september 2021

not much reading this month. been going out more often, and have been much more tired from work. 

reminiscence (2021), the emoji story (2020), this changes everything (2018), worth (2020)

Vox - The Death of the Job
NYT - Does Free College Work?
Taste - Strawberry and Kiwi: Why?
Buzzfeed - Why Am I Sp Bad At Typign?
The Atlantic - Colleges Have a Guy Problem
GQ - The Marathon Men Who Can't Go Home
GQ - The Best Things About the Worst Year Ever
Taste - Food Brands Fight the Background Check
Slate - “Men’s Rights Asians” Think This Is Their Moment
Vogue - What 6 Weeks Pregnant Looked and Felt Like to 6 Women
The Smithsonian - How Do Astronauts Spend Their Weekends in Space?
ABC News - North Korea holds 1st military parade since Biden took office
NPR - What I Learned From Watching Every Sport At The Tokyo Olympics
Inverse - How Marvel's Shang-Chi had to "Destroy" It's Own Racist Origins
Atlas Obscura - The Blacksmith Turning Decades of Chinese Bombs Into Kitchen Tools
Quartz - The racial dynamics between American women are flipped in a disorienting photo series
Refinery29 - A Japanese Man Was Hollywood’s First Sex Symbol So Stop Emasculating Our Asian Leading Men

Teen Vogue - Police Are Dying of COVID While Police Unions Fight Vaccines
"In 2020, COVID-19 was the highest cause of death for police officers on the job"

The Counter did a 3 part series on the prison / food industry complex. it's worth a read

The Counter - How corporations buy—and sell—food made with prison labor
"Across the country, at least 650 correctional institutions have some sort of food processing, landscaping, or farming operation..."
"States are allowed to garnish up to 80 percent for room and board, taxes, and other expenses. Again, Rice said, the concern about wages was not so much about the rights of incarcerated workers—rather, lawmakers wanted to ensure prison labor did not undercut the free market."
"For long hours in the hot sun, they earn as little as 4 cents per hour."

The Counter - This under-the-radar supply chain routes food from prisons to hospitals, food banks, and even schools
"PIECP rules allow corrections departments to withhold up to 80 percent of workers’ wages."
"The idea that the person who’s incarcerated should be paying for their own incarceration runs completely contrary to our knowledge of the prison system as a publicly funded and equally funded agency, right?"

The Counter - “Essential” and exploitable: Prison factories stayed open during the pandemic. People got sick.
"researchers have identified at least 650 U.S. correctional institutions that have some sort of food processing, landscaping, or farming operation. About half of states run some sort of farm or animal agriculture operation. People employed in state prisons earn anywhere from nothing to $5.15 per hour, averaging $0.14 to $1.14, according to a 2017 study by the Prison Policy Initiative. In federal institutions and many states, incarcerated people cannot refuse to work."
“I think one of the most obvious injustices in our prison system is that you have people who are working certain jobs, and then they come out of the prison system and they can’t get those same jobs on the outside.”

august 2021

the donut king (2020), luca, 

Taste - We Can’t Quit the Ziploc
The Atlantic - The Limits of Sex Positivity
The Atlantic - Vaccinated America Has Had Enough
The New Yorker - America Ruined My Name for Me
The Atlantic - The Vaccine Cards Are the Wrong Size
Vox - Why school lunches feel like they’re frozen in time
Quartz - The Five Universal Laws of Human Stupidity
The Conversation - When men started to obsess over six-packs
NYT - Pandemic Aid Programs Spur a Record Drop in Poverty
BBC - Why South Korean women are reclaiming their short hair
NYT - Inside the Diverse and Growing Asian Population in the U.S.
The New Yorker - Tokyo’s Olympics Have Become the Anger Games
Wired - How Some Americans Are Breaking Out of Political Echo Chambers
Bloomberg - Shipping Chaos Kills 1,800 Cows, Fueling Calls for Animal Ban
NYT - A Chinese ‘Auntie’ Went on a Solo Road Trip. Now, She’s a Feminist Icon.
Narratively - The Acrobatic Immigrant Who Invented Pilates in a Prisoner of War Camp
CNET - Take a look inside Air Horse One to see how racehorses fly to the Kentucky Derby
Bored Panda - People Are Shaming Their Dogs, And Here Are 43 Of The Worst Good Boys Ever
National Geographic - How science solved the mystery of feet washing ashore in the Pacific Northwest
Washington Post - Rand Paul discloses 16 months late that his wife bought stock in company behind covid treatment
The Hill - Stunning new report ranks US dead last in health care among richest countries—despite spending the most
Pro Publica - “Don’t You Work With Old People?”: Many Elder-Care Workers Still Refuse to Get COVID-19 Vaccine

Business Insider - COVID allowed Raquel Esquivel and 4,500 others to be released from overcrowded federal prisons. So why is she back behind bars?

Vogue - The Powerful Story Behind the German Gymnastics Team’s Unitards
Wall Street Journal - Bye-Bye Bikinis? Athletes at the Olympics and Beyond Fight Sexist Uniforms

july 2021

less reading this month since I stated a new job. "prepped" for a bit before that meeting up with old coworkers, and then sewed j a dozen plus scrub caps for like two weeks. 

raya, el bulli: cooking in progress (2010), chef flynn (2018), tokyo rising (2020), another round (2020), soul (2020)

NYT - How the World Ran Out of Everything
The Atlantic - Emergency Medicine’s Original Sin
Bloomberg - What Happened to Pickup Trucks?
Wired - Inside Silicon Valley’s Mayo Marketing Madness
Scientific American - The American Obsession with Lawns
NYT - Send in the Bugs. The Michelangelos Need Cleaning.
NYT - Why Police Have Been Quitting in Droves in the Last Year
AP - Oxfam: 11 people die of hunger each minute around the globe
Discover Magazine - How Adding Iodine to Salt Boosted Americans' IQ
The Atlantic - An Archivist Sneezes on a Priceless Document. Then What?
Mcclean's - Have Guelph's delightful ‘fairy doors’ become a forest plague?
SF Gate - California exodus is just a myth, massive UC research project finds
LA Times - Trees give us life. These fake ones give us TikTok on our cellphones
19th News - 5 pads for 2 cellmates: Period inequity remains a problem in prisons
Vogue - Why Is the Fashion World Still Obsessed With This Olympian’s Sunglasses?
NYT - Jury Awards $125 Million After Walmart Fires Woman With Down Syndrome
LA Times - To vaccinate or not? For U.S. Olympic athletes, the debate creates division
Salon - How evangelicals abandoned Christianity — and became "conservatives" instead
San Francisco Chronicle - Mendocino is running out of water. The solution might involve a very old train
The Guardian - Mystery of the wheelie suitcase: how gender stereotypes held back the history of invention
Business Insider - Meet the typical Costco shopper, a 39-year-old Asian American woman earning more than $125,000 a year
Insider - Photos show China's most surreal tourist spot— a fake Instagram-worthy town full of pretend farmers and phony fishermen
The Washington Post - A trans woman reportedly undressed in a spa. Customers said they were ‘traumatized,’ and a protest ensued.
Pro Publica - State Attorneys General Push Federal Government to Follow the Law and Finally Create Side-Impact Tests for Kids’ Car Seats

National Farm Worker Ministry - Children in the Fields
The Atlantic - The Overlooked Children Working America's Tobacco Fields

terribly written but worth the read if only for the shock and disgust factor:
Vice - I’m a Parkland Shooting Survivor. QAnon Convinced My Dad It Was All a Hoax.

june 2021

tinker tailor soldier spy (2011), stowaway (2021), amy tan: an unintended memoir, andre and his olive tree (2020), season 1 and 2 of Manifest, 

jonathan zimmerman - too hot to handle: a global history of sex education, jim davidson and kevin vaughan - the ledge: an inspirational story of friendship and survival

BBC - A day in the life of a flavour inventor
Wired - Wait, Vaccine Lotteries Actually Work?
NYT - Farewell, Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy
BBC - Why being kind to others is good for your health
The Atlantic - Where Gender-Neutral Pronouns Come From
AP - Some Stolen US Military Guns Used in Violent Crimes
FiveThirtyEight - Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories
Xtra - With queer co-parenting, the more is definitely the merrier
The Atlantic - The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work
The Atlantic - You Can Only Maintain So Many Close Friendships
Refinery29 - Here’s Why So Many People Are Fighting On Airplanes
The Atlantic - The Unspoken Wedge Between Parents and Grandparents
Crosscut - UW research shows racism and redlining hurt local wildlife, too
FiveThirtyEight - Why The Two-Party System Is Effing Up U.S. Democracy
The Atlantic - Research Proves It: There’s No Such Thing as Noblesse Oblige
Vogue - Meet New York’s Top Hand and Foot Model Agent (It’s a Real Thing!)
FiveThirtyEight - It’s Not Just Young White Liberals Who Are Leaving Religion
Bloomberg - Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working From Home
LA Times - L.A. traffic behavior is changing. Is post-pandemic gridlock inevitable?
Smithsonian Magazine - The Senator Who Stood Up to Joseph McCarthy When No One Else Would
Mother Jones - An Incarcerated Artist Memorializes the “Forgotten” People Killed By COVID in Prison
Variety - How the Rembrandts’ ‘Friends’ Song Became the Most Iconic TV Theme of the ’90s… and Beyond
San Francisco Chronical - San Jose plans to be first U.S. city requiring firearms owners to pay back taxpayers for gun violence

New Statesman - CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
NYT - Meager Rewards for Workers, Exceptionally Rich Pay for C.E.O.s
digg - The 20 Companies With The Biggest Pay Gaps Between CEOs And The Average Worker
NYT - Want to Make Money Like a C.E.O.? Work for 275 Years

Atlas Obscura - The Grim, Depression-Era Origins of Dance Marathons
"3780 continuous hours" is almost 158 days straight?! which is like 5 months?!

NHK - China addresses food waste with “clean plate” campaign
LOVE!!! I am every time absolutely SHOCKED by home much food waste there is in China. it's SO upsetting to see all that food going to waste at the end of banquets. UGH...

The Atlantic - How Helicopter Parenting Can Cause Binge Drinking
I never understood the "let's go get drunk!" people. like, yeah, let's go drink, get tispy, have fun. but getting drunk is no fun. getting vomit on your stuff, losing your phone and wallet, waking up the next day hugging the toilet, walking around with a hangover, ugh, no thanks. I don't understand wanting to do that at all. (full disclosure. I've been throw up drunk three times, and black out drunk twice. each time, I knowingly drank too much, but also did not know what my limit was. these days I have a two drink per hour maximum. but that usually turns into a two drink an event maximum, ha.)

NYT - The Cost of Being an ‘Interchangeable Asian’
"There is a Japanese proverb that states, “The quacking duck gets shot.” It stands in stark contrast to the Western idiom “The squeaky wheel gets the oil.”"
"In one study citing national employment data from 2018, the Ascend Foundation found that white men were 192 percent more likely to become executives than Asian men, and white women were 134 percent more likely to become executives than Asian women. Another study, from 2013, found that while there were nearly as many Asian professionals as white professionals working at five big tech companies (Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo), white men and women were 154 percent more likely to be an executive than their Asian counterparts; Asian professionals tended to peak at middle management."

The Atlantic - The Drug That Could Break American Health Care
"The way that Medicare pays for drugs exacerbates the problem. The program is not structured to negotiate with manufacturers, which spurs drug companies to set high prices. Worse still, Medicare also pays prescribing physicians 6 percent of a drug’s average sales price, a practice that encourages physicians to prescribe more expensive drugs."

may 2021

seaspiracy, the one (8 episode series), spotlight (2015), coded bias (2020), nail bomber: manhunt,

BBC - The rise, fall, and rise of the status pineapple
Hakai Magazine - The Unlikely Success of Fish Sticks
MSN - The man who didn't invent Flamin' Hot Cheetos
NPR - How Extremists Weaponize Irony To Spread Hate
Bloomberg - America Has Lost Its Taste for Iceberg Lettuce
Ars Technica - Why online voting is harder than online banking
NYT - As Covid-19 Devastates India, Deaths Go Undercounted
OZY - She's Taking on 'Wigging' and Whitewashing in Hollywood Stunts
Smithsonian Magazine - The Unmistakable Black Roots of ‘Sesame Street’
New Scientist - Birds use cigarette butts for chemical warfare against ticks
The Hustle - Why it’s nearly impossible to buy an original Bob Ross painting
Bloomberg - Charging 589% Interest in the Pandemic Is a Booming Business
Dangerous Minds - Gorillas Make Up 'Little Food Songs' While They Eat
The Conversation - How Where You’re Born Influences the Person You Become
Forbes - The Billionaire Who Wanted To Die Broke . . . Is Now Officially Broke
The Atlantic - The Body’s Most Embarrassing Organ Is an Evolutionary Marvel
Fast Company - Car design is about to change forever. This video encapsulates how
The Conversation - The forgotten origins of the modern gay rights movement in WWI
NY Post - Less than half of NYPD cops have received at least one COVID-19 vaccine
NPR - 6 Charts That Dismantle The Trope Of Asian Americans As A Model Minority
The Guardian - What Is the Mysterious ‘Global Hum’ – and Is It Simply Noise Pollution?
LA Times - Dwayne Johnson accounts for a third of all API movie leads as study finds sad stats
Upworthy - Women shared how they make sexist men explain their nasty jokes, and it's so satisfying
Smithsonian Magazine - The Man Who Brought the Swastika to Germany, and How the Nazis Stole It
Teen Vogue - Overdose Awareness Day: How Drug Overdoses and White Supremacy Are Linked in the U.S.

Medium - Why the Hybrid Workforce of the Future Depends on the ‘Geriatric Millennial’
Medium - Why I Call Myself a “Geriatric Millennial” — and Why Our Micro-Generation Matters

Axios - How CEOs got raises amid COVID
Institute for Policy Studies - Pandemic Pay Plunder

NYT - See Fewer People. Take Fewer Showers.
I hope this trend lasts! let's all save water and build up our immune system and microbiomes folks! personally, I shower 2-3 times a week if I'm not doing anything. my hair starts getting really greasy looking after 3 days. obviously, if I work out, go to the beach, do something dirty, I'll shower in between. body odor doesn't seem to be much of an issue either. I was never consistent with deodorant and gave it up completely like 10 years ago and have never had anyone complain. 

Brain Pickings - The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior
"All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths."
"Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this."

The Root - A Judge Asked Harvard to Find Out Why So Many Black People Were In Prison. They Could Only Find 1 Answer: Systemic Racism
"The researchers also couldn’t figure out why Black people are always initially charged with more serious crimes than white people. The easiest explanation was that Black suspects commit worse crimes than white people, but the data disproved that assumption. Then, they hypothesized that prosecutors may be overzealous when it came to convicting violent cases but that proved not to be the case. When all was said and done, Black people were arrested more often, had higher bail and received harsher sentences. But when they examined convictions, they discovered that Black people were surprisingly less likely to be convicted than white people. Essentially, according to the researchers, a white person has to commit an egregious offense to wind up behind bars while all a Black person has to do is...well, be a Black person."

Vice - Why Do So Many Adult Men Keep Their Mattresses On The Floor?
when I was dating, I wouldn't say that I judged, but I definitely noticed bed stuff. I never asked the one guy with the mattress on the floor why he didn't have a frame or even a box spring, but then, he seemed really poor, so I figured it was that. the thing I actually really noticed was lack of headboards. I think only one person had a headboard, and he was also the only one with actual PLANTS (two small trees!!!) in his room. he had a very adult room. but then, he also had the most money. j had a box spring, and a frame, and art!! but no headboard. he was the only one I asked. and he said he never liked them. personally, when I bought my first bed. it wasn't even a consideration NOT to have one. I bought a headboard that came attached to the frame. and chose a mattress that didn't need a box spring. we're on that same bed now, lol, a full. which is too small but has fit both of our too small bedrooms just fine. I'll be happy to upgrade to something bigger someday, tho honestly, with j's schedule, we barely sleep together now, except for my daily nap with him in the afternoons. 

april 2021

made you look (2020), i care a lot (2020), the last cruise, the biggest little farm (2018), all 3 seasons of shtisel

martin brookes - fly: the unsung hero of 20th century science

NYT - 2020 The Year in Pictures
BBC - Why some people can deal with the cold
The Hustle - The economics of vending machines
Smithsonian - Why Is the Pentagon a Pentagon?
Collaborative Fund - Expiring vs. Permanent Skills
Medium - The Slow, Troubling Death of the Autopsy
The Atlantic - The New Comedy of American Decline
BBC - The daring plan to save the Arctic ice with glass
NPR - There Is Growing Segregation In Millennial Wealth
BBC News - The millions being made from cardboard theft
NYT - Parents Got More Time Off. Then the Backlash Started.
Atlas Obscura - Around the World in Rare and Beautiful Apples
Atlas Obscura - The Battle to Invent the Automatic Rice Cooker
NYT - Why Don’t Some TV Shows Sound the Way They Used To?
FiveThirtyEight - How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics
CNN Style - Karate, Wonton, Chow Fun: The end of 'chop suey' fonts
NYT - How Lower-Income Americans Get Cheated on Property Taxes
Wired - Facial Hair Is Biologically Useless. So Why Do Humans Have It?
AP News - US Catholic bishops may press Biden to stop taking Communion
The Conversation - The white supremacist origins of modern marriage advice
WaPo - Consumers loved ‘all-natural’ — until Trix cereal lost its neon-bright glow
WaPo - Want to borrow that e-book from the library? Sorry, Amazon won’t let you.
The Atlantic - Why British Kids Went Back to School, and American Kids Did Not
Bloomberg - The 50 Richest Americans Are Worth as Much as the Poorest 165 Million
American Progress - Ending the Tipped Minimum Wage Will Reduce Poverty and Inequality
The Guardian - In a pandemic, billionaires are richer than ever. Why aren't they giving more?

Axios -Exclusive: 1 in 2 states at risk of "rigged maps," group warns
Sludge - 35 States at Risk of ‘Rigged’ Districts Due to Gerrymandering, Report Finds

Eater - Why Do Fast-Casual Restaurants Get a Pass on Appropriation?
Eater - Shibumi’s White Chef Takes Aim at Japanese Restaurants for Not Being Japanese Enough

I've had a bunch of tabs open for many weeks, all articles about the recent increased attacks on asian americans, but I just haven't had the capacity to read them. well, I finally did, and these are the ones that resonated the most.
BBC - The docility myth flattening Asian women’s careers
ABC News - Survey: 1 in 4 in US Have Asian-American Bias
The Nation - Anti-Asian Violence in America Is Rooted in US Empire
The Washington Post - The real reasons the U.S. became less racist toward Asian Americans
NPR - 'Am I Asian Enough?' Adoptees Struggle To Make Sense Of Spike In Anti-Asian Violence
Refinery 29 - Talking About Anti-Asian Hate With My Conservative Chinese Mother Isn’t Always Easy, But It’s Never Been More Important
Time - My White Adoptive Parents Struggled to See Me as Korean. Would They Have Understood My Anger at the Rise in Anti-Asian Violence?

Bloomberg - Never Stop Cleaning Like It’s 2020
but why? isn't the actual purpose of cleaning so that we don't get sick? and if we weren't getting sick before, even if we didn't clean often "enough", then why keep it up? having a reasonable amount germs around keeps our immune systems healthier and more prepared for "bad" germs.