Monthly library update: February 2025
Date published: 2025.03.09
This one isn’t even that late
Articles and essays 📰
The Unbearable Whiteness of the Goodreads Choice Awards
Pretty unsurprising news to anyone who’s ever used Goodreads, but it’s good to have the stats. Goodreads is:
Large decline in children’s happiness in Poland over past five years, finds UNICEF report
❝ Currently, 59% of children in Poland report feeling happy, down from 75% in 2019, according to a survey of 12- to 17-year-olds carried out in October and November 2024 by research firm IBRiS on behalf of UNICEF Polska. (…) Parents, however, seemed unaware of this shift, with 82% of them currently believing their children to be happy, only slightly down from 86% in 2019.
❝ The report found a dramatic drop in the proportion of children who say teachers respect their rights, with the figure now standing at 38%, down from 70% in 2019.
Jesus Christ. I knew things were bad, but I didn’t know they were this bad.
You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism
❝ More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.
Video essays 🎥
Is Cyrillic better for Polish?
You're not addicted to tiktoks/reels, you're addicted to the scrolling
Funny to watch this video on YouTube, the platform that fucked up my homepage algorithm so bad that I almost completely stopped using it – specifically because the ratio of gems to absolute shit got so low I don’t even enjoy the scrolling anymore (my brain lost all hope that I would get any food from pressing the button)
Music 🎵
Didn’t manage to find a lot of good new music this month. The only album I can share with you is Avar by Дeva: it’s some really great Hungarian folk. Give it a listen!!
Favourite track: Odú.
Books 📘
Unmasking Autism. Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity – Devon Price
Phew. This was a difficult read. Not the book’s fault – it’s written in such a way that makes it really easy to read, actually – but mine for needing breaks every time it made me realize things about myself. I appreciate the author’s approach immensely: they’re intersectionality-focused, they’re pro-queer, pro-mad liberation, pro-self determination.
I don’t know how helpful of a read it’d be for someone who’s already knowledgeable about their autism, to be fair. I still don’t feel comfortable claiming the “autistic” label for myself; I am still so deep in masking my neurodivergence to survive that I can’t properly identify what exactly is going on with me, and this book helped me specifically because of that. There were many times during reading it when Price described some behaviour as an anecdote, and I was like “oh! so this thing people kept getting mad at me for/making fun of me for in the past is pretty common among neurodivergent people! guess this wasn’t about me specifically, but it was fucking ableism!” or “wait a second is arm biting while in distress seriously an autism thing ( yes) I thought the past me was just extremely fucked up for no reason”
(Now that I know about all of this, I might be a bit gentler towards myself for this “weird” behaviour. I have a lot of internalized ableism to unpack, and it helps to know that what it is is actually ableism and not just “normal” self-dislike.)
Movies & TV shows 🎞️
You know, the plot or humour of this movie wasn’t really my thing (I’m pretty picky when it comes to romances, especially straight ones). But here’s the thing: I have an extreme weakness towards art that’s filled with love for humanity. And here, I could feel this love the entire time, beaming at me from the screen.
That’s enough for me. Go watch Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. It’s worth it.
Other things we’d like to share
A 100-pages long (!) document listing plurality-related sources.
We can FINALLY play around with spreadsheets using Obsidian
The plugin doesn’t work on mobile, but we don’t really need to be updating our spreadsheets on mobile anyways.
For anyone who moved from Spotify but still wants to have their music visible as a Discord status. Nice and simple, works with a lot of different music players.
Polish stuff
Adam Mickiewicz jako poeta białoruski, czyli zagadka niewidzialności
❝ Uderzające jest jednak, że podczas gdy Szkocja czy “szkockość” stała się pewnym rozpoznawalnym kontekstem, a może nawet rodzajem logo całego romantycznego przedsięwzięcia w literaturze brytyjskiej (tak przynajmniej było to później opisywane w historii literatury), w przypadku polskim białoruski substrat pozostał pod powierzchnią widoczności - a przez długi czas wręcz poza zainteresowaniem historyków literatury.
Liderka Razem: Poparcie dla Konfederacji to efekt naszych zaniedbań
❝ Dyskutowanie z ludźmi, którzy nie mają szacunku do innych, rzadko przynosi coś pozytywnego. Historia pokazała, że wycofując się z tego sporu, myliliśmy się. Czasem i z takim przeciwnikiem trzeba się zetrzeć.
❝ Jednym z kluczowych wniosków płynących z badania jest pogarszająca się kondycja psychospołeczna dzieci i młodzieży. 40% badanych deklaruje, że nie odczuwa szczęścia, co jest wynikiem o 16 p.p. gorszym od uzyskanego w 2019 roku. (...) Z kolei 80% rodziców uważa swoje dzieci za szczęśliwe. Często dostrzegają występowanie u dzieci problemów emocjonalnych, ale jednocześnie nie zdają sobie sprawy z braku odczuwania przez nie szczęścia.
❝ W 2024 roku młodzi przestrzeganie ich praw oceniają gorzej niż w 2019 roku. Bardzo poważny regres dotyczy przede wszystkim nauczycieli i szkoły. Tylko 38% badanych przyznaje, że nauczyciele przestrzegają praw dziecka. Jest to aż o 32 p.p. mniej niż w 2019 roku.
Brought to you by: Iri 🌫️, again