Intern Uprising →
I am overwhelmed by all the top tens/best music of your life/if you miss this you’re not listening to anything relevant lists. Here are some recs from the interns at NPR.
Thousands Sterilized, a State Weighs Restitution →
“Now, along with scores of others selected for state sterilization…Mr. Holt is waiting to see what a state that had one of the country’s most aggressive eugenics programs will decide his fertility was worth.”
Lately I’ve been reading and learning about the history of birth control and its ties to eugenics, and it’s a pretty wild history. I listened to Jill Lepore on Fresh Air talking about this history, and she said North Carolina regularly required birth control and/or sterilization as a requirement for welfare recipients starting in the 30s. What’s especially wild to me is that this wasn’t that long ago, and some of these sterilization programs went through the 70s! I found this article an important part of the story.
It’s such a bummer to me that all these (mostly awesome!) parklets are poppin up all around the city with such poor design. To my mind, I think they cultivate community because it’s a place to sit and talk with strangers where there wouldn’t otherwise be an invitation to stop and sit. I think they’re trying to encourage bike riding too because they all have bike racks but alas! The bike rack designs are awful! I guess the width and height of them is designed to make it hard to steal someone’s bike, by minimizing the leverage a thief has to wedge in and break your lock - but it’s also kind of a task to lock up your bike. It’s difficult to lock up several bikes too, despite the appearance of offering more racks. I can’t imagine what the city’s spending on these, such a let down that all that money can’t also plan a better, more useable(sp?) design.
Mark Bittman...I'm disappointed →
This article makes me mad.
People sure love to blame the poor for their own problems, and this is sure a great example. Mark seems to have forgotten about how many people:
-don’t have a stove
-don’t have a refrigerator
-don’t have cooking supplies like a sharp knife, multiple pans, etc
-don’t have a car (I would really like to know where that statistic about 93% of food stamp recipients have access to a car thing came from. That seems totally off to me)
-don’t have access to the Internet to look up how to roast a freaking chicken
-are too exhausted from their work to cook because their jobs involve being on their feet all day, not sitting at a desk
-become obese on unhealthy food that is not from McDonalds
-a million other things about the impossible challenges people who are poor face every day in their fight to just GET BY that he doesn’t acknowledgeGosh, he doesn’t realize how absolutely paternalistic he sounds talking about how we need to “change the culture” of people experiencing poverty. I want people to eat well too, Mark. But this victim-blaming stuff has to stop. Your burgeoning community of progressive foodies and their organic produce co-ops just raised the rent in an “up and coming” neighborhood and pushed another family into a food desert.
After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town →
Alabama enacts “the strongest immigration law in this country” making an environment hostile to immigrants. And I say let ‘em. Let the xenophobes see what the fall out is when the immigrants leave.
Hiring Locally for Farm Work is no Cure-All →
“…many immigration hard-liners have come to agree that the dearth of Americans willing to work the fields requires some sort of rethinking, at least, of the H-2A program.”
Once the Bush and Obama administrations decided that you couldn’t let these firms fail and they didn’t want the mess of nationalizing them, there was really only one way forward — and that way was to gift money onto these banks until they’re back on their feet and can function at the center of the economy again. But that, to any normal person who is outside the system, just looks ridiculously unfair. It looks like socialism for capitalists and capitalism for everybody else. So it’s no wonder people are marching in southern Manhattan.
— On today’s Fresh Air, Michael Lewis talks about Occupy Wall Street, the debt crisis in Greece, the Euro, and why he feels like California is having ‘third world problems’ (via nprfreshair)
(via nprfreshair)
An Open Letter from Black Women to SlutWalk organizers →
I know NY’s SlutWalk has passed, but this is an important point of view to consider and know.
“We can learn from successful movements like the Civil Rights movement, from Women’s Suffrage, the Black Nationalist and Black Feminist movements that we can make change without resorting to the taking-back of words that were never ours to begin with, but in fact heaved upon us in a process of dehumanization and devaluation.”
