December 2020

i rediscovered tv this month and have therefore stopped reading, lol.

safety not guarenteed (2012), how to change the world (2015), sky ladder: the art of cai guo-qiang (2016), ramen heads (2017), i feel pretty (2018), plus one (2019), last christmas (2019), happiest season, year one (2009), palm springs, neat: the story of bourbon (2018), crazy not insane

NYT Magazine - Taste Test
NYT - The Real Estate Collapse of 2020
The Verge -  Nature is not healing
BBC - The Family With No Fingerprints
Lifehacker - How They Made a Vaccine So Fast
Food 52 - The Lonely Legacy of Spam
Wired - The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles
Huffington Post - The Myth of the Ethical Shopper
Atlas Obscura -  How a White Lie Gave Japan KFC for Christmas
Washington Post - Is It Okay to Laugh at Florida Man?
Texas Monthly - How the Unchecked Power of Judges Is Hurting Poor Texans
Quartz - Experts are sounding the alarm about the dangers of gas stoves
Politico - Washington's Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale.
NPR -  You Want To Move? Some Cities Will Pay You $10000 to Move There
Politico - Flint Has Clean Water Now. Why Won't People Drink It?
Vanity Fair - Inside the Very Big, Very Controversial Business of Dog Cloning
NPR - 'Toxic Individualism': Pandemic Politics Driving Health Care Workers From Small Towns.
The Guardian - The year of Karen: how a meme changed the way Americans talked about racism
Study International - More money goes into the US prison system than it does on education
Los Angeles Magazine - The Homeless Republic of Echo Park: life (and death) in L. A. 's fastest growing tent city.
Time - The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

Pro Publica - The Pandemic Hasn’t Stopped This School District From Suing Parents Over Unpaid Textbook Fees
WTF schools charge students for textbook rentals? that's total bullshit.
"Indiana is one of at least nine states that allow school districts to charge fees for required textbooks, according to the Education Commission of the States, a national education policy organization."
"Education advocates say that the state’s constitution guarantees a “tuition-free” education, not a free education."

Washington Post - As organized religion shrinks, faith-based charities worry about the future
As more people turn away from organized religion, churches and other worship communities face a struggle to keep marshaling their corps of volunteers. Churchgoers, mostly elderly, reliably turn up to staff food banks, clean up after hurricanes, and cook hot meals after natural disasters. Of the 74 groups that belong to the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, 40 are faith organizations. But the white Christian denominations to which most Americans used to belong are dwindling, and many younger people who consider themselves spiritual but unaffiliated will not replenish the supply of church volunteers and have no comparable institution around which to organize.

fivethirtyeight - Women Won The Right To Vote 100 Years Ago. They Didn’t Start Voting Differently From Men Until 1980.
Pew Research - Men and women in the U.S. continue to differ in voter turnout rate, party identification
"about half of U.S. adults (49%) – including 52% of men and 46% of women – say granting women the right to vote has been the most important milestone in advancing the position of women in the country"

november 2020

still reading a lot. stayed off social media for a few days following the election, hoping not to get too caught up the drama. got laid off in the middle of the month and was suddenly then too busy to read, somehow, lol, but starting watching documentaries again.

capital in the 21st century (2019), the crown (season 4), tell me who I am (2019), kids the ground, sacred cow, human nature

NYT - He Married a Sociopath. Me.
Vox - America’s gun problem, explained
Bloomberg - The Global Fertility Crash
Popular Science - How humans created color for thousands of years
Curbed - Why we can’t build small homes anymore
Vox - The case for hiring more police officers
The Atlantic - The Accidental Experiment That Changed Men’s Lives
Popular Mechanics - The Truth is in the Muck
NPR - Twin Birthrate Drops For First Time Since The '80s
Smithsonian Magazine - The Science Behind Your Cheap Wine
Vox - Coronavirus is exposing all of the weaknesses in the US health system
ESPN - The ugly, gory, bloody secret life of NHL dentists
BBC - Lifting the lid on Japan’s amazing bento boxes
The Atlantic - Why Everything Is Getting Louder
BBC -  The cheap pen that changed writing forever
AP - Where you die can affect your chance of being an organ donor
Vox - The challenge of combating fake news in Asian American communities
The Atlantic - Why Most of America Is Terrible at Making Biscuits
Esquire -  The Crushing Reality of Zoom School
NPR - When Shoplifting Is A Felony: Retailers Back Harsher Penalties For Store Theft
Business of Fashion - How the Puffy Vest Became a Symbol of Power
FiveThirtyEight - Why Are Great Athletes More Likely To Be Younger Siblings?
The Guardian - .Should we stop keeping pets? Why more and more ethicists say yes
Medium - Forget Shutdowns. It’s ‘Demand Shock’ That’s Killing Our Economy.
Marie Claire - Inside the Growing Movement of Women Who Wish They'd Never Had Kids
Inverse - Lab-Grown Meat Also Creates an Benefit: Ethical Zebra Burgers
Mental Floss -  The Reason Why No Photography is Allowed in the Sistine Chapel
CNN - Crispy, spicy and hugely popular: Why chicken sandwiches are taking over America
Washington Post - To David Chang, the ‘ethnic’ food aisle is racist. Others say it’s convenient.
NPW - At The Mercy Of An App: Workers Feel The Instacart Squeeze
Art & Design - How the ‘Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World’ Got Its Logo
Harvard Business Review - A Short History of Golden Parachutes
FiveThirtyEight - What Should The Government Spend To Save A Life?
Marie Claire - To End Sexual Abuse in Churches, Dismantle Purity Culture
The Atlantic - How Pink Salt Took Over Millennial Kitchens
NPR - Now That More Americans Can Work From Anywhere, Many Are Planning To Move Away.
The Conversation - The long history of how Jesus came to resemble a white European
Bloomberg - Covid-19 Explodes the Myth That Women 'Opt' Out.
LA Times - Small turkeys are in high demand this Thanksgiving. Good luck finding one
National Geographic - Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus—but not because of parties and bars
Time - Low Wages, Sexual Harassment and Unreliable Tips. This Is Life in America’s Booming Service Industry
Refinery 29 - This Racist Form Of Voter Suppression Is Killing Democracy — & Nobody’s Talking About It
NBC - A fight over gifted education in New York is escalating a national debate over segregated schools
The Conversation - A quarter of US parents are unmarried – and that changes how much they invest in their kids
Bultimore Sun - John Waters bequeaths his art collection to Baltimore Museum of Art, whose bathrooms will be named in his honor  :D

The Atlantic - Why IVF Has Divided France
Apartment Therapy - Why 70 Percent Alcohol Disinfects Better Than 91 Percent, According to a Microbiologist

The Atlantic - Why Some People Become Lifelong Readers
I think the definition of a reader needs to be revised. I don't read many books anymore, but I read hella articles. I mean, obviously, look at this blog. I only note the interesting articles I've read that month, but I read at least 5 times more than what is listed. so I read at least 100 articles, on fairly broad topics, every month. assuming each article averages 5 minutes long, that's 500 minutes which is over 8 hours of reading articles a month. it's not much, but I think it definitely qualifies me as a "reader" even if it's not books. 

The Atlantic - What Happened to American Childhood?
"We know they affect nearly a third of adolescents ages 13 to 18, and that their median age of onset is 11, although some anxiety disorders start much earlier (the median age for a phobia to start is 7)."

The Atlantic - America's Health-Inequality Problem
"The U.S. has one of the largest income-based health disparities in the world... Only Chile and Portugal have a larger income-based gap in the health status of their citizens."
"Furthermore, while two-thirds of Americans report that “many” people in their country can’t access the health-care they need—10 percentage points higher than in any other country—Americans were less likely than average to say that it’s unfair that wealthier people can afford better health care. “We found that ethical concerns about the fairness of income-based health-care disparities were less common in the United States than in most of the other countries in our sample,” the authors write."

Vice - Brave: Corporations Stand In Solidarity With the Communities They Exploit
"In reality, the vast majority of these companies have business models explicitly designed to profit from what MLK called the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism.” Dignified jobs have always been at the forefront of racial justice campaigns for good reason: Poverty is just another form of violence—“the worst form,” according to Mahatma Gandhi."

october 2020

j started working 3rd shift this month so I have a lot of quiet time. also, our tv broke and we didn't get one for a few days so I continued to clear out my inbox as a result. 

Buzzfeed - The Era Of Influencers Being Apolitical Online Is Over
ProPublica - California Will Keep Burning. But Housing Policy Is Making It Worse.
LA Times - Largest study of COVID-19 transmission highlights essential role of super-spreaders
Pew Research Center - Many Americans Get News on YouTube, Where News Organizations and Independent Producers Thrive Side by Side
Washington Post - For the first time in history, US billionaires paid a lower tax rate than the working class last year
Wall Street Journal - Americans Want Homes, but There Have Rarely Been Fewer for Sale.
The Guardian - World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam.
Axios - Democrats' Armageddon option
New York Magazine - Many GOP Voters Value America’s Whiteness More Than Its Democracy
Food 52 - The 2,000-Year-Old History of Vending Machines
The Guardian - Gun inequality: US study charts rise of hardcore super owners
BBC - What would happen if the world suddenly went vegetarian?
Business Insider - A searing new report claims opioid drugmakers spent 8 times as much as the NRA on lobbying
Vox - The hidden war over grocery shelf space
Wall Street Journal - Parents Don’t Want to Name Their Kids Mike Anymore
The Atlantic - Americans’ Bizarre Relationship With the Color of Their Food
FiveThirtyEight - We Asked 8,500 Internet Commenters Why They Do What They Do
The Guardian - The rise and fall of French cuisine
The Ringer - Will Write for Food
NPR - Your Name Might Shape Your Face, Researchers Say
Vox - Study: half of the studies you read about in the news are wrong
Popular Science - We need more 'body farms' to figure out how corpses rot
The Atlantic - Dude, She’s (Exactly 25 Percent) Out of Your League
NBC - How women in poverty are supplying America’s market for hair
Daily Beast - When The One Percent Sent Its Kids to War
The Verge - The Photography of Tump's Presidency is a Huge Break from Obama's
The Guardian - How we made the typeface Comic Sans
NYT - Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree.
The Atlantic - The Paradox of American Restaurants
NPR - Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Won't Change Her Name 'To Make Other People Happy'
The Guardian - Why do we think poor people are poor because of their own bad choices?
Fast Company - Free shipping is quietly changing the design of your favorite products
The Verge - Road Tripping with Amazon Nomads
NY Mag - Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors
Racked - It Costs $2.50 to Make Lipstick — Here’s Why You’re Charged So Much More
Vice - The Weird Science Behind Chain Restaurant Menus
The Atlantic  - Disposable America
Jezebel - The Strange, Sad Story of the Ken Doll's Crotch
The Thillist - How Ferrero Rocher Became a Status Symbol for Immigrant Families
The Guardian - Naomi Klein: how power profits from disaster
Bloomberg City Lab - Take a Seat: 5 Brilliant Bus Stop Fixes
The Outline - You can’t just put homeless people in tiny houses
Nautilus - Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food
Mental Floss - Meet the Two Women Who Give Prescription Drugs Their Generic Names
Medium - Bug Breeders Are Cultivating Waste-Guzzling Flies to Gobble Up America's Trash
Refinery 29 - We Are Now The United States Of GoFundMe
The Atlantic - The Little College Where Tuition Is Free and Every Student Is Given a Job
NBC - Want to go to the movies? There's an airplane for that
The New Republic - The Fight for the Right to Be Cremated by Water
Longreads - The Ugly History of Beautiful Things: Perfume
Bloomberg CityLab - How School Districts Seal Their Students Into Poverty
Barking Up the Wrong Tree - Is bad truly stronger than good?
The Guardian - The fatal, hateful rise of choking during sex
Telegraph UK - When daylight kills
NYT - How a Brand Name Becomes Generic
Barking Up the Wrong Tree - Do women and men have different moral values?
The Atlantic - What George W Bush Plans to Do About Trump
Elle - Senator Gary Peters Shares His Abortion Story
World ABC News - A B.C. research project gave homeless people $7,500 each — the results were ‘beautifully surprising’
Fast Company - A hospital introduced a robot to help nurses. They didn’t expect it to be so popular
The Guardian - 'This guy doesn't know anything': the inside story of Trump's shambolic transition team.
Medium - Turns Out Immigrant Parents Were Right About Everything
Miami New Times - Woman Who Likes Trump's Smile: "I Wish He Would Smile More and Talk Less"
BBC - How modern life is transforming the human skeleton
ART News - The Surprising Power of Color to Ease Quarantine Anxiety
Axios - New culture war: The meaning of white privilege
History - How an Accidental Invention Changed What Americans Eat for Breakfast

NYT - Study Finds ‘Single Largest Driver’ of Coronavirus Misinformation: Trump
USA Today - Rigged: Forced into debt. Worked past exhaustion. Left with nothing.
NYT - Blue Cities Want to Make Their Own Rules. Red States Won’t Let Them
The Guardian - The trouble with charitable billionaires
NBC News - What if you call 911 and no one comes?
NBC News - Why are many of America's military families going hungry?
USA Today - America's parents want paid family leave and affordable child care. Why can't they get it?
LA Times - One is Chinese. One is American. How a journalist discovered and reunited identical twins (I watched this documentary! One Child Nation)

Vox - Extreme poverty is getting worse across the globe for the first time in decades
Axios - Study: 8 million Americans have fallen into poverty since May

FiveThirtyEight - Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back
Pacific Standard - Why Atheists Terrify Believers

The Atlantic - Every Culture Appropriates
appropriation is different from appreciation, tho sometimes they can be mixed. the banh mi example. there's nothing really about that that reflects an actual banh mi. it uses different ingredients, and uses them differently it's just a plain sandwich, not reflective of a banh mi at all. the prom dress is appreciative. she liked the dress, liked how she looked in it, awesome. had she put her hair up in a bun with chopsticks and carried a purse that looked like takeout box, no good. cause that's a fucking stereotype and not appreciative or respectful at all. 

Fast Company - Bananas have died out once before–don’t let it happen again
"...there is no genetic difference between them. Plantation bananas are sterile and produced via cloning; baby banana plants sprout from the base of adult banana plants, identicals in miniature of the adjacent giants they will soon become."

NYT - It’s Not Just Mike Pence. Americans Are Wary of Being Alone With the Opposite Sex.
"A majority of women, and nearly half of men, say it’s unacceptable to have dinner or drinks alone with someone of the opposite sex other than their spouse."
I find these numbers so surprising! maybe it's part of living in a "big city" but these rules seem so antiquated. and i can't even imagine my life like this? so many of my interactions are one on one, with women and men. I think most of my outside meals are just between me an one other person. I think that other person (even outside joe) is usually a man! maybe it's cause i'm introverted also? and kind of of guy's girl? I can't get over this, lol. 

NPR - Ramen To The Rescue: How Instant Noodles Fight Global Hunger
NPR - 'Cup Noodles' Turns 45: A Closer Look At The Revolutionary Ramen Creation
"To serve its global customers, Nissin makes culturally specific adaptations, like different flavors for different national palates. Even the length of noodle changes... "Americans don't like to slurp their noodles. So they make the length of the noodles for the American version smaller so they don't have to suck it up.."

Tech Crunch - Writer Anand Giridharadas on tech’s billionaires: “Are they even on the same team as us?”
"I often say that the government at its best is like a lawyer for all of us. The government is like ‘Why don’t we check out these car seats for you and create some rules around them, and then you can just buy a car seat and not have to wonder whether it’s the kind that protects your child or crumbles?’ That’s what the government does for all kinds of things."

Slate - Is Lab-Grown Meat Really Meat?
"By 1900, it was illegal in 30 states to dye margarine yellow, and a handful of states went even further, dictating that margarine had to be dyed an unappetizing pink. Canada outright banned margarine until 1948."

Vox - Millennials have very little confidence in most major institutions
this article is from 2016, so I'm sure things have changed, but it's still crazy to see that millennials had the most trust in the fucking military. "post" covid, I have more trust in governors and mayors. certainly not in every state and city, but at least in mine.

BuzzFeed - When You’re Trans, Living With Your Parents Can Be Complicated
"Nationally, 40% of homeless youth are queer or trans."
"Last month, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed that homeless shelters be allowed to deny access to trans people, overriding the 2012 Equal Access rule that bans discrimination in public housing, federally funded shelters, and federally backed mortgages on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, and marital status"

BBC - Is this the most powerful word in the English language?
"According to Culpeper, men say ‘the’ significantly more frequently. Deborah Tannen, an American linguist, has a hypothesis that men deal more in report and women more in rapport – this could explain why men use ‘the’ more often. Depending on context and background, in more traditional power structures, a woman may also have been socialised not to take the voice of authority so might use ‘the’ less frequently. Though any such gender-based generalisations also depend on the nature of the topic being studied. Those in higher status positions also use ‘the’ more – it can be a signal of their prestige and (self) importance."

september 2020

rising phoenix, social dilemma, my octopus teacher

this month, I finally finished about a year's worth of Radiolab podcasts. Radiolab was my first podcast and I definitely plan on donating to them this year. but rather than going even further back in their library, I tried listening to a few other shows. I gave Death, Sex, and Money a few episodes but won't be returning, and started listening to Insivisbilia by NPR. they're not bad; I find the stories compelling, but I don't like the editing as much. 
Invisibilia podcasts of note: white vs white, The confrontation, Rough Translation: Liberté, Égalité and French Fries, The End of Empathy, A Very Offensive Rom-Com

Vogue - Old Navy Will Pay Its Employees to Work the Polls on Election Day !!!!!!!!!!!
NYT - The War Crime No One Wants to Talk About
LA Times- Mongols Feel Under Siege
Medium - Tiny Weed-Killing Robots Could Make Pesticides Obsolete
First Coast News - 'It was gutting': Family says home's appraised value soared after they removed all traces of 'Blackness' from their home
NYT - The Flight Goes Nowhere. And It’s Sold Out.
Atlas Obscura - The Museum Where Racist and Oppressive Statues Go to Die
Southern Poverty Law Center - Study shows two-thirds of U.S. terrorism tied to right-wing extremists
NYT - Black Homeowners Face Discrimination in Appraisals
Medium - Remote Work Is Killing the Hidden Trillion-Dollar Office Economy.
CNN - Top intelligence office informs congressional committees it'll no longer brief in-person on election security
Economic Policy Institute - CEO compensation surged 14% in 2019 to $21.3 million
Vox - The post office arrested Steve Bannon. Yes, the post office can arrest people.
The Atlantic - The Rise of the 3-Parent Family
NYT - Just because I have a car doesn't mean I have enough money to buy food
Time Magazine - The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure
The Guardian - Our gigantic problem with portions: why are we all eating too much?
Quartz - With an updated Nutrition Facts label, the FDA settles an eternal question: “Why Helvetica?”
NYT - 7 Ways the Pandemic Has Changed How We Shop for Food
Refinery29 - A New Survey Shows That Over 1 In 10 Young Americans Have Never Heard Of The Holocaust
NYT - You’re Not Listening. Here’s Why.
AP News - Ginsburg's style was more than a subtle courtroom statement
The Guardian - How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket
The Atlantic - Why White People Don’t Use White Emoji
Mel Magazine - Inside the World of "Femcels"
NYT Magazine - David’s Ankles: How Imperfections Could Bring Down the World’s Most Perfect Statue
Washington Post -  We analyzed the names of almost every Chinese restaurant in America. This is what we learned
USA Today - Eight people in Indonesia who refused to wear face masks ordered to dig graves for COVID-19 victims as punishment
NYT - Why Giving Food Stamps to the Rich Is Not a Terrible Idea
LA Times - The anti-Spotify: How online music company Bandcamp became the toast of the COVID age
Vice - What Twitter's Preference for Ted Cruz With Big Anime Boobs Says About AI Bias
The Atlantic - The White-Savior Industrial Complex
NYT - It’s a Banana. It’s Art. And Now It’s the Guggenheim’s Problem.
NYT - To Protest Colonialism, He Takes Artifacts From Museums
Atlas Obscura -  The Dark Side of the 'Angel's Share'

Fast Company - A Detailed Look At How Complex Equal Pay Day Really Is
fivethirtyeight - Why Women Are No Longer Catching Up To Men On Pay

99% Invisible - Shade
NYT - How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering

Long Beach Post - Driver speeding through Belmont Shore crashes into, destroys restaurant parklet

august 2020

g and I subscribed to NYT and The Atlantic this month (she has one, I have the other and we're sharing between the two) so I think you'll start seeing a LOT more NYT articles, lol. I also set up a password to access my dad's LA Times account too!

Loving Vincent (2017), The Speed Cubers, ford vs Ferrari (2019), spirited away (2001), Ed Astra (2019), joker (2019), class action Park (2020), an american pickle

Wave 3 - Kentucky town hires social workers instead of more officers - and the results are surprising

BBC - Mexico obesity: Oaxaca bans sale of junk food to children

Vogue - How Hair Salons Are Mobilizing to Help Clean Up the Mauritius Oil Spill

Asia Society - Asian Americans Then and Now

The Atlantic - American Passports Are Useless Now

Mother Jones - Please Excuse My Lack of Gratitude Over a Female Vice President

Taste - The Convenient Truth of Rotisserie Chicken

Mother Jones - Protesters Arrested in Tennessee Could Now Lose Their Right to Vote

Vice - How a Joke Twitter T-Shirt Exposes a Frustration Many Asian Women Share

NYT - America Has Two Feet. It’s About to Lose One of Them.

YT - Sweatpants Forever

The Guardian - From farm to factory: the unstoppable rise of American chicken

Wired - Meet the Star Witness: Your Smart Speaker

ABC News - Virus causes uncertainty for state lotteries

The Guardian - White supremacists and militias have infiltrated police across US, report says

The Smithsonian - Growing Up Surrounded by Books Could Have Powerful, Lasting Effect on the Mind

Alta - California’s Lone Wolf Pack

The Smithsonian - Researchers “Translate” Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue

BBC - Genetic impact of African slave trade revealed in DNA study

Mental Floss - The Forgotten Uses of 8 Everyday Objects

The Atlantic - Now We'll Know What the Recession Feels Like

Ideas. Ted. - How to make your arguments stronger (hint: longer is not the answer)

Political - The Racist History of Tipping

Vox - MacKenzie Scott is donating her billions much faster than her ex Jeff Bezos

The Conversation - 5 takeaways from MacKenzie Scott’s $1.7 billion in support for social justice causes

The NYT - We’re 20 Percent of America, and We’re Still Invisible

"People with disabilities are the largest minority group in the United States, but for the most part, we remain invisible."

Ideas.Ted - Want to fight climate change? Educate a girl

"Educating girls is one of the most cost-effective, high-impact ways for every nation on earth to fight the rising temperatures and atmospheric changes that threaten us all. It’s a simple and basic reality. But why hasn’t more been said about this? Why hasn’t this been the topic of media coverage worldwide? I can only imagine it’s because the climate change discussion has been largely driven by Western nations — and in Western nations, girls’ education is a given. It’s not a topic most Westerners think about."

The Atlantic - Americans Are Determined to Believe in Black Progress

"In 1963, the median Black family had about 5 percent as much wealth as the median white family. Respondents said close to 50 percent. For 2016, the respondents estimated Black wealth to be 90 percent that of whites. The correct answer for that year was about 10 percent."

"For instance, there’s what might be called the generational fallacy: Many who acknowledge the reality of racism see salvation in the ebbing presence of older white people and their replacement by a surging mass of enlightened younger people. But generational change is not so simple. Young people’s racial attitudes are more like their parents’ than they may realize. (It is also the case that this “solution,” even if effective, would be very slow.)"

"The mythology of racial progress is corrosive in countless ways. It provides a reason to blame the victim: If we’re converging on equality, then those left behind must not be trying. And it diffuses moral responsibility for actively and significantly reforming the American system: If we’re converging on equality anyway, then why do we need laws and other measures to promote it?"

CNN - Supreme Court says states can punish Electoral College voters

good. what would even be the point of actual people voting if the electoral college can vote for whomever they want? ...tho seriously, we should just rid of the whole electoral college.

The Atlantic - The Lesson Americans Never Learn

liberals WANT government to be providing these things. it's the conservatives who don't because, at least the poorer ones, have been brainwashed to believe that choice is the most important thing. rich conservatives don't care about privatization of resources because they have the resources to spend and they're the profiteering of it.

Refinery29 - Why Have Incarcerated People Been On The Frontlines Of California Wildfires?

“The inmates should have been put on the fire lines, fighting fires,” Mike Hampton, a former corrections officer who previously worked at an inmate fire camp, told the New York Times. “How do you justify releasing all these inmates in prime fire season with all these fires going on?”

...um, NO. that's not their job. we abuse them by asking they fight fires for us, but they have no obligation to do so. it's stupid w should depend on such labor. ...more stupid, of course, is that we have so many people in prison to begin with.

July 2020 - highlight

 Refinery29 - There’s No Money In Working Anymore

"Last year, the Brookings Institution took a deep look at pay across the U.S., and found that almost half of workers — 44% — earn low wages."

"The National Low Income Housing Coalition released a report last week showing that there isn’t a single county in the U.S. where a full-time worker making minimum wage can afford a two-bedroom apartment."

“One [misconception about low-wage work] is that they’re mostly young people who are going to, as they get more experience or graduate from college or high school, move on as a matter of course. Most low-wage workers are not young.”

"Various studies have shown that while the U.S. wants to think of itself as a land of opportunity, economic mobility is tough. In a comparison of income inequality among 35 countries in the OECD, the U.S. ranks 32nd. One study found that while Americans whose parents’ income was in the bottom fifth managed to rise to the top fifth income bracket about 8% of the time, we optimistically believe there’s a 12% chance. In Canada, the actual chance of rising from the very bottom to the very top is about 13.5%."

"According to the National Women’s Law Center, women make up almost two-thirds of minimum wage workers. And while both men and women do low-wage work, the gender makeup varies a lot depending on age group and education level. Of low-wage workers ages 18-24 who have no college degree and aren’t currently in school, 57% are men. But among low-wage workers ages 25-50 who have at least an associate’s degree, 62% are women. This indicates that women are more likely to be employed in a low-wage job even with a college degree."

"“Black and Latinx women specifically make up between 26% to 28% of those working in the service sector,” says Dr. C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “These are jobs that are lower paying, have fewer benefits, less job security, the first to go when there's an economic downturn.”"

“The median wealth for Black families is $17,000. For white families, it’s $171,000. It’s criminal.”

"If the bottom line was that, as a country, we believe everyone deserves a living wage, the economy could be structured around that immutable fact. Ross says it’s policy and political choices, not "impersonal economic forces," that have allowed poverty wages to proliferate."

July 2020

discovered twitter's bookmark function this month which means WAY more time on twitter, and less on pocket. in other words, way more politics and current stuff

Stuffed (2019), Antarctica: a year on ice (2017), spelling the dream (2020), lady bird (2017), a serious man (2009), ex machina (2014)

Norah Vincent - voluntary madness

LA Times - Billionaire created a perfect experiment by erasing $34 million in student debt
NYT - Trump Announced, Then Canceled, a Yankees Pitch. Both Came as a Surprise.
Medium - All your most paranoid transfer of power questions, answered.
Bloomberg - OK Boomer, We're Gonna Socialize You.
Worth - Not All Billionaire Philanthropists Are Created Equal
Inverse - Evolution Made Really Smart People Long to Be Loners
Washington Post - Reagan Foundation to Trump, RNC: Quit raising money off Ronald Reagan's legacy.
In the Public Interest - The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service

CBS News -  Flawed COVID-19 antibody tests shipped without FDA review

Reddit - How to become president with 22% of the vote

The Mercury News - Police reform: California bill would strip convicted officers of their badges

digg - Believe It Or Not, Your Net Worth Is Way Closer To Elon Musk, Oprah And Michael Bloomberg Than Theirs Is To Jeff Bezos

LA Times - Filipino Americans are dying of COVID at an alarming rate

Mother Jones - The Last-Ditch Effort to Stop Florida's Century-Old Campaign of Racist Disenfranchisement

Medium - these evangelical women are abandoning trump and their churches

Seattle Times - New cuts threaten the Postal Service when it's most needed

Medium - The Uncertain Future of Post-Pandemic Starbucks.

The Texas Tribune - How a $175 COVID-19 test in Texas led to $2,479 in charges

Mother Jones - Herman Cain's Death Is Political. All Coronavirus Deaths Are.

TMI - Gilead Is Profiteering Off A COVID Drug We Already Paid For

"The American public helped finance the development of remdesivir — and will now be charged $3,000 for a treatment that experts say costs less than $10 to produce."

The Atlantic - Hygiene Theater Is a Huge Waste of Time

I HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS SINCE LITERALLY THE BEGINNING!!! 

Vogue - What’s the Carbon Footprint of Your Internet Habit? It’s Probably Higher Than You Think
I had read somewhere way before that our archived emails actually makes up quite a bit of our online carbon footprint. so during quarantine, I made a point to go thru my inbox and clear out a bunch of emails. I'm sure what little I did made pretty much no impact, especially since I've been on the internet more overall since quarantine, but still, it felt nice to clean up my inbox a bit.

Vogue - Soul Fire Farm’s Leah Penniman Explains Why Food Sovereignty Is Central in the Fight for Racial Justice
Your CSA boxes, or “Solidarity Shares” are delivered to families living in neighborhoods classed as “food deserts,” although you prefer the term “food apartheid.” Why is that?
According to the USDA, a “food desert” just means a zip code with high poverty and no nearby grocery stores. “Food apartheid” is a term that Karen Washington introduced me to and refers I think more accurately to the situation. A desert is natural, but there's nothing natural about your zip code being the number-one determinant of your life expectancy, usually highly correlated to race. And that's all about, like I said, histories of redlining and zoning exclusions of people of color from certain neighborhoods. The fact that certain people have food opulence and others have food scarcity is not because of personal choice. It's because of these systems of segregation that are more appropriately called apartheid. So that's a term that we use to not pretend that it's natural and inevitable when one in four Black children are hungry every night.

June 2020

AKA Jane Roe, bottle shock (2008), Figure It Out on the Hayduke Trail (2008), Ken burns: the central Park five (2013), love me (2015), just eat it: a food waste story (2014), magnetic (2018), the history time travel (2014)


The Atlantic - The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying
Columbia Journalism Review - Black and white: why capitalization matters
NPR - 1 In 4 Americans Thinks The Sun Goes Around The Earth
Elle - It Does Not Matter If You Are Good
Scientific American - Cognitive Ability and Vulnerability to Fake News
The Guardian - Why are Africa's coronavirus successes being overlooked
Buzzfeed - I Don't Feel Like Buying Stuff Anymore
Vogue - She Does, He Doesn’t: The Gender Divide in Mask-Wearing
Marker - Inside the Flour Company Supplying America’s Sudden Baking Obsession
Mental Floss - Henry Johnson, the One-Man Army Who Fought Off Dozens of German Soldiers During World War I
Citylab - Who Owns a Home in America, in 12 Charts
Sup News - A brief history of typeface and its online evolution
Narratively - What I Learned About Life at a Company That Deals in Dead Bodies
Yahoo - How a 'rogue' employee forced NFL, Goodell into new Black Lives Matter stance
Washington Post - The need to go is a big barrier to going out. Why public bathrooms are a stumbling block for reopening.
The Conversation - The tooth fairy as an essential worker in a child's world of wonder.
NYT - What the pandemic reveals about the male ego
Mother Jones - “Qualified Immunity” Gives Abusive Cops a Free Pass. Will the Supreme Court End It?
WKMS - She Was Generous. She Was Also Racist. Should This Ballpark Carry Her Name?
Atlantic - The Coronavirus Was an Emergency Until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying
Mental Floss - There's a Wire Above Manhattan That You've Probably Never Noticed.
The Atlantic - You're Showering Too Much - The Atlantic
SF Chronicle - California effort to restore affirmative action divides Asian Americans
Atlas Obscura - The Man Who Recorded, Tamed and Then Sold Nature Sounds to America
The Conversation - Why is the U.S. unwilling to pay for good public transportation?
NYT - Nearly Half of Men Say They Do Most of the Home Schooling. 3 Percent of Women Agree.
The Conversation - Why the German language has so many great words
Market Watch - 5 mistakes parents make when giving kids an allowance
fivethirtyeight - What Would Happen If We Just Gave People Money
Mother Jones - The Cruise Industry Is Donald Trump Personified
Harvard Business Review - What Leadership Looks Like in Different Cultures
Bloomberg - This May Be the World's Best Prison Food
Mother Jones - The Anti-Vax Movement’s Radical Shift From Crunchy Granola Purists to Far-Right Crusaders

BBC - The mystery of why there are more women vegans
BBC - The hidden biases that drive anti-vegan hatred

Domino - Whoa: This Is What Happens to Your Body When You Drink Enough Water
"Though the eight-cup rule is popular, there is no one-size-fits-all number. Instead, it’s more of an individual approach. The new general rule of thumb is half your weight in ounces, according to Dr. Cohen. For example, if you weigh 120 pounds, you need to drink 60 ounces of water a day."

The New Yorker - What Would Happen If G.P.S. Failed?
"The United States Air Force, which runs the G.P.S. Master Control Station, in Colorado, calls G.P.S. “the world’s only global utility.” Wholly owned by the U.S. government, the system is available free to everyone, everywhere..."

NY Times - The Man Who Coaches Husbands on How to Avoid Divorce
"Instead of listening to their parener, digesting the information and caring about why they feel bad, I've found that guys invest their energy in one of three ways: they dispute the facts of the story their partner just told; agree with the facts, but believe their partner is overreacting; or defend their actions by explaining why they did it. In all cases, his partner's feelings are invalid."

The Atlantic -  Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should
“This is an extraordinary failure of leadership in the United States,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at the Harvard Business School who studies crisis leadership, told me. “At the national level, there’s been a complete abdication by the government to help people make choices and adopt behaviors.”
"Koehn quoted David Foster Wallace’s definition of leadership to me: “A real leader is somebody who … can get us to do better, harder things than we can get ourselves to do on our own.” But now, when good leadership is absent, we have to try to do the better, harder things anyway."

The Atlantic - The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks
"Still, trying to shame people into healthier behavior generally doesn’t work—and actually can make things worse. Public-health professionals have learned this lesson before. In 1987, Congress banned the use of federal funds for HIV-prevention campaigns that might “promote or encourage, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities.” As a result, public-health campaigns avoided sex-positive imagery and messaging, and instead associated condom use with virtue and condomless sex with irresponsibility, disease, and death. According to one particularly foreboding poster, which featured an image of a gravestone: “A bad reputation isn’t all you can get from sleeping around.” But those moralistic, fear-mongering health messages often fell flat. Other HIV-prevention campaigns began to adopt a harm-reduction approach, which empathizes with people’s basic human needs and offers them strategies to limit potential dangers. For some men, condoms got in the way of what they valued most about sex: pleasure and intimacy. Not surprisingly, HIV-prevention campaigns that put pleasure and intimacy at the center of their safer-sex messaging tended to work."
"And, most of all, masks are a constant reminder of what Americans so desperately want to forget: that despite all of our sacrifices, the pandemic hasn’t gone anywhere."
"Just like the buckets of free condoms stationed in gay bars, masks need to be dispensed where they’re needed most: at the front of every bus and the entrance to every airport, grocery store, and workplace. Masks should become ubiquitous, but distribution should begin in areas where the coronavirus has hit hardest, including black and Latino neighborhoods."

May 2020

hail Satan? (2019), downsizing (2017), the lovebirds (2020)

i'm working hard on reading this month! the last couple months when I go to may parents' I've picked something to go thru, organize, get rid of. I've cleared out two boxes of magazines to donate to the library, and have started going thru books too (to sell at bookoff, or donate to the library and local "little libraries." i've also been going thru my email inbox. I get flipboard and pocket emails every day so I've been trying to actually read the stuff now, ha!

Jennifer Jordan - Savage Summit, Hilary liftin and Kate Montgomery - dear exile, Stephen Clarke - a year in merde, Christopher R. Browning - Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, Loung Ung - First They Killed My Father

LA Times - Does L.A. Catholic school have a religious-liberty right to fire a teacher who gets cancer?
Bloomberg - At overloaded thrift shops, coronavirus is wreaking havoc
Mental Floss - The Man Who Built a 40-Foot Spite Fence Around His Neighbor’s Home
Time - How Martin Luther King Jr.'s Groundless Traffic Ticket Changed History's Course
Your Tango - What happened to Jared Kushner's face? Startling before/after photos
The Conversation - Dynasties still run the world
The Guardian - Finnish basic income pilot improved wellbeing, study finds.
Grub Street - The Quarantine Garden Has Taken Off Seeds are the new sourdough.
Mental Floss - The Russian Family That Cut Itself Off From Civilization for More Than 40 Years
Fast Company - The untold origin story of the N95 mask
The Guardian - 'It's for my daughter's memory': the Indian village where every girl's life is celebrated
Popular Science - How the new World Cup ball was designed to not influence the games
Longreads - The Difference Between Being Broke and Being Poor
GQ - Is There a Place for Hooters in 2018?
The Hechinger Report - How to reach students without internet access at home? Schools get creative
Outside - Can You Hack Coral to Save It?
Esquire - How Vans Became the Shoes Everyone’s Wearing—Again
Huffington Post - FML: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.
Racked - The History of Green Dye Is a History of Death
Reuters - Cadavers in the ballroom: Doctors practice their craft in America’s favorite hotels
The Guardian - Why are America’s farmers killing themselves?
The Atlantic - How the Index Card Cataloged the World
IndieWire - Animation’s Whitewashing Problem: ‘Rick and Morty,’ ‘BoJack Horseman,’ ‘The Simpsons’ Producers On How To Fix It
Fast Company - Here’s A (Crazy?) Plan To Bribe Crows To Clean Up Cigarette Butts
Vox - How granite countertops became an American obsession
CNN - What North Korean propaganda posters reveal
The Guardian - Bussed out: How America moves its homeless
The Telegraph - No time for leftovers: The astonishing scale of food waste in the UK and around the world
NYT - This Exhibition Was Brought to You by Guns and Big Oil
The Guardian - Rain is sizzling bacon, cars are lions roaring: the art of sound in movies
Vogue - “I Have Never Been Fired at By Police Until Tonight” – Journalists Covering Protests Find They Too Are Targets
Refinery 29 - The Traumatized 17-Year-Old Who Filmed George Floyd’s Killing Is Already Being Harassed
The Splendid Table - Mouthfeel: the effect of sensation and texture on the flavor of food


LA Times - Coronavirus leaves Washington farmers with a big problem: What do you do with a billion pounds of potatoes?
BBC - Coronavirus: Meat shortage leaves US farmers with 'mind-blowing' choice

Refinery29 - What K-Pop’s Beautiful Men Can Teach Us About Masculinity
Vogue - This Was the Decade That Hip-Hop Style Got Femme

CNN - She came out as transgender and got fired. Now her case might become a test for LGBTQ rights before the US Supreme Court.

The Atlantic - The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM
"The upshot of this research is neither especially feminist nor especially sad: It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested."

Scientific American - Nice Brains Finish Last
"According to the model of “social value orientation,” humans can be placed into three rough categories, based on their reactions to economic inequity. 60% of people are pro-socials, meaning they prefer resources to be distributed equally among everyone. 30% are individualists, meaning they are primarily concerned with maximizing their own resources. Roughly 10% are competitive; to them, the most important outcome is that they have more than other people."

The Guardian - How the face mask became the world's most coveted commodity
"The pandemic has brought on a global shortage of masks, which is really a global shortage of one particular plastic inside the masks – a type of non-woven polypropylene that acts as a filter. In casual conversation, people in the mask business call the plastic “meltblown”, referring to how its plastic filaments are made. Meltblown goes into many things: jackets, nappies, filters in water purifiers and air conditioners. Masks are in short supply not because they’re difficult to produce, but because the meltblown industry is used to stable, long-term demand. It churns out just enough for its customers and no more. To install an assembly line of meltblown takes many months, even at the calmest of times; with demand now soaring, some companies supplying meltblown equipment are quoting timelines of up to two years to even deliver a new machine."

Buzzfeed - There Are Thousands Of Empty Hotel Rooms Across The US. Why Can’t Homeless People Use Them Through Quarantine?
J and I talked about this, how if he owned a hotel he would not let homeless stay there because they might ruin the rooms. I, of course, feel really bad about all those damn empty rooms and would want to give the homeless a place to stay. however, I would offer an incentive to help keep rooms clean. make it stupid dirty: I kick you out. keep it reasonable: I'll give you $10. keep it really nice: I've give you $20. or something like that. while yes, there are a lot of very messed up homeless who might trash the rooms, there are even more who would relish the opportunity to stay somewhere clean and private. during this time my hotel is making no money anyway, so yeah, I'd like the govt put people up. and i'd try to help them out too. j thought it was a pretty good idea :)

NYT - Leaders Are Crying on the Job. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.
"...it was common in the 18th century for upper-class men to cry — in fact, “they were viewed as brutes if they didn’t,” he said. It was only in the 19th century that the idea of male stoicism emerged, and it was not until the mid-20th century that tears were used to suggest that “candidates for public office were not manly or stable enough” to be there, Mr. Lutz said."
"women’s tear ducts are anatomically shallower, leading to spillover, which makes their crying more visible."
"“We have very narrow boundaries of acceptable emotional expression at work in general, and even more narrow for our leaders, male or female,” said Professor Grandey, the psychologist at Penn State. So narrow are those boundaries that they may boil down to the literal amount of tears. A tear or two — not a sob, Professor Grandey said. It also depends on what the emotion is about. Religious tears tend to be OK, as do heroic tears (think: war, sports). Patriotic tears are generally welcome, while personal tears are more risky."