I hope the Year of the Water Tiger brings you fortune and wealth in the form of meaningful relationships, financial security and more. 

Texas school libraries have become a battleground between parents and educators as books addressing racism and LGBTQIA+ issues are pulled off the shelves. How we remember history and who we chose to center has material impact on the lives of people today. So this week we bring you two sources who are, respectively, experts on deaf history and trans stories.  

Jaipreet Virdi is an assistant professor of history and the co-director of the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology and Culture at the University of Delaware. She teaches courses on disability histories, the history of medicine, and health activism. Deaf since the age of 6, she researches the ways medicine and technology impact the lived experiences of disabled people. 
 
Virdi uses her platform to raise awareness of medical inequities, social injustice and disability rights. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (2020), examines deafness in American society and the history of deafness “cures.” In 2020, Virdi created a Twitter series, #DeafHistorySeries, to spotlight deaf and hard-of-hearing people, technologies and events; one of the episodes was adapted for a segment for CBC radio. 

Jules Gill-Peterson is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches transgender history, culture and politics. She is a historian who writes about the history of sexuality, focusing on racial histories of sex, gender, and trans existence in both institutional and conversational science and medicine.
 
In Histories of the Transgender Child (2018), she debunks the myth that transgender children first appeared in the 21st century. Most recently, Gill-Peterson was featured in Framing Agnes, a documentary about trans people in the 1960s that premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Gill-Peterson is an editor of the Duke University Press journal Transgender Studies Quarterly. She co-hosts Slate’s queer culture podcast, Outward, and writes regularly on her Substack, Sad Brown Girl. 

Other sources of interest this week.

February is Black History Month, and as we cast a light on stories from the past, we also look toward the Black futures and the narratives being crafted today. 

Malakai is a director who describes her mission as “to be a disruptor by telling world-building and fantastical narratives that turn archetypes of the Black diaspora on its head.” She is the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Made in Her Image, which provides opportunities to women and nonbinary youth of color to create their own films, scripts, content and more. 

Sources of the Week on the news

Read:

• Daniel José Older spoke to Syfy about the future of Star Wars: The High Republic. 
• U.S. News interviewed Otis Brawley about President Biden’s goal to cut cancer deaths by more than 50% in the upcoming decades.
• California Healthline interviewed Alice Wong about how public health officials downplay the deaths of people with preexisting conditions and frame disabled lives as "disposable."
• USA Today asked Isabel Araiza whether tip lines are actually helping vulnerable communities.
• Sung Won Sohn spoke to Reuters about U.S. economic growth.
• The IndyStar interviewed Jimmy Gurulé about a bill before the Indiana state senate that will help innocent people to receive compensation for their time in prison.
• Piyush Mehta spoke to Space Daily about the space debris that threatens the trillion-dollar future of the space industry.
• CNN Politics reported that Sherrilyn Ifill is one of the individuals being considered as a Supreme Court nominee. 
• Angela Rye joined ESPN as a special correspondent.

Watch:

• Marc Lamont Hill and Jamilah King were interviewed in Showtime’s recently released four-part documentary on Bill Cosby’s legacy.
• On ABC News, Leah Wright Rigueur discussed Justice Stephen Breyer’s retirement.
• Hua Hsu interviewed Michelle Zauner about Crying in H-Mart, on CBS News’ Sunday Morning. 
  

Listen:

• Carl Hart spoke to Wyoming Public Radio about the stigma in American culture around recreational drug use.
  
• On WYNC’s The Takeway, Moriba Jah talked about space trash.