The Reading List, 10/11/2015

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.

  • “Bistline wrote that FLDS bishop Lyle Jeffs would use ‘the FLDS Church’s voicemail system to alert families that the harvest would begin.’ A 15-year-old girl wrote that she worked the farm for three years, beginning when she was 10. She testified she was not paid for any of her work.” Read more.
  • “Atheism can motivate terrible crimes, just like religion can. This is a thing we have to get used to.  Atheists are so used to being exceptional, to being smarter and less criminal than other Americans, that the fact that someone was an atheist and did a bad thing seems to be exceedingly difficult for us to understand.” Read more.
  • “The general plot is the playwright’s own, but his characters are the historical figures I unearthed, and snippets of the dialogue they speak appear in the archival evidence presented in my book.” Read more.
  • “Bad reviews of businesses have typically gone viral because those businesses have acted in discriminatory or otherwise unfair ways, but people have gone viral for things as innocuous (and irrelevant to normal people who have shit to do besides stalking people they don’t like) as speaking at a feminist rally, being a bad date, or simply existing.” Read more.
  • “Skepticon strives to create a yearly event that is accessible for as many attendees as possible. This year, we’re hoping to take that mission a step further” Read more.
  • “Charamsa, flanked by his Catalan boyfriend Eduardo and wearing his priest’s collar, told a news conference in Rome he had been compelled to speak out against what he said was the hypocrisy and paranoia that shapes the Church’s attitude to sexual minorities.” Read more.

  • “Outside of the work I’m doing for my individual clients, or clients completely outside the comics industry, I really want nothing more to do with mainstream comics. As the old saying goes, I really have no more fucks to give.” Read more.
  • “Now, Australia’s homicide rate was already declining before the NFA was implemented — so you can’t attribute all of the drops to the new laws. But there’s good reason to believe the NFA, especially the buyback provisions, mattered a great deal in contributing to those declines.” Read more.
  • “The pro-life movement is an incredibly powerful grass-roots group. If they made strong welfare for single parents a priority, the GOP – which depends on pro-lifers to get elected – would have no choice but to support it – or at least, to stop opposing it.” Read more.
  • “In terms of alcohol content, the distinction is silly these days, since you can buy craft beers like Boatswain Double IPA (8.4% alcohol) for $2.29 at Trader Joe’s. Unless those questions were retained as a code for race and socioeconomic status…” Read more.
  • “And there’s yet another problem. By honoring breakthroughs, award committees reinforce the misconception that science is all about discoveries, when the cornerstone of science is replication and corroboration of results, which ensure that a finding is real and not a false lead.” Read more.
  • “District Management Council CEO John J-H Kim, a Harvard Business School graduate, worked for McKinsey and Company as a consultant before becoming the founding CEO of the for-profit ‘school management company’ Chancellor Beacon Academies—a fact notably absent from his LinkedIn page, perhaps for good reason.” Read more.
  • “I’m suddenly aware that I’m the only black person in the room. Stunned, I feel the hot cloak of ‘angry black woman’ descending. But I don’t pounce, I keep thinking, I’m not aggressive, I’m not. I hate confrontation. I’m often frustrated with myself for being too nice. The air gets smaller, I’m angry and black, black angry and black black black.” Read more.
  • “It’s unlikely that these scattered groups randomly happen to share more vulnerability genes for addiction than any other similarly dispersed people. But what they clearly do have in common is an ongoing multi-generational experience of trauma.” Read more.
  • “What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals.” Read more.
  • “I get a lot of flack for pointing out that Amazon is used as a ‘marketplace’ by authors and assumed to be a neutral marketplace by many (not all, lots of smart people out there). But it isn’t a neutral marketplace.” Read more.
  • “The mother of the Oregon mass murderer stockpiled firearms because she feared stricter gun laws — and shopped around for a shooting range that would let her and her son fire away without supervision, the Daily News has learned.” Read more.
  • “Look, I’ma need some of y’all to not use Black Lives Matter to sell your shit. Your beer, your apples, your what the fuck ever.” Read more.
  • “It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money.” Read more.
  • “It may seem hard to imagine what could change this gloomy picture – but, despite atheism’s public image as a male-dominated and too-often obliviously sexist community, atheists are getting active in the fight to preserve women’s reproductive choice.” Read more.
  • “One thing I found striking about this meeting is that my female colleague and I had very different personalities: she’s quiet and tentative, I’m loud and assertive. Neither one did either of us any good. She’d get talked over and ignored, and I’d get interrupted and shut down.” Read more.
  • “Since I, too, care dearly about the state of everyone else’s souls, I’ve used my experiences to compile a list of the best things to do to get atheists to convert to your religion, for those who may not be assertive enough in their spirituality to do so.” Read more.
  • Every Nerd Box, no matter the diversity of its other contents, has one item in common: the illusion of freedom.Read more.

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The Reading List, 10/11/2015
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