"‘Bro’-liferation"

"‘‘bro’’ has been ripped from its life as a teasing term of endearment and description of camaraderie and plunked into the sociopolitical swamps of entitlement and privilege. It starts to get at the fractious identity rifts at the heart of this campaign season. On one hand, women and people of color don’t want to be patronized by know-it-all white guys or bullied into supporting one presidential candidate and harassed away from supporting another. On the other: #NotAllMen...

It’s also odd that ‘‘bro’’ has become a culturally white designation. The word has roots both in the church and as a way that black people address black men — as ‘‘brother.’’ Black use of that word is publicly fraternal and privately political. It’s how black men salute each other — still — in white spaces, as a way of saying to each other, ‘‘I see you.’’ What’s vaguely obnoxious about ‘‘bro’’ is that it doesn’t really see anybody."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/magazine/bro-liferation.html?_r=0&referer=&login=email

Related: This American Bro; Bernie-Bro

FB: Perfect summary: "‘‘Bro’’ puts a dunce cap on patriarchy"

"How ‘LOL’ Became a Punctuation Mark"

"Kim’s “LOL” offers, instead of laughter, an ironic aaaaaand scene to the humblebrag she’s typed into her Instagram caption field. There is pretty much nobody in the world who is less likely to find herself with “nothing to wear” than Kim Kardashian West; her LOL acknowledges that. Her LOL suggests the many threads of irony required to weave an outfit of black-rectangled censors. Her LOL is a wink, rendered as an acronym. Her LOL functions as, essentially, a punctuation mark...

McWhorter gave, in his essay on the matter, the example of Jocelyn and Annabelle, two friends who are texting with each other. “Jocelyn texts ‘where have you been?’” McWhorter wrote, “and Annabelle texts back ‘LOL at the library studying for two hours.’ How funny is that, really?” (Not very.) Instead, McWhorter argued, the “LOL” in the women’s exchange is standing in as, effectively, a marker for empathy. It is replacing the things that can be achieved in an in-person conversation—the nodding of the head, the contact of the eyes, the tiny gestures that together lend the “L” to the “IRL”—with a three-letter symbol. “LOL,” McWhorter put it, “no longer ‘means’ anything. Rather, it ‘does something’—conveying an attitude—just as the ending ‘ed’ doesn’t ‘mean’ anything but conveys past tense. LOL is, of all things, grammar.”...

Which is also to say that Kim Kardashian West—with her naked selfie and her naked self—have done what centuries’ worth of writers have failed to do: create punctuation that suggests, in its winking way, sarcasm."
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/03/how-lol-became-a-punctuation-mark/472824/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

We really need punctuation for online sarcasm - and, thinking about it, 'lol' is totally it.

tbh, I really don't like the lol punctuation mark. I know a lot of people who use it, I have a lot of communications full of it, and it kind of annoys me. I need to unpack all of the reasons why, but the thing that I am most aware of is that it feels like it makes everything less serious and it asks the other person to also engage with the topic kind of flippantly and mindlessly. And if you want to introduce something serious, or like finally make a firm decision about where we are meeting for brunch, you have to push against the lol a little bit.

Same deal with 'haha'. Which is a little bit apologetic somehow.

"You’re probably doing email introductions wrong"

"Use the double opt-in introduction

A double opt-in introduction is the nice, non-lazy, respectful way to introduce people and not be viewed as a terrible person. Here is what you should do:"
http://qz.com/457699/youre-probably-doing-email-introductions-wrong/?utm_source=atlanticFB

Short and very sensical :) I make and receive lots of these kinds of introductions and they work maybe half the time, let's be real.

"Sex isn’t chromosomes: the story of a century of misconceptions about X & Y"

"The scientific process often involves tweaking taxonomies. Humanity saw distant objects above, and the taxonomy we built was simple: two entries, one labelled “planets”, the other “stars”. Over time we added extra things, like asteroids (rocky) and comets (icy), to cover new discoveries – and, then, even further research (and pictures like those returned by the Rosetta probe) meant that some of the things we thought made asteroids and comets very different were really only a reflection of our perspective...

Ah, but there’s a weasel word there: “normal”. And with sex chromosomes, perceptions of “normal” play a huge role – not only in what we think that they are and do, but in the very existence of the term “sex chromosomes”. This is the subject of Sarah Richardson’s revelatory book Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome, a history of the science of sex and the invention of the sex chromosome concept – one that Richardson argues we should reject entirely as a mistake that has led to bad science, societal prejudice and widespread misunderstanding of what sex really is...

In reality, there are extremely few sexual characteristics solely controlled by the presence or absence of a Y chromosome – and just as there are plenty of characteristics controlled by genes found on other chromosomes, the “sex” chromosomes also carry genes that determine traits that have nothing to do with sex...

some scientists became convinced that there was something in the body, and then the cell, and then the genome, that would literally be “sex itself” – the only thing that truly mattered for sex, the thing that was its true source and the thing that finally allowed for a simple, causational definition of sex... This came after a strong fight from those who disagreed. Richardson writes of Thomas Montgomery at the University of Philadelphia, who called the sex chromosome theory “an absurd and simplistic overextension of the chromosome theory of heredity”; and of Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the leading figures in the young field of embryology, who blasted it for inventing “a special element that has the power of turning maleness into femaleness”...

Anne Fausto-Sterling and Jennifer Graves, in particular, as well as feminist science pressure groups like the Society for Women’s Health Research, are cited as important critics of the binary representation of biological or genetic sex - and critical to the post-2000 “conceptual shift” towards the complex model we know today, where the interplay of different genetic and environmental factors gives rise both to physical sex characteristics and aspects of the psychological feeling of gender identity.

http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2015/02/sex-isn-t-chromosomes-story-century-misconceptions-about-x-y

Related: Species not real; Nature - Sex Redefined [Quoted in the article and totally worth reading in its entirety]; Sex in the brain; the one on urinals and male genitalia;

FB: "like the platypus, it’s crucial not to think the taxonomy more important than the reality it’s meant to describe."

"You Just Got Out of Prison. Now What?"

"Hammock was sent away in 1994, at a time when stiff sentencing reforms around the country were piling more people into prison for longer amounts of time. These included California’s ‘‘three-strikes law,’’ which took effect just months before Hammock was arrested. The law imposed life sentences for almost any crime if the offender had two previous ‘‘serious’’ or ‘‘violent’’ convictions. (The definitions of ‘‘serious’’ and ‘‘violent’’ in California’s penal code are broad; attempting to steal a bicycle from someone’s garage is ‘‘serious.’’) Similar laws proliferated in other states and in the 1994 federal crime bill, becoming signatures of that decade’s tough-on-crime policies and helping to catapult the country into the modern era of mass incarceration. But as the criminologist Jeremy Travis, then head of the Justice Department’s research agency, later pointed out, America had failed to recognize the ‘‘iron law of imprisonment’’: Each of the 2.4 million people we’ve locked up, if he or she doesn’t die in prison, will one day come out...

Many spill out of prison in no condition to take advantage of the helpful bureaucracies the re-entry movement has been busily putting in place... Unlike typical parolees, third-strikers are often notified of their release just before it happens, sometimes only a day in advance. (It can take months for a judge to rule after papers are filed.) They’re usually sent out the door with $200, a not-insubstantial share of which they often pay back to the prison for a lift to the nearest Greyhound station: An inmate might be released from a prison outside Sacramento and expected to find his way to a parole officer in San Diego, 500 miles away, within 48 hours. Stanford’s Three Strikes Project was setting up transitional housing for its clients, but initially, a lot of the third-strikers weren’t making it there — they were just blowing away in the wind. Then, Carlos and Roby started driving around the state and waiting outside to catch them...

It was a short drive through downtown from Target to their final destination. Everyone seemed drained. Carlos said almost nothing, while Roby crammed a few last bits of acclimating information into the conversation, seemingly as they occurred to him. (Some parking spots downtown cost $192 a month. ‘‘There’s this thing called a Keurig.’’) He turned to Hammock and asked, ‘‘How you feel so far?’’
Hammock didn’t know what to say, so Roby rephrased the question: ‘‘Are you free yet?’’
‘‘I’m getting there,’’ Hammock told him."
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/magazine/you-just-got-out-of-prison-now-what.html?smid=tw-share&_r=2

This is a great article, I totally want to hang out with Carlos. There were so many little moments of insight into what the criminal justice system does to people. Like this -
"Lying there, it hit them how unusual this was: They were both still on parole at the time, but here they were, welcomed into this white lawyer’s home in the middle of the night, while his wife and two little children slept upstairs. ‘‘That really changed everything,’’ Carlos remembers. ‘‘It changed our perspective of how people actually viewed us.’’ He and Roby had been locked up so young that they’d never lived as regular, trustworthy adults. This, they told each other before falling asleep, must be what it feels like."

"Op-ed: The Truth About Political Correctness"

"This is why I find the latest rash of alarmist “political correctness run amok” articles to be quite disingenuous. They express consternation about “word policing” and “censorship” without ever acknowledging that we — as a society, or within certain subcultures or settings — are always making judgments about what language and ideas (not to mention people) are acceptable and which ones are deemed unacceptable.

Once we acknowledge this, it becomes clear that “political correctness” is an inherently biased meme. No one would ever argue that jokes made at the expense of transgender people constitute “political correctness” — even though they clearly express a political viewpoint, one that has historically dominated in our culture. But if I were to complain about that joke — which, lest we not forget, is also an expression of free speech — plenty of people would accuse me (and any supporters I may have) of “political correctness” and “censorship.”

In other words, “political correctness” is merely a pejorative wielded by those who wish to protect the status quo. But of course, the status quo is always evolving. The proverbial line in the sand that determines which words or ideas are acceptable within civil discourse and which ones are deemed to be beyond the pale is constantly shifting over time...

What I find most frustrating about all these articles critiquing “political correctness” is that they obscure more relevant conversations that we should be having and where we may find common ground. Even though I am a trans activist (which some might view as the epitome of “political correctness”), I have written extensively about how policing language can sometimes make spaces less safe, not more. I have chronicled some of the problems associated with identity politics and attempts to simply ban language that some people find demeaning."

http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/08/19/op-ed-truth-about-political-correctness

"Want to be attractive to online daters? Be biracial."

"Looking different “could be beneficial rather than a reason to be discriminated against” in the online dating game, said study co-author Ken-Hou Lin, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Examining millions of initial messages sent between straight men and women between 2003 and 2010 on a large U.S. dating site, the researchers found that the premium placed on daters who self-identified as only white wasn’t as high as they originally thought...

Among all groups, Lin said men didn’t play racial favorites as much as women did. Except when it comes to black women, who were responded to the least.
That doesn’t surprise D.C. Tinder and Hinge user J.Q., a 24-year-old black woman who agreed to be identified only by her initials. “People sort of like the whole ‘ambiguously ethnic thing’ because it’s still safe,” she says. You can experience new cultures and ethnicities without going so far outside your comfort zone, she said of dating people who are biracial."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2015/07/01/want-to-be-attractive-to-online-daters-be-biracial/

This is really interesting.

"Study Links Disparities in Pain Management to Racial Bias"

"In a study of medical students and residents, researchers find that a substantial number of white medical students and residents hold false beliefs about biological differences between black and white people (e.g., black people’s skin is thicker; black people’s blood coagulates more quickly) that could affect how they assess and treat the pain experienced by black patients.

The findings are detailed online in the April 4 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences...

The researchers found that half of the sample endorsed at least one of the false beliefs, and those who endorsed these beliefs were more likely to report lower pain ratings for the black vs. white patient, and were less accurate in their treatment recommendations for the black vs. white patient."

https://news.virginia.edu/content/study-links-disparities-pain-management-racial-bias#sthash.xutENRjd.dpuf

"Imagining Climate: How science fiction holds up a mirror to our future"

"Imagination is what speculative and science fiction have to offer in the conversation about climate change. It’s not that climate change is a figment of a possible future, but that its deep infiltration of the present is so vast and slow that we need to see it through fiction. Bruce Sterling called it “a melancholy and tiresome reality,” and when Atwood inaugurated the Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative in November of 2014 she called it “the Everything Change.” Perhaps the single best tool we have to combat wicked problems and complex systems is narrative — the ambiguity, complexity, and specificity of stories that can capture an entire era through the eye, and the heart, of a single character.

And, yes, I’ll say it: we also need more optimism. Climate fiction should not only be about the things that can’t and shouldn’t happen. We have to imagine better tomorrows in order to change our reality today. We need stories that make sense of climate change and chart a path to action, helping us to see the challenges clearly but also begin envisioning our answers to those challenges. We need infectious, thrilling, scientifically grounded stories about what might be — stories that invite all of us to see the world as it is and make it a better place than we found it."
https://medium.com/@zonal/imagining-climate-40d8f20d62f

I'm getting into (or trying to get into) more speculative fiction. It feels like it's a way to process the various disasters happening around us.

And I'm reading this and realizing that I have this weird thing with climate change activism, where I feel sort of tired and unimpressed by it; environmental justice movements are notoriously white and middle/upper class, and I also have this weird personal relationship to it that I now recognize where a young-me definitely channeled a lot of her uncomfortableness about social issues into being really intense and guilty about environmental issues. So, it sometimes looks and feels like a way to process guilt and anger about other things and to block out other issues. But I'm also definitely projecting; and it's also definitely important and urgent.
Which is all to say, I have a knee-jerk reaction to glare at people who just let the water run while they are washing dishes, and that's probably a little about climate-change-induced water scarcity and a little about income inequality.

"Wrapping it up in a person: Examining employment and earnings outcomes for Ph.D. recipients"

"This work takes a first step toward describing the links between research funding and the economy by tracing the flows of doctoral recipients employed by research grants subsequent to their separation from the university that employed them. The analysis shows that many doctoral recipients who were employed by funded research projects moved into the nonacademic sector and that, when they do, they disproportionately get jobs at establishments with high payroll per worker and in high-tech and professional service industries. Although the results are descriptive and not causal, the findings are consistent with sociological research regarding knowledge flows. A major way in which knowledge is transmitted from research institutions to the economic marketplace is through the placement of people at businesses that draw on that knowledge (10)."

http://m.sciencemag.org/content/350/6266/1367.full?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=nzolas-1424

Also, apparently all the life scientists are stuck in post docs.

Which we already knew, but this reinforces it.

"Jerry Saltz: How and Why We Started Taking Kim Kardashian Seriously (and What She Teaches Us About the State of Criticism)"

"DWW: Well, to be fair, the response hasn’t been universally rapturous. But there was, actually, a lot of rapture. To take just two examples, Laura Bennett called the book a masterpiece in Slate, and in the Telegraph, Sam Riviere called Kim a feminist artist who belongs alongside the Brontës, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf. Just this week, The Atlantic declared, “You win, Kim Kardashian.” A year ago, those were exactly the kinds of writers and the kinds of outlets that deployed Kim as a punch line about the end of culture. That’s a pretty incredible turnaround. Especially because, frankly, I don’t think Kim has changed very much...

 

JS: To me, it felt as if the art world was either being defensive, frightened, or hadn't caught up to the disturbance in the image force. Regardless, the art world wasn't having any of it; just the idea that Kim and Kanye could be creating something as out there as an aesthetic of a "new uncanny" or Andy-ish got people's panties in a real twist.

Now Kanye has gotten an honorary Ph.D. from the same art school that gave me one. I mean, how freakish is that! (Though, needless to say, many in the art world have protested this, too.) And Kim is now a role model. And she should be. She started taking selfies in the mid-1980s with pre-digital cameras, and many of the genre's formal earmarks are already present in her pictures: the odd angles, arm holding the camera visible, peeks behind scenes, the fish-eyed distortion in the depth of field, the urge to create reality by documenting it. The irretrievability of passing moments...

the people who think of themselves as intelligent consumers of culture — people who want and like to have opinions about music, movies, television, etc. To me, these are also people who — and here’s what I really want to talk about — seem more and more to depend on a kind of permission-giving consensus about a subject before they actually feel comfortable endorsing or even entertaining it. With so many subjects, there seems to be a sort of tipping point, followed by a flood...

 

what’s changed undeniably is our attitude towards television, which has allowed a lot of people who had sort of trained themselves to deride it to finally allow themselves to enjoy it. We are so much more open to quality now, and pleasures of the form like seriality, character familiarity, and immersive narrative. And because we’re more open to it, we see quality more...

We have so many people using their energy now to attack how other people use their energy. This is the new nullity.
In the art world, two or three generations of critics were all but lost to academia or having the subjectivity and original opinion scared out of them, making them refrain from writing clearly, with voice, judgment, something personal. That's changing... I mean, Kim has nothing to do with it, but the ethos of acceptance or change around her is indicative of something. I love this."

http://www.vulture.com/2015/05/saltz-how-kim-kardashian-became-important.html

Ugh it's so trueeeee about not having opinions until other people have opinions, we're the worsttt

Almost makes me want to buy the book - "Some kind of love is born and maybe dies in this book, a sort of nervousness, inaccurate explanations, liberation. And I only need to see it once to get all this."

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

"In Louisiana, the Poor Lack Legal Defense"

“All of this highlights the contradiction at the heart of Louisiana’s public defense system. For those with little money, trends away from tickets and jail time may be a welcome development. But those same trends jeopardize a poor person’s ability to get a lawyer if he or she needs one.

“All of those are policies we’ve supported,” Derwyn Bunton, the Orleans Parish chief public defender, said of measures to reduce incarceration and punitive fees. “But because of the perverse incentives and the absurdity of our system, it’s hurt us here in the public defender’s office. It just makes you shake your head.”

Pointing out that court fees are paid only on conviction, Mr. Dixon added: “It’s even worse than that. Our revenue is partially dependent on our losing.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/us/in-louisiana-the-poor-lack-legal-defense.html?referer=&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%203/21/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

"Ways of Seeing Instagram"

"Isn't it striking that the most-typical and most-maligned genres of Instagram imagery happen to correspond to the primary genres of Western secular art? All that #foodporn is still-life; all those #selfies, self-portraits. All those vacation vistas are #landscape; art-historically speaking, #beachday pics evoke the hoariest cliché of middle-class leisure iconography. (As for the #nudes, I guess they are going on over on Snapchat.)...

 

Ways of Seeing helps square this circle, to break out of the choice between dismissive traditionalism and easy techno-optimism, that I think makes it useful. The whole purpose, for Berger, of having a political take on how images function in society is to point beyond this binary: technology makes possible many good things; political and economic conditions guarantee, however, that it is constantly warped so that the same kinds of bad patterns repeat themselves, in new and improved forms."

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ways-of-seeing-instagram-37635"

 

YES. I love this interpretation. I love not dismissing new things, and also critiquing old things. This essay is like 'we've always been sending the same messages, good and bad'

 

Related: "Jerry Saltz: How and Why We Started Taking Kim Kardashian Seriously (and What She Teaches Us About the State of Criticism)" (where I found this essay)

 

This American Bro (if you want to follow the tone instead of the topic)

"New Koch"

"A new, data-filled study by the Harvard scholars Theda Skocpol and Alexander Hertel-Fernandez reports that the Kochs have established centralized command of a “nationally-federated, full-service, ideologically focused” machine that “operates on the scale of a national U.S. political party.” The Koch network, they conclude, acts like a “force field,” pulling Republican candidates and office-holders further to the right. Last week, the Times reported that funds from the Koch network are fuelling both ongoing rebellions against government control of Western land and the legal challenge to labor unions that is before the Supreme Court...

As the Kochs prepare to launch the most ambitious political effort of their lives, they appear to be undergoing the best image overhaul that their money can buy... He points to a series of public-policy initiatives that they launched recently, all of which counter their plutocratic image by showcasing a concern for the poor. In the past year, Koch Industries has become one of the leading backers of a bipartisan coalition for criminal-justice reform, supporting legislation that aims at reducing prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom are poor people of color...

Brooks told the audience that a single statistic explained why conservatives had lost. In polls, he said, only a third of respondents agreed that Republicans “cared about people like” them. And fewer than half of Americans believed that Republicans cared about the poor. Conservatives had an empathy problem. This was important, Brooks explained, because Americans almost universally believed that “fairness matters.” He went on, “I know it makes you sick to think of that word, ‘fairness.’ ” But Americans, he said, overwhelmingly believed that “it’s right to help the vulnerable.”

In the view of the American public, Brooks said, the Democrats were “the fairness guys.” He added, “They’re the ‘helping-the-poor guys.’ Who are we? We’re the ‘money guys’!”...

Fink had a solution. “This is going to sound a little strange,” he acknowledged. “So you’ll have to bear with me.” The Koch network, he said, needed to present its free-market ideology as an apolitical and altruistic reform movement to enhance the quality of life—as “a movement for well-being.” The network should make the case that free markets forged a path to happiness, whereas big government led to tyranny, Fascism, and even Nazism. Arguing that an increase in the minimum wage would cause higher unemployment, Fink told his audience that unemployment in Germany during the nineteen-twenties had led to the rise “of the Third Reich.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/25/new-koch

I'm realizing something right now about how I ear the "big government = tyranny" argument: I am approaching it like I know what that means even though I have never read any libertarian materials. It's like when someone who has never engaged with feminism declares that feminism is anti-men. It's like when someone has never read the words of Occupy or BLM activists assumes that there is no strategy in the movement. I've let myself rest in a lot of smug superiority because I have created a boorish construct of libertarian motivations in my head and assumed it to be accurate

There is something important, for me at least, in understanding the Kochs' world view and their motivations - the Kochs and the members of their organization are devoting tremendous financial resources and time to these goals and visions. It's important to wonder about this; it's important to recognize one's "bogeyman" and humanize them and keep them in perspective. It's not real that people are evil or somehow unable to unerstand/perceive things that "we, the good people" can. It's hard  to walk through the world following a consistent goal if you don't feel driven by something big and important or if you are constantly fighting confusion or guilt.

So I should be seeking to answer a lot more questions when I encounter people whose politics I disagree with - What is their truth, what are the experiences and knowledge which led them to these truths? What can I learn from them; what can I comunicate to people with this perspective whose actions I perceive as harmful, who might benefit from information and perspectives that I have?

FB: "or more than two decades, Seitel has been a spokesman for the Rockefeller family, and he believes that the Kochs are following a template established by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the tycoon for whom modern corporate P.R. was invented. In 1914, Rockefeller hired the publicity expert Ivy Lee to salvage his image after the Ludlow Massacre, in which security guards and National Guardsmen attacked miners on strike at a Rockefeller-owned mine, killing more than a dozen people, including some of the miners’ wives and children. Rockefeller, taking Lee’s advice, visited the miners’ tent camp and expressed a personal interest in his workers’ well-being. “It was all about humanizing him,” Seitel noted. “It’s much harder to loathe someone if he is open, available, and approachable.”""

"We Suck (But We Can Be Better)"

"there are issues here that aren’t just about men and women; they’re about what kind of culture we have in academia generally, science in particular, and physics/astronomy especially. Not only did these things happen, but they happened over an extended period of time. They were allowed to happen. Part of that is simply because shit happens; but part is that we don’t place enough value, as working academic scientists, professors, and students, in caring about each other as human beings.

Academic science — and physics is arguably the worst, though perhaps parts of engineering and computer science are just as bad — engenders a macho, cutthroat, sink-or-swim culture. We valorize scoring well on tests, talking loudly, being cocky and fast, tearing others down, “technical” proficiency, overwork, speaking in jargon, focusing on research to the exclusion of all else. In that kind of environment, when someone who is supposed to be a mentor is actually terrorizing their students and postdocs, there is nowhere for the victims to turn, and heavy penalties when they do. “You think your advisor is asking inappropriate things of you? I guess you’re not cut out for this after all."...

Academia will always necessarily be, in some sense, competitive: there are more people who want to be researchers and professors than there will ever be jobs for everyone. Not every student will find an eventual research or teaching position. But none of that implies that it has to be a terrifying, tortuous slog...

A big problem is that, when problems like this arise, the natural reaction of people in positions of power is to get defensive. We deny that there is bias, or that it’s a problem, or that we haven’t been treating our students like human beings. We worry too much about the reputations of our institutions and our fields, and not enough about the lives of the people for whom we are responsible."

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2016/01/13/we-suck-but-we-can-be-better/

! We can be better  thereon reasoning has to be like this.

"How “The Cosby Show” duped America: The sitcom that enabled our ugliest Reagan-era fantasies"

"In many ways “The Cosby Show” was the anti-”Moynihan Report”—a much misunderstood and misrepresented exploration of “black ghetto poverty” and “the breakdown of the black family” written in the 1960s by the Labor Department. “The Cosby Show” was also a rebuttal to ’70s TV producer Norman Lear’s popular shows — “Good Times,” “Sanford and Son,” and “The Jeffersons” — where the humanity and travails of black folks living in poverty (and escaping such conditions) were the dominant themes.

Popular culture is inherently political and ideological. While the depiction of a rich and “functioning” black family was superficially transgressive, “The Cosby Show” channeled a particular understanding of race, capitalism, “success,” and “middle class” identity that more often than not reinforced dominant American cultural norms and rules basically in line with the the Horatio Alger myth; it offered to viewers a harmless type of “diversity,” where blackness and the “Black experience” were massaged down into a throwaway mention of the March on Washington and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., or the struggle to end Apartheid, or simple guest appearances for accomplished black musicians, artists, and actors.

For most of its 8 seasons, “The Cosby Show” existed inside a bubble that was outside of the day-to-day lived experiences of the vast majority of black Americans. The events in bubble were white fantasies of black folks’ lives.

 

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/12/how_the_cosby_show_duped_america_the_sitcom_that_enabled_our_ugliest_reagan_era_fantasies/

 

I want shows and media in general to take me out of the background and sometimes the bbf<add link> role and place my stories as central and real and complete. But I have this big internal struggle about what I want those stories to be. Sometimes I really want to see a mainstream representation of the problems that I have in my life, the ones that I have trouble putting words to or convincing other people of if they haven't personally experienced it. But other times, I really just want someone showing people who look like me just leading "normal", mainstream lives where they don't have to deal with extra baggage. I mean, honestly, I always have to be a little emotionally-ready when I encounter stories about people who are like me, and sometimes I just want brain candy - but brain candy where I exist.

 

But then, like, all the problems brought up in this article...

 

And, so, i have this important relationship with The Cosby Show, because it remains the piece of media that (a) mostly closely resembles my family, even though almost all of the details are different, and (b) makes me feel like there are safe spaces for me in American society. And as I get older, I understand more and more that this was an illusion, but it was still an illusion tang had a big positive impact on me when I was young and I don't know exactly what to do with that.

 

 

Related: real reason research on black poverty...

"Who’s ‘They’?"

"This registers as a modern problem, but gender-neutral pronouns have been proposed for centuries. In 1808, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggested repurposing “it” and “which” “in order to avoid particularizing man or woman, or in order to express either sex indifferently.” But only recently has mainstream pop culture entertained the idea of a neutral pronoun for referring to trans, genderqueer and even some feminist folks who either don’t identify as “he” or “she” or are interested in demolishing that binary in speech. A flurry of totally new constructions has emerged to bridge the gap. On Tumblr, it’s now typical for young people to pin their preferred pronouns to their pages: The writer behind a blog called “The Gayest Seabass” identifies as “Danny, xe/xim/xir or he/him/his or they/them/their, taken-ish, 20.”...

central to the appeal of the singular “they” is that it’s often deployed unconsciously. It’s regularly repurposed as a linguistic crutch when an individual’s gender is unknown or irrelevant. You might use it to refer to a hypothetical person who, say, goes to the store and forgets “their” wallet. That casual usage has a long history — it has appeared in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen and Shaw. It wasn’t until 1745, when the schoolmistress-turned-grammar-expert Ann Fisher proposed “he” as a universal pronoun for a person of unknown gender, that the use of “they” in the same circumstance was respun as grammatically incorrect...

In a very real way, accepting the fluidity of gender requires rejecting standards in general. It means opening our “closed class” of pronouns."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/magazine/whos-they.html?_r=1&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%203/29/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All&referer=

"Have an Opinion About Bernie Sanders? Or Hillary Clinton? Or Donald Trump? Just Shut Up."

"During the first few years of the Iraq War, there was no Facebook, no Twitter, no Grindr through which people could megaphone okay Guardian articles that expressed an echo of their slapdash political opinions. You read a piece, you forwarded a link to a few people, and then you went about your day in your condo financed with a subprime mortgage loan. Now everybody's still going on and on about bullshit, bleating like sheep that have no idea they're about to be put into the meat grinder, except that their bleatings are amplified by the witch's curse of social media. Any half-assed feminist critique of Ted Cruz is worth repeating a thousand times (with a thousand hashtags), ad infinitum and ad nauseam and ex post facto and 3,000 other pretentious Latin phrases that Hitch and Vidal, the last living literate blowhards, used to deploy. Well, Latin is dead and so is David Bowie. Only the plainest O'Reilly language will suffice:

Everybody shut up!"

https://www.thestranger.com/feature/2016/04/06/23911223/have-an-opinion-about-bernie-sanders-or-hillary-clinton-or-donald-trump-just-shut-up?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%204/8/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

This is super great. I think it's the kind of comedy we need right now because there is this sticky, glooby, sad intensity to this election season. 

I think we all need to be yelled at.

FB: "the worst thing about Donald Trump is that his verbal diarrhea is highly contagious, easily contracted by people of all political stripes. Most writers offer up smart opinions like "Electing Donald Trump would be bad for America." O RLY, editorial boards? Do you think it would be bad idea to hand over the nuclear arsenal to a walking advertisement for time-share condos and erectile dysfunction? How courageous of you to say so!"

"I’m Not Mad. That’s Just My RBF."

"it’s safe to assume that humans have always made The Face. (Doesn’t the Mona Lisa sort of have it?) And it does have its uses. It is great for staring down Greenpeace solicitors on the street, or glaring at men who catcall you on the subway.

At a crowded bar, the expression can serve as a kind of armor against unwanted pickup artists (better, as one young woman put it, “than a fake engagement ring”).

And, as Tanya Tarr, a 36-year-old professional coach, described it: When engaged correctly, it can part a crowd of tourists on a busy street “like the Red Sea.”

But it is also a problem (and, like the word “bitch” itself, one that seems to predominantly affect one-half of the gender equation)...

For many years, studies have determined that women do tend to smile more than men, but not necessarily because they’re happier (in fact, they suffer higher rates of depression). Nancy Henley, a cognitive psychologist, has theorized that women’s frequent smiling stems from their lower social status (she called the smile a “badge of appeasement”). Still others have pointed out that women are more likely to work in the service sector, where smiling is an asset.

And yet there is also a kind of ingrained association between women and the friendly face. The phrase “Stop telling women to smile” has become a rallying cry for the movement against street harassment."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/fashion/im-not-mad-thats-just-my-resting-b-face.html?_r=0&referrer=

RBF is a pretty solid armor against street randos.

Related: Cara Delevingne; fake smiling is bad for you

"Film Dialogue from 2,000 screenplays, Broken Down by Gender and Age"

"Across thousands of films in our dataset, it was hard to find a subset that didn’t over-index male. Even romantic comedies have dialogue that is, on average, 58% male. For example, Pretty Woman and 10 Things I Hate About Youboth have lead women (i.e., characters with the most lines). But the overall dialogue for both films is 52% male, due to the number of male supporting characters...

In 22% of our films, actresses had the most number of lines (i.e., they were the lead). Women are more likely to be in the second place for most number of lines, which occurs in 34% of films. The most abysmal stat is when women occupy at least 2 of the top 3 roles in a film, which occurs in 18% of our films. That same scenario for men occurs in about 82% of films."

http://polygraph.cool/films/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%204/8/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

"Einstein v. Roberts"

"Issues related to race in the United States have created barriers since the nation's founding, determining which citizens experience benefits, and which deprivations. This problem is not new for physicists. Albert Einstein's essay “The Negro Question” includes “What…can the man of good will do to combat this deeply rooted prejudice? He must have the courage to set an example by word and deed, and must watch lest his children become influenced by this racial bias.” Einstein described racism as a “disease,” and he recommended principles to end discrimination, aligning with the O. Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision by the Supreme Court in 1954 to desegregate public schools...

In 1969, I entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) expecting to be different from most of the other new undergraduate students. Although often challenging, I found that my difference could be an advantage: Distinctive backgrounds can lead to different approaches to framing problems. If MIT had been legally bound then to admissions based solely on test scores, I would never have been admitted. It would have been a personal loss, but more importantly, unique mathematical and physics ideas created in my career, and tied to my idiosyncratic framing of problems, might never have seen the light of day."

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/1371.full

The author has a long and extremely prestigious career as a physics professor/researcher and is currently one of President Obama's science advisors.

FB: ((just friends)) an op-ed by my dad's thesis advisor, who is currently a member of PCAST (President Obama's board of science advisors) "Chief Justice Roberts' question—premised on the idea that a person's background, including race, is irrelevant in science—shows a fundamental misunderstanding of both science and human creativity."

"#NigeriansAtHogwarts Hashtag Is Brilliance and Hilarity You Need"

"I am a PROUD Potterhead and super fan of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and I am unashamed of my dorkiness in making references to the books. Add that to the fact that us Nigerians are a special breed of awesome. The #NigeriansAtHogwarts hashtag is EVERYTHING, throwing inside jokes, cultural stereotypes and our unfuggwitable humor into a giant bowl. Add to the fact that Naijas are generally superstitious and these jokes are priceless and the brilliance is clear."

http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/2015/08/nigerians-at-hogwarts.html

I enjoyed these even though I barely understood the references.

"LOST IN TRUMPLANDIA

"The pattern-finding sense goes wild in such a place. The corner of the eye takes over the whole. Language as I knew it had either ceased to exist, or else reverted to an automatic form. A phrase lit in a mouth was spoken, went looking for another. A different kind of thinking was happening—the kind you find around racetracks, casinos, the floor of the stock market. I had not thought politics was a physical pleasure. Feeling the air crackle around me, I knew it must be...

I watched who the crowd parted for, who they blocked, the nearly ineffable thickenings and thinnings among people. It was not anger I felt, exactly. It was volatility, a sort of revved and ready tribalism that waited and even wished to be disproved. All it would take to disprove it was the sudden and unexpected sight of an other...

It’s us, was the undercurrent. It’s just us in here. A handshake moved through the air as the speech walloped on, and then something more than a handshake. The more he spoke, the more Trump sounded like a rich man at dinner with a young woman whose passport is her face and her freshness, explaining to her the terms of the arrangement: that he would wear her on his arm, turning her toward the lights, that she would defer to him in public, that he would give her just enough of what he has to sustain her. I wrote in my notebook, “Trump is offering to be our sugar daddy? He wants to make America his trophy wife?”...

Earlier, in the car, I had struggled to explain how America has always been willing to dare, and double-dog dare, and triple-dog dare itself. America has always offered to drink anything for five dollars, no matter how disgusting.

“It might be a cowboy thing,” I had said. A sort of, fuck you, and while I’m at it, fuck me!, kind of thing. I watched a million cowboy movies growing up, and in the ones where the cowboy doesn’t ride off into the sunset, he usually dies. Sometimes he dies while riding off into the sunset, slumped over on a horse. There has to be a better way...

As we walked past the parked vans, we were stopped by another news crew, and Rich repeated to the bright lights that Trump is saying what most of us are thinking, that people are tired of career politicians and want something different, something new. He strode ahead of me toward the car, with that barely perceptible hint of ancient injury somewhere in his bearing, and I thought of the boy inside dressed up as Uncle Sam and felt suddenly ashamed: Votes, even ones incomprehensible to us, rise out of real lives, out of the distance between what we have and what we hope for ourselves."

https://newrepublic.com/article/131936/lost-trumplandia

FB: The writing of this piece is so gorgeous, and evokes all those squishy-human-feelings that are really the motivations and reasons here

"“Do you think the American people like Trump?” Babiker asked me.

“It’s hard to know, always, with Americans . . . whether we think something’s funny,” I hesitated. “Are we doing this because we think it’s hilarious? Are we just seeing how far we can push it?”"

"“Do you think the American people like Trump?” Babiker asked me.

“It’s hard to know, always, with Americans . . . whether we think something’s funny,” I hesitated. “Are we doing this because we think it’s hilarious? Are we just seeing how far we can push it?”

"Millennial Men Aren’t the Dads They Thought They’d Be"

"Work-family policies strongly affected women’s choices, but not men’s. Ms. Thébaud said that occurred because women disproportionately benefit from the policies since they are expected to be caregivers, while men are stigmatized for using them

Ms. Thébaud was the co-author of a study, published in February in the American Sociological Review, that was the first major examination of the effect workplace policies have on the relationship preferences of young men and women. It found that men and women ages 18 to 32 have egalitarian attitudes about gender roles, across education and income levels. But when faced with a lack of family-friendly policies, most fell back on traditional roles...

Surveys of young people that compare those who are childless with those who are parents also show a striking shift post-children. Millennial men have the least traditional notions about gender roles of any generation or time period, according to the most recent installment of a continuing study from the Families and Work Institute. Only 35 percent of employed millennial men without children said they thought men should be breadwinners and women should be caregivers.
Yet those who had children had different attitudes. Of millennial men who were already fathers, 53 percent said it was better for mothers and fathers to take on traditional roles...
The obstacle, she said, is that even as young men and women say they want to share responsibilities, work and child rearing have both become more demanding.

“Rather than creating more flexible notions about what a career means, there’s increasing pressure to have to put in more time at work,” she said. “Another paradox of the 21st century is that even as the caretakers of the past, women, have gone to work, the standards we apply to parents are greater than ever.”"
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/31/upshot/millennial-men-find-work-and-family-hard-to-balance.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referrer=&abt=0002&abg=0

Related: American parenting ruining marriage

"The Party Crashers"

"A lot of people, not least the candidates themselves, have been talking about political revolution and, more modestly, about party realignment. None of the candidates, not even the party favorites, are campaigning on behalf of their party; most are campaigning to crash it. Outsiders are in. Insiders are out...

[The two-party system] began in 1787, during the debate over the Constitution, a debate waged in ratifying conventions but also, more thrillingly, in the nation’s hundreds of weekly newspapers. Some favored ratification; these became Federalist newspapers. Others, the Anti-Federalist newspapers, opposed it. If it hadn’t been for the all-or-nothing dualism of this choice, the United States might well have a multiparty political culture. But the model held, and the Federalist–Anti-Federalist cleavage, with some adjustments, became the basis of the first party system, which took shape in 1796. It pitted Federalists, who supported the election of John Adams, against the Democratic-Republicans, who supported Thomas Jefferson. In the seventeen-nineties, the number of newspapers, each of them partisan, grew four times as fast as the population. At a time when there were very few national institutions, parties exerted a tremendous, and vital, nationalizing force. Once much maligned as destructive of public life, parties, driven by newspapers, became its machinery. “The engine,” Jefferson said, “is the press.”...

There will not be a revolution, but this election might mark the beginning of the seventh party system. The Internet, like all new communications technologies, has contributed to a period of political disequilibrium, one in which, as always, party followers have been revolting against party leaders. So far, neither the R.N.C. nor the D.N.C., nor any of their favored candidates, has been able to grab the wheel. Trump, meanwhile, is barrelling down the highway toward the White House, ignoring every road sign, a man without a party.

The fate of the free world does not hinge on this election. But the direction of the party system might. And that’s probably worth thinking about, slowly and deeply. Parties, while not written into the U.S. Constitution, do sustain our system of government. As the political scientist V. O. Key pointed out, half a century ago, “They perform an essential function in the management of succession to power, as well as in the process of obtaining popular consent to the course of public policy. They amass sufficient support to buttress the authority of governments; or, on the contrary, they attract or organize discontent and dissatisfaction sufficient to oust the government. In either case, they perform the function of the articulation of the interests and aspirations of a substantial segment of the citizenry, usually in ways contended to be promotive of the national weal.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/did-social-media-produce-the-new-populism

I like this analysis of why this election feels important and sort of dangerous. I appreciate this bigger picture of the structure that we're in and how that relates to the shifts in political power.

I don't think there are ever going to be American elections that determine the fate of the country or whatever, but I think elections make it clear where we are and who we are as an electorate, what our wants and needs are and what our options are to see those fulfilled. And then it thresholds and signal boosts and plucks out the big trends and themes that can drive the most people. And I guess that new forms of media and engagement are kind of changing the landscape from which those trends and themes are chosen.

FB: "The fate of the free world does not hinge on this election. But the direction of the party system might. And that’s probably worth thinking about, slowly and deeply... It’s unlikely, but not impossible, that the accelerating and atomizing forces of this latest communications revolution will bring about the end of the party system and the beginning of a new and wobblier political institution. With our phones in our hands and our eyes on our phones, each of us is a reporter, each a photographer, unedited and ill judged, chatting, snapping, tweeting, and posting, yikking and yakking. At some point, does each of us become a party of one?"

"Mother is Marxist"

"The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.

Parents register and respond often seeking out the places (the “good” neighborhood or private school) where a child’s value is high enough in relation to the needs of others to make them relatively safe

or a parent may reaffirm existing market valuations...

When we bought the house, we joined the neighborhood association. We also had the option of paying an additional $180 for “an off-duty police officer to patrol our neighborhood each week” as well as “answer our emails” and provide “special patrols” while we were away...

When the mothers of the victims of police violence march on Washington DC,

when mothers in Central America set their children like paper lanterns

on a breeze,

when warehouses of children wait at our border,

Mother is Marxist, exposing as false and pernicious the mystification of capitalist instantiations of value, promiscuous relations of value and their violence.

Mother is not a biological or relational subject position, but can be an attitude of resistance before the market."

https://www.guernicamag.com/features/mother-is-marxist/