#5SmartReads - December 12, 2022

Hitha on a royal love story, the significance of Morocco's World Cup run, and the Twitter Files

December 12, 2022

Morocco’s World Cup run is not just stellar social media content (the TikToks especially), but it’s also been a unifying moment for Arabs, Muslims, and Africans (and the countries they now live in) globally, which has been beautiful to watch.

Watching the players hug and dance with their mothers is something I personally can’t get enough of. But to see so much of the world - especially countries, religions, and religious subsects that typically find themselves on opposing sides - rally against this team is something that does reaffirm my faith in humanity. There’s also the element of representation. Outside of cricket, I’ve rarely seen Brown men succeed in sport the way the Moroccan team has, and while my sons and their generation may take it for granted, it’s something I hold very dear.

And being a Philly girl, I love an underdog. I’m furiously knocking on wood and asking my mom to do a Ganesha puja with me in support of Morocco and their incredible World Cup run.

“One was of royal blood, brought up in the lap of luxury. The other was a commoner, brought up in straitened circumstances by a single mother. Neither cared the least about such things, although they were not so naïve as to think other people would share their views. Their greatest fear was that once their relationship became public they would lose what little freedom they had. Between the demands of royal protocol and the 24-hour glare of public scrutiny, they would become prisoners in a gilded cage.”

You might think you know who this story is about. Their engagement was in 2017, to much celebration. Their 2018 wedding was much the same, though the tabloids began publishing conflicting stories designed to sow discord and sell papers. And by 2020, the couple had left their roles as working royals to live and work in America, independently.

And it’s not Harry and Meghan.

I’ll let you read this story (shared by my very smart friend Keren) for the big reveal. But their story is a worthy one to examine in how the modern world views these historic royal families, and what the role of royalty is in modern life.

Because the second wave feminist movement was whitewashed by the media and historical records (and what little intersectionality it had was just that - little), you may not know who Dorothy Pitman Hughes was.

Hughes was a co-founder of Ms., the founder of the West 80th Community Childcare Center in Manhattan in the late 1960s and Harlem Office Supply in the 1980s. When asked how she described herself, Laura L Lovett’s biography records her as saying she “defined herself as a feminist, but rooted her feminism in her experience and in more fundamental needs for safety, food, shelter and child care.”

She also called out the racial inequity in the second wave feminist movement.

“Dorothy’s style was to call out the racism she saw in the white women’s movement. She frequently took to the stage to articulate the way in which white women’s privilege oppressed Black women but also offered her friendship with Gloria as proof this obstacle could be overcome.”

Does #5SmartReads give me entry into this group email? Because I’ve never wanted to be a part of one more in my life.

“This “secret society of sorts,” as CNN’s Jake Tapper calls it, was worrying about its favorite football team, the Philadelphia Eagles. Never mind that Jalen Hurts and Co. were in the process of hanging 35 points on the Tennessee Titans. When Washington reporters email about the Eagles, they exude the same sense of fatalism you find in the upper deck of the Linc or in the headquarters of the Democratic Party.

“We’re so sure we’re going to be disappointed because that’s how it always goes,” says New York Times reporter Kenneth Vogel, a native of the Philadelphia area who’s on the email thread. “Then they win, and it’s like, ‘OK, fine, they won.’””

Being a Philadelphia Eagles fan has prepared me for entrepreneurship and, well, life better than anything else. And reading this piece made me feel like I’ve found my people.

Fly, Eagles Fly indeed. To victory - all of them.

A lot has been said about the ‘Twitter Files’ - what the contain, why these files were contained, and the impact of their release in terms of the public square, the First Amendment, and what happens when billionaires single-handedly own platforms like Twitter and what they plan to do with them.

I read the first reporting on these files - and far too many articles about said Twitter Files - to understand these issues. This article is the best deep dive of the whole issue, and I’ll leave you with this quick analysis of these files and what their impact is.

“Musk delivered a vast trove of internal Twitter documents to two independent journalists, Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, who have long endorsed aspects of the GOP’s indictment of the platform. Taibbi and Weiss proceeded to publish a pair of exposés on Twitter’s inner workings. Dubbed “the Twitter Files,” these reports featured a couple genuinely concerning findings about pre-Musk Twitter’s operations. But they were also saturated in hyperbole, marred by omissions of context, and discredited by instances of outright mendacity. Musk’s commentary on the Twitter Files, meanwhile, proved even more demagogic and deceptive than the exposés themselves.”

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