Emily M. Danforth's Blog, page 30

"Accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need..."

“Accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.”

- George Saunders’s Advice to Graduates - NYTimes.com (via rebeccaschinsky)

"One of the reasons some cultural elitists—political pundits, novelists, intellectuals—tend to be so..."

“One of the reasons some cultural elitists—political pundits, novelists, intellectuals—tend to be so unsettled by the Internet is that it has revealed how oceanically broad are the interests of the public in general. Before the Internet, with no way of observing the obsessions of the masses, it was a lot easier to pretend that these obsessions simply didn’t exist; that the nation was “united” around caring about the same small number of movies, weekly magazines, novels, political issues, or personalities. This was probably always a self-flattering illusion for the folks who ran things. The Internet destroyed it.”

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Clive Thompson, Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better

(via rebeccaschinsky)

fer1972:Baloon Heads by Bela Borsodi

fer1972:

Baloon Heads by Bela Borsodi

fer1972:Andy Gilmore

fer1972:

Andy Gilmore

"It may be OK, soon, for a woman to marry a woman and a man to marry a man everywhere in the United..."

“

It may be OK, soon, for a woman to marry a woman and a man to marry a man everywhere in the United States. But it’s not even close to being OK for a boy to like Barbies and sparkly pink dresses or to swish when he grows up—or for a girl to be so masculine that people nearly do a double take trying to figure out which sex she fits. It’s not OK, yet, for someone apparently born male to grow into womanhood, or for someone who started life considered female to make it clear he’s a man. As for the rest of us, we are still, far more than we understand, herded unnecessarily by our sex—by the stereotypes associated with how a woman or a man should act.

It needn’t be this way. And if we as a country make the right legal, cultural, political, and educational decisions in the years to come—if we are willing to listen to, and learn from, those on the gender margins—we can make more room for us all.

”

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What’s Next for the Gay Rights Movement? | E.J. Graff for Newsweek

This is a long read, but a great one, about why there’s more to LGBT rights than marriage equality. I love when mainstream publications take the time to really delve into issues of gender and expression like this one did. What do you all think? Trans* and gender nonconforming friends, especially looking at you. 

(via gaywrites)

"1.9% to 2.4% of YA books published in 2013 include LGBT main characters or are about LGBT issues."

“1.9% to 2.4% of YA books published in 2013 include LGBT main characters or are about LGBT issues.”

- From 2013 LGBT YA by the Numbers by Malinda Lo (click through for the much messier context and all the supporting data)

fer1972:Microscopic Photographs of Insects taken by Martin...

fer1972:

Microscopic Photographs of Insects taken by Martin Amm

Fall comes to Pirogue Island State Park—Miles City, MT:...

Fall comes to Pirogue Island State Park—Miles City, MT: October 5, 2013.

"The air and its light are described as ‘melted’, ‘glazed’, ‘unctuous’, ‘elastic’, ‘fermenting’,..."

“The air and its light are described as ‘melted’, ‘glazed’, ‘unctuous’, ‘elastic’, ‘fermenting’, ‘contracted’, ‘distended’, ‘solidified’, ‘distilled’, ‘scattered’, ‘liquid’, ‘woven’, ‘brittle’, ‘powdery’, ‘crumbing’, ‘embalmed’, ‘congealed’, ‘gummy’, ‘flaked’, ‘squeezed’, ‘frayed’, ‘pressed’, ‘percolated’, ‘vitalised’ and even ‘burning.’”

- Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick from The Weather in Proust (via gravellyrun)

"Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love,..."

“Perhaps it’s that you can’t go back in time, but you can return to the scenes of a love, of a crime, of happiness, and of a fatal decision; the places are what remain, are what you can possess, are what is immortal. They become the tangible landscape of memory, the places that made you, and in some way you too become them. They are what you can possess and what in the end possesses you.”

- from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit