Featuring TikTok, some nice pandemic pix, and people literally getting eaten bears I am not kidding.
P.S. Like my newsletter? Make your friends sign up and feed my sense of self-importance.
Talkin’ About Some Generation (TikTok > SNL)
Atlantic critic Hannah Giorgis explains that TikTok’s black creators are doing better election satire than SNL. Tying in academic Danielle Fuentes Morgan’s theory that relates antebellum humor to contemporary satire, Giorgis gives a quick tour of the black TikTok creators who parody Tr*mp by playing him as "an un-extraordinary loser.” Giorgis is, I think very accurately, making the point that this is much funnier than any over-the-top buffoonery that Alec Baldwin’s been doing on SNL for the past four years. A primo example of this “un-extraordinary loser” character comes from this TikTok where someone is playing Tr*mp as a guy who refuses to leave the White House, trying to make excuses about fixing the heater to keep himself there for longer. I do wish The Atlantic’s interface had a better way to embed the TikTok videos, but every single video I clicked on was funnier than the SNL opens of the last four years, if that helps you navigate the best way to take in the article.
P.S. My personal favorite was this parody of Donald Tr*mp refusing to leave the White House, referencing the 2009 Beyoncé movie Obsessed.
A Less Serious, More Uplifting Item!
I rather enjoyed this photo series from The Cut of people having fun outside in Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Birthday parties, weddings, yard sales, quinceañera photo shoots — all socially distanced and masked up in the great outdoors. The only way to really be safe these days. Just a nice thing to click on! Joy scrolling instead of doom scrolling, if you will.
This could be you if you joy scrolled!
This Week’s Theme: The Never-ending Hunt for Gender Equality
First, we’re going to take a trip to New Zealand, the country doing the most for gender equality in the work place. This is a bit legal-y, but basically New Zealand is working to enforce a law “aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations.” Basically: let’s pay social workers, elder care workers, pre school teachers, and every other female-dominated profession the right amount of money for the skills required. Female-dominated professions are historically underpaid. The primo example from this NYT article compares elder care workers and prison guards — why do prison guards make so much more when the work is comparable?
Both jobs require “dealing with challenging behaviors including sexual behaviors and/or aggression.” Arguably, care home workers could be even more at risk, since while corrections facilities are specifically designed to promote maximum security for workers, care homes are not.
New Zealand’s work is a road map for how to try and achieve gender parity. It involves explicit redefining of the skills involved in female-dominated vs. male-dominated professions — we need the words to describe the complexity of a preschool worker’s job in order to show why they need to be paid more. In one case, New Zealand put together a working group to try and “describe” the role of social workers in the country, in response to a claim from social workers that they should be paid more (which followed the landmark claim from the elder care workers mentioned above). I was particularly amused by this tidbit, illustrating how deep our biases against these sorts of skills run:
Although everyone at the table sought consensus, disagreements arose. The employer advocates, for example, hesitated to classify “listening” as a skill, arguing that anyone can listen; Ms. Ross, herself a former social worker, tried to explain how active listening entails not just hearing, but also picking up on what goes unsaid, the way things are said and what that means in context.
Ultimately, the author tries to draw parallels to the way the COVID-19 crisis has forced Americans to reflect on the value of traditional women’s work in the home, but it’s a weak hope that this reflection will lead to the kind of revolution occurring in New Zealand. But at least New Zealand found some happy endings:
The final settlement [of the social worker case] included an average 30.6 percent pay increase, phased in over two years. It was, to Ms. Ross’s surprise, a higher figure than the union had historically promoted — and a powerful argument for going through the job evaluation process with the goal of eliminating gender-based undervaluation, rather than targeting a specific pay hike.
The job evaluation process yielded another unexpected benefit. Ms. Ross said many social workers found the analysis of their work “more valuable” than the pay raise itself. Some, on seeing the many skills and competencies they brought to work every day spelled out in a detailed assessment, were moved to tears.
The other link I want to direct you to this week is about a woman in Multnomah County, Oregon who campaigned this summer for the successful ballot initiative “Preschool for All.” The initiative will be the most sweeping universal pre-k program in the country, not only offering free pre-k to all 3 and 4 year olds in the county (which is a common form of the program), but significantly increasing wages for preschool teachers as well. The initiative anticipates raising preschool teachers wages to $74,000, up from $31,000, putting them on par with public kindergarten teachers. Universal pre-k is a key element for gender equality in America, and Multnomah County offers yet another piece of the roadmap for how to get there. The Times article I linked above has all the facts, but the piece that really keyed me into the movement is this link from The Cut, penned by the woman mentioned earlier. She explains the resistance to the movement as well as the diverse coalition that brought the moment alive — her experience a microcosm of the political landscape we face today, tied to the pandemic and tax-haters and infighting among the left. Plus, it features this fun little anecdote about how low the bar is for dads:
Perhaps there are also large, ideologically sprawling Facebook groups for dads, but I do not know of any (one dad working on the campaign seeded his own thread on Nextdoor to lure voters). Once, when I was gathering signatures in a park, a pair of dads (apparently friends out with their respective daughters) inquired about the income-tax threshold — after doing some silent math, one signed and the other didn’t (rich dad; less-rich dad).This made me laugh rather than seethe; dads as a category have long benefitted from our collective lower expectations.
Politics (Libertarians Left to Their Own Devices Attract Bears and Chaos)
From New Republic comes a book review of a A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (and Some Bears, a book by Matthew Hongotz-Hetling that details an attempt to create a libertarian utopia in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. A brief synopsis is here:
This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards. While their various platforms and bugbears were inevitably idiosyncratic, certain beliefs united them: that the radical freedom of markets and the marketplace of ideas was an unalloyed good; that “statism” in the form of government interference (above all, taxes) was irredeemably bad. Left alone, they believed, free individuals would thrive and self-regulate, thanks to the sheer force of “logic,” “reason,” and efficiency. For inspirations, they drew upon precedents from fiction (Ayn Rand loomed large) as well as from real life, most notably a series of micro-nation projects ventured in the Pacific and Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s.
The result? The RESULT? The result was beyond imagination — the town became overrun by black bears. Overrun! Women were attacked in their homes, bears showed up on porches and patios — the town with no government had no means to save themselves from bears. And for many libertarians, safety from bears is not a part of freedom! Supposedly!
It is the most hilariously and disturbingly unhinged thing I’ve read in weeks, working to unintentionally satirize libertarianism in ways I couldn’t have imagined, and this next quote doesn’t even include the bear stuff:
And so the libertarians keep coming, even as Babiarz himself soon came to rue the fact that “the libertarians were operating under vampire rules—the invitation to enter, once offered, could not be rescinded.” The precise numbers are hard to pin down, but ultimately the town’s population of a little more than 1,100 swelled with 200 new residents, overwhelmingly men, with very strong opinions and plenty of guns.
I implore you to read it all, it runs 2,000-ish incredible words, and every word is worth your time. Especially the ending, which explains that the state of New Hampshire itself, libertarian as hell, refuses to invest anything in controlling the black bear population, resulting in sleep-deprived, anxious, high calorie-addicted black bears who are much less chill than the “bear that nature produced.” What a story.
Live footage of a bear right after it took over Grafton, New Hampshire.
A Celebrity Thinger (The HHS x Celebrities)
Quickly: the Trump administration, a few months ago-ish, attempted to create a star-studded PSA to “lift spirits” regarding the coronavirus (certainly preferred to another stimulus check, amirite?). These efforts cost somewhere around $265 million and involved vetting at least 264 different celebrities in an effort to find one who fit their bill: a celebrity who had not supported gay rights or same-sex marriage, and who had not publicly disparaged President Tr*mp. So that’s about a million dollars per celebrity, in what was clearly a wild goose chase, since almost no celebrities fit that bill. Almost no celebrities except Dennis Quaid, who was chosen for the gig, but then backed out. Ultimately, the PSA never got made and has not been released. No word on where the $265 million is as far as I can tell! Here’s the full article from the Times. But the real gem of this situation is the spreadsheet that the administration used to vet celebrities. The spreadsheet had four columns: Celebrity Name, Status of Acceptance, Additional Notes, and Demographic. For example, Travis Scott’s row reads:
Name: Travis Scott / Status: Pending Answer / Additional Notes: Arrested in 2017 for enticing a riot and disorderly conduct in Arkansas, appeared as a special guest at a rally for Beto O'Rourke, Democratic candidate / Demographics: Black Americans, Super spreaders, General population
The celebrities they chose to include (Maude Apatow? KAIA GERBER?!), the notes they chose to include (the single additional note for Zendaya reads “advocated for young people to use their voice during the Teen Choice Awards in 2017”) — it is a treasure trove of information regarding how the Trump administration perceives celebrities. It’s also a treasure trove of information regarding who rejected the PSA outright: Selena Gomez, Britney Spears, Carrie Underwood, Luke Bryan, Viola Davis, Sandra Oh, and iCarly herself Miranda Cosgrove.
More highlights below, but I implore you to peruse the spreadsheet yourself (any misspelling of celebrity names are from the spreadsheet and not my mistake! For example, they spelled “Kirstie Alley” as “Kristi Ally”):
Dave Ghrol / Pending Answer Arrested in 2000 due to a DUI; has campaigned for Democrats / General
Billy Joe Armstrong / Pending Answer / Critic of Trump during the 2016 election calling him a "fascist" and "puppet of the illuminati;" supported Bernie Sanders and endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket / General population
Al Pacino / Pending Answer / Arrested in 1961 for attempted robbery. Donates to Democratic Party candidates, no public political affiliation. / Elderly. General public.
Other items of note? Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg appear next to each other on the list. As do Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner.
P.S. Thank you to Good Link subscriber Amy Foertsch, who DM’d the spreadsheet to me on Instagram, and is generally a hero.
P.P.S. I literally did not have the time to read every single entry, so if you come across a great one that I missed in this little summary, please message me about it, comment under this post, whatever you want, I want to talk about it!
Would You Rather? (Thanksgiving Edition)
Would you rather sip, sip your chardo-nay-nay or be all about that baste?
P.S. Please look at the whole thread. Please.
A Recommendation (It’s French AND It’s Not Em*ly in P*ris)
Due to what feels like a dearth of English-language television (prove me wrong! send me recs! I promise I am watching The Crown!), I have turned to the French. More specifically I’ve gotten into a Netflix program which is titled Call My Agent! in English, but in French is called Dix Pour Cent which translates to “Ten Per Cent.” This is kind of a weird place to start with a show if you don’t speak French. For the first six episodes of the show I would watch the intro, where the phrase “Dix Pour Cent” appears on the screen, and think to myself “Look at me! I’m learning French! ‘Dix’ assuredly means ‘call’!” It turns out I am an idiot who is not learning French and furthermore does not know how to say “ten” in French, but it also turns out that “Call My Agent” is great television. It follows French talent agents (like what Ari Gold does in Entourage) at an agency called ASK right after their lead partner dies and leaves the agency in the throes of financial instability. But mostly it’s about them dealing with their personal lives while also dealing with very demanding and eccentric clients, who are all actual French actors cameo-ing as themselves. Some things I learned from this show about French celebrities:
That guy from that 2010 movie The Artist (Jean Dujardin) is actually very famous and getting work in France!
Lea Seydoux, mostly known for being a Bond girl on this side of the pond, is EXTREMELY famous in France
Juliette Binoche, famous in France and America, is actually quite funny!
Also, in what I think is very French fashion, everyone at the agency is very interpersonally involved, making for well-rounded comedy. The show is a true pandemic salve: funny, biting, ultimately sweet, and very entertaining.
One of the main characters, Andréa, cursing in French. Do I have a direct translation? No, but I think this means something like “fucking shit.”
Donation Corner! (For You to Ignore or Engage With As You Please!)
Hello! Welcome to the newly established Donation Corner of the Good Links! Which you are free to ignore or engage with as you please — it will live at the bottom of the newsletter!
Here are your donation opportunities for the week:
Philabundance - it’s Thanksgiving time and this is just your classic local Philly food bank.
Philly Community Fridge - keeping on the food theme, you can Venmo @phlcommunityfridge and help keep two South Philly community fridges stocked. If you don’t know what a community fridge is, it’s a type of mutual aid project and you can click here for more.
Help a Haitian immigrant keep her home in West Philly — she’s about $8,000 away from her $10,000 goal!
P.S. If you have an organization/mutual aid fund/individual in mind that you think would be good to highlight, feel free to email me directly with information about it!
P.P.S. Why three places each week?
The first donation opportunity will always be a a 501(c)3 organization that I have done some due diligence around to try and ensure they’re a real non-profit organization that 1) does good work and 2) is tax-deductible!
The second donation opportunity will be a mutual aid fund (s/o to the politics good link!), which FYI is probably not tax-deductible.
And the final donation opportunity will be an individual in need of funds who has a GoFundMe or a cashapp (or however the kids are accepting funds these days) where you can donate. Also likely not tax-deductible. Note: I’m going to do my best to share GoFundMes that have not yet reached their goals!
The Interactive Bits (Interact with me!)
Want more of Cassandra’s Good Links content? Upgrade to a paid subscription here ($5/month or $50/year).
Have you link you think is good? Submit link suggestions here.
Want Good Links merch? Order merch (postcards/stickers) here.