net neutrality

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• Women's Media Center writes about Ibtihaj Muhammad's journey to become the first women to compete for the U.S. Olympic team wearing a headscarf.
• In the "Something actually good occuring at Penn State this week" category, Angela Davis and Eric Stanley spoke about Stanley's new anthology, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. (Thanks Toshio!)
• Ms. Magazine writes on the importance of net neutrality—and how lucky we are that Obama vetoed it.
• Sady Doyle gives the Spice Girls a second chance over at Rookie.
• Dahlia Lithwick writes about and the old-school misogyny and the frightening new-school sexual harassment denial surrounding the Herman Cain scandals.
• Maxwell Zachs weighs the pros and cons of the new BBC series, My Transsexual Summer.
• We're still taking who-to-follow recommendations for Twitter! Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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Remember those weird Verizon ads that seemed to empower young women with statements like "air does not transmit the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman"? Really, they were co-opting feminism to sell phones from a company that is fighting against net neutrality—the idea that people and organizations should be charged more for access or speedier connection to certain sites and services instead of treating all access as equal—something many of us take for granted right now.

The Albuquerque-based New Mexico Media Literacy Project made a response video to the ads that does more than parody, it sends a strong message of its own about net neutrality and free internet: "Latinos aren't buying what Verizon is selling. Verizon says 'Rule the Air,' but Latinos say 'Libera el Aire!'"

Verizon doesn't exactly have a reputation for being an organization that's empowering its users. After all, it is Verizon that's leading the fight against net neutrality, which would amount to an Internet that is basically the opposite of user-friendly. Perhaps that's why they've launched a new ad campaign designed to convince us that, through powerful transmitters, Verizon is on our side in the fight against prejudice. (I know, right?)