Watch the trailer for American Crime Story: The Murder of Gianni Versace. I am not, repeat, NOT a true crime fan. But I remember the day this murder was reported so very distinctly, and it came during 1997, which is the year that defined the next section of my life… It was weird and memorable and I can still hear the person who told me about it pronouncing his name “Johnny” because “the i softens the g in Italian, it doesn’t get pronounced on its own.” She was Canadian and a hoot and I wish I could remember her name.
On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality. “Our bland, featureless Midwest—on some level, it is a fantasy. The easiest, most tempting tack for a cultural critic to take with fantasies is to condemn them. Given what ideas of normalness, in particular, have done to this country, to its nonwhite, nonstraight, non–middle-class, nonmale—and also to those who are all of those things, and are driven slightly or fully crazy by the effort to live up to the norm that is their birthright—it is tempting simply to try to fumigate the myth away.” (The Midwest, by the way isn’t flat. The Plains states are flat. The Midwest has hills and forests and lakes – some of them Great – but it isn’t flat.)