1. Why We Need More Covers Like ELLE’s, Featuring Breastfeeding Model Nicole Trunfio
ELLE Australia’s just-released issue features model Trunfio breastfeeding her son Zion. The mag’s timing is appropriate, as the movement to #NormalizeBreastfeeding (y’know, the primary biological purpose for female breasts) is gaining momentum in the U.S. and globally.
2. U.S. Releases Contents of Bin Laden’s English-Language ‘Bookshelf’
Among a host of conspiracy-theory books are manuals for Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro, articles on topics ranging from the dive of America Online stock to a profile of John Esposito, and almost a full year’s worth of Foreign Policy magazine issues.
3. Who Said It: Fox News or Jesus?
In the easiest/saddest quiz ever …
4. ISIS Has Seized the Ancient City of Palmyra. Here’s What That Means for History
“Any loss to Palmyra is not just a war crime, it will mean an enormous loss to humanity.”
5. Is Being Mentally Ill in America a Crime?
The Root examines another result of our mass incarceration epidemic — how prisons are becoming “the new asylums, where the mentally ill are misunderstood and locked away, punished for their illness as if they were criminals.”
6. A D.C. Nonprofit Is Giving the City’s Homeless Tools to Film Their Experiences
The nonprofit Street Sense — the Washingon, D.C., biweekly street newspaper that features 50 percent content created by homeless and formerly homeless writers — is now equipping those content creators with the tools to make documentaries highlighting the realities of poverty in the city from the perspective of those actually experiencing it.
7. Why Boko Haram and ISIS Target Women
This week, the New York Times released a report outlining the latest atrocities by the terror group Boko Haram, this time showing that hundreds of women and girls had been raped, sometimes with the specific intention of impregnating them and creating a new generation of ideological extremists.
8. Immigrant Family’s Hope on Hold After Promises from the President
As legal challenges delay implementation of President Obama’s program — which would have allowed undocumented immigrants who have been in the country more than five years and who have children who are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents to apply to stay in the country temporarily — real families’ lives hang in the balance. NPR tells one family’s story.
9. Oil Spill Returns to its Ancestral Waters Near Santa Barbara
“Could a ‘significant’ oil spill near several beautiful state beaches (and right before Memorial Day) be the thing that finally leads to serious legislative change?” Check out the reasons to be optimistic.
10. Contraception & Honesty: A Proposal for the Next Synod
From the Catholic magazine Commonweal: “Why did [October’s Synod on the Family] appear to treat so perfunctorily the issue that was, and is, the starting point for the unraveling of Catholic confidence in the church’s sexual ethics and even its credibility about marriage? To which, of course, one could add further questions about this baffling silence: Does it even matter?”
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