1. A Warming World Creates Desperate People
“The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that since 2008, 22.5 million people have been displaced by climate-related or extreme weather events.”
2. What It Costs to Be Smuggled Across the U.S. Border
“They can build as many walls as they want. They can send as many soldiers to the border as they want, but a people’s need and desire for a better life is stronger.”
3. The Millennial Socialists Are Coming
“All over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle for democratic socialism.”
“Before a certain age, Muslim women are presumed to be virgins; after a certain age, wives. Since these assumptions — enforced both within and outside the Muslim community — rob the individual Muslim woman of any agency, this mythical virgin/wife figure becomes one and the same. Once again, there is no middle ground.”
5. Cages Are Cruel. The Desert Is, Too.
“No matter what version of hell migrants are made to pass through at the border, they will endure it to escape far more tangible threats of violence in their home countries, to reunite with family or to secure some semblance of economic stability. Policymakers also ignore that new enforcement measures almost always strengthen cartel-aligned human trafficking networks, giving them cause to increase their smuggling fees and push vulnerable migrants to make riskier crossings to avoid detection.”
6. What Men Say About #MeToo in Therapy
“The #MeToo era has changed my work. If therapy has a reputation for navel gazing, this powerful moment has joined men in the room, forcing them to engage with topics that they would have earlier avoided.”
7. I Did a Terrible Thing. How Can I Apologize?
“Maybe, I thought, this was a universal longing — to be listened to, rather than apologized at.”
8. Into the Wild With Kanye West
“More than any other famous person of his stature, he shares his rough drafts.”
“To go on Raya is to enter a strange and alluring world filled with thirsty elites, a place where fame is measured in Instagram followers and humble-bragging is a high art.”
“Canceling … is an act of withdrawing from someone whose expression — whether political, artistic or otherwise — was once welcome or at least tolerated, but no longer is.”
11. Are More and More People Working Meaningless Jobs?
“Graeber argues that there are more useless office jobs than ever before. He blames this largely on the rise of the financial and information sectors and on what he calls ‘managerial feudalism,’ in which companies keep adding supervisors and white-collar workers, rather than sharing with blue-collar workers the fruits of their increased productivity.”
12. How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
“Storr suggests that the self-esteem fad, which went mainstream in the late 1980s and 1990s, evolved into the epidemic of digitally enhanced self-absorption from which we are said to suffer today.”
13. Click ‘Delete’ to Save Your Soul
“He worries that our reliance on big tech companies is ruining our capacity for spirituality, by turning us into robotic extensions of their machines. The companies, he argues, have no appreciation for the ‘mystical spark inside you.’ They don’t understand the magic of human consciousness and, therefore, will recklessly destroy it.”
14. Does American ‘Tribalism’ End in a Compromise, or a Fight?
“It is generally not a good idea to expect people on the receiving end of brutal policies — like families broken apart by police violence, immigration raids, travel bans or anti-L.G.B.T. discrimination — to hash out a compromise over sweet tea.”
“People don’t merely go to the same places or take photographs of the same monuments and sites; they take photographs of the same monuments and sites in the same way. This applies to tourist sites, public spaces and ordinary buildings. The same gestures and vantage points and compositions are repeated, and the images come out so uncannily similar that it’s as though everyone were subject to the same set of instructions.”
16. Letter of Recommendation: Timehop
“As our digital footprints expand, Silicon Valley’s major players must spend more and more money maintaining enormous digital garbage dumps, full of moldering tweets and flip-phone mirror selfies and old Facebook statuses composed in the third person.”
17. Adrian Piper’s Show at MoMA is the Largest Ever for a Living Artist. Why Hasn’t She Seen It?
“However Piper came to plumb the paradoxes of her own racial designation (and everyone else’s), the desire to alter other people’s behavior by challenging their reflexive biases is one of her defining fixations.”
Submitted For Your Perusal 