https://www.epicurious.com/recipes-menus/history-of-the-rule-breaking-gunshop-fizz

INTERESTING.

https://vinepair.com/articles/chartreuse-vegetal-explainer-guide/

Hmmm.

“Cohen said it normally takes three months to a year and a half for cases to be heard in Fulton County Superior Couty. He thinks it would take years for Trump’s case to go to trial and believes his lawyers would likely try to postpone it until after the 2024 Presidential Election.” https://www.11alive.com/article/news/special-reports/ga-trump-investigation/fulton-county-insiders-expect-former-president-donald-trump-indicted-this-week-georgia/85-10b10a28-e537-49a5-a17e-042d86dd4777#:~:text=Cohen%20said%20it%20normally%20takes%20three%20months%20to%20a%20year%20and%20a%20half%20for%20cases%20to%20be%20heard%20in%20Fulton%20County%20Superior%20Couty.%20He%20thinks%20it%20would%20take%20years%20for%20Trump%27s%20case%20to%20go%20to%20trial%20and%20believes%20his%20lawyers%20would%20likely%20try%20to%20postpone%20it%20until%20after%20the%202024%20Presidential%20Election.

“Then again, by the nineteenth century, owners could purchase life insurance on their slaves (from some of the most reputable insurance companies in the country) and be paid three-quarters of their market value upon their death. These insurance companies, including modern household names New York Life, Aetna, and U.S. Life, were just some of the many northern corporations whose fortunes were bound up with slavery.”

https://a.co/6s8JND1

Wait, there’s more:

“In fact, by the time war loomed, New York merchants had gotten so rich from the slave economy—40 percent of the city’s exporting businesses through warehousing, shipping insurance, and sales were Southern cotton exports—that the mayor of New York advocated that his city secede along with the South.

In very stark and quantifiable terms, the exploitation, enslavement, and murder of African and Indigenous American people turned blood into wealth for the white power structure. Those who profited made no room for the oppressed to share in the rewards from their lands or labor; what others had, they took. The racial zero sum was crafted in the cradle of the New World.”

🤯

«As to why white Americans, who have thirteen times the median household wealth of black Americans, feel threatened by diminished discrimination against black people, neither Sommers nor Norton had an answer that was satisfying to any of us.»

https://a.co/9gAbpeo

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/us-department-of-education-reaffirms-baylor-s-religious-exemption-in-response-to-sexual-harassment-complaints/ar-AA1fbnin

«The U.S Department of Education exempted Baylor University from sexual harassment claims regulated under Title IX last month, after the Christian university asked the agency to dismiss discrimination complaints made by students, arguing that the claims were inconsistent with the university’s religious tenets.»

Alrighty, then.

Kurt Vonnegut:

“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

“And he went wow. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at any of them.’

“And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’

“And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘win’ at them.”

https://medium.com/writers-blokke/a-life-lesson-from-kurt-vonnegut-of-all-people-4cbd3284c740

https://www.npr.org/2023/08/10/1193091939/montgomery-brawl-memes

From Eric Deggans, NPR’s first full-time TV critic and author of the book Race-Baiter, a book I’ve always wanted to read:

«I always say social media is often like a giant dinner party, where people forget they are sometimes listening in on conversations between other people. In this case, being asked to explain the folding chair memes felt like having someone barge into an ongoing conversation to ask for an explanation.

As I traded messages with people and retweeted the best memes, this felt like a moment where folks could be hilariously Black online and we could all share the experience together, laughing and consoling each other in one viral social media moment.

Someone popping up to demand an explanation felt like they were re-centering the conversation in a way I just wasn’t willing to do right away.

Sometimes, in situations like that, understanding comes best by sitting back, listening widely, and learning. Even for me.

I originally wrote a version of this column for my personal Tumblr page, mostly as a way of processing a response that was new and unfamiliar for me. I don’t know if this reaction is fair – especially given how much I’ve encouraged discussion about race over the years.

But it’s all I have left, in a world where I increasingly feel like a frog in pot of steadily heating water, watching racists and racism get bolder — wondering when the heat will begin to burn me, my loved ones, my family, my friends and my people.

Or when I’ll need to reach out for aid from a helpful brother with a folding chair.»

(btw, I will always be grateful for a Black person who has the patience and takes the time to explain something.)