The news may be fraying your nerves, and there is new information flashed in front of us every few minutes. So much so that we can find ourselves missing the slow, thoughtful, considerate words that our brains – and souls – need. This weekly update can provide that for you. We do this by distilling the best of the web and recommending just three links every week that you absolutely must see.
No fluff, no fuss, just three exceptional reads. Here are this week’s recommendations:
The greasy spoon chronicles: a day in the life of the Hope Workers Cafe (Jay Rayner / Guardian)
Matthew asks for a fried egg sandwich. She offers him a cup of tea to go with it. He nods, gratefully. No money changes hands, because no money is required. In the window is a red and white sign, designed in the early months of the pandemic by a regular customer, which reads: “Pay it forward, donate a meal for someone who needs it”. Beneath that it says: “Free Hot Meals for anyone who cannot afford one. Just come in and ask.” Which is what Matthew has done. “Sometimes there will be one of them,” says Sue. “Sometimes six.” The customer who designed the sign also put the first £200 into the pot and it’s grown from there. It’s an appropriately dignified start to a working day at a cafe called the Hope.
No Health, No Care: The Big Fat Loophole in the Hippocratic Oath (Marquisele Mercedes / Pipe Wrench)
This is the fatphobia industrial complex: the cluster of entities using fatphobia to sell products and services that provide the influence and capital needed to exert control over large swaths of people and regulatory bodies for the purposes of making profit, repeated ad nauseum. Their appropriation of health equity language is a tool to further the idea that ob*sity is a disease requiring prescribed cures, making pharmaceutical companies and ob*sity specialists into fat people’s saviors. And their ability to do these things while referencing research that demonstrates the uncontrollability of weight—research that well-meaning people use to criticize fatphobia—is further proof that fighting for fat people’s rights on the basis of how healthy they are will never make us free.
George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine.” (Ken Klippenstein)
George W. Bush: "The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine."pic.twitter.com/amgTG41RPb
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) May 19, 2022
Image: Christian Ladewig