0 What We've Been Reading Recently - Mike Brown, Eric Garner, #BlackLivesMatter, and more (UPDATE: 12/16/14)

A compilation of what I've been scouring on the InterWeb. It's by no means comprehensive or the most wonderful collection of links, posts, etc., but it's something to reference that shouldn't drive up your data charges like fracking through someone's Facebook Timeline. UPDATED: 12-16-14 (11:05 PM Central) Off Target on Toy-Gun Regulation - New York Times Jay Caspian Kang Cleveland police shot and killed 12 year-old Tamir Rice as he carried toy gun - Vox German Lopez How to Uphold White Supremacy by Focusing on Diversity and Inclusion - Model View Culture Kyra Another March on Washington? After Ferguson, 'That's not change. That's just church.'...

0 What We're Reading Today (7-30-2014)

Here's Proof That the Anti-Abortion Movement Is Winning - The New Republic Lane Florsheim The New Yorker Stories You Should Read Before the Paywall Goes Up - Slate Eliza Berman and Slate Staff The Girls Obama Forgot - NY Times Kimberle Williams Crenshaw Time for an Equal Rights Amendment - Politico Alexandra Brodsky and Elizabeth Deutsch Moms Winning the Common Core War - Politico Stephanie Simon Get Out of Jail, Inc. - The New Yorker Sarah Stillman Sympathy for the Overdog - Slate Luke O'Neil RAND Helps to Develop From Coverage to Care, a New CMS Initiative - RAND Laurie T. Martin and David M. Adamson Transit of Tomorrow - Chicago...

0 What We're Reading Today (7-23-14)

Women Penalized for Promoting Women, Study Finds - Wall Street Journal Rachel Feintzeig How Questlove Is Bringing Music Back to Television - The Daily Beast Kevin Fallon A pause in global warming? Studies try to better explain what's happened - CS Monitor Pete Spotts We Can Code It! Why computer literacy is key to winning the 21st century - Mother Jones Tasneem Raja How America Finances the Destruction in Gaza -- and the Clean-Up - Mother Jones David Corn Jordan's Quiet Emergency - The Atlantic Alice Su I Hate Ayn Rand but here's Why My Fellow Conservatives Love Her - The Week Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry Why Black People Must Stand with Palestine...

0 What We're Reading Today (7-21-14)

Austin's Black Population Leaving City, Report Says - NY Times Corrie Maclaggan West Philadelphia, Reborn and Razed - Politico John Marchese What We Learned from Liberals at Netroots Nation - Politico Katie Glueck White Gay Man Publishes Epically Stupid Response To "Stop Stealing Black Female Culture" - Autostraddle Yvonne NYC Can't Afford to Build the Second Avenue Subway, and It Can't Afford Not To - City Lab Benjamin Kabak Your summer reading list: Rashida Jones, Elizabeth Gilbert, Bill and Melinda Gates and many more share their book recommendations - TED Katie Torgovnick May Why the Voting Rights Act Still Matters: The Case of Jasper,...

0 What We're Reading Today (7-17-14)

Jameelah has been harassing me everyday to give her articles to read. Jameelah, here is the dump. This should be like 20+ articles for  you and the rest of The Horde to consume. Happy reading and happier summers to everyone. With Friends Like These... On the Military Occupation of Chicago - Prison Culture What We Talk About When We Talk About Violence in Chicago - NPR Gene Demby Kafka's Joke Book - McSweeney's John McNamee Which Supreme Court Justices Vote Together Most and Least Often - NY Times Jeremy Bowers, Adam Liptak, Derek Willis The Democrats Are Finally Turning Away from Israel - Foreign Policy Michael A. Cohen Democracy,...

0 Dear Black Gays: Don't Get Comfortable

            To Ms. Sierra Mannie, who’s ***flawless piece implicating gay white men in misogynoir:  I stand with your rhetoric, your diction, and your argument. You have, in the canon of Black women, carved out a space demanding your visibility and affirmation in the face of erasure. In the space you have carved out, some queer Black men have had questions. I have had questions and I hope to offer my interaction to your work. The conversation you created is needed and urgent and my desire is to stand with you in the ways that I can.            ...

0 What We're Reading Today (6-24-14)

Apologies, again, for the lack of content coming through on Snakes. I'm working in DC this summer and I have been writing on two other blogs as well. One with my internship at GlobalSolutions.org and the other is a project out of TFA Houston called, "Textual Healing." It was already tough to keep Snakes updated and my writing has been pulled in multiple directions. The positive, though, means I have been reading plenty. I'm reading Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns currently. I finished The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao before leaving Houston for Chicago. I'm hopeful that I will be traveling more this summer -- perhaps...

1 The Warmth of Other Suns - Florida and the Lynching of Claude Neal

This summer I'm reading The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson.  The book was cited heavily by Ta-Nehisi Coates in his discussion (read: trouncing) of Jonathan Chait and I am hopeful that I will expand my own cultural and historical awareness through reading it.   For those who haven't read it, Wilkerson follows three different individuals as they discuss their own migrations from the South to the North. She uses them to illustrate the context in which sharecropping, Jim Crow, housing segregation, and the many other maladies of the hundred years of the Great Migration.  At times, this has been slightly frustrating...

0 On “Table-seats” and Validations: An Open Letter to Kanye West:

Dear Yeezy, I have deeply appreciated your additions to the constantly evolving black sonic canon. Creating and re-imagining what rappers/Black Men/Sad Men/Queer Men can sound like. You reminded us of the screams and moans in the echoes of Black music in America. These accolades can be found in other parts of your discography however, believing Yeezus is their culmination . But we have problems: the grief-driven misogyny; the obsession with goods as signifiers of legitimacy, framing particular women as those goods; and for having a devastating fixation on some mythical seat at a glass table surrounded by gate-keepers of cultural social order....