This week: Feminist dystopia / The new nuclear arms race / What we lost in MLK / Immigrants’ city of sadness / How to reduce plastic use
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1. The Remarkable Rise of the Feminist Dystopia
By Sophie Gilbert | The Atlantic | October 2018
“A spate of women-authored speculative fiction imagines detailed worlds of widespread infertility, criminalized abortion, and flipped power dynamics.”
2. A New Nuclear Arms Race Has Begun
By Mikhail Gorbachev | The New York Times | October 2018
“President Trump says he plans to withdraw from a nonproliferation treaty that I signed with Ronald Reagan. It’s just the latest victim in the militarization of world affairs. ”
Also see, from The New York Times: George Schultz: We Must Preserve This Nuclear Treaty
3. City of Exiles
By Daniel Duane | The California Sunday Magazine | October 2018
“Every month, thousands of deportees from the United States and hundreds of asylum-seekers from around the world arrive in Tijuana. Many never leave.”
4. MLK: What We Lost
By Annette Gordon-Reed | The New York Review of Books | October 2018
“It might be hard for younger generations of Americans in 2018, fifty years after King’s assassination, to fathom just how controversial a figure he was during his career, and particularly around the time of his death.”
5. First Man, Gravity, 2001: A Space Odyssey: When Auteurs Go to Space
By Bilge Ebiri | Vulture | October 2018
“Something special happens when an auteur goes to space. They push their stylistic and thematic limits. The vast emptiness of the cosmos, combined with the sudden malleability of time, has a way of bringing out the more experimental side of a filmmaker.”
6. The Sinaloa Cartel’s 90-Year-Old Drug Mule
By Sam Dolnick | The New York Times Magazine | June 2014
“He always drove alone and had managed to avoid detection for nearly a decade. The D.E.A. agents listened to key cartel figures talk about Tata many times, and they had even caught a glimpse of him once. Now, for the first time in months, Tata was coming back to Detroit.”
7. How to reduce plastic, foil and other kitchen disposables
By Katherine Roth | Associated Press | August 2018
“Remember that in addition to reducing and reusing, recycling is an easy option for many items, including glass, plastic containers, bottles, cans, clean aluminum foil and batteries.”
8. A Great Writer at the 1968 Democratic Disaster
By David Denby | The New Yorker | August 2018
“It was the convention that, in effect, turned the country over to Richard Nixon and led to six more years of war in Vietnam.”
9. The Benefits of Nakedness
The Documentary | BBC World Service
“Some people just love to be naked in public. Dr. Keon West travels far and wide to speak to those who enjoy taking their clothes off to find out why they do it, and what the benefits — and disadvantages — might be.”
10. ‘Sharp Objects’ and Damaged Women
By Liza Batkin | NYR Daily :: The New York Review of Books | August 2018
“Camille is treated, quite literally, as a text to decipher: her body is covered with words that she has cut into herself, and each episode in the series is named after a scar on her body (‘Milk,’ ‘Cherry’).”
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stillness of heart 