Marissa D. Barrera

Gotta hand it to the bad guys - hitting children and farmers at the same time is almost impressive!

whoever installed this outside the met gala is ICONIC.

Today is the Met Gala. Here are some things to keep in mind while engaging in Met Gala discourse: — The Met Gala is a fundraising event that supports the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. — The Costume Institute preserves historical garments, curates public exhibitions, and educates people on how clothing reflects and shapes culture. — In a political climate when public arts funding is being limited or contested, private fundraising efforts like this are even more important. — Many organizations hold galas to raise money for their missions. This includes organizations focused on the arts, LGBTQ+ rights, environmental justice, and medical research. The Met is not the only institution that holds galas. — The Met Gala raises money through ticket sales. Major fashion houses such as Gucci often purchase entire tables and invite celebrities to attend the event in their designs. For brands, this functions as a form of marketing, similar to advertising or runway shows. But here, that spending also helps fund a public cultural institution. — Members of the public can later visit the museum and see exhibitions that contextualize fashion as part of cultural history. And their tickets are relatively affordable because they have been subsidized by these fundraisers. — Not all clothing is meant to be practical or "presentable" by conventional standards. Some garments are made as artistic statements. Even if you wouldn’t wear something to the office, you can still appreciate the creativity and technical craft behind it. — Events like this provide work for countless tailors, embroiderers, textile specialists, and artisans. These people often work on other types of cultural productions, such as the costuming for films, theatre, and TV shows. The Met Gala helps sustain these craft industries and thus keeps the production quality high for the areas of culture you care about. — Traditional black tie is never wrong for a gala. In fact, this is how men traditionally dressed for the Met Gala for much of this event's history. Not everyone has the personality to pull off an avant-garde outfit, so they shouldn't be forced into one.

If abortion is "playing God," so is chemo, insulin, and C-sections. Funny how only women's medical choices get called sacrilegious.

They’re going after law school accreditation because they can’t find accredited lawyers willing to work for Trump’s DOJ

@jacob_wass *cries in NoMa* Union Market is nice

My early DC neighborhood rankings (based on where I’ve been so far): 1. Adams Morgan 2. Columbia Heights 3. Georgetown 4. Dupont Circle 5. Navy Yard 6. Capitol Hill

Instead of worrying that humanities degrees don’t prepare students for jobs in today’s world [product managers finance consultants startups], we should worry that we’ve created a world with such little value for literature, art, philosophy—anything that expresses the human soul

@D8N13L_TH0M85 Smart! Will be updating my MO!

@mdb2 Cross slightly ahead and walk slower than them so they can concentrate on the opposite curb

When someone elderly or with disabilities is struggling to cross the street, slow your pace from a respectful distance so drivers see both of you.🩷

Tell me you never studied at the library as an undergrad without telling me

.@JamesTalarico: I’m an elderly millennial. I can’t stay up past 10pm, my joints ache, and my younger cousins call me cringe. They also call me ‘unc,’ whatever that means. But Gen Z — freed from illusions — is uniquely suited to lead us at this moment. Many of you grew up on the For You Page. The endless scroll is emblematic of what humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years: searching. If we scroll past one more tweet, one more TikTok, maybe we’ll find what we’re looking for — the one that will make us feel something. But what you’re looking for can’t be found on artificial platforms run by billionaires. It’s within you.

It kind of gets lost but a reminder that Bernie is in leadership under Schumer’s big tent structure

we told you that in confidence

People are arguing that “silhouette” and “gauche” are not words a high schooler would/should know. Those are middle school vocabulary words, diva

“Ooh, we love Aquiqui!” - me, a Providence College grad

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

I don't think non-lawyers can truly grasp what it means for the DOJ to be doing this.

re: smoking discourse… tweeted this before, but this passage from nickel and dimed where barbara ehrenreich realizes why her coworkers at a diner smoke so much really made sense to me…

I want people to become more informed about politics and I do think TMZ could help, but in order to do that, the outlet needs to make sure they're reporting accurately There are statements in this video that are just wrong First, Congress did pass a bill to fund DHS, which Trump signed into law yesterday — the shutdown is effectively over Second, framing recess as just a "vacation" is misleading, particularly since hill offices are continuing to offer constituent services Do better

Every moral panic about women “abandoning the home” is also a panic about who will do the labor if women stop doing it for free.

Read that if you look young for your age, it’s your last reincarnation on earth. So there!