What I Read This Week: Pee-Wee, Winona, and the original welfare queen

Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, 5/2/09 - 3 of 3

As an erstwhile news editor and content curator, I subscribe to a lot of great daily and weekly email newsletters. The Quartz Daily Brief, This.cm, Pocket, Digg, and The Week all keep me up to date on what’s happening in the world and what everyone is reading and sharing.

I often tweet and Facebook (that’s a verb now, right?) my favorite stories, but I thought I’d also gather them right here every week (or at least try to).

Pee-Wee’s Big Comeback

Although I never watched Pee-Wee’s Playhouse growing up nor did I love Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, I’m still a big Pee-Wee Herman fan. I think it all started with his first appearance post-scandal and continued with his appearances in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the movie), Murphy Brown, and 30 Rock.

Jonah Weiner’s NY Times piece is a fan of Pee-Wee’s creator Paul Reubens as well. It opens with Reubens showing Weiner a fabulous Walgreen’s in Los Angeles (which I want to visit), takes us through his latest project, and ends with him hard at work at a voiceover session.

Winona, Forever

I like when artists keep on working no matter what, which is just one of the reasons I love Winona Ryder.

I enjoyed this article by Soraya Roberts at Hazlitt because I enjoy most things Winona, and it’s important that it calls out the blatant sexism in Hollywood. For instance, Ryder’s entire net worth is only half of one paycheck Johnny Depp gets for a movie, and Robert Downey, Jr., despite a drug scandal, was able to bounce back to become a megastar while Ryder didn’t have as much luck after her shoplifting debacle.

However, I’m happy to see Ryder doing any kind work. Like Reubens doing voiceovers for cartoons, I admire Ryder for continuing to work, even if it’s “small” roles in big films. Not that I’m saying she should take what she can get, and I hope things change, but it’s better than not working at all.

And besides, Winona can do no wrong in my book.

The Welfare Queen

I stumbled upon this fascinating 2013 Slate piece while doing research on the term welfare queen. Josh Levin takes an exhaustive look at the craziness that is the original welfare queen, Linda Taylor, which by the way is only one of at least 80 pseudonyms she used. Cheating the welfare system is the least of her evils, which include abduction and possibly murder.

Another layer of the story is race. Apparently Taylor could pass for just about anything: white, black, Spanish, and Filipino. Much of her family claims she’s white, despite her “long black hair and dark skin,” which no one else in the family had.

The piece is hella long but well worth the read.

A Polygamist Cult’s Last Stand: The Rise and Fall of Warren Jeffs

Warren Jeffs is a sicko. That is all.

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