This is the best best best thing.
A great article using World of Warcraft/role playing games as an analogy for privilege.<br>
"Dudes. Imagine life here in the US — or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world — is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it? <br>
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is."
Last week Clinton, a woman who holds degrees from Wellesley and Yale, has served in the Senate and as Secretary of State, endured an endless loop of media coverage for not wearing makeup.
The black Jewish hip-hop artist Yitz Jordan has struggled with his public image for years. Now he's ready to come out (as gay).
This is a great little article on how we view history as something that always gets better, but there are a lot of issues Americans are less accepting of than they were in the past.
This is really interesting. This memo, from a pollster who polled for George W. Bush in 2004, is currently circulating among Republicans. He recommends dropping opposition to gay rights issues in order for Republican politicians to keep pace with the broader culture. I know things have sucked and this year has been horrible for these culture-war issues, so maybe this is a tiny sign of hope.
Unicorn Booty wants to know what you think.
OBAMA: I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
OBAMA: I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.
From the review:
"Beauty is a Verb is a collection of poems and companion essays by and addressing the lives of the nearly 50 million Americans with disabilities."
And the excerpt that really got me:
I’m sorry—this space is reserved
for poems with disabilities. I know
it’s one of the best spaces in the book,
but the Poems with Disabilities Act
requires us to make all reasonable
accommodations for poems that aren’t
normal.
An intelligent, moving, thoughtful take on what it means to be pro-choice and pregnant at this particular point in history.
Nuns have largely embraced Vatican II, which asked religious orders to modernize. For nuns, that meant focusing strongly on social justice rather than religious doctrine. The Leadership Conference of Women Religious (the umbrella group for most American nuns), which previously had a certain degree of independence, is now being monitored by Seattle's archbishop, due to a shift in a more conservative Vatican leadership.
For you yippers in grad school.
I feel like this article is the epitome of yip. It's about the prevalence of all things feline on the internet.
This has been true in my experience at different tattoo parlors. Thoughts?
This is quite good. But this might be my favorite part: "Later, after the interview ended, we found Hillary sitting in a small chair, scrunched between the desk of Obama's secretary and the door to the Oval Office. The two former rivals now seem completely at ease with each other. Clinton joked about the popularity of the fake Tumblr site Texts From Hillary Clinton, and Obama began to air-thumb an imaginary text. "See, I'm hip," he said with a laugh."
"Clinics in about a dozen states are being visited by suspiciously similar women seeking an oddly specific type of abortion. Is there a "gotcha" coming?"
"Members of a privileged class talking about how they are so annoyed with words used by oppressed people to describe their identities does not give me much confidence in the privileged person’s status as an ally. When you seek to erase these words, you are seeking to erase people’s identities and experiences."
"The removal of anonymity is a means to clarify," she wrote in a statement translated from German. "Just think of all the children, young people and adults who are secretly harassed by perverts and don't know what to do or how to defend themselves. Should we not go forward as a good example and demonstrate strength?"
Plus, look at how fucking awesome her hair is.
