"CDC's current funding for gun violence prevention research remains at $0." Lois Beckett on politically motivated suppression of basic research.
"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." At the NYT, Abby Goodnough continues her valuable series on the implementation of the ACA.
"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." 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.)
"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." @prisonculture at her blog on a young man she knows who was recently shot.
"The 234 missing girls are not being seen as Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba; they are simply people's children." Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani at The Guardian on the response of ordinary Nigerians to the extremist kidnapping of students from a school in the northeast.
"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." Cora Currier reports from Burundi, where radio has been a major player in preserving a fragile peace after civil war. At Al Jazeera America.
"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 before they even begin the application process to graduate school. Nicki Lisa Cole at About.com analyzes a recent study on racial and gender bias among professors. (Via @SocImages.)
"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." Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on the majority decision — and the dissent — in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
"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." Jia Tolentino, who teaches at the University of Michigan, at The Hairpin, writing about the Schuette decision.
"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.'" Every sentence of this piece is diamond-sharp. Tressie McMillan Cottom and dude Robert Reece at her blog.
"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." Zeynep Tufekci at Medium asking incisive questions about what social media does badly compared to traditional organizing.
"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." Nuanced piece about working under censorship, by Leslie Anne Jones at Aeon.
"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." Anne Helen Petersen at The Baffler from a couple of weeks ago, on her experiences as a "liberal arts nanny."
"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." At The Billfold, Lauren Quinn on giving up her dream of writing a book.
"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." Roxane Gay at Slate on "women you should be reading" lists.
"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?" At Popular Science, a Q & A with Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin on a new fellowship (er) in feminist biology.
"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." From last month at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on repetition as a fundamental part of how we hear music.
"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?" Wikipedia editor Dorothy Howard muses on the implications of who performs the free encyclopedia's labor. (Via Karen Gregory.)
"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." Josephine Wolff at Nautilus on the unrepresentative nature — not to mention outright fraud — that limits the usefulness of online product and service reviews.
"In its simplest terms, gold-digging is trying to use someone else’s privilege for a leg up." Promising new column at The Billfold by a very young writer named Diana Clarke.
"The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. 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. Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf and accepting uncertainty. At The New Yorker. (Via Jody T.)
"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." At Vela, Amanda Giracca complicates a volunteer stint at a Peruvian nature reserve.
"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." Lovely essay on faith and anxiety by Laura Turner at The Toast.
"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." Lili Loofbourow interviews comedian Heather Gold at The Hairpin.
"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." 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!)
"What kind of an asshole doesn’t talk to their own mother? Let me try to answer that." Finally, from Gabrielle Moss at The Toast, an excellent essay on being estranged from one's parent(s).
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!
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Links for the week ending 20 April 2014
"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.'" 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 here.
"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 Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson." Sarah Carr at The Nation. (Via Dana Goldstein.)
"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." 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!)
"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. " Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on the racial inequalities created by drug-free school zone laws.
"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." Marie French for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Via @prisonculture.)
"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." 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.)
"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?" Fascinating piece by Monica Hesse at The Washington Post on staffing a newly planned Ohio factory.
"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?" Tressie McMillan Cottom at Dissent about how the end of good middle-class jobs has hollowed out the advantage of a college education.
"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." Stephanie McCrummen for The Washington Post on the terrible choice given to soldiers who have suffered sexual assault.
"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." Linda Greenhouse on the Roberts Supreme Court, for the NYT. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"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.'" Liz Day at ProPublica on the not-so-grassroots campaign against prefilled tax returns.
"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." Julia Angwin on the Heartbleed bug for ProPublica.
" 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." Carol Rosenberg for the Miami Herald.
"From Homs to Damascus, even in landscapes of crushed and charred buildings, new posters of Mr. Assad are appearing, with an electioneering flavor. Anne Barnard for the NYT on proposed presidential elections in Syria.
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." Julie Makinen at the LAT on suppression of discussion about the knife attacks at a Chinese railway station. (Via David Hull.)
"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 ." 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.
"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." Sasha Sagan at New York Magazine on her father, Carl. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"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." Neela Benerjee at the LAT. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"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." 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.)
"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?" Nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing explaining the facts and the ambiguities about IUDs. (Hat tip to Rebecca Jeschke.)
"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." Writer Elizabeth Hand singing the praises of her new, affordable insurance. At Salon. (Via @rsp1661.)
"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 is the aftermath." 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.)
"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." At n+1, Claire Harlan Orsi on growing up in between two homes. (Via Mara Smith.)
"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." I gotta be honest and say that I am not entirely sure what this is, 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 Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
"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." Ah, Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin saying more in two paragraphs than most of us will ever say in our entire lives.
"Do we have kitten posters hanging above our desks? If we do, who can say that we do not work in an office?" 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.)
"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 Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson." Sarah Carr at The Nation. (Via Dana Goldstein.)
"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." 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!)
"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. " Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on the racial inequalities created by drug-free school zone laws.
"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." Marie French for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Via @prisonculture.)
"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." 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.)
"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?" Fascinating piece by Monica Hesse at The Washington Post on staffing a newly planned Ohio factory.
"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?" Tressie McMillan Cottom at Dissent about how the end of good middle-class jobs has hollowed out the advantage of a college education.
"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." Stephanie McCrummen for The Washington Post on the terrible choice given to soldiers who have suffered sexual assault.
"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." Linda Greenhouse on the Roberts Supreme Court, for the NYT. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"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.'" Liz Day at ProPublica on the not-so-grassroots campaign against prefilled tax returns.
"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." Julia Angwin on the Heartbleed bug for ProPublica.
" 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." Carol Rosenberg for the Miami Herald.
"From Homs to Damascus, even in landscapes of crushed and charred buildings, new posters of Mr. Assad are appearing, with an electioneering flavor. Anne Barnard for the NYT on proposed presidential elections in Syria.
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." Julie Makinen at the LAT on suppression of discussion about the knife attacks at a Chinese railway station. (Via David Hull.)
"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 ." 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.
"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." Sasha Sagan at New York Magazine on her father, Carl. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"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." Neela Benerjee at the LAT. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"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." 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.)
"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?" Nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing explaining the facts and the ambiguities about IUDs. (Hat tip to Rebecca Jeschke.)
"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." Writer Elizabeth Hand singing the praises of her new, affordable insurance. At Salon. (Via @rsp1661.)
"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 is the aftermath." 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.)
"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." At n+1, Claire Harlan Orsi on growing up in between two homes. (Via Mara Smith.)
"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." I gotta be honest and say that I am not entirely sure what this is, 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 Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
"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." Ah, Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin saying more in two paragraphs than most of us will ever say in our entire lives.
"Do we have kitten posters hanging above our desks? If we do, who can say that we do not work in an office?" 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.)
Sunday, April 13, 2014
Links for the week ending 13 April 2014
You could see the fear in the faces of the families who watched our plane land and those of people in the streets." 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.
"'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.'" Very moving story by Jina Moore at BuzzFeed about a memorial to Rwanda's dead, and the survivors who maintain it.
"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." Anne Barnard at the NYT with reports of violence in the devastated Syrian city of Homs and elsewhere.
"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." 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.)
"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." @prisonculture writes about a protest against police torture in Chicago.
"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." Smart explainer on the Obama administration and deportations, by Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Liliana Segura.)
"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." Seriously, WHAT? By Nicole Flatow at ThinkProgress. (Via Isabel Wilkerson.)
"Mr. Modi revised his official biography on Wednesday, when he noted on an election registry that he is, in fact, married." At the NYT, Ellen Barry's wry coverage of India's ongoing national elections.
"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." At Vox, Sarah Kliff profiles Vermont's pursuit of a single-payer health care system.
"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." Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian on local communities leading the way on climate change.
"'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.'" Kate Sheppard profile Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell at the Huffington Post.
"'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.' 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.
"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." 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.)
"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." 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.)
"'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.'"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!
"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?" 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.
"A picture emerges of a strange and lonely woman, emotionally intelligent yet forever apart from the common human life she observed so keenly." Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic reviewing the new documentary film about street photographer Vivian Mayer.
"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." 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.)
"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. " Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun. NYC chef Amanda Cohen has a new column in Eater. (Via Martha Bayne.)
"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." Sweet, tongue-in-cheek essay by Jaya Saxena at Medium about moving on from Manhattan. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"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." Lindsay King-Miller at Cosmopolitan on the particular invisibility of a femme lesbian.
"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." NPR interview by dude Jairo Ramos with poet Kima Jones. (Via Roxanne Gay.)
"'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.'" This wasn't the first album I ever bought (right, Thriller), 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."
Kate Beaton's multi-part comic, "Ducks." So good.
"AMY: CHRIST I’M DROWNING
JO: let me know if you see my manuscript down there"
Mallory Ortberg's Dirtbag series: even better than Texts From? Discuss. At The Toast.
"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." Finally, a.ma.zing essay by Lizzie Wade at Aeon about raising condors… and being human. (Via Nicole Cliffe.)
"'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.'" Very moving story by Jina Moore at BuzzFeed about a memorial to Rwanda's dead, and the survivors who maintain it.
"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." Anne Barnard at the NYT with reports of violence in the devastated Syrian city of Homs and elsewhere.
"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." 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.)
"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." @prisonculture writes about a protest against police torture in Chicago.
"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." Smart explainer on the Obama administration and deportations, by Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Liliana Segura.)
"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." Seriously, WHAT? By Nicole Flatow at ThinkProgress. (Via Isabel Wilkerson.)
"Mr. Modi revised his official biography on Wednesday, when he noted on an election registry that he is, in fact, married." At the NYT, Ellen Barry's wry coverage of India's ongoing national elections.
"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." At Vox, Sarah Kliff profiles Vermont's pursuit of a single-payer health care system.
"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." Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian on local communities leading the way on climate change.
"'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.'" Kate Sheppard profile Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell at the Huffington Post.
"'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.' 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.
"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." 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.)
"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." 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.)
"'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.'"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!
"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?" 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.
"A picture emerges of a strange and lonely woman, emotionally intelligent yet forever apart from the common human life she observed so keenly." Sarah Goodyear at The Atlantic reviewing the new documentary film about street photographer Vivian Mayer.
"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." 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.)
"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. " Oh, boy, this is gonna be fun. NYC chef Amanda Cohen has a new column in Eater. (Via Martha Bayne.)
"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." Sweet, tongue-in-cheek essay by Jaya Saxena at Medium about moving on from Manhattan. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"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." Lindsay King-Miller at Cosmopolitan on the particular invisibility of a femme lesbian.
"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." NPR interview by dude Jairo Ramos with poet Kima Jones. (Via Roxanne Gay.)
"'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.'" This wasn't the first album I ever bought (right, Thriller), 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."
Kate Beaton's multi-part comic, "Ducks." So good.
"AMY: CHRIST I’M DROWNING
JO: let me know if you see my manuscript down there"
Mallory Ortberg's Dirtbag series: even better than Texts From? Discuss. At The Toast.
"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." Finally, a.ma.zing essay by Lizzie Wade at Aeon about raising condors… and being human. (Via Nicole Cliffe.)
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Links for the week ending 6 April 2014
"The overriding lesson of this report, the scientists said, was that unless governments acted now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adopt measures to protect their people, nobody would be immune to climate change." Suzanne Goldenberg covered the U.N. climate science report for The Guardian. If you read these pieces, you have my permission to spend the rest of the day in bed with the covers over your head and your fingers in your ears while you sing LA LA LA LA LA to yourself. Because we are way not saving the world by talking about this on social media.
"LAN says, due to the state's failure to properly advertise the programs—specifically to lower income communities—that there were only 849 Latino applicants and 878 African American applicants to the Resettlement Program, compared to nearly 18,000 Caucasian applicants." Queen Muse at NBC 10 Philadelphia on glaring inequities in the distribution of Sandy relief funds in New Jersey. (Via Nikole Hannah-Jones.)
"But there can be moments that throw him. Recently, a shopper at the food pantry took an item off a shelf and told Moore, 'I put this on the shelf, too.' The shopper was a Walmart worker." From Part 3 of Krissy Clark's series (Part 1, Part 2) at Marketplace called "The Secret Life of a Food Stamp." (Via Lizzie O'Leary.)
"Since the beginning of the downturn, about 50% of those who were short-term unemployed at any given time were found to be working a year later. But only about 15% were at steady full time jobs," writes Suzy Khimm at MSNBC.
"For four weeks this winter, spread out over a six-week period to avoid the holidays, I hustled for work in the gig economy. Technically I was undercover, but I used my real name and background, and whenever asked, I readily shared that I was a journalist." At Fast Company, Sarah Kessler tries to make minimum wage by participating in the "future of work." Prosperity does not ensue. (Via Susie Cagle.)
"Newly insured patients have flooded Family Health Centers with requests for referrals; its largest clinic, in Louisville’s impoverished West End, had a backlog of several hundred requests in mid-March and was hiring temporary workers to help patients arrange appointments." At the NYT, Abby Goodnough reports on how the Affordable Care Act is already changing the health care landscape in Louisville, Kentucky. (Via Jennifer Steinhauer.)
"So the problem is that even Nazis are treated better than rich people—less constrained by public anger in their ability to speak out." Amy Davidson at The New Yorker on this week's Supreme Court decision removing aggregate limits on any individual's campaign donations to multiple candidates. For a more detailed analysis of the decision, Amy Howe has you covered at SCOTUSblog.
"The political world watched the 80-year-old Adelson zip in and out of the sessions on his motorized scooter, observing closely for signs of his favor." Molly Ball at The Atlantic reports from "The Sheldon Adelson Suck-Up Fest" for potential Republican presidential candidates.
"Across the country, immigrant-rights advocates report mounting disillusionment with both parties among Latinos, enough to threaten recent gains in voting participation that have reshaped politics to Democrats’ advantage nationally, and in states like Colorado with significant Latino populations." Jackie Calmes for the NYT.
"AP PHOTOS: Afghan women lawmakers fight for rights." The last piece filed by AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus before being murdered by a gunman while covering Afghan elections this week. (Via Anne Bernard.) You can see more of her work in this 40-photo collection that ran at The Atlantic last November. (Via Michelle Shephard.)
"I landed in Afghanistan in the wake of these brutal, merciless massacres, knowing the goal posts had changed—no one was off limits to the Taliban." Photographer Lynsey Addario at Time, who ends her essay on a surprising note of hope. (Via Tara Todras-Whitehill.)
"The absence of our likeness accurately rendered in photographs is one more piece of the construct of white supremacy. Film stocks that can’t show us accurately help to control the narrative around appearance, and shapes our reality and the value of our lives in American society." At BuzzFeed, Syreeta McFadden reflects on the racism baked into decades of photographic technology.
"The promotion of competition and conflict along gender lines shifts attention away from harmful public policies to the wrongs committed by individual members of the 'opposite sex.'" Sociologist Susan Sered argues at Salon that "gender-based violence is reinforced by economic policies and welfare laws that pit women and men against one another." (Via @prisonculture.)
"It makes me impatient — and yeah, I acknowledge my culpability in this — how often we choose to focus on the deliciously scary but conveniently far-away, rather than the diseases we could do something about." At Wired, Maryn McKenna does not think you should freak out about hemorrhagic fevers, though if you wanna freak out about multidrug-resistant TB, she's cool with that.
"The poor man's life was nasty, brutish and short, but his afterlife is long and illuminating." Jill Lawless for the AP on what researchers are learning from a London burial ground for victims of the Black Death. (Via Jody T.)
"More than 60 per cent of the world, and fully 99 per cent of the US and Europe, lives under a yellowy sky polluted with light. For many of us, the only place to see the milky backbone of our own galaxy is on the ceiling of a planetarium." Rebecca Boyle at Aeon on light pollution. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Over a million records telling the tale of nearly a century of North American bird migrations have been rescued from obscurity and transcribed by an international network of more than 2,000 volunteers, making the records available for the first time online for use by researchers and the public." Hannah Hamilton and Jessica Zelt for the USGS on the building of an archival database that provides clues to climate change. People who do this sort of thing in their free time are my nominees for Most Awesome People.
"An analysis showed that among both boys and girls, if a student was is in the middle of the school social hierarchy — the 50th percentile — and moved up the social ladder to the 95th percentile, the likelihood that he or she would be victimized by his or her peers increased by more than 25%." Michelle Healy at USA Today gives you good reasons to be grateful for your relative social insignificance when you were a teenager. (Via Yamiche Alcindor.)
"Unlike other members of the first family, she moves about without Secret Service detail. If she is recognized, the president has said she just demurs, saying she gets that a lot." Krissah Thompson and Juliet Eilperin for The Washington Post on the First Grandma, Marian Robinson. (Via Amy Davidson.)
"You might not believe that your institutional doppelgänger works against you, but it does not seem like a stretch to argue that the sum of your activity as a consumer—your social-media posts, credit history, the freakishly accurate profile advertisers have of you—is its own creature, and can move about independently of you." Carmen Maria Machado on the automated afterlife of a Michigan woman. At The New Yorker.
"Slothified (adj.)
1. Overwhelmed by sloths
2. Overwhelmed by sloth - so tired after catching sloths all day that you don't want to get out of bed
3. Overwhelmed by the cuteness of sloths (baby sloths in particular)
4. Overwhelmed by sloth lovers"
You may become slothified after reading this story by Vibeke Vendama at the BBC. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
"This is the house that Jack built.
Let us dismantle Jack’s house with Jack’s tools"
More misandrist lullabies by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
"LAN says, due to the state's failure to properly advertise the programs—specifically to lower income communities—that there were only 849 Latino applicants and 878 African American applicants to the Resettlement Program, compared to nearly 18,000 Caucasian applicants." Queen Muse at NBC 10 Philadelphia on glaring inequities in the distribution of Sandy relief funds in New Jersey. (Via Nikole Hannah-Jones.)
"But there can be moments that throw him. Recently, a shopper at the food pantry took an item off a shelf and told Moore, 'I put this on the shelf, too.' The shopper was a Walmart worker." From Part 3 of Krissy Clark's series (Part 1, Part 2) at Marketplace called "The Secret Life of a Food Stamp." (Via Lizzie O'Leary.)
"Since the beginning of the downturn, about 50% of those who were short-term unemployed at any given time were found to be working a year later. But only about 15% were at steady full time jobs," writes Suzy Khimm at MSNBC.
"For four weeks this winter, spread out over a six-week period to avoid the holidays, I hustled for work in the gig economy. Technically I was undercover, but I used my real name and background, and whenever asked, I readily shared that I was a journalist." At Fast Company, Sarah Kessler tries to make minimum wage by participating in the "future of work." Prosperity does not ensue. (Via Susie Cagle.)
"Newly insured patients have flooded Family Health Centers with requests for referrals; its largest clinic, in Louisville’s impoverished West End, had a backlog of several hundred requests in mid-March and was hiring temporary workers to help patients arrange appointments." At the NYT, Abby Goodnough reports on how the Affordable Care Act is already changing the health care landscape in Louisville, Kentucky. (Via Jennifer Steinhauer.)
"So the problem is that even Nazis are treated better than rich people—less constrained by public anger in their ability to speak out." Amy Davidson at The New Yorker on this week's Supreme Court decision removing aggregate limits on any individual's campaign donations to multiple candidates. For a more detailed analysis of the decision, Amy Howe has you covered at SCOTUSblog.
"The political world watched the 80-year-old Adelson zip in and out of the sessions on his motorized scooter, observing closely for signs of his favor." Molly Ball at The Atlantic reports from "The Sheldon Adelson Suck-Up Fest" for potential Republican presidential candidates.
"Across the country, immigrant-rights advocates report mounting disillusionment with both parties among Latinos, enough to threaten recent gains in voting participation that have reshaped politics to Democrats’ advantage nationally, and in states like Colorado with significant Latino populations." Jackie Calmes for the NYT.
"AP PHOTOS: Afghan women lawmakers fight for rights." The last piece filed by AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus before being murdered by a gunman while covering Afghan elections this week. (Via Anne Bernard.) You can see more of her work in this 40-photo collection that ran at The Atlantic last November. (Via Michelle Shephard.)
"I landed in Afghanistan in the wake of these brutal, merciless massacres, knowing the goal posts had changed—no one was off limits to the Taliban." Photographer Lynsey Addario at Time, who ends her essay on a surprising note of hope. (Via Tara Todras-Whitehill.)
"The absence of our likeness accurately rendered in photographs is one more piece of the construct of white supremacy. Film stocks that can’t show us accurately help to control the narrative around appearance, and shapes our reality and the value of our lives in American society." At BuzzFeed, Syreeta McFadden reflects on the racism baked into decades of photographic technology.
"The promotion of competition and conflict along gender lines shifts attention away from harmful public policies to the wrongs committed by individual members of the 'opposite sex.'" Sociologist Susan Sered argues at Salon that "gender-based violence is reinforced by economic policies and welfare laws that pit women and men against one another." (Via @prisonculture.)
"It makes me impatient — and yeah, I acknowledge my culpability in this — how often we choose to focus on the deliciously scary but conveniently far-away, rather than the diseases we could do something about." At Wired, Maryn McKenna does not think you should freak out about hemorrhagic fevers, though if you wanna freak out about multidrug-resistant TB, she's cool with that.
"The poor man's life was nasty, brutish and short, but his afterlife is long and illuminating." Jill Lawless for the AP on what researchers are learning from a London burial ground for victims of the Black Death. (Via Jody T.)
"More than 60 per cent of the world, and fully 99 per cent of the US and Europe, lives under a yellowy sky polluted with light. For many of us, the only place to see the milky backbone of our own galaxy is on the ceiling of a planetarium." Rebecca Boyle at Aeon on light pollution. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Over a million records telling the tale of nearly a century of North American bird migrations have been rescued from obscurity and transcribed by an international network of more than 2,000 volunteers, making the records available for the first time online for use by researchers and the public." Hannah Hamilton and Jessica Zelt for the USGS on the building of an archival database that provides clues to climate change. People who do this sort of thing in their free time are my nominees for Most Awesome People.
"An analysis showed that among both boys and girls, if a student was is in the middle of the school social hierarchy — the 50th percentile — and moved up the social ladder to the 95th percentile, the likelihood that he or she would be victimized by his or her peers increased by more than 25%." Michelle Healy at USA Today gives you good reasons to be grateful for your relative social insignificance when you were a teenager. (Via Yamiche Alcindor.)
"Unlike other members of the first family, she moves about without Secret Service detail. If she is recognized, the president has said she just demurs, saying she gets that a lot." Krissah Thompson and Juliet Eilperin for The Washington Post on the First Grandma, Marian Robinson. (Via Amy Davidson.)
"You might not believe that your institutional doppelgänger works against you, but it does not seem like a stretch to argue that the sum of your activity as a consumer—your social-media posts, credit history, the freakishly accurate profile advertisers have of you—is its own creature, and can move about independently of you." Carmen Maria Machado on the automated afterlife of a Michigan woman. At The New Yorker.
"Slothified (adj.)
1. Overwhelmed by sloths
2. Overwhelmed by sloth - so tired after catching sloths all day that you don't want to get out of bed
3. Overwhelmed by the cuteness of sloths (baby sloths in particular)
4. Overwhelmed by sloth lovers"
You may become slothified after reading this story by Vibeke Vendama at the BBC. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
"This is the house that Jack built.
Let us dismantle Jack’s house with Jack’s tools"
More misandrist lullabies by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Links for the week ending 30 March 2014
"The account by Mr Salam intimately details, for the first time, how at the beginning of the uprising in 2011 the Syrian leadership decided to create a paramilitary force - secretly commanded by them - that could attack anti-government protesters." Salwa Amor and Ruth Sherlock at The Daily Telegraph.
"'No way that he can rule Syria,' says Hadian, referring to the Syrian president. Hadian insists this is a position with widespread support among Iranians, but, he says, 'there are powerful groups who would think otherwise.'" Deborah Amos reports for NPR on the prospects for continued Iranian support of the Syrian government.
"An Egyptian court has sentenced 529 people to death in the largest capital punishment case on record in Egypt, judicial authorities said Monday." Abigail Hauslohner and Lara El Gibaly for The Washington Post. Louisa Loveluck comments on at The New York Times: "The trial and its aftermath reveal the fault lines in Egypt’s escalating crackdown against political opposition that may yet provoke a stinging response from the very forces it was meant to eliminate."
"The decision on Thursday to release Mr. Hakamada, thought to be the world’s longest serving death row inmate, underscored the dark side of a criminal justice system that boasts a near-100 percent conviction rate and immediately led to calls for reform." From Hiroko Tabuchi at the NYT, a dark look at justice and capital punishment in Japan.
"Years go by, and you still have no idea why this happened to you. You have never been charged with a crime." The ACLU presents a comic explainer about the No Fly List, by Jen Sorensen. (Via Jody T.)
"Polk was not alone. Her kit on the shelf was just one of 11,304 in Detroit’s backlog of untested rape kits." Emily Orley at BuzzFeed reports on one dedicated Wayne County prosecutor's grant-funded quest to work through every single one of those kits. (Via Roxanne Gay.)
"Taylor was charged with two felony counts of child abuse for leaving her six-month-old and two-year-old in a car with the windows cracked last Thursday for at least 45 minutes as she sat in an interview for a potential job." This is the most heartbreaking story I've read in a long time. By Annie-Rose Strasser at ThinkProgress. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"Alexander’s plight reveals the unique vulnerabilities faced by Black women in the face of domestic violence, as well as their tragic invisibility in public awareness and advocacy around domestic violence, mass incarceration and Black-on-Black crime." Incisive analysis of the Marissa Alexander case and what it reveals about the "Overpolicing and Underprotection of Black Women" by Priscilla A. Ocen and Kimberlé Crenshaw at Ebony. (Via @prisonculture.)
"In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for 'depraved heart murder' — defined under Mississippi law as an act 'eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.' By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had 'unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously' caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison." Nina Martin, from two weeks ago at ProPublica. (Via Beth Schwartzapfel.)
"Jones wanted to help men like himself, and West Baltimore has no shortage of them. More than half the prison population released in Maryland returns every year to the neighborhoods around the center. They come out burdened not only by their records but by family estrangement and debt. Child-support arrearages are allowed to accumulate in prison, and about 3,000 men who live near the center owe more than $50 million in back child support." So many insights in this excellent longread from Monica B. Potts at The American Prospect, profiling one released felon's journey through an employment-training program whose inflexible, even abusive, policies are designed to mimic the conditions its clients will find in the world of low-wage work.
"Brooks finally made it to a foreclosure workshop in late February, where more than a dozen distressed homeowners sat around a conference table upstairs from a food pantry—all African-American men and women living in Prince George’s County." At MSNBC, Suzy Khimm looks at one mother's struggle to avoid foreclosure after losing her job last summer — and how Congress has made that struggle so much more difficult.
"We’ve had audience members say, 'You should talk to boys around the drug scene and who’re on drugs.' And I would say, 'You don’t even know that we didn’t.'" At Colorlines, Carla Murphy interviews Nicole Murphy, the producer of a film series that asks black boys ages 9-13 to describe what they think about love. (Via Julianne Hing.)
"What are we to make of this particular line of scholarship--so individualistic in nature, so far from a structural critique--gaining such favor in these times of gross inequity? If education is 'the civil rights issue' of our time--as so many reform entities, including those supporting the scholarship in question, often claim--what are we to make of a research agenda that explicitly names as its foundation a text steeped in eugenic thinking?" You're not wrong if you suspect I've included this piece out of schadenfreude, but it's still worth a read. Lauren Anderson at Education Week. (Via Tressie McMillan Cottom.)
"You know those ubiquitous BuzzFeed quizzes? The ones trying to help you determine what brand of peanut butter or which Game of Thrones character you are? Well it’s hard not to walk out of oral argument this morning in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius without being forced to confront a similar, but perhaps more awkward, question: What kind of contraceptive method are you?" Oh my god, this Dahlia Lithwick piece in which she assigns a contraceptive method to every member of the Supreme Court will make you laugh so much that you'll almost forget that said court is going to find that corporations can have religious beliefs and those beliefs have more legal standing than women's lives. At Slate. (Via Jody T.)
"There is an emerging consensus from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill that the government’s mass collection of data about Americans’ phone calls must end." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
"When McPherson woke up, he was still sitting upright in his heavy wooden chair. But their house in a rural enclave about an hour's drive north from Seattle had been pushed 150 yards. His chair was crushed around him. A ceiling beam lay across his lap." Haunting piece by Maria L. La Ganga and dude Matt Pearce about the victims of the Washington mudslide. At the LAT. (Via Alana Semuels.)
"The type of oil that spilled — a marine fuel oil known as RMG 380 — is black, sticky and particularly heavy. That means that instead of evaporating from the surface of the water like gasoline would, much of it will sink, persisting in the environment for months or even years." Neena Satija reports for The Texas Tribune about an oil spill fouling Galveston Bay, including the spill's likely effects on the bay's fishing industries.
"Moreover, trees in the infamous Red Forest—an area where all of the pine trees turned a reddish color and then died shortly after the accident—did not seem to be decaying, even 15 to 20 years after the meltdown." Runner-up for Creepiest Science Article of the Week, on decomposition in the forests around Chernobyl, by Rachel Nuwer at Smithsonian. (Hat tip to Jenny F. Scientist.)
"NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time." Yeah, this is the Creepiest Science Article of the Week. By Helen Thomson for New Scientist. (Via Amanda Katz.)
"Two years ago, a cancer scientist who formerly worked at the pharmaceutical company Amgen disclosed that his team was able to successfully repeat only 6 of 53 landmark research studies that had been cited hundreds of times." Another fascinating piece on the process of science by Carolyn Y. Johnson at Boston.com.
"U.S. interconnection markets are at the moment perfectly engineered to raise revenue for Comcast and AT&T, at the same time that these companies are spending no more than 15 percent of that revenue on their infrastructure." Susan Crawford at Bloomberg View.
"Exactly. ‘Oh you must hate your job so much that you have to like dissociate yourself from it.’ But the thing is, most people do! The idea that your entire individual identity is based on your work identity is something that is relatively new." Really fascinating interview at The Billfold, where Melissa Gira Grant talks to Meaghan O'Connell about sex work as a labor issue.
"The things that differentiated this gathering from a high school cafeteria were small: the thin kid wearing a parka inside who came up, bashful, for a full plate of food three times; the kids who wrapped up food in tin foil or took it away with them in to-go containers." Rachel Kincaid at Autostraddle with a moving longread about Detroit's Ruth Ellis Center for LGBT youth.
"Part of the reason I went through such a rough patch last year was I went away to finish revising my novel for my publisher; I wanted to get away from all the "distractions" of being home, but it turns out those "distractions" are often the things that keep me from falling apart." The last in Sarah McCarry's series of interviews with writers on working and depression, this one with Cristina Moracho.
"In time I saw that this stuckness, rather than any physical pain, was what made me so reluctant to try. I wondered how many times I’d overlooked powerlessness as the source of my discomfort. I philosophized: was it wiser, in general, to make peace with impotence or resist it by any means possible?" This piece by Melinda Misener at The Hairpin is absolutely guaranteed to be the most profound thing you read about pull-ups (the exercise, not the toddler-wear) in this week — or any other.
"MACBETH: feel like we’ve already killed a lot of my friends
LADY MACBETH: then we could throw a PARTY and make out"
Yeah. Mallory Ortberg continues the Dirtbag Shakespeare series at The Toast.
"People hurt and wound each other, and don’t understand, and betray, and all those things. And also emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. I mean, it’s a relationship like any other. " At The Believer, Madeleine Schwartz interviews 78-year-old writer Vivian Gornick.
Ahem. "March Madness: Tournament of Upper-Middle Class Afflictions." By Jessica Hagy at Medium. You're welcome. (Via Garance Francke-Ruta.)
"In the course of seven weeks, Waterson interviewed a hundred and twenty-seven families about their reaction to articles that begin with a wryly affectionate parenting anecdote, segue into a dry cataloguing of sociological research enlivened with alternately sarcastic and tender asides, and end with another wryly affectionate anecdote that aims to add a touch of irony or, failing at that, sentimentality." Finally (and in lieu of that Hanna Rosin takedown — I know I promised, but life — and, more specifically, this afternoon — is too short to hate-link, I've decided), Sarah Miller at The New Yorker with "New Parenting Study Released." (Via Amanda Brokaw.)
"'No way that he can rule Syria,' says Hadian, referring to the Syrian president. Hadian insists this is a position with widespread support among Iranians, but, he says, 'there are powerful groups who would think otherwise.'" Deborah Amos reports for NPR on the prospects for continued Iranian support of the Syrian government.
"An Egyptian court has sentenced 529 people to death in the largest capital punishment case on record in Egypt, judicial authorities said Monday." Abigail Hauslohner and Lara El Gibaly for The Washington Post. Louisa Loveluck comments on at The New York Times: "The trial and its aftermath reveal the fault lines in Egypt’s escalating crackdown against political opposition that may yet provoke a stinging response from the very forces it was meant to eliminate."
"The decision on Thursday to release Mr. Hakamada, thought to be the world’s longest serving death row inmate, underscored the dark side of a criminal justice system that boasts a near-100 percent conviction rate and immediately led to calls for reform." From Hiroko Tabuchi at the NYT, a dark look at justice and capital punishment in Japan.
"Years go by, and you still have no idea why this happened to you. You have never been charged with a crime." The ACLU presents a comic explainer about the No Fly List, by Jen Sorensen. (Via Jody T.)
"Polk was not alone. Her kit on the shelf was just one of 11,304 in Detroit’s backlog of untested rape kits." Emily Orley at BuzzFeed reports on one dedicated Wayne County prosecutor's grant-funded quest to work through every single one of those kits. (Via Roxanne Gay.)
"Taylor was charged with two felony counts of child abuse for leaving her six-month-old and two-year-old in a car with the windows cracked last Thursday for at least 45 minutes as she sat in an interview for a potential job." This is the most heartbreaking story I've read in a long time. By Annie-Rose Strasser at ThinkProgress. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"Alexander’s plight reveals the unique vulnerabilities faced by Black women in the face of domestic violence, as well as their tragic invisibility in public awareness and advocacy around domestic violence, mass incarceration and Black-on-Black crime." Incisive analysis of the Marissa Alexander case and what it reveals about the "Overpolicing and Underprotection of Black Women" by Priscilla A. Ocen and Kimberlé Crenshaw at Ebony. (Via @prisonculture.)
"In early 2007, a Lowndes County grand jury indicted Gibbs, a 16-year-old black teen, for 'depraved heart murder' — defined under Mississippi law as an act 'eminently dangerous to others…regardless of human life.' By smoking crack during her pregnancy, the indictment said, Gibbs had 'unlawfully, willfully, and feloniously' caused the death of her baby. The maximum sentence: life in prison." Nina Martin, from two weeks ago at ProPublica. (Via Beth Schwartzapfel.)
"Jones wanted to help men like himself, and West Baltimore has no shortage of them. More than half the prison population released in Maryland returns every year to the neighborhoods around the center. They come out burdened not only by their records but by family estrangement and debt. Child-support arrearages are allowed to accumulate in prison, and about 3,000 men who live near the center owe more than $50 million in back child support." So many insights in this excellent longread from Monica B. Potts at The American Prospect, profiling one released felon's journey through an employment-training program whose inflexible, even abusive, policies are designed to mimic the conditions its clients will find in the world of low-wage work.
"Brooks finally made it to a foreclosure workshop in late February, where more than a dozen distressed homeowners sat around a conference table upstairs from a food pantry—all African-American men and women living in Prince George’s County." At MSNBC, Suzy Khimm looks at one mother's struggle to avoid foreclosure after losing her job last summer — and how Congress has made that struggle so much more difficult.
"We’ve had audience members say, 'You should talk to boys around the drug scene and who’re on drugs.' And I would say, 'You don’t even know that we didn’t.'" At Colorlines, Carla Murphy interviews Nicole Murphy, the producer of a film series that asks black boys ages 9-13 to describe what they think about love. (Via Julianne Hing.)
"What are we to make of this particular line of scholarship--so individualistic in nature, so far from a structural critique--gaining such favor in these times of gross inequity? If education is 'the civil rights issue' of our time--as so many reform entities, including those supporting the scholarship in question, often claim--what are we to make of a research agenda that explicitly names as its foundation a text steeped in eugenic thinking?" You're not wrong if you suspect I've included this piece out of schadenfreude, but it's still worth a read. Lauren Anderson at Education Week. (Via Tressie McMillan Cottom.)
"You know those ubiquitous BuzzFeed quizzes? The ones trying to help you determine what brand of peanut butter or which Game of Thrones character you are? Well it’s hard not to walk out of oral argument this morning in Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood v. Sebelius without being forced to confront a similar, but perhaps more awkward, question: What kind of contraceptive method are you?" Oh my god, this Dahlia Lithwick piece in which she assigns a contraceptive method to every member of the Supreme Court will make you laugh so much that you'll almost forget that said court is going to find that corporations can have religious beliefs and those beliefs have more legal standing than women's lives. At Slate. (Via Jody T.)
"There is an emerging consensus from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill that the government’s mass collection of data about Americans’ phone calls must end." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
"When McPherson woke up, he was still sitting upright in his heavy wooden chair. But their house in a rural enclave about an hour's drive north from Seattle had been pushed 150 yards. His chair was crushed around him. A ceiling beam lay across his lap." Haunting piece by Maria L. La Ganga and dude Matt Pearce about the victims of the Washington mudslide. At the LAT. (Via Alana Semuels.)
"The type of oil that spilled — a marine fuel oil known as RMG 380 — is black, sticky and particularly heavy. That means that instead of evaporating from the surface of the water like gasoline would, much of it will sink, persisting in the environment for months or even years." Neena Satija reports for The Texas Tribune about an oil spill fouling Galveston Bay, including the spill's likely effects on the bay's fishing industries.
"Moreover, trees in the infamous Red Forest—an area where all of the pine trees turned a reddish color and then died shortly after the accident—did not seem to be decaying, even 15 to 20 years after the meltdown." Runner-up for Creepiest Science Article of the Week, on decomposition in the forests around Chernobyl, by Rachel Nuwer at Smithsonian. (Hat tip to Jenny F. Scientist.)
"NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time." Yeah, this is the Creepiest Science Article of the Week. By Helen Thomson for New Scientist. (Via Amanda Katz.)
"Two years ago, a cancer scientist who formerly worked at the pharmaceutical company Amgen disclosed that his team was able to successfully repeat only 6 of 53 landmark research studies that had been cited hundreds of times." Another fascinating piece on the process of science by Carolyn Y. Johnson at Boston.com.
"U.S. interconnection markets are at the moment perfectly engineered to raise revenue for Comcast and AT&T, at the same time that these companies are spending no more than 15 percent of that revenue on their infrastructure." Susan Crawford at Bloomberg View.
"Exactly. ‘Oh you must hate your job so much that you have to like dissociate yourself from it.’ But the thing is, most people do! The idea that your entire individual identity is based on your work identity is something that is relatively new." Really fascinating interview at The Billfold, where Melissa Gira Grant talks to Meaghan O'Connell about sex work as a labor issue.
"The things that differentiated this gathering from a high school cafeteria were small: the thin kid wearing a parka inside who came up, bashful, for a full plate of food three times; the kids who wrapped up food in tin foil or took it away with them in to-go containers." Rachel Kincaid at Autostraddle with a moving longread about Detroit's Ruth Ellis Center for LGBT youth.
"Part of the reason I went through such a rough patch last year was I went away to finish revising my novel for my publisher; I wanted to get away from all the "distractions" of being home, but it turns out those "distractions" are often the things that keep me from falling apart." The last in Sarah McCarry's series of interviews with writers on working and depression, this one with Cristina Moracho.
"In time I saw that this stuckness, rather than any physical pain, was what made me so reluctant to try. I wondered how many times I’d overlooked powerlessness as the source of my discomfort. I philosophized: was it wiser, in general, to make peace with impotence or resist it by any means possible?" This piece by Melinda Misener at The Hairpin is absolutely guaranteed to be the most profound thing you read about pull-ups (the exercise, not the toddler-wear) in this week — or any other.
"MACBETH: feel like we’ve already killed a lot of my friends
LADY MACBETH: then we could throw a PARTY and make out"
Yeah. Mallory Ortberg continues the Dirtbag Shakespeare series at The Toast.
"People hurt and wound each other, and don’t understand, and betray, and all those things. And also emotional sympathies just dry up and die as we change, and they are as mysterious in friendship as in love. I mean, it’s a relationship like any other. " At The Believer, Madeleine Schwartz interviews 78-year-old writer Vivian Gornick.
Ahem. "March Madness: Tournament of Upper-Middle Class Afflictions." By Jessica Hagy at Medium. You're welcome. (Via Garance Francke-Ruta.)
"In the course of seven weeks, Waterson interviewed a hundred and twenty-seven families about their reaction to articles that begin with a wryly affectionate parenting anecdote, segue into a dry cataloguing of sociological research enlivened with alternately sarcastic and tender asides, and end with another wryly affectionate anecdote that aims to add a touch of irony or, failing at that, sentimentality." Finally (and in lieu of that Hanna Rosin takedown — I know I promised, but life — and, more specifically, this afternoon — is too short to hate-link, I've decided), Sarah Miller at The New Yorker with "New Parenting Study Released." (Via Amanda Brokaw.)
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Links for the week ending 23 March 2014
"Those records, collectively, show that child welfare administrators consistently under-reported the number of verified deaths by abuse and neglect. For example, in 2009, the state reported 69 child deaths 'with priors' to the governor and Legislature. The Herald, using records provided by DCF, tallied 107." This special report by Carol Marbin Miller and Audra D.S. Burch for the Miami Herald is investigative journalism at its best. But it is not easy reading. (Via Jacqueline Charles.)
"Regulators, contractors and more than 20 current and former workers interviewed in recent months say the deteriorating labor conditions are a prime cause of a string of large leaks of contaminated water and other embarrassing errors that have already damaged the environment and, in some cases, put workers in danger. In the worst-case scenario, experts fear, struggling workers could trigger a bigger spill or another radiation release." Excellent, alarming investigation of labor practices at the Fukushima clean-up, by Hiroko Tabuchi for the NYT.
"Trapped in her northern Syrian village by fighting, Mervat watched her newborn baby progressively shrink. Her daughter's dark eyes seemed to grow bigger as her face grew more skeletal. Finally, Mervat escaped to neighboring Lebanon, and a nurse told her the girl was starving." Diaa Hadid for the AP on the growing numbers of malnourished children both within Syria and in the swelling refugee camps in neighboring countries.
"With nine million Syrians driven from their homes, according to the United Nations, 2.5 million of them into nearby countries, the Syrian displacement dwarfs the exodus from British-mandate Palestine during the war over Israel’s founding in 1948, a flight of 750,000 people that fuels conflict and hardship to this day." The NYT's Anne Barnard reflects on the three years that have transformed Syria from a stable "middle-income country" to a wasteland of brutal violence and starvation.
Michelle Shephard is reporting for the Toronto Star from the Central African Republic. Here, on the use of drug-addled child soldiers in the violence. And here, on Muslim families trapped in a ghetto in the country's capital.
"But the main reason Safari and Muzaneza point to, as do others working to combat sexualized violence, is that men are trained at a young age in Congo to fight and be dominant over the weak or vulnerable in order to get what they want -- whether that is power, money, or women's bodies." Lauren Wolfe at Foreign Policy on continuing very high rates of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, years after the war ended.
"This has left many Haitians wondering why a country with no external threats, a history of violent, military-led repression against its own citizens, and an abundance of more pressing problems would need—or even want—a new military. 'Given the history of Haiti’s military,' warned Mark Weisbrot, its 'existence alone could be considered a threat to security.'" At Foreign Policy in Focus, Nathalie Baptiste writes about the recreation of Haiti's feared army. (Via Brian Concannon.)
"But within a few months of Russia’s recognition, shivering through the winter behind windows made of plastic sheeting, people began to wonder when the billions of rubles of aid pledged by Russia would reach them." Olyesa Vartanyan and Ellen Barry report for the NYT on the fate of another region that split from an independent former Soviet republic to return to Russia. (Via Lydia Polgreen.) Elizabeth Piper reports for Reuters, "Karen Vartapetov, an analyst at Standard & Poor's rating agency, calculated that Moscow would need to pay 38 billion roubles (just over $1 billion) a year to bring Crimea's per capita budget revenue to the same level as Russia's poorest regions, such as North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria in the restive North Caucasus."
"He is no longer simply a Russian statist, an old KGB man who wants to recapture Soviet glory, as Brookings analysts Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argued in their fascinating 2013 biography. Instead Putin has become a Russian ethnic nationalist." Meanwhile, at The Washington Post, political scientist Kimberly Marten argues that Putin's choice of language reveals the path down which his country may be headed. (Via Atossa Abrahamian.)
"According to a company that tracks Twitter use in Turkey, more than half a million tweets were posted in the first ten hours after the ban took effect, roughly in line with normal daily activity. Even members of the A.K.P. appeared to breach the ban, including Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who announced his campaign schedule on Twitter." Jenna Krajeski for The New Yorker on Prime Minister Erdogan's attempt to shut down his country's access to Twitter. Also Zeynep Tufekci at Medium.
"Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they’ve never seen before — wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money." Kim Barker and dude Theodoric Meyer for ProPublica.
Mounds of sludge—'ashbergs'—forty or fifty feet high jutted out of the river, some topped with bushes and trees torn from their roots. What she was seeing was a disaster: the worst industrial accident in American history." Rachel Cernansky at Medium reports from Kingston, Tennessee, five years after it was almost swallowed by the rupture of a retaining pond holding more than a billion gallons of coal ash.
"Even preschoolers are getting suspended from U.S. public schools — and they're disproportionately black, a trend that continues up through the later grades." Kimberly Hefling and dude Jesse J. Holland report for the AP.
"The new estimate would mean 56 million people, or nearly half of the U.S. population between the ages of 40 to 75, could be eligible for taking a statin to prevent heart disease." Julie Steenhuysen for Reuters on controversial new guidelines for heart-disease treatment that sure are going to be profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
"Banter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors raises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty, which they have meted out about four to five times a year since 1990." Katie Fretland for The Colorado Independent on the secretive lengths to which some states are going to obtain untested drugs for executing prisoners. (Via Liliana Segura.)
"The combined service for the two men takes a little less than 10 minutes. When it’s over, Collier steps away from the caskets and the crew begins lowering the coffins into the ground." Robyn Ross for The Texas Observer on the state cemetery that receives the bodies of some of Texas's poorest prison inmates. (Via Pamela Colloff.)
"Compared to those people who had never been members of a gang, former gang members reported much worse overall health—both mental health and physical health. Former gang members were more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and “poor general health” physically when they were 27, 30, and 33. They were also three times as likely to be addicted to drugs." Lauren Kirchner reports for Pacific Standard on some surprising findings from a 7 Up-style Seattle study.
"When those babies reached adulthood, even though they themselves had never been exposed to THC, their brains showed a range of molecular abnormalities. They had unusually low expression of the receptors for glutamate and dopamine, two important chemical messengers, in the striatum, a brain region involved in compulsive behaviors and the reward system." Virginia Hughes at National Geographic on a study that finds epigenetic changes in the offspring of rats regularly exposed to the active compound in marijuana.
"It is a women’s holiday, and so Nepal’s government gives all women a day off work. This is not to recognise the work done by women, but to give them the time to perform rituals that will atone for any sins they may have committed while menstruating in the previous year." By Rose George for Mosaic. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"Only one Copenhagen cyclist was killed in 2012, and no year from 1998 to 2012 has seen more than seven cyclists killed in the city, according to Statistics Denmark. These figures are quite something in a city where the population cycles an estimated 1.27 million km every day." Also at Mosaic, Lesley Evans Ogden with a longread on cycling in seven different cities in Europe and Canada.
"'I think we can think of this measurement today as opening a new window up on what we believe to be a new regime of physics, the physics of what happens in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the universe, and at extremely high energies,' said John Kovac, the team leader and an associate professor of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center." Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe on evidence announced this week in support of the "inflation" theory of the universe just after the Big Bang. At The New Yorker, Andrea Denhoed writes a short, lovely piece on the reaction of elderly physicist Andrei Linde to the news that observation bears out the theory he championed on the origin of the universe.
"Another way we can show that people pronounced things in a particular way before we had recording devices to prove it is spelling variation, especially from less-standardized text like private notes and letters or from respelling schemes in early dictionaries. For example, if someone is writing “should” as 'shud', we can be fairly sure that the /l/ is silent for that person; conversely, if people don’t start writing “park” as 'pak' until 1775, we can suppose that they didn’t start pronouncing it that way until around the same time." So great — Gretchen McCulloch at The Toast on what Shakespeare's English might have sounded like.
"Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone." Jenni Diski, with a badness I share.
"It’s cheesy, and yet for days afterward, I find myself feeling more attentive, more curious, slower to anger, more attuned to people’s capacity to surprise. I feel bolder and less embarrassable. Crist makes people feel good. It’s what he does." Finally, from two weeks ago, Molly Ball's Atlantic profile of Florida's former governor and current gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist is a delight from start — in which she describes the candidate's appearance in a way one generally expects only when the subject of the profile is a woman — to finish.
"Regulators, contractors and more than 20 current and former workers interviewed in recent months say the deteriorating labor conditions are a prime cause of a string of large leaks of contaminated water and other embarrassing errors that have already damaged the environment and, in some cases, put workers in danger. In the worst-case scenario, experts fear, struggling workers could trigger a bigger spill or another radiation release." Excellent, alarming investigation of labor practices at the Fukushima clean-up, by Hiroko Tabuchi for the NYT.
"Trapped in her northern Syrian village by fighting, Mervat watched her newborn baby progressively shrink. Her daughter's dark eyes seemed to grow bigger as her face grew more skeletal. Finally, Mervat escaped to neighboring Lebanon, and a nurse told her the girl was starving." Diaa Hadid for the AP on the growing numbers of malnourished children both within Syria and in the swelling refugee camps in neighboring countries.
"With nine million Syrians driven from their homes, according to the United Nations, 2.5 million of them into nearby countries, the Syrian displacement dwarfs the exodus from British-mandate Palestine during the war over Israel’s founding in 1948, a flight of 750,000 people that fuels conflict and hardship to this day." The NYT's Anne Barnard reflects on the three years that have transformed Syria from a stable "middle-income country" to a wasteland of brutal violence and starvation.
Michelle Shephard is reporting for the Toronto Star from the Central African Republic. Here, on the use of drug-addled child soldiers in the violence. And here, on Muslim families trapped in a ghetto in the country's capital.
"But the main reason Safari and Muzaneza point to, as do others working to combat sexualized violence, is that men are trained at a young age in Congo to fight and be dominant over the weak or vulnerable in order to get what they want -- whether that is power, money, or women's bodies." Lauren Wolfe at Foreign Policy on continuing very high rates of rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, years after the war ended.
"This has left many Haitians wondering why a country with no external threats, a history of violent, military-led repression against its own citizens, and an abundance of more pressing problems would need—or even want—a new military. 'Given the history of Haiti’s military,' warned Mark Weisbrot, its 'existence alone could be considered a threat to security.'" At Foreign Policy in Focus, Nathalie Baptiste writes about the recreation of Haiti's feared army. (Via Brian Concannon.)
"But within a few months of Russia’s recognition, shivering through the winter behind windows made of plastic sheeting, people began to wonder when the billions of rubles of aid pledged by Russia would reach them." Olyesa Vartanyan and Ellen Barry report for the NYT on the fate of another region that split from an independent former Soviet republic to return to Russia. (Via Lydia Polgreen.) Elizabeth Piper reports for Reuters, "Karen Vartapetov, an analyst at Standard & Poor's rating agency, calculated that Moscow would need to pay 38 billion roubles (just over $1 billion) a year to bring Crimea's per capita budget revenue to the same level as Russia's poorest regions, such as North Ossetia and Kabardino-Balkaria in the restive North Caucasus."
"He is no longer simply a Russian statist, an old KGB man who wants to recapture Soviet glory, as Brookings analysts Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argued in their fascinating 2013 biography. Instead Putin has become a Russian ethnic nationalist." Meanwhile, at The Washington Post, political scientist Kimberly Marten argues that Putin's choice of language reveals the path down which his country may be headed. (Via Atossa Abrahamian.)
"According to a company that tracks Twitter use in Turkey, more than half a million tweets were posted in the first ten hours after the ban took effect, roughly in line with normal daily activity. Even members of the A.K.P. appeared to breach the ban, including Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, who announced his campaign schedule on Twitter." Jenna Krajeski for The New Yorker on Prime Minister Erdogan's attempt to shut down his country's access to Twitter. Also Zeynep Tufekci at Medium.
"Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they’ve never seen before — wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money." Kim Barker and dude Theodoric Meyer for ProPublica.
Mounds of sludge—'ashbergs'—forty or fifty feet high jutted out of the river, some topped with bushes and trees torn from their roots. What she was seeing was a disaster: the worst industrial accident in American history." Rachel Cernansky at Medium reports from Kingston, Tennessee, five years after it was almost swallowed by the rupture of a retaining pond holding more than a billion gallons of coal ash.
"Even preschoolers are getting suspended from U.S. public schools — and they're disproportionately black, a trend that continues up through the later grades." Kimberly Hefling and dude Jesse J. Holland report for the AP.
"The new estimate would mean 56 million people, or nearly half of the U.S. population between the ages of 40 to 75, could be eligible for taking a statin to prevent heart disease." Julie Steenhuysen for Reuters on controversial new guidelines for heart-disease treatment that sure are going to be profitable for pharmaceutical companies.
"Banter about exchanging lethal injection help for football tickets and other favors raises questions about how seriously Oklahoma officials take the death penalty, which they have meted out about four to five times a year since 1990." Katie Fretland for The Colorado Independent on the secretive lengths to which some states are going to obtain untested drugs for executing prisoners. (Via Liliana Segura.)
"The combined service for the two men takes a little less than 10 minutes. When it’s over, Collier steps away from the caskets and the crew begins lowering the coffins into the ground." Robyn Ross for The Texas Observer on the state cemetery that receives the bodies of some of Texas's poorest prison inmates. (Via Pamela Colloff.)
"Compared to those people who had never been members of a gang, former gang members reported much worse overall health—both mental health and physical health. Former gang members were more likely to suffer from depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and “poor general health” physically when they were 27, 30, and 33. They were also three times as likely to be addicted to drugs." Lauren Kirchner reports for Pacific Standard on some surprising findings from a 7 Up-style Seattle study.
"When those babies reached adulthood, even though they themselves had never been exposed to THC, their brains showed a range of molecular abnormalities. They had unusually low expression of the receptors for glutamate and dopamine, two important chemical messengers, in the striatum, a brain region involved in compulsive behaviors and the reward system." Virginia Hughes at National Geographic on a study that finds epigenetic changes in the offspring of rats regularly exposed to the active compound in marijuana.
"It is a women’s holiday, and so Nepal’s government gives all women a day off work. This is not to recognise the work done by women, but to give them the time to perform rituals that will atone for any sins they may have committed while menstruating in the previous year." By Rose George for Mosaic. (Hat tip to Jill Heather.)
"Only one Copenhagen cyclist was killed in 2012, and no year from 1998 to 2012 has seen more than seven cyclists killed in the city, according to Statistics Denmark. These figures are quite something in a city where the population cycles an estimated 1.27 million km every day." Also at Mosaic, Lesley Evans Ogden with a longread on cycling in seven different cities in Europe and Canada.
"'I think we can think of this measurement today as opening a new window up on what we believe to be a new regime of physics, the physics of what happens in the first unbelievably tiny fraction of a second in the universe, and at extremely high energies,' said John Kovac, the team leader and an associate professor of astronomy at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center." Carolyn Y. Johnson at The Boston Globe on evidence announced this week in support of the "inflation" theory of the universe just after the Big Bang. At The New Yorker, Andrea Denhoed writes a short, lovely piece on the reaction of elderly physicist Andrei Linde to the news that observation bears out the theory he championed on the origin of the universe.
"Another way we can show that people pronounced things in a particular way before we had recording devices to prove it is spelling variation, especially from less-standardized text like private notes and letters or from respelling schemes in early dictionaries. For example, if someone is writing “should” as 'shud', we can be fairly sure that the /l/ is silent for that person; conversely, if people don’t start writing “park” as 'pak' until 1775, we can suppose that they didn’t start pronouncing it that way until around the same time." So great — Gretchen McCulloch at The Toast on what Shakespeare's English might have sounded like.
"Noise, like pain, makes me want to leave the planet, but before that to kill someone." Jenni Diski, with a badness I share.
"It’s cheesy, and yet for days afterward, I find myself feeling more attentive, more curious, slower to anger, more attuned to people’s capacity to surprise. I feel bolder and less embarrassable. Crist makes people feel good. It’s what he does." Finally, from two weeks ago, Molly Ball's Atlantic profile of Florida's former governor and current gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist is a delight from start — in which she describes the candidate's appearance in a way one generally expects only when the subject of the profile is a woman — to finish.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Links for the week ending 16 March 2014
I'm sure it will be outdated by the time you read it, but as of yesterday, CNN's Faith Karimi and Barbara Starr were reporting on the latest developments in the probable hijacking and subsequent disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370.
"'If we, Russians, let him win here, he will win in proving that we are nothing but zombies, a bunch of sheep who follow without questioning.' And then, before he finished his thought, Semenov buried his head in his big hands and broke into tears." Natalia Antelava reporting from Crimea for The New Yorker.
"What Moscow liberals are discovering is how quickly the ground has shifted beneath their feet since Putin came back to power in 2012, how futile and pathetic their resistance, and how easily wartime mobilization can steamroll them into nonexistence, in a way it couldn’t when Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008." A deeply despairing post from Julia Ioffe at The New Republic about where Putin's Russia is heading.
"About 4,000 women disappeared in Mexico in 2011-2012, mostly in Chihuahua and the State of Mexico, according to the National Observatory Against Femicide." Anahi Rama and Lizbeth Diaz at Reuters on pandemic levels of violence against Mexican women. (Via Melissa del Bosque.)
"'There is an alarming number of children seeking asylum. The U.S. government estimates this year there could be as many as 60,000 children in federal custody,' said Leslie Velez, a lead author of the new UNHCR report 'Children on the Run,' released by the agency’s Washington, D.C., office, which covers the United States and the Caribbean." Melissa del Bosque for The Texas Observer.
"Two hours later, after the fighters had left, it was finally safe for Bior and other survivors to come out of the water. But by that time, he said, eight children had drowned in their mothers' arms." Robyn Dixon reporting for the LAT on the ethnic cleansing that overtook South Sudan starting in December.
"Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim has publicly denied allegations of ill treatment and torture at the country’s detention facilities. But the accusations of abuse have been widely documented by human rights organizations in recent months and corroborated by detainee accounts." Erin Cunningham at The Washington Post on mass incarcerations in Egypt.
"It was in September that the interrogators broke his leg. Two weeks later, Zhou started slipping into unconsciousness. Only then, he says, did they let him go to a hospital under the false name of Wang Yan, with the story that he had fallen in the bathroom." Gillian Wong for the AP on torture committed during anti-corruption crackdowns conducted internally by China's Communist Party.
"Ahmed Belbacha, 44, became the first prisoner released from the Pentagon detention center this year. The U.S. never charged him with a crime across 12 years in custody, but an Algerian court convicted him of terror-related charges in 2009 and issued a 20-year sentence while he was at Guantánamo. Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald reporting from Guantánamo.
"'What I take away from it is how prisoners are looked at as commodities,' she says. 'It's all about how the private prisons can make the most money.'" Rina Palta at NPR reports on a new study showing that for-profit prisons contain an even higher percentage of people of color than their public counterparts.
"That’s what I’m thinking about a lot, how we name anti-blackness and anti-black racism as the foundation of punishment in the juvenile and adult legal systems, that we can’t separate those things out. I want to find a way to address that in a more transparent and real way." Interview at the Children and Family Justice Center's blog with Chicago advocate Mariame Kaba.
"Under current mandatory minimum guidelines, a drug offender convicted of possessing 500 grams of cocaine or 28 grams of crack would face a term of 63 to 78 months. Holder is proposing that the time in such a case be reduced to 51 to 63 months." Sari Horowitz at The Washington Post, on the not-exactly-game-changing sentencing reforms proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder.
"The study also shed light on why people get into sex work. Pimps and sex workers often said they were encouraged by their families to do so, and many cited poverty as a major factor in their decisions." Annie Lowrey at the NYT on a new report by the Urban Institute (which does amazing work) on the sex economy in seven major U.S. cities.
"Six percent of the men admitted to rape, or attempted rape. Of the rapists, 63 percent were serial offenders. In all, the serial rapists accounted for 439 of the 483 rapes." Claire Gordon at Al Jazeera America on the shocking percentage of campus rapes committed by repeat offenders. (Dear admissions committees, maybe start screening out likely rapists?)
"When colleges and universities become a market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know. When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all poorer for it." I feel lucky to have caught this very smart piece from last December on its second go-round on Twitter this week: Tressie McMillan Cottom at Slate on the disincentives and barriers colleges have to teaching about structural inequalities — like racism — especially when taught by members of marginalized groups.
"The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that he favors ending the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of U.S. citizens’ phone data, making him the first of the four leaders of the congressional intelligence panels to do so." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
"By focusing on legible seats of power, activist groups and outraged political players have largely sidestepped the question of how surveilled subjects uphold—cannot but uphold—their position as surveilled. It is perhaps unbearable to consider that modes of surveillance undergird the way we live in contemporary capitalism." Natasha Lennard at The New Inquiry.
"Fortunately, WIRED is here with a solution: Cover your camera lens with a sticker." Fight the power, thanks to Kim Zetter at Wired.
"Bitcoin thieves, as a rule, don’t get caught, which made the hypothetical threat more serious. The chance of being apprehended for stealing cryptocurrency is so low that the usual disincentive to commit theft is almost nonexistent." Congratulations! You've made it to the non-depressing portion of this week's list! Reward yourself with Maria Bustillos' wonderful piece at The New Yorker on the media misidentification of the still-mysterious inventor of Bitcoin.
"The difficulty of sorting out visionary ideas from crackpot ones—or even outright fraud—has long been part of science, especially at the cutting edge." At Boston.com, Carolyn Y. Johnson continues her great series of posts examining the continuing controversy over possibly fraudulent stem cell research as a viewfinder onto the process by which science is made.
"It’s a part of the brain that’s particularly active when you’re reading. In fact, you’re using it right now. Across fonts, across languages, across systems of writing, injuring this area would take away your ability to read or even recognize words." Super-interesting Gal Science piece at The Toast by neuroscientist Sarah Hillenbrand.
"After months of inaction, the Senate might finally act to restore federal unemployment benefits as a small handful of Republicans broke from their party to support a new bipartisan compromise." Suzy Khimm at MSNBC.
"The tenth and final recommendation, 'Be critical of the commercial advertisement of food products,' is particularly unusual in the world of dietary guidelines." Mia MacDonald and Judy Bankman at Civil Eats on Brazil's new, plainspoken, and refreshingly direct anti-obesity recommendations.
"Her husband, a ramrod straight-standing white-haired man recently retired from a government job, demonstrates a unique talent for being able to stare out at the horizon without moving or speaking for hours at a time. I spend the next few days considering his inner monologue, wondering exactly what I am watching him see." This piece by Caity Weaver at Gawker from last month about a week on a Paula Deen cruise is a thoughtful, funny delight from start to finish.
"Or, they can complete reams of paperwork and secure a bureaucratic certification called a HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control point) plan – originally a safety procedure created for NASA space flights and now applied in an unwieldy way to the food industry – which verifies that the preparation process is safe." Eveline Chao at Open City on the battle between Chinatown's roast ducks and NYC's Department of Health inspectors — and the economic disparities ABC health grades have introduced into the city's wildly diverse restaurant scene.
"It outsources the emotional and practical needs of the oft-fetishized, urban-renewing 'creative' workforce to a downwardly mobile middle class, reducing workers’ personality traits and educations to a series of plot points intended to telegraph a zombified bohemianism for the benefit of the rich." BOOM. Molly Osberg at The Awl with reflections on being a barista through a Brooklyn neighborhood's transition to hipsterhood. (Warning, though: The Awl has definitely become a place where you should skip the comments, unless you really wanna watch some guy evaluate a piece according to the degree by which he'd enjoy having the author as a girlfriend. Thanks, bro!)
"The bar counter of a pub is possibly the only place in Britain where the natives feel comfortable about shedding their natural reserve and engaging in conversation with strangers." On the other hand! The Toast has intensely awesome comment sections where a lovely soul linked to this 79-page .pdf 18-year-old anthropological study of the etiquette and rituals of British pubs, by Kate Fox. If this doesn't cheer you up simply by existing, try reading it from start to finish in one sitting. You will almost certainly feel better. (I did.)
"I’ve been written to at least a dozen times since by various organizations and colleges running drag balls, asking advice or asking for use of our photos. I can let them use the pictures all they want, but I don’t really have any wisdom. What can I say, really? Be a popular white kid? Pretty much good advice for anything." Okay, this piece at The Toast by Whitney Reynolds on going to her high school prom (in central Tennessee, no less!) in drag is guaranteed to cheer you up.
"Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you can conjure one yourself, then wish it senseless and inert when you have done with it." At The Toast, good advice from Mallory Ortberg, "A Solitary Witch." (Oh my god, the tags.)
"Languages are made up of dialects. They fit together like jigsaw puzzles: remove one or two pieces and you'll still be able to see the whole image, but the picture is incomplete nonetheless and you're definitely not getting more than $0.50 for it at a garage sale." Finally, this perfect piece by Kory Stamper at io9.com on why we should probably cut it the hell out what with being the grammar police, okay? (Grateful hat tip to Els Kushner!)
"'If we, Russians, let him win here, he will win in proving that we are nothing but zombies, a bunch of sheep who follow without questioning.' And then, before he finished his thought, Semenov buried his head in his big hands and broke into tears." Natalia Antelava reporting from Crimea for The New Yorker.
"What Moscow liberals are discovering is how quickly the ground has shifted beneath their feet since Putin came back to power in 2012, how futile and pathetic their resistance, and how easily wartime mobilization can steamroll them into nonexistence, in a way it couldn’t when Russia went to war with Georgia in 2008." A deeply despairing post from Julia Ioffe at The New Republic about where Putin's Russia is heading.
"About 4,000 women disappeared in Mexico in 2011-2012, mostly in Chihuahua and the State of Mexico, according to the National Observatory Against Femicide." Anahi Rama and Lizbeth Diaz at Reuters on pandemic levels of violence against Mexican women. (Via Melissa del Bosque.)
"'There is an alarming number of children seeking asylum. The U.S. government estimates this year there could be as many as 60,000 children in federal custody,' said Leslie Velez, a lead author of the new UNHCR report 'Children on the Run,' released by the agency’s Washington, D.C., office, which covers the United States and the Caribbean." Melissa del Bosque for The Texas Observer.
"Two hours later, after the fighters had left, it was finally safe for Bior and other survivors to come out of the water. But by that time, he said, eight children had drowned in their mothers' arms." Robyn Dixon reporting for the LAT on the ethnic cleansing that overtook South Sudan starting in December.
"Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim has publicly denied allegations of ill treatment and torture at the country’s detention facilities. But the accusations of abuse have been widely documented by human rights organizations in recent months and corroborated by detainee accounts." Erin Cunningham at The Washington Post on mass incarcerations in Egypt.
"It was in September that the interrogators broke his leg. Two weeks later, Zhou started slipping into unconsciousness. Only then, he says, did they let him go to a hospital under the false name of Wang Yan, with the story that he had fallen in the bathroom." Gillian Wong for the AP on torture committed during anti-corruption crackdowns conducted internally by China's Communist Party.
"Ahmed Belbacha, 44, became the first prisoner released from the Pentagon detention center this year. The U.S. never charged him with a crime across 12 years in custody, but an Algerian court convicted him of terror-related charges in 2009 and issued a 20-year sentence while he was at Guantánamo. Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald reporting from Guantánamo.
"'What I take away from it is how prisoners are looked at as commodities,' she says. 'It's all about how the private prisons can make the most money.'" Rina Palta at NPR reports on a new study showing that for-profit prisons contain an even higher percentage of people of color than their public counterparts.
"That’s what I’m thinking about a lot, how we name anti-blackness and anti-black racism as the foundation of punishment in the juvenile and adult legal systems, that we can’t separate those things out. I want to find a way to address that in a more transparent and real way." Interview at the Children and Family Justice Center's blog with Chicago advocate Mariame Kaba.
"Under current mandatory minimum guidelines, a drug offender convicted of possessing 500 grams of cocaine or 28 grams of crack would face a term of 63 to 78 months. Holder is proposing that the time in such a case be reduced to 51 to 63 months." Sari Horowitz at The Washington Post, on the not-exactly-game-changing sentencing reforms proposed by Attorney General Eric Holder.
"The study also shed light on why people get into sex work. Pimps and sex workers often said they were encouraged by their families to do so, and many cited poverty as a major factor in their decisions." Annie Lowrey at the NYT on a new report by the Urban Institute (which does amazing work) on the sex economy in seven major U.S. cities.
"Six percent of the men admitted to rape, or attempted rape. Of the rapists, 63 percent were serial offenders. In all, the serial rapists accounted for 439 of the 483 rapes." Claire Gordon at Al Jazeera America on the shocking percentage of campus rapes committed by repeat offenders. (Dear admissions committees, maybe start screening out likely rapists?)
"When colleges and universities become a market, there is no incentive to teach what customers would rather not know. When colleges are in the business of making customers comfortable, we are all poorer for it." I feel lucky to have caught this very smart piece from last December on its second go-round on Twitter this week: Tressie McMillan Cottom at Slate on the disincentives and barriers colleges have to teaching about structural inequalities — like racism — especially when taught by members of marginalized groups.
"The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee said Wednesday that he favors ending the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of U.S. citizens’ phone data, making him the first of the four leaders of the congressional intelligence panels to do so." Ellen Nakashima at The Washington Post.
"By focusing on legible seats of power, activist groups and outraged political players have largely sidestepped the question of how surveilled subjects uphold—cannot but uphold—their position as surveilled. It is perhaps unbearable to consider that modes of surveillance undergird the way we live in contemporary capitalism." Natasha Lennard at The New Inquiry.
"Fortunately, WIRED is here with a solution: Cover your camera lens with a sticker." Fight the power, thanks to Kim Zetter at Wired.
"Bitcoin thieves, as a rule, don’t get caught, which made the hypothetical threat more serious. The chance of being apprehended for stealing cryptocurrency is so low that the usual disincentive to commit theft is almost nonexistent." Congratulations! You've made it to the non-depressing portion of this week's list! Reward yourself with Maria Bustillos' wonderful piece at The New Yorker on the media misidentification of the still-mysterious inventor of Bitcoin.
"The difficulty of sorting out visionary ideas from crackpot ones—or even outright fraud—has long been part of science, especially at the cutting edge." At Boston.com, Carolyn Y. Johnson continues her great series of posts examining the continuing controversy over possibly fraudulent stem cell research as a viewfinder onto the process by which science is made.
"It’s a part of the brain that’s particularly active when you’re reading. In fact, you’re using it right now. Across fonts, across languages, across systems of writing, injuring this area would take away your ability to read or even recognize words." Super-interesting Gal Science piece at The Toast by neuroscientist Sarah Hillenbrand.
"After months of inaction, the Senate might finally act to restore federal unemployment benefits as a small handful of Republicans broke from their party to support a new bipartisan compromise." Suzy Khimm at MSNBC.
"The tenth and final recommendation, 'Be critical of the commercial advertisement of food products,' is particularly unusual in the world of dietary guidelines." Mia MacDonald and Judy Bankman at Civil Eats on Brazil's new, plainspoken, and refreshingly direct anti-obesity recommendations.
"Her husband, a ramrod straight-standing white-haired man recently retired from a government job, demonstrates a unique talent for being able to stare out at the horizon without moving or speaking for hours at a time. I spend the next few days considering his inner monologue, wondering exactly what I am watching him see." This piece by Caity Weaver at Gawker from last month about a week on a Paula Deen cruise is a thoughtful, funny delight from start to finish.
"Or, they can complete reams of paperwork and secure a bureaucratic certification called a HACCP (hazard analysis and critical control point) plan – originally a safety procedure created for NASA space flights and now applied in an unwieldy way to the food industry – which verifies that the preparation process is safe." Eveline Chao at Open City on the battle between Chinatown's roast ducks and NYC's Department of Health inspectors — and the economic disparities ABC health grades have introduced into the city's wildly diverse restaurant scene.
"It outsources the emotional and practical needs of the oft-fetishized, urban-renewing 'creative' workforce to a downwardly mobile middle class, reducing workers’ personality traits and educations to a series of plot points intended to telegraph a zombified bohemianism for the benefit of the rich." BOOM. Molly Osberg at The Awl with reflections on being a barista through a Brooklyn neighborhood's transition to hipsterhood. (Warning, though: The Awl has definitely become a place where you should skip the comments, unless you really wanna watch some guy evaluate a piece according to the degree by which he'd enjoy having the author as a girlfriend. Thanks, bro!)
"The bar counter of a pub is possibly the only place in Britain where the natives feel comfortable about shedding their natural reserve and engaging in conversation with strangers." On the other hand! The Toast has intensely awesome comment sections where a lovely soul linked to this 79-page .pdf 18-year-old anthropological study of the etiquette and rituals of British pubs, by Kate Fox. If this doesn't cheer you up simply by existing, try reading it from start to finish in one sitting. You will almost certainly feel better. (I did.)
"I’ve been written to at least a dozen times since by various organizations and colleges running drag balls, asking advice or asking for use of our photos. I can let them use the pictures all they want, but I don’t really have any wisdom. What can I say, really? Be a popular white kid? Pretty much good advice for anything." Okay, this piece at The Toast by Whitney Reynolds on going to her high school prom (in central Tennessee, no less!) in drag is guaranteed to cheer you up.
"Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you can conjure one yourself, then wish it senseless and inert when you have done with it." At The Toast, good advice from Mallory Ortberg, "A Solitary Witch." (Oh my god, the tags.)
"Languages are made up of dialects. They fit together like jigsaw puzzles: remove one or two pieces and you'll still be able to see the whole image, but the picture is incomplete nonetheless and you're definitely not getting more than $0.50 for it at a garage sale." Finally, this perfect piece by Kory Stamper at io9.com on why we should probably cut it the hell out what with being the grammar police, okay? (Grateful hat tip to Els Kushner!)
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