Society
MIT Technology Review: Social media filters are helping people explore their gender identity
Every few months, a social media giant drops a new beauty filter with gender-tuning capabilities. For many, these filters are a lark, quickly forgotten once they stop trending. But others find themselves drifting back to the apps again and again, staring at their gender-bended reflection. Something, they feel, has suddenly crystallized. Read more.
Washington Post: The Birmingham Belles celebrate the Old South in hoop skirts. Some former Belles say it’s time to stop.
Every spring, an 1840s plantation home owned by the city of Birmingham comes alive with a froth of ruffles and pastels.
Part debutante presentation, part “Gone with the Wind” costume play, a service organization called the Birmingham Belles taps high school girls to do good works in bespoke Civil War-era hoop skirts, gloves and hats, which can cost $1,000.
But some former Belles are denouncing the organization after re-examining the tradition within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.
An investigation by the Washington Post reveals the city of Birmingham’s heavy investment into the plantation home at the center of the Belles — once known as the Arlington Confederate Shrine, today it’s a plantation house museum that fails to acknowledge the people once enslaved there.
Juneteenth: Remembering Asheville’s slaves in their own words
In the depths of the Great Depression, as unemployed Americans toiled away at infrastructure projects like the Blue Ridge Parkway and dams for the Tennessee Valley Authority, there was a different kind of public work in action. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal founded the Federal Writers' Project, a small army of out-of-work writers that roamed across the Southeast to gather testimony from the few remaining former slaves. Those interviews, numbering over two thousand, are held in the Library of Congress and available to read (and in many cases, listen to) online.
These are the stories of three of Asheville's last slaves — whether they worked the Swannanoa Valley fields or eked out a living in Asheville after Emancipation — in their own words. Read more.
