Links for the week ending 15 April 2012

This was the most powerful thing I read this week: Roxanne Gay in The Rumpus on her love of The Hunger Games, and why "Just because you survive something doesn't mean that you're strong." Or maybe it does.

In the tweet that brought this article to my attention, Azmat Khan described these women in one word: survivors. Zara Jamal interviews six Pakistani women for The Atlantic.

An American teenager is killed by a drone in Yemen. No judge or jury sentenced him to death. Was his only crime being his father's son? And are these the legal precedents we are prepared to live with? By Michelle Shephard for the Toronto Star.

Ailsa Chang for wnyc writes about how the NYPD's illegal searches of men in minority neighborhoods has led to a huge increase in the number of dubious prosecutions for marijuana-related offenses.

From Ann Finkbeiner at The Last Word on Nothing, the adolescence of robins, and also of granddaughters. "How do their hearts stand it?" It's the question we're asking no matter what the topic, isn't it?

At SciAm, Melanie Lenart takes a trip to Argentina, where the switch from ranching to farming is causing water tables to rise and soaking soils in salt. Ecological systems are hella complex, yo.

Also in SciAm, more ecological complexity. In the Florida Keys, Michelle Bialek explores alien mosquito species, disease, control measures, genetic engineering, and public alarm.

At The Horn Book, Hilary Rappaport questions the persistence of gendered reading lists. I can't help but wonder if we plant the seeds of gendered byline inequities when we first inform boys that some books are nothing they need concern themselves with.

Speaking of one of the authors that Rappaport's boys loved (as does my son), Frances Hodgson Burnett really had a secret garden, for a time, on an estate she couldn't afford to keep. Vanessa Blakeslee at the Paris Review looks at Burnett's garden in the context of her career.

Sady Doyle just kills it this week at In These Times on Barbie the presidential candidate (available at toy stores now for $13.99).

As for Barbie herself, her history would stand up to the strictest conservative standards. She’s never needed an abortion. Or used contraception. Or had illicit sex, or premarital sex, or sex. Barbie, it turns out, has the single most valuable quality a woman in politics can have: A complete lack of genitalia. Also, a literal inability to speak or think for herself.

This was the weirdest thing I read all week: an account of the astrologer employed as a propagandist by the British government during World War II. By Emma Garman at The Awl.

Fabulous interview with danah boyd at News.me about how she engages with the news, but also how Kids These Days do and don't engage with it. "When I hear news agencies talk about wanting to get young people, they don’t want to figure out how to actually inform them — they want to hear how to monetize them."

The former head of the FDIC suggests that every American household receive a $10 million loan from the federal government, so we can all invest in, you know, Portuguese debt and quit our day jobs. It's not often that sober financial bigwigs reach for this level of furious sarcasm. By Sheila Bair for the Washington Post.

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano in The New Inquiry reflects on race and the word "exotic," first in general terms, and then in personal ones.

You all probably saw this already, but seriously, who knew that Ashley Judd could unleash the righteous patriarchy-blaming like this? Awesome.

To help ease your grief about the short, brief life of the glory of the internet that was Texts from Hilary, Rachael Combe's profile of Hilary Clinton in Elle.

Fascinating Francine du Plessix Gray at the NYRB about stuttering and its sufferers (who are disproportionately male and disproportionately left-handed), including the author herself.

Last but never least, an incredible interview with Toni Morrison in the Guardian.

Links for the week ending 8 April 2012

Sighing heavily. Shaima Alawadi may have been the victim of domestic violence rather than a hate crime. By Kristina Davis for the San Diego Tribune.

This essay by Susan Gardner cuts to the brutal heart of what's at stake about universal health insurance: "Opening Pandora's Box: Why my 22-year-old kid needs Mommy's insurance."

It comes down to this: We either let these children die at birth or we as a society agree to spread the cost among all of us. There really is no other way, no matter what fancy conservative "private solution" claptrap is dressed up and churned out by Heritage next week. No one family and no one individual can possibly shoulder the medical cost of "miracle" lives.

In The Nation, EJ Graff profiles Elizabeth Warren and incumbent Scott Brown in the closely watched MA Senate race. Both candidates are running on their up-from-hardship backgrounds, but their politics couldn't be more different. Plenty of interviews with stereotype-bending MA voters flesh out this piece — and explain why Warren is most certainly not a sure bet: "Elizabeth Warren: Yes She Can?"

California's unincorporated communities are disproportionately populated by the poor and the undocumented — and they often have no access to sewage disposal and other basic municipal services. A report from Bernice Yeung for California Watch.

Another way that pockets of the US look more like developing nations: vaccine refusal rates, and the end of herd immunity. From Juliette K. Tinker at The Scientist.

In Nature, Katherine Harmon looks at the mysteries of Kawasaki Disease. Is it caused by an infectious agent? And is that agent transmitted by, of all things, the wind?

OMG! The Browser linked to a piece by a woman this week! From Walrus, a new-to-me magazine, Rachel Giese looks at medical errors.

“This isn’t an issue of incompetent people making stupid mistakes,” he says. “It’s many average, decent people working in poorly designed systems. Most medical mistakes were accidents waiting to happen.”

At Mother Jones, Julia Whitty describes some of the changes we can expect thanks to climate change and the reduction in the cryosphere, the areas where water is in its frozen state for at least one month out of the year. Yes, this is depressing.

Writer Farai Chideya reflects on what she's learned at midlife: "in the past few years, I've gotten less likely to think I can change my nature and more likely to know I can change my habits."

A deeply troubling and honest piece about transracial adoption by Debra Monroe in Guernica: "But I think of people who can’t immediately say to the officer or clerk: hey, I’m white here."

At Good, Sushma Subramanian and Deborah Jian Lee offer a fascinating and wide-ranging look at a generation of gender-ratio imbalance in Chinese villages: lonely village farmers, trafficked young Vietnamese brides, and the prospect that eventually the market will create "the rich choosing sons and the poor choosing daughters."

In SciAm, Dr. Judy Stone writes about the spread of "conscience clauses" in health care, their conflict with the traditional ethics of the medical profession, and the degree to which increasing numbers of mergers between Catholic hospitals and secular hospitals effectively shut out secular health care options.

Bug Girl presents a nice overview of the recent research on neonicotinoid pesticides and possible links to Colony Collapse Disorder in bees. Seriously, you guys, am I the only person who thinks you should have to get the equivalent of a prescription to buy pesticides for home use?

From last week, when March Madness was still a thing: Ramona Shelburne at ESPN asks why men still freak out when a woman dunks. Indirectly via Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry (his Sunday Reading posts are always worth a look).

Roxanne Gay at The Rumpus finally says what needs saying about women writers, male readers, and gender parity: "This is where we should start focusing this conversation—how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.” To quote Hillel ('tis the season for doing so): everything else is commentary.

By Amy Martinez for The Seattle Times: how Amazon.com is trying to strong-arm small publishers into giving exclusive ruinous wholesale discounts in return for carrying their books at all. Sobering look at what near-monopoly engenders.

From the Wall Street Journal, where Julia Angwin leads the byline: what information are Facebook apps selling about you — and your friends?

Laugh-out-loud lines in Kathryn Schultz's NY Mag review of Jeanette Winterson's and Alison Bechdel's new memoirs. "A friend told me that while I was reading Winterson and coming out as a lesbian, he was reading Martin Amis 'and coming out as a pompous dick.'"

Also very funny, especially for the shy, introverted, or insecure among us. (Ahem. A quorum, I do believe.) "The Impossibility of Making New Friends," by Janet Manley in The Bygone Bureau (which I totally found out about through The Awl, yes).

Amanda Shubert writes a wonderful piece in Full Stop about a new biography of Pauline Kael.

We don't talk about Stieglitz's bullying personality, though God knows he had one, or his professional ethics. Why should we? His aesthetic vision and intellectual muscle transformed the landscape of American arts. Few people doubt that Kael's muscle transformed the way we watch movies today, but many are more comfortable with the notion if they can prove Kael was a mean, bad person while she was doing it.

The inimitable Nicole Cliffe at The Hairpin on how becoming a parent was... not an emotionally transformative experience for her.

I love her so much, but I love her like I love my parents, and my husband, and my best friends, and my 15-year-old mixed breed dog. Incredibly! Delightfully! Fiercely! But it's not a whole new feeling. She's like having a really high-needs roommate that you just couldn't picture living without. You know, the kind that would have a chore wheel.

Again via Aaron Bady at The New Inquiry, an essay called, “dear white people, i love you,” by a blogger named samantha.

Teju Cole linked on Twitter to this decades-old essay by Elizabeth Hardwick in the NYRB on Billie Holiday. Such good writing here! If you haven’t read it before, enjoy.

Finally, ask and ye shall receive: The Rejectionist outs herself. Her first book will be out next spring.

Links for the week ending 1 April 2012

Again I lead off with the Rejectionist, for whom no pull-out quote suffices, and I sure hope she is soon to be published in a fashion that allows me to pay for the privilege of reading her. Because I am nothing if not Team People Who Just Don't Leave Your House.

At Colorlines, Mónica Novoa writes about "The Horrific Death of Shaima Alawadi and the Many Lessons of Hate." As I had reason to learn this month, this kind of hatred lives in my neighborhood, too. Does it live in yours? And how can we do more to raise our voices against it?

Fascinating account by Anna Holmes in the New Yorker about racist responses on Twitter to The Hunger Games movie casting and the man who compiled them, and connected the dots about how that racism translates into the real world. "'Remember that word innocent? This is why Trayvon Martin is dead.'"

Melissa Harris-Perry in the Nation on Trayvon Martin and being the problem: "A black body in public space must presume its own guilt and be prepared to present a rigidly controlled public performance of docility and respectability." DNLee at SciAm writes about what this looks like for a science researcher — and a concerned sister: "Brown Faces in White Places doing science (and wearing hoodies)."

Very, very long — I'm not done with it yet — but equally rewarding (and distressing): Arundhati Roy in Outlook India with "Capitalism: A Ghost Story."

Via Aaron Bady, at Al Jazeera Sarah Mousa tells the stories of Syrian activists currently taking refuge in Cairo.

Pizza, Uighurs, and Guantanamo's legacy: a moving look at dislocated former Guantanamo detainees, and how they are coping with their new lives in one of the few countries that was willing to piss off China and accept them: Albania. By Michelle Shephard for The Toronto Star.

An op-ed in the LA Times by Vicki Divoll, former general counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "So now we are targeting not just the phones but the lives of Americans, and there is no constitutional doctrine, statute or executive order addressing the issue. This is where the framers would have expected the legislature to take a good, hard look."

Incredible essay by Laura Rena Murray in The New Inquiry about seeking to be emancipated from Child Protective Services. "But I was tired of living a life that felt out of control; waiting for things to happen to me; waiting to get caught. Emancipation was proactive and no one could take that freedom away once I had it."

Via Maddow Blog, an interview in the Orlando Sentinel with outgoing president and CEO of the local Planned Parenthood, Sue Idtensohn on being on the front lines for reproductive freedoms and women's health: "I've always said, ‘I hope that someone knew that I was here.'"

From Dr. Jen Gunter, a heartbreaking description of what no health insurance looks like: late-stage cervical cancer discovered in the ER, and doctors forbidden to offer the patient treatments that would offer her a slim chance of survival. "Cancer v. the Constitution."

Does food poisoning have long-lasting later effects, like arthritis, diabetes, and kidney failure? Cheery questions from Maryn McKenna at SciAm. Now you can freak out doubly the next time you or your loved ones go down with a stomach bug!

At Nature, Heidi Ledford asks biologists what discoveries in their field would be as important and fundamental as the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle would be in physics. Lots of interesting points about the origin of life and about aging.

Sharon Begley for Reuters reports that an incredibly high percentage of studies in cancer research could not be replicated. That's bad news for the "war on cancer," and it's bad news for science. So maybe we should take Katherine Harmon's reminder seriously: "U.S. Cancer Rates Could Be Cut in Half Today Based on What's Already Known."

"Today we have Bayer Aspirin. It relieves headaches. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they had Bayer Heroin." Awesome piece by Esther Inglis-Arkell for io9.com on the era of wide medicinal use of heroin, opium, cocaine, and absinthe. Dosing regimens for five-day-old infants! Papal cocaine use!

This is the most depressing thing you'll read all week, by Nina Chestney at Reuters (republished by SciAm): "Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible."

This, on the other hand, is not bad news! Capped landfills being repurposed as solar energy fields. By Robynne Boyd for SciAm. (Now if your landfill uses methane capture AND and a solar energy field, then its contents are transmuted into pure unicorn farts, I think.) Also, Maggie Koerth-Baker looks at the potential of small hydroelectric power. Hey, if it worked for the turning the mills of the Industrial Revolution…

And another Maggie Koerth-Baker piece with an extremely necessary take on Earth Hour and the false promise that individual choices are what makes the difference.

Europeans don't use less energy than us because they're better people, who are more willing to make sacrifices and sit in the dark. They use less energy because their shared systems allow them to use less energy without having to think about it, and without it being a hardship.

At SciAm, Kristin Hendrickson (a.k.a. SquintMom) takes a long, detailed, and very interesting look at what we do and don't know about high cesarean section rates in the U.S.

Wonderful rant by Scicurious about networking in academia, though some of the questions she raises would hold true for networking in any field. The post also sports an unusually high percentage of actually useful comments, too.

If the phrase "riveting linguistic change" does not sound oxymoronic to you, you are sure to be fascinated by this piece by Julie Sedivy in Discover about vowel-shifting and political affiliation.

Wonderful piece on fact-checking in The New Inquiry by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian. "We don’t fact-check because we love facts. We fact-check because we hate liars."

Speaking of liars… Placing Mike Daisey in the context of Orientalism: another valuable piece from Maria Bustillos in The Awl.

At the venerable Geeky Mom blog, Laura Blankenship writes about Women and Coding.

I’ve taken a couple of these courses. In one from MIT, the first lesson had us calculating the first 1000 prime numbers. Woo hoo. That’s going to be something I use again. My first lesson in the class I teach? Draw a square with your robot. Same principles apply, but it’s a lot more fun, imho.

"Ghosts Are Real, At Least In Publishing." Fun Sari Botton piece at The Rumpus on ghostwriting.

Here I must confess that I may be the only feminist in the world who was never particularly drawn to or moved by the work of Adrienne Rich. But this moved me: Marge Piercy's "Another obituary." And, okay, for everyone who was irritated by the piece in the NYT (who hasn't already had this discussion with me on Twitter, hi Susan!), Michelle Dean takes on David Orr: "Adrienne Rich: 'Every Mind Resides in a Body'."

Finally, I hear there was some guy in the NYT fulminating about adults who read YA, or any other level of children's book. If any of you were so unfortunate as to read the piece in question, might I recommend an antidote? Tove Janson's Moominpappa's Memoirs, which is both a children's book and the most perfect skewering of Very Important Man syndrome ever.

I put my trivial surroundings aside and mused more and more about myself, and I found this to be a bewitching occupation. I stopped asking and longed instead to speak of my thoughts and feelings. Alas, there was no one besides myself who found me interesting.

As always, more links throughout the week @PhantomsList. Thanks for reading!

Links for the week ending 25 March 2012

Horrifying. "An Iraqi immigrant and mother of five died Saturday of injuries from a severe beating in her El Cajon home, where a note warning the family to 'go back to your own country' was left next to her." By Pauline Repard for San Diego Union-Tribune.

This week I must have read thirty different moving pieces about Trayvon Martin's murder and what it means about racism and power in this country. You've probably read most of them already. But, if you missed it, I recommend Roxanne Gay's essay in The Rumpus: "A Place Where We Are Everything." Debra Dickerson picks out a very moving detail from the 911 tapes — this is short, but it's so packed with compassion that you'll probably need tissues. I also recommend the fascinating historical perspective present in Jamilah King's Colorlines interview with OSU professor Koritha Mitchell, who studies African-American plays and performances about families and communities grappling with the impact of lynching.

Who is immune to that message? None of us are. The only way that we can become immune to it — or at least resist it — is through community conversation; telling the truth to ourselves and each other about what is really constituting what is making our realities and our situation.

In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Briallen Hopper writes about protest fictions: Mike Daisey, Jason Russell, and Harriet Beecher Stowe(!): "It's been a rough week for the well-intentioned."

Irin Carmon at Salon writes about Republican opposition to the Violence Against Women Act. (The bitter jokes, they write themselves.) She particularly notes the barrier Republicans are throwing up to a provision involving violence against Native American women married to non-Native men. In that regard, this Colorlines interview of Charon Asetoyer by Akiba Solomon, "Why Native American Women Are Battling for Plan B," is relevant and heartbreaking.

Despairing? Don't give up. Have a laugh from Pemy Levy's round-up of women's Facebook posts asking male politicians for advice on our ladybits, since they're so expert at regulating them.

Are you still despairing? Here's a piece by Lisa Miller for New York Magazine about benzodiazepine use in an anxious age: "Listening to Xanax."

At Alternet, Sara Robinson argues that 40-hour work weeks are better for productivity and profits as well as for the personal lives and health of workers. Duh, right? But it's one of those little tidbits of wisdom from the early 20th century that we apparently need to learn all over again. There are a lot of those going around these days....

I bet this took more than 40 hours. From open source developer Jessamyn Smith at Geek Feminism Blog: At work, the IRC channel contained a bot programmed to insert "That's what SHE said" jokes into conversation. "I asked a number of times to have that bot function turned off, but got the usual combination of being ignored, being told it's funny, and being told I should lighten up." So what did she do? She made a bot that automatically responded with a quote from a notable woman every time the sexist joke got made. WIN. Here's how she did it.

In a week that saw more revelations about police surveillance of activists and advocates, Azmat Khan's piece for Frontline about new regulations that allow the government to retain data on US citizens who are not suspected of terrorist activity is a quick way to familiarize yourself with the very latest in dystopian realities. Whee!

Sarah Kliff at the Washington Post writes about how the health care reform law has begun to change the business model of American medicine. "These reforms, if successful, will move the country's health system away from one that pays for volume and toward one that pays for value." I am shocked, simply shocked to learn that doctors are (at least initially) profoundly unenthusiastic about the changes.

Boing Boing's Maggie Koerth-Baker has a new book coming out about climate change, peak oil, and energy needs. It was excerpted this week in Scientific American. She's one of the few writers I've ever encountered who can cover these issues without making you want to throw yourself off a bridge in despair. Go, read, buy her book!

Knock-out post from DNLee at Scientific American on being a black female scientist — and being herself. "Did you really think I came to follow in your footsteps?"

It was another fine week for women to have thoughts about the continuing relevance — or not — of certain Very Important Male Authors. I'm sure it is a complete coincidence that the NYRB chose this particular moment in time to allow Francine Prose to show what it looks like when you actually have something thoughtful to say about the relation of Edith Wharton's life to her work. And this is what it looks like when you discover, along with Michelle Dean at the Rumpus, that you don't have to read all the Very Important Male Authors; you don't have to "stay in the living room where everyone can see me, dutifully reading DeLillo because That's What's Good." (True confessions: I've never read DeLillo. And I laughed out loud at Dean's consternation that someone she considered a friend had never heard of Dorothy Parker.) Finally, this, from The Rejectionist, is what it looks like when you have something fierce and compelling to say about where Very Important Male Authors fall on the scale of things to be enraged about:

I can be angry about so many things at once, I can be angry about the big things and the little ones, the massive injustice of Trayvon Martin and the gnat that is Jonathan Franzen's opinions, I can be angry about the abortion ban that just passed in Mississippi and the books that are being banned in Arizona, and I am not in any way saying that these things are the same things, that they are weighted equally, but we have to live with all of them, and here's the thing. Nobody, but nobody, gets to tell me what to be angry about.

Apparently a new movie came out this weekend? I don't know; I live under a rock. But many people who don't live under rocks have strong opinions about this movie. Via @writingasjoe, Jaclyn Friedman tells us about "Four Things The Hunger Games Can Teach Us About the War on Women." Laurie Penny (whom, for the purposes of this list, we should probably start referring to as "the ubiquitous Laurie Penny"), writing in Salon, agrees. Me, I am giving myself a pass from this particular cultural phenomenon — I don't do so well with blood and gore — but you should all enthusiastically enjoy it on my behalf, okay?

Print and save for all the middle-schoolers and middle-schoolers-to-be in your life. "On Taking Yourself Seriously," by Sadie Doyle at Rookie.

Lovely essay by Arika Okrent in Lapham's Quarterly about gesture and language. "Gestures are thoughts, ideas, speech acts made tangible in the air."

At Guernica, Eleanor Stanford writes about moving her family to Brazil, mothering, working, and looking at a landscape of colonialism, crime, poverty, wealth — and fruit.

Last — but not least! — is pixie party alumna Rachel Hartman, who took a call from her sixth-grade teacher on the way home from promoting her book, due out from Random House in July. Yay, Rachel! [Kermit arms]

Links for the week ending 18 March 2012

In any given week, there seem to be uncountable articles about the big data, the privacy, the erosion of civil liberties, and the terrifying place where those three issues intersect. This week, those articles were mostly by men (and thus you probably don't need me to help you find them), but E.J. Graff's outraged response at The American Prospect to the Obama Administration's claim to have legal authority to kill an American citizen without judicial process is a necessary reminder of why these developments are so chilling when taken all together. A government that reads your every email AND claims for itself the right to kill you if it deems you a threat? I did not have children in the hopes that they'd live in a world straight out of a dystopian novel, President Obama. I'm just saying.

On the other hand, as Lois Beckett reports for ProPublica, an anti-foreclosure advocacy group is using Facebook ads to target employees of Freddie Mac and JPMorgan Chase, asking them to complain to their CEOs about their companies' treatment of a veteran facing eviction. Not so sure that asking people via Facebook to get themselves fired is an effective way to conduct advocacy, but maybe it's the sort of thing that will make people that much more creeped out about big data and privacy?

From 2008, Liliana Segura's piece on "stand your ground" laws at Alternet is chillingly relevant following the Treyvon Martin shooting in Florida this week. In a similar vein, Farai Chideya reminds us that individual tragedies, and the fear and compassion fatigue they engender, must not stop us from pushing to change the structural biases that make those tragedies likely.

Dahlia Lithwick at Slate writes about how the state of Virginia has stolidly refused to share with anyone — including dozens of people who may have been wrongfully convicted — the results of its years-long audit of a stockpile of biological evidence saved from old criminal cases. Some really troubling statistics about the reliability of eye-witness identification here: "of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing, a whopping 76 percent were misidentified by eyewitnesses."

Very long, but important article from Laurie Garrett in this month's Foreign Affairs on global funding for public health and prevention initiatives. Some jaw dropping statistics, like

The Gates Foundation, now combining the philanthropic assets of the Gates family and Warren Buffett, is responsible for 68 percent of all private giving for global health, dwarfing the efforts of even the largest public or international institutions.

And this:

Total estimated expenditures worldwide on health care in 2010, meanwhile, hit $5.3 trillion, with U.S. domestic spending accounting for nearly half of that. Even at its recent peak, the amount of money spent on the health of the world's poorest people, who suffer most of humanity's infectious and preventable diseases, represented merely .0005 percent of worldwide health spending.

We could spend the rest of the week just thinking about how the U.S. spends nearly half of the world's total expenditures on health care. Or how the world's poorest people get five-ten-thousandths of a percent of the world's health care spending. (Via Partners in Health.)

Via The Browser, a fascinating article (translated from the Croatian) by Slavenka Drakulic at Eurozine, looking at how immigration is transforming Italy after a century of emigration, and how art responds to these changes faster than politics or policies.

This week in reproductive health: Pemy Levy at Talking Points Memo recaps the spread of Blunt Amendment clones in state legislatures around the country. Rachel Benson Gold and Elizabeth Nash for the Guttmacher Policy Review take a detailed look at the passage of abortion restrictions in the states in 2011, reporting that 55% of American women now live in states that are legally hostile to abortion rights. What does that hostility look like on the ground? It looks like this devastating account by Carolyn Jones of what she was forced to go through in order to spare a dearly wanted baby an abbreviated lifetime of profound suffering.

As a break from the war on women, I recommend Lola McClure at The Hairpin, who tells you everything you ever wanted to know about IUDs. (Still legal! For now!) There are pictures. And charts. And props. Seriously. I'm pretty sure she's the best thing that ever happened to the internet.

Another knockout piece from Deborah Blum this week, "Cough Syrup, Dead Children, and the Case for Regulation." I don't think there's anyone out there today who does a better job of using past history to illuminate current political controversies. (But if there is, and I'm missing her, SEND ME LINKS, okay?)

At Good, Nona Willis Aronowitz looks at sputtering attempts to unionize Gen Y's legion of college-educated baristas, bartenders, and restaurant workers, who generally have no benefits (read: health insurance), no job security, no opportunity for advancement, and, often, not even a living wage. "The average restaurant worker made $15,000 in 2009." Yeah, you can't pay off student loans on $15,000 a year. Via @MacMcClelland, of course.

Sarah Miller at The Awl takes a very funny look at a less-than-effective anti-bullying program in a northern California school. But I also recommend the following very different take on the subject of bullying, both more upsetting and more uplifting. From Hyphen Magazine and writer Helen I. Hwang, this is a long but rewarding account of racially targeted bullying at South Philadelphia High School, and how Asian-American students successfully organized to demand change from the teachers and administrators that stood by and allowed the violence to take place.

At The Last Word on Nothing, Ann Finkbeiner coins the wonderful term, "closed-system sibling knowledge." I see it in every sibling grouping I can think of — except my own kids, oddly enough. (No, wait. Little sister allows big brother to hold all the family expertise on Pokemon. Everything else, she wants to master TOO.) Does it also apply to spouses and children? Could it also apply to countries? This sort of n="people I know" piece may not be the most convincing science ever, but it sure is fun fodder for discussion.

This may be the funniest science blog post ever. How do alligator penises work… and how many "Alligator Pie" parodies can one compose from the answers? From the inimitable @scicurious.

This, on the other hand, is the feel-good science story of the week… if you're trying to justify a post-breakup drinking bender. Christie Wilcox at Scientific American Blogs writes about how sexually rejected fruit flies consume more alcohol than their non-rejected peers. (There is no research yet to confirm or deny that sexually rejected fruit flies also consume more Ben & Jerry's than their non-rejected peers. GET ON IT, SCIENCE.)

Annalee Newitz at io9.com presents "10 Psychological States You've Never Heard Of… and When You Experienced Them." This is worth it for the terms alone. Normopathy, people. I am so using that in a sentence this week.

The Morning News is conducting a book bracketology tournament this month, only instead of Dick Vitale you get commentators judges like Edith Zimmerman, who issues perhaps the single most devastating take-down of the Important Male Writer ever made when she describes the male main characters of Eugenides's The Marriage Plot as "Muppet-Baby versions of David Foster Wallace and Eugenides himself." Can you ever look at any of their books on a shelf again without picturing foreshortened scruffy guys in hipster glasses with bonnets and pacifiers?

Finally, while we're thinking about fiction, here is a compelling, disturbing short story from Israeli Shani Boianjiu about boot camp in the IDF: "The Sound of All Girls Screaming." Via

As always, not all the links I tweeted made it to this post (nor do all the links I post make it to Twitter), so if you run out of reading material during the week, replenish at @PhantomsList. And thanks for reading!

Links for the week ending 11 March 2012

Good morning, internets! Here are my top picks for whiling away your idle moments this week. First, a laugh, courtesy of Jessica Winter's wonderful "Subject for Debate: Are Women People?"

The New York Review of Books is, um, not the most frequent publisher of women writers, but when it does, the results are often splendiferous. This Elaine Blair piece, positing that male American writers are paralyzed by the fear that female readers will cease to find any reason to keep reading them, is snort-out-loud funny. While we're on the topic of books, here's a lyrical piece by Lightsey Darst: "Who Gave You That Book?" (ᔥJessa Crispin.) Or there's this fierce piece by Belinda Webb on the class issues that determine which women writers go forward into posterity, and which are left behind. (ᔥVIDA.)

The second part of a two-part Diane Ravitch piece in the NRYB about school reforms and (dis)respecting the profession of teaching, is not in the least bit funny, but is essential reading. "By 2007–2008, the largest number of teachers were in their first year of teaching." Oy.

Reuters editor Chrystia Freeland writes about Cal economist Emmanuel Saez and the 1 percent recovery.

I saw hand-drawn signs for Kony 2012 around my local high school this week. Rebecca Rosen at the Atlantic gave a brief analysis of the viral campaign and its articulate backlash. Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing created a list of African writers talking back to the Kony campaign. She also talked to the director of communications for MSF (Doctors Without Borders) about the impact it may have on established humanitarian missions. And the indispensable Zeynep Tufecki has an essay on Kony 2012 and "slacktivism" up on her own blog this week.

At Colorlines, Jamilah King looks at some of the issues around protest, activism, and the potential surveillance of mobile phones, particularly an issue for people of color, as they disproportionately rely on smartphones for internet access. (If you missed it, this excerpt from Rebecca Mackinnon's "The Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom," ran in the Atlantic last month.)

Laurie Penny appeared to be just about everywhere this week. Here's my pick, in which she argues for more rebellion and more anger in the struggle for women's rights: "Politeness, however, has bought even the luckiest of us little more than terminal exhaustion, a great shoe collection, and the right to be raped by the state if we need an abortion."

Virginia Postrel argues that many forms of birth control pills can and should be offered over the counter, but suggests that it would only happen if some corporate interest (i.e., a pharmaceutical company) lobbied the government for the change.

This post is more than a week old, but, as today is the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, it seems fitting to link to it: Katherine Harmon at Scientific American on health problems in the aftermath of Fukushima. Not surprisingly, heart disease and depression are at the top of the list. SciAm also offers a timeline by Sarah Fecht of the events as they unfolded at Fukushima. For a more general recap one year after the catastrophes, Yoko Kubota files this piece for Reuters. Among the more heartbreaking statistics: 326,000 survivors are still homeless.

Also at Scientific American, Maria Konnikova writes about our immense capacity for self-deceptive storytelling.

Annalee Newitz at io9 offers a short recap of the latest report by the Union of Concerned Scientists about how corporations produce fake science to bolster their products.

Essential reading by Jennifer Francis at Yale Environment 360º explaining how Arctic warming contributes to weird and often unseasonable weather. It's supposed to be 70 degrees here tomorrow. I'm just saying...

Last week I pointed you to a story about childhood lead-poisoning fatalities in Nigeria. This week, it's particularly fitting that Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner's Handbook, should write such a cogent piece protesting the federal government's decision to slash to almost nothing funding for lead-remediation efforts at home. I don't even need to tell you that this hurts poor families and children of color disproportionately, do I?

I really like SquintMom: Resources for Evidence-Based Parenting, which I found ᔥ@BoraZ, a guy (I know, but!) with truly omnivorous science reading habits. (Would that more guys were such omnivorous readers — then there'd be no need for this list!) Anyway, this week's entry is about the curiously consumerist "science" of optimized environments for development in early childhood.

On the other side of life's arc, two stories this week about aging parents. From Aimee Phan in The Rumpus, a very moving chronicle of her father's deterioration from Alzheimer's. From Lisa M. Krieger at the Mercury News, a hard look at how her father's last ten days of life cost $323,000 despite the Do Not Resuscitate order he had in place.

Food! In the right hands, it can be a frame for an exploration of almost any aspect of human society. Here are two very different approaches: Christine Baumgarthuber talks about the politics of leftovers as a lens for viewing the relationship between rich and poor at The New Inquiry, while Emily Matchar looks at cookbooks, canned food, working women, and gender politics at The Hairpin.

Also from The Hairpin, this wonderful look at the last performance of 87-year-old Marta Becket's one-woman desert show, by Maude Standish, with equally wonderful photos by Jennie Ross. (You must click through, if only to see the audience Ms. Becket painted on the theater walls to watch her performance when no one else came.)

Victoria Johnson is a cartographer who writes a monthly column for The Awl, and I can't recommend it highly enough. This week she offered "A Reading List For People Who Like To Know About Places." I've only read two of the books on it (ahem, /humblebrag), and can't wait to read the rest.

Wondering about the occasional inexplicable squiggles in this post? ᔥMaria Popova at Brain Pickings a proposed new format for attributing discovery. Like "via" and "hat tip," only signified by Unicode symbols. There's a bookmarklet if, like me, you doubt your ability to remember which symbol means what or how to represent it. (There is, as yet, no bookmarklet to help you redeem yourself if you can't for the life of you remember who first pointed you towards something interesting, alas.)

Finally, breaking my own rules here: this heartbreaking piece from Lapham's Quarterly is by a man, but it is about a woman, Barbara Newhall Follett: made famous by publishing her first novel at the age of 12, betrayed first by her father and then by her husband, disappeared without a trace at the age of 26. "Her writings, out of print for many decades, only exist today in six archival boxes at Columbia University's library. Take together, they are the saddest reading in all of American literature." Those of you who remember photos of my daughter typing determinedly at a laptop before her second birthday will not be surprised to hear that this essay made me sob…

As always, there are more links throughout the week @PhantomsList.

Links for the week ending 4 March 2012

This week VIDA published its statistics on the percentage of women published by major magazines in 2011. The results were, how you say, not surprising for anyone who has made a habit of glancing at the first names of the bylines in any major publication lately. Lots of women in the field suggested lots of different responses to the continuing disparity, ranging from editor-focused hashtags for "lady journos" on Twitter to raising the profile of some wonderful and underutilized women journalists to ignoring all the male-focused mags and letting them trundle into inevitable irrelevance to (uh) giving Salon some more of your money. (Oh, sorry, that was to make Rush Limbaugh mad, not to address the gender byline disparity. Still. Really? There's a fine line between editorial and advertising these days, eh?) As a reader, I am going to continue voting with my eyeballs and my dollars (which go to Mother Jones). And I'm going to keep offering this as way to balance out aggregators like #longreads and The Browser (which I think in any given week selects more articles by male economists than they do by women in any field at all, though Saturday's editor, Evan Kindley from the Los Angeles Review of Books, made a better showing than usual). Also, as Shani O. Hilton reminds us in a look at her own employer's gender parity — and racial parity — stats, there are a whole lotta ways that magazines are failing at diversity. Gender is only one of them. So.

Even The Browser highlighted the long-form reporting that Mac McClelland did for Mother Jones this week on working conditions in the shipping centers that fulfill your online shopping orders. If you read one long article this week, it should be this one. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to bring myself to buy a book online again, not unless someone can guarantee me that no one is going to get an electric shock powerful enough to knock her down while getting my book off the shelf.

There were plenty of other stellar (and very depressing) works of essential and bravura long-form reporting from women this week. Most terrifying was the Texas Observer's cover story by Melissa del Bosque on wartime levels of violence ripping apart Mexico's Juarez Valley.

Equally sad, if marginally less hopeless, was Elizabeth Grossman's report for Yale Environment 360 on an epidemic of — in hundreds of cases, fatal — lead poisoning among the children in Nigeria's gold-mining region of Zamfara.

Elizabeth Kiem writes for The Morning News about the upcoming Russian elections and what she describes as a Russian civil-rights movement that may — or may not — be on the verge of springing from the forehead of online-savvy urban elites.

Speaking of movements and online participation, there's no smarter thinker than Zeynep Tufekci, who was interviewed in The European this week, "How Social Media Is Changing The Cultural Landscape." Too many thoughtful sentences to have a pullout do any justice to it. It's long and terribly formatted, but worth sticking with.

Christie Aschwanden writes for The Last Word on Nothing (which I have already convinced you to read regularly, right?) a devastating piece about the lingering effects of Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the political realities that make it impossible to say for sure that Agent Orange is, in fact, the cause of the suffering she observes.

Tracie McMillan is pushing her new book in a lot of places this week, but the most interesting coverage I've seen is at Colorlines, where Julianne Hing gets McMillan to talk about healthy food, race, immigrant farm labor, and working conditions.

There has always been a very deep rift in the organic community, especially in the organic certification conversation, about whether or not to include labor standards in that. And most growers argue against that because yes, organic farming is better in terms of pesticide exposure, but it’s a lot worse in terms of musculoskeletal injuries because you’re having farmworkers do all this work by hand.

So much excellent science writing this week! I can't recommend highly enough Julia Whitty's devastating and beautiful piece on ocean acidification for OnEarth.

In a totally different vein, Kate Clancy hit it out of the park (er, there must be a roller-derby analogy I could use there, but I am not so much with the knowing about roller-derby terms) with a three- blog series about vaginal pH. With so much awesome knowledge about our most legislatively regulated body parts on offer, how can you not add Context and Variation to your regular reads?

Another regular read: Maryn McKenna at Wired Science, who will this week give you the vapors about the levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in some of your favorite meat and poultry products. (I'd feel smug as a vegetarian, but, well, I eat a lot of peanut butter. Sigh.)

An article in this week's Washington Post by Lonnae O'Neal Parker about how black women report a much less negative correlation between body weight and self image than white women do got a strong response by Debra Dickinson about how body weight isn't where the self-esteem bludgeon hits black women: hair texture is. In this context, @DNLee5's critique of a clutch of scientific studies proposing a link between use of hair care products and development of uterine fibroids in black women seems even more essential.

The news this week being what it was, there were uncountable posts and pieces from women describing or reporting on the reality of American women's experiences with contraception, abortion, and pregnancy. From Irin Carmon at Salon, "The ultrasound fallacy" looks at the past 20 years in anti-choice legislation, and asks whether the outrage about transvaginal ultrasound can turn that tide.

Very affecting and nuanced piece from Emily Rapp at Slate in response to Rick Santorum's attacks on prenatal testing, regretting that she did not know ahead of time that her son, Ronan, has Tay-Sachs.

I'm so grateful that Ronan is my child. I also wish he'd never been born; no person should suffer in this way—daily seizures, blindness, lack of movement, inability to swallow, a devastated brain—with no hope for a cure. Both of these statements are categorically true; neither one is mutually exclusive.

Also in Slate, Allison Benedikt takes on the What To Expect When You're Expecting juggernaut.

In any given week, one could happily drown in the endless numbers of fine personal essays and cultural criticism women have written on the web. Thanks to @jillheather for pointing me at this thoughtful defense of the Twilight movie franchise — no, really, all three parts are worth a read on a lot of levels, even if the very thought of seeing the movies makes you want to (as a wise man once said) strangle yourself with your own large intestine.

Francie Latour is blogging now, though readers of the Boston Globe will recognize her name from plenty of investigative reporting pieces over the years. She deserves a wider audience. This short piece, "You Will Never Be a Fireman," is just one reason why.

It was eating disorders awareness week. Laurie Penny (whom I should probably just plan to link to every week, or until you cry uncle) has a brilliant piece in the New Statesman today. There was also a long, thoughtful piece in The New Inquiry (which is shaping up to be a very interesting publication) by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano arguing a similar point, that body image is not necessarily the hinge against which anorexia swings open or shut.

Finally, via Julianne Hing again at Colorlines, from Momo Chang, an interview at Hyphen with Grace Lee Boggs, a 96-year-old activist. I love, love, love being able to learn from women activists who worked their way through the length of the twentieth century. Also, I found it fascinating how she described her Chinese-born mother's resentment at the opportunities her American-born daughter had, and how it was always a barrier in their relationship. My American-born grandmother reported a similar painful dynamic with her Ukrainian-born mother, who had no formal education and insisted that her daughter go to college no matter what.

Are you good to go on reading material for the week? If not, I'll be tweeting fresh links @Phantomslist. Or there's always a good book. I'm reading Mary Lee Settle's WWII memoir "All The Brave Promises."

I had forgotten the silence, not mystic but halted, as if we were all waiting in one vast depot for an interrupting train that never came but was always coming, so that nothing could be planned and carried through.

What are you reading by women this week?