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The Revolution Will Be Handmade!

Anne Herdman Royal wears a brain hat during the March for Science on Saturday, April 22, 2017, in Chattanooga, Tenn. About a thousand demonstrators marched from the Main Terrain Art Park to Riverfront Parkway and back in support of science and education in solidarity with other marches nationwide. (Doug Strickland/Chattanooga Times Free Press via AP)

At one time, women’s education included critical training in needle arts like sewing and knitting, which were “not only necessary skills but also political tools for the women involved in resisting authority.” At PBS, Corinne Segal reports on pussy hats and brain hats as just two examples in a long line of handmade symbols of women pitting themselves against the status quo. Then and now, knitting circles are perfect environments in which to sew the seeds of political and social discontent.

In October 2014, Sewell and Payne helped form the Yarn Mission, a knitting collective aimed at fighting racial injustice through community organizing and by supporting black creators’ work. The quiet setting of a knitting circle has helped them discuss difficult topics, Payne said. “A lot of times what we’re talking about is really traumatic,” she said. “It’s the only way I’m able to talk about a lot of the things that have happened in Ferguson and continue to happen in St. Louis.”

Recent marches such as the Women’s March on Jan. 21 and the March for Science on Saturday have brought knitting into the international spotlight and lured newcomers to a symbol of activism that dates back hundreds of years.

Academics and historians say that these new knitters are tapping into a long history of needle arts in the U.S. that is inextricably bound up in race, gender and class issues. Its recent popularity is only the latest chapter.

And during the movement for abolition, sewing circles continued to serve as a place for women to exchange ideas and talk about political work. The Liberator, an abolitionist newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison between 1831 and 1965, wrote on Dec. 3, 1847:

“Sewing Circles are among the best means for agitating and keeping alive the question of anti-slavery. … A friend in a neighboring town recently said to us, Our Sewing Circle is doing finely, and contributes very much to keep up the agitation of the subject. Some one of the members generally reads an anti-slavery book or paper to the others during the meeting, and thus some who don’t get a great deal of anti-slavery at home have an opportunity of hearing it at the circle.”

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Letters to My Molester: Unraveling a Decade of Childhood Abuse

Photo by Peter Hellberg (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Karen Durrie was ten years old when her mother’s boyfriend began to molest her. At The Globe and Mail, Karen examines the years of abuse and the fear, shame, and feelings of complicity that not only kept her silent, but encouraged her to correspond with her attacker over the period of a decade.

Here is the strangest mystery: I came to like John, back then, at least when he wasn’t touching me. Our relationship existed in two separate rooms in my mind. The gross, secret stuff I wanted to forget and pretend didn’t exist was on the dark side of the door; the fun, cool stuff like making art and joking around was on the light side.

I read, and I saved. I had a big secret, and the letters were proof of that. I wanted that proof, even if I never shared it with another soul for the rest of my life. I also hoped the letters would contain clues that would help a future me figure out what had happened. Why he’d done what he did.

Although I had asked for the correspondence, sometimes I would finish reading the letters and whip them across the room, leaving them there till I calmed down. Some of them bear evidence of being enthusiastically crushed into balls, then smoothed out. I felt the same rush of anger, violation and shame after reading a letter as I had all the times his hand had been down my pants. In some ways, I was allowing him to do the same thing to me now, only psychically, long-distance. And I hated myself for allowing it.

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‘But Islam Does Not Forbid Love’: How Young Muslims Define ‘Halal Dating’

a pink rose surrounded by smaller white roses
Photo by Susanne Nilsson via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At NPR Code Switch, Neha Rashid reports on how careful use of language and a peck of dating apps for young Muslims are helping them find love while observing Muslim beliefs that forbid sex before marriage.

For young couples like them, the idea of dating is common, and it means balancing their religious views with their desire for emotional intimacy. But the term “dating” still invites an offensive suggestion for many Muslims, especially older ones, irrespective of how innocent the relationship may be. Dating is still linked to its Western origins, which implies underlying expectations of sexual interactions — if not an outright premarital sexual relationship — which Islamic texts prohibit.

One way that some young Muslim couples are rebuking the idea of dating being offensive is by terming it “halal dating.” Halal refers to something permissible within Islam. By adding the permissibility factor, some young couples argue, they are removing the idea that anything haram, or prohibited, such as premarital sex, is happening in the relationship.

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When Alzheimer’s Disease Relieves Us of the Pain in Our Past

Photo by James Sutton. (Pexels)

At Guernica, Maria Browning reflects on the fact that while Alzheimer’s Disease has stolen her mother’s memory, it has also relieved her mother of the torments and disappointments of her past — something that Browning is unable to forget.

My mother is both child and madwoman, all the time. She doesn’t know what day it is, or what she did one minute ago, or even the names of the few friends who still call or stop by to visit. She gets angry at the trees for dropping their leaves in autumn and can no longer understand why it’s a bad idea to share her chocolate bar with the dog. Dementia has wiped out most of her past, leaving behind a shell of personality that exists in a perpetual, baffling present.

The loss of memory is so awful a prospect, yet memory is, at best, a mixed blessing. It’s a source of torment as often as pleasure, the place where pain and loss reside. Grudges live there, and so do shame and regret. My mother, as far as I can see, is relieved of all those things. The deprivations of her childhood, her difficult marriage, the baby she lost, her thwarted dream of a singing career—all gone now. No memory means no grieving. And yet, there is still that disquiet behind her smile. There remains some unbeautiful mystery in the place she now dwells, something bad that is unknowable to me, unnameable to her.

I keep running up against that something whenever I try to find comfort in my mother’s liberation from her past. It’s so tempting to deny the darkness I see in her, to choose to believe she’s entirely happy, and I’m not sure whether that’s for her sake or mine. Even when I was a little girl battling with her over the dolls, I desperately wanted her to be happy. I realize now that I thought her happiness would make mine possible. My fate was all bound up with hers, and that still feels true. What haunts her haunts me. The darkness is something shared between us, as real as our blood and just as elemental.

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Alexander Chee: ‘He thought I wanted monogamy more than him, and I didn’t.’

detailed carvings on an archway at the alhambra in granada, spain
Photo by Michelle W. (CC BY 2.0)

When the New York Times asked authors to share stories of love intersecting with travel, Alexander Chee recalls a summer in Granada, Spain, with M. — his boyfriend at the time — who betrayed Chee at a local hammam. “He thought I wanted monogamy more than him, and I didn’t. And I couldn’t forgive that I didn’t get to choose.”

I liked M. I was having my first summer in Spain and he was good in bed, funny at dinner, smart about books. Enjoying that was not a mistake. Hiding himself from me was. When I eventually discovered the truth, I was more offended that he wouldn’t tell me. He thought I wanted monogamy more than him, and I didn’t. And I couldn’t forgive that I didn’t get to choose.

Some things I remember very clearly from that summer: learning to love the feel of cold red wine in my mouth on a hot day. The beautiful boy on the bus the whole way to the beach at Carboneras from Granada, burning the back of the rubber and vinyl seat with a lighter, but slowly, never enough to catch fire, who stopped only to take pictures of himself on his phone. The man putting saccharin in his fresh orange juice. And the streets paved with stones taken from the river, smooth and shining in the dark, like the backs of fish.

M. can keep his secrets, I told myself then. I have this. That was my bargain. I still think it is a good one.

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Top of the Muffin to You! 25 Great Food Moments in “Seinfeld”

Photo by Alan Light (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Food — from the infamous chocolate babka to the “big salad” — figures heavily in the popular ’90s sitcom, Seinfeld. At Eater, Chris Fuhrmeister serves up 25 Seinfeld food favorites, ranked “based on their influence on pop culture, accuracy at mirroring real life, and overall hilarity.”

Episode: “The Dinner Party” (Season 5, Episode 13).

One of many in which the gang is out in the world experiencing constant mishaps, the episode shines a light on the unwritten rules of a civilized dinner party. Elaine, George, Jerry, and Kramer must pick up a bottle of wine to take to their friends’ party (they can’t simply grab a bottle of Pepsi, as George would prefer). That’s not enough: There must be a cake, too. But in the events that lead to the group missing out on the last chocolate babka and having to settle for cinnamon, one wonders: What kind of New Yorkers are these? Forgetting to take a ticket in a crowded bakery seems like an amateur mistake.

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Coretta Scott King Fuelled the Civil Rights Movement with ‘Courage, Dignity, and Poise’

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Image is in the public domain.

Did you know that after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, the Memphis Fire Department sent his widow, Coretta Scott King, a bill for transporting him to the hospital? At Lenny, resident historian Alexis Coe talks with Wayne Dowdy, manager of the history department in the Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library in Memphis, Tennessee, on how racist tension and discrimination created the environment in which King was assassinated and how Coretta Scott King’s “courage, dignity, and poise” in the face of horrific tragedy fueled the civil rights movement.

Alexis Coe: Coretta Scott King returned to the city where her husband had been assassinated three days after claiming his body. This was truly extraordinary. On a national level, she’s demonstrating that the civil-rights movement would not be deterred by the death of its leader. If she could, in the most nascent days of her widowhood, with small children at home mourning the loss of their father, show up to fight, so should everyone else. And on a local level, she’s telling Memphis, and Mayor Loeb, this needs to end. Now. How closely was the country watching her and, by extension, Loeb?

Wayne Dowdy: The courage, dignity, and poise shown by Mrs. King impressed many Americans and certainly influenced the many white Memphians who pressured Loeb to settle the strike. In addition, Mrs. King’s two visits must have influenced the conduct of the majority of Memphians who, unlike those in other urban centers, stayed true to Dr. King’s philosophy of nonviolence.

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Opioid Addicts Are Losing Their Memories and Doctors Don’t Know Why

Image courtesy of Pixabay

After two years of almost daily drug use, Max had the amnesia spell, and his life began to spiral out of control. Unable to remember what year it was or how to get around Boston, he dropped out of school. He had to quit the restaurant job after two dizzying shifts losing people’s orders and forgetting where his tables were.

“I remember feeling, just like, intense dread, because I didn’t know what was happening,” he said. “Because I thought I was going to be like that for the rest of my life. It made me act like a crazy person.”

The cluster of new cases in eastern Massachusetts, which began with Max’s case in 2012, appears to be growing in step with the nationwide opioid epidemic. Opioid overdoses have quadrupled in the last 15 years, driven largely by a rise in heroin use and, more recently, by fentanyl, an opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. In Massachusetts, where overdose rates have doubled since 2012, 75% of people who died of an unintentional overdose last year had fentanyl in their system.

After overdosing, some opioid addicts are losing their memory and nobody really knows why. All doctors know is that each patient’s hippocampus — the area of the brain responsible for memory — becomes severely damaged. Are the opioids laced with an unknown toxin that targets the hippocampus? Does reduced respiration caused by opioid overdose damage the hippocampus? Azeen Ghorayshi reports at BuzzFeed.

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#Vanlife: Selling Their Staged World, One Social Media Post at A Time

Photo by Mike Petrucci (CC BY-SA 2.0)

How did a movement toward simple, nomadic life in Volkswagen vans become commercialized sponsor-fodder, in which “vanlifers” trade social media currency for subsidized van repairs and discounts? Is #vanlife really freedom, or just another way to sell your soul, one social media post at a time? Read Rachel Monroe’s story at The New Yorker.

Scroll through the images tagged #vanlife on Instagram and you’ll see plenty of photos that don’t have much to do with vehicles: starry skies, campfires, women in leggings doing yoga by the ocean. Like the best marketing terms, “vanlife” is both highly specific and expansive. It’s a one-word life-style signifier that has come to evoke a number of contemporary trends: a renewed interest in the American road trip, a culture of hippie-inflected outdoorsiness, and a life free from the tyranny of a nine-to-five office job.

Vanlifers have a tendency to call their journeys “projects,” and to describe them in the elevator-pitch terms that make sense to potential sponsors. While still in Central America, King and Smith came up with a name for their project: Where’s My Office Now, a reference to their goal of fusing travel and work. “We wanted to see if it was possible to combine this nomadic hippie life with a nine-to-five job,” Smith explained. After the couple returned from Central America but before they bought a van, King registered a Web site and set up social-media accounts. “The business part of me knew there was potential,” she said. Smith, who was still using a flip phone, was suspicious of his girlfriend’s preoccupation with social media, worrying that it would detract from the experience.

King and Smith were now professional vanlifers. They began working more product placement into their Instagram posts. Since then, their sponsorships—which King prefers to call “alliances”—have included Kettle Brand potato chips, Clif Bars, and Synergy Organic Clothing. Last summer, the tourism board of Saskatchewan paid the couple seven thousand dollars to drive around the grasslands of central Canada with other popular vanlifers, documenting their (subsidized) kayaking trips and horseback rides.

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‘S-Town’ Host Brian Reed Talks Ethics in Journalism

Photo by AJ Cann (CC BY-SA 2.0)

At Pacific Standard, Katie Kilkenny interviews Brian Reed, the host of the popular investigative podcast, S-Town, from the producers of Serial and This American Life. Reed shares his perspective on his approach to reporting the story. He relates how he earned the trust of the people he interviewed (the story takes place in Bibb County, Alabama — a poor and rural part of the state not used to outsiders) and his thoughts on reporting on someone after they have died. Warning: the interview contains spoilers.

I did find, in general, with some people down there, the “fuck it” attitude that I talk about in the story applied to talking to me. They got a kick out of me being there and having a reporter interested in their lives. That can be a lot of things — it can be annoying and it can be overwhelming, but it can also be validating to have someone listen to you as long as you want to talk, and listening to your every word, which I would do a lot of times. Otherwise it can be fun, and add some spice into your otherwise normal day, when you have this guy with a microphone following you around, and it’s funny. I think all of those were present in these relationships.

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