Thought Catalog

Here, in no particular order, our 10 favorite comments for the month of April.

“One Thousand And One Nights” is a perfect example of Orientalism and the Western gaze: the evocation of exoticism within the fictive boundaries of the Orient, the conflation of culture in this Orient, and the hodge-podge of Judeo-Christian iconography with a dusting of Bollywood glamour.

We’re thinking about how these things weren’t supposed to happen to people like us. We’re thinking about sepia, scalloped-edged family portraits and New World dreams, and how these well-reaped dreams have inverted like well-worn myths. We’re thinking about mnemonic devices and smiles that should have been, that were not, that never are.

Two days after my mother had cradled a small piece of happiness in her hand, her body performed its most treacherous act and unraveled that knotted ball of chromosomes. Mitosis taught her an important lesson: to become whole, you must at first be broken.

And here at Thought Catalog, we think we have some of the best commenters on the internet. We’re always reading you, laughing with you, and occasionally cringing away from our computer screens.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but old and/or dead white men still matter, and this is why: they matter in the way that their works speak to the development of constructs regarding race and racism.

This article has been removed at the contributor’s request.

I’m positive that the organizer did not intend for her commentary to be divisive; from my interactions with her, I knew that her intentions were pure. She certainly didn’t mean for her words to parent a thick, tar-like awkwardness that pervaded the room, even after she began to read.

Touching base with a best friend you haven’t talked to in forever is not only fun and makes you feel good, it’s also stupid cheap. So save some money by being a good friend and start dialing your night away.

My grandfather was good friends with Carver during his lifetime. Although they were not able to visit each other often, they wrote to each other extensively. I had heard snippets about their relationship in passing, but had never been presented with any evidentiary support. This, however, has recently changed.

This asseveration lead me to the undeserved conceit of imagining life as Ellis (“…after all, who am I compared to him?” says the Woody Allen sequitir in my head), and thus, to imagining what I would do if I were B.E.E. for a day.

They’re finding excuses to grab your arm or knee and it’s not creepy. Not to get all Cosmo on you guys but body language is everything. A casual knee rub means things are headed in the “Let’s get naked and potentially have babies!” direction. It all starts with the unnecessary knee rub.

To close the year out, we’ve created a list of 25 of our favorite articles we ran in 2011. They’re in no particular order. Enjoy.

Hello readers! Wanna hang out with us? Wanna tell us how much we suck and throw things at our head? Wanna tell Kat and Stephanie how much you’re in loveeee with them? Well, now’s your chance! On Thursday, October 6th, Thought Catalog will be hosting a reader meet up at The Anchor Bar in Soho. Open bar is from 9-10 with drink specials after!

For the next 24 hours, two of our regular contributors, Tao Lin and Megan Boyle, will be liveblogging their experience of the hurricane from a two-story house in Zone B in Williamsburg. Keep tuning in for regular coverage of what Irene’s like ground-level, and, most importantly, stay safe.

Newsflash! It’s hot as hell outside. So why don’t you cool down by looking at some pictures of cold things? Like snow, eskimos and maybe a pic of your ex-girlfriend. Consider it a virtual gift from your friends at TC. Now excuse us while we suck on phallic popsicles and put our heads in the freezer.

Funny Or Die has released a fake movie trailer for Sunday Comes Afterwards in which the tween singer has to rally the world when a natural disaster strikes. The scary thing is that we can actually see this movie being produced by a major studio IRL.

This NSFW-ish collection from Mariel Clayton, a self-taught photographer influenced primarily by Japanese miniatures and her grotesque loopy imagination, takes beautiful dolls and backdrops them against scenes of violence and filth: suicide, murder, sodomy, cannibalism, anything subversive really. The titles are as provocative as the images.