A double shot of Some Links this month.
- And thus passes away the world’s only palindromic demonym: Nauru is now Naoero.
- To-do list management tips from T. Rex.
- The perspective of Reid Walker, a Native American, on land acknowledgements: too much and too little.
The practice has roots in Indigenous protocol, but the modern institutional version came through Australia and Canada. In Australia, a “Welcome to Country” can be delivered only by a member of the nation whose territory you’re on, usually an elder — a host’s gesture. An “Acknowledgment of Country” is what non-Indigenous people offer in return, as guests. The American version collapsed the two, so non-Native institutions now perform what was originally a host’s role.
- Anthony Conwright: Stop calling it the Civil War.
The linguistic whitewashing of the Confederacy is more than a manufactured myth of Southern redemption. It is a ritual of national forgetting, one in which American society participates every time we call the Slaveholders’ Rebellion against the United States the Civil War. “Civil War” is no name for a war waged by slaveholding traitors against the United States to hold Black Americans in human bondage. Now, 165 years since the war’s first shots, we should be honest about how we hold its memory.
- The usual crap from 47: Trump administration moves to block public from enforcing environmental protection laws; Donald Trump accuses The Washington Post of treason.
- Jerry Cayford on a framework for eliminating gerrymandering.
- A Letter from Mick Jagger to the Devil on the First Draft of “Sympathy for the Devil,” by John Moe.
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- James Harbeck continues fighting the good fight for epicenter.
- Chasing life goals is a recipe for disaster – so try these tiny experiments instead. Maybe my first experiment should be acting on some of the Personal Development links that I’ve posted, instead of just sharing them.