Sunday Scraps 97

1. GENDER: Remember when Anita Sarkeesian at Feminist Frequency got seriously harassed by the internet? The fruits of her labor are now available in the form of part 1 of her exploration of gender in video games.

2. RACE: W. Ralph Eubanks at the American Scholar explores what happens to conceptions of race when DNA tests prove your origins diverge from your sense of self.

3. PORN: Here’s a profile of porn entrepreneur Cindy Gallop (of Make Love Not Porn) from Vice. I think there’s a reason we don’t watch regular people have sex, but I wish her all the luck in the world if she can change some of the most offensive porn norms.

4. PUNDITS: Ta-Nehisi Coates invariably blows me away with everything he writes. The New York Observer tracks Coates’ rise to intellectual stardom.

5. PRETTY: Smithsonian Magazine’s best photos of 2012.

6. NAMES: Nico Lang writes for Thought Catalog about what happens when his readers can’t tell whether he’s male or female and how that changes their reactions to his pieces. I wish I had written this, but Emily is kind of an obvious name….

Related Post: Sunday 96 – Harper High School, Philip Roth, duct tape art

Related Post: Sunday 95 – Girls in the NFL, Seth McFarlane, Orson Scott Card

Monday Scraps 95

1. DATING: Where do “missed connections” happen? In Illinois, on the train (duh), in Indiana, at home. Wait, what?

2. AUTHORS: Ugh. Ender’s Game was kind of my favorite thing for so so long. It still is, but I hate when the authors you love turn out to be raging homophobes. Dammit.

3. EDUCATION: This amazing investigative piece by WBEZ on the South Side’s Harper High School is incredible in basically every way journalism can be incredible.

4. KNOPE: NYMag has the inside scoop behind Amy Poehler/Leslie Knope’s amazing wedding dress.

5. SPORTS: For the very first time, a woman is participating in the NFL regional tryouts. Kicker Lauren Silberman will probably not play in the NFL, but that’s still pretty f’ing cool.

6. OSCARS: I would write about Seth McFarlane’s horribly sexist jokes, but Margaret Lyons at NYMag  nailed it so hard I’d just be paraphrasing. 

Related Post: Sunday Scraps 94: Bey, Connie Britton, Jane Austen and more.

Related Post: Sunday Scraps: 93: Guns, visiting Chicago, Margaret Atwood

Apps for Bootycalling?

This week for Role/Reboot I “reviewed” a new Facebook app called “Bang with Friends.” In theory, it’s a discreet way to figure out which of your friends are down to hook up with you. In practice, I found it to be a quick reminder of why you don’t sleep with your friends.

I tested it with a willing friend, just to see what happens. We indicated we were down to bang each other (literally, the button you press per friend is “Down to bang!”), which opened up a little mini-messaging conversation that went like this:

Me: Hey baby, let’s get a little more comfortable. 

Me: I would never write that. That’s what this silly thing made me do.

Him: mmmm, sounds good.

Me: gross. 

If you’d like to read more about my thoughts on Bang With Friends, casual sex, secret admirers, and FWB relationships, read on:

Related Post: Sex on the first date? I made a flowchart!

Related Post: The “end” of courtship?

Watch This: Lindy West Explains Away the Trolls

It will get sad before it gets better, but man it’s so good.

Lindy West is one of my faves on Jezebel these days, and to her point, I had no idea what she looked like until this video. Who gives a shit, right?

Related Post: Anita Sarkeesian and a story I’ve been avoiding.

Related Post: The worst of all Facebook pages.

How Does the Arc Bend?

Back in 2008, in a speech commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King, President Obama elaborated on his famous “arc of justice” quote:

“Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice. It bends towards justice, but here is the thing: it does not bend on its own. It bends because each of us in our own ways put our hand on that arc and we bend it in the direction of justice….”

My best friend and I find ourselves gchatting the same thing to each other at least once a week: “people are the worst.” It might be in response to a political ad, or a terrible headline, or a horrific crime, or just the way the world seems to be behaving at the particular moment in time. It seems a lot less common that we get to say the phrase I infinitely prefer, “people are the best.”

The photo of Balpreet posted on Reddit

So this was a special week when twice–twice!–I got to crow about the goodness in people, the badass-ery of people, the decency and strength of people. First, you may have read about a Sikh woman whose picture was posted on Reddit and then insulted by a bunch of ignoramuses. Some people would cry (and maybe she did, I probably would have), some people would rant and rave (I definitely would), and some people write extremely eloquent, articulate explanations and seek to educate instead of judge. This woman, Balpreet Kaur, is one of those. Read her letter and then response and you will find yourself thinking, for once, people really are the best.

Then, yesterday, a story broke about a Wisconsin anchorwoman who took the uneducated, rude, hurtful words of a viewer and made the story not about her weight, as he would have liked her to do, but about bullying. Jennifer Livingston, like Balpreet, just calmly explains exactly why this approach to her is disrespectful, damaging, and unwarranted. The viewer accuses her of being a poor role model for girls because she is overweight, when in fact Livingston’s response shows she is exactly the kind of role model I would want for my children.

Seriously, you guys, sometime people are just the coolest.

Related Post: Just another horrible story I’ve been ignoring…

Related Post: Thumbs up for the 6 billion

I am the DQer!

I’ve mentioned my friend Jon, who writes a news round up called The Daily Quinn. If you, like me, do not have time to read the entire internet every morning, you may want to sign up. You’ll blearily get to your inbox just in time for Jon to send you links to all of the important things that happened while you were still brushing your teeth.

The DQ is quick and simple, and organized by subject (budget, education, health care, etc). I always find at least one or two great pieces that I would never have found myself (or bothered to read). If you want to sign up, email thedailyquinn @ gmail.com.

Every Friday, Jon interviews one DQ reader, and today it’s me! I feel so special! In the interview, I talk about my job, fear of credit card readers, Alison Bechdel, and B&Bs in Fort Lauderdale. Read on!

Click to read the full interview

Related Post: I copied Jon’s interview format for the new series So What Do You Do Exactly?

Related Post: Congresswoman Virginia Foxx doesn’t tolerate people with loans. Um, what?

Sunday Scraps 53

1. BEAUTY: One mom, Eleni Gage, writes about how she pierced her infant’s ears and wound up on the receiving end of a whole slew of comments ranging from “female genital mutilation!” to accusations of class warfare.

2. REDDIT: Pretty fascinating account from Wired of how a rampant Reddit thread about a hypothetical Romans vs. United States military battle became a sensation, a screenplay, and a soon-to-be-released blockbuster.

3. GROCERY: Ever been to the Bi-Rite in the Mission in San Francisco? How did the store on the corner become the little grocery nobody can shut up about?

4. ORIENTATION: From Salon, one story about how San Francisco’s sexual fluidity pushed Anna Pulley away from her lesbian history towards conventional hetero sex.

5. BLOOD: Incredible, moving, beautifully-written piece in The Atlantic by John Fram on the course of his relationship after his boyfriend’s HIV status is revealed.

6. ART: Artist Andrew Myers creates 3D portraits out of screws, a drill, and paint.

Related Post: Sunday 52 = Advice for black children, Southerners deserve more, SATs at 35

Related Post: Sunday 51 = Rooming with Gloria, Bruni on double standards, A League of Their Own

This is how much advertisers want you to buy things

Fun fact of the day: An orange “Buy” button is statistically going to sell more of whatever than a button of any other color. For example:

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

The Daily Grommet

Gap

Once I started looking, I couldn’t stop seeing the big orange buttons everywhere. Science claims that orange is the second most visible (?) color after red, but red has all sorts of horrid negative connotations. You could see a dozen red “Buy” buttons and all your brain would recognize is “No!” “Stop!” “Don’t!” “Beware!” or “Danger!” Consquently, web designers and UX experts (user experience) around the world have collectively buried us all under a pile of orange buttons.

It just goes to show how much the tiniest details matter to advertisers. I once worked on a photo shoot that involved a kitchen scene. We spent literal days plotting out the shape of the water glasses on the table (“It has to be clear they’re not for booze”), what type of juice was in the refrigerator in the background (juice has weird racial connotations), and whether the model’s fake wedding ring should be silver or gold.

It seems preposterous, but the brands that put this kind of thought into their advertising do so much volume that even if each of those decisions affects one tenth of one percent of their customers, it’s worthwhile.

Think about that next time you pick up some gum “on a whim” at the cash register. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A WHIM.

Related Post: Kotex and the Kardashians.

Related Post: How Amy Poehler got me to donate to Planned Parenthood.

Sheila, Katie, Caterina, and Robin

Today I’m at Persephone Magazine with more on the Women 2.0 Pitch conference I attended last week in Mountain View. Boiling a dozen different speakers and conversations with participants into some sort of “pearls of wisdom” mash-up was pretty daunting, but I tried to distill a jam-packed conference into a couple of key takeaways. Their advice is aimed at female start-up founders and women in technology, but I think it’s pretty f’ing good advice for everyone:

Related Post: Last time at Persephone, Badass Ladies on the TV.

Related Post: Previously at Persephone, How to Ace an Interview.

What is it they say about absence?

Yesterday, as everyone who lives their lives connected to screens and keyboards knows, wikipedia went dark to protest SOPA. I would never have called myself a wikipedia addict, but in its absence I noted three separate instances where I went to find or confirm a specific fact (and yes, I know, wikipedia is not infallible.) In retrospect, that’s probably a fairly typical day, and apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so:

The bill has lost three co-sponsors since yesterday.

What did you want to search yesterday, but couldn’t?

Related Post: Counting friends.

Related Post: Even Pinterest got in on the protest action.