Link Roundup April 2016

Top Conservative Writer Is A Group Effort, Sources Say

These sources — a former intern and someone who has worked with Yiannopoulos for years both in and outside of the Breitbart News Network — as well as a video taken from a private chat offer a glimpse behind the curtain of one of a new movement’s leading provocateurs. The sources also suggest that much of the commentator’s work is written by a bevy of mostly unpaid personal interns.

TurboTax Maker Funnels Millions To Lobby Against Easier Tax Returns

Intuit has spent $11.5 million lobbying the federal government — more than Apple or Amazon. Former California Senator, Tom Campbell, who felt Intuit’s power during his proposal for an easy-file system in California, wrote that he “never saw as clear a case of lobbying power putting private interests first over public benefit.” Intuit’s long and expensive campaigns over the years have argued that IRS-based service is a “massive expansion of the U.S. government through a big government program.”

Crowd Source: Inside the company that provides fake paparazzi, pretend campaign supporters, and counterfeit protesters

Adam believed a niche service providing crowds might appeal to campaign directors. But once he launched the service, he found that he was asked to wield his crowds in a way he hadn’t anticipated — not only to support a candidate but to protest a candidate. A candidate might muster 500 supporters to a speech on a college campus, but if Adam sent just five recruits to demonstrate outside the auditorium, he discovered that the media would give equal coverage to both the rally and the demonstration.

BLACK GIRLS MATTER: PUSHED OUT, OVERPOLICED AND UNDERPROTECTED

Black girls receive more severe sentences when they enter the juvenile justice system than do members of any other group of girls, and they are also the fastest growing population in the system. Despite these troubling trends, there is very little research highlighting the short and long term effects of overdiscipline and pushout on girls of color. Emerging from the 2012 symposium, it was clear that serious interventions were necessary to alleviate the knowledge desert that exists around the lives and experiences of Black women and girls.

On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship

And so it was that I asked questions about the questions that mattered to us and had to write in certain ways, as these matterings sometimes were more our business than others, but clearly had import for much larger questions, questions concerning just forms of dominion, or sovereignty or citizenship. I want to reflect upon the dissonance between the representations that were produced by writing away from and to dominant forms of knowing and commitment to what people say (imperfectly glossed here as “voice”). I do so in order to ask what the form of knowledge might look like when such histories as the one sketched out above are accounted for in disciplinary form and analysis. And further to that, I consider what analysis will look like, or sound like, when the goals and aspirations of those we talk to inform the methods and the shape of our theorising and analysis.

The Jefferson Bottles

We sat down in Koch’s “cowboy room,” surrounded by Charles Marion Russell paintings, Frederic Remington bronzes of men on horseback, antique cowboy hats, bowie knives, and dozens of guns, displayed in glass-topped cases: Jesse James’s gun, Jesse James’s killer’s gun, Sitting Bull’s pistol, General Custer’s rifle.

Online abuse: how women are fighting back

“Watching how someone copes with a horrendous situation isn’t your opportunity to jump in and tell them how to do it better. I’ve tried every method for dealing with harassers: blocking, ignoring, responding, reporting, mocking, crying, everything. And do you know what worked? Nothing. So the only option left is the one that makes me feel better, that gives me back some control.”

Growing Up On The Seedy Underbelly Of The Internet

In a sense, it’s not that the internet has gotten less weird, but rather, the internet has gotten more corporate.

The dark side of Guardian comments

Articles written by women got more blocked (ie abusive or disruptive) comments across almost all sections. But the more male-dominated the section, the more blocked comments the women who wrote there got (look at Sport and Technology). Fashion, where most articles were written by women, was one of the few sections where male authors consistently received more blocked comments.

Zucker's "Therapy" Mourned Almost Exclusively By Cis People

Over and over, the “Activists vs. science” narrative emerges. It’s a “segment” of us that is to blame. It’s “an influential strain of trans politics” that finds Zucker’s methods offensive—a clever rhetorical move that suggests there are other competing strains.

The Feminists Of Wakanda

The feminist critique is in the air now. If my rendition of Black Panther wasn’t created by that critique, it breathed the same air. I can’t really kill off or depower women characters without grappling with Gail Simone. I can’t really think about how women characters are drawn anymore without thinking about the women in Bitch Planet, and how they seem drawn beyond the male gaze. This is why criticism is important. The job of criticism isn’t to interrupt or encourage commercial prospects. (“Batman vs Superman smashes Box Office, despite critic complaints!”) Criticism should push our imagination and help us understand what is actually possible in art and, I’d argue, even what is moral.

I tried to warn women about Jian Ghomeshi — and it nearly destroyed my life

The cyber hate proliferates. I’m swimming in a sewer of it, but even worse are the unexpected remarks from people in my life. “Not cool, I love that guy,” one male friend texts. Another sends: “HARSH, Ciccone. Why’d you do that?” “I wanted to warn other women,” I tell him. “Right,” he says.

The Killer Hiding in the CDC Map

Last Friday, a friend doing research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta sent me a photo of a display at the CDC’s in-house museum. She thought I’d be interested because it had to do with the cholera epidemic in Haiti, which I lived through at its beginning and have been reporting on ever since. She was right.

We Tracked Down the Lawyers Behind the Recent Wave of Anti-Trans Bathroom Bills

Many conservative groups have promoted these bills: As my colleague Hannah Levintova reported, three of Ted Cruz's advisers threw their support behind the bathroom bill in North Carolina, as did the Family Research Council. Another group, the Family Action Council of Tennessee, rallied behind a bathroom bill in its state, along with the executive director of the Tennessee Baptist Convention. But one conservative powerhouse appears to be particularly influential when it comes to putting bathroom bills on the agenda: a massive, deep-pocketed network of lawyers called Alliance Defending Freedom.

Re-examining Monica, Marcia, Tonya and Anita, the ‘scandalous’ women of the ’90s

An abused woman deserved to be treated with care, but a shameless, attention-guzzling, power-hungry bimbo certainly didn’t.

Your Friends and Rapists: How dick culture permits the crime

That night I did not want to find out, or maybe I already knew, whom they would choose if I made them. Jon or me. My word against his. Their phones. I can see him that morning after I left, when he no longer had to pretend to be asleep, calling Rob or Jake, saying it’s cool, man. She’s cool. Don’t show anyone those pictures.