I share a lot of links on Twitter and Facebook that I don’t blog about because I don’t have much to add. The reading list is a periodic feature where I share those links with my blog audience too. Of course, you’re still welcome to follow me on Twitter.

Around FtB

• Plausibility–“You want to make it believable. You see what I’m getting at? You don’t want to say ‘my friend is a saint, and for this saintliness he is roundly punished.'”
• Elliot Rodger and Misogyny Denialism: The Call Is Coming From Inside The House–“So many people are contorting themselves into pretzels to find any motivation at all other than misogyny. What the fuck is going on here?”
• They Have To See It With Their Own Eyes: Men and Violence Against Women–“Men who refuse to take violence against women seriously until it happens right the fuck in front of their faces are as complicit in this injustice as men who commit violence against women.”
• Represent–“That’s what the harassers call me. Sometimes they vary it to Oafy, just like any 5-year-old. And the Global Secular Council thinks it’s appropriate to follow their lead.”
• Round 3, or is it 4–“So much for instructing the Social Media team for future to take less liberties in this regard. And as for tweeting an apology – !”
• Why do they think they are above being questioned?–“The refusal is now taking the form of pretending not to know how to do it, not to know what they did that’s apology worthy, not to know how apologies work, not to know that they are an organization and thus responsible for what branches of their organization do.”
• Hello, World. Still Fucked Up, I See: Elliot Rodger Edition–“I do agree that, yes, Rodger had some serious issues, and that the little don’t-kill-people switch in his brain was broken, and we need to improve the way we recognize and handle people whose don’t-kill-people switches are broken. But I’m also going to mention that there are many people whose don’t-kill-people switches don’t function properly.”

The Wider Web

• Making Peace with Self Promotion–“Wishful thinking about meritocracy ignores the abundant science about how information and attention flow in human societies.”
• Cristina Rad is creating YouTube Videos–“I have many talents. All of them fictional. Like God.”
• CFI Launches Campaign to Keep Religion and Pseudoscience Out of Health Care–“With your help, we at the Center for Inquiry have been fighting on all fronts in the battle against superstition and pseudoscience in health care and medicine. The time has come for us all to take this fight to a new level.”
• Gwyneth Paltrow thinks you can hurt water’s feelings by yelling at it–“As quackery goes, Emoto isn’t as dangerous as vaccine denialists or televangelist faith healers; his main takeaway from the rice experiment is that it shows you should talk to your children rather than ignoring them, a point which I didn’t realize needed popularizing but is nonetheless correct.”
• Last of Navajo ‘code talkers’ dies in New Mexico–“The Navajos’ skill, speed and accuracy under fire in ferocious battles from the Marshall Islands to Iwo Jima is credited with saving thousands of U.S. servicemen’s lives and helping shorten the war.”
• Dave Truesdale Explains It All–“Do I even need to go into the ridiculousness that is Truesdale’s claim that he’s never witnessed even a single incident of racism or sexism? As a white man, would he have even noticed?”
• An Open Letter to Dave Truesdale–“I have to call bullshit on you, buddy. In those 18 months you were working for me as Managing Editor of Black Gate, from early 2001 to 2002, and while we were buying fiction together, we were blatantly, nakedly sexist — and I think you know it.”
• Women Destroy Science Fiction: Texts in Conversation–“It’s always interesting to see a man address a woman’s anger by telling her she doesn’t know how good she has it; it’s even more interesting to see him use dead women’s voices to do so, to use them to tell her she doesn’t know how good she has it, to imagine women disdaining and belittling each other instead of supporting and sympathizing with each other.”
• Encouraging diversity – an editor’s perspective–“I was planning to solicit, but heard back from a few folks that I should expect to quickly run out of PoC poets from whom I could solicit. That did not happen. What happened was that the field grew in response to a welcoming market.”
• Slender Man is a convenient target for our fears. Misogyny and racism aren’t–“But there is no Slender Man street harassment, whereas, we see misogyny driving all kinds of lesser abuses against women every day, even by people who are apparently perfectly sane.”
• How to Search Your Hotel Room for Bed Bugs–“I can’t promise this is foolproof, but knowing how one slightly-paranoid entomologist deals with the threat of bed bugs might be useful to some readers.”
• Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris Are Old News: A Totally Different Atheism Is on the Rise–“But in 2014, Hitchens is dead, and using Dawkins or Harris to make a case for or against atheism is about as relevant as writing about how Nirvana and Public Enemy are going to change pop music forever.”
• The Fight To Take Back Our Health Care System From Junk Science–“‘The campaign, broadly speaking, is focused on two issues: the use of religious beliefs to limit access to health services, and the remedies and cures that aren’t scientifically sound,’ Michael De Dora, who’s leading the new effort, told ThinkProgress.”
• Strange Fruit: Nine Unsung Heroes of Black History, in a Graphic Novel–“Titled after the harrowing song made popular by Billie Holiday and written by a Jewish schoolteacher who witnessed a brutal racial lynching, this graphic anthology spotlights nine unsung heroes of civil rights.”
• Mixing curation and crowdsourcing in skeptic event planning–“I know some event curators might approach new techniques like this with much trepidation – perhaps fearful they would result in a drop in overall quality. However, each of these four ideas have features which limit the danger of that.”
• Seriously, how did you think this would make you look, dude?–“I am still 80% sure you are female”
• How chemistry can save you from the zombie apocalypse–Article on Inquiring Minds #37, Raychelle Burks – Zombie Repellent and Other Awesome Uses for Chemistry
• Tainted Love: FDA Recalls your Ant Mojo–“In May, the FDA recalled an herbal ant erectile dysfunction remedy. Um, a remedy for people with ED, not ants.”
• Secular Group, on Eve of Big Meeting, Fires Top Official Who Elevated Its Profile–“An internal audit, obtained by The New York Times, found that two employees who handled the Secular Coalition’s finances embezzled $78,805, mostly by using the coalition’s credit cards to pay for restaurant meals, travel and plastic surgery.”
• Aboriginal people and alcohol: Not a genetic predisposition–“But when it comes to possible predisposition for alcoholism, ‘what those really boil down to, in almost all scientific analysis, is the social circumstances and social conditions — whether experiences with family, community or at a larger level, in society,’ he said.”
• I’ve gotten a lot of really supportive messages today.–“This is giving me cookies, and I don’t want them if Ami doesn’t get any.”
• On Nicholas Wade and the blurring of boundaries between science and fantasy–“Is it a surprise that Wade just happens to find evolutionary explanations for the most pervasive racist attitudes of the day? Of course not. Because unmoored from data and logical rigor, one can make up an evolutionary explanation for anything.”

I share a lot of links on Twitter and Facebook that I don’t blog about because I don’t have much to add. The reading list is a periodic feature where I share those links with my blog audience too. Of course, you’re still welcome to follow me on Twitter.

Around FtB

• Equality for–“What a fascinating once-in-a-lifetime coincidence. Isn’t life exciting.”
• The Worst Thing Written About Isla Vista Shootings–“Renounce these horrors now. It is a decent thing to do. It will make you healthy and sane again. It will make the world healthy and sane again…”
• Guest post by Leo Igwe: Stopping Witch Burning in Kenya?–“Very often, whenever there is a case of witch killing, the police respond and make some arrests. But afterwards nothing is heard about the case again. The matter just dies away.”
• Guest post by Marwa Berro: Not a tool to be used to bolster anti-feminism–“Those who hold such opinions, Dawkins included, can kindly fuck off.”
• Why are YOU here?–“I can’t help but think that anyone supporting this behaviour and enabling it by attacking those damn PC feminists is not someone with whom I’m willing to cohabitate in any-sized tent.”
• “Who cares, Granny? Pipe down.” “are u a dude or a gurl?”–“It’s really striking when Lewis’ Law — ‘Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism’ — get demonstrated so blatantly.”
• I’m Not Dead! Just Sleeping Like It…–“I think I figured out where my new medications put my anxiety: it transferred it to all of you!”

The Wider Web

• My mistake of silence–“The thing is, in all the years since 2008, I’ve had a stream of women coming to me saying, ‘Me too,’ and sometimes they say, ‘Me too, only it was worse and no one intervened.'”
• The Price of Silence–“We have enough crap to deal with in our professional lives. We work our butts off to bring science to everyone. Who needs to waste time on this? Well, apparently, we do.”
• Why We Must Teach Ethics Along With Programming–“Programming is often portrayed as apolitical–progress in tech is good in and of itself, and should never be impeded. But a post-Aaron Swartz world should know better, according to Brian Knappenberger.”
• Triumph of Reform: Last Public School in New Orleans Closes–“Almost all the fired teachers were African American. They were replaced mostly by white Teach for America recruits. The fired teachers won a lawsuit for wrongful termination and are owed $1 billion.”
• We need to recognize Elliot Rodger for what he was—a terrorist–“When Khan claimed other-worldly motivations and prayed for rewards in Heaven, plenty insisted (and fairly) that no amount of personal twistedness and no motive but the one he gave could explain what he did. Can’t the same now be said of Rodger?”
• Choosing Your Attitude–“This is of course never easy, and is made harder when dealing with something like depression, but it’s a far more concrete action to take than simply trying to choose to be happy or positive.”
• WisCon 38’s Massive Fail (and My Own)–“So, back to this year’s WisCon, I found out at my first panel that the harasser in question was back. I didn’t understand. I knew another woman had been harassed last year by the same man and she had very publicly told her story of reporting the incident.”
• WisCon Wins & Fails–“And several of the authors Lemberg has mentored and championed, who could contribute valuable new voices to WisCon, do not feel safe attending, either. What a trade-off we have made!”
• WisCon and Harassment–“What about the rights of those who have been harassed?”
• Statement on Harassment–“Until we can consult an attorney, we are not going to make public comments on particular people or incidents. We are in the process of arranging that consultation now.”
• To Jaclyn Glenn On Elliot Rodger [YouTube]–“While I don’t have a problem with the spirit of her criticism, I found a lot of inaccuracies in her statements that I felt compelled to respond to.”
• Medium: CENSORED comments on “Alpha Male” Elliot Rodger’s Retribution–“Is he the ventriloquist or is he the dummy? Does it make any difference?”
• Events this weekend mark anniversary of 1921 Tulsa Race Riot–“‘So many people are frequenting businesses located on land that should be historically sacred. This event is for them, so that they are no longer comfortable in ignorance of the massacre that happened in 1921.'”
• The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction: A Detailed Analysis–“What I’m trying to do is make available some facts, as far as I can discern them. What is the situation regarding gender representation in science fiction?”
• “We Have Always Fought”: Essays on Craft, Fiction & Fandom–“We are a small community, all told, but the stories we write, the worlds we create, upstream often to major media channels – to movies, to comics, to TV – and various Comic-Cons have grown so large as to become forces of nature.” [Free download of Kameron Hurley’s new collection.]
• An Atheist and Agnostic Group For Women–“I have watched dozens of my friends silently walk away from organized skepticism, this network, and movement atheism because of the hostile environment they have witnessed.”
• When is a priest not a priest? When he’s molesting a child, diocese says in defense of lawsuit–“‘Well,’ replied the diocese lawyer, ‘you can determine a priest is not on duty when he is molesting a child, for example. … A priest abusing a child is absolutely contrary to the pursuit of his master’s business, to the work of a diocese.'”
• Bad Chart Thursday: Not Misogyny–“Obviously, interpreting my list that way completely ignores men’s footwear choices. It’s almost as if you believe men do not have the right to choose what they wear on their feet.”
• 5 Things I Learned After My Partner Was Sexually Battered at an Atheist Conference–“Men are no less harmed by non-consensual sexual touch than women are.”
• Why Have Female Hurricanes Killed More People Than Male Ones?–“The team argues that splitting the data meant there weren’t enough hurricanes in each subset to provide enough statistical power. But that only means we can’t rule out a connection between gender and damage; we can’t soundly confirm one either.”
• The latest fad in anti-choice law is a lie–“So abortion providers – who almost never transfer patients to hospitals – may not be able to get privileges precisely because abortions are so safe.”
• Bodies of 800 babies, long-dead, found in septic tank at former Irish home for unwed mothers–“They remember how, as one local told the Irish Central, they were ‘usually gone by school age — either adopted or dead.'”