the-real-ranger-rick
49 posts
Latest Posts by the-real-ranger-rick
what i read in february 2022:
(previous editions) bold = favourite
class, race, & economy
what coming out of the ‘caste closet’ was like
world food prices are climbing closer toward a record high
i was surrounded by ‘final girls’ in school, knowing i’d never be one (usa)
petrópolis: a perfect storm of weather extremes and deep inequality (brazil)
gender & sexuality
why were scientists so slow to study covid-19 vaccines and menstruation?
bimbofication is taking over. what does that mean for you?
hollywood played a role in hypersexualising asian women
politics, climate change, & covid
‘whatever horrors they do, they do in secret’: inside the taliban’s return to power (afghanistan)
the vietnamese workers japan depends on are falling through the cracks
britain’s ownership of the chagos islands has no basis, mauritius is right to claim them
despite climate goals, europe’s 25 largest banks continue to invest billions in oil and gas
history, culture, & media
‘i remember the feeling of insult’: when britain imprisoned its wartime refugees
archaeologists in egypt discover 3,000-year-old ‘lost golden city’
the good place and bojack horseman died as they lived
‘death knows no colour’: the forgotten african soldiers of wwii
ukraine
i’m in kyiv and awake at the darkest hour – as putin’s bombs rain down
dictators aren’t pretending anymore
‘the hope is finished’: life in the ukrainian separatist regions of donetsk and luhansk
how suicide became the hidden toll of the war in ukraine
nigeria condemns treatment of africans
Essays
Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love
also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!
Literature + Writing
Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag
The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*
Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*
A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi
How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik
Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone
Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman
Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom
The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*
The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes
Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*
Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*
Why I Write - George Orwell*
Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*
Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)
Looking at War - Susan Sontag*
Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz
Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker
The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews
In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*
On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*
Kalighat Paintings - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri
Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past - Maël Renouard
Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel
Cities
Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash
Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*
Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur
The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*
Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur
From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective - Andrew Harris
The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay
The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel
Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan
A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp
The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne
The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*
The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour
Philosophy
The trolley problem problem - James Wilson
A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram
Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*
Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer
The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*
The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape
If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood
Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart
The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*
The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*
History
The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan
The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*
From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*
Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*
All By Myself - Martha Bailey*
The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder
The sea/ocean
Rim of Life - Manu Pillai
Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery
‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*
The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*
Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti
Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*
Assorted ones on India
A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *
Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash
Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee
Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu
The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*
Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta
Our worldview is Delhi based*
Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)
‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*
Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh
When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger
Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*
Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha
MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*
Music
Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo
Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder
The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*
Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*
How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield
Concert for Bangladesh
From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen
Gender
Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane
The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin
Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*
Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe
Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*
Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack
Food
How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)
Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee
Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu
Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*
From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*
The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*
How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*
Pav from the Nau
A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes
Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)
Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)
Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*
Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua
The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*
Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*
Travel
The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism
Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan
On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose
On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*
More random assorted ones
The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*
In El Salvador - Joan Didion
Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee
Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell
Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*
What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*
The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith
Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*
Credibility and Mystery - John Berger
happy reading :)
FYI : this website definitely DOES NOT have a million free TEXTBOOKS and in general books for you all to download 😌
No reason to reblog this 👀
Edit : omg this blew up GUYS CHECK MY STUDYGRAM I AM SHARING LIFE SAVING TIPS ON THE DAILY @ABOOKISHDEMON
Safety warnings from the Nintendo Wii’s Japanese manual
Working from home struggles
(via)
i went to a small private school in bumfuck, alabama, and we had a rite of passage. in 10th grade, every student took chemistry with Mr. Jenne, and every year, he showed his students a short video. the older students refused to tell the younger students what the video was, so by the time we got to chemistry, we were all super curious about it.
Mr. Jenne would go through the syllabus and explain how his class worked, then he'd drag out an old tv set and put an ancient vhs tape into an equally ancient vcr (i graduated in 2005; we knew what dvds were, but i don't think this was ever put on dvd). finally, he'd turn out the lights, and let us watch The Consequences of Our Choices, aka
The Pump
afterwards, when we were completely and utterly confused, he'd explain the metaphor. Mr. Jenne said he could always tell who had primed the pump by studying and who was going to die in the desert because they'd been cheating.
somewhere around December, when it was time for exams, he'd show it to us again. after that, he'd show it to us at random intervals -- if he needed to leave the room for a bit, if we finished the lesson early (ha!), or the next time we had exams in May. He also taught organic chemistry and physics, and you can bet your sweet ass i took both of those classes. i got to watch The Pump quite a few times.
Mr. Jenne passed away about a decade ago. He's still one of my all time favorite teachers because he taught us how to think, not what to think, and he didn't hold it against us when we thought something he didn't agree with (unless it was something provable, like science. he would've mercilessly mocked anti-maskers).
the older of my 2 little sisters starts 10th grade at my high school soon, so i did what any good sister would -- i made her watch The Pump. after i explained the metaphor and how much all of Mr. Jenne's students came to love the weird little video, she immediately started texting the link to her friends.
so, after a decade, i brought The Pump back to my school. I feel like I've reintroduced an endangered species to its native habitat.
(yeah, The Pump was originally about Christianity and Jesus and all that crap, and it was put out by the Mormons, but when i see this, i think science, not religion. but i tagged it religion, anyway, just in case)
the only thing these two have in common is the price they paid to win (open for a surprise for light mode users)
If any of my posts blow up please let it be this one:
Australia is currently petitioning to make it that all gender confirming surgeries for transgender individuals are covered by Medicare. This is absolutely huge as surgeries are super expensive even with private health insurance.
It doesn't ask for an address or phone number or anything so I think anyone in the world can sign for it? But I'm not entirely sure.
EDIT: yeah you gotta be a citizen, so if you're outside the country, if you could reblog this to reach more Australians, this would be amazing!
Here's the petition link:
Petition information:
Please reblog this and spread it as far and wide as you can, this is super important!
Chrome extensions I actually use as a mentally ill university student
Making websites easier to digest:
Dark Reader - Changes any webpage to dark mode.
Mercury Reader - Simplifies the layout of any webpage to eliminate distractions and irritating formatting.
Podcastle AI - Turns any article into a podcast. This is a lifesaver for being able to process what I’m reading, to be honest.
Spelling/grammar:
LanguageTool - Spelling and grammar check for those of us who regularly type in more than one language.
Grammarly - Spelling and grammar check for those of us who only type in English. Can be used with LanguageTool installed, which is what I do.
Google Dictionary - Define any word on the webpage with a double-click.
Google Translate - Translate an entire webpage or even just a short segment.
Misc:
AdGuard Adblocker - After trying quite a few adblocker options, this is the one I find the best.
The Great Suspender - Automatically suspend inactive tabs to help with performance. <- as an edit, I don’t believe this is available anymore
Honey - Try coupon codes automatically to save money on online purchases.
Built-in Chrome tab grouping - Group your tabs to keep organized and minimize distracting clutter.
Your daily dose of motivation from some lovable guys
rb this to give the person you reblogged from a very tiny frog
Narumi: here’s the plan-
Yuu: hey Mika, do you know who is the most beautiful person on the whole planet?
Narumi: Yoichi will check the perimeter-
Mika: I don’t know, Yuu-chan… You?
Narumi: and then-
Yuu: no no, it’s you~
Narumi: AND THEN-
Mika: no way, it’s definitely you
Narumi: I SAID-
Yuu: how can you say that with that gorgeous face of yours?
Narumi: COULD YOU PLEASE STOP WITH THAT?!
Yuu&Mika: …
Narumi: *sighs* where was I?
Shinoa: hey Mitsu~ do you know who is the most beautiful person on the planet?
Narumi: WHY GOD
REBLOG IF YOU SHIP YATO X YUKINE PLEASE EVEN IF YOU DONT POST ABOUT IT REBLOG
Because shounen-ai
FYI : this website definitely DOES NOT have a million free TEXTBOOKS and in general books for you all to download 😌
No reason to reblog this 👀
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Edit : hey I'm the student who wrote this if you're feeling like helping out click here 🥺
Hi there, this is my first time doing something like this but i've really been struggling so i feel i need to do this
I'm dara, latina 24 y.o. lgbt girl from south america. I've been struggling with money these past few months. Due to covid it's been really REALLY hard for us latin americans and my country's reaching over 3000 deaths due to covid a day. Vaccines are not accessible to the entire population yet, only 60+ people, and still it's going at a really slow pace (no hope for me being vaccinated this year). I'm unemployed, and although i've been searching i cant get a job. Also there are my significant other's health issues (they have a lung problem, so cant go to work bc of risk of getting covid). They are recieving financial support from government but it cant cover all expenses and it's all the 2 of us are earning right now. So i've decided to ask for donations...
Our country's currency is really devalued internationally (idk specific economic terms in english sorry) so trust me, even a dollar helps. Converting it, 5 dollars is enough to pay 1 person a full meal, so do trust me EVEN $1 HELPS! Our rent is currently (equivalent to) 200usd and i dont expect to get this much but it would help a lot
Anyway please donate if you can! If you cant its okay ofc and please reblog also so this can get to more people 🙏🏻 im so thankful to every single person who reblogs and donates
Paypal donation
I explained to some absolute idiot on discord that as a blind person I hate when people make their blog titles or their usernames a bunch of letters compiled from different languages. If you use the letter that looks like an A but in Greek is actually an s, the screen reader is going to read it with an s sound. So a blind person cannot tell what you have typed because it reads as garbled nonsense.
And they thought it was just the funniest joke to intentionally type like that to poke fun. Please reblog and spread awareness that typing like this is inaccessible
you have been visited by the seven magic dragon balls your biggest wish will be granted but only if you reblog
this keeps coming up, in all sorts of different discourse, so I finally gave up and made it a meme
LISTEN UP AGAIN KIDS STOP REBLOGGING THIS FUCKING GARBAGE POST. IT IS 100% FUCKING BULLSHIT AND CAN AND MOST DEFINITELY WILL LITERALLY KILL. DO YOU NOT SEE WARNING LABELS THAT SAY “DO NOT INDUCE VOMITING”? THEY AREN’T FUCKING AROUND. YOU CAN FUCKING BURN THEIR ESOPHAGUS BY CAUSING VOMITING, CAUSE CHOKING, DROWNING, OR MAKE IT WORSE! AGAIN DO NOT FORCE ANYTHING DOWN ANYONE’S THROAT. THEY. CAN. DROWN. IF SOMEONE IS LOSING CONCIOUSNESS ALL THE CHIT CHAT IN THE WORLD WILL NOT PREVENT IT AT THAT POINT THEY ARE IN SERIOUS DANGER. “Buuut i don’t wanna take them to the hospital!!!” WELL SUNSHINE GLAD YOU’D RATHER HAVE A DEAD FRIEND THAN A LIVING ONE BUT YOU’RE IN LUCK CALL FUCKING POISON CONTROL. THEY ARE NOT THE COPS. THEY WILL HELP YOU. AND IF THEY SAY GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL YOU GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL. NO EXCUSES. 0. NONE. I have seen this shit cross my dash SO MANY TIMES so PLEASE fucking reblog this and prevent some well meaning idiot from accidentally killing someone they love!
you know what, i respect the hell out of haikyuu for having both protagonists be stupid. Just dumb as bricks. In most anime protag rivalries at least one of them is smart where the other is strong but no. Both hinata and kageyama just have deflated volleyballs rolling around their skulls and i love them for it.
Yeah. Like being a titan for example
