#449: “How can I protect you in this moment?”

Welcome, new subscribers, and welcome back, loyal readers! I’m happy you’re here.

Today’s issue is dedicated to an interview with Amanda E. Machado, the author of “The Abstract Rage To Protect,” June’s article of the month.

First published in The Adroit Journal, “The Abstract Rage To Protect” is about masculinity, the need for men to protect women, the violence that follows, and what we can do about it.

I highly encourage you to read the piece (if you haven’t already), then listen to the interview, then sign up for our discussion on Sunday, June 30, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. I’d be very happy to connect with you in conversation.

Sign up for the discussion on June 30

⭐️ About the article

“There is a difference between a man’s sense of protection and a man’s sense of violence,” a male friend once reassured me. But I never could tell the difference.

When Amanda E. Machado tells men that she was once sexually assaulted at a festival, with her ex-boyfriend nearby but lost in the crowd, they instantly become ashamed of him. “How could he let this happen?” they ask. “He was supposed to protect you.”

In this enlightening essay, Amanda explores notions of masculinity, weaving personal experiences with the work of Phil Christman, a lecturer at the University of Michigan. Christman writes, “When I try to nail down what masculinity is — what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence — I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.”

The biggest problem with this “abstract rage to protect,” Amanda argues, is that there is a fine line between a desire to protect and a desire to inflict violence. “The aggression men learn to protect the women they love, becomes exactly how they hurt the women they love.”

⭐️ About the author

Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator with ancestry from Mexico and Ecuador. Their work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, Sierra Magazine, among many other outlets. In addition to their essay writing, Amanda is also a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations around the world. They are also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

Amanda currently lives on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland, California.

⭐️ About the interview

Alongside fellow Article Clubber Sarai Bordeaux, I got a chance to interview Amanda a few weeks ago. It was an honor. We discussed a number of topics, including:

  • that we all have a desire to be protected

  • that we’re socialized that protection must be physical and therefore may involve violence

  • that we have a collective responsibility to find ways to redefine protection

Most of all, I appreciated Amanda’s generosity. It was clear that their thinking is expansive and non-judgmental. Listening to Amanda got me to want to be more imaginative in how I support others and how I show up for other people when they seek emotional protection. And it made me excited to discuss their piece with you.

🙋🏽‍♀️ Come Join Our Discussion on June 30

I urge you to join us on June 30 as we discuss our article of the month.

If you’re interested, I’ll be sure to get you all the info you need, including the Zoom link and this version of the article, where you can annotate and share your thoughts with other Article Clubbers.

If this will be your first time participating in Article Club, I’m 100% sure you’ll find that you’ll feel welcome. We’re a kind, thoughtful reading community.

What do you think? Interested? All you need to do is sign up below. Or reach out with all of your questions.

Sign up for the discussion on June 30

Thank you for reading and listening to this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 13 new subscribers — including Lex, Charlotte, Aoife, Martin, Susan, Ana, Alla, Rosie, Simone, Sham, Riccardo and Maarten — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. To our long-time subscribers (Alison! Allison! Allyson!), you’re pretty great, too. Loyal reader Salvador, thank you for sharing the newsletter and getting the word out.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet for hours on end, please consider a paid subscription. (Big thanks to Boris, Article Club’s latest paid subscriber.)

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, don’t despair: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend (thanks Juan!), leave a comment, send me an email, or send me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#448: Running From Blackness

Hi there and happy summer, loyal readers. I’m happy you’re here. ☀️

This week’s search for a great lead article took a circuitous route via The Audacity, Roxane Gay’s newsletter. Because many of you are subscribers, you may have seen last week’s emerging writer piece, “Black Negation,” by Allen M. Price. Reading that article led me on an online reading binge of Mr. Price’s essays. He writes clearly and directly about race, and his prose is unvarnished and unapologetic. I think that you’ll find reading “Running from Blackness,” valuable and thought provoking.

Because sometimes articles are best read in conversation, I’ve paired this week’s lead article with a best-of-AC selection — “Twelve Minutes and a Life,” by Mitchell S. Jackson. Published in June 2020, Mr. Jackson’s profile of Ahmaud Arbery is stunning. My hope is that you’ll read it (if you haven’t already).

Not interested in heavy (and important) articles about race and identity? Here are a couple more pieces to check out. They’re about:

⭐️ Join us for this month’s discussion of “The Abstract Rage To Protect,” by Amanda E. Machado. It’s a deep, thought-provoking article about about masculinity, the need for men to protect women, the violence that follows, and what we can do about it. ICYMI, here’s last week’s issue with more info.

We’re meeting on Zoom on Sunday, June 30, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm PT to discuss the article. If you’re interested, I urge you to take the leap.

Sign up for the discussion

1️⃣ Running From Blackness

Allen M. Price grew up in an all-white neighborhood in Warwick, Rhode Island, because his mother did not want him to be hurt, kidnapped, or killed. He began running in the sixth grade because he wanted to fit in with his white friends. Then he kept running, got good, and never looked back.

For much of his youth and adulthood, Mr. Price writes, “running took my mind off of knowing and understanding my Blackness or rather my lack of wanting to.” But the murder of Ahmaud Arbery caused him to reflect on how his childhood conditioned him to struggle with racial embarrassment. Now in his 40s, his relationship with running — and its influence on his identity — has shifted. Mr. Price writes:

When I ran, the layers of my identity that I had gathered in my life, that white America had put on me, the labels, names, cruel names, all of it fell away, leaving me with the raw soul of my being. By running harder, faster, deeper, further away from those almost irreparable scars on my developing young mind that burdened me with unrelenting stress, anger, and melancholy drove me to lose all sense of my lost identity and low self-esteem. All the hurt, frustration, and fatigue disappeared, and what appeared was a spiritual enlightenment, a meditation through movement, a connection beyond this physical world, beyond this earthly realm. By tiring, wearing down my body, my ego, running allowed my consciousness to appear and feel a sense of unity with the universe.

By Allen M. Price • The Masters Review • 15 min • Gift Link

Read the article

2️⃣ Best Of Article Club: Twelve Minutes And A Life

I’ll keep recommending this article until everyone reads it (or purposely chooses not to read it). It’s probably my #2 all-time selection, after “When Things Go Missing,” by Kathryn Schulz. I wouldn’t say “Twelve Minutes and a Life” is one of my favorites; that would suggest I enjoyed reading it. Enjoy isn’t the word I’d use. But in terms of the quality of its writing, and in terms of its message, and how brilliantly Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mitchell S. Jackson makes certain we remember that Ahmaud Arbery was a person who was loved — well, this piece is unparalleled. Mr. Jackson writes:

Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag or a name on a list of tragic victims. He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He, doubtless, was more than our likes or emoji tears or hearts or praying hands. He was more than an R.I.P. t-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript or a police report or a live-streamed hearing. He, for damn sure, was more than the latest reason for your liberal white friend’s ephemeral outrage. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.“

✚ This article won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, “for a deeply affecting account of the killing of Ahmaud Arbery that combined vivid writing, thorough reporting, and personal experience to shed light on systemic racism in America.” It was also chosen one of Article Club’s best articles of 2021.

✚ Mr. Jackson joined us in October 2022 to talk about his piece, “Looking For Clarence Thomas” (gift link). It was one of my all-time favorite Article Club interviews, mostly because Mr. Jackson gets into it about his writing process.

By Mitchell S. Jackson • Runner’s World • 26 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

Here’s young Article Clubber Ayka reading a book about a cat and a trombonist. Know the title? Big thanks to loyal reader Sele for the photo.

3️⃣ AI And The Death of Student Writing

For the past 12 years, Lisa Lieberman has been teaching freshman composition at community colleges in California’s Central Valley. She loves discussing feminism in Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and totalitarianism in The Handmaid’s Tale. But lately, she doesn’t enjoy grading. But it’s not because grading takes forever. Rather, it’s because at least one-third of her students are using artificial intelligence to write their essays. What is there to do about it? she asks in this well-written essay.

If you like a good dose of nostalgia, you’ll love this piece, especially toward the end, when Ms. Lieberman remembers her days at UC Berkeley, a young English major, reading Chaucer on a grassy knoll, under a shady tree. “There was nothing better,” she writes. “It felt like magic.”

By Lisa Lieberman • The Chronicle of Higher Education • 6 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

4️⃣ Gays Against Briggs

Since its founding three years ago, Moms for Liberty has urged its supporters to stand up for parental rights so that teachers don’t groom their kids to become trans. “It is not a question of civil rights or human rights, but it is one of parents’ rights and simply one of morality,” they might say.

Except they didn’t say this. This is what California State Senator John Briggs said in 1977, in his quest to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools.

The Slow Burn podcast — always outstanding at pointing out the connections between present-day controversies and their historical counterparts — is dedicating Pride Month to tell the story of how the LGBTQ community fought back against Proposition 6, otherwise known as the Briggs Initiative. Even though I don’t know what déjà vu really means (it’s French!), listening to this podcast, that’s how I felt.

By Christina Cautericci • Slow Burn • 50 min • Apple Podcasts

Listen to the podcast

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 8 new subscribers — incuding Warren, Anya, Erin, Terri, Meredith, Tabitha, and Leo — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet for hours on end, please consider a paid subscription. (Big thanks to Terri, Article Club’s latest paid subscriber.)

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, don’t despair: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend (thanks Tsoniki and Christian and Hoang!), leave a comment, send me an email, or send me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#447: The Abstract Rage To Protect

Welcome to June, Loyal Readers. Thank you for being here.

I’m very happy to announce that June’s article of the month will be “The Abstract Rage To Protect,” by Amanda E. Machado. It’s about masculinity, the need for men to protect women, the violence that follows, and what we can do about it.

It’s a deep, thought-provoking article, and I urge you to read it.

We’ll come together as a reading community to discuss Ms. Machado’s article on Zoom on June 30, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. You are warmly invited.

Today’s issue is dedicated to sharing with you a little more information about the article and to encouraging you to join us in discussion. Let’s get to it.

1️⃣ Article of the Month: The Abstract Rage To Protect

“There is a difference between a man’s sense of protection and a man’s sense of violence,” a male friend once reassured me. But I never could tell the difference.

When Amanda E. Machado tells men that she was once sexually assaulted at a festival, with her ex-boyfriend nearby but lost in the crowd, they instantly become ashamed of him. “How could he let this happen?” they ask. “He was supposed to protect you.”

In this enlightening essay, Ms. Machado explores notions of masculinity, weaving personal experiences with the work of Phil Christman, a lecturer at the University of Michigan. Mr. Christman writes, “When I try to nail down what masculinity is — what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence — I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.”

The biggest problem with this “abstract rage to protect,” Ms. Machado argues, is that there is a fine line between a desire to protect and a desire to inflict violence. “The aggression men learn to protect the women they love, becomes exactly how they hurt the women they love.”

By Amanda E. Machado • The Adroit Journal • 15 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

🙋🏽🙋‍♂️🙋🏽‍♀️ Come Join Our Discussion on June 30

I urge you to join us on June 30 as we discuss our article of the month.

If you’re interested, this is how things will go:

  • This week: We’ll read the article.

  • Next week: We’ll annotate this version of the article and share first impressions.

  • The following week: We’ll listen to our interview of Ms. Machado.

  • On Sunday, June 30, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT: We’ll discuss the article on Zoom.

If this will be your first time participating in Article Club, I’m 100% sure you’ll find that you’ll feel welcome. We’re a kind, thoughtful reading community.

What do you think? Interested? All you need to do is sign up below. Or reach out with all of your questions.

Sign up for the discussion on June 30

We are 9 years (and 447 issues) in the making. Thank you for building Article Club. Thank you for being part of our kind and generous reading community.

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 10 new subscribers — incuding Alvin, Martha, Athena, Lucydania, Colin, Lyes, Manuel, and Caroline — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription. (Big thanks to Athena, Article Club’s latest paid subscriber.)

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend (thanks Brooke!), leave a comment below, buy me a coffee, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#446: Just A Word

Most of you know this by now: I read a lot of articles and listen to a ton of podcasts each week to bring you the best pieces on race, education, and culture. My process is far reaching and wide ranging — a tour of hundreds of publications! — and my hope is that all of this foraging of the Internet means I don’t miss anything worth your time and attention.

But sometimes, there are gems that elude me. That’s what happened this week. A New Yorker article mentioned a new book that is based on a podcast published three years ago. So I listened to the podcast, then bought and started the book, and then asked myself, “How did I miss this?”

The podcast is Southlake. It’s outstanding, and I encourage you to listen (that is, if you haven’t already!). It’s about a rich white suburb outside of Dallas-Forth Worth that has a problem with racism. It’s about how a community failed to heal from a racist incident involving its young people. It’s about the backlash our country has experienced since the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning of 2020. It’s about the fight to protect or destroy our public schools. I think you’ll appreciate it. If you take time to listen, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Not interested in listening to an upsetting podcast about a community coming apart? Here are a couple more pieces to check out. They’re about:

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the main event. If a piece moved you, or elicited a strong reaction, I encourage you to share your perspective. Hit reply or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

1️⃣ Just A Word

This disturbing (yet unsurprising) podcast episode is about how a mostly-white community in a Texas suburb failed to respond to the harm that white students caused when they chanted the N-word in a video after a homecoming dance in 2018.

Instead of addressing the issue head-on, and instead of following a district plan to address racist bullying, teachers and administrators at Carroll High School in Southlake, Texas quietly treated rampant use of the racist slur on a case-by-case basis. Raven Rolle and other Black students, who made up just 3 percent of the school’s student body, did not feel heard. Meanwhile, white students argued that their freedom of speech was being violated. They asked, Why can Black students say the word while white students can’t? “To me, it’s just a word,” one white boy said.

Note: This is the second episode of a six-part series. Although not necessary, if you have the time, I recommend that you start from the beginning.

By Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton • NBC News • 40 min •
Apple Podcasts • Whole Series + Transcripts

➡️ More? Check out Mr. Hixenbaugh’s new book, They Came For The Schools. I’m in the middle of it, and it’s superb so far. In addition, this article includes a discussion of Southlake as context to explain the current attack against public education.

Listen to the podcast

2️⃣ 70 Years Later, Moms Are Still Fighting Segregation

In last week’s lead article, Prof. Bettina Love argued that 70 years after Brown v. Board of Education, it is abundantly clear that “our schools are separate” and that “most white Americans appear unwilling to integrate them.”

But something hopeful is happening in the Pasadena area of Southern California, where decades of white flight have left a whopping 50 percent of families sending their kids to the city’s 40 private and parochial schools. White moms are fighting back.

Reporter Nadra Nittle does an excellent job telling the story of school segregation in California and following the efforts of the Pasadena Education Network, an organization of mostly moms who promote family participation in public schools. When fellow white parents tell them they want their kids to go to a “safe school,” PEN parents push back. “They could never really articulate what safety meant,” one mom said. “What safety meant was they didn’t want their child in an integrated, diverse school. They just didn’t.”

By Nadra Nittle • The Hechinger Report • 18 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

Cruiser, who belongs to loyal reader Mindy, is a little stinker and is obsessed with food and pestering his big brother, Tater. Want your pet to appear here? hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ Manhood: What Are Men For?

Two weeks ago, Amanda Machado’s piece, “The Abstract Rage to Protect,” explored how men’s need to protect is a root cause of toxic masculinity and violence toward women. (If you haven’t read it yet, do!) In this illuminating collection, the editors of The Point Magazine interviewed hundreds of people from all genders, asking them questions like, “How did you learn what it meant to be a man?” and “What are men for?” It was fascinating reading the responses. Most striking to me was to see how easy it is (given our conditioning) to say that being a man means “hard work” and “taking responsibility” and “protecting women,” as if those are exclusive traits of one gender. My favorite answer was more expansive:

Men are for what anyone is for, to love and to laugh, to learn, to take care and to be taken care of, to breathe when the air still allows it, to gain through time a sense of what a good life looks like, and to seek it out.

By The Editors • The Point Magazine • 14 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

4️⃣ Janet Jackson’s Worn-In Braids Have the Most to Say in ‘Poetic Justice’

I appreciated this piece by Darian Symoné Harvin on Janet Jackson and the journey of her braids in the movie, “Poetic Justice.” Ms. Harvin writes:

Over the span of the film, we see the progression of Justice’s braids from pristine to worn-in, which is a realistic detail. Now — to be very direct — your boyfriend does not have to die for you to end up with less-than-pristine braids. Any Black person who’s held on to braids long after that unofficial expiration date has been to the edge of no return. So to think of all the relatable circumstances that lead one further away from booking that next appointment, or setting aside hours to take braids out in front of the television, it is realistic for Jackson to have those blurred parted lines as she plays Justice. Exhaustion, tiredness, long hours on your feet doing other people’s heads, grief, family. Not only are fuzzy braids inevitable, but they are the mark of a fast and fly girl living in any era. In this case, the braids helped Jackson to capture the mundane <> brilliant balance that Black women and femmes often strike. Expertly. If fresh braids are the equivalent of a fresh attitude and guaranteed self-esteem boost, worn braids represent a certain kind of struggle.

By Darian Symoné Harvin • Studio Symoné • 7 min • Gift Link

Read the article

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 6 new subscribers — incuding Diodio-Yang, Linaja, Pragati, Christy, Harpreet, and Amina — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription. (Big thanks to Diodio-Yang, Article Club’s latest paid subscriber.)

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend (thanks Heidi!), leave a comment below, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT. I’ll be revealing the article of the month for June!

#445: The Failed Promise of Brown

Hi Loyal Readers. We had another swell of new subscribers this week, which makes me very happy. Welcome, and I hope you feel home here at Article Club.

If you weren’t paying attention this week, or if you were distracted by the many things on the Internet designed to distract us (I won’t mention examples), you might have missed that the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, turned 70 years old.

Brown’s birthday prompted me to reflect on the promise of education and the state of our society. As someone who has worked in schools for many years, I still believe that classrooms filled with talented teachers and young people from diverse backgrounds can help us build a better, less racist, and more equitable world.

But over the years, I have come to acknowledge that my perspective is limited. While some people may wish for school integration as an ideal, others focus on the reality that we’re a deeply segregated society. Brown may have been a dream for some people at some point of our history, but it’s time to move on from integration.

If you care about public education, I encourage you to read this week’s lead article, “Seventy Years of Abandonment: The Failed Promise of Brown v. Board,” by Teachers College professor Bettina Love. I’d love to hear if the piece challenges your thinking or affirms it.

Not interested in reading a critique of our public education system and our society at large? Here are a couple more articles to check out. They’re about:

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles. If an article moved you, or elicited a strong reaction, I encourage you to share your perspective. Hit reply or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

1️⃣ The Failed Promise of Brown v. Board

On the 70th anniversary of Brown v. Board, Dr. Bettina Love speaks plainly and directly. Here are three excerpts from her powerful piece:

  • “What children of color have endured since the 1954 ruling is a resistance so powerful, so pervasive, and full of white rage that it has created a public school system that is separate and unequal by design to not only appease white dissent but to ensure a racial caste. Seventy years after Brown, public schools across the country are still deeply segregated and unequal.”

  • “If this nation is going to outright refuse integration through every possible personal, political, and legislative measure, then Black people must demand this country revisit the separate but equal doctrine. Centuries have taught us that we cannot force this country to live up to the promise of integration.”

  • “Our schools are separate, and most white Americans appear unwilling to integrate them based on the evidence. So, if separate is the reality for millions of Black and brown students for the foreseeable future, the demand needs to be for reparations.”

By Bettina Love • Education Week • 4 min • Gift Link

Read the article

2️⃣ Maybe You Shouldn’t Talk To Someone

“Sometime in the past decade or so,” writes Melissa Dahl, “my friends started talking about going to therapy like going to the gym: as a nonnegotiable healthy habit you’re supposed to keep forever.” After all, why bother your friends and family with your problems when you can pay hundreds of dollars to pay a professional?

But recently, something changed, Ms. Dahl writes. In her sessions, she would bring up the same issues. Her therapist would offer the same advice. Ms. Dahl was tired of talking about herself. So she quit. She wonders, Have I done the right thing?

It turns out, many people are quitting therapy. The question is why. Is it because therapy doesn’t work long-term? Or because it’s too expensive? Or is it something deeper — that now that we’re finally caring about mental health in a substantive way, we have to retreat? Where there is progress, do we need to regress?

By Melissa Dahl • The Cut • 8 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

Tater, who belongs to loyal reader Mindy, is obsessed with his ball and loves running on the beach and swimming in the lake. Want your pet to be featured here in Article Club? hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ The Parents Who Want Daughters Only

In most countries, if you’re having a baby through in vitro fertilization, you can’t choose the sex of your child. Here in the United States, that’s different. If you have the means, you can walk into most clinics and say you want a daughter, even if you have no problems with fertility.

In this well-reported piece, Emi Nietfeld explores the ethical considerations of sex selection and follows prospective parents who want to engineer their families. For example, you’ll meet 31-year-old Grace, who can’t even think of having a boy. She says, “It’s almost a repulsion, like, Oh my God, no,” she says.

Their reasons for preferring girls are many. Among them: boys are trouble; there’s already too much toxic masculinity in the world; having a daughter would combat systemic inequities; they would have a tighter bond with a girl.

But isn’t there something wrong with this? Ms. Nietfeld asks.

By Emi Nietfeld • Slate • 13 min • Gift Link

Read the article

4️⃣ It’s time for a poll! 🙋🏽

I’ve been noticing lately that more of you are reading the articles in the newsletter. This gets me thinking why. One reason might be that I’m including pieces that are shorter in length, just to mix things up. Do you like this? Let’s see.

POLL

What’s your optimal article length?

1-10 minutes

31%

10-20 minutes

69%

20-30 minutes

0%

30+ minutes

0%

POLL CLOSED

💬 Chat update: Tuesday’s experimental text thread chat about “Are White Women Better Now?” did not gain traction, so let’s put that idea on pause for a moment. If you have ideas for non-Zoom ways for us to connect and discuss articles, let me know!

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 13 new subscribers — incuding Faheem, Brooke, Vincent, Cheryl, Caroline, Mindy, Sarah, Eric, Andrea, Susan, Lini, Annaliese, and Em — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription. (Big thanks to Sarah, Article Club’s latest paid subscriber.)

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend (thanks Carla!), leave a comment below, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#444: Is This The End Of Reading?

Hi loyal readers! Great to see you. Before anything else, let me introduce a new experiment here at Article Club. Hope you like it.

💬 Let’s chat! Last week’s lead article, “Are White Women Better Now?” elicited strong reactions. Let’s chat about it. Next Tuesday 5/21, 5-6 pm PT, I’ll open a live text thread here for us to discuss. (If you can’t make it live, feel free to add your two cents afterward.) I’m looking forward to trying this out and seeing you there.

And now, back to regular programming.

I’ve been following the state of reading for a long time — as a teacher, non-profit founder, and general concerned citizen. It’s not looking good out there. People might be buying books, but they’re certainly not reading them very much. Other meaningful (i.e., not social media) reading is down, too. What is to be done? This week’s lead article, “Is This The End of Reading?” is a great one, especially if you’re a big reader like me who is a little bit scared as to what the future will bring.

Not interested in the inevitable demise of reading? Here are a couple more articles to check out. They’re about:

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles. If an article moved you, or elicited a strong reaction, I encourage you to share your perspective. Hit reply or leave a comment.

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1️⃣ Is This The End Of Reading?

Some of this, we’ve heard before: Young people aren’t reading as much, and they’re not as skilled in reading, so they’re coming to class unprepared to read complex texts. Whether or not this is true, or a new phenomenon, it certainly doesn’t help to bemoan the state of reading without trying to do something about it.

That’s why I appreciated this article so much. Reporter Beth McCurtrie follows college professors as they grapple with how to teach their students in a post-print world. After all, as one professor says, “If you design a class based on the assumption that students will do the reading, you’ll get nowhere.”

After listing a litany of causes that explain the decline of reading — here we go: smartphones, the pandemic, poor reading instruction, testing culture, less homework in schools, less writing in schools, grade inflation, anxiety, isolation, that school is boring, that parents don’t read to their children, and more — this article focuses on the successes and failures of real teachers doing the real work. It’s not all happy and triumphant. “We all kind of feel lost these days,” one professor says.

➡️ In case you’re interested, here’s my hand-written annotated version.

By Beth McCurtrie • The Chronicle of Higher Education • 18 min • Gift Link

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2️⃣ Masculinity: The Abstract Rage To Protect

“There is a difference between a man’s sense of protection and a man’s sense of violence,” a male friend once reassured me. But I never could tell the difference.

When Amanda E. Machado tells men that she was once sexually assaulted at a festival, with her ex-boyfriend nearby but lost in the crowd, they instantly become ashamed of him. “How could he let this happen?” they ask. “He was supposed to protect you.”

In this enlightening essay, Ms. Machado explores notions of masculinity, weaving personal experiences with the work of Phil Christman, a lecturer at the University of Michigan. Mr. Christman writes, “When I try to nail down what masculinity is — what imperative gives rise to all this pain seeking and stoicism, this showboating asceticism and loud silence — I come back to this: Masculinity is an abstract rage to protect.”

The biggest problem with this “abstract rage to protect,” Ms. Machado argues, is that there is a fine line between a desire to protect and a desire to inflict violence. “The aggression men learn to protect the women they love, becomes exactly how they hurt the women they love.”

By Amanda E. Machado • The Adroit Journal • 15 mins • Gift Link

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Here is Kite, who belongs to loyal readers Jenny and Daniel, having the time of his life at the mulch piles at Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland. Want your pet to be featured here? hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ My Guilty Pleasure Is My Old Friend, Diet Pepsi

After a once-a-day Coca-Cola habit that lasted from my childhood into my mid-20s, which left my brain addled on sugar, I quit cold turkey in April 2000 and have not looked back (except for the occasional Sprite). For Mireille Silcoff, her decision to return to her guilty pleasure, Diet Pepsi, stemmed from a desire to wean herself off her wine-drinking habit, which peaked during the pandemic and did not wane afterward, mostly because writing, she says, is stressful. In this quick essay, Ms. Silcoff recounts drinking her first can — “it tasted like seventeen!” — and reflects on how a good 20th century diet cola is “like an old friend.” Who cares if that friend is a little bit toxic? “Maybe life’s just a little more exciting for it,” she writes.

By Mireille Silcoff • The Walrus • 4 min • Gift Link

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4️⃣ Best Of Article Club: The Crow Whisperer

After crows attacked their dog, harassed their baby, and followed them around their neighborhood in Oakland, Dani Fisher and Adam Florin knew they had to call the local crow whisperer in order to avoid a murder. In this delightful piece, Lauren Markham follows Yvette Buigues as she mediates conflicts between humans and animals and performs energy healing on people’s pets, like Ernie the bull terrier and Bodie the cat. “Animals store pain and memories just like we do,” she says.

➡️ This is a Best Of Article Club selection. Based in the East Bay, Ms. Markham is one of my favorite writers. She focuses on issues related to youth, migration, and the environment. Her article, “Our School,” was one of my favorites of 2017. She has also joined us twice on the podcast — including to share her thoughts on “The Crow Whisperer.” Ms. Markham is the author of the acclaimed book, The Far Away Brothers, about twins who escape from El Salvador and build new lives in California. She gets bonus points because she’s an educator, too.

By Lauren Markham • Harper’s Magazine • 22 min • Gift Link

Read the the article

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our four new subscribers — Rhonda, Piotr, Abhina, and Antonio — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription.

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend, leave a comment below, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#443: Are White Women Better Now?

Hi Loyal Readers. We had another surge of new subscribers this week, which makes me very happy. Welcome, and I hope you feel home here at Article Club.

In personal news, I returned home this afternoon after a four-day school visit in which I served for the first time on an accreditation team. My two main takeaways: (1) Young people are great everywhere, (2) Teachers are fundamentally good people. Which reminds me: It’s Teacher Appreciation Week. If you’re a teacher, I appreciate you. And if you’re not, I encourage you to appreciate someone who is.

This week’s issue is a bit different. The lead article, “Are White Women Better Now?” might be a surprise to long-time readers of Article Club. In short, the piece challenges the effectiveness of anti-racism workshops and mocks white women who attend them. I’m not including it because I believe or disbelieve the author’s argument. Rather, I selected the article because it’s a well-written and thought-provoking satire. Depending on your politics, it might make you uncomfortable, but I hope you appreciate the author’s approach to writing the piece.

Not interested in reading a potentially controversial article? Here are a couple more to check out (still serious, though, this week). They’re about:

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles. If an article moved you, or elicited a strong reaction, I encourage you to share your perspective. Hit reply or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

1️⃣ Are White Women Better Now?

Progressive white women who fight for social justice are familiar with the criticism that after the assassination of George Floyd in 2020, they found themselves performing absolution in a proliferation of book clubs and Robin DiAngelo anti-racism workshops. But it’s one thing when a Black writer calls you out for this behavior; it’s entirely different when the admonishment comes from an anti-woke ex-liberal who married Bari Weiss, the publisher of The Free Press.

In this provocative piece, Nellie Bowles questions the value of anti-racism workshops and wonders if white women have become less racist having attended them. But her criticism does not land squarely on white women themselves. Ms. Bowles also does not trust the motives of the workshops’ facilitators. Most importantly, she derides our society’s expectaton that women apologize for structural inequities. She writes:

Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its “whiteness” (and I don’t mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. We’ll thank you for it.

I’d like to thank loyal reader and 22-time Article Clubber Jennifer for recommending this article to me.

By Nellie Bowles • The Atlantic • 12 min • Gift Link

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2️⃣ What ‘Cheer’ Led To

“Audiences love an underdog story,” writes Sarah Hepola in this captivating profile of the Netflix television show Cheer and its star no-nonsense coach, Monica Aldama. But if there’s anything that American audiences like even better, Ms. Hepola continues, “it’s what you might call an overdog story.” In other words, when a juggernaut comes back down to earth — especially when there’s scandal involved — that’s what‘s particularly gripping.

You don’t need to have watched Cheer to appreciate this article, but it helps. Ms. Hepola humanizes Coach Aldama and follows the rise and fall of the Navarro College cheerleading squad. There is certainly no shying away from the team’s many disturbing scandals, several involving sexual assault. But Ms. Hepola writes, “I was torn between thinking Aldama had the worst luck in the world and wondering, on the other hand, whether there was indeed something rotten in Corsicana. But from where I was standing, she looked like a convenient, high-profile scapegoat.”

By Sarah Hepola • Texas Monthly • 38 mins • Gift Link

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Here’s Arlo, who belongs to me and my partner Peter, being maniacal after returning from an adventure in the Oakland hills. Want your pet to appear in the newsletter? By all means! Here’s how: hltr.co/pets

3️⃣ Best Of Article Club: The Crane Wife

Ten days after calling off her wedding, author CJ Hauser travels to the gulf coast of Texas to study whooping cranes for an upcoming novel. On the trip, Ms. Hauser reflects on her failed relationship, realizes painful personal truths, and begins the healing process. Ms. Hauser writes, “It’s easy to say that I left my fiancé because he cheated on me. It’s harder to explain the truth.” This is a beautiful, raw, heart-wrenching essay.

This is a Best Of Article Club selection. Originally featured in Issue #203 in August 2019, “The Crane Wife” was selected as one of the best articles of that year. Ms. Hauser participated in AC in March 2020, when our reading community began to take shape and when the world began to close down. She generously joined our discussion and recorded a podcast interview.

By CJ Hauser • The Paris Review • 12 min • Gift Link

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4️⃣ It’s time for a poll! 🙋🏽

Last week’s poll revealed that 59 percent of you haven’t participated in our monthly discussions for one of these three reasons:

  1. Zoom isn’t ideal

  2. It’s scary to talk to strangers

  3. Sunday afternoons aren’t the best time

I hear that. This gets me thinking: What about a live chat thread where we discuss the week’s lead article? I’d be there Mondays 5-6 pm PT if you’d like to join live, but the thread would remain open through Wednesday night.

POLL

Would you join a chat thread about the week’s lead article?

Absolutely, sign me up

30%

Maybe, depends on if I like it

35%

Not really, I just want to read

13%

Discussions are better in person

22%

POLL CLOSED



Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 16 new subscribers — including Nasha, Julia, Adam, Devorah, Jacob, Caylin, Eric, Wrenn, Ariel, Noble, My Sister, Emil, Red, and Tara — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription.

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend, leave a comment below, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#442: Everything Is A Game

Hi Loyal Readers. Before we get to the articles, I’d like to welcome our 60 new subscribers — thanks to

Caitlin Dewey

and her outstanding newsletter,Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends. (If you haven’t subscribed, do!)


If you’re new or newish here: I’m Mark, I’m an educator in Oakland, and for the last nine years, I’ve been sharing the best articles on race, education, and culture for your reading delight. Plus we’re a kind and thoughtful reading community that does a deep dive on one article a month, if you’re interested. No matter if this is your first or 442nd issue, always feel free to reach out and say hi.

Say hi

All right, let’s get to the articles. There’s not a theme this week, just three great articles, all of which stopped me in my tracks and got me thinking. The lead piece, “Why Everything Is Becoming A Game,” sort of blew my mind. At first glance, it reads like something we’ve read before: a thoughtful critique of gamification — how tech companies trick us, in a Skinnerian way, to value their capitalist goals rather than our own humanity. But then comes the Unabomber part — which takes the article into the realm of I’ve-never-read-anything-quite-like-this-before. Yes, you might feel a bit creeped out at first, as I was. But if you make it all the way through, you’ll get it, and you might find yourself deleting your social media apps forever.

Not interested in such an intense read? Here are a couple more to check out (still serious, but less intense):

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles. As always, if an article moved you, or elicited a strong reaction, I encourage you to leave a comment and share your perspective.

Leave a comment

1️⃣ Why Everything Is Becoming A Game

If you’ve taken an introductory psychology course, you likely know about B. F. Skinner and his famous theory of behaviorism. In his experiments, pigeons kept pecking at a button attached to a food dispenser even after they felt full. Why? Because the button made a clicking sound, and the pigeons liked the clicking.

In this outstanding essay (that, yes, does include a section on the Unabomber, please don’t unsubscribe, it’s intriguing!), Gurwinder argues that tech companies and other major corporations have trained us to be like pigeons in a Skinnerian box — caring not about our intrinsic happiness, but rather about meaningless secondary extrinsic goals, like likes and follows and other things we can count but shouldn’t. He writes:

Today, people increasingly live inside their phones, bossed around by notifications, diligently collecting badges and filling progress bars, even though it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary, substantial research comprising over a hundred studies finds that prioritizing extrinsic goals over intrinsic goals — in other words doing things to win prizes and achieve high scores rather than for the inherent love of doing them — leads to lower well-being.

There’s definitely a sense of dread and doom in this essay, especially as the author speculates that late-stage capitalism will require businesses to accelerate the trend of gamification. Gurwinder writes, “[G]amification is not just a fad; it’s the fate of a digital capitalist society. Anything that can be turned into a game sooner or later will be.”

By Gurwinder • The Prism • 22 min • Gift Link

Read the article

2️⃣ The Problem With Passion Jobs

If you call your work “a calling,” or like “making a difference,” or find yourself working evenings and weekends, watch out, says Anne Helen Petersen: You’re likely working a “passion job,” and your employer is likely taking advantage of you.

You’re especially at risk of you’re a woman and working in a “caring” field like education or nursing. “Passion jobs are usually salaried,” Ms. Petersen writes, “because there is always far more work to be done than 40 hours a week. Give a passion worker a salary and the additional hours become a testament to their dedication.” And don’t worry about benefits: That’s what your husband’s job is for.

I appreciated this article not only for the reminder that workers should be paid for their labor, but also for Ms. Petersen’s analysis of teaching as a “profession on fire.” It’s not rocket science, she argues, that 30% of teachers are looking for a different job and that 82% think education is getting worse.

By Anne Helen Petersen • Culture Study • 11 mins • Gift Link

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Loyal readers Angelina, Sele, and Clem discuss with emerging loyal reader Ayka the many benefits of subscribing to Article Club.

3️⃣ The Parents Who Regret Having Children

I don’t have children, which means that from time to time, people ask me if I regret not having them. It got me thinking: Do people who have children ever get asked the opposite question? Apparently not often, according to R. O. Kwon, whose well-written essay explores the taboo some parents don’t want to admit.

If you’re a parent, and you somehow don’t love all your children all of the time, the shame and isolation are deep. Ms. Kwon writes, “Some of these parents talk about feeling utterly alone, like villains past all imagining. Several have noted that, afraid of being judged, they decline to be candid with their own therapists.”

At the same time, Ms. Kwon points out that if our society allowed for more complexity, we’d allow space for parents to share more nuanced views. After all, “it’s possible to have strong, lasting regrets about a life choice while ferociously loving — and caring for — the fruit of that decision.”

By R. O. Kwon • Time Magazine • 11 min • Gift Link

Read the article

4️⃣ It’s time for a poll! 🙋🏽

The other day, I did some math. More than 90% of you have never participated in our monthly Article Club discussion. (And that’s totally OK!) I want to hear from you, because I’m thinking of making some changes to the discussion format.

POLL

What’s the biggest reason you haven’t participated in a discussion?

I didn’t know about the discussions

33%

The articles haven’t interested me

7%

Being on Zoom isn’t my cup of tea

22%

It’s scary talking to strangers

22%

Sundays aren’t great

15%

POLL CLOSED

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our 60 new subscribers — including Leah, John, Lisbeth, Neal, Antioch, Dr. Fabulous, MJL, Jennifer, Allison, Dulcie, Jenny, Madeleine, Elizabeth, Emily, Damara, JZ, Casey, Abbie, Maria, Amy, Sarah, Ellie, Paula, Regina, Luci, Akharaz, Amelia, Laura, Charles, Brandy, Laura, Kate, Mollee, NW, Monica, Wendy, Nik, Katarina, Sabrina, Anne-Sophie, Erika, Alice, Jamie, Stefanie, Jesse, Kaleigh, Sarah, Ashley, Auntie, Stuart, Weirdo, Ally, and Charles — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

If you appreciate the articles, like the gift links, value our discussions, and in general have come to trust that Article Club will have better things for you to read than your current habit of incessantly scrolling the Internet, please consider a paid subscription.

Subscribed

If subscribing is not your thing, no worries: There are other ways you can support this newsletter. Recommend the newsletter to a friend, leave a comment below, send me an email, or leave me a voicemail. I’d like hearing from you.

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#441: School, Three Ways

I love my school, and I love working in a school. But this week has been a tough one. I won’t go into details, but I got that feeling that educators get sometimes: Is this public school thing really possible? Am I making a difference? What’s this all for?

Thankfully, a kind colleague got me out of my momentary funk, and I’m pushing strong into the weekend. But if you’re a teacher or a parent, you know: With everything we’re dealing with right now, educating our children is not easy.

This week’s issue offers three perspectives on schools and the challenges they’re facing. At first glance, the headlines seem click-baity, and possibly sensational. But rest assured, the typical Article Club-level writing quality is there.

Here are the topics of this week’s pieces. Hope you appreciate them, even if they might be difficult to read.

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles.

1️⃣ The Sextortion Of Boys

First, a warning: This article is sad and disturbing. It discusses the suicide of Jordan DeMay, a 17-year-old senior at Marquette Senior High School in Michigan. Jordan played football and basketball and was the school’s homecoming king.

One Instagram message: That was all it took for scammers in Nigeria to convince Jordan DeMay that they were a sexy, innocent girl named Dani who liked to flirt and play “sexy games.” After sending a naked photo, Dani asked for one in return. Jordan’s decision to reciprocate cost him his life.

Even though this is a harrowing story, I found myself riveted and could not put my phone down before finishing the article. Professor Olivia Carville does an outstanding job reporting on the latest horrible technology trend: the sextortion of boys. She also follows Jordan’s family’s response to the tragedy, as well as puts the blame on Meta, other social media companies, and Congress for allowing these horrors to continue.

By Olivia Carville • Bloomberg • 26 min • Gift Link

Read the article

2️⃣ Unplug The Classroom. Or Reboot It.

Back in the day, when I was a teacher, I used to love using technology in the classroom. The iPhone was new. Google Docs was new. It was a delightful endeavor to set up a classroom blog where your students could publish their thoughts.

Then came the pandemic. Since then, my opinion of technology has shifted. I’m not as severe as Jonathan Haidt, whose The Anxious Generation has called for schools to ban phones entirely. But I maintain that one of the saddest scenes in education is a classroom with a talented teacher and brilliant young people ignoring each other and instead hunching over their Chromebooks, squinting at their tiny screens.

This well-written essay by Antón Barba-Kay exhorts educators to be bold and do something about the role of technology in their schools. You can’t be wishy-washy with technology, Prof. Barba-Kay writes. You have to embrace it, or you have to fight it. Otherwise, our young people are doomed.

By Antón Barba-Kay • The New Republic • 24 mins • Gift Link

Read the article

Today we are celebrating the life of the adorable and wonderful Macy, who passed away last week. She belonged to loyal reader and podcast cohost Melinda. We’re sending our love.

3️⃣ Quitting Public Schools, Teaching Kids To Be Anti-Woke

Kali and Joshua Fontanilla grew up in left-leaning households and used to teach middle and high school students in Salinas, California. But then the Covid shutdowns and Black Lives Matter protests disgusted them. The adoption of a new ethnic studies course was the last straw. So they packed their bags, moved to Florida, and founded The Exodus Institute, an online Christian school that promises to teach students the “Com-plete History of Slavery in America.”

I’ve read a ton of these stories. You have, too. They’re usually boring to me. But this one was different. Reporter Hannah Natanson criticizes the Fontanillas without shaming them. She also subtlely makes the point that teachers should urge kids to think, rather than do the thinking for them.

By Hannah Natanson • The Washington Post • 13 min • Gift Link

Read the article

4️⃣ It’s time for a poll! 🙋🏽

You may have noticed a newish feature at Article Club: gift links. The point is to make sure you never hit a paywall when reading an article in this newsletter. They’re made possible by paid subscribers (thank you!). What do you think of gift links?

POLL

Should we keep gift links?

Yes, absolutely!

83%

Maybe, I could go either way.

7%

No, they shortchange journalism.

7%

No, I don’t think I’ll use them.

3%

POLL CLOSED

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

To our six new subscribers — including Yarona, Dinesh, Brook, and Jenny — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

Dear readers, if you appreciate Article Club, please feel free to leave me a voicemail, recommend the newsletter to a friend, or buy me a coffee. ☕️ (A big thanks to López for the gallon of coffee!)

Subscribed

On the other hand, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, please feel free to unsubscribe below. See you next Thursday at 9:10 am PT.

#440: An Age of Hyperabundance

Hi Loyal Readers. A few weeks ago, I was reading a newsletter written by someone I respect. Good person, good writer, good newsletter. Halfway through, something wasn’t quite right. My stomach fell. I felt discombulated.

And then it hit me: I was reading AI.

It wasn’t my first time, of course. AI-generated prose is everywhere now. But still, I felt cheated. Maybe it’s because I want to believe that when we put our name on something, it means we wrote it. At the least, it should mean we should cite our sources and collaborators.

But I’m coming around to the fact that AI is here, and it’s not slowing down. This week’s lead article, “An Age of Hyperabundance” (public link) discusses the latest trends in conversational artificial intelligence. The piece might terrify you, or you might be excited by the future’s possibilities. I’d love to know what you think. Feel free to share your perspective in the comments.

Leave a comment

If AI is boring to you, I have three other articles for you to check out. They’re about:

📚 All right, it’s time to get to the articles. Hope you enjoy them.

🎙️ One more day to sign up: Next Sunday, April 28, we’re discussing “The Colorblindness Trap,” by Nikole Hannah-Jones, via Zoom, 2:00 - 3:30 pm PT. I would be delighted to have you join.

Sign up for the discussion on April 28

1️⃣ An Age Of Hyperabundance

What happens at an artificial intelligence conference? Laura Preston knows. Not only did she attend the Project Voice Conference in Chattanooga last year, but she also delivered a keynote address, as its “contrarian speaker.” That is to say, Laura was the one person the organization invited to share the possible ills of conversational AI.

In this disturbing, funny, and well-written article, Ms. Preston recounts her experience at the conference. You’ll meet Keith, who believes virtual assistants will keep our elderly company and help them take their medicine. “There’s not going to be a choice,” he said. “A lot of old people are going to be talking to avatars in ten years, and they won’t even know it.”

You’ll also meet Caitlyn, whose AI can determine your mental health with a 40-second recording of your voice. And a chatbot that will tell you to euthanize your dog, without first visiting your veterinarian. And an avatar that will remind you over and over again that she’s not a doctor, yet nonetheless chastise you about your cholesterol.

Besides the creepiness of it all, Ms. Preston points out an important danger as we shift from a search culture to an AI culture. With Google, there’s still some agency in typing what we’re looking for and rummaging through results. With AI, we get just one answer, “packaged as authoritative” (based on whose expertise?) and giving “the impression of thought.” Will this be what knowledge becomes?

➕ Ms. Preston joined Article Club last March, when we discussed her outstanding piece, “HUMAN_FALLBACK” (so good).

By Laura Preston • n+1 • 20 min • Public Link

Read the article

2️⃣ On Being Queer And Happily Single

Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and The Late Americans:

“Sometimes when I’m talking about my work with friends, they ask me: ‘Yes, that’s great, but how are you?’ What they mean is, ‘But why aren’t you dating? Why are you alone?’ As if there’s only one way to be lonely, as if sex and romantic love were the only thing a person could long for. There’s something that happens in our conversations that makes it easy to quip or reduce the scope of a person’s life and all their desires to the presence or absence of a sexual or romantic partner. I say, ‘Oh, who knows, I’m happy. I’m fine.’

“And then, I guess, I feel like a hypocrite, because while I do bristle when people ask me questions like that, I do long for something. And I’m only just now able to scrape away the simple surface of it. Recently, another friend came to stay with me for a couple days. We had coffee and tea. We ate meals together. We looked at books. We had long conversations deep into the night. We challenged each other. We engaged each other. We were active and present to each other’s presence in the room. He is thoughtful and good. He is the sort of boy I’ve fallen in love with my entire life — wounded and a little sad, but with smart, searching eyes and a depth of acuity that is rare in the world. But I did not fall in love with him, not really. Instead, I think, we fashioned the sort of intimacy I’ve always longed for. To be open to another person; to be aware of them, their faults, their glories, their ugliness, their beauty.”

By Brandon Taylor • Them • 8 mins • Public Link

Read the article

We had a great gathering of 30 Article Clubbers last Thursday in Oakland. It was wonderful to build connections and chat about the articles. And a big welcome to first-timers Caitlin, Jason, Christian, Bex, Inés, John, and Ingrid! Let me know if you’d like to come to the next one.

3️⃣ Books Were My Lifeline

Here’s yet another example of why I believe that reading is the thing. Before Reginald Dwayne Betts became a lawyer and a National Magazine Award winner and a MacArthur Fellow, he spent eight years in prison. “Prison is the world’s most universal method of torture,” he writes in this thoughtful essay. “Prison is the symbol of all the hurt in the world.” To mitigate his suffering, Mr. Betts turned to reading books and writing poetry. He writes, “Books are central to the fight against the disappearing that follows a prison sentence. There is a particular kind of beauty in the belief that freedom might begin with a book.” Now Mr. Betts serves as the founder and director of Freedom Reads, a nonprofit organization that places libraries in prisons.

By Reginald Dwayne Betts • The Washington Post • 4 min • Public Link

Read the article

4️⃣ Tights vs. Leggings (vs. Stockings vs. Pantyhose)

I like words (example: chimera). In high school, I used to study my copy of the Webster’s New World Dictionary to parse meanings of similar words, like urge and encourage and exhort and and implore and prod. (You get the point.) Then senior year, my friends and I collected names that are also words (examples: Neil, Marlon). In college, my roommate laughed at me when I asked, “What really is the difference between a coat and a jacket?” (He couldn’t tell me. Can you?) This is all to say: I can’t believe I didn’t think of this article (and book) by Eli Burstein, who has compiled this delightful set of similar words that “probe all the nuances, niceties, and subtle shades of meaning your little heart desires.”

By Eli Burstein • Hazlitt • 6 min • Public Link

Read the article

Thank you for reading this week’s issue. Hope you liked it. 😀

⭐️ You may have noticed a recent new feature: public links. I want to make sure that you don’t hit a paywall when reading articles in my newsletter. If the “Read the article” button leaves you stranded, click the public link instead. You’ll be sent to a clean reading experience that includes the entire article, as a gift to you.

To our six new subscribers — including Beatrice, Barbara, Erika, Kellie, Kellie, and Em — I hope you find the newsletter a solid addition to your email inbox. Welcome to Article Club! Make yourself at home.

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