Year Of Action

Listen, talk, think, do.

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“Misogyny is dangerously capable of aligning otherwise disparate factions”

http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a42042/putin-trump-and-julian-assange-sexism-politics/

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🙌

https://www.buzzfeed.com/remysmidt/this-familys-blessing-box-is-so-pure-and-so-sweet?utm_term=.whoD73pXE#.upke1ODd3

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On empathy

Through discomfort.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/jan/06/what-learned-sleeping-rough-london

Impressive and powerful. 

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Numbers matter

Case in point. 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/kellyoakes/we-dont-actually-know-if-busy-roads-cause-dementia-yet

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Battling discrimination

An actual study! Data! 

A punchy headline but an encouraging theory well worth exploring. 

“Research indicates that when people engage more effortfully, they are more receptive and more likely to remember whatever they decide. It's a simple matter of time and effort."

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/is-it-possible-to-cure-prejudice-and-racism

Author: JS Rafaelli @vicemag​

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Balance at the top

Taking a look at the make-up of the teams behind politicians to understand policy-making and balance in UK politics is an important exercise. 

BuzzFeed’s Marie Le Conte does this over here, and includes some great insights from Ayesha Hazarika:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/marieleconte/female-spads?utm_term=.klP6j8zLv#.yeRkzxwv2

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Taking it to the streets

“Movements are born in the moments when abstract principles become concrete concerns.” 

An interesting read on the foundations of campaigns that drive change - Jelani Cobb writing in The New Yorker. And the role of purpose and focus. 

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-return-of-civil-disobedience

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Get up. Go out. Be in the world. Engage. Make yourself uncomfortable.

Yes, @suzanne_moore!

“Go find the places where you can make a difference – local campaigns or issues that you feel strongly about. Campaign, volunteer, organise. Fighting isn’t always dramatic. It is about many of us doing these small things.Once you turn and face the world and become involved, then you will be with other people. Complicated, flawed, lovely, argumentative people. This indeed is what the world is.”

https://www.the-pool.com/news-views/opinion/2016/52/suzanne-moore-a-lesson-learnt-in-2016-we-can-t-look-inwards-even-when-the-world-is-a-scary-place

[npr]

By now, you’ve probably heard about one very real consequence of fake news — the infamous “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory that ended with Edgar Welch, 28, firing a real gun inside a real Washington, D.C., pizzeria filled with real people.

When The New York Times later asked Welch what he thought when he realized there were no child slaves inside the restaurant, as one fake news story had led him to believe, he responded: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”

Welch isn’t the only one struggling to tell fact from fiction in this digital age. A recent Stanford study found that America’s middle, high school and college students are shockingly bad at it, too. It’s clear that something has to change in the nation’s classrooms. That something, according to Professor Sam Wineburg, one of those Stanford researchers, is “practice.”

“How do they become prepared to make the choices about what to believe, what to forward, what to post to their friends,” Wineburg asked on NPR’s All Things Considered, “when they’ve been given no practice in school?”

And he’s right. Many schools — perhaps most — aren’t doing nearly enough to help students learn how to sort fact from social-media fiction. But some are.

The Classroom Where Fake News Fails

Illustration: Hanna Barczyk for NPR

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One for the ‘to listen to’ list #criticalthinking