Links for Monday, May 15th

A Monday link roundup, now with 95% less Russia.

Current mood

A brief, achingly lovely piece by Alexander Chee about his father:

His drink was Crown Royal, his candy bar, a Baby Ruth, though he didn’t like chocolate much. He was good at poker, loved reading Tolstoy. His suits were bespoke.

In Korea, starting at the age of five, he ran barefoot in the snow when he was training for tae kwon do, so he was ready, during the Korean War, for when he and his oldest brother had to steal food from overturned army supply trucks, running the bags of rice home on their backs.

YES

“Watching the names—some of the top names at the National Post, Rogers Media, and CBC—pledging their $100 or $500 to [Ken Whyte’s ‘Appropriation Prize’], my stomach flipped. It was a reminder, once again, that too many white decision makers in Canadian media don’t seem to listen when people of colour and Indigenous people are talking.”

Does swearing make you stronger?

In previous physical-challenge experiments, volunteers who swore had higher heart rates than those who didn’t—telltale signs of the fight-or-flight response. In the recent study, however, they didn’t. “Our latest findings are an effect but without an explanation for it,” Stephens said. There are at least two possibilities, he added. One is that swearing aloud may distract people from their pain, enabling them to better tolerate it. Or “it could be that swearing brings about a general disinhibition,” he said. “People feel less uptight when they’ve been swearing, and that lets them go for it a little bit more.”

Mickey Rowe is the first autistic actor to play the autistic lead role in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: “I am so looking forward to getting the chance to show young disabled people that they can represent themselves honestly onstage and tell their own stories.”

How great musicians live on through their students’ music.

Today in Faves Talking to Faves: Elon Green’s interview with Doree Shafrir; Jaya Saxena’s interview with Scaachi Koul.

“Interracial pairings in popular culture still tend to necessitate one white person.”

Bless Alexandra Petri:

Okay, the firing of FBI Director James Comey looked bad. And when the president stunned him, pierced him with his fangs, wrapped him in a thick cocoon of impenetrable webbing and left him to hang there for days, that timing was also poor. It doesn’t seem as though it was what the FBI wanted or what the deputy attorney general wanted, either. But the American people voted for change!

WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE WRITE THE KDRAMA