"Gentrification May Actually Be Boon To Longtime Residents"

"a series of new studies are now showing that gentrifying neighborhoods may be a boon to longtime residents as well — and that those residents may not be moving out after all...

"To my surprise," Freeman says, "it seemed to suggest that people in neighborhoods classified as gentrifying were moving less  frequently."

Freeman's work found that low-income residents were no more likely to move out of their homes when a neighborhood gentrifies than when it doesn't... 

That squares with a recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

"We're finding that the financial health of original residents in gentrifying neighborhoods seems to be increasing, as compared to original residents in nongentrifying, low-priced neighborhoods," says Daniel Hartley, a research economist with the bank."

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/22/264528139/long-a-dirty-word-gentrification-may-be-losing-its-stigma

So, the social/cultural harms might remain - the way that a neighborhood is disrupted and neighborhood institutions might be coopted or replaced, etc... But it's *really good* to know that gentrification doesn't always make people homeless and might benefit original residents. I wish that there were some interviews with residents of these neighborhoods, to know what the actual experience is.

Related: Longer Salon one

"Blake Lively’s blameless blankness, explained"

"Blake Lively holds a special glimmer of distinction. She looks like a movie star. Her hair is golden, honey-spun. It catches the sun and flash photography like a piece of jewelry. Her teeth sparkle, whiter than paper. She’s beautiful in a way that wins you prom queen in a fairy-tale version of Southern California — a perfect avatar of blonde, casual and familiar. She looks like Malibu. She looks like joy.

But there’s no edge there. Lively’s greatest offense is not living up to her name.

Her gorgeous hair, no matter what movie she’s in, will always come down to her shoulders. It will always be blond. She will always smile the same way in ads as she does in front of the paparazzi. She will never stray far from what Blake Lively is supposed to look like, from how Blake Lively is supposed to behave."

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/27/12026642/blake-lively-backlash-explained

This is what it is, if there is already a narrative written about you because of what you look like, it's so easy to just follow that narrative. Some people would be led to good places, some people bad - and some people don't get a narrative at all, and deal with their non-existence everyday. 

"My Husband’s Unconscious Racism Nearly Destroyed Our Marriage"

"dating white men was tiring. I had to constantly be on guard, preparing myself for their racist comments. And I knew they were coming. I knew there would be a point where I’d have to talk about why I could say n***** and they couldn’t. I knew there’d be a conversation about Black on Black crime. I KNEW there’d be some fucked up assumption about Black people that I’d have to dismantle and then beat my white date over the head with—thereby ending whatever the fuck we were doing together. And I really wasn’t there for that shit... 

The more serious our relationship got, the more I was spending half my time—at least—surrounded by white people. While I’d gone to predominantly white schools and worked in mostly white companies, I’d never had so many white people suddenly in my intimate spaces. It’s one thing to hit it and split it with a guy and another to interact in my personal time with entire groups of white people, sometimes in my home.

And it affected me a LOT. I was constantly pulled out of spaces where I felt comfortable and pushed into spaces that felt isolating. We live in Atlanta, where multi-racial, multi-ethnic options are everywhere, yet when we socialized with his friends I was required to visit all-white neighborhoods, businesses, and events...

Growing up Black in America, you learn to ignore a lot of racist shit, especially if you are moving in white spaces. I was taught that white spaces were aspirational, that access to these spaces meant success. That’s a white supremacist ideology, but we live in a white supremacist society, so it’s also true: all-white spaces are where a lot of power brokering happens. This often means that the more power you achieve, the more you face casual social racism...

The side effect is that this type of talk, this dislike and hatred of Black people, becomes not just the white noise but also the internal harmony of your life. It goes from being something you actively ignore to something you actively hum, and eventually sing. You stop noticing it, and then you stop fighting it, because it no longer sounds wrong to you. It sounds normal."

http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/05/26/my-husbands-unconscious-racism-nearly-destroyed-our-marriage/

Related: Secretly racist boyfriend 

FB: "If you want to be my lover", the black version "I’d realized that, although being with Kevin had helped me to recognize the racist attitudes I’d unconsciously swallowed, he hadn’t been able to do the same. He wasn’t willing to face his own racism, and this meant I didn’t trust my husband with my Blackness. I am not naïve; I do not expect another person to ever understand and accept the whole of me. I think that is highly unrealistic and self-centered. But my Blackness defines how the world engages with me, and it is something that he had to understand and embrace for us to be together. And in order for him to do that, he had to own his racism."

"Pain Is Not a Game, But VR Games May Help With America’s Opioid Addiction"

"With few alternative treatments available, that “something” too often meant the reflexive prescription of opioids. It didn’t help that, at the time, Purdue Pharmaceuticals aggressively marketed OxyContin as a non-habit forming form of oxycodone, giving doctors an easy “fix” for patients’ pain. “The combination of not being trained well at managing pain, [being] encouraged to do more of it, and now having all these powerful opioids available,” Suzuki concluded, created the fertile ground for our nation’s pain-pill problem... 

VR pain relief may sound complex and futuristic, but the underlying mechanism isn’t much more sophisticated than the actions of a mother making silly faces at her son while he’s vaccinated. “Pain requires conscious attention,” Hoffman said. “Virtual reality uses up a lot of attentional resources [so] the brain has less attention available to process incoming pain signals.” Hoffman and Patterson have provided convincing evidence of their treatment’s effect by using FMRI to analyze neural patterns, which show less pain related brain activity for patients receiving VR."

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/play-the-pain-away?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

It's like this buzzy thing that helps children take shots.

"Study reveals that women are literally working themselves to death"

"when the researchers broke the findings down by gender, they found a startling correlation: The health risks associated with long workweeks were much greater for women than men.

“For men, long hour work appeared only to affect the risk of contracting arthritis. No adverse effects were found for other conditions,” explain the researchers in the study. “In fact, working moderately long hours (41 or 50 hours per week) was actually associated with less risk of contracting heart disease, chronic lung disease, or depression.”

For women, on the other hand, the side effects of working long hours were much more dire. For example, working 60 or more hours per week tripled the risk of diabetes, cancer, heart trouble, and arthritis in women. The researchers also found an association between hypertension and asthma among women working 51 to 60 hours per week."

http://fusion.net/story/317250/women-working-increased-risk-cancer-heart-disease-study/

FB: “Working long hours increases women’s exposure to these negative work characteristics, which might contribute to their overall burden of impaired health and chronic disease,” write the researcher

"WINE PROJECT - 3 GLASSES LATER"

"There is a saying about wine that I really like and it's something like this “The first glass of wine is all about the food, the second glass is about love and the third glass is about mayhem” I really wanted to see it for myself if that affirmation was in fact true says Marcos about his latest project.

3 Glasses after started as a joke like a game after hours but a serious work with a good humorous vibe ,the first picture was taken right away when our guests have just arrived at the studio in order to capture the stress and the fatigue after a full day after working all day long and from also facing rush hour traffic to get here. Only then fun time and my project could begin. At the end of every glass of wine a snapshot, nothing fancy, a face and a wall, 3 times. People from all walks of life, music, art, fashion, dance, architecture, advertising got together for a couple of nights and by the end of the third glass  several smiles emerged  and many stories were told."

http://www.masmorrastudio.com/#!wine-project/cyck

I really enjoy this idea of the stages of 3 glasses of wine :) 

It's making me think about the reason we (as humans) drink, use other drugs, have holidays centered around massive meals, go dancing, all our rituals and practices. It's about accessing different parts of ourselves, I think, making sure that we don't calcify into the most efficient version of who we are in our day-to-day lives. It speaks to the way that our consciousness needs to be nourished just like our bodies.

Related: Animals on drugs one

"I’m Ghanaian-American. Am I Black?"

"The trouble was that at home, we weren’t black. We were Ghanaian. We played high-life music and ate jollof rice and fried plantains. We rolled deep to graduations and had funerals that could not be outdone. We learned to separate ourselves, so that who we were to the world outside our house would not enter the world inside it.

For years I practiced this tightrope walk, but it did not come as easily to me as it seemed to come to my elders, who had spent most of their lives in Ghana. I had no memory of life back home; to claim Ghana over America felt false, but to claim an America that seemed hellbent on rejecting me felt ludicrous. The only role I truly knew how to play was that of “the good black,” the not-black-but-not-white-either black. It was the role I had been preparing for my entire life, but I was quickly growing tired of playing it."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/opinion/sunday/im-ghanaian-american-am-i-black.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=

All. Of. This. 

I want so many studies of black immigrants to the US and our identity struggles. There is a special kind of anti-blackness that we grow up in. I am immensely lucky to come from families that had economic privilege and excellent education, so that my parents were able to fulfill the dreams of America and raise children who could continue that legacy.

But the narrative that my family has about itself has so very little overlap with the narrative of Blacks in America. Those narratives are always threatening to overwhelm 

FB: this perfectly captures the special cognitive dissonances of being a black immigrant family in America

"I started to see cracks in the logic of respectability politics, namely the fact that no one ever asks white children to be good. White goodness is a given, and even if a white person is not good in deed, we can assume that he is good at heart. I wanted to be good because I knew subconsciously that being good is only worthwhile insofar as it separates you from those who are bad. And, in America, African-Americans are bad, both in deed and at heart."

"What’s in a Boarding Pass Barcode? A Lot"

"Earlier this year, I heard from a longtime KrebsOnSecurity reader named Cory who said he began to get curious about the data stored inside a boarding pass barcode after a friend put a picture of his boarding pass up on Facebook. Cory took a screen shot of the boarding pass, enlarged it, and quickly found a site online that could read the data...

“Besides his name, frequent flyer number and other [personally identifiable information], I was able to get his record locator (a.k.a. “record key” for the Lufthansa flight he was taking that day,” Cory said. “I then proceeded to Lufthansa’s website and using his last name (which was encoded in the barcode) and the record locator was able to get access to his entire account. Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.”"

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/10/whats-in-a-boarding-pass-barcode-a-lot/

Greattttttt

"Revelations About Being Brown In A World Of White Beauty"

"during my sophomore year of high school, their warnings would come into sharper focus as my British literature class zeroed in on the following passage:

“Gap-toothed was she, it is the truth I say.

Upon a pacing horse easily she sat,

Wearing a large wimple, and over all a hat

As broad as is a buckler or a targe;

An overskirt was tucked around her buttocks large”

This was also the year that Sir Mix-a-Lot’s seminal classic “Baby Got Back” ascended in hip-hop and pop charts, and blared across booming systems on ashy gray Midwest streets, the year when my male classmates perfected their marriage of dick jokes and hip-hop, and embraced their discovery of black female backsides. These were the tender years of youth and the bane of my fucking existence. However, teenagers being teenagers, and I, the singularly gap-toothed person in class, all eyes shifted on me. As expected, a request emerged, set up for ridicule: “Hey, S — smile?”

I don’t think I smiled much in class for the rest of that unit. And if I did, I harbored great discomfort. I don’t think I stopped participating in class discussions; I was still my father’s daughter, defiant and gap-toothed, very much assertive in self-expression. I was still a nerd, but I cannot deny that I leaned on the strength of my intellect because I feared everyone had finally accepted this truth so wretchedly rendered in Chaucer’s portrait of “The Wife of Bath”: to have gap teeth is to be ugly and to boot, sexually promiscuous. Even the textbook insisted that the trait was an imperfection, implying Chaucer’s portrayal as proxy for a widely accepted Westernized beauty standard.

Who the hell set things up like this?... 

If I wasn’t beautiful, at least I was smart as hell. I learned the craft of being exceptional."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/syreetamcfadden/revelations-about-being-brown-in-a-world-of-white-beauty#.muyeBv23Q

FB: "In these encounters with West Africans, I began a quietly informal inquiry to undo my acceptance of Westernized beauty standards, of white beauty standards, and the gift in these interactions had opened me up to recognize that not only was the diastema a sign and trait of beauty in these cultures, it was a clue from whence some of us came."

"How America Became Infatuated With a Cartoonish Idea of ‘Alpha Males’"

"The concept of the alpha male comes from the animal kingdom, and interest in the sorts of animal hierarchies led by alphas picked up greatly in the second half of the 20th century... A solid chunk of that upswing comes from primatology research — researchers have long been fascinated by the complicated social structures of chimps, gorillas, and our other evolutionary cousins. The alpha chimp and the silverback gorilla, physically imposing as they often are (alpha chimps have been known to rip tree stumps out of the ground in terrifying displays of dominance), have come to symbolize in the public imagination a natural order that favors a single dominant male “winner.”...

“The startling thing about chimpanzee corporate life is how much it resembles our own,” remarked the article’s author, Duncan Maxwell Anderson, in a sentence that only makes sense if you don’t think too hard about it...

This became the Ur-narrative of the alpha-male movement: Betas — even pathetic, helpless-seeming betas — can become alphas if they put enough time into it. Whether through neuro-linguistic programming or nutritional supplements or body-language training or whatever the other alpha-izing trick du jour is, there’s always something that can be done to improve the situation, and it always involves becoming more assertive and/or imposing and/or dominant...

These story lines, based as they are on misinterpretations and hysterical overextrapolations of our “natural” gender roles, feed rather fantastical visions of what it means to be a man, an adult, or both. Minutes after diving into the most alpha-obsessed pockets of the internet, you will come across stuff that reads as though the authors have rarely, if ever, interacted with other human adults in the real world"

http://nymag.com/betamale/2016/05/the-rise-of-the-alpha-beta-male.html

Related: New Men of 4Chan

"Friends at Work? Not So Much"

"It’s not that Americans are less concerned with relationships overall. We’re social creatures outside work, yet the office interaction norm tends to be polite but impersonal. Some people think pleasantries have no place in professional meetings...

The economic explanation is that  long-term employment has essentially vanished: Instead of spending our careers at one organization, we expect to jump ship every few years. Since we don’t plan to stick around, we don’t invest in the same way. We view co-workers as transitory ties, greeting them with arms-length civility while reserving real camaraderie for outside work...

The sociologist Max Weber classically argued that the Protestant Reformation had a peculiar effect on American work. At the dawn of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther preached that hard work in any occupation was a meaningful duty — a calling from God. John Calvin took this idea a step further, arguing that people should avoid socializing while working, as attention to relationships and emotions would distract them from productively fulfilling God’s will... For much of the 20th century, American workplaces were largely  designed by Protestant men."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/adam-grant-friends-at-work-not-so-much.html

"The mysterious origins of punctuation"

"In the 3rd Century BCE, in the Hellenic Egyptian city of Alexandria, a librarian named Aristophanes had had enough. He was chief of staff at the city’s famous library, home to hundreds of thousands of scrolls, which were all frustratingly time-consuming to read. For as long as anyone could remember,  the Greeks had written their texts so that their letters ran together withnospacesorpunctuation and without any distinction between lowercase and capitals. It was up to the reader to pick their way through this unforgiving mass of letters to discover where each word or sentence ended and the next  began...

Aristophanes’ breakthrough was to suggest that readers could annotate their documents, relieving the unbroken stream of text with dots of ink aligned with the middle (·), bottom (.) or top (·) of each line. His ‘subordinate’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘full’ points corresponded to the pauses of increasing length that a practised reader would habitually insert between formal units of speech called the comma,  colon and periodos...

The cult of public speaking was a strong one, to the extent that  all reading was done aloud: most scholars agree that the Greeks and Romans got round their lack of punctuation by murmuring aloud as they read through texts of all kinds...

when printing arrived in the mid-1450s, with the publication of Johannes Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible, punctuation found itself unexpectedly frozen in time. Within 50 years, the majority of the symbols we use today were cast firmly in lead, never to change again"

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20150902-the-mysterious-origins-of-punctuation?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

(real title: Punctuation in Europe )

That's really interesting, before we thought about our words as bring organized into sentences. And before we were organizing them to be recorded.

"Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?"

"In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that manifestations of hubris — often masked as charisma or charm — are commonly mistaken for leadership potential, and that these occur much more frequently in men than in women.

This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders, and that these personality characteristics are not equally common in men and women...

So it struck me as a little odd that so much of the recent debate over getting women to “lean in” has focused on getting them to adopt more of these dysfunctional leadership traits. Yes, these are the people we often choose as our leaders — but should they be?

Most of the character traits that are truly advantageous for effective leadership are predominantly found in those who fail to impress others about their talent for management. This is especially true for women. There is now compelling scientific evidence for the notion that women are more likely to adopt more effective leadership strategies than do men. Most notably, in a comprehensive review of studies, Alice Eagly and colleagues showed that female managers are more likely to elicit respect and pride from their followers, communicate their vision effectively, empower and mentor subordinates, and approach problem-solving in a more flexible and creative way (all characteristics of “transformational leadership”), as well as fairly reward direct reports. In contrast, male managers are statistically less likely to bond or connect with their subordinates, and they are relatively more inept at rewarding them for their actual performance. Although these findings may reflect a sampling bias that requires women to be more qualified and competent than men in order to be chosen as leaders, there is no way of really knowing until this bias is eliminated."

https://hbr.org/2013/08/why-do-so-many-incompetent-men

This is so very much a thing.

<3 HBR

FB: "The paradoxical implication is that the same psychological characteristics that enable male managers to rise to the top of the corporate or political ladder are actually responsible for their downfall. In other words, what it takes to get the job is not just different from, but also the reverse of, what it takes to do the job well. As a result, too many incompetent people are promoted to management jobs, and promoted over more competent people."

"If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is"

"Most philosophy departments also offer no courses on Africana, Indian, Islamic, Jewish, Latin American, Native American or other non-European traditions. Indeed, of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy...

No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain. The present situation is hard to justify morally, politically, epistemically or as good educational and research training practice...

Some of our colleagues defend this orientation on the grounds that non-European philosophy belongs only in “area studies” departments, like Asian Studies, African Studies or Latin American Studies. We ask that those who hold this view be consistent, and locate their own departments in “area studies” as well, in this case, Anglo-European Philosophical Studies."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/opinion/if-philosophy-wont-diversify-lets-call-it-what-it-really-is.html?_r=1

Yes. I really appreciate how they phrase it here - just asking for people to be honest about what they are doing.

"The struggle to speak up: how women are pushed to de-escalate sexist incidents"

"Years later, I realized the abuse was less in the act I had been subjected to, and more in my learned silence. De-escalation had been my trick, to the detriment of my agency.

A blog entry from last fall put this into words for me. It made me realise that women around me had been doing for years: de-escalating situations caused by men, with the burden of minimising incidents being placed squarely on our shoulders.

Occurrences could be as mundane as a street catcall, as infuriating as a sexist comment at work, or as troubling as an unwelcome physical touch. Occurrences also include compliments we have to decipher (just nice, or suggesting an expression of male ownership over our bodies?).

To the initial weight of having to deal with those acts of dominance is the added mental drain of having to evaluate how best to deal with it and not risk a violent backlash. De-escalating is just another form of the “emotional work” women provide with little recognition of its ongoing exertion and toll...

When she tries to explain the toll of such experiences to men, she says it is so exhausting she feels “it’s not even worth the effort half the time”.

“They don’t get it. It’s just not a reality for them.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/12/women-sexual-harrassment-sexism-deescalation

Hardikar, the health worker, adds: “There is a construct within masculinity that teaches them that they have the right to exert power over any space … It’s about demonstrating who is in charge in that space. I am sure that it’s subconscious, but it is learned and it is taught.”

FB: "“If someone compliments me, tells me I am attractive or whatever, I reply, ‘OK.’ It works for me.” Hardikar says she does not want to say “thank you” to something she is not sure she feels thankful for, but knows that for her own safety, she must express acknowledgement."

"Nicole Cliffe: How God Messed Up My Happy Atheist Life"

"Like many atheists (who are generally lovely moral people like my father, who would refuse to enter heaven and instead wait outside with his Miles Davis LPs), I started out snarky and defensive about religion, but eventually came to think it was probably nice for people of faith to have faith. I held to that, even though the idea of a benign deity who created and loved us was obviously nonsense, and all that awaited us beyond the grave was joyful oblivion... 

it was very unsettling to suddenly feel like a boat being tossed on the waves. I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t frightened—I just had too many feelings. I decided to buy a Dallas Willard book to read anthropologically, of course. I read his Hearing God. I cried. I bought Lewis Smedes’s My God and I. I cried. I bought Sara Miles’s Take This Bread. I cried. It was getting out of hand. You just can’t go around crying all the time.

At this point, I reached a crossroads. I sat myself down and said: Okay, Nicole, you have two choices. Option One: you can stop reading books about Jesus. Option Two: you could think with greater intention about why you are overwhelmed by your emotions...

Now, if you’ve been following along, you know already. I was crying constantly while thinking about Jesus because I had begun to believe that Jesus really was who he said he was, but for some reason, that idea had honestly not occurred to me. But then it did, as though it always had been true. So when my friend called, I told her, awkwardly, that I wanted to have a relationship with God, and we prayed, and giggled a bit, and cried a bit, and then she sent me a stack of Henri Nouwen books, and here we are today... 

No one could have in a billion years of their gripping testimony or by showing me a radiant life of good deeds or through song or even the most beautiful of books brought me to Christ. I had to be tapped on the shoulder. I had to be taken to a place where books about God were something I could experience without distance. It was alchemical."

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/june/nicole-cliffe-how-god-messed-up-my-happy-atheist-life.html

A piece of me feels like this might happen to me someday. When I was 8 or so, I realized that I just didn't believe in the God of my bible stories, any more than I believed in the characters in my favorite books. I didn't really understand what people were feeling that compelled them to sit through church.

I liked my church community (I still weirdly feel a part of it, 15 years since I stopped going more than twice a year to the actual services) 

"Work It: Is dating worth the effort?"

"Weigel reaches two main conclusions... Her second conclusion is that the way we consume love changes to reflect the economy of the times. The monogamy of the booming postwar fifties offered “a kind of romantic full employment,” while the free love of the sixties signified not the death of dating but its deregulation on the free market. The luxury- and self-obsessed yuppies of the “greed is good” eighties demanded that the romantic market deliver partners tailored to their niche specifications, developing early versions of the kinds of matchmaking services that have been perfected in today’s digital gig economy, where the personal is professional, and everyone self-brands accordingly...

The pursuit of leisure cost more than most single working-class women (paid a fraction of what men were) could readily afford. Weigel quotes a 1915 report by a New York social worker: “The acceptance on the part of the girl of almost any invitation needs little explanation, when one realizes that she often goes pleasureless unless she accepts ‘free treats.’ ” To have fun, a woman had to let a man pay for her and suffer the resultant damage to her reputation. Daters were “Charity Girls”—“Charity Cunts,” in a dictionary of sexual terms published in 1916—so called because they gave themselves away for free.

Dating thus amounted to a double bind. If women went out, they were seen as akin to whores, who at least got cash for their trouble—a distinction that was lost on the police, who regularly arrested female daters for prostitution. On the other hand, if women stayed in they couldn’t bump into eligible bachelors... 

The shift from calling to dating happened quickly, in the way that such shifts often do. The rich copied the poor; the middle class copied the rich...

On the plus side, Weigel argues, the culture of going steady allowed couples a degree of emotional intimacy that earlier dating models lacked. But its restrictive mores also put the onus on girls to regulate both their own sexual urges and those of their boyfriends. The result “was a setup that subjected girls to constant stress, self-blame, and regret.”...

It’s enough to cause an identity crisis, which is exactly what Weigel says happened to her. “I had no idea who I was,” she writes in the book’s afterword. “And as long as I kept impersonating all the women I thought I should be, I could not receive love, much less give it. I had no self to choose to give it from.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/23/why-dating-is-drudgery

FB: A really interesting history of American dating "In our consumer society, love is perpetually for sale; dating is what it takes to close the deal."

"Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women"

"Nearly 60 percent of the people who rated “Sex and the City” on IMDb are women, and looking only at those scores, the show has an 8.1. That’s well above average. Male users, though, who made up just over 40 percent of “Sex and the City” raters,assigned it, on average, a 5.8 rating.  Oof.

Ratings on the internet are inherently specious, and ratings aggregated from user reviews even more so. To distill a work of art down to a single number, you have to strip out an immense amount of meaning and context.

And for a perfect example of this, all you have to do is look at how men rate TV shows aimed at women compared with how women rate shows aimed at men. When you rely on the wisdom of the crowd on the internet, you risk relying on the opinion of mostly men. Seventy percent of IMDb TV show raters are men, according to my analysis, and that results in shows with predominantly female audiences getting screwed... 

another pattern emerges: The most male-dominated shows are very skewed, while the most female-dominated shows are less so. The 25th-most-male program has 94 percent of its ratings from men. The 25th-most-female show has only 75 percent of its ratings from women... 

Women gave their top 100 shows, on average, a 7.8 rating, about the same score they gave the top 100 male-dominated programs, 8.0. But here’s where that Twitter egg’s perception might come from: Men gave their top 100 an average score of 8.2 but gave the top 100 female-skewed shows a mere 6.9 average ratings. Shows with more than 10,000 ratings are inherently popular and yet men thought the programs in that group that skew female were below average."

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/men-are-sabotaging-the-online-reviews-of-tv-shows-aimed-at-women/?ex_cid=story-twitter&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=5/19/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Related: The world is designed for men

"How to Hope in Graduate School"

"CV’ing up with the Joneses. Maybe you’re in your cubicle. You’re happily doing research on your next chapter when you overhear that so-and-so placed an article in a major journal, or won a prestigious fellowship. Suddenly your whole day changes. You’ve got to finish that article, scrounge the Internet for elite conferences you can attend next week, and rethink your entire project. Ask any graduate student: No well-written paragraph can equal hours of angsty CV-stroking for a sense of emotional calm...

remember: Your track is singular. You will watch your peers find total fulfillment through tenure, alt-ac, and abandoning academe altogether. Recognize that all of those doors in academe that read "Authorized Personnel Only" are only awaiting your push."

http://chronicle.com/article/How-to-Hope-in-Graduate-School/236396/

"The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism"

"When a population explodes — as the human one did throughout the last century — eventually all manner of social institutions become over-crowded. From there, it’s simply a numbers game.

Want that awesome job? Stack your resume next to the hundreds of other people applying for it. Hoping to get into college? You’ll have to pay out the nose in student loans (if, that is, you were fortunate enough to get through admissions). Thinking of buying a house? You’re too busy paying rent in a skyrocketing market of housing prices.

But yeah, be sure to blame yourself. It’s obviously your fault.

Seriously though, we should have seen this coming. Build an economic system based on wealth hoarding and presumed scarcity and you’ll get what was intended...

Now more than ever, we need spiritual healing. As this capitalist system destroys itself, we can step aside and find healing by living honestly and without fear. They don’t get to tell us how to live. We can share our pain with family and friends. We can post it on social media. Shout it from the rooftops if we feel like it. The pain we feel is capitalism dying. It hurts us because we are still in it."

https://medium.com/@joe_brewer/the-mental-disease-of-late-stage-capitalism-4a7bb2a1411c#.pgci9hwek

FB: "The mental disease of late-stage capitalism is shame, the devastating feeling that we failed ourselves in the Land of Opportunity."

"The World is Designed for Men"

"Design and engineering consultancies create products for a global market, but the teams themselves rarely have diversity that reflects global perspectives.

The impact of having such a limited set of voices in the rooms where design decisions are made has far reaching implications. We’ll look at a few examples of how these missing perspectives lead to design “solutions” that create unexpected negative consequences for many, and shortchange us all...

Women are stereotypically considered less “handy” than men. You’ll see fewer women than men in a shop or on a job site, and fewer women own power tools themselves. Building/fixing things in general has culturally and historically been considered “men’s work”. So when a designer approaches creating a new power tool it’s likely that the target demographic is men, rather than a more inclusive concept like “everyone who wants or needs to build something”.

So it’s no surprise that tools are often designed in a way that’s more difficult for women to use...

Once after presenting a version of this article as a slide talk, a woman from the crowd approached me and said she was a developer who purchased the Pebble when it first came out. She developed three apps to work with Pebble but the watch was huge. It pinched her wrist and was so uncomfortable to wear that she couldn’t stand wearing it all day to fully test the apps she was working on. She eventually stopped developing for the platform...

a recent Carnegie Mellon study demonstrated that men are much more likely than women to be shown Google ads for high paying jobs. The researchers didn’t know for certain if that was due to bias in Google’s algorithms or that the companies posting these ads chose to target men."

https://medium.com/hh-design/the-world-is-designed-for-men-d06640654491?mc_cid=e76a81f99b&mc_eid=4cfda084d5#.asmit18t2

This is what happens when we blindly trust dudes.

The seatbelt thing? Seriously?

I shared this with my mother and she was astounded and then asked outloud "Don't these men have any compassion for the women in their lives?" - and I think it's less that, and more that once a standard is set (ex. "a model of a man can represent all humans") we often don't question it and assume that the standard was established because it is effective.

This is a reminder to question the status quo.

(credit to EG)

Related: a great article on how hard it is for women to find prosthetics that fit; Medicine Bias killing women (and articles about specific diseases); more on the male-standard-bias in biomedical research; 

"We Cannot Continue to Overlook 'High-Functioning' Depression"

"It's easy to put depression into a box of symptoms, and though we as a society are constantly told mental illness comes in all shapes and sizes, we are stuck with a mental health stock image in our heads that many people don’t match. When we see depression and anxiety in adolescents, we see teens struggling to get by in their day-to-day lives. We see grades dropping. We see involvement replaced by isolation. People slip through the cracks.

We don’t see the student with the 4.0 GPA. We don’t see the student who’s active in choir and theater or a member of the National Honor Society. We don’t see the student who takes on leadership roles in a religious youth group. No matter how many times we are reminded that mental illness doesn’t discriminate, we revert back to a narrow idea of how it should manifest, and that is dangerous."

http://themighty.com/2016/05/high-functioning-depression-we-cant-overlook-the-overachievers/

I grew up in a school district full of teens like this; I /was/ a teen like this. And I've been very aware of the invisibility of the struggles of high functioning people; I still have a hard time feeling like I deserve care or attention for my problems. At the same time, I am frustrated by how many of my friends and family can't seem to see my needs for support. 

My mother recently apologized to me about a day I don't even remember, when I was a junior in high school and I called her because I thought I was having a panic attack. She told me that, even though my symptoms matched a panic attack, she just didn't think of me as the kind of person who would have anxiety so she told me that I was probably fine. I probably hung up, tries to breathe slowly and stop crying, and then slipped into class late. 

There is a degree to which people almost don't seem to believe me about my mental health problems, like one of the required symptoms is to have visible shortcomings. Sometimes it makes me want to fail spectacularly and irreparably at something, so that for once I can tell someone about a problem I have and they won't respond with "Oh, well, I'm sure you'll figure it out!" or "Why are you being so stressed about this? You're being too sensitive/high-strung". 

I think that I piled my life full of classes and activities as a coping mechanism, so that I didn't have to be alone with my thoughts for too long, so that when my focus wavered on one thing I had another productive activity to switch to, so that I had socially appropriate excuses for my exhaustion and neuroticisms. This is not a pleasant way of living, this is not a life that doesn't have the need for support (...) 

Related: We need a new definition of depression; ADHD different for women

"Fancy Juice Doesn’t Cleanse the Body of Toxins"

"Toxins exist. Doctors typically define them as something that enters the body that has a damaging effect on its own — like pesticides, lead or antifreeze — or in large quantities, like alcohol or medications such as acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol.

But for the most part, the body handles toxins just fine on its own.

“The human body is well designed to eliminate wastes and toxins, and a number of organs play a role,” Dr. Grendell said.

The kidneys and the liver do the main removal work. They draw substances out of the bloodstream and process them for the body to excrete as feces and urine.

When asked what about this process would be helped by juice, Dr. Grendell seemed at a loss.

“It’s hard to understand because there is no good scientific evidence that a juice cleanse, or any other food for that matter, is particularly relevant to removing toxins,” he said.

This isn’t to say that drinking vitamin-rich, antioxidant-filled vegetable juice can’t be beneficial for one’s health, he added, or function as an effective tool for weight loss or resetting one’s habits. It’s the vague talk of toxins that reminds doctors of leeches."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/health/juice-cleanse-toxin-misconception.html?2016-MAY-FB-WELLTEST-AUD_DEV-0512-0531&WT.mc_ev=click&ad-keywords=AUDDEVREMARK&_r=0&referer=

I was reading a book that brought up the ways that "purity" is part of the human system of morality, and that different cultures have different definitions of purity, and how it can mead to a lot of seemingly Irrational behaviors. Environmental/health purity is a big part of the American liberal culture; GMOs fall in here too. A lot of food stuff is about purity, a lot of people slide into environmentalism around the anger that our food might be impure. 

And I totally get this feeling; when I was little and I had a stomachache, I used to picture it as some kind of sludgy (dirty/impure) ball in the pit of my stomach, that I needed to get out. It's really easy to feel weighed down and exhausted and imagine those feelings as icky, physical, dirty invaders of our bodies. 

"A LETTER TO ASPIRING (MALE) FEMINISTS"

"This was my first lesson in feminism: Using a feminist lens to analyze and understand your life is one of the most powerful things you can do. This is what led me to realize that sexual violence and domestic abuse; inequality in pay, education, and politics; biased media representation; gender stereotypes; and beauty norms aren’t women’s issues, they are social issues that shape everyone’s life. Understanding how men are gendered beings —yes, including you—can be transformational... 

After my initial class with Jaksch, I attended a feminist theory class with Professor Brian Jara. For me, having a class taught by a man was important. It showed me there was a place for me in the feminist movement if I held myself accountable. Jara pulled me aside after class one day, thanked me for all of my excited, thoughtful, and intelligent contributions to the class—and then told me, kindly, to shut up... He reminded me that anytime I am speaking, someone else in the class (most likely a woman) is not speaking... 

Men are treated so differently from women in our society that it can be difficult to see the world from their perspective, their standpoint—and that makes it difficult to understand how to be an effective and accountable antisexist man. Lesson five, then, is to listen to women."

http://primemind.com/articles/a-letter-to-aspiring-male-feminists?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=feed&utm_content=vara&utm_campaign=identity

A useful 101.

"Why We Must Stop Calling Menstruation A ‘Women’s Issue’"

"Teddy: It certainly plays a part in my dysphoria, not so much the fact that I have periods, but the feeling that I’m not the gender I am because it’s not seen as a “thing” guys have. That and the fact that my breasts tend to get quite sore during my period. They’re a massive source of dysphoria for me as it is. The pain usually makes it impossible to wear my binder, and so I’m left with a body that doesn’t feel like mine, and it can be really hard to get through the day... 

Ame: I do feel as though I, nonbinary trans people and trans men as a whole, face exclusion from such topics. People often refer to “women’s” bodies when discussing menstruation and reproductive rights, yet these are issues that I deal with and I am not a woman. It makes me feel invalid, and those discussions alone provoke my dysphoria. Hearing these topics spoken about in terms of “women’s issues” associates me with being a woman when I am not."

http://www.theestablishment.co/2016/05/25/on-trans-menstruation-a-roundtable

"Why Some People Find Crowded Cities Relaxing—And Others Don't"

"a recent paper published in The Society for Consumer Psychology suggests that the restorative qualities of nature might be overblown, and that certain people might find lush trees, chirping birds, and blue skies anything but zen-like. Kevin P. Newman, an assistant professor of marketing at Providence College, and his co-author Merrie Brucks, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona, teamed up to explore whether people who tend to be more neurotic might actually find relief from the very source of their racing thoughts and buzzing brain... 

The researchers discovered that neurotic people found “high-anxiety” situations to be more calming for their minds. In another experiment, Newman and Brucks ran a soothing ocean wave soundtrack followed by a tape of honking horns. Surprise: neurotics didn’t find the blare of taxi cab horns annoying. Actually, they found it rather satisfying."

http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/05/why-some-people-find-urban-hustle-invigorating/484412/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits

So, this is one study being over-interpreted and reported kinda absolutely, but... 

I kind of get this... I love, love, love getting out of the city and into a state Park or something for a hike and the kind of soundscape where you can hear a creek or some deer up the hill or wind in the trees. But I think I would eventually cave inward on myself if I lived out there all the time. Living with a rushing mind, it's sort of validating to see the rest of the world being just as chaotic. 

"Exploring the Secrets of Soothing Spaceship Sound"

"The background sound of the ships have done almost as much to build their respective worlds as the sets themselves, even if you don’t normally notice them. Since we don’t actually know what a warp drive would sound like, these hums and drones are created by sound effects editors who take tones from a number of sources to create some of the most recognizable spaceship sounds around...

Lago recently worked on the CW show The 100, which features a century-old space station called The Ark, a vessel which had been cobbled together by an ancient United Nations, but is, during the time of the show’s story, beginning to fall apart. In creating the ambient sounds for The Ark, the age and impending failure of the station needed to subtly come across in the sounds of the location. For The 100,Lago would sometimes just create sounds from things around the house. “I’d just set some microphones on the ground and drag something slowly. I’d tie a bunch of my kids’ toys together and drag them slowly, and get a nice little recording of some weird sound, and use those pieces in there,” he says... 

“One thing I did for The 100, I was shopping at a Fresh and Easy, and they had this freezer that made this incredible, “OOOOMMMMM,” says Lago. “ So I just stuck my recorder in there and closed it, and just stood outside of the freezer for a minute or so. Then I took that recording, and cleaned it up, and it was kind of elegant.” But a smooth elegant hum wasn’t right for all of the parts of the ratchety, old ark, so Lago used it specifically for the upscale chambers of The Ark’s ruling class, creating a distinctly different atmosphere than in other parts of the ship, while still having it feel like a natural extension of the overall space."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/exploring-the-secrets-of-soothing-spaceship-sound

It's true though, thinking about it - the calm background buzz of the Star Trek ships that lets you know it's a normalized living space; the antiseptic and sharp quality of the Death Star that makes it military and functional; the beep-whizz of the TARDIS that makes it more of a vehicle for transport and a character than an inanimate building. The sound is sort of part of thinking about what a space ship would be for and what the human experience of it would be.

"Anxiety, Meds, and Words from the Horizon. (So to Speak.)"

"Let me be clear: I’m okay with reactions, negative or otherwise. I am a grown woman, and a professional author, and when people disagree with me, even angrily, that’s okay with me. Readers are allowed, encouraged, to feel. To form their own opinions. To reject and despise a story. To think some books are crap and other books aren’t. To say so, in whatever GIF-y, sarcastic, exclamation point filled way they choose. On a logical level, I believe this, would fight for it if I had to. But Anxious Brain doesn’t get memos like that, doesn’t speak the language of logic. Anxious Brain just feels, feels, feels... 

The story of how a year of therapy turned into finally trying medication isn’t really important right now. Someday I’ll tell it. I was never the kind of person who was even open to the suggestionof antidepressants– I thought that was a sign of weakness, something other people needed, not me. I was strong. I would fight it on my own.

(Right?)

I’ll never forget what my therapist said to me the day I finally raised the subject of brain chemicals to her. It was pretty simple, just, “you don’t have to fight so hard.” Meaning: you don’t have to go it alone, do it without help. You don’t have to try to be so strong.

I burst into tears...

Antidepressant 4, my little miracle... Capable of self soothing. Capable of fighting back without draining my energy. Like a muscle that you suddenly realize is strong after you’ve been working out for a few weeks– like that first time you carry a bag of heavy groceries up a flight of stairs and realize you’re not as out of breath as you used to be. I wasn’t a robot, but I had energy. I could have a cup of tea and not feel so jittery and shaky from the caffeine that I wanted to turn back time and un-drink it. I could be kind to someone in a bookstore who recognized me and asked me for a picture– without having a panic attack!"

http://theartofnotwriting.tumblr.com/post/144829690341/anxiety-meds-and-words-from-the-horizon-so-to

We need so many of these narratives. I know so many people who hold out against psychiatric medication for their medical disorders, because of all these internalized stigmas and irrationalities. And it really is such a lovely thing to final have a little something to lean on, because it's never possible to will yourself healthy; taking medication lets you remember what it's possible to feel like, and to remember what you have been fighting for. 

FB: The author of the Divergent series on her journey to taking anti-anxiety medication.