Alex

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they/he, il. Wikipedian and book reader, mostly. Localization and sociology enthusiast.

Le soi-disant fossé des genres aux échecs

Read What gender gap in chess? by Wei Ji Ma

If you want to compare chess achievements between men and women, writes Professor Wei Ji Ma of NYU, given their vastly unequal numbers, it is a very bad idea to focus on the top male and female players. If you do you will need to account for the participation gap using an analysis similar to the one he presents. Prof. Ma supplies the tools needed to refute the theory of female inferiority.

(Cet article est un résumé personnel en français, avec parti pris, de l’article cité.) Les articles sur le fossé des genres aux échecs sont absurdes par principe, parce qu’ils partent du principe qu’il y a un fossé des genres en termes de niveau. Pour comparer un groupe sous-représenté et un groupe majoritaire, il ne faudrait…

Homesick by Jennifer Croft

Read Homesick by Jennifer Croft

Sisters Amy and Zoe grow up in Oklahoma where they are homeschooled for an unexpected reason: Zoe suffers from debilitating and mysterious seizures, spending her childhood in hospitals as she undergoes surgeries. Meanwhile, Amy flourishes intellectually, showing an innate ability to glean a world beyond the troubles in her home life, exploring that world through languages first. Amy’s first love appears in the form of her Russian tutor Sasha, but when she enters university at the age of fifteen her life changes drastically and with tragic results.

I read this book in one go, thought « this was amazing, probably just a bit too bleak to be a believable story ». Then I opened The Storygraph to mark it as complete and found out it was a memoir. Bon. I really liked the division of the book into short scenes of daily life, or…

Ariadne

Read Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

As Princesses of Crete and daughters of the fearsome King Minos, Ariadne and her sister Phaedra grow up hearing the hoofbeats and bellows of the Minotaur echo from the Labyrinth beneath the palace. The Minotaur – Minos’s greatest shame and Ariadne’s brother – demands blood every year.
When Theseus, Prince of Athens, arrives in Crete as a sacrifice to the beast, Ariadne falls in love with him. But helping Theseus kill the monster means betraying her family and country, and Ariadne knows only too well that in a world ruled by mercurial gods – drawing their attention can cost you everything.

I’ve seen this book compared with Circe about a million times, so I’m going to start by doing the same: Yes, this is similar to Circe in its premise. But it’s much less dense and verbose, and it’s also more in-your-face with its « women suffer the consequences from men’s actions in Ancient Greek mythology » underlying theme.…

Diary of a Misfit

Read Diary of a misfit : a memoir and a mystery by Casey Parks

When Casey Parks came out as a lesbian in college back in 2002, she assumed her life in the rural South was over. Her mother shunned her, and her pastor asked God to kill her. But then Parks’ grandmother, a stern conservative who grew up picking cotton, shared a story about her childhood friend, Roy Hudgins, a musician who was allegedly kidnapped as a baby and was « a woman who lived as a man. » « Find out what happened to Roy, » Casey’s grandma implored. Part memoir, part investigative reporting, Diary of a Misfit is the story of Parks’ life-changing journey to unravel the mysteries of Roy’s life, all the while confronting ghosts of her own.

In a memoir & investigation very similar in structure and messaging to Alex Marzano-Lesvenich’s The fact of a body, Casey Parks tells us her own story as she tries to uncover the life of a (seemingly) transgender man in rural Louisiana in the 70s. The memoir begins as her mother makes it very clear that…

Transidentités : de l’invisibilisation à l’obsession médiatique

Read Transidentités : de l’invisibilisation à l’obsession médiatique

Notre étude révèle que la moitié des articles n’ont pas un traitement respectueux des personnes trans, un sur quatre sont même anti-trans.

Le nouveau rapport de l’Association des Journalistes LGBT (AJL) est excellent. Le rapport est en trois parties : 1. Un sujet enfin légitime 2. Des progrès fragiles 3. Un nouveau marqueur des lignes éditoriales à droite À lire absolument !