Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
The Institute for Family Studies explains why men are more likely to benefit from marriage:
The fact that men are legendarily wary of marriage is stranger than it first appears. Both men and women benefit from marriage, but men seem to benefit more overall. In addition to being happier and healthier than bachelors, married men earn more money and live longer. And men can reap such benefits even from mediocre marriages, while for women, the benefits of marriage are more strongly linked to marital quality.
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin writes on an MS DOS machine?
The Huffington Post argues that Paul Ryan’s approach to poverty is straight from the 19th century:
Despite their calls for a new approach to poverty, however, Ryan and Woodson’s ideas are extremely old-fashioned. Indeed, they echo conservative views about welfare going all the way back to the English Poor Laws of the 17th century, which categorized poor people according to their deservingness of help. These ideas have gained popularity at different times since then in response to different crises, like when “tramps” terrorized American towns in the 1870s, when “welfare queens” birthed crack babies in the 1990s, and when the so-called “food stamp surfer” delighted the Fox News crowd by refusing to get a job in 2013.
The blog “Africa Is a Country” talks about how every book cover of Africa looks the same and it’s not pretty:
Last week, Africa Is a Country, a blog that documents and skewers Western misconceptions of Africa, ran a fascinating story about book design. It posted a collage of 36 covers of books that were either set in Africa or written by African writers. The texts of the books were as diverse as the geography they covered: Nigeria, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Mozambique. They were written in wildly divergent styles, by writers that included several Nobel Prize winners. Yet all of books’ covers featured an acacia tree, an orange sunset over the veld, or both.
Joshua Rothman from The New Yorker outlines the origin of political “privilege”:
The concept really came into its own in the late eighties, when Peggy McIntosh, a women’s-studies scholar at Wellesley, started writing about it. In 1988, McIntosh wrote a paper called “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies,” which contained forty-six examples of white privilege. (No. 21: “I am never asked to speak for all the people of my racial group.” No. 24: “I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to the ‘person in charge,’ I will be facing a person of my race.”) Those examples have since been read by countless schoolkids and college students—including, perhaps, Tal Fortgang, the Princeton freshman whose recent article, “Checking My Privilege,” has been widely debated.
Satanism may be breaking out at Harvard and people are pretty freaked out about it:
On Monday night, May 12, the Harvard Extension Cultural Studies Club planned on reenacting a black mass on the campus of Harvard University, but the event was canceled at the last minute, proceeding in limited form at a nearby bar. People were pretty upset, and Boston’s Cardinal even condemned the event. So it’s worth asking: what on Earth is a black mass, and why are people so mad about it?
The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates posits that the death penalty is inseparable from white supremacy:
Living with racism in America means tolerating a level of violence inflicted on the black body that we would not upon the white body. This deviation is not a random fact, but the price of living in a society with a lengthy history of considering black people as a lesser strain of humanity. When you live in such a society, the prospect of incarcerating, disenfranchising, and ultimately executing white humans at the same rate as black humans makes makes very little sense. Disproportion is the point.