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AYO EDEBIRI Cooks for Vogue

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"I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day."

Louisa May Alcott

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Everything, I say to myself, is changed. I think I was dead, before. Now she has touched me, the quick of me; she has put back my flesh and opened me up. Everything is changed.

—Fingersmith, Sarah Waters

#currently reading #fingersmith #sarah waters

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“The deep sea is a haunted house: a place in which things that ought not to exist move about in the darkness. Things can thrive in unimaginable conditions. All they need is the right sort of skin.”

— Our Wives Under The Sea, Julia Armfield

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“Ghosts don’t speak,” she said to me. “People misunderstand this. They think that when you’re haunted you hear someone speaking but you don’t. Or not usually. Most of the time, if you hear something speaking, it’s not a ghost—it’s something worse.”

—Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield

#currently reading #our wives under the sea #julia armfield

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By presenting this most passionate and diverse of all of Dickinson’s correspondences, Open Me Carefully relates Emily and Susan’s devotion to one and another and to the craft of poetry. Through all the decades or poems, letters; and letter-poems from Emily to Susan, we are constantly reminded that for these two remarkable women “Poetry” and “Love . . . coeval come.”

—A Note on the Text, from Open Me Carefully: Emily Dickinson’s Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson edited by Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith

#open me carefully #emily dickinson #currently reading

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My last morning at home was – like every last morning in history, I suppose – a sad one. We breakfasted together, the five of us, and were bright enough; but there was a horrible sense of expectation in the house that made anything except sighing, and drifting aimlessly from job to job, seem quite impossible. By eleven o’clock I felt as penned and as stifled as a rat in a box, and made Alice walk with me to the beach, and hold my shoes and stockings while I stood at the water’s edge one final time. But even this little ritual was a disappointing one. I put my hand to my brow and gazed at the glittering bay, at the distant fields and hedges of Sheppey, at the low, pitch-painted houses of the town, and the masts and cranes of the harbor and the shipyard. It was all as familiar to me as the lines on my own face, and – like one’s face when viewed in a glass – both fascinating and rather dull. No matter how hard I studied it, how fiercely I thought, I shall not gaze at you again for months and months, it looked just as it always did; and at last I turned my eyes away, and walked sadly home.

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters

#currently reading #tipping the velvet #sarah waters

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‘When I see her,’ I said, ‘it’s like – I don’t know what it’s like. It’s like I never saw anything at all before. It’s like I am filling up, like a wine-glass when it’s filled with wine. I watch the acts before her and they are like nothing – they’re like dust. Then she walks on stage and – she is so pretty; and her suit is so nice; and her voice is so sweet… She makes me want to smile and weep, at once. She makes me sore, here.’ I placed a hand upon my chest, on the breast-bone. ‘I never saw a girl like her before. I never knew that there were girls like her…’ My voice became a trembling whisper then, and I found that I could saw no more.

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters

#currently reading #tipping the velvet #sarah waters

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These cultural stereotypes can be found in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies already in widespread use. For example, when Londa Schiebinger, a professor at Stanford University, used translation software to translate an interview with her from Spanish to English, both Google Translate and Systran repeatedly used male pronouns to refer to her, despite the presence of clearly gendered terms like 'profesora' (female professor). Google Translate will also convert Turkish sentences with gender-neutral pronouns into English stereotypes. 'O bir doktor,' which means 'S/he is a doctor' is translated into English as 'He is a doctor', while 'O bir hemsire' (which means 'S/he is a nurse') is rendered 'She is a nurse'. Researchers have found the same behaviour for translations into English from Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Persian.

Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

#currently reading #invisible women #caroline criado perez

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Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

#screenshot #currently reading #invisible women #caroline criado perez

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There is no doubt that women are dying as a result of the gender data gap in occupational health research. And there is no doubt that we urgently need to start systematically collecting data on female bodies in the workplace. But there is a second strand to this story because, as the stickiness of the myth of meritocracy shows, closing the gender data gap is only step one. The next, and crucial step, is for governments and organizations to actually use that data to shape policy around it. This isn't happening.

In Canada, even where sex-disaggregated data on chemical exposure exists, the government 'continues to apply a mean allperson daily intake for many substances.' In the UK, where around 2,000 women develop shiftwork-related breast cancer every year, 'breast cancer isn't on the state-prescribed disease list.' Neither is asbestos related to ovarian cancer, even though it has the International Agency Research on Cancer's top cancer risk ranking and is the most common gynaecological cancer in UK women. In fact, asbestos-related ovarian cancer cases aren't even tracked and counted by the UK's Health and Safety Executive.

— Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

#currently reading #invisible women #caroline criado perez

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An analysis of 248 performance reviews collected from a variety of US-based tech companies found that women receive negative personality criticism that men simply don't. Women are told to watch their tone, to step back. They are called bossy, abrasive, strident, aggressive, emotional and irrational. Out of all these words, only aggressive appeared in men's reviews at all – 'twice with an exhortation to be more of it.'

— Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

#currently reading #invisible women #caroline criado perez

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"My viewpoint, in telling the history of United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners."

—Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

#currently reading #howard zinn #a people's history of the united states #quotation

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—Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

#screenshot #currently reading #a people's history of the united states #howard zinn

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Mary Oliver

#mary oliver #dog songs #poetry

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"When rain comes finally, washing away a low sky of muddy ocher, we who could not control the phenomenon are pressed into relief. The near-occult feeling: The fact of being witness to the end of the world gives way to tangible things. Even if the succeeding sensations are not common, they are at least not mysterious."

—Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

#currently reading #maya angelou #i know why the caged bird sings #quotation

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Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands

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