Why isn’t there a bracket for the best March Madness cowbell player? Surely Stanford’s Alex Chang would be my top pick. You can never have enough spirit…or cowbell. - Alice
Congratulations to Shigeru Ban, this year’s winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Design is not just about beauty or function, it can act as social change.
Ban on creating structures out of paper tubes: “It’s a question of love. If a building is loved, it becomes permanent.”
Read more: http://n.pr/1mrB9BY - Alice
(Images: Voluntary Architects’ Network/Shigeru Ban Architects)
Hello. It is time for Shameless Self Promotion.
Hyphen Magazine runs an annual…pageant/talent show/thing for masculine-identified Asian Americans called Mr. Hyphen. I am trying to be it. I’m posting it here because candidates represent their favorite nonprofit, and if I win, 18MR gets some bucks!
You can help me get to the finals (where I can publicly embarrass myself in front of a live audience) by voting for my video on this page. I wrote a poem about identity, activism, and the internet.
Also notable: if I win, I’ll be the first trans Mr. Hyphen! So that is pretty awesome.
Upshot? Vote for me. Kittens would vote for me (see photographic evidence, above), but they can’t, because they’re kittens. Think of the kittens. - CM
“You can be food secure in prison and be given sufficient food to survive. But you have no say in that process, in how that food is grown or how society has decided how to end hunger.”
— Food justice activist Raj Patel on a radical new UN report urging the prioritization of local, sustainable production over agribusiness’ mass mechanization. -MTP
Hey y'all. Join our friends at GetEQUAL on their national community call tomorrow night to help steer the work of the raddest national LGBTQ organizing project in all the land. Register here.
Let’s say you create a Cambodian dessert company to connect with your culture and a blogger writes about your food using a pun that involves Pol Pot. How do you react? If you’re Anna Hitchens of Koliyan, you respond with grace and a big ass history lesson.
Read about it here. - Alice
Read about it here. - Alice
60+ Years of Yoko Ono’s Revolutionary Art
Say what you will, but Yoko Ono is a brilliant, ahead-of-her-time, radical feminist AAPI womyn, and we dig it.
A new retrospective at the Guggenheim in Bilbao draws from 60+ years of the artist’s work, from revolutionary bed-in theatrics to interactive feminist performance.
Above: “One of Ono’s most well-known pieces is 1964’s "Cut Piece,” a performance in which Ono sat passively while viewers cut off her clothing items at their will. Today the performance is remembered as one of the most revolutionary moments in feminist art, though for Ono the work’s origins were as much in Buddhism as they were in feminism.“
Hey slacker, the deadline to get healthcare insurance under Obamacare is March 31st! Get to it! For resources on the ACA in 13 languages, click here! -Alice
Shattering Stereotypes (and Household Objects)–The Man Behind “Turn Down for What”
Q: What do a rooftop, a baseball bat, and a flower pot have in common?
A: They’re no match for Daniel Kwan’s crotch. Kwan is the co-director and star of Lil Jon & DJ Snake’s bizarrely awesome–and sometimes disturbing–new “Turn Down for What” music video.
Vice magazine sat down to talk with the actor and director, who says in real life he draws more from Michael Cera-esque social awkwardness than the “rock-hard” persona he channels in the music video. –MTP
No, but seriously. Why is this guy white?
Our pal Keith Chow of The Nerds of Color & SIUniverse talks to ComicsAlliance about why the live-action Iron Fist should be an Asian American. - CM