7 Essays To Read This Week: Twitter, Emotional Labor, And Being Fat At Your Own Wedding

The Army needs a major restructuring. And while there's been no shortage of criticism hurtled at the military and even plans proposed to fix it, there's so little scrutiny of the mundane. David Atkinson, who was formerly deployed in Afghanistan, suggested 12 ways to fix the military in a piece for BuzzFeed Ideas. In it, he touches on everything from the soldiers' ineffective workouts to their drinking problem. Read it here.

In a tearjerking piece for BuzzFeed Books, Matt Ortile recalls a relationship that he believed in and wanted so badly to work — one that began on Twitter. "When I was with Nate, I felt heard. And in this comfort, I came to see Nate exactly like the constellation I drew: that brunette twentysomething, who worked in media and had read me like an open book, who understood me, already knew me before he even met me. It was as though we’d skipped the hard parts, the growing pains, like I’d slid into a relationship." Read the entire essay here.

After Amandla Stenberg called out Kylie Jenner's cultural appropriation of black hairstyles last week, Lindsay Peoples penned an open letter to her white friends. In it, Peoples took cues from the Hunger Games star, asking her friends what their lives would look like if they loved black people as much as they loved the Kardashians, and reflected on her own racial awakening. Read it at The Cut.

For black men and women, it's difficult to be free-spirited in a world set on restraining and punishing you. For the Washington Post, Stacia L. Brown wrote about raising her daughter to believe that she can do anything she puts her mind to. "I’ll let her run as far she wants along an amusement park’s asphalt. I’ll hope security doesn’t stop her, assuming I’m not nearby. I’ll pray for one more year where these are my anxieties alone to bear, one more year where she isn’t saddled with some sense of herself as trapped between prejudgment and unjust punishment." Read it at the Washington Post.

Fat women are told by society to shrink or disguise their bodies. But Lindy West hid from no one at her wedding. For The Guardian, she wrote about wedding culture, the fraught concept of "beauty," self-love, and expressing herself as a fat woman. Read it at The Guardian.

Constantly having to listen to the woes of men and offering advice — let alone navigating society's patriarchal expectations — is a lot of work, and it can be exhausting. Jess Zimmerman wrote a brilliant essay on the value of this emotional labor and how women ought to receive compensation, if not recognition, for all that they do. Read it at The Toast.