Learning at home

I'm working through my relationships with my father and my niece for a podcast, but because of how much we now rely on the interent as the arbiter of truth, and the way we scrub our social media to reinvent ourselves, I have to get some of this down.    One of the things I learned on my sabbatical, is what doomscrolling is and what it does to my mental health.  I engaged with social media anew in 2016-17.   I'd given up on Facebook, and the news aggregators I'd come to rely on all went away, so I became active on Twitter.  I searched out diverse voices  from across the political spectrum.  I didn't realize that the algorithms favor conflict, and my feed kept filling up with the worst voices; probably because I tried to correct or inform the most counter-factual or crazy assertions.   Once I figured this out, I started purging my social media feeds.  One prominent voice was Nikole Hannah-Jones @nhannahjones who goes by Ida Bae Wells on Twitte...

I started listening to NPR's " Code Switch " because code-switching has always fascinated me through my experiences living as a non-native speaker in an immersion environment or navigating multilingual environments here, at work or home.  Sometimes a code switch fills in a gap in one language where another has a succinct word or phrase for a universal experience.  Sometimes we switch codes to to avoid, or inflict, microaggressions.* I was disappointed to learn that the podcast didn't focus on linguistics and actual  code switching, but I appreciated the focus on race.  The BLM protests may have caused a shift, or intensification, and I'd like to examine the June 16, 2020 episode " Why Now, White People ?" First, some context. Some famous people looked for content on race and culture, saw a reputable publication like NPR, subscribed and recommended the Code Switch podcast to their followers on social media.  Overnight the podcast shot to...