"“You Are Not Alone” Shonda Rhimes at The Human Rights Campaign Gala in Los Angeles, 2015"

"I don’t know if anyone has noticed but I only ever write about one thing: being alone. The fear of being alone, the desire to not be alone, the attempts we make to find our person, to keep our person, to convince our person to not leave us alone, the joy of being with our person and thus no longer alone, the devastation of being left alone.

The need to hear the words: You are not alone.

The fundamental human need for one human being to hear another human being say to them: “You are not alone. You are seen. I am with you. You are not alone.”...

You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe. And your tribe can be any kind of person, any one you identify with, anyone who feels like you, who feels like home, who feels like truth. You should get to turn on the TV and see your tribe, see your people, someone like you out there, existing. So that you know on your darkest day that when you run (metaphorically or physically RUN), there is somewhere, someone, to run TO. Your tribe is waiting for you.

You are not alone."

https://medium.com/thelist/you-are-not-alone-69c1a10515ab

Um, Shonda is my favorite. This speech is beautiful and important on the impact of media, and what it says to people who aren't represented. 

"When Talking About Bias Backfires"

"Why would knowledge about stereotype prevalence lead to greater stereotyping? We can find clues in research led by Prof. Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University. In a national park, Professor Cialdini’s team tried to stop people from stealing petrified wood by posting: “Many past visitors have removed the petrified wood from the park, changing the state of the Petrified Forest.” Even with this warning, theft rates stood at 5 percent. So they made the sign more severe: “Your heritage is being vandalized every day by theft losses of petrified wood of 14 tons a year, mostly a small piece at a time.” This warning influenced theft, but not in the direction you’d expect: stealing jumped from 5 percent to almost 8 percent.

The message people received was not “Don’t steal petrified wood,” but “Stealing petrified wood is a common and socially acceptable behavior.” We have the same reaction when we learn about the ubiquity of stereotypes. If everyone else is biased, we don’t need to worry as much about censoring ourselves."

If awareness makes it worse, how do we make it better? The solution isn’t to stop pointing out stereotypes. Instead, we need to communicate that these biases are undesirable and unacceptable."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/opinion/sunday/adam-grant-and-sheryl-sandberg-on-discrimination-at-work.html?_r=1

This whole series is super worth experiecing.

(credit to KM)

"Tech Companies Look to Break Down Walls Between Apps"

“Say you want a hotel for a weekend stay. You could Google for deals or go to a travel site. But wherever you go on the web, you will not find the rooms on HotelTonight, an app that offers steep discounts for last-minute bookings. The only way to get those listings is to use the app… That is but one example involving one app. But as people spend more time on their mobile devices and in their apps, their Internet has taken a step backward, becoming more isolated, more disorganized and ultimately harder to use — more like the web before search engines.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/technology/tech-companies-look-to-break-down-walls-between-apps.html

This is interesting. Also sort of makes me feel better about privacy, because right now at least not everything is talking to google.

The making-websites-more-like-apps thing is interesting

"Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Eulogy to Her Soul Mate"

"Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely… I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the world of words — to address the world with words. Then M. instilled in me this deeper level of looking and working, of seeing through the heavenly visibles to the heavenly invisibles"
http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/20/mary-oliver-molly-malone-cook-our-world/

"THE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE"

"With the release of their latest propaganda video featuring an apparent destruction of the Mosul Museum, ISIS got the art world fumed. ARTINFO's Mostafa Heddaya explains why western cultural institutions, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, should be more careful in their analysis of terror propaganda."
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/damage-has-been-done/

This was a great interview, super interesting about what we name as collective property and who gets to destroy it (sort of).
thank god at least some of that was fake, though.

"The African Emoji Company"

"I emailed Patel to see if he was at all worried about Apple finally moving into his company's niche and he told me “not really.”

“Apple have missed the whole point about diversity,” Patel said. “They were 'forced' to do this due to immense number of complaints on the lack of racially diverse emoticons, however look at their new emoticons—it's all about skin colour. Diversity is not about skin colour—it's about embracing the multiple cultures out there that have no digital representation.”"
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-african-emoji-company

"23 maps that explain how Democrats went from the party of racism to the party of Obama"

"The Democratic Party is the longest-existing political party in the US, and arguably the world. But in its over 180 year existence, it's completed a remarkable ideological and geographic transformation. Originally a staunch defender of Southern slavery, the party now wins the support of most nonwhite voters. Once an advocate of rural interests against coastal elites, the party now draws much of its strength from cities and coastal areas. These maps tell the tale of the Democratic Party's origins, its various metamorphoses, and the sources of its strength — and weaknesses — today."

http://www.vox.com/2014/12/8/7328755/maps-democratic-party

a really interesting look at American history