The week of February 27, 2021 was an extremely incorrect Girl Scout Cookie power ranking; celebrating our Name Days; and Canadian ButterGate. First bread and tuna, now butter?

Mash-Ups In The News

A World Of Black Intimacy At The Card Table

A game where you hover in each other’s space, too close and not close enough. Where talking trash is a type of romance and questioning someone else’s house rules is like questioning an ancestor or elder. Poet Hanif Abdurraqib explores the game of spades.

via NY Times

Seeking The True Story Of The Comfort Women

After her colleague reignited a history of mistrust, Dr. Jeannie Suk Gersen gives an in-depth investigation into the continued conflict between South Korea and Japan over the atrocity of Japan’s forced “comfort women” system. 

via New Yorker

English As A Second Language Students Are Falling Further Behind

Learning a second language is massively challenging. Learning a second language without English-speaking friends or an in-person class in the middle of a pandemic? 100000x harder. 

via NPR

Zombies Are Everywhere In South Korea. Why?

“K-Zombies” are a thing. While they invade pop culture, their resurgence in Korea is more like a reflection of a nation’s anxieties: Social collapse, dread, fending for yourself, loss of humanity, a world upside down.

via Los Angeles Times

Say “Bread And Butter” And Stick Together

If you’re walking in a pair and have to pass on opposite sides of an obstacle, you must say “bread and butter” or risk permanent separation. “Buttered bread, after all, cannot be unbuttered.”

For more modern superstitions, folk beliefs, rituals for chaotic times, we’ve got some bubbe meise for you.

via Catapult

1 In 6 Gen Z Adults Identify As LGBTQ. And This Number Continues To Grow

“The rigid lines around gender and sexuality are just opening up for everybody. Young people are just doing it. … They’re leading this revolution, and they’re forcing scientists to take a closer look.”

Whatever the reasons, The Youths™ have caught onto something important: Why do we have to live our lives this way? Let’s live the way we want and are.

via Washington Post

Meet The Black Trans Activist Fighting To Shield Her Community From An Epidemic Of Violence

“Black transgender women rarely make it past 35…Elders in my community fought and marched and sacrificed and advocated in the hopes that one day, a young trans person could be able to walk in spaces they couldn’t.”

Doroshow is the founder and executive director of NYC’s first-ever housing complex bought for and by members of the LGBTQ community in November.

via CNN

Steve Way On The Maddening Injustices Of Dating While Disabled

People with disabilities are just people — with all the feelings and love and relationships that come with it. The Ramy star wants to change how we think about the love lives of disabled Americans like him — and upend the barriers that make it impossible to get married.

via GQ

My Brother’s Keeper

Early in the Cuban Revolution, her mother made an excruciating decision that forever changed the lives of the author and her brother. A devastating story of one choice, and the guilt, lives, and forgiveness that came after. 

via New Yorker

Millions Qualify For The COVID-19 Vaccine Based On BMI. Why Should We Apologize For It?

The contradictions of BMI, the shame and resentment bred by fatphobia, and the compassion we deserve to show ourselves and others. 

via Vogue

Baarack From The Brink: Wild Sheep Rescued In Australia Shorn Of 75 Pounds Of Fleece

Baarack the sheep was found with fleece weighing nearly half the weight of an adult kangaroo. 

“It all goes to show what incredibly resilient and brave animals sheep really are and we could not love them any more if we tried.”

Let us all be the sheep we see in the world. 

via Reuters