Good morning!

Yesterday I finished Helen Macdonald’s amazing H Is For Hawk, which I highly recommend to everyone. As a tribute today’s Feminist Friday is all about the ways women exist in and picture the world.

Here’s an interview from this very week where Helen Macdonald talks more about her book:

Growing up I used to love those books about nature that were written in that wonderful expert tone. They would say: This is the natural world, and this is what’s in it, and this is what it means. I wanted to write a book with more than that one voice, and to play with genres. As the book progresses, all those different styles of writing crash up against each other. I think grief shatters narratives, and that’s what I was trying to do.

http://www.salon.com/2015/03/09/you_can%E2%80%99t_tame_grief_helen_macdonald_on_her_bestselling_memoir_h_is_for_hawk/

These amazing statement necklaces from Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick tell a story about air quality in Sheffield (note bonfire night!). This is the best data visualisation/materialisation I have seen this year.

By running their fingers over each necklace, the wearer can literally feel how the air quality in Sheffield went up and down over the course of each week. Dangerous particulate levels have the potential to hurt/prick the finger of the wearer.

http://www.stefanieposavec.co.uk/data/#/airtransformed/

Just reading this pullquote who will tell you that this story is to me as catnip is to a particularly impressionable cat. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

By the time Day was twenty-four, she’d been arrested outside the White House while demanding the vote for women and sent to jail for a month; worked as an assistant managing editor at The Masses, a left-wing monthly that was shut down after opposing the draft and the First World War; got arrested during the raid of an Industrial Workers of the World flophouse and mistakenly been charged with prostitution; worked as a library clerk, a restaurant cashier, an artist’s model, a nurse; had an illegal abortion; got married and sought a divorce; moved to Europe and lived on the island of Capri for six months; interviewed Leon Trotsky; and decided to write a novel. After selling the film rights to her first book, she bought a beach house on Staten Island and had a daughter with a common-law husband. And then Dorothy Day did something so radical that few of her radical friends could comprehend it. She became a Catholic. She took a vow of poverty. And she devoted the rest of her life to the practice of a new kind of American Catholicism—one that was uncompromising in its service to the homeless, its opposition to state power, its resistance to all forms of violence and war.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/09/break-in-at-y-12

Have a lovely weekend,

Alex.