Michael Balsamo, “FBI, Bureau of Prisons ordered to probe LGBTQ discrimination”
”Attorney General William Barr has ordered the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons to investigate allegations of discrimination against LGBTQ employees, he said in a letter released Friday.”
Stephen A. Crockett Jr., “Rep. Ilhan Omar Calls Trump Adviser Stephen Miller a ‘White Nationalist’; Her Critics Accuse Her of Anti-Semitism”
”Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) isn’t here to be liked, she’s here to call it as she sees it, and as such, she’s quickly moving up the “Auntie Maxine reclaiming my time” list of righteous women who don’t have the energy to placate the public.”
Lauren Evans, “Nine Activists Were convicted in Connection with Hong Kong’s Pro-Democracy Protests”
”Nine activists in Hong Kong have been convicted on public nuisance charges stemming from their roles in pro-democracy rallies in 2014; they now face up to seven years in prison.”
Lauren Evans, “Stanford Expels Its First Student Connected to the Admissions Scandal”
”Stanford has officially expelled a female student who, according to Stanford Daily, falsified her application and paid $500,000 via Rick Singer’s sham non-profit to join the sailing team. The paper reports that though the student was accepted through the standard process and not as a recruited athlete, her admission was followed by the contribution to the sailing program through the school’s former sailing coach, John Vandemoer, who last month pleaded guilty on racketeering and conspiracy charges.”
Emma Green, “What Another Round of Netanyahu Will Mean for American Jews”
”The lead-up to Israel’s election has revealed deep fractures between the Israeli prime minister and American Jews.”
Olga Khazan, “Invisible Middlemen Are Slowing Down American Health Care”
”Nurses spend 16 hours on the phone, medications take months to arrive, and patients suffer as they wait.”
David Kushner, “Recruiting Women to Online Dating Was a Challenge”
”Match.com started with questions about weight and explicit sexual preferences. Half the population wasn’t that into it.”
“The Latest: LGBTQ parents’ group applauds Mormon change”
”A group that represents members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with gay and lesbian children says the repeal of 2015 baptism rules is a good first step. But she says pain caused by the policy banning the baptism for kids of gay parents still lingers.”
Nick Martin, “Inside the Fight for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women”
”Indigenous women, be they in a city or on a reservation, have for decades been among the most unprotected members of North American society. In 2016, the National Crime Information Center recorded 5,712 cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women or girls in America; as was highlighted by the Urban Indian Health Institute’s groundbreaking 2018 MMIWG report, just 116 of those were logged in NamUs, the U.S. Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database.”
John McWhorter, “It Wasn’t ‘Verbal Blackface.’ AOC Was Code-Switching.”
”Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been accused of a lot, but the latest charge is especially piquant. Apparently, the new representative of some of the most multiethnic neighborhoods in the United States has engaged in ‘verbal blackface’.”
Dara Sharif, “Taraji P. Henson Tears Up Describing Mental Health in the Black Community as a ‘National Crisis’”
”Taraji P. Henson has been doing the work, the work to end the stigma surrounding mental illness in the black community. The urgency of the issue brought her to tears while she was being honored for her efforts at Variety magazine’s Power of Women New York lunch.”
Alan Taylor, “Rwandans Commemorate 25 Years Since Genocide”
”As the country continues to find ways to deal with the consequences of the mass violence, one path has led to the creation of six “reconciliation villages” in Rwanda, populated by genocide survivors who live side by side with—and offer forgiveness to—perpetrators who have recently been released from prison, who seek to apologize and atone.”
Esther Wang, “Sexual Assault Survivors Are Protesting to Keep Brett Kavanaugh Out of Their Classroom”
”Undergraduate students at George Mason University are calling for university officials to end a contract with Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was hired by the university’s notoriously conservative Antonin Scalia Law School to teach a study abroad course this year. The protesting students, many of whom are survivors of sexual assault, believe that the university should not reward a man who has been accused of sexual assault and sexual misconduct with a teaching job, and that the law school’s hiring of Kavanaugh is an example of how the university deprioritizes the issue of sexual assault.”
Article Spotlight
"My goal is to dissect the case and to explain why I find it more likely— though admittedly not definitive—that Hugh Davis’s partner was actually male. I will do this by examining the specific language used by the court, as well as the legal, colonial, and Atlantic contexts in which the case occurred. Finally, I consider the factors that may have led the colony to spare Davis’s life, whether or not he had actually committed sodomy. Considering the possibility that Hugh Davis’s partner might have been male instead of seeing the case as the starting point of antimiscegenation laws provides, I believe, a better reading of the case and its context.”
Episode Spotlight
In August of 1962, Sherri Chessen boarded a flight to Sweden in order to get an abortion after she was unable to obtain one in the United States. Sherri had accidentally taken medicine containing thalidomide, a drug that caused children to be born with internal injuries and shortened limbs. Thalidomide also caused women to miscarry, deliver stillborn babies, or have children who died during their infancy. Her decision to terminate this risky pregnancy and her journey abroad attracted international attention from journalists, politicians, and religious leaders. Sherri’s ordeal made public what countless American women experienced when they sought to terminate their pregnancies. Her widely shared story changed the way many Americans thought about abortion laws and even about abortion itself.
Books
