I share a lot of links on Twitter and Facebook that I don’t blog about because I don’t have much to add. The reading list is a periodic feature where I share those links with my blog audience too. Of course, you’re still welcome to follow me on Twitter.

Around FtB

• Inclusive Becomes Sexist, In One Easy Step–“What the research is telling us is what feminists have long realized: you don’t do your business any favors by excluding half of the potential brainpower.”
• CONvergence 2014 panel audio: Alien Conspiracy Theories–“Come join us as we talk about some of the alien conspiracy theories that have entered into popular culture, what’s implausible, what’s impossible, and what’s just good OBEY clean family STAY ASLEEP fun.”
• Do not tell me to stop fighting–“And Glenn herself of course is not above ‘infighting.’ She’s doing it right now. She’s doing it in her latest video about ‘Atheism + pussies’ (her blurb) and she’s doing it in this very post.”
• Movement cohesion–“The surest way to earn my enmity, my directed criticism, is to ask us to stop other fights so we can pretend we’re all one big happy big-tent family.”
• Shermer rides again!–“Pretending that climate scientists want everyone to be ‘swept away’ to deal with ‘one threat’ is simply dishonest. Reprehensibly dishonest.”
• Depression and Self-Gaslighting–“What happens when you teach yourself not to trust your own perception? How many toxic people become ‘just difficult for me to deal with because I’m so insecure and oversensitive’?”
• Atheism, love it or leave it–“And even when I was 9 years old I could see the deep logical flaw in the bumper sticker people.”
• “I’m a strong woman and I don’t need help.”–“A friend of mine responded that, well, some of us aren’t strong, and some can’t set boundaries, and why do these people deserve to feel uncomfortable or even unsafe just because they don’t have the capability to be ‘strong’ in this way?”
• Mystery Flora: Bitey McBiterson–“Some are subtle and devious jerks, drawing you in by seeming all tame and pretty, then giving you a stealthy stab.”
• So close–“C0nc0rdance is basically making the same mistake (to a lesser degree!) this clown in his comments is doing, caricaturing the feminist position because he doesn’t have the slightest clue what it is, so he fills it in with garbage he heard on the internet.”

The Wider Web

• Some Observations on the Seventh Circuit’s Decision–“What was striking about the court’s opinion was its explicit recognition that the nonreligious—atheists, agnostics, humanists—are part of the fabric of American society, and that they don’t have to pretend to be religious to take part in the legal, social, and civic life of this country.”
• Secular Celebrant Bill Would Allow Atheists to Solemnize Marriages in Ohio–“Members of the Northeast Ohio branch of the Center for Inquiry (CFI) – an organization that advocates for science, reason, and secular values – actively lobbied the State Assembly to take up this crucial issue of equal treatment for nonreligious Americans.”
• Girls Love Science. We Tell Them Not To.–“Given my and Kenny’s apparent ignorance on this topic, I decided to do what Kenny should’ve done: I spoke to some female scientists.”
• The intellectual cesspool of the inflation truthers–“So what do you do when your model of how the world works doesn’t, well, work? Easy: you make excuses.”
• Understanding the Crank Epidemic–“Why this lack of progress? The answer is that inflation paranoia isn’t a simple misunderstanding that can be corrected by pointing to evidence. It’s deeply embedded in the modern conservative psyche.”
• I Don’t Care If You Like It–“[I]n this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to ‘dude,’ whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes.”
• Contradictions made by people insulting my husband (AKA, Misogynist Troll Insult Fails Part 2)–“They know they hate women, and they hate men who don’t hate women, but they can’t figure out why. And their reasons are delightfully contradictory.”
• Grown in Hot Rock Depths: The Geology of the Seahawks Super Bowl Rings Part I–“You need just a few things for diamonds to form. For one, you need carbon. That’s a diamond, yeah? Chemical formula C. Simple, right?”
• Women and Minority Leaders Are Penalized For Fostering Diversity, Study Finds–“The researchers discovered that, while women and nonwhites were rated by their peers as significantly more valuing of diversity than white males were, their efforts only earned them disfavor from their bosses.”
• A Threshold View of Triggers–“Triggers — the things that send you spiraling into your own personal brain!hell — can be higher risk when you’re already worn down.”
• Free Online Ruby Resources–“Since I’ve reached the part of my internship where I need to evaluate a Ruby web API client library and had never written Ruby, I went looking for places to learn!”
• When intuition isn’t good enough–“You could have presented me with any of those interventions, told me it was a great method to get children more schooling, and I would have found it believable.”
• Blaming the Victim: Ladder Faculty and the Lack of Adjunct Activism–“As adjuncts have found a collective voice, however, they have also brought into sharp relief the silence of another group of faculty: tenured and tenure-track professors.”
• Dump Your Toxic Friends–“Be unreasonable. You don’t need to justify or explain why you’re enforcing your boundaries. Your refusing to let other people stomp all over your self-worth is not up for public debate or open to discussion.”
• Anti-Feminist Vlogger Jaclyn Glenn Plagiarizes YouTube & Twitter Comments–“To be absolutely clear, yes, that is Glenn quite clearly plagiarizing a YouTube comment in order to complain about being called ‘unoriginal.’ The irony is astounding.”
• NIH Women of Color Research Network–“Finally, a professional research network for women of color.”
• New York Times criticizes Archbishop John Nienstedt for handling of sex abuse cases–“The editorial board of the nation’s paper of record stopped short of calling for the archbishop’s resignation, but said, ‘[T]he archdiocese has made a mockery of accountability.'”
• WisCon’s flaky response to harassment incident sparks Internet uproar–“WisCon’s decision has sparked so much outrage that it’s now reportedly working on a new clarification to amend to its previous statement, to be posted some time Monday.”
• WisCon: The Frenkel Decision–[I tweeted most of the links included here over the last week. Thanks to Natalie for putting this all in one place.]
• Manufacturing the Talent Shortage–“This belief in the inherent capacity for skill in computing is problematic for several reasons, the least of which being that it is simply not borne out by the study and practice of learning and pedagogy, the volumes of research on brain plasticity, nor by our own experience developing our own skills and those of our present and future colleagues.”
• Why I Put My Son in Dresses–“Putting Bobby in dresses is easier for an array of reasons—they’re easier to put on, easier to find (no need to make sure shirt and shorts match), and easier to change a diaper in. Pretty soon, they’ll be easier to potty train in.”
• Erasure Comes In Many Forms – A ReaderCon Report–“I watched a guy come up to John Chu at the Meet The Pro(se) party and ask him to sign the issue of F&SF with Ken Liu’s The Glass Menagerie.”
• Women Who Are Ambivalent About Women Against Women Against Feminism–“The point is that sharks, much like feminists, are awesome, and beneficial, and the world would be a worse place without them. “
• ScienceCareers to postdocs: Think happy thoughts!–“Are you for actual serious with this?? The article describes a new study–and I use this word lightly because it’s based on a one-time survey of 200 postdocs–that found less anxiety and depression in folks who self-reported more frequent positive emotions.”
• 39 Pieces Of Advice For Journalists And Writers Of Color–“The words ‘lovingly hard on what you write’ were not, for me at least, the right advice, though I guess it was cool that he wrote back. Thing is, I was already hard on myself.”