All posts tagged "Lindsay Beyerstein"

Raw Story investigative reporter Alexandria Jacobson has won the prestigious Sidney Award for her months-long investigation into violence against letter carriers and a recent spike in mail-related crime.

Jacobson's investigation, "Letter carriers face bullets and beatings while postal service sidelines police," prompted immediate reaction from federal lawmakers who called on Congress to pass legislation that helped enhance safety for postal workers and the mail itself.

“Jacobson’s meticulous reporting casts a light on the risks faced by letter carriers and the official indifference to their wellbeing on the job,” Sidney Award judge Lindsay Beyerstein said Wednesday. “This story makes it clear how the security of letter carriers affects not only the workers involved but all of us in terms of the scale of thefts and fraud.”...

Lindsay Beyerstein has a wonderful review at Slate of the book Sweetening the Pill, which I've kicked around before on this blog. The book got floated as a "feminist" book, but as Lindsay makes utterly clear, there isn't any legitimate kind of feminism that so deftly replicates the sexist tendency towards gender essentialism, i.e. reducing women and the concept of womanhood to certain biological functions. This point should be obvious, but as Lindsay lays out, there's a widespread and disturbing phenomenon of gender essentialism calling itself "feminism", one whose outer reaches even extend towards anti-trans bigotry. There's a lot to read, including Lindsay's absolute decimation of the pseudoscience fueling anti-pill tirades, so I highly recommend reading it.

To donate to the Silver Ring Strikers, who are bowling for abortion access on Sunday, April 17th. We've got quite the team forming, with acclaimed journalist Lindsay Beyerstein and Jezebel founder Anna Holmes helping us out.

[rebelmouse-image 24750044 original_size="320x200" expand=1](Amanda's note: Lindsay has graciously written a retort to Jesse Bering in Slate, and I asked her if she's post i here. Bering has a history of half-baked evo psych writings that play loose with the concept that rape is all that bad, and Lindsay was kind enough to do the heavy lifting on this article.)

By all accounts, the radical 80s prom Friday night was a smashing success! Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein, Emily Douglas, Jean Stevens, and Nancy Goldstein for their organizing efforts. Thanks to Jill Filipovic, Twanna Hines, Jamia Wilson, and Deanna Zandt for being our fashion judges (with an extra thanks to Deanna for hooking us up with the Bowery Poetry Club). And thanks especially to my partner Marc Faletti for putting a ton of man hours into the content creation---both in terms of editing a video reel that played during the prom, and, above all, making the mash-up hour that was raved about all night long.

Lindsay Beyerstein has been doing a kick ass job as of late researching and reporting on the battle over mandated condom use in straight porn in California (it's already standard in gay porn). It's a story that has gotten some attention as yet another actor has tested positive for HIV and has likely exposed many women---often you can expose dozens---in the time since he became positive and turned up a positive test. It's hard to get people to care about this issue in more than a cursory way, in part because sex workers are still treated like they're not worthy of full human rights and in part because the public has become somewhat blase about HIV in general. It's an old story by now. The fact that there is a drug cocktail that is effective in allowing people who would have perished in short order back in the day to live long, productive lives has put the public in a place where they forget how deadly AIDS really is. But 11,000 people die of AIDS in the U.S. alone every year, and let's face it, having to take that drug cocktail for the rest of your life is no picnic and not that easy to do. Availability is also dependent on many factors. Despite the title "porn star", most porn actors don't make a lot of money and they are pushed out of the business at a relatively young age, and subsequently their access to regular health care is limited, to say the least. If you believe, as I do, that sex workers are full human beings deserving of the same consideration as everyone else, this is nothing to be blase about.