You know how some weeks the internets are just bursting with really fun things to read? Yeah. This was not one of those weeks. But there was some powerful reporting and writing going on out there, for sure. With all due respect to everyone's New York Times article limits, not to mention limits for knowing too much about sheer human evil, Emily Bazelon's "The Price of a Stolen Childhood" is the most powerful — and distressing — piece I've read in quite awhile.
I don't know that anything on earth can make you feel better after reading the article above, but this is sort of heartening: from Jessica Roy at Betabeat, a story about a class-action lawsuit filed against a revenge-porn website.
"And there is the illusion that being community-minded means protecting the strongest, rather than the most vulnerable members of a community." Amy Davidson at The New Yorker.
Lots of writing about and because of the 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade this week. Kate Sheppard for Mother Jones reports from "Inside Mississippi's Last Abortion Clinic." At Flyover Feminism, Betsy Phillips makes a fascinating point in "Just Go to Atlanta: The Southern Anti-Abortion Solution" about how anti-abortion strategy in the South "contains within it this strange safety-valve" that also brings "a fun-house mirror of intersectionality" into play. Finally, at The Crunk Feminist Collective, Shanelle Matthews tells the story of her abortion ten years later: "We've created a culture in which we've attached a certain set of feelings to a specific set of circumstances. I was ashamed and grieving out of obligation when all I really felt was relief."
"'I know countless women whose careers have been stunted by combat exclusion in all the branches.'" Jane Sutton reports for Reuters on reactions from women in all branches of the U.S. military on the lifting of the ban on women in "front-line combat" positions.
"He ate spaghetti and powdered milk, read the Quran and planned a war." The AP's Rukmini Callimachi reports from Diabaly, Mali, where Islamist rebels took control of residents' homes for more than a week before French bombing raids dislodged them.
Medicinal, as so many NYRB pieces are, but you will be much better informed about recent twists and turns in Egypt's increasingly thwarted revolution after reading Yasmine El Rashidi's essay about Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. For a quick recap on the violent events in Egypt this weekend, Abigail Hauslohner reports for the Washington Post.
"'Whenever I tell my sister I want to die, she tells me I can after I make 500,000 won for my funeral expenses,' said Kong, wiping tears from her eyes." Christine Kim reports on South Korea's impoverished, isolated elderly, and also on people's propensity to be just totally horrible to one another.
You know how I'm always linking to articles about deportations of undocumented immigrants, for, like, parking violations and shit? Yeah. From the Boston Globe, Maria Sacchetti with the story of how the rules are a little different for at least one white guy who's an undocumented immigrant: "Another free pass for Ivan the incorrigible." (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
Filed under "Things That Will Give You Reason To Look Up The History of The Informal Usage of The Word 'Apoplexy'": from Elizabeth Shakman Hurd at Boston Review, the tale of a lawsuit against the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom for — you guessed it — religious discrimination. (Via E.J. Graff.)
DNLee blogging at SciAm about the obstacles heaped in the path of poor kids she worked with in the St. Louis public schools that killed any interest — let alone opportunity — they had to develop an interest in STEM careers. The story about the teen mom whose successful poster presentation and notebook for the county science fair got thrown away by the honors bio teacher is guaranteed to induce apoplexy.
After you read that one, you will not have it in you to be quite as outraged by Jennifer Senior's New York Magazine essay on the evils that high school may wreak on the development of young humans.
All right! That was all the depressing things I can handle for the week. Next up, this lovely and sympathetic essay from Leah Reich at The Bygone Bureau on the two and a half years she spent writing an advice column for teenager videogamers.
"Procedure required that an arrest warrant be issued against the dinosaur itself, so the action became known as United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton." Paige Williams in The New Yorker, and just like that we're all cheered up again, right?
But if you need a little extra cheering up, Mallory Ortberg offers this helpful self-diagnostic test at The Gloss: "What Your Favorite Book In Sixth Grade Says About You."
Finally, in honor of her recent nomination for a Man Booker International Prize, Marilynne Robinson's 2008 interview in The Paris Review. You could mine this interview for months and still keep finding little gems to think about. And also this! "I tried that work ethic thing a couple of times — I can't say I exhausted its possibilities — but if there's not something on my mind that I really want to write about, I tend to write something that I hate. And that depresses me. I don't want to look at it. I don't want to live through the time it takes for it to go up the chimney." Amen.
