July 9, 2019
(no boobplate or stab-friendly midriffs)
99 D&D Female Character Art Pieces (more on Pinterest; account required to view larger art) - [n.b. MeFite-compiled list of credits]
"For nothing can seem foul to those that win"
While there is no indication that Mueller does not wish to appear before Congress on July 17, Attorney General Barr says the DOJ will support Mueller if he “doesn’t want to subject himself” to congressional testimony, and the DOJ will seek to block any attempt by Congress to subpoena members of the special counsel’s team. In the meantime, the House Judiciary Committee votes this week to authorize a bevy of new subpoenas, including for Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general; Michael T. Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser; John F. Kelly, the former White House chief of staff; Rod J. Rosenstein, the former deputy attorney general who appointed Mr. Mueller; Corey R. Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager; David J. Pecker, who as the head of American Media took part in a hush money scheme; and Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and adviser. [more inside]
This is Pleasure
Quin believed that he could perceive people’s most essential nature just by looking at them; he also believed that, in the same way, he could know what they most wanted to hear or, rather, what they would most respond to.
A creeping psychological horrorerotica take on the Sad Boner Confessional, This is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill is a read.
*slaps console* This ... is the Sony Betamax!
Three more California futures
Maybe California fails to adapt to climate change; maybe California will get desperate enough to try, and there will be a way. And afterwards, if life goes on, there will be different social stresses. [more inside]
Симпсоны
Abuse of Faith
"In the past 20 years, a disturbing number of Southern Baptists with formal church roles have engaged in sexual misconduct, a new investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News reveals. They were pastors. Deacons. Youth pastors. They left behind more than 700 victims. Read and hear the stories of those victims, and learn the depths of the crimes and misconduct of the church leaders they trusted." Starting in February 2019, the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News released a six-part report about widespread sexual abuse in Southern Baptist Churches. (link goes to a landing page) [more inside]
Movable type before Gutenberg
Zofia Rydet and the "Sociological Record"
The female gaze behind the Iron Curtain: "The history of photography behind the Iron Curtain is lesser-known and so the work of female photographers tends to fall even further through the cracks. Polish photographer Zofia Rydet is perhaps the most famous female photographer of the communist period." How one photographer produced an invaluable record of communist Poland: "Walking from door to door for over 20 years, she took more than 30,000 pictures, creating a project on a scale never seen before in Poland." Her work: Zapis socjologiczny ("Sociological Record" 1978-1990), and Dokumentacjach ("Documentations" 1950-1978). [more inside]
The Philosophical Origins of Patriarchy
The Philosophical Origins of Patriarchy. This is an excellent piece by Christia Mercer (@christiamercer8): "Ancient intellectual greats like Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle laid the foundations on which centuries of sexism were built. Although these Greek authors did not invent sexism, their writings contained ideas and arguments that were used to rationalize a particularly virulent form of misogyny. Once these ancient trend-setters devised arguments for female subjugation in the name of a divine good, it became self-confirming in the sense that women were taken to be naturally inferior to men, treated differently from birth, and trained to subjugate themselves, which itself further supported views about female imperfection and the disempowerment that entailed..." [more inside]
Kids On The Farm
“This pattern means that some of Yuma’s migrant students miss a few months of each academic year, spending the early fall and late spring in other school districts or studying independently. Increasingly, however, couples split up to allow their children to complete the academic year in a single location.“. For Children of Migrant Farmworkers, High School Graduation Takes a Village (Civil Eats) “The work requires human hands. It's hard, monotonous labor that supports an industry worth approximately $990 billion—and feeds the nation. Many Americans, maybe most, don't think about that, Anciso says. "You go and have your salad but don't realize someone's breaking their back to harvest that." Most shocking of all, hundreds of thousands of these workers are minors—and it's perfectly legal.” The Young Hands That Feed Us (Pacific Standard) The Future Of Food Is Cooperatives (Food Tank)
Marie Claire long reads on Women and Migration
Marie Claire has a new series on women and migration, and to date has three long articles online: 1. Claudia Patricia Gómez González, an indigenous Guatemalan, was killed crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. Will her family ever get justice? // 2. What Happens to Victims of Domestic Violence Seeking Asylum in the United States? Trump’s calls for a border wall won’t make it harder for domestic violence survivors to find refuge in the U.S.—a new ruling is already doing that. Marie Claire goes to Tijuana to see what women fleeing abuse endure in seeking asylum. // 3. What Happened to the Nigerian Migrants Who Died on a Boat to Europe in November 2017? The news cycle moved on, but the town that became the final resting place for 26 migrant women has not forgotten them.
human powered life
The Human Power Plant "is a multi-disciplinary research project into the possibilities of reducing energy demand in a modern society. If people have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How would the world look like if all energy was supplied by humans? Could we maintain a modern lifestyle with human power alone?" [more inside]
Archaeologists uncover palace of the Mittani Empire
German-Kurdish research team came upon a surprising discovery as ruins emerge from the waters of the Tigris River. [more inside]
Fake It Till You Make It
When Impersonation Becomes Transformation In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.
The show Alex appeared on, Faking It, had a simple set-up: each week a participant with an archetypical identity would be tasked with learning a skill that jarred with that identity. The participant had four weeks to perfect that skill before being sent to a real event where they would have to pass undetected by experts asked to spot the imposter. [more inside]
Change is something the American people identify with
New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered. Far from the dud it’s been made out to be, New Coke was actually delicious—or at least, most people who tried it thought so. Some of its harshest critics couldn’t even taste a difference. It was done in by a complicated web of interests, a mixture of cranks and opportunists—a sugar-starved mob of pitchfork-clutching Andy Rooneys, powered by the thrill of rebellion and an aggrieved sense of dispossession. At its most fundamental level, the backlash wasn’t about New Coke at all. It was a revolt against the idea of change. That story should sound familiar. We’re still living it.
Americans Shouldn't Have to Drive, but the Law Insists On It
In America, the freedom of movement comes with an asterisk: the obligation to drive. It’s no secret that American public policy throughout the 20th century endorsed the car—for instance, by building a massive network of urban and interstate highways at public expense. Less well understood is how the legal framework governing American life enforces dependency upon the automobile. To begin with, mundane road regulations embed automobile supremacy into federal, state, and local law. But inequities in traffic regulation are only the beginning. Land-use law, criminal law, torts, insurance, vehicle safety regulations, even the tax code—all these sources of law provide rewards to cooperate with what has become the dominant transport mode, and punishment for those who defy it.
“When he smiles at the camera, it’s almost impossible not to smile back”
Silent film clip appears to show Louis Armstrong as a teenager according to jazz historian James Karst, writing in 64 Parishes. The magazine has uploaded the eight-second clip to YouTube. Gwen Thompkins writes about the footage for The New Yorker in the short essay
An Eight-Second Film of 1915 New Orleans and the Mystery of Louis Armstrong’s Happiness.
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