Weekend Reading

Here's a collection of long reads for your weekend pleasure. It's a short list this week. I've been busy with getting adjusted to a new online gig (paid, yay!), and haven't been able to really look for more interesting things to share!

Please feel free to leave links to what you're reading (or writing) in the comments!

Jack Moore has written a thought-provoking article about how important Mo'Ne Davis is to everyone who loves sports: Mo'Ne Davis is Just the Beginning

The narrative of the gimmick girl in sports is doubly damaging. Not only does it foster a lower expectation of women’s abilities — in both genders — it also creates an assumption that women aren’t earning their spots when in reality they are almost certainly facing even higher standards than the men they compete against.If the sports world is truly going to house gender equality, we need to give girls the freedom to choose their sports. We need to stop pressuring them to take the path of least gender resistance. And we need to stop holding them to a higher standard when everything else is already working against them.

I'm eagerly awaiting the release of Laura Ingalls Wilder's memoir, Pioneer Girl, scheduled for November. It promises to be a grittier, more realistic version of her life than was shown in the beloved Little House series, as explained in this excellent Christian Science Monitor article: Gritty memoir from the author of 'Little House on the Prairie' to hit shelves this fall

While "Pioneer Girl" clearly wasn't for kids, the idea that the original autobiography is full of shock and scandal "isn't exactly true either," according to Lauters. She told the Associated Press that the first version of the beloved classic books was more "blunt" and "honest," but isn't to be read as a scandalous tell-all version of the classic series.

According to The Pioneer Girl Project, a blog detailing the ongoing process on Wilder's book, the edition coming out this fall will feature numerous annotations to better tell the real-life story of the Ingalls family in full, historical detail.

Cod Coddliness on G+ shared this excellent post about Nancy Wake, the Allies’ most decorated servicewoman of WWII, and the Gestapo’s most-wanted person.

Six months after they married, Germany invaded France. Slowly but surely Nancy drew herself into the fight. In 1940 she crossed the line between observation and action, and joined the embryonic Resistance movement as a courier, smuggling messages and food to underground groups in Southern France. She bought an ambulance and used it to help refugees fleeing the German advance. Being the beautiful wife of a wealthy businessman, she had an ability to travel that few others could contemplate. She obtained false papers that allowed her to stay and work in the Vichy zone in occupied France, and became deeply involved in helping to spirit a thousand or more escaped prisoners of war and downed Allied fliers out of France through to Spain.

And then, when you're done reading, be sure to check out this amazing short film, Pumzi by the amazing director Wanuri Kahiu of Kenya.

In a dystopian future 35 years after an ecological WWIII has torn the world apart, East African survivors of the devastation remain locked away in contained communities, but a young woman in possession of a germinating seed struggles against the governing council to bring the plant to Earth’s ruined surface.