How NYC’s Chinatown has stayed Chinatown:
Here are portraits of what could be called the Chinatown Establishment: a collection of people with deep roots in the neighborhood and unusual influence in shaping its future. Some wield familiar levers of power, like political position and real-estate portfolios. Others are included for reasons more particular to the neighborhood: pastors to the devout, third-generation herbalists, restaurateurs, labor activists (who have more muscle in Chinatown than just about anywhere else). Their visions for the neighborhood’s future, and their worries for it, vary considerably. (Such is New York.) But overall, they stand a fighting chance of controlling the fate of some of the most valuable land in the city. Here are five reasons why.
On disclosing mental illness in academia:
For every Saks or McElroy, though, there are many more academics who choose not to disclose their disabilities. I reached out to colleagues who have chosen to keep their disabilities secret, asking them if they have any advice for others. They all expressed a strong fear of being discovered, even despite my assurances that I would treat their words with the utmost privacy. Most of these folks are contingent professors.
One professor who teaches in a full-time contingent position at an R1 university said she would only disclose her mental health issues “under subpoena.” She believes that disclosing would hurt her job security because “contingent faculty can be so easily terminated.” In her opinion, contingent—and even pre-tenure—professors simply don’t have “the luxury to volunteer stigmatizing personal information.”
When threats from men taught me how to be a woman:
I had an entire block of light from the CVS windows to walk through before my body could plunge into darkness, which I knew could either help me or hurt me. I feared the dark because there I was most likely to get beat up, but it could potentially offer me safety — in the dark, the parts of my body that might give me away as a trans woman didn’t show. As I walked those hundred yards to the next crosswalk, I prayed that those men’s light would change, so that we could go in our opposite directions.
But light was not on my side. A moment later, a man blocked my path, and said, “Miss, my friend really wants to talk to you.”
I raised my head and looked him in the eye when I heard him say “Miss” — there was the promise of respect in that word, the promise that these men would see me the way I saw myself. Back then, I didn’t know yet that the chance of getting respect from the kind of men who would bother a woman on the street was slim. I hadn’t fully absorbed that this was not the kind of attention I wanted, that this type of attention could so easily turn — especially for trans women. When men approach us to express their attraction, they also stand to punish us for threatening their masculinity if they find out who we really are.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy likes to gaze majestically into the distance/the bushes:
Two top Army generals recently discussed trying to kill an article in The New York Times on concussions at West Point by withholding information so the Army could encourage competing news organizations to publish a more favorable story, according to an Army document.
The generals’ conversation involved a Freedom of Information Act request that The Times made in June for data on concussions resulting from mandatory boxing classes at the United States Military Academy. The Times also requested similar data from the Air Force Academy in June, and from the Naval Academy this month.
This is an ODDLY GRIPPING tale of a scammy cosmetics company:
Courtney is one of the few outspoken Lime Crime bloggers who has not fled the conversation over the years. Many people have gone silent, leaving ghost blogs and abandoned instagrams in their wake. It’s not for nothing — it’s public knowledge that Deere has pursued litigation against bloggers based in the U.S who have written negative reviews of the brand. She sued the founder of the first Lime Crime-critical blog, Doe Deere Lies, Michelle Jasczyn, for just under $250,000 — not on the basis of libel or slander, but for copyright infringement.
Great British Bake Off contestant Tamal has become something of a heartthrob, with fans professing their love for him on social media every Wednesday evening.
So naturally, the question on everyone’s lips has been is Tamal available?
“I wouldn’t have a girlfriend, I would have a boyfriend,” Tamal tells us in this week’s Radio Times magazine. “But I am single at the moment.”
