Sunday, April 30, 2017

"BLOOD TIES"

"self-mythologizing takes place when we assimilate the stories of our ancestors into our own—it’s automatic. We tell ourselves that their triumphs have somehow entered our bloodstream. We’re not descendants, we think; we’re heirs—heirs to intangible qualities (ambition, brilliance, endurance) through the fact of a thoroughly diluted blood tie. We allow ourselves to revise and cull from a shared history we lay claim to, every dead relation a past life lived vicariously...

On one of these ships arriving at Española, I have a blood relation. That is, he’s someone the Cuban side of my family counts among its own, tracing our roots back a half-millennium to take credit for the doings of at least one star conquistador. He will become one of the first governors of the New World. He will discover new territory himself and call it Florida. He will go hunting for—and find, and lose—a natural water source with near-magical powers of rejuvenation, in modern-day St. Augustine or St. Petersburg or maybe Punta Gorda. Each of these events is made more vivid for me by our shared bloodline. Each of these events is built on a lie."
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/magazine/item/789-blood-ties?utm_source=digest-nightly&utm_campaign=digest-nightly-20160308&utm_medium=email

It's weird, reading this, because this is not at all how I engage with my ancestry, as a descendant of slaves. Anything I ever learned or read about the kinds of people who were my ancestors was about their subjugation and terror and helplessness and less and death. Occasionally, there is one specific shining-star who is held up as a symbol of the potential contributions of all people who were enslaved or faced anti-black societies and laws. But I would know if I am descended from these tokens, and I am not. And before we were brought here...? Most of that ancestry from more than a few centuries ago is gone from our knowledge (the only way for me to know which countries my ancestors were from is to use 23andMe and hope it gets more specific about not-Europe soon, telling me that I'm Irish and Southern Italian but just generally West African, South Asian).

And then, the other weird thing: There are a lot of people in my ancestry who have names and can be tracked back to an old world continent, because they are white - but, there is a way in which I don't feel like I belong to their descendants or inherit anything from them, I imagine meeting them and their confusion and disgust at my skin color.

So, the few times that I have been able to access that feeling of being an heir to something desirable have been lessons on pre-colonial African history; I was lucky to attend a middle school that dedicated part of our 7th grade history curriculum to really talking about it, and then I took a class in college. But both times, the audience in those course was mostly not black and so, unlike the lessons about the renaissance or the American revolution, we did not learn these histories as part of our own history and inheritance and pride. And, if you are black in America, it is hard to feel pride and power in the histories if your ancestors without scaring the white people around you.

FB: "Most historians seem to agree that Juan Ponce de León is one of the more humane of these European settlers, treating the locals he absorbs into his enterprise more like indentured servants than slaves. But what does that mean? How thinly do we have to slice these moral distinctions to see the difference? He does not foment a native uprising—he helps to crush several of them. By the end of his first term in San Juan Bautista, the Taíno population has been drastically reduced through the deadly trifecta of fighting, forced labor, and disease brought by the Spanish.

This is not an aspect of my inheritance I want to engage with. Do I have to? Can I skip this part? Do we inherit awesome accomplishments and awesome guilt in equal measure? What part of this is family? Can we pick and choose what’s ours in the present tense?

Do we inherit darkness, even at a few centuries’ remove?"

Saturday, April 29, 2017

"Kenya’s League of Extravagant Grannies"

"This is the story of Kenya’s League of Extravagant Grannies who were once corporate and government leaders in the 1970’s but are now retired. They now live the retired high life travelling to exotic and remote areas within Africa to explore, party and enjoy in exclusivity."

http://africandigitalart.com/2016/03/kenyas-league-of-extravagant-grannies/

This is a perfect, perfect piece of art. Sort of afrofuturist-feminism-retro-glam?

Just like, "this is what it would look like".

Friday, April 28, 2017

"The Case of the Closely Watched Courtesans"

"Elite prostitution was treated differently. Certain brothels that catered to the male elite were allowed to operate. It was one duty of the vice unit’s inspectors to make sure the madams of these “authorized” brothels abided by certain rules, one of which was to supply the inspectors with a steady stream of information. But most of the unit’s energy was spent watching a particular group of elite prostitutes that worked as professional mistresses. Called kept women (the French term is dames entretenues), these women (and girls) provided sex, company, and sometimes even love for elite men in exchange for being “kept,” financially supported so that they could establish and maintain a household.

La galanterie, the practice of being or keeping a mistress, was not illegal, even while prostitution was...

Over the next eight years, Meusnier and his successor, Inspector Louis Marais, charted Varenne’s career. Marais’ final report, dated Feb. 26, 1762 found Varenne, after a decade of sex work, now in possession of significant wealth for someone of her background and on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, who was an army officer and a noble. She was stealing from her patron to pay for the nuptials. Did the marriage go through? The inspectors hoped it would not, fearing the social destruction of the officer. If it had, it would have represented a significant jump in social status for Varenne. But the real question is why did the police even care about the marriage, Varenne’s furniture, her love life, and her virginity?...

A clearer motive lies both in the larger police mission in this period and in understanding the importance of the demimonde, this particular sex market, to elite male society in the 18th century. The Paris police was rapidly changing in the middle of the 18th century, driven both by the needs of the police themselves in their effort to control and administer a city that was increasing in size and sophistication and by royal demands that the Paris police serve as sort of a domestic intelligence agency...

Everyone in early modern France was supposed to belong to a social unit such as a family, a household, or a guild, for example. Each unit theoretically occupied a niche in a larger social hierarchy. This system ensured each person was under what 18th-century political thinkers considered to be the “natural oversight” of their superiors, a hierarchy at the top of which sat the king. Being outside this system was highly problematic to the state because such a person was beyond social and political systems of control. For the police, controlling these populations meant keeping track of them, which in turn required developing the capacity to spy and manage information."

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2014/04/elite_prostitutes_in_18th_century_paris_and_the_detectives_who_watched_their.single.html

Interesting; it's easy to see how many of our perspectives and social institutions follow from these kinds of philosophies about society and order.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

"We Need A Decolonized, Not A "Diverse", Education"

"In his book Education, Power, and Personal Biography, Argentinian sociologist and educator Carlos Alberto Torres challenged mythologies of liberal education and its “notion that education is a neutral activity, and that education is an apolitical activity.” It is impossible for American education to be neutral and/or apolitical when lesson plans of all educational levels are sites of historical revisionism. One of my favorite quotes is an Ewe-Mina (peoples from Benin, Ghana and Togo) proverb: “Until the story of the hunt is told by the lion, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.” Until indigenous communities can tell the story of America’s “discovery” by European explorers, until the African diaspora can write the history of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, until marginalized communities are the storytellers of their experiences, history will be rendered partially complete but wholly privilege the knowledges and perspectives of colonizers...

The real problem with diversity in Terri’s eyes is that “because it is based on difference, [it] almost always includes whiteness,” which isn’t useful for anybody."
http://harlot.media/articles/1058/we-need-a-decolonized-not-a-diverse-education

FB: "The inclusion of marginalized identities and experiences without decentering dominant narratives is an understanding of diversity that leaves oppressive structures intact, and in fact, insulates them from criticism. Diversity is very frequently the linchpin of liberal racism in education, and inclusivity becomes functionally useless if we do not also exclude via decentering violent normativities positioned as normal"

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

"The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good"

"while alert to the possibility that history can be abused, as it unquestionably was in the Balkans in the 1990s, most decent people still endorse George Santayana’s celebrated dictum: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The consequence of this is that remembrance as a species of morality has become one of the more unassailable pieties of the age. Today, most societies all but venerate the imperative to remember. We have been taught to believe that the remembering of the past and its corollary, the memorialising of collective historical memory, has become one of humanity’s highest moral obligations...

Remembrance, however important a role it may play in the life of groups, and whatever moral and ethical demands it responds to, carries risks that at times also have an existential character....

These are the cases in which it is possible that whereas forgetting does an injustice to the past, remembering does an injustice to the present. On such occasions, when collective memory condemns communities to feel the pain of their historical wounds and the bitterness of their historical grievances it is not the duty to remember but a duty to forget that should be honoured...

An example of this is the so-called pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) between the right and the left that, while never formalised, was essential to the political settlement that restored democracy in Spain in the 1970s after the death of the dictator General Franco. The democratic transition came on the wings both of rewriting and of forgetting. The myriad avenues and boulevards that had been named after Franco himself or his prominent subordinates following the fascists’ victory in 1939 were renamed. But instead of replacing them with the names of Republican heroes and martyrs, the Spanish leaders chose to use names from the royal past...

The general tendency among human rights activists, including members of the judiciary such as Garzón, has been to present law and morality as inseparable, at least in cases when the matter under consideration is clearly within the jurisdiction of a court. And because most of them assume that justice is the essential prerequisite for lasting peace, they tend to downplay the risk of any negative political and social consequences flowing from their actions."

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/mar/02/cult-of-memory-when-history-does-more-harm-than-good

This is a really interesting thesis. I wonder if another way to look at it would be a sort of society-level PTSD or trauma-induced anxiety disorder, where thoughts of past experiences come unbidden and you end up living in your fears, hiding from your triggers.

So, the question isn't so much "can we forget" (the answer there is no, not without healing) and more "can we engage in therapy, and can we learn to recognize and react healthily to these moments when they happen in the future?"

And then also - how can we recognize that some reactions are toxic and unproductive, but also recognize that these traumas are continuing to happen?

Related: Decolonize, not diversify, education

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

"Meet Is Murder"

"Meetings must be scratching some kind of itch, if only for fellowship and a reprieve from deskbound loneliness. And what an itch: Meetings are not just considered indispensable to many professions; they are almost coextensive with them. You can make a whole career of planning, holding and attending meetings and never dare contemplate the possibility of your being exempt. They can’t be avoided, but maybe they can be made bearable. I set out to see if anyone had a bright idea...

Robertson’s book, ‘‘Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World,’’ presents an engaging theory: minority voices need a forum to register problems others don’t see, and a company should function like an ‘‘evolutionary organism,’’ which sounds both gentle and scientific...

With the firm support of Slack, Under Armour, the athletic apparel company, has opted to turn to the software for meetings, abolishing virtu­ally all in-person gatherings...

Robert, the original meeting hacker, was prompted to renovate meetings in the 1860s, when a discussion of abolitionist politics at a Baptist church in New Bedford, Mass., devolved into chaos... A meeting run by Robert’s Rules can be a joy to behold — though it’s clotted by as much jargon as a Holacratic meeting."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/meet-is-murder.html

I think part of the problem is that we're just bad at communicating with each other. At least in my experience, offices are planning especially that don't accept our full humanity and don't make room for nuanced or human/emotive communication - or for the reflection that would give us the insights that might be communicated those ways. If a project isn't progressing, or a task is confusing and poorly organized, or a team member is having trouble completing something for personal reasons, it's important to be able to communicate this so that everyone understands what is happening and can think about how to address it. But those kinda of conversations just don't happen in offices. So we have these disjoint and frustrating and stressful work tasks and we can't even out a finger on exactly what the problem is, much less tell someone, much less address it. And out of this unspoken, unrecognized anxiety it will seem like the appropriate thing to do is to meet, so that the problems that aren't being recognized could theoretically be caught early, so that there are all opportunities for the heart-of-the-matter communication that probably won't happen, so that for a little while you can sit in a room with other people who are having the same feelings you are and for a little while you won't feel solely responsible for bearing them.

So, I think we need to learn how to be better at identifying our needs and problems, and figuring out how to communicate them to each other and hear them from others.

Monday, April 24, 2017

"Watching And Reading About White People Having Sex Is My Escape"

"I love that I never experience that shock of recognition, and thus I never have to think about how someone who looks like me, with my body, is represented on the page and lives in the world. In these fictional fantasy worlds, not only does racism not exist — race doesn’t exist, at least in the ways that we live and experience it on a daily basis. There are no men who feel the need to fetishize unsuspecting young girls, no bad first dates with guys who ask you why Chinese people eat dogs, no middle school mean girls, no white women who get in your face and scream “Go back to China” when all you’re trying to do is get on the train and go home. In the world of the romance novel, your body is just a body that gets to fall in love and experience several volcanic orgasms in a row, and in this world, when you Google “Asian women,” you probably would get a 404 error page instead of dozens of links on how to find a sexy Asian girlfriend of your very own...

It’s the fatigue that comes from being hypercognizant of race and gender, of the way that your body is seen, in a way that white men (and often white women as well) don’t have to be... There's a freedom in identifying with the white woman who, more often than I do, just gets to be a person."
http://www.buzzfeed.com/estherwang/why-i-love-watching-and-reading-about-white-people-having-30?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%2036&utm_content=Longform%2036+CID_1f6cbfdaead99b8325fe82ef937cbe64&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.cvEJLlj4p#.cnlke0y76

I kind of totally get this.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

"Poem Cry"

"Strong black woman, words rooted in racism and slavery
Three words often spoken without realizing
While they seem empowering, they are dehumanizing
You expect me to be strong, never weak or vulnerable
But you forget that I am human, so I am not indestructible
Inside this body dwells a heart
That can sometimes be fragile and torn apart
Strength is what I exert
But I am a person, therefore I still hurt"

http://soar.forharriet.com/2015/07/poem-cry.html?m=1

Saturday, April 22, 2017

"Teens do better in science when they know Einstein and Curie also struggled"

"Showing how great scientists had to muddle through lots of tough stuff made the subject matter real and allowed students to connect with them as people.

“We think kids are so fragile,” she told Quartz. “Tell them the truth. They are resilient.”...

The study underpins a few key findings from the science of learning:

Some people learn better when the content has meaning to them. For those students, science comes to life more through personal stories than through the actual scientific content.

And kids who learn that intellect is a malleable thing, something to be built rather than inherited, take more academic risks and perform better."

http://qz.com/622749/teens-do-better-in-science-when-they-know-einstein-and-curie-also-struggled/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I think there is also an aggressive psychological thing about assuming you won't be good at science or math in a way we don't assume about other things. Like, you can practice and commit to other things - but you have to have a magical genius smartness to be good at math or science. Not true. I think STEM people are smart, but I think studying STEM topics and challenging ourselves made us that way.

Friday, April 21, 2017

"The Myth of the Barter Economy"

"This historical world of barter sounds quite inconvenient. It also may be completely made up.

The man who arguably founded modern economic theory, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, popularized the idea that barter was a precursor to money. In The Wealth of Nations, he describes an imaginary scenario in which a baker living before the invention of money wanted a butcher’s meat but had nothing the butcher wanted.“No exchange can, in this case, be made between them,” Smith wrote...

various anthropologists have pointed out that this barter economy has never been witnessed as researchers have traveled to undeveloped parts of the globe...

the harm may go deeper than a mistaken view of human psychology. According to Graeber, once one assigns specific values to objects, as one does in a money-based economy, it becomes all too easy to assign value to people, perhaps not creating but at least enabling institutions such as slavery (in which people can be bought) and imperialism (which is made possible by a system that can feed and pay soldiers fighting far from their homes)...

So if money is a choice, are there alternatives worth considering? Is a gift economy—which wouldn’t put people into debt, which relies on communal responsibility and trust—preferable to a system based on money? Or would people just take advantage of their neighbors?

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/barter-society-myth/471051/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=New%20Campaign&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All


Interesting.

Also, ugh the Atlantic. I'm trying not to read it right now (I feel like it just fuels the kinds of never-solved division-y controversies that are really unproductive, like safe space vs. free speech). But this magazine writes such good headlines and pulls you in... And then kinda disappoints with its final analysis.

Thursday, April 20, 2017

"How ADHD Affects Adults"



"Adults with ADHD have a tricky path to navigate. Those now in their 20s diagnosed with the disorder will have grown up during the noughties when newspapers were splashed with pictures of kids snorting Ritalin (a drug often used to treat ADHD) at school. 'ADHD is just a scapegoat for bad parenting' was a view frequently bandied about and I remember thinking of it as a disorder reserved for “problem kids” because this is what I was told.
In fact, it’s only really recently that adult ADHD is being widely talked about. Two recent studies have explored how symptoms of ADHD manifest differently in adults. One of the studies, conducted by King's College London, found that nearly 70% of young adults who tested positive for ADHD in their study didn’t appear to have the disorder as children. Interestingly, most adults diagnosed, 55% according to both studies published in JAMA Psychiatry journal, also turned out to be women.

The study suggested that those diagnosed as adults were likely to have higher IQs: "Symptoms may not become impairing until the increasing challenges of later, more demanding schooling.” And yet, because the disorder makes it tough to focus and settle down, it can be harder for people with ADHD to succeed in education and in their careers."


I was diagnosed with ADHD 2 years ago, solidly in my 20s and in between leaving my first job and entering graduate school. And since then I have found out that I have at least 4 other female friends with ADHD. 

It's a very strange thing to be working out after 16+ years of school and 20+ years of being-a-person, realizing all the unconscious coping mechanisms and finding a definition of your own attention (because there are very few narratives of adult female ADHD and everyone lives it differently). 

I hope that awareness of this increases, because I would still be confused and struggling with my symptoms if it wasn't for an Atlantic article that a friend posted on Facebook. 

*post April 20


FB: "Looking back on my early 20s I realise that if I’d only had the confidence to tell my bosses that yes, I could get this done, I just needed to sit somewhere quiet, those years could have been quite different. This is why greater awareness of ADHD in adults is essential, especially for those juggling a career, social life and a relationship."

"The Feel-Good Female Solidarity Machine"

"If Tina Brown, the celebrated former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, is there, you know you’ve reached the summit, literally. Her annual Women in the World Summit, a venture she launched in 2010, has done so well that it sold out 2,500-seat venues four years running and expanded overseas, showing that it was possible to monetize female rage. People pay up to $300 per day to attend, and the summit was profitable from its very first year, thanks to sponsorships by such blue-chip backers as Toyota Motor, Dove, Google, and MasterCard. October’s inaugural Women in the World London was packed morning to night with activists from around the world reliving their struggles, movie stars sharing life secrets, politicians, and royalty. During breaks, women milled around a crowded lounge, nibbling on popcorn and tweeting...

In what may be a sign that the branding of women’s issues is immune to irony, the National Football League hosts its first-ever Women’s Summit during Super Bowl week on Feb. 4. Coming off a string of player domestic abuse scandals and cheerleader lawsuits over fair pay, it’s called In the Huddle to Advance Women in Sport, and it features Serena Williams and Condoleezza Rice...

You often leave with a rosy glow, a sense of resolve, and a commitment to do more, for other women and for yourself. But then you return to your desk, probably next to a higher-paid male co-worker, and the old, familiar malaise sets in. There was no discussion of changing policies or lobbying members of Congress. No e-mail list to stay in touch and organize. In the end, one wonders if the explosion of these events is a reflection of how far women have come or proof that they haven’t made much progress at all. Why, in spite of all the energy these conferences generate, are women still just … talking?"

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-feel-good-female-solidarity-machine/

I have totally been to mini-versions of these, and I know exactly that feeling and that walking-away and that next-day-no-changes thing.

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

"How Homestar Runner changed web series for the better"

"So much of this understanding of web video was already present in the works of Homestarrunner.com, the first online provider of TV-like content to see significant crossover success. At the height of the site’s cultural cachet—roughly 2002 to 2005—the programs it offered, particularly its popular Strong Bad Emails series, made appearances in mainstream press publications like Entertainment Weekly. They were referenced on Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s series finale. News of them spread far and wide on the Internet, mentions of Trogdor The Burninator and The Cheat turning into a kind of lingua franca of Internet cool for those in the know. They turned up in video games both on the series’ site and produced by other companies. And this was accomplished almost entirely without social media. There wasn’t a Facebook or Twitter when Homestarrunner.com started putting up videos, and those videos were encoded in Flash (a platform that paled in comparison as a delivery system to essentially any video player out right now). The success of the site was a minor miracle, but it also seemed self-evident to anyone who spent more than a few minutes clicking around through its content. The stuff on Homestarrunner.com was really funny, and even if the site hasn’t been updated in years, its surprisingly elaborate mythology and characters still pop up in online discussions from time to time. It also provided a blueprint for web TV going forward: Start small, then keep going...

Homestar Runner ended up feeling very like the purest possible expression of one corner of the Internet, the one that wanted to just like stuff, instead of always feeling at a remove from it. It codified the pureness of being a little kid and falling in love with your first TV show or movie or book, and it turned that into a series of web shorts that pointed the way forward not just for the legions of web series to follow but also a host of TV shows, from Adventure Time to Bob’s Burgers, from Community to Parks And Recreation."

http://www.avclub.com/article/how-ihomestar-runneri-changed-web-series-for-the-b-104146

My friends and I dressed up as Teen Girl Squad one year for Halloween and it was fabulous. I have so much adolescent affection for that site; at the end of our high school graduation ceremony, one of my friends turned to the rest of us and channeled Strong Bad to declare "It's Over!!!!"

I miss that internet.

(Posting this today to celebrate my friend Alice's birthday)

Related: The immortal life of "my immortal"

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

"Sail (Far) Away: At Sea with America's Largest Floating Gathering of Conspiracy Theorists"

"Most notably, there was Andrew Wakefield, the British gastroenterologist who authored the now-infamous 1998 study that suggested there might be a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Jenny McCarthy was breathed into being because of Andrew Wakefield.


The wider world hasn’t been kind to Wakefield, who lost his medical license in 2010 and is widely described as a one-man public health disaster. Here, though, he was treated as a battle-scarred hero. The room hung on his every word.


“One in two children will have autism by 2032,” he told us, to horrified gasps. “We are facing dark times. The government and the pharmaceutical industry own your bodies and the bodies of your children.”


“There are no [vaccine] exemptions anymore,” Sean David Morton piped in. “Not even if you’re Jewish. But I think Obama made an exception for Muslims.” He switched into what may have been an impression of someone with an Arabic accent: “Ay yi yi!”...


Earthly concerns commenced early on a Monday morning with Andrew Wakefield, down in the green-carpeted Botticelli dining room. He was in a dour mood.


“The story of my life is that I had a promising career and I flushed it down the toilet,” he said. He wasn’t overstating things: Wakefield was a gastroenterologist in London in 1998, when he and a dozen co-authors published a piece in the Lancet,claiming that eight of 12 children they’d studied had developed behavioral symptoms associated with regressive autism after receiving the MMR vaccine. The study didn’t definitively state there was a link between the MMR and autism, although now Wakefield says he believes that to be the case.


The Lancet retracted it in 2010, and 10 of Wakefield’s 12 co-authors wrote a subsequent retraction that doubled as an apology for creating conditions in which an untold number of parents became afraid to vaccinate their children. Wakefield lost his license and was accused of having been working on patenting an alternate measles vaccine of his own and of being paid by a personal injury lawyer. (Wakefield called those reports inaccurate and done with bad intent. In 2007, he sued Brian Deer, the journalist who wrote the investigative pieces about him, for libel, but eventually dropped the case. He later sued the British Medical Journal, where Deer’s stories were published, as well as Deer personally for defamation in Texas; that suit was thrown out in 2014. A judge ruled state courts there didn’t have jurisdiction over a British publication.)


Wakefield’s belief in his own theories has never wavered... Compared to many of the presenters, Wakefield was quite coherent, with a thesis that hung together in a logical way, at least on the surface. It was easy to see why he’s a star in the anti-vaccine world.


The question was why he was delivering a passionate defense of his life’s work not to the medical establishment, but to an audience mainly composed of retirees, in a dining room, on a boat, in the middle of the sea...


The political scientists Eric Oliver and Thomas Wood, who authored the study, argue that conspiracy theories are, at their core, an attempt to deal with emotional distress, the kind caused by a shocking or inexplicable event: a vicious new drug coming out of nowhere, planes demolishing the World Trade Center, the president shot dead on a sunny day, riding through the streets of Dallas. Conspiracy theories provide a soothing order and, with it, reassurance.


But there’s also a reason why Americans are particularly prone to believing in conspiracy theories: In our case, quite a lot of outlandish things turn out to be true. The CIA really did conduct serious research into whether it could use mind control on its enemies, a program known as MKULTRA; it really did try to assassinate Fidel Castro through an increasingly absurd series of weaponized devices (exploding cigar, booby-trapped seashell, ballpoint pen laced with poison). The U.S. Army really did try to use elements of the “human potential” movement to try and develop “psychic spies,” known as the Stargate Project. The FBI really did run the COINTELPRO program, a series of covert operations designed to undermine and destroy political organizations from within"


http://jezebel.com/sail-far-away-at-sea-with-americas-largest-floating-1760900554?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email





FB: mostly fascinating because Andrew Wakefield, the guy who wrote the paper that started the vaccines=autism thing, is on the cruise and talks about his life.

Monday, April 17, 2017

"The Purely Accidental Lessons Of The First Black 'Bachelorette'"

"When the Bacheloron is white and most of the candidates are white, what this means is this: If you're a black candidate, you can be chosen, but first, you have to impress a white Bacheloron and convince that person to, for many weeks in a row, pick you. You cannot go forward without their say-so, because of longstanding structural rules about allocating power that they themselves have followed successfully in order to become powerful in the first place. You have to figure out how to navigate not only their evaluation of your qualities as a person, but also their largely mysterious "gut feelings" and "instincts" and ideas about "compatibility" and "fit" and so forth. Only by navigating that white Bacheloron's decision-making correctly can you, as a black candidate, obtain power yourself by being chosen. So to succeed in this structure as a black person, you have to click — in some hard-to-define way for which nobody is accountable — with a white person who gets to say yes or no to you. That person's approval is the only path.

Now go back and replace "Bacheloron" with "boss" and "chosen" with "promoted," and you'll see that they may have accidentally set up a really freaky metaphor for the way structural racism can sometimes work without anybody setting out to do it. They consider this system, by the way, to be utterly race-neutral. But in practice, in actual undeniable fact, it has been a story almost entirely of a white person picking the next white person, and of that white person then picking another white person, and everybody shrugging and saying, "I just went with my gut! It was love!"



FB: "This link between each season and the next has created a way for the centrality of white leads to perpetuate itself, without anyone who set up the whole one-goofus-leads-to-another system having ever needed to have that motive. "

"25 Small Ways Asian Immigrant Parents Show Their Love"

http://www.buzzfeed.com/christinalan/i-love-my-asian-parents?utm_term=.ecmg9qleO#.gc4qyqXo1y

Because it cuts through all those stereotypes. And we should probably all remember to call our caregivers and let them know how we are doing.

Sunday, April 16, 2017

"Quality of whose life, again?"

"Yes, death has been increasingly medicalized, but McKown isn’t exactly advocating de-medicalizing the process, just changing the venue. The problem isn’t that death has been medicalized — no one seriously advocates getting rid of doctors and nurses for aid during the process — but that it has been corporatized, like so many other facets of life. We get sick enough to die, and then the course of what’s left of our lives is lived out in impersonal surroundings, our needs attended to by strangers — skilled strangers, true, but dispassionate nonetheless, our decisions circumscribed by HMO policy and procedures driven by monetary concerns of either the cost-cutting or ass-covering varieties.

But when parts of our lives get corporatized, it’s generally the case that the associated relationships get monetized. In English: suddenly we find ourselves paying someone for labor we once got for free...

Like so many other arenas in which quality of life is seen to be dwindling in these here Modrun Times, the “good death,” in being cast as The Way Things Used To Be (though not by McKown, explicitly) is based on the assumption of unpaid female labor...

In a paper published a couple weeks ago, Dr. Sherilyn McGregor of Keele University in Staffordshire points out that when environmentally sound living requres extra work, that work is usually “women’s work.” Her paper is a useful and readable summation, and if it weren’t encrypted read-only I’d paste some of it here. Still, this is not news to environmentalist women. What decisions are environmentalist citizens asked to make? Choosing the green laundry detergent and toilet paper and buying organic groceries. Carrying cloth bags to the supermarket. Using non-toxic cleansers. Adding corporate citizenship to one’s list of brand loyalty factors and schlepping the Seafood Buying Guide around. Sorting trash into the proper containers for recyclables, compost, and landfilling."
http://coyot.es/crossing/2007/09/10/quality-of-whose-life-again/

This is short (especially if you skip the pull quotes) and uses two very different examples to point out how much unpaid female labor is implicitly expected in these movements. I find this so, so useful for recognizing what makes me uncomfortable about some of these sort of crunchy, liberal-y, upper-middle-class-y, hipster-y things that lean on ideals of the "good old days".

The good old days worked because of a lot of exploitation, and they only worked for a small group of people but those people wrote the books and painted the paintings and made those books and paintings mainstream and their descendants turned them into movies and TV shows. And then when people wrote fiction or were thinking of topics to explore in nonfiction or in historical research, these are the images and narratives they had to leap off from and further institutionalize in new pieces of mainstream media.

Related: Give your money to women; emotional labor; thing on problem with hipster food...

Saturday, April 15, 2017

"Researchers need recognition for team science"

""We don't want individuals participating in the really exciting bits of research to be lost to science because they are seen as 'just another person on the team' which means their careers are not progressing."

To encourage scientists to take part in collaborative research, the Working Group behind the report recommends several ways to improve how contributions to team science are recognised and rewarded so that they are not disadvantaged compared to the single Principal Investigator standard.

In response to one of the fundamental issues - how to record an individual's contributions - the report suggests researchers, funders and publishers adopt ORCID as the standard identifier for researchers.

Other recommendations touch on the need for more flexible funding schemes, as team science projects have different needs, such as travel and training, and often need longer timescales to produce their results...

“There is a need for a structured and uniform way to record information on contributions, a system to record this information needs to be developed and phased in, and it needs to be consistently used by researchers, employers and funders.""

Friday, April 14, 2017

"The Starvation Study That Changed The World"

"The volunteer subjects were all conscientious objectors who were eager to help the war effort. "Our friends and colleagues in other places were putting their lives on the line," said Samuel Legg, subject No. 20, in an interview 60 years later. "We wanted to do the same." Out of the hundreds who volunteered, 36 were deemed mentally and physically healthy enough to participate. They had basic daily work assignments, were required to walk 22 miles a week, and keep a diary. But aside from mealtime, there were no restrictions placed on their social lives... At the end of the control phase, their calories were cut by approximately 50% and the six-month semi-starvation period began.

Food became the sole source of fascination and motivation. Many men began obsessively collecting recipes ("Stayed up until 5 a.m. last night studying cookbooks," wrote one). They found themselves distracted by constant daydreams of food. Some sublimated their cravings by purchasing or stealing food; one man began stealing cups from coffee shops. They guzzled water, seeking fullness. Some took up smoking to stave off hunger and others chewed up to 30 packs of gum a day until the laboratory banned it...

[After the experiment ended,] To everyone's relief, the subjects' moods and social behavior stabilized three months later. But when it came to eating, the men agreed they were not "back to normal." Many ate "more or less continuously" and a subgroup of the subjects continued bingeing to the point of sickness, even eight months later."

http://www.refinery29.com/minnesota-starvation-experiment

FB: ""Hunger differs radically from the delightful nuances of appetite," wrote the researchers inMen and Hunger. Semi-starvation had temporarily changed these men in many ways, but what seemed to linger long after was this inability to distinguish between the constant gnawing of hunger and normal appetite. Appetite is a question to be answered with a meal. Hunger is a need, an enduring hollowness that begs for satisfaction by any means necessary."

Thursday, April 13, 2017

"Survival of the Friendliest"



"When selection is relaxed, the fitness landscape itself changes, such that thin precipices broaden out to plateaus. Once a selective constraint is lifted off a trait, the population is able to explore a wider array of possibilities in related traits, and evolution may improvise more freely... 

In the researchers’ model, huddling for warmth served to relax selection on the animal’s insulation, allowing genes controlling their metabolism to vary more without compromising their ability to maintain an optimal temperature... The authors argue that by huddling, mice effectively form a “super organism”—sharing heat to behaviorally approximate the benefits inherent to larger organisms without having to evolve a larger body, allowing their metabolism more freedom to change...

By analyzing the historical migrations of birds, the researchers discovered that species that had already evolved cooperative behaviors in a benign environment were twice as likely to have moved into a harsh one than non-cooperative breeders. The researchers speculate that cooperation buffers against unpredictable breeding seasons, allowing already social populations to be more successful in invading new niches... 

If an organism can modify its niche—by altering itself or its relationships with other species—it has the chance to build the world in which its future progeny will evolve, reshaping it to better ensure their survival... There are doubtless many reasons bacteria resist lab life, but chief among them is the fact that, in the wild, bacteria are not self-sufficient: They’ve co-evolved to depend on each other. It may seem precarious, from the vantage point of natural selection, for species to require each other to survive, but the overwhelming ubiquity of interdependence suggest it must have serious advantages...

Humans have created a unique global niche where we are largely shielded from selective forces: Agriculture staves off starvation, medicine protects us from disease, cultural norms promote group harmony. Our evolution has been profoundly influenced by our selection-buffering behaviors."



There is an overwhelming number of reasons why this interpretation is important and should be widely integrated into science curriculums. 

From just a scientific perspective, thinking about genetics/evolution at the community level reveals the answers to a slew of questions - for example, fascinating suggestions about the way autism provides advantages to the group that autistic individuals belong to, or the observation that a diversity in cognitive skills and behavioral habits and food preferences means that a community will always have someone around to do the task no one else wants to do and will be able to take advantage of all their food options without exhausting their supplies (imagine if 1000 people loved corn and hated beans). These explain why we have so much behavioral variation even though some of these variations might be less adaptive for an individual alone in the wilderness.

And then from a social perspective, the "survival of the fittest" philosophy has been the underpinning of some of the most toxic aspects of Western culture. It was used to catalyze widespread support for theories of white/male supremacy and later eugenics, wrapping them up with faux-scientific evidence. It created a society that perceives humans as individual units who must each prove their worth to be allowed to survive, and who are meant to care primarily about themselves and secondarily about their progeny and that is it. The individual must strive for total self-reliance and fear dependence on others. Individuals who fail to meet our society's criteria for such self-reliance are lesser beings, and deserve to be used by the self-reliant individuals who deign to provide support.

Human evolutionary study tells us that our species evolved because of our need for social groups and community. We were able to achieve higher survival rates because we worked together, and that gave our genomes the opportunity to change in new ways. There is clear positive selection for neural genes related to communication and decreased aggression (some scientists describe it as a process of humans "taming themselves"). We could tolerate genetic changes that increased the time it took for us to mature to adults, because it gave our brains more time to develop and that made our communities stronger and more capable of protecting defenseless children. And these communities also meant that individual humans could take risks and try out strange new foods and spend time developing better ways to hunt and better technologies for survival like clothes and that smaller groups could splinter off and explore the world beyond the environments that we had particularly adapted to. 


It's also clear that human beings actually need each other if we want to stay healthy. Loneliness, a product of our unnatural obsession with self-reliance, is worse for your health than smoking. The past decade has seen more and more research on this topic and some of the findings are incredible and beautiful - like the discovery of touch neurons in the skin that respond specifically to social touch and project not to the sensory cortex of the brain but the emotion-regulation centers. 

FB: "Evolutionary progress can be propelled both by the competitive struggle to adapt to an environment, and by the relaxation of selective forces. When natural selection on an organism is relaxed, the creative powers of mutation can be unshackled and evolution accelerated. The relief of an easier life can inspire new biological forms just as powerfully as the threat of death."

"Why Can't Washingtonians Resist Asking Each Other What They Do For A Living?"

"she wrote about what she calls the "second question": the thing you ask after asking someone how they’re doing.

"If you call someone in St. Louis and say what’s your second question, they’ll say, ‘Where did you go to high school?’ If you call somebody in Greenville, South Carolina, they’ll say, ‘Where do you go to church?’ And if you call somebody in New Orleans, they’ll say, ‘Who’s your momma?’ The one in Washington is definitely, ‘Where do you work?’" she tells me, adding that the question is often asked in New York as well.

Fallows says these "second questions" are a way for people to put strangers into context, to make quick sense of them and to better understand how they might fit into their world. The questions often reflect the culture or characteristics of the place where they are being asked, she says...

But Fallows says the question isn’t always really about your job. In fact, she says there's a subtle pretext to the question that speaks to the culture of Washington, the political town.

"I think it’s a power question. When you’re just getting to meet someone the ‘Where do you work?’ and saying ‘Well, I work for the finance committee’ or ‘I work for the no-name committee’ gives you a lot of the answer," she says.

http://m.wamu.org/#/news/16/01/13/why_cant_washingtonians_resist_asking_each_other_what_they_do_for_a_living


Absolutely - there's a piece of it that is "can I make a connection here?"

Also, it's so weird for me to read this and miss DC. It probably speaks to my darker nature...

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

"NOT SHAVING ISN’T ALWAYS A CHOICE FOR WOMEN OF COLOUR"

"I know women of colour that wear long sleeves to avoid the embarrassment of hairy arms. I know women of colour that can’t look at the mirror at themselves because the sight of hair on their body is a reminder of all the years they have been bullied for existing. And I know so many women of colour that are expected to get over their shame and trauma to get rid of the razor the minute white feminism decided to reclaim the hair.

In “rad” spaces, hairless pits are the anomaly, and sometimes it seems like there’s an assumption that women of colour who do remove their body hair are somehow less aware of oppression. “I developed a habit of doing my eyebrows before y’all went through puberty because I was bullied,” a friend told me, “and now it’s a pleasant thing I like to do.”

These double standards are not just about women. Men in communities of colour are afraid of growing out their beard for religious and cultural purposes lest they be branded a terrorist, lest they become subjected to more racial violence and reinforce harmful stereotypes about their communities. But man buns and beards are all the rage for the modern, edgy, white man.

If you are a white woman that doesn’t shave, I would like to remind you that your ability to be hairy is surely a result of you challenging the patriarchy, but it is also a privilege of your white skin."

http://www.gal-dem.com/shavingforwoc/

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

"An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage"

"Before the T.M.S., I had fantasized that the emotional cues I was missing in my autism would bring me closer to people. The reality was very different. The signals I now picked up about what my fellow humans were feeling overwhelmed me. They seemed scared, alarmed, worried and even greedy. The beauty I envisioned was nowhere to be found...

After some initial tumult, the changes in me proved transformational at work. My ability to engage casual friends and strangers was enhanced. But with family and close friends, the results were more mixed. I found myself unsettled by absorbing the emotions of people I was close to, something that had never happened before. Strong emotional reactions welled up in me, and I showed feelings I had never expressed."

Monday, April 10, 2017

"Mass. High Court Says Black Men May Have Legitimate Reason To Flee Police"

"the finding that black males in Boston are disproportionately and repeatedly targeted for FIO [Field Interrogation and Observation] encounters suggests a reason for flight totally unrelated to consciousness of guilt. Such an individual, when approached by the police, might just as easily be motivated by the desire to avoid the recurring indignity of being racially profiled as by the desire to hide criminal activity."

http://www.wbur.org/news/2016/09/20/mass-high-court-black-men-may-have-legitimate-reason-to-flee-police

This week (September of 2015). I've consciously settled a bubble around myself, and I haven't read anything about the men who were killed, I just can't, but I read this.

And the quote above stopped me because it rings so true, and because right now I am fleeing from the news of police activity, and because there are no spaces to go to to recover from that feeling of your humanity being casually forgotten.

"Literacy Narrative: I Would Appeal to the Canon"

"There was no literary precedent to assist me. Elizabeth Bennet never had to correct Lady Catherine on a matter as fraught as the Opium Wars. Shakespeare’s Othello didn’t offer any practical advice about racial Othering. The canon I studied could not help me, and my rights to them had already been questioned for three years...

It sometimes feels like impossible cheek to look at the blank spots where ‘Here be lions’ or ‘Here be dragons’ are usually inscribed as a shorthand for ignorance, and to try and fill them in myself. ‘I would much rather appeal to the canon than improvise my own,’ I think, when I’m at a loss for a reaction to new microaggressions to calls in Cantonese I cannot answer, to expectations of gratitude for the Opium Wars; I would rather return to books that have yet to give me the answers I need. I entertain an image of myself stowing away a quill pen and leaving the map half-formed...

Sometimes I would be obscurely troubled as I re-read passages of Les Misérables, wondering if in a comma in the middle of a phrase I might insert myself into the narrative, if anything in my experiences echoed what was on the page. Was there a place for me, in these works I was taught were universal? I put great effort into imagining myself in the streets of nineteenth century Paris, or in sprawled on a divan in Victorian England, drawling out some witticism."

http://entropymag.org/literacy-narrative-i-would-appeal-to-the-canon/

Sunday, April 9, 2017

"Trump Supporters Aren’t Stupid"

"We are depriving the white working classes of their means to give. As we export manufacturing jobs internationally and as we streamline labor with technology, we start moving people to the sidelines. It’s not just that they have less money, it’s that their identity as providers is being threatened. This is why they are often so against welfare. Even if it would fix their financial situation, it would not fix their identity problems. It would hurt their dignity. While the working class is undoubtedly worried about the economy, we already know many will not vote in their economic best interests. They vote for the candidate who promises a return to dignity, and it’s not because they’re dumb. It’s because they care about their dignity more than they care about their finances."
“Trump Supporters Aren’t Stupid” https://medium.com/@emmalindsay/trump-supporters-aren-t-stupid-3d38f70f2a2f

Related: Other Side Isn't Dumb

FB: "The main difference between a white racist and a white “race ally” is usually social group."

"‘White flight’ began a lot earlier than we think"

""When white homeowners think about how their choices shape the racial composition of neighborhoods, they say 'I would never support discrimination in mortgage lending, I'd never support anything like redlining or restrictive covenants, I would never participate in something like that,'" Shertzer says. "But the choices of white homeowners to move to neighborhoods that are almost exclusively white — this is a quantitatively important mechanism that keeps cities segregated."

The choices whites make today, though, are now also influenced by a century of segregation and the ways it has conflated race with poverty, crime and school quality. That makes this challenge a lot harder to resolve than if we had tried a century ago."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/17/white-flight-began-a-lot-earlier-than-we-think/

Saturday, April 8, 2017

"Against the Odds, A 40-Year Old West African Village in South Carolina Has Thrived"

"At its founding in 1970, Oyotunji African Village never promised its residents a perfect way of life. But it did offer them an idea equally radical: a world without Europe, a space outside white supremacy. A tiny village in South Carolina whose population has waxed and waned from as many as 200 to as few as 25 residents, it has since transformed from a bustling separatist community to a smaller and more-focused religious one...

The village is residential compounds, a café and marketplace, public spaces, and religious ones. There are small garden plots, ancestral altars, above-ground tombs, and at least eight temples dedicated to separate orishas—deities in the Yoruban pantheon that can be described as aspects of a single god, a conceptual framework not unfamiliar to Hinduism or Catholicism. The physical reality of this place is explicitly African. Its commanding entryway looks Hausa. Its flag takes its design partly from Ethiopia (the colors red, gold, green) and partly from Egypt (the ankh). Its afin, or palace, is modeled after Ile Ife’s, in Nigeria. The village’s name, referencing the Yoruban empire that dominated southwestern Nigeria between the 15th and the 19th centuries, means “Oyo rises again.”...

This is the crux of McCray’s argument. While Oyotunji is an important part of America’s black nationalist history, the village also tells a story about who and what is American. It is difficult, if not impossible, to pry apart the systems of power governing the United States from the idea of America. America is slavery, it isgenocide, it is internment and deportation and torture. McCray’s friend was punished for not complying with American, which is to say Eurocentric, standards, while remaining prototypically American. Not only does she have the conventional rights of a natural born citizen, but she also practices a cultural tradition that has been on these shores since about 1619, far longer than many American’s European ancestors. The Yoruban religion in America is older than the nation that now governs it. It is America. At least a part of it."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/against-the-odds-a-40year-old-west-african-village-in-south-carolina-has-thrived