#5SmartReads - March 31, 2023

Hitha on Disney vs. DeSantis, what a women-first economy looks like, and a fascinating hallmark of Love Is Blind

March 31, 2023

When the drama between Disney and the government of Florida is more entertaining than Succession or Vanderpump Rules…well, let me grab some popcorn and settle in.

If you need a refresher, here it is - the Florida legislature dissolved the Reedy Creek Improvement District and 5 other special districts. In the case of Disney, the Reedy Creek Improvement District was essentially a county government that had special dispensation to operate independently (unlike other county governments). When Disney made a statement about Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the legislature attempted to dissolve the district and ended up replacing the district’s board members and removing parts of their authority (this bill also renamed it to the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District).

What the new governors failed to predict is that the outgoing governors’ last act was to to strip the District of their powers, binding these rights to Disney in a development agreement that - wait for it - exists until 21 years after the last currently living descent of King Charles III dies.

Long live Princess Lilibet Diana. And who is writing this miniseries? I would watch it.

spoiler alert - this article discusses the details of the first 5 episodes of Love Is Blind

Speaking of shows I can’t get enough of, Love Is Blind is BACK and I think this may be the best season yet.

And I didn’t stop to think how corporate careers is a hallmark of this show and its cast (compared to the more random careers of The Bachelor or Love Island). A cast filled with corporate warriors is as important to this show as those gold goblets.

And both make sense:

“As shallow and mechanical as some of these utterances look on paper, they don’t necessarily reflect insincerity. Rather, I think they’re representative of a certain relatively successful subset of a certain financially stressed generation for whom the boundaries between work and home verge on nonexistence.”

The role of the gold goblets? It’s to hide the changing liquid level folks’ drinks, for consistency in filming.

I can’t wait for the new episode today, and the all the future seasons of this show. It’s such a fascinating show.

Awesome. It would look awesome.

“To address those challenges, women wanted to see policy solutions around the nature of work, including more flexible schedules, closing the gender pay gap and promoting more women to leadership positions. They laid out policy solutions for the federal government: support to help cover rising costs, raising income and asset limits for public assistance, raising the minimum wage, enacting a national paid leave policy and increasing access to affordable child care.”

And this was not a narrow survey, by any means. The surveyors took care to poll across racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and gender identity groups.

This article does an incredible job of breaking down the survey in greater detail, and it’s well worth your time.

Now to get the men to pay attention to it.

…and speaking of men, 's latest essay is a must-read.

It takes me back to my favorite Gloria Steinheim quote of “we’ve been so focused on raising our daughters like our sons, that we’ve forgotten to raise our sons like our daughters.”

Every word of this essay is brilliant, but this particular section struck me:

“We have a whole bunch of people who feel like they’re being “left behind,” when they were born on the 20th floor and the elevator to the 25th floor isn’t working quite as reliably as it once did, so they’re deeply aggrieved and panicky and blaming the entire situation on the people who’ve recently moved into the 6th and 7th floor. Then you have a whole bunch of people who’ve spent their entire lives trying to plan and procure the materials to jerry-rig a ladder from the ground or the 4th floor or the 4th floor to the 10th. They know that unless they maintain utmost vigilance — watching that ladder every hour of every day — it risks falling apart entirely.”

If you have sons or nephews or boys in your life you want to help build the new system of society we need, I highly recommend Sonora Jha’s excellent book How to Raise a Feminist Son. It’s become my personal parenting manifesto.

I am nerdishly obsessed with carbon capture technology, and this could be the most incredible use for it if successful.

Svante has developed industrial grade filters to capture carbon dioxide from industrial sties or the atmosphere, where it could then be compressed and used in producing sustainable aviation fuel or sequestered for future use.

And while $15M isn’t a huge investment for a company like United, it’s a promising sign that one of the largest users of fossil fuels is putting their money into finding and using sustainable alternatives. And I think carbon capture and conversion is one of our best bets for sustainable energy at scale in the near future.

I’ll be keeping my eye on this - I think it’s so cool.

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