OUR SUNDAY LINKS

This was a huge week with many emotional highs and lows. We were overjoyed with the news of an NDP victory in Alberta. We sighed with relief as Omar Khadr was released on bail with conditional freedoms, despite the efforts of the Harper government to keep him imprisoned. Bill C-51 passed and our hearts sank; then our fists clenched. Among the many important things we might feel after these events, one thing is more clear: things can change. But also: things can get worse. Let’s keep both of these realities in mind as the federal election looms, as we call for the restoration of what has been lost in the past nine years, and demand so much more.

We also felt a lot of feelings this week as we released the first instalment of our MOMS Issue. And hey, it’s Mother’s Day! So let’s recap: in our editorial note, we editors reflected on the myth of the good mother and what we’ve learned from our own mothers, then Soleil Launiere talked candidly with her mom about porn, queer sexuality, and abuse in a hilarious and open mother-daughter exchange, Rebecca Roher illustrated the transformative realities of childbearing in her comic “Mom Body,” Mary-Dan Johnston boldly considered if she’s turning into her mother, and Zoë Ritts gave us a powerful literary essay on the ways we hold on to absence after a parent has passed away.  Also this week, Kiersten Holden-Ada talked about what it means to mother when the gender binary just doesn’t fit, and in a special Mother’s Day post Kathy Witterick wrote about how to make space for diversity when parenting.

 

LINKS: 

•  Alberta elects a friendlier face for its oil sands and now it’s time to organize.

• Revisit Harsha Walia’s piece on the enprisonment of Omar Khadr: Race, Empire, and Unexceptional Detention

• Some of the hundreds of missing Nigerian girls tell their stories of trauma and survival.

• “Kindness is mandatory. Anger is necessary. Despair is a terrible idea. Despair is how they win. They won’t win forever.” Laurie Penny’s call to action after UK’s Conservative Party formed a majority government on Thursday.

• “None of us individuals asked for this. Nobody asked to be part of it. But when you are an American, you’re born into this.” Ta-Nehisi Coates on race in America.

• The interactions in the most recent episode of Mad Men, “Lost Horizon,” were some of the most sexist we’ve seen on the show in quite some time. Simultaneously over-the-top and devastatingly familiar, Joan’s plight was indeed maddening as she triumphantly climbed up and was knocked back down from each rung in the ladder of workplace misogyny. All I can say is thank goodness for Peggy’s arrival at McCann-Erickson, because no matter what happens, we will always have THAT.

• “I have learned that kindness has bright speed when you want things done. I have learned that the world is as hard as it is beautiful, and you must keep your teeth and claws sharpened.”  Preach, Tanya Tagaq (and hbd!)

• On raising teenagers, by a (former) teen mom.

• Frida Kahlo: wardrobe, portraits, politics.

• Sometimes you can’t rely on HR, sometimes you just have to take care of yourself: “Whenever I am seeking a distraction from work, a way to “waste time” before I have to sit down and do something (like as I tried to write this) my first impulse is to masturbate. Seeking pleasure keeps me from my work, but it also refreshes me, returns me to focus.”

• Black social media activists are building a twenty-first-century civil rights movement: “Our demand is simple, stop killing us.”

• Amy Schumer’s raucous feminist humour 

• Naomi Skwarna’s hilarious and heartbreaking Hairpin piece “A Joke, A Story” is really beautiful:

It was a feeling of having lost a mother that was never really mine to lose, a brief return to that locked moment when she left the frame, or I remained, not anticipating that it would end quite like this.

Every year on this day, I fumble through stories like these, paying them tribute while also hoping to cue a release, even though I know it’s not likely. And so the question is, when will I have told these stories enough?

• Going out for brunch this Mother’s Day morning? You’re partaking in a feminist tradition!

• “There’s never a good time to have your period, but this has to be the worst.” How three young feminists are helping homeless women access period supplies. 

• Sarah Maslin Nir’s New York Times investigative piece on wage theft, racial and ethnic caste systems, and the price of nice nails sheds light on some shocking realities of the lives of manicurists.

• On the variety of ways to not praise Charlie Hebdo and why you might protest against the Pen Gala.

• “Do not ever at any point use the eggplant emoji in any tweets or DMs directed at her.” Wise words from Scaachi Koul: How to talk to women on the internet.

• Last, but certainly not least, YES I loved every word of this: Tina Knowles Lawson writes a letter to her daughters.