Weekly Link Roundup: Charleston, Voting Rights, and Marriage Equality!

This week on the interwebs:

• The Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states. Yeeeees!
• Congressional Democrats introduce a new bill designed to bolster the gutted Voting Rights Act. From the article: “The 2016 election will be the first in 50 years where voters will not have the full protections of the VRA, which adds urgency to the congressional effort. Since the Shelby decision, onerous new laws have been passed or implemented in states like North Carolina and Texas, which have disenfranchised thousands of voters, disproportionately those of color. In the past five years, 395 new voting restrictions have been introduced in 49 states, with half the states in the country adopting measures making it harder to vote. “If anybody thinks there’s not racial discrimination in voting today, they’re not really paying attention,” Senator Leahy said.”
• Don’t know what to watch this weekend? Indiewire collected a list of 115 films by and about women of color, following a Twitter conversation led by Ava DuVernay (who’s just been tapped to direct Marvel’s Black Panther!)
• From The Toast: an interview with a slavery specialist who guides historical tours, and an interesting look in an arena of “heritage tourism.”
• Don’t let the Charleston massacre get lost in the 24-hour news cycle. From the African American Intellectual History Society: a powerful syllabus that collects op-eds to spur further discussion and a wealth of resources on South Carolina, Confederate history, the Confederate flag and its symbolic legacy, and the history of American racism.
• A particularly powerful piece that’s worth reading from the syllabus above: ways in which our racially fraught, violent history, which is sometimes framed as something antiquated, is in fact persistently present. A warning that this is a fairly upsetting read. But then again, so is being a victim of racism.
• Finally: do computers dream? Google’s neural image recognition software gives us an idea of what “AI inception” might look like.

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Weekly Link Roundup!

• Words to be intoned—on the steps of South Carolina’s capitol, and in your heart. “Take it down now…drive out this cult of death and chains.” As usual, Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic speaks truth.  Here, he makes clearer the connection between the racial terrorism of Dylann Roof’s murderous crimes, and the logic of the Confederate flag fluttering in the breeze.
• Words that need to be spoken (via The New Yorker) and the history of the church that Dylann Roof bloodied.
• Parsing the stakes of “is this feminist?” or “is this feminist enough?” (via The Mary Sue).
• Maggie Mertens argues that women’s soccer, and women’s sports more generally, deserve feminist attention. With women playing on a turf field for the World Cup and getting paid a fraction of what men get paid (surprise, surprise?), I’d say she’s right.
• And finally, because the world is a bitter place and laughter is a good protection against emotional exhaustion, have this tumblr, which hilariously captions old dress patterns. That doesn’t sound funny, but it is.

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Link Roundup!

Good reads and important feeds from around the interwebz. Most are new, some are old, all are mind-expanding.

• Thanks to my girl Maya for bringing this to my attn: The Huffington Post’s Barbara Sostaita writes on the anxieties, costs, and considerations of being a WOC in academia. “To do scholarship is to do autobiography.”

• Chloe Wyma writes for the Brooklyn Rail on The Guerilla Girls Broadband, activists and artists who take the names of historically forgotten women and “have carried on the Guerrilla Girls’s tradition of wit and righteous anger while embracing digital activism to expand their critique beyond the confines of the art world.”

• From Gimlet Media: Starlee Kine takes on the small, beautiful mysteries in life through a great new podcast called “Mystery Show.” Her second case is one of my favorite radio stories, in which she tracks the intersection of one soon-forgotten book and pop queen Britney Spears.

• An old one but a good one: novelist Vikram Chandra on elegant language, the beauty of code, and sublime programming that combines both.