#teenage girl who puts her most precise and intelligent writing in her diary for those who read it after she dies

[carniferous]

anyway the appeal of (tragic) regulus black is to have your narcissistic self-hatred and guilt validated by your own actions. it’s no longer narcissistic because you’ve repeatedly let down everybody who believed in you and wanted better for you and you’ve confirmed your worst fears about yourself only to die too young in mysterious circumstances that ensure nobody ever finds out how secretly selfless and brave you could be (though it was really only possible for you be those things while dead)

[an-ephemeral-blog]

Linkspam #4

Top Links

How to Not Die in America by Molly Osberg at Splinter News:

On that second Tuesday in June 2017, I found myself in what I worry could be a fleeting moment in my life, one in which the institutions around me find it advantageous to protect  rather than screw me. I find it baffling that, since my illness, well-meaning people have repeatedly referred to me as a “survivor,” as if the fact that I got to go on with my life had to do with some inherent moral strength, rather than the material forces put in motion long before I got sick.

The Many Lives of Pauli Murray by Kathryn Schultz at the New Yorker:

Murray’s silence about her gender and sexuality is striking, because she otherwise spent a lifetime insisting that her identity, like her nation, must be fully integrated. She hated, she wrote, “to be fragmented into Negro at one time, woman at another, or worker at another.”

Yet every movement to which Murray ever belonged vivisected her in exactly those ways.

Socialism As A Set Of Principles by Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs:

The instinct that “people should be able to shape their own destinies” leads socialists to endorse what I think is the core meaning of “democracy,” namely the idea that people should have decision-making power over those things that affect them. If we think people’s choices should be valued, then they should be included in decision-making that affects them.

Hence all this business about the “means of production.” The workers in an auto plant are strongly affected by the decision as to whether or not it should close and move production elsewhere. Yet because they do not “own” it (i.e. have any decision-making power), the choice will be made without the participation of those it will impact most. This violates the core principle of democracy. The whole reason socialists are critical of the concentration of private property in few hands is that it constitutes a concentration of socially consequential decision-making power.

How The ACORN Scandal Seeded Today’s Nightmare Politics by Zach Carter and Arthur Delaney at Huffington Post:

ACORN had survived for more than 40 years. Its sudden collapse was a defining moment in 21st century American politics. The explosive cocktail of racism, dishonesty, incompetence and cowardice that brought down the organization reveals as much about Washington Democrats as it does about the conservative movement. It marked the Republican Party’s full transition from the coded winks and nods of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy” to the bellicose white nativism that defines Donald Trump, and it exposed a Democratic Party establishment unprepared for dirty tricks in the Digital Age and unwilling to defend many of the black voters and activists it claimed to represent. 

The Spy Who Came Home by Ben Taub in the New Yorker:

[O]ver the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.”

The epic mistake about manufacturing that’s cost Americans millions of jobs by Gwynn Guilford at Quartz:

Thanks to a painstaking analysis by a handful of economists, it’s become clear that the data that underpin the dominant narrative—or more precisely, the way most economists interpreted the data—were way off-base. Foreign competition, not automation, was behind the stunning loss in factory jobs. And that means America’s manufacturing sector is in far worse shape than the media, politicians, and even most academics realize.

Inside the Massive U.S. 'Border Zone' by Tanvi Misra at Citylab:

Agents can enter private property, set up highway checkpoints, have wide discretion to stop, question, and detain individuals they suspect to have committed immigration violations—and can even use race and ethnicity as factors to do so.

That’s striking because the border zone is home to 65.3 percent of the entire U.S. population, and around 75 percent of the U.S. Hispanic population, according to a CityLab analysis based on data from location intelligence company ESRI. This zone, which hugs the entire edge of the United States and runs 100 air miles inside, includes some of the densest cities—New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Other Favorites

Science

This Roman ‘gate to hell’ killed its victims with a cloud of deadly carbon dioxide by Colin Barras at Science Magazine

The Framingham Heart Study and the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease: a historical perspective by Syed S Mahmood, Daniel Levy, Ramachandran S Vasan, and Thomas J Wang in the Lancet (full text here) - this article describes how the death of President Franklin Roosevelt from heart disease impacted cardiovascular research in this country

Twitter thread by Ask An Entomologist @BugQuestions - “What we now call 'queen' bees-the main female reproductive honeybees-were erroneously called 'kings' for nearly 2,000 years. Why?“

Diary of a Local Data Reporter by Rachel Alexander at Source - “Telling the story of health care workers dying from opioid overdoses in Spokane, Washington“

Method to identify undetected drug suicides wins top NIDA Addiction Science Award at the NIH website - what the post title fails to mention is that the method was discovered by a pair of high school girls.  Hell yeah, teenage science nerds making the world a better place. <3

Tech

Inclusion Riders in Tech by Nicole Sanchez at Medium and, conversely, Sorry, Hollywood. Inclusion Riders Won’t Save You by Rebecca Chapman at the New York Times

Stop Being Sexist, Siri at One Foot Tsunami - an example of algorithmic bias vis-a-vis the devaluation of women’s sports

The Aggregator Paradox by Ben Thompson at Stratechery - Facebook, Google, and their relationship with publishers and advertisers

Double Buffer by Robert Nystrom in Game Programming Patterns - a delightfully clear explanation of the kind of problem double buffering solves (graphics rendering in games) and how to implement it

The Universal Design Pattern by Steve Yegge at their personal blog - a long, detailed, and admittedly decade-old pitch for the properties design pattern

Four cents to deanonymize: Companies reverse hashed email addresses by Gunes Acar at Freedom to Tinker

Georgia bill could stifle the state’s booming cybersecurity community by Seth Rosenblatt at The Parallax - yet another example of why legislators at all levels need more technical experts on their staff

Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over censorship circumvention by moxio0 on the Signal blog

Invisible asymptotes by Eugene Wei at Remains of the Day - designing social media and other software products for growth

12 Fractured Apps by Kelsey Hightower at Medium - a practical guide to implementing 12FA philosophy when using Docker

Politics

America’s poor subsidize wealthier consumers in a vicious income inequality cycle by Aaron Klein at The Brookings Institution

Markets aren’t natural: governments have to make them work by Steven K. Vogel at OUPBlog

Black Teens Have Been Fighting for Gun Reform for Years by Lincoln Anthony Blades in Teen Vogue

The Persistence of Tyranny by Ken White at PopeHat - “Tyranny is mouthing platitudes about liberty while cheering its suppression. Tyranny is our capacity to rationalize exceptions to rights for our enemies. Tyranny is our willingness to dismiss violation of rights as unimportant or minimal. Tyranny sold you your morning coffee.”

How the Democrat’s Corrupt Congressional Pay-to-Play Machine Sabotages Progressives and the Popular Will by Yves Smith at naked capitalism

How Conflicts (Don’t) End by Richard English at Lawfare - four elements of conflict resolution as exemplified by the Northern Ireland peace process

Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns by Jeremy Adam Smith at Scientific American

We have to build the future out of the past by Quinn Norton at emptywheel - “This is the myth of the truth of the moment — that we are powerful beyond our own understanding, and broken and angry within our dysfunctional family.”

In A World That Polices Black Movement, ‘Black Boys Dance Too’ Is Revolutionary by By Ja’han Jones at Huffington Post

Inside Russian Women’s Fight For Their Lives by Madeline Roache at The Establishment - how legislation decriminalizing domestic abuse has made life even worse for women in Russia

Seniors Are More Conservative Because the Poor Don’t Survive to Become Seniors by Ed Kilgore at NYMag

History

Becoming Trans: Transgender Identity In The Middle Ages by zac clifton at Medium

Heroes, Identity and the Realm of History by Meg Foster at JHIBlog - on the Australian semi-mythic figure of the ‘bushranger’

Rethinking the “Lessons” of the First World War by Michael Neiberg at Lawfare

Misc

Why dictators find the lure of writing books irresistible by Lucy Hughes-Hallett at New Statesman - a review of a book which is itself a series of reviews of books by Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Mussolini, etc.

What Fullness Is by Roxane Gay at Medium - Gay writes about getting weight loss surgery

The non-profit that figured out how to massively cut suicide rates in Sri Lanka, and their plan to do the same around the world by Robery Wilbin at 80,000 hours - this title is wildly misleading but the content is interesting

Words Matter by Siderea on Dreamwidth - Small changes in language can have big effects.

“Who Do You Think You Are?”: When Marginality Meets Academic Microcelebrity by Tressie McMillan Cottom in Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology

Black Issues in Philosophy: A Conversation on Get Out at the APA Blog - an analysis of the film Get Out by political theorist Derefe Kimarley Chevannes and philosopher Lewis Gordon

A Landslide of Classic Art Is About to Enter the Public Domain by Glenn Fleishman at The Atlantic - I’m so excited, you guys!  For the first time in my adult life, we’re going to get a mass release of public domain material!  If Disney doesn’t get to it first, anyway.

The Rise and Fall of Dr. M. by Bernd Kramer at Elephant in the Lab - a story of academic fraud

Short & Sweet: Change Makers by forestofglory at ladybusiness - a short list of short stories about ordinary people making political change, all available to read for free online

Tendrils of Mess in our Brains by Srah Perry at ribbonfarm - what makes a mess a mess?

When does your company stop paying women in 2018? by Josh Holder, Alexandra Topping, Caelainn Barr and Antonio Voce at The Guardian - an interactive map

nontoxic masculinity by Katie at her personal blog - lifting up examples of non-toxic masculinity

“When Tables Speak”: On the Existence of Trans Philosophy by Talia Mae Bettcher at Daily Nous

A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy by John Nerst at Everything Studies - an extremely thorough and thought-provoking analysis of someone else’s debate (bonus follow-up post)

I’m Not Black, I’m Kanye by Ta-Nehisi Coates - as a white person I don’t feel comfortable opining on this except to say it’s really, really worth reading

The Nice Cop by Nick Slater at Current Affairs - “Is this because cruel people become cops, or because becoming a cop makes people cruel? I used to think the answer was obvious, until I watched my friend kill a man on Facebook Live.”