It’s time once again for news and views that you can peruse. It’s time for your summer edition of the Weekly Reader! As always, if you want to share something, just drop a link in the comments!
‘I Can No Longer Continue to Live Here’ (from Politico): “In a small town tucked in the hills outside Tegucigalpa, there is a stuffed gray bunny rabbit that knows a little girl’s secrets. “I tell him all my things,” she says. “About how I’m doing, and when I feel sad.” She feels sad a lot lately. “I start thinking about things that I shouldn’t be thinking,” she says.
There are a lot of things she shouldn’t be thinking. She is 12 years old and just weeks away from giving birth to a baby.”
“When They See Us” Shows How Black Slang Was Criminalized For The Central Park 5 & It Still Is Today (from Bustle): “These cases are infuriating, because they’re unfair. It’s shocking to think of how many people might be wrongfully punished simply because they use a dialect that’s different to what’s considered standard. That’s one reason, of many, that the Central Park Five case is so haunting; these men spent years in prison because of institutionalized racism around the way they spoke.”
The Ruthless Reality of Amazon’s One-Day Shipping (from Gizmondo): “In Seattle, Washington, Philip Hasten stopped driving for Amazon a few months ago after about a year because the $18-an-hour wage wasn’t enough to offset the driving expenses of gas, and wear and tear on his vehicle. “Last time I delivered I made $9 an hour,” he said. “The wear on my car was excessive and they don’t help you do repairs.””
HE CYBERSTALKED TEEN GIRLS FOR YEARS—THEN THEY FOUGHT BACK (from Wired): “The problem was that a lot of students were not reporting the behavior. They were trying to get through, heads down, not wanting to attract the wrong kind of attention. Seth’s victims seemed to share that trait. A girl named Mackenzie, who was harassed by Seth, told me that when she learned who a few of his other victims were, she realized that none were in the popular crowd. They were consigned to the insecure middle, where every misstep was perilous. Staying quiet seemed a reasonable choice.”
Trump’s fans think he’s a macho he-man — he’s really a moral weakling who preys on women and kids (from Salon): “To outsiders, the idea that Trump is a model of desirable masculinity is just plain bizarre, as he lacks not just the positive markers of traditional manhood — stoicism, strength and virility — but any positive human qualities at all. But this past month has offered a strong reminder of what, exactly, Trump fans believe makes Trump such a harbinger of restored masculine greatness: His viciousness and cruelty.”
Insect apocalypse: German bug watchers sound alarm (from Phys.org): “The result is a treasure trove of quantitative data that dwarfs that of any funded university project, he says.
But if he is visibly proud of the society’s research, the outcome terrifies him: in the test period, the total biomass of flying insects here has plummeted by 76 percent.”
Oh Dear: Photos Show What Humans Have Done To The Planet (from NPR): “Photographer Edward Burtynsky and filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier were inspired by this ongoing discussion of the debate over this new geological era. These three Canadian artists traveled to 22 countries to research and document “places of obvious, physical human incursions on the landscape,” says filmmaker de Pencier.”
Christians have no moral rationale for spanking their children (from The Week): “Pro-spanking Christians justify their position by pointing to a Proverbs passage they clearly don’t understand, or by ignoring the entire New Testament and Jesus’ teachings. But setting aside for a moment the gospels, there is a more practical reason to oppose spanking: It doesn’t work.”
It’s Not Nice to Lie to the Supreme Court (from The New York Times): “It would take a heart of stone not to feel sorry for the administration’s lawyers, faced with defending the indefensible. As they recognized 24 hours earlier, the chief justice’s opinion in fact left no wiggle room. Once the behavior of Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce, was called out by the Supreme Court of the United States, the president was trapped — and now his lawyers are caught in his net. Maybe they can find a way around the chief justice’s decision, but I don’t think so.”
When Does America Reckon with the Gravity of Donald Trump’s Alleged Rapes? (from GQ): “Acosta is now under fire for helping the wealthy pedophile escape federal prosecution. Amid growing calls for Acosta to resign, and at President Donald Trump’s urging, he defended his handling of the case in a press conference on Wednesday, arguing that “we live in a very different world” for sex-abuse victims than we did a decade ago and that a lenient plea deal resulting in any jail time at all was the best he could have hoped for at the time. The implication is that perpetrators are actually held to account now, regardless of their money or power; that the Me Too movement has forced the nation to reckon, finally, with how many men are allowed to get away with sexual harassment, abuse, and rape in a system indifferent to the lives of victims.
So, then, when is America going to reckon with the alleged serial sexual abuser in the White House? Donald Trump has not only been accused of rape and sexual misconduct by more than 20 women over the past several decades, but he regularly uses his power to threaten survivors who come forward and to protect and promote men who abuse women.”
That’s all for now. Drop by again for more articles that you didn’t know you had to read. Until then, happy reading!
Iacon East 