The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

• 10 Most Bada** Comic Book Heroines (IMAGES) | Mike Madrid

  Love the illustration for Betty Bates, Lady-at-Law (ha!). As she slugs a perp (knocking his gun out of his hand in the process), she tells him,”I’ll teach you to lie to a reputable attorney!” Needless to add, not one of her hairs is out of place. Sigh. 😉
  QUOTE
  …Betty Bates, Lady at Law, a beautiful but tough attorney with jiu-jitsu skills. This lady lawyer spent more time investigating cases than she did in the courtroom, and often wound up taking the law into her own hands. Two-fisted Betty hadn’t completely left her working class roots behind, and wasn’t afraid to punch a crook in her role as “purveyor of justice.” Eventually Betty became a crusading district attorney and enjoyed one of the longest careers for a female hero, appearing in “Hit Comics” for an impressive run from 1940-50.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: comics heroines mike_madrid dames_divas_daredevils

• The Snowden Leaks and the Public by Alan Rusbridger | The New York Review of Books

  Must-read article.
  QUOTE
  We have begun to glimpse how it’s all being done. The NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters), work closely with Internet service providers and telecom companies to amass enormous quantities of data on us. Some of it is done through the front door—formal legal requests. Some of it is done “upstream” of tech companies and phone companies—i.e., intercepting signals in transit. The agencies have attached probes to transatlantic cables, enabling them to vacuum up data on millions of users on both sides of the Atlantic. By last year GCHQ was handling 600 million “telephone events” each day, had tapped more than two hundred fiber optic cables, and was able to process data from at least forty-six of them at a time.

  We have also learned about how the agencies have spent vast sums of money on subverting the integrity of the Internet itself—weakening its overall security in ways that ought to concern every individual, public body, or company that uses it. A trapdoor that lets the NSA into your messages is, most cryptologists agree, quite exploitable by others. If you’re anxious about your bank details or medical records sitting online, you’re probably right to be.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: snowden nsa surveillance democracy privacy

• The New Economy Is Indentured TaskRabbits — Daily Intelligencer

  More on the wretched temp economy:
  QUOTE
  Surowiecki doesn’t say this, but the “world of work” isn’t just “changing.” Like ice floes and Miley Cyrus, its changes over time are the product of human intervention. In this case, the human error has been a jobs-destroying financial crisis, short-sighted fiscal policy, a credit crunch, and a well-funded deficit-reduction movement that has drawn attention away from the jobs crisis. If these things hadn’t happened, we might not be in the position of needing to mortgage decades of future earnings for the chance at a one-time loan. We’d work hard at full-time jobs with benefits, get fixed-rate loans when we needed to buy stuff, and keep our wages for ourselves once the loans were paid off.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: gig_economy economy nymag kevin_roose

• Slaves of the Internet, Unite! – NYTimes.com

  So damn true. And as for professors writing books about gift economies, no matter how eloquently: it’s easy enough to wax poetic about gift economies when you have the assurance of a tenured job that provides a regular salary…
  QUOTE
  I have read Lewis Hyde’s “The Gift,” and participated in a gift economy for 20 years, swapping zines and minicomics with friends and colleagues, contributing to little literary magazines, doing illustrations for bands and events and causes, posting a decade’s worth of cartoons and essays on my Web site free of charge. Not getting paid for things in your 20s is glumly expected, even sort of cool; not getting paid in your 40s, when your back is starting to hurt and you are still sleeping on a futon, considerably less so. Let’s call the first 20 years of my career a gift. Now I am 46, and would like a bed.
  UNQUOTE
  I’d like to add that someone once told me that if you work for free, you must really hate yourself.
  Also, this:
  QUOTE
  Practicalities aside, money is also how our culture defines value, and being told that what you do is of no ($0.00) value to the society you live in is, frankly, demoralizing. Even sort of insulting. And of course when you live in a culture that treats your work as frivolous you can’t help but internalize some of that devaluation and think of yourself as something less than a bona fide grown-up.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: nyt tim_kreider gift_economy free_economy economy

• Our Fear of Al-Qaeda Hurts Us More Than Al-Qaeda Does – David Rohde – The Atlantic

  Too true, all too true.
  QUOTE
  Twelve years after September 11, 2001, the United States’ obsession with al Qaeda is doing more damage to the nation than the terrorist group itself.
  UNQUOTE

  tags: usa nsa terrorism surveillance democracy_deficit

• L.A’s Sprawling Modernism, and the Places That Came Before – Stephanie Garlock – The Atlantic Cities

  “The story of L.A.’s hyper expansion is by now a familiar one. With more than a dozen miles sitting between downtown and the beach, Moeller explains, for the city’s budding school of developers, planners and modern architects, at the beginning of this period “it looked like they had as much space as they wanted.” But within this narrative of expansion and experimentation there is an embedded history of how a feverish pace of building changed the face of a city that was actually far from empty.”

  tags: los_angeles exhibitions sprawl urban_development

• Big Red & Shiny: Art in the Innovation Hub Part 2

  Great to see Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) get featured billing in this thoughtful piece:
  QUOTE
  Trevor Smith described artists’ roles as change agents, highlighting their ability not only to create new forms, but to recognize connections between topics and to remix cultural DNA, keeping this DNA “alive in the present tense.”
  UNQUOTE

  tags: boston art_reception

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.