Ms Informed Newsletter | Fran Lebowitz, New York, and Pretend It's a City
We're crushing on Fran Lebowitz this week, are you?
This Week's Show
Show Notes
Pretend Its A City on Netflix
Fran Lebowitz’s books
The New Yorker on who gets to be a real New Yorker
Humor piece: Fran Lebowitz’s One-Star Amazon Reviews
This week’s distraction
This week’s distraction is the concept of Emoji blackface! A new phenomenon has been creeping up that is being coined Emoji Blackface, when white people use consistently use emojis depicting people with a much darker skin tone than their own. Much like we covered in Episode 20 of Ms Informed the use of digital black face and black fishing is an ongoing issue. Kimberly Truong writes for Refinery 29: “using an emoji much darker than your own skin tone connotes a certain lack of self-awareness. This action, of trying on a different identity for fun in your digital interactions, seems reserved for those who already move through the world with a certain amount of privilege. While it doesn't mean that you're racist, it signals a lack of awareness of what this mean to people of color on the receiving end of your emoji.”
This week Madhvi has been listening to
Charles Mingus! Inspired by both Fran Lebowitz and reading Philip Glass’s memoir Words without Music, I have been listening to a bunch of different music to my usual Spotify autoplay selection. As well as Mingus: Lennie Tristano, Bartók, James Blood Ulmer, Shostakovich, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Coltrane. Yeah, I know, it’s quite a mix.
This week Rina has been reading
This week Rina has started reading: When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History. A grandson’s poignant look back at his family’s past and their identity as Arabs. Massoud Hayoun details how his grandparents were forced to leave Egypt and eventually settle in the US, and the complicated nature of being both Jewish and Arab.
This week’s inspiration
This week’s inspiration is the Guardians Jenny Stevens. In a recently released Podcast episode ‘Today in Focus’ Jenny talks openly about what it’s like to suffer from an eating disorder. Last November she wrote an amazing piece about what it was like to be treated in a hospital and takes you along on her emotional journey. Read it here and listen to Today In Focus here
Say hi
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Until next time...