Roxane Gay Celebrates Unruly Bodies With New Pop-Up Magazine
On April 3, Roxane Gay launched a month-long pop-up magazine through Medium. Unruly Bodies, curated by Gay, will publish new essays and features every Tuesday. “I wanted to…create a space for writers I respect and admire to contribute to the ongoing conversation about unruly bodies and what it means to be human,” Gay writes in her Editor’s Note. Contributors include Kiese Laymon, Larissa Pham, and Samantha Irby. Check out Gay’s letter here, read this amazing piece by Keah Brown, and get ready to add a new site to your reading rotation!
Say His Name: Saheed Vassell
Yesterday afternoon, four New York police officers fatally shot Saheed Vassell in Crown Heights. Vassell was unarmed. “Saheed Vassell, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by NYPD Wednesday night. Join us as we demand justice,” wrote organizers with NYC Shut It Down. If you live in or near Brooklyn, stop by the official rally at 6 p.m. to fight for justice, and read more about Vassell’s murder in The New York Times.
Women Aren’t Allowed In The Sumo Ring – Even When It’s Life Or Death
Sumo wrestling in Japan has always been a boys’ club. But the outdated exclusion of women is drawing some new attention after several women ran into a sumo ring in Kyoto to offer cardiopulmonary resuscitation to a politician who collapsed while giving a speech — only to be escorted out by referees. In a video released today, a ref can be heard shouting, “Women, come out of the ring.” Read The New York Times’ full coverage.
Op-Ed Explains How Detention Labor Resembles Slavery
In an op-ed published yesterday by Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University’s Deportation Research Clinic, The New York Times reports that detention facility giants including GEO and CoreCivic are under attack for unlawful work practices, including little to no pay for eight-hour shifts. Read the full piece here.
How Iconic Female Characters Were Described In Screenplays
Yesterday, after sifting through screenplays starring some of Hollywood’s most memorable female characters, Vulture compiled a list of these ladies’ introductions, and they are at turns fascinating and disgusting. A particularly gross one (to nobody’s surprise) goes to Quentin Tarantino’s description of a Death Proof star, who is “a tall (maybe 6ft) Amazonian Mulatto goddess…dressed in a baby tee, and panties that her big ass (a good thing) spill out of.” Yikes. Read the rest on Vulture.
There’s Been A Falsely Perpetuated Idea Of The Rape Kit “Backlog”
Meaghan Ybos and Heaather Marlowe, in a piece for In Justice Today, explained how a current narrative in place implies that police departments do not have the adequate technology or resources to fully investigate rape kits. “The National Institute of Justice defines a rape kit as ‘backlogged’ if it has been sent to a lab and has not been tested for at least 30 days after a request for testing was made,” Ybos and Marlowe wrote. “There is no justification for conflating this scenario with cases in which police never submitted rape kits to a lab in the first place.” Read more about the narrative—and what we need to do to shift it—on In Justice Today.
This post was published on April 5, 2018
Top photo via RoxaneGay.com
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