This video from Lindsay Ellis discusses empathy, antisemitism, genocide, and Ms Rachel. It is long, but well worth watching.
The Unforgivable Sin of Ms Rachel (YouTube – Lindsay Ellis)
Category: History
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Slavery Was Very Bad
It is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”
Clint SmithActually, Slavery Was Very Bad (The Atlantic)
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The American System of Democracy Has Crashed
As Donald Trump’s imperial presidency rolls forward across the wreckage of Congress on tank treads greased by the Supreme Court, there’s scant evidence of a legal movement for limited government or states’ rights. Trump is not the useful tool of an aggressive right-wing movement. Why look for complex explanations when there is a very simple one at hand? He is the king they serve enthusiastically, a leader whose lies and lawlessness they both enable and mirror.
Elizabeth Lopatto & Sarah JeongThe American system of democracy has crashed (The Verge)
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The Bitter Southerner
The other day, I was watching a video from Carolina Forward and liked the shirt that Blair Reeves was wearing. Looking for it led me to the Bitter Southerner General Store. I didn’t end up ordering that shirt, but only because I ended up finding others there that I liked even more. As I mentioned last week, I like biscuits, so this Make More Biscuits one won me over. Then I also got the Product of Public Schools and Wild Places Matter tees for myself and a Libraries are Essential one for Stef.
Beyond the store, the Bitter Southerner’s main purpose is telling stories about the South and pushing for a Better South. Towards that end, it publishes a magazine, newsletter, podcast, and books. So in addition to a few new shirts, I’m also now subscribed to their newsletter.
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Dumplings, History & Authenticity
This article from University of Michigan’s LSA Magazine was an interesting read.
Brown finds that when we look closely at the historic foodways that brought us popular dishes, we are “forced to consider that cuisines and cultures can’t be reduced to a single ethnic group.” Dumplings, for example, can be mapped all over the world, and she believes the first dumplings were likely made in Central Asia, or somewhere along the Silk Road, and not in the Chinese heartland.
Gina BalibreraWhat Can the Dumpling Tell Us About the History of the World? (LSA Magazine)
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The Invention of Countries
This is a good video from Tom Nicholas about the concept of countries and how it developed. In a world with voices calling for extreme nationalism seemingly on the rise, it is worth keeping in mind that they’re just something we made up.
I think it is helpful to replace the somewhat vague word “country” with the slightly more technical term “nation-state”. For, the phrase “nation-state”, in all its hyphenated goodness, helps to articulate the manner in which what we often think of as a singular phenomenon – a country – is usually actually comprised of two separate phenomena.
Tom NicholasHow Countries Were INVENTED (Tom Nicholas)
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The Three Evils of Society
And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program. The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.
It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero as their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn.
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Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Three Evils of Society” 1967MLK: The Three Evils of Society (The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change)
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Mantracks
Every Folding Ideas video that I’ve watched has been a worthwhile use of time, and his latest one about fake fossils is no exception.
Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils (Folding Ideas)
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Standard Ebooks
Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.
Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.
Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on.
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Those Who Remember Dictatorship
The events in South Korea, and this trip to Portugal, has me more convinced than ever that the United States is an innocent teenager when it comes to our development as a nation, and our tendency to let the market choose our politics and our economic policy for us is exactly what millions of citizens in Portugal, South Korea, Colombia, Turkey, Uganda, and dozens of other nations would warn us about. And for me the most shocking part was that as a journalist of 25 years, I know so little about their experiences.
Jacob WardThose Who Remember Dictatorship (The Rip Current)
Scott Boehmer 