Belated weekend linkdump!

From '07: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/spider-woman

> [An] irritated voice blared over the intercom, “Spider lady! Spider lady! Come to the front!”

> “There’s a kind of Zen moment where everything falls away and there’s just you and the spider.”

A recent paper finds that, as many suspected, Bitcoin's price has been manipulated with the token called Tether: https://nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-manipulation.html

After similar campaigns by workers at Microsoft and Google, Amazon workers demand that the company stop selling facial recognition software to ICE and police: https://gizmodo.com/amazon-workers-demand-jeff-bezos-cancel-face-recognitio-1827037509

In Morristown, TN, residents stand up for immigrant neighbours: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/11/us/tennessee-immigration-trump.html

> As McCutcheon later said to me, “It was a motherfucking cordyceps.”

Japanese cicadas' latest beneficial endosymbiont is not a bacterium but the notorious zombifying fungus: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/how-to-tame-a-zombie-fungus/562544/

Stories of trans women victims of violence in Toronto, from Cassandra Do to Alloura Wells: https://this.org/2018/06/14/each-death-is-a-preventable-tragedy/

The journalist whose coverage of Brandon Teena inspired "Boys Don't Cry" evaluates her "insensitive and inaccurate" story: https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/06/20/how-i-broke-and-botched-the-brandon-teena-story/

Four #bikeTO ghost bike rides in little over a week: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2018/06/15/amid-wave-of-toronto-deaths-cyclists-holding-first-of-four-ghost-bike-rides-friday.html

How landlords, building managers and developers emptied out the Palace Arms, a $700/month rooming house that was one of Toronto's last affordable housing options: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-for-torontos-poor-the-palace-arms-has-been-their-castle-now-a-new/

For years, they've said 80% of trans kids "grow out of it". A new paper takes a critical look at the shockingly flawed studies used to justify the figure. Background and commentary from the indispensable Julia Serano: https://medium.com/@juliaserano/reframing-transgender-desistance-debates-68648a4fd01a

This piece on trans women's inclusion is a really solid introduction to how to think about gender in a feminist, non-essentialist way! https://medium.com/@alysonescalante/how-we-talk-about-trans-inclusion-matters-75e1c6fce5dc

It's funny because in queer theory, gender studies, feminist philosophy, etc., it's a truism that sex and gender are 1) not really separate things, and 2) are socially constructed. Meanwhile in the wilds of Reddit or whatever ppl are like "well you see we're biologically different" like it's the fucking 19th century okay rant over