Reading List #34 (Patreon)

1) How Linguists Are Using Urban Dictionary 11/13/19 (Christine Rho) 

The internet affects a lot of things and language is no different. Check out how internet slang is making its historic mark on the English language. 

Read Length: Short

2) The 60s Tore My Family Apart 11/14/19 (Mike Wise)

I liked this essay because it provided an honest and raw perspective on being a child of indulgent parents in the 60s, and described how many people's traditional view of the decade has been painted by revisionist, LSD lens colored fantasies. 

I don’t know when my parents began using, how much or what, exactly, they took. And it wasn’t just their own detours from reality that scared the hell out of me and my sister. In San Jose, around 1969, anybody could be high as a kite.

Read Length: Medium

3) Are You A Seg Academy Alum  Too? Lets Talk (Ellen Anne Fentress)

In a few Intelexual Media posts I've discussed segregation academies, so it was interesting to come across this essay by a woman who attended such schools in the 70s. 

Back then, I felt bad about my new school’s obvious purpose. I silently fretted I’d be asked, point-blank, by someone who was black what school I attended. I cringed at the insult my answer represented. I needn’t have worried over a conversation so unlikely; despite living in the Mississippi Delta — an area with the highest proportion of black residents of any region of the country — I surreally never actually knew one black teen in my town of 23,000. That was an immediate byproduct of academy schooling, which limited my stock of life experiences to draw from as an adult.

The author of this essay just launched "The Academy Studies", which will publish more testimonies to expose how these schools perpetuated racism. It's hard for me to read essays like this because while Ellen Fentress may see the error in segregation academies now, these schools served their purpose by indoctrinating hundreds of thousands of white southerners (and later their children when they passed along those values). It's the kind of shit we shouldn't ignore in politics today but do. 

Read Length: Medium

4) Her Purchases Are Real. The Reviews Are Fake 11/20/19 (Nicole Nguyen)

This jaw-dropping article made me question every Amazon review I've ever seen. Shop with caution. 

Amazon reported that in 2018, customers spent $160 billion on items from third-party sellers — 58% of all sales on the site. More than 1 million sellers joined Amazon marketplaces around the world that year, according to e-commerce data firm Marketplace Pulse. In this year’s shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote: “Third-party sellers are kicking our first party butt. Badly.”

With thousands of new sellers signing up every day, there is a lot of competition — much of which comes from China. A Wall Street Journal story found that in 2018, a new product from China was uploaded every 1/50th of a second.

This information made me think about China's internment camps for Muslims and how their power grows unchecked because of their ability to provide so many goods online. As we all grow more dependent on Amazon, this will have serious effects on the growing tensions between the American and Chinese economies. What kind of repercussions will this have worldwide? 

Read Length: Medium

5) Will Worship For Likes: Is Churchome Redefining Christianity (Jennifer Swann) When you combine our meme-obsessed and celebrity-crazed culture with capitalism, Christianity, and millennial interest in inclusivity and social justice you get the church described in this article. Judge for yourself, but the church's pastor is pretty shady. 

Yet, in 2005, before he was Instafamous and buds with Bieber, Judah openly preached his unfiltered views. According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which profiled Smith’s growing popularity that year, he said he targeted followers ages 12 to 19 to “get them young” and told one such group that “President Bush’s Supreme Court nominations would be essential to determining ‘whether or not we will continue to murder innocent lives in the womb of our women.’” The article also summarized his views on homosexuality: “[It’s] a sin, the same as murder, rape, or living with your girlfriend.”

Read Length: Medium

6) How America’s Elites Lost Their Grip (11/21/19) Anand Giridharadas) What a succulent essay. This piece hinges on the shift of the Overton Window-- or the range of policies socially acceptable to the public. The shenanigans of the upper class have only been mounting in surreal and disgusting displays of privilege, and Giridharadas explains how such events have served to make more Americans radical thinkers (or at least open to more radical discourse). 

But, politics can be abstract; it can be complicated; people are busy living. Politics often benefits from scandal, from prominent misbehavior, from a dramatization of the discourse. And this was what was so remarkable about 2019: because of the coming election in these populist times, it was already a year potentially full of trouble for the plutocrats—or plutes, as I like to call them (to save space and, thus, paper and, therefore, trees). But, almost as if to assist the cause, the plutes seemed this year to put on an extended exhibit of performance art whose plain, if unstated, thesis is that plutocracy is maybe a bad idea.

This piece has numerous examples of upper-class bullshit that makes me angry, but it also gives me a bit of hope that we begin redefining what "normal" is. Poverty, plutocracy, elite cruelty-- none of that has to be normal.  

Read Length: Medium

7) GoFundMe Nation (11/19/19) Rachel MonroeSpeaking of poverty, using GoFundMe for healthcare and funeral expenses shouldn't be normal-- but because we live in a world of unmitigated cruelty, it is. GoFundMe both tragically highlights the beauty of humanity (over 5 billion dollars has been given through the site) and corporate greed (1 in 3 campaigns are for medical expenses). But plenty of people pour their hearts out on GoFundMe and lay bare their shame, fears, and concerns-- in exchange for little or no donations. This article explained how the most popular campaigns involve a well-off person stumbling upon a deserving "other" and helping them raise money. This has, of course, raised issues of respectability, class, race, and poverty. And what about hero complexes?

Not long after his 18th birthday, Chauncey had news for Matt: his girlfriend was pregnant. He was thrilled, but Matt didn't share his excitement. "I tried to influence their lives, but that culture it's just something else... It's hard to come up against that influence-- not finishing school, having children out of wedlock." 

Read Length: Long

8) I Just Translated '1984' Into Russian (I'm Gasping For Air) 11/26/19 Leonid Bershidsky1984 came out in 1949 and was banned in any language in Russia until 1988. Orwell's writing made him a non-person in Russia, and this essay discusses past translations of 1984 and how Russian people snuck to read the book (though they didn't have the best translations).

I first learned of the existence of “1984” when I was 11 or 12 years old. Digging around in a closet in our Moscow apartment, I stumbled upon a sheaf of yellowed Possev magazines, full of stories of brave dissidents and Communist oppression. My scandalized mother discovered me sitting on the floor engrossed in the forbidden literature and took the magazines away lest I brag about it at school. But I’d already seen the list of books the publishing house was selling — “1984” was on it — and memorized the titles so I could ask around for the unofficial bootleg copies known as samizdat.

The translators’ names were, according to the cover, V. Andreev and N. Vitov. Both are pseudonyms, one of a White Russian emigre professor, the other of a former Nazi collaborator. Their product doesn’t read well today, whether or not you're familiar with the original. It doesn’t appear that the translators had a good enough command either of English idiom or of proper literary Russian. The writing is stilted. “Big Brother is watching you,” is rendered as “Starshy brat okhranyayet tebya,” or “Big Brother is guarding you.”

I forgot about the tough and interesting process of translating popular books, so you may want to read this article: Harry Potter and The Translator's Nightmare 

Read Length: Long

9) That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It (11/25/19) Darren Linvile and Patrick Warren

We live in a fucking dystopian novel and I'm reminded of this damned near every day. Long before I read this article, I have been a bit paranoid about fake social media accounts. It's one thing to want to thoroughly vet every page that goes weirdly viral (with very few media and a recent sign-up date). But when you get hundreds to sometimes thousands of notifications a day, it's easy to interact with a troll account that aroused your anger or interest because they blend in with the thousands of real people on your timeline. In this article, the authors lay out how the Russian Internet Research Agency, though indicted by Robert Mueller and publicly dragged, is still operating but under a different program. These troll accounts have two primary goals in mind: gaining large audiences with heartwarming and inspirational messages and then using those audiences to "spread messages promoting division, distrust, and doubt."

Professional trolls are good at their job. They have studied us. They understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes. They know what pressure points to push and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. The professionals know you catch more flies with honey. They don’t go to social media looking for a fight; they go looking for new best friends. And they have found them.

It's important to keep in mind that these trolls aren't just veneers of conservative Americans. They're the dramatic and divisive liberals on your timeline as well. 

This tweet didn’t seek to anger conservative Christians or to provoke Trump supporters. She wasn’t even talking to them. Melanie’s 20,000 followers, painstakingly built, weren’t from #MAGA America (Russia has other accounts targeting them). Rather, Melanie’s audience was made up of educated, urban, left-wing Americans harboring a touch of self-righteousness. She wasn’t selling her audience a candidate or a position — she was selling an emotion. Melanie was selling disgust. The Russians know that, in political warfare, disgust is a more powerful tool than anger. Anger drives people to the polls; disgust drives countries apart.

As the authors point out, this horrifying social media battle tactic is not just about Trump, or even conservative racists (though those are real issues). The IRA existed before Trump because the goal is to exploit monumental divisions that we have rarely talked about honestly in the past, along with creating new ones. This is fucking scary and I hope to address misinformation and trolls in a more substantial post. Social Media is the new frontier of wars between countries. We've always had espionage, propaganda, and enemy recruitment but this is the digital version.

Read Length: Medium