"Why Time’s Trump Cover Is a Subversive Work of Political Art"

"By reproducing a Kodachrome color palette, the Time cover makes us reimagine the cover as if it were an image from the era of Kodachrome’s mass popularity. (Where your mind goes when thinking about leaders from the era of World War Two, segregation, and the Cold War era is up to you.) This visual-temporal shift in a sense mirrors a lot of the drives that fueled Trump’s rise...

On the Time cover, instead of seeing Trump head on and from below, we see him seated from behind and roughly at eye level. The power relation has shifted entirely.

Trump’s turn towards the camera renders the tone conspiratorial rather than judgmental. There are two images at play here — the imagined power-image taken from the front, and the actual image, in which Trump seems to offer the viewer a conniving wink, as if to say, look at how we hoodwinked those suckers in the front (both Trump and the viewer are looking down on those in front). By subverting the typical power dynamic, Time, in a sense, implicates the viewer in Trump’s election, in his being on the cover in the first place."

http://forward.com/culture/356537/why-times-trump-cover-is-a-subversive-work-of-political-art/

Wow, so much more than the devil horns.

Read this whole close reading....

"Seeds of Doubt"

"Hundreds of millions of people, in twenty-eight countries, eat transgenic products every day, and if any of Shiva’s assertions were true the implications would be catastrophic. But no relationship between glyphosate and the diseases that Shiva mentioned has been discovered. Her claims were based on a single research paper, released last year, in a journal called Entropy, which charges scientists to publish their findings. The paper contains no new research. Shiva had committed a common, but dangerous, fallacy: confusing a correlation with causation. (It turns out, for example, that the growth in sales of organic produce in the past decade matches the rise of autism, almost exactly. For that matter, so does the rise in sales of high-definition televisions, as well as the number of Americans who commute to work every day by bicycle.)...

For years, people have been afraid that eating genetically modified foods would make them sick, and Shiva’s speeches are filled with terrifying anecdotes that play to that fear. But since 1996, when the crops were first planted, humans have consumed trillions of servings of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients, and have draped themselves in thousands of tons of clothing made from genetically engineered cotton, yet there has not been a single documented case of any person becoming ill as a result. That is one reason that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, the U.K.’s Royal Society, the French Academy of Sciences, the European Commission, and dozens of other scientific organizations have all concluded that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food...

When Shiva writes that “Golden Rice will make the malnutrition crisis worse” and that it will kill people, she reinforces the worst fears of her largely Western audience. Much of what she says resonates with the many people who feel that profit-seeking corporations hold too much power over the food they eat. Theirs is an argument well worth making. But her statements are rarely supported by data, and her positions often seem more like those of an end-of-days mystic than like those of a scientist."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/25/seeds-of-doubt

This is the liberal equivalent of climate change denial - no one is stupid, we are all just highly rewarded by ideological belongingness. And we all want to save ourselves and our community members from harms.

FB: "The all-encompassing obsession with Monsanto has made rational discussion of the risks and benefits of genetically modified products difficult. Many academic scientists who don’t work for Monsanto or any other large corporation are struggling to develop crops that have added nutrients and others that will tolerate drought, floods, or salty soil—all traits needed desperately by the world’s poorest farmers. Golden Rice—enriched with vitamin A—is the best-known example. More than a hundred and ninety million children under the age of five suffer from vitamin-A deficiency. Every year, as many as half a million will go blind. Rice plants produce beta carotene, the precursor to vitamin A, in the leaves but not in the grain. To make Golden Rice, scientists insert genes in the edible part of the plant, too.

Golden Rice would never offer more than a partial solution to micronutrient deficiency, and the intellectual-property rights have long been controlled by the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute, which makes the rights available to researchers at no cost. Still, after more than a decade of opposition, the rice is prohibited everywhere."

"The Plus Side"

"Historically, plus-size apparel has had a conservative look. Its unofficial name, I quickly gathered at Full Figured Fashion Week, was “fat-girl clothes.” The clothes were heavy on basics—items like plain T-shirts—in stretchy materials and dark colors. They usually conformed to a set of generally accepted rules about what plus-size women should wear. No one can decide who wrote the rules (perhaps it was the principal of a very strict all-girls school), but everyone could rattle them off: Nothing tight or body-hugging. No crop tops. No loud colors. No patterns. No horizontal stripes. As a result, the plus section became the land of the mom jean and the muumuu—of dresses that were less fashion statement and more “tent to hide your body,” as one woman put it.

There is also the matter of terminology: in the plus-size world, sizes 0 to 12 are generally called “straight”—or, occasionally, by department-store buyers, “missy”—never “standard” or “regular.” Terms for larger sizes keep piling up. “When I started, they called them ‘mama sizes,’ ” Boos said—an expression still used by some Chinese manufacturers. Then came “women’s” sizes, followed by “full-figured,” which was popularized by lingerie sellers. The more assertive “plus” arrived in the past decade. Lately, it has been losing traction to “curvy,” though some people think that favors an hourglass physique. An alternative movement has long pushed to reclaim the word “fat.” “It’s a big controversy,” Boos told me. “We haven’t landed on the word that pleases everybody, and, frankly, I don’t know if we ever will.”...

Once “average” fat people came on the scene, Farrell writes, “fat denigration” became more common: fat jokes proliferated in nineteenth-century magazines.


Clothing changed, too: with manufactured garments came standardized sizes. People used to sew their own clothes (or, if they were wealthy, hired tailors), so they made clothes that fit their body’s shape. But factory-made clothes came in predetermined sizes. (In 1939 and 1940, the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted a survey of fifteen thousand women’s bodies to devise commercial standards.) Suddenly, it became important for your body to fit your clothes, instead of the other way around: it was possible to try on a skirt in a store and think, My legs are too short, or My butt’s too big.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/bigger-better

This is a fascinating history. Fashion is important, clothing and self-presentation are important components of self-ownership and empowerment

FB: An immersive history of "plus size clothing" and today's renaissance
"The blogger Marie Denee, one of the panelists, said, “The marketers still think that we’re in transition. They can’t accept a plus-size woman who isn’t waiting to be a smaller size.”"

"Home Free?"

"Our system has a fundamental bias toward dealing with problems only after they happen, rather than spending up front to prevent their happening in the first place. We spend much more on disaster relief than on disaster preparedness. And we spend enormous sums on treating and curing disease and chronic illness, while underinvesting in primary care and prevention. This is obviously costly in human terms. But it’s expensive in dollar terms, too. The success of Housing First points to a new way of thinking about social programs: what looks like a giveaway may actually be a really wise investment."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/home-free

Yes, more money for biomedical research please!

"Elephant Watch"

"The Bouba-Njida attack was one of the bloodiest massacres of elephants to date, and represented a serious escalation in the tactics and the daring of poachers in Africa. George Wittemyer, the chairman of the scientific board of the conservation group Save the Elephants, characterized the event as a “significant awakening,” involving “a terrorist militia coming into a relatively effectively governed country and engaging successfully with the Army—even, arguably, driving it off.”

Elephants are under siege throughout Africa. Demand for ivory is increasing in Asia: once prized by Chinese aristocrats, it is now sought by members of China’s growing middle class, who buy ivory cigarette holders, chopsticks, and even carved miniature elephants...

The overlap of organized crime and terrorism has become a concern for the Obama Administration, which recently announced an aggressive plan to involve American intelligence agencies, including the F.B.I. and the D.E.A., in tracking and targeting wildlife traffickers.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/elephant-watch

"The Milwaukee Experiment"

"The recent spate of deaths of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of police officers has brought renewed attention to racial inequality in criminal justice, but in the U.S. legal system prosecutors may wield even more power than cops. Prosecutors decide whether to bring a case or drop charges against a defendant; charge a misdemeanor or a felony; demand a prison sentence or accept probation. Most cases are resolved through plea bargains, where prosecutors, not judges, negotiate whether and for how long a defendant goes to prison. And prosecutors make these judgments almost entirely outside public scrutiny...

According to the Vera study, prosecutors in Milwaukee declined to prosecute forty-one per cent of whites arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, compared with twenty-seven per cent of blacks; in cases involving prostitution, black female defendants were likelier to be charged than white defendants; in cases that involved resisting or obstructing an officer, most of the defendants charged were black (seventy-seven per cent), male (seventy-nine per cent), and already in custody (eighty per cent of blacks versus sixty-six per cent of whites)...

Even findings in the Vera report that seemed encouraging turned out to have a troubling subtext. In addition to the city, Milwaukee County includes more than a dozen suburbs, most of which are predominantly white. “When I first saw the data, I thought, Here is some good news,” Chisholm told me. “It said that we charge white offenders for property crimes at a higher rate than we do black offenders for those kinds of cases. So I thought, Good, here is a disparity the other way. That must balance things out. But a deputy of mine pointed out that what the data really meant was that we devalue property crimes in the center city. We don’t charge a car theft, because we think it’s just some junker car that’s broken down anyway. It meant that we were devaluing our African-American victims of property crimes—so that was another thing to address.”...

The most significant innovation in Chisholm’s overhaul of the office involves an “early intervention” program, which begins after a defendant is arrested but before arraignment. Each defendant is given an eight-question assessment, which can be conducted in about fifteen minutes and is compared to the information on the rap sheet and in the police report. The questions include: “Two or more prior adult convictions?” “Arrested under age sixteen?” “Currently unemployed?” “Some criminal friends?” A low score can lead to an offer of “diversion”—a kind of unofficial probation that, if successfully completed, leaves the individual without a criminal record. A high score leads to a second, more detailed, fifty-four-question assessment. The questions include: “Ever walked away/escaped from a halfway house?” “Were you ever suspended or expelled from school?” “Does your financial situation contribute to your stress?” “Tell me the best thing about your supervisor/teacher.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/the-milwaukee-experiment



FB: "“I basically divide our world in two,” Chisholm told me in his office. “There are people who scare us, and people who irritate the hell out of us. The first group includes the people charged with homicide and other gun crimes. It’s about ten or fifteen per cent of our cases, a relatively small group, and there’s not much change with them from the old days. The most important thing we can do with those people is incapacitate them, so they can’t do any more harm.”

Chisholm decided to make changes in the larger pool—the “irritating” defendants. “The racial disparity spoke for itself, starting with the disparities in the state prison system,” he told me. “But there were very significant disparities in specific categories. The one that stood out the most was low-level drug offenders—possession of marijuana or drug paraphernalia. There were clearly a disparate number of African-Americans being charged and processed for those offenses.”"

"The World Capital of Plastic Surgery"

"It has been estimated that between one-fifth and one-third of women in Seoul have gone under the knife, and one poll reported by the BBC puts the figure at fifty per cent or higher for women in their twenties. Men, by one account, make up fifteen per cent of the market, including a former President of the country, who underwent double-eyelid surgery while in office. Statistics in this field are iffy because the industry is not regulated and there are no official records, but we’ll get to that in a grimmer paragraph...

The national fixation on plastic surgery began in the aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the offer made by the American occupational forces to provide free reconstructive surgery to maimed war victims. Particular credit or blame—you choose—goes to David Ralph Millard, the chief plastic surgeon for the U.S. Marine Corps, who, in response to requests from Korean citizens wishing to change their Asian eyes to Occidental ones, perfected the blepharoplasty. As Millard wrote in a 1955 monograph, the Asian eye’s “absence of the palpebral fold produces a passive expression which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the Oriental.” The procedure was a hit, and caught on fast, especially with Korean prostitutes, who wanted to attract American G.I.s. “It was indeed a plastic surgeon’s paradise,” Millard wrote."


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

"The Short-Termism Myth"

"There is reason to think that some companies are investing too little in the future. As a whole, though, corporate spending on R. & D. has risen steadily over the years, and has stayed relatively constant as a share of G.D.P. and as a share of sales. This year, R. & D. spending is accelerating at its fastest pace in fifty years and is at an all-time high as a percentage of G.D.P. Furthermore, U.S. companies don’t spend notably less on R. & D. than their international competitors. Similarly with investors: their alleged obsession with short-term earnings is hard to see in the data. Several studies in the nineties found that companies announcing major R. & D. investments were rewarded by the markets, not punished, and that companies with more institutional investors (who typically have shorter time horizons) spent more on R. & D., not less...

To the extent that companies are underinvesting in the future, the blame lies not with investors but with executives. The pay of many C.E.O.s is tied to factors like short-term earnings, rather than to longer-term metrics, which naturally fosters myopia."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/the-short-termism-myth

This is something that gets talked about a lot in science policy, and it makes me feel better to know if might not the problem it is often described to be.

"When Whitey Bulger Was an F.B.I. Informant"

"The notion that Whitey Bulger’s pact with the F.B.I. represented not a gross aberration but something like business as usual is almost too bleak to contemplate. It suggests, as English writes, that “the entire criminal justice system was a grand illusion; a shell game presided over by petty bureaucrats more concerned with promoting their careers and protecting their asses than anything else.” Nobody knows how many confidential informants are working for the F.B.I. at any time, but in a 2008 budget request the bureau put the number at fifteen thousand. After the degree of official complicity in Bulger’s crimes was revealed, the Department of Justice ordered the F.B.I. to track any crimes committed by its informants. In a 2013 letter, the bureau disclosed that in the prior year it had authorized informants to break the law on 5,939 occasions. “Stone killers,” Connolly once remarked. “That’s who you’re trying to recruit. Then you’re supposed to tell them ‘You can’t do that anymore’? Are you shitting me?” To English, the cautionary tale of “one very crafty psychopath who had corrupted the system” obscures the “preexisting corrupt system” that created him.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/assets-and-liabilities

This is a fascinating story

"Why We Keep Studying the Holocaust"

"Snyder’s Hitler was not exactly convinced that the Germans were a superior race. He was convinced that they might become a superior race, given their bloodlines and their numbers, but they would have to prove it in competition with other races on the world stage. Startling as it is, this view explains many aspects of Hitler’s character: his physical distance from the ideal he espoused (they aren’t like me, but I will midwife a superior race that I do not belong to); his unappeasable appetite for war; his rage at his compatriots for losing his war; his readiness, at the end, to see German land destroyed, German cities burned, German women raped—his manifest desire for a bonfire of the Germans. He had given them every chance to show themselves a superior race, and, since they had failed the test of history, they must suffer the consequences."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/09/21/blood-and-soil

"The Children of Strangers"

"Around this time, articles began to appear about the family in newspapers, and they began to win prizes; with this attention came criticism. Some people thought they were saints; but others thought they were publicity-seekers, or weirdos, or had some kind of psychological disorder. Some thought they were addicted to acquiring kids to fill some need, the way others were addicted to shopping. Some thought that they were presumptuous, to imagine that they could be good parents to so many. Even the people who thought they were saints couldn’t understand why they did it. Sue tried to explain.

SUE: Suppose someone trains for years so they can climb Mt. Everest. You watch a documentary about their life, and you learn that they had to give up many things, they didn’t even go to their own mother’s funeral, and you think, What is wrong with that person? Why would they make those sacrifices and not live a normal life in order to pursue this goal that seems so ridiculous? I can relate to that feeling. But then think, Why can’t I just accept that person? They’re driven to do that; that’s their calling; that’s important to them, just like what I do is important to me.

Hector’s mother had been against his having a large family—she wanted him to have a better life than she’d had. But she loved the children, and she would babysit, no matter how many kids there were. Hector’s brothers and sisters were another matter. Most of them believed in blood, Hector thought; a collection of black and Hispanic and Asian children did not seem like a Badeau family to them. They couldn’t understand why Hector would go out of his way to find children with mental and physical flaws. They didn’t spend much time with Hector’s family. Sue felt that her mother was bewildered and intimidated by all her children; she couldn’t understand why Sue had chosen a life like that. Her mother said: You cannot save the whole world. Is that what you think you’re doing?"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/the-children-of-strangers

This is an interesting story. Just interesting human moments.

"A Beginner’s Guide to Invisibility"

"just what is invisibility? Is it the condition of being transparent, so that all light passes through you undisturbed? Or of being cloaked in something all-concealing, like Harry Potter sneaking around Hogwarts? Or does it mean to be incorporeal, so that you exist but are made, like a thought, of nothing? Or does it simply mean to be overlooked? Is it always a property of whatever is unperceived, or can it be a limitation of the would-be perceiver? And why do we count as invisible the things that we do? Ghosts, gods, demons, superheroes, ether, X rays, amoebas, emotions, mathematical concepts, dark matter, Casper, Pete’s Dragon, the Cheshire Cat—what is all this stuff doing in the same category? And why have we ourselves expended so much imagination and energy in trying to join them?...

Ball briefly addresses this notion of invisibility as powerlessness, via Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”—but, as he acknowledges, that is an imperfect example. The invisibility experienced by Ellison’s nameless narrator is not simply a matter of being overlooked by society. It is, paradoxically, a consequence of conspicuousness; he is invisible because no one, black or white, can see beyond everything they project onto the color of his skin. Ball sums this up as “the price of nonconformity” and moves on, leaving unasked a broader question: how can invisibility function so well as both a fantasy of empowerment and a nightmare of powerlessness?...

The poet Claudia Rankine addressed this issue last year in “Citizen,” her award-winning prose-poetry investigation into the operations of racism in the United States. “For so long, you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person,” she wrote. But eventually, she continued, “you begin to understand yourself as rendered hyper-visible.”...

as David Hume noted, none of the causes controlling our world are visible under any conditions; we can see a fragment of the what of things, but nothing at all of the why. Gravity, electricity, magnetism, economic forces, the processes that sustain life as well as those that eventually end it—all this is invisible. We cannot even see the most important parts of our own selves: our thoughts, feelings, personalities, psyches, morals, minds, souls."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/sight-unseen-critic-at-large-kathryn-schulz

I love this reflection on visibility and the power of the invisible to shape the visible aspects of our lives.

FB: Unexpectedly beautiful thoughts on the meaning of invisibility "As a condition, a metaphor, a fantasy, and a technology, it helps us think about the composition of nature, the structure of society, and the deep weirdness of our human situation—about what it is like to be partly visible entities in a largely inscrutable universe. As such, the story of invisibility is not really about how to vanish at all. Curiously enough, it is a story about how we see ourselves...

The power of turning invisible, the nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi wrote, was, above all, “that of turning or paralyzing the attention, so that light arrives at the visual organ without exciting the regard of the soul.”"

"The Price of a Life"

"Restivo and Neidecker live modestly, on the salary from her job at the local post office. In 2010, he received a $2.2-million settlement from the State of New York, but much of that went to lawyers and to his mother, who for two decades had spent everything she could spare on his case, at one point putting up her house as bond. Restivo tries to live as if that settlement were the last money he will ever have. “When they handed me that check, I’m not thinking, Ah, I’m rich!” he said. “I’m not eligible for Medicaid. I’m not eligible for Social Security. I never put money in a 401(k). That money has to last me forever.”

But in April, 2014, a jury in Islip awarded Restivo eighteen million dollars in damages—effectively, a million for each year of his imprisonment. Nassau County is appealing the ruling, so the money will likely take years to materialize, if it comes at all. “I’ve been through too much in this world to think anything’s a given,” Restivo said. “I can’t start living off that money. Then I put myself in a hole and I’m screwed for the rest of my life.” His expenses are minimal: “I could live on the beach.” But he was concerned about his mother. He had just returned from spending several months repairing her house in Lynbrook, and she was in poor health. “These are my wishes—to know that she’s taken care of,” he said...

There is still no consensus about the value of lost time. Missouri gives exonerees fifty dollars a day for time served, California twice that much. Massachusetts caps total compensation at half a million dollars. In Maine, the limit is three hundred thousand; in Florida, it’s two million. The variation is largely arbitrary. “If there’s a logic to it, I haven’t seen it,” Robert J. Norris, a researcher at SUNY Albany who has studied compensation statutes, told me...

Compensation is intended in part as a deterrent: a municipality that has to pay heavily for police or prosecutorial misconduct ought to be less likely to allow it to happen again. But it is taxpayers, not police or prosecutors, who bear the costs of litigation and compensation. Prosecutors enjoy almost total immunity in cases of misconduct, even if they deliberately withhold exculpatory evidence from a jury. A 2011 Supreme Court ruling also made it virtually impossible to sue a prosecutor’s office for such violations. And, unless there is a civil-rights trial, there is no examination of the police practices that contributed to a wrongful conviction: it is seen simply as collateral damage in the fight against crime."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/the-price-of-a-life

I wonder about this. And what can be returned to people? And shouldn't' it be more than money - shouldn't it be things that let them have lives? Eligibility for services; mental health services! Free college? Employment assistance?

"Let It Go: Are we becoming a nation of hoarders?"

"The innovation of the past decade was the proposal that hoarding was a disorder in itself. With that claim, plus the prevalence estimates, which, however conjectural, were confidently asserted, experts on the subject—there was now a subject, and experts—felt safe in saying that hoarding presented “a major threat to public health.”...

Herring says that he is not interested so much in hoarding as in “discourses of material deviance”; that is, the web of thought and feeling that, as a society, we have constructed around hoarding. The operative word here is “deviance.” Herring repeatedly cites Michel Foucault (he might have nodded at Thomas Szasz as well), to the effect that people in authority use psychiatry as a means of social control."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/let-go

"Shipwrecks under Istanbul"

"archeology is ideology, especially in modern Turkey. Mustafa Kemal, who founded the republic, in 1923, once wrote in a cable to his Prime Minister, “More students should be trained in archeology.” The Ottoman Empire—an entity that at its peak encompassed the Balkans and much of the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Middle East—had recently been dismantled by the Allied Powers, after the catastrophic defeat of the First World War. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, asserting the principle of self-determination, was one of many signs that the age of multiethnic empires, such as the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian, was giving way to an age of ethnic nation-states. Kemal understood that, if Turkish-speaking Muslims were going to retain any land in the former Ottoman Empire, they would have to come up with a unifying mythology of Turkishness, based on the Western European ideals of ethnic nationalism, positivism, and secularism. Adopting the surname Atatürk (Father Turk), he quickly set about inventing a new national identity. Of course, it couldn’t seem invented; that’s where archeology came in.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-big-dig

I would love to go to 1872 or something and travel the world asking about identity. and history and heritage and government. We've constructed so much in the past 100 years. And, probably, every 100 years,

Also - they describe these neolithic footprints throughout, and I realized that I was assuming they were men's. But, really, half of them are from women.

FB: "In fact, a tiny Byzantine church did turn up in Yenikapı, under the foundations of some razed apartment buildings. But the real problem was the large number of Byzantine shipwrecks that began to surface soon after the excavation began, in 2004. Dating from the fifth to the eleventh century, the shipwrecks illustrated a previously murky chapter in the history of shipbuilding and were exceptionally well preserved, having apparently been buried in sand during a series of natural disasters.

In accordance with Turkish law, control of the site shifted to the museum, and use of mechanical tools was suspended. From 2005 to 2013, workers with shovels and wheelbarrows extracted a total of thirty-seven shipwrecks. When the excavation reached what had been the bottom of the sea, the archeologists announced that they could finally cede part of the site to the engineers, after one last survey of the seabed—just a formality, really, to make sure they hadn’t missed anything. That’s when they found the remains of a Neolithic dwelling, dating from around 6000 B.C. It was previously unknown that anyone had lived on the site of the old city before around 1300 B.C. The excavators, attempting to avoid traces of Istanbul’s human history, had ended up finding an extra five thousand years of it. It took five years to excavate the Neolithic layer, which yielded up graves, huts, cultivated farmland, wooden tools, and some two thousand human footprints, miraculously preserved in a layer of silt-covered mud. In the Stone Age, the water level of the Bosporus was far lower than it is now; there’s a chance that the people who left those prints might have been able to walk from Anatolia to Europe."

"Couple’s First Dinner Party, Serves Six"

"In a small kitchen, mix together the half of the guests who have arrived on time despite the fact that no one is sure whether “7:30” means “arrive at 7:30” or “arrive an hour late,” like it did in college. Let stand for one hour, until guests are very hungry and slightly irritable.

Slowly incorporate the remainder of the guests, pausing after the addition of each one for the same grating conversation about how easy or hard it was to find the host’s apartment from the subway and what an up-and-coming neighborhood this is. Gently fold the host’s new boyfriend into a discussion about people whom everyone else in attendance used to work with and whom he’s never met."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/couples-first-dinner-party-serves-six

This is gently perfect.

"INVISIBLE BLACK WOMAN: BEYOND BEYONCE, ACADEMIA AND THE WORLD"

"It is something very exhausting and triggering about being asked to take up so much space and be invisible at the same time. This is what academia asks of me daily. This is what the world asks of me as black woman each day. This is what the religion of my youth asks of me each day. You, in some way or another, ask me for this each day. “Show up EbonyJanice. Don’t just sit there. Your silence makes you seem like a bitch. Black girls can’t be introverts. Invest in this space. Give us something. Dance for us if we ask. Prove you belong here. Now be quiet.”"

http://www.thefreepeopleproject.com/ebony-janice-like-peace/invisible-beyonce-academia-theworld

FB: "I am not here for the Grammy’s wearing Beyonce’s actualization like a coutour hand bag and then stripping it off at the end of the night and throwing it on the floor in the corner of their closet. Greeting her with a tired, “Hey” by giving her an award for “Best Urban Contemporary Album” (a title that doesn’t properly define the body of work that Lemonade presented) and then greeting Adele’s “25” with shrieks, yelps and “Yays!”

"An Open Letter To My CEO"

"So here I am, 25-years old, balancing all sorts of debt and trying to pave a life for myself that doesn’t involve crying in the bathtub every week. Every single one of my coworkers is struggling. They’re taking side jobs, they’re living at home. One of them started a GoFundMe because she couldn’t pay her rent. She ended up leaving the company and moving east, somewhere the minimum wage could double as a living wage. Another wrote on those neat whiteboards we’ve got on every floor begging for help because he was bound to be homeless in two weeks. Fortunately, someone helped him out. At least, I think they did. I actually haven’t seen him in the past few months. Do you think he’s okay? Another guy who got hired, and ultimately let go, was undoubtedly homeless. He brought a big bag with him and stocked up on all those snacks you make sure are on every floor (except on the weekends when the customer support team is working, because we’re what makes Eat24 24-hours, 7 days a week but the team who comes to stock up those snacks in the early hours during my shift are only there Mondays through Fridays, excluding holidays. They get holidays and weekends off! Can you imagine?)...

I can’t afford to buy groceries. Bread is a luxury to me, even though you’ve got a whole fridge full of it on the 8th floor. But we’re not allowed to take any of that home because it’s for at-work eating. Of which I do a lot. Because 80 percent of my income goes to paying my rent. Isn’t that ironic? Your employee for your food delivery app that you spent $300 million to buy can’t afford to buy food. That’s gotta be a little ironic, right?"

https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73df021e7a#.4hgol568n

Silicon Valley. 

"LEMONADE DIDN’T WIN ALBUM OF THE YEAR BECAUSE WHITE PEOPLE DON’T KNOW HOW TO NOT BE WHITE PEOPLE"

"And it losing out to Adele’s 25 — a nice and decent and popular album from a nice and decent and popular woman — last night was a message:

“Your best doesn’t matter here”

Perhaps this message was unintentional. Maybe they just believed that 25 was just better. A better representative of the year in music. A bigger success. A more important album. But even a lack of malicious intent does nothing but reinforce the concept of pervasive invisibility. That we could be on their stage, defying gravity and time and age and common sense while waving our pregnant-as-fuck bellies in their faces — with our cute-ass-fuck babies serving as our impromptu hype men — and they still don’t see us."

http://verysmartbrothas.com/lemonade-didnt-win-album-of-the-year-because-white-people-dont-know-how-to-not-be-white-people/

"The Nerd Hunter"

"In the nineteen-eighties, even smart comedies like “WKRP in Cincinnati” featured misfits who were nonetheless gorgeous. Through her casting, Jones has introduced actors who more closely resemble people in real life. She found Andy Buckley, Michael Scott’s boss on “The Office,” at a farmers’ market in L.A., several years after Buckley had given up acting to become a stockbroker. The “Office” character Phyllis, a feisty, heavyset saleswoman, is played by Phyllis Smith, who was not trained as an actor; for several years she had worked as Jones’s casting associate. In 2013, Jones cast Joe Lo Truglio, a nebbish comedian, as a detective alongside Andy Samberg on the police comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.” Lo Truglio had auditioned for Jones dozens of times in the past two decades. “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” won a Golden Globe Award for best comedy series during its first season."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/the-nerd-hunter

Still all men, but... I don't know, I think there is also an interesting thing where Hollywood and life are getting closer.

"Adventures in Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation"

"One of the mysteries of tDCS is why some uses require a cognitive task and others don’t. The therapy makes people better at math only if it’s paired with a math task. But it seems to make depressed people feel better even if they’re just sitting there. Heidi Schambra, the neurologist who works with stroke patients, has a fascinating theory about this. She believes that, at the moment of receiving tDCS, a person in emotional or physical pain is engaged, wittingly or unwittingly, in a cognitive task: namely, the activation of the placebo response.

We’re not used to viewing placebo—a positive response to a sham treatment—as a “task,” but there are many cognitive factors involved, including Pavlovian conditioning, the patient-clinician relationship, and positive expectation. Deception, Schambra points out, may not be required: sugar pills have been shown to reduce the symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, even in patients who were explicitly told that they were receiving a placebo.

The implication of placebo is extremely powerful: What if the body knows, in some sense, how to heal itself, and it’s just a matter of triggering that knowledge? Schambra suspects tDCS may not merely trigger the placebo effect, as all treatments do, but actually amplify it."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/06/electrified

I think the study of placebo is going to be on the big themes of biomedical research in the next decades, and I like this theory.

"The Hidden Power In Trusting Your Gut Instincts"

"Why is trusting your gut so powerful? Because your gut has been cataloging a whole lot of information for as long as you’ve been alive. "Trusting your gut is trusting the collection of all your subconscious experiences," says Melody Wilding, a licensed therapist and professor of human behavior at Hunter College.

"Your gut is this collection of heuristic shortcuts. It’s this unconscious-conscious learned experience center that you can draw on from your years of being alive,"...

Wilding recommends developing an awareness of how you feel during work situations. "Do a body scan of what’s going on for you. You may think, I feel nervous right now, or I feel like I’m not sure what’s coming next. Use those skills of emotional labeling to get in touch with what your gut might be saying to you," says Wilding."

http://www.fastcompany.com/3058609/your-most-productive-self/the-hidden-power-in-trusting-your-gut-instincts?utm_content=bufferdb6e6&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Great advice.

"Behind the Scam: What Does It Take to Be a ‘Best-Selling Author’? $3 and 5 Minutes."

"Last week, I put up a fake book on Amazon. I took a photo of my foot, uploaded to Amazon, and in a matter of hours, had achieved  “No. 1 Best Seller” status, complete with the orange banner and everything...

The title of my fake book was “Putting My Foot Down” for a reason: I’ve become utterly exhausted with phony “authors” and the scam artists and charlatans who conspire with these folks–the cottage industry that has built up around them, selling courses, instructions and hacks...

If you’re in the Top 100 in your Amazon category, you will see a “bestseller ranking” below the title. A book at the #1 spot in any given category will get a “#1 Best Seller” banner featured next to the title. This lets potential customers know the book is the top-selling item in that category. If a book holds the top spot in a category for months, that’s saying something. Hitting it for an hour (which is how often Amazon refreshes its rankings), screen-shotting it, and calling yourself a “bestselling author” for life? Well…"

http://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/

Interesting. It's another curating problem in our "new media" world, where anyone can self-publish their media in a myriad of ways and the biases of the old gate-keepers are not silencing/erasing in the same way (good) but, as consumers, we are inundated with media and information from individuals and systems that don't necessarily feel any responsibility or carry any accountability (bad). 

I feel like this is like any time in our history when certain powers have transitioned from institutional to individual: as individuals, we also have to take a share of the responsibility and skill involved in engaging with that power. And then when it's clear that this is a burden on individuals with negative outcomes, we will (hopefully) build some grassroots institutions to consolidate some of that power and responsibility. Like, in this case, maybe some group will pop up to do better analytics on Amazon and establish a list mechanism that has greater authority while maintaining transparency and flexibility.

FB: "I didn’t write this to make my foot famous. I wrote this post because I’m tired of vanity titles and success without quality. I also wanted to show how simple it is to call yourself a best-selling author, in the hopes that people buying books become more discerning customers. Remember, if I can make my foot a “bestselling author” for under 3 dollars and a few minutes of work, you should take any person presenting themselves as such with a grain of salt...

Author’s update: Since writing this piece and making my debut, my book has inexplicably been removed from the Amazon catalogue. I have yet to hear from an Amazon representative on the matter, but it is clear that something is afoot."

"The "Secret" Online Lives of Teenage Girls Aren't Very Secret At All"

"Even if you’ve managed to avoid other journalistic stakeouts on the subjects of sexting, sexualized cyberbullying, and Instagram fame, these stories are shocking, then enlightening, then boring. The element that’s often sorely missing from scaremongering teen trend stories—actual teenage girls, talking about their actual lives—becomes tedious when told 200 times...

it also testifies to one of the backward assumptions of the “secret” social media narrative. The things kids do on Snapchat and Instagram and Facebook aren’t secret. Kids and teachers and parents see that stuff on the kids’ own phones, and the worst examples are elevated to the nightly news. What’s often missing from these stories is a real commitment to understanding teenagers as full, complicated people. Social media helps adults track teenagers’ movements but sometimes inflames misunderstandings about the thoughts and feelings and meanings behind the display...

One optimistic dispatch features a teenage girl in Tucson, Arizona, who has escaped the cycle of butt shots and dick pics because she doesn’t own a smartphone, because she doesn’t own anything, because she is homeless. She begs for her dinner, but at least she’s free from the urge to Instagram her plate...

In her book, Sales laments that boys get off so easy in social media scuffles. They demand nude pictures from girls, harass them with unsolicited dick pics, blackmail girls who don’t comply, and spread the evidence of those who do; all of it helps boys gain social capital. But their lives don’t strike Sales as a fascinating secret to unpack, and so her book lets boys off the hook, too. It’s telling that Sales’ cover displays three girls in low-cut tops and short shorts, manicured nails wrapped around shiny smartphones, photo cut off at the chin so they can stand in for any daughter or sister or fantasy girl."

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2016/02/nancy_jo_sales_american_girls_reviewed.single.html

I'm also so bored of these narratives. They have always happened, and they haven't seemed relevant to the increasing success and economic freedom experienced by each new generation of women. 

"Why too much evidence can be a bad thing"

"In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications. Counterintuitively, if one of the many witnesses were to identify a different suspect, then the probability that the other witnesses were correct would substantially increase.

The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it's more likely that the system is unreliable...

A famous case where overwhelming evidence was 'too good to be true' occurred in the 1993-2008 period. Police in Europe found the same female DNA in about 15 crime scenes across France, Germany, and Austria. This mysterious killer was dubbed the Phantom of Heilbronn and the police never found her. The DNA evidence was consistent and overwhelming, yet it was wrong. It turned out to be a systemic error. The cotton swabs used to collect the DNA samples were accidentally contaminated, by the same lady, in the factory that made the swabs." 

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.html#jCp

"WHEN A SELF-DECLARED GENIUS ASKS YOU TO READ HIS MASTERPIECE"

"A writer named Alan—I won’t mention his last name, even though he clearly craves the attention—sent me a link to his self-published something, followed by a P.S.: “Feel free to continue to ignore my work, just be prepared to pay a price for it that you might never have imagined.”

http://lithub.com/when-a-self-declared-genius-asks-you-to-read-his-masterpiece/?mod=e2this&utm_source=This+nightly&utm_campaign=903463f885-Feb+8+Nightly&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4b29b52ce6-903463f885-248506805

This was funny and sweet.

And makes me glad that I'm not a writer, frankly, because it sounds so, so hard.

"Why Mass. should defect from its time zone"

"A look at the map suggests we’re currently in the wrong time zone entirely. Boston lies so far east in the Eastern Time Zone that during standard time, our earliest nightfall of the year is a mere 27 minutes later than in Anchorage. When it comes to daylight, we can do much better than Alaska.

Fortunately for us, there’s already a time zone one hour ahead of Eastern: the Atlantic Time Zone.

Switching to Atlantic Standard Time—essentially, keeping the clock an hour forward all year—wouldn’t be nearly as radical a change as it sounds. As it is, we’re actually only on Eastern Standard Time for about four months per year, from early November until early March. In the spring, summer, and early fall we’re on Eastern Daylight Time, which is the same as AST.

The strongest lobby against full-year daylight time has traditionally been farmers. If you’re an early riser, it makes sense that you wouldn’t want the sun to rise only at 8:14 a.m., which would be the reality in the depths of winter if we switched to AST. On the other hand, it makes little sense for farmers’ needs to shape policy in the highly urbanized Northeast, and for a majority of people, it might be better to have the extra hour of light in the afternoon.

For Boston, particularly, keeping the clock turned forward could have some unexpected benefits."
https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/10/04/why-massachusetts-should-defect-from-its-time-zone/zusFxWGPQmwv6bfUb1ssxH/story.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%203/11/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

"Blind Positivity Sucks."

"Positivity that calls for you to hide behind “good vibes” instead of facing up to the reality of your life is never going to be healthy. It will never support you or prop you up. All it can ever do is provide you with a sense of hope built up on a platform so fucking weak that it falls apart at the first sign of strain.

For entrepreneurs, this is a particularly huge problem. Start-up inspiration is everywhere, in the form of stylised (and often misused, re-worded or taken out of context) advice from successful multi-billionaires...

Always believe you’re good enough. Always believe anything is possible. But don’t do it at the expense of reality. And don’t think you have to always stay positive."

https://medium.com/life-learning/blind-positivity-sucks-7cae3c68e993#.f409ubawl

Related: okay with being sad; stop trying to inspire me internet

"My Autistic Brother's Quest for Love"

"The typical age of onset is three years old, sometimes younger. Randy had problems from birth. Communication has always been one of his hardest struggles, and meeting someone he could truly connect with was like coming across a match burning brightly in the darkness...

Randy was told that he could not have a guest stay for an extended period, which struck him as absurd. After a series of failed relationships, he'd found his soul mate, and no one was going to tell him he couldn't be with her. So they called a taxi and fled."

http://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/sex/a42078/love-relationship-autism-spectrum/?mod=e2this&utm_source=This+nightly&utm_campaign=7956ecde22-Feb+17+Nightly&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4b29b52ce6-7956ecde22-248506805

"EVERYTHING YOU'VE EVER WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT 'GHOSTWRITER'"

"It was never in the series, but it came out later that he was the ghost of a runaway slave, correct?

Exactly. He was teaching runaway slaves to read and write. They were caught by bounty hunters with dogs. He was killed by the bounty hunters, and his spirit went into the book he had been reading with the other escaped slaves.

Did you guys know his origin from the conception of the show, or was it developed later on?

It was part of it from the beginning. We thought that the audience would be really interested in this story, and so at some point we thought we would do an origin story. But we never actually did it because we discovered that kids loved the mystery so much. We got tons of mail from kids with guesses as to who Ghostwriter was and we didn't want to prove anyone wrong, so we never revealed it...

As a quick side note, Samuel L. Jackson was in the first episode (as Jamal's dad). Did you realize at the time that he was going to be a big actor?

Absolutely!... Sam Jackson hadn't done Pulp Fiction yet. That was what really made him a megastar and he had to resign from Ghostwriter...

we hired some hand doubles that would do the handwriting. We'd have a chunk of handwriting [shots] at the end of the day, so the kids could do their homework. We'd shoot children writing with document cameras, because it had to be a child's hand, and it had to be exactly perfect. It was sometimes not the most interesting thing to do."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/everything-youve-ever-wanted-to-know-about-ghostwriter

The dreams of the 90s ;) I loved this show when I was little.

"Take It From A German: Americans Are Too Timid In Confronting Hate"

"it has always struck me as odd how timid most Americans become when asked to object to something, even politely. At the dinner table, I’ve noticed, what Germans call a discussion, Americans call an argument.

I know I am often perceived as harsh because I speak my mind. But I also see how the very thing that makes America great—its people’s quiet acceptance of other beliefs, their overwhelming friendliness, their effort to always get along—now threatens to become its downfall. I loathed having to read my friends’ whiny Facebook posts about how they were dreading Thanksgiving because of the elections. “Boohoo, I have to talk about politics to someone who thinks differently than I do!”

Here, this German said it. Will you still like me? I am asking because I believe what stands in the way is Americans’ compulsive need to be liked. At moments like this, though, we need to learn to object and intervene—whether in public protest or simply around the family dinner table. You don’t have to get into a fight to try out my little German lesson, but if you see something, do something.

Americans are fond enough of multi-ethnic, culinary mashups, and I think it’s time for all of us to try out a little German-American fusion. If you dare to bite into a Cronut or kimchi taco, you might want to try out my little German lesson."

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/01/take-it-from-a-german-americans-are-too-timid-in-confronting-hate.html

"STUDY FINDS MALE UNDERGRADS ASSUME OTHER MEN ARE THE MOST KNOWLEDGEABLE IN CLASS"

"Dan Grunspan, the prof who conducted the study — after noticing this dynamic play out in real life among his students — points out that this lack of recognition can have real consequences for young college women. While it’s nice to imagine that our confidence doesn’t hinge on whether our peers realize how brilliant we are, slights like this can add up, Grunspan said. Perhaps it’s not so surprising that women in male-dominated fields like STEM are so much more likely than men to drop their majors — a few semesters of being underestimated by the dudes who make up the majority of your classmates would be demoralizing for anyone.

And, of course, in the real world after graduation, these guys are no longer just classmates offering more figurative high fives to other students — they’re colleagues and supervisors giving professional feedback that can shape careers."

http://feministing.com/2016/02/17/study-finds-male-undergrads-assume-other-men-are-the-most-knowledgeable-in-class/

"Fleeing violence, asylum-seekers rely on psychologists to back up their story"

"For this asylum-seeker, as with many others, gaps in memory or inconsistencies in her story could have gotten her deported. Yet, when it comes to trauma, what might seem like a sign that testimony isn’t credible can itself be strong evidence that the story might be true. Berthold’s job was to explain this paradox to the judge.

She was there as a forensic psychological evaluator, a role she has played in hundreds of asylum cases. We think of US immigration law squarely in the world of politics, with people caught in the crosswinds of violence around the globe and each American administration’s policies. But based on interviews with nearly 20 health providers and immigration lawyers, STAT found that many of these cases pivot on the knowledge of clinicians like Berthold...

Immigration detention centers tend to be remote — making those sessions harder to work into a clinician’s schedule — and sometimes distance isn’t the only barrier.

“We’ve had evaluators go to a center after scheduling a whole day of travel, and the individual isn’t brought out: They just aren’t made available for the evaluation,” said Meredith Fortin, who runs the Physicians for Human Rights Asylum Network...

Sometimes they go to great lengths to avoid their lawyers because describing their experience is so emotionally difficult. “In some examples, they have left the state, and we have had to write to the court to ask for more time, so we can care for the patient so he can participate in his own case,” Kallivayalil said.

Even convincing an asylum-seeker to see a psychological evaluator can be a challenge: Many of them come from countries where those services aren’t accessible, and where mental health issues are deeply stigmatized."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/25/asylum-seekers-psychologists/

FB: "these cases depend on doctors and psychologists who can translate scars and symptoms into evidence — and who can tell when a person’s ability to testify may have been altered by trauma."

"How It Feels"

"Darkness is acceptable and even attractive so long as there is a threshold that is not crossed. But most people I know who suffer, suffer 
relentlessly and unendingly no matter what sort of future is proposed (“it’ll get better/it won’t always be this like/you will start to heal/
I know it’s such a cliché but you really will come out of this stronger in the end”).

•

Why is it so humiliating to go on and on about something that means a lot to you only to be told, “Wow, you spend a lot of time thinking about stuff, don’t you?”

Or: “So, you’re one of those people who analyzes everything, huh?”

Or: “That’s kind of dark.”

Or worse: “Um ... OK.”

...

Why are some people’s feelings so repellent and others so madly alluring? ...
I don’t know if we, as a culture, feel compelled to extend much sympathy to those who are half alive. Half alive is not dead."
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250614?utm_campaign=eaed58dd24-How_about_some_tennis1_17_2016

This was beautiful.

"Could Rising Insurance Premiums Eradicate Unlawful Police Conduct?"

"Cronin is the general manager of Risk Management Inc., a for-profit risk pool that provides legal liability protection to two-thirds of the police departments in the state of Louisiana. As the organization ultimately responsible for the Sorrento Police Department’s ever-mounting legal bills, Cronin finally decided that enough was enough.

Abolishing an unaccountable police agency with the stroke of a pen—police reform advocates can only dream of such power.  

“We just didn’t feel like the supervision was adequate to protect our risk,” he explains. “They basically ignored underwriting regulations—the things we required them to do, they didn’t do.”

So Risk Management canceled the Sorrento P.D.’s coverage. Without legal liability insurance, a single patrol car accident, wrongful arrest, or workers’ compensation claim could bankrupt the government of the small town. In the face of such legal risk, the town council made the only choice they could. A month after Cronin’s decision, the department was gone...

In some cases, insurance companies will either hold or subsidize training programs. These can range from information sessions to sophisticated virtual reality simulators designed to teach police officers how to safely pursue a fleeing car or when (and when not) to shoot a suspect.

These simulators and training sessions serve a dual role: insurance companies teach their insured officers to behave in a way that will minimize litigation and police officers learn some valuable legal, technical, and administrative skills. Sometimes the departments get lower premiums too. Think of this like your health insurance company subsidizing your gym membership to keep you healthy.

But sometimes insurance companies will step beyond the role of useful noodge and directly into the business of writing police department policies. This can actually be useful for small town police departments, where staff are small and the level of expertise is low. A five-person sheriff department might very well welcome a bean counter from the insurance company offering a pre-written use-of-force guideline."

https://priceonomics.com/could-rising-insurance-premiums-eradicate-unlawful/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

FB: Oh Capitalism "With ample financial resources, well-honed analytical capabilities, and a profit-driven focus on avoiding lawsuits, insurance companies might just be reform advocates' best hope for bringing abusive police departments in line."