Notes from the weekend.
Did you see the episode of Black Mirror where Amazon’s Ring allows its users to “share videos” with local police departments? Just kidding, that shit is real and you can read about it in Gizmodo thanks to tech writer Dell Cameron. Brush up on your 1984, cuties.
Here’s an uncomfortable question: who do guns keep safe? For BuzzFeed News, Joshua Manson details how our history of gun control largely revolves around it being used as a tactic to weaken black people, from disarming newly freed black Southerners in the aftermath of the Civil War to strangling off the Black Panthers’ modern gun-rights movement in 1967 through reactive policymaking. That is until conservative conventional wisdom shifted behind the influence of the NRA and conservative Superman, Ronald Reagan, in the late 1970s to lobby against gun control in the name of individual rights and self-protection rather than as a collective self-defense against police brutality as the Panthers had practiced. Here’s a particularly nightmarish part:
It’s not all that hard to imagine that Reagan — whose voice can be heard on a tape released last week calling black people “monkeys” who are “still uncomfortable wearing shoes” — might have categorized the Black Panther Party members as “thugs and criminals,” rather than “law-abiding citizens.” And in that sense, what might seem like a surprising about-face among conservative politicians, from supporting gun control to opposing it, is actually consistent. It was always about who was using the guns.
This torrid history of gun control is one of the driving reasons Kim Kelly called for arming the left in an essay for Vox.com last month, writing “the only thing that scares the reactionary right more than the idea of losing their guns is the thought of us having them.”
Young summer, young summer, give me a minute.
“I can't believe that it's been three years,” a playlist.
The most charming of the weirdo basketball video essayists, J. Kyle Mann asks “Is Blue Chips the Best Basketball Movie Ever Made?” The stranger than fiction manner in which Mann handles the question negates the fact that few have seen the movie Blue Chips or ever intend to and leads to some delightful what-ifs and rewinds that includes William Friedkin, Shaq, and Nick Nolte.
In “Why did I leave Google? A thread,” a former Google software engineer tweets about the company’s many scandals and culture shift from her perspective. You used Amazon to order a copy of 1984 already, right?
In a “Bearded man rudely slaps ball away” on r/nba, you can read the following sentence: “The Venn diagram of anime and NBA fans is not that wide.”
If your millennial anxiety is feeling extra itchy in the back of your brain, it may be over the fear of another recession. Vox.com’s Emily Stewart briefly explains the ingredients for a good recession and how we probably shouldn’t worry about the imminent doom because like death there isn’t really all that much you can do about it.
But it ain’t all bad. At this moment, my partner is dancing to Solange’s “Binz,” joint in her hand and lyrics on her lips; I'ma get back on my feet, give me a minute / I'ma feel this in my thighs, like evenin' it / Young summer, young summer, give me a minute. I’m going to go hit it. Bye, for now.
header image by gabby cox. graphics by styler.thecreator