This piece from VICE about an unknown plague affecting millions of starfish was equal parts fascinating and horrifying.

It is not uncommon for many species of sea stars to shed their arms in times of stress. When a curious child picks up a star out of a tide pool by one of its limbs, for instance, the star may jettison that arm in an effort to escape and regenerate it later. But Gong quickly understood that this was different. Her stars weren’t merely shedding their arms. They were tearing them off. They were tearing them off the way a man, lacking access to a sharp tool, might tear off one of his own arms: by using one arm to wrench the other out of its socket. “They twisted their arms together,” Gong said, “and they’d pull and pull and pull, until one of them came off. Then the arm walks away because it doesn’t know that it’s dead. It was horrific. They weren’t just dying. They were tearing themselves to pieces.”

Source: The Baffling, Gruesome Plague That Is Causing Sea Stars to Tear Themselves to Pieces | VICE | United States

For Millennials, racism is a relic of the past, but what vestiges may still exist are only obstacles if the people affected decide they are. Everyone is equal, they’ve been taught, and therefore everyone has equal opportunity for success. This is the deficiency found in the language of diversity. We have spent the post-Civil Rights era concerned with whether or not there is adequate representation for racial minority groups within our existing institutions, not questioning whether these institutions are fundamentally racist and rely on white supremacy for their very existence. Armed with this impotent analysis, Millennials perpetuate false equivalencies, such as affirmative action as a form of discrimination on par with with Jim Crow segregation. And they can do so while not believing themselves racist or supportive of racism.

Source: White Millennials are products of a failed lesson in colorblindness