linkspam, linkspam, where've ye gone

via siderea: Croutons, Capitalism, & Conservation (Kondo & the Bibliophibians, Pt 2i)

Kondo's respect for our attachments to things – for our emotional lives vis a vis inanimate things – is a breath of fresh air. For many, Kondo's insight into the fact there are multiple kinds of emotional attachment, and it is profitable and wise for us to distinguish between joy and duty, is a liberatory revelation. Duty is not good enough, she says, only joy. She is the champion of no-fault divorce from things.

With Kondo's focus on getting rid of things – and how that played out with books – one can easily see where bibliophibian backs would be put up by Kondo's philosophy. Less obvious is why bibliophibians might – and often do – feel she speaks to them. Less obvious is the necessary corollary of the above.

In telling us that we should only keep those things which spark joy in us, Kondo is telling us that it is okay to take joy in things. Indeed, she is telling us that it is good and right to take joy in things.

And that is not something bibliophibians hear much from outsiders.

star-anise has been killing it with discussions on disability activism and language on Tumblr this week. Those links go to base posts, but there's a lot of good stuff in reblogs. I've chimed in in a few places, too, but the reblogs are worth glancing at.

The surgeon had a dilemma only a Nazi medical text could resolve. Was it ethical to use it?

Knowing the book’s history, which came to light in the mid-1980s, Mackinnon and Yee wondered, is it ethical to use the Pernkopf illustrations? They reached out to some of the nation’s leading historians of Nazi medicine, bioethicists, and experts on Jewish law to discuss whether Mackinnon acted ethically, as they describe in the May issue of the journal Surgery.

Fighting the power in a southern college town

Parker is just one of hundreds of young people in the South who entered local politics in the wake of the 2016 election. And it’s easy for the national press, which loves a story that will trend in social media, to play Parker up. She’s the one who got sworn in on a copy of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.” And she raps!

But it tells us more about the direction of the South to look at how Parker operates on the local level in a college town — and how the movement that brought her and others like her to office plays out on the ground.

This is actually the town I went to college in, although I left before Parker moved in. But I'm so delighted to hear about her work.