Sunday Reading

The Butterfly Effect: Skin too Fragile to Touch / "His whole body, his skin was blistered and falling off everywhere someone had touched him,” Khavari remembers.
Addy Walker, American Girl / For seventeen years, Addy was the only black historical doll; she was the only nonwhite doll until 1998 [...] If you were a black girl, you could only picture yourself as a runaway slave.
EXCLUSIVE: Bree Newsome Speaks For The First Time After Courageous Act of Civil Disobedience / But this was neither a scene from a movie nor was it the past. A white man had just entered a black church and massacred people as they prayed.
1995 ABC Interview with Venus Williams / Father interrupts to tell the interviewer, "When she say something, we done told you what's happening. You're dealing with a little Black kid, and let her be a kid. She done answered it with a lot of confidence. Leave that alone!"
Humane Insight: Looking at Images of African American Suffering and Death William Pope.L by Martha Wilson / The reason for the contradiction is that I’m suspicious of things that make sense. Maybe I’m afraid of it. False security. Whereas contradiction does make sense to me.
images and textual materials for the study of the history of the African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) denomination and Black Church tradition
The Sovereignty of Subtraction / These selective spectacles of the exceptional amputee belie not only the inglorious causes of most bodily dismemberments—the so-called collateral damages of global war, industry, and disease—but also the lived lives of the majority of surgical amputees or congenitally disabled subjects.

ReclaimUC:

Kerim Friedman:

Practically Marzipan:

Books (kind of):

Megan Milks on fanfiction; this is good, and then there’s “it expresses an attitude not of denigration or gentle mockery, but desire mixed with betrayal. It’s infatuated, and it hurts. It wants”, and my heart is doing funny things.
Tipu Sultan’s dream journal. I want to read all of this.
Peepli’s gorgeous landscape glossary, via Dala and Kate separately.
Hari Kunzru on Dune is fantastic; also well worth it for the unhappy fans wellactuallying in the comments.
Frederic Jameson on Neuromancer at Public Books.

Not books (kind of):

Sara Ahmed on academia and its “problem students” (hint: those scare quotes are there for a reason).
Margaret Biser on some of the questions she was asked while giving tours on a plantation.
Bree Newsome Bree Newsome Bree Newsome.
Alexander Chee on America’s queer future, and then a coda to the earlier piece.
Rakesh Dixit reporting on the bizarre Vyapam story.
Alyssa Rosenberg on (Western) pop culture’s use of white supremacist villains to create comforting narratives–this is good, though I’m not sure it goes far enough for me. Perhaps a companion piece/coda is needed?

Jacob Remes: