Spring here is in the Northern Hemisphere! And it’s peak cherry blossom time in DC–which I’ve never seen and which I likely never will because I’ve heard that the crowds are horrifying. So here’s a picture of some cherry blossoms and a short but sweet collection of links below the fold.

“Cherry Blossoms” by Jeff Kubina. CC BY-SA
- One Weird Trick to Keep Female Employees Happy. Spoiler: it involves money.
- From the department of “No Shit, Sherlock”: As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops
- Maybe this will help: Tips From Your Boss to Help You Overcome Job Discrimination.
- To the point and mincing no words: “Self-entitled ungratereful fuckoff” – Seriously?!?
- Please Stop Saying You Want to Go to Cuba Before It’s Ruined
- “Increasingly, Batman is a fantasy of punishing someone, where Superman is a fantasy of helping someone.”
- Hooboy, I’m staying far away from this turd: Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice is as inelegant as its title
- Kill the Fatphobia: Fat Girls in YA I thought we were past the sort of representation that I was treated to as a child (by way of Judy Blume’s Blubber, but I guess not).
- Challenger Engineer Who Warned Of Shuttle Disaster Dies I so glad he was able to speak publicly about this and gain a measure of peace before he died.
- Organizing Concepts, or, Everything-All-Over-the-Place I thought this was really good way to look at all the different systems we have available to us to organize stuff.
- The Harvard Library That Protects The World’s Rarest Colors I really want one of those glass vials. So cool!
- Super important. If you only read one thing, read this: All That Isn’t Said: Kaye M. talks Islamophobia in YA
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Heh, so funny about the ‘Go to Cuba before it’s ruined!’, because when my mom and I say it, we mean it in the ‘Before Americans put strip malls and ugly hotels everywhere!’ way, rather than anything else.
Some of Ray Bradbury’s stories were set in Mexico and covered poverty tourism (as well as colonialism issues). In “Sun and Shadow” (1953, collected in The Golden Apples of the Sun) Ricardo starts photo-bombing (not with that term, but stepping into the shot and dropping his pants) every time a tourist would start to take a picture of a “rustic” broken-down car, cracked walls on houses, poor kids, etc. By the end of the story (once he’s explained himself), most of the locals consider him a hero.
The locals in that story might not have objected to malls and hotels (not only for jobs, but also the improved infrastructure like the running water the Cuban article mentions that would likely be needed before such investment from outside), even if they might not be enthused about aesthetics and poverty tourists.
The cherry blossoms in DC are lovely and I never encountered horrendous crowds whenever I went (but I was in college in DC at the time and probably went on like tuesday morning, don’t know if that’s a possibility for you). But they really are worth seeing.
Was there supposed to be a link for “Self-entitled ungratereful fuckoff”?