1. GAYS: In the 2010 census, one county in the US reported 0 gay people. None. Zilch. Nada. Explore Franklin County with CNNand find out if the census is true. Hint: Doubtful.
2. SCOTUS: A little late to the game on this one, but Courtney Milan’s concise play-by-play of the Prop 8 Supreme Court case is the first time I actually think I know what’s going on. Sample truncated piece of dialogue: COOPER: But these people were injured. They didn’t want gay people to marry, and now look! Gays. Lesbians. Able to marry at will. It’s very injurious. They’re injured just thinking about it.
5. FOOTBALL: From Grantland, what would happen if an NFL player died on the field? 8 years ago, Al Lucas died during an Arena football game. Is that where we’re headed?
6. LOOKS: Why does it matter that the President called Kamala Harris good-looking? Amanda Hess at Slate knows why, and I couldn’t agree with her more.
Related Post:Sunday 99: Megan Mullally and Ron Swanson, Tavi Gevinson, Rolling Rock history and more
Related Post:Sunday 98: Chinese marriage market, George Saunders, Lena in Playboy and more
2. BOOKS: Super great Atlantic essay about author Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Play) and her new bookstore in Nashville. As a lover of independent bookstores, I think this is all kinds of awesome.
3. CHRIS BROWN: After violent exchange with a female comedian on Twitter, Chris Brown deleted his account. The always excellent Roxane Gay on why criticizing Brown isn’t racist, and why it also is pretty f’ing complicated.
4. ELECTION: Curious about how all those Obama for America emails with subject lines like “Hey” or “It’s officially over” played out? Businessweek has some answers.
5. PAIN: There’s an extremely rare medical condition where you feel no pain. Sounds great, right? Not unless you step on a nail, scratch yourself bloody, or break an ankle and don’t realize it. The New York Times has an examination.
6. MEDIA: The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has put together an excellent report about the representation of women on screen (especially on children and family programming) and Mother Jones has a summary of some of the most telling facts and figures.
Related Post:Sunday 84 – Letters from astronauts, the female male model, bedrooms around the world.
Related Post:Sunday 83 – Hillary Clinton’s next move, Denver public schools, Mormons on the Romney bus
It’s over, and good riddance! Can we just wash our hands of the whole campaign season, of looping attack ads, of misquotes, of rape philosophizing, of spray-tans, of soundbites, of punditry, of Gallup and Rasmussen? Wouldn’t that be nice?
But the work isn’t over, so said President Obama on Tuesday night, and he’s obviously right. In the waves of relief and gratitude and joy and thank-fucking-God-it’s-over, there was also fear. At least, there was for me. That’s what I wanted to convey this week at Role/Reboot, how amazed I am by what we did this election, and how scared I am by the work ahead:
1. BINDERS: Amanda Hess for Slate makes a similar argument to mine earlier this week, and I’m into it. Binders full of women leads to cabinets full of women. Not an ideal process, not an ideal phrase, but not the wrong idea either.
2. OBAMA: Love this piece by Ta-Nahesi Coates for The Atlantic on the particular burden of carrying his “people.” Cool comparison with a 1936 boxing match in which Joe Lewis was knocked out by Max Shmeling.
3. HARPER: From Letters of Note, an excellent, excellent letter from the reclusive Harper Lee to Oprah Winfrey when O picked Mockingbird for the book club.
4. CLINTONS: How’d the Clinton/Obama relationship evolve from primary bashing to cooperation to Clinton’s epic convention speech? NYMag investigates.
5. SPAIN: What do you do if the country you call home can’t support your kids’ ambitions? Carlos Duarte writes for the Huffington Post about watching his daughter leave Spain in search of more than it can offer her.
6. MARKS: The joy of punctuation. Little-known, lesser-used punctuation marks that never quite hit the mainstream.
Related Post:Sunday 78: Inigo Montoya, Rebel Wilson, Roxane Gay, the truth of the VDay kiss.
Related Post:Sunday 77: Replacement refs, Urban Cusp, Jennifer Weiner
I know, I know, the binders have been much discussed and maligned, tumbled, tweeted, instagrammed and reviewed on Amazon. While it is a hilarious turn of phrase, in my opinion, it was one of the least problematic statements from Governor Romney during the debate.
This week for Role/Reboot, I explored why I’m down the with binders o’ women, as long as we recognize how temporary a fix such a binder is and how much opportunity equalizing we still have to do. Romney doesn’t, and that’s the real problem:
Side note: If you get a chance, read Nicole Rodgers’ piece on Role/Reboot today, because it is excellent.
Back in 2008, in a speech commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, President Obama elaborated on his famous “arc of justice” quote:
“Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice….”
My best friend and I find ourselves gchatting the same thing to each other at least once a week: “people are the worst.” It might be in response to a political ad, or a terrible headline, or a horrific crime, or just the way the world seems to be behaving at the particular moment in time. It seems a lot less common that we get to say the phrase I infinitely prefer, “people are the best.”
The photo of Balpreet posted on Reddit
So this was a special week when twice–twice!–I got to crow about the goodness in people, the badass-ery of people, the decency and strength of people. First, you may have read about a Sikh woman whose picture was posted on Reddit and then insulted by a bunch of ignoramuses. Some people would cry (and maybe she did, I probably would have), some people would rant and rave (I definitely would), and some people write extremely eloquent, articulate explanations and seek to educate instead of judge. This woman, Balpreet Kaur, is one of those. Read her letter and then response and you will find yourself thinking, for once, people really are the best.
Then, yesterday, a story broke about a Wisconsin anchorwoman who took the uneducated, rude, hurtful words of a viewer and made the story not about her weight, as he would have liked her to do, but about bullying. Jennifer Livingston, like Balpreet, just calmly explains exactly why this approach to her is disrespectful, damaging, and unwarranted. The viewer accuses her of being a poor role model for girls because she is overweight, when in fact Livingston’s response shows she is exactly the kind of role model I would want for my children.
Seriously, you guys, sometime people are just the coolest.
1. ZOE: British Olympian Zoe Smith strikes back at body haters in an extremely articulate and extremely badass blog post.
2. RACE: Nicole Moore at the Huffington Post addresses the recent announcement that Nina Simone will be played by Zoe Saldana and the controversial history of casting famous black women.
3. KATRINA: For the New Yorker’s Letter from Louisiana Katherine Boo reports on one town’s reaction, years later, to Katrina evacuees.
4. WRITING: How do contemporary writers address texting, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, FourSquare, Skype and the like in new fiction? The Millionsaddresses the “awkward but necessary role of technology in fiction.”
5. WHITE HOUSE:New York Timesprofiles White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett on her role in the Obama administration, especially during his courtship of female voters.
6. MEDITATION:Men’s Journal follows one man’s journey into total silence and total boredom in a 10-day meditation course at Dhamma Giri in Western India.
Related Post:Sunday 71 = Cosmo around the world, Helen Gurley Brown, Dr. Ann McKee
Related Post:Sunday 70 = Louie CK interview, boys in dresses, tween books
Goddamn I love This is Indexed. How simple and perfect is this?
Via This is Indexed (Jessica Hagy)
Reminds me of that piece a few weeks back that used video game settings as an analogy for privilege; “White Male” was the easiest setting.
Success is partially systemic, and this is where is often where I find myself diverging from some of my more conservative friends and family members. It’s not accidental that we have political dynasties in this country, on both sides of the aisle (think Kennedy, Clinton, Bush, Gore, Paul, Romney…). As the Bible says, power begets power begets power (probably not quite right, but I know there’s a lot of begatting in the Bible).
It’s not to say that legacy success is not without hard work, only that if you look back at the roots of influential people, you usually start with an advantage. Sometimes it’s money, or a high-placed friend, but it may often be as simple as your great-grandfather was white and got in a union, and someone else’s great-grandfather was black, and didn’t. We like to think of that kind of distant privilege as separate from our own successes (see Michael Lewis’ excellent convocation address at Princeton), but the truth is that the headstarts we get come from the headstarts our parents got from their parents, and sometimes that headstart was built on discrimination and prejudice. It’s not our fault, it’s just the system.
Which is why, when I see conservative friends post things like this on Pinterest, I just roll my eyes:
Do you live in a vacuum? Yeah, me neither. Let’s stick with your Lego analogy, since it’s oh so clever. Legos do not magically appear. Somebody had to give you your stupid Legos in the first place, and the early distribution of Legos at the Toys R Us wasn’t fair. And it wasn’t because other people’s parents overslept on their way to the toy store, it was because somebody stole their tires, handcuffed them to a radiator, and said “Ha! You can’t get to the Lego store with all the other parents!” Does that sound fair to you?
Can we get some historical context please? Even if you believe that the playing field is even now (to which I say, have fun in fairyland), you can’t deny that even very recently that was not the case.
Look what one of my Massachusetts friends found from back in the day:
Oh hey, remember when Romney was just that moderate Republican that Massachusetts voters elected to Governor?
On the other side of the aisle, as everyone in the world knows, President Obama gave the big thumbs up marriage equality. I’ve since “evolved” in my own views, but my initial instinct was not the cheering/applauding/hooraying of many of my friends and the internet.
My initial reaction was one part skepticism, one part “not enough, Sir,” and one part “too little too late.” It’s hard for me to believe that a black lawyer could ever be on board with a separate but equal policy, which is what we mean when we say we think civil unions are good enough. I felt like the timing, after the crushing blow of North Carolina, was infuriating. And then I got a campaign email and I felt pandered to. The email included this:
I respect the beliefs of others, and the right of religious institutions to act in accordance with their own doctrines. But I believe that in the eyes of the law, all Americans should be treated equally. And where states enact same-sex marriage, no federal act should invalidate them.
This is what would make me a terrible politician, and possibly a dictator handing down mandates from on high, but this is how I feel: I do NOT respect discriminating beliefs of others. I do NOT believe civil rights should be a state-to-state issue. I do NOT believe that the federal government should condone states removing the civil rights of a particular group just because the people in that state feel like it. Obviously, this is not how our government works, and I’m pretty sure there are really good reasons for that. But then I watched this speech by NC’s Reverand Barber (skip to 3:10), and I got all fired up again:
“The question should have been, do you believe that the majority, by popular vote, should get to decide the rights of the minority. That’s a dangerous precedent, because that means that the rights of people are determined by who’s in the majority at a particular time.”
All of the above happened in the first five minutes after I saw the President’s announcement, but I mentioned my views have evolved, so what happened? Well, you internet people happened. I started reading Facebook posts, blog posts, Tweets and the like from some of my LGBTQ friends, and I was reminded of a few things.
My friend Helen, at Bettencourt Chase, wrote this: Today feels momentous and magical and full of hope. Will this change everything? Perhaps not in a big immediate way. Equal marriage is not going to be legalized across the country tomorrow. But things are changing, and they are changing with greater and greater momentum. I am so proud of President Obama…Things are changing. I have so much hope. I feel so lucky to be alive right now, watching this unfold.
My friend Jon, at The Daily Quinn, wrote this: Nothing the President said yesterday will change any law. It will not erase the passage of North Carolina’s anti-equality amendment. But if you believe that politics still matters, that words have meaning and make a difference, that symbols are an important part of our culture, yesterday was a big day. Because the leader of your country was willing to talk about you on TV and say that he supports you. Supports you in spite of the voices that hound you and the laws that deny you. The President is the only person who represents the whole country, and so the voice with which he speaks is the vessel of our collected voices. And so it is the word of the land, going forth to say: Your lifestyle has value. Your love has value. And instantly you are a confused teenager again, and that man on the screen, that symbol of your country, is saying the words you so longed to hear at that young and impressionable age.
And I was reminded by Helen and Jon, and so many others, that this really is a monumental moment in our history. What’s more, it’s not really my monumental moment to judge and politically dissect. I was never a confused teenager who wondered if what I wanted was good and right and allowed. I never had an authority figure tell me my lifestyle was “wrong” and I never had to worry that my relationships wouldn’t be validated in the way, however flawed, that we in this society validate them. I was reminded that it took Reagan years to acknowledge AIDS. I was reminded that Clinton put into to place DOMA and DADT. I was reminded that I will get to be there for the weddings of my LGBTQ friends, a pleasure denied my parents.
