Friday News: Is Facebook tracking you, diverse emojis on iOS, Toni Morrison profile, and Key and Peele’s Game of Throne’s recap

JanetPublishing NewsAfrican American literature / American literature / diversity / emojis / Facebook / Game of Thrones / iOS / parody / privacy / Toni Morrison2 Comments

Facebook says it tracked people who didn’t use Facebook because of ‘a bug’ – Oh, look, Facebook may be violating your privacy again, even if you don’t USE Facebook. I know people think Amazon is taking over the world, but really, Facebook may already have it locked down.

The report, from the independent Belgian Privacy Commission, made several accusations about Facebook, suggesting the company had made it impossible for some users to truly opt out of tracking, or tracked users who had never even used Facebook — essentially, the report argues, keeping consumers from making their own decisions about their data. The problems identified could have implications for how the company operates in the EU, but Facebook’s responses seem mostly to be a matter of semantics. –The Verge

Racially diverse emojis have finally arrived! – Actually, it’s not just racially diverse emojis, but all sorts of diversifying emojis, 300 total, including flags and same-sex families, all available in iOS 8.3

(Don’t know how to access your emojis? It’s easy: On your iPhone, go to Settings, General, Keyboards, Add New Keyboard and add Emoji. Then, when you go to your keyboard to type a text, tap the little globe in the left corner. Voila!) –USA Today

The Radical Vision of Toni Morrison – A very interesting and comprehensive profile of Toni Morrison that contemplates her personal and professional history, as well her complex relationship to the literatures of America, which Morrison has helped forge, but has also resisted and pushed against. On the white literary establishment, Rachel, Kaadzi, Ghansah writes,

This is a problem even for Morrison. She is often discussed in terms of her audience, the older black women who fan themselves with her book covers at her readings, the teenage girls who sigh on buses and trains while reading “Sula” for class, the young male rappers who have interpolated lines from “The Bluest Eye” into their songs. It is this audience that her critics dismiss derisively, suggesting that Morrison panders to them, with long, poetic sentences and stories about broken black women. It is also true that a sizable portion of her audience simply looks like her, in a world where black Americans, and people of color in general, are still perceived to be nonreaders. But of course Morrison, rather than feeling marginalized or slighted by that criticism, takes delight in it. In an interview for The Paris Review, she said: “I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine but nevertheless fit first into African-American traditions and, second of all, this whole thing called literature.” She added: “It’s very important to me that my work be African-American. If it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too.” It is a reply that stumps her interviewer. First African-American, she asks her, as if Morrison had stuttered. Yes, Morrison replies. Rather than the whole of literature she asks. “Oh, yes,” Morrison replies.

This was a radical idea. Morrison wanted to not only broaden the tastes of the industry, she also wanted to change the fate of a literary culture that had to either diversify or die. She told me that the books she edited and wrote were her contribution to the civil rights movement. By publishing black geniuses, she was also forcing the ranks of the big publishing houses and the industry to become more hospitable to her point of view, to the idea that a black writer could write for a black audience first and still write literature. She was more humanist than nationalistic, more visionary than didactic, but to some extent her editorial work was political. “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes,” Morrison said in her 1981 keynote address at the American Writers Congress. “We need a heroic writer’s movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious.” –New York Times

‘Key and Peele’ Recaps ‘Game of Thrones’: “The Dinkles Is My Jam!” (Video) – Think you’re ready for the new season of Game of Thrones this Sunday? First you may want to keep the character death count with Key and Peele, whose homage to Peter Dinklage is especially brilliant. –Hollywood Reporter

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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