Feminist Weekly: Everything You Missed Between the DOMA Ruling and Wendy Davis

Impact

Editor's Note: Every Thursday, I'll be rounding up my favorite pieces from the past week so that PolicyMic Pundits can more easily read and comment on the great content being written about sex, sexuality, gender, and race in politics and culture, in addition to updates from our community and GIFs galore! You can subscribe to get updates delivered straight to your inbox.

Highlights This Week:

This was the kind of week that makes the life of an editrix seem illustrious.

You don’t need me to recap the good, the bad, and the ugly from this past week. What I’d rather do is share with you one of the many moments in the past week that made me so incredibly, fiercely proud of the PolicyMic community.  

Meet Jared Milrad.

Jared published his first piece at PolicyMic on April 11, 2013. In June, he conducted an excellent interview with VICE’s Editor-in-Chief Rocco Castoro about their new film Triple Hate, “a portal inside the secretive world of the KKK, a tag-along with rival Memphis gangs, and an exploration of the racial politics that still haunt the home of Elvis and the site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final days in March 1968.” He’s currently at work developing Civic Legal Corps, a national fellowship program for young attorneys to provide affordable, quality legal services to communities in need across the U.S.  (You can learn more about CLC here, or donate to the cause here.) And yesterday, he was quoted in the New York Times.

This, to me, is PolicyMic at its most powerful.

We all hope that writing can change hearts and minds, but the pathways to change are circuitous at best. We desperately need writers who are civically and politically engaged — the Angela Davises and Salman Rushdies of the world—to guide us through a post-fact world. We desperately need the voices of young people to be taken seriously. We need legacy media to make a distinction between naivety, inexperience, or lack of opportunity and stupidity, irrelevance, or indolence. We need an actualization of the truism that we are the future.

From your editrix: Thank you for all that you do. You make me believe in what I know to be true about millennials.

Updates From Our Pundits:

Watch Pundit Yash Bhutada discuss affirmative action with Kendra Pettis of Racialicious, Ari Berman of The Nation, Jerome Hudson from Project 21, and Kristen Tate on Al Jazeera’s The Stream!

On Friday, Sam Bakkila’s piece on Serena Williams was picked up by Feministing, the site which he credits with starting his social justice education. Congrats, Sam!

Feministing nod to Katie Halper.

Can you spot the PolicyMic contributors in this BuzzFeed piece on Wendy Davis? (Hint: There are two.)

It’s been a big week for Daniela Ramirez. First, the Australian site Daily Life cross-posted her piece “10 Things Women Are Afraid Of (But Shouldn’t Be).” Guess who shared it then?

Friend of PolicyMic Nathan Mathias and Sarah Szalavitz’s awesome new project — Follow Bias, a Twitter plugin that calculates and visualizes how many of your followers are male, female, brands, or bots — was featured in Nieman Lab’s round up from the 2013 Civic Media Conference. Check out the demo and read up on gender bias in the media here!

What did you do last week? I’ll share any outstanding writing achievements in our community, and highlight the great work that all of our Pundits do offline as well. If you have anything you’d like for me to include about yourself or a fellow PM writer, please send it along!

Must Reads From Last Week: 

Thanks for reading! Please encourage friends to subscribe here. Send me your feedback, give me a tip for what I should be reading, and tell me how I can do better: sam@policymic.com. 

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