“Did You Read the Book”

"the whole process of commodifying personhood to sell movie tickets is inherently dehumanizing. The TV people want some part of you, and in exchange for it, they will put the name of your movie on TV. But in that process, you do lose something of your self. (For the record, I don’t get the feeling that the journalists asking the same questions over and over particularly savor the experience, either. But they need their sit-down interview, and we need our publicity, and so the wheel spins on.)...

Cara Delevingne doesn’t exist to feed your narrative or your news feed — and that’s precisely why she’s so fucking interesting."
https://medium.com/@johngreen/but-did-you-read-the-book-2e2dad0ebab1

Posting this because there's this thing where I totally recognize the emotions Cara is having, but obviously translated into my regular life when regular randos are asking me regular questions.

I sort of want #DidYouReadTheBook to be made into a hashtag about the lazy and commodifying ways we interact with each other, looking for that one specific story and responding with irritation to anything outside of it. It's that thing where someone asks "What are you?", or even the everyday assimilation of "Howareyou?" "I'mGood" and then pretending this makes us friends. Pretending we have an understanding of each other's realities.

I mean, doesn't it say something that it's rude to give an honest answer to "How are you" - when was the last time your answer was longer than a sentence?

Related: "Cara Delevingne Responds To Awkward Interview”

[read]“THE LOST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF JAVIER GRILLO-MARXUACH”

“Damon and JJ now had the nigh-impossible task of not only delivering a great script based on their outline, but to also to film that script, and chart the course of an ensuing series with no road map for its future, and no discernible plot engine for episode after episode other than "survival."...

As much as many -- fans, critics, and sometimes even those of us who create the stuff -- want to believe in the possibility that greatness is sui generis (or conversely the cowboy myth that "We didn't know what we were doing -- we were just kids with a dream and gosh darnit we pulled it off with spit and bailing wire") both of these explanations rob us of the truth: inspiration is always augmented through improvisation, collaboration, serendipity, and plain, old, unglamorous Hard Work. 

I will, however, strenuously make the point that the notes from our think tank  prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that if we knew anything, we sure as shellac knew what the polar bear was doing on the island...

Now these were all great actors who would soon be playing characters that, in great part due to their interpretation, would become iconic... but the sad reality of American network television in 2004 was that shows needed competent, easily identifiable main characters with abilities that undeniably spoke to their leadership and heroism: and that was, most of the time, a handsome white guy with an advanced degree in criminology, law, or medicine... and an absurdly tragic backstory.

So when JJ and Damon returned from their first network notes session with a slightly bemused expression, I asked how the notes session went. I was not shocked when Damon shrugged with a not inconsiderable amount of contempt for his unimaginative corporate overlords and reported that, "We can't kill the white guy.”

http://okbjgm.weebly.com/lost

This is a really interesting, super long inside look (skim-read-skim-read-skim-read). Imagine if all that space that Jack and his dad-made-me-an-alcoholic-or-whatever stuff took up was instead filled by all the other great characters!

Short summary sort of -

http://www.vox.com/2015/3/25/8287389/lost-answers-secrets-abc

I feel like LOST will remain a cultural artifact of its time. A lot of what made the show what it was is that no one knew what was going to happen, and everyone watched it right on time in order to avoid spoilers the following day. And in between, people discussed and theorized. And that huge social element, that bringing-it-into-your-life, that can't be recreated. (to a certain extent, also tragically true of Harry Potter). Like, I stopped watching the show consistently in like season 2, but I still always kinda knew what was going on.

"Cara Delevingne Responds To Awkward Interview"

"The next questions concerned whether or not her workload was "easy," and if she and her character had anything in common. Delevingne seemed pained by the lame queries, prompting another anchor to jump in and ask why she didn't seem too excited. When she assured them that she was excited, adding that perhaps it was just the early morning start behind her lack of energy, the news team ganged up on her and suggested a nap and a Red Bull. Ouch."
http://www.refinery29.com/2015/07/91486/cara-delevingne-awkward-interview?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post#.xp40ia:205R

Does anyone else feel like they totally have this kind of interaction all the time? I don't express excitement in the way that other people want me to sometimes, where they get to consume it and say pre-prepared things about it instead of actually engaging with my joy or any nuanced negatives I might be experiencing. And I'm also an evening chronotype, so I don't have any energy for myself - and definitely not for others - in the morning. Honestly, if it's before 10 AM, I'm probably not feeling excited for the day - sorry? - I'm dealing with a body that is having to operate outside of its natural rhythms.

And the weird thing is, like in this video, people seem to be able to tell that I'm irritated and that I'm trying to be polite and not express my irritation but instead of wondering if they should adjust their clearly irritating behavior, they laugh at and deride my behavior. Like my negative feelings are adorably inappropriate - and this can frustratingly translate into a perception that I am just generally an adorably inappropriate person.

Which is all to say, if someone looks tired and isn't performing their emotions the way that you want them to, give them some room.

Related: Fake smiling is bad for you

"This Is What Rihanna’s BBHMM Video Says About Black Women, White Women and Feminism"

"Imagine if instead of kidnapping the accountant’s wife, Rihanna and her crew kidnapped his brother? Would white feminists be so upset? I doubt it. Because we understand that revenge fantasies wherein women hurt men are pushing back against the harm men do to us. But here’s what white feminists don’t get (and what has them fucked up): black women often see white women as the same as white men. The harm done to us by white men and white women isn’t vastly different to many of us. White women have been unapologetically violent towards black women for centuries. They’ve used the power of the state, of the media, and of individual white men to harm black women time and time again. They are as harmful to us as white men are. So, for many of us, kidnapping the white brother or the white wife is all the same."

http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2015/07/this-is-what-rihannas-bbhmm-video-says-about-black-women-white-women-and-feminism/

It's interesting, the beginning of the music video is kinda black gaze on white lives.

“Distribution and heritability of diurnal preference (chronotype) in a rural Brazilian family-based cohort, the Baependi study”

“Morningness was significantly (P < 0.0001) higher in the rural (70.2 ± 9.8) than in the municipal zone (62.6 ± 11.1), and was also significantly (P = 0.025) higher in male (64.6 ± 10.9) than in female (62.8 ± 11.2) participants. Thus, in spite of universal access to electricity, the Baependi population was strongly shifted towards morningness, particularly in the rural zone. Heritability of MEQ score was 0.48 when adjusted for sex and age, or 0.38 when adjusted for sex, age, and residential zone.”

http://www.nature.com/srep/2015/150318/srep09214/full/srep09214.html

"Los Angeles Times has added a reporter to cover Black Twitter"

"Dexter Thomas joins us today to cover Black Twitter (which really is so much more complicated than that). He will work closely with the newsroom and #EmergingUS to find communities online (Black Medium to Latino Tumblr to Line in Japan) and both create stories with and pull stories from those worlds."

http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/355529/los-angeles-times-has-added-a-reporter-to-cover-black-twitter/#.VZrZ_MoOoR0.twitter

Related: New York Magazine story about the Twitter leaders of BLM; An informative+inspiring essay about the nature of leadership and the origin of the phrase "Ella Taught Us"

"We Must Change the Ableist Language Surrounding Sandra Bland's Death"

"Folks are saying “Sandra Bland was mentally sound” and “Black women like her would never commit suicide”, etc. Not only are we upholding precarious and dehumanizing ‘strong black woman’ archetypes that neglect to hold Black women in the fullness and breadth that we embody, but our failure to operate within a mental health & disability justice framework by making the assertion that Sandra Bland was ‘mentallly sound’ in order to prove that she did not commit suicide is a dangerous narrative that both devalues black people who navigate mental health difficulties and trauma and also erases their/our narratives from the conversation...

Some black women don’t just wake up one day with mental health difficulties while the prized black women are strong, resilient, and beyond the impact of white supremacist state sanctioned violence. Black woman are not the curators of white supremacy and misogynoir, we are the targets. We can bring attention to the state-sanctioned violence of police murders against black women in custody while also understanding suicide as a manifestation of structural violence that is delicately crafted by a abusive sociopolitical context that is obscenely anti-black, wildly misogynist, and buttressed upon legacies of misogynoir."
http://www.forharriet.com/2015/07/we-must-change-ableist-language.html?m=1#axzz3gfxsvBZn

"AMERICAN DOCTORS ARE KILLING THEMSELVES AND NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT IT"

"Because doctors have the knowledge of anatomy as well as access to lethal doses of drugs, they have a far higher suicide “completion” rate than the general population. A 2005 essay published in JAMA found that male doctors killed themselves at a rate 70 percent higher than other professionals; among female doctors, that rate ranged from 250 to 400 percent higher... Since the average annual caseload of most family doctors is roughly 2,300 patients, 400 physician deaths could mean that a million Americans lose their doctors to suicide each year...
Internists routinely screen their patients for depression and anxiety—it’s considered the standard of care for an annual physical. But doctors, Wible says, must live up to a different set of standards. In medical school, professors teach their driven young students to put their own emotions aside, even as they attend to tragedy. “In general, we’re in a profession that will shun you if you show weakness or suffering in any way,” she says...
Medical boards have the duty to protect patients from doctors who may be compromised. But critics say the lengthy stays in rehab, followed by mandated abstinence, monitoring, and random drug testing are so coercive, they dissuade many doctors from acknowledging they need help."
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/03/23/american-doctors-are-killing-themselves-and-no-one-is-talking-about-it.html

"Black America's State of Surveillance"

"Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. 

Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy...
The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained...
At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly...
As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism."
http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance

The stared-at-ness.

"Research 2.0.1: The future of research funding"

“The recent rise of crowdfunding platforms that cater solely to raising money for research projects has captured the imagination of the mainstream media. Examples include Microryza, SciFund, Petridish and the partnership between Indiegogo and UCSF… As scientists continue to seek alternative funding sources, one increasingly attractive option is to generate funding through performing fee-for-service work for other researchers. The ability to fund a lab through ‘selling’ expertise is very similar to the bootstrapping approach used by many early stage software startups… Despite spending a median of 7.2 years of graduate training, only 15% of Ph.D.-trained scientists will find employment as a tenure-track professor at a research institution. Along similar lines to bootstrapping of research labs, I believe that scientific freelancers can’t be far behind.  Indeed, on Science Exchange, we already see a number of individuals offering bioinformatics services (which do not require wet lab space or equipment). They offer these services in their own free time, allowing them to supplement their income.”

http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2013/06/12/research-2-0-1-the-future-of-research-funding

"'Allies,' the Time for Your Silence Has Expired"

"I have a love-hate relationship with that word, ally. I find too often it's a self-appellation, and one that is often unearned. We should apply the same rule to it as we do to nicknames. You can't give yourself a nickname; other people give it to you. To give it to yourself comes off as pretentious. It's the same with self-proclaimed "allies." I know you mean well, but what about your life demonstrates that you walk in solidarity with others who experience life differently from you because of their skin color, legal status, or sexual orientation? Please don't call yourself my ally if your uncle's racist jokes go unchecked in your presence. Please don't call yourself my ally if you say something insensitive, I call you on it, and all you can do is brush it off and say, "Girl, but you know I love my Black people!" Don't do it."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-denise-anderson/charleston-shooting-allies_b_7616708.html

Somewhere else, I saw someone re-thinking ally as a verb instead of a noun. 

"In Fiery Speeches, Francis Excoriates Global Capitalism"

"Francis escalated that line last week when he made ahistoric apology for the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church during the period of Spanish colonialism — even as he called for a global movement against a “new colonialism” rooted in an inequitable economic order.

The Argentine pope seemed to be asking for a social revolution...

Francis has defined the economic challenge of this era as the failure of global capitalism to create fairness, equity and dignified livelihoods for the poor — a social and religious agenda that coincides with a resurgence of the leftist thinking marginalized in the days of John Paul II. Francis’ increasingly sharp critique comes as much of humanity has never been so wealthy or well fed — yet rising inequality and repeated financial crises have unsettled voters, policy makers and economists...

Many Catholic scholars would argue that Francis is merely continuing a line of Catholic social teaching that has existed for more than a century

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/world/americas/in-fiery-speeches-francis-excoriates-global-capitalism.html

"Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao: The trolls are winning the battle for the Internet"

"The Internet started as a bastion for free expression. It encouraged broad engagement and a diversity of ideas. Over time, however, that openness has enabled the harassment of people for their views, experiences, appearances or demographic backgrounds. Balancing free expression with privacy and the protection of participants has always been a challenge for open-content platforms on the Internet. But that balancing act is getting harder. The trolls are winning.

Fully 40 percent of online users have experienced bullying, harassment and intimidation, according to Pew Research. Some 70 percent of users between age 18 and 24 say they’ve been the target of harassers. Not surprisingly, women and minorities have it worst. We were naive in our initial expectations for the Internet, an early Internet pioneer told me recently. We focused on the huge opportunity for positive interaction and information sharing. We did not understand how people could use it to harm others."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-cannot-let-the-internet-trolls-win/2015/07/16/91b1a2d2-2b17-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html?postshare=7391437061068212

I think it's important for us to understand who we are on the internet, what our personalities are, where we go and how we think.

"I Don’t Want to Be an Excuse for Racist Violence Anymore"

"There is a centuries-old notion that white men must defend, with lethal violence at times, the sexual purity of white women from allegedly predatory black men. And, as we saw yet again after this shooting, it is not merely a relic of America’s hideous racial past. American racism is always gendered; racism and sexism are mutually dependent, and cannot be unstitched...

There is an important distinction between white women, a people, and the concept of white womanhood—one that holds that a white woman is the best thing you can be in America after a white man, and that it is the responsibility of white men to protect your virtue at any and all costs. This white supremacist and benevolently sexist ideology depends both on the subjugation of white women by white men, and on the subjugation of all people who are not white—by white people (including white women)...

the powerlessness we feel as a result of sexism too often urges us to hold on to, and exert over others, what remaining power we have. For white women, that means the power gifted to us by the color of our skin. Few white women resisted lynching in the early 20th century. A gendered and raced pedestal isn’t always comfortable to stand on, but it comes with a lot of perks and not a small amount of power. When contemporary black feminists critique white feminists for failing to recognize, interrogate, and cede their own racial privilege, that complaint is rooted in history...

As Rebecca Carroll argued last week in The Guardian, those women were shot because the belief that white women must be protected at all costs depends on the belief that black women aren’t truly women, that they’re barely people"
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122110/i-dont-want-be-excuse-racist-violence-charleston

“Science owes much to both Christianity and the Middle Ages”

“Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.

Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.”

http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages

We are taught such simplistic narratives in school.

"This American Bro: A Portrait of the Worst Guy Ever"

"He has existed for as long as there have been gluttonous men dedicating ceremonies to their own existence. Anyone who objects is either a slut or a hater or a minority, and you need to GET ON HIS LEVEL, SON. The only things that change are the miscellaneous wristbands he wears, and the brand of energy drink on the promotional T-shirt they gave him. He is a chest-pounding, chandelier-swinging, Godzilla-id mutant who does not need friends, just a hierarchy of other men around him who will simply acknowledge the noises he is making, his indignance, his fury."

http://www.vice.com/read/this-american-bro-an-ethological-study

This is so well written. It's a ride.
Related: NPR maps the qualities of bros, Douchebag as a social identity of over-privileged white men

FB: "He wants to be recognized, to participate in a ritual. That is the only way he understands success. He is in San Juan or Key West or Señor Frog's or some cookie-cutter debauchery enclave. He is going to the Groove Cruise and to Holy Ship!, literally exceeding the domestic capacity for his bro requirements. He needs another country to sustain his biological need to be awful.  He is wearing rosary beads, loving his grandmother, keeping a prayer card in his room somewhere, feeling passionately about State College athletics, going HAM on jet skis, having some vague job at a company that is named VERITAS FINANCIAL or CENTURION."

"Emo: Where the Girls Aren’t"

“Girls in emo songs today do not have names. We are not identified. Our lives, our struggles, our day-to-day-to-day does not exist, we do not get colored in. We span from coquettish to damned and back again. We leave bruises on boy-hearts, but make no other mark. Our existences, our actions are portrayed SOLELY through the detailing of neurotic self-entanglements of the boy singer; our region of personal power, simply, is our breadth of impact on his romantic life. We are on a short leash in a filthy yard, we are mysteries to be unlocked, bodies to be groped, minimum wage earners of fealty, harvesters of sorrow, repositories for scorn. Vessels redeemed in the light of boy-love. On a pedestal, on our backs. Muses at best. Cum rags or invisible at worst. Check out our pictures on the covers of records, we are sad-eyed and winsome and well cleaved. Thank you Hot Rod Circuit, The Crush, Cursive, Something Corporate - the fantasy girl you could take home and comfort.”

http://hitodeman.tumblr.com/post/902233193

#2003. Really, in every way including the kind of annoying animation on the page. Also, like, remember emo? What was that?

I love this word “romanticide”

"Taylor Swift and the Silencing of Nicki Minaj"

"You can debate whether the “Anaconda” video is brilliant or bad, but you can’t argue with Minaj that it was one of the most iconic pop-culture products of the past year, nor with the idea that a lot of people had a knee-jerk negative response to its glorification of big black butts. Her speaking up about those things doesn’t mean she’s dissing the other nominees. Yes, the video she’d most likely been referring to when talking about “slim bodies” was “Bad Blood,” a montage featuring a lot of supermodels and skinny actresses in superhero getups. But she didn’t question its merit; she even implied that it was commercially and culturally significant.

When Swift chimed in, it changed the conversation from woman versus institution to woman versus woman. Ironically, this is exactly the complaint Swift leveled against Minaj: “It's unlike you to pit women against each other.” This fits with Swift’s recent campaign against the Mean Girls stereotype of women as catty infighters; her 1989 shows have featured clips videos of her famous buddies telling the largely tweenage girl audience about how great same-sex friendship can be. The cause is righteous, but Swift’s tweet to Minaj shows the limits of it. When female solidarity shuts down someone’s honest expression of frustration at society, inequality, and racial and body-type bias, that’s hardly progressive."
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/07/taylor-swift-silencing-nicki-minaj-vmas-twitter-bad-blood-anaconda/399164/?utm_source=SFFB

The adorable confusion card.

Update: She apologized. And it was actually a good apology where she named what she did wrong and indicated that she had been listening. In my real-life experience of situations like these, the other person "apologizes" by letting you know that they are a good person and never wanted to be offensive and didn't know about that and are we done now so that I can talk to you about the thing I wanted to talk about?

"Every Single Word Spoken by a Person of Color in [Mainstream Film Title]"

"By now, we've all heard of the Bechdel Test, which reveals filmmakers dropping the ball on giving women three-dimensional characters, but the filmmakers featured on Every Single Word seem to have failed some deeper, more basic test, and it's galling to watch."
(from the Fast Company article)
http://everysinglewordspoken.tumblr.com/

So good. Her was the worst.

“I Saw My Admissions Files Before Yale Destroyed Them”

“Yale, apparently, wanted — even needed — a student to represent not just my high school but my entire 35,000-student school district, which is just 33% white, where 65% of students fall under federal poverty measures, and where almost a third of students are English-language learners. The admissions officers knew, I think, that it would look unfortunate to overlook a public school system as large as Minneapolis.

So they picked me, the white daughter of two Ivy League graduates. I was one of just two students from the entire system to be accepted to Yale and Harvard; the other, a friend of mine, was also the white, middle-class daughter of two college grads. (Two years later, the next student to attend Yale from my inner-city high school was also a white, middle-class friend of mine. Both his parents have master’s degrees.)”

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/i-saw-my-admissions-files-before-yale-destroyed-them?bffb&utm_term=4ldqpgp#.gr205vJyK

Do I want to do this? 

Do I want to do this??

“The Myth of Moral Outrage”

“It is commonly believed that moral progress is a surfer that rides on waves of a peculiar emotion: moral outrage. Moral outrage is thought to be a special type of anger, one that ignites when people recognize that a person or institution has violated a moral principle (for example, do not hurt others, do not fail to help people in need, do not lie) and must be prevented from continuing to do so…

[description of an experiment to examine the existence of moral outrage]…

if moral outrage is an illusion, then why do people claim to experience it? Perhaps the guise of moral outrage is an unconscious dramaturgical device: The semblance of moral outrage seems like an excellent way to signal the sincerity of your own moral commitments and to call supporters to your side of a moral debate. After all, garden-variety anger can supply an adequate amount of motivational fuel if your goal is merely to stick up for yourself or your loved ones against a schoolyard bully. But if your goals are more ambitious (bending the arc of human moral progress is nothing if not ambitious), you’re going to need allies and supporters. And nothing rallies the troops to moral action like a leader who is as mad as hell.”

http://www.humansandnature.org/mind---morality---michael-mccullough-response-125.php

"CRISPR: Science can't solve it"

"The idea that the risks, benefits and ethical challenges of these emerging technologies are something to be decided by experts is wrong-headed, futile and self-defeating. It misunderstands the role of science in public discussions about technological risk. It seriously underestimates the democratic sources of science's vitality and the capacities of democratic deliberation. And it will further delegitimize and politicize science in modern societies.

The never-ending debates about genetically modified (GM) organisms, nuclear power, chemical toxicity and the efficacy of cancer screening should be evidence enough that science does not limit or resolve controversies about risk.
There is no way to capture the full complexity of these issues from a scientific perspective...

Scientists are not elected. They cannot represent the cultural values, politics and interests of citizens — not least because their values may differ significantly from those of people in other walks of life. A 2007 study⁶ on the social implications of nanotechnology, for instance, showed that nanoscientists had little concern about such technologies eliminating jobs, whereas the public was greatly concerned (see 'A matter of perspective'). Each group was being rational. Nanoscientists have good reason to be optimistic about the opportunities created by technological frontiers; citizens can be justifiably worried that such frontiers will wreak havoc on labour markets."
http://www.nature.com/news/crispr-science-can-t-solve-it-1.17806

Yes. yes.

I think it's definitely the responsibility of the scientific community to make the information about these advances accessible to the public. And to interrogate our sense of division from the public. To figure out what authority we actually have over what happens outside of lab. And which responsibilities.
(Credit to MA)

“DARPA thinks it has a solution to Ebola (and all other infectious diseases)”

“Wattendorf, a clean-cut, angular triathlete, is a program manager for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military’s far-out research wing. On this day, he’s speaking at a DARPA-sponsored conference called Biology Is Technology. And he’s telling the assembled group what he will reiterate in a one-on-one interview with me later: that the agency is on the verge of a revolutionary way of preventing mass outbreaks of diseases like Ebola. If the system worked, many pandemic scenarios could be crossed off the “How the Apocalypse Could Happen” list. Dystopian novels and sci-fi shows would need to find a new set of plot points.

Briefly, Wattendorf explains, DARPA’s system would work like this: powerful antibodies would be isolated from survivors of a communicable disease, and the plans for making those antibodies would be encoded in RNA or DNA, then pumped into people who might come into contact with the disease. The cells in these people’s bodies would suck in the genetic material and start cranking out these high-performing antibodies. Any single human’s immunological innovation could be spread to the rest of humanity, protecting us all. The process would be faster and cheaper than previous methods of making vaccines and it would be widely applicable to all kinds of Hot Zone-style emerging diseases.”

http://fusion.net/story/57515/darpa-thinks-it-has-a-solution-to-ebola-and-all-other-infectious-diseases/

This isn’t new as a theoretical solution, but I guess it’s new as a massive-agency-infrastructure-actually-building-a-system solution.

"Everyone Should Be Reading These Intense #IfIDieInPoliceCustody Tweets Right Now"

"Its conceit is sobering: Black users across the social media platform — in part prompted by the suspicion that 28-year-old Bland did not, in fact, die by suicide in a Waller County, Texas, jail, but rather by more dubious means — are advising their readers what to do if they die under similar circumstances.

The posts amount to a series of unofficial advance directives. That they feel necessary is both troubling and heartbreaking. But considering the long list of black women and men who have died or been killed while held by law enforcement in recent years — including Freddie Gray in Baltimore, whose death sparked days of unrest in April — it's hard to imagine many alternatives."

http://mic.com/articles/122452/twitter-responds-to-sandra-bland-death-with-if-i-die-in-police-custody?utm_content=bufferb4dfa&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"Review: We Need to Talk About the Furiosa Comic"

"Here in the comic, women pass information to each other, but only because a man authorized the “history woman” to teach his wives. And this is so laughably infuriating to me already, this idea that women only whisper secrets and warnings and hopes and dreams and histories to each other because a man told them to. Even the idea that a man knows when information-exchange is taking place between women. This is the root, I think, of why so many works don’t pass Bechdel: because the male authors don’t imagine that women talk to each other, and even when they do stretch their imaginations to encompass female conversations, authors assume that they, as men, know what those conversations are about... to me (and I’m guessing other women in theaters), there was no “mystery” as to why the women knew things; they knew things because they were people...

and omg did someone ask the MRA boycotters to write this book without having seen the movie? Like, was that how this happened?...

by showing the rape and sexual assault over and over again in this book, that will likely overwhelm the wives’ valid complaints about freedom and reproductive freedom. It doesn’t–or shouldn’t–matter whether Joe is treating them “well” or whether he’s hurting them. They aren’t free, they deserve to be free, the end. The added rape sequences only serve to provide a validity prism for the audience: yes, the apocalypse out there is rotten, but it really was sufficiently terrible enough in Joe’s captivity to justify wanting to leave...

Apparently my freedom is something I should sell for water and shade, and I should only give that up if the abuse is bad enough."
http://www.themarysue.com/furiosa-comic-review/

I forgot how cathartic it can be to read someone else's intelligent, structured, long irritation. I don't want to say 'rant' because I am having a moment with that word (I realize that I only want to use it when I disapprove of something, and I'm trying to figure out what that means). But yay, seeing someone's speech that is usually highly censored.

"Driving Drunk in Nairobi? There’s an App for That Read more: Driving Drunk in Nairobi? There’s an App for That | Fast Forward | OZY"

“All of which is a long but colorful tale that demonstrates an exciting trend in Kenya and just beyond its border: the surprisingly powerful influence both apps and websites are having over people and government. Across East Africa, civic-minded developers are working to hold officials and institutions more accountable to the general public. The website Kenya Open Data publishes maps of water sources that help people keep an eye on government spending in the water sector, and the website’s data on class size, attendance and graduation rates at public schools help parents make more informed decisions about where to enroll their kids. Another group is using crowdsourcing to correct rumors and mistruths in real time as they spread across the Internet… “People fear that they’ll be held accountable. It’s a cultural thing we are struggling with,” says Kasongi. And that, he says, is precisely what Africa’s developers must disrupt. ”

http://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/driving-drunk-in-nairobi-there-s-an-app-for-that/37436

That is definitely the first time I have seen the words ‘Africa’s developers’ used in that sense.

"Why Adults Are Buying Coloring Books (for Themselves)"

"Coloring books for adults have been around for decades, but Basford’s success—combined with that of the French publisher Hachette Pratique’s “Art-thérapie: 100 coloriages anti-stress” (2012), which has sold more than three and a half million copies worldwide, and Dover Publishing’s “Creative Haven” line for “experienced colorists,” which launched in 2012 and sold four hundred thousand copies this May alone—has helped to create a massive new industry category. “We’ve never seen a phenomenon like it in our thirty years of publishing. We are on our fifteenth reprint of some of our titles. Just can’t keep them in print fast enough,” Lesley O’Mara, the managing director of British publishers Michael O’Mara Books, wrote to me about their own adult-coloring-books catalogue...

Summer camps for adults, for example, have also gone from curiosity to viable enterprise... Another example is Preschool Mastermind, a series of weekly preschool classes for adults in Brooklyn...

Brown went on to found the National Institute for Play, in 2006, which argues for the benefits of playtime for people of all ages. In his book “Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul” (2010), he writes, for example, of “Laurel,” a C.E.O. whose “irrational bliss” during horseback riding and spontaneous play “has spilled over into her family and work.” Such anecdotes have been backed by some psychological research...

[however] According to Jacoby, adults who immerse themselves in escapist fantasies like coloring books, camps, and preschool are regressing into safe patterns in order to avoid confronting the world around them. “I think the whole popularity of young-adult literature is a general decline of people not wanting to do things that require effort,” she said."
http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/why-adults-are-buying-coloring-books-for-themselves?mbid=social_facebook

I wonder what would have come up if you googled "Adult coloring book" five years ago...

Loving the term "Peter Pan market" here. I noticed this a lot in DC. And I've recently been talking to a lot of people about the experience of growing up in my small town and so I wonder if there isn't something here about the way our generation was parented. Someone said to me that we had short childhoods but a long adolescence.

Like, compared to some platonic ideal of childhood from the 50s in America, or all those books set in Edwardian England, we had much less time to play and be free before we were expected to be building toward our futures and experiencing some of the more complicated realities of the world. However, we also were not expected to be all done by our 20s, with families and steady jobs.

I think the "we" I am using here is people who grew up in places like my hometown, but I find myself tempted to generalize - although that's probably because I am privileged to see people similar to me in that way represented in media (hi New Girl) and being around writers for the New Yorker. And, like, writing for the New Yorker