Winnetka C
Hi, I'm Winnetka!
Sexual Assault: US Military Bases. At night in the Songtan camptown outside Osan Air Base in South Korea, I wandered through streets that were getting louder and more crowded now that the sun had set. As the night progressed, hip-hop boomed out of bars along the main pedestrian mall and from second-floor clubs with neon-lit names like Club Woody’s, Pleasure World, Whisky a-Go-Go and the Hook Up Club. Many of the bars have stages with stripper poles for women to dance to the flash of stage lights and blasting music. In other bars, groups of mostly Filipina women in tight skirts and dresses talked to one another, leaning over the table as they shot pool.
Some were chatting with a handful of GIs, young and old. Groups of younger GIs walked together through the red-light-district-meets-pedestrian-mall scene, peering into bars and considering their options. Bright signs for cheap hotels beckoned. For anyone in the U.S. military, it would have been a familiar sight. Story Continued Below. Solidarity is for white women and Asian people are funny - Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture.
Disclaimer: The discussion of inclusivity and solidarity is relevant to many constituencies in different ways; this is my unique take as an Asian, female-identified individual. I’ve come to a curious, heightened recognition these past few weeks: My ethnicity is something to laugh at. When an Asian woman is denigrated and exoticized by a group of white men in an offensive video entitled “Asian Girlz”, I am told I shouldn’t be so upset because the woman clearly enjoyed it and the video was clearly just a joke. When the lone Asian character in the critically acclaimed Netflix series “Orange is the New Black” perpetuates negative racial tropes through easy, cheap humor that capitalizes on her awkward silences and accented, broken English, I’m supposed to double back in laughter, shake my head, and say “Well, at least they have Laverne Cox!”
I also learned that Asian-Americans occupy a very limited niche in conversations about social justice. Equity in Publishing: What Should Editors Be Doing? “[The] book is more likely to be a symptom of our tension than an examination of it. The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.” —James Baldwin The state of diversity and equity in publishing is grim and has been for a long time—since the industry’s founding back in the day.
There’s no shortage of insightful writing that unpacks just how diverse it is—89 percent white—with nuanced and often eye-popping statistics and infuriating stories, like when Roxane Gay wrote about Janet Maslin’s New York Times summer reading list that contained zero titles by non-white writers, a moment that Jason Parham summed up as having achieved “peak caucasity.” Or when Christopher Myers wrote about the dismal number of children’s books written by writers of color (7 percent in 2014).
I wanted to hear from them and to examine the “gatekeeper’s” role. Now. Ad of the Day: This Remarkable Makeup Ad With High School Girls Has One Hell of a Twist. It isn't often that a makeup ad succeeds in being literally transformative and not just superficially so. But that's the reason for the viral success of this Japanese ad for cosmetics brand Shiseido, which launched less than 10 days ago and has already enjoyed millions of views. The spot, titled "High School Girl?
", opens with a professor opening the door to her classroom. As a soft female vocalist begins to sing over a loungy beat, we pan slowly across the faces of the girls in the room, who seem ordinary enough: One holds a guitar, another drinks from a bottle of water. At the end of the room, a last girl gives us a knowing look and gazes back down at her book. Check out the spot here (spoilers below). If you can read Japanese, this is the moment when you discover what you've missed.
The music abruptly transforms into a smooth rap duo. If you watch the ad again, you can appreciate the quiet subtlety with which it shows its hand: It's less of a reveal than a call to be more attentive. My Paradoxical Quest to Build a Personal Brand. In 2013, I traveled to Alaska to give a talk to a group of local reporters. The conference organizers had asked me to speak about how journalists can create a “personal brand,” and tantalized by a subsidized vacation in the Alaskan wilderness, I quickly agreed.
On the flight to Anchorage, I perused the local headlines. The Pirates of Penzance was opening at the opera. Free TV access in rural parts of the state was under threat. A respected rescue pilot had died in a helicopter crash. “Thanks for coming to the smarmy marketing panel!” And yet everyone seems to think they need a personal brand these days. But branding yourself has become a professional goal for more than just journalists. What is a personal brand, though? Exploiting your unique personality to get ahead professionally is as old as Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Though this was still the dark ages before Twitter and Facebook, Peters presciently identified how the digital wave would overwhelm us.
Raising "Media Healthy" Children. Valiant Entertainment. Literature. Racial Diversity. What Chapter Books Do I Read To My Kid That Aren't Just Straight White People? Reading bedtime stories aloud is boring and hard and anyone who tells you different is selling something. Bedtime comes right at the end of the day, when you either have work needs doing which you would like to HAVE AT, or you have some Archer banked up that isn’t going to Netflix itself. But my 3-year-old lovvvves it and it’s good for her brain and doing boring, dumb shit because your kids like it and/or it’s good for them is like 98% of parenting.
The other 2% is literally just booze. I asked my librarian about chapter books for a three-year-old because we read The Mouse and the Motorcycle and then I was like, Well I don’t know. And you know what’s harder than reading chapter books out loud? FUCKING FINDING GOOD CHAPTER BOOKS. I’m dying over here. I read Mary Poppins at my librarian’s recommendation (sooooo British. Ughhhhhhhh so much nature. The list my librarian gave me was very, like, A Little Princess! Except for the ones that are literally white people. Help a sister out.