Your week in review, in haiku.
1.
Zuck speaks. Ryan bolts.
The President tweets. Scooter
skates? Syria waits.
2.
<Phone> “Liev Schreiber.”
<Pause> “Mr. Cohen — you know
it’s just a show, right?”
3.
September, Taylor?
Twitter takes hot sauce from purse,
throws it at her head.
4.
Colin Kaepernick
still doesn’t have a day job.
Anyone surprised?
5.
Happy Friday the
Thirteenth! To the untruthful
slime ball on book tour
Have a truthful and well-seasoned weekend!
On Point
| How to diversify public relations agencies |
| Angela Chitkara, the director of the Branding + Integrated Communications (BIC) program at The City College of New York (CCNY), begins this important piece with a trip down memory lane. Remember the coolest monkey of H&M, Kendall Jenner’s Pepsi ad and the black woman who turned white selling Dove products? PR agencies need to become more diverse to be able to better assess how the ad campaigns of the brands they serve will be received in the marketplace, she says. For this piece, she interviewed 18 CEOs who lead top firms - thirteen were men, seventeen were white, and one Latino - to learn their D&I challenges. Her five-point plan is a blueprint for any enterprise, frankly, but number three got my attention: “Enlist the support of middle management to communicate how team diversity boosts organizational performance,” she says. |
| HBR |
| A map of evictions across the U.S. |
| You don’t have to be a data or infographics nerd to appreciate the importance of this extraordinary interactive map, the first nationwide database of evictions. (Just plug in your zip code and see what’s going on near you.) It was created by The Eviction Lab, a team of researchers, students, and web developers at Princeton University, who are studying the lives of poor, renting families, trying to understand how the growing number of evictions are destroying lives and communities. The work is an extension of the research done by Matthew Desmond, who has been studying housing, poverty, and eviction since 2008. “Eviction functions as a cause, not just a condition of poverty," he says. Learn more in his 2016 book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. |
| The Eviction Lab |
| Homeless girl scouts launch their first cookie drive |
| Troop 6000 is the first homeless shelter-based troop in history, and all the scouts live in different shelters around the NYC area. Their goal is to sell 6,000 boxes of cookies, and from this short video, it looks like they’ve got what it takes to succeed. “When you talk to the girls you’ll hear them say they belong to something,” says Meredith Maskara, the CEO of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York. “They don’t feel alone and feel like they have a stronger sense of community and belonging overall.” New Yorkers can find them selling cookies in Union Square today. I’m not crying, you’re crying. |
| ABC News |
The Woke Leader
| This 91-year-old lawyer is still a champion for desegregation |
| Alexander Polikoff was the lead attorney on Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, the first major desegregation case about public housing. The landmark case, named for famed black community organizer Dorothy Gautreaux, charged the Chicago and federal housing authorities with violating the 1964 Civil Rights Act by segregating black residents into public housing. The case, begun in the 1960s, made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. The settlement, which Polikoff supervised for decades involved “mobility vouchers,” allowing low-income black families to move to the suburbs. Click through for a fascinating Q&A about his life, work, and the housing mobility movement he helped launch. |
| CityLab |
| Historian Nell Irvin Painter’s great second act |
| The scholar and historian, best known for her books, including The History of White People (2010), made a remarkable decision at age 64 to reinvent herself as an artist. Now 75, Painter is a working painter who occasionally suffers for her art. “It’s just so uncool to be an old artist,” she says. “It feels wrong to be an old artist who doesn’t have the skills of say, 20 or 30 years of work.” She pulls no punches about the art world and her experience in grad school. “There’s something about art graduate school that can be pretty pernicious,” she says. “I didn’t feel that I knew the steps in the occupation of a visual artist. But mostly I felt I was just so bad at it.” She also wrote a book, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over, which, among other things, critiques the teaching ethos of M.F.A. programs.(Paywall, sorry, but here’s her website and Instagram.) |
| Chronicle of Higher Education |
| Behold: An Afro Sheen commercial starring Frederick Douglass |
| Since we’re rebooting absolutely everything these days, why not 1970s Soul Train? I’d love to revive any show that would bring this gem of a commercial to the airwaves. I don’t want to give too much away, but Douglass’s tribute to the dignity of natural black hair may not rank among his among his most powerful speeches, but he stayed firmly on message. Even then, he was doing an amazing job. The commercial is also a poignant look back at a time of tremendous cultural transformation. It’s a hair product! It’s a revolution! It’s a hair product and a revolution! |
| YouTube |
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| Frederick Douglass |
