cancer

Happy Memorial Day weekend! If your plans include reading, here are some links to get you started.

• Yet another teenage girl has committed suicide after months of school bullying—this time, the victim was 12-year-old Gabrielle Molina of Queens, New York. [New York Daily News]

• Amy Pascal, the chief of Sony studios, gave a fantastic interview to Forbes's Dorothy Pomerantz. Indiewire's Women in Hollywood blog has some of the most trenchant excerpts, including this one, on female characters in film: "They can be villains, they can be protagonists, I don't care but their movements, their actions what they do in the plot has to actually matter." [Women in Hollywood]

• The Center for Inquiry's CEO, Ron Lindsay, delivered the opening statements at last week's Women in Secularism conference. Unfortunately, he took the moment as an opportunity to lecture the women in attendence about how they're doing feminism wrong. [Skepchick]

• In not-all-profanity-is-profane news: Three women were kicked out of Pennsylvania's King of Prussia Mall when security took issue with their "Fuck Cancer" hats, which they were earing to honor their recently deceased mother. [Clutch]

• Stand-up comic Christina Walkinshaw did a set at an upstate New York casino and was heckled throughout by a table full of men shouting for her to show various body parts to them. When she complained to the club's (female) owner, she was told, "I thought you liked it." Then she was cut from the lineup of a future show. [xoJane]

• And speaking of female comics, 87-year-old Jerry Lewis recently doubled down on his low opinion of ladies being funny. When asked if he had changed his mind since his famously dumb statements in 1998, Lewis said "I am a bigot with no imagination whatsoever, so no." (Actually, what he said was, "I cannot sit and watch a lady diminish her qualities to the lowest common denominator," but same diff.) [AP]

• At The Rumpus, porn director Sam Benjamin discusses his youthful idealism about the "spectacular, feminist, clever, ornate" films he hoped to make, and what he's learned from working in the sex industry. [The Rumpus]

• Kathryn Joyce's book The Child Catchers—reviewed in the new issue of Bitch—is a fascinating, if disturbing, exposé of how international adoption has been impacted by evangelical Christianity and corruption. Joyce discusses these subjects and more in this great interview. [RH Reality Check]

Tig Notaro has been getting a heaping dose of publicity lately. It’s well-deserved. You may already recognize the charming comedian from her standup, or watched her play the feather-haired policewoman who briefly (and understandably) lesbianizes Sarah Silverman on the latter’s eponymous “Program,” or listened to her discuss her frequent run-ins with 80s pop star Taylor "Tell it to my heart" Dayne on This American Life. Maybe you’ve also read that earlier this month Tig released a half-hour standup comedy set (care of friend/comic superstar Louis C.K.), recorded after a diagnosis of breast cancer (in both breasts) only a few days prior. The performance was instantly touted as legendary, with audience member Louis C.K. calling it “one of the greatest standup performances I ever saw. I can't really describe it but I was crying and laughing and listening like never in my life.”

Here’s a reality check the next time someone wants to tell you about clean coal: They're still cleaning up the biggest fly ash spill in U.S. history that occurred in December 2008, which occurred at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) Kingston Fossil Plant. A dam holding back tons of slurry burst in the middle of the night, dumping more than a billion gallons of coal ash slurry into Tennessee River tributaries. The sludge leveled entire communities with a four-foot-deep layer of coal ash slurry and killed off an unbelievable number of fish living in the rivers. The spill has been said to be one hundred times as large as the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989.

How did hormone replacement therapy become so popular for American women going through menopause? Well, it turns out that pharmaceutical giant Wyeth helped write many of the supportive scholarly articles about its own hormone replacement drugs. The New York Times revealed this morning that the manufacturer of drugs like Premarin and Prempro paid ghostwriters to pen research articles about the hormone replacing drugs, which were then signed off on by a doctor and printed in reputable places like The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

Sales of Wyeth's female hormone replacing drugs have fallen by 50 percent since 2001, when a Women's Health Initiative study linked menopausal hormone treatment to an increased risk of cancer. But before that damning study, the company sold more than $2 billion worth of hormone drugs to thousands of American women. Feeling a little sick?

There is not much we can agree on as a nation, but if there’s one thing we every American should be able to declare a common enemy, it’s cancer. Right? Sometimes we’re allies with Afghanistan, sometimes we let North Korea slide but we, as modern intelligent Americans, will never defend that old varmint cancer. So then why are some true-blooded American politicians getting on their soapboxes to kill legislation that could help kill cancer? The way some politicos are spinning it, female sexuality is a greater risk to our nation than cancers that kill 3,700 American women every year. The HPV vaccine shouldn’t be controversial – it prevents 90 percent of those types of deadly cancers in women. But as the HPV vaccine snags headlines recently thanks to new research showing it's more effective than previously thought, conservative leaders are seizing the spotlight to swap morality for science and make sexually-active women the threat, rather than our arch-nemesis cancer.