Thoughtful Young Adults

My friend Jodi is a guidance counselor at a school in Brighton, and she recruited me to help out in the writing lab today. As it goes every time I come into a high school these days, I was intimidated by the metal detectors, impressed by the school’s devotion to anti-bullying and anti-prejudice posters, and not entirely sure which young adults were the students and which were the teachers.

Then a diminutive young woman said EVERYONE, IF YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR WRITING LAB IT IS TIME TO GO and a bunch of people who looked just as old as her, many of them twice her size, scrambled to leave or sit down at their desks. One young man needed a couple quick bits of grammar and style advice before an orthodontia appointment. Another was dawdling on his phone until I tried to talk to him, and the threat of having to have a conversation with some random adult was enough to get him to turn to his homework. Then I helped a girl revise an essay about going to visit family in Somalia and the perspective on privilege and language that she’d gained from trying to attend a Somali school for a few months. After about an hour, Jodi asked us how we were doing. My student was justifiably proud of her work: “Miss Jodi it’s going great, I want you to read my essay!”

Miss Jodi replied immediately with “I wanted to read your essay last month when it was due.” Lesson: do not waste Miss Jodi’s time.

Before I left, I introduced myself to a couple more students and told the I’d be around if they had any writing questions. One asked me if I had any advice about researching the history of hip-hop and dance music, since you’re not supposed to use Wikipedia as a primary source. He may have been trying to test whether I was actually hip enough, and he may have actually wanted to know. I advised him not to cite Wikipedia, but to look up the books that Wikipedia cites, because they are valid sources. And then I told him to check WhoSampled.com, because I love that site.

For example, the Notorious B.I.G’s still-popular track Juicy owes a huge debt to Mtume’s 1983 Juicy Fruit, a song remembered less for its quality or enduring popularity than for how many different artists sampled it.

I have only ever heard Juicy Fruit once outside of samples, but was a #1 hit.

On Billboard’s “Hot Black Singles” chart.

“Hot Black Singles” was a chart category from 1982-1990 on Billboard.

It’s now called Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs.

And that’s a good topic for a research paper on the history of hip-hop and dance music.

Sad!
Health insurance in America: Rationing insulin, dying.

Policing in America: Cops in Baltimore kept toy guns on hand in case they shot unarmed people and needed to frame them.

Missouri AG: Sexual freedom is sexual slavery.

Media Commentary
The NYT is like Charlie Brown, continually surprised that Lucy keeps pulling the football away at the last minute.

Ex-Great America PAC staffer, Trump appointee, banned from Uber after Islamophobic, racist, threatening comments to driver. 

Krugman tweetstorm on hypocrisy.

Stephen Miller photos + Ted Bundy quotes… kinda works.

Jacobin on poverty and surveillance (the first big data set in government hands was the eugenics commission…)

JustSecurity on The Memo.

Healy, Kieran (2017). “Fuck Nuance,” Sociological Theory vol. 35 no. 2, p. 118-127. Delivered at the symposium “What is Good Theorizing?” 

Cultivating joy
Oh no, kitty!
Local news coverage of the Boston Blizzard of 1978, featuring some great accents and hair.
Hilarious list of made-up NYT Bestsellers.