Books
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s Thunder Song
Geena Rocero’s Horse Barbie
Valerie Valdes’ Where Peace is Lost
Music
Beyoncé’s II HANDS II HEAVEN
Beyoncé’s TYRANT
Ronny Cash’s Unspoken
Cure for Paranoia’s TiiNY DESK
Iman Europe & Kaelin Ellis’s Masterpiece.
Nic Hanson’s OKALRIGHTISEEYOU
Hozier ft. Allison Russell’s Wildflower and Barley
Hozier’s Too Sweet
MAX & DUCKWRTH’s SAY LESS
Oceans Before Me’s Hidden Names
Wild Up’s Julius Eastman’s Stay On It (NPR Tiny Desk)
Young Original’s Perfect World
Misc.
Live: Wild Up’s Julius Eastman’s Femenine
TV show: Gundam Witch from Mercury
Podcasts
Country Music’s Race Problems, Tressie McMillan Cottom on Into It
Could not find a transcript, so a rough gloss:
- Country music is the only genre that remains and is staunchly enforced to be racially segregated
- Country music as it is now is not a genre that looks to the future, but to the past
- Country music is a sonic space where white people can feel good about their racism
The Deep Conflict Between Our Work and Parenting Ideals, Caitlyn Collins on the Ezra Klein Show
Link is to the transcript.
“CAITLYN COLLINS: …And to be honest with you, Ezra, as a sociologist, as a feminist, I don’t really care about our total fertility rate as a policy target. If you asked me, I would tell you, we should open up our borders and let immigration solve our, quote, unquote, “fertility problem.”
I don’t think that we should try to be using policy as a lever to encourage more births. What I do care deeply about is creating a society in which adults can make choices for themselves that bring them, again, as we’ve been talking about today, joy, meaning, fulfillment, happiness, a sense of wholeness.”
Fascism and Book Bans, Maggie Tokuda-Hall on Our Opinions Are Correct
Transcript not yet available on site, but Apple Podcasts generated a decent one, from which the quote is pulled.
“MAGGIE TOKUDA-HALL: I believe this [book banning] is a fascist movement.
“And so fascists on the far right have figured out that there are so many Americans with easily inflamed bigotries, that this is a really expeditious way to defund institutions of public learning, whether that’s public schools or libraries. And so they don’t give a fuck that it is actually also a permission structure for violence against these marginalized bodies and identities that they represent. They have this larger goal.
“And the foot soldiers in it, I don’t think are aware of that at all. They just have easily inflamed bigotries that they find certain things scary and they are willing to throw down on that. And they are able to do this with very little effort on their part.”
Articles
Jessica Bennet’s Judith Butler Thinks You’re Overreacting
Terrible title but interesting read. “My version of feminist, queer, trans-affirmative politics is not about policing. I don’t think we should become the police. I’m afraid of the police. But I think a lot of people feel that the world is out of control, and one place where they can exercise some control is language. And it seems like moral discourse comes in then: Call me this. Use this term. We agree to use this language. What I like most about what young people are doing — and it’s not just the young, but everybody’s young now, according to me — is the experimentation. I love the experimentation. Like, let’s come up with new language. Let’s play. Let’s see what language makes us feel better about our lives. But I think we need to have a little more compassion for the adjustment process.”
Andrea Long Chu’s Freedom of Sex
“The specter of mass infertility cannot be underestimated. I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that the anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself.”
“What trans kids are saying is this: The right to change sex that has been enjoyed for decades by their parents, friends, teachers, coaches, doctors, and representatives, especially if those people are white and affluent — this right belongs to them, too. We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.
I am speaking here of a universal birthright: the freedom of sex. This freedom consists of two principal rights: the right to change one’s biological sex without appealing to gender and the right to assume a gender that is not determined by one’s sexual biology.”
J.K. Dineen & Kevin Fagan’s This immigrant group used to fill S.F.’s bars, fire houses with workers. The pipeline has gone dry
“With the exception of students, who can stay in the United States for 90 days in the summer under the “J1” visa program, the only avenue for Irish to work in the United States is with a much harder to obtain H1B work visa. That requires an advanced degree — a master’s or higher. It also requires having a job lined up paying at least $60,000, although many H-1B visa recipients are paid at least three times that amount.
In the 1990s and into the first decades of the 2000s, some 75,000 Irish people obtained green cards through special programs — known as the Donnelly and Morrison visas — meant to grant legal status to thousands here illegally and make up for the fact that the Irish were largely excluded from the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act.”
Dan Gorenstein and Leslie Walker’s For patients with disabilities, this doctor prioritizes independence — and fun
“Carlson’s doctor, Clarissa Kripke, says this is what it looks like when health care “does better” by people with disabilities; it takes money, effort and, importantly, the conviction that sometimes physical health takes a second seat to joy. Kripke’s goal is to provide care that extends beyond medical transactions.
“Health care is about helping people to participate fully in their lives,” Kripke said, “not just about curing disease.””
Chris Klimek’s This Play Within a Play Confronts the Power Dynamic Between Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson
“The major lesson she took away from [James] Baldwin—one that she now tries to pass on to her own students at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts—was not about technique, but bearing.
“The main thing he taught me is how to conduct myself in the presence of the spirit,” she says, “how to listen with rapt attention, how to conduct myself like, ‘I am a lightning rod. I am ready. Send it. We will achieve transmission!’””
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Beyoncé Asks, and Answers, a Crucial Question in Her Latest Album
“If country music is about being from the South, she playfully rejoins, why isn’t Houston’s gritty “chopped and screwed” style sufficiently country? If country music is about murder ballads that romanticize the darkest, most transgressive human desires, why isn’t it romantic when a Black woman is the one doing the killing? If country music is about defending hearth and home for the love of a good woman, she taunts, why aren’t her stoic Black father and her young daughter an American family worth fighting for? The only way for Big Country to answer these questions honestly is to talk about race and gender, racism and sexism, history and power. But these subjects are all verboten.”
“Legacy requires legibility. It is almost imperative for a pop artist to do a bit more than gesture toward the textuality in her work if she wants that text to be legible. When she doesn’t, the audience fills in the gaps. They faithfully decode her gestures (especially her popular visuals) on social media. That is smart fan service in a hypercompetitive attention economy. It also buffers Beyoncé from the blowback that comes from saying clearly who she is and what she wants to say. But for someone fixated on legacy, letting fans litigate your artistic statement in this fragmented media culture leads to a chaotic message.”
“If she would turn her speaking voice to the audience and narrate her vision, the public work of reimagining genre could become the legacy project she so clearly wants.”
Lygia Navarro’s The Long Haul
“From the beginning, one thing was clear: the majority, around 80 percent, of long-haulers are women (and people assigned female at birth), often in our 30s, 40s, and 50s. In the United States, an outsized portion are women of color—but it would take nearly three years for the federal government to start to minimally acknowledge this fact. (Stats on race and long Covid are still estimations, but the Census Bureau has found Latinx, African American, and Indigenous people are most likely to develop long Covid.) Early in the pandemic, women of color were denied care during acute Covid infections, with hospitals calling security or the police on them in emergency rooms. As long Covid set in, they were disbelieved or ignored.
The official story has been that long Covid is a new, mysterious, and therefore still incomprehensible illness—all of which is simply untrue. More than a century of medical science has told this same story, of the unlucky few who never recovered from viral or other infectious illnesses. It happened after the 1918 flu and after polio. It happened following Ebola, West Nile virus, and SARS in 2003. The narrative has always been that some sufferers are too weak, or simply too weak-willed, to return to their former lives. The truth is much more complicated.”
“If not for decades of medical disinterest in post-infectious illnesses such as ME/CFS, long Covid might have been treatable from the get-go. The only consolation, and an especially bitter one, is that now, as the number of Covid long-haulers explodes, people like me will provide an ideal population for future research.”
“Soon after, quarantine requirements for infected people disappeared. In Washington, the Brookings Institution reported that lost wages from American long-haulers unable to work now totaled $200 billion—and would just go up from there. This number didn’t even include the estimated half of long-haulers like me who can only work part-time. Our insurance company issued its own report on long Covid’s challenges to employers: workers being “less productive” and “unpredictable,” plus “workflow issues,” “staffing problems,” and the fact that employees’ new disabilities “can increase employer costs.” No one noted the cost to families or the psychological effects of not being able to work.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s The College Student Keeps the Score
“Since the beginning of the pandemic, we have talked about what is going to happen to all this deferred grief, all this swallowed loss and unprocessed trauma. The result is all around us: in the disengagement from politics, in the loss of faith in public institutions, and in the waves of people fleeing professions on fire. It’s in the wages of our ruthless economy: the growing encampments of people with nowhere else to go, the bodies breaking because they can’t find or afford the care they need.”
“…if these students are “less resilient,” it’s not because they’re not resilient — it’s because they were forced to expend so much of that resiliency over the last five years. But even that framing smells of bullshit. Here is a micro-generation that, if we’re to listen to the commentariat, is detached and anti-social thanks to smartphones and disillusioned by coming of age in the middle of multiple economic, social, political, and viral disruptions. By that logic, these students should be removed from the world to the point of nihilism. But what we’re seeing in these protests is the near opposite. It’s not nihilism. It’s activism.
These protests aren’t taking place on forums or social media; they’re happening in physical space. It’s not a disengagement from a world that has largely left them to fend for themselves; it’s a brave, angry, and frequently messy engagement. I look at the protests and see students funneling their grief in a way that disrupts the narrative of their own disengagement. And I see them they using the tools they were given to fend for themselves during the pandemic — the surgical mask — to fight surveillance. I see adults, not children, furious about the inhumane Israeli assault on Palestine, and advocating for their institutions’ disinvestment in that war.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s When Your Profession is On Fire
Emphasis mine. Also thinking about the privatization goal in relation to Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s interview (also in this roundup post under podcasts).
“Some of what these unions are fighting for is pay. And some of what they’re fighting for is the ability for workers to do their job well. That’s what unions have always done! Advocated for working conditions that don’t kill, maim, or injure people (physically and psychologically) for workers to be compensated for that work with a fair and living wage. And that’s what unions are doing now. It’s just the work itself that often looks different.
Even if you don’t have a union, your organization should be asking itself: What does a sustainable workload actually look like? How many hours does it require, and what portion of a person’s whole self should it demand?The ideology of passion work tells us that the answer to that question should be as much as possible, because more work means more benefit (for the kids you’re teaching, for the climate crisis you’re addressing, for the public health problem you’re fixing, whatever). But as much as possible often makes the work itself impossible in the long term.”
“The refusal to grapple with these structural issues has led us to the charter school movement, to bourgeois parents taking their kids out of public school even when they philosophically support it, and to ongoing attempts to defund public education. But that understanding how how we’ve arrived at this current moment of educational crisis is too passive for me. The fire is spreading because the fire was set intentionally. In red states, in court cases, in state legislatures, in anti-union messaging, in messaging against local school levees, but also in general pushback against “entitlements” and all manner of policies, passed by both Democrats and Republicans, that exacerbate the wealth gap and exacerbate poverty.
The goal — sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, sometimes accidental or unintentional — has always been to privatize education. To control the curriculum, of course, but also to wrest control away from the unions and the educators themselves.”
Jen Silverman’s Art Isn’t Supposed to Make You Comfortable
See also Yoon Ha Lee’s Starting on the Wrong Side.
“Here on my screen was the distillation of a peculiar American illness: namely, that we have a profound and dangerous inclination to confuse art with moral instruction, and vice versa.”
Esther O. Lee 