tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54329047963182286152024-03-13T20:09:05.895-07:00Phantom's ListLinks to writing by women around the web.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger134125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-8380279282830443912014-10-26T06:41:00.001-07:002014-10-26T06:41:45.971-07:00A declaration of surrenderI am giving up the weekly round-up for the foreseeable future — taking a concentrated look at the utter depressing-ness of the world every weekend has finally gotten to me. I will continue to point out links on Twitter, and maybe I'll even be better about posting links myself rather than lazily retweeting other people's links. (Maybe.) If you're not a Twitter user — and, really, why should you be, social media is jumping the shark with tremendous vigor and noise — you can simply bookmark the <a href="http://twitter.com/PhantomsList">Phantom's List profile page</a> and scroll through the links posted there whenever the need strikes you. No need to sign in or have an account or anything like that. <br />
<br />
But by now you already know where to find women writers on almost any topic for yourself, amirite? Spread the knowledge around!<br />
<br />
As always (forever and ever, amen), thanks for reading!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-1049856007266536372014-10-19T06:33:00.001-07:002014-10-19T06:33:17.542-07:00No links today!I'm down for the count with a nasty — though totally non-newsworthy — virus. Have a good week, and stay healthy!<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-72181416504242495012014-10-05T06:46:00.001-07:002014-10-05T06:46:43.703-07:00Links for the week ending 5 October 2014"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/us/california-drought-tulare-county.html?_r=1">The local high school now allows students to arrive early and shower there. Parents often keep their children home from school if they have not bathed, worried that they could lose custody if the authorities deem the students too dirty, a rumor that county officials have tried to dismiss.</a>" Life in one drought-stricken California county after the taps have run dry. By Jennifer Medina for the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texastribune.org/2014/09/30/san-antonio-one-step-closer-controversial-pipeline/">'What happens to that water, knowing that that aquifer is going to be sold to other parties as well?' Nirenberg asked. 'If the water’s not there in 30 years, what are we doing? We’re just building a pipeline to nowhere.'</a>" Neena Satija for The Texas Tribune on San Antonio's proposed deal to buy water via pipeline.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/law-3?src=longreads">Stories circulate on Rikers about inmates who plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just to put an end to their ordeal, but Browder was determined to get his day in court. He had no idea how rare trials actually are. In 2011, in the Bronx, only a hundred and sixty-five felony cases went to trial; in three thousand nine hundred and ninety-one cases, the defendant pleaded guilty.</a>" Shattering story at The New Yorker by Jennifer Gonnerman about the destroyed life of a Bronx teen falsely accused of theft. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/and-around-canfield-green-residents-seek-new-normal">'I don’t think people realize how many people lost their jobs or hours during that time because they couldn’t get in and out of their houses,' Jones said.</a>" Durrie Bouscaren reporting from Ferguson for St. Louis Public Radio.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/10/02/ferguson-vote-registration/16572305/">More than 3,000 people have registered to vote in Ferguson, Mo., since the death of Michael Brown — a surge in interest that may mean the city of 21,000 people is ready for a change.</a> Yamiche Alcindor for USA Today.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/04/hong-kong-legislator-accuses-government-triads-against-protesters">His comments came as fresh clashes erupted between pro-democracy protesters and armed thugs on Saturday, with student leaders also accusing the government and the police of allowing triad gangs to attack them.</a>" Tania Branigan and dude David Batty for the Guardian on the protests in Hong Kong.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-hong-kong-china-20141001-story.html">Hong Kong has flourished too as a result of the economic interdependence, and it still provides China a unique bridge to the global economy. But its relative strength vis-a-vis Beijing has eroded substantially as the mainland economy has soared even faster and other Chinese cities, such as Shanghai, have started to offer many of the financial services once available only in Hong Kong.</a>" Good background piece by Julie Makinen at the LAT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="">IS is demonstrating that controlling wheat brings power. As its fighters swept through Iraq’s north in June, they seized control of silos and grain stockpiles. The offensive coincided with the wheat and barley harvests and, crucially, the delivery of crops to government silos and private traders.</a>" Maggie Fick for Reuters. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett's <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/99046352512/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a>.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/03/world/middleeast/protests-erupt-in-homs-over-bombings-that-killed-dozens-of-syrian-schoolchildren-.html">Reports of the death toll varied from 27 to 47 but they agreed that the dead were mostly children.</a>" Anne Barnard and dude Mohammad Ghannam at the NYT on the bombing of an elementary school in Homs, Syria, because dear god.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/syria/11127466/How-the-airstrikes-on-Syria-could-make-Isil-stronger.html">A largely home grown organisation, most of its fighters are Syrians who have not been indoctrinated with the radicalism of those practising international jihad. Their main focus is domestic.</a> Ruth Sherlock at The Telegraph on why U.S. bombing of "Khorasan" may backfire.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/turkey-to-approve-a-bigger-military-role-in-iraq-and-syria--but-not-on-american-terms/2014/10/01/3f860ad8-49a5-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html">But Erdogan’s comments suggest Turkey is in no hurry to join the military effort against the Islamic State, despite intensifying U.S. pressure to do so. The previous mandate, sought in the wake of the downing of a Turkish jet by a Syrian government missile, did not result in military action.</a>" Liz Sly at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/09/30/the_case_against_qatar_funding_extremists_salafi_syria_uae_jihad_muslim_brotherhood_taliban">But that same Qatari network has also played a major role in destabilizing nearly every trouble spot in the region and in accelerating the growth of radical and jihadi factions. The results have ranged from bad to catastrophic in the countries that are the beneficiaries of Qatari aid: Libya is mired in a war between proxy-funded militias, Syria's opposition has been overwhelmed by infighting and overtaken by extremists, and Hamas's intransigence has arguably helped prolong the Gaza Strip's humanitarian plight. </a>" Elizabeth Dickinson at Foreign Policy with "The Case Against Qatar." (Via Deborah Amos.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/un-wants-to-battle-is-but-is-it-fighting-freedom/article20890383/#dashboard/follows/">But the generality of Resolution 1373 allowed it to be abused and invoked by states seeking to limit civil liberties and basic human rights in the name of combatting terrorism and protecting national security.</a>" Dude Kent Roach and Carmen Cheung with an op-ed at The Globe and Mail criticizing a recent UN Security Council resolution in response to the Islamic State. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/americas/guantanamo/article2486856.html">A federal judge Thursday rejected an Obama administration bid to shut the public out of next week’s hearing showcasing medical testimony in one Guantánamo captive’s challenge of the prison’s forced-feeding policy.</a>" Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/01/-sp-gaza-portraits-the-one-thing-i-saved-from-the-rubble">Many families hung signs amid the rubble, bearing their names and phone numbers, and sometimes the number of rooms or people who had lived there. This was done partly with an eye to future compensation, but also a poignant marker: this was my home.</a>" Harriet Sherwood at the Guardian on photographic portraits of Gazans posing with the one thing they saved from their destroyed homes.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/10/04/how-ebola-sped-out-of-control/?hpid=z1">The epidemic has exposed a disconnect between the aspirations of global health officials and the reality of infectious disease control. Officials hold faraway strategy sessions about fighting emerging diseases and bioterrorism even as front-line doctors and nurses don't have enough latex gloves, protective gowns, rehydrating fluid or workers to carry bodies to the morgue.</a>" From today at The Washington Post by Lena Sun and dudes Brady Dennis, Lenny Bernstein, and Joel Achenbach.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/6881735/ebola-virus-US-liberian-patient-outbreak-dallas">The patient's sister said that Duncan told a nurse that he had come from Liberia. This vital information 'was not fully communicated throughout the full team,' said Mark C. Lester, executive vice president of the health-care system that includes Texas Health Presbyterian. 'As a result, the full import of that information wasn't factored into the clinical decision-making.' Ebola was not suspected.</a>" Julia Belluz for Vox. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/66a8811e714d45b0a0f5be613232bc93/texas-ebola-patients-neighborhood-scores-sick">As 9-year-old Mercy Kennedy sobbed along with neighbors mourning news of her mother's death, not a person would touch the little girl to comfort her.</a>" From Krista Larson at the AP, a wrenching report from the Liberian neighborhood where the Dallas patient originated.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texasobserver.org/brownsville-texas-border-doctor-stories-fear-love/">I listened to Isabela’s heart and told her that it sounded full of love. She shyly said she missed her papa and that she loved him very much. She had not seen him, the mother said, in two years. 'We are going to find him,' the little girl said in Spanish, and 'then we will be safe.'</a> Marsha Griffin, a physician who works at a clinic less than a mile from the Mexican border. At The Texas Observer. (Via Melissa del Bosque.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/5th-circuit-decision-close-majority-texas-abortion-clinics">The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday allowed Texas to begin enforcing tough new abortion restrictions that will effectively close all but eight abortion facilities in the nation’s second-largest state. Unless the Supreme Court steps in, the law is poised to have the most devastating impact on abortion access of any such restriction across the country.</a>" Irin Carmon at MSNBC.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://news.vice.com/article/historic-california-rape-law-tells-college-campuses-yes-means-yes?utm_source=vicenewstwitter">California has enacted a historic law that forces the state's colleges to adopt a policy of unambiguous, affirmative consent by students engaged in sexual activity.</a>" Olivia Crellin at Vice.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/09/29/the-hot-new-consent-app-good2go-is-logging-the-name-and-phone-number-of-everyone-you-have-sex-with/">Incidentally, you’re also telling a new mobile development company with no Internet footprint or track record to speak of (a) who you’re sleeping with, (b) when you did it, and (c) how drunk or sober you were at the time.</a>" On second thought, maybe an app for "affirmative consent" is not <i>such</i> a great idea? Caitlin Dewey for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/womens-atypical-heart-attacks.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region®ion=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region&_r=0">The American Heart Association keeps telling us about our hearts and we keep not listening, possibly because we are so fearful of cancer that we have no fear to spare, as we lie on our beds dutifully palpating ourselves for the lumps that we pray not to find.</a>" Martha Weinman Lear at the NYT on women and the Hollywood Heart Attack.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/09/egg_freezing_marketing_campaigns_lie_about_success_rates_of_this_fertility.html">The truth seemed so uncomplicated. Janelle Luk, a reproductive endocrinologist at Neway Fertility (one of several fertility centers affiliated with EggBanxx), for instance, breezily described egg freezing as 'part of technology that exists to help us all, just like the iPad, just like Skype.'</a>" Robin Marantz Henig at Slate on what sounds like Tupperware parties, except for fertility procedures of questionable utility.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/09/27/mormon-feminists-celebrate-contemplate-anniversary-movement/wRujOtEfU7JeYTiiiRVrgK/story.html">'I want people to know,' said Dushku, 'that we’re not pretending to be feminists.' She spoke about Mormon women’s willingness to disagree without dividing: Wasn’t that radical in itself?</a>" Wonderful Alexa Mills piece at the Boston Globe about the founding mothers of Mormon feminism, including Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href=http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/at-cia-starbucks-even-the-baristas-are-covert/2014/09/27/5a04cd28-43f5-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html?wpisrc=nl_rdin&wpmm=1"">There are no frequent-customer award cards, because officials fear the data stored on the cards could be mined by marketers and fall into the wrong hands, outing secret agents.</a>" This would make the funniest Get Smart episode ever. Emily Wax-Thibodeaux on the CIA Starbucks. (Via Kate Sheppard.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/29/mother-of-god/">I breathed as quietly as I could, staring into the middling dark that was the limit of my mother’s power, amazed that someone could stop her from speaking, could tell her that her desire to serve her God was sinful.</a>" Vivid and moving personal essay by Laura Cok at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://beltmag.com/seed-weed-bittersweet-rebirth-bloomingdale-trail/">Which is better in the long run? Is it even possible to quantify their relative good? Intention builds bridges; accident coats them with rust. Intention drops bombs; accident turns the rubble green. Intention sows spinach; accident raises lamb’s quarters instead.</a>" Martha Bayne at Belt Magazine.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/23/find-your-beach/">There’s no way to be in good faith on this island anymore. You have to crush so many things with your mind vise just to get through the day. Which seems to me another aspect of the ad outside of my window: willful intoxication. Or to put it more snappily: 'You don’t have to be high to live here, but it helps.'</a> Zadie Smith on Manhattan at the NYRB.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/05/magazine/the-revelations-of-marilynne-robinson.html?_r=0">'We were positively encouraged to create for ourselves minds we would want to live with. I had teachers articulate that to me: "You have to live with your mind your whole life." You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with. Nobody has ever said anything more valuable to me.'</a>" Finally, making a rare exception for this byline by dude Wyatt Mason at the NYT, interviewing my personal nominee for greatest living American writer, Marilynne Robinson.<br />
<br />
No list next weekend, though I'll probably be on Twitter sporadically. The list will return on the 19th. In the meantime, thanks for reading!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-91480949914120751512014-09-28T06:55:00.001-07:002014-09-28T06:55:44.790-07:00Links for the week ending 28 September 2014"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/islamic-state-attack-on-iraqi-base-leaves-hundreds-missing-shows-army-weaknesses/2014/09/22/9a8b9e4d-0fea-4650-8816-5e720dbffd04_story.html">If the survivors’ accounts are correct, it would make Sunday the most disastrous day for the Iraqi army since several divisions collapsed in the wake of the Islamic State’s capture of the northern city of Mosul amid its cross-country sweep in June.</a>" Loveday Morris at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/turkey-syria-border-crossing-harder-movement-isis-smugglers">It is not clear whether the incomplete border crackdown has halted the flow of fighters flocking to Isis and other armed opposition groups. But it has certainly made things much more difficult for civilians trying to flee the relentless violence in Syria.</a> Constanze Letsch at the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/sep/21/bbc-lyse-doucet-syria-gaza?CMP=twt_gu">“The way the wars of our time are fought, as punishing, sustained attacks on neighbourhoods, towns, cities, means assaults on families and childhood,” Doucet says. “Most places I cover young children are everywhere, in Gaza they are pouring out of every crevice.”</a>" At the Guardian, Maggie Brown talks to the BBC's Middle East correspondent Lyse Doucet.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/middle-east/israel-and-palestine/140921/school-gaza-city-operation-protective-edge-trauma-psychosocial">Children are killed often enough in Gaza that there is an established protocol to mark their absence at schools. Usually, says Marzouk, students make a sign with the name of the dead student and place it on the desk where they used to sit, which is left empty.</a>" Laura Dean at Global Post. (Via Louisa Loveluck.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/09/25/the-limits-of-the-sectarian-framing-in-yemen/">It is not focused on the kind of 'culture war' issues that might characterize a sectarian conflict, but rather seeks to achieve several genuinely popular reforms sidelined by the transitional government. That it was accomplished at the point of a gun speaks as much to the failures of the transitional framework as to Houthi ideology.</a>" Know a lot more than you did about what's happening in Yemen, courtesy of Stacey Philbrick Yadav at The Washington Post. (Via Michelle Shephard.)<br />
<br />
Know a lot more about conflict around the world courtesy of Torie Rose DeGhett's <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/98459766022/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/asia/narendra-modi-defies-expectations-with-mix-of-soft-and-severe-in-india.html?_r=1">As the Editors Guild of India complained in a letter published Tuesday, much of the bureaucracy has gone silent, and journalists have found themselves scrambling to get even basic information from the prime minister’s office, which has yet to appoint a contact person for the news media.</a>" Ellen Barry at the NYT on India under Modi.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/magazine/a-mother-in-jail-for-helping-her-daughter-have-an-abortion.html?_r=1">Whalen’s case is the only prosecution I could find involving a pregnancy in the first trimester, the early stage at which at least 88 percent of abortions in the United States take place. But it may not be the last. What Whalen did in trying to help her daughter — order pills online — is probably an increasingly common response to the rising wave of abortion restrictions that has rolled across the states in the last four years. </a>" Emily Bazelon at the NYT on the Pennsylvania woman sentenced to jail time for obtaining abortion pills over the internet for her pregnant teenage daughter.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/9/24/6839953/video-john-crawford-walmart-police-beavercreek-ohio-toy-gun">But the footage shows definitively that Crawford wasn't brandishing the toy gun when he was shot — and that he dropped it, ran, and came back before he died.</a>" Dara Lind and dude German Lopez at Vox.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/justice-department-gets-earful-public-about-problems-police"> 'At one point I asked one of the cops, when did people stop being human to you. He said "when they got locked up." Not when they committed a crime, not when they were convicted of a crime. When they got locked up.'</a>" Emanuele Berry reporting from Ferguson for St. Louis Public Radio.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/09/24/fence-jumper-brings-issue-of-troubled-veterans-to-obamas-door/">'Nobody’s been surprised,' at Gonzalez's case, he said. 'What they’re really surprised is he got to the front door because we’re all security experts. We know there are a lot of veterans who are extremely ill and are severely injured and feel lost.'</a>" Katie Zezima at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/four-questions-climate-march">Where is the President, senator, or governor who feels not just disappointment but a desperate failure to connect when encountering young (or old) people who want to know why more isn’t being done about climate change? Which ones, looking at the pictures of the crowds in Manhattan on Sunday, will feel lonely?</a>" Amy Davidson at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-22/china-beats-europe-on-emitting-more-greenhouse-gases">According to new research by scientists at two British universities, China’s CO2 emissions in 2013 reached 7.2 tons per capita—topping, for the first time, the EU’s per capita emissions of 6.8 tons. Meanwhile, Americans were responsible for 16.4 tons of CO2 per capita. And India lagged far behind, at 1.9 tons per capita.</a>" Christina Larson at Business Week. (Via Kate Sheppard.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/25/barack-obama-worlds-largest-ocean-reserve-pacific">It will ban commercial fishing and deep sea mining in about 490,000 square miles around remote tropical atolls and islands in the south-central Pacific Ocean, a White House fact sheet said.</a>" Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian on President Obama's enlarging of what will be the world's biggest marine reserve.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/us/drive-by-doctoring-surprise-medical-bills.html?_r=0">If the surgery had been for a Medicare patient, the assistant would have been permitted to bill only 16 percent of the primary surgeon’s fee. With current Medicare rates, that would have been about $800, less than 1 percent of what Dr. Mu was paid.</a>" First, do no harm… except to the national pocketbook, which is there to be plundered, amirite? Elisabeth Rosenthal for the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/nyregion/family-fights-health-care-system-for-simple-request-to-die-at-home.html">Many geriatric experts say that if the wasteful medical spending on this stage of life could be redirected, it could pay for all the social supports and services actually needed by today’s fragile elders and their families. Instead, public money has been shuffled in the same system, benefiting health care businesses but not necessarily patients.</a>" Nina Bernstein at the NYT. Seriously, burn the health care system to the ground.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/southern-states-are-now-epicenter-of-hivaids-in-the-us/2014/09/22/9ac1525a-39e6-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html">Many of the people living with HIV/AIDS in the South are desperately poor. Many live in rural areas miles from a clinic — and they don’t have access to a car. Others have no running water, or even homes. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released last year found that more than 40 percent of those infected have an annual household income of $10,000 or less.</a>" Teresa Wiltz for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learningcurve/day-life-data-mined-kid">Should that child get in trouble, the principal may rely on discipline software to dole out her punishment. Some software advertises that it can save time by automating discipline consequences.</a>" Adriene Hill on data mining children at school. From two weeks ago at Marketplace. (Via Audrey Watters.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://hackeducation.com/2014/09/21/teacher-wars-and-teaching-machines/">Students’ labor – students’ test results, students’ content, students’ data – feeds the measurements used to reward or punish teachers. Students’ labor feeds the algorithms – algorithms that further this larger narrative about teacher inadequacies, sure, and that serve to financially benefit technology, testing, and textbook companies, the makers of today’s 'teaching machines.'</a>" Audrey Watters' excellent review of Dana Goldstein's new book. At Hack Education.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2014/09/23/3570962/homeless-students-2/">In the 2012-2013 school year, there were 1,258,182 homeless students, according to newly released data from the National Center for Homeless Education.</a>" Bryce Covert at ThinkProgress.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0">Some borrowers say their cars were disabled when they were only a few days behind on their payments, leaving them stranded in dangerous neighborhoods. Others said their cars were shut down while idling at stoplights.</a>" Dude Michael Corkery and Jessica Silver-Greenberg at the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/us/rabbis-find-talk-of-israel-and-gaza-a-sure-way-to-draw-congregants-wrath.html?hpw&rref=us&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well">One Midwestern rabbi in the Conservative movement, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he is raising money from Jewish donors, said he was rejected for a position at a temple after he told the board that 'there’s not just one Jewish point of view' on Israel. Another rabbi’s board put a note in her file saying she cannot speak about Israel.</a>" Laurie Goodstein at the NYT on censorship in the American Jewish community.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/what-does-ethical-social-networking-software-look-like-315373c898ed">Social networks are like languages — they are only worthwhile when they are broadly adopted. This makes an incredibly compelling case for user tracking and advertising, since success as a broad network makes the most sense by giving network access away and then selling the people to companies. This is a hard model to escape.</a>" Quinn Norton at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2014/09/22/350563549/the-only-one-a-talk-with-shonda-rhimes?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social">The question of how to interview her in a way that doesn't ignore interesting characteristics of her work and doesn't pretend we're in a post-racial landscape where none of this exists but also doesn't treat her as solely Shonda Rhimes The Black Female Showrunner is related to the question of how to receive female characters of color and acknowledge that their race is part of their identity without thinking of them as primarily in terms of what kind of Black Female Character they are or how they fit into the picture of diversity.</a>" Linda Holmes at NPR reflecting on the racist NYT essay by Alessandra Stanley and her own experience interviewing Shonda Rhimes. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://mashable.com/2014/09/21/sexual-harassment-flight-attendants/">If a passenger reaches out to her in any way — say he invites her to dinner — she’s expected to respond with a thank you and give him a business card with her company email address on it. Once somebody sent her a bra with a note saying it would make her look more sexy. She was instructed to send a thank you. Because it might have come from a corporate VIP.</a>" Heather Poole on sexual harassment in the not-so-friendly skies. At Mashable. (Via Jim Roberts.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.elle.com/life-love/society-career/skylar-neese-disappearance-twitter">While they lived in different suburbs of Morgantown, they were living together virtually in the digital realm. They spent their waking lives posting, texting, tweeting, retweeting—having whole conversations in 140 characters, emoting in emoticons. As Skylar tweeted on April 4, 2012: <i>twitter seems to like, swallow me, at times</i>.</a>" Holly Millea at Elle with a longread about teens, Twitter, and murder in West Virginia. (Via Rebecca Traister.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/elissawashuta/this-indian-does-not-owe-you">When you quiz me on genocide highlights — <i>Were those smallpox blankets real? I’ve always wondered about that</i> — to sate your hunger for facts, I do not owe you a free education of the kind that my university students pay for, and I am not so flattered by your interest in my people that I might unfurl a lecture on 500 years of colonization for your edification.</a>" Elissa Washuta at BuzzFeed. (Via Sarah McCarry.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/22/on-my-butchness/view-all/">Now, I am all of five feet tall and pudgy. With my penchant for pastels and bright complementary colors, I look more like a giant Easter egg than like whatever it was my aunt and uncle were picturing when they read the word 'butch.'</a>" Caroline Narby at The Toast with "On My Butchness."<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/youre-not-as-introverted-as-you-think-a677a1f7b464">The words 'introvert' and 'extrovert' are just shorthands for larger experiences, a quick way for someone else to know what you’re about without having to get into specifics ('I’ve been out for four nights in a row and I usually need to be home to recharge every other night unless I’m going out with particular people and that’s why I can’t concentrate'). But if you break past the labels and listicles, everyone understands that sometimes enough is enough, that sometimes you just don’t have enough lightning bolts.</a>" Jaya Saxena at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/09/23/i-am-more-ok-not-having-it-all">And when Al pointed that out, it finally hit me that even if I did miss out on the greatest love you can possibly know as a human being, I was actually just fine with the amount I already had.</a>" Great essay from Kate Harding at DAME on being okay with not having it all.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cafe.com/r/0a693898-753e-454f-9fb1-a61b92927ac9/1/how-cooking-for-others-can-be-selfish">I really just wanted her to be happy. I thought summer should be fun, and I didn't like the parts of it — cutting fucking green beans! — that weren't fun. And she was an adult. She could actually choose what she wanted. She could choose fun, and it seemed like maybe she didn't know that, so I was telling her.</a>" Sarah Miller at Cafe with "To Cook or Not to Cook?" (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://rachelhartmanbooks.com/2014/09/24/gathering-the-ingredients/">Food is one art form where texture and flavour are paramount; nobody expects their sandwich to have a driving beat or comprehensible narrative. As an eater, you expect to savour the contrasting flavours and interplay of textures. A particularly good meal may be evocative of some emotion or significant moment in your life.</a>" Rachel Hartman at her blog on Yes. Because I am signing up to be the first subscriber to her Journal of Crackpot Musicology.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/xtinehlee/i-had-a-stroke-at-33#1tx7ons">People have asked if anyone around me could tell I was having a stroke. 'Weren’t you acting weird?' they’d ask, and my husband’s mouth would turn into a thin line, and my friends who joined us for New Year’s would lower their eyes. I was acting weird, yes. But it was New Year’s Eve.</a>" Christine Hyung-Oak Lee at BuzzFeed on the stroke that felled her when she was 33, and the long road back. (Via Roxane Gay.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/23/-sp-diana-athill-its-silly-frightened-being-dead">I can’t remember when I read, or was told, that he considered it a good thing to spend a short time every day thinking about death, thus getting used to its inevitability and coming to understand that something inevitable is natural and can’t be too bad, but it was in my early teens, and it struck me as a sensible idea.</a>" Finally, as the antithesis of that horrifying Nina Bernstein story, here is 96-year-old Diana Athill at the Guardian with, "It's silly to be frightened of being dead." (Via Nilanjana Roy.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-69403719155475277492014-09-21T06:42:00.001-07:002014-09-21T06:42:49.535-07:00Links for the week ending 21 September 2014"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/19/scottish-referendum-day-swithering-had-to-end-undecided">This was the decision, then, and a large part of me felt relief, not so much for the outcome, but more for the fact that I wasn’t responsible. I could continue being the kind of person who supports the radical movement without having to deal with the consequences. I hated myself a little bit, and I slept again.</a>" Lovely personal essay from Morven Crumlish at the Guardian about voting in the Scottish independence referendum.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/181618/why-liberians-thought-ebola-was-government-scam-attract-western-aid#">Health workers, who have, according to the Ministry of Health, accounted for 8 percent of all Ebola cases and 6 percent of all Ebola-related deaths in Liberia, are scared to come in to the clinics.</a>" Just one of many alarming statistics from Sara Jerving's piece at The Nation about the making of Liberia's Ebola disaster. (Via @fpinterrupted.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/09/r0-ebola/#more-1562581">This now truly is a type of epidemic that the world has never seen before. </a>" It won't help you sleep at night, but Maryn McKenna's take on the Ebola epidemic is worth reading nonetheless. At Wired.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/17/world/middleeast/syrian-plane-shot-down-as-attacks-by-groups-intensify.html?rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article">While the combatants scrambled on the battlefield, the chairman of a United Nations investigatory panel on human rights said in Geneva that he 'had run out of words to depict the gravity of the crimes committed inside Syria.'</a>" Anne Barnard and Hwaida Saad for the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/heres-one-iraqi-town-where-the-islamic-state-has-no-friends/2014/09/18/fe213f56-3f70-11e4-9587-5dafd96295f0_story.html">But on the front lines of Thuluyah, Sunni tribesmen, the police and the Iraqi army fight side-by-side. In recent weeks they have been joined by Shiite militias that are notorious for revenge killings against the Sunni sect.</a>" Loveday Morris reporting from Iraq for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/14/taliban-back-in-kandahar-400-people-die-august-fighting">Some of the men shared idle banter with the police officers, speaking laconically of this year's grape harvest in neighbouring districts. The police officers let them pass; if they had looked more carefully they may have spotted the guns and ammunition hidden under the shipments of grapes.</a>" May Jeong reporting from Afghanistan for the Guardian. (Via Margherita Stancati.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/why-do-democrats-keep-trying-to-ban-the-guns-that-look-scary?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_content=1410562928">But in the 10 years since the previous ban lapsed, even gun control advocates acknowledge a larger truth: The law that barred the sale of assault weapons from 1994 to 2004 made little difference.</a>" Lois Beckett at ProPublica.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/events-ferguson-spur-political-action-search-new-voters">'In local elections in St. Louis County in general, the typical turnout as measured as percentage of registered voters is between 10 and 15 percent,' said Jones. 'Sometimes if there is a hotly contested issue, they might get into the low 20s, but that is the exception, not the rule.'</a>" Emanuele Berry reports for St. Louis Public Radio on grassroots drives to register voters in Ferguson.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/17/us-usa-police-transparency-idUSKBN0HC2IC20140917">Speaking to Reuters in a group interview, the heads of police of Dallas, Chicago, Austin, Houston, Elk Grove, California, Boston, and Toronto, Canada said that every police shooting since Ferguson has been followed by protests.</a>" Fiona Ortiz for Reuters. (Via Alice Speri.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/09/the-case-for-abolishing-juvenile-prisons">Because there has never been a time in history when we’ve successfully eliminated the abuses that take place in these facilities, no matter how many investigations and reports and waves of reform there have been, I don’t believe they can be eliminated.</a>" At The Awl, Sarah Mayeux interviews Nell Bernstein on "The Case for Abolishing Juvenile Prisons."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/09/04/alameda-county-jails-forcing-women-take-pregnancy-tests/">The story of Alameda’s mandatory pregnancy tests is really the story of how U.S. prisons have grappled with an influx of young women over the past four decades: with supreme incompetence and intermittent malice.</a>" From earlier this month, Susie Cagle at RH Reality Check.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/09/15/346149979/smartphones-are-used-to-stalk-control-domestic-abuse-victims">NPR investigated these tools, also known as spyware, and spoke with domestic violence counselors and survivors around the country. We found that cyberstalking is now a standard part of domestic abuse in the U.S.</a>" Aarti Shahani at NPR. (Via Sarah Jeong.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/09/my_feminism_starts_300_years_ago.html">There’s not much difference to me between the adjunct crisis in higher education and the labor conversations that fast food and other low wage workers are having. It’s just that we like to see ourselves as different. We like to see our destinies as different. But they’re the same thing.</a>" Carla Murphy interviews Tressie McMillan Cottom at Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/when-you-cant-afford-sleep/380128/">Working minimum wage for eight hours per day would earn a worker $1,386 per month, less than half of the current median average rent in Brooklyn.</a>" Olga Khazan at The Atlantic. (Via Amanda Watson.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a30747/north-dakota-measure-one-abortion/">On November 4, North Dakotans will vote on Measure 1, a human life amendment that says, 'The inalienable right to life of every human being at any stage of development must be recognized and protected.'</a>" At Cosmopolitan, Robin Marty on the abortion amendment even North Dakotans haven't heard of. (Via Garance Francke-Ruta.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/18/hands-guns-brown-alive/">As we all stood on the steps with our hands in the air so a group photo could be taken, passing white affluent students, who’d largely previously treated our group like an obstacle to be avoided, began to take notice. Immediately out came the I-Phones to post Tweets and Vines.</a>" At The Toast, Rose Espinoza "On Being Brown and Alive" at the University of Michigan.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://m.colorlines.com/archives/2014/09/the_teacher_wars_author_talks_race_and_gender_in_american_education.html">And there is a translation process that happens there, where this set of ideas of was mostly being used by teachers of color with children of color. Now a multi-racial group of teachers is using these strategies. When someone from your community says to you, 'Look, there are no excuses,' that is very different from when someone from outside your community is telling you 'no excuses.' Although these are very old ideas, what they mean in practice today is has changed.</a>" Miriam Zoila Pérez interviews Dana Goldstein at Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2014/08/re-making-real-middle-ages.html#sthash.hXydcyXa.uxfs">The myth of the monochrome Middle Ages, in which the medieval is originary, pure, and white, transcends geographical and temporal boundaries. It is attached, through supposed biological descent, to white bodies, wherever and whenever they go, even into the apparently non-corporeal digital realms of fan-forums, television and video-games.</a>" From last month, Helen Young at the medieval studies blog In The Middle. (Via Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/unlikely-ballerina?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter">Basement Floor C resembled a boiler room, yet I felt that I had entered a commune of unicorns.</a>" So many great lines in this excellent profile of ballerina Misty Copeland, by Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/11/nba-rookie-camp-celtics-bulls-76ers/">Expertly employing the tips on how to take control of an interview, he looked this reporter straight in the eye and, with the utmost politeness, expertly skirted all the hard questions about specific parts of the program. Then he shook hands firmly, said thank you and loped out of the room, ready for the big leagues.</a>" Sarah Lyall on the NBA's training program for rookies. At some odd corner of the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/09/13/cheese-and-crackers-meal-for-ages/av1K91Kxd8dbUPKBzRcItM/story.html">If you send your children to school this week with cheese and crackers for lunch, you may not be providing the healthiest or most well-rounded of meals, but you will be continuing a longtime classic of basic sustenance for travelers.</a>" From last week, a short history of cheese and crackers, by Abigail Carroll for The Boston Globe. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://edge.org/conversation/social-pain">What we found is that the people who were taking acetaminophen reported less hurt feelings than people who were taking placebo, and they showed less pain related activity to social exclusion, just as a function of taking acetaminophen. We see this crossover effect in some ways, that this agent, which known to reduce physical pain, also seems to affect social pain.</a>" Naomi Eisenberger at Edge. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/09/the-birth-of-adulthood-in-american-culture#more-201138">Even a relatively light-on-ideas speculative novel for young people (Divergent, say) is about a thousand miles ahead of half the 'adult' stuff on the bestseller lists—get-saved or get-rich Life Full of Purpose snake oil, dumb, pompous narcolepsy-inducing would-be Literary Fiction, warmed-over Dean Koontz etc., etc., etc. I mean this not just in terms of entertainment—although, that too—but in terms of providing useful, interesting moral and philosophical questions for the reader to think about, and test against his own ideas.</a>" Maria Bustillos at The Awl.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/sultana/dream/dream.html">'O, I see my mistake, you cannot know our customs, as you were never here before. We shut our men indoors.'</a>" 1905 pioneering misandrist SF by Rokheya Shekhawat Hossein, digitized at UPENN. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/16/counted-reporting-rape-school-title-ix-investigation/view-all/">On my way down Franklin Street, I pass the bar where X. and I were hanging out the evening before he raped me. It’s still there, on the same street as the place where I’m going to report being raped.</a>" Brave piece at The Toast by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/science-has-a-sexual-assault-problem.html?_r=0">Sexual assault is a pernicious and formidable barrier to women in science, partly because we have consistently gifted to it our silence. I have given it 18 years of my silence and I will not give it one day more.</a>" Also brave: Hope Jahren at the NYT. (Hat tip to Jenevieve.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/16/dirtbag-teddy-roosevelt/">BRING ME STANDARD OIL<br />
I’M GOING TO PUNCH IT MANFULLY IN THE FACE</a>" Dear god, Dirtbag Teddy Roosevelt. Mallory Ortberg strikes again at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://incisive.nu/2014/ditching-twitter/">As Twitter expanded and my own little slice of it grew as well, I called it my front porch and defended its quirks and downsides. But now the magic has turned, in ways that have felt irrevocable.</a>" Thoughtful piece by Erin Kissane at her website, and one that will resonate for all of you who participated this week in a short Twitter requiem for an even earlier social media era. (Oh, days of blogger yore!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://review.gawker.com/the-original-gone-girl-on-daphne-du-maurier-and-her-re-1635758750">That is the helpful thing with codes; they make their users citizens of two countries, one public, the other a private place where the code is spoken and understood by an exclusive bonded few.</a>" Finally, petition to make the event of a new published piece by Carrie Frye a national holiday. Who's with me? At Gawker. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-68629976271658396222014-09-14T06:38:00.001-07:002014-09-14T06:38:29.455-07:00Links for the week ending 14 September 2014"<a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ap-more-5000-dead-c-african-republic">These old men, their eyes clouded by cataracts and their ears hacked by machete blades, sit on dirty straw mats at a church and gather the names of the dead from broken survivors. They write each name carefully in Arabic with faded blue ink on lined paper, neatly folded and stored in the pocket of one man's tattered kaftan. The list is four pages long.</a>" Incredible writing and reporting from the AP's Krista Larson in the Central African Republic.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/how-global-health-failed-liberia-as-the-ebola-outbreak-took">The only government forces with the resources to react, it seems, are the police. A body may wait for days before a lab worker or ambulance shows up, but when neighbors protest the wait by blocking traffic in the streets, police in riot gear respond within the hour.</a>" Jina Moore for BuzzFeed, continuing to report from the front lines of the Ebola catastrophe in Liberia.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/08/28/found_the_islamic_state_terror_laptop_of_doom_bubonic_plague_weapons_of_mass_destruction_exclusive">But after hours upon hours of scrolling through the documents, it became clear that the ISIS laptop contains more than the typical propaganda and instruction manuals used by jihadists. The documents also suggest that the laptop's owner was teaching himself about the use of biological weaponry, in preparation for a potential attack that would have shocked the world.</a>" Dude Harald Doornbos and Jenan Moussa for Foreign Policy. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/09/us-iraq-security-consequences-idUSKBN0H40B820140909">But the aftermath is far from what the Americans envisioned. Smoke now rises from those Sunni villages, where some houses have been torched by Shi'ite militia. Others are abandoned, the walls daubed with sectarian slogans.</a>" Isabel Coles for Reuters. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/obama-wants-arab-cooperation-against-islamic-state-but-must-overcome-mistrust/2014/09/10/78d0a213-75f9-43e1-b1eb-7bde11c33de5_story.html">In common with their fear of the Islamic State, however, the region’s leaders also share a deep mistrust of the Obama administration, rooted in the past three years of increasing disengagement from the Middle East as the United States has sought to distance itself from the turmoil engendered by the Arab Spring revolts.</a>" Liz Sly for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/iraq-crisis/2014/9/12/6134159/is-obamas-new-isis-strategy-legal?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=mattyglesias&utm_content=friday">Essentially, the administration is arguing that the 2001 AUMF authorizes the president to go to war against any organization that ever temporarily worked with al-Qaeda, even if the group in question didn't actually exist in 2001, and even if any subsequent collaboration has turned to enmity by the time the US takes military action.</a>" Amanda Taub at Vox.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/matter/you-cant-fight-beheadings-with-paperwork-95c47e9c0810">A law like this one also makes it easier to deport people legally living in the U.K. on tenuous grounds, and opens up the possibility of McCarthy-style witch hunts against people of Middle Eastern or African descent.</a>" Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/us/outrage-and-calls-for-change-follow-ferguson-officials-into-council-meeting.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMedia&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news">Some people told the Council of what they called routine mistreatment by the police and indifference from city officials. Debora Young of Ferguson said that when she called the police last year to report that her car was stolen, 'they came and locked me up.'</a>" Julie Bosman for the NYT.<br />
<br />
Elsewhere in Missouri Goddam: "<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/missouri-lawmaker-suing-deny-daughters-birth-control-access">In other words, the Wielands are asking the federal government to enforce their parental guidelines on their daughters. It may sound outlandish, but plenty of people thought <i>Hobby Lobby</i> and related cases were outlandish when they were filed, too.</a>" Irin Carmon at MSNBC. And "<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/legislature-expands-gun-rights-override-nixons-veto">Backers say the law is needed to protect gun rights, and to prevent frivolous arrests of people carrying firearms. Rep. Rick Brattin, R-Harrisonville, recommended that all Missourians be armed. 'We live in a world that's evil, that wants to harm each and every one,' he said.</a>" Jo Mannies for St. Louis Public Radio. (Via Sarah Goodyear.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/why-gun-control-groups-have-moved-away-from-an-assault-weapons-ban">With more information, Watts decided that focusing on access to guns, not types of guns, was a smarter approach. She came to the same conclusion that other gun control groups had reached even before the Sandy Hook shootings: 'Ultimately,' she said, 'what's going to save the most lives are background checks.'</a>" Lois Beckett at ProPublica on the death of a push to ban assault weapons.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/matter/welcome-back-to-school-shootings-11e14773a4c4">This year’s high school seniors, born in 1998 or 1997 or maybe 1996, have lived their entire lives in the aftermath of that burst bubble in a world with few illusions about what their mere presence in school might protect them from. The kids just starting kindergarten, I suspect, will have even fewer.</a>" Rachel Maddux at Matter on growing up in the era of the active shooter.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/daniel-holtzclaw-alleged-sexual-assault-oklahoma-city#1qsxu3s">Holtzclaw’s 'mistake' — the slip-up that prosecutors said landed him in orange jail scrubs in an unremarkable fluorescent-lit courtroom on Wednesday — was believing J.L. was similar to his other alleged victims: all black middle-aged women, but women of a lower social status and with reason to fear the authorities.</a>" Jessica Testa at BuzzFeed.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/rape-culture-in-the-alaskan-wilderness/379976/">In a state where hundreds of roadless communities are scattered across hundreds of thousands of miles, and where the storied rates of violence against women can hit 100 percent in some villages, silence is the norm, and violence is almost expected.</a>" Sara Bernard at The Atlantic on Alaskan rape culture.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://fusion.net/justice/story/desperate-raped-migrant-women-face-sexual-assault-mexico-1037738">The arrangement is so common there's a slang term for it—'cuerpomátic,' or 'cuerpomático' (an apparent wordplay on Credomatic, a Central American credit-card processing firm), which means to use one's body — or cuerpo — as a source of currency.</a>" Deborah Bonello and Erin Siegal McIntyre for Fusion on high rates of sexual assault against migrant girls and women. (Via Sheera Frenkel.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/the-forsaken-a-rising-number-of-homeless-gay-teens-are-being-cast-out-by-religious-families-20140903">From that moment, Jackie knew that she was entirely on her own, that she had no home, no money and no family who would help her – and that this was the terrible price she'd pay for being a lesbian.</a>" Hard-hitting and heartbreaking, Alex Morris' longread at Rolling Stone on the kids for whom it's not getting better: LGBTQ teens from religious families.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/09/the-underground-girls-of-kabul/379762/">The only thing that binds the <i>bacha posh</i> girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village.</a>" Jenny Nordberg at The Atlantic on "The Afghan Girls Who Live as Boys."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/obamas-long-immigration-betrayal/379839/2/">'But what I hear in the street is, "He’s a liar. We elected him, and he’s given us nothing but deportations,"' he said. 'There’s going to be a lot of activists—the next generation of leaders of the Latino community—who are never going to forget that Democrats found them inconvenient.'</a>" Molly Ball at The Atlantic on the deep disillusionment of immigration reformers.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/sports/football/ray-rice-is-an-outlier-most-domestic-abuse-suspects-play-on.html">There has been little public outrage over the case involving McDonald, who is 6 feet 3 and 290 pounds. McDonald was arrested at his San Jose, Calif., home Aug. 31, and the police said there were visible injuries on his pregnant wife.</a>" Karen Crouse at the NYT on the only way that Ray Rice is an outlier in professional sports.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/business/air-bag-flaw-long-known-led-to-recalls.html?_r=0">The air bag explosion sent a two-inch piece of shrapnel flying. When highway troopers found Ms. Griffin, then 26, with blood gushing from a gash in her neck, they were baffled by the extent of her injuries.</a>" Oh hey great. Hiroko Tabuchi for the NYT on the slim but existent possibility that your car's air bag will explode.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/dont-think-positively/379993/2/">If your goal is to be happy, the next time you’re not happy, you’ll feel like you failed. Emotional life doesn’t work that way. There are inevitably things that are going to make us unhappy, and that’s not pathology or failure when you feel that way.</a>" Olga Khazan interviews Julie Norem at The Atlantic on "defensive pessimism" FTW.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140818-at-multiverse-impasse-a-new-theory-of-scale/">The multiverse ennui can’t last forever.</a>" Defensive pessimism in action? Natalie Wochover at Quanta Magazine on the possible failure of supersymmetry theory, and the search for a new model.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140911-evolutions-random-paths-all-lead-to-the-same-place/"> His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?</a>" Emily Singer, also at Quanta Magazine.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://velamag.com/the-postcard-days/">I picked up stones and put them down again, and still not knowing how to talk to men, I informed him that as a kid, I’d named rocks, invented complicated societies and biographies for them. It had seemed as plausible as giving life to a doll, and more readily available.</a>" Erica Watson at Vela, with "The Postcard Days."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/features/medicine-and-its-metaphors/">Paternalism has fallen out of favor in medicine, just as the approach to fathering that depends on absolute authority no longer dominates parenting. But how we should care for other people remains a question.</a>" Spoiler: doctors' children have a complicated relationship with medical care. Eula Biss at Guernica.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/7/dancers-and-diplomats-new-york-city-ballet-in-moscow-october-1962">Dancer Bettijane Sills remembered a lobby the size of Grand Central Station, with elevators that could move cattle. One of the middle floors was inaccessible from the elevator, and the dancers surmised it to be the location of the hotel’s listening equipment.</a>" Portrait of a vanished era: Rachel Marcy at The Appendix with a history of the New York City Ballet's 1962 tour of the Soviet Union. (Via Nicole Cliffe's daily links at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/11/im-gamer/">Feminists control everything. This just proves that we need a by-men-for-men Patty Cake community. We need to insulate ourselves against feminist lies…about Patty Cake.</a>" Finally, Jaya Saxena at The Toast with "I'm A Gamer."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-66113835346515800202014-09-07T06:47:00.000-07:002014-09-07T06:47:04.995-07:00Links for the week ending 7 September 2014"<a href="http://lightbox.time.com/2014/08/31/inside-the-beslan-school-siege-10-years-on/photo/8/">The children, now young adults, journeyed with her back to the school, sometimes for the first time since the tragedy. In silence, with their eyes shut, they remembered.</a>" Almost unbearable photo essay by Diana Markosian on the tenth anniversary of the Beslan school siege and massacre. Text by Katya Cengel. At Time. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett's <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/96693874407/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a>.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/residents-of-komsomolske-pray-for-peace-under-crossfire-362766.html">Natalia Semeniuk, 14, had to flee her summer camp for orphans in the Donetsk Oblast town of Komsomolske along with other children on Aug. 28, when the shelling shattered all windows in the classroom.</a>" Oksana Grytsenko at Kyiv Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/sep/02/dying-russians/">In the seventeen years between 1992 and 2009, the Russian population declined by almost seven million people, or nearly 5 percent—a rate of loss unheard of in Europe since World War II. Moreover, much of this appears to be caused by rising mortality.</a>" Grim and beautifully written, Masha Gessen at the NYRB with "The Dying Russians." (Via Betsy Phillips.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/03/us-foundation-iraq-crisis-yazidi-idUSKBN0GY1BW20140903">When Adeba Shaker arrived at a house in Raabia, Iraq, after being kidnapped by Islamic State militants last month, one of her captors received a phone call.</a>" Benedetta Argentieri for Reuters on the escape of a 14-year-old Yazidi girl, and the plight of the women and girls still held captive. (Link via <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/96693874407/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a> again.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/03/rotherham-you-cant-blame-all-of-us">'At the moment they feel the law won’t protect them, because the other victims weren’t protected, so why would they be?'</a>" Nuanced piece on the horrifying child-rape scandal in the South Yorkshire town of Rotherham. By Homa Khaleeli at The Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/9/5/6105373/police-allowed-to-force-shoot-taser-training-policy">The law gives police incredibly wide latitude to use force against civilians if they feel they're under threat. In theory, it's the job of police departments to come up with policies that hold cops to a higher standard for using force.</a>" Dara Lind at Vox about the wide variability in training procedures for police in the use of force.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/slayings-protests-arrests-vex-palestinian-clan-with-strong-us-ties/2014/09/02/afd15b9a-2f8c-11e4-9b98-848790384093_story.html">The young Abu Khieder men who have been arrested, and their families, deny that they did anything illegal. They insist that those arrested had attended protests peacefully or were bystanders.</a>" Anne Marie O'Connor at The Washington Post on the Israeli arrests of up to 30 members of a single Palestinian-American family whose crime may be in being related to the Palestinian teen burned alive by Jews in a revenge killing earlier this summer.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/justice-dept-to-probe-ferguson-police-force/2014/09/03/737dd928-33bc-11e4-a723-fa3895a25d02_story.html">The federal officials said the probe will look not only at Ferguson but also at other police departments in St. Louis County. Some, like Ferguson, are predominantly white departments serving majority-African-American communities, and at least one department invited the Justice Department to look at its practices.</a>" Sari Horowitz, Carol D. Leonnig and Kimberley Kindy for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/31/3477604/ferguson-lawsuit-expensive-police-misconduct/">It’s hard to imagine how a small, low-income city like Ferguson can scrounge up anything close to $40 million should they end up settling the suit. The sum dwarfs the city’s total revenues for the fiscal year.</a>" Aviva Shen at ThinkProgress on how police misconduct drains public coffers — and rarely results in any penalty to the individuals or departments involved.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/09/oklahoma_cop_held_on_rape_charges_also_accused_of_wrongful_death.html">Daniel Holtzclaw, the 27-year-old Oklahoma City police officer charged with sexually assaulting eight black women, is also a defendant in a wrongful death suit filed earlier this year.</a>" Aura Bogado at Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/25/mike-brown-shooting-jim-crow-lynchings-in-common?CMP=twt_gu">Not terribly long ago in a country that many people misremember, if they knew it at all, a black person was killed in public every four days for often the most mundane of infractions, or rather accusation of infractions – for taking a hog, making boastful remarks, for stealing 75 cents.</a>" Isabel Wilkerson, whose <i>The Warmth of Other Suns</i> would be on my shortlist for required reading, at The Guardian on police violence as a phenomenon best understood in the context of a culture that encouraged lynching.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/watching-killing?src=mp">I know what I first felt when I saw each one, aside from sick: the urge—a gut instinct, a child’s fantasy, really—to leap into the picture, save everyone, and stop everything.</a>" Jill Lepore at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119314/feminism-and-teaching-interview-dana-goldstein">What’s interesting is that 76 percent of teachers are still women today. That’s because teaching remains the most common first step out of the working class and into the middle class. So we’re always having new generations of women who are, say, the first in their families to graduate from college.</a>" Dana Goldstein talks to Rebecca Traister at The New Republic about feminism and teaching.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/31/magazine/the-dawn-of-the-post-clinic-abortion.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1">'I know that it’s difficult, because abortion is not accessible to them. But this is not our work. I think this is a problem the U.S. has to solve itself. There are so many resources, so much money available there for abortion rights groups, I think they should be able to work on this. Starting on paper, with changing the laws.'</a>" Emily Bazelon at the NYT on the Dutch woman spearheading the "Dawn of the Post-Clinic Abortion." (Via Jenna Wortham.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/upshot/a-child-helps-your-career-if-youre-a-man.html">In a similar study done in a laboratory, Ms. Correll asked participants how much they would pay job applicants if they were employers. Mothers were offered on average $11,000 less than childless women and $13,000 less than fathers.</a>" Claire Cain Miller at the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/08/memes-and-misogynoir#more-200323">In the final evolution of the meme, the soundbite falls away and ventriloquism robs these individuals of the ownership of their own words.</a>" Lauren Jackson on "Memes and Misogynoir" at The Awl.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://tressiemc.com/2014/09/04/the-twitter-facts-of-life/">All I know is that crowds and intentions can turn on a dime and sometimes, like when they are erasing people who look like you or they call you by the wrong name, you can choose to not turn with them.</a>" Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog, on an incident in the life of Black Twitter.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/the-algorithm-giveth-but-it-also-taketh-b7efad92bc1f">What else will a curated feed optimize for? It will almost certainly look more like television since there is a reason television looks like television: that’s what advertisers like.</a>" Zeynep Tufekci at Medium on the prospect of an algorithmically arranged (as opposed to chronologically arranged) feed at Twitter. (I gotta say, for the purposes of this project, I will be stuck knowing more of what I already know rather than stumbling upon new-to-me voices and perspectives, should Twitter go that route.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/laniakea-home-supercluster-09032014/#sthash.q1h5yJtj.dpuf">Astronomers have mapped the cosmic watershed in which our Milky Way Galaxy is a droplet.</a>" Camille M. Carlisle for Sky and Telescope.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/09/05/gal-science-lets-talk-slime-mold/"><i>Physarum</i> is a gelatinous yellow decomposer which, though it’s single-celled, can grow to up to several square meters. Also, it’s smarter than you.</a>" Elizabeth Cutrone taking the Gal Science slot this week at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/opinion/sunday/studying-ebola-then-dying-from-it.html">It did not have to be that way. If diagnostic facilities like those at Kenema had been more widely available, the virus could have been caught as it emerged.</a>" Also proving the point that slime mold is smarter than us, Pardis Sabeti on the loss of her colleagues in Sierra Leone. At the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/08/27/_52_blue_the_loneliest_whale_in_the_world.html">No one has ever conducted a physical search for 52 Blue. An entrepreneur named Dietmar Petutschnig is currently prowling the South Pacific in a small sailboat, but his hunt for the whale seems more metaphorical, a kind of personal branding.</a>" An excerpt at Slate last week from Leslie Jamison's new longread for The Atavist.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/09/nighttime-in-the-devils-garden/">Although they were quiet children, they seemed excited to see me, and, without saying very much at all they invited me to their camp. I followed them because those were the days I followed people without asking too many questions.</a>" Lovely short piece by Jami Attenberg at The Hairpin.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vice.com/read/i-ghostwrote-hundreds-of-chinese-students-ivy-league-admissions-essays-897">One December evening, I used one of my most embarrassing moments as the basis for an essay for a 17-year-old Chinese girl who had never desired something she could not afford.</a>" Eunice Park at Vice on making a living — and losing a self — by ghostwriting college application essays for wealthy Chinese students. (Via David Hull.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/09/ask-polly-why-dont-men-i-date-ever-love-me.html">They never put their needs first, unless it indirectly serves someone else — a manicure, some highlights. They make sure everyone around them is 100 percent satisfied. Like grocery-store managers. Like customer service reps. Like masseuses who also give free happy endings.</a>" Just reminding you-all that Heather Havrilesky's Ask Polly column is at The Cut now.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2014/09/03/dengue-fever-a-threat-to-reporters-in-new-delhi/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0">I had often imagined what it would be like to be in the middle of an epidemic, a theme I had encountered in action movies and Edgar Allan Poe. But in reality it was different: Life changed gradually, until one day you suddenly realized that the effects of the sickness were everywhere.</a>" Finally, a rare personal essay from the NYT's Ellen Barry.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-85747007367749053492014-08-31T06:02:00.000-07:002014-08-31T06:02:54.756-07:00Links for the week ending 31 August 2014"<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/25/ferguson-michael-brown-missouri-police/14594185/">Lesley McSpadden waits for the crowds and the cameras to leave before she turns back to her son's casket to kiss it goodbye.</a>" Yamiche Alcindor reporting from Michael Brown's funeral. For USA Today. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/27/6058071/darren-wilson-killed-michael-brown-here-s-why-he-probably-won-t-go-to?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=voxdotcom&utm_content=wednesday">Darren Wilson killed Michael Brown. Here’s why he probably won’t go to jail.</a>" Amanda Taub at Vox. (Via Ta-Nehisi Coates.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ferguson-wasnt-black-rage-against-copsit-was-white-rage-against-progress/2014/08/29/3055e3f4-2d75-11e4-bb9b-997ae96fad33_story.html?tid=pm_opinions_pop">But that has it precisely backward. What we’ve actually seen is the latest outbreak of white rage. Sure, it is cloaked in the niceties of law and order, but it is rage nonetheless.</a>" Carol Anderson at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/for-students-and-parents-in-ferguson-florissant-a-chance-to/article_2223ea12-e9c2-5319-8074-3c0b7f9cb452.html?utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=twitterfeed">'Mommy, am I going to be killed when I go to school?' Jade Bugett asked.</a>" Jessica Bock at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thefrisky.com/2014-08-13/the-soapbox-why-we-cannot-have-reproductive-justice-without-fighting-police-brutality/">Women of color bear a relationship to reproduction that is fraught with trauma and state control, a perpetual tightrope that stretches beyond the simple paradigm of 'pro-choice' organizing.</a>" Hannah Giorgis at The Frisky. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/economics-police-militarism">But these forces operate in tandem—the tear gas and the tickets; the weaponry and the warrants—compromising a wide range of fundamental rights that seem, in Ferguson and beyond, to have gone up in smoke.</a>" Sarah Stillman on Ferguson at The New Yorker, and, while I linked to her piece on probation companies earlier this year, there's no harm in reading it again: "<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/get-out-of-jail-inc">'When you inject a profit motive into the criminal-justice system, you’re opening it up to corruption and abuse,' he later told me, adding, 'You are asking the poorest of the poor to fund the court system, and that’s what’s causing all of these abuses, in my opinion.'</a>" (Via Beth Schwartzapfel and Jelani Cobb.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/aug/27/-sp-lawmans-burden-south-texas-immigration-crisis">For many desperate families searching for missing relatives, Martinez is one of the few law enforcement officials they’ll ever meet who will genuinely listen.</a>" In the last of a four-part series by the Texas Observer's Melissa del Bosque and a multimedia team at the Guardian, a moving profile of the Brooks County sheriff at the epicenter of an immigration crisis.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/25/6052871/why-white-skin-works-better-than-most-medicine">The truth is this: even today, in America, white privilege works better than most medicine when it comes to staying healthy. Racial health disparities may be a more subtle killer than gun violence or murder, but they're arguably a more violent one. They infect every part of the body and they strike at literally every stage of life, from cradle to grave.</a>" Julia Belluz and dude Steven Hoffman at Vox.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/08/25/othering-ebola-and-the-history-and-politics-of-pointing-at-immigrants-as-potential-disease-vectors/">The long history of associating immigrants and disease in America and the problematic impact that has on attitudes toward immigrants should make us sensitive to the impact of “othering” African immigrants to the United States in the midst of the current Ebola outbreak in West Africa.</a>" Laura Seay and Kim Yi Dionne at The Washington Post. (Via @bechamilton.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-25/islamic-state-now-resembles-the-taliban-with-oil-fields.html">The Islamic State, he said, is likely earning some $2 million a day from crude sales, paid in cash or bartered goods as the oil crosses into the Kurdistan region of Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Jordan.</a>" Indira A.R. Laskshmanan for Bloomberg. (Via Yeganeh June Torbati.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/08/140827-iraq-dahuk-islamic-state-assyrian-christians-peshmerga-nineveh-kurdistan/">All dozen or so Christians interviewed by National Geographic adamantly shared the demand for a safe zone, akin to the two no-fly zones the West established in 1992 to protect Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from the forces of former leader Saddam Hussein.</a>" At National Geographic, Rania Abouzeid does a deep dive into the perilous choices left to Iraq's remaining Assyrian Christians.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.berkshireeagle.com/opinion/ci_26413535/mariane-pearl-reflections-journalists-death">As for me, I still believe you can only fight terrorists with what they're seeking to destroy, namely, your soul.</a>" Mariane Pearl at The Berkshire Eagle. (Via Lyse Doucet.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/08/23/part-brave-and-afraid-and-heading-down-longest-road-michael-bourne-struggle-with-mental-illness/M2fHUzRGBobpEo458eLf6J/story.html">Mike was 33 years old. He’d been in and out of institutions for half his life, since he first got sick when he was 17. His diagnosis had changed over the years — it was schizophrenia, then bipolar disorder, then schizoaffective disorder — and his medications were in constant flux.</a>" The first of Jenna Russell's three-part profile of a man struggling with chronic mental illness. At The Boston Globe.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-for-geeks-86cb784983b1">Up front, aggressive usually wins, but over time, persistent politeness will change the situation, and often even the aggressive people calm down.</a>" There are some misfires here, but also a lot of wisdom in this essay by Quinn Norton at Medium, "How To Be Polite For Geeks."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bkmag.com/2014/08/26/in-praise-of-polly-sugar-and-the-advice-column-as-personal-essay/">It’s that the thing that you want to hear during the hardest points in your life is not always that things will be OK, which they mostly turn out to be. What you need to hear is yes, life is hard and strange for everyone. That your pain is valid. That you are seen. That the messiness of humanity is a feature, not a flaw. That we are all improvising here.</a>" Margaret Eby pens a tribute to advice columnists. At Brooklyn Magazine.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/08/ask-polly-how-do-i-make-friends-in-my-late-20s.html"> Our standards are pretty low. Can you carry on a conversation? Is your kid maybe not a complete asshole? COME SIT NEXT TO ME, <i>YOU ARE MY BUDDY</i>.</a>" Speaking of advice columnists! Heather Havrilesky's Ask Polly column moves to The Cut, continues to be awesome. Here on the subject of making friends in one's post-education adulthood.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/zombie-sponge-reefs-are-lurking-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea">When an organism thought to be extinct is rediscovered—either in living form or in the fossil record after a gap of millions of years—it is known as a Lazarus taxon. In this sense, glass sponge reefs are a kind of Lazarus ecosystem.</a>" Sarah DeWeerdt at Nautilus on the mind-blowing phenomenon that is "zombie sponge reefs."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26111-schrodingers-cat-caught-on-quantum-film.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|picture-of-the-day">These images were generated using a cat stencil and entangled photons.</a>" Schrödinger's cat, for reals. By Penny Sarchet for New Scientist. (Via @pourmecoffee.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/08/the-flight-of-the-ladybugs#more-200146">The Lost Ladybug Project, a citizen science program that tracks ladybug populations around the country, has noted for years that populations of many lady beetle species have been shrinking or moving around—the result of an unknown number of variables.</a>" Cat Ferguson at The Awl last week.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/troll-slayer?src=mp">'The people who read the Mail are middle-aged women, and they look like me. They know what he’s saying. For all the very right-wing, slightly unpleasant populism that the Mail trades in, its readership is actually people who know an unacceptable insult when they see it. They’ve got gray hair. He’s talking about them.'</a>" Rebecca Mead's profile of Mary Beard this week in The New Yorker. (Hat tip to Paige Morgan.)<br />
<br />
Finally, if you haven't seen this already, or even if you have: Mallory Ortberg reads "<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/08/26/beautiful-woman-performs-male-novelist-jokes/">Male Novelist Jokes</a>" out loud, and you get reaction shots of Roxane Gay in the background. Enjoy!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-74265596443231577172014-08-24T06:56:00.000-07:002014-08-24T06:56:05.043-07:00Links for the week ending 24 August 2014"<a href="http://stacialbrown.com/2014/08/18/patience-appalled/">And while we were still reeling, while we were yet aghast, either time stood still as Ferguson Police teleported back to 1963 or time sped forward and we were all dumped into a near-future dystopia or, likeliest still, today is no different than the day of Mike Brown’s murder. Today is moving at the same predictable clip as every day that came before it.</a>" Gorgeous, heartbroken writing from Stacia L. Brown, at her <a href="http://stacialbrown.com/">website</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/locked-one-familys-story-behind-front-lines">'You wake up with your face itching,' Moore said. When they start to smell it in the house, they turn off the air conditioning, because 'it comes right through.'</a>" Durrie Bouscaren for St. Louis Public Radio on one family's experience of Ferguson during nights of protests and police violence.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/after-days-of-unrest-in-ferguson-the-stress-is-taking/article_f61c47c0-526f-59d1-af33-f6ae24caa1d2.html">In Ferguson, Sherry Taylor, 52, who lives near the protest site on West Florissant Avenue, said having sleep interrupted for days by violence outside her door was the least of her worries. She said police had shot her in the back with a rubber bullet while she was in her own yard, and she has suffered the effects of tear gas.</a>" Michele Munz and Lisa Brown at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/18/from-the-streets-of-ferguson/14260667/">Ferguson is both what you think it is and so much more.</a>" Yamiche Alcindor for USA Today.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.stlamerican.com/news/columnists/guest_columnists/article_eed36fb2-28e4-11e4-8da2-001a4bcf887a.html">The argument that many in the concerned community are making is that Bob McCulloch, when comes to a choice between protecting the reputation/careers of white police officers and searching for the truth in a case of a 'police-officer-on-African-American-crime,' will choose protecting officers at the expense of fairness, decency and truth.</a>" Lizz Brown at The St. Louis American.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://mashable.com/2014/08/22/police-tactics-ferguson/">Though police brutality has become the center of this story, one black officer said race issues truly were the underlying reason for these demonstrations. Growing up in the St. Louis area, he said he learned quickly about the importance of the phrase 'yes sir' because police stopped him frequently on the street and asked for his identification.</a>" Amanda Wills at Mashable.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/michael_brown_and_the_danger_of_the_perfect_victim_frame.html">Now, let’s join Michael Brown’s family in rejecting the perfect victim frame. Whether he was a squeaky clean, college-bound, 'gentle giant' or a teenager who may have done stupid things, his life still matters.</a>" Jamilah King at Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/08/12/in_defense_of_black_rage_michael_brown_police_and_the_american_dream/">Violence is the effect, not the cause of the concentrated poverty that locks that many poor people up together with no conceivable way out and no productive way to channel their rage at having an existence that is adjacent to the American dream. This kind of social mendacity about the way that racism traumatizes black people individually and collectively is a festering sore, an undiagnosed cancer, a raging infection threatening to overtake every organ in our body politic.</a>" Brittney Cooper at Salon.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/8/18/st-louis-segregation.html">'I tell people I grew up in an apartheid town,' he said. 'The only two places I remember being able to go were the public library and the St. Louis Zoo. Everything else was determined by where you lived and your skin color.'</a>" Jeannette Cooperman with a brief history of segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area. At Al Jazeera.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/help-for-the-most-affected-ferguson-neighborhoods-is-pouring-in/article_8bdc1ddf-e88d-54a5-a3b4-c396a5287f1f.html">The largest focal point of support is at the Dellwood Recreation Center, where the United Way, St. Louis County government, the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis and others have set up their base at the drop-in center. They’re providing food, children’s activities and an array of resources and services.</a>" At St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Margaret Gillerman lists some of the places where the people of Ferguson can turn for help — and the rest of us can make donations. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/comparing-ferguson-iraq">The rhetorical value of 'Iraq or Missouri?' is undercut when it becomes possible to show two pictures, taken seven years apart, of the <i>exact same armored vehicle</i> and ask the question literally.</a>" Elif Batuman at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/why-do-ferguson-s-police-officers-look-like-soldiers-184517098.html">The federal government argues that giving local police tanks and other leftover war equipment is a great way to avoid the waste of throwing away expensive gear that taxpayers have already paid for. But critics counter that militarizing police forces escalates conflicts and creates needless violence.</a>" Liz Goodwin at Yahoo News.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texasobserver.org/horror-every-day-police-brutality-houston-goes-unpunished/">More surprisingly, HPD rarely believes even its own officers when they claim to have witnessed unjustified violence against citizens. In the same period, Houston cops reported other officers for excessive force 118 times. Internal Affairs dismissed all but 11.</a>" From last year, an investigation on police brutality in Houston by Emily DePrang at the Texas Observer. (Via Melissa del Bosque.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/08/ferguson_s_constitutional_crisis_first_amendment_violations_are_only_part.html">Ferguson will not be a freer, better, or more just place when the protesters are allowed to gather without cops in riot gear down the block. It will be the same constitutional nightmare it has evidently been for years. We need to expand our vision of what is a constitutional violation to include what happens when the cameras roll out of town. Because even when the world stops watching, Ferguson and all the Fergusons across the country will need a lot of constitutional protection.</a>" Dahlia Lithwick and Daria Roithmayr at Slate. (Via E.J. Graff.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/crooked-dead">What the Moreland Commission to Investigate Public Corruption considers to be corruption is not what the United States Supreme Court considers to be corruption. And much of what the commission urged, by way of legislative reform, is, in the eyes of the Court, unconstitutional.</a>" Jill Lepore at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/wireStory/ap-exclusive-us-changing-fly-list-rules-25040140?singlePage=true">The Obama administration is promising to change the way travelers can ask to be removed from its no-fly list of suspected terrorists banned from air travel.</a>" Eileen Sullivan for the AP. (Via Torie Rose DeGhett at <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/95449669142/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a>.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/21/world/middleeast/isis-pressed-for-ransom-before-killing-james-foley.html">In fact, until recently, ISIS had a very different list of demands for Mr. Foley: The group pressed the United States to provide a multimillion-dollar ransom for his release, according to a representative of his family and a former hostage held alongside him.</a>" Rukmini Callimachi for the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/women-morgue-baghdad">He wonders if he shouldn’t have married, if he shouldn’t have brought a two-year-old son into this world. 'Why leave people behind when you’re gone? I see these people,' he said, pointing to the screens. 'They’ve left behind families. Honestly, there isn’t an Iraqi family that hasn’t been affected by violence in some way.'</a>" Rania Abouzeid reports from a Baghdad morgue. At The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/range-of-options-to-combat-islamic-state-are-under-discussion-senior-official-says/2014/08/22/f745619a-2a2a-11e4-8593-da634b334390_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop">The new authorization is one of several alternatives under active internal discussion as the administration grapples with whether and how to try to militarily defeat the Islamic State, which controls a wide swath of territory between Damascus and Baghdad.</a>" Hey, why not? We have such a great track record to date, right? Karen DeYoung at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/ebola-is-killing-women-in-far-greater-numbers-than-men#3lj0sme">Ebola relies on our weakness for compassion and comfort to survive, and as it successfully moves from one grief-stricken host to the next, it erodes another invisible bond between Liberians: trust.</a>" Dear god, in a heartbreaking month, this might just be the most heartbreaking piece of all. <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore">Jina Moore</a> reporting for BuzzFeed.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/opinionista/2014-08-20-how-to-write-about-the-deaths-of-people-who-dont-matter/#.U_RfaXLjXms">Brown’s death allows America to do what it does best – to plumb the depths of its soul in search of meaning. That she seldom learns the lessons that her poorest citizens teach her is another matter altogether, but for those wanting to learn, Ferguson’s critics offer many instructions on how to report with grace and dignity about people no one is supposed to care about.</a>" Thoughtful opinion piece by Sisonke Msimang at South Africa's Daily Maverick, contrasting the American coverage of Michael Brown's death to South African coverage of the recent brutal hate-crime killing of a woman named Gift Makau. (Via Mukelwa Hlatshwayo.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014/06/02/317996805/for-one-soldier-at-tiananmen-a-day-never-forgotten">Now he's in police detention. No one even knows what crime he's accused of committing, apart from challenging the unspoken orders with his act of remembering an event that is supposed to be forgotten.</a>" Louisa Lim on one of the soldiers of Tiananmen. At NPR. (Via Anna Limontas-Salisbury.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/the-youngest-are-hungriest.html?ref=world&_r=0">However, we cannot close the malnutrition gap without addressing the social norms and economic rationales that deprive girls and younger siblings of the resources they need.</a>" Seema Jayachandran and Rohini Pande at the NYT on their research showing massive inequality within Indian families.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://elle.in/magazine/still-i-rise/">All of the Indian professors on campus were upper caste as well, and all, except one, refused to advise me on projects and blacklisted my work. I stopped getting invited to South Asian events. These are some of the structural manifestations of caste in the diaspora. Once you’re out, you’re... out.</a>" Fascinating essay at Elle India on coming out as a Dalit in the Indian diaspora. By Thenmozhi Soundararajan. (Via Sonia Faleiro.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/13/us/starbucks-workers-scheduling-hours.html">'You’re waiting on your job to control your life,' she said, with the scheduling software used by her employer dictating everything from 'how much sleep Gavin will get to what groceries I’ll be able to buy this month.'</a>" In a more just world, this would have been the story I led with today. Jodi Kantor at the NYT on how scheduling software relentlessly destroys the lives of service workers — and their families.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-honduras-deported-youths-20140816-story.html?utm_content=buffer7c073&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer">'There are many youngsters who only three days after they've been deported are killed, shot by a firearm,' said Hector Hernandez, who runs the morgue in San Pedro Sula. 'They return just to die.'</a>" Cindy Carcamo for the LAT on the murders of children deported back to Honduras. (Via Suzy Khimm.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140812/10-years-fracking-boom-wildlife-effects-still-unknown">Scientists cannot yet begin to draw simple conclusions about drilling's effects on animals, plants and habitats because 'basic data is missing' on issues such as fracking fluid chemistry, and because of limited access to well sites, said Sara Souther, the study's lead author.</a>" Lisa Song for Inside Climate News.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/science/harassment-in-science-replicated.html?smid=tw-share">Whether harassment or discrimination takes place at a field site in Costa Rica or in a conference room, the problem will not be solved with new rules archived on unread websites. The responsibility for pushing back should not rest solely with the victims. Solutions require a change of culture that can happen only from within.</a>" Christie Aschwanden at the NYT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/06/11/getting-to-know-whale-vaginas-in-seven-steps/">“It’s a gauntlet. Our very first one, when we opened it up, there were so many structures in there we could not figure out how a sperm would be able to swim from one end to the other,” Mesnick says.</a>" Marah Hardt at SciAm bringing the comic relief this week in re: whale vaginas. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/seeing-like-a-network-114c5a13fe0d">In this phase of human civilization the interaction of the vast networks we’ve built is just about where everything happens. Understanding how networks function isn’t esoteric specialist knowledge anymore than being able to read is.</a>" Quinn Norton at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bkmag.com/2014/08/12/the-comments-have-failed-us/">The comments have failed us. It is time to acknowledge that comments sections are, most of the time, a disservice to both the writer and the reader.</a>" Margaret Eby at Brooklyn Magazine.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/ferguson-is-also-a-net-neutrality-issue-6d2f3db51eb0">What happens to #Ferguson affects what happens to Ferguson.</a>" Zeynep Tufekci at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.chookooloonks.com/blog/affected"><i><b>I am affected.</i></b> This is my truth, so I share it with you. And my dear sweet friends, those of you who have always supported my words, and images and work here, <i>I honestly hope that you're affected too</i>.</a>" Karen Walrond at Chookooloonks. (Via Els Kushner.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/column-54-control-freaks">Why so trigger-happy, officers? Are these cops evil people? Violent sociopaths? Racists? Sadists? I suppose some are; all those traits exist in the general population and it’s possible that the nature of police work attracts an undue share of them. But I think a simpler explanation is that cops shoot so much because that’s what they’re trained to do.</a>" Damn, this is great. Susan Schorn at McSweeneys. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/11/raised-voice?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter">It’s a song about a movement nearly out of patience by a woman who never had very much to begin with, and who had little hope for the American future: 'Oh but this whole country is full of lies,' she sang. 'You’re all gonna die and die like flies.'</a>" Claudia Roth Pierrpont at The New Yorker with a long profile of Nina Simone.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/michelle-lyons-witness-to-278-executions-in-texas?fullpage=1">Michelle spent many evenings—hundreds, in fact—standing shoulder-to-shoulder with witnesses in a cramped room that afforded a view of the death chamber, where she watched as men, and two women, were injected with a three-drug cocktail that stopped their hearts. All told, she had seen 278 inmates put to death.</a>" Finally, a masterful profile by Pamela Colloff for Texas Monthly: "The Witness."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-24628304217929877232014-08-10T06:46:00.000-07:002014-08-10T06:46:02.383-07:00Links for the week ending 10 August 2014Beginning the list again with Torie Rose DeGhett's "<a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/post/94149169852/this-week-in-war-a-friday-round-up-of-what">This Week In War</a>," because it has been that kind of week.<br />
<br />
The situation in Iraq is moving fast. Once again, I recommend following <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/loveday-morris">Loveday Morris</a> at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/08/08/235941/new-iraq-missions-tough-question.html">'How does this end? It doesn’t,' he said.</a>" Nancy Youssef on mission creep and the choices the U.S. faces against the Islamic State (ISIS). At McClatchy.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-israel-psychologist-trauma.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">A few blocks from Dr. Zeyada’s apartment, Younis al-Bakr, 9, sat curled on a sofa, chewing on his fist like a much younger boy. His family said he had not spoken a word since he witnessed the shelling that killed four of his cousins on the Gaza City beach on July 17. Younis and three more cousins survived the attack, suffering shrapnel wounds along with less visible ones.</a>" Anne Barnard at the NYT on widespread trauma in Gaza.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0805/In-this-Gaza-neighborhood-a-possible-Israeli-war-crime-video">Khuzaa survivors say efforts to flee were blocked by Israeli tanks and that Israeli soldiers shot at them as they waved white flags. Emergency responders say the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shot at ambulances trying to enter the area.</a>" Kristen Chick at the Christian Science Monitor. (Via Rabia Mehmoud.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/why-the-un">The whole point of an international organization like the UN, on the other hand, is to be inclusive—an antidote to nationalistic displays of hatred and violence. The UN won’t throw bombs back. It aims at solutions beyond revenge. </a>" Atossa Araxia Abrahamian at Dissent on the particularly bitter ironies of missile attacks on civilians sheltered by the UN.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/08/israel-palestinians-anti-war-protesters-gaza-2014839155862548.html">Maisa Arshid, an attorney for dozens of the detainees, said that the crackdown on Palestinian citizens is only getting worse, with 20 to 30 Palestinians getting picked up every week in the Nazareth area alone. 'All of them are accused of participating in illegal demonstrations,' Arshid told Al Jazeera, adding that 'part of these demos were permitted by the police themselves'.</a>" Mya Guarnieri at Al Jazeera on Israel's crackdown against internal dissent. (Via Sarah Schulman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/world/middleeast/civilian-or-not-new-fight-in-tallying-the-dead-from-the-gaza-conflict.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LedeSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0">Even as the war appears to draw to a close, the battle over casualty statistics rages on. No other number is as contentious as the ratio of civilians to combatants killed, widely viewed, including in Israel, as a measure of whether the commanders in the field acted proportionately to the threat posed by militants — or, in the eyes of Israel’s critics, committed war crimes.</a>" From a few days ago, Judi Rudoren at the NYT on the accounting of death in the Gaza war.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-insider-attack-in-afghanistan-as-investigators-probe-killing-of-us-general/2014/08/06/c8bbd680-1d62-11e4-82f9-2cd6fa8da5c4_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop">Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking U.S. military officer killed in a war zone in four decades, died not at the hand of a sworn enemy but from a burst of gunfire by a soldier in an allied army who had been largely paid, trained and equipped with American and NATO support.</a>" Pamela Constable at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.tnq.ca/article/heart-achingly-young-heartbreaking-place-may-jeong">But, of course journalism suffers. The very essence of reporting—striking up conversations with strangers, hanging around—is a logistical nightmare. We don’t go to restaurants anymore. Some have given up walking. Others have put up higher walls. Kabul as an archipelago of refuge and safety is long over.</a>" May Jeong at The New Quarterly on being a woman and a foreign reporter in Afghanistan.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2014/aug/06/-sp-texas-border-deadliest-state-undocumented-migrants">Within weeks, gang members began to target Exelina. They demanded money, and threatened to kidnap and kill her children. At first, the monthly extortion was $200. Every month Elsy and Salvador sent money to pay off the gang. 'She would call me in tears, saying she didn't want to live there anymore,' Elsy says. 'But I would tell her, "Be patient. Wait for your immigration papers to come through."'</a>" The first of a four-part series by Melissa del Bosque on the deaths of desperate immigrants trying to sneak around Border Patrol checkpoints in Brooks County, Texas. A joint project of The Texas Observer and the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/special-reports/article/The-case-for-asylum-A-child-s-long-lonely-trek-5665031.php?cmpid=twitter-premium&t=113162bd257fcfd54e">'My family blamed me for my uncle's deportation,' his sworn statement read. 'They told me if I had not been detained he would not have offered to sponsor me and immigration would not have found him. If I go back to Honduras I have nowhere to live. My family will not accept me.'</a>" Susan Carroll at the Houston Chronicle. (Via Lise Olsen.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/08/criminals_victims_and_the_black_men_left_behind.html">When beginning Chicago Survivors four years ago, Johnson and her team surveyed a single block in a neighborhood just south of Hyde Park, the University of Chicago’s leafy home base. Of 22 single-family homes, 12 had lost an immediate family member to violence. Eight of those households had lost more than one.</a>" Carla Murphy at Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/08/03/the-gooders/L0eQWOgMH7nSGhTmLeK0ZN/story.html">We didn’t know it at the time, but we were watching an experiment that tested the validity of the American dream for Boston’s poorest children. The kids we taught at camp and tutored during the school year were growing up in a tough place at a time of widening income disparities. We debated in our dorm rooms at night: How much can we do — or should we do — to try to change their lives?</a>" First of a six-part series from Farah Stockman at The Boston Globe, tracking down the people who participated in a summer camp for Mission Hill children run by Harvard students in the early 1990s. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/black-life-annotated/">In other words, prior to taking Anderson’s urban sociology class, when she is already at least one year into her study, Goffman is unable to discern as class difference the differences among black lower middle class, working class, and poor people. That blackness made that difference illegible as class is one problem that should raise questions about what else Goffman is unable to hear, see, and make sense of; her oscillation between tutor and ethnographer is another.</a>" Christina Sharpe at The New Inquiry critiquing a widely praised book by a young white sociologist about young black men in West Philadelphia.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/8/7/5978551/study-racism-criminal-justice-stop-and-frisk-reform-support?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_name=share-button&utm_campaign=vox&utm_content=article-share-top">A new study suggests that highlighting racism in the criminal justice system is not the answer, and in fact pushes white voters in the opposite direction. Even when whites believe the current laws are too harsh, they're less likely to support changing the law if they're reminded that the current prison population is disproportionately black.</a>" Dara Lind at Vox.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://roxanegay.tumblr.com/post/93728728705/my-receipt-was-not-good-enough#_=_">Let me repeat: My receipt was not good enough. I have never heard of needing to have a salesperson verify a purchase when a receipt has been proffered but I shouldn’t be surprised. The rules are always different when shopping/driving/walking/existing while black.</a>" You probably saw this already, but just in case: Roxane Gay on being profiled while shopping at Best Buy, plus bonus harassment from online conservative mobs afterwards.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://qz.com/244185/why-the-video-of-ivorian-cocoa-farmers-trying-chocolate-is-so-distasteful/">They’d ask me cutting and incisive questions about American political situations (they found the government shutdown as ridiculous as I did), they religiously followed the situation in Egypt with the Muslim brotherhood, mourned Mandela, and trash talked other football teams in anticipation of the World Cup. They also knew what chocolate was (and I suspect the guys in the video did too, but were in on the joke with the producers).</a>" Anthropologist Erin Kane talks back to that video of cacao farmers trying chocolate for the first time. At Quartz. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/the-next-hobby-lobby">Miller is 29, and gets her health care through the university. Her on-campus doctor was barred from even prescribing the IUD, she said, because of Notre Dame’s adherence to Catholic teaching against contraception. The doctor sent her off-campus for the prescription, but even then, Notre Dame’s insurance wouldn’t cover it.</a>" Irin Carmon on "the next Hobby Lobby." At MSNBC.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/08/07/origami-robot-folds-itself-scuttles-away/JE2rVdXZhxrevE6qVhqXjP/story.html">To automate the process, the team decided to build a robot body out of the most basic components: layers of paper, a thin piece of plastic with a circuit etched onto it, and Shrinky Dinks — children’s toys that contract when heated.</a>" Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe, reporting on a new study proposing a design for "origami robots." What I wanna know is: do you get to color in the robot, first?<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140805-as-animals-mingle-a-baffling-genetic-barrier/">The crows present a puzzling question to biologists, which gets to the heart of what it means to be a species: Given that hooded and carrion crows can mate and swap genes, how do the two groups maintain their individual identities? It’s as if you mixed red and yellow paint in a bucket but the two colors stubbornly refused to make orange.</a>" Emily Singer at Quanta Magazine on the surprisingly difficult question of how species are distinguished from one another.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://gawker.com/the-cia-must-tell-the-truth-about-my-rendition-at-12-ye-1616583709">My name is Khadija al-Saadi. I am a 23-year-old Libyan woman. I live in Libya's capital, Tripoli. I study in the humanities faculty of the Tripoli university, and I work in my spare time in a couple of local NGOs trying to improve living conditions in the city. I exist, and this is my story.</a>" At Gawker, the now-adult daughter of a man who was tortured after being rendered back to Libya by the CIA and British intelligence writes eloquently of her family's experience, and demands that the U.S. and U.K. governments allow a full accounting of their actions. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-transgender-crucible-20140730">'You never hear, "She passed on her own, natural causes, old age," no, no, no,' she continues, ticking off on her fingers. "She's either <i>raped</i> and killed, she's <i>jumped</i> and killed, <i>stalked</i> and killed – or just killed.' Which is why, amid all the death and sorrow, CeCe, whose jagged life experience embodies the archetypal trans woman's in so many ways, has become an LGBT folk hero for her story of survival – and for the price she paid for fighting back.</a>" From Sabrina Rubin Erdely at Rolling Stone, a masterful profile of CeCe McDonald.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/guess-ill-go-eat-worms-5ba9711905ec">Interviewing Cacioppo for my magazine article a few months ago, I naturally took many of his observations personally. One especially fraught time for lonely people, he told me, is when they are in a social setting and feel subject to ostracism or ridicule; it’s then that their brains go haywire, sensing social danger even where none might exist. 'We’re screwed,' I thought at the time.</a>" Finally, from two weeks ago, a piece from Robin Marantz Henig about loneliness. At The Archipelago at Medium.<br />
<br />
No list next weekend. In the meantime, and as always, thanks for reading!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-61052960563979241222014-08-03T06:48:00.001-07:002014-08-03T06:48:34.112-07:00Links for the week ending 3 August 2014"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/30/world/africa/ransoming-citizens-europe-becomes-al-qaedas-patron.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=LedeSum&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0#slideshow/100000003026904/100000003026929">In its early years, Al Qaeda received most of its money from deep-pocketed donors, but counterterrorism officials now believe the group finances the bulk of its recruitment, training and arms purchases from ransoms paid to free Europeans. Put more bluntly, Europe has become an inadvertent underwriter of Al Qaeda.</a>" Kudos to the NYT for hiring one of the most impressive journalistic badasses of our time, Rukmini Callimachi, with another jaw-dropping article about how Al Qaeda gets things done.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-28513709">'I hate the future so much,' says 11-year-old Daad of Syria who dresses in pink and has dark nightmares. 'We might live, or we might die.'</a>" Lyse Doucet of the BBC giving voice to the children of the rapidly expanding war zones of the Middle East.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/Heartbreak%3A-Reporting-on-Gaza%E2%80%99s-youngest-victims">At the same school, a little girl with big eyes and red hair put her hand out for mine, but instead of shaking it, she just held onto me. She told me her name was Yasmin, but she wouldn't say anything else. She followed me around the school as I did interviews, and then came and sat next to me as I waited in the shade for a press conference. She didn't want to talk, just to sit quietly by my side.</a>" Sara Hussein on the children of Gaza. For AFP.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/30/the-awful-decisions-ive-made-to-protect-my-palestinian-children-from-this-war/">One night, I make all three sleep in the same bedroom with us, hoping to increase the odds they’ll survive if a shell hits one of the empty rooms in our house. But then the next night, I’ll separate them, thinking that if I divide my children they won’t <i>all</i> die in an attack. (Unless we’re hit by a half-ton bomb, rather than artillery shell, in which case we’ll all be killed, anyway.)</a>" Wejdan Abu Shammala at The Washington Post writes about parenting decisions in Gaza.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/new-us-help-arrives-for-syrian-rebels-as-government-extremists-gain/2014/07/27/d4805a82-43b3-4583-85b5-f51efd6940a4_story.html">The outlook for the revolt against Assad’s rule is now bleaker than at any time in the past three years, rebel commanders say, diminishing the chances that the opposition will be able to present any meaningful challenge to the regime or even to serve as a counterweight to Islamist radicals, as U.S. policymakers are hoping.</a>" Liz Sly reports for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/destruction-of-mosuls-shrines-sparks-first-signs-of-resistance-against-islamic-state/2014/07/30/86c29ab1-9cdd-4037-8757-f62af28dca54_story.html">In total, at least seven sacred shrines have been razed, said an official with the city’s Sunni endowment authority, which manages religious affairs. 'At first, we expected them to only blow up places for Shiite people,' said the official, who declined to be identified for security reasons. 'Now they are blowing up everything.'</a>" Loveday Morris reporting from Mosul for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/liberian-capital-runs-out-of-space-for-ebola-patients">But in Monrovia, the capital city, there isn’t enough space in the specialized isolation unit to hold all of the city’s symptomatic cases. The Ministry of Health wanted to expand the unit at Elwa Hospital, on the outskirts of Monrovia, but the local community fought back, physically, making it impossible to secure health staff, a Health Ministry official told BuzzFeed by telephone.</a>" Jina Moore at BuzzFeed is covering the Ebola beat <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://matsutas.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/the-ebola-virus-and-the-vampire-state-by-susan-shepler/?utm_content=bufferc6f3b&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer">People’s apprehensions about the failings of the healthcare system come from experience, not from ignorance.</a>" Susan Shepler at Mats Utas' blog, about the narrative of public ignorance fueling the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. (Via Alexis Okeowo.) But, let's face it, she could be talking about events <a title="parents who refuse Vitamin K shot for newborns" href="http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/05/vanderbilt-pediatricians-call-for-a-tracking-system-for-babies-not-getting-vitamin-k-shot/">much closer to home</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/what-is-privacy-5ed72c66aa86">Surveillance isn’t simply the all-being all-looking eye. It’s a mechanism by which systems of power assert their power. And it is why people grow angry and distrustful. Why they throw fits over being experimented on. Why they cry privacy foul even when the content being discussed is, for all intents and purposes, public.</a>" danah boyd at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/07/26/students-make-efforts-identify-immigrants-buried-unmarked-graves-near-southwest-border/4iDqnsqHzu9m8N6pPZXffI/story.html">In 2012, the number of bodies found in the brush or on roadsides in Brooks County doubled to 129, and more than half were unidentified. The next year, according to the sheriff’s department, officials discovered 87 bodies, and 44 percent were unidentified. So far this year, they have found 43 bodies.</a>" Heartbreaking piece by Maria Sacchetti at The Boston Globe on the unidentified bodies buried along Texas and Arizona borderlands, and the families left with no way of knowing the fate of their vanished loved ones.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/31/5955351/prisoners-firefighters-california-wildfires-2-day-conservation-camps">Four thousand of the fifteen thousand people fighting wildfires in California this season aren't professional firefighters. They're men and women serving out their state prison terms by working full-time in fire crews, under a state program called 'Conservation Camps.'</a>" Dara Lind at Vox. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/not-my-backyard-us-sending-dirty-coal-abroad">As the U.S. tries to set a global example by reducing demand for fossil fuels at home, American energy companies are sending more dirty fuels than ever to other parts of the world, exports worth billions of dollars every year.</a>" Dina Cappiello reports for the AP. (Via Lisa Song.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2014/07/why-people-are-paying-5000-to-pollute-more.html">She calls rolling coal 'conspicuous pollution,' a very public way for conservative drivers to simultaneously broadcast that they aren’t worried about whether humans are the cause of global warming and to openly mock the people who are.</a>" Melissa Dahl at NY Mag.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://blogs.kqed.org/science/2014/07/31/californias-biggest-water-source-shrouded-in-secrecy/">Groundwater pumping is largely unregulated in California, except in places where judges have ruled in specific disputes. Landowners are generally free to pump as much as they want from under their property.</a>" Most of California is now classified as in "exceptional" drought. Lauren Sommer at KQED reports on the unknowns of the groundwater being pumped to make up for the drought.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/when-the-conversation-about-having-it-all-begins-and-ends-with-white-women-20140725">It needs to change because while we have many experiences that are similar to those of our white colleagues, we are also living with realities that are very different. I believe that if those conversations had taken place, had been truly inclusive, and had considered a broader array of life experiences, we would all be further along than we are now in addressing so many of the things that, for many women, make life more difficult than it needs to be.</a>" At National Journal, Michel Martin speaks out "on balancing career and family as a woman of color."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/katie-couric-interviews-ruth-bader-ginsburg-185027624.html">'You can't have it all, all at once,' Ginsburg said, referencing the controversial magazine article about work-life balance by academic and former Obama administration official Anne-Marie Slaughter. 'Who — man or woman — has it all, all at once? Over my lifespan I think I have had it all. But in different periods of time things were rough. And if you have a caring life partner, you help the other person when that person needs it.'</a>" Liz Goodwin with the Yahoo News write-up of Katie Couric's interview with the blessed Ruth Bader Ginsburg.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/health/2014/07/28/3464769/satanists-hobby-lobby-abortion/">Members of the Temple of Satan are encouraging all women who share their belief in medical accuracy to seek their own exemption from these laws, even if they don’t personally identify as Satanists.</a>" Tara Culp-Ressler at Think Progress on a promising new direction in "religious exemptions" to laws affecting women's access to health care. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/07/talking-to-tina-haver-currin-steadfast-pro-choice-protester-and-brilliantly-gentle-troll#more">The last time we showed up ('Bring Back Crystal Pepsi,' last weekend), the pro-lifers put away all their signs, put down their bullhorns, stopped yelling at people going into the clinic, and just started praying for me. It went on for probably twenty minutes, all of them just praying around that Crystal Pepsi sign.</a>" More brilliant protest ideas, this from Tina Haver-Currin, who talks to Linnie Green at The Hairpin.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://valleywag.gawker.com/app-debt-how-kim-kardashian-and-uber-will-bankrupt-us-1613194669">Between June and December of last year, I squandered more than $76 buying extra lives in Candy Crush, which is still holding steady as the third top grossing app on iOS.</a>" Nitasha Tiku at Gawker on how we spend money now. (Via Adrienne Jeffries.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/dont-call-us-girls-two-veteran-female-spies-bombs-forgery-f2D11601385">Almost 70 years later, Bohrer reminisces about her OSS days from the couch of her home in a Virginia retirement village. Now 90, she’s surrounded by seniors whose pasts are more sedate, but as she learned to her pleasure soon after she moved to the village, at least one of her new neighbors can relate.</a>" As always, I am a sucker for stories about badass little old ladies. By Monica Alba at NBC News.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/07/anger-problems-and-the-trivia-superteam#more">I saw that one of my fellow practitioners had written that she tended to speak very harshly or even yell when she felt she wasn’t being heard. She said she was starting to realize that perhaps sometimes she wasn’t meant to be heard, or she just wasn’t going to be heard. I got tears in my eyes when I read that.</a>" Anger, being heard, being an asshole. Sarah Miller at The Hairpin.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/the-internet-of-things-will-ruin-birthdays-8a5b781abb6b?source=tw-ea3e87d12f62-1406879041454">It was my birthday recently. Perhaps you heard? Sorry about that! Google Plus, the zombie social network I have barely used since its launch in 2011, alerted my contacts that have Android phones. And anyone with iCal synced to Google Calendar had it marked in their iPhones.</a>" Joanne McNeil at Medium with "The Internet of Things Will Ruin Birthdays." (Via Quinn Norton.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/scourge-relatability?src=mp">If the concept of identification suggested that an individual experiences a work as a mirror in which he might recognize himself, the notion of relatability implies that the work in question serves like a selfie: a flattering confirmation of an individual’s solipsism.</a>" Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/stage-mothers">The success of 'Hamlet' in Arslanköy might attest to Shakespeare’s universality. Alternatively, it might attest to certain similarities between Shakespeare’s world and a twenty-first-century Anatolian village. Rural Turkey is a place where revenge killings, honor suicides, and blood feuds are real.</a>" From The New Yorker's unlocked archives, this 2012 piece by Elif Batuman on a women's theater company is so damn good.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/mfa-vs-dmv/">MFA vs. DMV</a>." By Ali Shapiro at Ploughshares.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/02/roxane-gay-bad-feminist-sisterhood-fake-orgasm?CMP=twt_gu">She wrote dramatic, repetitive stories, full of sexual violence, and a teacher called Rex McGuinn saw something promising in them – and something deeply troubling. They met one day and he said, 'I'd like you to go to the counselling centre. I think they can help you, and I'll walk you over.'</a>" So many great little nuggets in this Kira Cochrane profile of Roxane Gay at the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/07/why-i-have-to-be-so-rude">This is my own problem, an idiot’s problem, the inevitable result of so much time spent doubling down on jokes until they become unrecognizably assimilated into my lifestyle; the distance between poles eventually had to collapse. But now 'Rude has become the Wrinkle in Time tesseract of both my musical universe and my structural understanding of the relationship between intention and result.</a>" Finally, I am OLD, have never even heard this song, and did not click anything that would have dispelled my ignorance of it — but Jia Tolentino is such a damn delight, I would read her analysis of just about anything. (Even books about <a href="http://t.co/vAZKzMoh17">adultery</a>", which, yawn.) At The Hairpin.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-6666664478191547862014-07-27T06:42:00.002-07:002014-07-27T09:19:52.627-07:00Links for the week ending 27 July 2014This week has vaulted far beyond my limited abilities to keep up with it. I once again recommend that you check out (or, better yet, subscribe to) Torie Rose DeGhett's <a href="http://thepoliticalnotebook.com/tagged/this-week-in-war#_=_">This Week In War</a> for one-sentence rundowns with links to in-depth coverage from a wide variety of English-language sources.<br />
<br />
Anne Barnard and Jodi Rudoren are still reporting from Gaza City and Israel, respectively, for the NYT. From Wednesday, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/24/world/middleeast/israel-says-hamas-is-using-civilians-as-shields-in-gaza.html">here</a> is their look at the not-my-fault arguments being passed around between Israel and Hamas on the carnage in Gaza.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israelis-cheer-gaza-bombing?CMP=twt_gu">As the sun begins to sink over the Mediterranean, groups of Israelis gather each evening on hilltops close to the Gaza border to cheer, whoop and whistle as bombs rain down on people in a hellish warzone a few miles away.</a>" From last Sunday, Harriet Sherwood at the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/can-israel-win-in-gaza">'One night the shell will go a bit further and hit the building where we are sleeping and we will all be dead,' said Aboujad. 'Death finds you anywhere in Gaza, there is nowhere safe.'</a>" Sheera Frenkel at BuzzFeed.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2014/07/israel-s-assault-gaza-intensifies-it-not-anti-semitic-say-not-my-name">It is not anti-Semitic to say 'not in my name'.</a>" Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0723/Egypt-Deaths-in-police-custody-once-a-spark-for-revolt-now-met-by-shrugs">Egypt's police are back to the most brutal practices of the Mubarak era, and deaths in custody have surged once again. But this time popular anger is muted, as many swing behind a repressive security state as a bulwark against the chaos and sectarianism that came in Mubarak's wake, particularly after police retreated from the streets.</a> Louisa Loveluck at The Christian Science Monitor.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://m.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28418925">Tripoli's main airport, which is the centre of the latest conflict, resembles a scrap yard.</a>" Rana Jawad reports from Libya for the BBC.<br />
<br />
Hey! What does the <a href="http://www.freep.com/article/20140714/OPINION05/307140016">city of Detroit</a> (or its hired henchmen) have in common with <a href="http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/water-war-weapon-syria-cities">ISIS in Iraq and Syria</a>? Compare and contrast an op-ed at the Detroit Free Press by Maude Barlow, Lynna Kaucheck, Maureen Taylor, and Melissa Damaschke with an article by Sarah Goodyear at Next City, and decide for yourself.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/7/20/syrian-women-qaedarebels.html">But at the moment, for Hala, Sara and hundreds of thousands of men and women in many of the towns and villages that have fallen out of Syrian and Iraqi government control, the ISIL-Qaeda social order is slowly becoming a lived reality.</a>" Rania Abouzeid at Al Jazeera America.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/07/25/scenes-from-iraq-death-would-be-better-than-this-life/">Forty-five-year-old Hayat Mohsen's family of four were gathered for their evening meal when their living room imploded around them, the doors and windows blown in. It's the third time her apartment has been damaged in a blast. She says she can't afford to move.</a>" Loveday Morris reports from Iraq for The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/24/-sp-families-abducted-girls-fight-boko-haram-supine-government">In the capital, another battle is taking place. Weeks earlier, somebody paid to erect 30 mobile campaign billboards for the president’s expected 2015 re-election bid surround the park where the Abuja Family gathers. Two giant screens now flash pro-Jonathan messages, while the president’s face beams down from three hot-air balloons.</a>" Monica Mark at the Guardian on the struggle of the families of the abducted girls from Chibok, Nigeria. (Via Rukmini Callimachi.)<br />
<br />
And also Monica Mark with the intensely alarming news that "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/first-case-ebola-lagos-nigeria">A man has died of ebola in Lagos, the first confirmed case of the highly contagious and deadly virus in Africa's most populous metropolis.</a>"<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20140722/families-sick-fracking-exposure-turn-concerned-scientists">'There's no one doing research on this. No one's testing what's going on,' she said. 'I'm not against oil and gas drilling. I'm a Republican…I just think you need to do it safely, and you need to know what you're doing, and I don't think either of those things is happening right now.'</a>" Lisa Song reports for Inside Climate News on preliminary research and health care for residents of southwest Pennsylvania's communities affected by fracking.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/07/17/lydias-drought-narrative-tk/">But for them — and most farmers around here — the answer is no. They all listen to a local meteorologist named Brian Bledsoe, who calls the phenomenon 'government warming,' and broadcasts his climate change skepticism on the local radio station, through his Web site and on speaking gigs around the region.</a>" At The Washington Post, Lydia DePillis reporting from the drought-stricken fields of Colorado.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/under-water-the-epas-struggle-to-combat-pollution">The Court ruling also included language that seemed to assert that only wetlands with a 'significant nexus' to traditional navigable waterways would be protected under the Clean Water Act. The Court did not make clear the meaning of the term 'significant nexus.'</a>" Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica reports on how lobbying and the Supreme Court have hobbled the EPA's ability to fine water polluters.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/07/22/15082/us-coal-giant-funding-violent-union-intimidation-colombia">While its Colombian operations quickly became a significant revenue stream for the company, security issues and labor disputes have always been substantial obstacles for Drummond’s business. And, according to its workers, intimidation has become routine in a country where trade union leaders are often viewed as subversives.</a>" Rosalind Adams reports for The Center for Public Integrity on a lawsuit alleging that a U.S. coal company bankrolls paramilitary violence against labor organizers in Colombia. (Via Lisa Song.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/article/2014/07/22/let-free-greg-diatchenko/">Until last year, any 14-, 15-, or 16-year-old accused of murder in Massachusetts was tried as an adult and sentenced as an adult. Seventeen-year-olds were tried and sentenced as adults no matter the charge. Anyone convicted of first-degree murder got life without parole. No exceptions.</a>" Beth Schwartzapfel at Boston Magazine on a 50-year-old murderer sentenced to life when he was 17.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/07/22/khadr_access_blocked_prompting_media_court_challenge.html">Morris said he is not surprised to hear Khadr is eligible for full parole and could be released this year. 'On some level, you have to say, OK, the kid was 15 and regardless of what he’s become he at least deserves a chance,' Morris said.</a>" Michelle Shephard at The Toronto Star on her newspaper's lawsuit against the Canadian government for denying reporters any access to former Guantanamo prisoner Omar Khadr.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/a-brutal-loss-but-an-enduring-conviction">I think what’s scary about it is thinking about how long does it take for all this change to happen and all the people who get ground up waiting? We are still a work in process. I use process instead of progress because I am not sure about the progress.</a>" Damn, this Nikole Hannah-Jones' interview at ProPublica with Rita Bender, who was widowed at 22 when her husband, Michael Schwerner, was murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in Mississippi.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/24/my-son-has-been-suspended-five-times-hes-3/">One after another, white mothers confessed the trouble their children had gotten into. Some of the behavior was similar to JJ’s; some was much worse. Most startling: None of their children had been suspended.</a>" Tunette Powell at The Washington Post on racism and preschool discipline. (Via Audrey Watters.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/07/20/the_day_i_was_nearly_arrested_for_having_an_autistic_son/">Thus, how would he have been 'helped' by this lady if indeed the cop had arrested us? J would have been left alone, needing his pain medicine for his gut and confused and stressed. It would have taken a difficult but stable everyday situation and made it terrible for all parties — and <i>for no reason</i>.</a>" Marie Myung-Ok Lee at Salon. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/07/crack_baby_hysteria_redux.html">It’s clear that the war on drugs—and the subsequent war on pregnant women of color who have used drugs—is motivated by ideology and profit, not actually care for the wellbeing of mothers and their children.</a>" Miriam Zoila Pérez at Colorlines on Tennessee's new punitive law on narcotic use during pregnancy. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/failing-the-third-machine-age-1883e647ba74">The author gives the example of Japan as forefront of this development, because, she says, of 'workforce shortages.' It’s a good example because it really highlights what shortage of humans actually means: a deep hostility to the 'wrong' kind of humans.</a>" I don't agree with every single bit of this Zeynep Tufekci essay at Medium — if you've ever been cared for by an abusive human, robot caregivers don't sound like such a bad idea in comparison — but it is, as always, a piece that will ask you to think deeply about labor, culture, and value.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/07/25/tending-robots-interview-labor-technology-sexuality/">And then it becomes this question of management. Can I convince this entity to do for me what I want it to do and what the entire company is telling it it should be doing? And so when I see it rebel, or when I personify it in such a way that I perceive its actions as rebellion, it becomes much more so that I perceive an actual relationship with it.</a>" Diana Clarke at The Toast with "Tending the Robots: An Interview About Labor, Technology, and Sexuality."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-online-tracking-device-that-is-virtually-impossible-to-block">The researchers found canvas fingerprinting computer code, primarily written by a company called AddThis, on 5 percent of the top 100,000 websites. Most of the code was on websites that use AddThis’ social media sharing tools.</a>" Julia Angwin at ProPublica.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nautil.us/blog/the-beautiful-unpredictability-of-coffee-clouds-and-fire">Zoom in on the Mandelbrot set and the same shapes repeat themselves over and over infinitely. This characteristic is known as self-similarity, and it occurs, at least above the molecular scale, many times in nature. Fractal patterns have been found in coastlines, lightning bolts, vegetables, and even the timing of heartbeats.</a>" On turbulence and coffee. By Nicole Sharp at Nautilus.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/07/21/trans-muslim/">We are a congregation of two – a tiny fraction of the Muslim Ummah, isolated by a culture of segregation and orthodoxy. We’re the transgender Muslims of Chicago.</a>" Fascinating short personal essay by Mahdia Lynn at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/what-writers-can-learn-from-good-night-moon/?_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=opinion&_r=0">'Goodnight nobody' is an author’s inspired moment that is inexplicable and moving and creates an unknown that lingers. How wonderful that this oddly compassionate moment, where even nobody gets a good night, shows up in the picture book that is the most popular!</a>" More like this, please! Aimee Bender in the NYT with an appreciation of one of the small masterworks of literature in English. (Via Vivian Schiller.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-69329553411555053242014-07-20T06:47:00.000-07:002014-07-20T06:47:42.180-07:00Links for the week ending 20 July 2014"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/17/world/middleeast/gaza-strip-beach-explosion-kills-children.html?src=me">Asked what he would miss most about his brother, Ramzi looked at the ground. 'Kul,' he whispered in Arabic. 'Everything.'</a>" <a href="https://twitter.com/ABarnardNYT">Anne Barnard</a> is in Gaza and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/world/middleeast/fleeing-amid-airstrikes-gazans-find-few-places-to-be-safe.html?smid=tw-share">reporting</a> for the NYT <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">along</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/20/world/middleeast/gaza-israel.html?_r=0">with</a> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/middleeast/from-gaza-an-array-of-makeshift-rockets-packs-a-counterpunch.html?smid=tw-share">Jodi Rudoren</a> in Jerusalem.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/18/israel-us-caution-deaths-gaza-ground-fighting?CMP=twt_gu">In the wreckage of the home on Friday morning, Salem Entez, 29, Mohamed Salem's father, approached the Guardian with a plastic bag, which he opened to reveal pieces of flesh he was collecting for burial. 'This is my son,' he said.</a>" Dude Peter Beaumont and Harriet Sherwood for the Guardian. Also, from this morning, the same team reported, "<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/gaza-thousands-flee-israeli-bombardment">All morning, terrified people ran from their homes, some barefoot and nearly all empty-handed. Others crowded on the backs of trucks or rode on the bonnets of cars in a desperate attempt to flee. Sky News reported that some had described a 'massacre' in Shujai'iya.</a>" In addition, Harriet Sherwood <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/20/israel-using-flechette-shells-in-gaza?CMP=twt_gu">reports on the Israeli military's use of anti-personnel ammunition in Gaza</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.yahoo.com/thousands-flee-gazas-shejaiya-night-terror-095111733.html">They described hours of terror, as tank shells slammed into homes, with no electricity and no way to escape. They called ambulances, but there was no way for the vehicles to get in under the constant fire. So in the end, thousands of desperate residents fled on foot at first light, walking two hours or more into Gaza City.</a>" <a href="https://twitter.com/sarahussein">Sara Hussein</a> reports for AFP.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/malaysian-airlines-plane-ukraine.html">There were strong indications that those responsible may have errantly downed what they had thought was a military aircraft only to discover, to their shock, that they had struck a civilian airliner. Everyone aboard was killed, their corpses littered among wreckage that smoldered late into the summer night.</a>" Sabrina Tavernise is <a title="warning: graphic descriptions" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/world/europe/malaysia-airlines-plane-leaves-trail-of-debris.html?_r=0">reporting from Ukraine</a> for the NYT along with some dudes.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jul/03/oklahoma-earthquakes-fracking-waste-water-wells">Scientists have, for the first time, linked hundreds of earthquakes across a broad swath of Oklahoma to a handful of wastewater wells used by the fracking industry.</a>" From two weeks ago, but still news you can use, from Suzanne Goldenberg at the Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2014/06/losing-sparta">This begged a larger question: How many of those 70,000 American plants offshored in recent decades, those millions of American jobs lost, had been the result not of a ruthless commitment to the bottom line, but of a colossal failure of due diligence?</a>" Esther Kaplan with a longread at the Virginia Quarterly Review. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/16/5909591/here-s-why-your-comcast-rep-is-yelling-at-you">That means a rep could get all the way to the second-to-last day of the pay period only to have a customer cancel four products. Suddenly the rep is below her goal, losing $800 to $1,000 off her paycheck.</a>" Adrienne Jeffries at The Verge with "Here's why your Comcast rep is yelling at you." (Via David Hull.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/07/21/140721fa_fact_aviv?currentPage=all">Waller reminded him that Parks was a 'sanctuary,' a 'safe haven' for the community. If the school didn’t meet its targets, Waller explained, the students would be separated and sent to different schools, outside Pittsburgh. Lewis said he felt that 'it was my sole obligation to never let that happen.'</a>" Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker with the tragedy of Atlanta's school-testing cheating scandal.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/07/why-poor-schools-can-t-win-at-standardized-testing/374287/">This is a story about what happened when I tried to use big data to help repair my local public schools. I failed. And the reasons why I failed have everything to do with why the American system of standardized testing will never succeed.</a>" Meredith Broussard at The Atlantic. (Via Audrey Watters.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a28431/texas-abortion-rio-grande-valley/">All of the highways out of the Valley have checkpoints like the one in Sarita. When the checkpoint means they can't drive to San Antonio, some women go through with pregnancies they don't want. Others turn to Cytotec. Still others find out about unlicensed providers who perform cheap abortions out of their homes.</a> Jill Filopovic at Cosmopolitan, and this is why our feminism had better be intersectional or it is complete bullshit. (Via Cory Ellen.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="">It’s a microcosm of the ways that beauty is about more than who we are just “naturally attracted to”. It’s a kind of oppression with far-reaching consequences for black women that leave us with almost negligible wealth, criminal justice battle stories, mass media accounts of our undesirability, poor health, and impoverished golden years.</a>" Tressie Cottom McMillan at her blog on a casting call for a new NWA video.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/15/who-gets-shot-in-america/">Summer was the worst. Holiday weekends were full of needless shootings — arguments, stray bullets, kids finding their parents’ guns. Compiling weekend reports took me 10 hours every Sunday. It was a slog, but it was necessary. This is exactly why I went to journalism school. It’s rare that you get to effect change on such a big stage.</a>" Jennifer Mascia at RawStory with the behind-the-scenes story of the Gun Report, which tracked news reports of gun violence over a year and a half.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/14/nadine-gordimer-margaret-atwood-tribute?CMP=twt_gu">But underneath all her work is the question posed in Ursula K LeGuin's well-known story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas: if you know that the beautiful manner of living you yourself enjoy is built on a foundation of misery deliberately imposed on innocents, can you in conscience do nothing? Her own answer was always no.</a>" Margaret Atwood at the Guardian on the late Nadine Gordimer. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/man-vs-word">I can’t situate my thoughts in the topography of a big book the same way when I'm able to see the text only through a keyhole, as it were, unable to feel with my hands whether I'm a third or a tenth of the way through; I feel as if I’m on the surface of the text, rather than in it. That hard, glossy surface!</a>" Maria Bustillos at The Awl with a meditation on the latest way to Disrupt Reading.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/1e9a1886c4e4">I’m reminded here of viruses, which, as Wikipedia points out, can only replicate inside the living cells of other organisms. Facebook benefits when this relationship remains invisible. When we make the mistake that I made—when we forget that Facebook is using our friendships as hosts, and not the other way around—our forgetting is very convenient for Facebook.</a>" Jessica Ferris from two weeks ago at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.randomhouse.ca/hazlitt/feature/natures-most-perfect-killing-machine">But Ebola, far away and ripe for the imagination, has grown legendary—and, like most legends, the truth is not quite as awesome as the tale. But before we wake ourselves up from this nightmare, let’s bask in the mechanics of this notorious killer.</a>" Leigh Cowart at Hazlitt (Random House Canada). (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/07/17/harvard-scientists-propose-gene-technology-that-could-alter-organisms-wild/Ae4XBtXhwOLOeKPQlabbcP/story.html">A powerful new technology could be used to manipulate nature by 'editing' the genes of organisms in the wild, enabling researchers to block mosquitoes’ ability to spread malaria, for example, or to make weeds more vulnerable to pesticides, Harvard scientists said Thursday.</a>" Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe, where the zombie movie plots practically write themselves.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/matter/franciss-holy-war-70a382606c0d">But he positively bounded toward the Popemobile at the end, like a child who has unexpectedly been offered his favorite peanut-butter sandwich. Refusing assistance, he climbed on energetically, as if to say, Let’s go!</a>" Wow, Matter (Medium) brings in Alma Guillermoprieto (usually at the NYRB) for this nuanced and moving profile of Pope Francis.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sandraeallen/the-sad-strange-true-story-of-sandy-allen-the-tallest-woman">It was there, in 1974, that some co-workers, prodding to know how tall she really was, kicked off their pumps and climbed on desks and chairs and dangled a tape measure down. They sent the figure to Guinness, in London, which replied that she was taller than any woman they had on record but the measurement needed to be verified by a medical professional. Sandy got in her car — which was hard-earned, and into which she barely fit — and drove to her family physician, where the figure was confirmed.</a>" Another moving profile, by Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed about another Sandra Allen, who just happened to be the tallest woman in the world.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118735/problem-esquires-praise-42-year-old-women-amy-poehler">I wish that every woman whose actions and worth are parsed and restricted, congratulated and condemned in this country might just once get to wheel around—on the committee that doesn’t believe their medically corroborated story of assault, or on the protesters who tell them that termination is a sin they will regret, or on the boss who tells them he doesn’t believe in their sexual choices, or on the mid-fifties man who congratulates them, or himself, on finding them appealing deep into their dotage—and go black in the eyes and say, 'I don’t fucking care if you like it.'</a>" Deeply, deeply satisfying piece from Rebecca Traister at TNR. (Via Betsy Phillips.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/regionals/north/2014/07/09/practice-old-bible-gleaning-offers-fresh-fruits-and-vegetables-people-who-can-afford-them/kuYtpO3HZgLblybeg2tsAM/story.html">Gleaners meet, then carpool to a designated farm, and over a few hours, harvest the seasonal crop — strawberries and peas in spring, corn in August, and root vegetables in winter. After enough boxes of produce are harvested to fill a van, the day’s pickings are driven directly to local food pantries and shelters.</a>" Perhaps for some reason you need to fortify your faith in humanity this week? This might help. Kathy Shiels Tully writes for the Boston Globe about a revival of gleaning.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/07/the-rube-goldberg-of-rice.html?mobify=0">As it turned out, Brill, his wife, and I were early, so I had a chance to ask how a middle-aged research associate at a giant pharmaceutical company with a degree in history became the Rube Goldberg of rice.</a>" Sheer delight: Nicola Twilley (from Edible Geography) at The New Yorker. (Via Paige Morgan.)<br />
<br />
It has been a rough week out there. Here is your reward: Caity Weaver at Gawker with "<a href="http://gawker.com/my-14-hour-search-for-the-end-of-tgi-fridays-endless-ap-1606122925">My 14-Hour Search for the End of TGI Friday's Endless Appetizers</a>."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.publicbooks.org/blog/this-is-what-i-mean-when-i-tell-my-dad-hes-alright">When I was growing up, my father kept a pronunciation dictionary of the English language by his seat at the table.</a> Finally, this gorgeous essay by Mattie Wechsler on language, the autism spectrum, and her father. (Grateful hat tip to Els Kushner.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-64829049654476278422014-07-06T06:54:00.000-07:002014-07-06T06:54:20.943-07:00Links for the week ending 6 July 2014"<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/07/03/cyndi-lauper-girls-just-want-to-have-birth-control.html">It doesn’t matter what women choose to do with the opportunities provided by birth control—what matters is that women are allowed to make these choices for ourselves.</a>" Best pop star ever Cyndi Lauper at The Daily Beast. (Via Anna Limontas-Salisbury.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_breakfast_table/features/2014/scotus_roundup/the_supreme_court_term_could_have_been_a_lot_worse_but_it_was_still_pretty.html">I have come to the point that, whenever I read the word <i>dignity</i> in a majority opinion, I start to flop sweat.</a>" Dahlia Lithwick signing off after the Supreme Court equivalent of "Oscar week." But before she goes, catch up on her take on the <i>Hobby Lobby</i> decision's, er, highlights: "<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_breakfast_table/features/2014/scotus_roundup/supreme_court_hobby_lobby_decision_where_was_antonin_scalia.html">For one thing we are—going forward—no longer allowed to argue the science.</a>" Fabulous. At Slate. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/28/us/supreme-court-abortion-clinic-massachusetts-buffer-zone-ruling.html?_r=0">She added, “I would like to see the Supreme Court get its fanny out here and talk to these people.”</a>" Jess Bigood and dude John Schwartz reporting for the NYT on the scene at a Boston abortion clinic after the Supreme Court struck down buffer laws.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/sotomayor-blistering-dissent-contraception-case">'But <i>thinking</i> one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened … does not make it so.' She added, 'Not every sincerely felt "burden" is a "substantial" one, and it is for courts, not litigants, to identify which are.'</a>" Irin Carmon at MSNBC covering the "open revolt" on the court evinced by a dissent issued by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Ginsburg. You yourself may have some revolt to express. <a href="http://ladypockets.com/2014/07/04/exclusive-ladypockets-arts-crafts-special-edition-issue/">Katherine Fritz at Ladypockets</a> has some crafting solutions for you. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/06/four-ways-the-riley-ruling-matters-for-the-nsa.html">Roberts explicitly rejects the idea that there are simple analogies between the search of physical objects (tangible things) and the data to which a phone is a portal.</a>" Amy Davidson at The New Yorker on the not-bad-news decision the Supreme Court made unanimously on the need for a warrant before searching a cellphone.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-officials-disclose-data-on-backdoor-searches-of-americans-phone-calls-e-mails/2014/06/30/31eeea4e-0089-11e4-8fd0-3a663dfa68ac_story.html">The FBI conducts a “substantial” number of warrantless queries for Americans’ e-mails and phone calls in a special database of intercepted communications, but it does not track exactly how often, an intelligence official said in a letter released Monday.</a>" Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post. <br />
<br />
Can't keep up with what NSA program you should be outraged about today? Julia Angwin and dudes Jeff Larson and Albert Cairo have for you special <a href="http://projects.propublica.org/nsa-grid/">this handy chart</a>. At ProPublica.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cjr.org/feature/the_back_door.php?page=all">Operational security and data journalism are just plain hard. But they are the realities of accountability journalism today. Not just the accountability that journalists bring to those in power, but the responsibility journalists have to their subjects, their readers, and especially their sources.</a>" Quinn Norton at Columbia Journalism Review describing the process by which a Syrian hacker got documents revealing Russian support of the Assad regime to ProPublica. <br />
<br />
Keep up to date on Iraq by checking in with <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/loveday-morris">Loveday Morris</a> at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/features/blink/cover/a-reporters-notebook/article6154514.ece">Meera completed a BA from Jhansi in 2006; Kavita (32) has had no formal education. Both of them have children. When Meera’s daughter calls her, she gently chides her. 'You know I am working on the field, I will be late.'</a>" At The Hindu Business Line, Priyanka Kotamraju profiles two intrepid reporters for a local weekly tabloid in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. (Via Sonia Faleiro.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/06/Paycheck_to_paycheck.html?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_campaign=hootsuite">But perhaps more subtly too, 'Spent' sells another idea being brought home by fast food and other low-wage worker protests around the country: Working class and low income Americans just are not earning enough money.</a>" At Colorlines last month, Carla Murphy reviews a YouTube documentary on poverty and the financial services industry.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://citypaper.net/article.php?A-Bitter-End-20651?src=longreads">'But I don’t know why anyone has the right to use the power of the state to force their religious views on other people. If your god doesn’t want you to end your life early when you have a terminal disease, then… don’t! This law wouldn’t require anyone to do anything. But don’t tell someone else who has different religious beliefs that they can’t live their lives according to their own beliefs.'</a>" Very long piece by Emily Guendelsberger on Pennsylvania's attempt to prosecute on homicide charges a woman who handed her 93-year-old father (then in hospice care) the bottle of morphine that hastened his death. At Philadelphia City Paper.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/07/01/the-obama-administration-does-not-approve-of-a-law-making-it-a-crime-to-use-drugs-while-pregnant/#comments">It is now a crime to use drugs if you are pregnant in Tennessee.</a>" Katie Zezima at The Washington Post. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/business/a-job-seekers-desperate-choice.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0">'I felt like this was my opportunity to basically improve life for all of us, and the one key part of it is now not available, so what do I do now?' Ms. Taylor said. 'That was my only thought: "What do I do now? What do I do now?" That was kind of what started the whole chain of events that day.'</a>" If you didn't read the NYT piece about Shanesha Taylor from two weeks ago, it is heartbreaking. By Shaila Dewan. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://tressiemc.com/2014/06/29/walking-without-papers-at-asu-the-new-american-university/">This week the university billing itself as the “New American University” is back in the news with a more personal story about class (and race and gender). ASU campus police arrested professor Ersula Ore for jaywalking on a campus street.</a>" From last week, Tressie McMillan Cottom at her blog.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/06/20/hiking-while-black-the-untold-story-black-people-great-outdoors/ssRvXFYogkZs2e4RX3z6JP/story.html">Weaving scholarly analysis with interviews of leading black environmentalists and ordinary Americans, Finney traces the environmental legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which mapped the wilderness as a terrain of extreme terror and struggle for generations of blacks—as well as a place of refuge.</a>" Francie Latour at The Boston Globe interviews geographer Carolyn Finney about the hidden history of African-American engagement with environmental stewardship. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/what-does-the-facebook-experiment-teach-us-c858c08e287f">If Alice is happier when she is oblivious to Bob’s pain because Facebook chooses to keep that from her, are we willing to sacrifice Bob’s need for support and validation? This is a hard ethical choice at the crux of any decision of what content to show. And the reality is that Facebook is making these choices every day without oversight, transparency, or informed consent.</a>" danah boyd at Medium with incisive commentary on the FB research study uproar.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/internet/2014/06/facebook-can-manipulate-your-mood-it-can-affect-whether-you-vote-when-do-we-start">If Facebook is a country, then it is a corporate dictatorship. This is not a metaphor. I believe that it is beyond time that we began to hold social networking not just to the laws of the market, but to the common laws of the societies we live in and the societies we want to see.</a>" Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/common-core-test-anxiety-108527.html">States can make minor modifications in the Pearson contract. For instance, the contract anticipates a shift to grading student essays by computer algorithm, assuming the technology pans out, but lets states pay more to have them scored by a human reader.</a>" Count me as overwhelmed by enthusiasm to think of my kids spending the school year prepping for an essay test that will be graded by computer algorithm! By Stephanie Simon and Caitlin Emma for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/06/neuman_celano_library_study_educational_technology_worsens_achievement_gaps.html">While technology has often been hailed as the great equalizer of educational opportunity, a growing body of evidence indicates that in many cases, tech is actually having the opposite effect: It is increasing the gap between rich and poor, between whites and minorities, and between the school-ready and the less-prepared.</a>" You don't say. Annie Murphy Paul at Slate.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/saline-shortages-create-troubles-u-s-hospitals/">Hospitals across the country are struggling to deal with a shortage of one of their essential medical supplies. Manufacturers are rationing saline — a product used all over the hospital to clean wounds, mix medications and treat dehydration.</a>" Yay, free-market health care! By April Dembosky for KQED.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.boston.com/health/2014/06/24/infections-possible-from-tick-bites/NPkpOX0KPZZZWsYzVXIkJO/story.html#mfp-share">s if the threat of Lyme disease weren’t enough, a new study finds that a deer tick carrying the potentially debilitating illness has a good chance of toting some other malady, too — and that may be especially true if the tick hails from the suburbs.</a>" Yay! Now enjoy summer! By Claire Hughes at boston.com.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/07/02/controversial-stem-cell-creation-method-retracted/NiScjZhcPcaopw7ziGvWaN/story.html">It is one of the highest-profile retractions of the last decade, and several stem-cell researchers said they are now convinced that the stunningly simple method for producing stem cells, reported in two papers in January, won’t work.</a>" Carolyn Y. Johnson at the Boston Globe, following up on her excellent coverage of the stem-cell-discover-that-wasn't.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/science/2014/06/30/elite-male-professors-train-fewer-women-biologists/12QftpnonxwAJ9JyIHCLfP/story.html">Overall at the top US research institutions, male professors employed 11 percent fewer female graduate students and 22 percent fewer female postdoctoral researchers than do women professors.</a>" Also by Carolyn Y, Johnson at the Globe. Sigh.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/matter/the-ping-pong-theory-of-tech-world-sexism-c2053c10c06c">I wasn't hired to talk to the men.</a>" An illustrated interview with a woman in tech by Ariel Schrag, at Medium. (Via Susie Cagle.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/what-gets-saved-and-what-gets-lost-an-interview-with-jill-lepore/">It’s hard to believe this is what actually happened, but Patience Wright pulls from her skirts a bust of William Pitt from his head down to his navel, so it looks like they’re in an act of congress. And Jane Franklin thinks this is like the coolest thing she’s ever heard of.</a>" I just finished reading Jill Lepore's fantastic biography of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane, so, in honor of Independence Day and all, here is a wonderful interview with Lepore by Joy Horowitz at the LARB from last November.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://prospect.org/article/astronaut-sally-ride-and-burden-being-first">Tampons were packed with their strings connecting them, like a strip of sausages, so they wouldn’t float away. Engineers asked Ride, 'Is 100 the right number?' She would be in space for a week. 'That would not be the right number,' she told them.</a>" At The American Prospect, Ann Friedman on a new biography of Sally Ride. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/07/01/enjoy-houseful-cats-asexual-woman/">People of all genders deal with unwanted attention, but women are especially likely to be regarded as resources rather than people. It is unfair, according to many a manbaby I have spoken to, that I’m selfishly hogging my goodies. Such a shame that only I get to be in my body.</a>" Julie Decker at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/how-to-avoid-a-bank-robbery-be9b3bb994c4">Several years later, after my banking days were long over, my dad called me, laughing, and told me the news that a pair of robbers had walked down the line of cars waiting at the drive up window at my favorite bank, and had methodically robbed them all.</a>" Lovely essay about paranoia, risk assessment, and bank robbery by Kathleen Cooper at Medium. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/07/01/becoming-jessica-fletcher-celebrating-murder-wrote/">Here was a game not unlike <i>Clue</i>—the object being to solve, from a rogue’s gallery of Cabot Cove’s finest, whodunnit—with an added twist: one of the players WAS the murderer. If you drew the murderer card, you visited people around the Cove spaces on the board and replaced their alive character tile with a dead one, thereby secretly MURDERING.</a>" For a certain child of my acquaintance, this great piece from Kate Racculia on her girlhood devotion to the doyenne of the murder capital of the world, Cabot Cove, ME.<br />
<br />
Continuing on the theme of "things a certain child (and I) would love to own," <a href="http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/06/30/tova-jansson-alice-in-wonderland/">Maria Popova</a> at Brainpickings with some sublime illustrations from the Tove Jansson edition of <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/candy-is-dandy-but-rents-are-outrageous-5b09e0440f04">We both love Philly, and also live with a constant, yawning void of homesickness and alienation. We both tend to fill that void with junk food.</a>" Really great essay from May on dislocation, nostalgia, and junk food, by Virginia C. McGuire at Medium.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/jus14-warcomeshome-report-web-rel1.pdf">The use of a SWAT team to execute a search warrant essentially amounts to the use of paramilitary tactics to conduct domestic criminal investigations in searches of people’s homes.</a>" Finally, I am taking next week off, so keep yourself busy next weekend reading this pdf on the militarization of law enforcement from the ACLU by a team of authors, including Kara Dansky, Sarah Solon, Allie Bohm, Emma Andersson, Jesselyn McCurdy, and dude Will Bunting. (Via Meghna Chakrabarti.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-66540666361850551822014-06-29T06:45:00.001-07:002014-06-29T06:45:27.648-07:00No links for the week ending 29 June 2014No post this week. I'll be back next week with links. As always, thanks for reading, whatever it is you read!<br />
<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-9294707461729936382014-06-22T06:54:00.001-07:002014-06-22T06:54:51.543-07:00Links for the week ending 22 June 2014"<a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/jul/10/glenn-greenwald-partial-disclosure/?insrc=toc">And getting the job done—if the job is collecting electronic data, and not, say, figuring out that two disaffected Chechen-Americans were plotting to detonate pressure-cooker bombs at the Boston Marathon—is what Alexander has accomplished.</a>" At the NYRB, where women are rarer — excuse me, more precious — than rubies, Sue Halpern reviews a small armada of books about the NSA and Edward Snowden.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraq-urges-us-airstrikes-as-insurgents-press-offensive/2014/06/19/51b0ef07-f5cd-4eb5-8260-1ab75c2d2ee4_story.html">Some 2,764 civilians have died from violence in Iraq so far in June, according to Iraq Body Count, which monitors the death toll. That figure is already more than double the 1,027 killed in May and the highest monthly death toll since May 2007, according to the group.</a>" Loveday Morris, Liz Sly, and Abigail Hauslohner at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/can-general-linders-special-operations-forces-stop-the-next-terrorist-threat.html?_r=0">There are now two kinds of refugees in Diffa: those fleeing Boko Haram and those fleeing the weather. The chaos wrought by dislocation and some of the world’s worst social indicators renders these communities vulnerable to extremism.</a>" So many interesting facts and insights in this very long Eliza Griswold profile of General James B. Linder, head of the United States Special Operations forces in Africa, at the NYT. (Via Sonia Faleiro.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.howwemadeitinafrica.com/africa-is-not-waiting-for-the-west-says-author/40515/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+HowWeMadeItInAfrica+%28How+We+Made+It+In+Africa%29">'In terms of people’s understanding of what Africa is, it’s a place where people are waiting for the west, and again this narrative is patently false,' argued Olopade.</a> Great piece about journalist Dayo Olopade by Kate Douglas at How We Made It In Africa.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/the-shame-of-shuhada-street-hebron/372639/">Now, several days later, I watched these Shuhada Street boys risk death for the sake of a liberty so rudimentary and fundamental that my own children are not even aware of its existence, or its importance, or its simple human beauty: the right to walk down the street.</a>" Ayelet Waldman at The Atlantic on the outrages of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian communities.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://972mag.com/i-am-a-palestinian-jew-or-at-least-i-will-be/92175/">I try to say it out loud: I am a Palestinian Jew. But it doesn’t easily roll off my tongue. I am not ready to say it to anyone else – I don’t even know what it means. But in all likelihood, I will become one sooner or later, so I better practice.</a>" Dorit Naaman at +927 Magazine. (Via Sarah Schulman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/what-happens-if-you-have-no-welfare-and-no-job/372685/">One woman described her TANF enrollment appointment as lasting from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, and several mentioned they had their TANF benefits cancelled for reasons they couldn’t understand.</a>" Olga Khazan at The Atlantic on a new study by the Urban Institute on barriers to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families cash assistance program.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/victoriabeale/should-two-children-be-imprisoned-for-plotting-to-kill-their">When Ashworth asked David whether it was a good enough reason to kill the girl because she was annoying, he replied, 'Well, the way the other boy and I see it, but you don’t, no.' He said the plan was 'actually good to me, and bad, but mostly bad for the real world cause I had a feeling that I’d get arrested.'</a>" Amazing longread at BuzzFeed by Victoria Beale about two fifth graders in rural Washington who planned to kill classmates. (Via <a href="http://velamag.com/women-we-read-this-week-66/">Women We Read This Week</a> at Vela.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/18/was-this-student-dangerous/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-share&_r=0">I had spoken several times about his violent ramblings to the campus police and to the university’s office of mental health, and this was what they came up with: I should invite the student to my office and calmly begin a conversation with the following question: 'Do you have a plan to harm yourself or anyone else?'</a>" Julie Schumacher at the NYT. (Via David Hull.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/">Misogyny and homophobia are central to the reproduction of violence in radical activist communities. Scratch a misogynist and you’ll find a homophobe. Scratch a little deeper and you might find the makings of a future informant (or someone who just destabilizes movements like informants do).</a>" This piece is a couple of years old, but still worth your time: Courtney Desiree Morris at INCITE! with "Why Misogynists Make Great Informants." (Via Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/06/17/terry-richardson-predatory-artist">This is, in the strictest of senses, showing both sides. But one side is a woman talking about her personal experience, and the other is a man and his supporters saying she’s wrong.</a>" Jess Zimmerman at Dame Magazine on apologists for photographer Terry Richardson. (Via Kera Bolonik.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/05/11/the_modern_history_of_swearing_where_all_the_dirtiest_words_come_from/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow">In the 19th century <i>shit</i> as a noun was reserved exclusively for men — the 'West Somerset Word-Book' defines it as 'a term of contempt, applied to men only,' as in 'He’s a regular shit.' Now, women too can work, vote, own their own property, and be called a shit.</a>" More than a year old, but maybe it's out in paperback now? An excerpt at Salon from Melissa Mohr's book, <i>Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing</i>. (Via Paige Morgan.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/06/20/giggly-girl-causing-problems-among-ultra-orthodox/">'Mr. Jacobs,' Rabbi Goldstein continued. 'We hear that DeDe uses disgusting language. Like the s-word.'</a>" So great: DeDe Jacobs-Komisar at The Toast on her yeshivish school days.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/life/education/2014/06/american_schools_need_better_teachers_so_let_s_make_it_harder_to_become.html">Instead of trying to reverse engineer the teaching profession through complicated evaluations leading to divisive firings, these changes aspire to reboot it from the beginning.</a>" Amanda Ripley at Slate on raising the bar to entry for teaching. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140522-inside-the-din-cells-fight-noise-with-noise/">But for the cells that make up all living things, noise — meaning random variability in the outside environment, including fluctuating food sources, pathogens and deadly toxins, or random processes within the cells themselves — can be a matter of life and death.</a>" Another fascinating piece from last month at Quanta Magazine, this one on randomness at the cellular level. By Emily Singer.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/lifestyle/miriam-toews/my-madeleine-miriam-toews">On the hottest of days relief came in the form of apocalyptic rain that flooded our roads and basements in minutes. Once, during one of these storms, my mother and I rafted down Main Street in our bathing suits.</a>" Short reminisence in the "My Madeleine" column at Intelligent Life by Miriam Toews, worth reading for that image alone.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/06/17/jumble-chronic-mental-illness/">On top of the physical sensation, there is a weariness that hovers around what you might call your soul. My brain is tired, my heart is tired. If I knew where to go to officially give up, I would.</a>" Molly Pohlig on mental illness at The Toast. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nymag.com/health/bestdoctors/2014/theo-justin-bieber-2014-6/">We were especially frustrated because when his caretaker, Erin, arrived at 9 a.m., she could get him to eat scrambled eggs with cheese, yogurt, cereal—a meal fit for a kid twice his age and size. Why? And why was he suddenly chanting 'Bee-bee, bay-bee' every five minutes?</a>" Kera Bolonik at NY Mag with a happy-ending essay about a Justin Bieber-compass to navigate around a toddler's unexplained medical issues, which, oh yeah, the memories...<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/06/a-conversation-with-jennifer-weiner">Men take it for granted that the world wants to hear what they’ve got to say, women have to be convinced that anyone besides their immediate family members care.</a>" Literary, not literary, I don't much care, but Jennifer Weiner has very smart things to say in conversation with best-interviewer-around Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin. (Hey, someday let's discuss why Weiner drew Rebecca Mead at The New Yorker — because, right, who's going to be more sympathetic to a pop-culture best-selling author than someone whose cultural touchstone is <i>Middlemarch</i>, while John Green drew Margaret Talbot.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/06/19/prestigious-literary-novel/">Sinara threw her two-year-old out the window. 'Parenthood is a prison,' she said. 'I always hated that baby.' That’s the only way to reject institutions, sometimes, is to throw a baby out of the window.</a>" Mallory Ortberg, "My Prestigious Literary Novel." At The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/lauren-quinn-which-side-are-you-on-girl/">OHTC disrupted the idea of whiteness I’d developed as innocuous, inoffensive and existing in laugh-track isolation. OHTC did not exist in isolation. Their smiling success was propped up by something—us.</a>" Finally, a summer story about race and class by Lauren Quinn at Guernica. (Via <a href="http://velamag.com/women-we-read-this-week-67/">Vela</a>.)<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-79154194709423844642014-06-15T06:51:00.002-07:002014-06-15T06:51:47.032-07:00Links for the week ending 15 June 2015"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraq-disintegrating-as-insurgents-advance-kurds-seize-kirkuk/2014/06/12/22e79e2b-f793-4120-8161-36f17c287e5f_story.html">Iraq was on the brink of falling apart Thursday as al-Qaeda renegades asserted their authority over Sunni areas in the north, Kurds seized control of the city of Kirkuk and the Shiite-led government appealed for volunteers to help defend its shrinking domain.</a>" If you've been here awhile, you probably don't need to be told that The Washington Post has a very strong trio of women reporting from the Middle East. This one is from Loveday Morris in Iraq and <a title="explainer on ISIS" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/06/10/isis-the-al-qaeda-linked-islamists-powerful-enough-to-capture-a-key-iraqi-city/?hpid=z6">Liz Sly</a> in Beirut. You wanna stay up to date, I suggest periodically checking for new articles <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/loveday-morris">written or co-written by Morris</a>. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/14/world/middleeast/iraq.html">Heeding the call to arms by Ayatollah Sistani, Shiite volunteers rushed to the front lines, reinforcing defenses of the holy city of Samarra 70 miles north of Baghdad, and helping thwart attacks by Sunni fighters of the radical Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in some smaller cities to the east.</a>" The NYT has Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad, reporting here with dudes Suadad Al-Salhy and Rick Galdstone.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10896557/Iraq-crisis-al-Qaeda-inspired-forces-battle-Kurdish-fighters-on-the-frontline-of-a-new-war.html?fb">This is the front line of a new war between ISIS and Kurdish forces, only a few hundred yards from the flares of Kirkuk’s lucrative gas fields.</a>" Ruth Sherlock reporting with <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10893814/Iraq-refugees-scarred-and-desparate-the-families-fleeing-the-tide-of-terror.html">Carol Malouf</a> for the Daily Telegraph.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://mobile.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN0EO0QH20140613?irpc=932">Tehran is open to the possibility of working with the United States to support Baghdad, the senior official said.</a>" Parisa Hafezi reporting for Reuters. (Via Jenan Moussa.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/06/11/230077/what-iraq-members-of-congress.html">No one pressed for answers about how many U.S. weapons supplied to the Iraqi forces had ended up in insurgents’ hands as Iraqi forces shed their uniforms and fled their posts. Or what the fate will be of the U.S. military assistance program to Iraq, on which American taxpayers have already spent $14 billion.</a>" Nancy A. Youssef reporting from Washington, D.C., for McClatchy.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_307124/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=9X0XonnR">'I am the Storyteller of Damascus,' Hallak said, chain-smoking, in an interview with The Associated Press in the Syrian capital. 'In these events, many people were harmed. I am one of them.'</a>" Diaa Hadid for the AP.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/does-everyone-who-suffers-trauma-have-ptsd/">But to call the community traumatised was to do it a gross disservice. It missed the point. The town had not been struck down by some psychopathological post-conflict plague. It was still under social and economic siege.</a>" From last month at Aeon, Lynne Jones argues that the concept of PTSD can erase the actual ongoing causes of suffering.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://fpif.org/haitis-chief-foreign-import-meddling/">Voter turnout was so abysmally low that Martelly won the presidency with the votes of only 17 percent of the electorate. Essentially, the OAS mission, backed by the international community, installed Martelly as president with utter disregard for democracy and sovereignty in Haiti.</a>" Nathalie Baptiste at Foreign Policy In Focus with a short history of international (mostly American) meddling in Haiti's political process. (Via Brian Cocannon.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/06/dissident-fetish-molly-crabapple">The dissident fetishist takes a brave, principled person, and uses them like a codpiece of competitive virtue.</a>" Damn, Molly Crabapple at Vanity Fair.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/microsoft-fights-us-search-warrant-for-customer-e-mails-held-in-overseas-server/2014/06/10/6b8416ae-f0a7-11e3-914c-1fbd0614e2d4_story.html?wpmk=MK0000203">Microsoft, one of the world’s largest e-mail providers, is resisting a government search warrant to compel the firm to turn over customer data held in a server located overseas.</a>" Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.wired.com/2014/06/cell-tower-data-requires-warrant/">A federal appeals court has ruled that the warrantless collection of cellphone tower data, which can be used to track the location of a suspect, is unconstitutional without a probable-cause warrant from a court.</a>" Kim Zetter at Wired.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.boston.com/news/nation/2014/06/12/woman-jailed-over-truancy-fines-found-dead-cell/qqDxtO6ZY8cE7nUudgZYGK/story.html?p1=Must_Reads">A Pennsylvania mother of seven died in a jail cell where she was serving a two-day sentence for her children’s absence from school, drawing complaints from the judge that sent her there about a broken system that punishes impoverished parents.</a>" Maryclaire Dale for the AP.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://prospect.org/article/great-american-chain-gang?utm_source=Master+List&utm_campaign=8c8c69674a-June_2014_Sidney_winner&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f29e31a404-8c8c69674a-164569481">But correctional industries, all told, employ only about 60,000 inmates—less than 4 percent of America’s prisoners. Why does a program with proven results remain so marginal? Largely because private-sector companies see inmates doing work that they do, at a fraction of the labor costs, and cry foul.</a>" Essential longread from Beth Schwartzapfel at The American Prospect on prison labor and labor rights.<br />
<br />
"<a href=http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/film/2014/06/11/where-the-fuck-are-all-the-guards-an-ex-con-reviews-orange-is-the-new-black/">I’m a white blonde girl who went out and willfully fucked up and committed armed robbery, and I got five years. There were tons of black girls in my prison who were holding onto a bag of dope for a couple of days, and they always seemed to get, like, 10 years. If you ever find yourself in prison and wonder why there’s tension between white and black, shit like that is probably one of the reasons.</a>" With all due respect to the legions of folks who write about TV shows for a living, this is the best thing I've seen yet: dude Adam Dawson talks to former incarcerated person Susan K. about <i>Orange Is the New Black</i>. At Washington City Paper. The <a href="http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/artsdesk/film/2014/06/13/no-fisting-parties-in-the-chapel-an-ex-con-reviews-orange-is-the-new-black-part-ii/">second part</a> is even better. (Via @pourmecoffee.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/05/do-drivers-discriminate-against-minorities-at-crosswalks/371666/">Driving is exactly the kind of high-speed, high-stimulus situation in which implicit bias thrives.</a>" From last month, Sarah Goodyear at City Lab on a study that found that drivers were less likely to stop for black pedestrians at crosswalks than for white pedestrians.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/11/college-debt-obama-private-student-loans">The end beneficiary? Wall Street, of course, which has driven the growth of private student loans in order to cut them up into bundles, securitize them and sell them to other financial institutions.</a>" Heidi Moore at the Guardian on how predatory private student loans are.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/us/california-teacher-tenure-laws-ruled-unconstitutional.html?smid=tw-share">The situation violates those students’ constitutional right to an equal education, he determined. It is believed to be the first legal opinion to assert that the quality of an education is as important as mere access to schools or sufficient funding.</a>" Jennifer Medina at the NYT on a California judge's decision against teacher tenure laws this week.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/why-online-tracking-is-getting-creepier">Tracking people using their real names—often called 'onboarding'—is a hot trend in Silicon Valley. In 2012, ProPublica documented how political campaigns used onboarding to bombard voters with ads based on their party affiliation and donor history. Since then, Twitter and Facebook have both started offering onboarding services allowing advertisers to find their customers online.</a>" Julia Angwin at ProPublica with "Why Online Tracking Is Getting Creepier."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/weird-corporate-twitter/">For us, there is a sociopathic freedom in knowing there is no individual behind the Twitter account. The corporation will not reach out for support in hard times the way an individual person on Twitter may. Laughing with it doesn’t trigger an existential fear that we might be relied on for support, sending vibes or crowdfunds during @dennysdiner’s darkest emotional hour.</a>" Excellent essay by Kate Losse at The New Inquiry on "Weird Corporate Twitter." (Via Cam Larios.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2014/06/07/mit-used-lobbying-influence-restore-nuclear-fusion-dream-after-white-house-sought-stop-funding/T5Q9esYqbZsxIbXUpnEHFN/story.html">This is a story about those 'hornets' and that nest, about the extraordinary multifront lobbying campaign waged by one of the most powerful research universities in the country. It was an exercise of muscle along the Massachusetts-Washington axis that did something significant even on gridlocked Capitol Hill — restoring funding for a program axed by the White House.</a>" Tracy Jan at The Boston Globe takes a deep look at a single lobbying campaign waged on behalf of MIT.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/14/mutation/america-is-getting-the-science-of-sun-exposure-wrong">But the melanoma capital of the world is welcoming back the sun after a half-century on the outs. The move follows a new understanding of skin cancer and vitamin D.</a>" From last week, Jessica Seigel at Nautilus on what remains poorly understood about sun exposure and skin cancer.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/06/13/uncommon-household-the-history-early-american-same-sex-marriage/oGJ3H6xZtluQUhvdJnR94M/story.html">The book is the first to delve deep into the history of an early American same-sex marriage. Cleves sees Drake and Bryant not as an aberration, but as part of a larger history of same-sex partnerships that has yet to be written—one that now exists mainly as clues dropped in family histories and stories told in the archives of local historical societies.</a>" Rebecca Onion at The Boston Globe interviews Rachel Hope Cleves about her new book, which sounds fascinating. (Hat tip to Sheila Allen Avelin.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/06/you-belong-to-me#more">But the act of investing in others is not selfless at all. In fact, it's something that requires exchange, not in a one-for-one way, like some therapeutic tennis volley, but as if two people were taking a boat out onto a lake.</a>" Thoughtful personal essay by Dayna Evans at The Hairpin.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.simonsfoundation.org/quanta/20140613-quasicrystal-meteorite-poses-age-old-questions/?smid=nytnow-share&smprod=nytnow">'It’s kind of a disharmony in space,' Steinhardt explained this winter in Princeton, carefully handling a plastic model of a quasicrystal that he keeps on his desk.</a>" A tale of rocks in a museum box, a secret secret diary, and the possible structures of matter in the solar system. By Natalie Wolchover at Quanta Magazine, which, look at all those women on the masthead! More like this, please! (Via Sarah Lyall.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nerve.com/books/a-young-adult-authors-fantastic-crusade-to-defend-literatures-most-maligned-genre">'YA is formulaic, worthless dreck,' she said, transforming into a vampire.</a>" If you haven't already read this Kathleen Hale piece on The Great YA Controversy Of (The Second Week of June of) 2014, congratulations, you are about to laugh very hard. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman and Els Kushner.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/06/spin-measure-cut-hobby-lobby-and-the-tangled-skein-of-reproductive-rights/">When you were raised to regard America as a refuge from ignorance and despotism—as many children and grandchildren of immigrants are—there's something perverse about standing in the aisle at Hobby Lobby, contemplating all the varieties of yarn and what you might make of them, and realizing that, if you worked there, you'd have less control over your own healthcare, your own body, your own religious beliefs, and your own procreative decisions than you would over a stupid afghan.</a>" Finally, Susan Schorn at The Hairpin with an intricately woven essay on "Hobby Lobby and the Tangled Skein of Reproductive Rights."Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-56290160787235606902014-06-08T06:37:00.002-07:002014-06-08T06:37:52.356-07:00No links for the week ending 8 June 2014End-of-school madness being what it is, I had no time whatsoever for the internets this week. I will be moving to a more sporadic and reduced schedule for the summer, but intend to be back at full strength this fall. In the meantime, please go on sending me links even if you don't see me around on Twitter — I'll see them eventually, and be grateful that you passed them along.<br />
<br />
As ever, thanks for reading! And have a great summer.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-65057763242755778392014-06-01T06:53:00.000-07:002014-06-01T06:53:56.472-07:00Links for the week ending 1 June 2014"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/26/world/middleeast/damascus-syria-hejaz-railway-station.html">Every day, Mr. Nasr, 68, a Transportation Ministry employee, pads around his offices in the Ottoman-era building, where light filters through red, yellow and blue stained glass. He imagines the past — the few short years a century ago when the place bustled with travelers headed for Mecca.</a>" Lovely color piece from Anne Barnard at the NYT on the lost railway culture of Syria and the greater region.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/world/middleeast/foreign-jihadis-fighting-in-syria-pose-risk-in-west.html?smid=tw-share">He has also received marriage proposals, which he declines. One woman asked whether electricity was working in Syria so she could bring a hair curler. 'Advice to people who want to come is, Don’t bring your hair curlers,' he said.</a>" Also at the NYT, Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura talks to Westerners who have traveled to Syria to become jihadis.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/nigeria-prepares-to-treat-rape-sexual-trauma-of-kidnapped-sc">That’s partly because stigma, like all vulnerability in the rural north, doesn’t affect only the girl who has been assaulted.</a>" BuzzFeed's Jina Moore reporting from Nigeria, where contingency plans are being drawn up to address the needs of the kidnapped Chibok teenage girls, should they be successfully rescued.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/05/lets-call-isla-vista-killings-what-they-were-misogynist-extremism">Violent extremism entices those who long to lash out at a system they believe has cheated them, but lack they courage to think for themselves, beyond the easy answers they are offered by pedlars of hate. Misogynist extremism is no different.</a>" Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2014/05/the-power-of-yesallwomen.html?mbid=social_retweet">The experience of feeling simultaneously threatened and unable to speak, of feeling as if I would be persecuting this man who was committing a sexual impropriety were I to pipe up and tell him to knock it off, was unsettlingly familiar. </a>" Sasha Weiss at The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/05/_yesallwomen_in_the_wake_of_elliot_rodger_why_it_s_so_hard_for_men_to_recognize.html">Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. </a>" Amanda Hess at Slate. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nkjemisin.com/2014/05/wiscon-38-guest-of-honor-speech/"> Let’s talk about how many conventions have been forced to use disturbingly careful language to basically say, Don’t assault people. Let’s talk about how much pushback statements like that have gotten from people whining, 'Aw, c’mon, can’t I assault someone just a little?'</a>" N.K. Jemison's speech at Wiscon 38, republished on her blog. (Via Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://bookriot.com/2014/05/27/local-brick-mortar-privilege/">Bookstores are a privilege. They’re not accessible to everyone, and when they are accessible, they’re not always worth it. Why would I or anyone else want to spend time in a shop where my presence isn’t welcomed?</a>" Kelly Jensen at Bookriot making an important argument (sez someone who grew up in a bookstore desert). (Via Malindo Lo.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2279/the-art-of-fiction-no-119-maya-angelou">Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up.</a>" From the Fall, 1990, issue of the Paris Review, an interview with Maya Angelou.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/05/new_civil_rights_case_calls_school_closures_discriminatory.html">In the city’s post-Katrina reform frenzy, New Orleans has shut down all but five of its traditional public schools, kicked out tenured teachers, and replaced schools with charters and a predominantly black teaching force with young, overwhelmingly white recruits from the controversial education reform and teaching training program Teach for America.</a>" Julianne Hing at Colorlines on a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the school systems of Newark, Chicago, and New Orleans. (Via Carla Murphy.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/smart-pills-with-chips-cameras-and-robotic-parts-raise-legal-ethical-questions/2014/05/24/6f6d715e-dabb-11e3-b745-87d39690c5c0_story.html?hpid=z3">Each morning around 6, Mary Ellen Snodgrass swallows a computer chip. It’s embedded in one of her pills and roughly the size of a grain of sand. </a>" Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post. (Via Katie Zezima.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vice.com/read/a-bum-without-a-country-0000326-v21n5">The problem with these philosophies isn’t that they seek to abolish, or challenge, the state; it’s that, in their current incarnation, they appeal mostly to individuals like Gogulski, who by accident of birth start off on top of the global pile. They aren’t solutions that management consultants would characterize as 'scalable'; rather, they’re limited, solipsistic. That makes ideologies like Gogulski’s more symbolic than globally meaningful.</a>" Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on an intentionally stateless person in Bratislava.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/05/ask-polly-i-have-a-perfect-life-but-my-insides-are-rotting#more-194996">To know a lot of smart, complicated adults is to know a lot of escapists and a lot of social media/booze/TV addicts and a lot of moms who obsess about every dimension of their kids' development and a lot of hothouse flowers with insanely complicated, expensive needs.</a>" Heather Havrilesky hits this particular edition of Ask Polly out of the park. At The Awl.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/5/28/5754380/winning-the-national-spelling-bee">There was a spelling bee in which anybody who participated was given extra credit. And I figured I could make up for some bad homework grades. I won the spelling bee, and I kept going along.</a>" Sarah Kilff at Vox with a delightful interview with five former champions of the National Spelling Bee.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/05/27/ayn-rands-harry-potter-sorcerers-stone/">Ayn Rand's <i>Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone</i></a>" is worth it for the tags alone. From Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, of course.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2014/may/29/hail-dayton/">Ninety-five-year-old Beverly Wilson was the only one who had been alive during the trial, though she didn’t remember much about 1925 except her parents arguing—not about theology or science but whether to name her baby brother 'Evolution.'</a>" Finally, at the Oxford American, a wonderful piece by Rachael Maddux about Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial took place.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-40549882125943042652014-05-25T06:14:00.001-07:002014-05-25T06:14:48.532-07:00Links for the week ending 25 May 2014Oh, look, another entitled white dude with parental fundage and a gun massacred people. Ain't it great that the powers-that-be collect data on every move we make online — but white dudes who rant about hating and/or killing women (or racial/ethnic/religious minorities, for that matter) on YouTube are not treated with the same controlling dystopian force that meets a teenage black kid trying to get to school in the morning? What is even the point of linking to news stories about it? There is nothing here you don't already know twenty times over. But, here, if you never saw this essay the first time, it's worth a read: <a href="http://faerye.net/post/the-puzzle-box">I am not a puzzle box,</a>" by Felicity Shoulders. (Via @saltypepper.) And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.<br />
<br />
Alas, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a dude, and thus beyond the purview of this here project. But! Tressie McMillan Cottom — who, like Coates, is one of the few truly essential public intellectuals at work in America today — is at her blog this week riffing on Coates' piece and writing about why more equal access to education is <i>not</i> going to undo the effects of structural racism: "<a href="http://tressiemc.com/2014/05/22/reparations-what-the-education-gospel-cannot-fix/">No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees.</a>"<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/05/chicagos-petcoke-woes-are-far-from-over/371171/">You might never have heard of petcoke before, but it’s a term that some people in the industrial Midwest have become all too familiar with in the last couple of years. It’s short for petroleum coke, and it’s a dusty byproduct of the tar-sands oil refining process.</a>" While we're thinking about structural racism in general and Chicago neighborhoods in particular, Sarah Goodyear's article at Citylab seems all too relevant.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/21/3439864/the-untold-story-of-what-happened-at-an-overcrowded-west-virigina-jail-after-the-chemical-spill/">While the jail initially said there had been no health concerns, multiple inmates say they suffered problems ranging from minor rashes to respiratory infections and fainting spells. Prisoners also described a policy implemented after the spill, which could land someone in solitary confinement for asking to see a nurse too many times.</a>" Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on how incarcerated West Virginia prisoners during the recent chemical spill that contaminated Charleston's water supply. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/19/trade-fracking_n_5340420.html">The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post.</a>" Dude Zach Carter and Kate Sheppard reporting on why you can expect more and worse resource-extraction pollution in your neighborhood.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/the-chocolate-king-who-would-be-president-106998.html">Now—three months after a violent uprising in which Ukrainians were united perhaps by only one thing: revulsion at the tyranny of the corrupt oligarchy that has dominated the country since independence— the billionaire is also the strong frontrunner in presidential elections scheduled for this Sunday, May 25.</a>" Excellent profile of Petro Poroshenko by Sarah A. Topol at Politico.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/05/the-crimean-tatars-bitter-anniversary.html#entry-more">'You have taken away my right to make sure that my grandchildren know that this tragedy must never repeat itself.'</a>" At The New Yorker, Natalia Antelava on the suppression of observance of the seventieth anniversary of the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/egypts-break-with-qatar-could-contribute-to-a-scorching-summer-for-countrys-residents/2014/05/21/c3cf1172-cd5d-4fed-8981-ea0142e75ab7_story.html">Egypt’s scorching summer heat and dwindling natural-gas supplies are expected to trigger nationwide blackouts at about the same time that Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the popular former defense minister who led the coup against Morsi in July, is widely anticipated to assume the presidency after elections this weekend.</a>" Erin Cunningham at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/nyregion/workers-at-nyus-abu-dhabi-site-face-harsh-conditions.html?_r=0">Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. </a>" Ariel Kaminer and dude Sean O'Driscoll at the NYT on NYU's deal with the devil to build its new campus in Abu Dhabi.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2014/05/26/140526taco_talk_okeowo">'The government of Nigeria is not serious,' he said. 'Had it been their children, they would have gone to get these girls.'</a>" Alexis Okeowo reporting for The New Yorker.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dangerous-memories-of-tiananmen-square/2014/05/16/16dfe888-d9de-11e3-bda1-9b46b2066796_story.html">One year she managed to make offerings at the spot where her son, Wang Nan, died on the sidewalk beside the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. The next year she was forbidden to leave her home. To this day, a closed-circuit camera is trained upon that spot, awaiting her return.</a>" Chilling account at The Washington Post by Louisa Lim about the risks of telling stories about 1989 in China. Her book comes out next month; I'll be looking for it.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/may/12/china-leftover-women-property-boom">Such attitudes are leading to a new gender wealth gap in the market-reform era. Evidence is found in legal setbacks to married women's property rights, a sharply widening gender income gap, report of an 'epidemic of domestic violence', as well as the orchestrated state media campaign to stigmatise single, educated women in their late 20s as 'leftover' women.</a>" Leta Hong Fincher at The Guardian on the complex interplay between growing gender inequality and the real estate boom in China. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-to-announce-first-criminal-charges-against-foreign-country-for-cyberspying/2014/05/19/586c9992-df45-11e3-810f-764fe508b82d_story.html?wpmk=MK0000203">The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and solar power firms, marking the first time that the United States has leveled such criminal charges against a foreign country.</a>" Ellen Nakashima and dude William Wan at The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/5/23/5742002/panda-diplomacy-china-soft-power-kathleen-buckingham-malaysia-panda-loan">But China also uses panda loans (as well as the trade deals themselves) to exert political pressure on countries. </a>" Oh, dear. Maybe you wanna plan that trip to the National Zoo soon, suggests Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Sarah Kliff.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-adoption-law-draws-lesbians-from-other-states-to-give-birth-here/2014/05/22/2f107354-df6b-11e3-9743-bb9b59cde7b9_story.html?hpid=z1">So the Bryans delivered their girls in the District. It was a two-hour drive from home, friends and family, but it’s a place that offers the surest way for Lily Mae and Mia Lynn to have two mothers in the eyes of the law.</a>" Carol Morello at The Washington Post on why lesbian couples are choosing to give birth in Washington, D.C. And, no, it's not so that their newborns can go visit the pandas. (Via Katie Zezima.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/opinion/a-cancer-treatment-in-your-medicine-cabinet.html">Our repeated attempts since 2010 to seek funding through federal grant mechanisms have been rejected.</a>" Harvard researchers Michelle Holmes and Wendy Chen making an op-ed pitch for funding their study asking whether aspirin might be an effective weapon against breast cancer. Is this the future of scientific research? Oy.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/mariakonnikova/2014/05/why-do-people-persist-in-believing-things-that-just-arent-true.html">Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming?</a>" Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker on the futility of reality-based arguments. (Via Kate Sheppard.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2014/05/school_lunch_program_in_the_agriculture_bill_house_republicans_want_rural.html">Though the bill is currently known as the 'Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,' it’s becoming clear that if some House Republicans had their way, they would like to call it the 'Hungry, Healthy-Free Kids Act.' The new object, at least in the House, is to ensure that less food, and less healthy food, finds its way to fewer kids.</a>" The previously cited article notwithstanding, it sure is satisfying to see Dahlia Lithwick and Amy Woolard refusing to pull punches at Slate.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texasobserver.org/military-base-serve-emergency-shelter-central-american-children/">Government officials had estimated as many 60,000 unaccompanied kids—the majority of them from Central America—would be apprehended at the border this year, but now officials predict it will be 70,000 or more.</a>" Melissa del Bosque for the Texas Observer with a short piece that sketches the outlines of tremendous human suffering, particularly when you read in an earlier article that "<a href="http://www.texasobserver.org/honduras-unravels-u-s-struggles-cope-refugees/">U.S. asylum law doesn’t recognize poverty and violence as credible claims for asylum.</a>"<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/tour-buses-to-sri-lankas-battlefields">It is a war that the island’s holiday industry wants to remember and forget simultaneously. Since the conflict ended, Sri Lankans themselves have established a macabre domestic tourist trail in silence.</a>" From the previous week, Kim Wall at Vice on the rapid transformation of former Tamil strongholds into sites for triumphal Sinhalese tourism. (Via Louisa Loveluck.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/05/the_overwhelming_whiteness_of_black_art.html">You’ll smell the molasses as you walk through the exhibit anchored by a 35-foot tall sphinx made of what the artist has called “blood sugar” and sculpted into the shape of a naked mammy. You’ll also see white people. Lots of white people.</a>" Fascinating piece by Jamilah King at Colorlines on the racial politics of art and museum-going in the United States. (Via Julianne Hing.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/05/20/nuns-and-medieval-art/">This is the catalogue author’s one and only piece of presented evidenced which he claims indicates a female scribe and possible female illuminator.</a>" By Whitney Burkhalter at The Toast, the best piece on controversies involving sexism and medieval art that you will read all week.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/05/advice-to-jill-abramson-from-my-mom">'Why should the individual who has been wronged bear the burden to police the system and then spend years of her life, emotional and financial capital trying to enforce the laws of the land? I am convinced that equality will never be realized as long as the victim has to police the system, be the whistleblower and then spend an average of ten years navigating a complicated legal system at great personal and financial cost.'</a>" Rebecca Greenfield at The Hairpin with the money quote from her mom on the latter's years spent pursuing a gender discrimination case.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/technology/never-forgetting-a-face.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytnational&_r=0">Rather, what troubles him is the potential exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens as they go about their lives in public. Online, we are all tracked. But to Dr. Atick, the street remains a haven, and he frets that he may have abetted a technology that could upend the social order.</a>" At the NYT from last Sunday, Natasha Singer on the terrifying promise of facial recognition technology. <br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/81e5f33a24e1?source=tw-ea3e87d12f62-1400581237350">This is because all computers are reliably this bad: the ones in hospitals and governments and banks, the ones in your phone, the ones that control light switches and smart meters and air traffic control systems. Industrial computers that maintain infrastructure and manufacturing are even worse.</a>" If you appreciate the chance to laugh all the way to the apocalypse, this piece by Quinn Norton at Medium is for you.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://hackeducation.com/2014/05/22/alberta-digital-learning-forum/">I want to encourage the building of technologies that see students’ lives and learning not as a resource to be extracted but as something they themselves can control and cultivate.</a>" Notes from a talk on education technology by Audrey Watters. At her blog.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2014/05/turning-your-cell-phone-off-for-folks-born-before-1950.html?mobify=0">O.K., well, let’s—no, Paula, go right ahead. You just root around in your bag and shout, 'I’m coming!' when it rings? O.K., well, Paula, that’s interesting, but it’s not a solution.</a>" Sarah Miller killing it at The New Yorker with "Turning Your Cell Phone Off For Folks Born Before 1950."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/05/mum-and-dad-s-tales-blitz-taught-me-being-parent-all-about-playing-it-down">Our youngest had his 13th birthday the other day and I got a wonderful text from my dad saying, 'All I remember about turning 13 is being allowed to smoke in the bomb shelter.'</a>" Tracey Thorn at the New Statesman. I hope the musical icons of today's teens write half so well in thirty years as my icons do. (See also: Kristin Hersh.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/05/19/genderqueer-fluidity/">The sexually fluid and gender fluid don’t necessarily stand up with the rest of the TV-friendly, marriage-campaigning queers and say, 'I’ve always been this way.' I understand that descriptors like that align with how many people have experienced their gender and sexuality, but I have <i>always</i> experienced these parts of me as mutable things that I had some degree of choice in expressing.</a>" Great piece by Jade Sylvan at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/05/a_new_labor_force.html">'Well what did you study?' she booms, her voice a constant invite to a party you didn’t know you even wanted to attend. And just like that, she has the resident’s full attention once more.</a>" At Colorlines, Carla Murphy profiles young labor organizer Michelle Crentsil, who amazes the reader more with each successive paragraph.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-27438001">Pietro was a humble man who lived in an enchanting region famed throughout the land for its delicious and abundant hazelnuts. Times were hard and chocolatey delights were not for the common people. Still, he dreamed of a magic formula that would enable everyone to enjoy his sweet treats.</a>" Dany Mitzman at the BBC on the "modern fairy tale" — and the reality — of the history of Nutella. Is it lunchtime yet? (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2014/05/dear-media-let-me-help-you-write-that.html">I will be there on opening night to see The Fault in Our Stars movie, largely because I am the parent to a pre-teen girl who wants to see it. But when you write your articles about him and YA lit, do a better job. Do it in a way that doesn't diminish the accomplishments of all the other authors working hard out there to reach teen audiences.</a>" On-point rant by Karen Jensen at Teen Librarian's Toolbox. (Hat tip to Els Kushner, another badass teen librarian!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/05/22/ancillary_justice_gender_pronouns_comparing_sci_fi_and_natural_language.html">The story’s first-person narrator, Breq, speaks a language that doesn't make gender distinctions, and, consequently, refers to all characters by the same default pronoun, rendered <i>she</i> in English.</a>" Linguist Gretchen McCulloch with an illuminating analysis of this year's winner of the Nebula Award — and how it reflects the real world. At Slate. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/letters-essays/6202/letter-from-greenwich-village-vivian-gornick">In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood, and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency.</a>" Finally, from last year, but they retweeted it this week, don't ask me why — the inimitable Vivian Gornick at The Paris Review.<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-12102758352947182082014-05-18T07:00:00.000-07:002014-05-18T07:00:07.318-07:00Links for the week ending 18 May 2014"<a href="http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/may/nasa-uci-study-indicates-loss-of-west-antarctic-glaciers-appears-unstoppable/#.U3ETCoFdWSo">These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise.</a>" That's from a news release by Carol Rasmussen from the NASA Earth Science News Team. Have a nice day.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/05/the-west-antarctica-ice-sheet-melt-defending-the-drama.html?utm_source=www&utm_medium=tw&utm_campaign=20140513">But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be <i>more</i> serious.</a>" In case you're not already gibbering in terror, here's Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker to take you the rest of the way there.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140516-dust-bowl-drought-oklahoma-panhandle-food/">Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original.</a>" Laura Parker reports from the Oklahoma panhandle for National Geographic. (Via @pourmecoffee.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.texastribune.org/2014/05/14/dont-point-and-jeer-wichita-falls/">No one involved in the brewing court battle over who owns San Antonio’s wastewater is calling it 'potty water,' as the <i>Fort Worth Star-Telegram</i> did in a recent story about the Wichita Falls plan. </a>" Neena Satija for the Texas Tribune reports that the future of drinking water is already here.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/11/opinion/sunday/the-toxic-brew-in-our-yards.html?smid=tw-share&smv1&_r=0">The United States Fish and Wildlife Service says homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals per acre than farmers do. Some of these chemicals rub off on children or pets, but most are washed with rainwater into our streams, lakes and rivers or are absorbed into our groundwater.</a>" Yes, I am subtweeting my neighbors with this piece from last week in the NYT by Diane Lewis.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/end-rain-know-drought-climate-change-81298/">There will be only dryness or downpour, no more metronomic rains like the one that kept me awake the other night. Like the economy, the climate is expected to change in ways that only advance inequality: The wet regions of the world will get wetter; the dry regions of the world will get drier.</a>" Casey N. Cep at Pacific Standard.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/the-perfect-storm-for-west-nile-virus/361896/?utm_content=buffer648db&utm_source=twitter.com">Although it will vary by region, these characteristics fomented by climate change, don’t bode well for West Nile outbreaks. And although it may be possible to disregard the slow changes happening within our climate, it’s less easy to ignore the effects of a disease ravaging a family.</a>" Brittany Patterson at The Atlantic last week on West Nile virus. (Via Maryn McKenna.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/05/140513-mers-saudi-camels-health-contagion-spillover-bats-disease/">Ameer has been following the most recent news reports anxiously and closely, as has every literate citizen of Saudi Arabia, but this latest suggestion, that MERS-CoV might somehow be tainting the kingdom's camels, had caused him to recoil. He was not willing to believe it. He was about to do a defiant thing.</a>" Great story at National Geographic by Cynthia Gorney on MERS and camels and people in Saudi Arabia.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_306481/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=UXHWTkRB">One woman, Umm Ahmed, told how a driver for one charity demanded $7 to take refugees' names to receive boxes of food and soap distributed by a nearby mosque.</a>" Diaa Hadid reports for the AP on corruption seeping into the distribution of aid for Syrian refugees in Lebanon.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/05/yemen-journalist-western/">A bullet smashed through the window next to my head, hissed through the hair of my driver but miraculously left both of us unharmed. Since then I have probably become the only woman in the world to convert their United Nude shoe bag into a gunshot trauma kit which I’ve since carried with me at all times.</a>" Dispatch from Iona Craig, the last accredited Western journalist in Yemen — as she leaves the country maybe forever. At Index on Censorship. (Via Erin Cunningham.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2014/05/turkeys-coal-problem.html#entry-more">This seemed to confirm what opponents of the A.K.P. already believed—that the government would take measures to help businesses develop Turkey, even at the expense of Turkish citizens.</a>" At The New Yorker, Jenna Krajeski on the mine disaster at Soma.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/giving-voice-to-the-survivors-of-nigerias-boko-haram">Most of the coverage of the group has been about 'the amount of people who died, and here’s what the politicians think of it,' says Saratu, a young Nigerian who prefers to go by only her first name, who began the project in February. 'No one is listening to the voices of the people affected.'</a>" At BuzzFeed, Jina Moore on the testimony of Nigerians afflicted by Boko Haram violence.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/17/world/asia/india-elections.html?smid=nytnow-share&smprod=nytnow&_r=0">Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a historic mandate in the country’s general election on Friday, emerging with 282 of 543 parliamentary seats, more than enough to form a government without having to broker a post-election coalition.</a>" Ellen Barry at the NYT on the final results in India's elections, which spell the end of the Gandhi political dynasty, and the beginning of the next chapter in India's history. (Via Lydia Polgreen.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/14/tobacco-farm-child-labor-laws">Grace, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, doesn't smoke – at 15, she's too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, anyway – but she might as well have had a regular habit. At her job on a tobacco farm last summer, she handled tobacco plants for up to 12 hours a day, steadily absorbing nicotine through her skin.</a>" Human Rights Watch's Margaret Wurth at The Guardian on the health risks to child laborers on American tobacco fields.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/05/13/fbi-shooter-had-stormy-record-officer/7zJ1ha78Z0SpfDey0PBuJJ/story.html">The Boston FBI agent who fatally shot a Chechen friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Florida last year had a brief and troubled past at the Oakland Police Department in California. In four years, Officer #8313 took the Fifth at a police corruption trial and was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations.</a>" Maria Sacchetti at The Boston Globe. (Via Sarah Jeong.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://pressthepoint.tumblr.com/post/85510673331/the-nypd-immigrants-and-choice">There is little choice for an Afghan Muslim man who is not fluent in English, sitting in an NYPD office and being questioned about his family back home, his religion, and his leisurely activities.</a>" Commentary on the NYPD's recruitment of informers among Muslim immigrants, by Rozina Ali at her tumblr. (Via Anne Barnard.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://colorlines.com/archives/2014/05/race_disability_and_the_school_to_prison_pipeline.html">More than one in every four black boys identified as having disabilities was suspended in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (PDF).</a>" Just one of the many eye-opening statistics in Julianne Hing's excellent reportage on race, disability, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At Colorlines.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/05/data-mining-your-children-106676.html">Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers.</a>" The future is now, and it is fucking terrifying. Er, I mean, here is an interesting article about data mining in schools, by Stephanie Simon for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.full-stop.net/2014/05/13/reviews/meagan-day/the-peoples-platform-astra-taylor/">While social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been instrumental in facilitating social movements across the world, their democratic utility does not guarantee their democratic ethos. They are instead predictably and abidingly corporate; the primary freedom they go to bat for is market freedom.</a>" Clear, incisive piece by Meagan Day at Full Stop reviewing Astra Taylor's new book. (Via Dayna Tortorici.)<br />
<br />
Do you all read "<a href="http://tinyletter.com/5ua/letters/api-in-the-sky-5-useful-articles-vol-1-issue-8">5 Useful Articles</a>" by dude Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong? You should. You'll be smarter (and funnier) about the latest techno/legal disasters because of it.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/14/columbia_university_alleged_rapist_list_how_bwog_journalists_reported_on.html">Student news and opinion blog the <i>Lion</i> covered the grassroots action as the list of alleged assailants—all of whom, the anonymous scribbler claimed, had already been found responsible for sexual misconduct through the university’s judicial process but were allowed to remain at school—spread from bathrooms to classrooms to printed fliers.</a>" Amanda Hess at Slate on what happened at Columbia University when the student publication that had been covering sexual assault issues found one of the accused on its own staff. (Via Kayla Webley.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/15/health/nih-tells-researchers-to-end-sex-bias-in-early-studies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0">Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1.</a>" Roni Carin Rabin at the NYT on a new directive aimed at reducing the gender bias in basic science research.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2014/05/12/marijuana-legalization-leaves-mothers-pregnant-women-behind/">Unbeknownst to her, however, Colorado’s marijuana law need not explicitly state exceptions to legalized adult marijuana use for such exceptions to exist. The complicated, incentive-based relationship between federal and state child abuse laws obscures parents’ protections under legalization.</a>" Kristen Gwynne at RH Reality Check on holes in marijuana legalization that have resulted in prosecutions against mothers and pregnant women.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyford/the-year-i-grew-wildly-while-men-looked-on">I stood there, shaking, gaping at my jeans and T-shirt. What about my clothes said I wasn’t 13? What about me kept telling the rest of the world I wasn’t a child?</a>" Lovely essay by Ashley C. Ford about that stage in which she had not yet grown into her maturing body. At BuzzFeed. (Via Shani O. Hilton.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.lizburns.org/2014/05/teens-today-they-dont-read.html">When it comes to kids and recreational reading, here are the questions I have. Look at those readers from 30 years ago. Look at them now. Do they have better jobs? Are they earning more money? Did they go on to higher education? Are they happy? In other words, does reading for pleasure mean anything other than.... someone likes to read for pleasure?</a>" Liz Burns at her blog skewering this week's edition of Kids These Days Don't Read. (Hat tip and fist-bump to Jody T. — god knows we have asked each other that last question frequently enough over the years!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2014/05/12/we-need-diverse-books-but-are-we-willing-to-discuss-them-with-our-kids/#_">Was my two-year-old ready for this? I figured probably not, but watching myself edit the book for her level turned out to be a strange pastime. I wasn’t just editing out the hatred but was also failing to explain why the kids were moving to a new school at all. It was as if I was afraid that mentioning race to her would cause her to say embarrassing things at daycare the next day, something I wanted desperately to avoid. </a>" At Fuse #8, Betsy Bird on the perils, pitfalls, and absolute necessity of finding diverse books for children.<br />
<br />
Wait, did something happen at the NYT this week? I kid, I kid. "<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/kateaurthur/jill-abramson-firing-new-york-times">She got fired with less dignity than Judith Miller, who practically started the Iraq War.</a>" Kate Aurthur at BuzzFeed. (Via Miriam Elder.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="">Observing the sharp contrast between this kinder, gentler transition and the cold glee with which Abramson was tossed on her ass today made me hope that eventually we will learn that she was stealing from the company cash register. Because that’s pretty much the only crime I can think of that would merit as swift and brutal an exit for a woman who—good or bad at her job, or, more likely, like most bosses in the world, some combination of the two—represented an undeniably historic first in journalism and at <i>The New York Times</i>.</a>" Rebecca Traister at The New Republic. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/05/jill_abramson_was_everything_to_young_women_at_the_new_york_times.html">To their surprise, she turned up at the noisy Manhattan bar, leaned in close, answered every one of their questions, and told dishy anecdotes about how she’s dealt with men who projected their own biases onto her work. 'It was awe-inspiring, the way she took that time out of her life to powwow with us, without ever seeming ceremonial about it,' one female staffer in attendance told me.</a>" Amanda Hess again at Slate. (Via @rsp1661.)<br />
<br />
<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/05/man-has-questions-about-whats-her-name#more">Sarah Miller at The Hairpin</a> writing as David Brooks on Jill Abramson, which wins the internets this week, unless you are also counting "<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/05/14/fall-asleep/">How To Fall Asleep: A Step-By-Step Guide</a>," by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/05/17/the-great-society-at-50/">The Great Society did not just seek to redistribute wealth. Johnson also set out to shift power in America — from states to Washington, from the legislative branch to the executive, from corporations to federal regulators, from big-city political machines to community groups.</a>" Finally, at The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty's evocative essay on the fiftieth anniversary of The Great Society. (Via @pourmecoffee.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-91988689916517466912014-05-11T07:11:00.001-07:002014-05-11T07:11:31.515-07:00Links for the week ending 11 May 2014"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/08/world/middleeast/syria.html?smid=tw-share&smv1">The once graceful historic district has been bombarded into grim lacework by the government. Its streets have been mined, and in some places burned, by fleeing fighters. Its last residents are leaving, except for six Christian families, who survived the siege alongside mainly Sunni fighters and civilians</a>," writes Anne Barnard in the NYT from Homs, Syria.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqi-army-faces-death-and-desertions-as-it-struggles-with-anbar-offensive/2014/05/08/83720f79-6cd2-4c7c-883b-dfe181ce7a5b_story.html">Traveling in the front seat of an armored Humvee, the general brushed off questions about a thick black plume of smoke to the south. It would turn out to be a suicide bombing at an army checkpoint that killed two soldiers. The general’s own house in Ramadi had been blown up a week earlier.</a>" Loveday Morris reports for The Washington Post from Anbar province in Iraq.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/world/asia/local-policies-help-an-indian-candidate-narendra-modi-trying-to-go-national.html">The flaws in the idea were apparent to planners — the city’s poor would be forced to commute great distances to their jobs, and private developers would be reluctant to build there — but those who were present kept their reservations to themselves, and the belt was added.</a>" Ellen Barry <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/10/world/asia/in-india-support-cools-for-a-gandhi-in-a-traditional-stronghold.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimesworld#">reports</a> for the NYT on the ongoing elections in the world's largest democracy, India.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304431104579550354216910992">The 'Bring Back Our Girls' hashtag—retweeted nearly two million times so far by Twitter users including the Vatican, the first lady and celebrities including singers Mary J. Blige and Chris Brown—wasn't created by Ms. Mosley but by Nigerian Ibrahim Musa Abdullahi, a 35-year-old attorney in the capital Abuja who adapted a chant he heard on television there.</a>" Elizabeth Williamson, Natalie Andrews, and dude Michael M. Phillips for the Wall Street Journal on a textbook case of hashtag appropriation. (Via Kayla Webley.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.compareafrique.com/dear-americans-hashtags-wont-bringbackourgirls-might-actually-making-things-worse/">It was Nigerians who took their good for nothing President to task and challenged him to address the plight of the missing girls. It is in their hands to seek justice for these girls and to ensure that the Nigerian government is held accountable. Your emphasis on U.S. action does more harm to the people you are supposedly trying to help and it only expands and sustain U.S. military might.</a>" At compareafrique.com, Jumoke Balogun argues that hashtag activism in support of American intervention is the last thing Nigerians need. (Via Jamilah King.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/05/03/why_whites_dont_see_racism_reagan_democrats_are_stephen_colbert_democrats_now/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=socialflow">Progressives are often perplexed at why blue-collar guys blame their economic frustrations on people of color and not Wall Street or corporate titans. This is a learned response. In the South, especially, ever since Reconstruction threatened to create a biracial democracy responsive to the working classes, economic elites have stoked racial tensions in order to avoid redistributive policies.</a>" At Salon, an excerpt from Sheryll Cashin's new book about affirmative action and white, working-class anger. (Via Nikole Hannah-Jones.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/05/canada_criminalizes_nondisclosure_of_hiv_status_shifts_responsibility_from.single.html">Like Aziga and Ssenyonga, 52 percent of heterosexual men charged have been black, even though blacks make up only 6 percent of HIV-positive men in Canada. According to Tim McCaskell, of AIDS Action Now, 'The trope of the sexually predatory diseased black immigrant helped marshal racism to harden public opinion behind HIV criminalization.'</a>" At Slate, Sarah Schulman on Canadian law criminalizing nondisclosure of HIV status — and the racism that fuels it.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/seismic-lines/">The Northwest Territories was fully open for exploration and development, but now, 70 percent of oil and gas contracts went to Inuvialuit businesses—a marked difference from the Alberta Tar Sands region, where First Nations have no ownership stake and also bear the brunt of the industry’s destructive and toxic effects (First Nations communities in the Tar Sands regions exhibit especially high levels of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases).</a>" At n+1 from the end of last month, Audrea Lim reports from the front lines of Canada's "Arctic energy frontier." <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Oil-field-deaths-rose-sharply-from-2008-to-2012-5433943.php?t=2b9393f2fbc3f0c8a9&t=2b9393f2fb0ca33e95">Oil field deaths reached 545 during America's drilling and fracking frenzy from 2008 to 2012, with Texas' 216 reported fatalities leading the nation.</a>" Lise Olsen reports for the Houston Chronicle.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/05/middle_east_respiratory_syndrome_in_the_u_s_how_to_stop_mers_transmission.html">Epidemiologically, MERS is probably like an iceberg, with the severe cases making up the visible tip. But as none of the affected countries have been testing broadly to see how many people have been infected, it’s impossible at this point to even guess at how much lower the real death rate might be.</a>" Helen Branswell at Slate (big points to Slate for finding the best woman for the job) telling you what you need to know about the newest worrisome virus on the block. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/06/health/death-rate-fell-in-massachusetts-after-health-care-overhaul.html">The biggest declines happened for conditions that are more likely to be deadly if not caught early — for example, infections from complications of diabetes, heart attacks and cancer.</a>" Sabrina Tavernise for the NYT on a new studying showing that death rates in Massachusetts dropped following the institution of mandatory universal health coverage.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/what-the-us-can-learn-from-brazils-healthcare-mess/361854/">Ever since 1988, the Brazilian constitution has promised free public healthcare to every citizen. '"Health is a private right and a duty of the state,"' said Alexandre Chiavegatto Filho, a health policy professor at the University of Sao Paulo, quoting the statute. 'People do love that phrase. It would be crazy and impossible for any government to change that.'</a>" Olga Khazan at The Atlantic with a fascinating look at how Brazil's immense inequality provides far more relevant lessons for American health care goals than the universal healthcare systems of Europe. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/why-many-latinos-dread-going-to-the-doctor/361547/">Latino apprehension about healthcare goes deeper than issues of access. It also partially derives from a long history of preferring non-Western medicine, a cultural uneasiness with the American style of healthcare, and a tradition of privacy and individual pride that makes many Latinos believe we have no need to ask for help.</a>" Also at The Atlantic, Amanda Machado explores why Latinos in the U.S. "are the racial and ethnic group least likely to visit the doctor."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/how-global-warming-may-starve-us-more-carbon-less-nutrition-n99481">At carbon dioxide levels that are projected for the year 2050, wheat lost more than 9 percent of its zinc content, 5 percent of iron and 6 percent of its protein.</a>" Maggie Fox at NBC News on one consequence of climate change: people will have to eat more calories to obtain the same amount of nutrients from common foods. Right, but let's go on blaming school bake sales for obesity, okay?<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/08/white-men-environmental-movement-leadership?utm_content=buffer2d84f&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer">The very top of "Big Green" is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn't look like change. It doesn't even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change?</a>" Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/05/town_of_greece_v_galloway_the_supreme_court_upholds_sectarian_prayer_at.html">In the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes for five justices, these benedictions are now free and unfettered 'prayer opportunities.' And 'prayer opportunities' are, like 'job creators' and 'freedoms,' what make America great.</a>" Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on this week's Supreme Court ruling ensuring that those of us who don't belong to the majority religions in our communities have more opportunities to feel excluded at public functions. Yay! <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/13/symmetry/math-shall-set-you-freefrom-envy">Division services like Fair Outcomes and Spliddit offer a mathematical lens through which users can view their own motivations. Will they choose to emphasize envy-freeness or social welfare? If even an envy-free division feels unacceptable to them, are they motivated by vindictiveness?</a>" At Nautilus, Erica Klarreich explains how math can help "set you free — from envy."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.damemagazine.com/2014/05/07/jason-patric-not-sperm-donor">With clumsy and inexact language, or language that chooses to be accurate only at designated moments, the media further clouds what is already the all-too-obscure world of what makes a family and how we get one and, now more than ever, how we keep it stitched together.</a>" Jennifer Gilmore at Dame Magazine with a hell of a piece about a celebrity custody battle, journalistic carelessness, and, ultimately, personal heartbreak. (Via Kera Bolonik.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.rookiemag.com/2014/05/do-right-by-me/">She does everything that she didn’t do before. I guess she feels like she has to make up for it. I’m not going to say I’m over it, but I forgave her a long time ago. Now my siblings are the ones who will never let her forget what happened.</a>" At Rookie, four teenagers talk about foster care, abuse, and resilience. (Via Suzy Khimm.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/tips/dartmouth-sexual-assault-bored-at-baker">'I had faith the authorities were going to do something about it,' she says. 'But they got back to me and said there was nothing they could do. The police contacted me at one point and said, "That person who you told us about, he sounds like he’s just concerned. I don’t think you have anything to worry about from him."'</a>" Katie Van Syckle at Cosmopolitan on sexual violence and online harassment at Dartmouth. Tell me, college administrators, why <i>exactly</i> our young people should pay a quarter of a million dollars to run the risk of these kinds of experiences? (Via Maryn McKenna.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sandraeallen/why-would-a-gay-teenager-commit-hate-crimes-against-herself">Her mom, friends, teachers, and coaches rallied around her, told her how much they loved her: 'All that shit that you just wish somebody would have said without there being an explicit reason to.'</a>" From last week, Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed reflects on the homophobic hate crime hoax a troubled high school student staged against herself ten years ago. (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theawl.com/2014/05/how-to-write">Well, that's the kind of little detail you just know to include when you're a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I'm in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!</a>" Heather Havrilesky at The Awl tells you how to be a real writer. For the record, 3:30 p.m. is the point at which I started laughing so hard that I strained something. (Like a real writer would!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/8046">We have no dominion over what the world will do to us, all of us. What the earth will make of our tinkering and abuse can be modeled by computers but is, in the end, beyond our reckoning, our science. Nature is not simply done to. Nature <i>responds</i>.</a>" Extraordinary piece by Eva Saulitis from the March/April issue of Orion, on facing her own death on the banks of a salmon stream. (Via Janine DeBaise.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/">In the immediate aftermath of this failed exchange, I did the only thing I could do: take to my room and fester. I had to figure out what had gone wrong. Soon I had decided the whole project of coming out had been bankrupt – that I had been misled by identity politics into a contraction of the political field to the microuniverse of the bourgeois family. The whole thing had been so <i>petit bourgeois</i> (I thought to myself, petit bourgeoisely) – an embarrassing political miscalculation.</a>" Finally, this amazing, wrenching, hilarious piece by Jordana Rosenberg at Avidly: "Gender Trouble on Mother's Day." (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin for this gem.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-90230810432375947842014-04-27T06:43:00.000-07:002014-04-27T06:43:25.587-07:00Links for the week ending 27 April 2014"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/republicans-say-no-to-cdc-gun-violence-research">CDC's current funding for gun violence prevention research remains at $0.</a>" Lois Beckett on politically motivated suppression of basic research.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/us/looking-at-costs-and-risks-many-skip-health-insurance.html?ref=us&_r=0">A common thread running through stories of the unenrolled is cost. Many people either do not qualify for federal subsidies or believe that the assistance is not enough to make insurance affordable, interviews with consumers and experts suggested.</a>" At the NYT, Abby Goodnough continues her valuable series on the implementation of the ACA.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://projects.thestar.com/what-michael-stewart-did/">She waited for him to hang up. Then she smashed the receiver several times against the base of the phone. Then she went outside to face her friends. 'I guess my brother just killed my mom,' she said.</a>" Wrenching profile of an Ontario family trying to move on after one member's mental illness spiraled into violence. By Amy Dempsey at the Toronto Star. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/04/24/the-young-and-unmoored/">I’ve been reflecting lately on the young people who live in the world, unmoored. The ones who seem to be passing through and don’t have any expectations of staying for long.</a>" @prisonculture at her blog on a young man she knows who was recently shot.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/24/nigeria-abducted-girls-uniting-country-boko-haram">The 234 missing girls are not being seen as Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba; they are simply people's children.</a>" Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani at The Guardian on the response of ordinary Nigerians to the extremist kidnapping of students from a school in the northeast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/4/19/snap-crackle-hissthesoundofdemocracyinburundi.html">In Bujumbura, the sleepy capital on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the radio echoes from shops, bicycle taxis, police handsets and cell phones. Around midday and in the evenings, when the main stations do their news programs — most in French (the colonial tongue) and Kirundi (the indigenous language) — it can feel as though the city itself is emitting the broadcasts.</a>" Cora Currier reports from Burundi, where radio has been a major player in preserving a fragile peace after civil war. At Al Jazeera America.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://sociology.about.com/od/Sound-Bites-Research-In-the-News/fl/Study-Finds-Racial-and-Gender-Bias-in-Professor-Response-to-Students.htm">Also important, the emails sent to professors were sent by 'prospective students' interested in working with the professor in a graduate program. This is noteworthy because it means that women and racial minorities are discriminated against <i>before they even begin</i> the application process to graduate school.</a> Nicki Lisa Cole at About.com analyzes a recent study on racial and gender bias among professors. (Via @SocImages.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/04/race_and_the_supreme_court_what_the_schuette_decision_reveals_about_how.html">His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing.</a>" Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on the majority decision — and the dissent — in <i>Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action</i>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="">To be isolated from history in a hall of mirrors is heaven to a young person, and the bliss of this collective, amnesiac atemporality on some campuses extends way beyond spring break.</a>" Jia Tolentino, who teaches at the University of Michigan, at The Hairpin, writing about the <i>Schuette</i> decision.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://tressiemc.com/2014/04/23/another-post-about-hashtags-no-seriously/">Our resistance is corporate labor. Take the very structure of hashtags. If capitalism works on the principle of false scarcity, achieving trending status makes hashtags 'scarce.'</a>" Every sentence of this piece is diamond-sharp. Tressie McMillan Cottom and dude Robert Reece at her blog.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/message/7957d8e685c4">The impressive ad hoc capacity that can be focused via digital tools– and with the aid of trending topics and other social media affordances — allows citizens to carry out actions for which they would previously have needed to build powerful and robust social institutions. Such institutions could then do other things besides the specific actions of the moment for which the citizen-capacity came together.</a>" Zeynep Tufekci at Medium asking incisive questions about what social media does badly compared to traditional organizing.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/how-self-censorship-works-in-china/">It’s a specious notion that free trade will singularly usher in political reform, when in fact China’s economic might has buoyed censorship beyond its national borders. At the same time, no one should expect heroism from for-profit enterprises; and I have a hard time begrudging people who make their livelihood in China, including foreign journalists, for proceeding with caution.</a>" Nuanced piece about working under censorship, by Leslie Anne Jones at Aeon.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thebaffler.com/blog/2014/04/labor_politics_and_the_liberal_arts_nanny#.U1Quc2_EAJo.twitter">In today’s economy, it’s possible to insulate yourself from almost all embodied interactions with employees—Internet commerce, customer assistance live chat, and even self checkout at the grocery story provide a soothing buffer from class inequities. But you can’t mechanize the labor that takes care of your child—at least not yet—which is part of the reason that nanny politics, for lack of a better word, remain so fraught.</a>" Anne Helen Petersen at The Baffler from a couple of weeks ago, on her experiences as a "liberal arts nanny."<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thebillfold.com/2014/04/moving-to-cambodia-was-my-socialist-revolution-and-other-things-my-parents-taught-me-about-following-your-dreams/">And this is perhaps the biggest thing my parents have taught me, by example, which is always the best way for a parent to teach something: that you follow what you believe in and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t sit around whining. You find something else productive that you can feel good about. You contribute something.</a>" At The Billfold, Lauren Quinn on giving up her dream of writing a book.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2014/04/_women_you_should_be_reading_now_lists_mostly_telling_us_what_we_already.html">We shouldn’t be reading to check off boxes. We should be reading in a way that, when we look at what we’ve consumed, we recognize a diversity of perspectives and ways of seeing the world.</a>" Roxane Gay at Slate on "women you should be reading" lists.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.popsci.com/article/science/qa-what-feminist-biology">There are certain phrases that tip people off about gender bias. For example, if people do some kind of neuroscience study, let's say it's an MRI study with humans. These researchers will often say, 'This is a hardwired difference between males and females.' Well, if these are adults [who are being studied], it's not hardwired at all, right?</a>" At Popular Science, a Q & A with Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin on a new fellowship (er) in feminist biology.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/altered-states/why-we-love-repetition-in-music/">Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen.</a>" From last month at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on repetition as a fundamental part of how we hear music.<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Thoughts_on_Wikipedia_Editing_and_Digital_Labor#cite_ref-3">As Wikipedia moves forward, I hope to advocate for Wikipedia taking a keener interest in its labor practices as pertaining to digital volunteering. Most volunteers or unpaid interns sign a volunteer contract- are such contracts necessary for digital volunteering?</a>" Wikipedia editor Dorothy Howard muses on the implications of who performs the free encyclopedia's labor. (Via Karen Gregory.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/12/feedback/one-percenters-control-online-reviews">In a 2014 study that analyzed data from a private apparel retailer’s website, MIT’s Simester found that only about 1.5 percent of customers, or 15 out of 1,000, write reviews.</a>" Josephine Wolff at Nautilus on the unrepresentative nature — not to mention outright fraud — that limits the usefulness of online product and service reviews.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thebillfold.com/2014/04/gold-diggers-20051933/">In its simplest terms, gold-digging is trying to use someone else’s privilege for a leg up.</a>" Promising new column at The Billfold by a very young writer named Diana Clarke.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/04/virginia-woolf-darkness-embracing-the-inexplicable.html?mobify=0"><i>The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.</i> It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing—as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion.</a> Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf and accepting uncertainty. At The New Yorker. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://velamag.com/yo-soy-peru/">That people came to the Tambopata to see something—as I first wanted to see it—as pristine, virgin, untouched. The 'real' Peru. But as I spent more time in the ensconced fantasy that the research center seemed to be, the real Peru was out there, through the television, in the streets, in the mines.</a>" At Vela, Amanda Giracca complicates a volunteer stint at a Peruvian nature reserve.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/04/21/faith-and-anxiety/">If I think of anxiety as this entity separate from myself, a curse from a God who would test me, I become this divided person who is constantly trying to walk half of herself out the door.</a>" Lovely essay on faith and anxiety by Laura Turner at The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/04/consensual-comedy-an-interview-with-comedian-heather-gold/">Oy. Okay. So, the show is sort of a solo show. I call it an interactive baking comedy. I tell stories. There’s an emotional arc. I structured the stories around the baking process: DRY – WET – MIX – FORM – BAKE.</a>" Lili Loofbourow interviews comedian Heather Gold at The Hairpin.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/4/interpreting-physick-the-familiar-and-foreign-eighteenth-century-body">I want visitors to understand that our eighteenth-century forbears weren’t stupid. In the absence of key pieces of information—for examples, germ theory—they developed a model of the body, health, and healing that was fundamentally logical. Some treatments worked, and many didn’t, but there was a method to the apparent madness.</a>" This is so wonderful. Lindsay Keiter at The Appendix on what she teaches visitors to a Virginia living history museum's apothecary shop. (Bah, I don't have a record of where I got this link from. My apologies to whoever you are, and thank you!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/04/21/mother-stole-30000-got-stupid-sense-closure/">What kind of an asshole doesn’t talk to their own mother? Let me try to answer that.</a>" Finally, from Gabrielle Moss at The Toast, an excellent essay on being estranged from one's parent(s).<br />
<br />
I'm taking a vacation from the internets this coming week. I'll see you back here on 11 May. As always, thanks for reading!Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-24141029325444999152014-04-20T06:52:00.001-07:002014-04-20T07:01:07.742-07:00Links for the week ending 20 April 2014"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-full-text">The principal struggles to explain to students how the segregation they experience is any different from the old version simply because no law requires it. 'It is hard, it is a tough conversation, and it is a conversation I don’t think we as adults want to have.'</a>" This link is to the full-text version of Nicole Hannah-Jones' report for ProPublica on the resegregation of schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You can see the Snowfall-style full graphic version <a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-now-the-resegregation-of-americas-schools#intro">here</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/179252/why-are-black-students-facing-corporal-punishment-public-schools#">Even in Mississippi, where a higher percentage of students get physically disciplined than in any other state, the paddle is starting to lose some of its might. The number of beatings fell 33 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a report by the <i>Clarion-Ledger</i> newspaper in Jackson.</a>" Sarah Carr at The Nation. (Via Dana Goldstein.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://projects.timesfreepress.com/2013//12/15/speaknoevil/index.html">They all say they don’t really trust police or each other, that they are still trying to forgive the system and the shooter. They all say there is no justice here.</a>" Another multipart Snowfall-style series, this one on witness intimidation and suspicion of the cops in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By Joan Garrett McClane for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. (I can't remember how I got to this one, but if it was via you, thanks!)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/14/3425658/the-true-price-of-drug-free-zones/">But the zones have ballooned to include entire cities. They now hit almost any urban drug crime with an extra felony, one that was meant to punish dealing to school kids. Meanwhile, drug offenders in whiter, wealthier, spread-out suburbs and towns rarely face the same consequences. </a>" Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on the racial inequalities created by drug-free school zone laws.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/political-fix/missouri-considers-lifting-lifetime-food-stamp-ban-for-drug-felons/article_1c8dc38e-e970-5d36-be1b-f51dcae58624.html?utm_campaign=2014-04-09-Stateline%20Daily.html&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua">Missouri’s lifetime ban on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for people convicted of a drug-related felony is an artifact of the welfare reform effort of 1996. Most states have modified or removed the lifetime ban. Missouri is one of 10 states that have not.</a>" Marie French for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Via @prisonculture.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/debt-ridden/fa4c36eb306b">He is allowed to work up to 35 hours per week, but is usually assigned fewer, and he is never assigned enough to live on. If a worker gets 40 hours per week, he tells me, the manager could lose his bonus.</a>" Sarah Kendzior profiles fast-food workers in St. Louis, organizing to change working conditions that guarantee nothing but generations raised in poverty. At Medium. (Via David Hull.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-recovery-puzzle-a-new-factory-in-ohio-struggles-to-match-jobs-to-job-seekers/2014/04/05/098d53ec-b44e-11e3-8cb6-284052554d74_story.html">Bernie likes to think of his job as if he’s building a baseball team. He knows he’s got to fill so many slots with so many applicants, but there’s potentially some wiggle room in how he does that. Can the guy who applied for first base play right field instead? What about the pitcher?</a>" Fascinating piece by Monica Hesse at The Washington Post on staffing a newly planned Ohio factory.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-university-and-the-company-man">With fewer landing spots in the middle, the structure becomes less sound. This is the question buried in the rhetoric about the higher education crisis: what is college when there is no middle?</a>" Tressie McMillan Cottom at Dissent about how the end of good middle-class jobs has hollowed out the advantage of a college education.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/04/12/the-choice/">She lies because she thinks she has to, because of the legal document she signed during her fourth month at Bagram air base, after she sneaked over to the hospital and asked to see the person who handles sexual assaults, after a nurse took Polaroid photos of bruises on her neck and scratches on her back, collected swabs and hair samples and put them in a brown paper bag.</a>" Stephanie McCrummen for The Washington Post on the terrible choice given to soldiers who have suffered sexual assault.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/17/opinion/an-indecent-burial.html">Deregulating campaign finance is clearly part of his long-term project. In the course of his opinion, the chief justice made some moves that are worth highlighting for the way in which they illuminate both his method and his priorities.</a>" Linda Greenhouse on the Roberts Supreme Court, for the NYT. (Via Irin Carmon.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/turbotax-maker-linked-to-grassroots-campaign-against-free-simple-tax-filing">Both Intuit and CCIA declined to answer questions about their connections to the letters and op-eds. An Intuit spokeswoman, Julie Miller, said in an emailed statement that Intuit works with many types of groups to support 'taxpayer empowerment,' and 'we feel all points of view deserve to be heard.'</a>" Liz Day at ProPublica on the not-so-grassroots campaign against prefilled tax returns.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/the-u.s.-government-paying-to-undermine-internet-security-not-to-fix-it">The United States spends more than $50 billion a year on spying and intelligence, while the folks who build important defense software — in this case a program called OpenSSL that ensures that your connection to a website is encrypted — are four core programmers, only one of whom calls it a full-time job.</a>" Julia Angwin on the Heartbleed bug for ProPublica.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/14/4059006/911-defense-lawyers-accuse-fbi.html"> A military judge abruptly recessed the first 9/11 trial hearing of the year Monday after defense lawyers accused the FBI in open court of trying to turn a defense team security officer into a secret informant.</a>" Carol Rosenberg for the Miami Herald.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/world/middleeast/as-war-rages-in-syria-presidential-election-looms.html">From Homs to Damascus, even in landscapes of crushed and charred buildings, new posters of Mr. Assad are appearing, with an electioneering flavor.</a> Anne Barnard for the NYT on proposed presidential elections in Syria.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-stabbing-silence-20140419,0,1269379.story?page=1">For now though, no one is publicly questioning how and why the Kunming attackers organized the assault, why they chose that city, why authorities were unable to prevent it and why it took 10 minutes for an armed SWAT team officer to arrive on the scene and shoot five assailants.</a>" Julie Makinen at the LAT on suppression of discussion about the knife attacks at a Chinese railway station. (Via David Hull.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/04/15/301433547/after-25-years-of-amnesia-remembering-a-forgotten-tiananmen?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=share&utm_medium=twitter">Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city's smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that .</a>" At NPR, Louisa Lim writes about a single elderly woman determined to keep alive the memory of a massacre in the Chinese city of Chengdu that took place at the same time as the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/04/my-dad-and-the-cosmos.html">Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority.</a>" Sasha Sagan at New York Magazine on her father, Carl. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-methane-emissions-natural-gas-fracking-20140414,0,2417418.story">Drilling operations at several natural gas wells in southwestern Pennsylvania released methane into the atmosphere at rates that were 100 to 1,000 times greater than federal regulators had estimated, new research shows.</a>" Neela Benerjee at the LAT. (Via Kate Sheppard.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://www.quora.com/Menstruation/What-is-the-evolutionary-benefit-or-purpose-of-having-periods/answer/Suzanne-Sadedin?share=1">The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them.</a>" Pregnancy as war between the mother and the fetus, and the menstruation that evolved as a result, by Suzanne Sadedin at Quora. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/04/19/hobby-lobby-iuds-and-the-fac.html">The owners of Hobby Lobby believe that IUDs actually cause abortions. Birth control activists say IUDs never cause abortions, and work by preventing pregnancy, just like you’d expect birth control to do. Who is right?</a>" Nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing explaining the facts and the ambiguities about IUDs. (Hat tip to Rebecca Jeschke.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/04/16/saved_by_obamacare/">So, from 2001 until February of this year, I spent at least $60,000 in health insurance and associated medical costs (routine doctor’s visits, medication and the like) that were not covered by insurance. One could counter that my insurance premiums bought me peace of mind — but not with a $15,000 deductible for myself and my children.</a>" Writer Elizabeth Hand singing the praises of her new, affordable insurance. At Salon. (Via @rsp1661.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.guernicamag.com/features/the-chemistry-of-an-echo/">She is talking these girls back from a place where Cobain’s suicide appears reasonable, justifiable, attractive. She is showing them the other side of suicide: the aftermath. She <i>is</i> the aftermath.</a>" From two weeks ago at Guernica, Candace Opper on Kurt Cobain's suicide — and the way it changed how we talked about suicide prevention. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://nplusonemag.com/seventh-day">You die the way you live; you divorce the way you live. When, in 1990, my parents filed for joint custody of me, they thought they were doing something without clear precedent.</a>" At n+1, Claire Harlan Orsi on growing up in between two homes. (Via Mara Smith.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://theholenearthecenteroftheworld.com/">A lot of young people are rescued by art. And comics and cartoons, because they are so abstracted—a pure art form that is only very loosely tethered to the so-called real world—are maybe particularly useful for that.</a>" I gotta be honest and say that I am not entirely sure what this <i>is</i>, but it's by Maria Bustillos and it's published by The Awl and it's making me think that maybe the Cartoon Network went on to do worthwhile things even after the demise of my dearly beloved <i>Space Ghost: Coast to Coast</i>. <br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thehairpin.com/2014/04/on-the-eagle-huntress">Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren't eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave.</a>" Ah, Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin saying more in two paragraphs than most of us will ever say in our entire lives.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2014/04/is-it-work/">Do we have kitten posters hanging above our desks? If we do, who can say that we do not work in an office?</a>" Finally, because anything containing an Elizabeth Bishop joke automatically wins the week, Patricia Lockwood at The Poetry Foundation asking: is poetry work? (Via Stephen Burt.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5432904796318228615.post-92033881241785314912014-04-13T07:03:00.001-07:002014-04-13T07:03:11.527-07:00Links for the week ending 13 April 2014<a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/04/10/un_approves_central_african_republic_peacekeeping_mission.html">You could see the fear in the faces of the families who watched our plane land and those of people in the streets.</a>" In a week filled with stories about the 20th anniversary of genocide in Rwanda, this piece from Michelle Shephard at the Toronto Star from the convulsing Central African Republic is deeply sobering.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/jinamoore/rwandas-keeper-of-the-dead">'I hid like a chicken with my head under the grass,' she remembers. 'It was important not to see the awful things that were happening. If you can die anytime, it’s better not to see.'</a>" Very moving story by Jina Moore at BuzzFeed about a memorial to Rwanda's dead, and the survivors who maintain it.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/world/middleeast/surge-of-violence-across-syria-kills-over-two-dozen.html">And in an indication of the divisions the blockade and amnesties have sown, one former insurgent said the bombing had been planned by one group of fighters to kill others.</a>" Anne Barnard at the NYT with reports of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/08/world/middleeast/dutch-priest-shot-to-death-in-syrian-city-homs.html?smid=tw-share">violence</a> in the devastated Syrian city of Homs and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/middleeast/break-in-syrian-war-brings-brittle-calm.html?smid=tw-share">elsewhere</a>.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/11/4052332/cias-use-of-harsh-interrogation.html">The Senate report, however, concluded that the Justice Department’s legal analyses were based on flawed information provided by the CIA, which prevented a proper evaluation of the program’s legality.</a>" Ali Watkins, dude Jonathan S. Landay, and Marisa Taylor for McClatchy on reputed findings of a still-classified report on the CIA's use of torture. At the Miami Herald. (Via Carol Rosenberg.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2014/04/07/on-police-torture-bearing-witness-and-saving-ourselves/">I look around and there are so few of us here; black people, I mean. And maybe that’s as it should be because this is not our crime even though we were its victims. We already know that our lives matter, that black lives matter. It’s the rest of the world that needs to understand and internalize this truth.</a>" @prisonculture writes about a protest against police torture in Chicago.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/4/9/5575006/2-million-immigrants-have-been-deported-under-obama">This 'border' is not what most people think of as the border. The government's definition of 'border' stretches 100 miles from the actual border</a>." Smart explainer on the Obama administration and deportations, by Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Liliana Segura.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/04/10/3425252/new-rule-prohibits-voters-in-miami-dade-county-from-using-the-restroom-no-matter-how-long-the-line/">During the 2012 presidential election, voters reportedly waited on line for upwards of six hours. That wait alone is enough to deter would-be voters from going to the polls. But now residents in Florida’s most populous county will have another disincentive: they won’t be able to go to the bathroom.</a>" Seriously, WHAT? By Nicole Flatow at ThinkProgress. (Via Isabel Wilkerson.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/world/asia/top-indian-candidate-believed-a-bachelor-admits-to-being-married.html?ref=ellenbarry">Mr. Modi revised his official biography on Wednesday, when he noted on an election registry that he is, in fact, married.</a>" At the NYT, Ellen Barry's wry coverage of India's ongoing national elections.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/4/9/5557696/forget-obamacare-vermont-wants-to-bring-single-payer-to-america">He hasn’t found a better term that describes what he wants to bring to Vermont: a system where a single entity (the state) pays for everyone’s health care. And he doesn’t care to spend much time thinking up a better description.</a>" At Vox, Sarah Kliff profiles Vermont's pursuit of a single-payer health care system.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/11/cities-solution-climate-change-ipcc">Even in America, where Republican governors and members of Congress deny the existence or have rolled back action on climate change, cities are moving ahead.</a>" Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian on local communities leading the way on climate change.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/10/sally-jewell-interior_n_5120424.html?1397181612">'People expect us to do things for the long term,' she explained. 'This is the longest-term focused job that I've had, and yet it's the shortest-term focused budget that I've ever operated under. That makes no sense.'</a>" Kate Sheppard profile Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell at the Huffington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/before-relisha-rudd-went-missing-the-8-year-old-longed-to-escape-dcs-homeless-shelter/2014/04/05/e21a020a-bc19-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html">'Who failed Relisha?' said Shannon Smith, the cheerleading coach who looked after her. 'I believe everybody failed that girl. The school, the system, the doctors, the police and everybody else that should have had something to do with her.'</a> Heartbreaking, in-depth story about the disappearance (and presumed murder) of 8-year-old Relisha Rudd, by Theresa Vargas, Emma Brown, Lynh Bui, and dude Peter Hermann. At The Washington Post.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2014/04/anger_causes_violence_treat_it_rather_than_mental_illness_to_stop_mass_murder.html">She explained that the voices were telling her not to hurt the man, but he had gotten in the express checkout lane with more than 10 items, and that made her so mad that she couldn’t stop herself.</a>" Laura L. Hayes at Slate making the argument that we should be worried not about mental illness and violence but about anger and violence. (Via Jody T.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2014/04/09/love-and-fire/">The corn was harvested, and the field was a dirty sort of brown. Deborah Clark would think about that later, how at a different time of year she wouldn’t have seen anything until it was too late.</a>" Knock-out work by Monica Hesse and photographer Bonnie Jo Mount, on arson in one rural Virginia county. At The Washington Post. (Via Gwen Ifill.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/09/parenting-the-non-girlie-girl/?_php=true&_type=blogs&smid=tw-share&_r=0">'Are you Cinderella?' I asked, loathing myself for hoping she’d say yes. 'No,' she said, rolling her eyes. 'I’m the prince dancing with Cinderella.'</a>"This essay by Hana Schank at the NYT captures exactly the thought-process behind every minute of parenting children through the fluidity of the preschool years, whatever the issue that one is trying to theorize one's way through!<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/04/10/new-candor/">What is it that compels one woman to explore the work and personality of another, often with centuries between us—and what are we trying to say?</a>" Thoughtful piece by Diane Mehta at the Paris Review taking recent biographies by Rebecca Mead (on George Eliot) and Jill Lepore (on Jane Franklin) as its topic.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2014/04/if-you-love-street-photography-new-documentary-must-see/8818/">A picture emerges of a strange and lonely woman, emotionally intelligent yet forever apart from the common human life she observed so keenly.</a>" Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic reviewing the new documentary film about street photographer Vivian Mayer.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.pressherald.com/life/How_a_movement_took_root__Over_60_some_years__Maine_s_farm-to-table_and_sea-to-table_ethos_has_grown_up__Today__local_food_is_everywhere_you_turn__.html?pagenum=full">If Maine’s landscape had been more inviting, it might have been turned into endless acres of soybeans or corn – one of Maine’s early, most profitable crops at the turn of the 19th century. 'In a way it’s the poor nature of northern New England which is an enabler for this new agriculture,' said Johnston, the founder of Johnny’s Selected Seeds.</a>" At the Portland Press Herald, Meredith Goad and Mary Pohls take a long look at how one state became a regional center of the locavore movement. (Via Michaela Cavallaro.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://eater.com/archives/2014/04/10/dispatches-from-dirt-candy-smoke-and-mirrors.php">I'm constantly being asked where I 'source' my produce. What does that even mean? I get my vegetables from the exact same place almost every other chef in the city gets them: in a box, off a truck. </a>" Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun. NYC chef Amanda Cohen has a new column in Eater. (Via Martha Bayne.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="https://medium.com/the-archipelago/3e4406f2a0fd">But I understood, because it was clear as day that this was my doing. I had abandoned my block, my home, to the transplants looking for the next cool thing, and because Sapporo East didn’t have my $13 check every two weeks or so they were forced to close.</a>" Sweet, tongue-in-cheek essay by Jaya Saxena at Medium about moving on from Manhattan. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.cosmopolitan.com/advice/tips/invisible-queer-femme">What would be great, I think, is if I could hire some kind of old-timey town crier to precede me into any room I enter, shouting 'Lesbian coming! Lesbian coming this way!' and possibly ringing some kind of bell.</a>" Lindsay King-Miller at Cosmopolitan on the particular invisibility of a femme lesbian.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/04/09/297314946/kima-jones-on-black-bodies-and-being-a-black-woman-who-writes?utm_campaign=storyshare&utm_source=share&utm_medium=twitter">It's imperative that we create the art that we want to see in the world, and that we write the future that we want. I mean, being realistic, right? Because you know certain things won't happen — but the first point of writing the future that I want is putting people of color in the damn future.</a>" NPR interview by dude Jairo Ramos with poet Kima Jones. (Via Roxanne Gay.)<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/04/the-feisty-feminism-of-girls-just-want-to-have-fun-30-years-later/359834/">'For a minute, I made it popular to be the odd guy out,' Lauper said. 'All of the sudden, the straight guy was the odd guy out, just for a minute—and that, to me, was justice.'</a>" This wasn't the first album I ever bought (right, <i>Thriller</i>), but it was damn close to it: Emma Green at The Atlantic looks back 30 years later at Cyndi Lauper's hit single, "Girls Just Want to Have Fun."<br />
<br />
Kate Beaton's multi-part comic, "<a href="http://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketch-comic-i-made-called-ducks-in">Ducks</a>." So good.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://the-toast.net/2014/04/07/dirtbag-little-women/">AMY: CHRIST I’M DROWNING<br />
JO: let me know if you see my manuscript down there</a>"<br />
Mallory Ortberg's Dirtbag series: even better than Texts From? Discuss. At The Toast.<br />
<br />
"<a href="http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/condors-bred-in-captivity-need-our-tough-love/">Puppet-rearing takes our love of captive breeding to the extreme by satisfying two guilt-absolving fantasies at once: it lets us play at being nature’s saviour while also symbolically erasing human beings from the face of the Earth.</a>" Finally, a.ma.zing essay by Lizzie Wade at Aeon about raising condors… and being human. (Via Nicole Cliffe.)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com