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

Here's a weekly round-up of things that made me smile (The Good), cry (The Bad), and think (The Curious).

The Good 
Here are some great tips on how to read a poem.

Here's a collection of laugh-out-loud funny books (that I might actually get to read because I get read things I want to read for the first time in eight years!)

There are two pop culture bracket playoffs I'm following with great interest. Vulture is trying to determine the best high school-based TV show and The Atlantic is set to determine the #ActualWorst TV character.

The Bad
This story of two police officers shooting into a moving vehicle and killing a six-year-old is too much for me.

My state never makes the news for anything good. Springfield, MO banned breastfeeding because they were afraid it was affecting tourism. Strip clubs, though, are exempt from this indecent exposure law (that is almost certainly not going to hold up since it goes against state law allowing breastfeeding.)

The Curious
Sociological Images has a side-by-side comparison of the vocabulary labels in Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever. There were a lot of changes from the 1963 original in the 1991 reprint. I wonder what changes a new update would bring?

This Inside Higher Ed post examines how the humanities must make a more public case for its existence if we are to survive:

There is a different unifying principle for most non-STEM disciplines -- among them English, history, politics and civics, languages and literatures, education, the arts, philosophy, psychology and sociology -- which I call the human disciplines. All of the subjects within human disciplines are fundamentally interested in people and with subjectivity. Our disciplines not only illustrate esoteric questions of the meaning and purpose of life but are also uniquely well suited to explore questions of how to live and work with other people. In practical terms, if the job requires being able to work with and understand people -- particularly those different from yourself -- these degrees can, and should, make you better suited for it. They promote empathy, and require students to regard problems, and people, with complexity and the understanding that no single answer is right.

Everyday Feminism has a great post on how feminists must stop pushing religious people out of the movement:

And yet, while mainstream feminists pine for young stars to pay lip service to feminism, women of faith who are actually doing brave and difficult work are routinely told they cannot be “true” feminists. 

We recognize that many people think it is only a feminist act to leave patriarchal traditions. We contend that it can also be a feminist act to stay, and we look forward to the day when doing so puts neither our faith nor our feminism in question.

"The Evolution of Bitchiness" takes a look at how women judge one another by appearance and use that to form alliances and marginalize others:

He argues that though this and other studies show how important physical appearance is to the way women respond to each other, there’s too much cultural baggage at play to say it all comes from our primate ancestors. The short-skirt-boots combo, for example, is already a “meaning-laden image,” he said.