White Fight, White Flight: The Atlanta Hawks and the Race Card (incidentally, I read this fine piece, and then said something to Shrill about how proud I was that I read an article about football for him, and he was all “Nicole, the Hawks are a basketball team“):
“I am deeply saddened and embarrassed that this has put a blemish on our team and our city, which has always been a diverse community with a history of coming together as one. We should build bridges through basketball, not divide our community or serve as a source of pain.”
There have been many odd and hilarious racist remarks uttered during this scandal—Ferry’s expression “he has a little African in him, but not in a bad way,” has a distinctly antiquated feeling, evoking images of an old colonial adventurer, enlightened for his time, describing a black native who had earned his favor—but the assertion that Atlanta is a city of racial harmony might be the most ridiculous and revelatory. That the Hawks would write and publicly issue this sentence betrays not only their deep ignorance of the city of Atlanta, but a professional incuriosity about the marketplace they wish to serve. One need only glance at the history of the city to understand this.
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Hate bees, love poems about bees:
And Mandelstam’s bees
Wore the thin wings of time,
Every one silent and enormously still,
Staring at him from the stone of the page.
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What do you mean, Marriott might be telling people to tip their housekeeping staff NOT AS A PURELY NICE GESTURE ON THEIR PART?
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They are still not having sex on Outlander.
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When animals infect:
At this point, you’re entitled to ask: Damn, what is it about bats?
I asked that myself, in conversation with Charles Rupprecht, a virologist and veterinarian who leads the rabies section at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. Rupprecht recited a list of factors that make this order of mammals, the Chiroptera, ideal candidates to host a variety of dangerous viruses. Some bats roost in huge colonies, snuggled intimately together; they give birth to only a few young, and therefore nurture those young dotingly; they have long life spans, especially for small mammals; they are old, too, in evolutionary terms; they encompass a great diversity of species, roughly 20 percent of all mammals; they fly, and therefore they get around the world nicely, finding places and ways to sustain themselves on nearly every landmass except Antarctica. Add to those traits the fact that, being nocturnal and airborne, they’re hard to study. “Bats really are the undiscovered country,” Rupprecht said. His point—the point of a rabies biologist who happens to like bats—is that they aren’t sinister and, if they seem to harbor an undue variety of nightmare diseases, it’s probably because they are so various and so poorly known.
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“My Feminism Needed to Start 300 Years Ago”:
The typical woman I talk to is doing shift work. In places like Atlanta that usually means at a bank so it has a slightly higher status but it’s still shift work. She’s working from 2pm-11pm Tuesday through Saturday, usually customer service. Then she’s going over to [for profit university] Strayer twice a week trying to get a degree. She’s hoping it’ll lead to her becoming a manager, which comes with a more stable schedule. The women I work for, they’re hustlin’—that’s how they describe it. So if I go and tell them something like, “You should Lean In” or, “I think Sheryl Sandberg reinvigorates the policy conversation around the work-life balance,” these women would laugh me out the room. What do you mean work-life balance?! It ain’t no work-life balance. It’s work. All of it is work! Their man is work. Their kids are work. Work is work. They’re not having it. But! Those are also the women whom I think are living feminism in ways that we don’t talk about.
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How evolutionary psychology went viral:
In each case, we are presumed to believe in the phenomenon under analysis already. All we require is an explanation, a story that tells us why we are the way we are. Ultimately, the explanation is always the same: evolution—i.e, reproductive advantage. Click on one of these stories and you will find two things: first, the results of a recent psychological study that verifies an observation about a common human behavior; and second, an evolutionary explanation for why that behavior was advantageous for our ancestors. Because their standard operating procedure is to begin from behaviors that they perceive as universal (despite the fact that blond hair, for example, could hardly be considered universally valorized), evolutionary psychologists tend to confirm received wisdom. Many EP studies tautologically assert that widely held social values are… well, widely held. Study finds that most men are attracted to women who are deemed conventionally attractive by society!
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The lost libraries of the Sahara
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MOCKINGJAY TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS:
