Kayleigh Hughes, writing for The Establishment, on the topic of mis-gendered band names:

Women and nonbinary people are desperate to see ourselves in, well, any kind of pop culture. We’ve created organizations around the world such as Girls Rock Austin, Gender Amplified, and Girls Inc to try to work toward a future where seeing women making music, working in tech, appearing onscreen, or working behind the scenes is normalized and not othered. So, when members of dominant cultural groups take terms used to describe us or our bodies, such as “girls” or “pussy,” this works against that goal by pushing us out of even lingual spaces. Even our words aren’t ours anymore; they’re being snatched back and reappropriated by those who already have so much.

If you’re thinking, “oh god another think piece,” I would beg you to reconsider and give this a full read, it’s well researched and well argued.

The Wall Street Journal, with an interesting article about how Nigeria is changing the strategy of Scrabble:

Nigeria is beating the West at its own word game, using a strategy that sounds like Scrabble sacrilege. By relentlessly studying short words, this country of 500 languages has risen to dominate English’s top lexical contest.

Last November, for the final of Scrabble’s 32-round World Championship in Australia, Nigeria’s winningest wordsmith, Wellington Jighere, defeated Britain’s Lewis Mackay, in a victory that led morning news broadcasts in his homeland half a world away.

I’m always fascinated by new ways of thinking and strategizing at games that seem to have had the same techniques for years.