It seems like every week I open this post by sending good wishes to people who’re experiencing something awful, and I know I don’t even remember all the awful things people are experiencing. This week, foremost on my mind (beyond the on-going mess post-hurricane in MANY places), is the fact that MUCH of California, my beloved home state, has burned.  If you have suggestions for how people can help, as always, please feel free to post them in the comments, and Fast Company had a good post this week about how to help if you’d like to check that out.

In other news — and here is where I awkwardly pivot from Disaster Discussion — our mobile site works again! There will still be some bits and bobs to fix (and we know that, for example, enlarging pics in posts doesn’t always work), but that was a huge hurdle and we’re so glad it’s back. Thank you, Tiffany, for all your hard work to make this happen, and for being generally amazing.

And in case you need something to read:

OBVIOUSLY the big Hollywood story this week was the continued unfurling of Harvey Weinstein’s reign of terror, as more and more women stepped forward, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie in the Times, and this horrifying and well-reported story from The New Yorker broke.  What a complete nightmare human he has proven to be. If anything good has come out of this, at least, it’s that the floodgates are open now: countless celebrities, men and women, are telling the stories of how they’ve been harassed and how it wasn’t okay. Hopefully, this will be a step toward everyone realizing that this kind of behavior is unacceptable and that the hand-waving excuse that “boys will be boys” is bullshit.

Related, at Lainey: Ben Affleck’s not having a great week, either.

I thought this was great, at Vulture: Stop Mentioning Your Daughters When You Denounce Harvey Weinstein

And Jezebel did a deep dive about the Marchesa/Weinstein connection.

Related, at The Hollywood Reporter: Weinstein threatened Felicity Huffman if she didn’t wear Marchesa.

This piece at the New Yorker, about New York monument Le Cirque, is really good. To wit: “As the name implies, Le Cirque is ostensibly circus-themed, with a tented ceiling and monkey paintings and that sort of thing. Its real theme, though, is power, one of those restaurants where titans of industry and well-preserved A-listers triple-kiss the dapper European stationed at the lectern. Sirio Maccioni, Le Cirque’s patriarch, overlord, and mascot, wields his considerable charisma with weaponized precision. Though a procession of great chefs have honed their skills in the Le Cirque kitchen (Boulud, Bouley, Torres, Telepan, Allegretti), at Le Cirque and its fine-dining cousins—Nello, the various Ciprianis, Michael’s, etc.—it is almost an unwritten rule that the food is neither the draw nor the point.”

At the New York Times: In Love With Romance Novels, but Not Their Lack of Diversity

This is interesting, at Vice: A Lawyer Explains Who Really Owns Your Tattoos.

At GQ, which has been doing really good work lately: The Man Who Forgot He Was a Rap Legend. The lede along is pretty amazing: “He was nervous. He hadn’t been onstage since the accident. Here he was, 34 years old, a veteran performer, but he felt like an anxious teenager, picking up a microphone for the first time. Would he find the words? He felt somewhat reassured when he summoned the rhythm in his head. He’d approached the mic a thousand times before, first on street corners and in clubs in New York and later on stages around the world. But he surely never anticipated performing in this venue—the rec room and sometimes synagogue of the Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation near Coney Island, Brooklyn.”

So real, at Racked: All I Want in This World Are Pants I Can Overeat In. Me too, girl. Me too.

Atlas Obscura tells us Amazing Ways to Visit Zealandia, Earth’s Lost Eighth Continent. !!!! Who even knew?!

At Pajiba: In Defence of Celebrity Gossip

Fascinating, at Town & Country, about the Winchester Mystery House. “The third and most bizarre theory claims Sarah was acting on the advice of a medium who, while supposedly channeling her late husband, said she needed to build enough rooms for all of the souls of people who’d been killed with Winchester rifles. Legend has it that the home’s labyrinth of rooms within rooms, interior-facing windows, doors that opened to walls, and stairs leading to nowhere were all part of a grand plan to “confuse” the spirits of the dead.”

This is so interesting, at Technology Review:  Online Dating Is Changing the Nature of Society (in a good way, though).

At Celebitchy: Are Jon Hamm and Dakota Johnson dating?! Or is she dating Chris Martin? Either way: GOOD FOR YOU, HONEY. I hope she’s dating them BOTH.

At Revelist: There is a fashion line from Forever21…devoted to Taco Bell.

Over at Refinery29, this is actually my own usual MO: How To Make A Halloween Costume With Things Already In Your Closet

Here, listen to A-Ha doing an acoustic version of “Take On Me.” Spoiler: THEY SOUND AMAZING, though Morten doesn’t do the SUPER high note in this arrangement. (Trivia: the normal version is my phone alarm.)

Do you need a new wine cardigan? We rounded up some options.

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