Hello, Friends. What a week! How are you holding up? Did anyone get enough sleep the last few days? As I write this, we still don’t have an official winner for the presidential election — though I’m confident, based on where the numbers are right now, it will be Biden. I look forward to celebrating and analyzing once the call has officially been made.
Something I’ve found really helpful this week: I’ve stopped looking at maps that fill in an entire state with either blue or red. They give such an inaccurate representation of what is actually happening in our country. Land doesn’t vote; people do.
Here’s another helpful map:
In many states it’s way harder to vote than it should be. In fact, voting should be super easy throughout the country. Anytime someone is working to make it harder to vote, assume they are up to no good.
Ready for your link list? Here are a few things I’ve wanted to share with you:
-A long and really good essay on tolerance, being offensive, justice, and civility. “In a just society, civility would always be preferable. In fact, civility would be a natural result of a society based on justice. It would not need to be called for; it would simply be. But impoliteness is not injustice. And justice will offend the unjust. Let it.”
-Scientists have identified time cells in the human brain that place a sort of time stamp on memories as they form. That allows us to recall sequences of events or life experiences in the right order — much like a movie.
-Woah. This seems extremely targeted. The USPS “processed 94.5 % of ballots on time [the expected rate is 97%],” but in the “9 postal districts spanning 5 states — AZ, NV, PA, NC & GA — that have yet to decide the presidential race, the on-time rate was 84.6 %.”
–Old Japanese firework catalogs.
–From Roxane Gay: “And then there are the other Trump supporters, the ones who are ashamed. The ones who want to seem urbane. The ones who want to be invited to all the good parties. They lie to pollsters. They lie to family and friends. And when they fill out their ballots, they finally tell the truth.”
–The Little Editors is a lovely online gallery of kids drawings from around the world.
-ICE Attempts to Deport Multiple Witnesses in Gynecologic Surgery Scandal.
-I loved and appreciated this essay about growing up conservative and seeing what happened to a lot of women I loved.
-Want to thank Stacey Abrams? Let’s buy her book, Our Time Is Now.
Here are some tweets I saved for you:
-If you are discouraged, read this thread (7 tweets).
-Wow! Check out this thread (30 tweets) on how ancient geology affects our elections.
-I learned a lot from the responses to this tweet. Some of the terms were familiar to me, but others I hadn’t considered. Click here to see the responses.
-Please read this thread (10 tweets) written by a non-partisan poll challenger in Detroit.
-There’s a lot being written about how the “Latino vote” is not a monolith. I appreciated this thread (19 tweets) with thoughts on why some Cuban-Americans (and some other Latinx voters), may support Trump.
-Thinking of our sisters in Poland this week.
-I’m trying hard to ignore exit poll numbers. They are bound to be way off this year, when so much voting was done by mail weeks ago. But I will be very curious to see accurate data in a few weeks/months when it’s available.
-I can’t stop thinking about this very positive thread (18 tweets) about what it means to get out there and work on local elections.
-I am worn out of calls for civility.
-This blew my mind! Sharks are older than Saturn’s rings.
I hope you have a good weekend. I’ll meet you back here on Monday. I miss you already.
kisses,
Gabrielle
