Reading List: The Call Is Coming From Inside The Founding Team.
Sweethearts! You’ve done it, you’ve made it to Friday, and you’ve made it to nearly the end of the August 2019! Now, if you’re in a city currently experiencing a heatwave which, I mean of course you are (#globalwarming,) the National Health Service in Britain has some tips to help you stay cool and healthy. How do I, a majorly heat-averse Canadian, deal with the rising temps? That would be cold baths at night and keeping two lavender-scented flax pillows in the freezer, one to use as an eye pillow and one for the back of my neck. And witchcraft. Don’t forget the witchcraft.
And trust me as someone who recently welcomed a British-lord named pebble into this world: DRINK LOTS OF WATER. Do. It.
TO THE CONTENT!
Elizabeth Dwoskin and Tony Romm, Inside Chris Hughes’s campaign to break up Facebook, the tech ‘monopoly’ he helped create (The Washington Post) - When these two reporters dive deep into how a co-founder of Facebook has turned into a crucial driver of calls to regulate the social media platform, you read the damned piece. Tony is quite possibly the best tech policy reporter out there, and his work covering Facebook in Washington is history-defining. And Elizabeth is legendary. So read this now.
Kera Bolonik, The Most Gullible Man in Cambridge (The Cut) - I haven’t finished this one yet, and the rest of the internet has already had a field day parsing the intricacies of this tale of a Harvard professor, an affair, a pregnancy, extortion, black mail, and an unfortunate incident with a Zipcar. But WOOF, it’s a soap opera-resembling doozy. I feel so much empathy for the Professor’s ex-wife.
Charles Bethea, A Father, a Daughter, and the Attempt to Change the Census (The New Yorker) - I mentioned this briefly when the story first came out, but the reason we will not have a citizenship question on the census is because of the work of a daughter to expose the gerrymandering motivations of her father, a Republican redistricting expert. This piece is fascinating.
Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response - I’ve studied genocides throughout my adulthood, a lifelong quest to try and understand how humans can bring both beauty and art and philosophy into the world, while also using politics and bureaucracy and mass media to attempt to eliminate whole peoples from our planet. I recently discovered that I know little-to-nothing about the Armenians genocides, and was referred to this book by Friend of the Missive Greg K. I’m about halfway through at this point, and am saddened and horrified at how little I knew of this period in history, a time in which millions of Armenians were murdered, maimed or displaced through a process Hitler referenced in regards to his planned invasion of Poland and extermination of its people. And I’m reminded once again that this playbook of stoking hatred, dehumanizing an “other”, using violent language to demonize, and then channeling national hate and rage into a systemic killing program carried out by one group on another… is history that repeats itself.
Welp. You’ve got this, folks. Stay cool, stay hydrated, and be kind to each other, mmmkay?
Xoxo Amy