29 Rejected Kimye Baby Names

I feel a certain kinship with Kim Kardashian West, because we’ve always been pregnant at the same time. While she beat me to the delivery room by about five months this time around, we were due within about a week of each other back in 2013.

And we both suffered from preeclampsia with our first pregnancies. I actually diagnosed her from my couch, where I was already on doctor-ordered bedrest, after spotting a paparazzi photo of her feet that revealed a scorching case of edema. (By that time, my own personal footwear collection had been effectively reduced to “house slippers” and, for my twice-weekly trips to the doctor, “fancy goin’-out slippers.”)

But while Kim and I are forever bonded by our similarly timed pregnancies and mutual dislike for the gestational phase, I completely lack her confidence and élan when it comes to baby names. I mean, North West? Saint West? I just couldn’t! I’d feel too self-conscious.

3 Things I Have to Give Gwyneth Paltrow Credit For

Shortly after I launched this blog — and yes, “launch” is probably too grandiose there — I wrote a post criticizing some tone-deaf comments by Gwyneth Paltrow about the difficulties she faces as a tremendously wealthy parent. The post was picked up by Freshly Pressed, which generated the most traffic I have ever had to my tiny weird blog, and which gave me an overly optimistic outlook on the prospects for my tiny weird blog. (If anyone has written up a six-figure book deal offer for me, but is saving it in their Drafts folder because it feels “too forward” to send it, know that I have been eagerly awaiting your message every day for the last 15 months.)

Anyway, my point is that I kind of owe Gwyneth Paltrow one, for making me the blogging semi-success that I am today. And by “semi-success,” I mean “blogging has not yet caused bad things to happen in my life, at least not in a direct way that I can easily track.” Not, like, “my aspirational newsletter has expanded into a full-fledged lifestyle brand with an editorial headquarters located in a barn on my Los Angeles property.”

Also, let’s be real — there’s no pride in taking potshots at Gwyneth. The phrase that comes to mind is “low-hanging fruit,” unless you prefer “fish in a barrel,” or perhaps even the super-classy “target-rich environment.” Instead, I find it nobler to give Gwyneth credit where credit is due — not just for launching (oops, sorry, there’s that word again) my blogging hobby, but ALSO for these three other random things I came up with after hours of  exhaustive, exhausting research.

Can These 17 People Live?!?

This is a list of people whispering plaintively into the nothingness of the universe, “Can I live?!?”

And it’s a simple enough request, sure. But will we — the Internet-based hive mind of U.S. society, whose thirst and appetite for human blood has become as insatiable as Audrey II‘s — let them?

Probably not.

13 Feminist Celebrities, Judged

1. Emma Watson

Occupation: Inventor of feminism

Relevant Quote: “Chivalry should be consensual.”

Credibility Level: Hufflepuff

2. Tina Fey

Occupation: Relatable working mom

Relevant Quote: “People will say, ‘Oh, fashion magazines are so bad, they’re giving girls a negative message’ — but we’re also the fattest country in the world, so it’s not like we’re all looking at fashion magazines and not eating.”

Credibility Level: Ugh mom you are soooooo second-wave sometimes.

The Nicki Minaj GQ Interview in 19 Bullets

Intermittently respectable lad mag GQ recently published an interview with Nicki Minaj. It’s terribly done, and there are no circumstances under which you should read it. Since I’ve piqued your curiosity, though, I will now summarize the main beats of this interview, as written from the perspective of curiously beleaguered reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

(You’re welcome.)

1.  I have so much free time to think about all of the questions I’m not asking Nicki Minaj right now, because she is sleeping through this whole interview!

2.  Well, actually, she’s only nodded off about four times for a few seconds each. But I’m going to keep harping on this angle throughout the remainder of the article.

3.  Wah, it’s hot in here.

17 Things Football Analysts Say

1.  National Football League

2.  Special player

3.  Very special player

4.  Putting on a clinic

5.  Both sides of the ball

6.  Every-down back

7.  Bang-bang play

8.  Those are some thick thighs. I bet you have a hard time buying pants.*

16 Debates More Useful Than “Is Beyoncé a Feminist?”

Beyoncé is a feminist! This we know, for Beyoncé tells us so.

It should really be this easy, but it’s not. Because instead of saying, “I’m a feminist” while wearing a pantsuit with shoulder pads and castrating a bull, Beyoncé said, “I’m a feminist” while wearing a sparkly leotard and — perhaps most unsettling of all — moving her body in such a way as to suggest that she’s had sex before. Talk about mixed messages!

Since there’s nothing else going on in the U.S. right now — not like we’re bombing Iraq again, or dealing with a rash of unjustifiable police homicides against black men — there is currently a great debate raging as to whether Beyoncé is really a feminist, and if so, whether she’s feminist enough, and if so, did you even notice she was gyrating?

I’m not saying we only have to talk about Serious Pressing Issues all the time, guys, because that’s Nancy Grace’s beat and she covers it very thoroughly. But since Beyoncé has told us she’s a feminist, maybe we should just assume she’s the kind of feminist who likes to dance, and not always wear pants, and sometimes even have sex? And that frees us up to discuss other matters that aren’t quite so clear-cut, such as:

7 Chilling Scenes from Tyra’s Dystopian Future

I love Tyra Banks — either because she is genuinely a narcissistic buffoon who can’t seem to keep herself from saying stupid shit literally all the time, or because she is a master of self-parody. I can’t tell which reality we live in, but it truly doesn’t matter. Either way, she is successful and wealthy and UTTERLY RIDICULOUS, and I would watch reruns of America’s Next Top Model and Life-Size every day — if only my schedule permitted! — simply to bask in the Tyra-rrificness of it all.

With her hilarious contribution this week to The Wall Street Journal, we may have actually achieved peak Tyra. My initial response to this article was a delighted squeal of, “WHAT IS THIS EVEN???” — a question with many possible answers:

A.  It’s a prediction of future beauty trends, written by Harvard alum Tyra Banks.
B.  It’s a dystopian manifesto, as penned by the author of the young adult classic Modelland.
C.  It is the sound of a one-legged aspiring model stomping it out TO THE DEATH.
D.  It is the sound of the seventh seal breaking wide open.

But no, the answer is E. It is everything.

What does the future of beauty hold for us? So sayeth Tyra:

The One Macklemore Controversy He DOESN’T Want You Talking About

I am over 30 and have a baby, and Macklemore is NOT the guy who sings the Super Why theme, so it took me a while to figure out who he is. After performing some very in-depth Googling over the course of several days, I have learned that Macklemore is the stage name of a white guy named Ben who raps. Macklemore has become somewhat of a controversial figure in the music world for a variety of reasons, such as:

• He is a white guy named Ben who raps.
• He is a white guy named Ben who rapped about how he’s definitely not gay but it’s cool if you are.
• He is a white guy named Ben who won a Grammy for Best Rap Album.
• He is a white guy named Ben who seemed to be soliciting public accolades for apologizing to Kendrick Lamar* about his Grammy for Best Rap Album.
• He is a white guy named Ben who inadvertently costumed himself as a piece of Nazi propaganda during a recent surprise performance in Seattle.
• He is a human person who says “hella” literally all the time, as every possible part of speech. (Does that shit fly in the Pacific Northwest? Because not around here, it doesn’t.)

After completing my extensive Macklemore research, I have come to the conclusion that these various offenses have been committed by our pale friend Ben only to distract us, the foolishly naive public, into overlooking the REAL controversy:

5 New Beyoncé Conspiracy Theories

In case you didn’t know, Beyoncé is amazingly beautiful and exceptionally talented and outlandishly famous. Beyoncé is a triple threat who can sing and dance and act. (Dreamgirls aside — if you haven’t seen Obsessed at least twice, you and I probably have nothing to talk about.) Beyoncé is married to Jay-Z, who is also outlandishly famous, and together they are very wealthy and successful and in love.

By all reasonable measures, there is no way in which Beyoncé has not attained excellence. The only possible negative that’s even tangentially related to Beyoncé is the difficulty one faces in trying to buy tickets to one of her shows, but this is just an unfortunate side effect of Beyoncé being one of the most sought-after women in the world.

So, you might say that Beyoncé’s chief flaw — the one she would have to cite as her “biggest weakness” if she were ever to interview for a job as shift manager at a Ruby Tuesday — would be, “There is not enough of Beyoncé to go around.”

(She could also say, “Beyoncé sometimes talks about herself in the third person,” but a valid argument could be made for this as an endearing personality quirk.)