Stuff I like by Benita
I'm awesome.
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My Life As an Undocumented Immigrant - NYTimes.com
This is such a good piece. Sometime today, be sure to read the whole thing.
In April 2008, I was part of a Post team that won a Pulitzer Prize for the paper’s coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings a year earlier. Lolo died a year earlier, so it was Lola who called me the day of the announcement. The first thing she said was, “Anong mangyari kung malaman nang tao?”What will happen if people find out?
I couldn’t say anything. After we got off the phone, I rushed to the bathroom on the fourth floor of the newsroom, sat down on the toilet and cried.”
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A Children's Classic, A 9-Year-Old-Boy And a Fateful Bequest
The story of the man who was just a child when Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon, bequeathed to him the rights to all of her books.
“Mr. Clarke’s family consists of himself and two of his children, Sharmaine, 10, and Albert, nine. They have moved seven times in the past five years, their household a jumble of cardboard boxes and photos taped to the walls. Mr. Clarke wears a gray button-down shirt so fresh from its plastic packaging that it still bears a symmetrical grid of creases. ‘I spend a lot of money on clothes for me and May and Aly,’ he says. ‘We wear them two or three times. When they get all wrinkly and funky, we throw them out.’”
This is a fascinating, and frustrating, piece, originally from the Wall Street Journal, on the man who receives all the royalties from the insanely popular “Goodnight Moon.” He squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalty checks a year, does not have a bank account and currently has about $20 grand in cash to call his own. I can’t even fathom spending checks of more than $500,000 in one year! I wonder what the author would think about her decision to leave everything to the then-9-year-old boy.
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The Neverending Nightmare of Amanda Knox | Rolling Stone Culture
This is a fascinating weekend read from Rolling Stone (yeah, I was surprised, too).
Knox had several disadvantages from the start: She was American and, despite majoring in Italian at the University of Washington, could barely speak the language. Her poor comprehension may have contributed to her second problem: her inability to realize that she was, from the first day of the investigation, suspected of murder. Most damaging, however, was her obstinate faith in the kindness of strangers.
“People talk about her being a manipulative mastermind. If she is, she’s a fucking idiotic one. If you’re a mastermind and you commit this murder, you leave the country. She walked into the police station. She just basically fucking skipped into the police station.”
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Murder by Text | Culture | Vanity Fair
This is really sad, disturbing and enthralling at the same time. It’s the story of a teen in British Columbia who was bullied and ends up murdered. Her killers left an online trail.
“Everyone knows teens live with abandon online—exposing their secrets, likes, dislikes, sexual preferences, home addresses, phone numbers, and so on—in ways their parents can’t understand. But it’s not just this generation’s sense of privacy that’s eroding. It’s their sense of permanence. They act as though the words they write and pictures they post and texts they send vanish into the ether. But in fact they’re leaving a running transcript behind, a digital trail of their hopes, their anxieties, and, in the case of at least one small Canadian town, even their crimes.”
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From Fashion to Housewares, Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut? | Vanity Fair
Look at people on the street and in malls—jeans and sneakers remain the standard uniform for all ages, as they were in 2002, 1992, and 1982. Look through a current fashion or architecture magazine or listen to 10 random new pop songs; if you didn’t already know they were all things from the 2010s, I guarantee you couldn’t tell me with certainty they weren’t from the 2000s or 1990s or 1980s or even earlier. (The first time I heard a Josh Ritter song a few years ago, I actually thought it was Bob Dylan.) In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.
Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.
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A journalist’s lessons from two years working for Patch, AOL’s hyperlocal web experiment. Editors started with autonomy and generous budgets, but they were always understaffed and found little support from sales teams:
In addition to the editorial and volunteer work, we fought to get our sites noticed—on and off the clock. The marketing dollars that we were given, if any, usually came with the understanding that we would be manning booths at community events, or taking the lead in finding sponsorship opportunities, like supporting the local hayride or Little League team.
It seemed I could control every aspect of my site’s being, but making it sustainable was out of my grasp. And for me, it was aggravating to know that my site was not profitable.
“The Constant Gardener.” — Sean Roach, Columbia Journalism Review
See also: “The Human Blog.” — Emily Nussbaum, New York magazine, Oct. 1, 2006
This is really good, and especially interesting to me because in the last couple years, many former co-workers and friends have taken jobs with Patch. It was hailed as the next great thing in journalism and appeared to have an unlimited source of cash. But I also kept hearing horror stories of overworked employees and high turnover.
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Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Magazine - The Atlantic
This is well worth reading. Despite the head, it doesn’t outright blame Facebook/social media, but discusses the increase in loneliness as related to technology. It’s interesting stuff.
“But it is clear that social interaction matters. Loneliness and being alone are not the same thing, but both are on the rise. We meet fewer people. We gather less. And when we gather, our bonds are less meaningful and less easy. The decrease in confidants—that is, in quality social connections—has been dramatic over the past 25 years. In one survey, the mean size of networks of personal confidants decreased from 2.94 people in 1985 to 2.08 in 2004. Similarly, in 1985, only 10 percent of Americans said they had no one with whom to discuss important matters, and 15 percent said they had only one such good friend. By 2004, 25 percent had nobody to talk to, and 20 percent had only one confidant.”
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The Sharp, Sudden Decline of America's Middle Class | Culture News | Rolling Stone
This is well-written, heartbreaking and worth taking the time to read.
“Janis Adkins hadn’t been back in Santa Barbara long before she needed to apply for government assistance. She had never asked for aid before. At the California Department of Social Services, she filled out the form for emergency food stamps.
“I didn’t wear my best clothes, but I wore a light blouse and jeans, and I guess I was just a little too dressed up,” she recalls. “Because the woman just looked at me and said, ‘Are you in a crisis? Your application says you’re in a crisis.’ I said, ‘I’m living in a van and I don’t have a job. I have a little bit of money, but it’s going to go fast.’ The woman said, ‘You have $500. You’re not in a crisis if you have $500.’ She said anything more than $50 was too much.”
If Adkins had filled her tank with gas, done her laundry, eaten a meal, and paid her car insurance and phone bills, it would have used up half of everything she had. But emergency food stamps, she was told, are not for imminent emergencies; they’re for emergencies already in progress. You can’t get them if you can make it through the next week – you have to be down to the last few meals you can afford.
“The money’s for my phone, it’s for gas, it’s for my bills,” Adkins said.
“Why are you in a crisis,” the woman asked, “when you have a phone bill?”
“I need the phone so I can get a job. You can’t look for a job without a phone.”
“Why do you have bills?” the woman asked. “I thought you didn’t have a place to live.”
“I live in my van,” Adkins said. “I have insurance.”
“You have a 2007 van,” the woman said. “I think you need to sell that.”
“Please, I need a break,” Adkins said. “I need some help. I need to take a shower.”
“Why didn’t you have a shower?”
“I live in a van.”
The woman told Adkins to come back when she really needed help.”
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Every woman should travel alone - Salon.com
This is so good. It makes me want to go on a months-long road trip like the author. However, I’m quite comfortable wandering new cities on my own and have done it often, not even close to the same thing as the author did but I still think a lot of people don’t think they are even capable of doing the small things alone, like eating dinner at a restaurant or seeing a movie.
“Yes, I was scared at times, but I had also been scared sitting on my futon watching “The Real World.” (Scared of the phone, scared of the future, scared of what people said about me.) The far more terrifying fate, as I saw it, was that I would fail to become the person I wanted to be. I still wasn’t sure what that was yet. I spent much of those five months feeling like a kite dangling on a string. Was I going to head to grad school? Write for television? Open my own school? My mind filled with clouds. But my God, it was fun. It was boring, too. I took eight-hour hikes and let my mind wander, or sang the “Xanadu” soundtrack for the 18 billionth time.
So I had a lot to learn about taking care of myself, but I was on my way. In the years since, I feel a jolt of excitement whenever I hear about a woman traveling alone, whether she’s a single woman surfing in Costa Rica or a married journalist dropping into a war zone or a mother going to the wilds of Africa, discovering what quiet sounds like when it unfolds around her. Such exotic forays are out of reach for many people – including me, for most of my life. But I also think you can take a day hike by yourself, you can travel to the lake by yourself. And what you find is a reassurance that you can stand on your own in the world.”
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A look at Degrassi, 25 years after resonating with teens:
Degrassi ’s grassroots approach to social class served as a near-invisible narrative strategy, but it anticipated the show’s most memorable legacy: its unflinching, plain-spoken treatment of pregnancy, suicide, interracial dating (a big deal in 1987), and HIV/AIDS. What’s more, Degrassi didn’t treat its characters with benevolence. Spike’s pregnancy at age fourteen — the result of a clumsy first-time sexual encounter with Shane, a baby-faced ninth-grader — didn’t end with a convenient miscarriage. Her character spent the remainder of the series as a struggling single parent. Later that season, Shane experimented with LSD, fell off a bridge, and suffered permanent brain damage. Wheels, one of the most popular characters, lost his parents to a drunk driver, and later experienced a breakdown that culminated in a drunk driving incident that killed a child, blinded his friend Lucy, and landed him in prison. In the early years of HIV/AIDS, Dwayne contracted the virus after having unprotected sex with his girlfriend (a thoughtful plot choice in an era when many thought of it as a ‘gay disease’). In a 1999 cast reunion on the CBC talk show Jonovision, actor Darrin Brown, who played Dwayne, was asked where his character would be now. ‘Dwayne would probably be dead,’ he replied.
The perks of close proximity to Canada: I used to watch the original Degrassi after school on CBC, along with Jonovision. Degrassi was SO good.
I like a lot of stuff, including but not limited to words, sarcasm, news, pop culture, bright colors, music, design, baking, books, Detroit, DIY.
