"To replace the Confederate flag with a Pride flag won't fix American racism"

"The Pride flag, created in 1978 by San Francisco artist Gilbert Baker, is today a profound international symbol for LGBT visibility and rights. Harvey Milk, the assassinated gay civil rights leader, strongly supported the idea of a flag to make the LGBT rights cause “more visible”. Baker said: “A flag really fit that mission, because that’s a way of proclaiming your visibility, or saying, ‘This is who I am!’”And, though it’s worth celebrating that the United States became the 20th country to legalize gay marriage – and worth waving that flag on its own – the right for same-sex couples to marry is not freedom for African Americans from the oppression symbolized by the Confederate flag. To suggest otherwise is to pit two important, but very different, struggles for equality against one another in the cheapest way...
And, as my colleague Dr Timothy P McCarthy told me, “[The flags] represent different traditions of protest – the former a reactionary one, the latter a progressive.” To put these flags in a line of succession is to disrespect the continuing impact on black Americans of the widespread display of the Confederate flag, and to fundamentally misunderstand the depths of the oppression still faced by LGBT people – and black LGBT people – even with the right to marry now enshrined in law."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/29/confederate-flag-pride-flag-fix-racism

mmmmm
"we’re a bit quick to replace a difficult reckoning with an enthusiastic celebration"

Ya - why do we have one understanding of fights against prejudice like they are the same process? Why do we have compartments (race, gender, sexual orientation, etc...) and then draw precise parallels across them? Why were we taught them in this way?

“One chart that explains why the WHO is actually in crisis”

“That's not to say the WHO isn't still hugely important. It has a monopoly on legitimacy, and is the normative body when it comes to health. That monopoly, for right now at least, just isn't being backed by dollar figures, and the organization is trying to find its way. Yet, as public expectations of the organization during the Ebola epidemic made clear, it's still the body the world looks to in times of global health crisis. 

That disconnect between perception and reality is something the organization is now grappling with.

Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO director general, explained in an address at the World Health Assembly today that the arrival of Ebola forced the conversation about internal reform and the organization's role in the world.

"The Ebola outbreak shook this organization to its core," she said. "This was a defining moment for the work of WHO and an historic political moment for world leaders to give WHO new relevance and empower it to lead in global health." Whether the organization remains the leader in global health — with Gates and other players rising — remains to be seen.”

http://www.vox.com/2015/5/18/8621129/who-reform-ebola

“Genome-wide ancestry of 17th-century enslaved Africans from the Caribbean”

“Between 1500 and 1850, more than 12 million enslaved Africans were transported to the New World. The vast majority were shipped from West and West-Central Africa, but their precise origins are largely unknown. We used genome-wide ancient DNA analyses to investigate the genetic origins of three enslaved Africans whose remains were recovered on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin. We trace their origins to distinct subcontinental source populations within Africa, including Bantu-speaking groups from northern Cameroon and non-Bantu speakers living in present-day Nigeria and Ghana. To our knowledge, these findings provide the first direct evidence for the ethnic origins of enslaved Africans, at a time for which historical records are scarce, and demonstrate that genomic data provide another type of record that can shed new light on long-standing historical questions.”

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/05/1421784112

I was talking to a genetics professor and we were jokingly discussing our common experience of being “ad-mixed”, and he mentioned that some geneticists had effectively guilted the Danish government into funding a huge study of ancient bones from slaves (like several European countries, a lot of Danish wealth can be traced back to the slave trade). I think this might be part of that project, and I am super excited for all of the data.

[full text pdf - http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/03/05/1421784112.full.pdf]

“Weight Loss Doesn't Always Lead to Happiness”

“The presumption is that congratulations are due when people slim down—their weight loss has surely made them happier, right? Even among academic researchers who study weight, obesity, and nutrition, that is a question that's been looked at infrequently... Much of the work conducted by obesity researchers has centered around the intricacies of how and why people become obese and overweight, how and if excess weight is detrimental to health, and how to lose it. But there has also been a little exploration into how weight loss could affect the mind…

they narrowed down the original ELSA sample to 1,979 overweight or obese individuals who reported no long-standing illness or clinical depression at the start of the study. The researchers then plotted out changes in measured levels of depressed mood, psychological well-being, hypertension, and triglycerides over a four-year period (the latter two factors known to be strong indicators of cardiovascular health). Even as their hypertension and triglyceride levels decreased compared to weight maintainers and gainers, weight losers were more likely to be depressed. Equally jarring was the finding that the weight-loss group saw no improvement in psychological well-being compared to the other two, though all three groups reported a higher level of depressed mood and a lower level of well-being over the four year period…

And if weight loss isn’t making people happy, that could explain, at least in part, why many people struggle to keep weight off.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/03/weight-loss-doesnt-always-lead-to-happiness/387619/

This is really interesting, and there are a lot of further findings and nuances that I didn’t summarize here. There is a huge amount of research going on in neurobiology exploring the neural link to metabolism/weight loss (metabolic disorders have huge genetic and mechanistic overlap with brain disorders) and it’s all implicitly about sort of curing obesity. It makes me uncomfortable because it sort of pathologizes weight gain. It indicates to me all of the ways in which we, as a society, have labelled one body type as ‘healthy’ and another as diseased and immoral – when, in fact, it is individual to everyone. Body size should not be this identity that it is.

I think this speaks generally to the need for more norms of community support, reducing the shame and stigma around health issues, and giving people space to speak about their struggles outside of apologetic whispers.

Related: Moth on communal depression thing

"Russian official wants to investigate whether U.S. moon landings actually happened"

"why is Investigative Committee member Markin speculating about conspiracy theories surrounding U.S. moon landings that happened decades ago? In his op-ed, the Russian official also emphasized that "U.S. authorities had crossed a line by launching a large-scale corruption probe targeting nine FIFA officials," according to the Moscow Times."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2015/06/17/russian-official-wants-to-investigate-whether-u-s-moon-landings-actually-happened/

Deeply random
(credit to KE)

“Controlling this game with my mind almost drove me crazy”

“During the final fourth of the demo, something weird began to happen. While running from one puzzle to another, I would mentally think about what I would have to do next. This always consisted of having to use the pick-up ability in some way. In these moments of planning my next strategy on the move, I would suddenly pick up an object that randomly crossed my line of sight.

I’d be walking through a path thinking about having to pick up some boulders at the next location, and suddenly, a giant tree branch would float in front of my face. I’d toss it away with my eyebrows then laugh it off, and boom, I’d have a boulder floating in front of me.

I eventually hit a point where I had to try and force myself to not think about picking up a rock, but how would I even do that? Just thinking about not thinking about it made me think about it, which resulted in more objects getting picked up on accident. I had trapped myself in my own mental paradox, where I couldn’t stop picking up objects, even though I didn’t want to do that…

I’m obviously not a neuroscientist, but my imagination is on fire when I think about a generation of children playing games this way. How would those human beings’ brains develop? I’m not so much talking about gaining actual psychic powers, but could these people surpass what today’s human beings are mentally capable of?

Or could they wind up going batshit insane after decades of mentally screaming, “Pick up the rock?””

http://venturebeat.com/2015/03/23/controlling-son-of-nor-with-my-mind-almost-drove-me-crazy/

This actually does sound like something that can change how people think, and make decisions. I hadn’t really thought about that aspect of brain-machine interfaces: planning.

"Breaking the silence: How youth, adults overcame cultural stigmas against depression and got help"

""I was convinced I had to be perfect, not only in school but socially. When I felt sad I convinced myself that I was a cry baby and could get over it. A lot of my depression came from me beating myself up. I really did not like myself," she said. "The people who I at the time considered my friends were particularly hurtful. There was a constant pressure to look good, be thin, get the best clothes and ace tests. I had to have it all, down to keeping my hair perfectly in place, or nothing."

The pressure continued even at San Francisco State. The summer before her junior year she attempted suicide. After recovering she was diagnosed with clinical depression and enrolled in La Selva, a mental health services clinic on California Avenue in Palo Alto that's part of the Momentum Health Group.

For too many people like Thomas and Dolph, what exacerbates their despair is not so much depression, which thanks to decades of research is treatable, but their reluctance to seek help, according to James Millsap, executive director of La Selva. Simply put, many people who should, and could, be receiving effective treatment are not.

"Something stops them. What stops them is not only their condition, which saps their energy and willingness to reach out, but also things they hear on the television set and the people around them that people with mental illnesses are crazy, dangerous, losers, weak or whatever. So then the solution is to start hiding what they feel and that ultimately leads to tragedy. That is the real enemy out there: It's stigma," he said."

http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/05/15/breaking-the-silence-how-youth-adults-overcame-cultural-stigmas-against-depression-and-got-help

"How I Learned To Be OK With Feeling Sad"

"Pre-therapy, this is the only thing I was ever taught, implicitly and explicitly, about sadness: It is bad.

You do not want it. If you've got it, you should definitely try to get rid of it, fast as possible. Whatever you do, don't subject other people to it, because they do not like that... culturally, we aren't allowed to be sad even for a little while. Even when it's perfectly sensible. Even when, sometimes, we need it...
The alarm I experienced over my sadness was another terrible feeling on top of my already terrible symptoms. The energy I spent panicking that I was sad could have been better spent on coping with the sadness. It was true that I — like many people, people with clinically depressed, never-ending, or life-threatening sadness — needed a lot more assistance than just a big philosophical hug, but if I could accept sadness, my therapist kept suggesting, I would be able to experience it (long and hard as that may go on) and then it could pass. The alternative — being sad, plus condemning yourself for being sad — only heightens the suffering. And, likely, the time it lasts...
Now, I was finally embracing it.
Which is how I could come to be in a position to miss it. The interestingness of it. The difference of it from other emotions. I remembered the sensations of it: the weight. The way it slowed things down and took the space of everything else up. It was exquisite, objectively but also as evidence that I couldfeel, that I was open and not shut down, capable of having a whole gamut of emotions rush in, and maybe overwhelm, but move through and move me. Not everyone can. Or does. I am occasionally jealous of people whose emotions come more softly, or quietly, or less often. I assume they have more time and energy, with those not being taken up by sensitivity that makes even the widely considered "good" emotions like joy feel like they're making their heart explode. But for the most part, I'm not. Some people are born, and then they live, and then they die, one of my doctors told me once, in an effort to comfort. You, you die and are reborn sometimes 10 times in one day. Lucky."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/macmcclelland/not-feeling-sad-about-feeling-sad?utm_term=.qtEqaxxK0

This is a really interesting and useful reflection on sadness, and I want to have more of them. I am of the opinion that American culture is too concerned with the smile, and an emphasis on high-energy positive emotions. Like, is the ideal state calmness and peace - or joy and exuberance?

"Protecting Mauna A Wakea: The Space Between Science and Spirituality"

"Mauna Kea is special to the Hawaiian people because it represents the beginning of our oral history, what we call moʻoleo. The view of the white cap of Mauna Kea poking through the clouds is likely the first thing our kupuna (ancestors) saw as they rolled through the deep ocean swells and peered through the mist in search of the priceless ʻaina (land) we call Hawaii nei today...

If built, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) will be a 1.4-billion-dollar 18-story telescope with a segmented mirror lens the size of a basketball court. But the telescope is supposed to be built atop what is considered by many to be the most sacred mountain in Hawaii: Mauna Kea. The TMT will be the fourteenth observational complex built atop Mauna Kea, reigniting a controversy that began in 1977 with the proposed construction of the W. M. Keck Observatory. Native Hawaiian opposition to the TMT has resulted in a recent temporary freeze on construction...
To gain some understanding of the complicated issue at hand, I want to take a historical turn: I want to consider the immoral suppression of our islands by the West. Most of all, I want to tell the story, our story, in a way that respects Indigenous knowledge in the way the West did not...
Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders as a whole have never opposed science: on the contrary, our expansive knowledge of the natural world and renowned skill for astronavigation, or wayfinding, were light years ahead of our Western counterparts...

As a young, Native Hawaiian scientist who intends to return to Hawaii after finishing my postdoctoral research, I realize the complicated implications of my choice to stand by my people and oppose the construction of the TMT. Am I shunning science by doing this?"
http://mixedracepolitics.com/2015/04/16/protecting-mauna-a-wakea-the-space-between-science-spirituality/

Being in science policy, I feel like I should have known about this.

"Just How Nepotistic Are We?"

"I studied the probability of male baby boomers’ reaching the same level of success as their fathers. I had to limit myself to fathers and sons because this was a highly sexist period in which women held few powerful political positions...

I went through a wide range of fields and found a consistent pattern: greater success for the sons, but nothing like the edge a winning politician provides.

Here is the estimated parental edge for other big American prizes and positions. An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-just-how-nepotistic-are-we.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=0&referrer=

Like, obviously, political success is just an extremely heritable trait. Clearly.

It's weird, this is sort of something we know but also it's not usually put in these terms.

"Bobby Jindal is so ‘white’ – Twitterati mock Jindal’s Presidential bid"

"Conservative candidate Bobby Jindal is often lambasted for his enthusiasm to distance him from his desi roots and even refused to be called an Indian-American. So when the Conservative candidate launched his US presidential bid, the Twitterati led by Indian-American comics Hari Kondabolu and Aasif Mandvi started trending jokes with the hashtag #BobbyJindalIsSoWhite."
http://us.india.com/news/world/bobby-jindal-is-so-white-twitterati-mock-jindals-presidential-bid-435787/

These are super funny and super cutting. 

"How 'Orange Is the New Black' Misrepresents Women's Federal Prison and Why It Matters"

"while it may not make for an exciting backstory, six in 10 women in real federal prison are there for nonviolent drug crimes. For every woman who has committed murder there are 99 drug offenders. Almost none of the 99 are international drug smugglers like Alex Vause; most of the women incarcerated for crack cocaine or methamphetamine were caught with less than 100 grams, the weight of an average bar of soap. Many sold small amounts of drugs to support their own addiction or, like Taystee and Daya, worked as a low-level assistant in a relative's operation...

We only see a couple of mothers on the show, but in real federal prison four in five women have children, and over half have kids under 18...

While Crazy Eyes, Jimmy and Lorna are the only characters who display any mental health issues on the show, in reality 62 percent of all women in federal prison suffer mental health problems...

women's prisons barely existed 30 years ago. There are 10 times as many women in prison today as there were in 1980, an explosion twice as large as that of the male prison population. With one twentieth of the world's population, we now have a quarter of the world's male prisoners and a third of the world's female prisoners"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amos-irwin/how-orange-is-the-new-black-misrepresents-womens-federal-prison-and-why-it-matters_b_7547334.html

Prison reform prison reform whyyy

"Guardians of the Rail"

"Haight is the sort of man who likes to bully bullies and has so many tattoos on his neck — including the names of his wife and two sons — that he jokes he doesn’t have room for any more. He is also one of the crossing guards who monitors the train tracks at the Churchill and Alma intersection, right next to Palo Alto High School, where he graduated in the Class of 1996.

The train guards work for Val Security, a private security firm commissioned by the City of Palo Alto to watch over the tracks since 2011. So far, the city manager has spent $133,000 on an emergency contingent of train guards this year. In April,  the city council earmarked $175,000 to effectively continue the guards’ presence into the summer months, though the longevity of this arrangment remains to be seen...

One time, Rodriguez noticed a kid loitering by the tracks late at night, who admitted, when pressed, that he had recently gone through a family dispute.

“The truth is, you know all you’re going to do is depress your whole family,” Rodriguez told him. “You’re going to ruin everyone else’s life because you’re going to be gone. Everyone else here is going to be thinking of you. Missing you. And you’re going to be gone.”

Later, the kid passed by with his friends and didn’t say a word to Rodriguez. He came back alone and tapped Rodriguez on the shoulder and said, “Thank you.” Rodriguez nodded. And then the kid left."
http://verdemagazine.com/guardians-of-the-rail

So proud of the journalism at my high school.

"‘HAS ANYONE HERE BEEN RAPED BY ISIS?’"

"Does the public’s interest in knowing explicit details of sexual violence outweigh these victims’ urgent need for safety and privacy? I don’t think so and there are indications that victims would agree.

In extreme cases, journalists have tricked victims into giving interviews. In its report “Escape from Hell,” Amnesty International tells the story of a woman who had requested medical assistance because she was having panic attacks. Instead of being taken into a doctor’s office, she was taken to a room full of journalists waiting to interview her...

One of the consequences of this obsessive reporting on rape has been that all of the escapees are now suspected by their families, community, and aid workers of having been raped while in captivity. They are all now collectively stigmatized and shamed."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/18/has-anyone-here-been-raped-by-isis.html

"When Men Want Kids — and Women Aren’t So Sure"

"Lauren is part of a growing cohort of women: those in their late 20s and early 30s who aren’t sure about — or are decidedly against — becoming mothers. In a nationally representative survey of single, childless people in 2011, more men than women said they wanted kids. (On the other hand, more women reported seeking independence in their relationships, personal space, interests, and hobbies.) A different poll from 2013 echoed those findings, with more than 80 percent of men saying they’d always wanted to be a father or at least thought they would be someday. Just 70 percent of women felt the same...

This generation hasn’t solved the problems. But young women may be more aware of them. “The younger generation of women is even better integrated into the workforce and feels like sometimes they’re forced to choose between having a meaningful career and having kids at all,” Coontz noted.

The majority of today’s young people of both genders seek an egalitarian split in work and family responsibilities. But even if both partners want it, women are aware that they probably won’t get it...
She had already thought through the disruption, but the notion that his life would change was entirely new. “Even in a progressive, liberal, feminist household like ours, there was still that idea that the woman will stay home and the guy will keep working … or that a man’s work isn’t going to be compromised.” At one point, she asked if he would consider quitting his job to be a stay-at-home father given how much he wanted a baby. “That just wasn’t the plan he had in mind,” she said."
http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/03/when-men-want-kids-and-women-arent-so-sure.html

This is really interesting, the idea that men are less likely to think of the disruption children would cause to their lives.

Also, mahhhhh, there is no way for something to not be terrible. 

"Baltimore Residents Away From Turmoil Consider Their Role"

"“They’re not our reality,” Ashley Fowler, 30, said on Monday at the restaurant where she works. “They’re not what we’re living right now. We live in, not to be racist, white America.”

As Baltimore considers its way forward after the violent unrest brought by the death of Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old black man who died of injuries he suffered while in police custody, residents in its predominantly white neighborhoods acknowledge that they are sometimes struggling to understand what beyond Mr. Gray’s death spurred the turmoil here. For many, the poverty and troubled schools of gritty West Baltimore are distant troubles, glimpsed only when they pass through the area on their way somewhere else...

“I can only imagine how frustrated they must be,” said Ms. Bahr, 36, a nurse who was out with her 3-year-old daughter, Sally. “I just wish I knew how to solve poverty. I don’t know what to do to make it better.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/05/us/baltimore-residents-away-from-freddie-gray-turmoil-consider-their-role.html

Let's not even get into how patronizing these people are.
There is this thing I have been noticing recently where people don't want to talk about things that aren't basically already solved. Like, if there is a problem but there isn't an obvious solution yet, people can get really uncomfortable when you want to talk about it. And then discuss it as a useless thing to discuss. Like, I think there is way more discussion if police violence because we have this bandaid idea for bodycams - people can start sentences with "police brutality is a problem" because they know they can end that sentence with "bodycams are the solution".

But, really, solutions only come about after all of the talking and the reflection and the looking directly at the problem. There is a necessary period of uncomfortableness.

"Man Hands"

"When a woman puts on a foot or a knee or an arm, she often finds that it’s not quite right. Knees are too tall and too stiff, feet don’t fit into shoes, hands are big, ankles don’t bend to accommodate heels. Every step a female amputee takes puts them face to face with the fact that prosthetics is still a male dominated industry.

It starts at the beginning. Before they even get a device, amputees have to find a prosthetist, a person who they will work with for likely hundreds of hours over their lifetime to find, fit and adjust their device. And that prosthetist not only has to really understand what the patient wants, communicate well, and create and shape devices for the amputee, they also often have to work in private areas...
“You used to have to weigh close to 130 pounds to wear a microprocessor knee. I could never get a microprocessor knee to even flex," she said. "The everyday walking foot used to start at a [size] 6.”
Bassett, an above-the-knee amputee and triathlete, found that at her height she couldn’t find a prosthetic knee system that really worked for her. So she runs without one—on a straight leg without a knee joint at all. It took her a while to get used to, but it works for her now. She's a four-time medalist at the ITU Paratriathlon World Championships...
And, just like the big feet Lacey and other had to deal with, the hands that companies make are often sized for men. The first set of microprocessor hands—devices in which the speed and motion of the hand is controlled by a computer chip, rather than physically—were too big for most women. “A female couldn’t wear it, unless they wanted a giant hand on there,” said Havlik. Even now, companies unveil their large, male hand first. The female hand is always the second priority, and often doesn’t get made."
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/man-hands

This set of issues is really interesting and challenging.
Ladies exist too.

"How Impossible, Actually, Is the Dinosaur DNA Splicing in Jurassic World?"

"Well, there’s just one problem: Dinos are not like strawberries. In the case of GMO crops, we’re talking about isolating one gene that codes for one specific trait. In the case of Jurassic World, we’re talking about traits that involve hundreds of genes. Take camouflage, the trait that (spoiler alert!) so surprises the Indominus rex’s trainers. Blending in with your surroundings requires tweaks to neural genes, skin genes, hormonal genes, and temperature sensitivity genes. “It’s likely a whole suite of genes,” says Beth Shapiro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California at Santa Cruz and author of How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-Extinction.

In other words, it’s not a simple matter of genetic cutting and pasting. “When genomes evolve, they don’t do so in isolation,” says Shapiro. “They do so in the background of the entire genome.”"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2015/06/16/jurassic_world_s_sketchy_science_how_impossible_would_it_be_to_splice_dinosaur.html

So, well, I didn't like Jurassic World. Like, I enjoyed the experience of watching it - but I didn't enjoy the thing itself. None of the characters had any kind of memorable personality (or memorable names... except for I think Larry?, the control room guy, who has a great scene involving an awkward hug), there was an absurd level of product placement, and it only passed the Bechdel Test because some of the female dinosaurs talk to each other (although, it's been pointed out, they were probably talking about a man). 

But, honestly, the most annoying thing for me was the not-subtle shade it tries to throw at GMOs. Watching it, I realized where a lot of the fear comes from - it's because most geneticists in media are in the role of the evil scientist with an experiment that either goes massively out of control, or is intentionally created to do something evil. In addition, biology and genetics are massively mis-represented to make it seem as though a lot more is possible and feasible. If genetics, or available genetic tools, worked anything like they do in the movies then there would be a lot of reasons to stop all genetics research for a second and work out some careful screening procedures. But they don't, and it's frustrating that so many people only have access to these false portrayals - and that these false perceptions are the only basis they have to make judgments about things like GMOs

"Pockets of Resistance"

"As children we are taught that we have a right to defend ourselves. As media consumers, we applaud characters who fight back against systems and people that oppress them. As a nation, we enter into violent conflict whether the threats are actual or merely perceived. And yet, take one look at our justice system and it quickly becomes clear: Self-defense is a justification that seems only to work if you’re wealthy, white, male or a guest star on The Good Wife.

Just such a glaring double standard takes center stage in blair dorosh-walther’s new documentary, Out in the Night, which chronicles the past eight years in the lives of the New Jersey 4—Venice Brown, Terrain Dandridge, Renata Hill and Patreese Johnson. They’re a group of queer African American women who, after an altercation with a street harasser, found themselves steamrolled by the justice system and dehumanized by the media, the newest casualties in a long-running history of casting lesbians in the role of violent man-haters, regardless of the truth...
Black, female, lesbian, working-class: “It was the perfect storm of their multiple identities,” says dorosh-walther. “The prosecutor and judge and police just didn’t believe the women.” Nor did the media: “The first article that really hit me was The New York Times’ article [“Man Is Stabbed in Attack After Admiring a Stranger”]…This isn’t a tabloid paper. It’s a national paper. It’s one of the more reputable papers. Why was he an admirer? What man is an admirer to a woman that he doesn’t know on the street at 2 a.m.?”"
http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/03/18/pockets-of-resistance/

"This Is What Depression Really Looks Like"

"people experiencing depression, anxiety, and many other mental illnesses often look exactly like somebody who isn't, as we found when we gathered stories and pictures from times when people have been suffering these conditions"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/laurasilver/this-is-what-depression-really-looks-like?bffb&utm_term=4ldqpgp#4ldqpgp

This is only something you become aware of when people feel comfortable talking about their mental health problems - I attended a high school with a really mentally toxic environment, and an incredibly stressful college; both places had a high level of stigma around mental health issues, and it was really only in my later years of college when I started to have conversations with classmates and former high school classmates and I would learn that they were in counseling, or taking medication, or had taken that year off because of such and such problem. These were people who I always thought of as dynamic and energized and high functioning - and they were, they just also were dealing with some mental health problems that they should never had felt so ashamed of. 

And it's these conversations that made me finally comfortable with dealing directly with my mental health. Why couldn't we have been talking about this all along?

"Uber Drivers in California Are Employees, Labor Commission Rules"

""The defendants hold themselves out as nothing more than a neutral technological platform, designed simply to enable drivers and passengers to transact the business of transportation," the commission wrote in its ruling. "The reality, however, is that defendants are involved in every aspect of the operation."

The ruling, which for now only applies to California drivers, is the result of a claim filed back in September by Barbara Ann Berwick, a former Uber driver. Berwick argued she was owed payment for expenses, such as mileage, incurred while working for the company, but Uber insisted that she was only an independent contractor and therefore not eligible for reimbursement. On Tuesday, the commission ordered the company to pay Berwick $4,000 in expenses.

The difference in classification is significant, as an employee status may force Uber to provide drivers benefits such as social security, health insurance, and unemployment insurance. Uber is in the process of appealing the decision."
http://www.motherjones.com/mixed-media/2015/06/uber-drivers-employee-california

This is good - there is a major problem with the sharing economy, because it doesn't allow any real stability to the actual workers. It is such a weird, feudal system if you look at it in a certain way. The power and money are really concentrated in the hands of a few people.

And Uber in particular is just super sketch. I've become kind of reliant on these taxi apps, but I am trying to use Lyft instead.

Related: The Case Against Sharing

"#lightenup"

https://thenib.com/lighten-up-4f7f96ca8a7e

On colorism and microagressions and media.

"To Rachel Dolezal: A white NAACP president could have been a powerful thing"

"Self-hatred is a dangerous thing. In this case, it seems possible that Dolezal could have became so wrapped up in her own desire to belong that she became an inadvertent mockery of the very community she wanted so desperately to belong to.

But blackness should never be performed. It is not some abstract concept that can be morphed and shaped from foundation or elaborate extensions purchased from the beauty salon. It’s the skin that you wake up in the morning and go to sleep in at night. It’s the life experiences that cannot be absorbed through books or vicarious erudition. And no matter how much make-up you don, wigs you wear, or colloquialisms you speak, one cannot become black."

http://qz.com/427065/to-rachel-dolezal-a-white-naacp-president-could-have-been-a-powerful-thing/

I don't know. I just felt immediately exhausted by this, from the first headline I saw and didn't click on. There isn't an endgame here, there is just sad confusion.

I read this article, and I listened to this podcast - http://www.buzzfeed.com/anotherround/episode-14-multitudity-tiq-milan-interview-trans-media#.erEy8oXmK - and I think I'm done.

(credit to TO)

"We Live in an Age of Irrational Parenting"

"Bluntly put: It’s hard to think of a safer time and a better place than the United States of 2015 to raise children — but we act as though the opposite were true... National crime rates have been falling since the early '90s. It’s something we adults, unlike kids, have been taking full advantage of for years, walking unaccompanied late at night in places our own parents would never have dared to tread...
I think what really underlies this generation’s fears has to do with a much greater force than tabloid journalism or government transparency or even Bureau of Labor Statistics. Rather, it’s the principle of economic scarcity. We’ve deferred having children for so long — college-educated woman today have their first child at 30.3 years old — and we have so many fewer children than we once did (an average of two per family, as opposed to five in 1850) that we assign them a far higher value and therefore fret far more about their physical well-being...
Back in the 1980s, the psychologist Jerome Kagan presciently noticed that something was happening to American parents: Absent having any other conspicuous way to prove moral worth — by taking care of their own parents, say, or heading up local civic organizations — we instead try to show our virtue through parenting."
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/03/we-live-in-an-age-of-irrational-parenting.html

I was talking about this with some other people raised in the Bay in the 90s/2000s, and all the things our parents absurdly wouldn't let us do or the check-ins after 5 minute drives to school, and how kids today are under-socialized. I also suspect that kids who grow up with not just helicopter parents but a general helicopter culture are more likely to experience the world as a place full of potential dangers.

“We don’t need to keep criminals in prison to punish them”

“While it lasts, prison is horrible for the prisoner and expensive for the state. And things often don't get better when it ends: of the people released from prison today, about 60 percent will be back inside within three years.

The transition from prison to the "free world" can be very tough, both for the offender and for the neighborhood he returns to. In the month after getting out, a person released from prison has about a dozen times the mortality rate of people of the same age, race, and sex in the same neighborhood, with the leading causes of death among former inmates being drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide…

The trick is to start the re-entry process before what would otherwise have been the release date, so the money you spend in the community is balanced by the money you're not spending on a cell. The average cost of holding a prisoner comes to about $2,600 per month. At the same time, even very intrusive supervision leaves a released offender freer than he would have been on the inside. So even a program that looks expensive and intrusive compared with ordinary re-entry or parole is cheap and liberating compared with a cellblock.

Start with housing. A substantial fraction of prison releasees go from a cellblock to living under a bridge: not a good way to start free life. Spend some of the money that would otherwise have financed a prison cell to rent a small, sparsely furnished efficiency apartment. In some ways, that apartment is still a cell and the offender still a prisoner. He can't leave it or have visitors except as specifically permitted. The unit has cameras inside and is subject to search. But he doesn't need guards, and doesn't have to worry about prison gangs or inmate-on-inmate assault.”

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/18/8226957/prison-reform-graduated-reentry

I love this. In my list of “things our society is going to look back at with shame in 100 years”, the current prison system… like, what are we doing?

I randomly stumbled on this program in Delaware doing this with drug offenders

http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/community/drug-offenders/Pages/decide-your-time.aspx

“Genes aren’t destiny, and other things I’ve learned from being adopted”

“But let me try to describe it, at least a little bit. Meeting your biological family, seeing siblings who've just learned you exist, walking into the homes of your biological parents, even just having a drink or two with them — it's like stepping out of the life you know and into an alternate history of yourself.

If you are the biological child of the parents who raised you, you probably can't understand this. We all wonder "what if," certainly, especially for things that didn't quite go our way in the past. But those "what ifs" remain just that: unvisited other selves who disappear into the mists as quickly as we conjure them up.

What makes a just-met biological family so very powerful is the fact that all those what ifs become real. You'll hear stories about the wild parties your grandparents threw, or what a brat your sister was as a child, or what soda your father preferred to drink, and it will be so, so easy to see yourself in the middle of those stories, even as you know you weren't there. Because you almost were. This is the person you could have been, but for one decision somebody else made for you.

For the most part, I've found, adoptees prefer the lives they were raised in, but the connection to that other self can be intoxicating…

We're all, every single one of us, trying to discover who we are. Sometimes I think being an adoptee was beneficial for me in that regard, because I got to realize, later in life, that there would never be an easy answer, an escape pod from my home planet, a giant who came to the door and delivered me to Hogwart's. Instead, I, like everybody, was going to have to fill in the blanks myself.”

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/17/8203507/adoption-children-experiences

This is all really interesting to read, these reflections on belongingness and what makes us who we are.