My Uncle Wayne just dug up this old picture of my dad and his sister, and obviously we must all now ooooooh at the cuteness together.
Jamelle Bouie on How Trump Happened (yeah, it’s racism):
For millions of white Americans who weren’t attuned to growing diversity and cosmopolitanism, however, Obama was a shock, a figure who appeared out of nowhere to dominate the country’s political life. And with talk of an “emerging Democratic majority,” he presaged a time when their votes—which had elected George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan—would no longer matter. More than simply “change,” Obama’s election felt like an inversion. When coupled with the broad decline in incomes and living standards caused by the Great Recession, it seemed to signal the end of a hierarchy that had always placed white Americans at the top, delivering status even when it couldn’t give material benefits.
In a 2011 paper, Robin DiAngelo—a professor of multicultural education at Westfield State University—described a phenomenon she called “white fragility.” “White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves,” she writes. “These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation. These behaviors, in turn, function to reinstate white racial equilibrium.”
The trailer for the second season of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is here, and I’m sure it’s gonna fix everything that bothered us about the first season while keeping all the good parts.
A show I like more than Kimmy that ALSO has some big issues is Silicon Valley, and they know it, but:
The crew went to TechCrunch Disrupt, a startup competition also featured in the show, to film footage of the crowd, Berg explained.
During the review process once the footage was woven in, another editor criticized the crowd shots for not featuring any women and blamed Berg for the oversight.
“She said those crowd shots were absurd,” Berg told the crowd at SXSW. “Those were real shots of the real place, and we didn’t frame women out. The world we’re depicting is f—ed up.”
Even trips to visit tech companies, like Google, didn’t help. “That’s where we realized it really is 87% dudes,” executive producer Mike Judge said. It was the same when they visited the bars in Palo Alto, Judge added.
“Palo Alto is the ‘no sense of humor’ capital of the world,” Judge declared.
MAROONED AMONG THE POLAR BEARS for title of the year:
Sergey Ananov is trapped on a slab of ice in the Arctic Circle. He has no locator beacon, no phone, and barely any water. The fog will hide him from any rescuers. Night will come. Hypothermia will come. And whatever large, powerful creatures that scratch out their existence in this primordial world—maybe they will come too.
His eyes wander past the ice and over the roiling open waters of Davis Strait. He is alone, and with each minute that passes he will drift farther from the spot where the helicopter went down, lessening the chance he will ever be found.
You had me at “I found a horrible blog about a co-worker”:
There’s a certain head of a department who I have to work with occasionally who is rude, dismissive, and just does not seem competent enough to do her job. I’ve spoken with other coworkers and they think the same of her. And she writes her emails in Comic Sans, so clearly not a person worthy of respect (I kid! Sort of…)
I googled said coworker after a very frustrating day trying to work with her (she totally screwed my team over for an international trip that she was told was high priority weeks ago) . I found a blog written about her. She’s a recruiter, and it sounds like it’s written by a candidate she worked with.
The complaints about her on the blog are similar to my complaints with her, only the blog is more scathing. I would be beyond mortified if someone wrote about me on the internet like that. In my opinion, it looks terrible for a company to have someone who’s the head of a department have this nasty blog show up as the second link when you Google her name + company (and she’s somebody who would get searched for, given her role).
The blog has been up for several months, so I’m assuming other people in the organization have seen it, even possibly her managers, and may have already dealt with it, but I’m wondering if the blog and complaints from coworkers might spur change? I don’t want to put my neck out there either though, so can I send an anonymous complaint? Casually let higher-ups know what I’ve seen? This isn’t a me or her situation or anything like that, but I’d still like to know this was addressed with her and she knows she needs to make changes to be productive within our company. So – what, if anything, can I possibly do here?
A few days after dropping a medium-size spoiler about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones, Ian McShane could not be filled with less regret. “You say the slightest thing and the internet goes ape,” the actors tells The Telegraph, accurately. “I was accused of giving the plot away, but I just think get a f—ing life. It’s only tits and dragons.” So, why did he take the gig? “They asked me if I wanted to do Game of Thrones and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll be able to see my old pals Charlie Dance and Stephen Dillane,’ and they said, ‘No, we’ve killed them off.'” (Coincidentally, “No, we’ve killed them off” is Thrones‘ tagline for season six.) McShane says he wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to taking on another TV role, but was swayed when producers revealed he’d only be in one episode. “I said, ‘So that means I must die at the end of it. Great, I’m in.'” Now, technically, that’s not a spoiler per se, just speculation, but we have a feeling Ian McShane doesn’t care either way.
I really loved Laura’s piece about Pat Conroy, ICYMI:
Conroy grew up Catholic in the South, an anomaly that made him feel like a perennial outsider. His father was a Marine Corps fighter pilot and his mother was a housewife and a fierce personality. There were seven Conroy children, and every day when Dad got home from work one of them would yell, “Godzilla’s home!” and the children would scatter to their respective corners of the house in whatever state they happened to be living in at the time. Don Conroy was a physically abusive man, a trait his son did not shy away from depicting in his many novels and, eventually, his memoirs. Southern men and women of Conroy’s generation did not grow up in a world that offered counseling or treated abuse as something to be discussed; it was a world that had a great deal invested in a certain kind of stoic masculinity. Pat Conroy wrote openly about his childhood abuse; he spilled pages and pages of ink talking about what it was like to be hit and threatened and caught in between his mother and father when he was sure one of them would die. There is a scene in Prince of Tides in which the Pat Conroy character gets hit and knocked down by his father at home, and runs into his mother’s arms. His father looks at him, at his child, and laughs. “I would run from that mocking, cheapening laughter for the rest of my life,” Conroy writes, “always away from him, always toward the soft, embracing places.”
I had a lot of feelings yesterday, if you would like to know about them, they start here:
This time around, there won’t be any suggestiveness about Xena’s (Lucy Lawless) relationship with her sheroic partner Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor). Xena will for sure be openly gay in the series, according to executive producer Javier Grillo-Marxuach.
“There is no reason to bring back Xena if it is not there for the purpose of fully exploring a relationship that could only be shown subtextually [sic] in first-run syndication in the 1990s,” Javier Grillo-Marxuach wrote in a Tumblr response. “It will also express my view of the world—which is only further informed by what is happening right now—and is not too difficult to know what that is if you do some digging.”
My conversion podcast-y thing! This was really hard! The sweet Toasties who run this podcast were very welcoming, I just find these things so intimate and squicky to discuss. But it was good to do. I’m glad I did it. If you find the whole idea laughable or ridiculous, that is SO FAIR, but I am not having the greatest week emotionally, so I would so appreciate it if you had that convo over email with friends. I did this off-site for a reason, so that only people who wanted to take part would. Thanks, teammates.
