The Reading List, 12/20/2015

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.

  • “The Problem With ‘Dress Professionally'”
  • “The Story Behind A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens”–“Little did they know that Carol would create not only a gigantic Christmas book market, but change the popular understanding of Christmas forever.”
  • “On Setting The ‘Universal Sex Difference’ Bar Way Too Low”–“Call us sticklers, but we don’t think you can declare human universals because the BBC did an internet survey, where only people who spoke English responded.”
  • “Planting New Farmers for the Future of Food”–“We lost that knowledge transfer. Ninety percent of people in the room at this conference are growers—but 80 to 90 percent of them had no connection to farming before they started.”
  • “Condescension Isn’t Kindness”–“Often, people think this is a kindness, that they know my heart and know that I would never give up my belief—when I didn’t give up anything in the first place.”
  • “Growing Up Arab American in DC After 9/11”–“Like I said, I was always a little weird. Still, no amount of thick skin could prepare me for the type of bullying I faced after 9/11.”
  • “Tennessee Woman Charged With Attempted Murder After Failed Self-Induced Abortion”–“‘Tennessee’s homicide law explicitly doesn’t apply to [Yocca],’ explained Farah Diaz-Tello, senior staff attorney at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, ‘but this arrest tells women that if they try to seek emergency medical assistance, they may end up behind bars. That won’t stop women from having abortions, but it will stop them from getting help.'”
  • “Fuck Imposter Syndrome.”–“I asked myself why I’m spending all my time worrying about what other people think of me, instead of focusing on what I feel. What I want. And just like that, this scary meeting transformed into something exciting.”
  • “Trump and the Good Americans who want to be entertained”–“The best show in town. The fucking privilege to be able to imagine that Trump’s campaign is nothing more than a “spectacle” for your consumption—a terrific bit of entertainment to take in with your son, like a revival of Hair, perhaps.”
  • “‘War’ Correspondence: Almost Half Of Americans Say They Prefer Secular Greetings Rather Than ‘Merry Christmas'”–“The poll found that 49 percent prefer retailers say ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Season’s Greetings’ to their customers, while 43 percent said they want businesses to wish them ‘Merry Christmas.’ In 2010, only 44 percent said they favored secular tidings while 49 percent wanted to be wished ‘Merry Christmas.'”
  • “No, Trump’s Racist Anti-Muslim Proposal is Very American”–“But the true spirit of American values has always been demonization of the other in the name of ‘democracy.’ Homilies about the U.S. moral uprightness and vaunted democratic freedoms are belied by the staggering reality of epic racial wealth gaps, deepening racial segregation and state violence.”
  • “101 Lies to Tell So You Can Stay Home and Read”–“I tasted vanilla extract and the fact that something that smells so good can taste so bad is making me question everything I know about the world.”
  • “Study: Elite scientists can hold back science”–“All this suggest there’s a ‘goliath’s shadow’ effect. People are either prevented from or afraid of challenging a leading thinker in a field. That or scientific subfields are like grown-up versions of high school cafeteria tables.”
  • “United Nations Working Group: Women in the United States, Texas Face Extreme Barriers to Basic Health Care”–“The Working Group—which visited Washington, D.C. and Texas interviewing various community leaders, elected officials, and individual women—announced their preliminary findings at a press conference in Washington, DC last Friday, noting that the U.S. in general ‘is allowing its women to lag behind international human rights standards.'”
  • “About That Wine Experiment”–“There are two levels to the inaccuracy of the popular story. The first is that several of the details that have been routinely reported are simply incorrect, having been copied from one article to another. So let’s break them down.”
  • “Why Women Don’t Apply For Jobs Unless They’re 100% Qualified”–“First, it’s likely that due to bias in some work environments, women do need to meet more of the qualifications to be hired than do their male counterparts. For instance, a McKinsey report found that men are often hired or promoted based on their potential, women for their experience and track record.”
  • “An Unbelievable Story of Rape”–“In a report not previously made public, Sgt. Gregg Rinta, a sex crimes supervisor with the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office, wrote that what happened was ‘nothing short of the victim being coerced into admitting that she lied about the rape.'” (CN: While this article gets to something like justice, the story of injustice is delivered in such a neutral tone that I had some trouble with it.)
  • “Secular Social Justice Conference 2016”–“SSJ focuses on the lived experiences, cultural context, shared struggle and social history of secular humanist people of color and their allies. The event will include panels on economic justice, feminism(s) of color, LGBTQ atheists of color, African American Humanist traditions in hip hop, racial politics and the crisis of New Atheism and much more.”
  • “Online Harassment Insurance Is Useful, But It’s Another Tax On Women For Being Women”–“However, it also falls squarely into a bucket with an infinite array of services, applications, weapons, and products that women have to pay hard-earned money for in order to ‘stay safe.’ It is just one more way that we are expected, and encouraged, to pay for violence we are subject to because we are women.”
  • “Sponsor withdraws Mizzou athlete strike proposal”–“Brattin’s decision to withdraw the legislation came as a surprise Wednesday to co-sponsor Rep. Kurt Bahr, R-O’Fallon. ‘Unfortunately, it’s going to be seen as a coup by those who opposed the bill,’ Bahr told the Post-Dispatch.”
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The Reading List, 12/20/2015
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