oh my god have you been following the blowback from the idiotic Economist review of Edward Baptist’s new book about slavery? I am not linking to the review, bc JFC, but Twitter has it covered:
Uhhh. “Almost all blacks in his book are victims, almost all whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.” http://t.co/nlMdzUSuLB
— Roxane Bey (@rgay) September 4, 2014
Why, it’s not just US police officers who can behave dreadfully towards POC!
The importance of sex worker advertising:
Katrina, who has been escorting in the Vancouver area for over 10 years, spends $200 of her $300 monthly marketing budget on print advertising in the free weekly Georgia Straight. “At $50 [a week], it’s more than I spend on online advertising, but it obviously pays off and is well worth it,” she explains. “The clients who come from the paper ads don’t use the Internet, or if they do, they don’t use it all the time. They include older guys who are used to paper ads and like to have a phone conversation.”
Learned League gave me a consolation freebie yesterday:
On the history of feminism and teaching.
Five questions for police following the exoneration of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown:
4. Why did detectives write out confessions for both Brown, then 15, and McCollum, then 19, and ask them to sign the statements? Why did they do so knowing that the confessions were incriminating, that the boys were both intellectually disabled and that they were being interrogated in the absence of any legal representation?
Nick’s chill ex-wife who did our cool “Support the Toast” animated toaster-buttons for us has a new site for her work, check it out!
The five kinds of poems you hear at weddings:
1. The Poem That Explains Weddings
Even as “married” becomes an increasingly meaningless distinction, weddings are nevertheless expected to remain what the poet Robert Hass calls “a feast for the saying of a magic spell.” Perhaps this is precisely because marriage is so flexible. We need the bride, the groom, the officiant, and the king’s horses and all the king’s men to put together again what, exactly, is at stake at a wedding? Why are we here? Are you really going to use the ice-cream machine I bought off your registry? In ancient days, a type of poem called epithalamium blessed brides en route to the marital chamber (and instructed them on the obscene terrors waiting therein).
Drawback: Talking about the ceremony itself can be a little boring — where’s the romance? — but I find two wedding-explainer poems that I like: Jane Hirshfield’s “A Blessing for Wedding” replaces traditional chants with modern language and floral imagery; Peter Meinke’s “The First Marriage” explains how ceremonies help to codify love. The couple favors the latter.
When you join a commune, everything is yours. When you leave, nothing is. Before my second birthday, we left with nothing. There was no breaking point, no one incident anyone could point to. But my parents were not impressed with the quality of life, and they wanted better for their kids. So my parents, two sisters, and I hitched a ride to Michigan to stay with my uncle. Even though my dad had handed over every paycheck, The Farm forwarded our medical bills—I’d once been rushed to an E.R. after a peanut was lodged in my one-year-old throat. My dad gave me that peanut in a heart-shaped locket on my 16th birthday, calling it the “most expensive jewelry” he would ever give anyone. “I had worked like a dog for The Farm and the basic agreement was that we were all in it together,” he’s told me. “It reminded me that something had been lost.”
