Hello there! Hope you’ve had a wonderful socially-distant Valentine’s - either celebrating your singlehood, or embracing some quality time with your significant other. Let’s get into this month’s labor of love.
Tip of the Month
Here’s something useful for my iOS friends! Have you ever thought, “I wish I could connect my headphones via voice”?
Just me? *crickets*
Well, if you’re interested in automating part of the process like I was, it just takes a little bit of work up front with Siri Shortcuts! Watch the video below, narrated by yours truly:
Links You’ll Love
Digital Accessibility
Alexa Heinrich is one of my go-tos for understanding how to be more inclusive on social media. Have you ever heard how emoji-laden social content sounds through a screen reader? It’s….not comprehensible, as Alexa demonstrates below (click the top of the tweet to play the video):
We’ve all seen the brand statement or the celebrity mea culpa blasted out on Twitter as an attached image. But did you know screen readers can’t make sense of these?
It can be hard to stay on top of these things. Fortunately, last month, Alexa put together a helpful checklist for digital accessibility, and she also has a newsletter on the topic that I highly recommend you subscribe to.
Playlist Picks
Those of you who know me know that I have a fairly eclectic music taste. I enjoy finding those lesser-known gems that may float below our Top-40 attuned radar. For example, The Hu, a Mongolian rock band using native instruments and guttural throat singing, burst onto the scene a few years ago, but they might have escaped your notice. Here’s one of my favorites of theirs:
This week I went down a YouTube rabbit hole and learned about Epik High, a Korean hip-hop group. “Rosario,” one of their latest, is quite good:
Recommended Reads and Listens
Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste”
I recently finished reading “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents” by Isabel Wilkerson, which interprets race relations in America through the framing of caste - a system of social hierarchy. I had previously read Wilkerson’s magnificent “The Warmth of Other Suns” about the Great Migration of Black people out of the Jim Crow South in the early 20th century, and this tome is right up there with that earlier work.
She compares the race-based caste system of America with the millennia-old system in India and with the system developed by Nazi Germany. One of the more interesting - and disturbing - things I learned from this book is that the Nazis, early in their reign, looked to the United States for inspiration - specifically the American eugenics movement and our segregation practices:
A young Nazi intellectual named Herbert Kier was tasked with compiling a table of U.S. race laws, and was confounded by the lengths to which America went to segregate its population.
He made note that, by law in most southern states, “white children and colored children are sent to different schools” and that most states “further demand that race be given in birth certificates, licenses and death certificates.” He discovered that “many American states even go so far as to require by statute segregated facilities for coloreds and whites in waiting rooms, train cars, sleeping cars, street cars, buses…”
He later remarked that, given the “fundamental proposition of the equality of everything that bears a human countenance, it is all the more astonishing how extensive race legislation is in the USA.” Kier was just one of several Nazi researchers “who thought American law went overboard.”
Wilkerson describes her work as “narrative non-fiction,” and through her storytelling ability, she has a knack for making history come alive. Highly recommended.
Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized”
This month I also finished “Why We’re Polarized,” by the political writer and proto-blogger Ezra Klein. The book takes a look at the red-blue divide and what may be behind our intensifying tribalism.
One interesting concept he shares is called “identity-protective cognition,” from the Yale researcher Dan Kahan. Quoting Kahan: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.”
An identity, once adopted, is harder to change than an opinion. An identity that binds you into a community you care about is costly and painful to abandon, and the mind will go to great lengths to avoid abandoning it. So the more media people see that encourages them to think of themselves as part of a group, and the more they publicly proclaim—through sharing and liking and following and subscribing—that they are part of a group, the deeper that identity roots and the more resistant the underlying views become to change.
NPR’s Throughline Podcast
Finally - I’m a big podcast listener, and one of my current favorites is Throughline, NPR’s history podcast, hosted by Ramtin Arabloue and Rund Abdelfatah. Arabloue and Abdelfatah bring the past alive to help explain current events for a consistently compelling listen. Here they are on why we have an Electoral College:
That’s all for now! Stay tuned for a special end-of-February edition, since I ended up missing January.