HELLO and welcome to the 125th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can read them too and we can all know more about Gmail! This “column” is less feminist/queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is feminist/queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
How Gmail Happened: The Inside Story Of Its Launch 10 Years Ago (April 21014), by Harry McCracken for Time Magazine – Unfortunately how they decided to create G-chat was not addressed, which is something I was very curious about. I was so resistant to G-Mail at first because I couldn’t feel calm unless my emails had been neatly organized into folders, like I could do with yahoo and hotmail. But I eventually converted because the cool kids made me do it.
Fireball Whiskey: Selling A Brand, Shot By Shot (April 2014), by Devin Leonard for Bloomberg Businessweek – I have suddenly been seeing this shit everywhere and now I know why!
*Up From Radicalism (1969), by Ellen Willis for US Magazine in 1969, reprinted in Guernica – Well, I just really loved this. “For a while I feel that now I understand and love all other women. It’s a great high until I realize that it’s mostly a defense against the fear and antagonism of a lifetime, a compound of superiority (“Oh, I’d rather be friends with men, they’re much more stimulating!” Translation: I’m not like them, I’ve made it out of the ghetto) and sexual competitiveness. Revise: I’m starting to be interested in other women. To feel warmth and sympathy. To recognize a new loyalty. To realize other women are not the enemy. To understand as a gut reality the phenomenon of rulers setting the ruled against each other.”
Can Social Scientists Save Themselves? (April 2014), by Jerry Adler for PS Magazine – Seriously you guys sometimes we get press releases about studies and when I read it I’m like, are you fucking kidding me, how on earth could [that] be taken as proof of [this]. Anyhow this is about how there are a small number of social scientists who are full of shit, and how they skew their studies to prove their hypothesis even when the data doesn’t warrant it.
*MFA vs. POC (April 2014), by Junot Diaz for The New Yorker – “In my workshop what was defended was not the writing of people of color but the right of the white writer to write about people of color without considering the critiques of people of color.”
Does Political Operative Chad Griffin Deserve The Hero of the Gay Marriage Movement? (April 2014), by Benjamin Wallace-Wells for New York Magazine – This was really eye-opening. The whole thing is worth a read just to get to the last paragraph and see how you feel about that. Griffin, BTW, is the current president of the HRC.
Walking Scarred (May 2014), by Natasha Gardener for 5280 – “My whole life, I just assumed I was clumsy. Then I discovered the truth.”
We Have Lots of Noise, We Need Lots of Solutions (May 2014), by Carmen Rios for Autostraddle – Through multiple interviews with students and activists, Carmen blends her own personal experience as a women’s advocate at American University with the story of what’s going on there right now after the leak of a  fraternity’s rapey emails, and why nothing ever seems to change or get better, and what needs to happen for things to get better.
