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The Martha Stewarting of Powerful Women (Ann Foster for Longreads)
With very few exceptions, it is wealthy white women who are able to get close enough to white male power to threaten it. And, if they threaten to make white men look foolish for following them, the Martha Stewarting comes on even more strongly as a defense mechanism to protect the woman’s former supporters.
A NYC Urban Garden Teaches Youth Community and Justice (Jennifer D. Adams and Pieranna Pieroni for Civil Eats)
Raven, a student who grew up in Coney Island, recalls a reading in Community Roots class from Brazilian educator and theorist Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Freire introduced an approach called problem-posing: teachers and students teach and learn together. Their major subjects of inquiry include themselves, each other and the ideas and issues that shape their realities and relationships.
Could Public Banks Help California Fund Affordable Housing? (Sarah Holder for Citylab)
Even advocates acknowledge that the process of building banks from scratch will be expensive, time-consuming, and logistically complicated. In San Francisco, for example, the city would be tasked with moving a $12.3 billion-plus budget out of Bank of America and U.S. Bank and into a public one; figuring out a governance model; and agreeing on how that money will be invested.
Sixteen and Evangelical (Laura Turner for Slate)
To me, the boys were liquid, eternal, a fraternity of accessible and mysterious interiority. I was probably the only one of my friends who would have identified as a feminist in high school, and something about the ease with which these young men navigated the world—their confidence, their adaptability, their surety that things would work out for them—attracted me to them, in the way that we are all attracted to what we do not have.
Food Injustice (S. Margot Finn for The Breakthrough Institute)
Today, thinness is still associated with wealth, but now it’s predominantly seen as a sign of good health. The poor, meanwhile, are strongly associated with fatness and the other stigmatized characteristics popularly linked to it, including ignorance, laziness, apathy, and a lack of willpower. The stigma though, is just that. The strength of the popular association between poor people and fatness is not well supported by the available data.
Photo: Akulatraxas