Nick s writes: I winced in recognition several times reading this essay about being a visibly Muslim young immigrant in America. She does a good job of capturing the awkwardness, pain, and frustration of every day interactions:

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/15/10767904/islamophobia-immigrant-america

We finally make it to our gate, and, anticipating a "random" search, I let her go ahead. The security guard stops me right before the metal detectors, gestures to my head, and asks me to take off my scarf.

I feign ignorance at first. "What?" I say. "I don't understand."

"That," he says loudly, pointing to my hijab. "You can't wear that through security. Please take it off."

The line is growing exasperated behind me.

"No."

"All right." And just like that, waves me through.

I am seething, and throw myself into a seat. "Did you see that?" I say. "Did you see that back there? It's like he was testing me."

"He's just doing his job," she says, this woman I have made the mistake of traveling with while we're rapidly falling out of love. "Why do you have to make everything about Islam? It's exhausting."

We never acknowledge it, but this is the moment that breaks us.

Heebie's take: I'm skipping all formatting because I'm on my phone, but everything after the link should be blockquoted.

I'm going out on a limb here: the author of this piece is doing something deft insofar as most incidents end in someone telling her to stop being difficult. I feel like the author is daring me to wonder, "well, maybe she is difficult AND experiencing lots of awful prejudice?" Your Jedi tricks won't work on me, missy, I bet you were generally in the right but not as acquiescent as people desire.

It's hard to know if I'm making sense on my phone!

Remember when PGD linked this tattoo and said of it, "I find the contrast between the sexy young belly and the viscerally ugly message rather disturbing"?

This is the opposite of that.

Lately I'm having neck pain. I had to stop reading on my side, with my arm propping up my head, which really bummed me out. Now I'm reading propped up in bed, and it has improved a lot.

Next I want a swanky pillow, though, for my birthday. The memory foam mattress-topper was a game-changer for assorted hips and lower back creakiness, so I was thinking about that. But the heat retention is real. Anyone try a latex pillow? I remember there were non-memory-foam recommendations - wool, latex - the last time I solicited advice. The difference is that now I believe you all.

Maybe the next big trend for minimalism-anorexia-deprivation is to apply it to time. We'll decide that being over-scheduled is like hoarding and binging, and that truly urbane civilized thin minimalists ought to stare at walls all day. (I suppose this is what free-range parents are thinking, with less ridiculousness.)

Messily sends in this knitted good time.

Nick S. writes: This rant about unnecessary page bloat is both fabulous and, incidentally, a reason to reflect on how lean unfogged is, and how much can be accomplished with basic text and HTML.

To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.

...

If you open that tweet in a browser, you'll see the page is 900 KB big.

That's almost 100 KB more than the full text of The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov's funny and enigmatic novel about the Devil visiting Moscow with his retinue (complete with a giant cat!) during the Great Purge of 1937, intercut with an odd vision of the life of Pontius Pilate, Jesus Christ, and the devoted but unreliable apostle Matthew.

For a single tweet.

...

The javascript alone in "Leeds Hospital Bosses Apologise after Curry and Crumble On The Same Plate" is longer than Remembrance of Things Past.

...

Facebook has also launched internet.org, an effort to expand Internet access. The stirring homepage includes stories of people from across the developing world, and what getting Internet access has meant for them.

You know what's coming next. When I left the internet.org homepage open in Chrome over lunch, I came back to find it had transferred over a quarter gigabyte of data.

Heebie's take: it is really good.

This line jumped out at me, from a review of the new Konmari decluttering book and her method in general:

As Slate's June Thomas observed last year in a DoubleX podcast, the intensity and austerity of Kondo's practice and recommendations suggest an "anorexia of things" (although God only knows we should also not underestimate the pathology of its opposite, hoarding).

This doesn't strike me as far-fetched. Anorexia and binging (by which I mean versions of overeating that are symptoms of psychological distress) are culture-bound. Hoarding is culture-bound. Why shouldn't hoarding have an anorexic counterpart?

(The thrust of the rest of the review strikes me as a stretch - that Marie Kondo's minimalism is really death anxiety. I mean, everything is death anxiety.)

What is the most English song by the Smiths?

We signed Hawaii up for a hip hop dance class this semester. On the one hand, the cultural reappropriation is a thing. On the other hand, omg I would have loved it so much at her age.The dance moves have so much fun energy. I'd love it even today if I could get over my self-consciousness, which of course I couldn't. How much awkwardness is the right amount of awkwardness? (on this topic, not on the stage.)

She will be in town [ETA: namely the SF bay area] and free on the thirteenth and fourteenth of this very month! She is willing to go to wherever is convenient for the locals! Let's plan this shee.

UPDATE: The thirteenth, Drake's Dealership, starting around 6:30. I will be bringing fruitcake.

Dairy Queen writes: I am medium-cynical for a lawyer of my vintage, but this amicus brief gave me chills.

I found the combination of not putting names to the individual stories in the brief with listing the names and professional affiliations in the appendix very effective. The stories span a very wide range of backgrounds and experiences and will hopefully cause Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts to be physically uncomfortable wondering whether every woman clerk, staff person and litigator they interact with has had an abortion. Solidarity, sisters!

Heebie's take: Context. (also via DQ)

Goodbye to David Bowie. Everyone who knows me knows I'm really not very involved in music at all. But I did care about Bowie -- I can't think of a better album than Hunky Dory.

I have ten minutes and nothing to post! Sorry! It's the HEEBIE SHOW for the next three months and we're off to a terrible start!

I had some ideas to post, but nothing I have time to flesh out because I have a bunch of boring meetings this morning. Maybe this afternoon will be better.

Fascinating article at Vox (I know, right?) about a woman who had a high-conflict relationship with her mother as a teenager, which resulted in her being temporarily committed, and then directed into Alcoholics Anonymous when she was thirteen. And she spent the next twenty years being really engaged in AA, and thinking of herself as an alcoholic.

And then five years ago, something clicked for her, and she realized that while she had drunk alcohol a few times before being sent to that first AA meeting, she hadn't ever actually been drunk. And that it didn't really make sense to think of herself as having had a drinking problem. And she started having an occasional glass of wine, and found out that no, she didn't appear to be an alcoholic at all, and the whole thing was a misdiagnosis, which she'd latched onto as a teenager because it provided an explanation for why her relationship with her parents was so bad.

I'm not doing it justice, but you should read it. Really interesting.

This article - How To Spot A Spiritual Sexual Predator - has a legitimate point, but is still making me laugh. There are more categories than you might expect.