While I recognize that I have a better chance of contracting dengue fever in my suburban city than there is of you actually reading this, I will try anyways. Here it goes.
My name is Megan. I am a family medicine doctor practicing in Northern California, and I love my job. I’m nothing fancy. I don’t spend my day in the OR. I don’t spend my day in the emergency room treating gunshot victims. I spend my day (my often 12 hour day) in a quiet office where I see 18 to 22 patients all with various complaints.
Some have a cold. Some have abdominal pain. Occasionally one will come in with a complaint of chest pain that ends up being a heart attack. It won’t be me that whisks them off to the cath lab for an angiogram with stent placement nor will it be me to perform an appendectomy if that...
Music
A friend recently showed me some footage of Rihanna at this year's BET Awards, but it wasn't the usual 'woman on the red carpet' or 'accepting an award' clips that we're all accustomed to seeing. Instead the footage shows Rihanna dismiss the BET exec Stephen Hill and throw a big wad of cash straight at his face.
Let me tell you, I was as dumbstruck as poor ol' Stephen looked after watching it.
I truly couldn't believe how rude and vulgar such a show was!
As the press put it:
"While preparing to step out on stage to intro a teaser for her “B*tch Better Have My Money” music video, the pop star got into a brief yet intense spat with BET’s President of Programming, Stephen G. Hill.
Much of their discussion is inaudible, but apparently Rihanna wanted to take a couple stacks...
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Dear Directioners,
I write to you as a fellow fan, because in these trying times we all need to stick together. To be honest, as I write this, “Made in the AM” is currently playing in the background because just the sound of their voices puts me at ease — I know I’m not alone in that feeling. Ever since Liam, Louis, Niall and Harry announced the hiatus, we’ve experienced a roller coaster of emotions from fear to understanding. We can’t help but wonder what will it be like knowing we don’t have a world tour to get psyched for next year? I mean, you and me got a whole lot of history (yep, that happened).
Today ( January 13), the hiatus, as Us Weekly and The Fader have reported, has reportedly escalated to a permanent split — which their rep has recently denied.
I know you’re scared...
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WHEN I OPENED MY SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS THIS MORNING, IT WAS HUMBLING FOR ME TO SEE THAT SO MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT I DESERVE RECOGNITION FOR THE WORK I WAS ABLE TO DO LAST YEAR BY THE GRACE OF GOD.
BUT LIKE THOMAS A KEMPIS FAMOUSLY WROTE;
“MAN PROPOSES, BUT GOD DISPOSES”. TO SEE THAT FANS ACROSS DIFFERENT SOCIAL AUDIENCES APPRECIATE THE EFFORTS I PUT INTO MAKING MY MUSIC IS ONE I WILL NEVER LOOK DOWN UPON, NO AWARD BEATS THAT, AND I HOPE TO BE ABLE TO REPAY THIS CONFIDENCE IN GOOD TIME. MY FANS HAVE BEEN THE MOST AMAZING SOURCE OF INSPIRATION FOR ME, AND I PROMISE NEVER TO LET YOU DOWN.
FROM THE DAYS WHEN I WAS NOBODY IN THIS INDUSTRY, TO SONG AFTER SONG THAT YOU HAVE HELPED BECOME HITS, I SAY GOD BLESS YOU FOR ALL THE SUPPORT. TO BE HONEST, IT WAS QUITE HEARTBREAKING TO FIND...
3,412
Dear Prince,
As a fan of yours who was looking forward to purchasing a ticket to your upcoming London show and I was disappointed to learn that the UK shows had been postponed. But upon reading further into the situation I found that you had withdrawn them so that ticket touts wouldn't buy them all up to make a profit from them.
I think this is an amazing thing that you have done and something other artists would seldom bother to do. I have long appreciated the effort you make to speak out about the music industry and its faults. Your opinions and actions always strike a chord with me and it shouldn't be under-appreciated just how important and genuine they are. Especially in a society that constantly falls prey to Taylor Swift's marketing team making her look like a saint for...
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Dear Prince,
As a Baltimore native, I want to personally thank you for your interest in helping Baltimore.
However, as someone who has worked on social justice issues in the city for most of my adult life, I’m writing to question your timing/methods.
I was out of town on Monday, so I saw what the city looks like from the outside. Knowing people I worked with in the city were helping to lead protests, I was terrified from what I saw on cable news.
I thought Baltimore was basically done for as a functional city.
To my surprise, when I got home, about 5 minutes walk from the scenes of “ground zero”, I found very little visible damage from the so called “riot”, but a community so structurally neglected as to make it difficult to see how the community would change much even if a...
6,370
Dear Bruce,
No way you'd remember — Akron Civic Center, August 8th, 1975. I found an open door around the side after the show, and me and my girlfriend snuck in and I shook your hand outside the dressing room and thanked you for the best concert I'd ever seen. Forty years later, it still is.
I'm reaching out to you now — I can't remember exactly where I learned to say "reaching out"; I know it was sometime after I moved to North Jersey in 1996 — because every time Chris Christie holds another town-hall meeting, I get to hear you singing "We Take Care Of Our Own" on the PA system. Bothers the hell out of me.
What the fk? Is it possible you're not aware of this? Seriously? Or could it be that you're aware, but somehow okay with it? Either way, I'm asking you to tell Christie to...
5,625
Open Letter from Gaza to Tom Jones: Sing for Freedom and Justice, Not Apartheid and Ethnic Cleansing
Dear Tom,
We are a group of Palestinian musicians, academics and students from the besieged Gaza Strip in Palestine. Despite Israel’s blockade of our land, air and sea borders we have continued to enjoy the soul, vibrancy and passion of your songs. Israel has deprived us of our homes, our olive groves, our families and communities, our freedom to travel and even our musical instruments. It is for this, from the crowded streets of Gaza’s refugee camps, we are calling on you to cancel your performance in Tel Aviv, the Sun City of the Middle East, this October. We ask you to honour the global call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against the Israeli apartheid regime, in the same way you and other famous, principled artists refused to entertain apartheid South Africa.
After the...
3,074
Dear Alicia Keys,
I have learned today that you are due to perform in Israel very soon. We have never met, though I believe we are mutually respectful of each other’s path and work. It would grieve me to know you are putting yourself in danger (soul danger) by performing in an apartheid country that is being boycotted by many global conscious artists. You were not born when we, your elders who love you, boycotted institutions in the US South to end an American apartheid less lethal than Israel’s against the Palestinian people. Google Montgomery Bus Boycott, if you don’t know about this civil rights history already. We changed our country fundamentally, and the various boycotts of Israeli institutions and products will do the same there. It is our only nonviolent option and, as we...
2,729
Dear Donatan,
I congratulate you on the success enjoyed by your hit single My Słowianie (now available in English as Slavic Girls). More than 28 million views, way to go! As a big fan of Slavic culture, I am thrilled that it caught the attention of millions, but I am also slightly disquieted. Keeping in mind how often the Slavic ethos was perverted and led to discrimination and inequity, I would like to express a few remarks with respect to your work.
Why do the lyrics from your album repeatedly evoke blood and genes? It triggers some very unpleasant associations, but most of all it hardly seems justifiable. In all likeliness, Slavs never formed a nation in the genetic sense of the word, and especially not in the early days of their existence. They emerged from masses of dwellers...
3,140