January 1991 Teen Life: Depression, Douching & The New Sassiest Girls In America

It's a new year in the Sassy timeline, and you know what that means: time to crown a new Sassiest Girl In America! The latest crop of hopefuls descend on New York (thanks to Clairol and L.A. Gear), and apparently don't slow down for photos because other than the winner on the cover, all you get are silver dollar-sized, super-processed photos of them. (If this is what we have to look forward to from the magazine's new redesign, its first since its launch almost three years ago: boo.) Elsewhere, we hear first-person testimony from staffers' bouts of depression, a wildly sexist feature on why boys find YOU scary, an excellent short story from copy assistant Jessica Vitkus, the incongruous choice of Nick Cave as What He Said's celebrity boy, and much more. You're going to need your reading glasses and a flashlight to make out what's on some of these pages, so you might as well just let us tell you about it all instead!

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TOPICS
🎧 It Is January 1991
🎧 Feature: Spying On The Sassiest Girls In America
🎧 Feature: Why Boys Think You’re So Scary
🎧 Feature: When We Were Depressed
🎧 Fiction: Chicago
🎧 Body Talk
🎧 It Happened To Me: Pen Pal Stopped Writing
🎧 What He Said: What’s Your Type?
🎧 Help
🎧 Help For Him
🎧 Stuff You Wrote
🎧 Goodbye For Now

NOTES
🐳 Tom Carvel on Wikipedia
🏫 "Smart Business with a Social Conscience" and Columbia College Today
🧑🏻‍💼 Wah Chen on LinkedIn
⚖️ Traprock Center for Peace & Justice
🏪 Sandra Yeh on Yelp
⛑️ "10 Disturbing Things ProPublica/NPR Learned Investigating the Red Cross' [sic] Sandy Relief Efforts" at ProPublica
💰 "How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Build Six Homes" at ProPublica
😡 "Red Cross Endorsed Top Official Despite Sexual Misconduct Claims, ProPublica Reports" at NPR
📜 Dawn Wilkinson on Wikipedia
📸 Dawn Wilkinson on Instagram
🎬 Derek Madison on IMDb
🍎 Christian Cervegnano on BitbyBit
💻 Terry Miura's website