A Few Things

Hello, Friends. How is December going for you? Did you have a good week? I’ve had a challenging one. My Alt Summit work load is particularly heavy this month and I’m definitely feeling the strain. The hardest task at the moment is trying to find an A-list Keynote Speaker. This is my 16th conference, and it’s always tricky, but this year seems extra hard. (And hey, if you have any connections, let me know!)

I’m feeling happy the weekend has arrived. Our plans include taking the kids to go shopping for their sibling gifts and getting the house ready for our older kids to arrive for the holidays. How about you? Anything you’re looking forward to this weekend? I’d love to hear.

And I’ve got some good stuff on my link list this week (was it just me or was their lots of major news this week?). Here are a few things I’ve wanted to share:

-Fox News Is Now a Threat to National Security.

-Related. Infowars video editor: “The information did not meet our expectations, so we made it up, preying on the vulnerable and feeding the prejudices and fears of Jones’s audience. We ignored certain facts, fabricated others and took situations out of context.” (NYT)

-I LOVE stuff like this. An animal painting found in a cave is 44,000 years old.

-“…axiomatic is the fact that, frequently, it is women who have come forward, in droves, to speak truth to that power, or to nonsense, or, perhaps most accurately, to the nonsense that feeds his power.”

-Read Katie Hill’s story to understand the toll of abusive partners and cyber exploitation. (NYT)

Easiest lasagna recipe ever.

-A rape victim was set ablaze while traveling to court in India. Five men were arrested; two are her alleged rapists. (WP)

U.S. officials grossly misled the public about the war in Afghanistan. Extraordinary.

-Have you ever used a weighted blanket? Are you a fan? Do you have a preferred weight?

-Fascinating. Have you ever heard the term “harbinger households”?

Here are a few tweets I’ve saved for you:

-Author Shannon Hale talking about how books for children are mostly written by women, but men are more likely to be best-sellers.

-Great films directed by women this year.

-Sorry for the f-word, but the tweet is so funny, and the responses are so good.

-Beautiful embroidery that looks like Normandy from an airplane.

-A thread of email requests sent to an academic who is a woman.

-A quote I’m thinking about.

I hope you have a marvelous weekend. I’ll meet you back here on Monday. I miss you already.

kisses,
Gabrielle

14 thoughts on “A Few Things”

  1. OMG that needlepoint!!!!! (heart eyes emoji)
    We are looking forward to our family gift exchange this weekend. We have our tree up and decorated, our biggest ever! Feeling the holiday spirit!

  2. Thank you for this start to my weekend! You always have the best links, and introduce them so well, too – succinctly but accurately. What great work you do. Have a nice weekend!

  3. Have you heard of Michelle Pohler from Hello Fears? She is a great keynote speaker! I don’t know her personally but she responds to all my insta DMs.

  4. Not sure how anyone was fooled by the Afghanistan war reports. As a gold star family whose loved one was killed there in 2011 on his 3rd tour of duty, we knew for years that it was and continues to be an unwinnable war and one that the US should have never entered. We voted for Obama in hopes that he would end the war, and four year later, when my kindergarten-aged son and I met with him after the death of my son’s father, we begged him to bring the troops home to end the unnecessary deaths on both sides. And yet, we continue to have a presence there. If you paid attention, there was never any hope of resolution or success.

  5. The article on harbinger households has a link to Sci Hub (it’s the first link that supports the data about harbinger households). You may not know about Sci Hub but it is an illegal repository of scientific and scholarly articles and literature. I’ll let you research Sci Hub for yourself. It is rather controversial among scholars, publishers, researchers.
    Sci Hub is illegal. As a long-time reader of this blog, I suspect you would not approve copyright infringement.
    Merry Christmas!

  6. Wow, this quote about Fox News: “its unique combination of lies and half-truths has built a virtual reality so complete that it leaves its viewers too misinformed to fulfill their most basic responsibilities as citizens to make informed choices about the direction of the country.”

    I feel like this article pinpoints why my parents and I can’t even discuss current events, because we have no common ground reality. Even the Wall Street Journal has become “too liberal” per my mom, a longtime Fox News viewer.

    1. It is so distressing to me-it’s like millions of people have been brainwashed and are now determining the fate of our country.

    2. It makes family get-togethers difficult. An aunt or uncle will make some bizarre claim, all the other aunts and uncles will nod in agreement, and I’ll have to say, “Actually, that’s not at all true…” and I’ll show them evidence that it’s wrong. They’ll accept the evidence, but it doesn’t stop them from making other wild claims, which I then have to debunk. And at NO POINT do any of them stop and examine their sources of information. No one thinks “Hmmm, maybe I should rethink getting all my information from one source, a source that has caused me to make wild claims and be corrected by my niece.” No! There is no self-awareness!

      It makes me feel like that generation is a lost cause. Don’t even bother. Lets just concentrate on the young people and hope for the future. And I’m talking about my relatively sane aunts and uncles, not the ones who think Mark Zuckerberg is a secret CIA employee pretending to have invented Facebook, a secret CIA program. Heaven help us all this Christmas.

  7. Oh man that Fox News article and Alex Jones piece. Wow. So scary and so good to read those. My parents are long time Fox News watchers and its getting harder and harder to speak to them in any way about current events in the US. If I dare say anything against Trump they jump to his defense so quickly. Ugh. Makes me so sad!

  8. The Twitter feed about the emails young, male scholars sent to a female academic is killing me! I would really like to see her responses! I hope they are snarky.

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