"STUDY SHOWS HOW MEN OVERCOMPENSATE WHEN THEIR MASCULINITY IS QUESTIONED"

"The researchers note that while women may display a similar dynamic when it comes to femininity, in general, the anxiety about not meeting gendered expectations is likely more severe among men since gender norms have expanded more for women — as the study puts it, “masculinity is more easily threatened than femininity.”
And the ways in which it may be reasserted when threatened are also way more harmful. This study joins a huge body of research on the dangers of threatened masculinity. While the overcompensation in this case is pretty benign — lying about their height, avoiding stereotypically “feminine” products — other research has hinted at how damaging it can be. In one study, men whose masculinity was threatened were more likely to hit a punching bag and, in another, to sexually harass a female interaction partner, and, in another, to blame the victim in a rape case."
http://feministing.com/2015/06/24/study-shows-how-men-overcompensate-when-their-masculinity-is-questioned/

There is totally an acknowledgment of this and a management of men's sense of masculinity.
Related: white comfort one from Charleston

"A black man and a white woman switch mics, and the result is amazing"

"Watch Eastern Michigan University students Darius Simpson and Scout Bostley speak for each other—and show us a thing or two about privilege."

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/24/1396071/-A-black-man-and-a-white-woman-switch-mics-and-the-result-is-amazing

It's such an interesting question of 'speaking for each other'. It is not uncommon for white people or men to interrupt me while trying to educate about and speak against prejudices. I guess we need models for support which make interrupting or replacing impossible? Or maybe where people are good at identifying where it is that the speaking-for is necessary.

"AS A WOMAN, I AM A BODY OF DISPLAY BEFORE BEING A PERSON. AND HERE’S WHY I’M TIRED OF IT"

"Women still cannot walk on the street without hearing strangers’ feedback on their bodies and without getting those slow, slimy once-over looks that say “Hey, watch me, watching you.” I live with fear. For the sake of my mind, I sometimes send it on short holidays to the state of Denial. At times I even try to cross the border to the neighbouring state of Defiance. This summer, the croptop hashtag has inspired me to – you guessed it – wear a crop top and brave the streets. My small attempt at heroism ended with my Saturday afternoon walk cut short, as it didn’t take long for me to end up feeling like Rembrandt’s skinned bull. Actually, make that Francis Bacon’s reinterpretation of Rembrandt’s skinned bull, cut in half, with the screaming pope figure in between the two flanks...

even in cold weather, I still have my earbuds in, regardless of whether or not I feel like listening to music. I still make a conscious effort to not look anyone in the face on public transport – I’ve been told that it might be interpreted as provocative. It’s like folding my eyes upon themselves. It gives me headaches. In short, I still refuse to watch myself being watched."

http://www.artparasites.com/watch-me-watching-you/

"I refuse to watch myself being watched". That's so real, and so constant, that I want to cry and scream. 

It perfectly captures how powerless anyone who is perceived as feminine can feel in public. And how in the face of dealing with this everyday we can't do anything but try to preserve ourselves so that we can be the person we need to be when we get to work or when we arrive at that party or walk into the grocery store and have to remember what was on our list.

#YesAllWomen

I'm in the middle of this conversation about street harassment with a male friend and it's amazing to me how invisible this is to people who don't read as feminine in public. It's not the first time I've sent articles and described experiences to someone, and they don't quite take it seriously, it's like they can't absorb it.

Until recently, that's been the most frustrating part in a way - how it doesn't feel possible to make it not-invisible. But then I realized how much denial I am in even when it's happening to me, and how I rarely find space in my life to discuss street harassment because it's not obvious how to integrate the privileged and safe and self-guided nature of much of the rest of my identity and experiences with the experience of street harassment. 

And that realization gives me something to sort of chip at, in terms of thinking about visibilizing struggles and lowering that threshold to understanding.

After I finish throwing a tantrum.

FB: this is sharply articulated realness about the emotional impact of street harassment

"the alienation that rises from having to divide yourself into mind and body, when you would much rather think of yourself as a whole – a system where mind and body work together, as yoga wisdom says. It looks great on paper, and I keep telling myself that I can do it, but everyday micro-aggressions on the street remind me that I am a hole... I’m sure I’m not the only one who sometimes feels as if her life is a constant negotiation with an insidious curse."

"In Defense of “Trap Queen” As Our Generation’s Greatest Love Song"

"It is almost an initiation, learning how to most effectively give language to our desires, our deepest loves. Turning your face away from whatever sadness the world has placed at your front door, taking off your shoes, and sliding across somebody’s mama’s wood floor. The right love song is the truest equalizer. There is a type of surrender in it. To grow up in a climate of violence and fear is to find a very particular joy in watching the perfect love song disarm even the hardest of your peers. I have always been of the belief that the most major function of prayer in our society was to allow for the idea of building vulnerability in the people who have the least reason to be vulnerable...

These are urgent times. Too many people aren’t making it home alive, and so perhaps we are past the age of supplication; we have gotten what we can get, by whatever means we can get it. We’re the generation of coming to terms. Of knowing what it is to keep our heads above water, or perhaps what it is to do whatever is needed to never be near the water again...

The Ultimate American Love Song exists to engage us in a way that frees us from whatever would otherwise suffocate us."

http://sevenscribes.com/in-defense-of-trap-queen-as-our-generations-greatest-love-song/

Mmmmm. Vulnerability.
(Credit to DB)

"Langston Hughes Warned Us About Trolls Like Don Lemon"

"Shoving a sign with the n-word in all caps in our faces for the supposed purpose of pushing the conversation about the Confederate flag and racism forward is beyond insensitive. It’s lazy. And gimmicky. And adds nothing to the conversation about systemic and cultural racism plaguing the country. Everyone knows the n-word is offensive.

What annoys me even more is that Lemon, as Taffy Brodesser-Akner describes in her May 2015 GQ profile, is totally fine with being wrong. “This is Don Lemon, after all,” she writes. He “[declared] on the scene at Ferguson that there's the smell of marijuana in the air, ‘obviously.’ This is the guy who asked if a black hole could be responsible for the disappearance of Flight MH370; who asked one of Bill Cosby's alleged rape victims why she didn't stop the attack by, as he put it, ‘the using of the teeth.’”

Lemon uses these antics because he thrives on conflict, being called wrong, and being that one crazy Negro everyone loves to hate. It’s also proven to attract viewers."
http://www.colorlines.com/articles/langston-hughes-warned-us-about-trolls-don-lemon

I love this title. We see you.

"What Happens If You Try To Prevent Every Single Suicide?"

"An effort that began in Detroit in 2001 to treat the most common cause of suicide — depression — is offering hope. With a relentless focus on finding and treating people with depression, the Henry Ford Health System has cut the suicide rate among the people in its insurance plan dramatically. The story of the health system's success is a story of persistence, confidence, hope and a strict adherence to a very specific approach...

Primary care doctors screen every patient with two questions: How often have you felt down in the past two weeks? And how often have you felt little pleasure in doing things? A high score leads to more questions about sleep disturbances, changes in appetite, thoughts of hurting oneself. All patients are questioned on every visit.

If the health providers recognize a mental health problem, patients are assigned to appropriate care — cognitive behavioral therapy, drugs, group counseling, or hospitalization if necessary. On each patient's medical record, providers have to attest to having done the screening, and they record plans for any needed care...

Patients themselves come up with "safety plans."

Lynn has two copies, one by her nightstand and one in her kitchen. Each lists things she can do when she feels depression coming on. She could sit on her balcony, or do some drawing or painting. The list includes her therapists' phone numbers. And there's a reminder that the feeling will pass — it has before."

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/11/02/452658644/what-happens-if-you-try-to-prevent-every-single-suicide

This makes perfect sense, mental health screening should be integrated broadly.

"When an Apology Is Anything But"

"we haven’t addressed the deeper meaning of these “sorrys.” To me, they sound like tiny acts of revolt, expressions of frustration or anger at having to ask for what should be automatic. They are employed when a situation is so clearly not our fault that we think the apology will serve as a prompt for the person who should be apologizing.

It’s a Trojan horse for genuine annoyance, a tactic left over from centuries of having to couch basic demands in palatable packages in order to get what we want. All that exhausting maneuvering is the etiquette equivalent of a vestigial tail."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/opinion/when-an-apology-is-anything-but.html

I also think it would be an interesting world if we stopped using "sorry" for intentional apologies too, and actually had to fully articulate an apology. Because I think that "I'm Sorry" really just means "now it's the time in the conversation for you to forgive me".

"Margaret Mead on Myth vs. Deception and What to Tell Kids about Santa Claus"

"Disillusionment about the existence of a mythical and wholly implausible Santa Claus has come to be a synonym for many kinds of disillusionment with what parents have told children about birth and death and sex and the glory of their ancestors. Instead, learning about Santa Claus can help give children a sense of the difference between a “fact” — something you can take a picture of or make a tape recording of, something all those present can agree exists — and poetic truth, in which man’s feelings about the universe or his fellow men is expressed in a symbol."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/16/hannah-arendt-the-life-of-the-mind/

Mmmmm, I love this. Poetic truths :)

"The Benjamin Franklin Effect: The Surprising Psychology of How to Handle Haters"

"In sum, we are excellent at deluding ourselves, and terrible in recognizing when our own perceptions, attitudes, impressions, and opinions about the external world are altered from within. And one of the most remarkable of manifestations of this is the Benjamin Franklin Effect, which McRaney examines in the third chapter. The self-delusion in question is that we do nice things to people we like and bad things to those we dislike. But what the psychology behind the effect reveals is quite the opposite, a reverse-engineering of attitudes that takes place as we grow to like people for whom we do nice things and dislike those to whom we are unkind."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/02/20/the-benjamin-franklin-effect-mcraney/

"WHEN THE CAMERA LANDS ON CAREFREE MUSLIM GIRLS"

"I first came across his portraits of Moroccan Muslim women dressed in brightly colored djellabas and niqabs, sitting astride motorcycles and set against vibrantly patterned backgrounds while scrolling through Tumblr. In one photo, the women wear djellabas and niqabs emblazoned with the Nike logo. In another, their dresses were army camo, and their Moroccan babouche slippers were rendered in the iconic brown Louis Vuitton lettering. In all the photos, the women seem to stare with defiance at the camera, projecting an unspoken challenge to the lens. These portraits demanded to be reblogged. They were, as The New York Times called them, “dazzling.”

What was the subject of Hajjaj’s 'Kesh Angels? Was it the women or was it the veils? His portraits were less about people than they were about the collection of symbols, and what they meant when they were overlayed with each other. In fact, Hajjaj designed all the clothes featured in the photographs, including the babouches. These images weren’t so much about authentic representation as they were about countering otherrepresentations. He began the project, he says, after working on a photoshoot in Marrakesh that featured non-Moroccan models and Western clothes...

These Muslim women are not like those Muslim women, Hajjaj’s images say. These Muslim women are depoliticized and decontextualized, the veiled Muslim woman made palatable to a Western audience. She wears Nike symbols just like you. She rides a motorbike. And she doesn’t look like she’s going to be strapping a bomb onto her chest any time soon. When introduced to the Western imagination, her hijab becomes a signifier for the traditional and the provincial. The logos she bears on her clothing become the signifiers of modernity and globalization. The rigid binary between these two concepts means that when they are combined together, they constitute a contradiction. And it’s the assumed tension between them that fascinates the Western art world...

the motorcycles are meant to invoke a sense of exciting recklessness, independence, and rebellion that’s not usually associated with Arab women. But in reality, the motorcycles don’t represent rebellion in Marrakesh—they’re merely practical in a city whose narrow streets and alleyways are difficult to traverse with a car."

https://bitchmedia.org/post/when-the-camera-lands-on-a-carefree-muslim-girl

wowwww there is so much here. So much about using muslim women as objects to cast political messages, about the question of whether a body - once it has been made political - can ever relax into "accurate representation". There is so much about Western symbols of safety and what Nike represents, and our American ideas about who rides a motorcyle and why.

And I'm thinking about how we offer ourselves for others' consumption. Particularly, as a person of color who has always lived in mostly-white spaces with mostly white friends and mostly white authority figures, I am thinking about the costumes and characters we wear in order to be intriguing and non-threatening therefore acceptable.

"The Year We Obsessed Over Identity"

"Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. If Meyers is clued into this confusion, then you know it really has gone far, wide and middlebrow. We can see it in the instantly beloved hit ‘‘Transparent,’’ about a family whose patriarch becomes a trans woman whose kids call her Moppa, or in the time we’ve spent this year in televised proximity to Caitlyn Jenner, or in the browning of America’s white founding fathers in the Broadway musical ‘‘Hamilton,’’ or in the proliferating clones that Tatiana Maslany plays on ‘‘Orphan Black,’’ which mock the idea of a true or even original self, or in Amy Schumer's comedic feminism, which reconsiders gender confusion: Do uncouthness, detachment and promiscuity make her a slut, or a man?...

What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae. We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/the-year-we-obsessed-over-identity.html?referer=http%3A%2Ft.co%2FxlsSeWSNKP&_r=1

This was a fascinating reflection on the year and what has tied together some of its biggest new and culture moments. At times the thesis feels forced, and it sort of feels like the author didn't know quite who his intended audience was, but I really recommend reading it. These are fascinating thoughts from someone who is clearly a close observer of American life.

"Should Jackson Stay on the $20 Bill?"

“The story is even worse than is generally known. Jackson and his friends obtained slices of Cherokee real estate for personal profit, and colonized the land with lucrative cotton plantations worked by slaves.

What redeems this as an American story is the resistance of John Ross. A Cherokee of mixed race, Ross navigated between cultures in a way that feels familiar today. As a young man he fought in Jackson’s army. Later he became Jackson’s antagonist, rejecting his efforts to capture the Cherokee homeland in north Georgia and surrounding states.

Determined to adapt to white civilization, Cherokees embraced white styles of clothing and agriculture. Some, including Ross, also took up slavery. (There are few saints in this tale.) The ultimate adaptation came in 1828, when Ross was chosen as principal chief under a new constitution modeled on that of the United States. Ross’s government started a newspaper, publishing exposés of the Cherokees’ white antagonists. He worked with white allies, including women. Cherokees even sued, asking the Supreme Court to recognize their right to govern their land.

A ruling in their favor was ignored. But Cherokees were more than mere victims. They enriched our democratic tradition. Ross wanted the Cherokee Nation to become a territory or state within the Union — which it did, in a way, generations later as part of Oklahoma…

A $20 bill with Ross and Jackson would set a pattern for other bills. Each denomination should feature two different people who together tell a story, illustrating our democratic experience.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/opinion/should-jackson-stay-on-the-dollar20-bill.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-top-span-region&region=c-column-top-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-top-span-region

This is… interesting. It taps into what I’ve been thinking about a lot, the idea of who ‘owns’ America (in the, like, deep identity sense, not the capitalism sense) and who gets to be American and who gets to decide who owns and is America. There is something about people on the money as a representation of America.

And there is something here about a white man (the author) recognizing that importance but still being uncomfortable about losing representation.

I don’t know, trying to pull apart why I find this ‘double representation’ idea cute but falling short of the point.

"Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture"

“We have made this period of civil rights into a period of consummate triumph. Everyone wants to own it. A great number of people were not for it at the time, and it took tremendous struggle with failure after failure… to bring about the great changes. Nothing in history is really ever new, but nothing ever happens just because it is right”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05t5jxf

FB: A brief lecture on the history of race in the united states, and the way that America creates narratives about itself, with Ellison and Baldwin quotes sprinkled throughout. I thought it would be just the same stuff I have been reading in lots of think-pieces recently, but it got to different places and I think partially because it was this British-sponsored lecture.

"What Racism Has Done to Baltimore"

"For a long time, our domestic affairs, or at least the portion of them most explicitly tied to race, have resembled a nightmare doomed to be repeated until the underlying conflict is resolved...

It is true that we have grown adroit at feigning astonishment at the episodic convulsions of violence in American cities, but that doesn’t make them any less predictable or their roots any less apparent. With the exception of the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., every major riot by the black community of an American city since the Second World War has been ignited by a single issue: police tactics...

(It’s worth noting our tendency to think of declining, mostly white Rust Belt cities elegiacally, and of largely black ones moralistically.)"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/city-life-what-racism-has-done-to-baltimore

"Humans Did Not Wipe Out the Neanderthals, New Research Suggests"

"These findings suggest that modern humans did not rapidly replace Neanderthals in Europe — say, via violent means. Rather, the Neanderthal extinction "might have been more complex and drawn out than previously thought," Higham told Live Science.

There is some genetic evidence that Neanderthals in Western Europe may have experienced declining genetic diversity about the time when the first modern humans began arriving on the continent, Higham said. "This might mean that they were fading out at this time, although, of course, our evidence suggests that there was a long period of overlap during which this occurred," he said.

Neanderthals may not even have truly disappeared, but instead have been assimilated into modern human populations. "We know, of course, that we have a genetic legacy from Neanderthals of about 1 to 2 percent, so there was interbreeding," Higham said."

http://m.livescience.com/47460-neanderthal-extinction-revealed.html?cmpid=514627_20151017_53521866&adbid=10153051678066761&adbpl=fb&adbpr=30478646760

"MARIA POPOVA — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age"

“We seem to be bored with thinking. We want to instantly know… We’ve been infected with a kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it… The only thing to glean from skimming is trivia, and the only way to gain knowledge is contemplation. And the road to that is just time. There is no shortcut…

For me, I try to discern between information and wisdom…

Going to bed and feeling like the day happened, like the day was lived, there is nothing more than that really.”

 http://www.onbeing.org/program/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age/7580

And there are so many more little gems that just casually pour out of her mouth.

I want to think about this, because I feel like it’s true but I feel like instead of sort of a moral-pathology-of-the-youths, I feel like it’s something that has been imposed on me. I feel like the expectations for the 90s and 2000s child (and for the 2010s child too, I’m sure) were such that it didn’t feel like there was every enough time for anything, really. There is this constant sense of being behind on checking boxes, there is no attention pointed to any kind of journey. There’s the montage toward that end scene where we have mastered the skill or transformed ourselves.

I think we are a generation seeking a productive, transformative montage.

"What A “Racebent” Hermione Granger Really Represents"

"As I grew up I stopped comparing myself as much to Hollywood actors and tried to train myself out of seeing white as the default for fictional characters.
Call it maturation, call it learning to love myself, call it education; whatever it was, I started looking at my media and my stories through a more critical lens — and as someone learning to feel more comfortable speaking up when not enough of those stories are representing me.
And, somewhat miraculously, so did the internet...

Hermione’s story was always one involving a young girl living in a world aggressive towards her for her very existence...

All of this makes painting Hermione as a woman of color an act of reclaiming her allegory at its roots."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alannabennett/what-a-racebent-hermione-granger-really-represen-d2yp#.qx3ApmGPm

"People's Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them"

"In some cases, the most intimate questions a person is asking—about health worries, relationship woes, financial hardship—are the ones that set off a chain reaction that can have troubling consequences both online and offline.

All this is because being online increasingly means being put into categories based on a socioeconomic portrait of you that’s built over time by advertisers and search engines collecting your data—a portrait that data brokers buy and sell, but that you cannot control or even see...

while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers—online, via phone, and by mail—for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits...

Not only are lenders taking advantage of people in vulnerable financial situations, not only are lead generators sometimes skirting Google’s ad policies and even violating state laws, but companies are sharing individual data in a way that puts consumers directly at risk. All this comes down to the widespread availability and longevity of personal data online...

The effect may be a more pleasant online experience for someone who is perceived to have more income"

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/11/google-searches-privacy-danger/413614/

I think there would be a lot of value in going back to what it was the Internet was supposed to be, what it was supposed to provide people, and thinking about how that Internet would be designed for 2015.

I feel like all I read these days are all the ways we are dissatisfied or scared of the Internet. But, at this point, it's such an integral part of our lives. For example, in science research - no one reads physical copies of journals anymore, those are practically ornamental. We use specialized search engines to find what we are interested in and then print it out or read it online.

Related: Reddit how Internet was supposed to be; 2015 is year Internet died

“Who Do You Trust? Marble Jars and Empathy”

“How do you know who to trust?  How do you know who has the ability to offer you empathy and not a ‘one up’ or ‘poor you’ response?

Brené Brown says ‘people have to earn the right to hear your story.’  Meaning, people need to show you that they can hold your tender emotional parts, will care what happens to you and how you feel, and will value your connection enough to keep things to themselves.

In her book, Daring Greatly, Brené talks about Marble Jar friends.  She tells a great story of her daughter’s teacher who kept a jar in the classroom and each time the class did something positive a marble went in the jar.  Conversely, when the class veered into the land of negatives marbles were removed.

We can use the idea of the Marble Jar to help define who to trust and to what limits.

How do you determine when marbles go in and out of your Marble Jar?  For me, marbles go in when a friend does things like follows through, shows up on time, invites me to occasions, shares deeper thoughts, and demonstrates care.”

http://www.catherinebruns.com/who-do-you-trust-marble-jars-and-empathy/

"Imagining The Post-Antibiotics Future"

"Predictions that we might sacrifice the antibiotic miracle have been around almost as long as the drugs themselves. Penicillin was first discovered in 1928 and battlefield casualties got the first non-experimental doses in 1943, quickly saving soldiers who had been close to death. But just two years later, the drug’s discoverer Sir Alexander Fleming warned that its benefit might not last...

As a biologist, Fleming knew that evolution was inevitable: sooner or later, bacteria would develop defenses against the compounds the nascent pharmaceutical industry was aiming at them. But what worried him was the possibility that misuse would speed the process up. Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive...

Penicillin-resistant staph emerged in 1940, while the drug was still being given to only a few patients. Tetracycline was introduced in 1950, and tetracycline-resistant Shigella emerged in 1959; erythromycin came on the market in 1953, and erythromycin-resistant strep appeared in 1968...

Health authorities have struggled to convince the public that this is a crisis... deaths like this are changing medicine. To protect their own facilities, hospitals already flag incoming patients who might carry untreatable bacteria... Without the protection offered by antibiotics, entire categories of medical practice would be rethought...

A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on their land, and in human illnesses as well. Resistant bacteria move from animals to humans in groundwater and dust, on flies, and via the meat those animals get turned into...

Few, though, have asked what multi-drug–resistant bacteria might mean for farm animals. Yet a post-antibiotic era imperils agriculture as much as it does medicine. In addition to growth promoters, livestock raising uses antibiotics to treat individual animals, as well as in routine dosing called “prevention and control” that protects whole herds."

http://thefern.org/2013/11/imagining-the-post-antibiotics-future/

This feels a little fear-mongery to me, but it's sort of okay because it really is SUCH a real issue. Researchers are working on next-gen antibiotics, but still...

Related: “How to Develop New Antibiotics”

“The awful truth about climate change no one wants to admit”

“The latest contretemps was sparked by a comment in Nature by Oliver Geden, an analyst at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. In it, he made a simple argument. Politicians, he says, want good news. They want to hear that it is still possible to hit the widely agreed-upon climate mitigation target of 2°C. Even more, they want to hear that they can do so while avoiding aggressive emission cuts in the near-term — say, until they're out of office.

Climate scientists, Geden says, feel pressure to provide the good news. They're worried that if they don't, if they come off as "alarmist" or hectoring, they will simply be ignored, boxed out of the debate. And so they construct models showing that it is possible to hit the 2°C target. The message is always, "We're running out of time; we've only got five or 10 years to turn things around, but we can do it if we put our minds to it."

That was the message in 1990, in 2000, in 2010. How can we still have five or 10 years left? The answer, Geden says, is that scientists are baking increasingly unrealistic assumptions into their models.”

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/15/8612113/truth-climate-change

"Iraqis think the U.S. is in cahoots with the Islamic State, and it is hurting the war"

""It is not in doubt,” said Mustafa Saadi, who says his friend saw U.S. helicopters delivering bottled water to Islamic State positions. He is a commander in one of the Shiite militias that last month helped push the militants out of the oil refinery near Baiji in northern Iraq alongside the Iraqi army.

The Islamic State is “almost finished,” he said. “They are weak. If only America would stop supporting them, we could defeat them in days.”...

At a time when attacks by the Islamic State in Paris and elsewhere have intensified calls for tougher action on the ground, such is the level of suspicion with which the United States is viewed in Iraq that it is unclear whether the Obama administration would be able to significantly escalate its involvement even if it wanted to...

They are persistent enough to suggest a deliberate campaign on the part of Iran’s allies in Iraq to erode American influence, U.S. officials say."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iraqis-think-the-us-is-in-cahoots-with-isis-and-it-is-hurting-the-war/2015/12/01/d00968ec-9243-11e5-befa-99ceebcbb272_story.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

This is fascinating. 

"It Doesn't Have to Be This Way: The Infuriating Reality of Womanhood"

"Watching TV today, I felt that it was a fucking miracle that I made it through high school and college without being raped. And how deeply fucked up is that? We're steeped in it. A fellow actress in my acting class had to pretend to be fucked backwards over a table while reading off a list of missed calls to her fictional boss, once. She had to walk into an audition room, and let people see her that way to try to get a job. How deeply dehumanizing. How disgusting that someone even felt entitled to write that role. And don't even get me started on Khaleesi, everyone's favorite princess on Games of Thrones who, just an episode or two after we meet her, is raped on her marital bed by an enormous Dothraki man who has recently purchased her, and proceeds to then fall in love with her (apparently gentle-hearted) rapist? Please. This is so widespread and so sick. And yet is it better to acknowledge these things by writing stories about them, than to keep them secret? Is it better to tell these stories so that we feel this outrage?

I don't know. I don't know if it is. At least, I don't know if it's better to tell them in this way. In this throw up your hands, clean up the mess sort of way. The cops come afterwards. Couldn't save her. Couldn't stop it, but at least someone will be punished. Sort of. Unless they're famous. Or rich, then it's pretty much whatever. Right?

What I'd rather see than sad stories of abuse that someone swoops in to try to half-assedly address, is an absolute refusal to tolerate these crimes in the first place. Rather than TV shows trying to mete out justice in one-hour segments, I'd rather see men on TV becoming empowered to stop each other in the moment. High school boys resisting peer pressure, not succumbing to it. Father figures who even though they're in a half-hour comedy, defend their women, rather than being cowed by them."

http://jezebel.com/it-doesnt-have-to-be-this-way-the-infuriating-reality-1537068838

Um, yes.

I think a lot of women kind of feel like rape is this inevitable thing - like, turn to a woman near you and say the phrase "so this is where it happens..." and I bet that she knows what 'this' is. [Actually, don't do this, she's probably just chilling, she doesn't need that]. Like, I joke about it - I'll tell a story about a super sketchy path that google maps sent me down and, to illustrate the scene, I'll say "and I was looking around and thinking 'so THIS is where I am murdered by the rapist'". And we all laugh and then sigh.

There is a way that rape is considered to be part of every woman's story; either she is a victim, she is protected, or she is lucky. And we make choices everyday to keep ourselves out of the victim category, because if we fail to find protections for ourselves (the appropriate neighborhoods; the appropriate clothes; appropriate levels of sobriety; attaching ourselves to appropriate male figures who society then understands as people who can't rape us; etc...)  then we are also understood to be the perpetrators of our own misfortune.

It's exhausting sometimes when I have a moment of perspective and realize how much responsibility for not-being-raped I have accepted, this precarious balance between expressing myself and my gender identity and the threat of balance, the way I sometimes just want to hold very still forever. This responsibility should be societal and not individual.

And it's kind of all in the title of this piece: It doesn't have to be this way.

Not just the experience of having feminine traits in public (here I want to include women and men) but also masculinity/power shouldn't be like this.

Related: Why I don't watch game of thrones; Women's pain (long one)

FB: "

I've always known that being a woman was complicated. That it comes with a price. That the joy I find in being desirable, is also a liability - I've been taught that. My life has taught me that. But even I was shocked, as I sat in a group therapy session just a few months ago, to hear a friend, an incredibly beautiful 23-year-old girl, a girl I was jealous of, to be totally transparent, tell us with horrifying casualness about a recent sexual assault and wrap up by saying "I know this isn't my fault. I know that when I look this way, these things will happen to me. It's just the way it is." She understood the price of her body. She understood that over and over again, no one fucking helped her."

“How Stephen Colbert taught Americans about Super PACs”

“In a later phone survey, after controlling for factors like general political knowledge and demographics, more frequent Colbert viewers were more likely to answer questions about campaign finance correctly. And the effect of Colbert viewership on these answers was stronger than viewership of CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, or the nightly news, according to the study by Bruce Hardy, Jeffrey Gottfried, Kenneth Winneg, and Kathleen Hall Jaimeson.

These are the issues where Colbert's viewers overperformed in their demonstration of knowledge, paired with the Colbert segments they may have learned from:”

http://www.vox.com/2014/6/4/5776676/stephen-colbert-super-pac-study

"Comedian sells Shrek nudes on Etsy to benefit Planned Parenthood"

"The very very real store, Shrek Nudes 4 Planned Parenthood, contains nine nudes to choose from, complete with green frames, for a range of prices. If you want to see uncensored pics, you’ll have to shell out and buy ‘em, buddy...

I was harassing local productions of Shrek: The Musical for a couple of years while I was living in Boston (production of BU here) (sawShrek five times here) (saw Shrek again in California here) and it became a long running joke to the point where a few of us were willing to paint ourselves as Shrek, strip naked and sing songs for the musical and 100 people at an ImprovBoston variety show and people were willing to pay to see it. I’m sure anyone with a heart and forward-thinking vision would agree that tasteful Shrek nudes were the next logical step."

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/272232/comedian-sells-shrek-nudes-on-etsy-to-benefit-planned-parenthood/?mod=e2this

"Why What You Learned in Preschool Is Crucial at Work"

"Preschool classrooms, Mr. Deming said, look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.

Work, meanwhile, has become more like preschool.

Jobs that require both socializing and thinking, especially mathematically, have fared best in employment and pay, Mr. Deming found. They include those held by doctors and engineers. The jobs that require social skills but not math skills have also grown; lawyers and child-care workers are an example. The jobs that have been rapidly disappearing are those that require neither social nor math skills, like manual labor.

Despite the emphasis on teaching computer science, learning math and science is not enough. Jobs that involve those skills but not social skills, like those held by bookkeepers, bank tellers and certain types of engineers, have performed worst in employment growth in recent years for all but the highest-paying jobs. In the tech industry, for instance, it’s the jobs that combine technical and interpersonal skills that are booming, like being a computer scientist working on a group project."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/how-the-modern-workplace-has-become-more-like-preschool.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=2

It feels a little like they are stretching to meet the thesis, but it's an interesting thesis - mostly the point about what we are teaching in the classroom.

Our education system was designed a century ago, for very different purposes.

In a few decades, it will have been silly to ever have had to memorize almost anything.

"NEW NYC PROGRAM AIMS TO CREATE 5,000 WOMEN ENTREPRENEURS FROM LOW-INCOME NEIGHBORHOODS"

“Glen announced the new initiative, Women Entrepreneurs NYC, dubbed WE NYC, on Thursday. It will offer free training and business services—including loan negotiation workshops, connections to capital, pro-bono legal assistance, and navigating government resources—for aspiring entrepreneurs.

The program is a collaboration between the city’s Department of Small Business Services (SBS) and Citi, which is providing more than $425,000 for programs designed to help New York City Housing Authority residents interested in launching their own businesses. WE NYC is also partnering with Goldman Sachs's 10,000 Small Businesses program, which will educate aspiring entrepreneurs on accessing capital, and microlender Grameen America, which will provide further business-building services. LaGuardia Community College will offer intensive classes on entrepreneurship to prepare women for success in the marketplace…

"I think there’s really been a very strong debate and issue raised nationally, led by Sheryl Sandberg and others, about breaking the glass ceiling on Wall Street and corporate America," she tells Fast Company. Glen points out that there are many women who can't relate to the problems in climbing a corporate ladder or seeking startup funding because they are struggling to make ends meet. She argues that these women "have terrific ideas, are really creative, (and) could be the next great entrepreneur, but are really struggling with how to break into business. . . . I really want to use the city’s platform to address those issues head-on."”

http://www.fastcompany.com/3043680/strong-female-lead/new-nyc-program-aims-to-create-5000-women-entrepreneurs-from-low-income-n