Riley's Farm is a staple of Los Angeles overnight school trips (my daughter visited last year with her elementary school); it's an apple farm with a pick-your-own apples sideline that branched out into civil war re-enactments, with some students staying overnight in tents. Read the rest
Senator Ron Wyden has publicly denounced both Apple and Google for hosting mobile apps that connect to Absher, a Saudi government service designed to allow Saudi men to track their spouses and employees' whereabouts at all times. Read the rest
Malawi's "barefoot engineers" are a group of eight local women who received solar engineering training in the Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India and returned home to install solar systems for poor and/or rural women. Read the rest
During the 1930s, the WPA sponsored horseback librarians -- all women -- to visit rural Americans, bringing them books; the librarians were only allowed to make deliveries in counties that had existing libraries, so schools and other institutions donated materials to establish libraries that would make their counties eligible. Read the rest
Author Carol Emshwiller has died at the age of 97, after a long and distinguished career in science fiction, fantasy and other genres. Read the rest
Science fiction scholar Lisa Yaszek's recent book The Future Is Female! 25 Classic Science Fiction Stories by Women, from Pulp Pioneers to Ursula K. Le Guin, is a secret history of women in science fiction, reframing the story of exclusion ("women weren't welcome in early sf writing circles") as one of erasure ("women made vital contributions to early science fiction, and these were systematically expunged from the record when the first wave of historical sf anthologies were published, as part of a backlash against first-wave feminism"). Read the rest
Anti-abortion extremists are among the most violent domestic terrorists in America, having murdered and attempted to murder dozens of people using firearms, firebombs and traditional explosives. Read the rest
A couple of days ago Teen Vogue published an article about "resistance, rebellion, and revolution" (see Cory's post about it). Today, Teen Vogue has another excellent article along the same lines. It's written by Kim Kelly and is called General Strikes, Explained. With the Trump Shutdown threatening to disrupt functioning society, it's a good time to read this.
A general strike is a labor action in which a significant amount of workers from a number of different industries who comprise a majority of the total labor force within a particular city, region, or country come together to take collective action. Organized strikes are generally called by labor union leadership, but they impact more than just those in the union. For example, imagine the scenario if thousands in your town or city — no matter what their job was or whether or not they were in a union — got together and decided to go on strike to protest police brutality, as happened in Oakland, California, in 2011, after Iraq veteran Scott Olsen was critically wounded by local police when they stormed the Occupy Oakland encampment. The community declared a daylong general strike that ultimately saw thousands of people shut down the Port of Oakland (which was more of a symbolic protest, but still it got the job done).
Teen Vogue continues its excellent tradition of radical reporting with Lucy Diavolo's explainer on the definitions and relative merits and demerits of "resistance," "rebellion" and "revolution." Read the rest
After marketing executive Clementine Crawford published an essay about being banned from eating at the bar at her favorite New York restaurant, Nello (a notorious ripoff joint), because the owner (already notorious for labor abuses) was "cracking down on escorts" and had decreed that only men would be permitted to dine at the bar, The Cut tried to get a comment on it from Balan, whose employees repeatedly hung up on them. Read the rest
As EFF's Eva Galperin notes, Nicole Kobie's story about resisting surveillance by taping over your webcam "proves that once more, the best and most straightforward tech reporting is being done by Teen Vogue." Read the rest
In Saudi Arabia, women can only get a divorce after proving abuse in court, but men can simply file -- in secret -- for a divorce from their wives, and sometimes, they don't even tell their wives, continuing to live with them so they don't have to pay alimony, fraudulently using power of attorney to access their funds, etc. Read the rest
Last week, incoming Senator Kyrsten Sinema [D-AZ] was sworn in by Mike Pence, in his aspect as President of the Senate, choosing to take her oath on a book containing both the Constitutions of the United States of America and Arizona, a tome repeating the framers' prohibition on the US government's establishment a state religion or discrimination on the basis of faith or lack thereof. Read the rest
Last week, Kansas state senators Dinah Sykes and Barbara Bollier and state representative Stephanie Clayton announced they were no longer going to serve as Republicans and would instead serve as Democrats; they were joined by former state rep Joy Koesten who served as a Republican until getting primaried by a far-right candidate who will take her seat in 2019. Read the rest
Laurie Penny (previously) got sent on the 2018 CoinsBank Blockchain Cruise -- a four-day cruise filled with "starry-eyed techno-utopians and sketchy-ass crypto-grifters" who solved the fact that there almost no women signed up using the "free market": they paid teen sex workers from Ukraine to ship out with them. Read the rest
The Girlfriend Zone is the place that women find themselves repeatedly and insufferably placed into by their male platonic friends, who can't or won't understand that the relationship is and will remain platonic: Ann: "So are you hanging out with Ben after class today?" Leslie: "No, he girlfriend zoned me hard. Hes a cool guy, but I can't hang out with him for more than 10 minutes without him making a pass at me." (via Seanan McGuire) Read the rest
At the age of 15, Tavi Gevinson was the prodigy founder of Rookie, a latter-day second-coming of Sassy Magazine -- a smart, funny, critical teen magazine that presaged the odd world we live in now, when magazines like Teen Vogue have become highly politicized. Read the rest
