Start the day by sitting on a small child.
RIP, GLENN FREY (I will tolerate NO Eagles criticism or jokes in the comments today, I am really genuinely sad, do NOT try me. Love you, Glenn.)
This piece on a persistent, brilliant laywoman’s relentless pursuit to understand her rare genetic condition was the best thing I read last week:
…it was a personal note from a 39-year-old Iowa mother named Jill Viles. She was the muscular dystrophy patient, and she had an elaborate theory linking the gene mutation that made her muscles wither to an Olympic sprinter named Priscilla Lopes-Schliep. She offered to send me more info if I was interested. Sure, I told her, send more.
A few days later, I got a package from Jill, and it was… how to put it?… quite a bit more elaborate than I had anticipated. It included a stack of family photos — the originals, not copies; a detailed medical history; scientific papers, and a 19-page, illustrated and bound packet. I flipped through the packet, and at first it seemed a little strange. Not ransom-note strange, but there were hand-drawn diagrams with cutouts of little cartoon weightlifters representing protein molecules. Jill had clearly put a lot of effort into this, so I felt like I had to at least read it. Within a few minutes, I was astounded. This woman knew some serious science. She off-handedly noted that certain hormones, like insulin, were too large to enter our cells directly; she referred to gene mutations by their specific DNA addresses, the way a scientist would.
And then I came to page 14.
What can an elaborate fan theory teach us about Internet culture? Plenty, when that theory is about Star Wars cult idol Boba Fett.
It all started when Tumblr user sashayed remarked in passing, “Is there any reason to believe Boba Fett isn’t a lesbian?”
Our own John Leavitt wants people to know about the Silver Fork genre of the 1820s and 1830s.
Luna’s tribute to Alan Rickman killed me:
After that meeting I thought about him a lot and what a truly lovely, kind, generous person he was. For someone as established, wise and revered as he, the greatest gift you can give someone is your full attention and presence in the moment. Most people of his measure of talent and intellect are extremely busy and are anxious for you to know this. You start to talk to them and their eyes are already darting to the other corners of the room, their fingers reaching for their phone where a million more interesting people are pinging away at their inbox. They can’t afford to spend their precious time and entire mental facilities just on you, so mostly they just give you a bit, just for a few minutes. But Alan Rickman was not that at all. In the hour I sat with him, he managed to be completely present, kind, attentive and curious about someone who did not expect or look for that from him. It says a lot about him, how nice a person he was and what discipline it must have taken to stay in character so much. It must have been hard to play Snape and to have to alienate himself from everyone. It must have been hard to have to stop smiling at people. And uncomfortable to make others so uncomfortable. There aren’t that many actors that would go to such lengths for the integrity of their character. There were deep and heart-breaking reasons why Snape didn’t smile, why he is such a loner and the most stubbornly emo adult ever. I so appreciate the fact that he cared that much about his character, that he didn’t dismiss Harry Potter as a ‘kids film’, a handy job and a sizeable paycheck. He loved and honoured Snape the way all beloved characters deserve and he made the Harry Potter world that much more real for us.
When “burnout” masks depression:
In February of 2014, I began to experience a new episode of major depression, but it felt different. It felt so utterly unlike my previous recurrent episodes that I did not recognize it as depression. I just thought I was burned out. I had been promoted and awarded tenure the year before, and my book had come out the year before, and I was looking forward to a Fall 2014 semester sabbatical. The fact that I was suddenly completely unable to concentrate at work seemed like just another burnout symptom. I would go to my office, close the door, and literally stare off into space for hours. I would look at the clock and say, okay, it’s 11:30 am. I can space out for 20 minutes and then I really have to buckle down and get to work. And so I’d space out, and the next thing I knew, a whole hour would go by.
I think it’s incredibly important for white Christians (the black Christian church in the US having a completely different historical idea of the relationship between Jesus and liberation) to spend a lot of time thinking and talking about the colossal moral failure of most white Christians to grasp what the civil rights movement meant and their ongoing complicity in American racism (Philip Yancey has written some great stuff on growing up Southern Baptist and coming to realize how just incredibly fucking wrong they were on civil rights.) I’m happy to see Rachel Held Evans asking the hard questions:
People in schools and churches across the country will pay homage to Martin Luther King Jr. today, and many will read “Letter From The Birmingham Jail,” which is right and good.
But few will read “A Call for Unity” or any of the thousands of editorials, letters, articles, and sermons composed by American whites—most of them Christians—in opposition to King’s work. We forget that just as our most heated discussions on social media emerge from the context of a cultural conversation, so too did the treatises of theologians and activists past. When we familiarize ourselves with only one side of the debate (typically the side ultimately found to be just) we miss the full depth of the argument and, worse yet, slip into a sort of historical amnesia that allows us to believe we too would have chosen the side of good on account of its seemingly obvious virtue.
That’s when Rolly Burrell came over and used a highly technical snake removal technique called “grabbing it with your bare hands and throwing it in a sack.”
It’s a good thing Burrell came over when he did. Although in the video they refer to the snake as “he,” it turns out that he was a she, and was carrying a belly full of eggs—14 to be exact—which she laid two days later.
My visiting brother-in-law and I talked a lot about the situation in Flint during his visit this weekend; he’s involved with public health work, and is responsible for helping coordinate testing kids for exposure and making recommendations to pediatricians and politicians alike, and it is just as nightmarish as you can imagine, the failures are extraordinary, and it is going to cost zillions of dollars to set right:
It was immediately obvious that the water was filthy, and residents loudly protested that it was cloudy, smelled bad, and tasted worse. General Motors stopped using the water because it was literally corroding their machinery. But Snyder and his handpicked head environmental official Dan Wyant studiously ignored the problem — despite internal warnings of lead poisoning as early as July of last year — until an outside scientific study demonstrated extreme levels of lead in Flint children. In late December — over a year after the water switch — Snyder finally apologized and Wyant quietly resigned.
Glad to see some of our finest citizens quoted in this piece on the importance of a more diverse Nancy Drew:
Fans of the original who want characters that look more like them can be a powerful audience.
“When I was a kid, there were so few shows centring people of colour. Often the one non-white character, if there was one, occupied a sidekick/punchline sort of role,” Nicole Chung, managing editor of the Toast and a Nancy Drew fan says.
But for Chung, the idea of a non-white Nancy Drew particularly excited her because she grew up reading the books.
“Having Nancy played by a woman of colour would provide a great opportunity for some viewers to see themselves represented in a medium that often still struggles when it comes to diversity,” she says.
The enslaving of Native Americans:
A reductive view of the American past might note two major, centuries-long historical sins: the enslavement of stolen Africans and the displacement of Native Americans. In recent years, a new wave of historians of American slavery has been directing attention to the ways these sins overlapped. The stories they have uncovered throw African slavery—still the narrative that dominates our national memory—into a different light, revealing that the seeds of that system were sown in earlier attempts to exploit Native labor. The record of Native enslavement also shows how the white desire to put workers in bondage intensified the chaos of contact, disrupting intertribal politics and creating uncertainty and instability among people already struggling to adapt to a radically new balance of power.
Kathryn Schulz has a really good, probing piece on Making a Murderer:
Beerntsen had also been unusual among crime victims involved in wrongful convictions in that she had instantly accepted the DNA evidence—and, with it, her mistake. “It ain’t all her fault, you know,” Avery had said at the time of his release. “Honest mistake, you know.” But Beerntsen had felt horrifically guilty. “This might sound unbelievable,” she told me when we first talked, “but I really feel this way: the day I learned I had identified the wrong person was much worse than the day I was assaulted. My first thought was, I don’t deserve to live.” She wrote Avery a letter, apologizing to him and his family, and, concerned by the missteps and misconduct that led to his incarceration, became involved with the Innocence Project, which seeks to free the wrongfully convicted and to reform legal practices to help prevent miscarriages of justice.
Given her history, Beerntsen does not need any convincing that a criminal prosecution can go catastrophically awry. But when Ricciardi and Demos approached her about participating in “Making a Murderer” she declined, chiefly because, while her own experience with the criminal-justice system had led her to be wary of certitude, the filmmakers struck her as having already made up their minds. “It was very clear from the outset that they believed Steve was innocent,” she told me. “I didn’t feel they were journalists seeking the truth. I felt like they had a foregone conclusion and were looking for a forum in which to express it.”
Okay, so I’ve now watched “Art Crawl,” “Gayle’s Tales,” “Boyz 4 Now” and the one in the taffy factory, tell me which other ones:
My heart bleeds for this deleted commenter, who wanted to explain why what happened at Nikki’s party was not racist:
