a last-minute fill-in, as the NYFW security folks are almost always the same crew, and they certainly know Bill Cunningham by sight.) I will very much miss seeing his friendly, curious, kind face at Fashion Week. It feels like the end of an era.

– This RULES, at Maximum Middle Age: Get the Look: Endora from Bewitched.

– Ana Gasteyer’s Grub Street Diet is one of the best ones they’ve had, I think.

– At Lainey: Drew Barrymore might become a talk show host? I can kind of see that, actually.

– This is so interesting, and very apt for us, at Racked: How Did Celebrity Airport Style Become a Thing?

– Two Nerdy History Girls prove that sheer dresses have been A Thing FOREVER

– At Pajiba: Calvin Harris Could Give a Master Class In How Not to Handle a Breakup

– At Celebitchy: It is INSANE to me that Leslie Jones had problems getting a designer to dress her for the Ghostbusters premiere, but it was also sadly not surprising.

– At Vanity Fair: Joan Rivers’s Private Collection Is Up for Auction—See the Over-the-Top Items You Can Bid On

– Over at The New Potato, DIY face masks! They sound delicious.

And here at GFY, in case you missed it: