The Reading List, 9/13/2015

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 Red Wolf announcement is a real life version of the comics trope of a villain making a hero choose which victim to save– basically, anyone who speaks out about Edmondson being part of Red Wolf must also be aware that they are doing harm to representation in comics. Do you want Native Americans to be better represented in comics? Then you must also accept this alleged serial predator being involved in the title. Do you want this alleged serial predator to get outed and stop getting jobs in comics? Then you must accept potentially dooming a book that opens up diversity in comics.” Read more.
  • “In DBT there’s something called Wise Mind. It’s the balance between emotions and reason. When you’re in Wise Mind, you’re aware of your values and goals, and also capable of paying close attention to the facts at hand. TWs give me the space to try to be in Wise Mind. It’s that moment of mindfulness that makes me pull away from the strong emotional reactions I would have otherwise.” Read more.
  • “Knoxville news station WBIR reported that Jackie Sims, the mother of a 15-year-old boy at Knox County Schools’ L&N Stem Academy, had objected to Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks when he brought it home as part of his summer reading. Her son has now been assigned a different text, but Sims is attempting to get Skloot’s biography of the African-American whose cancer cells – taken from her without her knowledge and which subsequently changed modern medicine – pulled from all Knox County schools.” Read more.
  • “Family First national director Bob McCoskrie said in a statement his group welcomed the interim banning of Into the River and the move could set a benchmark for restricting offensive content to younger readers in New Zealand. Media law expert Professor Ursula Cheer told the New Zealand Herald it was legal to possess a copy of the book for your personal use but not to supply it to anyone else.” Read more.
  • “I thought that having more realistic people and pet characters would hopefully excite her more about building with Legos. I was wrong, every time I showed them to her she was wholly uninterested. Her first Lego set was actually Sponge Bob which she loved a great deal. My son however did express an interest in Lego Friends (he still doesn’t have any, only because other sets he liked a little bit better). This was the first time my son had really been highly interested in a toy marketed to girls.” Read more.
  • “Yes, I found the all-black, female college group on my predominantly white campus of Iowa State University . . . but I was still an outcast for spending my nights chatting online, writing fanfiction, watching copious amounts of Yu Yu Hakusho, and destroying my fingers trying to beat Guilty Gear X2 on its hardest difficulty setting. So my defenses were way, way up when I went to my first anime convention, but when I walked through those doors I found so many people who got it, because no matter what size they were or the color of their skin, they knew what it was like to be picked on for being yourself.” Read more.
  • “It could be a show starring an unapologetically girly, silly, fun, and witty host doing science demonstrations and interviewing brilliant scientists and engineers. I would love that! It could be like Felicia Day’s Flog for science, or a cousin of Emily Graslie’s The Brain Scoop. But it’s not. It’s a show starring a hapless character who takes pride in not being able to do anything.” Read more.
  • “We need to start calling things by their real names. This is gender terrorism.” Read more.
  • “However, this isn’t an example of any kind of genetic freeloading. If anything, it means that a few of those previous male’s cells might get enslaved to contribute to the somatic tissues of your child: the germ line, the cells that produce the gonads of the child and are going to produce your grandchildren, are set aside very early in development and are not going to incorporate the microchimeras, especially since the microchimeras consist of primarily previously differentiated cells that are not in the totipotent state of a germ cell. There is no genetic cuckolding going on. I just have to roll my eyes at this paranoia of MRAs.” Read more.
  • “It requires so much information – good luck if you haven’t had consistent health care. It requires so much waiting and waiting and waiting and fucking waiting.  Lots of people give up after that first rejection. Even more after the rejected appeal. Your life is picked apart as complete strangers examine every part of it.  If you can’t lift 30 pounds with your chronic illness, can you lift 10?  You can’t speak on the phone without a panic attack, but how about customers face to face?” Read more.
  • “However, even in the best conversations with officers, just as I have with theists, there is usually a missing piece of history that they gloss over or blatantly dismiss. For theists, it might be the whole killing babies thing, inability to reconcile creation thing, or the Flood that never happened thing. For many police supporters, its the the historicity of policing and its influence on the way they approach minority communities they over police.” Read more.
  • “Murdoch is a notorious climate change denier, and his family’s Fox media empire is the world’s primary source of global warming misinformation. Which would be no big deal here, I guess, were it not for the fact that the National Geographic Society’s mission includes giving grants to scientists. Or had you forgotten?” Read more.
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The Reading List, 9/13/2015
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