Celebrate Pride Week with our top LGBT reads
June 24, 2016
As New York City Pride Week reaches its culmination this weekend, get ready for the biggest LGBT party of the year by checking out our selection of top queer literature.
Month: June 2016
Brexit will fuel citizenship arbitrage
—Peter J. Spiro
The unexpected result in the British referendum is hitting the news today like a thunderclap. As the financial markets tumble, few will escape Brexit’s consequences. But none will feel Brexit more than those whose employment and residential security have been contingent on the UK’s continued EU membership.
How racism came to be called a mental illness — and why that’s a problem
June 22, 2016
— James M. Thomas and W. Carson Byrd
Few would disagree that racism deserves condemnation, or that racist people shouldn’t change their views. But arguing that racism constitutes an actual mental illness goes a step further. Racism has long been considered the product of economic, social and political forces, not a mental health disorder. What changed?
The Price of Freedom in Orange Is the New Black
—Jill A. McCorkel
Season three of Orange is the New Black introduced us to a new character, one that you won’t find on listed among the show’s cast or analyzed in any detail on the many blogs devoted to the series. The character in question is Management & Correction Corporation (MCC), the private corporation that receives a contract from the feds to take over day-to-day operations of Litchfield prison.
Buying a Bride vs. Making a Match
June 21, 2016
—Marcia Zug
The stigma of meeting someone online is gone, but there is one glaring exception to this acceptance: mail-order marriage. The dislike of mail-order marriage has a complicated history, but while the reasons men and women seek mail-order marriages have changed throughout the centuries, its use as a means to increase one’s marital options and thereby improve one’s situation through marriage has changed very little.
Survivor’s Guilt
June 20, 2016
—Bernadette Barton
Wrapping my head and heart around the murder of 49 queer people while they were dancing in a gay bar in Orlando, beneath the familiar numb feeling accompanying another story of loss, horror, and violence, is survivor’s guilt. I feel an enormous teary affection for all us struggling to digest the consequences of so many queer lives lost in the very place that is supposed to be our haven, and by someone who, had he allowed it, might so easily have been one of us.
To Better Respect Nature and Authority
—Kerry Mitchell
National parks provide nature in its full glory and reality, but they do so while providing a measure of security and comfort that visitors would not naturally encounter without the institution. Such a paradox is not a logical impossibility, but an operation and a strategy. And as much as that sounds like a game, the stakes can be as real as the ground under foot.
Why do we blame mothers when children are harmed?
June 14, 2016
—Linda C. Fentiman
The recent public excoriation of the mother whose three-year-old son slipped through a barrier at the Cincinnati Zoo and fell into a gorilla enclosure is striking, but not surprising. There is a widespread tendency to blame parents—and especially mothers—whenever a child’s health or well-being is endangered.