I love this idea but I feel like it's going to have unintended consequences.

(photo via Evermine / martyz)

Operas as clickbait articles

opus72:

“This Man Slept With 1,003 Women- You Won’t BELIEVE What Happens Next!”

“Is That Rocco’s Young Apprentice Or Your Heroic Wife? Take This Quiz To Find Out!”

“What Is His Name? 8 Shocking Facts About That Mysterious Knight You Have To See To Believe!”

“Bats HATE Her- Queen of the Night Discovers Notes Inaccessible in the Natural World”

“She Is 337, Looks 20. Local Czech Woman Exposes Shocking Life Extension Potion“

“We Introduced Two Twins to Each Other Without Their Knowledge- The Results Will Disturb You”

“Woman Declares Crush On Local Prophet- You Won’t BELIEVE What Happens Next!”

“Get You And Your Lover Out of Italy Safely- One Woman’s Weird Solution”

I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, ‘Well you know it’s deeply troubling to hear what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘We don’t have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany.’ And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, ‘There’s no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people.’ And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn’t bear it. It would be unconscionable. And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people - where you’re 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white - in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect.

Bryan Stevenson (We Need to Talk About Injustice)

(And then we fly the confederate flag over our government buildings, and wear it on our shirts, and put stickers of it our cars.)

And this is what I don’t understand about the US. Germany was able to learn from its horrific past but the US sometimes seems to revel in it.

(via windycitylibrarian)

Kitten And Owlet Become Best Friends And Nap Buddies

Some Things Your Local Librarians Would Like You To Know

It is not a stupid question. Even if it is a stupid question, we have been thoroughly trained to answer your question without judgement or second-guessing. Besides, we’re mostly just glad you’re not asking us about the noise the printer is making again.

There are probably (at least) two desks in the library. One is where you check out books and is mostly staffed by people wearing nametags that say “Circulation Clerk.” These people can answer your questions about damaged or missing books, fines, and how many forms of identification we’ll need if you want to get a library card but your mailing address is in Taiwan. The other one is closer to the books and computers and is mostly staffed by people wearing nametags that say “Librarian.” These people can answer your questions about spider extermination, how to rent property to the United States Postal Service, and the number of tropical island nations in which you could theoretically establish the first United States Embassy. We would love to answer these questions for you. It would be a nice change from the printer.

We probably own a 3D printer by now. 3D printers, are cool, right? Please, please come use our 3D printer, it’s so lonely.

We spent a lot of money to hire this woodworker to come and teach a class at the library which you can attend for free. You will probably be the only person between the ages of ten and fifty in attendance, but your presence will fill the librarian with an unnameable joy. They will float back to their manager in a daze. “A young person came to my program,” they will say. You will have made their entire job worthwhile.

Every time you ask us for a book, movie, or music recommendation, a baby librarian gets their first cardigan.

Somewhere in the library, there is a form. If you fill out this form with your name and library card number and the details of the thing you are looking for, we will find you the thing. Sometimes the answer is “the thing is in Great Britain and they will not send it to us,” but more often the thing will just appear on hold for you, and one day you will pick up a copy of that out-of-print book you never thought you would read and maybe you will say, “Wow, the library is amazing,” and the librarian’s heart will glow. 

Please bring back book #2. The rest of its series misses it very much.

Five dollars is not a large library fine. Believe me, before I started working in libraries, I too wondered how someone could sleep at night, knowing they owed money to the library. When we laugh as you sheepishly apologize for your $2.50 in overdue fees, we are not mocking you, we are thinking of the ten people we sent to debt collection already today.

We really don’t care why you’re checking out Fifty Shades of Grey. Maybe you have a specifically-themed ironic bachelorette party to plan. Maybe you’re working on a thesis paper about mainstream media’s depiction of female sexuality. Maybe you just got curious. We will give you the benefit of the doubt. 

Whatever you’re smoking in the family restroom, please stop.

Somewhere on the library’s website, buried under “Links” or “Research” or “On-line Resources,” is a page that a librarian spent a month’s worth of work on. It contains many links to websites you thought everyone knew about, and one to a page that you could never have imagined existed that perfectly solves a problem you never expected to be resolved. 

Imagine the kind of person who would think to themselves, “Library school sounds like a thing I should do.” For the most part, you are imagining the kind of person who is now a librarian. We want very much to help you, but we’re not entirely sure how to do that unless you ask. You are not bothering us. Please, come and say hi.

Is this Tinder or program notes of a concerto performance?

Honestly I’m so sick of seeing rich-girl fitness. Don’t show me pretty vegan smoothies in mason jars held by a girl with perfect makeup, a manicure, and a color-coordinated running outfit. Show me diets and workouts that I can manage when I’m working 13 hours days and living on a budget. Show me how to eat healthy when I have 5 minutes for lunch. Show me small things I can do to help my body. Show me workout plans that I can do outside of a gym when I can’t afford a membership. I don’t have time. I don’t have money. Half the time I don’t have the motivation to get up in the morning. But I have a body. I want to be healthy.

the moral of hamlet is don’t ever try to go home and resolve conflicts with yr family just stay at college and do gay shit w ur friends

“You fight like a girl.”

“Thank you.”

Emotional Overlap / Inside Out

Source: Siz iOS app - Video

Watch: Cameron Esposito nailed why everyone should support Planned Parenthood — and the facts back her up 

Young women’s speech isn’t just acceptable—it’s revolutionary. And if we value disruptors and innovation, we shouldn’t just be tolerating young women’s speech—we should be celebrating it. What does it mean to disrupt language? Let’s start with the great English disruptor: William Shakespeare. Shakespeare is celebrated to this day not just because he wrote a mean soliloquy but because of what he added to our language—he’s said to have brought in over 1,700 words. But recent scholars have called that number of words into question. As Katherine Martin, head of US Dictionaries at Oxford University Press, has pointed out, if Shakespeare was inventing dozens of new words per play, how would his audience have understood him? Rather, it’s likely that Shakespeare had an excellent grasp of the vernacular and was merely writing down words that his audience was already using. So if Shakespeare wasn’t disrupting the English language, who was? And how did we get from Shakespearean English to the version we speak now? That’s right: young women. A pair of linguists, Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg at the University of Helsinki, conducted a study that combed through 6,000 personal letters written between 1417 and 1681. The pair looked at fourteen language changes that occurred during this period, things like the eradication of “ye,” the switch from “mine eyes” to “my eyes,” and the change from hath, doth, maketh to has, does, makes. In 11 out of the 14 changes, they found that female letter-writers were changing the way they wrote faster than male letter-writers. […] All of this leads us to the biggest question: if women are such natural linguistic innovators, why do they get criticized for the same thing that we praise Shakespeare for? Plain old-fashioned sexism. Our society takes middle-aged men more seriously than young women for a whole host of reasons, so it’s only logical that we have also been conditioned to automatically respect the tone and cadence of the typical male voice, as well as their word choices. Sure, let’s encourage young women to speak with confidence, but not by avoiding vocal fry or “like” or whatever the next linguistic disruption is. Let’s tell them to speak with confidence because they’re participating in a millennia-old cycle of linguistic innovation—and one that generations of powerful men still haven’t figured out how to crack.

Move over Shakespeare, teen girls are the real language disruptors

I’m on quartz! I really want to excerpt the whole thing, so you should just go there and read it. Here’s a bonus paragraph that didn’t end up fitting in the article: 

Criticizing any disadvantaged group for their language is confusing cause and effect – we don’t like the language because we don’t like the people, not vice versa. But if you still don’t believe me, how about an experiment? Try deeply respecting young women for a few generations. Perhaps they’ll start sounding less tentative, or perhaps we’ll all learn to stop conflating the content of what you say with the style of how you say it.

(via dilettante-perpetuel)

#DearNonNatives happened yesterday. Signal boost this and support! This hashtag needs more traction.

Forgive them. All of your thems. The more thems you can forgive, the better you’ll feel.

Karen Salmansohn  (via thatkindofwoman)