"A Texas Community Takes On Racial Tensions Once Hidden Under The Surface"

"The idea behind "new urbanism" is that a planned environment, designed with pedestrians and social interaction in mind, can create a meaningful community.

The celebrated Mueller project in Austin, Texas, is one such place. This master-planned development seems to have it all: electric cars, solar panels, green buildings, walkability and native landscaping.

But what happens when one of Austin's most progressive, welcoming neighborhoods experiences racial incidents involving some of its own African-American residents who don't feel so welcome?

In Mueller, where construction began in 2007, the incidents quietly accumulated to the point where the community realized it had a problem — and needed to be confronted...

At the neighborhood meeting, the one thing people agreed on is that, in general, white people need to get to know more black people in Austin.

"Everyone always hypes this, 'Oh, you moved to Austin, you didn't really move to Texas. Austin is ... the center of liberalism in Texas.' What I'm finding is that people here haven't had the opportunity or the experience of interacting with people that aren't like them," says Daniel Colimon, a first-generation Haitian-American and real estate investor who lives in Mueller."

http://www.npr.org/2015/02/13/385495327/a-community-takes-on-racial-tensions-once-hidden-under-the-surface?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=nprpresents&utm_term=aboutnpr&utm_content=20150213

Wait, I totally love how this is explored. This is the second article in short series (actually, the whole series might be 2...) and I happaned to open the first one totally independently of the second and I love love love that they were like 'look at this utopia!' that featured all pictures of white people and then were like 'but also, let's shift the lens and explore who the utopia is for'

“The two simple facts that explain why the US prison population exploded”

“A National Research Council report from 2014 debunked two big misconceptions about what caused the increase, and offered two big reasons: prosecution has become more efficient, and prison sentences have lengthened. Here's a guide:”

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/1/5669166/the-two-simple-facts-that-explain-why-the-us-prison-population

Ugh, prisons. What’s the point?

"Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody's Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World"

"Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods.

Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/policing-is-a-dirty-job-but-nobodys-gotta-do-it-6-ideas-for-a-cop-free-world-20141216

#LetsBeRadical. restorative justice is amazing also. Stories about restorative justice keep popping up in my podcasts and making me feel hopeful.

I would like to see a world where these 6 things were implemented broadly, and over time replaced functions currently involving militarized police officers. 

Community, please.

"The Science of Why No One Agrees on the Color of This Dress"

"Light enters the eye through the lens—different wavelengths corresponding to different colors. The light hits the retina in the back of the eye where pigments fire up neural connections to the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes those signals into an image. Critically, though, that first burst of light is made of whatever wavelengths are illuminating the world, reflecting off whatever you’re looking at. Without you having to worry about it, your brain figures out what color light is bouncing off the thing your eyes are looking at, and essentially subtracts that color from the “real” color of the object. “Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance,” says Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington. “But I’ve studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I’ve ever seen.” (Neitz sees white-and-gold.)

Usually that system works just fine. This image, though, hits some kind of perceptual boundary. That might be because of how people are wired. Human beings evolved to see in daylight, but daylight changes color. That chromatic axis varies from the pinkish red of dawn, up through the blue-white of noontime, and then back down to reddish twilight. “What’s happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you’re trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis,” says Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College. “So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black.” (Conway sees blue and orange, somehow.)"

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/science-one-agrees-color-dress/

IN CASE YOU WERE CURIOUS

I love this though, a perceptual boundary - I desperately want to know what causes the individual variation too. It's part context, probably part priming (if you tell someone it's blue and black they are probably more likely to see it that way?), and probably a little bit about what their brain screens out naturally.

"Panel Says Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Is A Disease, And Renames It"

"The mysterious and complicated illness that has been called chronic fatigue syndrome has a new definition and a new name: systemic exertion intolerance disorder, or SEID for short...The condition, which can render people housebound or bedridden and unable to work or go to school, is believed to affect between 860,000 and 2.5 million Americans. Because there is no specific test for SEID, many people who have it haven't been diagnosed, and healthcare professionals often have viewed patients as complainers whose symptoms are psychological, not physical.

But a 15-member panel of the Institute of Medicine, an independent government advisory body with a lot of clout, says otherwise. In a report released Tuesday, the panel writes that the condition "is real," and admonishes clinicians, "It is not appropriate to dismiss these patients by saying 'I am chronically fatigued, too.' "

...This [new] definition is much simpler than some previous ones for chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalomyelitis. And it doesn't require doctors to run a bunch of expensive and time-consuming tests to rule out other causes for the patient's symptoms before making the diagnosis."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2015/02/11/385465667/panel-says-chronic-fatigue-syndrome-is-a-disease-and-renames-it?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150211

It makes me really sad that they had to say that last part.

Thinking about how we legitimize things (who gets to be a voice of authority - why not the person having the experience?), and how that 

"The Strange Inevitability of Evolution"

FB: a lovely and informative read
http://static.nautil.us/5056_2654d1a3f16bf62d0dc4f91fa3ec9377.png

"Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival  of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival  of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how  Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible...These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster’s sometime collaborator, Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that’s right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability."

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the-strange-inevitability-of-evolution

This was a beautiful article, certainly answering a question I had not heard posed before.

I really like this, kind of what I want part of my future research to be - "the connection between phenotype and genotype retains many mysteries. Arguably it is the biggest mystery of the post-genomic era we are now entering, in which it is proving unexpectedly hard to identify where many inherited phenotypic traits are encoded in the genotype"

"Mirror Touch"

"MILLER: This condition is called mirror-touch synesthesia.

BANISSY: Mirror-touch synesthesia.

MILLER: 'Cause, you know, synesthesia is when your senses get crossed. And here, their touch system is crossed with their visual system.

BANISSY: If people, for example, see me, let's say, touching an ice cube or something like that, they'll say they'll get a sensation in their fingertip of coldness.

MILLER: And Banissy says mirror-touch isn't just about physical feelings. They seem to contract people's feelingsy feelings.

BANISSY: Emotions. So for example, if you see somebody upset, and you feel upset in response to that. And it's in this type of empathy that we find that mirror-touch synesthetes differ to non-synesthetes. They have higher levels of this."

http://www.npr.org/2015/01/30/382453493/mirror-touch

I have this total love-hate relationship with this show so far, but this story was very good and sort of beautiful and fascinating and enlightening. 

"Paul Ryan isn't running for president. He's after something even bigger."

"No member of Congress has understood the power of the institution to set the president's agenda in recent years as well as Ryan. His budget became the de factopolicy platform of the Republican Party. Pretty much every GOP presidential candidate endorsed some form of it (Newt Gingrich began his campaign by trying to distance himself from Ryan's work, but he quickly realized his folly). It got Ryan named to Romney's ticket.

But the most telling — and most perceptive — line on Ryan's budget came from Grover Norquist. Speaking at the conservative confab CPAC in 2012, Norquist said, "We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget ... Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States.""
http://www.vox.com/2015/1/14/7537371/paul-ryan-presidential-run

"Leigh Anne Tuohy, Racism, and the White Saviour Complex"

"Another white woman, one Leigh Anne “I Adopted A Black Boy So I Can’t Possibly Be Racist” Tuohy, decides that White Lady #1 is wrong. Which is actually the correct assumption for Ms. Tuohy to make, so I guess this is where some people are getting confused because we see that her intent is good, and that makes us want to believe that the action that follows will also be good. She’s at a crossroad here – two roads diverged, etc. Had she taken the road less travelled, Ms. Tuohy might have said to her friend, “Wow, you’re being really racist right now! I’m not comfortable with how this conversation is going.” Instead, she decided to confront the teenagers who, as a reminder, have done absolutely nothing wrong."

http://bellejar.ca/2014/12/15/leigh-anne-tuohy-racism-and-the-white-saviour-complex/

I want to quote all of this, and make a bunch of people read this (for example, a sibling of a friend of mine has been traveling through a South Asian country and posted a picture of a man like he was a decorative symbol of the whole experience - sort of the way I post pictures of my food when I travel) 

Some people don't really get to exist in the world without occasionally being scooped into someone else's narrative, and becoming their momentary props.

This is sort of like when rando dudes think they are doing me a favor by telling me that I am attractive, and make me an emotional prop for their shitty morning commute when I am just trying to also have a morning commmute.

“Discovery, Guided by Morality”

“Traditional techniques for staining brain tissue produce byproducts and waste that are hazardous to the environment. And often, this sort of research is performed on animals, something Dr. Lam insists on avoiding. The radiation that illuminates the Stanford microscope was once a waste product produced by the particle accelerators. Now that it has been harnessed — recycled, in a sense — she is able to use it to examine tissue removed from living human patients, not animals…In 2012, Dr. Lam and Dr. Elan Ohayon, her husband, founded the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in a former industrial building in the Convoy District, an up-and-coming San Diego neighborhood. Solar panels rest on the roof, and a garden is lovingly tended on the second floor.

Dr. Lam and Dr. Ohayon refuse to experiment on animals, a mainstay of neuroscience research, and will not conduct research with military applications. At scientific conferences around the country, they have been urging scientists to stop clinging to dated notions of normalcy and deviance.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/science/research-with-a-scientific-and-moral-purpose.html?_r=0

I feel like someone sent this to me and I can’t remember who :/ either way, super interesting and I’m glad to see this happen. There are little labs I have occasionally encountered that look at developing more humane ways to do science but, frankly, there isn’t much funding or prestige in the work and there isn’t really an activist-scientist scene. We need more radical scientists J

This is associated with the Open Worm project which is pretty cool.

Also – I would be fascinated to know how this was being funded.

"Keene: Our Ancestors Are Not Your Props!"

"There’s also this piece that I can’t quite put my finger on, and don’t know if I can adequately express. The photos are all men in (mostly) western clothing, with “tribal” accents here and there. I feel like there is a subtext here of “civilizing”— even the “wild Indians” can look dignified in these clothes...Finally, there is the economic piece at play here. Look at the prices. A $265 T-shirt featuring a sacred headdress, a $1,300 plaid coat, $400 sweaters — and all of this money is going straight to building Lauren’s personal wealth and empire, none of it is going to the communities he is directly exploiting to sell his product. How American of him: seeing Natives as inherently disposable and exploitable, and using Native resources to build his personal wealth, while simultaneously yearning for the romanticized past when Natives roamed the plains, and ignoring his own complicity in the ongoing settler colonial project. Pretty much the story of the United States."

https://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2014/12/18/keene-dear-ralph-lauren-our-ancestors-are-not-your-props-158363

I'm really starting to see the US as having a fundamental cultural devotion to the appropriation of Native American... Everything. I was going to say just like images, but it's so much more physical and emotional than that. 

:( 

""EBOLA DOCTOR" CRAIG SPENCER IN A MEDIA MAELSTROM"

"Back in October, Dr. Craig Spencer set off a media firestorm when he checked into Bellevue Hospital in New York City after coming down with a slight fever. It turned out he had contracted Ebola while caring for patients in West Africa. Now recovered, he speaks to WNYC's Mary Harris about the experience of being at the center of national panic."

http://www.onthemedia.org/story/ebola-doctor-craig-spencer-media-maelstrom/

A great interview with the **New York Ebola Doctor Who Went Bowling** and the shittiness and deep inaccuracy of the media reaction

“Charitable techies can now donate their skills to nonprofits in need”

“a new platform called #charity is encouraging IT professionals to donate their time and specialist tech skills to nonprofits in need, helping those organizations to reduce costs and put the money back into their missions.

Charities of all sizes can list their IT needs, one project at a time, on #charity for free. Volunteers can sign up to the network and #charity will smartmatch them with the project that best suits their skills and interests — using an algorithm which scan’s participants LinkedIn profiles. #charity assign project managers to ensure the right people are in place and they also backup all the volunteers’ work on their platform in case they are not able to complete the task.”

http://www.springwise.com/charitable-techies-donate-skills-nonprofits/

"A Short Sad History of Congress Trading Away D.C.'s Sovereignty"

"The more than 600,000 residents in the District still have no voting representation in Congress, despite the fact that D.C. has a greater population than Wyoming or Vermont. And local residents' interests are frequently used as leverage in larger congressional negotiations. (For a sense of how racially charged this is, consider the fact that roughly half of the District's population is black, while Congress is 87 percent white.)

What follows is a look back at the many times Congress has trampled on D.C. rights."

http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/7-times-congress-bargained-away-d-c-s-rights-20141211

I recently had a conversation  about DC natives, in which someone said 'no one really lives in DC' and it's such a common (and totally problematic) feeling among the sort of transient-youth population I am part of in DC right now. I don't feel like I live here, really, I just am living here. So, weirdly, I feel totally unaffected by the DC rights thing even though I pay taxes and benefit from the city services and am subject to local laws and stuff. And the majority of people I interact with either don't live in the district (I.e. They live in Maryland or Virginia), or haven't been here more than maybe 3 years or aren't planning to live here for more than another few years, or all 3. 

From my perch, there isn't a huge amount of investment in DC or what it is. It's a hotel city for us. 

And it's sort of like the themes of every dystopian novel ever - I spend most of my time in the hotel bits, in streets that are sometimes terrifyingly clean, and don't see what needs to be cared about or fostered or supported and I don't see the communities eroded by the hotel-ization of more and more neighborhoods. And I probably won't, because I am going to be gone soon.

I feel like I sometimes claim to be getting really DC, but what I really mean by that is that is the policy world - be sure to call me out if I ever pretend to be any part of the real city.

"Young Women Shouldn’t Have to Talk Like Men to Be Taken Seriously"

"But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused. So why should anyone have a problem with it? The thing is, this pastime of critiquing women’s speech is not limited to American English speakers. It’s easy to find these attitudes in any culture that devalues femininity and women. In  Belfast English, stereotypical women’s speech falls at the end of a sentence, while men’s speech rises before it plateaus—basically, the men are uptalking. And yet Belfast women’s speech is still perceived as more expressive or emotional, showing that it's not about their actual intonation at all: It's about whose mouth the speech is coming from...employers admit to actively punishing workers who use uptalk, and many women, especially women of color, simply can’t afford not to change their voice in order to gain respect. But just because sexism exists doesn't mean that the sexists are right about it"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_is_okay_young_women_shouldn_t_have_to_talk_like_men_to_be_taken_seriously.html

Related: “Why I’m Genderqueer, Professional and Unafraid” 

"Let’s kickstart science in America"

“It’s not all bad news for the thousands of science and conservation ideas that fall outside the traditional funding rubric. Fortunately, new citizen science models are emerging — along with a new class of philanthropic backers to fill the funding voids left by the NSF and the NIH. Our experience developing OpenROV (an open-source underwater robot) into one of the largest (by volume) underwater robot manufacturers in the world is illustrative of this shift…This experience made us think: How can we make more microsponsorship opportunities available in science, exploration and conservation? OpenExplorer was our response. Instead of providing seed funding, we’ve created a model that gives everyone a chance to sponsor new ideas, research and expeditions in science and engineering."

http://thegovlab.org/lets-kickstart-science-in-america/

We definitely need new models, and I like the model of private foundations picking up some of the slack. However, there are concerns about who should be deciding scientific priorities. *link to below**

Related to: the Postdocalypse

“Retraction Watch is growing, thanks to a $400,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation”

“The goal of the grant — $200,000 per year for two years — is to create a comprehensive and freely available database of retractions, something that doesn’t now exist, as we and others have noted. That, we wrote in our proposal, is a gap that deprives scholarly publishing of a critical mechanism for self-correction… The funding will allow us to hire a reporter, an editor, and a database developer. (Retraction Watch remains a volunteer activity for Adam and Ivan, with any honoraria and payment for writing going toward expenses, including staff salaries.)”

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/12/15/retraction-watch-growing-thanks-400000-grant-macarthur-foundation/

No Relief for Air Travelers

"But the biggest reason airlines are not passing on lower prices to consumers is that they don’t have to. Demand for air travel is strong, and a series of megamergers has significantly reduced competition in the industry. The four biggest airlines in the United States — Delta, Southwest, United and American — control about 80 percent of airline capacity, down from 11 companies as recently as 2005. For most travelers, that has meant higher prices and jam-packed planes."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/opinion/no-relief-for-air-travelers.html?emc=edit_th_20141216&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=8017714

Read this on a plane. Did not feel pleased.

Flying does not need to be this icky.

"Time to Tell the Truth About Slavery at Mount Vernon"

"At the time of George Washington’s death, the Washingtons enslaved 318 people of African descent at Mount Vernon, according to the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. But you would not know it from the main tour, nor from the brochure. In fact, most visitors, including schoolchildren, can spend hours admiring the Mount Vernon mansion, fine furniture, and manicured lawns without considering that it was all paid for with forced labor... Washington acquired thousands of acres of Ottawa land along the Ohio River illegally from the British as a reward for helping the British in the French and Indian War... The great Ottawa leader Pontiac entered into an agreement with the king of England that stated no further encroachment of white settlers would take place west of the Alleghenies. Washington ignored this proclamation after the War of Independence and organized brutal campaigns against the Ottawa in his quest for more land.

George Washington purchased people directly from the holds of slave ships. He preferred them to be “strait Limb’d & in every respect strong and likely, with good Teeth & good countenances,” not exceeding 16 years of age if female. Washington wanted genetically healthy girls for reproduction purposes.

While serving as president of the United States, Washington faced a legal problem with the people he enslaved. The capital was moved from New York to Philadelphia in 1791 and the enslaved people who accompanied him to Pennsylvania would be given their freedom if they resided in the state for more than six months. George and Martha Washington kept careful records and rotated enslaved people back and forth to Mount Vernon to avoid being required to free any of them."
http://zinnedproject.org/2015/02/mount-vernon-tour/

I remember going on this tour in 8th grade, and I remember something about goats and like his gardens?
Which is the success of American mythology - we are never told about these parts. #WhoseHero #WhosePresident

“Why science is so hard to believe”

“Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs. A study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals and that the Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) and whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive)… Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. They, too, are vulnerable to confirmation bias — the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once the results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them — and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or an absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-science-is-so-hard-to-believe/2015/02/12/2ff8f064-b0a0-11e4-886b-c22184f27c35_story.html

(this article is a little longer than it needs to be, so just stop reading when it stops being interesting to you).

This is really important and it’s discussions like this that I want more of. I am so, so sick of articles that just scream and blame and mock and denigrate people who don’t believe whatever scientific thing, and it’s so elitist and classist and it so doesn’t solve any problem at all. This, recognizing that intuition is important and that communication about new non-intuitive truths have to recognize this, and also that even us vaunted scientists are skeptical of things that are proven rationally to be true, this is a step in the correct direction for determining how to address problematic scientific skepticism.

Also, banning CNN just all the time maybe. Or like, at least when it wants to talk about ebola.

" Episode 65: Race, police and chokeholds"

"Adolph Lyons sued the City of Los Angeles for violating his constitutional rights: the right to due process under the Fifth Amendment, and the right to equal protection, under the Fourteenth Amendment. His case rose all the way to the Supreme Court, where, in 1982, the high court included the nation’s first African-American Justice and the grandson of slaves: Justice Thurgood Marshall. 

In this week’s DecodeDC podcast,host Andrea Seabrook and Mother Jones reporter Dave Gilson recount the case of Adolph Lyons and the legal battle over race, police and chokeholds. The case’s similarities with the case of Eric Garner are palpable and stunning. And the conclusions of Thurgood Marshall show that the issues of race, police and chokeholds struck people of conscience long before Eric Garner’s death."

http://www.decodedc.com/home/2014/12/18/episode-65-race-police-and-chokeholds.html

this is worth listening to. Most striking detail: a genuine argument in favor of continuing to use chokeholds was the idea that black people have extra muscles that let us breathe through chokeholds, so they won't kill us.

Yes.

In high school, I remember having a conversation about the belief that Africans have "extra muscles" in their ankles that let them run faster. My mother was told as a child (and believed for a while) that Native Americans were often window cleaners of the Manhattan skyscrapers because they could breathe more easily than others at high altitudes. And then like, every sitcom ever using the trope of women's periods making us emotionally incapable so that we deserve to be patronized.

It's so, so easy to justify the shittiness of the world by building another layer of shittiness

Related: Sports stuff below

"Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism"

"There are more than 215 million blogs on Tumblr and, according to comScore, an analytics company, 50 percent of Tumblr users are from 15 to 34 years old. The company’s internal surveys show that 64 percent of users say that they care about social causes and look into them on Tumblr. These numbers suggest that millennials, who have long been pigeonholed as an apathetic bunch, have a strong interest in social issues — it’s just hidden from the eyes of their elders...“Tumblr is kind of like a gateway drug for activism,” said Philip Howard, 44, the principal investigator at the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington. “Once you connect to other people who feel strongly about race or crime or gay marriage, you stay engaged on that one issue area.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/style/millennials-and-the-age-of-tumblr-activism.html

I like this theory about perceptions of apathy - our action and passion are just in spaces that aren't traditionally looked to. 

I think there is so much to say about the impacts of "hashtag activism". It provides narratives and images in ways that weren't as accessible before - I really, really believe that mainstream news media was only able to report on a lot of issues because twitter and tumblr and bloggers had provided an easily accessible narrative that showed quick comprehension and adoption by others. News shows are practically reporting on what social media is saying about a news event, as a way to report about a news event that makes much of their audience feel personally uncomfortable.

"The Most Miserable Princess Ever: Sisi, Empress Elisabeth of Austria"

"But slowly, surely, Sisi began to act out. She welcomed her brother's wife into the family—an actress who'd already borne him a daughter out of wedlock. She donated to help a Protestant congregation build a steeple—and remember, the Habsburgs were once Holy Roman Emperors. She took increasingly liberal political stances, increasingly loudly. She threw balls but invited only young people, not their higher-ranking mothers... The young Sisi makes a sympathetic figure, but the deeper you get into her life, she's increasingly frustrating... You could compare her to any number of famous women (Princess Di, Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, Marie Antoinette). But Sisi reminds me of nobody so much as Marilyn Monroe—a complicated woman who died and was promptly reduced to a series of very, very lovely pictures. Nothing heavy, just a lady in a pretty poofy dress."

http://jezebel.com/the-most-miserable-princess-ever-sisi-empress-elisab-1671950113

“The Megyn Kelly Moment”

“A few hours later, Gilliam arrived on Kelly’s cavernous set, just as she was closing out the C block. A production assistant sat him on the white leather high-back stool at the corner of Kelly’s transparent desk. Gilliam is bald and broad shouldered, with a thick neck and a bushy gray goatee. He has been trained to “kill ruthlessly,” he told me later. Kelly, in black spiky heels and a bright red dress, her blond hair now blown out, offered him a chilly hello during a commercial break, then returned to paging through her notes. The stool was small, and Gilliam appeared to droop over the sides. His Megyn moment approached.

For those unfamiliar with the phenomenon, a Megyn moment, as I have taken to calling it, is when you, a Fox guest — maybe a regular guest or even an official contributor — are pursuing a line of argument that seems perfectly congruent with the Fox worldview, only to have Kelly seize on some part of it and call it out as nonsense, maybe even turn it back on you. You don’t always know when, how or even if the Megyn moment will happen; Kelly’s political sensibility and choice of subjects are generally in keeping with that of the network at large. But you always have to be ready for it, no matter who you are. Neither Karl Rove nor Dick Cheney have been spared their Megyn moments, nor will the growing field of 2016 presidential aspirants, who can look forward to two years of interrogation on “The Kelly File.” The Megyn moment has upended the popular notion of how a Fox News star is supposed to behave, and led to the spectacle of a Fox anchor winning praise from the very elites whose disdain Fox has always welcomed. In the process, Kelly’s program has not just given America’s top-rated news channel its biggest new hit in 13 years; it has demonstrated an appeal to the younger and (slightly) more ideologically diverse demographic Fox needs as it seeks to claim even more territory on the American journo-political landscape.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/25/magazine/the-megyn-kelly-moment.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

She is a super interesting woman, and also a super interesting part of American culture – I think that in like 50 years when our current state of hyper-partisanship has imploded to some other and more functional state of being, there will be lots and lots of analysis of what she revealed about the psyche of American political identities.  This thing with Jon Stewart’s reactions, reflecting the confusion/delight/ownershipiness? of the reactions of high-liberal America. I’m imagining this totally surreal but sort of logical future situation in which they co-host a show together.

Also, I love this term – the Megyn moment. I want to see it in other places too, with other “Megyns”. It’s also the thing where – and I love doing this – she wades in as though she is all the silly, vapid, unprepared stereotypes that her guest probably can’t help but implicitly assume she is and then she flips around to punish that assumption.

Let’s be ready to point out our hypocrisies to each other, even when it feels like it will uncomfortably violate in-group status.

"When Helping Rape Victims Hurts a College’s Reputation"

"From the perspective of a university administrator who is concerned primarily with his school’s reputation, a sexual assault that goes unreported is a sexual assault that never actually happened. That’s why there’s a difference between symbolic gestures like UVA’s fraternity suspension and policies that actually encourage victims to speak up about their experiences. More transparency means more recorded victims...These changes [at Princeton] are almost certainly going to help victims. More money means more resources and more support. A lower burden of proof means more women will have the confidence to come forward, and more assailants will be punished. But it’s significant that none of these developments took place until the university had been publicly shamed by the White House and the media. If history is any indicator, this topic may simmer for a while and then recede from the national spotlight. When it does, there will be less pressure for colleges and universities to maintain their reforms. When that time comes, schools might take stock of their reported numbers and quietly scale back their programs, reverting to policies that keep more victims quiet."

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/12/when-helping-rape-victims-hurts-a-universitys-reputation/383820/

"Sex redefined"

"Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD²... What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body."
http://www.nature.com/news/sex-redefined-1.16943

A must read; so fascinating, so many questions to explore.

There is a lot of interesting stuff going on in terms of sex differences in the brain, and basically (paraphrasing from a talk I went to back in November and slightly forget the details of) there are a lot of places in the brain that have clear differences between the "average male" and the "average female" human but within an actual individual, all the different regions of a single brain will vary in their sex-ed-ness and there is a huge amount of overlap. Like, a given woman might have a ~neutral amygdala and a super feminine visual cortex. So, there are absolute differences, but they are all relative, and they mix-and-match within individuals.

"THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING"

"This week, 700 new victims were added to the tally of over 3,200 African-Americans lynched in the Jim Crow era South. Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says we've got the narrative of lynchings and their legacy wrong, too."
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/lynching-era/

A very thought-provoking interview on classifying the South to North migration of the early 19th century as the flight of refugees from terrorism

"Religion Without God"

"Religion is fundamentally a practice that helps people to look at the world as it is and yet to experience it — to some extent, in some way — as it should be. Much of what people actually do in church — finding fellowship, celebrating birth and marriage, remembering those we have lost, affirming the values we cherish — can be accomplished with a sense of God as metaphor, as story, or even without any mention of God at all."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/25/opinion/religion-without-god.html

Sort of interesting, not crazy well written but I appreciate the little pieces of history and reading these ideas written down.

"Should Higher Education Have a Leftist Bias?"

"Show that you approach opponents’ actions and writings with an open mind, not with malice aforethought. Concede the other side’s valid arguments–preferably toward the beginning of your critique, not tacked on grudgingly at the end or in inconspicuous subordinate clauses. Acknowledge points on which you agree at least partially and might be able to cooperate."

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/should-higher-education-have-a-leftist-bias/

Mostly posting because I really like these "rules for polemicists" at the beginning, and I wish they were practices we were taught in school. I would love to have a helpful and structured environment in which to practice them. I would definitely be a more intellectually organized person if so :)

The book sounds interesting, but like it would only reinforce an idea that I agree with defaultly, so I wouldn't necessarily emerge from the experience having grown at all. Additionally, I would imagine that there is much that can be said about a liberal bias that makes it unfairly difficult for people with conservative social/political/economic perspectives to gain respect in certain academic communities.

I appreciate reading the summaries of his arguments though.