Saturday, October 31, 2015

"First, Kill the Witches. Then, Celebrate Them."


"Insofar as we can chart its murky origins, Halloween derives from Samhain, an ancient Celtic harvest festival. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried its otherworldly imagery to America, largely in the mid-19th century. Black cats arrived along with their broomstick-flying consorts in the 1890s. The witches’ origin is unknown; they played no role in the Celtic tradition. The costumes came later, as did the witches’ basic black. Trick-or-treating began in the 1920s. The candy companies saw to the rest.

That the least decorous, most disorderly of holidays should have established permanent residence in eastern Massachusetts is incongruous on any number of counts. Our Puritan forefathers had a horror of holidays. They renounced even saints days, to wind up with a calendar that has been described as “the dullest in Western civilization.” They feared that boatloads of nefarious Christmas-celebrating Irishmen were to disembark imminently on American shores. They were off by only a few centuries...

Among the oldest settlements in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and for years among the wealthiest cities in America, Salem had many claims to fame. It preferred not to count the witchcraft delusion among them; no one cared to record even where the town had hanged 19 innocents. It addressed the unpleasantness the New England way: silently. When George Washington passed through Salem in October 1789, he witnessed neither any trace of a witch panic nor of Halloween. Sometimes it seems as if the trauma of an event can be measured by how long it takes us to commemorate it, and by how thoroughly we mangle it in the process
...

THREE HUNDRED years after the trials, Salem unveiled an elegant, understated memorial to the victims. Three hundred and thirteen years after the trials, it unveiled a gleaming statue of the “Bewitched” star, Elizabeth Montgomery, on a broom.
"

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/opinion/sunday/first-kill-the-witches-then-celebrate-them.html?ref=todayspaper

Happy Halloween ;)

This is making me think about what it is that we are celebrating today. This holiday is pretty much just about fun, sort of focused on children, sort of about celebrating our own creativity and popular culture - but also loosely about expressing our myths and superstitions and all the parts of our society that belie our notions of our rationalism and modernity.  

Like, how do we choose costumes and what we are expressing when we wear them? What makes a "good costume"? I think the goal is to (a) subsume your own identity into something else, totally realistically, achieving a perfect transformation so that others can experience what it would be like to interact with that other person/thing/concept, and (b) reflect something important in the zeitgeist, like a figure who has been in the news or media, or some big concept/idea that our culture has been immersed in. Letting us directly process something important to our experiences, but too distant or abstract for us to realistically approach directly.

But then, most of us just want to fun of dressing up, finding the perfect costume is a lot of work. My costume is Misty Copeland, and I'm not sure exactly what I'm expressing my attempting to embody her. I guess I find her inspiring, it makes me feel a lot of good emotions to see her being really visible in the media right now, and I sort of want a way to express and celebrate that. (also, it's pretty simple and comfortable and she's my race and that's hard to find)

"Coffin remains tell life story of ancient sun-worshiping priestess"

"Once upon a time in the Bronze Age, a girl was born to a family of sun worshipers living in the Black Forest of what is today Germany. When she was young she became a priestess in the local sun cult, and soon attracted the eye of a tribal chief who lived far to the north. The girl’s family married her off, and she went to live with the chief in what is now Denmark. She often traveled back and forth between Denmark and her ancestral home and eventually gave birth to a child while she was away. Sometime before her 18th birthday, she and the child died. They were buried together in an oak coffin, the young woman wearing a bronze belt buckle in the shape of the sun."
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/05/coffin-remains-tell-life-story-ancient-sun-worshiping-priestess

this is so cool
Related: Çatalhöyük

Friday, October 30, 2015

"A Rainbow Rejection: How ‘The Muppets’ Gets Everything Wrong About the Muppets"

"I guess I’ve found the one marriage-equality hypothetical on which I’m a fuming mossback conservative: Turns out I am opposed to the sexualization of the Muppets and therefore to the implication that humans and Muppets can or should miscegenate...

I get that adorable felt characters indulging depraved grown-up urges and espousing cynical grown-up sentiments can be funny and subversive, because I’m not an idiot. But shows like these work because they zero in on the discrepancy between the soft and brightly colored fantasies of comfort and security with which we nurture children and the often unpleasant and painful truths of the adult world. They’re funny because they’re deeply sad. They take the core concept of The Velveteen Rabbit and turn it inside out, presenting a world where instead of becoming loveworn and thereby real, our childhood pals just grow up to be shitty, diminished adults like the rest of us. This is a rich premise for stories that depend on our winking recognition that we’re looking at Muppets once removed. But on The Muppets, diminished adulthood has come for the actual Muppets, and it’s really depressing."

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/a-rainbow-rejection-how-the-muppets-gets-everything-wrong-about-the-muppets/

Hmmmm. I really wants this to be good, but I twasnt blown away by the trailer. Maybe I'll skip the first season and let it work itself out for a bit; I still have a lot of hop

"Adult women are now the largest demographic in gaming "

"Teenage boys, who are often stereotyped as the biggest gamers, now lag far behind their older female counterparts, making up just 17 percent of the gaming demographic...

stereotypes are breaking fast in the gaming industry, particularly the longheld stereotype of the adult woman as an outlier who sticks to mobile games and "social" games on Facebook while the more hardcore gamer, the "serious" (male) gamer, goes for console games.

Though this stereotype has long persisted, and even been used as a hiring tactic , the new data suggests there's little if any truth to it—especially not when you consider that the average adult woman has been gaming for 13 years.

Sorry, male gamers of Reddit and 4Chan, but Angry Birds  only came out five years ago. Unless you want to try to argue that women have just been playing Bejeweled  for the last 13 years, the math just doesn't add up.

And while the total audience for mobile social games is now bigger than ever, the audience for computer and video games is now an even 50-50 split between male and female genders."


 http://www.dailydot.com/geek/adult-women-largest-gaming-demographic/ 

"In unusual move, German scientists lobby for GM labeling"

"Their unusual plea is a political gamble; rather than making it more difficult for GM products to reach consumers, they hope the new law will show Germans just how widespread such products already are—whether it’s in food, clothes, drugs, or washing powder—and that there is nothing to be afraid of.
The petition to the German parliament, which will go online tomorrow, asks the German government to prepare a law that requires GM labeling for all food, feed, drugs, textiles, chemicals, and other products that have been produced using genetic engineering. The petition also calls on the government to advocate a similar law at the E.U. level.
The text was written by Horst Rehberger, who leads a group called Forum Grüne Vernunft (Forum Green Reason), and has the backing of several prominent scientists, including Nobel Prize winner Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, as well as some politicians. If it receives more than 50,000 signatures in the next 4 weeks, the German parliament has to consider the proposal."
http://news.sciencemag.org/europe/2015/05/unusual-move-german-scientists-lobby-gm-labeling

Thursday, October 29, 2015

"BACON BITS"

"On Monday the WHO classified high consumption of processed meats like bacon and sausage as a class one risk factor for colorectal cancer. But contrary to headlines, it's NOT the same as smoking. Brooke talks with Ivan Oransky, who explains what the announcement actually means and how we should interpret it. Also, we revisit our Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Health News Edition with Gary Schwitzer to help you navigate the perennially murky world of health and diet reporting."
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/bacon-bits/?utm_source=sharedUrl&utm_medium=metatag&utm_campaign=sharedUrl

This ~15 minute podcast breaks down how this story is being reported in a really disingenuous way, and also provides a useful series of steps to go through when you hear this kind of reporting and de-bunk the claims for yourself.

To expand on this, I wrote an explainer of the biology involved; this might also help you ignore the studies you don't need to be stressing about:

tl;dr: Red meat isn't going to "give you cancer"; if you get cancer, the vast majority of the time it won't be linkable to a specific thing and is MOST likely just due to random chance. We like the illusion of control, but it's probably just making us unnecessarily stressed.

I'm sure that the results of the red meat study are real. I just don't think that there is a lesson here for the vast majority of the people reading and sharing the viral articles about it. There are lots of good reasons to eat less meat, and this is not one of them. Here is why -

Cancer is caused by the disruption to the regulation of cell growth and proliferation, an unavoidable consequence of basic principles of biology that also allow us to develop from single fertilized eggs into full humans (in some ways, embryos have similarity to cancerous growths). Cell growth and proliferation is caused by genes being turned on and off, leading to the cell having more or less of certain kinds of proteins, and those proteins binding to each other and to cellular building blocks to "build more cell".

In healthy bodies, it is common for cells to be cued to proliferate at the wrong times or to grow into the wrong cell types (i.e. becoming pre-cancerous). However, these cells often die, or the immune system is able to destroy them - this is probably happening right now, as you read this, and has probably always happened in all multicellular organisms. Cancer develops when the immune system can't clear all the pre-cancerous cells, either because the immune system is weak and/or unable to detect the cancerous cells, or because cancerous cells are developing too quickly. The second scenario is the most common, happens by random chance, and none of us can do much to impact this either way.

I think about this as a consequence of being alive and having all the benefits of the amazing, complex, dynamic processes that occur in our bodies: In order to find the boundaries of just the right amount of dynamically alive, sometimes our bodies go a little too far and have to pull back. And sometimes we can't pull back.

There are factors that can tip the scales of chance either way - from which genetic alleles you have (like the well-studied BRCA1 alleles that raise breast cancer risk) to exposure to carcinogenic stimuli (like blasts of the wavelengths of radiation from atomic bombs). Possibly the most common and useful example is the sun: The wavelengths of radiation that come from the sun can penetrate the skin, and knock hydrogens off oxygens in molecules in the cell - these are "free radicals" and they can do things like damage that cell's DNA if the cell doesn't clear them out with, for example, vitamin D. This is what causes skin cancer. Other wavelengths of radiation, like from the radium Marie Curie used, can directly break DNA (but, to address a common myth, the radiation from cell phones is NOT at a wavelength that can do either of these things).

Epidemiologists look for cancer causes in two ways: by investigating populations of people with high rates of cancer, to see if they all have something in common, or by investigating a specific factor to see if people who are highly exposed have different rates of cancer. When carcinogenic factors are identified by these studies, it's rarely clear what the molecular mechanism is, and the results are also really dependent on population. For example, this meat study doesn't tell us what specific thing in processed meat is doing what specific thing to the body to cause cancer, which means that this might still be a correlation and not a causation. In addition, this study is specific to people who are already at risk of colorectal cancer. 

Cancer holds this sort of existential terror in our society. There are some very legitimate reasons for this special attention (like most people, I've had family members pass away from cancer; these diseases are still often deadly and are almost always unpleasant). However, looking at how information about cancer is communicated, I also see cancer fears as an expression of American society's unhealthy obsession with individual safety. It's tantalizing to believe that we can explain and prevent every negative experience. That if we just read all the studies and designed our lives, we could control the outcomes of our lives and exist in perfect safety. 

But this is most certainly an illusion - and luckily so. The sooner we all recognize that, the sooner we will have the room to live without these false and anxious responsibilities, and the sooner we will stop blaming and shaming people who need support to overcome random and unforeseen disease.

Caveat: I'm not a cancer researcher or a doctor, so this is probably missing a lot of nuances, but these are the general principles as I understand them from a molecular biology background


FB: Why red meat ISN'T going to "give you cancer" and my cancer explainer

"The Upsetting Reason Why We Don't Always Know How Meds Affect Women"

"For much of medical history, men (and male animals) have been the "guinea pigs" for testing — effects, dosages, and side effects have been measured on primarily or completely male subjects. In modern medicine, men have been the model; women are often an afterthought.

Unfortunately, the trend of overlooking the effects of medications in women continues today. In 2013, 20 years after the drug first became available, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cut the recommended dosage of Ambien for women in half (from 10 mg to 5 mg for the immediate release version)...

Thankfully, NIH is pushing to make a substantial permanent change in research. Beginning in September of last year, it began to introduce a series of policies, regulations, and incentivizing grants to encourage (and in many cases necessitate) researchers to recognize biological sex as a significant factor in their work...

In his work, Dr. Mogil has found that variability in male and female mice data is nearly equal and, if anything, males are slightly more variable than females. A recent meta-analysis published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews mirrors these findings, concluding that in 293 studies across all fields of biomedicine, there were no significant differences in variation between males and females...

Dr. Mogil's most recent research has focused on how mice process pain, and he's found that male and female mice actually do this through different types of immune cells. Therefore, any work looking at this mechanism only in male mice could be ignoring female pain."

http://www.refinery29.com/2015/07/90501/women-medication-clinical-trials?mc_cid=2f7b7bcb51&mc_eid=a3b20efd74

!! Cuz I hella learned that lady rats have menstrual cycles that cause variability. Like, it wasn't on a test or anything, but it feels like something I would expect any scientist working with rodents to be thinking about.

I mean, right now (at least, as I write this) I'm looking at RNA levels in rat models of mood and anxiety disorders, and we're only using male rats. It's sort of a default position.


"For police accountability, look beyond individual racial bias"

"Case studies reveal that a fuller examination may lead to a more accurate accounting. “Because of the way the media and popular discourse treat civil rights and social justice, we assume the problem lives inside somebody’s mind or heart,” said Phillip Atiba Goff, president of the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But then we get stuck in conversations about character rather than solutions.” In other words, to stop police violence, focusing on individual bias among officers is not enough. Rather, a “race and …” approach that tackles problems at a granular level holds the most potential for change...

The study found some negative feelings toward blacks among some officers, but it also found that officers who felt well treated by the department used less force, as did those whose identities as cops were very important to them... Another key consideration is how important masculinity is to an officer’s sense of self...

Goff’s work has shown that masculinity factors into police violence as well. “An officer who feels a need to demonstrate his masculinity may be more likely to use force in general, but particularly against people who threaten his self-concept as a man,” he said. “If African-Americans are seen as hypermasculine, then the officer will feel more threatened. ” This can be true whether or not the officer exhibits clear racial bias."
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/9/ferguson-police-accountabilityracelaborgender.html


This doesn't surprise me, and it is soooo intersectional. Blackness is so gendered!

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

"Poll Reveals that White America Views Black Lives Matter Movement as a Distraction"

"That’s just one of the insights from a new poll from PBS NewsHour and Marist College’s Institute for Public Opinion, which was conducted in advance of the PBS broadcast of “America After Charleston.” Across the board, white respondents felt that blacks enjoy more opportunities than that group identified for itself....

When it comes to the Black Lives Matter movement, 59 percent of whites polled thought it distracted attention from the real issues of racial discrimination, while just 26 percent of African Americans agreed. And while 67 percent of blacks view it as a movement, just 46 percent of whites think so—and 40 percent think it’s just a “slogan.” Fully 41 percent think it advocates violence."

http://www.colorlines.com/articles/poll-reveals-white-america-views-black-lives-matter-movement-distraction

And I bet that a bunch of these people would proudly let you know about their black friends/co-workers.

"2015 is the year the old internet finally died"

"Take a look at your browser tabs if you're reading this on a computer. Inevitably, you have at least a few that are weeks, if not months, old, things you've always intended to get to but just never have. Odds are these are so-called "longform" articles that will take a while to read. (Here's one of mine, which I've had open since October: a GQ feature about "the last true hermit.") A fair number of you are going to open this piece in a tab and just never get back to it.
These longform pieces are the pinnacle to which lots and lots of us writers and the websites we work for aspire. They win awards. They garner attention from other journalists. They're often why we got into this business to begin with. Even BuzzFeed turned out to be using all those cat GIFs as a Trojan horse for a lot of great investigative journalism.

And I don't want to suggest, even inadvertently, that nobody reads these longer pieces...

The internet has made it clear that the kinds of things that people want to read are sort of an endless collection of what's cool. And that might be a longform story, or it might be the quick, clicky little things that repackage the best flotsam and jetsam out there in a more presentable fashion. And if longform takes time, then aggregation is its opposite, easier to throw together in a few minutes with huge potential upside...

On social media, you share an article because you agree with the take, sure, but also because it says something about you, whether that fact is that you're angry about a political issue, or that you like cute bunnies, or that you love Back to the Future. Your social media feed is a curation of things you want people to know about you. Inconvenient truths, negative views, or anything too dark will be pushed aside...

articles increasingly seem to be individual insects trapped in someone else's web "
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/6/9099357/internet-dead-end


That's such  an interesting point, that we share information because it says something about us.

"How Eating Disorders Evolved Online: An Update"

"we try to block the things that are visible rather than the things that are the problem"
http://www.wnyc.org/story/how-eating-disorders-evolved-online-update/


Related: "DANAH BOYD — Online Reflections of Our Offline Lives"

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

"Tracing Ancestry, Researchers Produce a Genetic Atlas of Human Mixing Events"

"geneticists applying new statistical approaches have taken a first shot at both identifying and dating the major population mixture events of the last 4,000 years, with the goal of providing a new source of information for historians.

Some of the hundred or so major mixing events they describe have plausible historical explanations, while many others remain to be accounted for...

Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers, as do several other groups in the region...

One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia. The event occurred 22 generations ago, according to genetic dating, which corresponds to the beginning of the 14th century, fitting well with the period of the Mongol empire."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/02/14/science/tracing-ancestry-team-produces-genetic-atlas-of-human-mixing-events.html?_r=0&referrer=


Includes a good description of haplotypes, which I think are such a cool piece of population genetics, and kinda describe how genetics actually works (it's not "a gene for being Asian", it's statistically unlikely clusters of hundreds of little genetic variations that tend to be passed down between people in specific regions).

"When The Gang-bangers Are White Guys"

"I have never encountered a gang incident in Chicago remotely like this. The number of perpetrators involved — not to mention the nine deaths — far exceed the typical urban gang-related shooting. Maybe there was some gang incident in Chicago like this decades ago. But this sort of pitched battle? I’ve never heard of anything like it. If these biker gang members were non-white, I think this would cause a national freak out...
Urban gangs and criminal organizations very rarely get into gun battles with police...
Of course, the number of deaths is lower overall with these groups. You don’t have the daily deluge of homicides the way we would in Chicago. But I do think that our views about urban crime are so framed by race and inequality in a variety of ways. When criminal activity seems unrelated to these factors, it doesn’t hit our national dopamine receptors in quite the same way. People tend to view these motorcycle gangs as a kind of curiosity."
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/05/19/when-the-gang-bangers-are-white-guys

Related: "Here's What People Are Saying About The Waco Shootout And Race"

there is this thing where media cutely reference the Sharks and the Jets (which, would they think to do that if it was a Black or Latinx gang?). And it's as if to say 'they are part of America culture, nbd, and later we can make a version of them that appears in a commercially successful movie'.

Monday, October 26, 2015

"More than 2,000 enslaved fishermen rescued in 6 months"

"More than 2,000 fishermen have been rescued this year from brutal conditions at sea, liberated as a result of an Associated Press investigation into seafood brought to the U.S. from a slave island in eastern Indonesia...

Many experts believe the most effective pressure for change can come from consumers, whose hunger for cheap seafood is helping fuel the massive labor abuses. Southeast Asia’s fishing industry is dominated by Thailand, which earns $7 billion annually in exports. The business relies on tens of thousands of poor migrant laborers, mainly from neighboring Southeast Asian countries. They often are tricked, sold or kidnapped and put onto boats that are commonly sent to distant foreign waters to poach fish...

Many of those leaving recently from Ambon were handed cash payments by company officials, but they said the money was a fraction of what they were owed.

An AP survey of almost 400 men underscores the horrific conditions fishing slaves faced. Many described being whipped with stingray tails, deprived of food and water and forced to work for years without pay. More than 20 percent said they were beaten, 30 percent said they saw someone else beaten and 12 percent said they saw a person die...

almost all come back empty-handed, struggle to find jobs and feel they are yet another burden to their extremely poor families... Even with the increased global attention, hundreds of thousands of men still are forced to work in the seafood industry."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/more-than-2000-enslaved-fishermen-rescued-in-6-months/2015/09/17/503e04a0-5d01-11e5-8475-781cc9851652_story.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email#

"Stonewall Is Terribly Offensive, and Offensively Terrible:

"What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is. We have to literally see a black character hand Danny a brick so Danny can be the first to throw it and the first to cheer “Gay power!” (This is the moment my screening audience, of professional critics, was lost to groans and laughter for the rest of the movie.) We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
Which, of course, is nonsense. When Straight Outta Compton is earning $60 million on its opening weekend, it’s nonsense. When Tangerine is earning rave reviews and art-house dollars, it’s nonsense. When a show like Transparentis winning Emmys, it’s nonsense. But Stonewall demands that we accept Emmerich’s evasive, self-serving sociology and then has the audacity to ask that we be moved by it. We’re not."

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/09/stonewall-review-roland-emmerich

"This 1950s Movie Is More Feminist Than Most Movies Today"S

"All About Eve, in a way, is all about mansplaining. In a year when Her is attempting to critique flimsy female characters with a female character whose sole function is to teach the male protagonist about himself, the fully realized women of All About Eve (1950!) and the vicious fights they have about misogyny are astonishing...
Later in the argument, he demeans her further, calling her “a body with a voice.” “It’s about time the piano realized it has not written the concerto,” he yells, graduating from “body with a voice” to an even more explicit object. You don’t know what you’re talking about, he is telling her, taking for granted his ability to grasp the situation...
Sometimes when a man is explaining to you how you’re being hysterical, you can say anything at all and he won’t listen to you, and there’s nothing you can do but eat a fucking chocolate."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/arianelange/this-1950s-movie-is-more-feminist-than-most-movies-today#.id5JMW9Ew


Yo. The "taking for granted his ability to grasp the situation". I am so tired of situations where people are confused by my perspective and, instead of recognizing that they don't have all the information and asking me more, reacting on the implicit assumption that their perception is Truth and I am being irrational.

Sometimes, it's like - why do I even open my mouth?

Sunday, October 25, 2015

"DEAR NORTH SIDERS: STOP ACTING LIKE CHICAGO DOESN'T HAVE A SOUTH SIDE"

"Our part of town has a few distinctions as well, but unfortunately, to the greater part of Chicagoland, the South Side is defined as a war-torn shit sandwich -- aka “Chiraq” -- filled with gangs battling over turf and corrupt politicians running roughshod over communities.

As a result, South Siders don’t quite get the same perks of belonging to Chicago that North Siders do. The Stanley Cup never seems to make its way to bars and restaurants south of Cermak. That “If Chicago's Neighborhoods Were Game of Thrones Houses” post from your friends’ Facebook wall most definitely ignores the lower half of the city (not part of the "known world"?). There’s a persistent attitude that there’s no reason for local Chicagoans to ride the Red Line beyond The Cell...

Many of you know that South Siders are a proud bunch. I suggest you check us out. Visit Pullman, Pilsen, South Shore, Beverly, Hyde Park (you might not find parking), Little Village, Pill Hill, Bronzeville, Englewood, or Bridgeport. A city that is so rich in history deserves better. To keep strictly to the North Side of the city would be like going on a vacation without ever leaving the confines of the resort.
Here’s a few places you can visit that you don’t hear much about:"

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/chicago/an-open-letter-to-north-siders-who-won-t-visit-the-south-side-of-chicago


I'm so glad that I read this so early into my time in Chicago.

Every place I have ever lived, there has been at least one part of town or nearby city that you weren't supposed to go (unsaid end of the sentence: "unless you are poor and black, then that's where you belong") because you "could get shot!" or, like, mugged for, I guess, looking wealthy and/or white and, like, ~not knowing the streets~. The only legitimate reasons to go there would be some kind of volunteering or charity work where you drove directly to the school or whatever, and then directly back to safety.

It barely seems to occur to anyone that people live there, everyday, and don't get shot or OD after stepping on a druggy needle on the sidewalk or beat up by roving thugs or whatever else is supposed to happen in "the bad part of town". And a big part of the reasons why these communities have crime and poverty problems is because of a lack of financial investment; the kind of thing that happens when all the economically privileged people refuse to go there.

"What Hollywood’s Acceptance Of Sexism Looks Like In Practice"

"I felt uncomfortable but was focusing on getting the shoot done. Without hesitation, I sat down next to Johansson with my laptop, explaining to him the process of creating reaction GIFs — at which point he slung his arm around my back.

Then, in the middle of the shoot — for which we asked Johansson to act out reactions to so-called dicks in the workplace — the actor made another comment, one we did capture on camera. "I'm not shy," he said to my colleagues and me under the hot fluorescent lights inside the studio. I laughed at his improvisation, which admittedly was pretty funny. Then he said, a little too casually, "I'm sweating like a rapist," wiping his forehead and the sides of his face, seemingly not paying attention to the camera that was recording those very words.

It took me a second to register what I'd just heard. Still, none of us in the room objected or expressed our discomfort. Instead, I forced myself to laugh before proceeding...

In the immediate aftermath of my interview with Johansson, I'd shrugged off one of my colleague's suggestions to write about the experience and told myself that this was bound to happen one day. Every journalist has had a negative experience with an interviewee at some point in her career, and this was mine, right?

It worries me that I felt this way. It worries me that it took a conversation with my editor to make me realize that I should have been pissed. If I were a man, Johansson would not have said those things in front of me, let aloneto me."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/susancheng/paul-johansson#.dh9oRAY7l

Ya, my initial reaction to most microagressions is laughter - I guess in the hope that if I act like it's not a bug deal then it won't escalate? But probably shitty socialization that tells me to trust the feelings of the other person in the situation more than I trust my own feelings.

Related: Why Smiling Too Much May Be Bad for You

"Stunning Images Show How Native American Fashion Looks Without Cultural Appropriation"

"Her inspiration, she says, is encapsulated in the vision board she created before designing the pieces — old black-and-white photographs of her grandfather, Hawk with the Yellowtail Feather, and of her aunt performing a rare women's warbonnet dance in the 1940s juxtaposed with her sister participating in the same ceremony a few years back.

"It's beautiful to see the continuity of our people from then to now," she told Mic. "I wanted to convey that with my collection — we're still here, we're still a reflection of our ancestors."

In fact, much of Yellowtail's mission — which drives her work and, in a sense, elevates it above the fashion economy's more commercial ambitions — revolves around fighting cultural erasure, the tendency to treat Native people like they're gone or disappearing.

"At this point, they're taking our voices and our designs from us," she says. "They don't acknowledge us as living people and nations. This is not just fashion, it's part of our tribal identities.""
http://mic.com/articles/118150/stunning-images-show-how-american-indian-fashion-looks-without-cultural-appropriation

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