It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse! It’s another edition of your Weekly Reader! As always, if you have something you’d like to share, drop a link in the comments! The more articles, the better! Because sharing is caring! So feel free to share away. The more, the merrier! ❤
Flight attendants know the real job killer isn’t the Green New Deal. It’s climate change. (from Vox): “For flight attendants and passengers alike, that dangerous, shaky feeling in midair comes from air currents shifting. Clear air turbulence, or CAT, is the most dangerous. It cannot be seen and is virtually undetectable with current technology. One second, you’re cruising smoothly; the next, passengers and crew are being thrown around the cabin. For flight attendants, who are often in the aisles, these incidents pose a serious occupational risk.”
Mark Zuckerberg leveraged Facebook user data to fight rivals and help friends, leaked documents show (from NBC News): “The documents, which include emails, webchats, presentations, spreadsheets and meeting summaries, show how Zuckerberg, along with his board and management team, found ways to tap Facebook’s trove of user data — including information about friends, relationships and photos — as leverage over companies it partnered with.
In some cases, Facebook would reward favored companies by giving them access to the data of its users. In other cases, it would deny user-data access to rival companies or apps.”
Justin Fairfax’s Victims Say He’s a Manipulative Sexual Predator (from The Cut): “There are clear parallels between the women’s accounts. Watson and Tyson, both black women, both trusted Fairfax. They both say he violently sexually assaulted them. And both say they had confided in Fairfax about being survivors of sexual violence in the past: Tyson is an incest survivor, while Watson claims she was raped by a Duke basketball player a year before her alleged encounter with Fairfax. Both women claim they divulged these parts of their past to Fairfax during the periods that they knew him — before the alleged attacks.”
As a Black Mother, My Parenting Is Always Political (from The Nation): “Black mothers like me know that motherhood is deeply political. Black women are more likely to die during pregnancy or birth than women of any other race. My own mother, who has never married and who worked full-time throughout my childhood, is a model for my own parenting, but culture-war messages from the left and the right tell us she fell short of maternal ideals. My grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts, and elders in the community supported my mother as she raised me. Their investment in me and in other children—some their blood relations, some not—demonstrated an ethic that we can all learn from. Sociologist Patricia Hill Collins has called this “other-mothering,” a system of care through which black mothers are accountable to and work on behalf of all black children in a particular community. “I tell my daughter all the time: We don’t live for the ‘I.’ We live for the ‘we,’” Cat Brooks, an organizer in Oakland, told me.”
They Had It Coming (from The Atlantic): “Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.”
Facts alone don’t sway anti-vaxxers. So what does? (from USA Today): “Trying to convince someone that a deeply held view is flawed is an uphill battle. Human beings are hard-wired for bias. If you’re a new mom who believes vaccines cause autism, are you searching for research that shows whether they actually do, or are you Googling “vaccines cause autism” to find stories to affirm your belief? Likely the latter, which Charles Taber of Stony Brook University says is driven by “motivated reasoning.””
Queer Love in Color (from the New York Times): “As a child, I thought all gay people were white.
By the time I was 18 and living in Detroit, being gay was no longer a “problem” for me. I was out of the closet, and my family and friends were supportive, even encouraging. Yet, as I set off for college, and grew more comfortable calling myself an adult, a man — a gay black man — I was convinced that no one would ever date or love me.”
The Art of a Monster (from The Atlantic): “And through this terrible man, this destroyer, poured a force that can only be truthfully described as art. Michael Jackson’s dancing is no mortal enterprise: James Brown’s shuffle, Fred Astaire’s precision, and some other element that exists so far beyond anything as simple as influence, or talent, that we can only say we know it when we see it. It’s not a gift; it’s the gift itself.
The ancient question: What moral stain awaits us if we cannot abandon the art of a monster? None.”
And that’s all for now. Drop by again next week, where I’ll have links you’ll want to read. Or at least bookmark. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 