Recommendations for November 2

More recommendations!

First,  a great article from Evan Narcisse at Kotaku about the need for better portrayals of blackness in video games. Don't have a lot to say about this one, other than that I really appreciate how he specifies certain black characters in games as examples of how to do things well, but reminds the reader that it's not enough to just clap your hands and finish at that. Also, apparently this is an except from The State of Play, an anthology of video game cultural analysis which just came out. I think I'll have to pick that up.

On that note, Laura Hudson at Offworld (which I really need to read more regularly) has a nice feature on Kiro'o Games, the first game development studio in Cameroon, and their upcoming game, Aurion. I actually remember hearing about this last year and am glad I was reminded of it. Video games often lack a sense of identity that draws on where they were made - or at least, that identity tends to be implicit. So I'm glad that we're starting to see games come out of areas outside of the traditional development centres of North America, Japan and Europe. (Chilean developer ACE Team is another example.) That these folks seem to be pulling a Tolkien on African history and mythology makes me even more excited.

Because of the Blue Jays recent, but too short, playoff run, I've fallen back in love with baseball. Which means I've been reading a lot about baseball history. Corinne Landrey at The Hardball Times wrote about how this years World Series between the Mets and the Royals is the first ever not to feature one of the original eight MLB teams. That's pretty shocking, considering that this was the 53rd World Series since the MLB started expanding. Equally shocking, to me at least, was that the New York Yankees used to be called the Baltimore Orioles. Weird. I also liked this article by Rany Jazayerli at the recently shutdown Grantland about the biggest plays in MLB history. Baseball is great because of how it's punctuated by moments like these. Dozens and dozens of things happen that seem to be of no consequence and then all of the sudden games, series and seasons pivot on one hit, one catch, or one throw. And to round out the baseball reading with contemporary events, here's Jeff Sullivan at FanGraphs congratulating the Kansas City Royals on winning the World Series yesterday - and for being such a damn fun team.

Finally, some Canadian politics, in the form of comments on Justin Trudeau's policy plans for electoral reform from Evan Solomon at Maclean's and the Syrian refugee crisis from the CBC. These were both important issues for me during the election, so I was glad to see some continuing coverage of them. Both articles are a bit pessimistic, though. On the electoral reform front, while the Liberals might put forward a ranked ballot as the easiest change that also benefits them, I'd prefer anything to First-Past-the-Post (although my preference is Single Transferable Vote.) On the refugee crisis, I find it strange that the article talks about the difficulty in processing the applications for so many people before the end of the year, but doesn't really address what those applications are like and whether things could be done to reduce the paperwork.

One final recommendation, although not for an article: Bouletcorp is a fantastic webcomic that everyone should read. It's mostly in French, but there are English versions of many strips, so you have no excuse!

Article Recommendations

As part of my ongoing goal to post here regularly, I thought I'd do a weekly round-up of interesting articles I've read. I try to read a lot of news, opinion and just generally informative stuff online. Usually, I share it on my Facebook page, but I think it might be more effective to have everything in one place. That also allows me to write up my thoughts on each item a bit more clearly.

Since this is the first one of these posts, these won't actually be things I specifically read this week. In the future, I'll try to keep it to recent stuff, or at least pieces that I've personally read recently.

First up is actually a group of articles about masculinity:

The Lack of Gentle Platonic Touch in Men's Lives is a Killer by Mark Greene
Bosom Buddies: A Photo History of Male Affection by Brett and Kate McKay
Escape the "Act Like a Man" Box by Charlie Glickman

The first two are about how homophobia has made men afraid to touch each other casually and gently. Greene argues that because of this fear, young boys get much less physical attention from their parents and peers than girls do. They then enter adulthood understanding touch as either sexual or aggressive - sometimes, disastrously, both. The pictures in the McKay article do a really good job of showcasing how men used to be much more willing to hold hands, sit on each other's laps and hug. While I think Greene may be overselling the psychological value of touch, I think there's a lot to the argument. I'm lucky that my dad was never afraid to show affection with me or my brother - he hugged us and told us how much he loved us every day. I went to summer camp as a kid, where hugging is the default form of greeting. So I've always been pretty comfortable with physical contact with other men. Even so, those photographs are striking in how different the interaction is to what I would consider normal or comfortable.

The third article of the group is a pretty straightforward take on how corrosive the norms of masculinity are. Hopefully this isn't news to anybody, but it's worth emphasizing often. Even as a pretty gender-norm conforming type of dude, I bristle when some marketer tries to remind me that liking musicals or cooking or bracelets means I'm not a "man."

Next up, The Drone Papers by The Intercept.

This is a chilling set of articles detailing secret information about the United States' drone strike program, as revealed by a whistleblower. There's a lot of information in there - acronyms, statistics, diagrams, dates. But it's worth reading. The upshot is this: the US has become increasingly willing and able to initiate drone strikes against possible threats by order of the President. The strikes are often against targets within the borders of countries not at war with the US; they can target citizens of the US or allied countries, killing them without recourse to due process; they are imprecise, killing hundreds of non-combatants who are by default labelled as "Enemies Killed in Action" when their identities are unknown; and these strikes are an inefficient form of intelligence gathering, as they kill people who might otherwise have divulged valuable information. It's all horrifying. The knowledge that nobody cares enough to stop it horrifies all the more.

Let's keep it dreary:

The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Coates is the best non-fiction writer I've read in ages and these two cover stories for The Atlantic (from last summer and this summer respectively) illustrate why. With beautiful writing, he brings mounds of evidence to show that the crime of  subjugating African Americans was historically and is presently fundamental, not incidental, to the wealth of the United States. I've actually just finished Coates' recently published book, Between the World and Me, and plan on writing a longer post about it, so I won't go into more detail here. Rest assured, you should know who Ta-Nehisi Coates is, what he writes about and why it's important.

On a somewhat lighter note, Canada recently had an election and after nine long years, we've had a change of government. I'm more thankful that Stephen Harper's gone than pie-eye-excited about Justin Trudeau, but he's at least saying most of the things I want to hear. The CBC has a rundown of the new Liberal government's top early priorities and The Trudeau Metre is a good resource to make sure that the new Prime Minister fulfills his promises. Something to keep an eye on.