Compulsory reading

• Just in time for the yellow jackets Season 2 finale, critic and writer Carmen Maria Machado explains cannibalism storylines and why we love to ~consume~ for Enjoy your meal:

Stories of cannibalism ask us to grapple with tough questions about what it means to eat the things we eat, or what it means to undo something like us in service to ourselves. It’s an impossible topic to disentangle from our human desire to consume, or the vulnerabilities that make us easy to consume. In her essay on cannibalism as a metaphor for capitalism and feminism, Chelsea G. Summers, author of her brilliant cannibal novel, A certain hunger— writes about how the idea has infected our very language: “We don’t just win; we devour. We don’t just win; we roast our rivals, and we eat them for breakfast. We go to bars described as meat markets in search of a piece of ass, and if we find a lover, we nibble it, we ravish it, we swallow it whole. Cannibalism is a way of framing the capitalist impulse to conquer; how the top, so to speak, always goes straight to the mouth.

• THE Guardianby Oliver Milman reports the sad news that New York is sinking, and unsurprisingly, skyscrapers and climate change are to blame:

This enormous weight rests on a jumble of different materials found in New York’s soil. While many of the larger buildings are set on solid bedrock, such as shale, there is a mixture of other sands and clays that have been built up, adding to a sinking effect that occurs naturally anyway the along much of the eastern seaboard of the United States. the earth reacts to the retreat of the huge glaciers after the end of the last ice age.

“There’s nothing to panic about immediately, but there is this ongoing process that increases the risk of flooding from flooding,” said Tom Parsons, geophysicist at the US Geological Survey, who led the new research.

• A article from the late 1990s by Tema Okun has recently been weaponized against activists of color, although it was originally intended to identify signs of “white supremacist culture” within organizations and interpersonal relationships. For Forgefive longtime activists – Sendolo Diaminah, Scot Nakagawa, Sean Thomas-Breitfeld, Rinku Sen and Lori Villarosa – discussed the uses of the framework and how it can be adapted by activists today:

Sen: Building a culture is difficult in organizations; it’s hard anywhere. It is a daily activity. And it is the responsibility of leadership to build a constructive and pluralistic culture that advances the mission. One thing it takes is a really good strategy and the ability to communicate it clearly. Many leaders get in trouble because their strategy isn’t so clear, so how people should organize themselves in relation to their power in the organization isn’t clear either.

Sendolo, I want you to talk about the responsible use of power from the top down in an organization because I think that’s something everyone should bring to work. This is what distinguishes scammers from real people.

Diaminah: I’ve often been afraid to use power decisively because in our movements power is so associated with abuse and we find it hard to distinguish between the two. You’re not supposed to want power, you’re not supposed to use power; you’re supposed to tear it down. I think what this hides is that we always use power in different ways: it’s not just the people at the top of an organizational structure who are engaged in power. There is a need for all of us in motion to be like: we all have power. How do we use it? Do we use these terms [from “White Supremacy Culture”] in order to hijack the ways in which we ourselves use power? And are there ways to enlighten ourselves and say, “How can I take responsibility for this moment right now?”

The modern home console gaming industry is almost unrecognizable from those early days. Extra lives are no longer distributed sparingly between checkpoints, an easy mode is usually just a toggle away, and generally speaking editors are more interested in throwing us into a story rather than humiliate us with our shortcomings. And yet, even now players are reluctantly enjoying a truly challenging level. They may not be as common as they once were, when there was a direct financial incentive to thwart players, but many studios are still increasing the counters to 11, eager to break our thumbs in half. In fact, with the mainstream success of games like Ring of Elden And Feedback, difficulty seems to be coming back into fashion. We are here to celebrate the tradition and hopefully put an end to our collective angst.

• For the New York TimesMargaret Roach spoke to New York’s High Line designer Piet Oudolf to get a feel for the art of creating artistic gardens:

You loved what you call in the book the “exceptional quality” of gardens, but you also say, “English gardening is very much about decoration and doing the right thing at the right time.” »

In those days, when you read garden books in English, it was all about knowing what to do and when to do it. It’s a bit dogmatic to tell people what to do in a garden. I felt that, without losing my interest in English gardens, I wanted to free myself from this idea that you had to do things in the gardens at a certain time – such a week or such a day. In addition to the necessary know-how, I wanted to do something creative, without being limited by rules.

• As film continues to play a key role in India’s Hindu nationalist movement, Sayeri Biswas analyzes five films and their overtly right-wing message to Feminism in India:

The 2022 film directed by Vivek Agnihotri titled ‘The Kashmir Files‘ is another propaganda film that uses fiction disguised as truth. Apparently based on real events, he exaggerates, manipulates and builds on these examples to create a version of the truth that is far removed from what is historically said. The exodus of Hindus from Kashmir in the 1990s is the premise of the film’s fictional storyline. Immediately after the film’s release, it received the stamp of support from the BJP government, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi going so far as to declare it unmissable as it finally reveals the truth that has suffered silence for a very long time.

The film received an almost instantaneous reaction from audiences. Despite critics vehemently objecting to factual inaccuracies, gross misrepresentations, and demonization of the Muslim community, the film continued to do well at the box office with right-wing groups doing mass viewings and demonstrations in favor of the film. Even though the promotion of the film was made with claims of truth, the disclaimer of the film shows that in reality the film has no hold on historical accuracy or timeliness and it is a another piece of propaganda.

• Curator and organizer Breya M. Johnson examines the linguistic nuances of survival versus victimization, especially for black women and marginalized people, in a thoughtful essay for naughty:

Despite well-meaning efforts, the cultural push toward survivor language comes with assumptions of growth and empowerment that are not inherent in any term. For some people, identifying as a survivor feels better. It’s more digestible. Several black women in my life who have suffered tremendous harm, injury and violence remain deeply committed to calling themselves survivors – if they can even acknowledge what happened – but many struggle to see strength as part of integral to this term.

I don’t believe black women and gender oppressed people need to get stronger. We need a world that gives us all less to survive. Patriarchal violence (PV) is an “interconnected system of institutions, practices, policies, beliefs, and behaviors that harm, undervalue, and terrorize girls, women, women, intersex people, nonconformists gender, LGBTQ and other gender oppressed people in our country”. communities”, so that violence does not only occur at the individual level. We live in a society that perpetuates PV and other forms of violence. Under systems of domination such as capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy, we live in conditions of violence all around us. In other words: wherever there is violence, there will be victimization. There will be evildoers.

• Orcas seem fed up with humans, and who can blame them? A group of them sank three boats in southern Europe this week, but no one seems to know exactly why. Stephanie Pappas has the story for American scientist:

The safe rescue of everyone involved, however, suggests to Deborah Giles that these orcas have no malevolent motives against humans. Giles, science and research director of the Washington state-based nonprofit Wild Orca conservation organization, points out that humans have relentlessly harassed killer whales off the coasts of Washington and Oregon in the 1960s and 1970s, capturing young orcas and taking them away for display to the navy. parks. “These are animals that each and every one of them have been captured at one time or another – most whales multiple times. And these are whales that have had their babies taken from them and loaded onto trucks and driven away, never to be seen again,” says Giles. “And yet these whales have never attacked ships, never attacked humans.”

• After a teenager was harassed by “Citi Bike Karen” Sarah Comrie a few weeks ago, her sister taken from TikTok to share his brother’s story and shed some light on the situation: