Celebrate 20BiTeen, With These 10 LGBTQ-Friendly Novels to Read This Summer
By Rachel Rivenbark
Summer is the perfect time for fun in the sun and to catch up on all the reading you missed out on during the other three seasons. In honor of 20BiTeen, here is a round-up of 10 of the best LGBT YA reads to devour during your next vacation:
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Fierce Fat Girls Tell Their Stories
By Ghia Vitale
Hot & Heavy is a fat positive anthology that’s edited by Virgie Tovar. According to the cover, this anthology features stories by “fierce fat girls on life, love & fashion.”
Determining the Best 2020 Presidential CandidateBy Rachel Rivenbark  Saying that the upcoming primaries for the 2020 presidential election are going to be hectic seems like a little bit of an understatement. Perhaps “bonkers” might be a more appropriate word, given that there is now an utterly ground-breaking twenty-seven primary candidates in total currently in the running - twenty-five of whom are Democrats, and only two of whom are Republicans. This beats out the last historical records for the highest number of primary candidates by almost ten, with the last records having been broken in 1976 with sixteen Democratic primary candidates, and again in 2016 with seventeen Republican candidates.
An Obituary Revisited The Miami humidity put me in a stupor when I was already low on energy. My sister Nina and I crammed into her car to drive from her apartment in Miami to the southern suburb of Kendall. This was not a holiday. The occasion was the death of our Uncle Bobby, a man who was not actually our uncle. We sat in silence, partially because of the heat, partially because of the mood. I had flown in from Washington, D.C. already expecting and dreading this half-hour drive. Neither one of us wanted to cry, but it happened anyway. The blasting air-conditioning smeared our tears before we could wipe them.
Burnt Stakes
By Alex Carrigan
Recollecting one's teen years can be a complete mixed-bag. It's a lot of scattered events with almost no connection between any of them, it's marking the days with routines and vague aspirations, and it's about remembering how you spent those days obsessing or idolizing something odd in hindsight. That's not to say that everyone's teen years are a complete jumbled mess, but when looking back, it's the realization that some of the most important and developmental years of your lives were completely out of your control, and realizing that this is merely a sampling of your adult life. As someone who did virtually nothing with people his age, spent time working as a games attendant at a theme park, and was into reading Wikipedia articles for fun, it really dawns on how much that bizarre period of life has shaped me as an adult.
Come On, MaBy Joanna Patzig  NBC/Universal There’s something about going to historic theaters that raises my expectations for movies a little. The movies these little places get are more curated than a normal box office, and they’re often so decorated and grandiose that everything seems important. The screen of the Byrd Theater in Richmond, Virginia did elevate the movie Ma at times, but not all of it. I can’t say enough that Octavia Spencer was amazing and she deserves an Oscar. The rest of the movie was just okay.
The End of the Biggest Illusion By Rongqing Dai  The essence of the notion “illusion” is something that feels real but indeed unreal. The key point here is the antithesis between real and unreal. Obviously, in order to make something more illusory, we could either make its fake appearance look more real, or make its substance even more unreal, or push it in both directions so that it would feel more real while it is indeed more unreal. Based on this understanding about how to make things more illusory, we can conclude that the most successful illusions would be those that could have billions of people feel it real for generations. Still, if someone can make billions of people to believe something that is in fact real to be unreal for generations, then it would be even more successful than just making people feel something unreal as real, because it is more difficult to have people collectively disbelieve what they clearly see with their eyes. Furthermore, if someone can make billions of people believe something real not just unreal but actually illusions for generations, then I would feel compelled to credit them collectively as the biggest illusion.
Yesterday is a Modern HitBy Rachel Rivenbark  Universal Pictures Going to the movie theater with my girlfriend this past weekend, I found myself very unexpectedly being talked into seeing Yesterday. I’d have gone for John Wick: Chapter 3, personally (I don’t like action flicks, but I would die for Keanu Reeves), but my girlfriend’s family being included in the plans necessitated a last-second change to something a little more child-friendly.
Ridin' with Biden: Part TwoBy Christopher Sloce Image by Marc Nozell  Happy Tuesday, and welcome back to Ridin’ with Biden. It’s been a bad week for the big guy, since he got burnt so bad by Kamala Harris at the debate she paid a prisoner exactly five cents to put him out. A lot of what the week has amounted to is an attempt to stop the bleeding since he took one on the chin.
ANIMA ANIMA ANIMA: Processing Thom Yorke’s New Album Through Retrospect
By Joanna Patzig
Image Courtesy of Flickr. Image by user anyonlinyr.
First, I want to take a minute to go back to the 2000’s and think about Kid A. I was pretty young then, but I remember how it totally gutted me emotionally, and it was beautiful. Today Radiohead is a big meme territory, the power of white men whining to electronic music definitely feels dated. Music has changed a lot since those iconic albums, but the bands influence in today's landscape is undeniable from groups like Sigur Rós to MGMT. Thom Yorke’s recent solo album shows a return to the cutting edge of music and tech, reflecting the work of the very musicians that he helped lay groundwork for. Anima presents a multimedia vision complete with a short film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s definitely Yorke’s most dynamic solo album to date, and it’s super contemporary sound is fascinating.
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