Books
S. T. Gibson’s Evocation
Courtney Milan’s The Earl Who Isn’t
Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story
D.L. Soria’s The Cottage Around the Corner
Julie Soto’s Not Another Love Song
Film/TV
Gong to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
True Detective Night Counntry
Blindspotting S2
Music
Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso’s Tiny Desk Concert
Luis Enrique’s Yo No Sé Mañana [Salsa Version]
Laura Itandehui’s self-titled album
Meshell Ndegeocello’s Tsunami Rising (ft. Staceyann Chin)
Warriors album
Articles
Abbie’s Play Parties Let Me Explore My Asexuality
“To me, what this [Audre Lorde’s erotic] means is I can define my aceness not by absence of sexual desire, but by the presence of finding (even demanding!) intimacy, depth of feeling, connection, and fullness outside of sex and in all parts of my life.”
Naomi Klein’s How Israel has made trauma a weapon of war
“In an interview, she told me that memorializing traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides. But there are also times when, for political actors within these groups, healing isn’t the goal – keeping trauma alive, despite the passing of time and changing conditions, is infinitely more useful.”
Lyz Lenz’s I understand why people ban books
“It’s no accident that the book bans are also happening as younger generations talk about sexuality and gender in a way that was taboo even just 20 years ago. The book bans are a reaction to the floodgates of knowledge.
Controlling access to information is about preserving power. Who gets to know that queer identities have been around as long as the history of humanity? Who gets to know about the women who preached and about the queens who put on pants and loved other women? Who gets to know about how to find birth control? Who gets to know about condoms? Who gets to know which boys to avoid dating? Who gets to know which bosses not to be alone with in the office after hours? And who is left out from this knowledge? And who then finds themselves at 35 finally learning that what happened to them at 20 was assault? Who gets to know? And who gets to put a name on their pain? And who doesn’t? Who finds themselves at almost 40 years old reading books written over a hundred years ago and saying, “Why didn’t I know this sooner?”
When you think about the destabilizing power of the true answers to those questions, it’s not so hard to understand why you would ban something. The wonder is when people actually tell the truth.
People say they ban books to protect children. But every day we send bombs to other countries to annihilate children in genocidal wars. We pass laws that aim to protect the lives of children but kill their mothers and then we refuse to feed those children school lunch once they exist. Not, it’s not love or protection. These bans are rope tied around children, designed to hold them in place, and keep them tied up and tamed, like that horse the man compared me to all those years ago.”
Anne Helen Petersen’s White Celebrity and Rituals of Civility
Really interesting article that starts at Taylor Swift and Brittany Mahomes’ relationship and then pivots to how white women writers cover celebrity.
“white people with societal power cannot be allies to those with less of it if they’re also allies with those who believe in the eradication, degradation, and/or dehumanization of that first group of people.”
“you’re avoiding the sort of conflict that could occur if you used the trust and intimacy at the heart of your connection as the beginning of a much more difficult conversation”
Anne Helen Petersen’s “The Kids Are Too Soft”
“The best indication of the health of an industry like journalism isn’t who excels there, because the answer is obvious: work robots who come from some sort of family money. To understand just how broken media is, look at who leaves the field — or who dares not pursue it. Because this much I know is true: it’s not because they’re soft.
So how do we break this cycle? If, upon encountering or even considering the attitude, ambition, or “work ethic” of a younger generation, your impulse begins to drift towards they don’t work like we do, my hope is we consider the following:
- How have we, as a society — and how have I, as a leader — helped foster the conditions that encourage someone to work a certain way, with certain habits, or attitudes, or ambitions?
- How much of my reaction is to the fact that someone is not working exactly the way I did at that point in my life — even though my circumstances were almost certainly wildly different?
- How has our society — or our industry — tacitly agreed on an understanding of excellence that has little room for different ways of navigating the world, of making space to care for others, or collectivism just generally?
- What if working differently is also an attempt to keep people in the industry for longer — and make the industry as a whole more sustainable?
- What can *I* learn from the way they’re approaching work?
Hard work isn’t always the work that takes the most time, or the work that gets paid the most. The hardest work is the work that challenges, makes us uncomfortable, or requires change. If we actually value hard work — we have to do some of our own.”
Leah Piepzna-Samarasinha’s crip fatigue time covid ouroboros/ spirit journey in a spirit time
“so many of us with torn up roots go looking for The Truth. what happens when you know there are things that are just gone, that you just won’t find out? what story do you write out of that space? not simple heroic or tragic. not lying to make things simple and revolutionary cute.
what comes out of that powerful void.
when so much got lost and took, this might be the best best we get.
“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet”
Meredith Shiner’s The Appalling Attack on Ta-Nehisi Coates Is a Massive Media Failing
“The Discourse tells us there is a “Palestinian-Israeli conflict” and that it is “complicated.” But somewhere in this word soup we have simmered long enough to deflect attention from how power works, who benefits from it and who loses everything…”
“What might happen in January 2025 with these overt threats to Jews in 2024? Why are we downplaying this, and who is served by it? Why are we pretending that Tlaib’s generalized complaint about the right to dissent is the same thing as Trump’s constant incitements to political violence? The effort expended on bothsides-ing us into meaninglessness inoculates those in power from criticism and simultaneously emboldens a reckless wannabe dictator.”
Esther O. Lee 