Why are we asking the police to stop being the police over and over again? Ultimately, calls for collective responses rooted in arrests and prosecution are likely to lead to dead ends and deep disappointments. But even if successful, the arrest, conviction and sentencing of individual cops represent an exception to the rule: the rule is impunity. Focusing on arrests leaves the whole system intact.
In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.Why isn’t anyone talking about this? Why are we not hearing a primal scream so deafening that no plodding policy can be implemented without addressing the people buried by it? Why am I, a food blogger best known for such hits as the All-Butter Really Flaky Pie Dough and The ‘I Want Chocolate Cake’ Cake, sounding the alarm on this? I think it’s because when
you’re home schooling all day, and not performing the work you were hired to do until the wee hours of the morning, and do it on repeat for 106 days (not that anyone is counting), you might be a bit too fried to funnel your rage effectively.
After the Pandemic, We’ll Finally Have to Address the Impossible State of MotherhoodVivas notes that the inequalities mothers face are not confined to sexism, but also classism and racism, and that “the problem is not motherhood but the employment model, which is
incompatible with mothering and parenting.” This is no shock to anyone who has sat in a windowless closet touting itself as a “lactation room” listening to the
relentless sucking of a breast pump while hurriedly gobbling lunch, or anyone who’s been told she’s “so lucky” to have cobbled together a measly few months of
maternity leave by using up vacation, unpaid time, and sick days, or the new mother who has been up all night with a collicky newborn
while her partner slept because “he had to work in the morning.”
I Don't Feel Like Buying Stuff AnymoreNot wanting to buy things feels as bizarre as not wanting to sleep or not wanting to eat. It’s been ingrained in us, as Americans, as an unspoken component of residency. Before the
coronavirus pandemic, I’d find myself clicking on the emails that overflowed the Promotions tab in Gmail, seemingly from every store I’d ever patronized. I’d online shop while I was traveling for work, while stressed, while avoiding a seemingly insurmountable number of other emails in my inbox. Buying things, especially things on sale, provided a momentary sense of comfort: I was fixing some problem, completing some task, simply by clicking “Buy Now.”
'Spectacular' ancient public library discovered in GermanyThe remains of the oldest public library in
Germany, a building erected almost two millennia ago that may have housed up to 20,000 scrolls, have been discovered in the middle of Cologne.
'Tidying Up with Marie Kondo' Is Inadvertently About Women's Invisible LaborWhen tasked with home organizing, men and women on Tidying Up treat it very differently. Piles of disorganized possessions provoke disproportionate dismay and shame in the women of the house, while men seem irritated but not personally ashamed. The third episode centers on a family that calls themself the “fantastic four” where the mother bears the entirety of the mental load and the majority of the chores themselves.
My Year of No ShoppingThe trick of no shopping isn’t just that you don’t buy things. You don’t shop. That means no trawling the sale section of the J. Crew website in idle moments. It means the catalogs go into the recycle bin unopened on the theory that if I don’t see it, I don’t want it. Halfway through the year I could go to a store with my mother and sister if they asked me. I could tell them if the dress they were trying on looked good without wishing I could try it on myself.
