Hi! Welcome to another issue of Close Tabs, a newsletter to hold me accountable to exactly one, bare minimum task every week: closing all of my tabs.
I wanted to get this to you so you’d have it with your Sunday morning coffee/chai/mimosa, but the day got the best of me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I hope this gives you some reading for your Sunday evening coffee/chai/nightcap or your Monday morning procrastination.
Anyway, making it out of the Trump presidency still feels surreal. The constant anxiety of the last five years (campaign year included) as a Muslim woman journalist of color under that administration has hardly faded just because there were no epic catastrophes on Inauguration Day. My journalism career only knows this chaos. I was an intern for a daily newspaper in Wisconsin when Trump announced his campaign.
The Washington Post’s Mariana Alfaro summed it up so well:
No amount of executive orders can immediately heal the trauma that this presidency has inflicted (though the reversal of the Muslim ban is much appreciated), so this week’s stories are, I think, reflections on what we’re left with.
What I read this week (in no particular order)
Donald Trump is out. Are we ready to talk about how he got in? by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic
I’m not going to punch above my weight and try to explain why you should read Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I’ll just say that you should read his revisit of his 2017 piece “The First White President,” which discusses how Trump’s presidency was a negation of Barack Obama’s:
“‘The First White President’ was the culmination of the years I’d spent watching the pieces fall into place. Pieces that, once assembled, finally gave us Trump. I’m sorry to report that I think the article holds up well. This would be a much better world if it didn’t. But in this world, an army has been marshaled and barbed wire installed, and the FBI is on guard against an inside job. Whatever this is—whatever we decide to call this—it is not peaceful, and it is not, in many ways, a transition. It is something darker. Are we now, at last, prepared to ask why?”
The nation shall overcome by Abdallah Fayyad in The Boston Globe
I always learn a lot from Abdallah Fayyad’s writing and this column was no exception, as he explained the Battle of Fort Stevens during the American Civil War, the last time that Washington D.C. was attacked by people with Confederate flags. All the pieces are in place for President Joe Biden to lead a Third Reconstruction in the United States, and “this is the nation’s chance to overcome centuries of injustice,” Fayyad writes. “The president — and the country — must not squander it.”
The mindfulness business is thriving on our anxiety by Sarah Todd in Quartz
So the coronavirus pandemic pushed mindfulness— a practice rooted in Buddhism that’s been adapted in more science-y, secular ways by white people in the U.S. for years— to become a BILLION DOLLAR industry. My eyes rolled so far back into my head when I read this:
“There’s something ironic about racing to remain competitive with a product that is meant to be about ‘slowing you down, making you more conscious, making you a better person and better world citizen,’ as Jeff Wilson, a professor of religious studies and east Asian studies at Renison University College in Ontario, points out. These are ‘almost diametrically opposite impulses.’”
This is a fantastic deep-dive into an industry that isn’t without its faults. (Full disclosure: I use Ten Percent Happier, an app mentioned in the story that my employer offers as a benefit.)
The art of repeal: Illustrating Trump’s toxic legacy and Biden’s daunting task ahead by Clayton Aldern in Grist
To be honest, I don’t know enough about the Environmental Protection Agency and why the Trump administration aggressively undid a lot of environmental progress (or perhaps I do), so all of this feels really sinister. Clayton Aldern breaks up this story into five sections of the Trump administration’s legacy on the environment: energy, vehicles, toxics, extractions, and oversight. Each section is divided by graphics that contextualize just how bad this shit is.
I’m not qualified to say which of these is the worst, but the most chilling to me is that the effects of all these rollbacks will be felt for years to come, and most apparently in vulnerable communities. “The legacy of the Trump administration's environmental deregulation won’t be relegated to the pages of the Federal Register,” Aldern says. “It will be written in bones.”
Pink seesaws across US-Mexico border named Design of the Year 2020 by Lanre Bakare in The Guardian
Me reading this story: 🥺🥺🥺
The architects of this project looked to political cartoons when they were designing this, and overall this just seems like what is hopefully the poignant end to the racist border wall operation that Trump started his own presidential campaign with.
“Videos of people interacting and playing across the border on the day-glo creations went viral in July 2019, with Rael saying they provided ‘a literal fulcrum’ between the countries,” Bakare writes. “The bright pink colouring was inspired by the femicide memorials in Ciudad Juarez, which pay homage to women murdered in the city.”
Bonus: 21 signs you or your organization may be the white moderate Dr. King warned about by Vu Le in Nonprofit AF
This story was very popular on Media Twitter on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and after reading it now, I understand why. If nonprofits are to advance society, then they can’t be apolitical or reserved in their efforts to do so. This is a good list of food for thought for any organization in 2021.
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You’re welcome to write me back and let me know what you think of the stories and the newsletter, or even better: send me a story that you think I’d like.
Happy reading,
Hanaa’