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Weekly Round Up: December 11

December 11th, 2015     by Michelle Schwartz     Comments

Illustration by Erin McPhee

Everyone’s favourite podcast/obsession, Serial, is back for Season 2, The New Yorker

Download Episode 1: Dustwun

[An] exploration of the case of Bowe Bergdahl, the American former prisoner of war. Bergdahl walked off his Army base in Afghanistan in 2009, and he was soon captured by the Taliban. Six U.S. soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan after his disappearance, some claim, died directly or indirectly because of his actions. Bergdahl was held captive for almost five years and released in a prisoner exchange in May, 2014.

After a Mass Shooting, A Survivors Life, The Washington Post

TRIGGER WARNING: Violence, trauma. An absolutely devastating account of the life of Cheyeanne Fitzgerald, 16, after being gravely injured in the Umpqua Community College mass shooting.

Jessica Jones: shattering exploration of rape, addiction and control, The Guardian

Netflix’s Jessica Jones is one of the most complex treatments of agency in the wake of victimhood that the small screen has seen yet seen. A grim show, shadowy and hopeless and unlikeable, it’s finally less about trauma than it is a murky contest between revenge and rehabilitation and the term that floats between those: responsibility.

Jessica Jones, Or Hot to Make a TV Show About Trauma, Feministing

Binging the series with my girlfriend this weekend, I was stunned by what I saw. Yes, this is a “superhero” show with a female lead, but Jessica Jones is so much more. The show does what we all got excited about Mad Max: Fury Road doing this summer: it’s a story about the aftermath of sexual violence that doesn’t include gratuitous rape scenes, one that takes on issues of violence and patriarchy head on without replicating harmful tropes. But Jessica Jones goes further than Fury Road by making survivors the central characters, and making their trauma and recovery the meat of the show.

Fatema Mernissi, a Founder of Islamic Feminism, Dies at 75, New York Times

Fatema Mernissi, a Moroccan sociologist who was one of the founders of Islamic feminism, whose work included studies of the sexual politics of Islamic Scripture and a memoir of her childhood in a domestic harem, died on Nov. 30 in Rabat.

Adrift in the Maghreb: Finding Peace in Discontent, The Toast

It was April of 2009, and immediately upon our arrival in Marrakesh, I was accosted from all directions with the joyous cry: “La soeur d’Obama!”… I was twenty-one years old, a junior in college, and in a perpetual state of capsizing, adrift in a sea of my own self-doubt and discovery.

The 2015 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog, Deadspin

Every year, Drew Magary writes the Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma holiday catalog, and every year the products grow more obscene. Not since Vogue suggested we all go glamping has capitalism seemed so ludicrous.

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