Tuesday Link Roundup

Hello, I am a grown woman who has slept with the bathroom light on ever since I started watching “The Handmaid’s Tale.” There’s certainly no shortage of thinkpieces about this show, and true to form I am now working my way through every single one of them. Here are two I think you should read: Soraya McDonald, “In ‘Handmaid’s Tale,’ a postracial, patriarchal hellscape”; Hännah Ettinger, “I Grew Up In A Fundamentalist Cult — ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Was My Reality”

Sam Wallman on the attack on minimum wage and workers’ rights: “The thing to keep in mind is that none of these protections or safety nets appeared out of thin air . . . Not one of our conditions was given over voluntarily. We have these rights because we imagined that they could exist, and we had the patience and clarity to organise toward them.” (If you don’t read The Nib every single day, what are you even doing with your life?)

Climate marchers; the Climate Denier Caucus; Nathalie Baptiste on how Trump’s attack on environmental protections will harm people of color the most.

“Nationally, Hispanic, black and Asian women make up less than 5 percent of newsroom personnel at traditional print and online news publications, according to 2016 data from the American Society of News Editors.”

On undocumented victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, who often do not report because they fear detention and deportation.

Bich Minh Nguyen, American Stories Are Refugee Stories:

The message to refugees and immigrants is a demand for value: prove that you belong here, prove that you have any right to exist here. And while you’re doing so, stay quiet and don’t make a fuss. If refugees are lauded it’s for what they might accomplish: look at those who became doctors, scientists, inventors. The good refugee is invariably described as gracious, which is to say grateful.

ooh, pretty

I greatly enjoyed this profile of Kumail Nanjiani.

Sarah Kurchak on the challenges of having relatively tiny feet:

My collection of kids’ shoes also started to effect the way that people perceived me, leading to all sorts of assumptions about my style and my maturity. In casual conversation, acquaintances would joke about my baby shoes. I once ended up in a conversation with a stranger who told me that she thought that overly rounded toes “infantilized women.” She didn’t appear to be referring to my shoes in particular, but as I looked down at the pair of children’s flats that I’d told myself looked “just like real shoes” and realized that their toes were more blunt than those of the woman I was talking to, I started to worry that my attempts to look my age were actually having the opposite effect. In one particularly mortifying interaction, a prospective employer made a sneering reference to my choice of footwear during an interview. I didn’t get the job.

Betty Ann Adam was one of approximately 20,000 Indigenous children removed from their families as part of Canada’s Sixties Scoop. Here she recalls what happened to her and her family (with whom she has since reunited).

Jia Tolentino on Samantha Bee’s Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner:

“Your job has never been harder,” she had said, addressing journalists at the beginning of the show. “You expose injustice against the weak, and you continue to fact-check the President as if he might someday get embarrassed. Tonight is for you.”

At that line, I felt a little bit embarrassed myself. One of the most demoralizing things about Trump’s election was the way it immediately called into question the usefulness of even the strongest and most dedicated reporting. He was a sexual harasser, an alleged assaulter, a walking exemplar of conflicts of interest, a man who lied about giving to charity, a man whose business history was checkered by racism and failure and fraud. We elected him anyway. It’s true that journalism exposes injustice against the weak, as Bee said, but, at the moment, a good portion of the country seems to favor injustice against the weak.

Hasan Minhaj’s Actual White House Correspondents’ Dinner monologue

A History of Sequins!

“Let’s just do it and be legends, man.”

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