Link Roundup: Monday, May 22nd

So I took a few days off from rounding up links. To recap last week, WHICH CERTAINLY WAS A WEEK:

- Eight million BREAKING NEWS BOMBSHELLS in rapid succession - That one Atlantic essay; maybe you heard something about it? - Male rompers - Who cares what happened over the weekend? I am writing this on Friday night

Welcome back, friends! Let’s all hold our hearts and do this thing. First, I absolutely loved this piece by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan about how the Bethnal Green Asylum became a library (and then a bomb shelter/library, and then just a library again):

. . . throughout the war, this little library offered a respite from fear, an education, and beauty.

Can you imagine celebrating our libraries as we do our battalions? What if world leaders put their egos in the number of libraries their countries boasted? Perhaps we should start by being grateful for those libraries we do have. There was almost no bomb-shelter library. If the war government had decided that books were too frivolous, if Carnegie had not found the money, if the residents of Tower Hamlets had refused to pay their taxes, if a few Victorians hadn’t wanted to shunt the poor from the pubs, then the residents of Bethnal Green would’ve had no books to unfold as they crouched underground.

EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS SHOW ALREADY MAKES ME SO EMOTIONAL WHO IS GOING TO LET ME RECAP IT

Yeeeees, very baffling

“Betsy DeVos does not know anything about public education except that she doesn’t believe in it as a concept.”

Clint Smith on the young Black activists of Take ’Em Down NOLA:

Moore describes it as “a black-led, multiracial, intergenerational coalition,” with a strong emphasis on intersectional awareness. He reminds me the organization wouldn’t exist without Kinlaw and other women who have been on the frontlines of this work. “Even our elders, as an intergenerational coalition, I watch get somewhat of an education on this,” he says. “[Men] gotta learn how to step back, right? Because that’s what damaged a lot of the movements in the past.”

Take ’Em Down NOLA was birthed out of a recognition that the Confederate statues were the physical manifestation of an ahistorical worldview, one which valorized and apologized for the very champions of slavery.

The estate of Edward Albee has refused to allow a theatre company in Portland, Oregon to cast a Black actor as Nick. (Related: Did you know the estate of Tennessee Williams refused to allow East West Players to produce The Glass Menagerie because it would have had an Asian American cast?)

Yep, I have another Handmaid’s Tale thinkpiece for you, because it is very smart:

Much of the conversation around The Handmaid’s Tale has become a feminist war cry, but there is something disconcerting about this sort of groupthink. It is easy to indict men like Commander Fred Waterford or the brutality of those that make up Gilead’s police force. It’s easy to rest the ills of Gilead and the real-world dynamics it clearly reflects solely on conservatism. It is easy to treat Serena Joy and Aunt Lydia as warped mirror images of conservative women. But it isn’t primarily conservatism that creates women like this. It’s a cultural obsession with whiteness that has plagued this country since its beginnings — particularly the brands of white womanhood that Serena Joy and Aunt Lydia represent. It’s the disease whose name dare not be spoken even within the series, which means The Handmaid’s Tale’s commentary on it can only go so far . . . This is the question that haunts the otherwise incisive series: How can The Handmaid’s Tale indict the world it’s created, and the real one it reflects, if the spectre of white womanhood isn’t fully critiqued?

tag urself, I’m Stanky Bean

This is both horrifying and on-point.

“This week, I celebrated twenty-five years without a drink.”

Porochista Khakpour wrote this for us last week and IT IS SO DANG GOOD: How to Write Iranian-America, or: The Last Essay

Despite melting permafrost, turns out the Svalbard seed vault is probably fine.

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