This Week in Diversity: Looking At History and Faces

Another Friday is here, and we have another round of links to articles we think you’ll appreciate. Enjoy, and feel free to come back and comment on what you thought.

Our first reading suggestion comes from the New York Times. This year is the 150th anniversary of the start of the civil war, and the Times has a new column, disunion, that follows the war’s developments, day by day but a century and a half later. You can start at the beginning, or you may be particularly interested in Jim Crow on West Broadway, about a young African American man who refused to get off a whites-only streetcar, a hundred years before Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks.

History sometimes gets a late bit of resolution. ColorLines brings us a story about the killing of a civil rights marcher, Jimmy Lee Jackson, in 1965. After forty-five years, the killer is going to jail.

Maybe if the face is on a book, you'll remember it?

We’re moving from history to modern science and from diversity to reading for our last link. Are you a good reader? Are you terrible at remembering faces? A new study shows that reading and facial memory use the same parts of the brain, and being good at one means being bad at the other. Comforting news, isn’t it . . . wait, who are you and why are am I talking to you?

And that’s all for today, folks!