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."

April 2020 donation

even when I first started tracking notable articles on this blog in October 2018, I noticed that I read a lot of stuff from The Guardian. I never noticed before then tho. since noticing, I've thought to donate, but never did so until today. I gave only a small amount, and hope to feel more comfortable to give more after Covid, but I think anything, no matter how small, is appreciated.

I plan to choose a new group to donate to every month, and will probably eventually want suggestions. but for now I really like NPR, Radiolab, PBS, Planned Parenthood, Compton Initiative, OC Food Bank, Second Harvest, Food Finders, Harvest Partners, Food Forward, and Seed Savers.

cross-posted to my actual blog