Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 40.3 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
Well, we have arrived. Forty weeks of pandemic (on the East Coast) later, 2020 is almost over.
In a year impossible to recap—here are some last thoughts before a week of…indigestion? (I hope not.)
Here are The Guardian’s pictures of the year. Here’s the NY Times’ extended obituary remembering some of the thinkers and makers we lost this year.
Here is a reminder that our ‘president’ is not quite done yet and still demanding changes to an already lackluster relief bill while letting criminals off the hook.
Biden has a lot of work ahead to be the climate president we need; organic meat is not the answer, actually; but at least there is a little bit of climate legislation in the relief bill, and the US is suing Walmart over its role in accelerating the opioid crisis.
Chernobyl is rearing its ugly head/river/nuclear waste again because of a truly unfathomable plan to dredge a canal across Europe and threaten one of the most biodiverse places on the continent. There’s so much we don’t know about human impacts on ecosystems, still, but now we know that myths about lemmings are just that.
Scientists are trying to study blinking by outfitting grackles with headgear, and Neptune has a weird dark spot.
The point is—it never stops. There is always so much. A lot of it is terrible, as conditions under white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism are wont to be, but a lot of it is good and amazing and moving. There is a lot worth saving and a lot worth leaving behind.
On that—since yesterday, y’alls donations in celebration of my lovely mama have totaled over $300, which will cancel $30,000 in medical debt. (If you still want to donate, venmo me @lena-greenberg.)
And for some funny time travel—here’s the very first issue of Digestable, from 100 years ago, otherwise known as March 14th, 2020.
Thank you, really, for reading, emailing me back, sending me animals, and supporting this project. I am so grateful!
Here is a cat. Celebrate and rest, be gentle with each other—there is so much ahead of us.
*Hot Goss*
Brought to you by the superb Latifah Azlan.
On the last day of ~*Hot Goss*~ the Goss Gods gave to me: one (1) Scott Disick mansion-hunting with his 19-year-old girlfriend whom he started dating around October even though he's 37 years old and this is all just really f-in nastyyyyyyyyyy.
Yes, you read that right. Kardashian-adjacent fameho Scott Disick was spotted looking at multi-million dollar properties with his extremely, extreeeeemely young girlfriend Amelia Hamlin, who is 19 and is daughter to Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna. Amelia is a self-described model in the way that all of the offspring of Third Tier celebrities (second-string athletes, former heartthrobs and bombshells from the 80s, cast members of family-oriented reality tv shows) all hustle to get a modeling gig of some kind. They won't be walking runways in Milan or New York Fashion Week like Kendall Jenner or Lily-Rose Depp or Kaia Gerber but the nepotism will be juuuust enough to book them gigs for a smaller fashion magazine or commercial shoot somewhere. Anyway, we're not here to shit talk a 19-year-old person because she's not the gross one in this situation: Scott Disick is.
So yeah. Scott and Amelia rolled out their coupling back in October and I guess things are still going full speed ahead now. There's all this speculation about them being super serious because of the whole mansion-hunting thing but I doubt it's anything more than Scott scoping out new properties and Amelia tagging along for the day. So no, I don't think Scott's about to settle down with Amelia anytime soon. But it's still gross. Every day I am reminded that Scott Disick is a thing is gross to me, let alone the fact that he's dating a barely legal teen while he's nearing his 40s. I don't even know what Scott does anymore but his stunts and former association to the Kardashians have earned him some sort of consistent coverage and level of fame to live off and that upsets me. At least Rob Kardashian tried to sell socks.
Anyway, I feel bad for ending this year's run of ~*Hot Goss*~ on such a sour note but the mill is winding down and even the celebrities have started hunkering down for the end of year holidays and break. So to lift our spirits a little bit, I just wanted to take a hot sec to thank all of you for tuning in to ~*Hot Goss*~ (almost) every day. Moonlighting as a Serious Gossip Columnist has been a true joy to this difficult year and I can't express how much I've enjoyed writing these stories and even talking to some of you about them! This column has given me an outlet for my escapist needs and yet another way to connect with people whom I have had to (physically) disconnect from this year due to the pandemic. I hope you've felt the same way.
Rest well, folks! I'll see you in January.