Saturday Link Love: Teenage Martyrdom, Legal Mischief, and Silicon Valley Domestic Abuse

Saturday Link Love is a feature where I collect and post links to various articles I’ve come upon over the past week. Feel free to share any interesting articles you’ve come along as well! The more the merrier.

After Columbine, martyrdom became a powerful fantasy for Christian teenagers, on Vox—“But if you were a Christian teenager in 1999, the word “Columbine” doesn’t just make you remember feeling suddenly unsafe in places you thought were okay. It’s synonymous with both a whole cottage industry that sprang up around the shooting … and an ethos of martyrdom that seems in retrospect to have summed up what it was to be a youth-group kid at the turn of the last century.”

Mischief is a Superpower, on the Sue Chef—“The District Attorneys are in the habit of ‘letting’ him plead to the charges after a night in jail and go home.  His defense attorneys are in the habit of advising him to take that deal.  I got sick of watching my client be subjected to harassment and to mounting court costs, so after getting his agreement, I decided that some alternative tactics were in order.”

I Thought I Understood the American Right. Trump Proved Me Wrong. by Rick Perlstein—“Future historians won’t find all that much of a foundation for Trumpism in the grim essays of William F. Buckley, the scrupulous constitutionalist principles of Barry Goldwater or the bright-eyed optimism of Ronald Reagan. They’ll need instead to study conservative history’s political surrealists and intellectual embarrassments, its con artists and tribunes of white rage.”

Silicon Valley CEO Pleads ‘No Contest’ to Abusing His Wife—and Is Offered a Deal for Less Than 30 Days in Jail, on The Daily Beast—“At Apple, Neha Rastogi worked on everything from Siri to FaceTime to Maps, sometimes seated beside Steve Jobs himself. … Nobody could have foreseen that she would someday be compelled to employ an iPhone to record harrowing moments of what she says was a pattern of domestic abuse during virtually her entire 10-year marriage to a man who is now CEO of a Silicon Valley startup.”

The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black, Ijeoma Oulo—“There was a moment before meeting Dolezal and reading her book that I thought that she genuinely loves black people but took it a little too far. But now I can see this is not the case. This is not a love gone mad. Something else, something even sinister is at work in her relationship and understanding of blackness.”

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