Anyway... let's get to the links. I don't have many this week, but I think the ones I have are good!
My pick for the one story to read if you only read one this week is Jamelle Bouie's piece about the new memorial for lynching victims.
Apparently GOP candidates who have criminal convictions in their past are now blaming Obama for those convictions. I think this is a dangerous trend and hope these candidates lose their primaries. If reports I've heard that Democrats are supporting Blankenship in his primary (because he will presumably be easier to beat in the general) are true, I think that is a bad and short-sighted strategy and hope they think better of it.
Jonathan Chait had a good piece about the problem in the Republican party right now.
ICE has detained US citizens, and from my read of this story, does not have a good procedure for, or even much demonstrated interest in, making sure that doesn't happen.
I included this in my Management Monthly newsletter, but I want to share it here, too: Brigid Schulte interviews Jeffrey Pfeffer, author of Dying for a Paycheck, about the harm our modern work culture does to us. I've put that book on my "to read" list.
Recommended listening: Code Switch had a really interesting episode on Jewish identity.
The discussion around "incels" is mostly just exhausting to me, and I confess I'm ignoring a lot of it. How many times do people have to say that this group of men is not really looking for sex per se, they're looking for the status they think dating (and having sex with) a conventionally attractive woman gives them, and that men who view women as status symbols don't really consider us fully human? How many times do we have to remind men that we are people with our own stories, not just supporting characters in their stories? It is exhausting and since I briefly dated a guy in college who saw me as a status symbol (EWWW) and that contributed to some difficulties I had in my first year of college that almost derailed me... I find it particularly unpleasant to engage in this discussion. Also, I know that I do not have the ability to explore the weirdness of that status symbol dating experience and all the associated stuff... so I just avoid it. I would love to read someone like Rebecca Traister unpack this whole thing, but I know I cannot do that work myself.
Anyhow, all of that is to say that this Helen Rosner thread is as close as I got to engaging with the latest iteration of the discussion:
Hi Ross! It’s cool that your published argument was so opaque and poorly articulated that you felt the need to clarify it, but along other things your foundational points 1 and 2 are both spectacularly fallacious.— your friend Helen (@hels) May 3, 2018
This article about rescuing baby birds (or not) reminded me of the time I ended up co-parenting a baby sparrow for a few weeks after rescuing him from Brooklyn traffic. https://t.co/CUh9RMRvmh— Summer Brennan (@summerbrennan) May 3, 2018
4th May 2018 pic.twitter.com/KQ4KDv7QP4— Rabbits of the Day 🐰 (@RabbitsoftheDay) May 4, 2018
Another bunny!
3rd May 2018 pic.twitter.com/amhxMg3Wwo— Rabbits of the Day 🐰 (@RabbitsoftheDay) May 3, 2018
Happy weekend, everyone!
The incel thing along with the WH Correspondents dinner thing (and other things in the news that are so bad my mind can't even hold onto them, like the jailing US citizens thing, like the media not calling Trump's lies lies, like us mostly ignoring Trump's unhinged speeches because we're used to them) have really gotten me down this week. It didn't help that my daughter read a book about Rosa Parks this week and had a lot of questions and we had to have that difficult conversation. (At the end she declared she was never moving out of our house. I think because the world is a scary place.)
ReplyDeleteI need to come up with an activism thing to do by the end of the day or this will be the first week I haven't done anything since 2 Novembers ago. Maybe I'll find a local race to donate to.