I’m sort of locked in to using the tabclosing tag for these entries now, but the name has become a pleasant fiction. These days when I want to save something for later reading, I just send it to my Pocket queue. I’ve neglected actually looking at that queue the last couple of months, though, and so my Pocket is stuffed to bursting. Let’s change that a bit. (And pretend we didn’t.)
- A Brief History of Romantic Friendship – Maria Popova writes about an era when homosocial romance was considered innocuous or laudable, and how growing “sophistication” about sex in the 20th century curtailed the practice.
- This Is What Gentrification Really Is – Annalee Newitz offers a nuanced, historical view of gentrification as a form of immigration, and examines how (as with other forms of immigration) opinions of it are largely shaped by narrative.
- ‘Human Props’ stay in luxury homes but live like ghosts – an article that is, more than anything, about companies monetizing the desire to pretend nothing has changed.
- “Why Did You Shoot Me, I Was Reading A Book?” – Article in Salon by Radley Balko from last year about the militarization of America’s police forces. This has been linked a lot since all the horribleness in Ferguson started.
- The San Antonio Spurs hired Stars star Becky Hammon to be the first woman employed full-time as an assistant NBA coach. This is historic, but, in typical Spurs fashion, they never mentioned it. In their press release about the signing, they talked exclusively about Hammon’s qualifications and didn’t refer to her gender once. Which, in a Finkbeiner test sense, is exactly what they should do. Here are a bunch of articles about it: from the New York Times, from Esquire, from Rolling Stone, from Pounding The Rock.
- And finally, “Happy Fun Room,” a science fiction short film by Greg Pak, about a woman who’s gone through a change so severe, she’s blind to things changing again:
