"Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well"

"Karen is a fictional coach in a software-driven experiential art piece. Part story, part game, designed to be played over a period of days, it offers a deliberately unsettling experience that’s intended to make us question the way we bare ourselves to a digital device...
The dynamic that unfolds is somewhat reminiscent of “Her,” the 2013 Spike Jonze film in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system. With Karen, however, it’s not the user but the app that starts exhibiting inappropriate behavior. “She develops a kind of friend crush,” Mr. Adams said. “And over the next 10 days or so, she feeds back to you things she’s learning about you — including some things you’re not quite sure how she knows or why.”...
Karen, like “Desert Rain” and “Ulrike and Eamon Compliant,” was developed with support from the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab, which looks at how digital technologies can affect everyday life. The lab investigates such matters as the nature of online consent — a project that, using a standard readability test, recently found Google’s terms of service to be slightly harder to comprehend than “Beowulf” — and the role of personal data in constructing online identities."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/arts/karen-an-app-that-knows-you-all-too-well.html?_r=0

I sort of want to experience this. Would probably give me a proper level of concern about providing an app with hella information about me.

"How The Screenshort Could Save Us From Horrible Headlines"

"Screenshorts could be a real solution to bizarre, nü-internet–style headlines. The Way We Write Headlines Now is terrible and the rise of the screenshort is largely due to the fact that screenshorts give us a better way to tease and share stories...
Headlines are rarely written for the pages they live on anymore. Instead, they live remotely on aggregation sites, and social media. Rather than informing the reader, the headline is often little more than an attempt to get someone’s attention...
"I think its a more user-centered user value way of creating content," he said. "It's saying, 'Look, I'm going give you the best part. It's not a clickbait headline; it's what I think is the most interesting part.' It's more humane, more user-respectful. You are saying, 'I want you to make an informed decision about what lies behind the click.'""
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/viva-screenshorts#.gdn22nJy72

It's just a little meta for me to post this. Just a little.

"At Hartford's King School, 'Beautiful' Support On First Day"

""Everybody!" Johnson shouted to the scores of sharply dressed black men lining the walkway to M.L. King. "We've got Jamar here coming to the first grade!"

The group — Hartford businessmen, lawyers, community organizers, city politicians, artists, neighborhood dignitaries, a police officer in uniform — erupted in cheers and whoops for Jamar, giving the boy high-fives and handshakes as if he were LeBron James being introduced at Game 7 of the NBA Finals.
"I want everyone to put their hands together for Odell!" Johnson said as another child, third-grader Odell Harris, 8, walked up to the school and was greeted by the dapper crew of well-wishers, men of color in suits and ties who came to show their support. It was a sight that left one King mother in tears...

Superintendent Beth Schiavino-Narvaez, who links social justice to her educational approach, has rolled out a plan to lift Hartford's graduation rate from 71 percent to 90 percent by 2020, part of a five-year road map to cut suspensions and chronic absenteeism, while raising third-grade reading proficiency, expanding college opportunities and connecting each student to a "caring adult."
"I'm really starting to think about our work here in Hartford as being an urban center of excellence," Narvaez said as she concluded her visit to King School on Tuesday, her first stop on a bus tour that headed to Hartford Public High's Academy of Engineering and Green Technology and Breakthrough Magnet School, two schools that won national awards this year."
http://www.courant.com/community/hartford/hc-hartford-first-day-school-0826-20150825-story.html

so feel good :)

Related: This American Life episode on the Hartford school system

"Princeton president says elite school is ‘inclined’ to expand undergrad enrollment"

"“At our level of higher education, the problem isn’t affordability,” he said. “Our students graduate with very little debt. … The problem is scarcity. And if we can do something about it, we should.”...

He said Princeton has diversified significantly in recent years. In 2001, he said, the share of undergraduates with family income low enough to qualify for federal Pell grants was 6 percent. The share in the class that entered last fall, he said, was 18 percent."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/08/04/princeton-president-says-elite-school-is-inclined-to-expand-undergrad-enrollment/?postshare=1651438790728671

The thing that was wonderful and inspiring about my alma mater was the way it stood at the top of many lists of the best universities in the country and the world, and yet it's still committed to observing its flaws and bettering itself. I have encountered so, so many institutions that are deeply and aggressively content to rest on their laurels, and become hostile when people point out flaws - reacting by pointing out that these flaws are common and most other places aren't trying to address them, most other people are just dealing, and look at all these ways that this institution is considered successful, so if you don't like it then you should go somewhere else!

Princeton definitely hides from some of its flaws, there is still definitely hostility and apathy when people point things out, but I have often observed a general culture of reflection and improvement. Our administration tried hard to recognize its privileges and its abilities to make an impact. And it was incredible to see it change in just the four years I was there, and to see that there was space for little-me to leave behind my own impacts.

"EXCLUSIVE: TSA’S SECRET BEHAVIOR CHECKLIST TO SPOT TERRORISTS"

"Since its introduction in 2007, the SPOT program has attracted controversy for the lack of science supporting it. In 2013, the Government Accountability Office found that there was no evidence to back up the idea that “behavioral indicators … can be used to identify persons who may pose a risk to aviation security.” After analyzing hundreds of scientific studies, the GAO concluded that “the human ability to accurately identify deceptive behavior based on behavioral indicators is the same as or slightly better than chance.”

The inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security found in 2013 that TSA had failed to evaluate SPOT, and “cannot ensure that passengers at United States airports are screened objectively, show that the program is cost-effective, or reasonably justify the program’s expansion.”"
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held-behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/

"OUR SHARED AFFAIR: THE SEXUAL SHAMING BEHIND THE ASHLEY MADISON HACK"

"What is truly “coming home to roost” here is the profound moral illness propagated by the false notion that social media swarming of individuals constitutes an exercise in “justice.” Justice must restore and rebuild on the wreckage of injustice — it cannot merely be another wrecking ball. What good is truly served by this punishment, or the equally unsettling zest for it? Worse, we fail to grow as a society by failing to interrogate our understanding of what is sexually possible by projecting a sitcom narrative onto this hack; queer and poly relationships are invisible, and we do not ask whether sometimes “cheating” can be acceptable. Finally, we also fail to ask how, even the case of the most reprobate users on the site, this data dump will hurt innocent spouses and their children...

What queer homeless youth does this revelation house? Does it magically transport a poor woman in rural Texas to her nearest abortion clinic? Does it #SayHerName? Much ink is spilled over whether exposing right-wing hypocrites is worth our time and energy, or on whether it is moral. Allow me to spill a little more to say that in the vast majority of cases, it isn’t — and is, in truth, merely a punitive action meant to hurt someone who has hurt us."

http://feministing.com/2015/08/27/our-shared-affair-the-sexual-shaming-behind-the-ashley-madison-hack/

I've totally noticed this in my reaction - this vague, default sense of vindictive glee/"yay, justice" about this. The hack isn't being covered as a crime so much as another inevitable outcome of people being on the Internet and doing sex things, and sex things never stay secret on the internet! and people should know that and just go back to writing chaste letters that are delivered by the pony express/never having non-monogamous non-heterosexual feelings. 

It's sort of like we-as-a-society feel entitled to this information, as though these people have transgressed and the outcome is that their sex lives are supposed to become public now. Like the weird undertones of acceptance of revenge porn and leaks of celebrities' nude pictures. I think this interpretation is informed by something I read recently - "when prostitution is nobody's business".

"It's time to play the music: 10 Muppet minutes that sold the new show "

"With Muppet stalwarts Kermit, Miss Piggy and Fozzie, as well as human guests Elizabeth Banks and Topher Grace, the clip is a taster of what’s to come – a mockumentary “behind the scenes” take on Muppet life featuring the characters talking about their feelings directly to camera (a trope that’s nicely undercut by Gonzo). It’s being promoted as a more adult version of the show – which so far means some slightly more risque jokes (Kermit’s “bacon-wrapped hell on earth”) and some sly drug references (“Everyone’s going to be upset,” says Kermit at one point. “Except the band, they’re always happy … Legally now”)."

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2015/jul/22/its-time-to-play-the-music-10-muppet-minutes-that-sold-the-new-show

Muppets :)

"With 'Single-Stream' Recycling, Convenience Comes At A Cost"

""This machine is like a large grocery store scanner," says Brent Batliner, manager at the St. Louis-area recycling division of Republic Services as he stands next to something called an optical sorter. "It's got infrared scanners that, as material passes underneath it, it will read the chemical makeup of the bottle."

This optical sorter is set to scan for HDPE, or the type of plastic labeled with the numeral 2. When a milk jug or detergent bottle reaches the scanner, a row of air jets sends it flying off the conveyor and into a storage bunker 25 feet below...

Collins adds that about a quarter of single-stream recycling goes to the dump. For glass, that loss can be as high as 40 percent.

Even so, in the constant tug of war between quality and convenience, convenience wins. But as single-stream processing continues to increase in popularity, the trade-off will be fewer recyclables recycled."
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/31/396319000/with-single-stream-recycling-convenience-comes-at-a-cost?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150331

"Top Science Publisher Failing Minority Groups, Industry Leaders Say"

"In an open letter sent last week to the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science -- which is best known for publishing the well-regarded magazine Science and running career-advice site Science Careers -- 600 scientists and supporters called on the group to "work more diligently to ensure that Science’s web and printed material does not reinforce harmful stereotypes that hinder the advancement of underrepresented groups in [science, technology, engineering and mathematics] fields."

The letter, first obtained by BuzzFeed, suggests the AAAS should introduce diversity training for its editorial staffs and more closely monitor the comments sections of its online materials to weed out insensitive statements...

Glass said telling minority groups that "it's dangerous to speak out about these issues or advising them to wait until they reach a certain secure point in their careers to point out weaknesses in the system" is an entrenched problem.

Letter co-author Lenny Teytelman agreed that many people are hesitant to speak out about inequalities in the field, noting there's a concern within the scientific community that calling out issues like sexism might be seen as a distraction.

"If people think you’re being a activist, they’ll think you’re not focusing on your research and they’ll take your research less seriously," he said."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/minority-groups-in-stem_55b651d3e4b0074ba5a51cbe

! All of this!

"zoë kravitz is our august cover star"

"Kravitz knows how to treat herself—but it hasn’t always been this way. Growing up as a self-described “chubby, awkward brown girl around a bunch of blonde girls” led to struggles with bulimia and anorexia in her teens...

it wasn’t only her parents’ celebrity that hampered Kravitz’s ability to feel like she belonged while growing up. As one of few black kids in her predominately white school, she remembers saying things like, “I’m just as white as y’all,” to her classmates. “I identified with white culture, and I wanted to fit in,” she says. “I didn’t identify with black culture, like, I didn’t like Tyler Perry movies, and I wasn’t into hip-hop music. I liked Neil Young.” But as time went on, her views shifted. “Black culture is so much deeper than that,” she says, “but unfortunately that is what’s fed through the media. That’s what people see. That’s what I saw. But then I got older and listened to A Tribe Called Quest and watched films with Sidney Poitier, and heard Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. I had to un-brainwash myself. It’s my mission, especially as an actress.

A big tenet of this undertaking involves choosing roles that don’t focus on her race. “I don’t want to play everyone’s best friend,” she explains. “I don’t want to play the role of a girl struggling in the ghetto. It’s not that that story isn’t important, but I saw patterns and was like, ‘I don’t relate to these people.’”"
http://www.nylon.com/articles/zoe-kravitz-august-2015

Too much real.

Related: unlearning colorblindness one

FB: So, apparently Lenny Kravitz and Lisa Bonet have a daughter (didn't know this) and she's been in a bunch of movies (like Mad Max), but most interestingly she has very real things to say about struggling to have a black race identity while growing up around mostly white people.

"Virginia Shooting Gone Viral, in a Well-planned Rollout on Social Media"

"The killings appear to have been skillfully engineered for maximum distribution, and to sow maximum dread, over Twitter, Facebook and mobile phones. The video Mr. Flanagan shows is an up-close, first-person execution. It was posted only after his social media accounts had become widely known, while the police were in pursuit of the killer. And unlike previous televised deaths, these were not merely broadcast, but widely and virally distributed, playing out with the complicity of thousands, perhaps millions, of social networking users who could not help but watch and share...

On these services, the killer knew, you often hit retweet, like or share before you realize just quite what you have done."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/27/technology/personaltech/violence-gone-viral-in-a-well-planned-rollout-on-social-media.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referrer=

It's so real to think about this, how members of the media know how it works, know how to trigger something. Although I think there were a lot of lessons learned here, about the limits of our voyeurism. About autoplay

"It's time to play the music: 10 Muppet minutes that sold the new show"

"With Muppet stalwarts Kermit, Miss Piggy and Fozzie, as well as human guests Elizabeth Banks and Topher Grace, the clip is a taster of what’s to come – a mockumentary “behind the scenes” take on Muppet life featuring the characters talking about their feelings directly to camera (a trope that’s nicely undercut by Gonzo). It’s being promoted as a more adult version of the show – which so far means some slightly more risque jokes (Kermit’s “bacon-wrapped hell on earth”) and some sly drug references (“Everyone’s going to be upset,” says Kermit at one point. “Except the band, they’re always happy … Legally now”)."

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2015/jul/22/its-time-to-play-the-music-10-muppet-minutes-that-sold-the-new-show

Muppets :)

“Your pain reliever may also be diminishing your joy”

“In the study, participants who took acetaminophen reported less strong emotions when they saw both very pleasant and very disturbing photos, when compared to those who took placebos.

Acetaminophen, the main ingredient in the over-the-counter pain reliever Tylenol, has been in use for more than 70 years in the United States, but this is the first time that this side effect has been documented.

Previous research had shown that acetaminophen works not only on physical pain, but also on psychological pain. This study takes those results one step further by showing that it also reduces how much users actually feel positive emotions, said Geoffrey Durso, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in social psychology at The Ohio State University…

Way said people in the study who took the pain reliever didn't appear to know they were reacting differently…

Each week about 23 percent of American adults (about 52 million people) use a medicine containing acetaminophen, the CHPA reports…

this study offers support to a relatively new theory that says that common factors may influence how sensitive we are to both the bad as well as the good things in life.”

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-04/osu-ypr041315.php

This is just all kinds of interesting.

I definitely agree with this theory of emotional sensitivity.

"The trouble with the Enlightenment"

"The strident rationalism of Hitchens, Wheen et al is, in this way, simply the vulgarisation of a long intellectual tradition, whereby thinkers view the Enlightenment in terms of whatever happens to be “modernity” at a given time, whether it is the atheist and communist modernity of the early 20thcentury or the secular, democratic modernity of today. As the Stanford historian Dan Edelstein recently pointed out, “accounts of the Enlightenment accordingly become something else entirely: thinly veiled ideological manifestos or pale reflections of current trends...

The Enlightenment’s great achievement, Pagden argues, was to repair the bonds of mankind. Its distinctive feature was not that it held history, nature, theology and political authority to the scrutiny of reason, as most of its critics and many of its champions claim, but instead that it recognised our common humanity—our ability to place ourselves in another’s situation and, ultimately, to sympathise with them. Adam Smith and David Hume taught us that man is neither a creation of God nor a selfish pursuer of his own interests; at the most fundamental level, man is the friend of man. This, Pagden argues, was the origin of cosmopolitanism: the central Enlightenment belief in a common humanity and an awareness of belonging to some world larger than your own community... This raises a further objection to Pagden’s cosmopolitanism: it unquestioningly endorses the Enlightenment belief that “civilisation” is the inevitable destiny of all human beings and all human societies. The philosophes worked this out in Europe in the 18th century, thinks Pagden, and we in the west are still waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

But a cosmopolitanism that rests upon ideals that were developed centuries ago in a few corners of Europe is just about the most restrictive, parochial cosmopolitanism imaginable. In its advocacy of a global “civilising process” it is archly imperial, recalling the condescending liberal aspirations that Thomas Macaulay and John Stuart Mill once held for the British Empire’s Indian subjects."

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/the-enlightenment-and-why-it-still-matters-anthony-pagden-review

This was interesting

"The Likely Cause of Addiction Has Been Discovered, and It Is Not What You Think"

"If you had asked me what causes drug addiction at the start, I would have looked at you as if you were an idiot, and said: "Drugs. Duh." It's not difficult to grasp. I thought I had seen it in my own life. We can all explain it. Imagine if you and I and the next twenty people to pass us on the street take a really potent drug for twenty days. There are strong chemical hooks in these drugs, so if we stopped on day twenty-one, our bodies would need the chemical. We would have a ferocious craving. We would be addicted. That's what addiction means...

As the Canadian doctor Gabor Mate was the first to explain to me, medical users just stop, despite months of use. The same drug, used for the same length of time, turns street-users into desperate addicts - and leaves medical patients unaffected.

If you still believe - as I used to - that addiction is caused by chemical hooks, this makes no sense. But if you believe Bruce Alexander's theory, the picture falls into place. The street-addict is like the rats in the first cage, isolated, alone, with only one source of solace to turn to. The medical patient is like the rats in the second cage. She is going home - to a life where she is surrounded by the people she love. The drug is the same, but the environment is different...

This gives us an insight that goes much deeper than the need to understand addicts. Professor Peter Cohen argues that human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. It's how we get our satisfaction. If we can't connect with each other, we will connect with anything we can find - the whirr of a roulette wheel or the prick of a syringe. He says we should stop talking about 'addiction' altogether, and instead call it 'bonding'. A heroin addict has bonded with heroin because she couldn't bond as fully with anything else.

So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection...

Ironically, the war on drugs actually increases all those larger drivers of addiction: for example, I went to a prison in Arizona - 'Tent City' - where inmates are detained in tiny stone isolation cages ("The Hole") for weeks and weeks on end, to punish them for drug use. It is as close to a human recreation of the cages that guaranteed deadly addiction in rats as I can imagine. And when those prisoners get out, they will be unemployable because of their criminal record - guaranteeing they with be cut off ever more. I watched this playing out in the human stories I met across the world."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/the-real-cause-of-addicti_b_6506936.html

"Some Of You Asked Us To Stop Writing About The Kardashians — This Is Our Response"

"We write about the Kardashians and Jenners because they are a fascinating cultural phenomenon. They're loud, brash, and attention-seeking in a way that's decidedly American. Andy Warhol would have been transfixed by them. They’ve managed to not only run down the clock on his assertion that, "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," — but also hurl that clock out the window and smash it to pieces. 

These five women — Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, Kylie, Kendall — and their mother, Kris, have completely redefined what it means to be famous. In their case, no, they didn’t come to prominence because of any particular talent. Khloé even admitted to this in 2011 on Barbara Walters’ annual "10 Most Fascinating People" special. They don't really do anything except...exist. In what should henceforth be known as the Kardashian Paradox, the Kardashians and Jenners are famous because they’re talented at being famous. The New York Times put it a bit more bluntly in its May 2015 profile of family puppeteer and brand engineer Kris Jenner: "They are famous for the industry that they’ve created, the Kardashian/Jenner megacomplex, which has not just invaded the culture but metastasized into it."

It’s true: The snake is eating its own tail, but the world is watching — quite literally... when the show premiered, E! was a middling cable network that ranked 13th in its target demo of 18 to 49-year-old women on Sunday nights. By season 4, KUWTK was the No. 1 broadcast in that time slot for E!'s core demographic...

 Just like Marcel Duchamp once upended a urinal and Andy Warhol painted Campbell’s Soup cans, forcing the world to question what does and does not constitute art, Kim has somehow elevated the ordinary, now-everyday act of turning a lens on oneself into an art form."

http://www.refinery29.com/2015/07/91473/kardashian-family-pop-culture-relevance?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post

 

I've never seen an episode of the show, but the virulent dislike for the Kardashians has made me kind of on their side. Or, just opposed to the cultural phenomenon of hating them as a way to indicate that you are cultured and classy? You know, not a part of the mob mentality that gets fed ideas without critically examining them. 

 

^I hope you can read that as acerbic.

 

There is a certain amount of classism and elitism that is present in critiques of reality TV (but, also, in the construction of reality TV I guess)

“‘Galileo’s Middle Finger,’ by Alice Dreger”

““Galileo’s Middle Finger” is many things: a rant, a manifesto, a treasury of evocative new terms (sissyphobia, autogynephilia, phall-o-meter) and an account of the author’s transformation “from an activist going after establishment scientists into an aide-de-camp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me” — and back again.

As its title suggests, the book is also a defiant gesture aimed at those who would deny empiricism. Yet this middle finger (Galileo’s actual middle finger, in fact, which Dreger stumbles across in Italy) is raised in affirmation as well. It points toward the stars that confirmed his cosmology — and toward empiricism’s power to create a fairer, more rational society. For Galileo is famous not just because he saw how the stars move. He’s famous because he insisted we see for ourselves how the world works, share what we see and shape our society accordingly.

Dreger brings a similar mission to ­activism and ethics. She insists that both be based on evidence, so that we respond to problems as they really are, rather than as we’d like to see them…

When a motivated group with a playbook of ugly tactics spots a scientific finding they don’t like, they can often dominate public discussion in a way that replaces a factual story with a false one. Only scientists of Galilean character can weather the storm. And even they, like Galileo, might be effectively exiled.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/galileos-middle-finger-by-alice-dreger.html?rref=books/review

This is interesting, I super want to read it. I found her because of her live tweets of her son’s abstinence-only sex ed class <link>.

I think there are a lot of issues that aren’t really empirically measurable, or where the measures we have erase the things we can’t measure (for example – we can measure the number of times a black man is stopped by the police in Ferguson but we can’t measure the systemic and implicit bias that is the core problem; we can measure thyroid function in people with depression caused by hypothyroidism but we don’t yet have a biomarker test that can diagnose everyone with depression)

"Online And In Person, Bernie Sanders’ White Supporters Advance A Black Lives Matter Conspiracy"

"The basic mythology is that someone — maybe frontrunner Hillary Clinton, maybe the Republicans, maybe her billionaire backers, maybe even the FBI — is using Black Lives Matter to tear Sanders down, to diminish an insurgent candidacy that, the supporters say, is viewed as a real threat by the establishment.

On a flight from San Francisco to Phoenix recently, for instance, a young, white, male Sanders supporter noticed the reporter sitting next to him was writing about Sanders and, unprompted, started talking about information dug up on Marissa Johnson, one of the young black women who took the stage at the Seattle Social Security event. He noted online sleuths on Reddit had discovered the woman had posted about being an evangelical Christian and a Sarah Palin supporter on Facebook years earlier. Subterfuge, he said. She’s not the real deal. Something’s afoot...

“It was definitely from a Sanders-supporting camp of people specifically treating the action as targeting Bernie Sanders, which it wasn’t, and specifically orchestrated by somebody else — as though we don’t have the autonomy,” Tia Oso, one of the protesters who interrupted the Netroots candidate forum, told BuzzFeed News on Thursday. “Almost like Black Lives Matter is not a real movement.”...

The women who took the stage in Seattle, Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford, say they’re very aware many Sanders supporters think they were sent to harass Bernie by one of his opponents.

“My first response to this was, ‘Bitch better have my money!’” Johnson joked, when asked about the conspiracy theories swirling that Clinton was behind the protests, to the hosts of the This Week In Blackness podcast the day after the Seattle action. “Yes, please, give me that money, I’ll expropriate those funds back to the ‘hood, let’s do it. Hillary, this is a call out: If Hillary wants to give me some money, please do.”"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/evanmcsan/online-and-in-person-bernie-sanders-white-supporters-advance?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All#.cdMZDKVBG

I really enjoyed this article, this is such a fantastic joke of a moment. Come now

FB: yesssssss

"WHY ‘THE ENLIGHTENMENT PROJECT’ IS NECESSARY AND UNENDING"

"To put it mildly, the phrase “Enlightenment project” is a term of indignant disavowal, as if it referred to a blueprint for the world’s biggest prison. By using it, the speaker casts an anathema, sometimes with a curl of the lip or a roll of the eyes. In this voice, “the Enlightenment project” means (more or less) the organization of thought, beginning in the 17th and 18th centuries, in Europe and its colonies, around a set of interlocked propositions:

1. the mind is a lone wolf; 

2. its rational operations are predatory in that

3. they devalue women, people of color, and the colonized,

4. suppress ways of knowing other than the rational, Newtonian, Cartesian, and scientific,

5. and lead to seeing all of nature—the whole world outside the predatory ego, and in particular those seen as rightly subject to the domination of reason,

6. which is an ideological instrument cultivated by European males to rationalize their exercise of colonial and imperial power.

You might well ask what the Enlightenment had to say for itself? In 1784, its pivotal philosopher, Immanuel Kant, wrote a newspaper article, of all things, called “What Is Enlightenment?” proposing a rather different notion: “Enlightenment is man’s release from his self-inflicted immaturity. … ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’—that is the motto of enlightenment.” Of all the ideas that clustered around the Enlightenment, infinite perfection through reason was one of the lesser strands. Far more important were critiques of unearned privilege, whether of throne, church, or property. Toward improvement? Surely. Perfection? Not hardly...

when an Enlightenment vocabulary is used to justify hereditary privilege (for example, in the tyranny of test scores), then it becomes necessary to fight against misuses of Enlightenment—in the name of more Enlightenment."

I heard the phrase "the enlightenment project" a while ago and I'm trying to understand it. And if you're reading this, you are joining me for this journey. I'd love suggestions of what it read next.

"‘I'm Really Rich': Donald Trump and the Art of Having No Shame"

"The escalator lowers him past a banner that reads "TRUMP MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN." Make America totally awesome. Make America rad as fuck. Make America's dick so big they'll need multiple computer monitors to see all of it when he emails it to the Chinese to ask for our money back. He walks on stage and, for a moment, bobs his head to Neil Young like it is a virus slowly infecting his brain...

There are no stakes because he has never contributed to the conversation. He is making fart noises in the back of a symposium on veganism or recycling. It is a wonder that he has not proposed a reality show in which $100 bills are glued to the streets of impoverished neighborhoods, and on the back, if you win, are condo listings and a phone number. He has never heard of shame, no idea what you're talking about, I want to see shame's birth certificate, I'm just saying we've never seen it physically, how can we know that it's real?"
http://www.vice.com/read/im-not-bragging-donald-trump-escalators-and-having-no-shame-617

Aaaah, I love how this guy writes and observes.
His great essay on the American Bro.

related: Who is voting for Donald Trump

(and I guess I have read more about him - but really, only this and one other article. I'm making exceptions for high quality)

By the guy who wrote the essay on the American Bro; this is similarly excellent