Jordan Reid, self-proclaimed ‘writer’, is on her family roadtrip from NYC to San Jose. Along the way she decided to stop in Hot Springs, Arkansas for a ‘couple of days’.

I want to be clear: there are great things about the area. It is beautiful out there in the country…There is so much poverty. There is so much decay. And god, is there ever a lot of racial tension; you can practically feel it in the air.

The ‘liberal resident of a coastal state’ then described the horrifying situations she was exposed to in omgAR.

The hotel we stayed in – which was the second-nicest one in town, from what I gathered – had cockroaches on the floor, chipped walls in the elevators, trash on the mattresses, a two-foot-wide pool of water in the carpet from a leaky air conditioner, and burned-out lightbulbs. Outside the hotel sat a woman in a wheelchair wearing a Confederate flag t-shirt, smoking alternately from the long cigarettes she held, one in each hand.

This basically sounds like something from any number of New York City neighborhoods, so I’m not sure why she had to travel to Dixie to experience such upsetting sights. She goes on to say the ‘hotel received two visits from police officers within twelve hours (two that we knew of, at least)’; that she heard someone use the n word; that she and her family unwittingly rode in an elevator where someone had been pepper sprayed minutes before.

I can’t feel good about having gone to this place, and failing to show you what I really saw. Because there was a dark and ugly undercurrent hiding behind the facade of leisure…

Jordan is responding to the collective ‘wtf?’ of much of her audience by saying ‘it was important to write about it – if only for the reason that writing gets people talking’. Because obviously nobody was discussing poverty and racism in America until a white, upper middle class lady from a white, upper middle class suburb told everyone how awful poverty and racism are, and she should know because she made a choice to stay in a bad hotel that one time.

Cupcakes and Cashmere, provider of elevated lifehacks, has shared her secret for those times “when someone’s service dies or they accidentally hang up and you spend the next ten minutes frantically dialing each other at the same time and can’t get through”. She and her best friend have a system that will forever alter the way you deal with dropped calls.

…simple things like phone conversations carry more weight, which led us to develop a bit of a strategy for those annoying times when calls drop…Our solution is simple: whomever initially dialed the other person is in charge of calling back. That’s it!

You guys. YOU GUYS. I don’t about you but I literally never thought of having a system for those times someone goes “sccrrr static sound driving into a tunnel *click*”. Usually I just text and say “call back if you want” or one of us, ya know, picks up call waiting if we are trying to dial them while they dial us. Now I can inform the other party of my phone pre-nup before the conversation even starts! In a world full of questions and confusion I say brava to Emily for continuing to post amazing content that the internet sorely needs.

James, the Bleubird blogger behind Mothermag, recently went on a comped vacation at a Mississippi poverty theme park/hotel thing. Seriously, I’m not sure what else to call it. It’s literally old sharecropper shacks sitting by a cotton field, where white hipsters can go play Huckleberry Finn for a few days. Thankfully James and co. were duly respectful of the place’s history and didn’t carry on like a bunch of imperialists come to frolic among the savages. Oh wait.

When we arrived to The Shacks (yes, shacks. That is what they are called because they are literally shacks)…We stayed in “The Rich House”, which is their biggest accommodation…The next morning we explored the cotton field next to our house…

The James clan thoughtfully contemplated their surroundings, the scene of so much past poverty and despair.

We spent the afternoon with our friends and their families, flying kites with the kids and playing in the cotton field. That night everyone gathered at our house and cooked a giant feast…

They spent the evening in their big shack, probably the former home of a brutally poor tenant farmer, gorging on “the most incredible pulled pork, sweet mashed potatoes, corn bread, roasted this and that, salad, and more”. Afterwards, they hopped into the GMC Yukon they were given free, to review, and headed home to their white house, to sleep on their clean white beds.

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyone!