Their Mouths Were Throwing Up on Their Party Clothes

That roommate was a frequent reader of Jolie Kerr’s Ask a Clean Person column on the women’s interest site The Hairpin, which provides advice to novice homemakers. The advice is, at once, delightfully voicey (“Bleachie,” Ms. Kerr’s term for her favorite cleaning solvent, is a recurring character to whom the author and readers express their “❤”) and useful (bleach really does clean up surfaces like counters). And Ms. Kerr, with her column teaching millennial, gen-Y and gen-X readers how to remove personal fluids from leather or upholstery, is at the forefront of an online movement that’s taking homemaking from the stodgy, didactic world of Martha Stewart et al. to the cluttered homes of youngsters who apparently have no idea how to perform even the most basic task. “How to clean up vomit is a topic you’ll see on Heloise, on Martha,” Ms. Kerr said, “but you won’t find them in a context of people being honest about why they were vomiting on their party clothes.”

“Hipster homemaker”* Jolie Kerr is in the paper! (Also: Jolie, how much newsprint/paper is too much newsprint/paper to stick to a refrigerator?)

*To use loosened definitions of conveniently alliterative words.