It's Friday, I'm in Love: interweb syllabus for June 2012

Beware the Dangerous Fatties by Ragen Chastain
"The first use is when someone suggests that you should go on a diet. Try giving them a look of disbelief, a quick snort of a laugh and saying “Are people still peddling that? I thought everybody knew that weight loss doesn’t work.” shake your head disapprovingly and say “Wow, the computer era makes the evidence so accessible and people still don’t bother to read it!'"

Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility by Lindy West
"Fat people in America are reduced to nothing but fatness. A fat person has a health problem of any kind? It’s because they’re fat. A fat person is single? Well, duh. Fat. They deserve it. A fat person is poor? That’s not surprising-obviously they have bad judgment and no impulse control! Because why would a smart person choose to be fat? If a fat person goes to a restaurant and sits on a broken chair and the chair collapses under them, it’s because they’re fat. But if a thin person sits on the same broken chair and the chair collapses under them, it’s because they sat on a broken chair."

This is just randomly hilarious, right?

"We let Willow cut her hair. When you have a little girl, it’s like how can you teach her that you’re in control of her body? If I teach her that I’m in charge of whether or not she can touch her hair, she’s going to replace me with some other man when she goes out in the world. She can’t cut my hair but that’s her hair. She has got to have command of her body. So when she goes out into the world, she’s going out with a command that it is hers. She is used to making those decisions herself. We try to keep giving them those decisions until they can hold the full weight of their lives."
- Will Smith on why he let Willow cut all of her hair off



"Call Your Girlfriend" cover by Lennon & Maisy
So twee and I give no fucks. It is adorable. 
Is the free market efficient? by Paul D'Amato
"Above all, capitalism wastes human life. The U.S. spends billions to warehouse 2 million people—many of them young Black and Latino men—in overcrowded prisons. It provides sub-par education to millions of poor students, sending a message that their lives will amount to nothing. Are people homeless in America because there’s a shortage of homes? And if that’s the case, is there a shortage of homes because we don’t have the concrete, the wood and the steel to build them? The truth is that under capitalism, there’s no incentive to build low-cost housing for the homeless—because it isn’t profitable to do so. The same goes for the more than 800 million people in the world who go hungry. It isn’t profitable to feed them. So food is stockpiled or destroyed rather than distributed to them."

VIDEO: Ill Doctrine: Why Gwyneth Paltrow Should Just Say “Nuh” by Jay Smooth
How Gwyneth Paltrow should’ve handled the controversy surrounding her tweeting the “N-word” during Kanye and Jay-Z’s concert this weekend.

truth.

A Rapper Finds His Muse in the Stars by Anna Louie Sussman
"Informed by meetings with top physicists and cosmologists at MIT and Cornell University, "Dark Matter" is intended to be the first in a series of albums that GZA—born Gary Grice in Brooklyn in 1966—will put out in the next few years, several of which are designed to get a wide audience hooked on science. "Dark Matter" is scheduled for a fall release. Another album will focus on the life aquatic, a subject he's fleshing out with visits to the labs of marine biologists and researchers, as well as meetings with the likes of Philippe Cousteau."

"Immature people falling in love destroy each other’s freedom, create a bondage, make a prison. Mature persons in love help each other to be free; they help each other to destroy all sorts of bondages. And when love flows with freedom there is beauty. When love flows with dependence there is ugliness. A mature person does not fall in love, he or she rises in love. Only immature people fall; they stumble and fall down in love. Somehow they were managing and standing. Now they cannot manage and they cannot stand. They were always ready to fall on the ground and to creep. They don’t have the backbone, the spine; they don’t have the integrity to stand alone. A mature person has the integrity to stand alone. And when a mature person gives love, he or she gives without any strings attached to it. When two mature persons are in love, one of the great paradoxes of life happens, one of the most beautiful phenomena: they are together and yet tremendously alone. They are together so much that they are almost one. Two mature persons in love help each other to become more free. There is no politics involved, no diplomacy, no effort to dominate. Only freedom and love."
- OSHO

For those who aren't in the know, I totally reopened comments when I did the name change/redesign. Feel free to share noteworthy links you've come across recently in the comments on this here post!