Sunday, May 31, 2015

"How to save Star Trek: Make it the True Detective of science fiction"

"The anthological miniseries has found a way around one of TV's most persistent problems. Yes, a show can tell a compelling story, but if its a success, then it could also run forever. That inhibits attempts to tell incisive, to-the-point stories across many years.
All stories need endings, but if writers never know when that ending will come, it's much harder to build effectively to said ending. This has always been American television's Achilles heel. Even TV's best shows have flab here and there, episodes that could have been trimmed or even cut entirely.
The anthological miniseries gets around this by allowing a show to become more of a formatthan a constant. True Detective isn't about following the same characters through the same wacky adventures, year after year. It's about establishing a vibe, then staying true to that vibe. Each season can tell a big, bold story, and then the next season can become even bigger and bolder."

ooohhh

Saturday, May 30, 2015

"Why Are We Still Moving to California?"

"There is truth in the contradiction between these two pieces of writing, as the same brand of cognitive dissonance has appeared to infect those gleefully packing it up for L.A..
There has always been an element of incongruity to Los Angeles, a city that exists as some sort of glimmering haven for the pale, shrunken, overworked refugees of an increasingly inhospitable New York—a narrative that has been compelling for as long as New York has been overpriced and stressful. I, along with almost all of my friends, have considered making this particular move every single winter, despite the fact that I’m a fair-skinned nervous driver with an extremely low tolerance for vegan restaurants. Joan Didion understood better than most the strange, unsustainable dualities inherent in that collective belief in the West, writing inSlouching Towards Bethlehem: “California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.”
But now there is no water in California. There is no water in California. And yet it’s never been more popular."


Sometimes Jezebel just has great essays.

Related: “R.I.P. California (1850–2016): What We’ll Lose And Learn From The World’s First Major Water Collapse

"Students Give Worse Reviews to Professors With Asian Names"

"Students also tended to flag the accents of professors with Asian-seeming names, sometimes making extreme comments such as “HE BARELY SPEAKS ENGLISH,” “don’t take him unless you know Chinese,” and “did not understand a single word he said all quarter.” Subtirelu noted that these complaints are probably exaggerations, as “it seems unlikely that [the student] attended a course over an entire term and never understood a single word the instructor produced," he wrote in the paper.

Even when students made attempts at complimenting their professors with Asian-sounding names, they showed an awareness of bias, the study found. Comments such as “her English is perfect,” appeared in evaluations of Asian professors but not American ones. “The fact that they are making these comments suggests that they anticipate that other people are reading the names and thinking, 'oh this person will be incomprehensible,'” Subtirelu said.

Instructors with American names were more likely to earn effusive praise from students. Students were more likely to say that an American professor was the “best math teacher I have ever [had]” and the word “best” appeared in fewer reviews of Asian professors."
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-02/students-give-worse-reviews-to-professors-with-asian-names

Friday, May 29, 2015

"Are You Man Enough for the Men's Rights Movement?"

"As the flagship political site of the movement (it had just shy of 9 million site visits last year), Elam's A Voice for Men functions as the closest thing there is to a center, an intelligence, a superego to the bloggy manosphere id of lust and fury. Just how big the whole thing is, nobody can say. More than fringe, less than mainstream, but at 3 A.M., sitting with Elam in his hotel room, I'm not looking for numbers. Size doesn't matter. What I'm really asking is, What does it all mean?...

The irony of the men's rights movement is that its critique, its focus on the constraints of gender, is essentially a feminist one. No less an arch-feminist than the late Andrea Dworkin—a "300-plus-pound basilisk of man-hate" who just "wanted to be raped," according to Elam—critiqued the idea of men as "disposable" in her 1983 book Right-Wing Women, ten years before The Myth of Male Power. "Feminism," wrote Dworkin, "proposes one absolute standard of human dignity, indivisible by sex."

"Nope," says the manosphere. Or rather, "I can't hear you!""
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201503/mens-rights-activism-the-red-pill

The anecdotes in here - I mean, it is likely that the journalist had to choose the more extreme people who created the more interesting moments but wow.

Thursday, May 28, 2015

"Ever heard of 'pine nut syndrome'? Neither had I, until I got it"

"“During the past few years,” the story reported, “there have been reports of people suffering from a constant bitter or metallic taste as a result of eating pine nuts.” The condition, it said, is “pine nut syndrome.”

The adverse reaction can develop suddenly and inexplicably within 12 to 48 hours after consuming the nuts, which are the edible seeds of the pine tree. It can happen out of the blue, even to people who have eaten pine nuts previously with no adverse reaction. It does not seem to matter whether the pine nuts are raw or roasted. It does not seem to matter whether three nuts are consumed, or a handful. It does not seem to matter where the nuts come from. The syndrome does not involve mold or bacteria. It is not an allergy.

It is a mystery...

The FDA, he told me, had first taken note of the problem three years ago, when the agency  began receiving daily complaints about pine mouth. Reports are now at a relative trickle but not rare. Nobody knows why it happens, he said, “but it’s not dangerous.”"
http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-bad-taste-in-my-mouth--20140722-column.html

The world is full of weird things that are good for biologists. (the delay might be how long it takes to turn on a certain genetic cassette and change the state of the cell? Or it could be a weird immune thing? Or is it in the brain?)

(credit to MJ)

"Sex, lives and disability"

"This scenario, where a disabled man is judged to have lost sexual power because of his impairment and his sexual partner has carte blanche to seek solace elsewhere, has become known as the ‘Chatterley Syndrome’.

As Shakespeare observes, disabled men (and, to a lesser extent, women), are rendered impotent and sexless by disability, and thus are seen as unattractive and vulnerable to mockery and exploitation. As Cicero wrote: “In deformity and bodily disfigurement, there is good material in making jokes.”

This may explain an assumption often made in the past – that it was better to shield disabled people from reaching out for sexual relationships rather than risk the potential of being rejected. There was an expectation that disabled people’s sexual desires should be set aside and ignored, because they should not – or could not – be satisfied... 
In some countries where legislation around sex work is permissive (e.g. Holland, Germany, Denmark and Switzerland), there is a flexible attitude towards services for disabled people. In Holland, as in Denmark, social workers ask disabled clients whether they need any support with their sexuality and may even fund limited numbers of visits by sexual assistants or sex workers... 
In Australia, Touching Base works with dementia and disabled people’s organisations to develop consent guidelines. “There is a lot of discussion around consent at the moment,” Wotton says. “In terms of dementia, we are looking at what people used to do, when they are losing capacity."... 
Alex Ghenis, an American disability advocate and former dating and relationships columnist, is unconvinced: “It commodifies sex in terms of an action. It makes it so society can check this box that men are getting laid, so we don’t have to have broader social change – we are giving them sex through a brothel, so we don’t have to change our social attitudes around socially excluded people with disabilities.

“And it pities and coddles us, as if we are being given things that will assuage us... rather than have society change around us,” Ghenis adds."

http://mosaicscience.com/story/sex-disability

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

"Hillary Clinton’s Empowerment"

"NOW and other mainstream women’s organizations have been eagerly anticipating her 2016 candidacy. Clinton and supporters have recently stepped up efforts to portray her as a champion of bothwomen’s and LGBT rights.
Such depictions have little basis in Clinton’s past performance. While she has indeed spoken about gender and sexual rights with considerable frequency, and while she may not share the overtly misogynistic and anti-LGBT views of most Republican politicians, as a policymaker she has consistently favored policies devastating to women and LGBT persons.
Why, then, does she continue to enjoy such support from self-identified feminists? Part of the answer surely lies in the barrage of sexist attacks that have targeted her and the understandable desire of many feminists to see a woman in the Oval Office.
But that’s not the whole story. We suggest that feminist enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is reflective of a profound crisis of US liberal feminism, which has long embraced or accepted capitalism, racism, empire, and even heterosexism and transphobia...

A more robust vision of feminism doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t defend women like Hillary Clinton against sexist attacks: we should, just as we defend Barack Obama against racist ones. But it does mean that we must listen to the voices of the most marginalized women and gender and sexual minorities — many of whom are extremely critical of Clintonite feminism — and act in solidarity with movements that seek equity in all realms of life and for all people."


(honestly, if you aren't an international relations junkie, I would read the first section and then skim until "The Feminists Not Invited"; too many details to absorb, for me)

She's sort of, yes, all of the problematic things about America's position in the world and the dominant themes of American politics. But also, I can't figure out what the 'else' is - like, who else would I want from the Democrat side? Would I want someone on the Republican side? Is there someone with my all politics who is running symbolically - and could anything really be achieved by supporting them?


And there is a lot in me that wants a female president. I want to see everyone figure out how to change their pronouns; I want to see that society-wide shift in unconscious understandings of what is possible, how many testicles you need to be a Leader. I want the First Lady exhibits to struggle with what to do with someone who is also the President, how to handle the treatment of First Ladies as sort of political-barbies next to their princely President husbands. I want Bill in a First-spouses exhibit. I just want to see how people deal with that.

"Buy These Pajamas & Rescue a Prostitute; Or, Why Rescue Brands Are Dumb"

"The actual ad copy is "Created by women in India who wish to remain free of sex slavery." I wonder if were there other contenders for the spot of the word "wish"? "Wish" is nuts—so breezily hopeful, as if it said "prefer to remain free of sex slavery," or "yearn to remain free of sex slavery" or even "think it would rule to remain free of sex slavery." The tagline is so disturbingly arch I don't think anything I've imagined is much worse than what is.

Getting further inside the world of Punjammies—to their umbrella organization called International Princess Project—did not increase my sympathy...I imagine that these Punjammies customers are very nice. But I hope they don't think they are contributing to the fight against human trafficking any more than I would be "helping fight illiteracy" by teaching one person to read. I would be fighting that person's illiteracy, certainly, but if I really wanted to use words like "helping fight illiteracy" I would hope that I would spend some more time and effort on the systemic issues behind it.

I don't mean to sound like a humorless undergrad—please, go ahead and buy Punjammies. Just don't come all over yourself afterwards thinking that you've fought the good fight. If you're truly interested in fighting human trafficking, you could donate a significant amount of money to a shelter in a region of your choice, or throw your time into advocating for decriminalization for sex workers. Or just start investing yourself in the full dismantling of the world economy, but know if your efforts work, it will probably suck for you."
http://jezebel.com/buy-these-pajamas-rescue-a-prostitute-or-why-rescue-1688197906?utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

yerssss stop telling me that my economic privileges can save people with flippant purchases. Stop thinking you can start a company that saves people with flippant purchases. Stop thinking that when a little blond child finishes their food in the US it has anything to do with 'starving children in Africa'. Stop evoking images of sad brown people to legitimize choices. That's not what they are there for.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

"The Uneducated Nose"

"When it comes to the vocabulary of sense, in bodice rippers and elsewhere in the English-speaking world, smell is at a significant disadvantage; nonspecificity is commonplace. A recent paper in the journal Cognition, for instance, quipped that if people were as bad at naming sights as they are at naming scents, “they would be diagnosed as aphasic and sent for medical help.” The paper quoted scattershot attempts by participants in a previous study to label the smell of lemon: “air freshener,” “bathroom freshener,” “magic marker,” “candy,” “lemon-fresh Pledge,” “some kind of fruit.” This sort of difficulty seems to have very little to do, however, with the nose’s actual capabilities...
difficulty with talking about smell is not universal... In one analysis, Majid and her colleague Niclas Burenhult found that speakers of Jahai were as good at classifying scratch-and-sniff cards as they were at classifying color chips; their English-speaking counterparts, meanwhile, tended to give meandering and disparate descriptions of scents...
In English, smells are often described in terms of the things that emit them (“chocolaty”) rather than in terms of their inherent, abstract qualities (“musty”). In Jahai, however, there are about a dozen abstract words in common use for distinct scents, such as the one that emanates from stale rice, mushrooms, cooked cabbage, and certain species of hornbill (yes, the bird)."
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/naming-scents-uneducated-nose

(credit to JL)

Monday, May 25, 2015

"Earth Actually Has Another Moon"

"Dubbed Cruithne, this moon orbits the Earth quite differently from the familiar orb we see every night. Instead of traveling in a tight circle around the Earth, Cruithne actually follows what scientists call a“horseshoe” orbit, where the celestial body creates multiple, smaller rings that are connected and eventually compose a large circle. Essentially, it looks like a doodle.

Cruithne’s path is massive. As it swings away from the Earth, Cruithne actually comes close to Venus and Mars only to travel back near Earth again. And though it orbits the Sun once a year, it takes Cruithne about 800 years to travel all of the rings that compose its massive orbit."
http://modernnotion.com/earth-another-moon-heres-havent-heard/

Huh, interesting
(and also, you - reader - are not allowed to feel superior for knowing this)

"The Miracle of Minneapolis"

"Shaver’s theory, which he’s developing into a book, is that Minneapolis is so successful at turning medium-size companies into giants because its most important resource never leaves the city: educated managers of every level, who can work at just about any company. Shaver looked at the outward migration of employed, college-educated people who earn at least twice the national average income—his proxy for the manager demographic—and found that of the 25 largest American cities, only one had a lower rate of outflow than Minneapolis (although he couldn’t compute data for three others). Among all college-educated workers, Minneapolis also had the second-lowest outflow. “It bears out the old adage: ‘It’s really hard to get people to move to Minneapolis, and it’s impossible to get them to leave.’ ”

Why is that? And how has the city stayed so affordable despite its wealth and success? The answers appear to involve a highly unusual approach to regional governance, one that encourages high-income communities to share not only their tax revenues but also their real estate with the lower and middle classes"
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-miracle-of-minneapolis/384975/

Sunday, May 24, 2015

"ADHD Is Different for Women"

"Dr. Ellen Littman, author of Understanding Girls with ADHD, has studied high IQ adults and adolescents with the disorder for more than 25 years. She attributes the under-diagnosis of girls and women—it is estimated that there are around 4 million who are not diagnosed, or half to three-quarters of all women with ADHD—and the misunderstandings that have ensued about the disorder as it manifests in females, to the early clinical studies of ADHD in the 1970s. “These studies were based on really hyperactive young white boys who were taken to clinics,” Littman says...

while a decrease in symptoms at puberty is common for boys, the opposite is true for girls, whose symptoms intensify as estrogen increases in their system, thus complicating the general perception that ADHD is resolved by puberty...

For the two decades prior to my diagnosis, I never would have suspected my symptoms were symptoms; rather, I considered these traits—my messiness, forgetfulness, trouble concentrating, important-document-losing—to be embarrassing personal failings."


There's so much wrapped up in here - how diseases and disorders can be defined around a reference group, how a diagnosis of a disorder can relieve a lot of shame, and then the interesting neurodevelopmental questions about ADHD.  

(credit to MD)


Some other articles on this topic - 

Something to listen to (including an ~online quiz~):


In conversations or meetings, I would constantly pre-empt people – anticipating their train of thought and talking over them (with varying degrees of success). I found myself interrupting, jumping in, and being boisterous in cutting to the proverbial chase. There was no chase, except me chasing time…
I used to think I was anxious. But I realised that the content of the thoughts were not worrisome – there were just lots of thoughts. All of the time. From the moment my synapses starting firing to when I finally fell asleep. If my thoughts were milk, they could make butter…
It's seem de rigueur to joke about being 'totally addicted' to technology/devices that you enjoy using or 'soooo ADD' when you just mean busy and excitable. I made these comments and mostly people joked along – until one person didn't. He was a colleague and child psychiatrist who gently suggested I was doing a pretty good job at disguising the issues with my coping techniques, but the cracks were starting to show. He was right. The strategies themselves were becoming the distraction.”

"From the standpoint of teachers, parents and the world at large, the problem with people with A.D.H.D. looks like a lack of focus and attention and impulsive behavior. But if you have the “illness,” the real problem is that, to your brain, the world that you live in essentially feels not very interesting... findings suggest that people with A.D.H.D are walking around with reward circuits that are less sensitive at baseline than those of the rest of us. Having a sluggish reward circuit makes normally interesting activities seem dull and would explain, in part, why people with A.D.H.D. find repetitive and routine tasks unrewarding and even painfully boring."


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/opinion/sunday/a-natural-fix-for-adhd.html

Not being in a learning environment is a huge shift for me, I never realized how many little thrills I was used to getting in my daily life from something new and interesting I would encounter as a student. And maybe this is why I always started to feel irritable in August and look forward to school starting again. And I have always been a person who becomes less productive on a task the longer she does it and the easier it becomes.


"researchers are testing mindfulness: teaching people to monitor their thoughts and feelings without judgments or other reactivity. Rather than simply being carried away from a chosen focus, they notice that their attention has wandered, and renew their concentration.

According to a recent report in Clinical Neurophysiology, adults with A.D.D. were shown to benefit from mindfulness training combined with cognitive therapy; their improvements in mental performance were comparable to those achieved by subjects taking medications."
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/12/exercising-the-mind-to-treat-attention-deficits/?_r=0

From a neuro perspective, it’s a really interesting question we are probably like 15 years away from really having the tools to directly address, because it’s a prefrontal cortex thing that’s not cellular like, say, Alzheimer’s but instead it’s a difference in the system-state of the brain. And it could probably be cellular stuff too.

"The Quantum Mechanics of Fate"

"Physicists as renowned as John Wheeler, Richard Feynman, Dennis Sciama, and Yakir Aharonov have speculated that causality is a two-headed arrow and the future might influence the past. Today, the leading advocate of this position is Huw Price, a University of Cambridge philosopher who specializes in the physics of time. “The answer to the question, ‘Could the world be such that we do have a limited amount of control over the past,’ ” Price says, “is yes.” What’s more, Price and others argue that the evidence for such control has been staring at us for more than half a century.

That evidence, they say, is something called entanglement, a signature feature of quantum mechanics...
Price asks us to consider the impossible: that doing something to either of the entangled particles causes effects which travel backward in time to the point in the past when the two particles were close together and interacting strongly. At that point, information from the future is exchanged, each particle alters the behavior of its partner, and these effects then carry forward into the future again. There is no need for instantaneous communication, and no violation of relativity."
http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-quantum-mechanics-of-fate-rp

Also, this; wow, science/lyricism - "Although individual particle processes can move backward or forward in time, the universe as a whole is skewed in the forward direction, because its past endpoint was highly ordered, and its future endpoint is highly disordered. Our mortality is this asymmetry in microcosm."

Saturday, May 23, 2015

"Lean In Isn’t Just About Professional Fulfillment. It’s Also About Worst-Case Scenarios."

"Sandberg faces a terrible situation, but a situation that will not be made more terrible by worries about how to feed her children or pay the mortgage. She can focus on the most important issues—her grief and that of her children. Given Goldberg’s own successes, Sandberg would probably have been financially stable in widowhood even if she hadn’t leaned in. But in some ways, her message is even more powerful now: It looked like she had the perfect life, but no one is immune to shocking upheavals. Whatever her philosophy’s shortcomings, leaning in even a little bit—staying connected to the professional world while focusing on your children—can help keep you on your feet, if and when the universe lands a sucker punch."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2015/05/04/death_of_sheryl_sandberg_s_husband_lean_in_prepares_you_for_a_worst_case.html?utm_source=slate&utm_medium=syndication

"How to Work in Tech and Still Be a “Good San Franciscan”"

"Are you a “techie” tired of being maligned for simply moving to a wonderful city for work? I would be too. Here’s what you can do to be one of the good guys, and help unite San Francisco against greed... Will doing these things “save San Francisco”? No, of course not, but it’s a step in the right direction. We need to bridge this gap between “techies” and “locals” and unite to make San Francisco the inclusive place it should be. There is a war going on and we are all being used to distract each other while a few people at the top get very very rich. Fuck them."
https://medium.com/@broke_ass_stuart/how-to-work-in-tech-and-still-be-a-good-san-franciscan-83a600985cf8

Friday, May 22, 2015

"The Science of Superstition"

"Magical thinking is not just a result of ignorance or indoctrination—it appears to be a side effect of normal, socially adaptive thinking: we attribute intentions to the natural world in much the same way that we attribute intentions to other people. Indeed, a recent paper from a lab at the University of British Columbia reported that the better study participants were at reading others, the more strongly they believed in God, the paranormal, and the notion that life has a purpose [6].Meanwhile, one of the few true avenues to atheism may be autism. The same lab found that the more autistic traits a person had, the less likely he or she was to believe in God [7]."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/the-science-of-superstition/384962/

"Practicing Islam in Short Shorts"

"I'm guilty of judging and projecting my thoughts onto her before giving her a chance to receive this information and respond to it. It's wrong. My hesitation in these scenarios comes from knowing that a sizable number of people from my religion look at people dressed like me and write us off as women who have lost their way and veered off the path of Islam. I don't cover my thighs, let alone my ankles. (The most dominant Islamic schools of thought consider a woman's ankles to be 'awrah, meaning an intimate part of her body, and revealing it is undoubtedly a sin.) Nothing in my outward appearance speaks to or represents the beliefs I carry. Some might even get to know me and still label me as a non-practicing Muslim—I drink whiskey and I smoke weed regularly.

However, I am a practicing Muslim. I pray (sometimes), fast, recite the travel supplication before I start my car's engine, pay my zakkah (an annual charitable practice that is obligatory for all that can afford it) and, most importantly, I feel very Muslim. There are many like me. We don't believe in a monolithic practice of Islam. We love Islam, and because we love it so much we refuse to reduce it to an inflexible and fossilized way of life. Yet we still don't fit anywhere. We're more comfortable passing for non-Muslims, if it saves us from one or more of the following: unsolicited warnings about the kind punishment that awaits us in hell, unwelcomed advice from a stranger that starts with "I am like your [insert relative]", or an impromptu lecture, straight out of a Wahhabi textbook I thought was nonsense at age 13."
http://truestories.gawker.com/practicing-islam-in-short-shorts-1683991294

Something about this feels like "what westerners want to hear" but it's also her real story and it's super shitty that her life is surrounded by expectations and counter-expectations and politics that will totally use her as an example.

"America’s Most Influential Thinker on Race"

"The principal point Justice Thomas has made in a variety of cases is that black people deserve to be treated as independent, competent, self-sufficient citizens. He rejects the idea that 21st-century government and the courts should continue to view blacks as victims of a history of slavery and racism.

Instead, in an era with a rising number of blacks, Hispanics, Asians and immigrants, he cheers personal responsibility as the basis of equal rights. In his concurring opinion in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), he made the case against government set-asides for minority businesses by arguing that “racial paternalism and its unintended consequences can be as poisonous and pernicious as any other form of discrimination.” The Constitution, he said, bans discrimination by “those who wish to oppress a race or by those who have a sincere desire to help.”"
http://www.wsj.com/articles/juan-williams-americas-most-influential-thinker-on-race-1424476527?mod=e2fb

Related: Up from Leeds (Charles Barkley)

Thursday, May 21, 2015

"WHY I DROPPED EVERYTHING AND STARTED TEACHING KENDRICK LAMAR’S NEW ALBUM"

"Butterflies are beautiful, too – and they are full of color. Butterflies are so beautiful, they can’t be made any more so. They can’t be manipulated, exploited, controlled, or confined. So why does America keep trying to do these same things to people of color? Why does America keep trying to pimp the butterfly? Surely we must know by now, the Civil Rights Movement was a metamorphoses from which we emerged into a colorblind, post-racial springtime, shedding the cocoon of Jim Crow, right?

It’s 2015 and Kendrick Lamar doesn’t think so. His album continues the conversation that Toni Morrison started in 1970. Inspired by the Black Is Beautiful cultural movement of the previous decade, Morrison offers a devastating critique of white supremacy...
While it’s problematic to cast Kendrick as a savior for hip hop and black America, it’s equally as dangerous to dismiss him. He offers a new brand of hope for the hip hop generation – one that is rooted in traditions of resistance and struggle. With pain and anger in his voice on “The Blacker the Berry,” Kendrick describes weeping, “when Trayvon Martin was in the street.” It’s easy to become devastated by the stagnation of race relations in America. But Kendrick is careful to balance the chaos with a clear and purposeful sense of direction – even when shining the light on his own hypocritical double consciousness...
If I pedagogically ignored Kendrick’s album release at a time when my students were reading Toni Morrison alongside articles about Mike Brown, Ferguson, #BlackLivesMatter – and considering the disposability of black bodies in an America that constructs a standard of beauty based solely on whiteness – I would have missed an opportunity to engage them in a pivotal conversation about race, hope, and justice. I would have missed an opportunity to speak to their hip-hop sensibilities – their hip-hop ways of being and knowing. I would have missed a chance to develop a set of profound connections to a popular culture text that is part of their lives. "

Warning: This essay super spoils The Bluest Eye. Which, I guess, is punishment for me because I still haven't read it somehow. /That's sort of the fault of my education system that had me read so many different shades of the White American experience and then, like, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to help me understand my life and position in society. This is such a huge digression.


Anyway, I really want to have a listening party for To Pimp a Butterfly now. While exploring how the double consciousness might have shifted in the past century. 

"Hollywood's New Feminist Voice of Reason -- Ryan Gosling"

"A couple of weeks ago, Ryan spoke out against the anonymous members of the MPAA and their attempt to censor an honest depiction of female sexuality.

He issued this statement,
You have to question a cinematic culture which preaches artistic expression, and yet would support a decision that is clearly a product of a patriarchy-dominant society, which tries to control how women are depicted on screen. The MPAA is okay supporting scenes that portray women in scenarios of sexual torture and violence for entertainment purposes, but they are trying to force us to look away from a scene that shows a woman in a sexual scenario, which is both complicit and complex. It's misogynistic in nature to try and control a woman's sexual presentation of self. I consider this an issue that is bigger than this film.

His co-star, Michelle Williams, also issued a statement,

Mainstream films often depict sex and violence in a manner that is disturbing and very far from reality. Yet, the MPAA regularly awards these films with a more audience friendly rating, enabling our cultlure's desensitization to violence, rape, torture and brutality. Our film does not depict any of these attributes. It's simply a candid look at the difficulties couples face in sustaining their relationships over time. Blue Valentine opens a door for couples to have a dialogue about the everyday realities of many relationships. This film was made in the spirit of love, honesty and intimacy. I hope that the MPAA will hear our pleas and reconsider their decision.""
http://feministguidetohollywood.blogspot.com/2010/12/hollywoods-new-feminist-voice-of-reason.html

This is from like 5 years ago but I didn't see it then and also, wow, that was 5 years ago???

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

"Episode 599: The Invisible Wall"

"Hernando de Soto wanted to figure out what was trapping people in poverty. "There's gotta be an invisible wall someplace," he thought. "Let's find the wall."
Today on the show: How de Soto found the invisible wall that was trapping people in poverty. How it transformed poor countries around the world. And how his discovery almost got him killed."
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2015/01/28/381652827/episode-599-the-invisible-wall

This helps explain the world and how it works and why.

"THE POWER OF AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART: A BLACK HISTORY MONTH SPECIAL"

"This year, State of the Re:Union recognizes Black History Month through the lens of African-American art, the role it has played in social movements and everyday life, and why it matters both to the black community and the United States as a whole."
http://stateofthereunion.com/power-of-african-american-art/

A great little audio-documentary on art (music, literature, food), artists, and black civil rights campaigns - including history and art about U Street here in DC
(let's pretend that my posting this after February is next-level commentary about how stories about black people shouldn't just be told during the shortest month of the year) (totally intentional)

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

"The 100 Most Important Cat Pictures Of All Time"

http://ak-hdl.buzzfed.com/static/2014-04/enhanced/webdr04/10/17/enhanced-buzz-7745-1397164006-9.jpg
"Why It Matters: Because this is the way the world ends — not with a bang, but with a cat who is hugging a cat who is hugging another cat."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/expresident/best-cat-pictures?s=mobile
Happy birthday to me. I strategically only scrolled through the first third of this before I scheduled it to be posted.

"Why we all need to practice emotional first aid"

"We'll go to the doctor when we feel flu-ish or a nagging pain. So why don’t we see a health professional when we feel emotional pain: guilt, loss, loneliness? Too many of us deal with common psychological-health issues on our own, says Guy Winch. But we don’t have to. He makes a compelling case to practice emotional hygiene — taking care of our emotions, our minds, with the same diligence we take care of our bodies."

Yay, emotional hygiene, I love that. I am thinking about actionable lessons that I could take to my high school at some point (literally been trying for years to make meetings with the principal(s) to discuss mental health). This is something that could actually be taught, and be a general value for students.

"'Shadow biosphere' might be hiding strange life right under our noses"

"Biologists have proposed the existence of a “shadow biosphere”—an undiscovered group of living things with biochemistry different from what we’re used to. Most of life’s diversity on our planet is too small to see, making microbes the most likely place to look for these new types of life. Already, new discoveries are shaking our beliefs about what life is. Recently discovered giant, amoeba-infecting viruses blur the line between life and nonlife—although they rely on their hosts for essential biological functions, the bacteria-sized viruses have complex genomes. Such unexpected discoveries suggest that we shouldn’t define what we are searching for by what we know is already out there, Orphan said."
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/02/shadow-biosphere-might-be-hiding-strange-life-right-under-our-noses?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

I think about this all the time! If we find life, it's almost definitely going to be something fundamentally outside of our experience. Like, if there are really other species out there developing the ability to travel through space, all of that is going to be so tremendously different - "culture", "society ",...  It's sort of exciting to think about

Monday, May 18, 2015

“This insanely detailed map proves race is a social construct”

“The hierarchy of the table reflects the conventional wisdom of the time — eugenics and social Darwinism hypothesized that the Nordic races were the most evolved, that southern and eastern Europeans were less so, and that non-Europeans (who are barely worth a mention on the immigration map) were the "lowest," least-evolved peoples.

There wasn't universal agreement on what the races actually were, but the federal government appears to have used "Nordic, Celtic, Slavic and Iberic" regularly to categorize the immigrants coming into America. A medical journal article published about a decade after this map expresses concern about the "preponderance of the Iberic and Slavic races" among recent immigrants, because of "their poorer physical and mental equipment, and their radically different ideals and standards of living as compared with the Celtic and Teutonic races."

By the point that article was written, the government was beginning to respond to fears like the ones the authors expressed — by moving toward widespread restrictions on immigration.”

Sunday, May 17, 2015

"Top Canadian scientists resign over lack of female nominees"

"Dr. Catherine Anderson, a clinical instructor in the faculty of medicine at UBC and a nationally renowned science educator, resigned April 9 because she was concerned about the message the museum was sending to female students.

“It’s important for young people to see people who look like them being successful. The Hall of Fame is supposed to represent the best and the brightest in Canada and it’s just not doing that.”

Illes and Anderson asked to reopen nominations so a more diverse group of candidates could be considered after they were  given four male finalists to consider for three spots in the Hall of Fame. Both Illes and Anderson say the request was denied by Corbeil, who oversees the nominations...

U of T engineering professor and researcher Molly Shoichet, one of five recipients of the Women in Science award from UNESCO and the L’Oreal Foundation this year, is concerned by Bouchard’s implication that there aren’t any women who deserve to be nominated. “If the Hall of Fame doesn’t know about the fantastic Canadian female scientists who are internationally renowned and would be great inductees, that’s a commentary on the Hall of Fame.”"
http://www.macleans.ca/society/two-top-canadian-scientists-resign-from-award-committee-over-lack-of-female-candidates/

“Why Americans still use Fahrenheit long after everyone else switched to Celsius”

“As an early inventor of the thermometer as we know it, Fahrenheit naturally had to put something on them to mark out different temperatures. The scale he used became what we now call Fahrenheit.

Fahrenheit set zero at the lowest temperature he could get a water and salt mixture to reach. He then used a (very slightly incorrect) measurement of the average human body temperature, 96 degrees, as the second fixed point in the system. The resulting schema set the boiling point of water at 212 degrees, and the freezing point at 32 degrees…
Congress passed a law, the 1975 Metric Conversion Act, that was theoretically supposed to begin the process of metrication. It set up a Metric Board to supervise the transition.

The law crashed and burned. Because it made metrication voluntary, rather than mandatory, the public had a major say in the matter. And lots of people didn't want to have to learn new systems for temperatures or weights.”

It’s so, so silly when you look at it. Ugh, status quos; ugh, change being uncomfortable.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

"Relearning the Art of Asking Questions"

"Because expectations for decision-making have gone from “get it done soon” to “get it done now” to “it should have been done yesterday,” we tend to jump to conclusions instead of asking more questions. And the unfortunate side effect of not asking enough questions is poor decision-making. That’s why it’s imperative that we slow down and take the time to ask more — and better — questions. At best, we’ll arrive at better conclusions. At worst, we’ll avoid a lot of rework later on.

Aside from not speaking up enough, many professionals don’t think about how different types of questions can lead to different outcomes. You should steer a conversation by asking the right kinds of questions, based on the problem you’re trying to solve. In some cases, you’ll want to expand your view of the problem, rather than keeping it narrowly focused. In others, you may want to challenge basic assumptions or affirm your understanding in order to feel more confident in your conclusions"
https://hbr.org/2015/03/relearning-the-art-of-asking-questions?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits


I think the problem is also that some workplaces don't trust questions, that people are implicitly socially punished when they ask for help or contextual information.
Frustratingly, I have often founs that people will say 'let me know if you have any questions!' but then deeply overreact to actually being asked a question. Like, they will assume that my question is an indication that I fundamentally don't understand and need to hear the entire explanation of the project again (in a way that typically, again, doesn't directly address my question). Or, that my asking a question means that I am not equipped to complete the task and I want someone to come do it for me.
So, there is also training needed in listening and supporting question-askers.

"American democracy is doomed"

“voiced in another register, my outlandish thesis is actually the conventional wisdom in the United States. Back when George W. Bush was president and I was working at a liberal magazine, there was a very serious discussion in an editorial meeting about the fact that the United States was now exhibiting 11 of the 13 telltale signs of a fascist dictatorship. The idea that Bush was shredding the Constitution and trampling on congressional prerogatives was commonplace. When Obama took office, the partisan valence of the complaints shifted, but their basic tenor didn't. Conservative pundits — not the craziest, zaniest ones on talk radio, but the most serious and well-regarded — compare Obama's immigration moves to the actions of a Latin-American military dictator…
The breakdown of American constitutional democracy is a contrarian view. But it's nothing more than the view that rather than everyone being wrong about the state of American politics, maybe everyone is right. Maybe Bush and Obama are dangerously exceeding norms of executive authority. Maybe legislative compromise really has broken down in an alarming way. And maybe the reason these complaints persist across different administrations and congresses led by members of different parties is that American politics is breaking down.”..
The United States, of course, is  a long way from a coup. What we are witnessing instead is a rise in what Georgetown University Professor Mark Tushnet labeled "constitutional hardball" in a 2004 article.

Constitutional hardball describes legal and political moves "that are without much question within the bounds of existing constitutional doctrine and practice but that are nonetheless in some tension with existing pre-constitutional understanding." In other words, moves that do not violate the letter of the law, but do trample on our conventional understanding of how it is supposed to work.”
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed

Yo. I speculate about this all the time, but totally out of my ass because I have only taken one political science course but it totally freaked me out about how fundamentally dysfunctional Congress is.
I’m ready for the #revolution.