Monday, June 3, 2013

The Good, the Bad, and the Curious (Links)

Here's what I've been reading that made me smile (the Good), cry (the Bad), and think (the Curious). What did I miss?

The Good 

The second issue of "Conversations with my Two Year Old" contains the line "Because I'm naked, I'm the boss." 


Wallpaper that lights up? Yes, please!

Birthing Beautiful Ideas talks about how writing a dissertation and having a baby share a lot of key elements. (I did one. Surely I can do the other. Right? Right?!)

Staceyann Chin reminds us that she comes "in too many flavors for one fucking spoon." 


Check out this awesome resource guide for multicultural books, shows, and research from Ellie at Musing Momma. 

This Offbeat Families story is a charming tale of how one woman gave birth to a daughter who was then adopted by her aunt. Families form in lots of ways

Nevada bans breed-specific legislation that discriminates against pit bulls. 

The Bad 

Fourteen-year-old Tremaine McMillian was tackled to the ground and choked for giving a police officer a "dehumanizing" look. 

It's not often a trivia quiz makes me sad, but this quiz on Sporcle about life expectancy by country put a lot into perspective. 

This mother was arrested and imprisoned when her children were found living in a storage locker. What happens when the best you can do doesn't meet the minimum standards for society? Is prison really the answer?

The Curious

This Salon article is about how much we love to hate on spelling bee contestants: 
All this callous tween-trolling is a drag, and maybe that’s all there is to say about it. But there are leagues of pre-pubescent mental athletes out there who could own any one of us in a ‘sport’ that, it so happens, every single fucking one of us has technically trained for. For more than a decade, with grades. Can you imagine if every American was made to play basketball, intensively and with parents mean-mugging our report cards if our defensive rotations were slow, for twelve years?
NPR has a great article on code-switching that looks at some of the tough intersections between identity and language:
If we code-switch to get jobs, to make friends, at what point are we indicating that we will mold to expectations no matter how they clash with our realities? Why do we try so hard to fit in when doing so might make it harder for us to be seen as we are? That is, when our trying to fit in makes it so that people expect us to try to fit in and yet also makes it so that we never can.
Happiness doesn't always mean feeling good, and the toughest part about building happiness through relationships sometimes means realizing that:
Our habitual pleasure-seeking keeps us from being able to be truly and deeply committed to our endeavors in life. Our idea that we deserve to feel good all the time, and that anything that isn't actively making us feel good is bad and wrong and scary, makes it so we inevitably begin to resist the things we have committed to.
Fit and Feminist asks what happens when the pursuit of being "strong" collides with the pursuit of being "skinny":
For most of us, this is just not possible. It is not possible for us to train hard without eating a considerable amount of food to support our bodies. (As a triathlete, swimmer and distance runner who lifts weights, I find I have to eat more than 2,500 calories a day just to keep my body from cannibalizing my muscles.) It is not possible for us to build muscle without eating enough food because our bodies need something to build that muscle out of. And it is not really possible for us to eat and train in such a way that we gain nothing but pure muscle.

What have you been reading? 

1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much for including the new resource page here! The article on code-switching is really interesting. You always pull together such interesting links!

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