HELLO and welcome to the 151st installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about foodies! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
You Can Look It Up: The Wikipedia Story, by Walter Isaacson for The Daily Beast, August 2014
Have you ever wanted to know the whole entire complete history of Wikipedia? WELL NOW YOU CAN.
Pink Collar, by Jennifer Pan for Jacobin, June 2014
Women only represent 38% of newsroom journalists, but the PR industry is over 85% female. In this piece, Pan looks at “the palpable distaste for PR practitioners that continues to swell — spearheaded by the very same members of the media with whom publicists theoretically enjoy a symbiotic relationship — requires, then, a deeper look at how gendered assumptions about work continue to shape our contemporary notions of creative labor under capitalism.”
Found Money, by Alice Gregory for The New Yorker, May 2014
About the rise of reality TV shows about auctions. This writer is really good, I keep seeing her stuff everywhere.
“Sitting here, in this echoing vault of capitalism, I am less confused about the price of a good than I’ve ever been. And while I’m reluctant to glorify the dignity of manual labor, romanticize agrarian enterprise, or oversimplify a dense matrix of activity, the whole operation seems refreshingly straightforward. It makes me wonder whether the much-maligned, all-purpose nostalgia that’s rampant among city-dwelling young adults — the pickles, the flannel, the rye-based cocktails — is really a kind of mass intellectual crisis: an allergy to economic abstraction.”
Lessons From A “Local Food” Scam Artist, by Alison Kinney for narrative.ly, September 2014
On selling not-local produce at a “local” farm stand on the side of the road in New Jersey, and everything she learned about the wonders of fruits and vegetables and farmers and the unpleasantries of foodies from the city.
America’s Bathrooms Are A Total Failure, by Rick Paulas for The Pacific Standard, October 2014
There is a contest for the best bathroom but also all of our bathrooms are horrible. Now you know.
Carless Cities, by Owe Carter for Confused.com, September 2014
Although this article exists on what appears to be a website about car insurance, it’s really well-done and designed dynamically — definitely read it on your computer. Looking mostly at the UK but also at other European cities hoping to phase cars out of their city centers, the author investigates the damages cars do to our health and social lives and alternatives prompted by conscious city planning, better public transportation and simply changing the way people think about mobility.
The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles, by Richard Rothstein for The Economic Policy Institute
This is really important and REALLY LONG and also is a really solid example of the issues Ta-Nehisi Coates talked about in The Case For Reparations. “I tell this story with some hesitation. I do not mean to imply that there is anything special about racial history in Ferguson, St. Louis, or the St. Louis metropolitan area. Every policy and practice segregating St. Louis over the last century was duplicated in almost every metropolis nationwide. Yet this story of racial isolation and disadvantage, enforced by federal, state, and local policies, many of which are no longer practiced, is central to an appreciation of what occurred in Ferguson in August 2014 when African American protests turned violent after police shot and killed an unarmed black 18-year-old. Policies that are no longer in effect and seemingly have been reformed still cast a long shadow.”
A New Way To Talk About Poverty In Troy, NY, by Jordan G. Teicher for Slate.com, July 2014
Brenda Ann Kenneally grew up in Troy, on and off, and has been returning for over ten years to photograph families living below the poverty line and document their lives, collecting “family photo albums, school and medical records, letters from prison, scrapbooks, and even screenshots from Facebook.”
Fumigation: A Love Story, by Mónica Teresa Ortiz for Autostraddle, October 2014
Y’all, this is a beautiful essay with original illustrations and you MUST check it out. The author, Mónica Teresa Ortiz, is the Poetry Editor for Raspa Magazine, a Queer Latin@ literary art journal, and her work has appeared in Huizache, Pilgrimage Magazine, Borderlands, the Texas Observer, Black Girl Dangerous and Sinister Wisdom and now also AUTOSTRADDLE.
Mind. Blown.
And I realize that I didn’t specify which article I am referring to, but let’s face it – that refers to all of the articles.
Thank you for sharing these writings with us. They look interesting esp. F e r g u son.