Elsewhere for June 22, 2019

You should read this for 6/22/2019:

Art and Film

Stonewall survivor tells his story of the uprising

Joe Negrelli, a SAGE participant and Stonewall survivor, tells his firsthand story of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
This video features archival footage throughout the decades, including highlights from Gay & Proud, a film by lesbian pioneer Lilli Vincenz, documenting the first-annual pride march. At the time Gay & Proud was made, no television networks would distribute it.

Mark Hamill calls for Carrie Fisher Walk of Fame star to replace Donald Trump’s

Star Wars: The Last Jedi actor Mark Hamill has called for Donald Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star to be replaced by one for Carrie Fisher, his co-star in multiple Star Wars movies.
Hamill retweeted an article from August 2018 reporting that West Hollywood City Council had voted to remove Trump’s star. Hamill added: “Good riddance! (and I know just who should replace him…) #AStarForCarrie.”

H/T Lisa Carnell: Thanks for making Detroit cool, artists. Here’s your eviction.

“It was artists moving back to Detroit that started the renaissance, and now those are the people getting pushed out,” said Pat Domanski, a painter who was forced out of her studio on Grand River in May along with the others.
Arts advocates say that’s reality nowadays in Detroit: The city is hip in part because of its bohemian vibe, but as public art has helped boost property values artists are forced out through rising rents or building sales.

Books, Writing, and Language

When Gloria Vanderbilt Reviewed ‘Harriet the Spy’

Food and Drink

Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

History and Archaeology

Concentration Camps Existed Long Before Auschwitz
And they exist now near U.S. borders.
The Photographer Who Captured 20th-Century Queer Life “Joan E. Biren’s images from the ’70s and ’80s—which appear in the new exhibit “Art After Stonewall”—reflect an effort to document and encourage lesbian love.”

“I wanted to be a photographer in large part because I needed to see images of lesbians, and it was a visceral thing. I wanted a reflection of my reality, and I think everybody wants that,” JEB told the historian Kelly Anderson in 2004 as part of Smith College’s Voices of Feminism Oral History Project. “My experience is that there’s an enormous hunger among people to be able to see themselves.”

Science and Nature

Song of the Rarest Large Whale on Earth Recorded for the First Time

For the first time ever, scientists have recorded the song of a right whale. And not just any right whale, but the rarest of them all. A team with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) first heard the song of the North Pacific right whale in 2009, but they weren’t able to visually confirm what animal was making the sounds until 2017.

Via Open Culture: The Atlas of Space: Behold Brilliant Maps of Constellations, Asteroids, Planets & “Everything in the Solar System Bigger Than 10km”
Narlugas Are Real “A very strange hybrid whale was the offspring of a narwhal mother and a beluga father.”
Seals in Scotland Were Taught to Sing the Star Wars Theme — Watch

Society

FCC Chair Ajit Pai promised that killing Net Neutrality would spur investment and improve service: a year later, service and investment have declined

A year ago, Trump FCC Chairman (and former Verizon exec) Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality, leveraging illegal, fraudulent industry dirty tricks to ram his rule through the process; all along, he claimed that Net Neutrality was a drag on investment, competition and service improvements, and that Americans would see immediate benefits once he was done killing Net Neutrality.
It’s been a year, and while Pai has touted major gains in broadboand investment, these were also a fraud, with the big telcos slashing investment, slashing jobs, sucking up massive tax subsidies (no, even more massive), while continuing to deliver the slowest, most expensive data in any developed country.

No, anti-vaccine hysteria didn’t emerge from grassroots. This rich NYC couple funded it.

“A myth of the anti-vaccine movement is that it emerged organically through the rise of social media,” says Washington Post investigative reporter Amy Brittain. “We looked into the $$$ behind the movement and found a well-funded operation, driven largely by one Manhattan couple who gave millions to the cause.”

Watch Ta-Nehisi Coates school Mitch McConnell on American history

The matter of reparations is one of making amends and direct redress, but it is also a question of citizenship. In HR 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism. To say that a nation is both its credits and its debts. That if Thomas Jefferson matters, so does Sally Hemings. That if D-Day matters, so does black Wall Street. That if Valley Forge matters, so does Fort Pillow. Because the question really is, not whether we will be tied to the “some things” of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.

There’s a transcript of Coates’ testimony.

Technology

Dumbest ‘Gotcha’ Story Of The Week: Google, Genius And The Copying Of Licensed Lyrics
Copyright cases tend to have to be settled in court, or by agreement between the parties; I’m not sure that the encoding via punctuation wouldn’t represent added value. But mostly, I hope that somewhere in the licensing festival that the lyric creators were paid.
BODIES IN SEATS “At Facebook’s worst-performing content moderation site in North America, one contractor has died, and others say they fear for their lives”

But in return for policing the boundaries of free expression on one of the internet’s largest platforms, individual contractors in North America make as little as $28,800 a year. They receive two 15-minute breaks and a 30-minute lunch each day, along with nine minutes per day of “wellness” time that they can use when they feel overwhelmed by the emotional toll of the job. After regular exposure to graphic violence and child exploitation, many workers are subsequently diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and related conditions.

This isn’t how to do content moderation; you own your platform Facebook. You can and should just say No to valueless, exploitive, inappropriate and damaging content. This isn’t a problem that’s silicon-based; it’s human. We did this before technology, and we need to do it better now.

Women’s Work

Sex toy company sues MTA over rejected ads

The lawsuit, filed today, points out that New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority has regularly approved ads focused on sexuality in recent years, including erectile disfunction drug ads from Hims and Roman, posters for the Museum of Sex, promotion of PrEP and condoms from the New York City Health Department, and more. Dame says the rejection of its sex toy ads is rooted in sexism and is a result of the MTA’s “squeamishness about openly acknowledging female sexual pleasure.”

The Problem With HR “For 30 years, we’ve trusted human-resources departments to prevent and address workplace sexual harassment. How’s that working out?”

That the #MeToo movement kept turning up so many shocking stories at so many respected places of employment seemed to me to reflect a massive failure of human resources to do the job we have expected it to perform. Even Harvey Weinstein’s company, after all, had an HR department.

Oh, please, HR doesn’t care about employees, HR is there to cover the company’s legal ass. More often than not, HR is a tool that protects and helps harassers.

Trumpery

ReportbytheO ceofCongreswomanKatiePorter(CA-45) Frequently asked questions about the Mueller Report, impeachment,
and more
Guardian told it was target of Saudi hacking unit after Khashoggi killing

Pay It Forward and Make It Better

The 9 Nanas

In Tennessee, you will find a “secret society” of sorts that consists of 9 women who call themselves “The 9 Nanas.” The mission of this “secret group” is simple – to spread happiness by performing random acts of kindness for those in need. The 9 Nanas have been carrying out this mission in secret for over 30 years. Even their husbands had no idea what the ladies were up to! And to think – it all started with pound cake!