"Why your internet connection is slow wherever you are in Africa"

"In June  David Weekly,  a Google product manager, looked at loading speeds for various websites as he sat in Jomo Kenyatta Airport in Nairobi. The quality of the Wi-Fi itself was excellent but many sites were still loading slowly, so Weekly investigated where those sites were being served from. He found that Facebook and Google Kenya were reaching him from London; Apple was coming to him from Paris; and Twitter was trekking all the way from Atlanta, Georgia...

Angani is one of the key players now changing that story. As its CEO, Phares Kariuki, told me, “in our Nairobi office there are four different infrastructure providers running high speed fiber links just to our building. So when it comes to infrastructure on the ground we have more infrastructure than some US cities. We also have a multitude of undersea cables for bringing in data internationally—four cables land in Mombasa alone. So raw capacity is no longer the issue. But the speeds are still not improving, as David Weekly pointed out, simply because the content is not hosted locally. We lose the benefits of having in-country delivery infrastructure by not having reliable hosting infrastructure.”"

http://qz.com/472028/why-your-internet-connection-is-slow-wherever-you-are-in-africa/    

"Brexit as Nostalgia for Empire"

"The run up to the EU referendum has shown Britain for what it is. Woodwork: the washed-up bracken of the British Empire, and the ugly flotsam of its legacy of racism. From this woodwork the Brexiters have emerged. They have long romanticised the days of Empire when Britannia ruled the waves and was defined by its racial and cultural superiority. It is no coincidence that Farage has a preference for migrants from India and Australia as compared with East Europeans, and has advocated stronger ties with the Commonwealth. This referendum has not been about Europe, but about Britain and its imperial legacy. For Brexiters, turning their back on Europe and turfing out their neighbours is a step toward salvaging the shipwreck of the British Empire, which saw the exploitation of peoples, their subjugation on the basis of race, a system that was maintained through the brutal and systematic violence of the colonial authorities. The violence in the Brexit rhetoric of “taking back control of our borders”, of excluding others for self-interested goals at a time when thousands of refugees are dying at sea, is resonant of the racism that pervaded imperial Britain at the time of the 1781 Zong massacre which saw slaves thrown overboard by their captor to save a British slave ship and in the interest of profiting from an insurance claim. If what we want is to live in a more equitable society, it is dangerous to begin by voting for an outcome which has been driven by racism. A nostalgia for empire is no starting point for emancipatory struggle based on solidarity with the oppressed."

http://criticallegalthinking.com/2016/06/19/brexit-nostalgia-empire/

I pull this because I see if happening in American politics too, with the references to "making American great again" clearly being full of nostalgia for the post-WWII world in which the US was comparably unscathed and, while the rest of the world recovered from the War or struggled to overthrow its colonizers, it self-righteously assumed a position as "#1" and spun myths about how it had gotten there. And then our relative privilege faded and our myths were revealed for what they are and people feel like something has been taken away from them.

It's like that truism, that when you are used to privilege, equality feels like loss.

"You're not irrational, you're just quantum probabilistic: Researchers explain human decision-making with physics theory"

"According to Zheng Joyce Wang and others who try to model our decision-making processes mathematically, the equations and axioms that most closely match human behavior may be ones that are rooted in quantum physics.

"We have accumulated so many paradoxical findings in the field of cognition, and especially in decision-making," said Wang, who is an associate professor of communication and director of the Communication and Psychophysiology Lab at The Ohio State University.

"Whenever something comes up that isn't consistent with classical theories, we often label it as 'irrational.' But from the perspective of quantum cognition, some findings aren't irrational anymore. They're consistent with quantum theory—and with how people really behave."...

"In the social and behavioral sciences as a whole, we use probability models a lot," she said. "For example, we ask, what is the probability that a person will act a certain way or make a certain decision? Traditionally, those models are all based on classical probability theory—which arose from the classical physics of Newtonian systems. So it's really not so exotic for social scientists to think about quantum systems and their mathematical principles, too."...

Quantum cognition is what happens when humans have to deal with ambiguity mentally. Sometimes we aren't certain about how we feel, or we feel ambiguous about which option to choose, or we have to make decisions based on limited information."

http://phys.org/news/2015-09-youre-irrational-quantum-probabilistic-human.html

This is fascinating and I kind of love it. It feels so much more real about the world, moving away from falsely deterministic models. Because, really, every psych study is about probabilities - X group is 20% more likely to have Y behavior under Z condition. It's rarely absolutely deterministic. 

I wonder if we didn't start explaining things with that set of math in the20th century because we'd just developed it and were suddenly finding all these things we could explain with it, so there was a zeitgeist of explaining things with that math. And now we're moving into another level of math, and I feel like it's letting the world feel a little less chaotic.

"What Happens When You Get Your Period In Space?

"In the early days of space flight, menstruation was part of the argument for why women shouldn't become astronauts...

In 1964, researchers from the  Women in Space Program  still suggested (without evidence) that putting "a temperamental psychophysiologic human" (i.e., a hormonal woman) together with a "complicated machine" was a bad idea. (Evidently the Soviets struggled with this, too.)...

In 1983, 22 years after Alan Shepard became the first American to go to space, Sally Ride left Earth's atmosphere. She told an interviewer:

"I remember the engineers trying to decide how many tampons should fly on a one-week flight; they asked, 'Is 100 the right number?'

"No. That would not be the right number."

So what does happen when you get your period in space?

The same thing that happens on Earth! In the past three decades of female space flight, periods in space have been normal — no menstrual problems in microgravity."

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/09/17/441160250/what-happens-when-you-get-your-period-in-space?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150917

Click for some great examples of mid-century sexism.

Related: flow and marathon one, a joyful essay by a woman who decided not to wear a tampon while running a marathon

"Pride, Prejudice, and the Provisions of Privilege: Margo Jefferson on Race, Depression, and How We Define Ourselves"

"Negroland is my name for a small region of Negro America where residents were sheltered by a certain amount of privilege and plenty. Children in Negroland were warned that few Negroes enjoyed privilege or plenty and that most whites would be glad to see them returned to indigence, deference, and subservience. Children there were taught that most other Negroes ought to be emulating us when too many of them (out of envy or ignorance) went on behaving in ways that encouraged racial prejudice.

Too many Negroes, it was said, showed off the wrong things: their loud voices, their brash and garish ways; their gift for popular music and dance, for sports rather than the humanities and sciences. Most white people were on the lookout, we were told, for what they called these basic racial traits. But most white people were also on the lookout for a too-bold display by us of their kind of accomplishments,  their privilege and plenty, what they considered their racial traits. You were never to act undignified in their presence, but neither were you to act flamboyant. Showing off was permitted, even encouraged, only if the result reflected well on your family, their friends, and your collective ancestors...

She rages against bigotries, big and small; falls into a depression (“I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind”), then upbraids herself for being insufficiently stoic. She strives for perfect selflessness. “Conscience answers it is wrong, it is ignoble to despair… Let us take courage, never ceasing to work, — hoping and believing that if not for us, for another generation there is a better, brighter day in store.” She sinks back into self-doubt. She is not a misanthrope, she is a melancholic — a depressed gentle-woman."

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/09/14/margo-jefferson-negroland-privilege/

This is still kinda a thing, these are still the "safest" rules.

"THE SCRIBBLER: Amish ask for forgiveness from Native Americans"

"The Amish apology follows a series of reconciliation meetings in Lancaster County between various Christian groups and American Indians. A group of Lancaster Mennonites began the process more than a decade ago.

Melvin Lapp, of New Holland, organized the event. MaryAnn Robins, president of Circle Legacy, a Native American advocacy group in Lancaster, helped with planning. Lapp was raised in an Amish family. Robins is a leader of the Onondaga tribe.

As pacifists, the Amish did not fight American Indians, but they did take their land for their farms. They asked forgiveness for that passivity in the face of Native American deprivation...

In addition to the Amish reconciliation effort, some Native Americans apologized to other tribes for mistreating them. This effort was as significant to meeting participants as the Amish apology."

http://lancasteronline.com/opinion/the_scribbler/the-scribbler-amish-ask-for-forgiveness-from-native-americans/article_4c4f8b02-54d1-11e6-a2ef-7b51a8d22c78.html

That is so beautiful and healing.

"Alton Sterling, Eric Garner and the double standard of the side hustle"

"In cities where short-term rentals remain technically illegal, we don't typically think of Airbnb hosts as operating in a black market. Nor do we consider Uber drivers skirting the law — making, for instance, illegal airport runs — to be "hustling." But the kind of parallel activities Dash cites have been heavily criminalized, with the further help of anti-loitering laws. Black children selling candy bars come to be treated as criminals...

The larger cruelty is that, by excluding certain communities from the formal economy, society has pushed people who might prefer legal work into underground alternatives. Poor education, criminal records, discrimination and legal obstacles for immigrants have turned the shadow economy into a key means for how marginalized communities support themselves, whether driving gypsy cabs, selling street food or working restaurants under the table."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/07/alton-sterling-eric-garner-and-the-double-standard-of-the-side-hustle/

Related: the irony of the way that the word hustle has been adopted in white professional spaces

FB: "Another way to look at all this informal work — it totaled about $2 trillion in annual economic activity by one U.S. estimate — is that it reveals an entrepreneurialism in these same communities. Although we seldom call it that. In Los Angeles, for instance, street vendors who can't legally obtain licenses are small-business owners by another name."

"You Get Two Questions"

"If you’re talking to a stranger and not sure whether or not she’s interested in talking to you, she’s probably not, but to make it very easy: Stop after two questions.

When approaching someone you don’t know, start with, Hi, how are you? You can ask one more question after that. If, after asking those two questions, the person does not ask you a question, time’s up. Politely excuse yourself.

This rule applies, broadly. Perhaps you want to chat to the person seated next to you on a plane or train or in a shared Uber car: You get two questions. Standing in line at the DMV: two questions. Hanging out at a coffee shop: two questions, so long as the other person is not wearing headphones. At the movies: no questions. Christ."

http://gawker.com/you-get-two-questions-1732426998?utm_campaign=socialflow_gawker_facebook&utm_source=gawker_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow

I really like this rule.

Like, I really really like this rule.

It's not just the individual conversations that will end more quickly, it's theoretical ease with knowing that I won't have to deal with any over-long conversations. 

"Etsy’s Trying to Fix Tech’s Women Problem. Why Aren’t You?"

"This dominant tech archetype doesn’t just affect funders’ decisions. It affects women themselves. All of the stories about start-up culture being defined by twentysomething men who enjoy beer pong don’t make many women want to jump in and join them. “I’ve had a lot of women come up to me and say, ‘Gosh, I considered applying to Y-Combinator, but I didn’t because I don’t think we’re the type of people you tend to fund,’” says Jessica Livingston, another co-founder of the famed accelerator program, who is married to Graham. “That’s where I think we’ve done a poor job. Over the past nine years we’ve always been so focused on helping our own start-ups that we’ve done a very poor job of sharing what we do with the world. We fund tons of different types of founders, not just young male programmers, which it was when we first started.”

Even if they know they can land the job or the funding, many women don’t want to sign up to be an outlier. To be the first or the only woman in the room is to be noticed for your gender as much as for your work — a fact that simply isn’t true on a more gender-balanced staff. “What the management blogs wittering on about leadership don’t tell you is that being the first is a burden,” wrote Ciara Byrne, a former software developer. “You carry the responsibility of representing not only yourself but the entire experience of working with that semi-mythical creature, the female techie...

“The men who come into our organization who are excited about the fact that we have diversity as a goal are generally the people who are better at listening, they’re better at group learning, they’re better at collaboration, they’re better at communication, they’re particularly the people you want to be your engineering managers and your technical leads,” saidKellan Elliott-McCrea, chief technology officer at Etsy, in a talk to venture capitalists about Etsy’s hiring success. “These people are hard to find, and when you can find them, they’re awesome.”"

https://medium.com/matter/this-is-the-last-thing-youll-ever-need-to-read-about-sexism-in-tech-56b9a3a77af0#.qf8kgeyg6

FB: "Here’s the other thing about that young, male, and awkward archetype: The more socially oblivious technologists don’t even think to try and understand people who aren’t like them, and often fail to notice that they don’t work well with people who aren’t exactly like them. “I have a high emotional IQ. Most people in tech do not,” says Adria Richards, a developer and consultant. “I learned how to have empathy and act on it. The root of the problem in tech is lack of awareness.”"

"The Women of Wall Street - (Trailer Parody of The Wolf of Wall Street)"

"Imagine every male role replaced by a woman. Same dialogue, same debauchery. 

A trailer parodying the film The Wolf of Wall Street. 

Women can throw money too!"
https://youtu.be/wST8FHUJVZA

This was cool to watch, just to see it be women, just to realize how fundamentally gender unbalanced that movie was.

related: http://www.clipd.com/movies/37502/30-disney-characters-swap-genders-and-the-results-are-magical?utm_source=fbk&utm_campaign=mob-37502-fa-i-15101310&utm_medium=referral&pid=null#page=17

"Australia Allows Abuse of Refugees to Deter Others, Rights Groups Say"

"the two spent 12 days interviewing 84 asylum seekers and refugees, including children, and spoke to service providers there. They said that asylum seekers were denied adequate medical care, that they were often the victims of crime and that depression and anxiety were rampant.

“Australia’s policy of exiling asylum seekers who arrive by boat is cruel in the extreme,” Ms. Neistat said. “Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom.”

Australia’s policy is that no asylum seeker who tries to reach the country by sea will ever be allowed to settle here, regardless of whether they are granted refugee status. The government says that policy, which rights groups and the United Nations have criticized, is meant to stop migrants from trying the often dangerous voyage in rickety boats, which have sometimes ended in mass drownings.

Migrants intercepted at sea are instead sent to Nauru or to Manus Island, a part of Papua New Guinea, where they are held indefinitely. A few refugees have been resettled in third countries, including Cambodia, and many have been returned to the countries they fled. In April, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea ruled that the detention center there was illegal.

More than 1,000 refugees and asylum seekers, including around 50 children, are being held on Nauru. About 470 live on the grounds of the Australian-funded processing camp, while the rest live elsewhere on the impoverished island."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/world/australia/nauru-refugees-abuse-conditions.html?module=WatchingPortal&region=c-column-middle-span-region&pgType=Homepage&action=click&mediaId=thumb_square&state=standard&contentPlacement=1&version=internal&contentCollection=www.nytimes.com&contentId=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2016%2F08%2F04%2Fworld%2Faustralia%2Fnauru-refugees-abuse-conditions.html&eventName=Watching-article-click&_r=0

Related: podcast on this (Snap Judgment??)

"Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Psychological Paradox of the Sulk"

"Sulking pays homage to a beautiful, dangerous ideal that can be traced back to our earliest childhoods: the promise of wordless understanding. In the womb, we never had to explain. Our every requirement was catered to. The right sort of comfort simply happened. Some of this idyll continued in our first years. We didn’t have to make our every requirement known: large, kind people guessed for us. They saw past our tears, our inarticulacy, our confusions: they found the explanations for discomforts which we lacked the ability to verbalize.

That may be why, in relationships, even the most eloquent among us may instinctively prefer not to spell things out when our partners are at risk of failing to read us properly. Only wordless and accurate mind reading can feel like a true sign that our partner is someone to be trusted; only when we don’t have to explain can we feel certain that we are genuinely understood."

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/06/27/alain-de-botton-the-course-of-love/

A friend shared this with me after listening to his book on tape (which she strongly recommends) and I've been living with the message for a week or so now and I've been thinking about it a *lot*. The week that I am writing this reflection is the week after Philandro ** and Alton Sterling were shot by police and my newsfeed filled with people all over the country and the world sharing the videos and sharing news and sharing articles and sharing their personal reactions and processing and thoughts and support for each other and it was a very heady space that was at times healing and at times traumatic and I realized very quickly that my habit in times like this is to bury myself in these online spaces and express myself on them while hiding from the people I share physical space with. 

This is partially because it isn't really emotionally safe for me to be open and vulnerable with my feelings in my work spaces *add link* which have been predominantly (if not exclusively) white and privileged and where no one talks about uncomfortable politics and where my grief and alienation and frustration would, I fear,  at best be met with uncomfortable silence and at worst with a silencing populist/mainstream #AllLivesMatter dismissal that would label me a workplace outcast. 

And my mostly-white friend group isn't necessarily more prepared to sense and react to my feelings and pain. And as I've come into my blackness, I've found myself hiding it from people in the assumption that if they can't see it then they won't good people to communicate with about race. And with their failure to support me (a failure which I have engineered), I begin to feel resentful and aggressively, exhaustingly isolated. 

In sum, I always go into a sulk, and I am trying much harder to tell people what is happening to me and to give them am opportunity to meet my expectations. And it isn't necessarily getting me what I need, but it is clearing away that stress of secretiveness and I anticipate that it is helping my relationships to grow. 

"Land Homeland"

"[a] 

‘civilising mission’ involved the spread of a rule of law, whereby law was considered synonymous with civil law specifically, or European law broadly; in contrast, the pursuit of ‘law and order’ involved the creation of ‘customary law’ for statutorily defined groups. The statutory definition was sometimes totally arbitrary (as with some ‘tribes’), and at other times took existing notions of difference as its point of departure. At all times, however, it totalised identities, as cultural, legal, administrative and even political. The re-definition reified difference through the force of law, and created administrative systems and units (‘native administration’) that corresponded to these identities (‘religions,’ ‘castes,’ ‘tribes’)...

Colonialism spread two related fictions: that individual forms of [property ownership] tenure did not exist in pre-colonial Africa, and that group tenure was everywhere synonymous with tribally-held land. Both were meant to legitimize the creation of ‘tribal homelands’ where land would be under the authority of ‘customary authorities’."

http://chimurengachronic.co.za/land-homeland/

"Why You Should Fix Your Inconsistent Sleep Schedule"

"Unlike the rigid global clock, whose time zones are an artifice of our connected world, our internal clocks vary from person to person, and even within individuals as they move from childhood into puberty, adolescence, and adulthood. The discrepancy between our internal, biological clocks and our external, social clocks peaks around age 20. But the ongoing tug-of-war between external and internal time can affect everyone from school-aged children—whose schedules are dictated by their school districts—to those of retirement age and beyond. People stay up late, or sometimes not; use alarms to wake up early, or snooze it to sleep in; and then spend weekend mornings trying to make up for the sleep they missed, or they don’t. The result? A massive sleep debt and an off-kilter internal clock."

I am so here for this that I wrote my own version of this article. I even submitted an application to explore the circadian-gene impacts on cognition.

Related: Why it's not always health to be a morning person

FB: yesssss read for your health "Time is ripe to customize the social clock to our specific needs. This demands, first of all, an acknowledgment that better sleep is not a luxury, but a necessity—one that will benefit us both at our jobs and our relationships."

"How it feels when white people shame your culture’s food — then make it trendy"

"My hunger for my family’s food was overpowered by my desire to fit in, so I minimized Chinese food’s role in my life and learned to make pasta instead. Little did I know that Americans would come to embrace the dishes and cooking styles that once mortified me. The Cantonese foods of my childhood have reappeared in trendy restaurants that fill their menus with perfectly plated fine-dining versions of our traditional cuisine. In some cases, this shift has been heartening. But in too many others, the trend has reduced staples of our culture to fleeting fetishes...

Gravitating toward “new” cuisines is understandable, and when done well, immigrant food can provoke discussions about personal history and shared diasporas. I’ve seen this happen at restaurants such as China Chilcano, which describes the history of Chinese and Peruvian fusion that influences its menu, a bare minimum that many restaurants ignore...

In the United States, immigrant food is often treated like discount tourism — a cheap means for foodies to feel worldly without leaving the comfort of their neighborhood — or high-minded fusion — a stylish way for American chefs to use other cultures’ cuisines to reap profit. The dishes of America’s recent immigrants have become check marks on a cultural scavenger hunt for society’s elite."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/08/31/childhood-friends-called-my-food-chinese-grossness-how-did-it-become-americas-hottest-food-trend/

I took a class on the history of drugs in America; we started with the ways that tea, coffee, and chocolate entered Europe (and then the United States). I ended up writing my first paper on an inconsistency I noticed: it was explained that these goods became popular with the nascent middle class because the elite were enjoying them, but the packaging used to sell them tended to feature images of exoticized jungle scenes and wild animals and "natives", instead of images of the elites (which were usually used to sell other goods). I argued in my paper that these exotic images were used because the lure of these goods was not just that they could make the 17th/18th century European feel more elite, but the idea that this was how the average person was getting their piece of the land being colonized by their monarchs. 

Since writing that paper, I keep on noticing how true this continues to be with goods we get from non-Western countries. It's a little bit of buying some of that country or that culture. That's the experience being sold. It's still icky. We never stopped.

(and it's weird, me saying 'we', because like 3/4 of my ancestors were the ones being featured on those packages and violently exploited in order to process those goods; but now, I am a member of that Global North consumption class).


Related: Parents not seeing as cultural appropriation; comic on "authentic" food

"Lost Day: Stress and other modern day gripes"

"For me, these caveman traits can crop up for for days at a time. Those familiar sensations, which feel like a cross between a sinking ship and a bird frantically flapping in a cage it has now found itself trapped in, are most at home on days like today.

I call them lost days...

It’s the feeling that —despite my rational self trying to chime in — life is a kind of path to be followed, with a formulaic trajectory. And today, maybe again tomorrow, I'm not going along that trajectory, and I'm not following that path; I'm lost.

On lost days I don’t see society as the living, breathing series of human interactions I sometimes do. I see it as this upwards slope on a rocky terrain, sludgy with mud, with very little footholds and points of purchase to hoist myself up. If I make a wrong move, I’ll tumble downwards and there’s no knowing how long for."

https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/lost-day-8865fd494abc

"The ‘smoking gun’ proving North Carolina Republicans tried to disenfranchise black voters"

"One of the most comprehensive studies on the subject found only 31 individual cases of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States since the year 2000. Researchers have found that reports of voter fraud are roughly as common as reports of alien abduction.

The federal court in Richmond found that the primary purpose of North Carolina's wasn't to stop voter fraud, but rather to disenfranchise minority voters. The judges found that the provisions "target African Americans with almost surgical precision."... 

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. "This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)," the judges wrote."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/29/the-smoking-gun-proving-north-carolina-republicans-tried-to-disenfranchise-black-voters/?utm_campaign=Vox+Sentences+7%2F29%2F16&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Sailthru

"Is the Gun Lobby’s Power Overstated?"

"the invincibility of the gun lobby is being overstated. For one thing, gun ownership is becoming more concentrated in a smaller share of the population, one that is increasingly clustered in certain regions, thus limiting the lobby’s political reach.

For another thing, the big recent defeat for the gun-control movement, the 2013 failure to pass universal background checks for gun purchases, was a close call. Six senators with A-ratings from the NRA voted for the bill; it fell just five short of the filibuster-proof 60. Had it passed the Senate, there would have been great pressure from the Sandy Hook families to bring it up for a vote in the House, and it would have needed only about 20 Republicans to pass...

As more elected officials take on the NRA and live to tell the tale, the calculus for even self-interested politicians will evolve"

https://www.propublica.org/article/is-the-gun-lobby-power-overstated?utm_campaign=sprout&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_content=1444048205

"Why Do We Hear More About Hillary’s Emails Than Donald Trump’s Rape Allegations?"

"Two weeks ago, a woman filed a federal lawsuit against Donald Trump, alleging that he raped her in 1994, when she was 13 years old. Also named as a defendant in the lawsuit is Jeffrey Epstein, a man who has already served a year in prison for soliciting an underage prostitute, and who was recently described by Donald Trump as a “terrific guy.”

This story was first reported on June 20th by The Real Deal, a publication dedicated to covering New York real estate news. It was picked up by Gothamist, The Daily Beast, Snopes, and a few other websites. I did not learn about the case until a friend of mine shared this Huffington Post blog about it. The case was not covered in Huffington Post’s news section, nor in the news section of any major publication.

Meanwhile, I received two New York Times push notifications this week with updates about Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Has the media decided Donald Trump is just so despicable that it isn’t worth covering another atrocity allegedly perpetrated by him, while Hillary Clinton is expected to be a perfect human being, so more coverage of her emails serves the public good? Have they decided Donald Trump is just so immune to negative coverage that reporting this lawsuit is a waste of time, while another story on Hillary’s email server is guaranteed to make her even more unpopular?

Or, is giving credence to rape accusations against powerful men still socially unacceptable? (Re: Peyton Manning)"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-do-we-hear-more-about-hillarys-emails-than-donald_us_577979e2e4b0746f564846b4

Phenomenal question/s. 

Very related: Vox on why we're going to hear terrible things about Hillary

FB: "In this country, the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” tends to serve the privileged. That principle goes out the window when we discuss accusations against women and people of color."

"Strong placebo response thwarts painkiller trials "

"An extensive analysis of trial data1 has found that responses to sham treatments have become stronger over time, making it harder to prove a drug’s advantage over placebo.

The change in reponse to placebo treatments for pain, discovered by researchers in Canada, holds true only for US clinical trials. "We were absolutely floored when we found out," says Jeffrey Mogil, who directs the pain-genetics lab at McGill University in Montreal and led the analysis. Simply being in a US trial and receiving sham treatment now seems to relieve pain almost as effectively as many promising new drugs. Mogil thinks that as US trials get longer, larger and more expensive, they may be enhancing participants’ expectations of their effectiveness...

"Our data suggest that the longer a trial is and the bigger a trial is, the bigger the placebo is going to be," he says...

Mogil's data also challenge one of the fundamental principles of placebo-controlled trials — that comparing a drug against placebo tells us how well a drug works."

http://www.nature.com/news/strong-placebo-response-thwarts-painkiller-trials-1.18511?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

This is fascinating, and I hope there is a lot more research here. It also possibly says something about the therapeutic impacts of environment and belief/hope. Like, if placebos work, let's think about how we can use them ethically. 

"Swordswoman, Opera Singer, Runaway: 'Goddess' Chronicles A Fabled Life"

"I started to think, how would that have been, to be a cross-dressing, sword-fighting opera singer in the 17th century — I mean, she would have felt incredibly alone for a lot of her life, and incredibly brave. So she must've felt apart, I think, for a great deal of her life...

she saw a young woman on the dance floor, beautiful young woman. And she kissed her. Everyone gasped, and three men, one after another, three noblemen, challenged her to a duel. So she said to them, one after another, yes, I'll meet you outside at midnight. She met them at midnight, fought them, one after another, beat them all, and then returned to the ball. As you do."

http://www.npr.org/2015/10/03/445032371/swordswoman-opera-singer-runaway-goddess-chronicles-a-fabled-life?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=202503

"Some readers unconvinced by our True rating for Michelle Obama’s claim that slaves built the White House"

"At PolitiFact, we appreciate feedback, and we’re used to taking flak from dissatisfied readers. But what struck us as unusual about the blowback from this fact-check was the sheer diversity of arguments that readers made about why we were wrong. We found none of the arguments to be compelling, and the rating of Obama’s statement remains True.

Here’s a sampling of their arguments."

https://medium.com/@PolitiFact/some-readers-unconvinced-by-our-true-rating-for-michelle-obamas-claim-that-slaves-built-the-white-957c1d7ad46c#.icptw8vhv

*sigh*

"17 Comics Tackle The Frustration Of Living With A Mental Illness"

"Although Ruby doesn't see her work as an active attempt to change our perspectives on mental illness, she makes a point "not to sugar-coat things," she says. Which is why she'll never shy away from the sides of mental illness and treatment we don't normally see. For instance, she's drawn comics about taking mood stabilizers, dealing with nightmare therapists, and crying for no apparent reason — often ending up in a familiar human picture of absurdity or frustration.

Which is why her comics have found a huge audience beyond just those who deal with issues such as anxiety and depression. "I’ve seen in a pretty major way that our experiences as feeling, crying, laughing, sentient potato-humans are not so dissimilar," Ruby says. "Not everyone has mental illness or struggles to the same degree. But there are maybe uncomfortable things we can [all] relate to but were perhaps too afraid to talk about because it makes us vulnerable.""http://www.refinery29.com/depression-anxiety-comics-ruby-elliot?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=post&unique_id=entry_94989

"You’re Complaining About The Olympics Wrong"

"Brazil is not a rich country, but it’s not poor either. It’s a very large country, roughly in the middle of world wealth rankings. But Brazil is also going through an unforeseen, once-in-a-generation catastrophic political and economic crisis. How will this affect the tourists!? Who fucking cares, say many Brazilians, very understandably. Brazil is not China or Russia, it is not a sports rival, and it is not a geopolitical enemy, it’s a nice, democratic country down on its luck right now, and journalists or tourists coming from the world’s richest countries are not fighting Latin American corruption by complaining about bad service or their hotels. Some things are just crappy here, that’s because life on Earth is crap in general, ugh, chill."

https://theawl.com/youre-complaining-about-the-olympics-wrong-f85205a0e1b0#.kucisao9i

FB: very good to read "Brazil has free speech, liberal values and big aspirations, so you hear a lot about the problems. Inequality is brutally high, and the country is held back from its enormous potential by a semi-feudal elite, and so the population protests loudly, knowing things really should be much better. This is good. Their complaints don’t mean Brazil is actually bad, globally speaking."

“He Thinks He’s Untouchable”

"Over the past year, several esteemed science professors have been embroiled in sexual harassment scandals. But Katze’s case is exceptional, partly because of his response. In December, he took the unusual step of suing the university in federal court for violating his rights as a tenured professor. In April, he sued UW and BuzzFeed News to block the release of the investigation documents, including more than 100,000 text messages, emails, and other materials. He lost both suits... 

When pressed about his treatment of employees, however, Katze told the university investigator: “My job is to get grants. I am singularly focused on training scientists. This kind of shit is completely unimportant to me.”... 

Messerle’s full log of texts and emails between Katze and the two employees from 2011 to 2015 shows that their relationship was complex; often, they reciprocated Katze’s overtures in friendly or flirtatious ways. But their texts to each other, as well as other friends, suggest that they felt they had to do so.

Mary occasionally made her objections explicit to him. “Another thing is that I feel is that I am receiving things or money from you in exchange for a bj,” she texted Katze in May of 2015. “I don’t want to do that and I am put in situations where I do it because I owe you.” At times when he felt she was distancing herself from him, she told the investigator, Katze would say that he didn’t know if they could work together anymore, and that maybe she should find another job... 

“One interviewee said that they would be able to cite ‘a bajillion’ examples of his cruelty; another described those incidents as ‘abundant’; one person said you needed to walk on eggshells around him,” Messerle wrote. “Dr. Katze told one employee they were ‘stupid,’ ‘a mumbler,’ and ‘a stutterer.’ Another person told me Dr. Katze called them a ‘weak sissy with a tiny dick,’ and others recounted complaints that Dr. Katze would tell people they were ‘fucking stupid’ or ‘fucking idiots.’”

Of the 26 former lab members and colleagues contacted by BuzzFeed News, none agreed to let their names be published in this article. Several insisted on speaking without attribution because they feared professional retaliation; one referred to serious concerns for her health and safety; another said that he was “traumatized” from his time working under Katze."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/azeenghorayshi/michael-katze-investigation?utm_term=.yb2NM8Pvw&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%2073&utm_content=Longform%2073+CID_52ac800ada5f4908a71b5a3689dc975e&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters#.bdQmDWdwp

There is something about the academic environment in STEM than can protect behavior like this, especially if the perpetrator is successful in their science. The culture is still wary of both the personal and the political and still convinced that science is a socially-neutral activity, that a scientist sets their identity aside when they do their work - and that, in fact, a scientist is most competent when they lack identity outside of their work. 

But - but, we live in a culture that casts whiteness and maleness and heterosexuality as the norm, as almost non-identities as the background of more disruptive identities. We live in implicit assumptions that straight white men are impartial (unlike all other identities) and the physical embodiment of rationalism. Ergo, behaviors that fall into our expectations of SWMs encounter very little social friction and can go unchecked - especially given that checking them is a personal and political act that many STEM cultures see as foreign, disruptive, dangerous, and even anti-science. 

Luckily, the culture is changing, but slowly and in a way that often doesn't root put the places where it isn't. And in most places, it is changing too slowly to react to changes in the rest of society, and too slowly for the goals of anti-discrimination policies. 

"You’re Complaining About The Olympics Wrong"

"Brazil is not a rich country, but it’s not poor either. It’s a very large country, roughly in the middle of world wealth rankings. But Brazil is also going through an unforeseen, once-in-a-generation catastrophic political and economic crisis. How will this affect the tourists!? Who fucking cares, 

say many Brazilians, very understandably. Brazil is not China or Russia, it is not a sports rival, and it is not a geopolitical enemy, it’s a nice, democratic country down on its luck right now, and journalists or tourists coming from the world’s richest countries are not fighting Latin American corruption by complaining about bad service or their hotels. Some things are just crappy here, that’s because life on Earth is crap in general, ugh, chill."

https://theawl.com/youre-complaining-about-the-olympics-wrong-f85205a0e1b0#.kucisao9i

FB: very good to read "Brazil has free speech, liberal values and big aspirations, so you hear a lot about the problems. Inequality is brutally high, and the country is held back from its enormous potential by a semi-feudal elite, and so the population protests loudly, knowing things really should be much better. This is good. Their complaints don’t mean Brazil is actually bad, globally speaking."

"My illegal neighborhood"

"Not far from the school was a senior center and some subsidized housing for families of modest means. Scattered here and there in the nearby blocks were grand old houses—some beautifully maintained and very expensive, other cut up into legal and illegal apartments.

Three blocks away was an arterial street, but it wasn’t too much wider than the street in front of my apartment building. I often walked there to buy groceries from a small grocery store and drop off my dry cleaning. Another block or two farther along the arterial was a branch library. Across the street from the grocery store was a small sheet metal fabrication business.

Once, when I was explaining to a reporter how our neighborhood had every possible kind of use and service, I gestured to the sheet metal company to illustrate the presence of light industrial uses. It was then that I realized is was called Schmeer Sheet Metal Works and Fabrication. “See,” I said, “we have the whole schmeer.”

That neighborhood is typical of many older neighborhoods in American cities. And in almost all of American cities and suburbs, that neighborhood would be illegal...

It is illegal to build an apartment building in a district of single family homes. Residential zoning was adopted in order to prevent single family neighborhood property values and families from being degraded by the presence of apartments where immigrants and low-class people lived"

http://cityobservatory.org/my_illegal_neighborhood/

This whole thing is fascinating and a good point. Zoning! Ridic

He goes through why almost everything in his neighborhood would be illegal.

"We’ve Got Gender All Wrong"

"“There ain’t no other way, baby, I was born this way” rings through our skulls, arming our neurons with muskets of confidence. But I worry that that slogan is dangerous. It sounds fatalistic to me. It suggests that our biology sentences us to a certain kind of life...

“Immutable nature”! By that logic, as long as we LGBTQ persons can’t help ourselves, we can keep our weddings. But give us agency, and we best cancel the catering and send back the flowers, because no one in their right mind would ever choose to be one of us. This deterministic mentality thrives at the expense of what seems to me the much more appealing idea — that we should treat people fairly because it is a basic tenet of human dignity.

“Born this way” marks us as not just gay or straight, or male or female, but also introverted or extroverted, good or bad at math. It goes against a huge body of research on the importance of environment in shaping who we are and whom we become. To dig into just the gender and sexuality angles, what frustrates me is that “born this way” protects straight and cisgender persons from ever being one of us. They cannot be infected with our queer desires or queer gender presentations. In this worldview, we all enter this world with a stable gender identity and unwavering sexual desire. Identity is simple."

https://medium.com/matter/we-ve-got-gender-all-wrong-dc7a7a6a2809

And the fun and fascinating part of biology is how many things impact it. How fluid biologicl trits ARE given environment and random things.

"Hawaii Moves One Step Closer to Declaring Sovereignty from U.S. Government"

"In 2011, Hawaii passed a law to recognize Native Hawaiians as the first people of Hawaii. That bill also established the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission to “assemble a list of qualified and interested Native Hawaiian voters” — a move that gave infrastructure to the current push for self-determination.

Last month, U.S. District Court Judge J. Michael Seabright ruled to allow the vote, which will not be administered by the state. The month-long election will select 40 delegates to attend a constitutional convention in February. Though delegates will not be elected to any public office, they will be instrumental in deciding how Native Hawaiians will rule themselves. At the eight-week convention scheduled for February, the elected delegates will decide whether or not they want to create a new Native Hawaiian government. If a Native government is formed, delegates will also decide whether to establish a “government-to-government” relationship with the U.S. or seek total independence.

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/11/hawaii-moves-one-step-closer-to-declaring-sovereignty-from-u-s-government/

Related: telescope protests

FB: " As Danner, who works for the government-created commission, expressed, “Being native in the United States is like living a cycle of grief. Because being native in the United States is to have lost something powerful. First, you’re depressed. Then you’re angry. Then there is some acceptance and then you get to a point where you say, ‘What am I going to do about it?’ As a people I think we are at the stage where we are ready to do something about it.”"

"Hey girl, a new study says looking at Ryan Gosling memes increases men’s feminist feelings"

"According to a new study out by psychology researchers at Canada’s University of Saskatchewan, viewing the “Feminist Ryan Gosling” meme — an Internet favorite, circa 2011! — causes men to experience an actual surge in feminist feeling...

"When they look at the meme, they aren’t just looking at the picture,” explained Sarah Sangster, one of the study’s co-authors. “They are processing the message and integrating it into their belief system.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/01/28/hey-girl-a-new-study-says-looking-at-ryan-gosling-memes-increases-mens-feminist-feelings/

Related: a time he was actually feminist

"Sacred Prostitutes"

"In the nineteenth century, scholars thought Mesopotamia to be a hotbed of "naïve and primitive sexual freedom" (Assante 1998:5-6). Members of the then-new discipline of anthropology, such as Sir James Frazer of The Golden Bough fame, made matters worse by presenting for readers' delectation the orgiastic rites of fertility cults (Assante 2003:22-24; Oden 2000:136-138). The result was a fertility-cult myth which took hold among scholars (Stuckey 2005:32-44; Assante 2003:24-25; Lambert 1992:136). A number of ancient sources were ultimately responsible for the concept of "sacred prostitute": the Hebrew Bible; later Greek writers like Herodotus (ca.480-ca.425 BCE), Strabo (ca.64 BCE-19CE), and Lucian (ca.115-ca.200 CE); and early Christian churchmen. They greatly influenced later writers (Oden 2000:140-147; Assante 1998:8; Henshaw 1994:225-228; Yamauchi 1973:216)...

"Tragically," says one contemporary scholar, "scholarship suffered from scholars being unable to imagine any cultic role for women in antiquity that did not involve sexual intercourse" (Gruber 1986:138). However, recent scholars are fast setting the record straight. Even if ancient priestesses were involved in ritual sex, even if they received offerings for their temples, they were not prostitutes but devotees worshipping their deity."

http://www.matrifocus.com/SAM05/spotlight.htm

"Life in the People’s Republic of WeChat"

"I drift by company displays and find myself at the table for Yoli, a business that offers a sort of speed dating for English learners: 15-minute on-demand tutoring sessions with native speakers through WeChat. Two sheets of paper taped to the table each bear a pixelated QR code: Scan one to become a teacher, scan the other to become a student.

The Chinese term for this ritual, sao yi sao, quickly becomes familiar. Everyone and almost everything on WeChat has a QR code, and sao yi sao-ing with your phone is both constant and strangely satisfying. James, a tanned American with unruly blond hair who mans the Yoli table, is here to host a workshop called “How We Built a WeChat App & Recovered Our Development Costs Within 24hrs.” He scans my code, which gives him my WeChat profile and also generates the equivalent of a friend request; I accept, and we agree to meet during the week, skipping right over the old-fashioned niceties of last names and business cards.

The presentations are about to start, and jet lag is kicking in. I hurry to the coffee counter for an iced Americano. There’s a QR code in a plastic photo frame. The woman ahead of me is scanning it. I try it, and … WeChat fail. I’ve entered a credit card into WeChat, but it won’t work, and my WeChat wallet is empty. I feel distinctly self-conscious fumbling around for yuan. I’ve been in WeChat-era China one day, and already cash money feels embarrassing."

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-09/life-in-the-people-s-republic-of-wechat

"On Being a Chinese-American Woman"

"Although I went to elementary school with mostly Asian children, my middle and high school lacked significant diversity. I often felt I had to de-racialize myself to fit in, and at times found myself rejecting friendships with other Asian students because that would make me more Asian (and therefore more marginalized) by association. This all happened unconsciously; I was a child who lacked an objective understanding of the shame I felt for being different. I often found myself not studying in order to counteract stereotypes that because I was Asian, I was a nerd. I stopped going to Chinese school and put up a fight practicing piano every evening -- things I wish I had continued -- because I felt that they would further alienate me (I didn't need to be further alienated, I was already marked as an alien on my green card before my citizenship!). Unfortunately, my rejection of education was against my parents' values; like many Chinese immigrants, they relied on education as the main mode of upward mobility. My reaction towards discrimination and my desire to assimilate were costly and left me confused, isolated and filled with shame and guilt...

I want to be vocal about my experience in order to encourage others to do the same. The experience is one that needs to be collectively shared so that future generations will one day feel empowered and thus embrace their culture."

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8298920?utm_hp_ref=women&ir=Women%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dwomen&ir=Women&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000046

Also interesting is how inte red this is, how much race and gender are intertwined in the US.

Related: on friendship and knowing your place, the videos on yellow fever

"How to Be Polite"

"Here’s a polite person’s trick, one that has never failed me. I will share it with you because I like and respect you, and it is clear to me that you’ll know how to apply it wisely: When you are at a party and are thrust into conversation with someone, see how long you can hold off before talking about what they do for a living. And when that painful lull arrives, be the master of it. I have come to revel in that agonizing first pause, because I know that I can push a conversation through. Just ask the other person what they do, and right after they tell you, say: “Wow. That sounds hard.”

Because nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult. I once went to a party and met a very beautiful woman whose job was to help celebrities wear Harry Winston jewelry. I could tell that she was disappointed to be introduced to this rumpled giant in an off-brand shirt, but when I told her that her job sounded difficult to me she brightened and spoke for 30 straight minutes about sapphires and Jessica Simpson. She kept touching me as she talked. I forgave her for that. I didn’t reveal a single detail about myself, including my name. Eventually someone pulled me back into the party. The celebrity jewelry coordinator smiled and grabbed my hand and said, “I like you!” She seemed so relieved to have unburdened herself. I counted it as a great accomplishment. Maybe a hundred times since I’ve said, “wow, that sounds hard” to a stranger, always to great effect. I stay home with my kids and have no life left to me, so take this party trick, my gift to you... 

a whole class of problems goes away from my life because I see people as having around them a two or three foot invisible buffer. If there is a stray hair on their jacket I ask them if I can pluck it from them. If they don’t want that, they’ll do it themselves. If their name is now Susan, it’s Susan. Whatever happens inside that buffer is entirely up to them. It has nothing to do with me."

https://medium.com/message/how-to-be-polite-9bf1e69e888c#.4dv6errtl

This was a kind of lovely read. Some of its probably most applicable for white guys (who don't have to deal with nearly as many toxic prejudiced humans who will use your politeness to slowly, innocently strip away your sense of self).

But all of it warms the heart. 

FB: "One thing about being polite is that you know that within you there lurks an incredibly impolite person... 

This is not a world where you can simply express love for other people, where you can praise them. Perhaps it should be. But it’s not. I’ve found that people will fear your enthusiasm and warmth, and wait to hear the price. Which is fair. We’ve all been drawn into someone’s love only to find out that we couldn’t afford it."

"Living Near Happy Friends Has the Greatest Effect on Your Own Happiness"

"Of the types of relationships and social ties that spread happiness, the Framingham Heart Study, which tracked individuals from 1983 to 2003, found that mutual friends living within a mile of each other and next door neighbors influenced happiness the most"

http://lifehacker.com/living-near-happy-friends-has-the-greatest-effect-on-yo-1736728928

Related: Emotional regulation paper

"How Teenagers Got Police to Back Down and Remove Military-Grade Weaponry From Their High Schools"

"Perhaps most stunningly, the coalition eventually persuaded the Los Angeles School Police Department to issue its own apology. “The LASPD recognizes the sensitive historical aspect of associating ‘military-like’ equipment and military presence within a civilian setting,” wrote Chief Steven Zipperman in a letter dated May 18. “We recognize that this sensitive historical component may not have been considered when originally procuring these type of logistics within a civilian or K-12 public school setting.”... 

The subsequent campaign “took a lot of work and time,” Ashley Franklin, lead organizer for the Strategy Center, told AlterNet. “We organized on each of the blocks we work in, organized in different high school campuses, going in and doing classroom presentations at the school about how this is rooted in institutional racism. We had phone call campaigns, turned in 3,000 petitions and made over 300 calls to school board members. It was a long campaign, and those were just the easy tactics.”

Taking Action clubs at multiple high schools in the district played a critical role. “Young people decided to put their bodies on the line, following after Malcolm X and Fannie Lou Hamer,” Franklin said. “They did multiple sit-ins at the school board and disrupted meetings, declaring that this should not be business as usual.”

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-teenagers-and-activists-got-police-back-down-demilitarize-their-own-school?utm_content=bufferb4bd6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

"The psychological danger of laughing at offensive jokes"

"Gervais’ comedic failure has multiple consequences. Besides making the Golden Globes less enjoyable from an entertainment perspective, trotting out old tropes and stereotypes has a potentially insidious effect. While we would likely prefer to think of ourselves as critical thinkers, research shows the reality is less noble. Indeed, multiple studies suggest (pdf) we believe much of what we hear or read by default (pdf).

This means that when someone asserts a stereotype, we may passively believe what they said to be true. Rejecting what we hear requires more effort and concentration than simply accepting it as truth. What’s more, lazy jokes actually increase the danger that their audiences will form and hang onto passive beliefs. When jokes are challenging, there is a better chance they will engage our critical faculties."

http://qz.com/592524/the-psychological-danger-of-laughing-at-offensive-jokes/

Related: Why I always challenge racist jokes (or whatever it was called); harm from obvious vs. ambiguous racism