• Elie Mystal writes for THE Nation on the mediocre whiteness and anti-blackness at the heart of the Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action in college admissions earlier today:

But the death of affirmative action was not achieved simply through the machinations of Republican lawyers. While the Supreme Court’s conservatives have dealt the fatal blow, politics has long been rendered vulnerable by the soft bigotry of parents, whose commitment to inclusion and equality cools as their little ones cherubim fail to get into their first choice college or university. If you want to see a white liberal drop the pretense that he cares about systemic racism and injustice, just tell him his child didn’t get into the “elite” school he was hoping for. If you want an immigrant family to take a Klansman’s perspective on black intelligence, culture, and work ethic, tell them that their child’s standardized test scores aren’t enough to guarantee entry into the ivy-covered halls of power. Some of the most horribly racist people have felt comfortable telling me to my face has been said in the context of people telling me why they don’t like affirmative action, or why my credentials are somehow so “undeserved” because they were “given” to me by positive discrimination.

• For ForkIsabelia Herrera writes of three Puerto Rican queer female musicians – Young Miko, RaiNao and Villano Antillano – who are at the forefront of reggaetón and rap:

Villana’s courage is a product of her journey as a trans woman. “There’s a lot of anger that grows as a person who’s off the spectrum of cis heteronormativity,” she explains. “Ever since I was little, I’ve always had this resentment. Like, ‘Why doesn’t anyone like me the way I am?'”

Her parents kicked her out at 17 and she enrolled in college working three jobs, one of which was sex work. “I ended up rapping because it was the best medium to get rid of all the frustration that was inside me,” she says. Although she is now her mother’s “best friend”, her time on the streets has been formative, partly because of the dangers she has been exposed to, but also because of the queer community that has helped her to survive. Villana and her friends often pooled their money to pay the rent. “I had many angels protecting me on this journey.”

• Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift as a phenomenon has influenced nearly every sphere of mainstream life, and psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell sheds light on how the artist “rocked” her practice in THE New York Times:

“What would Taylor Swift do?” is a refrain among some patients in my practice. Teenagers suffer for many reasons. One is to be fragile and in formation, a human construction site. Another is being around others who are fragile and in formation. Ms. Swift articulates not only the betrayal of bullying, but also the just shy cruelty that is even more pervasive: the meanness, the exclusion, the intermittent ghosting. She said: Borrow my strength; embrace your pain; do something nice with it – and then you can get rid of it.

But what is singular about this artist, at this time, is the access she has created to a cohesive community, especially for the pandemic generation, whose social ties have become tragically elusive and for whom the offers of internet have assumed a central role. No matter what upsets you, this generation’s Poet Laureate has a song somewhere in her mega-work describing that exact feeling. She’s not going to solve the problem you’re having, but she’s going to sit with you until the passage of time does its job: Look at her now.

• Life is plastic and that’s fantastic for a handful of “Barbiecore” interior design fanatics, whose dedication to the Barbie Girl lifestyle is part of wider home decor trends. Lia Picard writes in the New York Times:

It’s not enough to wear bright pink, people also want to be surrounded by it at home.

Bright pink fits right in with maximalism, which has seen a resurgence in recent years in response to the cool minimalist aesthetic that has dominated Instagram feeds for so long. During the pandemic, people have been leaning into their personal styles at home, from disco balls to handmade checks.

When Mrs. Hansen married her husband six years ago, she tried farmhouse decor. “It wasn’t my style, and I realized that, but I was trying to be mature,” she said. “So it just started happening one day and I think it was probably three or four years ago and I started painting the walls and it just escalated.”

• At Harvard, a professor was recently accused of falsifying data – and his field of research is literally dishonesty. If it sounds too ironic to be true, read Juliana Kim’s report for NPR:

The scandal was first reported by The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month. According to the outlet, over the past year, Harvard had investigated a series of articles involving Gino.

The university found that in a 2012 paper it looked like someone had added and changed numbers in its database, said Max H. Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor who collaborated with Gino in the past. The Chronicle.

The study itself examined whether honesty in tax and insurance documents differed between participants who were asked to sign declarations of truthfulness at the top of the page and at the bottom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Scienceswho had published the research, retracted it.

• For the low price of £70,000, you too could don Princess Diana’s black sheepskin sweater which will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in August. Maddy Mussen reports in evening standard:

A brief lesson in fashion history: Diana first wore the jumper to a polo match in June 1981, where she sat down with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and watched a young Prince Charles playing. The event took place just a month before her marriage to Charles. According Tatler, “At the time, some royal commentators interpreted the ‘black sheep’ message as a comment on how Diana felt about her place within the monarchy.”

• And on TikTok, writer Sim Kern enlightened how the CIA partnered with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to shape what constitutes “great” American literature, explicitly rejecting leftist writing as didactic and applying a politically lukewarm literary sensibility that remains dominant today: