#like there was a collection of essays on climate change that i wanted to read

[mostly-mundane-atla]

Inupiaq Books

This post was inspired by learning about and daydreaming about visiting Birchbark Books, a Native-owned bookstore in Minneapolis, so there will be some links to buy the books they have on this list.

Starting Things Off with Two Inupiaq Poets

Joan Naviyuk Kane, whose available collections include:

Hyperboreal

Black Milk Carbon

The Cormorant Hunter's Wife

She also wrote Dark Traffic, but this site doesn't seem to carry any copies

Dg Nanouk Okpik, whose available collections include

Blood Snow

Corpse Whale

Fictionalized Accounts of Historical Events

A Line of Driftwood: the Ada Blackjack Story by Diane Glancy, also available at Birchwood Books, is a fictionalized account of Ada Blackjack's experience surviving the explorers she was working with on Wrangel Island, based on historical records and Blackjack's own diary.

Goodbye, My Island by Rie Muñoz is a historical fiction aimed at younger readers with little knowledge of the Inupiat about a little girl living on King Island. Reads a lot like an American Girl book in case anyone wants to relive that nostalgia

Blessing's Bead by Debby Dahl Edwardson is a Young Adult historical fiction novel about hardships faced by two generations of girls in the same family, 70 years apart. One reviewer pointed out that the second part of the book, set in the 1980s, is written in Village English, so that might be a new experience for some of you

Photography

Menadelook: and Inupiaq Teacher's Photographs of Alaska Village Life, 1907-1932 edited by Eileen Norbert is, exactly as the title suggests, a collection of documentary photographs depicting village life in early 20th century Alaska.

Nuvuk, the Northernmost: Altered Land, Altered Lives in Barrow, Alaska by David James Inulak Lume is another collection of documentary photographs published in 2013, with a focus on the wildlife and negative effects of climate change

Guidebooks (i only found one specifically Inupiaq)

Plants That We Eat/Nauriat Niģiñaqtuat: from the Traditional Wisdom of Iñupiat Elders of Northwest Alaska by Anore Jones is a guide to Alaskan vegetation that in Inupiat have subsisted on for generations upon generations with info on how to identify them and how they were traditionally used.

Anthropology

Kuuvangmiut Subsistence: Traditional Eskimo Life in the Latter Twentieth Century by Douglas B. Anderson et al details traditional lifestyles and subsistance customs of the Kobuk River Inupiat

Life at the Swift Water Place: Northwest Alaska at the Threshold of European Contact by Douglas D. Anderson and Wanni W. Anderson: a multidisciplinary study of a specific Kobuk River group, the Amilgaqtau Yaagmiut, at the very beginning of European and Asian trade.

Upside Down: Seasons Among the Nunamiut by Margaret B. Blackman is a collection of essays reflecting on almost 20 years of anthropological fieldwork focused on the Nunamiut of Anuktuvuk Pass: the traditional culture and the adaption to new technology.

Nonfiction

Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement by Dan O'Neill is about Project Chariot. In an attempt to find peaceful uses of wartime technology, Edward Teller planned to drop six nukes on the Inupiaq village of Point Hope, officially to build a harbor but it can't be ignored that the US government wanted to know the effects radiation had on humans and animals. The scope is wider than the Inupiat people involved and their resistance to the project, but as it is no small part of this lesser discussed moment of history, it only feels right to include this

Fifty Miles From Tomorrow: a Memoir of Alaska and the Real People by William L. Iģģiaģruk Hensley is an autobiography following the author's tradition upbringing, pursuit of an education, and his part in the Alaska Native Settlement Claims Act, where he and other Alaska Native activists had to teach themselves United States Law to best lobby the government for land and financial compensation as reparations for colonization.

Sadie Bower Neakok: An Iñupiaq Woman by Margaret B. Blackman is a biography of the titular Sadie Bower Neakok, a beloved public figure of Utqiagvik, former Barrow. Neakok grew up one of ten children of an Inupiaq woman named Asianggataq, and the first white settler to live in Utqiagvik/Barrow, Charles Bower. She used the out-of-state college education she received to aid her community as a teacher, a wellfare worker, and advocate who won the right for Native languages to be used in court when defendants couldn't speak English, and more.

Folktales and Oral Histories

Folktales of the Riverine and Costal Iñupiat/Unipchallu Uqaqtuallu Kuungmiuñļu Taģiuģmiuñļu edited by Wanni W. Anderson and Ruth Tatqaviñ Sampson, transcribed by Angeline Ipiiļik Newlin and translated by Michael Qakiq Atorak is a collection of eleven Inupiaq folktales in English and the original Inupiaq.

The Dall Sheep Dinner Guest: Iñupiaq Narratives of Northwest Alaska by Wanni W. Anderson is a collection of Kobuk River Inupiaq folktales and oral histories collected from Inupiat storytellers and accompanied by Anderson's own essays explaining cultural context. Unlike the other two collections of traditional stories mentioned on this list, this one is only written in English.

Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit/King Island Tales: Eskimo Historu and Legends from Bering Strait compiled and edited by Lawrence D. Kaplan, collected by Gertrude Analoak, Margaret Seeganna, and Mary Alexander, and translated and transcribed by Gertrude Analoak and Margaret Seeganna is another collection of folktales and oral history. Focusing on the Ugiuvangmiut, this one also contains introductions to provide cultural context and stories written in both english and the original Inupiaq.

The Winter Walk by Loretta Outwater Cox is an oral history about a pregnant widow journeying home with her two children having to survive the harsh winter the entire way. This is often recommended with a similar book detailing Athabascan survival called Two Old Women.

Dictionaries and Language Books

Iñupiat Eskimo Dictionary by Donald H. Webster and Wilfred Zibell, with illustrations by Thelma A. Webster, is an older Inupiaq to English dictionary. It predates the standardization of Inupiaq spelling, uses some outdated and even offensive language that was considered correct at the time of its publication, and the free pdf provided by UAF seems to be missing some pages. In spite of this it is still a useful resource. The words are organized by subject matter rather than alphabetically, each entry indicating if it's specific to any one dialect, and the illustrations are quite charming.

Let's Learn Eskimo by Donald H. Webster with illustrations by Thelma A. Webster makes a great companion to the Iñupiat Eskimo Dictionary, going over grammar and sentence structure rather than translations. The tables of pronouns are especially helpful in my opinion.

Ilisaqativut.org also has some helpful tools and materials and recommendations for learning the Inupiat language with links to buy physical books, download free pdfs, and look through searchable online versions

#eskimo on main

[damnesdelamer]

INTRO TO LEFTIST THEORY

So I wrote a recommended reading list awhile back, but have increasingly become aware it can be daunting. As such, I wanted to present a simplified sort of guide to leftist theory. So here’s a sequence of texts to help you get to grips with it all, rather than just a mass of recommendations. So let’s get started!

The Communist Manifesto. Just read it, comrade. It’s like fifty pages long, and intentionally simplified, so as to be accessible. Start here.

What next? You wanna expand your familiarity with Marx & Engels? How about Socialism: Utopian And Scientific? Written by Engels as a truncated, simplified form of Marx’ magnum opus Capital (which you should also read, eventually, but is a bit much to start). Want more? Check out Wage Labour And Capital, another of Marx & Engels’ shorter works which is a good, simple introduction to understanding our plight in both human and economic terms. Want something similar but not limited to the perspective of just a couple (visionary) gentlemen? The Conquest Of Bread is also short-ish and an easy intro, but this time from a less orthodox angle (anarchism!?); simultaneously a plea for tenderness and a call to arms.

So now, you’re comfortable with Marx et al, but you want something a bit more pracitically engaged with revolutionary movements? Try Quotations From Chairman Mao. There’s a reason the Black Panthers prescribed members read this little red book; rather than a single long text, the short, punchy form gives a lot of good ideas to the budding revolutionary. Want something a bit more in-depth? State And Revolution is surprisingly applicable to our present predicament; this is how we agitate, educate, and organise, regardless of how we identify. Speaking of which, want something that won’t scare people with the mere mention of Lenin or Mao? Consider Reform Or Revolution? The question is rhetorical, so why not get familiar with the rhetoric.

Okay, but maybe your interest in leftism is via a specific experience of marginalisation. These old school classics are all well and good, but what about something that really speaks to you?

Are you trans, or have you got a particular interest in gender and its politics? Read Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come, which lays the groundwork, and is still pertinent today. Want something a bit more in-depth and academic? Gender Trouble: Feminism And The Subversion Of Identity can equip you to rhetorically destroy TERF nonsense like nothing else, among other things!

Right, and what about the intersections of gender and other forms of marginalisation? Feminism For The 99 may be a good starting point! Maybe something a bit more introspective, that tackles race and identity? Sister Outsider: Essays And Speeches is a digestible and inspiring collection which you can read in short bursts or all at once.

But some of this seems a bit Amero-centric, huh. If you wanna grapple with racialised imperialism more broadly, maybe delve into Discourse On Colonialism. Oh, but that seems to ignore the significance of sex and gender? Well luckily we can ask Can The Subaltern Speak? which may draw a lot of these threads together.

Yeah, but some of this postcolonial stuff seems a bit tangled up with history and international relations, so maybe a more in-depth understanding can be gleaned from Orientalism. Looking for more contemporary, less academic? Well we should all know by now Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor.

And what about the environment; isn’t capitalism largely a threat because of it’s refusal to address climate change? Yes, have a look at An Ecosocialist Manifesto.

Or do you find yourself asking Are Prisons Obsolete? Well let me tell you, you’re not alone!

The point is that this stuff is easier than you may think, and readily accessible. And yes, we’re in this together, and we’ve all got to co-educate, but it starts with you.

#marxism #marxist #theory #leftist #leftism #socialist #socialism #recommended reading #literature #original #marx #lenin #mao

[somerabbitholes]

Hello! As summer draws close I finally have more time to read. Do you have any non-fiction recommendations? Or just any book that you find interesting and engaging. Thanks a lot!🌸

hi, i'm sorry i'm late! here you go, off the top of my head—

let's get the olivia laings out of the way first: the lonely city, the trip to echo spring, to the river, everybody, and funny weather if you want collected essays and writings

the old ways by robert macfarlane: about walking and how landscapes are culturally preserved across time

empire of cotton by sven beckert: looks at colonization, imperialism, capitalism through the production of cotton; really well done

sweetness and power by sidney mintz: like empire of cotton, but about sugar; and mintz also mixes anthropology with history to study how sugar is consumed and experienced; it's really fun to read

bookshops by jorge carrion: everything about bookshops, what they mean, what makes them, how we encounter them; it's so poetic. also see his against amazon and other essays, which sort of adds to the things he writes about in bookshops

figuring by maria popova: looks at how people have thought about the world and have tried to understand it; i love that it looks at genius and creativity as inherently collaborative projects; insane big brain energy

when we cease to understand the world by benjamin labatut: a little like figuring in terms of its principle (interconnected people, ideas etc) but very different in its outlook; very well written; i'm halfway through and i'm loving it

the end of the end of the earth by jonathan franzen: essays on climate change and living in a global warming world; you may or may not agree with him, but these are engaging essays

justice by michael sandel: a brief overview of what justice means and how we deal with the philosophical and political concept; also has his theory of what justice should be. and although i haven’t read it, i would also recommend his the tyranny of merit

why we swim by bonnie tsui: pretty much what it says; if you like water/swimming, i would definitely recommend; but otherwise too, it’s so well written and has so much to offer

you’ll also find more in the book recs tag. hope you find something you like!

#book recs #anonymous #answered #booklr #reading list

[vefanyar]

6 & 16 for the book asks?

6. The shortest book you read this year

It's a tie between Wangari Maathai's The World We Once Lived In and Greta Thunberg's No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference; both at 69 pages. Both are environmentalist/climate change essay/speech collections from Penguin Classics Green Ideas series. It's a pretty neat little series covering some environmentalist icons, I'm planning on getting more of those books.

16. A book you already want to reread

Even at the risk of sounding like a broken record, Jane Goodall's Book of Hope. I think that's gonna be one that I will refer back to every so often, as a reminder for when I'm trying to find a bit of light in a dark spot. If not that, it's also just simply a beautiful book.

As an added little bonus, I took today to re-read Call Us What We Carry by Amanda Gorman, also excellent.

#books #reading #meme #starspray

[climateresearch]

The Climate Book

As a primary source for my research, I wanted to interview a family friend who lives by a river that floods very frequently. I thought this would be a great way to get inside thoughts on how residents are affected by more frequent storms and floods because of climate change. Unfortunately, this plan did not work out, so instead, I looked at The Climate Book by Greta Thunberg.

This book was published in October 2022, and consists of short essays from multiple scientists and experts in this field. The cover of the book is the Global Warming Stripes, mentioned in my introduction post, which is a graphic of blue and red stripes visualizing how the world’s climate has been increasing. The Climate Book has many interesting facts on the first few pages which are followed by the table of contents. The book is divided into 5 parts: How Climate Works, How Our Planet Is Changing, How It Affects Us, What We’ve Done About It, and What We Must Do Now. Within these “chapters” are individual sections created by different authors, scientists, and researchers discussing their thoughts and data they have collected. Some sections are separated by works from Greta Thunberg herself, where she talks about the history of science, what is going on in the science world today, and the future of science. Even though I did not read the entire book, it is an amazing source for learning about climate. This book goes way deeper than my original topic of how the ocean is being affected by climate change, though it does talk about that as well. These authors give insight as to how the whole world is changing, from oceans to forests to humans. The book also offers ways of spreading the word, like at family gatherings, shopping centers, airports, and especially social media platforms. The back cover of the book states “The time has come for us to tell this story, and perhaps even change the ending,” hinting that we can come together to take action to start reversing the effects of climate change and make the world a healthier place. 

[petalsandpurity]

people need to stop talking to me in bookshops when im sad and telling me the book im looking at is really good bc now i've bought yet another book even tho i've got 4 that i still need to read

(but also it cheered me up so maybe don't stop)

#im joking i hope they never stopped it is always so nice talking to people about books #i got hit with the realisation today tho that there are so many books i want to read and so little time to read them #and it made me sad bc i can't read every book in the world rn #like there was a collection of essays on climate change that i wanted to read #there was a book dedicated to poems about the nIGHT which is perfect #and just.. so many books.. pls i wish i could just like...absorb the stories somehow

[dancedance-resolution]

andi mack friendom, are you interested in some more thoughts about my andi mack / american girl crossover (which is actually just a thinly veiled info dump about american girl history and drama)? if so, you're in the right place!

the andi / buffy / cyrus doll set i designed would be a contemporary line.

CONTEXT (forewarning, this is basically just an ag info dump about the 2017 contemporary line) (also, tagging @kirstensleepey because i think this write up might be useful for the ag project you're working on <3):

so in 2017, american girl did a brand new thing. they released 3 dolls who were contemporary characters but not girls of the year. (prior to these dolls' release, which are called "the contemporary line" by the ag fandom, the only categories of ag dolls were historicals, girls of the year, and just like yous.)

the contemporary line was controversial for many reasons.

first, we have our main character, tenney grant. (tenney is basically taylor swift as a doll, if taylor were uncool and a r*publican lol.)

one of the reasons why tenney is so controversial is that she overshadowed the girl of the year (henceforth abbreviated as goty) 2017, gabriella mcbride.

tenney was released only one month after gabriella's release. ag's social media gave much more focus to tenney than gabriella. upon tenney's release, gabriella's store displays were downsized (which is unheard of for a goty). tenney even had a larger collection than gabriella!

why are we mad about tenney overshadowing gabriella? well, gabriella was ag's first (and as of 2021, ONLY) black goty. also, gabriella was ag's first doll to have an explicity confirmed disability - her stutter.

BRIEF INTERMESSION - SOME STATISTICS ABOUT DIVERSITY IN CHARACTER DOLLS:

only 7 out of the 22 total historical characters have been dolls of color. only 3 out of 22 historicals have been black (one of which is now retired). only 2 out of 22 have been aapi (one of these dolls, ivy, was just a best friend doll and is now retired; and the other doll, nanea, has a problematic face mold. i wrote an essay about why her facemold is problematic here!). only 1 historical doll, josefina, is hispanic, and ag has actually misspelled her name as "josephina" on their social media before.

only 1 doll EVER has been native american, kaya'aton'my, who is a historical character from 1764. (not even any of the just like you dolls have had kaya's face mold! kaya is truly the only indigenous doll!) in fact, ag has had more colonizer characters than indigenous characters. felicity and elizabeth are white character dolls from 1776, and their books fail to address the issues surrounding colonization and treatment of native americans. and kirsten is a swedeish immigrant to wisconsin in 1854. her book does acknowledge the existence of native americans, and kirsten has an indigenous friend named singing bird. (i haven't read kirsten's books and i'm not indigenous, so i can't comment on this storyline.) ag actually had a controversy about kirsten just this year - in 2021, the t-shirt design for kirsten said "settlers gonna settle", and ag actually ended up changing the design to "cabin sweet cabin" after backlash.

moving on to the girl of the year line - out of 21 goty dolls, gabriella is the ONLY black goty. only 6 out of 21 gotys have been dolls of color. there have been 2 hispanic characters (luciana, who is generally regarded as an excellent doll; and marisol, who is controversial because her book talks about how her family moved from pilsen chicago - a real area of chicago that is home to many hispanic immigrants - to a white suburb due to crime. this storyline involves racist stereotypes.) also, goty 2016 lea clark (slightly tan skin, blonde hair, light green eyes) is 1/8th brazilian, and some brazilian ag fans consider the emphasis on lea being 1/8th brazilian racial feticization. next, there have been 3 aapi gotys. one of these dolls, sonali, was one of two best friend dolls for chrissa (goty 2009) - yep, you heard that right, yet another doll of color that is a side character! sonali is the bully in chrissa's books, but she gets a redemption arc. to this day, sonali is ag's only south asian character doll. [additionally, there has been some criticism that all of the aapi gotys are mixed race - jess mcconell (goty 2006) has a japanese mother and an irish/scottish father, kanani akina (goty 2011) has a french/german mother and a japanese/hawaiian father, and sonali matthews has an indian mother and a father of unknown race/ethincity. perhaps notably, the only aapi historical doll who is not currently retired (nanea) is also mixed race (hawaiian mother and scottish father).]

as for the disability thing i mentioned - ag also has a disappointing track record regarding disability representation, lol. it was very lightly implied that mckenna (goty 2012) had a learning disability, but that was never confirmed. mckenna's tutor, who used a wheelchair, was ag's first big disability rep, but she was just a side character in mckenna's story. then, many ag fans were disappointed when mary ellen, a historical character released in 2015, was able-bodied (in canon, she had polio as a child, so it would make sense for mary ellen to be disabled and use mobility aids). finally, in 2020, goty joss gave us some disability rep - she has a hearing aid.

ag's lack of disability rep is very frustrating, especially considering that doll companies, like our generation, have made some really cool disabled dolls. and ag has been doing this ad campaign with the paralympics that feels performative to me - like, they want to seem inclusive by featuring dolls with prostetic legs, but they don't even sell dolls like that!!!

lastly, religious diversity - iirc, there are three jewish dolls (rebecca, goty 2001/2002 lindsey, and goty 2009 chrissa). the rest of the dolls are either christian or of unspecified religion. there has never been an explicitly muslim, hindu, or buddhist doll, or a doll who is a member of any religion other than judaism/christianity/unspecified. (there is some hope that we might get a muslim doll, though, since an outfit with a hijab was leaked, and ag trademarked a persian name that i can't recall off the top of the head at my moment. but take these with a grain of salt - ag trademarks a ton of stuff that they don't use, and the leak could be false or just a truly me outfit.)

END OF INTERMISSION - BACK TO THE TENNEY/GABRIELLA CONTROVERSY:

so, we get our first black goty, and she's being totally overshadowed by tenney.

here's where a conspiracy comes in:

we can track when ag trademarks their character names. goty names are usually trademarked early in the year prior to their release (by may). but gabriella mcbride wasn't trademarked until october, iirc.

and gabriella is a very underdeveloped character in comparison to most gotys. one of her main hobbies - dancing - was the same main hobby as both marisol (goty 2005) and isabelle (goty 2014). her store displays were underemphasized in comparison to tenney's, as i mentioned before. she was the first goty who didn't get a movie in six years (since kanani, goty 2011). and gabriella didn't even have a big ticket accessory item available until summer!

so, we get our first black goty, and she's underdeveloped, underemphasized, seems to have been rushed (due to her trademark date), and overshadowed by tenney just one month after her release. why is that?

well, some people think that tenney was actually supposed to be goty 2017! (i agree)

tenney was trademarked earlier, had more development, had a bigger collection, etc. we think that tenney was supposed to be goty 2017, but ag decided to do a doll of color (gabriella) at the last minute. (keep in mind the climate of 2015/2016 - ag probably wanted some clout for doing a black goty, and they also probably heard the ag fandom's demands for more dolls of color.)

so that's tenney.

next we have logan everett. logan was ag's first boy character doll. i'm glad that ag had a boy character doll, but logan kinda missed the mark for me. the main source of controversy surrounding logan is his face mold: he, a white boy, uses the kaya face mold. !! it kinda felt like a slap in the face to many indigenous ag fans - kaya is literally The Only Doll with the kaya face mold, and when we finally get another doll with her face mold, he's not even indigenous.

lastly, we have z yang my beloved <3. z yang was done dirty - she is yet another doll of color who is a mere side character, and also, she was available for only a total of 20 months before being retired!

so, that's everything i have to say about the 2017 contemporary line.

now i'm going to talk about the 2021 contemporary line :3

so, it's summer 2020. the black lives matter is becoming more mainstream. brands are now getting clout for appearing "woke."

so, admist this climate, ag is (as always) facing demands from its fandom/collectors to diversify its doll line. so they announce that they're going to be doing a new contemporary line, to be released in "the second half of 2021"!!!! and they promise that the contemporary line will have a black lead character

fast forward to modern day. thanks to ag's trademarks, we can safely assume that the new contemporary line will be called "world by us." we can safely assume that the line will have 3 characters. the 3 characters all live in washington dc and are best friends :) we can safely assume that the characters will be maritza ochoa, evette peeters, and makena williams. i talked about makena and maritza on that ask regrettable-username sent me about my andi mack/ag headcanons! personally, i'm excited for world by us, and i think it has a lot of potential!

alright sawyer, that's the end of the ag info dump fhjhdhfskf.

now for my andi mack friends:

i think the andi/buffy/cyrus line would be structured similar to world by us: andi is the main character, and buffy and cyrus are her best friend dolls :) all 3 dolls would be released at the same time. andi would have 3 books that have buffy and cyrus as side characters, and buffy and cyrus would have one book each.

the big ticket item for this collection would be andi's andi shack. i'm imagining its design sort of like kira's tent mixed with lanie's camper mixed with blaire's farm. andi the walls of andi shack would open up so that when it's fully opened, the four walls are on an even plane with the back wall and extended out like wings. you remove the roof before opening up the walls. the shack is tall enough that the doll can comfortably stand up even with the roof still attached, and wide enough that all three dolls (andi, buffy, and cyrus) can comfortably stand next to each other inside of andi shack.

andi shack would come with a ton of craft supplies inside of it. it would also come with a little flower box that has cece's african violets, like blaire's flower box. (thanks to regrettable-username for coming up with the african violets idea fdjfsj.)

alright i have to go now, so these are all my andi mack/ag thoughts for now, but i might be back later with more thoughts fhdfjs (hopefully not though, since typing this out took me over three hours [sweating emoji]).

sorry for any typos and sorry for how scatterbrained this is! also this may have some forgotten things/mildly incorrect things bc my only source is my brain (and a photo of all the dolls so i can count how many dolls for the statistics portion) and my brain is not the most reliable thing on earth lol.

#long post #american girl dolls #i feel kinda bad about putting this in the andi mack tag since it's mostly ag related; but it does include info about my andi mack/ag au #and the friendom has seemed to be really enjoying the andi mack/ag au (nostalgia i guess) so uhhh hopefully you guys will enjoy this? lol #andi mack

[oh-mother-of-darkness]

Hello. I am, as you know, an American. I turned eighteen in 2014, voted in my first presidential election in 2016, and voted in my second presidential election last week via early voting in the state of Texas. 

I’m reflecting right now on the difference between those experiences. This is going to be a very self-indulgent essay. 

The 2016 election was in my third and final year of undergrad at Texas A&M University. At the time, I was living with a roommate who grew up in a town of 2,000, all of them members of her church. I loved her very much, but she was the most sheltered person I’ve ever met. 

I was only a few years ahead of her. My home growing up was deeply liberal about many of the things that counted, but deeply conservative on equally important things. For me, leaving for college was a radicalization speed-run.

I, a good Memphis girl, moved to Texas and encountered for the first time in my life white homogeny and everything that comes with it. I made most of my friends at A&M through a Christian orientation camp that I attended, then worked at. I went to school at a history department that was overwhelmingly male and war-obsessed. 

My second semester, I was randomly sorted into a writing seminar on the American Civil War and Reconstruction. There were eight other students in that class, all of them Texans. By day two I had gotten into a open fight with one of my classmates after he used the phrases “one of the humane parts of slavery” and “the secession declarations are moving and beautiful appeals, if you read them,” and “well I’m not going to criticize my own state.”

We got into at least one yelling match per week from that point forward. It was a formative experience for me-- not just him but the seven other students that took his side every time because they just couldn’t conceptualize anything outside of their own experiences, and frankly, I couldn’t either. 

It rocked my world to be surrounded by people who told me, among other things, that their high schools flew the Confederate battle flag or Lee was their all time role-model (because he actually didn’t want to secede! He didn’t believe in it, but Virginia did, so he put his own qualms aside and served his country, and that’s what we all have to do). I ran a survey once by knocking on every door in a dorm hall and asking the two people inside why the Civil War happened. 

I feel like you can guess the most common answer I got. Only two said slavery. Six didn’t know what the Civil War was. 

The last week of the semester, my class read a collection of recorded oral accounts of freed slaves during Reconstruction. My nemesis told me that he “didn’t realize black people actually had it bad.” At the same time, I was struggling with my sexuality, my relationship to my religion, my relationship with my parents, and a handful of newly-diagnosed but long-existing mental illnesses. I wasn’t having fun. 

Over the next three years, I tried my hardest to humanize the people that said disgusting things about minorities, poverty, and me personally. I barely won on that one, and I’m actually really proud that I did, even if it took me a few years. I can trace the biggest change in me directly to my nemesis from the history department, the kid that made me so mad that I started arguing back. I was too scared to do that before. 

By 2016, I was in full existential spin-out-- a very suddenly liberal kid fighting my whole family, all of my classmates, and most of my friends in an explosive political climate, the first I had ever participated in. 

I voted by Tennessee absentee ballot in 2016. On election night, I ordered takeout for me and my roommate, who I knew had voted red. Confident, like pretty much everybody, that Clinton would win, I was trying to show her that I didn’t hate her. She went to bed after dinner, also so certain that Clinton would win that she didn’t bother to stay up. 

I sat in front of my laptop sewing a birthday present for a friend (Kenza, actually), while the votes came in. I wasn’t super alarmed when the map turned red. I just figured the blue states hadn’t finished counting yet. 

The map didn’t get any bluer. By 1am, I knew what was about to happen. They called it an hour later, while I was sobbing on my floor. I threw up in the bathroom out of pure anxiety. I got two anonymous messages telling me the asker was going to commit suicide. Neither of them responded to my replies. I don’t actually know what happened to them. 

I remember riding the bus to class the next morning and distinctly seeing that most of the racial minorities there had swollen eyes from crying. The girl with the pride stickers all over her laptop didn’t show up that day, and I’m kind of glad she didn’t, considering the way some of our classmates in the back were loudly talking about “the gays.” Hope she’s okay.

My roommate came home completely unaware that Clinton lost. I was crying in my room when that happened. I remember showing her a demographic map of who voted which way. She got visibly upset when she figured out what races how. I think she really did feel guilty. 

That Thanksgiving, one of my cousins tweeted, “I can’t wait to go argue with my liberal cousin today. The wins. Keep. Coming,” an hour before he walked into my house. Inauguration day was January 20, 2017. I decided to go to law school a week later, the day the president signed the Muslim ban. That’s when I figured out for the first time just how much power the courts have. The last three years have only enforced that. 

I got angrier and angrier during law school, egged on by a few friends but more than anything just... finally conscious of exactly how the American system works and exactly who’s behind it. I still live in Texas, farther west now, and I’m working my first legal job. I’m going to be a licensed attorney next week. 

I went back and forth for months about how this election was going to shake out. I knew there wasn’t going to be an overwhelming red majority this time, but my big fear was an election close enough that the Supreme Court could take it. That fear doubled last month, at RBG’s death. 

I was hoping for a blue enough victory on election night that there wouldn’t be a week of uncertainty, but that was unlikely, and it didn’t happen. I obsessively refreshed my election map all of Wednesday and Thursday, aware that at least some states would flip after mail-in ballots came in, but unsure which would. 

Again, my great fear was a blue victory held down by only one state. Given (I would say “any” chance here, but I don’t mean “any” chance because genuinely jurisdiction or facts or legal merit don’t matter to the Supreme Court) an opportunity to make one (1) decision that hands over a red election, please know that a conservative supermajority would take it. I cannot emphasize enough how true that is and how important it is for all of us to grasp that. 

Watching Georgia flip was one of the best experiences of my life, and it’s a little hard for me to articulate why, but I’m going to give it a shot here. I’m southern. I’m from the South, and for this conversation it’s really important that I’m from Memphis, a black city and a center of black music and culture. 

When people think about the South, they think of the white South, and on some level, they should. It is absolutely essential to understand the white South in order to understand American history. Let me be 100% clear here. That is not a good thing. American majority history is not good. We are not a good country. 

It’s near-impossible to understand why that’s true without knowing exactly what happened in the white South and exactly what is still happening there now. With that, however, is another truth that most folks don’t get. 

The SouthTM is white and needs to die. The South as it actually exists is partially white yes, but it is also everyone else that lives here, particularly black folks. Southern culture is black, not white. Georgia flipped because the people that have always, always been there finally got to crack apart the conservative machine holding the South hostage. 

That’s amazing. It’s fucking mind-blowing. I watched it happen at 3:30 in the morning days after Election Day, and holy shit holy shit, Georgia flipped. Atlanta won. Holy fucking shit. 

I would be terrified right now if only Georgia flipped, because SCOTUS would have found a way to throw out a few thousand votes. Inevitable. Absolutely certain on that one. 

With a few states of buffer, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I really do think it’s over. 

I came home after work on Friday and immediately went to sleep because I hadn’t really done that since Tuesday. I woke up at noon today, checked the map, checked my messages, and saw what happened while I was gone. After that, I went back to bed until 5:30pm. I’m really just getting up now, after most of 24 hours asleep. 

I don’t know if I would say that I’m happy right now, but I am overwhelmingly relieved. I’m under no illusions that a Biden victory will solve everything, but I also do think this is a real thing to celebrate. I’ll take suggestions on how to celebrate right now, actually, since I’m finally awake. 

I’ll be angry forever, I think, but this is a good thing, and I’d like to enjoy it. If you’re happy right now, hey, tell me about it. I’ll be thrilled with you. I want to hear it. Congrats to all of us. Love y’all. 

#that's me rambling thanks and gig em #there are some things to tag here huh #uspol #politics #suicide #this would be a good time to remind everybody that i am white #so take that into account re: Georgia #personal i guess #not comics sorry

[fatehbaz]

Sorry. This might be annoying and excessively long. Among people interested in psychogeography, ecology, folklore, bioregionalism, urban geography (and Empire, hegemony, anti-imperialism, to a lesser extent, I guess?) there is a quote that gets circulated from time to time. I’ve seen the quote in academic articles, sure, but also on the W0rdpress blogs of, like, birders, hikers, gardeners, “bioregional animists,” and “woods aesthetic” fans. But why do both academic authors and popular/mainstream writers and bloggers and such consistently remove the end of this sentence from Michel de Certeau’s memorable statement: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

Gonna revel in the wonders of the garden, the forest, the landscape, the other-than-human lifeforms, and yet not willing to explicitly address the vulnerability, the cascading extinction, the tightening noose of imperial hegemony and carceral systems threatening it all, landscapes, lives, entire worlds? What de Certeau is referring to here is the way that imperial/dominant power structures (European modernity, Empire) try to subdue, erase, destroy smaller, alternate, and/or non-Western cosmologies, to make it seem like Empire is the only possible world that can be constructed. And so landscapes become sanitized, especially in cities, and de Certeau says that such sanitized places are “uninhabitable” because they are so cold, because Empire tries to standardize experience, rather than allowing localized connections tor regional landscape. But the alternative worldviews, the histories, have not been fully erased, and exist in the cracks and crevices of modernity, and so there are “ghosts” of alternative worlds which live on. And it is the remnants of other worlds, or the glimpses of other creatures (animals/plants/etc.) or other surviving worldviews (graffiti in the subway, which rejects order and control), or the hopes of possible better future worlds, crevices where the “failures” of modernity can be glimpsed, which make a place habitable. “Haunted geographies.”

Here’s a sentence fragment from a different author, writing about de Certeau:

“exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration”

This kinda thing.

This fragment comes from a criticism of early-20th-century Euro-American academia’s so-called “folklore studies” but I think it also describes much 21st-century academic interest in “ecological knowledge” and non-Western cultures. I have a feeling that this behavior is similar to what contemporary upper class careerist-academics in academic anthropology departments and those “studying the utility of traditional ecological knowledge” are doing when they superficially throw around words like “decolonial” or “Haraway’s Chthuluscene” in their article abstract for Cool Points without actually having given much through to the way they and their sponsoring institution, in their thirst for prestige or good optics or whatever, are in fact continuing to perpetuate dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous/non-Western knowledge. And on some level, it is deliberate and calculated, though not always a conscious act on the individual author/researcher’s part. Intentional power consolidation masked as passive chauvinism masked as benevolent paternalistic concern for “primitive peoples” masked as genuine respect. What’s happening is a recuperation, the subsuming of alternative cosmologies and ways of being. Hypothetical Nat/Geo article, variations of which you’ve probably seen before: “How can we utilize Indigenous knowledge? Can traditional knowledge help us battle climate change?” Empire, those in power, hegemonic institutions colonizing knowledge, thought, cosmology.

Plenty has been written, especially in recent years, of a “plurality/pluriverse of worlds in contrast to one imperial worldview/cosmology” and also the paternalistic attitudes of Euro-American anthropologists, but the mid-century work of Michel de Certeau, in my opinion, anticipated a lot of this disk horse. Here’s the fuller quote:

-----------------------

“In recent years, especially since 1960, scholarship in the service of popular culture has been of Marxist inspiration, or at least ‘populist’ in spirit,” de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacque Revel wrote in a 1980 essay, “but does the scientific operation it undertakes obey different laws than it did in the past? On the contrary, it seems to be dominated by the mechanisms of age-old excommunications…to conceal what it claims to show” (de Certeau 1986, 121). This opening statement encapsulates much of de Certeau’s thinking about the history of folklore studies. Tracing its development in successive stages from the late eighteenth century to the “heyday of folklore” in France’s Third Republic (1870-1940), the authors argue that the eighteenth century aristocratic vogue for “the popular” concealed a powerful movement toward the domination of the peasantry. This movement involved both exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration.“ The idealization of the “popular,” as they put it, “is made all the easier if it takes the form of a monologue. The people may not speak, but they can sing...The intent [of folklorists] is both to collect…and to reduce (de Certeau 1986, 122).[...] The governing ideologies driving the emergence of this obsession with the folk were not static, however, and therefore, in order to understand the development of the politics of culture in folklore studies, scholars must examine, at each point, its “subjacent postulates” (de Certeau 1986, 123). For instance, following the domination imbricated with the origins of folklore studies in the 18th century, by the mid-nineteenth century, the authors describe folklore as taking on a paternalist role vis-a-vis its subject. The collection of folklore by this time, embodied especially in the works of Charles Nisard (1808-1890), is not just a chronicle of its elimination by the elite, but a protective function executed by the elite on behalf of the incompetent peasant. In this view, de Certeau and his colleagues observe, “the people are children whose original purity it is befitting to preserve by guarding them against evil readings” (de Certeau 1986, 124, original emphasis). [...] This, then, is the basic outline of de Certeau’s historical critique of both the conceptualization of folklore and the discipline of folklore studies, as well as the core of his critique of cultural studies in the late 20th century. Interestingly, however, it is also the core of his larger understanding of the workings of modernity.

From: Anthony Bak Buccitelli. “Hybrid Tactics and Locative Legends: Re-reading de Certeau for the Future of Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis, Volume 15.1. 2016.

--------------------------------

So there is a popular quote from Michel de Certeau (French interdisciplinary scholar, 1925-1986), which seems to have been yet more popular since, like:

(1) 2010-ish with elevation of Mark Fisher’s work; “object-oriented ontology”; “dark ecology”; apparent academic elevation of ontological turn in anthropology; and the white-washed Euro-American academic language of traditional ecological knowledge, “decolonization,” etc.,

And also since (2) 2014/2015 in “popular” media, with apparent mainstream-ing or “revival” of folk horror, alongside elevation of eco-horror, Anthropocene disk horse, etc.

(In my anecdotal experience, at least, reading about geography, folklore, psychogeography, etc. in online spaces from M.S.N chatroom days onwards.)

I’m of course very wary of de Certeau’s interest in and celebration of Freud (come on, bro) and also the implications of de Certeau’s Jesuit background and early interest in missionary stuff (gross). But de Certeau did write some thoughtful and nicely-phrased stuff (in my opinion) about the importance of subverting imperialist/hegemonic cosmologies; how Euro-American academic institutionalized knowledge reinforces power; imperative for combating hegemony/carceral thinking by connecting with landscape; the “memory” of places; the “hidden” histories of landscapes, etc. And he wrote this decades before academics started stealing from Indigenous people of Latin America and getting into pluriverse stuff.

Anyway, one quote in particular seems most popular. but almost every single instance where i’ve ever seen this quote shared, it always cuts out the last few words of the statement. The quote is from what might be his most widely-read work, the “Walking in the City” chapter of his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life. (it’s a pretty brief chapter which is available for free online; might take 30 minutes to read, if you’re interested.) The quote as translated by Steven Rendall: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

The “inversion of the panopticon” portion is almost always left out of the quote. even in academic writing or in the writing/blogs/whatever of people who otherwise seem like they would be down with anti-imperialism or something.

So, it comes across to me as if contemporary (2005-2020) academics and activists interested in, like, folklore or local horticulture or psychogeography will like ... take the “cute” fragments of these excerpts, but don’t want to “stir the pot” by presenting these writings in their fuller context, a fuller context which calls-out knowledge appropriation and explicitly trash-talks Empire.

And de Certeau’s not just writing about folklore or geography. He’s writing about taking action, about practicing alternative ways to relate to landscape in direct contrast to imperial cosmologies, academic/institutionalized/gatekept knowledge, and carceral thinking. (He’s famous for this; he emphasized “tactics” and “action.”)

So this guy is, of course, human, and had disagreeable and/or outright problematique associations. You can argue with his writing extensively. his publications are a mix of great, cool, iffy, “meh” and “bad take bruh.” But de Certeau was ahead of the curve in anticipating the way ambitious US academics would see “the decolonial turn” happening in academic anthropology in the 1990s/2000s and then weaponize it in a way that preserved their power dynamic and institutional power while still paying lip-service to “decolonization.”

But besides dunking on the imperialist foundations of Western institutionalized knowledge systems and the cunning employment of geographic re-worlding and re-naming in creating propaganda and imperial cosmology, and besides being ahead of the curve in anticipating re-enchantment trends and folk horror ... One thing I like about de Certeau’s writing is the emphasis on action, practice, and doing things to counter dominant/powerful cosmology’s attempt to destroy folk/non-Western worldview. Encouraging something like:

Take action. Books are cool, but books are not a substitute for action. Girl, you wanna study landscape, place-based identity, folklore, and how to escape the panopticon? Gotta put the theory texts down occasionally. Please go walk around in the forest; if you’re in the major city, don’t despair, just look at the moss growing in crevices betwixt the cobblestones. Imagine the ghosts, the histories, the stories, who died, what was lost, what’s come before. Power is trying to subsume all, but Empire gets anxious and flails because they know that there are gaps in their cosmology, cracks and breakages where other worlds seep through or can be glimpsed, retrieved, renewed. They know their cosmology can’t account for the diversity of life, the plurality of experience. There is not one world, but many. Find the crevices, the cracks, in the dominant power structures, and break them further. You can help to escape the tightening noose, the planetary-scale plantation, by using your imagination, cooking a meal, taking a walk.

#whatever #sorry for all this

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pandemics and peak indifference

When I think about our historical, profound shifts in attitude and discourse, the model I apply is "peak indifference."

Say you have real, existential problem. More often than not, these are systemic problems, and those are the hardest problems.

https://locusmag.com/2016/07/cory-doctorow-peak-indifference/

Not just because systemic problems involve collective action (you can't recycle your way out of climate change), but because the cause-and-effect relationships of systemic problems can't be easily known, so it's hard to know what you need to do to avert the problem.

Systemic problems pose a third difficulty: they enrich small minorities, and those minorities can exploit causal ambiguity to deliberately sow doubt.

To make that more concrete: think about cancer-tobacco denial.

Not everyone who smokes gets cancer. When it does give you cancer, the tumor comes years after the puff that damages your genes. There's lots of social pressure to smoke, and getting your friends to quit is even harder than quitting yourself.

And on top of all of it, the tobacco industry made tons of money from giving us cancer, and they could use some of that to fund doubt-merchants who deliberately worsened the difficulty in linking smoking and cancer.

https://timharford.com/2015/04/cigarettes-damn-cigarettes-and-statistics/

But denial doesn't make problems disappear - it just incurs policy debt, and the interest on that debt is human suffering. Climate inaction, tobacco inaction, and inequality inaction only delay the day of reckoning, and make it worse when it arrives.

That's where peak denial comes in. Over time, the mounting harms from policy debt make it harder and harder to deny the problem, At a certain point - long before we take action - the number of people who deny the problem starts to decline.

This happens naturally, without any need for activist urging. The problem is that the natural peak denial point is often several steps beyond the point of no return. And that's when denial slides into nihilism:

Here's what nihilism looks like:

"Well, I guess these things *did* give me stage 4 lung cancer after all. No point in quitting now."

or

"You were right, rhino populations are in danger! But since there's only one left, let's find out what he tastes like?"

That's why we can't wait for peak denial to arise on its own, why we must hasten its arrival - because we want people to engage with systemic problems *before* the point of no return.

That's where storytelling comes in.

Stories are a fuggly hack, an illusion played on our empathy, wherein we're fooled into caring about the literally inconsequential fate of made-up people (your breakfast yogurt's death was more tragic than Romeo and Juliet's, for it was once alive).

https://locusmag.com/2014/11/cory-doctorow-stories-are-a-fuggly-hack/

But still, made up stories that make vivid and visceral the consequences of inaction can spur us into action, can create a vocabulary for discussing the lived experience of people in a future that has not yet arrived.

Even better than stories, though, are *histories*, the real stories of real people who really suffered through real experiences comparable to those that we face on our horizon. Hence "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

We're very good at forgetting history. The arrival of the covid pandemic was filled with stories of the dimly remembered 1918 influenza pandemic. Our failure to heed those warnings triggered tales of its brutal second wave the following winter.

Herp derp.

Starting in 1968, successive US presidents began to dismantle Glass-Steigel, a corrective put in place after a horrendous finance sector collapse that triggered the Great Depression and WWII. Not one president heeded historians' warnings about the consequences.

Derp.

Dismantling the checks on finance led to successive, worsening crises followed by crushing austerity a deepening inequality. Historical warnings about how this cycle ends with guillotines and Reichstag fires were ignored.

Derp derp derp.

The ideology of finance is a subset of right-wing thought, defined by Corey Robin (in "The Reactionary Mind") as the belief that some people are born to rule, while the rest are born to be ruled over.

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-reactionary-mind-9780190692001

This belief has many guises (Dominionism, imperialism, racism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism) but they all boil down to one thing: eugenics.

It's one thing to believe that markets are meritocratic during a moment of dynamism, when the low-born can rise to riches.

But when their offspring pull up the ladder and social mobility halts, "meritocracy" becomes hereditary: markets elevate the best people, and the best people are all descended from the wealthy, so the wealthy must be of better stock (cue Trump and his talk of "good blood").

Eugenics was once a mainstream American doctrine, and American eugenicists inspired Nazi "race science." But after the Holocaust, eugenics fell into disrepute and we dropped it down the same memory hole that the 1918 flu disappeared into.

But eugenics made a comeback under another guise: the "human capital theory," which holds that markets reward us in proportion to our value to society, and thus the CEO is paid 10,000x more than the janitor because the CEO provides 10,000x more value to the human project.

Eugenics isn't just repugnant, it's also wrong. To understand why, you have to understand how desirable traits are social, not isolated in individuals.

Blair Fix's essay on the link between eugenics and human capitol theory is a must-read:

https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2021/01/14/the-rise-of-human-capital-theory/

By way of illustration, Fix describes geneticist William Muir's experiments with improving chicken egg-production through artificial selection, in which he only bred the best layers. The result? A disaster. Egg-laying plummeted.

It plummeted because laying isn't an isolated trait. Chickens that produced the most eggs did so by bullying other chickens out of *their* feed and resources. Selecting for laying selected for bullying and aggression and led to endless chicken-fights and no eggs.

When Muir bred another flock of chickens based on a *group*'s ability to lay, THEN he got his eggs. Egg-laying is a social process.

This story will be familiar to anyone who's worked in a stack-ranked software development shop.

Software managers have long noted that some coders can turn in 10X or even 100X more code than their median colleagues. But attempts to build "superstar" teams that fired all the median programmers end in chaos and destruction.

If your 100X programmer is such a dick that no one can work with them, then their aptitude is irrelevant - you'll never ship.

I assume there are analogies to this in the sporting world, but I am vastly unqualified to discuss sports of any kind.

Despite the bankruptcy of human capital theory, the systemic dangers it posed, and the obvious fact that it was just eugenics dressed up as economics, the theory festered for decades, poisoning our worlds.

The C-suites of every major company are filled with hens whose egg-laying prowess is the result of their suppression of their peers' efficacy - while others whose social integration make them far more productive are relegated to worse jobs or forced out altogether.

The lockdown provoked squeals of outrage from the world's wealthiest people, who insisted that the factories be re-opened. As the slogan of the day went, "If a billionaire needs you to go to work to maintain his fortune, then you are the source of that fortune - not him."

We can't afford to be indifferent to any of our systemic problems any more: not climate science, nor inequality, nor monopoly, nor the lurking eugenics that justifies it all.

#pluralistic

[hobc-challenge]

Context

You grew up in the fast paced city of San Myshuno but you never quite fit in there. You were always day dreaming of the country side and of simpler times. You spent most of your time at the library, reading about farming, climate change and essays about the negative impacts of technology on the Sims condition. You have come to the conclusion that modernity is to be rejected and that a more traditional, off the land lifestyle is necessary for the survival of the Sims species. Knowing that one sim alone can’t change the world, you move to Henford-on-Bagley with the intention of having as many offspring with different sims as possible to repopulate the Sims world with like-minded individuals. This challenge is a variant of the 100 babies challenge with additional rules. You win once your 100th offspring reaches adulthood. The rules are inspired by Shoobysims’ Post-Apocalyptic 100 babies challenge, be sure to check hers out!

Rules:

1. Founding sim

Create one young adult to play with.

You may chose your founder’s aspiration and traits.

2. Lot

Move your founder on 2 Olde Mill Lane.

You must have the simple living challenge lot trait and LittleMsSam’s live in store traits. You can add more challenge traits as you play but you cannot remove them once they are set. The other lot traits are up to you but chose wisely because you cannot change them.

3. Gameplay

You cannot use any electronics (computer, phone, TV, tablet, etc.), use MCC to remove autonomous phone interactions (exceptions: you may use your phone to host parties or travel to a vacation location).

Your kids and teens cannot go to school, use MCC here again.

You can use the travel interaction only if you have no toddlers/babies at home unless you have a teen at home that can babysit. The only exception to this is for Finwick fair on Saturdays.

You may travel to other worlds but you cannot go to San Myshuno or Del Sol Valley. Try to avoid places that have a modern feel to it (I’ll let you interpret that however you want).

You cannot go to the hospital, use home remedies if your sims are sick and labor at home (if you have GTW and want a wall of birth certificate you can get one following these steps and use LittleMsSam’s advanced birth certificate mod to rename it).

The only ways you can make money are through selling things in your store, through a yard sale, and by selling goods at the market on Saturdays during the fair. You can sell anything you make, cook, bake, harvest, fish, collect or were gifted.

All the aspirations and traits for your offspring must be randomized.

You cannot use cheats but mods are allowed.

Your babies can only age up on their birthday.

Your toddler and children can only age once all of their skills are at 3.

Your teens can only age once 3 of their skills are at 3.

All of the pregnancies must be by different sims.

If your founder cannot get pregnant the pregnant sim must join the household for the duration of the pregnancy.

If your founder dies or reaches the end of their childbearing age before the end of the challenge, the youngest offspring becomes the new heir.

4. Optional

I’ve been testing this challenge and it can be very hard if you start with sets of twins/triplets. You can make things easier for you by having one (1) other adult to help you out until your first offspring reaches childhood. They cannot have a job, leave your lot or impregnate your sim, they are there to assist you with the farm and raising the babies/toddlers only. They must move out immediately after your first toddler ages up!

I’m personally adding challenge traits to move towards self-sufficiency. I added the Reduce and Recycle challenge trait once I had enough offspring to help with the farm and then Off-the-Grid once I had enough power/water generating devices.

This challenge is meant to be fun, if some rules don’t work for you you can absolutely change them!

 If you try this out and post gameplay please use the tag HoBC challenge so I can see what you are doing:)

#sims 4 #s4 #ts4 #simblr #sims 4 challenge #sims 4 100 baby challenge #100 baby challenge #cottage living #HoBC challenge #ts4 challenge #s4 challenge #ts4 100 baby challenge

[quiet-fern]

Tagged by @ampiyas to post my reading list for 2021. Coincidentally, I was able to come up with my own 2021 challenge with 21 prompts just this week :>

I’m so shy and still new to this side of Tumblr haha but I love all the mutuals I met this year 💖

Tagging @panaceaphantastica @neurotic-nymph @elderf1ower @brujasdelmar @moonlitpool if you wanna ~

Here goes!! Feel free to reblog or suggest titles under the prompts. For next year, I want to read more women or POC authors! Same goal with @ampiyas, I also have to read more from my country ! PM me if you wanna read a book together!!

💌 READING LIST 2021 💌

Hayao Miyazaki Recommendation (Childrens YA)

- Earthsea by Ursula Le Guin

- 20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne

Magic Realism

- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

- House of Spirits by Isabel Allende

Latin American Author

- Agua Viva by Clarice Lispector

- Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros

Russian Author

- Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin

- Complete Collection of Poetry of Anna Akhmatova

Poetry Collection of an Author I Already Like

- Duino Elegies by Rainer Rilke

- Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverman

Essay Collection by A Woman

- A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

- Plainwater by Anne Carson

Diary of Woman POC and/or LGBTQ+

- Diary of Frida Kahlo

- First journal of Anaïs Nin

Contemporary Fiction by A Woman

- Little Weirds by Jenny Slate

- Girl Woman Other by Bernadine Evaristo

Philippines Social Issue

- The Philippines is Not A Small Country by Gideon Lasco

- Stories of Struggle: Experiences of Land Reform in Negros, Philippines by Sarah Wright

Philippines History and Culture

- Isabelo’s Archive by Resil Mojares

- Culture and History by Nick Joaquin

Indigenous Peoples or First Nations History

- As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock by Dina Gilio-Whitaker

- An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Africa History

- Still looking for books on this!

Food Colonization

- Still looking for books on this!

Connection to Nature

- Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer

- The Overstory by Michael Powers

Climate Change

- The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells

- Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein

Graphic Novel

- Maus (all volumes) by Art Spiegelman

- Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Essays on Art or Design

- In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

- Design As Art by Bruno Munari

Essays on Food

- You And I Eat the Same by Chris Ying

- Foundations of Flavor by Rene Redzepi

Creativity Instructional

- Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron

- Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

Book About New York

- The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead

- Don’t Be A Tourist in New York by Vanessa Grail

Horror written by a woman

- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

- Haunting on Hill House by Shirley Jackson

#mine #reading list #cait talks

[somerabbitholes]

hi! i love ur blog so so much it’s literally the most aesthetic thing ever! i was just wondering if you could please recommend some books to help me get out of a reading slump? any genre i don’t mind! thank you so much and have a blessed day 🤍

hi! thank you so much <33

when i'm in a slump, i generally read fantasy, or essays, or short stories, and here are a few of my favourites that have gotten me out of slumps —

essays:

pop song by larissa pham: semi-memoir, essays on art, intimacy, love; i'm halfway through this, and it has been lovely. i can't wait to finish it and go back and look at all the parts i highlighted

the end of the end of the earth by jonathan franzen: about the end of times, climate change, how we deal with it, how we can deal with it, also a dash of personal essays, they're all excellent; my favourites include the one on 9/11, 'why birds matter', 'missing', the eponymous one, and 'xing ped'

intimations by zadie smith: six essays, short ones, on living in early pandemic 2020; they feel very warm and comforting because they're full of all the anxieties that marked the beginnings of last year

the anthropocene reviewed by john green: essays on the human planet; very wholesome; a relatively quick read, they're short ones

the book of indian journeys by dom moraes (editor): it's an anthology of writings on traveling in india, i like for the collection of authors it brings together, you should look it up

if you feel like fantasy/urban fantasy/scifi:

the licanius trilogy by james islington: i read this early last year, and i was obsessed; starts as a chosen one story about this boy who has augur abilities, but it becomes so much more; very sleek time-travel/loop situations; also looks at free will, choice, destiny

good omens by neil gaiman, sir terry pratchett: this is one of the funniest and the most wholesome-est books i've read; follows an angel and a demon working together to stop the apocalypse; they both share one brain cell between them, and i love them for that; also check gaiman's coraline (be warned, it is creepy); and pratchett's small gods

the hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy by douglas adams: this is the first part, and i would totally recommend them all; it starts with the earth being demolished to make space for an intergalactic highway, only one human escapes, he hitches a ride on a spaceship nearby; utter chaos of a book (affectionate), also very funny

the immortalists by chloe benjamin: follows four siblings who discover the exact dates of their death, and then takes a look at their lives one by one; has interesting things to say about destiny and choice

an absolutely remarkable thing by hank green: about april, who becomes famous overnight after "discovering" an alien installation in new york; it's science fiction, and a really fun read; about human cooperation (or lack thereof), the internet, and the nature of our communication; also the sequel, a beautifully foolish endeavour, is amazing pandemic reading

more than this by patrick ness: a boy drowns to death and finds himself in what he thinks is obviously hell, but things get complicated as time passes; YA scifi, pretty fast-paced

and a few assorted ones:

the lonely city by olivia laing: has there been a time i haven't recommended this? absolutely not. it's about artists who explored art as a means of negotiating isolation and loneliness; blends memoir and art appreciation; very poetic

the dublin murder squad series by tana french also got me out of a slump this year; they're very addictive crime fiction; six books and i thoroughly enjoyed them all; my favourites are the likeness and broken harbour

a man called ove by fredrik backman: follows an old man who has a very meticulously planned schedule, and who is generally grumpy; you're slowly introduced to his past, and it's just a very wholesome story; great if you want light reading

the uncommon reader by alan bennett: it speculates on what would happen if the queen (of england) made a hobby out of reading; it's a day's read, only 50-odd pages, and it's pure fun

the blue umbrella by ruskin bond: another short one, under 200 pages; about a girl who stumbles across a japanese umbrella, and about how her village receives the exoticism of the umbrella; a very fine story

round ireland with a fridge by tony hawks: it's a travelogue, where hawks takes a trip around the perimeter of ireland with a small fridge after losing a bet; it's absurd and engaging, and wild that this really happened

i hope you find something you like!

#book recs #booklr #anonymous #answered #bookstagram #reading list #slump reading

[skippyv20]

Artist knits “Temperature Scarf” to track climate change every day for a whole year

Josie George’s temperature scarf as of September 4, 2020.

When artist and author Josie George started knitting her temperature scarf in January, she could not have imagined how this calendar year would unfold. The year 2020 has been unpredictable in many ways—from the emergence of a global pandemic to the social unrest and protests around the world to the wildfires ravaging Australia and then the United States. Despite everything else going on, George initially began her knitting project as a way to engage with the effects of climate change. She discovered her experience of weather patterns often paralleled her own life and emotions. As an author and artist, George’s many projects centre around awareness of her surrounding environment

The artist now spends each day knitting two rows in colour-coded yarn to record the temperature and the weather in her hometown in England. She’s chosen a variety of warm and cool shades to depict the full spectrum of the English climate. Some months are more uniform, as seen in the chilly blues and grays of January and February. Other months set records as unusually warm and dry. This blend, gradience, and jarring juxtaposition of colours is visually arresting within the length and beautiful chevron pattern of the temperature scarf. The project has even inspired others to merge art and weather in the form of temperature scarves and blankets of their own. George hopes that her project will encourage a deeper contemplation of climate change.

As a means of updating her followers, George often adds commentary on Twitter about her scarf and the local weather, pairing it all with insight into her life with a life-long chronic illness. Deep contemplation is a theme throughout her creative practices—knitting, photography, and writing. In her June 4 temperature scarf update, George tweeted about a swelteringly hot May and her concurrent thoughts. She wrote, “For me, a month of deep grief and deeper resolve, side by side, as I looked unflinchingly at the world’s damage. I read and spoke words of hope and change as I knit. I continued. I committed. I began again.” Those who enjoy the beauty and reflection of George’s temperature scarf project will find these same themes reflected in her essays on diverse topics.

We had the chance to speak with Josie George about her temperature scarf project, her creative philosophies, and her upcoming memoir A Still Life (out in the UK with Bloomsbury on February 18, 2021). Read on for My Modern Met’s exclusive interview.

The temperature scarf at the end of March.

You began your temperature scarf this past January as a way to remain conscious of the changing climate as you experience it in the UK. Why did you choose to use yarn as a medium to record the climate?

I’ve knitted for many years and had seen similar projects online with people knitting temperature, precipitation, or the colour of the sky each day into a blanket in straight rows. I decided to do something a little different—to knit the daily temperature and the day’s weather together to try and capture more of what it is to experience climate as a whole. I also wanted to make something both meaningful and beautiful and so decided on a zig-zag chevron stitch pattern and subtle, shifting colours to give the piece a sense of movement through the year.

I love the quiet repetition and humility of knitting, each stitch considered and equal. In many art forms, the artist speaks through a piece of work, but yarn felt like the perfect medium to allow myself to step back and to allow the changing temperatures and weather patterns to speak for themselves. I love too how knitting is a kind of coding—knits and purls instead of ones and zeros. It lends itself gorgeously to data collection.

George’s yarn color code for daily weather conditions.

In your monthly scarf updates on Twitter, some blocks of uniform colour appear while other lines are anomalies. Has the weather of any particular month surprised you?

Very much so. Here in the UK, we’ve had a year of quite extreme weather—intense rain and storms, an early heatwave, with record temperatures and dry spells. I expected colder weather at the beginning of the year (and had my cool colors ready) but was surprised to getting warm very early on. February brought endless downpours, deep floods and fierce storms, but April and May—usually our months of spring showers—were entirely dry with hot, sunny days, and I had to fight to keep my spring plants watered and alive. Sudden flashes of extreme heat through the summer left everything crisp and curling. The strangest month was August—I saw days of 35°C [95°F] fall to barely 12°C [54°F] in just a few days. It has made me quite dizzy at times, just how unpredictable it has been.

The April weather in the UK reflected in the scarf.

Based on your experience, why is it important to remain conscious of the environment?

I am deeply aware that our planet is in trouble. Although my year’s worth of data isn’t indicative of anything in itself, it coincides with a wider consensus that climate change is having a profound affect on the world’s temperatures and weather patterns and is linked to extreme and unusual weather events and wildlife decline. And yet, daily human life is not easy, often swallowing all our attention and thought. It is frighteningly easy to switch off, forget, tune-out or dismiss environmental news. When we ignore something, we lose our relationship with that thing. We numb our sensitivity to its moods and changes, our sensual experience of being with it. We also lose sight of how deeply connected we are to everything around us. The earth is my home and I am joined to everything in it. I don’t ever want to forget that. I want to stay awake to what’s going on around me and to think of more than my own life.

George’s temperature scarf at the end of May.

Creating daily is an impressive feat of routine. Has the daily knitting of a year-long project affected how you experience (or gauge) the passing of time?

I am very much a creature of routine and find great comfort in repetition and disciplined action, so daily knitting slotted in beautifully with other habits I have as an author and artist. I love the way conscious actions repeated every day became a sort of slow, rhythmic dance. Writing, moving, knitting, making art, meditating, caring for my environment. Each of my hours has a different focus and I love that. It shifts my attention through time and keeps me connected to the turn of the day. It helps my life to feel directed, chosen. Without these anchors, I find the days become a blur of vague thought and unfocused, reactive behaviours and I start to feel more like passive pinball in some giant machine rather than someone with agency, choosing her way.

A close-up view of the month of June.

You have described creating the scarf as a work of commitment, a relationship. Could you elaborate further on what it means to truly engage with a project?

Even before COVID, I was mostly housebound and spent huge quantities of time alone. I’ve been disabled since I was a child, I’m a single mum, and my partner lives and works abroad, so solitude has long been a big part of my daily experience. That’s been really hard at times, but I’ve never wanted to overlook all the opportunities for relationship and companionship I have right here in the small rhythms of my day.

As with many other aspects of my work and creativity, the scarf was a way of saying to my environment, “I see you! I’m here with you.” To listen and look and see what I can learn. The best relationships are the ones where we’re able to get out of the way a little, to let the other person or situation be seen and appreciated for who and what they are, without us layering on our own biases, expectations and judgements. That’s what I wanted to do here, too. To make myself fully available to the day, to truly pay attention to it, and then to respond in a way that honoured that day’s reality. I guess it’s about love, really, don’t you think?

George’s July update showing variable temperatures.

As a writer, photographer, painter, and knitter, you create in many mediums. Do your creative practices intertwine? Do you find yourself approaching themes—such as the environment—across multiple mediums?

The big theme that runs through everything I do is attention; but yes, this expresses itself in many different ways. Alongside knitting the scarf, I’ve been working on a novel that deals with the difficulty and pain of staying awake to what’s really going on around you and inside you, and nature plays a big role in that. My art practice has focused on drawing moments around me and seeing how that changes my relationship with that moment. My biggest interest right now is in how play and playfulness might be a good channel for both learning to pay attention to life as it really is, and in building relationships with the things and environments around us. It’s all connected.

For August, George knitted a wide range of temperatures which she tweeted was “both relentless & comforting.”

You have a forthcoming memoir entitled A Still Life. You tell your story of living a meaningful, rewarding, quiet life. What would you like our readers to know most about the book?

That it’s beautiful. That I think it will touch them and make them look up at the world around them with new eyes. It is deeply personal, tender, and full of love. If you’re feeling lost, lonely, burnt-out, too slow, too tired, too jaded, then I think this book could be a good friend to you. I hope it will make you feel better about being in your body and your life and help you to know that you matter.

“A Still Life” by Josie George, published by Bloomsbury and due out on February 18, 2021.

What do you intend to do with the temperature scarf when it’s complete? Do you plan to make the scarf an annual project?

I haven’t quite decided yet! If someone wanted to exhibit it, I think that would be lovely thing, but equally I’d quite like the chance to continue the project and see what happens. I have wondered whether to do the same thing next year and attach the strips side by side, to see the contrast of the years held together. I will certainly do something next year—it’s too big a part of my day now to imagine life without it.

Author and artist Josie George.

https://mymodernmet.com/josie-george-temperature-scarf/

Thank you😊❤️❤️❤️❤️

[richincolor]

Last week someone asked if I knew of any good lists of memoirs and coming-of-age novels. We do have a list of memoirs, but that was created four years ago and several more have been published since then that we’d recommend. I couldn’t recall or find a list like she was describing for coming-of-age books either, so the librarian in me felt the need to make one. Here’s an updated collection of memoirs along with a few coming-of-age novels. If you know of others written by BIPOC authors that you would recommend, please share the titles.

Memoirs

All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto by George M. Johnson Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr)

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

Both a primer for teens eager to be allies as well as a reassuring testimony for young queer men of color, All Boys Aren’t Blue covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, brotherhood, family, structural marginalization, consent, and Black joy. Johnson’s emotionally frank style of writing will appeal directly to young adults.

Almost American Girl: An Illustrated Memoir by Robin Ha Balzer & Bray/Harperteen

For as long as she can remember, it’s been Robin and her mom against the world. Growing up as the only child of a single mother in Seoul, Korea, wasn’t always easy, but it has bonded them fiercely together.

So when a vacation to visit friends in Huntsville, Alabama, unexpectedly becomes a permanent relocation–following her mother’s announcement that she’s getting married–Robin is devastated.

Overnight, her life changes. She is dropped into a new school where she doesn’t understand the language and struggles to keep up. She is completely cut off from her friends in Seoul and has no access to her beloved comics. At home, she doesn’t fit in with her new stepfamily, and worst of all, she is furious with the one person she is closest to–her mother.

Then one day Robin’s mother enrolls her in a local comic drawing class, which opens the window to a future Robin could never have imagined.

Banned Book Club by Kim Hyun Sook, Ryan Estrada, Hyung-Ju Ko (Illustrator) Iron Circus Comics [Crystal’s Review] [Q&A with Authors – in a Comic]

When Kim Hyun Sook started college in 1983 she was ready for her world to open up. After acing her exams and sort-of convincing her traditional mother that it was a good idea for a woman to go to college, she looked forward to soaking up the ideas of Western Literature far from the drudgery she was promised at her family’s restaurant. But literature class would prove to be just the start of a massive turning point, still focused on reading but with life-or-death stakes she never could have imagined.

This was during South Korea’s Fifth Republic, a military regime that entrenched its power through censorship, torture, and the murder of protestors. In this charged political climate, with Molotov cocktails flying and fellow students disappearing for hours and returning with bruises, Hyun Sook sought refuge in the comfort of books. When the handsome young editor of the school newspaper invited her to his reading group, she expected to pop into the cafeteria to talk about Moby Dick, Hamlet, and The Scarlet Letter. Instead she found herself hiding in a basement as the youngest member of an underground banned book club. And as Hyun Sook soon discovered, in a totalitarian regime, the delights of discovering great works of illicit literature are quickly overshadowed by fear and violence as the walls close in.

It’s Trevor Noah: Born a Crime Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah Delacorte Press

Trevor Noah, the funny guy who hosts The Daily Show on Comedy Central, shares his remarkable story of growing up in South Africa with a black South African mother and a white European father at a time when it was against the law for a mixed-race child to exist. But he did exist–and from the beginning, the often-misbehaved Trevor used his keen smarts and humor to navigate a harsh life under a racist government. This fascinating memoir blends drama, comedy, and tragedy to depict the day-to-day trials that turned a boy into a young man. In a country where racism barred blacks from social, educational, and economic opportunity, Trevor surmounted staggering obstacles and created a promising future for himself, thanks to his mom’s unwavering love and indomitable will.

Infinite Hope: A Black Artist’s Journey from WWII to Peace by Ashley Bryan Atheneum Books

In May of 1942, at the age of eighteen, Ashley Bryan was drafted to fight in World War II. For the next three years, he would face the horrors of war as a black soldier in a segregated army.

He endured the terrible lies white officers told about the black soldiers to isolate them from anyone who showed kindness–including each other. He received worse treatment than even Nazi POWs. He was assigned the grimmest, most horrific tasks, like burying fallen soldiers…but was told to remove the black soldiers first because the media didn’t want them in their newsreels. And he waited and wanted so desperately to go home, watching every white soldier get safe passage back to the United States before black soldiers were even a thought.

For the next forty years, Ashley would keep his time in the war a secret. But now, he tells his story. The story of the kind people who supported him. The story of the bright moments that guided him through the dark. And the story of his passion for art that would save him time and time again.

Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir by Nikki Grimes Wordsong

In her own voice, acclaimed author and poet Nikki Grimes explores the truth of a harrowing childhood in a compelling and moving memoir in verse. Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night – and discovered the magic and impact of writing. For many years, Nikki’s notebooks were her most enduing companions. In this accessible and inspiring memoir that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how the power of those words helped her conquer the hazards – ordinary and extraordinary – of her life.

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, Harmony Becker (Illustrator)Top Shelf Productions

They Called Us Enemy is Takei’s firsthand account of those years behind barbed wire, the joys and terrors of growing up under legalized racism, his mother’s hard choices, his father’s faith in democracy, and the way those experiences planted the seeds for his astonishing future. What does it mean to be American? Who gets to decide? When the world is against you, what can one person do? To answer these questions, George Takei joins co-writers Justin Eisinger & Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker for the journey of a lifetime.

Coming-of-Age

Clap When You Land by Ellizabeth Acevedo Quill Tree Books [Crystal’s Review]

Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people…

In New York City, Yahaira Rios is called to the principal’s office, where her mother is waiting to tell her that her father, her hero, has died in a plane crash.

Separated by distance–and Papi’s secrets–the two girls are forced to face a new reality in which their father is dead and their lives are forever altered.

And then, when it seems like they’ve lost everything of their father, they learn of each other.

Darius the Great is Not Okay by Adib Khorram Penguin Books [Interview with Adib Khorram]

Darius Kellner speaks better Klingon than Farsi, and he knows more about Hobbit social cues than Persian ones. He’s a Fractional Persian–half, his mom’s side–and his first-ever trip to Iran is about to change his life.

Darius has never really fit in at home, and he’s sure things are going to be the same in Iran. His clinical depression doesn’t exactly help matters, and trying to explain his medication to his grandparents only makes things harder. Then Darius meets Sohrab, the boy next door, and everything changes. Soon, they’re spending their days together, playing soccer, eating faludeh, and talking for hours on a secret rooftop overlooking the city’s skyline. Sohrab calls him Darioush–the original Persian version of his name–and Darius has never felt more like himself than he does now that he’s Darioush to Sohrab.

Forward Me Back to You by Mitali Perkins Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr)

Katina King is the reigning teen jujitsu champion of Northern California, but she’s having trouble fighting off the secrets in her past.

Robin Thornton was adopted from an orphanage in India and is reluctant to take on his future. If he can’t find his roots, how can he possibly plan ahead?

Robin and Kat meet in the most unlikely of places–a summer service trip to Kolkata to work with survivors of human trafficking. As bonds build between the travelmates, Robin and Kat discover that justice and healing are tangled, like the pain of their pasts and the hope for their futures. You can’t rewind life; sometimes you just have to push play.

In turns heart wrenching, beautiful, and buoyant, Mitali Perkins’s Forward Me Back to You focuses its lens on the ripple effects of violence–across borders and generations–and how small acts of heroism can break the cycle.

Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith Candlewick Press

When Louise Wolfe’s first real boyfriend mocks and disrespects Native people in front of her, she breaks things off and dumps him over e-mail. It’s her senior year, anyway, and she’d rather spend her time with her family and friends and working on the school newspaper. The editors pair her up with Joey Kairouz, the ambitious new photojournalist, and in no time the paper’s staff find themselves with a major story to cover: the school musical director’s inclusive approach to casting The Wizard of Oz has been provoking backlash in their mostly white, middle-class Kansas town. From the newly formed Parents Against Revisionist Theater to anonymous threats, long-held prejudices are being laid bare and hostilities are spreading against teachers, parents, and students — especially the cast members at the center of the controversy, including Lou’s little brother, who’s playing the Tin Man. As tensions mount at school, so does a romance between Lou and Joey — but as she’s learned, “dating while Native” can be difficult. In trying to protect her own heart, will Lou break Joey’s?

Loveboat, Taipei by Abigail Hing Wen Harperteen [Jessica’s Review]

And just like that, Ever Wong’s summer takes an unexpected turn. Gone is Chien Tan, the strict educational program in Taiwan that Ever was expecting. In its place, she finds Loveboat: a summer-long free-for-all where hookups abound, adults turn a blind eye, snake-blood sake flows abundantly, and the nightlife runs nonstop.

But not every student is quite what they seem:

Ever is working toward becoming a doctor but nurses a secret passion for dance.

Rick Woo is the Yale-bound child prodigy bane of Ever’s existence whose perfection hides a secret.

Boy-crazy, fashion-obsessed Sophie Ha turns out to have more to her than meets the eye.

And under sexy Xavier Yeh’s shell is buried a shameful truth he’ll never admit.

When these students’ lives collide, it’s guaranteed to be a summer Ever will never forget.

Parachutes by Kelly Yang Katherine Tegen Books

They’re called parachutes: teenagers dropped off to live in private homes and study in the United States while their wealthy parents remain in Asia. Claire Wang never thought she’d be one of them, until her parents pluck her from her privileged life in Shanghai and enroll her at a high school in California.

Suddenly she finds herself living in a stranger’s house, with no one to tell her what to do for the first time in her life. She soon embraces her newfound freedom, especially when the hottest and most eligible parachute, Jay, asks her out.

Dani De La Cruz, Claire’s new host sister, couldn’t be less thrilled that her mom rented out a room to Claire. An academic and debate team star, Dani is determined to earn her way into Yale, even if it means competing with privileged kids who are buying their way to the top. But Dani’s game plan veers unexpectedly off course when her debate coach starts working with her privately.

As they steer their own distinct paths, Dani and Claire keep crashing into one another, setting a course that will change their lives forever.

Yes No Maybe So by Aisha Saeed & Becky Albertalli Balzer & Bray/Harperteen [Group Discussion]

YES

Jamie Goldberg is cool with volunteering for his local state senate candidate–as long as he’s behind the scenes. When it comes to speaking to strangers (or, let’s face it, speaking at all to almost anyone) Jamie’s a choke artist. There’s no way he’d ever knock on doors to ask people for their votes…until he meets Maya.

NO

Maya Rehman’s having the worst Ramadan ever. Her best friend is too busy to hang out, her summer trip is canceled, and now her parents are separating. Why her mother thinks the solution to her problems is political canvassing–with some awkward dude she hardly knows–is beyond her.

MAYBE SO

Going door to door isn’t exactly glamorous, but maybe it’s not the worst thing in the world. After all, the polls are getting closer–and so are Maya and Jamie. Mastering local activism is one thing. Navigating the cross-cultural crush of the century is another thing entirely.

#memoir #Coming of age #YALit

[iobjectfa20]

Print: ‘Imposed migration’ by Pudlo Pudlat.

1986. Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Buffin Island, Canada.

British Museum

Explanation

This image appears in the current exhibit at the British Museum, “Arctic: Culture and Climate.” The exhibit was prompted by some recent archaeological discoveries in the Arctic, but contains a variety of artifacts and art pieces through a range of eras. Not all the objects in the exhibit are accessible online, but some interesting items I found were an intricately-beaded woman’s coat from 1898, an engraved walrus tusk from 1954, and a snowmobile from 1986. Interestingly, none of the objects from the exhibit featured on the website or in downloadable educational materials featured any of the ancient, recently-discovered artifacts; all appeared to be from the 19th century and later. In addition to the various artifacts displayed, the exhibit also features art from contemporary Native artists. These art pieces came from a partnership with the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, also called the Kinngait Cooperative.

The Kinngait Cooperative was founded in 1959 by a white Canadian settler who has been credited with “discovering” Inuit art and a local Inuit artist. There had been a longstanding culture of sculpting in the area, but as the cooperative developed, printmaking, drawing, and painting became more popular. Similarly, Pudlat had begun his artistic career as a sculptor but after suffering an injury that made continuing to sculpt difficult, he turned to printmaking, drawing, and painting as his primary forms of expression. He ultimately created over 4000 drawings and 200 prints. Pudlat’s work has been honored and recognized in a variety of ways. He has been featured on UNICEF greeting cards and on Canadian postage stamps, as well as in a variety exhibits. Two years before his death, the National Gallery of Canada opened a retrospective of 30 years of his drawings, the museum’s the first solo show of an Inuit artist.

I chose this exhibit and this particular piece for a variety of reasons. What initially interested me in the exhibit was the murky moral quandary surrounding the newly-discovered ancient artifacts. They had been trapped in ice in the Arctic circle, and if not for Global Warming, would not have become accessible to archaeologists. I find it interesting that none of these artifacts were pictured on the British Museum exhibit page. Furthermore, to include the work of contemporary Native artists in an exhibit centered on cultural artifacts does not do justice to the value of the artistry itself. Pudlat’s drawing powerfully captures the impact of industrialization and militarization on the environment, and through the environment, on Native communities. The other drawings and prints from Native artist in the accessible materials for the exhibit did not offer such a jarring statement; instead they highlighted the aspects of Native life that many often romanticize. I do not know who chose Pudlat’s drawing, but I think it was a brave choice. I hope that soon, more museums will lift up Native artistry and resistance, rather than exoticize it as an anthropological artifact.

Reimagining and Reframing

The image is a simple one. A military-style helicopter appears suspended against a blank background. From the helicopter hang three animals: a walrus on the left, a polar bear in the middle, and a musk ox on the right. The walrus is hung from its head, the polar bear from its neck, and the musk ox from its belly. I find the polar bear in the center to be the most disturbing. It is emaciated, echoing the photographs of polar bears we see increasingly frequently, who due to climate change lose their homes and sources of food. Its coat is yellowed, another sign of ill health. But most notable is that the rope attaching it to the helicopter looks exactly like a noose. The title of the piece is “Imposed migration,” and the image offers the illusion that perhaps the helicopter is simply relocating the animals. We know, however, that this is not really migration, but extermination. The animals will not survive human expansion and the climate change that accompanies our consumerism and greed. The title of the work also echoes the history of forced relocation of Native people – a governmental policy that did not only result in displacement, but also untold death.

This exhibit serves as an example of the British Museum benefiting from climate change. They can attract crowds (putting the pandemic aside for a moment) with the promise of newly-discovered archaeological findings, without grappling with the reality that those items only became recoverable because of a catastrophic loss of Arctic ice. Native populations are among those most effected by climate change; for example, many still rely on hunting and subsistence activities for their livelihoods, and animals are becoming increasingly sparse, and no longer migrate as far south because of rising temperatures. Exhibiting these new archaeological discoveries in a museum provides no benefit or relief to Native individuals suffering from climate-induced food or housing insecurity. In a telling move, the British Museum intentionally kept the BP logo away from promotional materials about this particular exhibit, although BP is a major funding source for the museum. That the museum simply removed the logo, but changed nothing about the policy of accepting BP’s sponsorship and promoting the company, highlighted that this exhibit was constructed to skirt its moral murkiness, not engage in what could be a groundbreaking discussion of ethics.

Referring to the opening up of the new archaeological site as both a tragedy and a treasure trove, a curator at the British Museum continued, “It’s like the library of Alexandria being on fire ... You’re plucking out these books which are coming out … it’s a remarkable window into life, all coming out of the ground in one go.” It’s not like the library of Alexandria being on fire, unless that fire were in fact an arson set by an invading army who then tries to paint themselves as the heroes in the narrative.

There have been some interesting cases and discussions in recent years of museums returning items obtained through various forms of theft, including colonial force, to the original countries or peoples. Last year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City returned a coffin to Egypt that was determined to have been smuggled out of Egypt by a multinational art trafficking ring. Benin City in Nigeria hopes to open a museum in 2023 to display Benin Bronzes in their city of origin, but has experienced difficulty in getting other countries and museums, including the British Museum, to return them. The blockbuster movie Black Panther featured a scene at the fictional “Museum of Great Britain” in which the lead villain comments on how the items were looted from Africa before stealing them himself. The director wanted to shoot the scene at the British Museum itself, and use the real museum’s name, but the museum did not consent. That the British Museum comes up again and again in examples of pleas to repatriate stolen cultural artifacts speaks to how much of its collection was obtained illicitly. I believe that the objects obtained from these archaeological sites made accessible through climate change should be treated the same way as the Benin Bronzes and should be repatriated.

Reading this account by the curator alongside the belief of James Houston, one of the cofounders of the Kinngait Cooperative, that he had “discovered” Inuit art, reminded me of many of the points Gayatri Spivak made in her groundbreaking essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Although she did not use this terminology, she issued a powerful indictment of the white savior complex, famously identifying a dynamic of “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Colonizers give themselves credit for saving Native peoples without taking accountability for or even recognizing the compounded oppression that they inflict on those they colonize. Houston, for example, felt proud of introducing the Native people he encountered in Kinngait to art forms that they could profit from, taking public credit without also publicly acknowledging the role that the Canadian government and the industrialization and capitalism it introduced played in destroying Native economies.

I read that archaeologists felt rushed to excavate the Arctic sites because looters were pillaging them as the melting ice made them accessible. How do we know that these “looters” were not simply Native people looking to hang on to remnants of their culture? I think of the disparity in newspaper captions after Hurricane Katrina, in which White survivors who took food from abandoned stores were termed “resourceful” and Black survivors doing the same thing were portrayed as looters and criminals. What separates the archaeologists themselves from the title of looters? My reimagined exhibit would address these questions head-on. Who can claim ownership to an ancient item? What constitutes theft? How should such an artifact be displayed? If that artifact or piece of art is obtained through some form of violence, how should that violence be acknowledged? What is a just reparation?

There is a long history of museums degrading Native art. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City for example, which primarily features dinosaur bones, animal panoramas, and other exhibits on the natural (non-human) world, has a wing on Native American art and culture. The inclusion of Native Americans in the AMNH is, to say the least, dehumanizing. Native Americans are not Neanderthals. They are alive and could be thriving if not for European settler colonialism. The myth and romanticization of Native ways of living as an older and purer but unrealistic way of life does violence to all the Native people incorporating centuries of ritual into their 21st-century existence. For this reason, I believe that Native art should no longer be featured in exhibits that also contain archaeology; nobody would put an Andy Warhol painting in an exhibit with colonial-era embroidery. Native people deserve the same degree of attention and distinction.

—Mira R