"When My Oldest Friend Did Something Unforgivable"

TW: Rape

"I decided to avoid, to the best of my ability, having any sort of visceral reaction to this place he’d put me in. In lieu of anger, or sadness, or disgust, I opted for some bare-bones reasoning. I knew that I couldn’t ever see him again (not that I wanted to). I knew if I told anyone what had happened exactly what they would call it, though I was hesitant then to claim the word. I still am, even with plenty of gender and women’s studies classes under my belt. The chasm that separates what I know — as a feminist, as a woman — from the sticky, tangled mess of what I feel, and what I fear to feel, has gotten smaller and more manageable as the years have passed; but I still haven’t been able to leap over that gap entirely. At the time, I used the simplest facts at my disposal to wrap myself up in a warm, safe blanket of unfeeling and carry myself, slow and steady, all the way from point A to point B.

I didn’t want this, I told him.

He flipped. I can’t believe you’re turning this special thing, one of the most important nights of my life, into something ugly.

As he began, over text, to spiral out of control, I sunk deeper into a vaguely apathetic sort of peace. This time I could say no — I could deny him — and it would stick.

But I’d been denying him successfully for years before, really, without my fully knowing it. He’d made advances toward me since I was fresh out of middle school, that first season at the snack bar, when I was scared and young and lonely. He had continued to flirt with me summer after summer, in what I’d thought was a playful, innocent way — he would never take it too far, I thought. I trusted him not to. Here’s what I hadn’t realized, all those years: Ever since I first met him, I’d had a string of boyfriends. I belonged to other men, and that made me untouchable. But within weeks of falling in love with a girl for the first time, I started carrying myself through the world a different way. And Thomas, perhaps, had sensed it. He’d sensed that now, more than ever before, I would never, ever want him."

https://www.buzzfeed.com/shannonkeating/when-my-oldest-friend-did-something-unforgivable?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%20410&utm_content=Longform%20410+CID_c2123820a237c16d915c0f9265d35604&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.mxDyB0K1l#.grm5gKEXO

Pulling out because it's one of those things so many women do, deciding to ignore red flags because our society calls them "innocent" and tells us we are flawed for feeling uncomfortable.

It's just this scary thing to know that masculinity is so toxic it could creep violently into seemingly pleasant, casual - or even caring - relationships.

"Airports, Designed for Everyone but the Passenger"

"Roughly 40 years later, during a layover in Madrid’s airport, I started to think about Mr. Eno and how, by today’s standards, his complaint about airports and bad music almost seems quaint.

Airports have been drastically transformed since the 1970s, when you could smoke anywhere, stroll leisurely through security and hug your loved one at the gate before boarding the plane...

Passing through security these days takes forever and sometimes borders on harassment. The lighting is brighter than a World Series night game. Almost all the chairs have armrests, preventing you from splaying out. And the ambient noise — the endless gate changes, the last calls for boarding, the CNN late-breaking news — makes it almost impossible to relax...

Architects may need to spend more of their creative energies on the traveler’s experience than on creating an interactive postcard."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/travel/airport-architecture.html?contentCollection=weekendreads&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region

"No More Books by Men"

"There is a trick of Pavlovian conditioning that I’ve been using lately on my best girlfriend. She is a person who sends a lot of text messages and a person who does a lot of Crossfit, so that particular Venn diagram means that she is she a person who sends a lot of text messages about Crossfit. As a person disinterested in both Crossfit and long text conversations, this arrangement works poorly for me. So, when she sends a non-Crossfit related text, I make my best effort to respond. A message about the Leon Bridges concert? Here is your treat in the form of a smiley emoticon. A message about deadlifts? Crickets. This strategy has not changed the volume of texts she sends, nor the number to which I reply—about thirty percent—but it has slightly changed the volume of Crossfit-related to non-Crossfit-related texts.

What if male-authored pirate books are the Crossfit texts of the publishing world? And what if I, in my capacity as a book reviewer, have the power to shift the ratio of rubbish pirate books by dudes to meaningful literature by women? The publishing houses will keep putting out books about buccaneers and they’ll keep appearing on my monthly review list but what if I don’t expend any mental energy or spill a drop of ink about them? This wouldn’t change the number of books by women that are published every year, nor the total number of books that Publisher’s Weekly reviews—some eight thousand per year, mostly for librarians, the media, and booksellers—but if someone is reserving all of their mental energy and all of their ink for female-authored books, then perhaps these books will be covered sooner, the gems among them celebrated louder, and the publishing industry will slowly adjust the definition of the type of book that is deemed worthy of attention. It seems like a better strategy than doing nothing, so moving forward, I’m only going to review books written by women."

http://www.theawl.com/2016/02/no-more-books-by-men

"Why Slaves’ Graves Matter"

"Memorialization keeps us connected to what is most significant about those who are no longer with us. So what does it mean that the grave sites of countless enslaved Americans have not been afforded this recognition?

Since the emancipation of enslaved Americans, their public memory has become abstract. Cemeteries, graveyards and memorials are visual reminders for us. They exist because we desire to memorialize those buried there. By gracing the sacred spaces of enslaved Americans with that same intention, we can give humanity and dignity to their memory...

The burial grounds are often found incidentally by developers under parks and office buildings, and for many of the sites, oral history is their only source of documentation. (This was the case for my family as well. Grandpa Ben’s daughter, my great-aunt, directed me to his burial site before she died in 2014, at the age of 101.)

Equally distressing are the struggles to save burial grounds that are in danger of being lost. For example, a community in Shelby County, Ala., is trying to rescue a cemetery of enslaved Americans and their descendants from a quarry company that acquired the land it is on. In Queens, N.Y., a church congregation is seeking to reinter the remains of a 19th-century woman who was unearthed in 2011 by a developer digging in what turned out to be a burial ground founded by enslaved Americans.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/opinion/sunday/why-slaves-graves-matter.html?referer=

Note the phrase "enslaved Americans"; makes me think so many thoughts.

I wonder, if I went up to someone and asked them to tell me about a time when Americans were enslaved, would the centuries of chattel slavery come to mind, or would they first reach for some memory of cults or kidnapping and "white slavery" or, like, wage slavery or something...

FB: "Our country should explore ways to preserve the public memory of enslaved Americans. Their overlooked lives are an inextricable part of the historical narrative of our country — and not simply because they were the “beneficiaries” of the 13th Amendment. We should remember enslaved Americans for the same reason we remember anyone; because they were fathers, mothers, siblings and grandparents"

"Drugs You Don't Need For Disorders You Don't Have"

"when Schwartz saw the Belsomra ad, she was struck by how smoothly it sidestepped the drug’s limitations. A soothing voiceover hypes the science, giving a sophisticated explanation of how Belsomra targets a neurotransmitter called orexin to turn down the brain’s “wake messages.” “Only Belsomra works this way,” the voice continues. The ad ends with the young woman curling up with the “sleep” animal and falling into a peaceful slumber. “You have no idea watching that ad that we’re talking about falling asleep 6 minutes faster and staying that way an extra 16 minutes—and that’s at higher doses,” Schwartz said. “We really don't have a great idea of how well it works at the lower dose FDA actually recommends for people starting the medication.”...

One study, from the Journal of General Internal Medicine, found that 57 percent of claims in drug ads were potentially misleading and another 10 percent were outright false...  Concerns about direct advertisements of pharmaceutical products have become so acute that last November the American Medical Association called for an outright ban, saying that the practice was “fueling escalating drug prices.” Spending on prescription drugs already accounts for about one in every six dollars that go into medical care...

Companies like Merck point out that their ads always instruct patients to consult a physician. And it’s true that doctors aren’t supposed to prescribe medication unless they think it makes sense clinically. But as multiple studies have shown, doctors often give patients the particular brand-name drugs they ask for, even when a cheaper generic version is available...

Between 2003 and 2011, the success rate for clinical trials fell, the time from trial to approval rose, and the ratio of approved drugs to trial drugs declined. These are all signs that the drug pipeline is drying up. Innovation could pick up again, but in the meantime, drug companies have been spending much of their time pushing drugs of questionable clinical advantage, or persuading viewers to seek medication for “a disease that may be hard to distinguish from normal behavior in most cases,” according to Aaron Kesselheim, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School who focuses on the drug industry. In his field, the tactic is known as “disease mongering.” And to critics of consumer drug advertising, Belsomra is a perfect example of these practices at work."

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/sleep-advertising/

"Happiness Hack: This One Ritual Made Me Much Happier"

"If the food of friendship is time together, how do we make the time to ensure we’re all fed? My friends and I have recently come across a way to keep each other close. It fits into our lifestyles despite busy schedules and a surfeit of children. We call it the “kibbutz.”

In Hebrew, the word means “gathering,” and for our gathering, four couples meet every two weeks to talk about one question — sort of like an interactive TED Talk over a picnic lunch. The question might range from a deep inquiry, like “What’s one thing your parents taught you that you want to pass on to your children?” to a lighter, more practical question, like “How do you disconnect from your iPhone on weekends?”

Having a topic helps in two ways. For one, it gets us past the small talk of sports and weather, and helps us open up about stuff that actually matters. Second, it prevents the gender split that happens when couples convene in groups — men in one corner, women in another. The question of the day gets us all talking together."

http://www.nirandfar.com/2016/02/happiness-hack-one-ritual-made-much-happier.html

Quite lovely.

"Investigating the Minds of Mass Killers"

"In fact, the sort of young, troubled males who seem to psychiatrists most likely to open fire in a school — identified because they have made credible threats — often don’t fit any diagnosis, experts say. They might have elements of paranoia, deep resentment or narcissism that are noticeable but don’t add up to a specific disorder, according to strict criteria. And there’s no good evidence that mental health treatment would have made a meaningful difference...

“The really scary ones, you have a gut feeling right away when you talk to them,” said Dr. Deborah Weisbrot, the director of the outpatient clinic of child and adolescent psychiatry at Stony Brook University. She has interviewed about 200 young people, mostly teenage boys, who have made threats. “What they have in common is a kind of magical thinking, odd beliefs like they can read other people’s minds or see the future, or things that happen in their dreams come true.”"

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/04/health/investigating-the-minds-of-mass-killers.html?referer=http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/04/02/science/misconceptions-week.html?em_pos=large&emc=edit_sc_20160405&nl=science-times&nlid=68799238&ref=headline&te=1&_r=0

"How can we save our beloved mom-and-pop shops from gentrification?"

"Much of suburban and rural America long ago said farewell to the corner store or local watering hole. People gather instead to buy their dry goods at Wal-mart and meet for drinks at Applebee’s. But a few of the nation’s more densely populated cities have continued to provide a healthy environment for small independent retail stores, restaurants, cafés and bars, establishments that function as essential and beloved links in the community.

These establishments aren’t just window dressing. They’re a big part of the reason that living in the city feels different and exciting. They’re the amenities that make neighborhoods attractive and valuable, touted by real-estate agents looking to close the condo sale or make the high-end apartment rental. And they’re in danger...

In San Francisco, a city traditionally open to government intervention and regulation, voters just passed Proposition J, a measure to assist some endangered longtime business owners with cash grants. Prop J joins existing restrictions on chain stores in some of the city’s neighborhood shopping districts.

Elsewhere, a timetable for action remains elusive. In New York, a proposal that would require landlords to offer 10-year leases and submit to binding arbitration when negotiating rents has been stuck in committee for 30 years...

“I think it’s really ripping the heart and soul out of our city,” says Kevin Hunsanger, a co-owner of the beloved Green Apple Books in San Francisco. “Especially when it comes to bars, because we don’t have places to gather and meet and converse anymore. Coffee shops are now becoming office spaces. Nobody communicates anymore. Bookstores are (among the) few (places) where you can really go and spend time. There are fewer and fewer places where people can just get together and talk with each other.”"

http://interactive.nydailynews.com/2016/04/save-mom-pop-shops-gentrification/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

FB: "In some parts of the world, cities see enough value in certain types of businesses that they actively protect or even subsidize them. Since 2004, Paris has had the Vital’Quartier program, in which the city’s planning department buys buildings in historic neighborhoods and leases space at reasonable rents to cafés, bookstores and the like. In Buenos Aires, the Bares Notables program certifies drinking establishments deemed of cultural importance. And in London, the Assets of Community Value program allows a neighborhood’s residents to nominate places like pubs in recognition of their “social interest.” Since 2013, designated businesses qualify for tax breaks and grants, and there is also a “community right to bid” that allows neighbors to organize and propose a cooperative plan for businesses if the properties go up for sale."

"All the Pretty Mermaids: Racist Narratives in Entertainment for Children"

"As a little girl, I was proud of my natural hair. It was fashioned into cornrows, or formed into dreadlocks, and for years I felt like my hair was beautiful. It all changed when I became a regular viewer of children’s television, watching Walt Disney movies like they were going out of style, and unknowingly damaging my perception of myself as a pre-adolescent. As a child, I immediately noticed that the princesses and heroines didn’t look like me, did not have dreadlocks or brown skin. Heck, they didn’t look like many of the kids I knew (I live in Hawaii). Suddenly, I didn’t feel so pretty and I quickly realized that I could never look like any of the princesses, fairies, mermaids, or nymphs that I had come to love. I suddenly realized that they were considered beautiful and I was not...

Even with my mother telling me how beautiful I was with my brown skin, thick hair, and full mouth, I did not believe her. It didn’t matter that God had made us varied and unique. All the princesses were white."

http://blackgirlnerds.com/pretty-mermaids-racist-narratives-entertainment-children/

There is so much here that is important and true. Growing up in the 90s, I also was totally immersed in disney and formed my idea of beauty based on those princesses. I distinctly remember the understanding that I had all through elementary school, that beauty was long-straight-golden-hair and blue-eyes-with-thick-lashes and clear-fair-white-skin and thin, long bodies.

In the way that children learn the world first as a series of rules, I knew that I would never be among the beautiful, just like fish don't walk; maybe I could be pretty (i.e. acceptable for a background character), if I was "good" and someone taught me the rules and I tried to look like, say, Tia Mowry on Sister, Sister (by the way, it took me until high school to realize that the reason I found Tia to be prettier that Tamera was Tia's straightened hair). This didn't bother me at all at the time; I didn't care about boys noticing me yet, and I was also absorbing the idea that intelligence and attractiveness were mutually exclusive.

In middle school at some point I realized that my understanding of my inherent ugliness was based on media and westernized ideas of beauty, but it was too late: I had already built this understanding of myself, I already had deep assumptions that boys would never be attracted to me, I was already deeply anxious about the idea of trying and failing to look nice. Like Lupita N'yongo said "**thing about mediocrity**" It wasn't until high school that I started to discover that I could sometimes like what I saw in the mirror, and that was okay.

Children's media really, really matters. I don't know that I will ever have a really healthy, measured relationship with my appearance or attractiveness (especially because I have all of the rest of the 90s/2000s crap about women's bodies thrown in the mix too). If I ever have children, it will be important for me to give them media that centers happy, growing, confident black children - and it will be important for me to find a place where their peers will also be familiar with those characters so that they are a real cultural element in their lives.

Related: Raising anti-racist children; Lupita speech

"My Mother’s Garden"

"We practiced this objectivity in our current events class. It was never explicitly tied to identity, but it was implied. I learned that the best person to talk about wealth and class was an upper-middle class person because she supposedly could look at it dispassionately. The best person to talk about race was a white person, for the same reasons. The best person to talk about gender was a boy...

I would sit in class and listen to the sons and daughters of doctors and lawyers and policy makers — people who had never needed and would most likely never need welfare — earnestly advocate the dismantling of the welfare state, and I would shake and shake and shake with something I couldn’t name.

I told myself it did not matter that my classmates and teachers described a reality that was not mine, was never mine, was so far removed from mine as to be a fiction. Their fiction was the truth because they didn’t live in my reality. That’s what made them objective.

I wanted to be objective, too...

When I came home from school in the afternoons, I remembered what was said about us, about the projects, about our poverty. My mother asked me if I wanted a plot for my pansies in her garden and I said no. I wasn’t brave, like her and those kids. I was ashamed to claim any part of this, to make it my own, to love it so hard as to seed it with flowers and patiently hope for them to bloom."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/27/opinion/sunday/my-mothers-garden.html

This essay is beautiful

"Your Brain’s Music Circuit Has Been Discovered"

"In 2015, he and a post-doctoral colleague, Sam Norman-Haignere, and Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at MIT, made news by locating a neural pathway activated by music and music alone. McDermott and his colleagues played a total of 165 commonly heard natural sounds to ten subjects willing to be rolled into an fMRI machine to listen to the piped-in sounds. The sounds included a man speaking, a songbird, a car horn, a flushing toilet, and a dog barking. None sparked the same population of neurons as music.

Their discovery that certain neurons have “music selectivity” stirs questions about the role of music in human life. Why do our brains contain music-selective neurons? Could some evolutionary purpose have led to neurons devoted to music? McDermott says the study can’t answer such questions. But he is excited by the fact that it shows music has a unique biological effect. “We presume those neurons are doing something in relation to the analysis of music that allows you to extract structure, following melodies or rhythms, or maybe extract emotion,” he says...

“To the extent that music functions for communication, it’s quite different from language in that it doesn’t denote specific, concrete things in the world, like something you would say,” he says. “But it obviously expresses something, typically something emotional.”"

http://nautil.us/blog/your-brains-music-circuit-has-been-discovered?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I would love to take a psycholinguistics seminar at some point. I think a lot about communication and how much more there is to communication than words. I think about all of these experiences in the world that don't have words, or that moment when you learn a new word and it's so incredible to finally have a way to understand and communicate an experience. But there is also the way that words are often insufficient to describe something, especially emotion. This, I guess, is art: communicating something that is greater than the sum of the words that would otherwise be used, or where words are an inefficient or impossible way to communicate something.

I would be really interested in a study of emotive sounds outside of music (like sighs and groans and screams). Like, I can make a sound that communicates exhaustion/contentment/love/amusement - and I think the best actors are the ones who go outside of the words on the scripts to use their voices and bodies to communicate those kinds of nuances. It would be interesting if those activated this music circuit.

"The Golden Generation: Why China’s super-rich send their children abroad."

"The children of wealthy Chinese are known as fuerdai, which means “rich second generation.” In a culture where poverty and thrift were long the norm, their extravagances have become notorious. Last year, the son of China’s richest man posted pictures online of his dog wearing two gold-plated Apple Watches, one on each front paw. On Web forums, citizens complain that fuerdai are “flaunting what they haven’t earned” and that “their grotesque displays are a poison to the work ethic of Chinese society.” President Xi Jinping has spoken of the need to “guide the younger generation of private-enterprise owners to think where their money comes from and live a positive life,” and the government recently held an educational retreat for seventy children of billionaires, who were given a crash course in traditional Chinese values and social responsibility...

Contempt for the nouveau riche is hardly limited to China, but the Chinese version is distinctive. Thanks to the legacy of Communism, almost all wealth is new wealth. There are no old aristocracies to emulate, no templates for how to spend...

Thom was alarmed that consumption has effectively replaced production as Vancouver’s growth industry. “The city has become a hotel,” he said. He was opposed to what he called “selling citizenships”—the practice whereby countries including Canada and the U.S. grant residency in exchange for investment. “I think any country should be against that, because you’re not buying the best people,” Thom said. “They don’t invest in their country. There’s no belonging. But it’s a worldwide trend. It’s happening in England. It’s happening in France. It’s happening in Australia. Everywhere.”...

Pam and many of her friends, having emigrated in their teens, exist between two cultures. Canadians, and the West generally, could be inscrutable. The cultural capital that their parents had hoped would be theirs was elusive. But having been away from China during years of dizzyingly rapid change made them foreigners there, too."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/chinas-rich-kids-head-west

"I Am Resisting Trump The Only Way I Know How: By Releasing Doves Into the Subway"

"By the time Rex Tillerson got confirmed, I was so burnt out from shellacking picture frames of hopeful imagery, I almost gave up. But I couldn’t. So I slowly crawled out from my comfort zone, marched into the streets, and while my neighbors were at a town hall meeting, I painted the words “no hate” in small, beautiful cursive lettering, on the side of the building. It was my most challenging and most necessary act of resistance, but I knew it could inspire generations of people throwing away trash in the dumpster beneath it to stop having hate. It felt amazing to make an impact, and I have to emphasize this again: I literally don’t know any other way to do this."

http://reductress.com/post/i-am-resisting-trump-the-only-way-i-know-how-by-releasing-doves-into-the-subway/

"Runs in the Family: New findings about schizophrenia rekindle old questions about genes and identity"

"When people think of heredity in a colloquial sense, they think about the inheritance of unique features across generations: the peculiar shape of a father’s nose or the susceptibility to an unusual illness that runs through a family. But the conundrum that heredity addresses is really much more general: What is the nature of instruction that allows an organism to build a psyche, or a nose—any nose—in the first place? The C4-gene variant that contributes to schizophrenia is the same gene that, in all likelihood, is used by the brain to prune synapses and thus enable cognition, the tethering of thoughts to realities, and adaptive learning. Push the activity of the gene beyond some point, and Bleuler’s threads of association break; a mind-demolishing illness is unleashed. Swerve too far in the other direction, and we lose our capacity for adaptive learning; the blooming, buzzing confusions of childhood—its naïve, unshorn circuits—are retained. Our unique selves must live in some balanced state between overedited and underedited brain circuits, between overpruned and underpruned synapses.

One night in 1946, Rajesh came home from college with a riddle, a mathematical puzzle. The three younger brothers went at it, passing it back and forth like an arithmetic soccer ball. They were driven by the rivalry of siblings, the fragile pride of adolescence, the terror of failure in an unforgiving city. I imagine the three of them—twenty-two, sixteen, thirteen—each splayed in a corner of the pinched room, each spinning fantastical solutions, each attacking the problem with his distinctive strategy. My father: grim, purposeful, bullheaded, methodical, but lacking inspiration. Jagu: unconventional, oblique, but unfocussed. Rajesh: thorough, inspired, disciplined, often arrogant. Night fell, and the puzzle was still not solved. But, unlike his brothers, Rajesh stayed up all night. He paced the room, scribbling solutions and alternatives. By dawn, he had cracked it. He wrote the solution on four sheets of paper and left it by the feet of one of his brothers.

There is a trope in popular culture of the “crazy genius,” a mind split between madness and brilliance, oscillating between the two states at the throw of a single switch. But Rajesh had no switch. There was no split or oscillation, no pendulum. The magic and the mania were perfectly contiguous—bordering kingdoms requiring no passports. They were part of the same whole, indivisible. It is tempting to romanticize psychotic illness, so let me emphasize that the men and women with these mental disorders experience terrifying cognitive, social, and psychological disturbances that send gashes of devastation through their lives; I know this story as intimately as anyone."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/28/the-genetics-of-schizophrenia

So many questions here that are really core to neurogenetics: Are we poking at molecules that are getting in the way of some pure sense of who we are, or are we finding the courses of our unique individual capacities of consciousness?

What is our responsibility as scientists, biomedical researchers, in approaching and interpreting that?

FB: "“Genes,” he said, frowning.

“Is there a Bengali word?” I asked.

He searched his inner lexicon. There was no word—but perhaps he could find a substitute.

“Abhed,” he offered. I had never heard him use the term. It means “indivisible” or “impenetrable,” but it is also used loosely to denote “identity.” I marvelled at the choice; it was an echo chamber of a word."

"What Money Can Buy: Darren Walker and the Ford Foundation set out to conquer inequality."

"Lack of money is a stubborn obstacle, but not as hopelessly unyielding as some of the others, and so would-be world-changers often set out to overcome it. Some try to raise money, but that can be depressing and futile. Others try to make money, but it’s hard to make enough. There is a third, more reliable way to overcome this obstacle, however, and that is to give away money that has already been made by somebody else, and has already been allocated to world-changing purposes. This is the way of the grant-makers of the Ford Foundation...

they possess a rare and heady blend of power and freedom: they are beholden to no one, neither consumers nor shareholders nor clients nor donors nor voters, and they have half a billion dollars each year to spend on whatever they like...

[The Foundation] had recently decided, in fact, that inequality was the problem of the times—more than climate change, for instance, or extremism. The foundation had been accused for years of spreading itself too thin. (The budget for 2015 was five hundred and eighteen million, but it was amazing how fast you could run through half a billion dollars with a world to fix.) So now it was going to do something dramatic: it was going to work on inequality and nothing else...

what would happen to things that could not properly be measured at all, such as oppression, or justice? What about initiatives whose success could take decades to become evident, such as social movements or the erosion of cultural norms?...

Ford thought of itself as the sort of foundation whose staff did not dictate what its grantees should do but sought out grantees with ideas and methods of their own: that was the social-justice way. But, ironically, this meant that it required far more staff than it would if it came up with its own ideas and hired people to execute them. Coming up with ideas to be executed was the sort of thing that could be done in a meeting at headquarters; but finding small, local N.G.O.s and community leaders and artists and researchers to fund in dozens of countries around the world required offices in those countries, with program staff and administrative staff and maintenance staff and gardeners and drivers, plus money for travel and hosting meetings and all the rest of it...

Humility was expensive."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can-buy-profiles-larissa-macfarquhar

A big profile of the Ford Foundation and its history, and the history and place of foundations in America, and the current director of the Foundation and his philosophy and his very human thoughts on leadership and hierarchy.

The article doesn't necessarily synthesize everything it brings up, but it's launching so many thoughts for me about what money and intentions can do, about what we can really have knowledge about, about power and trust and appearances, about being corrupted and innocent and whether there are any real distinctions where when you reach a certain point of power and privilege.

I respect this work so much, but it also makes me that that we need new models for "doing good".

"The Digital Dirt"

"scandal has been chronicled for millennia. Thirty-five hundred years ago, Mesopotamian scribes used cuneiform to record the impeachment hearings of a mayor who had been accused of corruption, kidnapping, adultery, and the theft of manure. In 1709, the first modern gossip magazine, The Tatler, started publication, in London. The medium arrived in America in the late nineteenth century, when a weekly named Town Topicsbegan publishing blind items, in a section called “Saunterings.” (In 1905, the section’s editor attempted to blackmail Emily Post’s husband after learning of his infidelity.) Tycoons and politicians were the initial focus of the gossip trade; one British photographer bribed a gardener to gain entrance to Winston Churchill’s house, where he hid, waiting for the perfect shot, until Churchill spotted him and chased him away. With the rise of Hollywood, actors became gossip’s prime quarry; the magazine Confidential courted lawsuits by printing stories with titles like “Mae West’s Open Door Policy.”...

In the early aughts, [Howard Levin, founder of TMZ] successfully pitched an idea to Telepictures, a division of Warner Bros.: a weekday newscast dedicated to celebrity court cases. His “mission,” he once said, was “not to make celebrities look bad but to make them real.” To Levin, the O. J. Simpson case offered a glaring example of how differently the law was applied to celebrities and to ordinary citizens...

Jim Paratore, the president of Telepictures, wanted to find Levin another project. Paratore had been contemplating a new Web site that could feature unused footage amassed by “Extra,” also a Telepictures production... But Levin was not interested in managing a site that functioned as “another thing to puff up Hollywood,” Bankoff recalled. Instead, Levin proposed adapting the combative spirit of “Celebrity Justice” to the pace of the Web. “ ‘Urgency’—Harvey used that word all the time,” Jeff Rowe, another former AOL executive, told me. “He wanted a site that created a sense of urgency.”

The site needed a name, and “Feed the Beast,” “Frenzie,” and “Buzz Feed” were all considered, according to Rowe’s notes. Then, one day, a Telepictures executive suggested “Thirty Mile Zone.” It was an old movie-industry phrase, dating back to the mid-twentieth century, which designated the industry’s boundaries in Los Angeles. Levin suggested an abbreviated version: TMZ."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/22/inside-harvey-levins-tmz

So this is how it started - the background is surprisingly interesting, as is the impact that the model has had. The founder used to be a lawyer, and his journey towards his current role is so, so 80s.

"The Struggle to Save Teen 'Love Huts' in Cambodia"

"There were consequences to the opinions of outsiders. History and memory have been revised, and meanwhile, the maiden huts have gone from Ratanakkiri. No one builds them anymore in Cambodia, says Ly Sam Oeun. The few that remain are in the farthest villages, tenanted by shy 19- and 20-year-olds soon to be wed.

Some say that the reason for the disappearance is practical. Khmer influence has changed village houses. "The fathers of the girls have big houses now," says Yan Vuy. "There's enough room in these houses [now] for the girls to have privacy." But most people in Ratanakkiri give a different reason. In Krolah, Cha Bai and the other elders can remember the years when the maiden huts were lost. They have trouble speaking about it. "The Khmer who've lived here a long time—twenty, thirty years, they understand us," says Ly Sam Oeun from the Kreung village of Krolah. "They asked about our customs when they came, too. They asked, and then they learned."

A number who came later didn't understand. "They looked down on us. They looked at us wrongly," she recalls. "They asked, 'Why are you letting your daughters sleep away from her mother?'""

In 2003, a Khmer businessman raped an indigenous girl from a village near Krolah. It was about then that most in Ratanakkiri decided to stop building the maiden huts. "We stopped. All of us, we stopped. We couldn't do it anymore," says Ly Sam Oeun"

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/the-struggle-to-save-teen-love-huts-in-cambodia

"You can't ignore racism and raise anti-racist children. You have to tackle it head-on"

"I understand the fierce love that we feel for our children, but if we truly love them and want them to grow, we have to tell them the truth about their actions and how those actions shape who they are. In this case, the truth is that these young men – even if they were drunk, even if they were raised the “right way”, and even though they may feel shame now – are racist. The real next step for them needs not to be arguing that point, but figuring out how they can mitigate the very real harm they caused.

White people have the privilege of pretending that racism doesn’t exist or is a relic of the past. It would’ve been easy enough to say to myself that the book my daughter brought home from the library was published in 1937 and that times have changed, kept turning the pages and returned it like normal. But despite many people pointing out the book’s racism – its Amazon reviews are full of warnings – it is still being widely sold and, obviously, housed in children’s libraries. And, presumably, other parents are reading it to their children as though the illustrations and depictions are normal or acceptable."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/12/raise-anti-racist-children-tackle-racism

It's weird, I remember being really into Babar when I was little...

"THE LUXURY OF TEARS"

"the very idea of the emotions is a surprisingly young one. The concept arrived from France in the early 19th century as a way of thinking about the body as a thing of reflexes and twitches, tears and shivers and trembles, that supplanted an older, more theological way of thinking,” says Tiffany Watt Smith, once a director at the Royal Court Theatre, now a researcher at the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London. Before the discourse of the emotions took hold, she argues, people spoke of other phenomena – “passions”, “moral sentiments”, “accidents of the soul” – that were not always located within the human body. Ill winds blew no good upon the ancient Greeks, carrying flurries of unhappiness through the atmosphere. Fourth-century Christian hermits were plagued by acedia, a form of religious despair spread by demons that patrolled the desert between 11am and 4pm. Non-human organisms could also be afflicted by passions: in the Renaissance, palm trees became lovesick and horticulturists brokered arboreal marriages by entwining the leaves of proximate specimens...

Perhaps the most revealing entries are those on emotions that remain felt, but which have been substantially reconstructed. In the early 19th century, for instance, nostalgia was considered a terminal condition. Men in their 20s were thought particularly susceptible. During the American civil war, doctors scribbled the word on dozens of death certificates...

His last publication, “Weeping Britannia”, a critical history of British emotional restraint, was one of the most lauded history books of 2015. Its thesis is excitingly revisionist. It takes that most familiar of emotional concepts – the British stiff upper lip – and reveals that it was a historical blip. The phrase, it seems, was coined in America, and only became fully associated with Britain during the first half of the 20th century, as an increasingly militarised and imperial national culture absorbed the shock of global conflict. Britain before this period is, he suggests, better characterised as a wet-cheeked, passionate nation in which tears enjoyed an elevated status...

In 1890, the philosopher William James drew a distinction between the “crying fit” – a psychological event accompanied by “a certain pungent pleasure” – and the much less bearable sensation of “dry and shrunken sorrow”. Some experiences, it seems, are too bleak for tears...

The history of the emotions is a young discipline. It is at the very beginning of its investigation into the long story of our feelings. “Are we”, asks Thomas Dixon, “writing the history of something that has always been the same fundamentally in the human mind being expressed and interpreted in different ways? Or are we, as most of us who do it would think, discovering the historicity of the human mind?""

https://www.1843magazine.com/features/the-luxury-of-tears

I think there is something very useful in the title - I think that it is a privilege to express your emotions. I wonder if the physiological act of crying isn't about communication, just like things like yawning and vomitting has partially communic

FB: "Tears, the study suggested, were not evidence of primitivism, as they had been for Darwin. They were not even good indicators of distress. Rather than being the habit of the wretched of the Earth, weeping appeared to be an indicator of privilege – a membership perk enjoyed in some of the world’s most comfortable and liveable societies. “If you live in really distressing and difficult circumstances, crying is a luxury,” says Dixon. “We know when we have been bereaved, we might be so shocked or traumatised that tears don’t come. So perhaps we should see tears as a sign of moderate grief, of bearable negative emotion. If you are enduring extreme distress or extreme hardship, that is not the time for tears.”"

"How millennials should deal with baby boomers at work"

"Restraint, millennials on Twitter agree, is indispensable, even when boomers aren't showing any. Older colleagues may drop comments such as, “I have children your age!” Under no circumstance should you point out that you have parents their age. Just smile and don't stop smiling for the duration of your employment. If you are tempted to roll your eyes, carefully fix your gaze on your computer until the feeling has passed. The modern workplace functions best when employees of all ages are able to avoid making a big deal about the comments that annoy them most. Headphones help."

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0325-friedman-millennials-boomers-work-tips-20160325-story.html

^ too real. Like, those have been my actual workplace strategies.

"When it’s good to be bad"

"It is a common belief that to achieve a goal one must work at it constantly – not taking a circuitous path towards it when a straight one is available. Thus the Overeaters Anonymous organisation, the Atkins diet, the South Beach diet, and so on, ban a variety of ‘bad foods’; financial planners would probably advise clients against going to fancy restaurants while saving up to buy a house or car; a pastor would seek to dissuade his congregation from sin, no matter how minor. In order to achieve a goal, the thinking goes, one must not deviate from the straightest course; to allow for mistakes or failures is to torpedo your chances of attaining your goal.

And yet a new school of thinking is challenging these received ways and arguing that straying from the path, even engaging in hedonistic behaviour, might be the surest way to success...

In experiments conducted with Rik Pieters and Marcel Zeelenberg, and published in January 2016 in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, do Vale surveyed the way people go about achieving their goals. She concluded that it is better to make plans to fail intermittently – to splurge on occasional luxuries when saving for a house; to have a slice of chocolate cake when trying to shed a few pounds – than to end up failing anyway and getting so demoralised you give up your goal altogether.

‘It’s something that’s so obvious, but no one has ever studied these phenomena,’ do Vale told me. ‘We all plan for breaks during the day – coffee, a nap – and we know that we will feel better after these rests. But with goals we simply don’t think like this.’...

‘Slack’, which allows a person to use more of their cognitive and emotional resources, comes from having a cushier social and financial safety net, according to Sendhil Mullainathan, a professor of economics at Harvard University, and Eldar Shafir, a behavioural scientist at Princeton University. Slack is often a better indicator of potential success than grit. It’s the reason the impoverished single mother, gritty and hardworking though she might be, is likely to have a tougher time succeeding than a young man from an affluent family."

https://aeon.co/essays/the-road-to-excellence-is-paved-with-a-few-lapses-on-the-way

I really appreciate the end of this article, which asks us to reflect on why we have the goals we have, and why we make the priorities we do.

Other related myths about success and perfection - the self-reliant person

FB:
"In fact, the mindset needed to maintain persistent forward motion can be its own setback. People who are obsessive and who want the very best for themselves tend to be the grittiest; they also tend, as University of Texas psychiatrist Monica Ramirez Basco writes in her book Never Good Enough (2000), to be ‘more vulnerable to depression when stressful events occur’...

why do some people have significantly more willpower – and thus the potential for higher grit – than others? It might boil down to the types and number of decisions they must make each day, factors that are primarily influenced by one’s socioeconomic class."

"Latinx: An Intentionally Inclusive Language"

"many feminists in Latin America have dubbed Spanish an innately sexist language. Imagine a room full of women, we can refer to ourselves as nosotras las Latinas, but the MINUTE one man enters this primarily female space we become: nosotros los Latinos...

2014 I met with LGBTQIA folks in El Salvador and became particularly aware of the “X” as intentional inclusive language, as in Latinx (La-teen-ex). A Salvadorian human rights protector/activist/intersex/trans/queer feminist friend of mine Nicole Santamaria wisely told me:

“I use X because everyone shares an X chromosome, and I do not have to categorize people into genders that may or may not apply to them. So in progressive LGBTQIA circles in Latin America and the Caribbean, there has been a move toward addressing a room as: nosotrxs lxs Latinxs.”

http://www.vivala.com/womens-issues/latinx-intentionally-inclusive-language/3482

Smell and Cognitive Development -- "Sex bias in copy number variation of olfactory receptor gene family depends on ethnicity"

"the most polymorphic CNV-enriched OR cluster in the human genome, located on chr 15q11.2, is found near the Prader–Willi syndrome/Angelman syndrome bi-directionally imprinted region associated with two well-known mental retardation syndromes. As olfaction represents the primitive cognition in most mammals, arguably in competition with the development of a larger brain, the extensive retention of OR pseudogenes in females of this study, might point to a parent-of-origin indirect regulatory role for OR pseudogenes in the embryonic development of human brain."

http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fgene.2013.00032/abstract

I have a vague memory of reading about the link between cognitive evolution and olfactory (smell) receptor genes. I was putting together a presentation on the neurogenetics of smell for a continuing education day for science teachers, and I stumbled on this paper.

The paper starts from the fact that there is a lot of variation between humans in the number of copies of certain olfactory receptor genes. This means that some people might have a lot more of a certain receptor than others, and be more sensitive to certain odors or have the ability to distinguish similar odors that other people can't.

The authors basically find that this copy number variation might be associated with a gene-regulation change that causes mental retardation. They suggest that the olfactory system competes with higher cognition (thinking, attention etc...) for resources during development, so that if you have a lot of different receptor genes and

"The Enduring Mystery Of 'Jawn', Philadelphia's All-Purpose Noun"

"Linguists have long been fascinated by the peculiar mid-Atlantic mutations of words like “water” and “creek” (in Philadelphia parlance: “wooder” and “crick”) and an unusual lexicon that includes words like hoagie and jimmies (sub sandwich and sprinkles as on ice cream, respectively), but nothing has captivated them quite like “jawn.”

The word “jawn” is unlike any other English word. In fact, according to the experts that I spoke to, it’s unlike any other word in any other language. It is an all-purpose noun, a stand-in for inanimate objects, abstract concepts, events, places, individual people, and groups of people. It is a completely acceptable statement in Philadelphia to ask someone to “remember to bring that jawn to the jawn.”...

Ben Zimmer, a linguist and language columnist who’s written and talked about “jawn” before, agrees, writing in an email that “‘jawn’ evidently developed as a Philly variant of ‘joint’ in the '80s,” following the release of the popular 1981 single “That’s The Joint” by Funky Four Plus One, an early hip-hop group from the Bronx... Usually semantic bleaching works like that, little chips at the word’s original meaning. But joint/jawn, in Philly, has come to be so broad as to encompass basically anything...

White Philadelphians, notes Jones, are quick to note that they too use the word jawn, and that it’s a Philly thing and not just a black Philly thing. The data from the Philadelphia Neighborhood Corpus is a little too outdated, Jones thinks, to make a definitive statement either way, but he opined white Philadephians seemed to use it in a more limited way, not really exploring its full breadth and range...

A possibility is that the mutation happened in such an extreme way because Philadelphia is, in some ways, an extreme kind of place. A recent feature from 538 placed Philadelphia as the fourth-most racially segregated major city in the country, behind only Chicago, Atlanta, and Milwaukee. Jones says that it’s possible that Philadelphia’s segregation encouraged the changing and adoption of jawn; black Philadelphians and white Philadelphians don’t mingle nearly as much as, say, black New Yorkers and white New Yorkers, so a word created or altered in the black community can develop without outside influence."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-of-jawn-philadelphias-allpurpose-noun

Woah.

“Sexism is Hard to Explain”

"I thought of the men on Reddit who call women cunts because some ladies don’t want the door opened for them. Every time I read the men’s wounded lash-outs, I sadly laugh at how they think the thing is the thing. The door isn’t the thing. For me, the incident this morning was a bang-on metaphor for my experiences as a woman. The millions of small ways that I’ve been forced to surrender to men, who made me move or change or come to them because they felt like it. The ways that I’ve had to change my path in magnitudes great and small...

I can tell a man what it feels like when I’m walking down the street and men lean out of their vehicles to hoot at me. I can tell a man what it feels like to walk through a busy mall and feel sets of eyes fix on you and shamelessly stare at every inch of you while you pass... They think I’m trying to tell them that I don’t like doors opened for me. I won’t ever be able to explain it."

https://medium.com/@Kelcie/sexism-is-hard-to-explain-c0679a8deaae

FB: this is very short and very perfect at illustrating how impossible it is to communicate the experience of sexism.

"Story of cities #5: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace"

"Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century...

Pearce writes that these walls “extended for some 16,000 km in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They covered 6,500 sq km and were all dug by the Edo people … They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct, and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet”... Benin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting...

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.

As he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”...

Then in 1897, the city was destroyed by British soldiers – looted, blown up and burnt to the ground. My great grandparents were among the many who fled following the sacking of the city; they were members of the elite corps of the king’s doctors."

http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace

We never got to learn about this stuff in school. The Europeans weren't there at the time, so who cares, right?

I mean, in order to describe it, the author has to spend a bunch of time comparing it to European cities.

Got mistaken for a shoplifter today (by two different workers in the store), feeling very salty about the representation of black people.

"The big myth Facebook needs everyone to believe"

"observers remain deeply skeptical of Facebook’s claims that it is somehow value-neutral or globally inclusive, or that its guiding principles are solely “respect” and “safety.” There’s no doubt, said Tarleton Gillespie, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in New England, that the company advances a specific moral framework — one that is less of the world than of the United States, and less of the United States than of Silicon Valley.

If you study Facebook’s community standards, going back to the long-forgotten time when users voted on a version of them, the site has always erred on the side of radical free speech, corporate opaqueness and a certain American prudishness: Its values are those of the early Web, moderated by capitalist conservatism.

The values that Facebook articulates are not always the ones it enforces."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/01/28/the-big-myth-facebook-needs-everyone-to-believe/

And, honestly, I don't know if it's possible for Facebook-the-culture to see this. Having grown up in that area, and spent most of my life surrounded by people geographically of that culture or part of the culture because of their alignment to business/computer science/etc... I know the inflated sense of one's judgment that comes with being part of that world: "We are global, diverse, knowledgeable, focused on technology - which is social-neutral, right, how can metal and 1s and 0s have any kind of social baggage? If it mattered, we would have been required to take more humanities courses in undergrad, right, and our products are totally functional without that knowledge, so - everyone else is reacting wrong."

We've also been taught that the majority of the action of having a value is to declare that you have that value, and maybe spend a few minutes writing it down somewhere. It confuses me so much whenever a company has some problem with sexism or racism or whatever and then releases a statement like "We at XYZ are committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workspace!". And that's taken as some sort of evidence that everything is okay...

And then, if you grow up seeing that kind of stuff, you start to think that you can be good at social stuff just by declaring that you want to be good at it; that that's it, and if anyone accuses you of not being good at it, they are saying something false and to prove them wrong you just declare again.

"Until 1950, U.S. Weathermen Were Forbidden From Talking About Tornadoes"

"During that time, Roger Edwards of the National Weather Service’s Storm PredictionCenter writes, “tornadoes were, for most, dark and mysterious menaces of unfathomable power, fast-striking monsters from the sky capable of sudden and unpredictable acts of death and devastation.”

Less than confident in their own predictive powers and fearful of the responses of a panicky public, “the use of the word 'tornado' in forecasts was at times strongly discouraged and at other times forbidden” by the Weather Bureau, Edwards writes, replaced by euphemisms like “severe local storms.”"
http://www.slate.com/blogs/atlas_obscura/2016/03/15/until_1950_u_s_weathermen_were_forbidden_from_talking_about_tornados.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=March%2017%2C%202016&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

When we can't explain or predict something, we don't talk about it...

"Robin Coste Lewis: "I don't accept the idea of my history as tragic.""

"I came across the eighteenth-century etching “Voyage of the Sable Venus” maybe ten years ago. It's really horrible. It's beautiful and horrible simultaneously. It's a redux of the Botticelli Venus on the half-shell, except this “Venus” is a black woman. Like Botticelli’s Venus, she's attended by all these classical figures, but then you notice something in Triton’s or Neptune’s hand. Instead of the usual trident, he's carrying a flag of the Union Jack! So it’s a pro-slavery image. And I remember two things about first seeing this. One is, I thought this is exactly what it feels like to be an American, for anyone, but more specifically for African Americans. On the one hand you have this myth of democracy and it's all beautiful, so you're compelled by the propaganda of nation—but at the same time you're repelled, because you know the history, you know the country is blood-soaked in every way...

The more research I did, the more heinous it became, the larger it became, the more I realized that the entire Western world is saturated by black female figures, everywhere. Even if it's not in the painting, it's in the frame that someone carved to house the painting. In certain frames you'll have black female figures carved in these subservient postures, or even a beautiful mahogany chair with black female figures as the legs, or holding up a basin. And that shocked me so much that I quickly realized that the project was going to have to expand...

One of the things that is intrinsic for anyone within this period, but especially for people of color, or anyone who's been repressed, people in exile, anybody that's lost the floor in some way, whether nationally or culturally, is that we learn that absence is as much a presence in our lives as anything else—if not the greatest presence of all. So I tried very deliberately to have absence be the main character in that so-called story. And it’s very important to me that fragmentation be something that's not only present, but that I also celebrate. I don't accept the idea of my history as tragic. I refuse that in every way that I possibly can. And in order to do that, I have to embrace and celebrate situations that many people quite understandably renounce...

Why would a person need to hold a black woman’s body in their hand while they shave their face? That's not a black sadness, to me. That's a white, pathological, tragic sadness that has really nothing to do with me."

http://bombmagazine.org/article/844716/robin-coste-lewis

There are so many moments I want to pull from this interview.

Like - this is beautiful and meaningful about remembering our identities - " there's a line that says, but maybe “embodiment is so bewildering, even God grows / wracked with doubt.” That occurs in Sanskrit epic over and over and over again. The gods are constantly forgetting that they are gods. The gods are constantly making a mess and acting out. Rama is one of the classic examples. In The Ramayana, when Sita is abducted by a demon, and Rama, the god, loses his woman, he completely loses it. Mind you, this is the incarnation of Vishnu, the creator of the entire universe. But he loses his shit. And his best friend, Laksmana, takes him by the shoulder and shakes him and says, “Rama, Rama! Stop losing your shit, you're a god, dude! Come on!” This scene has always stayed with me. Even God forgets that God is God."

FB: "I love it when you're traveling in London, when you get on the train there are all of these signs that say, MIND THE GAP. I always laugh to myself because I feel like that's what I do, constantly. That's where I am. My work is in the gap, that dark place that we can't see—if we fall through—where the bottom is. I like that place; that is a narrative for me... Agnosticism, I think, means that people know something's going on, they just don't know what it is. And they believe in something, they just don't know what to call it. But my bad day is this: I believe in something and what I'm calling it is “Fuck You!” I do have a very active, rageful, loving relationship with something out there. But it's not pretty."

"The Linguistic Appeal Of 'Garbage Person,' The Internet's Favorite Insult"

"“Garbage person,” like “bloodsucker” or “Neanderthal,” is the type of descriptor that pretty much defines itself. In the interest of clarity, though, the term as used here does not refer to a sanitation worker, or a person made from actual detritus. It is, instead, someone terrible beyond belief, but in an everyday sort of way.

According to recent headlines, someone who ends their texts with a period may be a garbage person. Same with someone who refuses to chase down runaway napkinswhen they blow off their table, or chooses to listen to songs from the Entouragemovie trailer...

McCulloch doesn’t remember the first time she came across the idiom, but she does have a theory about its proliferation. “I think what’s different about this one is that it’s garbage being used as a prenominal modifier,” she says. When used in the traditionally insulting way, she points out, “garbage” is a plain old noun. Utter “this person is garbage,” and you’re setting up a direct comparison between those two things, in order to illustrate said person’s badness.

When used in this new way, though, garbage comes before the noun, a place usually reserved for descriptors or adjectives. There are only a few cases where nouns double as prenominal modifiers–"shit" is an example of this, says McCulloch. “Swear words are very versatile,” she says. “You can do all sorts of things with them.” Putting “garbage” or other nouns in this privileged syntactic position gives them some of the oomph of a swear"

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-linguistic-appeal-of-garbage-person-the-internets-favorite-insult

"The Shopping Mall’s Socialist Pre-History"

"Unable to compete with online shopping, declining consumer affluence, rising oil prices, and a volatile property market, shopping malls are dropping like flies. The CEO of a major shopping mall building company recently warned that “within ten to fifteen years” the shopping mall “will be a historical anachronism — a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs."...

The inventor of the American suburban shopping mall,Victor Gruen, was a Viennese architect and socialist forced to flee to the United States after the occupation of Austria in 1938. Gruen saw the mall as having the potential to re-centralize suburban sprawl. His plans were for large state-owned indoor agoras that would literally contain the market forces that were running rampant outside their walls. It was a modernist vision for the refounding of American public life. Many of the malls built by Gruen and his company in the 1950s retained elements of this promise, with his Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn., planned around an enormous common meeting place modeled on a European piazza...

Meanwhile, the aggressive, unquestioned privatization of such spaces has led to the expulsion of the homeless and the banning of public demonstrations. After a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s following political protests in shopping malls, First Amendment rights are not applicable within shopping malls."

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall/

FB: "Today’s shopping malls are worlds in themselves, removed in both time and space from the chance play and chaotic bustle of the high street. They are carnivals of artificiality where time and space are collapsed under the eternal sun of fluorescent lights. The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, has a Chinatown, a Bourbon Street, and a replica of the Santa Maria."

"A Century of Silence"

"Demirbaş had the opposite reaction: inspired by Socrates, he became a teacher of philosophy. Between 1983 and 1991, the Kurdish language was illegal, but he and his wife named their daughter Berfin, the Kurdish name for a pale-colored flower—a decision that instantly triggered prosecution. The legal battle went to Turkey’s Supreme Court, and by the time Demirbaş won, his daughter was a year old. As a teacher, he confronted the bureaucracy of Turkification with similarly mild gestures, each time eliciting a severe legal reaction. The government moved Demirbaş from school to school. In 2001, he was posted to Sivas, a deeply conservative city, where he wrote a press release stating that all people in Turkey had a right to education in their native languages. He was fired. Destitute, he returned to Diyarbakir, and was elected to lead a teachers’ union. From there, he entered politics, and in 2004 he became mayor of Diyarbakir’s old city.

At the time he lost his teaching job, he had been charged in as many as a hundred cases. Some of them, owing to changes in the law, were dropped; many others were added, and now he does not know how many there are. His lawyer told him that if he lost every case his combined prison term would be four hundred and eighty-three years. It seemed strange that Demirbaş could not keep track of his legal affairs, but as he spoke about his cases, I began to understand his confusion. Shortly after he was elected, a twelve-year-old Kurdish boy was fatally shot while police were gunning down his father, in front of their house; Demirbaş erected a sculpture to mark the tragedy, with thirteen holes carved into it, representing the boy’s gunshot wounds. He was prosecuted: misuse of municipal office and resources. (Three years.) The case went to the Supreme Court, which remanded it to a terrorism court, which threw it out—though now, on appeal, it has made its way back to the Supreme Court. In 2006, at a conference in Vienna, he presented a paper, “Municipal Services and Local Governments in Light of Multilingualism.” This time, the charge against him was “propagandizing for a terrorist organization.” (Five years.) When he issued a multilingual tourist brochure, in Turkish, Kurdish, Armenian, and Assyrian, he was charged. He was charged for speaking Kurdish while officiating at a wedding.

In 2007, the government forced Demirbaş out of office, and so he phoned a friend who owned a house near the municipal headquarters and set himself up there as shadow mayor. Journalists, dignitaries, and assemblymen still sought his advice, as did his constituents, who came by the hundreds, with offerings of tea and sugar. Members of his former staff raised funds to cover a small budget and volunteered during off hours. Demirbaş’s teen-age children took jobs to support the family. In this way, he continued his term. And the state continued finding new ways to charge him."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/05/century-silence

"John Leguizamo Says High School History Makes Latino Students Feel 'Invisible'"

"On the topic of Latino visibility, the comedian showed particular concern for the absence of Latinos in U.S. history education -- despite research that shows Latino students exposed to ethnic studies perform better in school.

“Just imagine, you’re a white kid and all of a sudden everybody’s Latin and everything they’re teaching you is Latin and you don’t hear anything about yourself or about your contributions,” Leguizamo said. “You don’t know hear about George Washington, you don’t hear about Thomas Jefferson and you feel like you haven’t contributed anything. How would you feel? How would you think of your future? How would you think of your participation in American culture?”

“You feel like an invisible person screaming in the woods and nobody hears you,” he added. “And it’s really weird and unfair because we had huge contributions.""
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-leguizamo-high-school-history-makes-latinos-students-feel-invisible_us_55cba1e5e4b0f73b20bb950f