Sunday, July 31, 2016

"The New Language of Protest"


"Just as the social turmoil of the 1960s generated new vocabulary — turn-on, sit-in, sexism — this latest wave of activism and upheaval is adding to our lexicon, with terms such as safe space, trigger warning, microaggression and cultural appropriation, which we explore here. We asked student leaders and activists from local universities to define these terms for us and to elaborate based on their own thoughts and experiences."


"The poisonous paranoia of ‘see something, say something’"

"Particularly revealing of this mentality was a shocking letter about the incident that McArthur High principal Daniel Cummings sent to school parents. Rather than explain the situation and apologize to Ahmed’s family, the letter depicts the violation of his civil rights as “a good time to remind your child how important it is to immediately report any suspicious items and/or suspicious behavior they observe,” even while acknowledging “the item discovered did not pose a threat to your child’s safety.”...

Unsurprisingly, having untrained citizens report suspicious activity based solely on caprice is a completely ineffective security strategy: The vast majority of tips received by agencies such as New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority report completely innocuous activities — for example, Muslim men counting prayers on the train using a common electronic tally device. There is no evidence that the reports have ever helped to thwart a terrorist plot...

An environment built on nebulous and irrational fear is one in which nothing can be taken for what it is, where there is always something nefarious lurking behind every perceived abnormality, discomfort or disruption in the flow of day-to-day life — whether it’s a forgotten backpack or a teenage kid building a clock."


http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/9/the-poisonous-paranoia-of-see-something-say-something.html

Saturday, July 30, 2016

"The Reluctant Memoirist"


"My book was being dismissed for the very element that typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative journalism. When Ted Conover, author of the award-winning Newjack, posed as a corrections officer to investigate the prison system, he was lauded by TheNew York Times for going “deeper than surface” and reporting “for real.” Barbara Ehrenreich, author of the best-selling Nickel and Dimed, was widely celebrated for working undercover as a waitress, hotel maid, and sales clerk toexpose the conditions of the working poor. Among journalists, undercover work is generally viewed as a badge of honor, not a mark of shame. (Miscategorizing my book as a memoir, as it happens, also had the effect of disqualifying it from any journalism awards.)

The backlash extended well beyond the media. At my book events, I began to notice that there was always someone in the audience—often white, often male, inevitably hostile—who raised his hand to challenge my work. The gist was always the same: He had been to North Korea himself, or knew someone who had, and it wasn’t as bad or dangerous as I claimed, so why was I lying, and putting people in danger, to sell a book?

The invariable pattern of such attacks gave me pause. Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships? My book had clearly wounded these men in some way. Perhaps it had undercut their male pride, their sense of being an expert on world affairs, even when they weren’t. Perhaps they felt accused of being complicit in North Korea’s horrors, and converted that guilt into denial, a basic survival instinct. Whatever their motives, they felt a need to assert themselves over me. Some even denounced me, a South Korean woman, as someone who had merely returned “home” to North Korea; to them, I hadn’t gone undercover at all. Which is another way of saying that what I had written was personal, and therefore by definition not authoritative...

As I grappled with these feelings, I saw that my anger, the inner bits of it, reaches back to the reason why I write: to soothe that stirring within me, each moment I face the blank page, that beckons a heart so fearful of the wider world. When I sleep, I rarely dream; I am alone inside a darkness, and at the edge of my consciousness lurk the howling, stifled cries of what lies outside. In my own way, I write to make sense of these jarring worlds, from internal to external, and to save lives, both mine and others’. This is why I risked going into North Korea undercover: because I could not be consoled while the injustice of 25 million voiceless people trapped in a modern-day gulag remains part of our society. To have my reporting on this brutal truth so systematically undermined is symptomatic of what scares me about America."


There is so much here - the way that some people are experts and their personal experiences are universal truths, and some people are storytellers who can never truly understand themselves or tell a truth that isn't biased by their context.


FB: "There are only two kinds of books on North Korea: those by white journalists who visited the country under the regime’s supervision, and “as told to” memoirs by defectors. The intellectual hierarchy is clear—authority belongs to the white gaze. Orientalism reigns."

"Inuit Study Adds Twist to Omega-3 Fatty Acids’ Health Story"

"A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reported that the ancestors of the Inuit evolved unique genetic adaptations for metabolizing omega-3s and other fatty acids. Those gene variants had drastic effects on Inuit’s bodies, reducing their heights and weights.

Rasmus Nielsen, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the new study, said that the discovery raised questions about whether omega-3 fats really were protective for everyone, despite decades of health advice. “The same diet may have different effects on different people,” he said...

ne of these gene variants was present in almost every Inuit in the study. It is much less common in other populations: About a quarter of Chinese people have it, compared with just 2 percent of Europeans...

studies missed this influential gene variant because they focused mostly on people of European ancestry. So Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues also investigated how it affects Europeans. As it turns out, the gene variant is linked to a drastic drop in height and weight in that population, too."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/science/inuit-study-adds-twist-to-omega-3-fatty-acids-health-story.html?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email&_r=0&referrer=

Friday, July 29, 2016

"UNDERSTANDING HILLARY"


"Let’s stop and state the obvious: There are gender dynamics at play here.

We ran a lot of elections in the United States before we let women vote in them. You do not need to assert any grand patriarchal conspiracy to suggest that a process developed by men, dominated by men, and, until relatively late in American life, limited to men might subtly favor traits that are particularly prevalent in men.
Talking over listening, perhaps... 

Given where both candidates began, there is no doubt that Bernie Sanders proved the more effective talker. His speeches attracted larger audiences, his debate performances led to big gains in the polls, his sound bites went more viral on Facebook.

Yet Clinton proved the more effective listener — and, particularly, the more effective coalition builder. On the eve of the California primary, 208 members of Congress had endorsed Clinton, and only eight had endorsed Sanders. “This was a lot of relationships,” says Verveer. “She’s been in public life for 30 years. Over those 30 years, she has met a lot of those people, stayed in touch with them, treated them decently, campaigned for them. You can’t do this overnight.”

One way of reading the Democratic primary is that it pitted an unusually pure male leadership style against an unusually pure female leadership style. Sanders is a great talker and a poor relationship builder. Clinton is a great relationship builder and a poor talker. In this case — the first time at the presidential level — the female leadership style won... 

I want to be very clear here. I’m not saying that anyone who opposed Clinton was sexist. Nor am I saying Clinton should have won. What I’m saying is that presidential campaigns are built to showcase the stereotypically male trait of standing in front of a room speaking confidently — and in ways that are pretty deep, that’s what we expect out of our presidential candidates. Campaigns built on charismatic oration feel legitimate in a way that campaigns built on deep relationships do not.
But here’s the thing about the particular skills Clinton used to capture the Democratic nomination: They are very, very relevant to the work of governing. And they are particularly relevant to the way Clinton governs."


FB: 
"In her book Why Presidents Fail, Brookings scholar Elaine Kamarck argues that "successful presidential leadership occurs when the president is able to put together and balance three sets of skills: policy, communication, and implementation."
The problem, Kamarck says, is that campaigns are built to test only one of those skills. “The obsession with communication — presidential talking and messaging — is a dangerous mirage of the media age, a delusion that inevitably comes crashing down in the face of government failure.”"

"A Toxic Work World"

"The people who can compete and succeed in this culture are an ever-narrower slice of American society: largely young people who are healthy, and wealthy enough not to have to care for family members. An individual company can of course favor these individuals, as health insurers once did, and then pass them off to other businesses when they become parents or need to tend to their own parents. But this model of winning at all costs reinforces a distinctive American pathology of not making room for caregiving. The result: We hemorrhage talent and hollow out our society...

"It is the way work continues to be circumscribed as something that happens ‘in an office,’ and/or ‘between 8–6’ that causes such conflict. I haven’t yet been presented with a shred of reasonable justification for insisting my job requires me to be sitting in this fixed, 15 sq foot room, 20 miles from my home.”...

THE problem is with the workplace, or more precisely, with a workplace designed for the “Mad Men” era, for “Leave It to Beaver” families in which one partner does all the work of earning an income and the other partner does all the work of turning that income into care — the care that is indispensable for our children, our sick and disabled, our elderly. Our families and our responsibilities don’t look like that anymore, but our workplaces do not fit the realities of our lives...

THE problem is with the workplace, or more precisely, with a workplace designed for the “Mad Men” era, for “Leave It to Beaver” families in which one partner does all the work of earning an income and the other partner does all the work of turning that income into care — the care that is indispensable for our children, our sick and disabled, our elderly. Our families and our responsibilities don’t look like that anymore, but our workplaces do not fit the realities of our lives."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/sunday/a-toxic-work-world.html?_r=0&referrer=

! What is it with our distaste for caregiving?? The systems should fit us, we shouldn't have to release ourselves to fit the system. What's the point of society then?

And so much love for Anne-Marie Slaughter.


Related: No work friends

Thursday, July 28, 2016

"HOW TAYLOR SWIFT IS THE MOST DANGEROUS TYPE OF WHITE WOMAN, EXPLAINED"


"No one is better at this type of specifically White female performative faux melodrama — where status is cultivated and maintained through a state of perpetual exaggerated victimhood (which everyone laps up because “sad White woman” = “Let’s find our fucking capes and save her!”) — than she is.

You know that co-worker (let’s call her “Susan”) who somehow managed to use her offense at a minor breach in email etiquette (someone forgot to put an exclamation point on a sentence, which made Susan “interpret” it as a “threat”) as fuel for a raise and a promotion?

Taylor Swift is Darth Susan.

Kanye, however, would later tweet that he actually reached out to Taylor about the lyric before incorporating it in his song. And that she thought it was funny and was cool with it.

Which suggests the following:

1. They’re friends. Or, rather, friendly enough to have this conversation.
2. The entire Grammy speech was an act.
3. She’s more than willing to throw a friend under the bus for the opportunity to performative martyr.

Of course, Taylor vehemently denied that this conversation ever happened. And, of course, most of the country seemed to believe Taylor. Because Kanye is the scary Black dude. And Taylor, again, is Darth Susan."


I just really enjoyed the exhausted snark tone of this essay

Related: Taylor and Nicki


FB: "One advantage I presume of being romantically involved with a Kardashian is that everything seems to be recorded. Conversations, weddings, grocery shopping, sex, shits — everything. Which means you’ll never have to go without receipts. “Kardashian” is actually Swahili for “White woman with receipts.” And since Kim has all the receipts, she released footage of Taylor Swift doing exactly what Kanye said she did. Agreeing to the lyrics and expressing her appreciation that Kanye reached out first before publishing them."

"Islam is just as European as Christianity"

"Islam is represented as foreign to Europe. Even when politicians do talk positively about Islam in Europe, they tend to stick to the large Muslim populations in the United Kingdom, France, or Germany, most of whom arrived relatively recently. If Islam isn’t foreign to Europe, the narrative goes, then it’s new—something it’ll take Europeans (at least those who are practicing Christians) time to get used to.

But this is false...

Muslims have lived in Europe for centuries. And while Germany and France have the largest Muslim populations of any nation in Europe (unless we’re counting Russia or Turkey), the European Union member with the highest percentage of Muslims is actually Bulgaria.

These are not immigrants...

while the Ottomans were establishing themselves in Eastern Europe, Teutonic knights were already crusading against the indigenous peoples of what are now the Baltic states, forcing them to convert to Christianity. But who amongst us thinks Lithuania or Latvia is any less European for it? Islam is simply held to a different standard.

Rising nationalism saw many of these early Muslim communities wiped out, not very differently from how Eastern Europe’s Jewish communities were."

http://qz.com/505705/islam-is-just-as-european-as-christianity/

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

"Why Futurism Has a Cultural Blindspot"

"But when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same. Try to imagine yourself at some future date. Where do you imagine you will be living? What will you be wearing? What music will you love?

Chances are, that person resembles you now. As the psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues have argued, in a phenomenon they termed “projection bias,”1 people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”...

“Futurology is almost always wrong,” the historian Judith Flanders suggested to me, “because it rarely takes into account behavioral changes.” And, she says, we look at the wrong things: “Transport to work, rather than the shape of work; technology itself, rather than how our behavior is changed by the very changes that technology brings.” It turns out that predicting who we will be is harder than predicting what we will be able to do...

One futurist noted that a 1960s film of the “office of the future” made on-par technological predictions (fax machines and the like), but had a glaring omission: The office had no women.9 Self-driving car images of the 1950s showed families playing board games as their tail-finned cars whisked down the highways. Now, 70 years later, we suspect the automated car will simply allow for the expansion of productive time, and hence working hours. The self-driving car has, in a sense, always been a given. But modern culture hasn’t."

http://m.nautil.us/issue/28/2050/why-futurism-has-a-cultural-blindspot

Hmm.

Related: Quant defines decisions/behavior

Tuesday, July 26, 2016

"The Anti-P.C. Vote"

"Jonathan Haidt, a professor at N.Y.U., suggested to me that one way to better understand the intensity of Trump’s appeal is by looking at something called “psychological reactance.” Haidt describes reactance as

"the feeling you get when people try to stop you from doing something you’ve been doing, and you perceive that they have no right or justification for stopping you. So you redouble your efforts and do it even more, just to show that you don’t accept their domination. Men in particular are concerned to show that they do not accept domination."...

Translated to the Trump phenomenon, I would say that decades of political correctness, with its focus on “straight white men” as the villains and oppressors — now extended to “straight white cis-gendered men” — has caused some degree of reactance in many and perhaps most white men."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/01/opinion/campaign-stops/trump-clinton-edsall-psychology-anti-pc-vote.html?_r=0

V. useful concept; it's also that thing where someone mentions that they are vegetarian and suddenly half the group feels the need to discuss their love of meat. 

I really want to dive into the ways that straight white men are feeling instructed/restricted in their behavior; what active, direct, interpersonal policing do they experience and what passive, indirect, societal/systemic messages? What do they feel are the repercussions? What do they agree with, what don't they agree with, and what are the reactions they wish they were having? 


I actually did ask a white guy about this once, and he responded with a quote from a book:

"There is a passage in Pat Conroy's The Prince of Tides that gestures at this:

"This has not been an easy century to endure. I entered the scene in the middle of a world war at the fearful dawning of the atomic age. I grew up in South Carolina, a white southern male, well trained and gifted in my hatred of blacks when the civil rights movement caught me outside and undefended along the barricades and proved me to be both wicked and wrong. But I was a thinking boy, a feeling one, sensitive to injustice, and I worked hard to change myself and to play a small, insignificant part in that movement -- and soon I was feeling superabundantly proud of myself. Then I found myself marching in an all-white, all-male ROTC program in college and was spit on by peace demonstrators who were offended by my uniform. Eventually I would become one of those demonstrators, but I never spit on anyone who disagreed with me. I thought I would enter my thirties quietly, a contemplative man, a man whose philosophy was humane and unassailable, when the women's liberation movement bushwhacked me on the avenues and I found myself on the other side of the barricades once again. I seem to embody everything that is wrong with the twentieth century.""

That quote really helps me understand behavior that might otherwise seem chaotic and nihilistic.

"5 Steps To Trick Yourself Into Going To Bed Earlier Tonight"

"When we think about procrastination, we typically generalize to this notion of something we don’t want to do. But when you think about bedtime procrastination, the context is very different. What is it we’re avoiding by not going to bed?

Here are a few hurdles keeping you from getting to bed on time:..

It seems that most people have some sense of entitlement to having a certain amount of time to do things (get more work done, watch TV, unwind) before bed. If you feel that you deserve this time at the end of the day to do other things, maybe you do! But it may be leading you to prioritize poorly simply because this feeling of deserving more time is telling you not to go to bed until you’ve done something else."

http://www.changecollective.com/blog/go-to-bed-earlier

This article is really useful. I'm trying to improve my sleep in a couple of ways right now, and sticking to plans is a challenge. Our lives are not structured for healthful sleep.

Monday, July 25, 2016

"They Pretend To Be Us While Pretending We Don’t Exist"

"When I was a graduate student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for fiction writing, I felt both coveted and hated. My white classmates never failed to remind me that I was more fortunate than they were at this particular juncture in American literature. “No one is going to pay attention to a name like mine,” a white dude who exclusively wrote stories about white dudes said to me one time when I was feeling particularly low about my writing...

She and the other white writers who marveled over my luck wanted to try on my Otherness to advance their value in the literary marketplace, but I don’t think they wanted to grow up as an immigrant in the United States. I don’t think they wanted to experience racism and misogyny on a micro and macro level, be made to feel perpetually foreign no matter how long they’ve lived here, and be denied any opportunity to ever write something without the millstone of but is this authentic/representative/good for black/Asian/Latino/native people? hanging from their necks...

I won’t be scandalized by a white man who hasn’t considered that perhaps what helped his poem finally get published was less the fake Chinese woman he pretended to be, and more the robust, unflappable confidence bordering on delusion that he and many privileged white men possess: the capacity to be rejected forty (40) times and not give up, to be told, “no we don’t want you” again and again and think, I got this. I know what will get me in. What may be persistence to him is unfathomable to me...

Put another way: Everything people of color must endure, our sensational pain and our sensational brilliance, must be accessible to white people; they must have it in their quest to be rewarded. Put one more way: white people don’t like it when we don’t do well and they don’t like it when we do. But most of all, they don’t like it when they don’t do well."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jennybagel/they-pretend-to-be-us-while-pretending-we-dont-exist#.dhJYAoEW9

"both coveted and hated" captures something really important. The fact that both can happen at once; the way in which people are looked upon as commodities; the way something is treated when it is coveted - held close but not looked at.

The essay by the editor of Best American Poetry is very worth reading. It's honest in a special way - 

"And, hey, guess what? In paying more initial attention to Yi-Fen Chou's poem, I was also practicing a form of nepotism. I am a brown-skinned poet who gave a better chance to another supposed brown-skinned poet because of our brownness...

I was practicing a form of literary justice that can look like injustice from a different angle. And vice versa...

And, yes, in keeping the poem, I am quite aware that I am also committing an injustice against poets of color, and against Chinese and Asian poets in particular.
But I believe I would have committed a larger injustice by dumping the poem. I think I would have cast doubt on every poem I have chosen for BAP. It would have implied that I chose poems based only on identity.

But that's not what happened. In the end, I chose each poem in the anthology because I love it. And to deny my love for any of them is to deny my love for all of them."

Sunday, July 24, 2016

"Female mice liberated for inclusion in neuroscience and biomedical research"

"In a meta-analysis of 293 articles, behavioral, morphological, physiological, and molecular traits were monitored in male mice and females tested without regard to estrous cycle stage; variability was not significantly greater in females than males for any endpoint and was substantially greater in males for several traits. Group housing of mice increased variability in both males and females by 37%. Utilization of female mice in neuroscience research does not require monitoring of the estrous cycle...

A 2009 survey documented male bias in 8 disciplines, with ratios of male-only versus female-only studies ranging from 3.7:1 in physiology to 5:1 in pharmacology and neuroscience (Beery and Zucker, 2011).

Hughes (2007) noted that despite repeated attempts to draw attention to sex-dependent drug effects the vast majority of rodent researchers continue to use males exclusively in drug studies. This is problematic given adverse effects of various drugs are more common or severe in women than men (Rogers and Ballantyne, 2008). The tendency to ignore females typifies all types of research, from studies of cell lines to those of higher order behaviors, and everything in between (Beery and Zucker, 2011) and remains uncorrected in 2014...

A major impediment to reversing sex bias in rodent research is the widespread belief that the 4-day estrous cycle of rats and mice requires daily tracking of vaginal cytology, viewed as a time-consuming undertaking in experiments with females."

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763414000049

!!!

Saturday, July 23, 2016

"America’s Epidemic of Unnecessary Care"

"In 2010, the Institute of Medicine issued a report stating that waste accounted for thirty per cent of health-care spending, or some seven hundred and fifty billion dollars a year, which was more than our nation’s entire budget for K-12 education. The report found that higher prices, administrative expenses, and fraud accounted for almost half of this waste. Bigger than any of those, however, was the amount spent on unnecessary health-care services. Now a far more detailed study confirmed that such waste was pervasive...

Virtually every family in the country, the research indicates, has been subject to overtesting and overtreatment in one form or another. The costs appear to take thousands of dollars out of the paychecks of every household each year. Researchers have come to refer to financial as well as physical “toxicities” of inappropriate care—including reduced spending on food, clothing, education, and shelter. Millions of people are receiving drugs that aren’t helping them, operations that aren’t going to make them better, and scans and tests that do nothing beneficial for them, and often cause harm...

For instance, cancer screening with mammography, ultrasound, and blood testing has dramatically increased the detection of breast, thyroid, and prostate cancer during the past quarter century. We’re treating hundreds of thousands more people each year for these diseases than we ever have. Yet only a tiny reduction in death, if any, has resulted...

And that is the hidden harm: unnecessary care often crowds out necessary care, particularly when the necessary care is less remunerative."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande

This is a really excellent article, about how problems arise from unresponsive systems with incentives that will lead well intentioned people to do the wrong thing and discourage them from behaviors that would be more

Related: “Time in the bank: A Stanford plan to save doctors from burnout"

Friday, July 22, 2016

"This Old Man"

"I’m ninety-three, and I’m feeling great. Well, pretty great, unless I’ve forgotten to take a couple of Tylenols in the past four or five hours, in which case I’ve begun to feel some jagged little pains shooting down my left forearm and into the base of the thumb. Shingles, in 1996, with resultant nerve damage.

Like many men and women my age, I get around with a couple of arterial stents that keep my heart chunking. I also sport a minute plastic seashell that clamps shut a congenital hole in my heart, discovered in my early eighties. The surgeon at Mass General who fixed up this PFO (a patent foramen ovale—I love to say it) was a Mexican-born character actor in beads and clogs, and a fervent admirer of Derek Jeter. Counting this procedure and the stents, plus a passing balloon angioplasty and two or three false alarms, I’ve become sort of a table potato, unalarmed by the X-ray cameras swooping eerily about just above my naked body in a darkened and icy operating room; there’s also a little TV screen up there that presents my heart as a pendant ragbag attached to tacky ribbons of veins and arteries. But never mind...

Old letters are engrossing but feel historic in numbers, photo albums delightful but with a glum after-kick like a chocolate caramel. Home movies are killers: Zeke, a long-gone Lab, alive again, rushing from right to left with a tennis ball in his mouth; my sister Nancy, stunning at seventeen, smoking a lipstick-stained cigarette aboard Astrid, with the breeze stirring her tied-up brown hair; my mother laughing and ducking out of the picture again, waving her hands in front of her face in embarrassment—she’s about thirty-five. Me sitting cross-legged under a Ping-Pong table, at eleven. Take us away...

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/02/17/old-man-3

A long, elegantly cantankerous essay on old age. Read it in a thoughtful mood when you have some time to spare, or when you are winding down a long day. Or going to visit a grandparent.

Thursday, July 21, 2016

"HE’S GOT A BIG EGO — THAT’S REALLY EASILY BRUISED"

"A study conducted by researchers at Purdue University found that holding a door open for men lowers their self-esteem and self-confidence, as compared to men who open doors for themselves. Yes, you read that correctly. If you hold the door open for man, chances are he feels less confident in himself. Holding a door open for a man could lead to a bout of self-loathing and despair, as he has been emasculated to the point he does not recognize himself as a man. Imagine that world. Imagine all the sad men having doors held open for them. Imagine the angst building up inside.

Imagine just how silly this whole thing is...

Patriarchy doesn’t make sense. Beyond that, it’s dangerous. And it’s not dangerous because of what it does to men’s egos when they are faced with the slightest hint of  “emasculation.” It’s dangerous because it somehow makes those moments important. It’s dangerous because the men whose self-esteem and self-confidence take a hit during these fleeting moments of “emasculation” don’t just bottle it up inside and allow themselves to whither away (dangerous in its own right, to be sure). No, it’s dangerous because those men, believing they are entitled to feeling masculine and powerful in a world that worships the masculine and powerful, often take out their frustration on the rest of society."

http://feministing.com/2014/02/26/hes-got-a-big-ego-thats-really-easily-bruised/

Wednesday, July 20, 2016

"The Superhero Franchise: Where Traditional Movie Stardom Goes to Die"

"Right now, stars are beating one another silly in “Captain America: Civil War”: It’s Robert Downey Jr. versus Chris Evans versus Scarlett Johansson versus Paul Rudd versus Jeremy Renner versus Don Cheadle. So it went in the “Avengers” movies, a bunch of X-Men films (including “Apocalypse,” opening Friday, May 27), and “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

And I can’t say that any of the actors look happy. The entire point of “Civil War” is that infighting sucks. All the long-faced stoicism suggests that this is miserable work. And those stars have a lot of company: Ben Affleck, Michael Fassbender and Jennifer Lawrence all play comic-book combatants the way Bruce Willis moped all over “The Sixth Sense.” At least he had an excuse. The comic-book franchise is where traditional movie stardom is going to die."



Interesting. There is something about the endlessness of the sequels.

"The Alarming New Research on Perfectionism"

"We tend to see the Martha Stewarts and Steve Jobs and Tracy Flicks of the world as high-functioning, high-achieving people, even if they are a little intense, said lead author Gordon Flett, a psychologist at York University who has spent decades researching the potentially ruinous psychological impact of perfectionism. “Other than those people who have suffered greatly because of their perfectionism or the perfectionism of a loved one, the average person has very little understanding or awareness of how destructive perfectionism can be,” Flett said in an email. But for many perfectionists, that “together” image is just an emotionally draining mask and underneath “they feel like imposters,” he said...

The all-or-nothing, impossibly high standards perfectionists set for themselves often mean that they’re not happy even when they’ve achieved success. And research has suggested that anxiety over making mistakes may ultimately be holding some perfectionists back from ever achieving success in the first place. “Wouldn't it be good if your surgeon, or your lawyer or financial advisor, is a perfectionist?” said Thomas S. Greenspon, a psychologist and author of a recent paper on an “antidote to perfectionism,” published in Psychology in the Schools. “Actually, no. Research confirms that the most successful people in any given field are less likely to be perfectionistic, because the anxiety about making mistakes gets in your way,” he continued...

But the dangers of perfectionism, and particularly the link to suicide, have been overlooked at least partially because perfectionists are very skilled at hiding their pain."

http://nymag.stfi.re/scienceofus/2014/09/alarming-new-research-on-perfectionism.html?om_rid=AAENcg&om_mid=_BUKv4wB88rikgO&sf=roblox

Mmmmmm. #paloalto

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

"Two white women launch ‘White Nonsense Roundup’ to unburden people of color (VIDEO)"

"If you are a Person of Color (POC), you have enough on your plate! It’s not your job to educate white people about privilege, racism, and what’s really going on in the world. If a white person is filling your social media with white nonsense – anything from overt racism to well-intentioned problematic statements – tag us and a white person will come roundup our own. We welcome your involvement, resource suggestions, and will take your feedback seriously. We are also happy to boost the signal of voices of color...

It does NOT include calling people names. It does NOT include personal insults. It does NOT include trolling individuals and harassing them long after the argument is over. It does NOT include giving yourself a high-five for doing this work. IT MOST DEFINITELY DOES NOT INCLUDE WHITE-SPLAINING.


Let’s explore that last one: we are here to support communities of color, and are responsive to their needs and feedback. We never explain racial issues to a non-white person who is living the reality of racism every day. If you are invited in to a conversation, you must respect their space. If they ask you to cool off or back off entirely, leave the conversation immediately. If you are called out for saying something problematic, you must own up to it, apologize directly, and follow their direction for further steps (including leaving the conversation after apologizing)."

http://egbertowillies.com/2016/07/19/white-women-launch-white-nonsense-roundup/


<3 <3

Related: "Anti-Racist Rednecks with Guns" <-- phenomenal interview

"'I Am Still Called by the God I Serve to Walk This Out'"

"At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me. No one was amused. If I were to carve out some peace myself, I could not be amused either. I think I lost some of myself out there, some of the softness that was rightfully mine, to a set of behavioral codes for addressing the block. I think these talks that we have with our sons—how to address the police, how not to be intimidating to white people, how to live among the singularly plundered—kill certain parts of them which are as wonderful as anything. I think the very tools which allow us to walk through the world, crush our wings and dash the dream of flight...

Agency is religion in black America. Benjamin Banneker made it. Harriet Tubman made it. Madame C.J. Walker made it. Charles Drew made it. Malcolm X made it. Barack Obama made it. You must make it too, and there is always a way. The religion of autoliberation is certainly not rebutted by the kind of graphs and stats that keep me up at night and that can easily lead to suicidal thoughts. Yours is the only self you will ever have. One must discover how to live in it or perish."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/i-am-still-called-by-the-god-i-serve-to-walk-this-out/284064/

Monday, July 18, 2016

"The Obligatory Caveat"

"Still, it’s a problem in that trying to avoid one misimpression leads to another.  The obligatory caveat suggests that there are two groups of cops, a large “good cop” one and a small “bad cop” one.  This further leads to the mistaken belief that if we could just get rid of the small “bad cop” group, everything would be hunky dory.  Not so.

There aren’t two discrete groups.  There are cops and cop culture.  The same police officer who will risk his life one day to save that of another, and the next day beat a black man for disrespecting him.  So is he a hero or a villain?  It’s all according to which day the video camera is on him.  It’s all according to whether you are the person saved or the person beaten. "



Remembering to escape the simple narratives.

I read this and planned to post it before the two incidents of police officers being shot, in Dallas and in Baton Rouge. And I still don't know how to process those moments. They scare me, for a collection of reasons, and to me they fall into that category in my head of "the American Mass Shooting Phenomenon". And given the "AMSP", it felt inevitable that at some point this would happen, that there are a lot of men who are on the cusp and just need some rationale.

And the AMSP causes this special kind of fear that has caused divisiveness and reverberating violence in every case, while people argue about the reason the man (always a man) did whatever it was and while they argue about how to prevent it and while they argue about who is actually sad and who is trying to profit politically. 

And these two shootings scare me because they amplify the problems described in this article, they make it so much harder for us to avoid the simple narrative, they make me feel like I need to be giving this "obligatory caveat" and it scares me that any of the people I communicate with might need me to do that, might think that I somehow want police officers to die.

I am not a member of the law enforcement community, nor are any of my family or friends, so I don't want to pull attention away from their pain and take up space by proclaiming my sadness for them (like when people continents away post about "thoughts and prayers" "my heart goes out to..." and clog up my newsfeed before I can see what has actually happened or encounter the words of the people actually affected). But, on a human-to-human basis, I hope that we can resolve and heal so that the law enforcement community does not have to feel this fear again.

"You Can’t Fight Poverty With a Concert"

"The campaign offers a hopelessly depoliticized picture of poverty—which is always a political problem above all—and fails to make serious demands of key institutions. From the perspective of the world’s poor, the Global Citizen Festival looks less like a strategic intervention on their behalf and more like a demonstration of young Americans’ support for a doomed agenda for global “development,” one that serves the interests of the rich and powerful first and foremost. As young people concerned about these issues, we urge Global Citizen to do better...

Ending world poverty in 15 years might sound impossible. That’s because it is—at least without a massive reordering of our world economy, which demands precisely the kind of political discussion Global Citizen avoids. Critics of the Global Goals have called them “a high school wish-list for how to save the world,” “worse than useless,” and a “betrayal of the world’s poorest people.”A studydone by economist David Woodward shows that poverty eradication is impossible under our current global economic system. Even under the most ideal conditions, it would take 100 years to bring the world’s poorest above the Global Goals’ poverty line of $1.25/day, and this amount of growth, in a carbon-constrained world, would have devastating environmental consequences...

It creates a similar paradox to the one Gary Younge has described in liberal discussions of racial inequity. “We have racism,” writes Younge, “but no racists.” What we get from the Global Goals and Global Citizen is a similar idea with regards to poverty—“a consequence that nobody caused, a system that nobody operates creating victims without perpetrators.”

http://www.thenation.com/article/you-cant-fight-poverty-with-a-concert/

Sunday, July 17, 2016

"An Atlanta Neighborhood Tries To Redefine Gentrification"

"The model was this: Create mixed-income housing, but pair it with quality schools and services like job counseling and child care to help existing residents. A nonprofit, the East Lake Foundation, would lead the way.
East Lake led Cousins and other investors like Warren Buffett to create a nonprofit consulting group called Purpose Built Communities to take the idea national.

But the model in Atlanta needed a sustainable revenue stream. A lot of that came from the East Lake Golf Club, which helps fund the foundation's programs. The course used to be a neglected landscape of dry patches, where golfers might have to dodge the occasional stray bullet. Now, it's a PGA destination...

When East Lake Meadows Public Housing was torn down, residents were offered the chance to return to the new community, but they had to meet some requirements: no felony record and either employed or in training. The Atlanta Housing Authority says about 13 percent of families were not allowed back. In the end, only about a quarter of the residents returned, and that's led to criticism that East Lake's improvements stem from a strategy of cherry-picking residents."

http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/09/23/435293852/an-atlanta-neighborhood-tries-to-redefine-gentrification?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&ut

Saturday, July 16, 2016

"Is there anything wrong with men who cry?"

"the gender gap in crying seems to be a recent development. Historical and literary evidence suggests that, in the past, not only did men cry in public, but no one saw it as feminine or shameful. In fact, male weeping was regarded as normal in almost every part of the world for most of recorded history...

Weeping was such a central part of worship that it was written into the rules of monastic orders as a required accompaniment of prayer and repentance. Throughout the medieval era, disapproval of crying is confined to hypocritical tears, which were understood to be common in both men and women. Put another way, until recently, grown men actually forced themselves to cry publicly in the hope of impressing their peers...

The most obvious possibility is that this shift is the result of changes that took place as we moved from a feudal, agrarian society to one that was urban and industrial...
from the 18th through the 20th centuries, the population became increasingly urbanised; soon, people were living in the midst of thousands of strangers. Furthermore, changes in the economy required men to work together in factories and offices where emotional expression and even private conversation were discouraged as time-wasting...

Such contexts are known to have a significant effect on how rewarding it is to cry. A study by Lauren Bylsma, Ad Vingerhoets, and Jonathan Rottenberg, published in the
Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology in 2008, found that people felt better after a good cry – if they cried alone or with a single supportive person. When they were in public, or with someone who was unsupportive, crying made them feel even worse. Supportiveness was expressed in simple gestures such as ‘comfort words’ and ‘comfort arms’ – which seem easy enough, but are unlikely to be forthcoming on a factory floor."

http://aeon.co/magazine/society/is-there-anything-wrong-with-men-who-cry/

Agh, this is fascinating, the way that society and gender sort of re-arranged, and then the psychology - and it's so true, being vulnerable and expressive and "letting it out" can be really negative in the wrong circumstances.

(Credit to DK)


Related: The enlightenment project

Friday, July 15, 2016

"'Women are just better at this stuff': is emotional labor feminism's next frontier?"


"“Your next story is on emotional labor as the next feminist frontier?” She repeats back at me. “But that is so sociology 101! I have been teaching undergraduate students about that for years.”

I take a sip of my beer and mumble, apologetic.

In all fairness, Lena’s friendly dismissal makes a strong point. The concept has been around for over 30 years; it was first introduced by Arlie Hochschild, an academic who formally coined the concept in her 1983 book The Managed Heart.

But only recently has it slowly started to re-emerge in online debates and pop culture. Jess Zimmerman, who wrote about emotional labor for The Toast, says she was floored by the amount of feedback she received – hundreds and hundreds of women commented in fervent agreement, thanking her for finally giving them a vocabulary for what they experienced...

In a work context, emotional labor refers to the expectation that a worker should manipulate either her actual feelings or the appearance of her feelings in order to satisfy the perceived requirements of her job. Emotional labor also covers the requirement that a worker should modulate her feelings in order to influence the positive experience of a client or a colleague...

“The way I think of emotional labor goes as follows: there are certain jobs where it’s a requirement, where there is no training provided, and where there’s a positive bias towards certain people – women – doing it. It’s also the kind of work that is denigrated by society at large.”...

The same is valid for smaller details of everyday life. “He is looking for stuff. Have you seen my nail filer? He goes to the closet and says he cannot see it. It’s there. ‘Where do we keep the kitchen towels?’ He asks me time and time again. After the third or the fourth time, that shit needs to be learned.”

She continues: “It suggests to me that there is a detachment to home that I do not have the luxury of having. Because if I did, then our everyday life would be a nightmare. So I take on that role. That’s not my authentic self, but I have no choice,” she says."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/08/women-gender-roles-sexism-emotional-labor-feminism?CMP=share_btn_fb