This versus that. // There was an awful lot of dancing in 80s movies. // Sweet Dreams, orchestrated. // Wooden skyscrapers and tall timber buildings. // For Weird Tales enthusiasts. // Lift your spirits with levitating glassware. // Candles of note. // At last, a title capitalizing tool. // Old NYC, a Google Street View of yesteryear. // Gender role test. It’s cutting edge science, people. // Ski slopes are sexist. // Sponge holder of note. // Meals made of paper. // Atomically thin transistors. (h/t, Peter) // Art. // Dissolving drugs. // Composite birds. // Elevated bus carries 300 passengers. // His balloon animals are better than yours. // Bespoke joints, only $7000. “What Monet was to Impressionism, Tony is to the art of joint rolling.” // And finally, informatively, how to chop an onion.

In academia, the past will be remembered by erasing any unflattering reference to it:

Yale University has established a new committee dedicated to deciding when and how the school should rename buildings, monuments, and other campus features it believes are too offensive for a modern university.

And over at Columbia University (and Bowdoin, and Barnard, and Wesleyan, and NYU):

Behind these moves away from [admissions] testing is another phenomenon that schools do not appear to have stated explicitly.

But coyness aside, deliberately lowering standards is apparently a good thing.   

And lifted from the comments, meet Olivia Legaspi, a young woman with sense:  

Here’s what I was told during my freshman orientation at Haverford College: “Speak up when you feel uncomfortable. Place your own wellbeing above all other concerns.” In short, the school was ready to protect me from any personal slights or hurt feelings I might suffer. What counted as a personal slight or similar offence was up to me to define. This surprised me. It surprised me because at McDonald’s, where I worked before I started school, acting in this way would have probably cost me my job, a job I needed in order to go to college.

Among other things, Ms Legaspi notes that expecting your own feelings to always be indulged and prioritised, however inconvenient to others and however small the slight, sounds an awful lot like “privilege.”

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

If you are only attracted to able, ‘mentally well’, cis, normatively beautiful people, from class privileged backgrounds, then you are upholding violent norms.

Attention, husbands, wives, lovers, seekers of amour, and the partnered of the world. Student activist and avowed “feminist killjoy” Josefin Hedlund wishes to correct your desires in a totally non-dogmatic, non-presumptuous way:

This myth [of love, marriage and monogamy] still has a powerful hold in today’s Western neoliberal societies. Its most important message is that love is magical and apolitical. However, at a closer look, it is obvious that love actually works to uphold hetero- and cis-normative, patriarchal, capitalist, and hierarchical structures in society. 

Better stow your luggage and strap yourselves in. The ride may be bumpy.

Test yourself: write down the gender, race, class, social, political, educational, and geographical background of everyone you have been attracted to. Do you see a pattern?

Maleness aside, can’t say I do. In fact, I doubt I could recall everyone who’s ever caught my eye. And it occurs to me that if even momentary attraction requires a thorough preemptive vetting of each person’s geographic and educational background, and knowledge of their bank balance and socio-political views, then something’s gone horribly wrong. I should think few of us have time to maintain what sounds like a hugely impractical academic sorting fetish.

If you are only attracted to able, ‘mentally well’, successful (by society’s standards), cisgender, normatively beautiful, slim people, from class privileged backgrounds… you cannot just declare that who you are attracted to is a personal preference.

I feel there ought to have been some kind of explanation here, to pad out the assertion. I’m still waiting for some elaboration on that “upholding violent norms” thing. And it’s not entirely clear to me how my own lifelong coupling, with a chap, is “upholding hetero- and cis-normative, patriarchal, capitalist, and hierarchical structures in society.” Perhaps we’re supposed to enjoy the air of mystery. Still, there’s lots of boilerplate and rote regurgitation: