Please Allow Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times to Teach You About White Supremacy. A striking rebuttal to the assertion that middle America must be white, and that if it isn’t, then it isn’t America. Weisman, an editor for the presumably liberal New-York Times, deserves all the flak he’s getting for trying to dismiss the midwestern roots of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar. Whichever side of the political spectrum you identify with, white supremacy is precisely about dismissing the existence and role of non-whites in society.
“This Shithole Made Me”. One of the best decisions I’ve made in recent times was to disable all my work Slack notifications on mobile devices. 4 writers with a heavy presence on Twitter discuss how tight social media loops and the stream of notifications changed their habits and their brains. They also go into how they are trying to fix themselves by, e.g. reading paper books. Marie Kondo ought to do a show for folks whose life is getting lost in the mountain of digital crap they crave each day.
“The Art of Giving a Damn”. Last week, Beto O’Rourke said the words “shit” and “fuck” and it was recorded on camera. This has somehow grown into a story competing with the act of white supremacist domestic terrorism he was reacting to. America has always had a weird relationship with swear words: G-rated movies can show dozens of people being shot and killed but don’t you dare use any word that might hurt the audience’s sensitive ears. This is the same bend-over backwards logic that leads Walmart to (temporarily) remove video games from its shelves while it keeps selling guns. Megan Garber takes a historical lens at the use of profanity in politics and its role in conveying outrage.