This election has made everyone feel some type of way, whether that’s elation, depression, fury, empathy, confusion or of course, exhaustion. It’s just been so damn long! And strange! When will it finally be over? (Spoiler: It could be over as soon as 9 p.m. ET tonight, assuming Florida gets its act together).
The latest round of polls show that the two candidates are near tied in both Florida and North Carolina; Bloomberg and Fox News have Hillary winning by three and four points, respectively. Should you cancel that morning coffee meeting you scheduled for tomorrow in a bizarre fit of productiveness, knowing that you’ll be up late tonight biting your fingernails between sips of [insert hard alcohol of choice here]? Who knows? What is clear is that we, as a nation, must get through today.
While you quietly kill time at your desk, why not also prepare for that election party you RSVP’d to with a few choice selections, courtesy of us. Above, enjoy a host of celebs — Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s Rachel Bloom, Moby, Elizabeth Banks and more — sing a get-out-the-vote song, because there’s always one of these every four years, and this one is truly enjoyable. Below, long reads, medium reads, podcasts and more.
If you want to laugh, read this Vulture piece by the writer/producer behind Fox’s New Girl: “Hillary Clinton’s Locker-Room Talk”
Paul Ryan headed back to the locker room to get changed after a hard-core P90X workout. The first thing he saw when he walked in the door was President Hillary Clinton. She’d brought a lawn chair in from the White House, and she was sitting with her feet up on the bench, eating a panini from Au Bon Pain. Her eyes were glued to Mike Pence as he tried to change out of his gym shorts and back into his suit. He was using a towel to cover as much of his body as he could, but the towel kept slipping. “Magic Mike! Show me your Hoosier, baby!” the president shouted from her chair, wiping some kind of pesto sauce off her chin. Mike Pence’s face was red as he desperately tried to cover up, but it was a losing battle. “Not as tight as they used to be, Mike. I’m talking about your butt cheeks,” Hillary clarified.
If you want to cry, read this story in the Washington Post about a woman who was born in 1920, the year that women got the right to vote. The piece walks you — in a simple, straightforward manner — through the life of Gladys, a 96-year-old woman, and the 18 elections she’s voted in over 70 transformative years: “She was born the day women got the vote. And then a century passed…”
Her son had a daughter, which meant that Gladys had a granddaughter and she could see yet another generation of young women growing up, with even more opportunities than she’d ever imagined for herself. Her granddaughter never questioned whether she would be allowed to go to college. She just went, and while in school she worked part time in a job that nobody told her would be reserved for men.
If you want to ponder why the lead-up to the election felt so icky, this New York Times opinion piece by Jill Filipovic is intriguing. In it, Filipovic posits that as women have evolved and grown, men haven’t: “The Men Feminists Left Behind”
While women have steadily made their way into traditionally male domains, men have not crossed the other way. Men do more at home than they used to, but women still do much more — on an average day, 67 percent of men do some housework compared with 85 percent of women. Male identity remains tied up in dominance and earning potential, and when those things flag, it seems men either give up or get angry.
If you want to be inspired by some serious tenacity, Politico has a story about just what it has taken for Hillary to get to where she is — all the concessions, all the challenges, all of the scenarios where she was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t: What it Took: Hillary Clinton’s Uphill Road to the White House
How much was her identity worth if it meant costing [Bill] his political future? Her calculation was concise, as she would phrase in [her] memoir: “I decided it was more important for Bill to be Governor than for me to keep my maiden name.” She made her announcement at the same news conference her husband announced he would be running to win back the office. It worked. Bill Clinton was elected governor again in 1982, and 1984, and 1986, and 1988, and 1990.
If you want to be surprised, tune into This American Life’s podcast about the Hillary email scandal (if you can stand to hear about it one more time, that is). They sat down with a reporter who read 247 pages of summaries of the FBI investigation into the emails — aren’t you glad that isn’t your job? — and it turns out that H-Dog does not know how to use a desktop computer: Master of Her Domain…Name
Graff concludes that it’s not the scandal most people thought it was. Not a sophisticated, Machiavellian scheme to evade federal rules and record laws. The interviews “depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology.”
And if you need to escape all election news ENTIRELY, here’s what to wear for the rest of the week. Here’s what we wore all of last week. Read your horoscope. Eat pancakes for dinner, and then try writing something. It’ll help get your mind off things.
