Yesterday was Matt and Jaya’s two-year wedding anniversary, so here is a picture of one of their cats.
Why the Roots remake is important:
Many viewers who watched and were affected by the original Roots, like my family was, end up trying to sell the value of sweeping biopics with a simple, “You need to know this. It’s important to know your history.” But often, younger viewers, like my students, push back, earnestly asking, What is the use of it though? What am I supposed to go out and do with it? The Roots remake offers an ideal chance for both sides to revisit the conversation, and for grownups to make a stronger case for learning about difficult historical realities from watching and evaluating major productions like this one, and how transformative consciousness and knowledge can possibly develop from an encounter with it.
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My friend, who is an Arbonne consultant, recently posted this on her Facebook page and I was wondering your thoughts (and the readers’ thoughts) on it:
If your friend sells Avon, try it!
If your friend sells Scentsy, try it!
If your friend sells Tupperware, try it!
If your friend sells Jamberry, try it!
If your friend sells Intimo, try it!
If your friend sells Arbonne, try it!
If your friend sells Juice Plus+, try it!
If your friend sells Mary Kay, try it!
If your friend sells Isagenix, try it!
If your friend sells Bodyshop, try it!
If your friend sells Norwex, try it!
Moral of the story, if my friend owned a restaurant, yes I would eat there! If my friend bought a coffee shop, I’d buy their coffee/tea. If a friend of mine owned a finance company, I would go there! If one of my friends owned a gym, I would train there. At the end of the day when you help a small business owner you’re not only helping them, but you’re also helping put money back into our economy. #SupportYourFriends #networkmarketing #thefutureisonlinebusiness #betterway #helpingothers #workingtogether #team #businessofthe21stcenturyI personally disagree with this sentiment. I don’t think eating a friend’s restaurant is the same as supporting their MLM business. When I eat at a restaurant, my friend doesn’t then ask me if I want to start up my own restaurant business! What are your thoughts?
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I am still reading Rebecca Traister’s long Hillary profile, which is worth your time:
She also edged toward something uglier, harder to talk about. “I think it’s the competition,” she said. “Like, if you do this, there won’t be room for some of us, and that’s not fair.” I pushed her: Did she mean men’s fears that ambitious women would take up space that used to belong exclusively to them? “One hundred percent,” she said, nodding forcefully.
She told a story about the time she and a friend from Wellesley sat for the LSAT at Harvard. “We were in this huge, cavernous room,” she said. “And hundreds of people were taking this test, and there weren’t many women there. This friend and I were waiting for the test to begin, and the young men around us were like, ‘What do you think [you’re] doing? How dare you take a spot from one of us?’ It was just a relentless harangue.” Clinton and her friend were stunned. They’d spent four safe years at a women’s college, where these kinds of gender dynamics didn’t apply.
“I remember one young man said, ‘If you get into law school and I don’t, and I have to go to Vietnam and get killed, it’s your fault.’ ”
“So yeah,” Clinton continued. “That level of visceral … fear, anxiety, insecurity plays a role” in how America regards ambitious women.
The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.”
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This may be paywalled, if not, READ IT:
Contrary to the claims of Stop Islam in Gillette, however, the Muslims who established the mosque are not new to the region. Together with some twenty per cent of all Muslims in Wyoming, they trace their presence back more than a hundred years, to 1909, when a young man named Zarif Khan immigrated to the American frontier. Born around 1887, Khan came from a little village called Bara, not far from the Khyber Pass, in the borderlands between Afghanistan and Pakistan. His parents were poor, and the region was politically unstable. Khan’s childhood would have been marked by privation and conflict—if he had any childhood to speak of. Family legend has it that he was just twelve when he left.
What he did next nobody knows, but by September 3, 1907, he had got himself a thousand miles south, to Bombay, where he boarded a ship called the Peno. Eight weeks later, on October 28th, he arrived in Seattle. From there, he struck out for the interior, apparently living for a while in Deadwood, South Dakota, and the nearby towns of Lead and Spearfish before crossing the border into Wyoming. Once there, he settled in Sheridan, which is where he made a name for himself, literally: as Hot Tamale Louie—beloved Mexican-food vender, Afghan immigrant, and patriarch of Wyoming’s now besieged Muslim population.
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A great interview that spans the history of Black Toronto, filmmaking, The Book of Negroes, and a bunch of other stuff too:
Was it challenging starting your career and knowing that you’d want to make these kinds of stories? As Black Canadians, I feel like we don’t really see ourselves, or it’s unlikely to see ourselves reflected in TV and movies. Was it challenging to be out there insisting on telling these stories?
I think it was easier when I started, actually. I think it’s a bit more difficult now. It is a challenge when you’re trying to cast it and you get the feedback that perhaps there aren’t a lot of young Black Canadians who could get a film made or get a television series made. But it doesn’t stop me from trying to get it done. But now it’s much more difficult. The stakes are higher. But those are the stories I want to tell. Those are the stories that interest me.
When you say it’s difficult now, the stakes are higher…
In the environment that we live in now, there’s a real sense that if you want to sell your movies that perhaps Black faces wouldn’t sell internationally or in parts of Europe or Asia. So if you want to make a film for a certain budget, there’s a sense that only certain kinds of faces will sell in these parts of the world. Sometimes it’s difficult to convince financiers that this young Black woman can sell in Asia or in Europe.
