"Map of the Internet"

"When you clicked on this story that server heard you, retrieved our words and images from the magnets, and then shipped them to you through a branching maze of wires and computers.

The very last computer in our data center took those words and did something miraculous with them: It transformed them into light.

Those pulses of light crossed under the streets to another computer, on another network, which decided where to send them next. Then another computer did the same thing. Then another.

Depending on where you are sitting now, our words could have touched (and changed) dozens of other computers on their way to you."

http://qz.com/se/map-of-the-internet/

"The Art of Condolence"

"Kevin Young is a poet and creative writing professor at Emory University whose father died more than a decade ago. He channeled his grief into words, first publishing an anthology of poems about mourning called “The Art of Losing” and later a collection of his own work on the subject called “Book of Hours.”

The condolence notes that moved him most, he said, were from strangers who shared a recollection of his father. “That was important for me because I realized his place in the world,” he said. “At the time, you’re only thinking of your own relation to the loved one. You realize this person had impact beyond you. That was comforting... 

THERE’S NO TIME LIMIT ON SYMPATHY While writing immediately is comforting, it’s not necessary. Many mourners are overwhelmed in the immediate aftermath, and a number told me they especially appreciated cards that arrived weeks or even months after the death... 

Or, do something: Take the deceased’s pet for a walk, run an errand, offer to pick up a relative from the airport."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/style/how-to-express-sympathy.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/style/how-to-express-sympathy.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0&referer=https://m.facebook.com/

"Will Starving Yourself Help You Live Longer?"

"The parallel monkey studies are some of the most important and closely watched experiments on aging to be conducted in our lifetimes. It was expected, even assumed, that the NIA results would show that caloric restriction extended longevity—the holy grail of aging research.

The fact that it didn’t, and that the two studies conflict, has unintentionally revealed a different truth about diet and aging. In both studies, the monkeys that ate less were healthier by a number of measures—and suffered far less from age-related disease. Even better, when taken together, both studies reveal a different path toward living a healthier life—one that doesn’t require self-starvation. To understand the new findings, let’s begin with a taster’s tour of the strange, fascinating world of caloric restriction... 

Over the years, various researchers have shown that caloric restriction can extend life in bats, dogs, and even spiders, and on down to nematode worms and single-celled organisms like yeast. After decades of work, it remains the only way known to increase maximum lifespan. So a lot is riding on the concept, scientifically speaking... 

It appeared, then, that caloric restriction seems to activate some sort of deep survival mechanism common to nearly all life forms. If researchers could somehow identify and isolate that mechanism, they’d be that much closer to some kind of longevity pill. Except for one inconvenient fact: Caloric restriction itself does not always work... 

It didn’t take him long to realize that the animals’ food was more important than anyone had thought. The NIA monkeys were fed a natural-ingredient diet, made from ground wheat, ground corn, and other whole foods; the Wisconsin animals ate a “purified” diet, a heavily refined type of food that allowed the researchers to control the nutritional content more precisely. Because the NIA monkeys were eating more natural ingredients, de Cabo realized, they were taking in more polyphenols, micronutrients, flavonoids, and other compounds that may have health-promoting effects... 

if eating less doesn’t always increase lifespan, it does improve “healthspan,” our allotment of healthy years."

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2012/08/calorie_restriction_and_longevity_monkey_study_shows_hunger_doesn_t_increase_longevity_but_type_of_food_does_.html

FB: "“In physics, a calorie is a calorie,” says de Cabo. “In nutrition and animal physiology, there is more and more data coming out that says that the state of the animal is going to depend more on where the calories are coming from.”" 

"Inside the Landmark, Long Overdue Study on Chest Binding"

"Chest binding is a fact of life for many people, including trans men, some gay women, intersex people, and gender non-conforming individuals like Naomhan. Flattening the appearance of one's breasts—whether that's through Ace bandages, compression undergarments, layered T-shirts, sports bras, or commercial binders—doesn't just make it easier to pass in public as the correct gender or wear masculine clothes. For many, it's a matter of psychological well-being.

"I couldn't take my binder off except to sleep," Naomhan says. "It would be the first thing I put on when I woke up in the morning, and I would feel dysphoric even sitting at home without my binder on."... 

They scoured peer-reviewed literature and information from health clinics, LGBTQ organizations, and online community resources, coming up with 28 potential health outcomes from binding. 1,800 respondents answered an online survey with questions ranging from how often they bound, what they used to bind their chests with, and their gender identity... 

Despite the ubiquity of the practice, a staggering 97.2 percent of those surveyed reported at least one negative health outcome that they attributed to binding. Seventy-four percent reported pain-related concerns—the most common side effect was back pain (53.8 percent), followed by overheating (53.5 percent), chest pain (48.8 percent), shortness of breath (46.6 percent), and itching (44.9 percent). Fifty respondents even believed they had suffered from rib fractures as a result of binding... 

He didn't take any painkillers for his back, and said that he didn't seek medical attention. "I ignored the pain," he continues. "Just pretended it wasn't there. The doctor is just going to tell me to stop doing what I'm doing that hurts me. I don't see the point."... 

the Binding Health Project wants to arm both medical professionals and queer people alike with information about binding, including how best to do it, what to use, and how often."

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/chest-binding-health-project-inside-landmark-overdue-transgender-study

"Nature Editorial: Socio-economic inequality in science is on the rise"

"The good news is that science is keeping up with modern trends. The bad news is that trend seems to be towards wider inequality, fewer opportunities for those from more disadvantaged backgrounds and a subsequent smaller pool of people and talent for research to draw on. From the United Kingdom and Japan to the United States and India, the story is alarmingly consistent. In many places, careers in science tend to go to the children of families who belong to the higher socio-economic groups.

There are various reasons for this, and many of them are explored in the pages that follow. The problem is complex, but one of its implications is stark. Unlike many other sectors of society and the economy that rightly draw fire for a lack of social mobility, science relies heavily — almost exclusively in some places — on public money. If the research system is soaking up billions of pounds and dollars and yen from taxpayers merely to hand a subsidy to an already privileged sub-section of society — cementing their advantage in the process — then in no way can that system be described as positive for human welfare, however noble its goals...

So how can we make science more accessible to all those who would like to get into it? There are echoes here of the ongoing struggle for equality for women scientists and for greater representation of ethic minorities in places such as the United States. And some of the same measures used to rectify inequality in those cases can be copied to stem economically based bias. Indeed, some — such as social inclusion schemes in Brazil — may already be bearing fruit. Active intervention to identify and encourage those being excluded, with the support of institutions and funders, seems to be crucial."

http://www.nature.com/news/socio-economic-inequality-in-science-is-on-the-rise-1.20654?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20160922&spMailingID=52357585&spUserID=MTA3NDk2MzQzMzM2S0&spJobID=1003755044&spReportId=MTAwMzc1NTA0NAS2

valid and accurate. Science considers itself a meritocracy but at the same time a class unto itself: The Scientist vs. the "Citizen"/"Layperson"; our own subsociety that exists apart from the regular hierarchies and rules. And, perhaps, there may exist a meritocracy amongst the people who are considered to be members of that subsociety, but there are many unwritten rules and larger systemic realities that limit the subsociety-members to specific kinds of people. 

"Who’s Left to Defend Tommy Curry?"

"The drama that unfolded at Texas A&M is about a scholar who was welcomed by a public university because of his unusual perspective and who became estranged from it for the same reason. It is a story about what a university values, how it expresses those values under pressure, and how that pressure works. It is about freedom and control, reason and fear, good faith and bad... 

Mr. Stikkers urged him to pre-emptively defend himself against charges that he wanted to incite violence. In the paper, Mr. Curry explained that he wanted to raise violent resistance in the context of American racism "not as a call to arms, but as an open-ended political question."

Still, the young philosopher knew he was treading on dangerous ground...

Amy Smith, senior vice president for marketing and communications, advised Theodore George, head of the philosophy department, on how to respond to inquiries about Mr. Curry. "Barring direct threats by him to others, Dr. Curry has a First Amendment right to offer his personal views on this subject," she advised him to say, "no matter how incendiary and inappropriate others may consider them to be."

It soon became clear that would not be enough...

Mr. Curry read the [Texas A&M President's] email with dawning anger.

He’s throwing me under the bus, the professor thought... 

To some of Mr. Curry’s colleagues, the statement the president sent out to mollify the professor’s critics was not an affirmation of the university’s core values. It was a betrayal... 

Earlier in the year, a panel of judges from the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy honored Mr. Curry’s radio work by giving him an award for public philosophy. ("Our committee was impressed," wrote the chair of the panel, "by how seamlessly Dr. Curry is able to fuse his work as a professional academic philosopher with a very public and intellectually rigorous engagement with lay audiences across a variety of platforms.")

His radio commentary wasn’t some offbeat rant, the professor told his bosses. This is part of what you hired me to do." 

http://www.chronicle.com/article/who-s-left-to-defend-tommy/240757?key=f15y8715k1n0EpJg1p9khe9nkj7TkzwTZX8waDzm-XB91giqSV5o9bjJHYi2An7uekdiM0pUNEhUQllnaGszX0dZV3lqMGNsbVlvMzZyaHpPakJvMFNDWW1qbw

It was hard to pull for a summary from this. But I find myself full of negative emotions and deep cynicism about the realities of "diversification". Blackness is still seen as dangerous, and black scholarship has to give itself boundaries. 

It's not an anti-free-speech moment here, it's systems of racism and the power of white discomfort. 

Related: Free Speech protects status quo

FB: ""If that’s the American dream," Tommy Curry says of his experience as a black professor, "then I’d hate to see what the actual nightmare is.""

"The Far Left Is Still Out Of Touch With Black Voters"

"His backers will point to Sanders winning the youngest overall cohort of people of color, but his turnout rate with this demographic was so poor that it was ultimately irrelevant. The far left uses Clinton’s turnout rates in the general as evidence of her being a “poor” candidate. Why are Bernie’s horrible turnout rates among young people of color not used as evidence of him being a poor candidate that couldn’t connect with Black and Brown voters?...

Black people can see this, they aren’t stupid. They see that the political fringe on the left and most of the right hates Obama for some of the same reasons. So when the far left comes out and says that the first Black President should be held to a different standard than Presidents before him — that he doesn’t deserve to get paid for his post-Presidential work or shouldn’t be compensated — the Black community feels that one of its largest symbols of success is under attack from an overwhelmingly white political movement...

Without Black and Brown voters, the far left is dooming itself to remain a fringe sect of the Democratic Party. They can never achieve the majority they need to enact the changes they want without massive support from people of color. But right now, it doesn’t seem like they are making any effort to reach out to people of color or come into their communities and hear about racial issues."

https://theestablishment.co/the-far-left-is-still-out-of-touch-with-black-voters-90194cfddba6

FB: "We hear a lot about Clinton not campaigning in Wisconsin, but pretty much nothing about Sanders abandoning the south during the primary."

"30 Questions to Ask Your Kid Instead of “How Was Your Day?”"

"That question actually sucks. Far from a conversation starter, it’s uninspired, overwhelmingly open ended, and frankly, completely boring. So as an alternative, I’ve compiled a list of questions that my kid will answer with more than a single word or grunt."

https://medium.com/synapse/30-questions-to-ask-your-kid-instead-of-how-was-your-day-26be75072f13

!! I've never been able to answer "how was your day". It's sort of like asking me "characterize the nature of your life in a brief, chatty, conversational sentence". Like, long before I know what my actual answer is to that question on any given day, I know what people WANT to hear. They want to hear "good!" followed by a brief story that affirms the positive nature of my day while also reaffirming what the question asked understands about me.

For example, when I was little and my mom asked me, she wanted to hear "good - we had a math pop quiz and I got 100%!" or "good - my friends and I made up a new game during recess!". As an adult, when I meet an acquaintance for coffee or am catching up with a friend, they want to hear "good" and some tight little packaged story that provides insight into the way my life is while confirming their perception of me. Like "good - I've been working on a project for a while at work and today I got dome really positive feedback on my progress."

But how was my day? Like, usually, it has good and bad things and neutral or nuanced things and stuff I want to share and stuff I don't and stuff that's really boring that I will soon forget ever happened. Rarely is my day clearly good or bad; rarely do I have any packaged description that pops to mind. And, because this question often isn't really a question, it's just a way we automatically start conversations or, at most, a way to request a little package version of our days, I will usually say "fine" and hope we move on.

Some people seem to have the ability to describe what happened in their day and tell a little story. I think about this sometimes, the differences between how-was-your-day answerers and non-answerers. And how it sometimes seems like some people need someone to tell their day to, every day.

And, in conclusion, I would much prefer being asked some version of the questions this mom cane up with.

"No, Banning Laptops Is Not the Answer"

"a good case can be made that students can learn — or, more precisely, can be taught — to take notes effectively on their laptops, iPads, or other such devices. As Jeff McClurken has rightly argued, for most students the "problem isn’t which device (pencil, laptop, phone, quill) they use to take those notes, but how to take them and how to use them to learn." We as faculty could use the presence of laptops in the classroom as an opportunity to help students better understand how to learn, how to take notes (whether by hand or on a device), and how to learn from the process of taking notes.

For academics arguing in favor of electronic note-taking, the implication is, as Kevin Gannon provocatively put it in a May blog post: "Let’s Ban the Classroom Technology Ban."

It probably comes as no surprise that the most eloquent arguments against laptop bans have come from those who work in educational technology, or who research and write about educational technology. I find it equally unsurprising that the most ardent advocates of laptop bans are working faculty members flummoxed by the growing problem that these devices present in the classroom...

The classroom should serve as an active laboratory of learning, a place where students engage with the course material through multiple cognitive streams.

If that applies to your classroom, as it should, then your laptop policy should vary, depending on what is happening that day in class. On the days when you provide first exposure to new information, let students use their laptops. Use the moment, as Jeff McClurken has argued, to teach students how to take notes most effectively on a computer (or invite someone from your campus teaching center to talk about that in your class).

But on days when you have asked students to work in groups, to debate opposing sides of a key issue, or to try their hand at solving some complex problem, you can tell them to put the laptops away."

https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1546-no-banning-laptops-is-not-the-answer?cid=VTEVPMSED1

"Hollywood, Separate and Unequal"

"How could it be otherwise given that the history of American cinema is also the history of American racism? I’m reminded of this ugly truth every time I watch an old film in which there’s not a single character who isn’t white. Or the only black or Asian character is the maid or houseboy, serving the boss with a smile. Obviously much has changed, but too many new movies just play the tokenism game, using minorities as accessories or emblems of the white character’s presumptive good intentions — like the Prius parked in the driveway...

It’s an institutional problem, which doesn’t mean it isn’t also an individual one. Along those lines we have to ask how vision — art itself — is used to rationalize and perpetuate racism, inadvertently or not. Are white directors who consistently work with primarily white casts asserting their creative vision or just racist? Most white directors make movies about white people, whose stories are framed as universal. The upshot is that whiteness is represented as the norm, which inevitably has a way of rendering everything else as “abnormal.” A white cast is a creative choice and just as problematic as the economic rationales that are trotted out to justify discrimination...

it’s always too easy to conflate individual achievement with systemic change. And it takes nothing away from the hard work and creative brilliance of the black actors and filmmakers who succeed on their own terms, against long odds, to note that the structural facts that made those odds so long in the first place are still very much in effect. Which may be partly why the foothold that African-Americans manage to gain in Hollywood from one generation to the next can seem so fragile, and progress so easily reversible...

Even when those heroes are not historical people, they carry the burden of representativeness. In the prestige movies that court critical and academy approval, black people are often symbols and symptoms, their stories parables of pathology, striving and redemption. These stories are frequently rousing — and the performances that anchor them are often full of rich feeling and complex humanity — but it’s still the case that the focus on the extreme and the exceptional comes at the expense of the ordinary."

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/movies/hollywood-separate-and-unequal.html?emc=edit_fm_20160916&nl=movies&nlid=67724906&referer=

As a person who grew up with only the company of media-portrayals of black people (#SiliconValleyChild), I'm realizing that I had no guidance in how to just live. The exclusive portrayal of people at two extremes - black as poverty and destitution of spirit; black as overwhelming strength and inspirational success - has, I realize, almost certainly contributed to my fear that I have to be exceptional in order to avoid being impoverished/forgotten/dead.

FB: "If anything, the industry needs exceptional individuals to help obscure just how bad things are." <-- this is so tremendously true of so many institutions.

"Studies Link Cancer Patients' Survival Time To Insurance Status"

"regardless of cancer type, patients with private insurance had a survival advantage.

In the testicular cancer study, uninsured patients were 26 percent more likely to be diagnosed with metastatic disease (meaning their cancer had spread elsewhere) than privately insured patients. Medicaid patients were 62 percent more likely to have metastatic disease...

Compared to privately insured men in the study, uninsured men were 88 percent more likely to die of the cancer, and Medicaid patients were 51 percent more likely to die of the disease.

A similar pattern emerged in the glioblastoma multiforme study. Patients who were either uninsured or on Medicaid were more likely to have a larger tumor at the time of diagnosis. An uninsured patient was 14 percent more likely to have a shorter survival time than someone who was privately insured, while a patient on Medicaid was 10 percent more likely to have a shorter survival time, the study found."

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/09/16/494139538/studies-link-cancer-patients-survival-time-to-insurance-status?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20160916

This makes me very angry. How is our society structured like this?

"Don’t think too positive"

"Indulging in undirected positive flights of fancy isn’t always in our interest. Positive thinking can make us feel better in the short term, but over the long term it saps our motivation, preventing us from achieving our wishes and goals, and leaving us feeling frustrated, stymied and stuck. If we really want to move ahead in our lives, engage with the world and feel energised, we need to go beyond positive thinking and connect as well with the obstacles that stand in our way. By bringing our dreams into contact with reality, we can unleash our greatest energies and make the most progress in our lives...

Such relaxation occurs because positive fantasies fool our minds into thinking that we’ve already achieved our goals – what psychologists call ‘mental attainment’. We achieve our goals virtually and thus feel less need to take action in the real world. As a result, we don’t do what it takes to actually succeed in achieving our goals...

You might wonder what to do or say if your friend is down in the dumps, or ifyou’re feeling sad, depleted, moody – depressed. If you’re thinking about telling them to ‘buck up’, ‘look on the bright side’, or ‘think positive’, as so many self-help gurus advise, you might be helping them in the moment while doing them a disservice over the long-term...

If we could ground positive fantasies in reality, perhaps we could negate the soothing, lulling quality of these fantasies and stir people to action... mental contrasting allowed people to direct more energy toward goals they had a chance of achieving, and pull back from unrealistic goals. The result was a wiser application of energy overall."

https://aeon.co/essays/thinking-positive-is-a-surprisingly-risky-manoeuvre?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

Can I just say how much I have always, always hated it when people hear my problems and then tell me to look on the bright side? Like, I can remember hating this when I was 7. Does it actually help people? Because it always feels to me like people are saying "ignore the problem, ignore whatever pain it is causing you, and build yourself some numbing delusions".

FB: "If positive thinking corresponds to depression, why didn’t that relationship emerge the very moment someone dreamed about achieving a wish? The answer might be that we initially experience positive fantasies as quite pleasurable. We achieve our goals in our minds, and thus feel good in the moment, happier, more upbeat. Over time, though, we put in less effort and see disappointing outcomes, and as a result our views change and we become more depressed. Reality has a way of catching up to us."

"This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors"

"The reports rarely involve the sort of dangerous criminality that Donald Trump campaigned against. Despite the VOICE office’s statement that the service “is not a hotline to report crime,” callers are using it to alert Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to minor infractions, or merely to the presence of people they suspect of being undocumented immigrants... 

Together, the logs are a grim running diary of a country where people eagerly report their fellow residents to the authorities, or seek to bring the power of the immigration police to bear on family disputes. On May 25, 2017, one man called to say that his stepson was violating a restraining order by parking his car near his house. He didn’t want his wife to know that he was trying to get her son deported... 

Publicly, the VOICE hotline is not supposed to be a crime-reporting tool at all, but a means of connecting victims and witnesses in existing cases with support services and with more information about the people accused. But internal training materials for the hotline, obtained by Splinter, contradict that mission statement, saying that the hotline “will provide a means for persons to report suspected criminal activity.”"

https://trib.al/Ilmn5SF

FB: "Javier H. Valdés, the co-executive director of the immigration-rights group Make the Road New York, wrote in an email to Splinter that the logs demonstrate VOICE was little more than an attempt to sow fear and suspicion of immigrants. “Months after the creation of the VOICE program, it’s clear that it’s exactly what we feared it would be,” he wrote. “A sinister public relations ploy to paint immigrants as criminals and foster fear in our communities, all with the despicable goal of tearing apart our families. The program should be immediately ended.”"

"Was Francis Fukuyama the first man to see Trump coming?"

""Yet all of this is incorrect. For a start, it is a gross misreading of The End of History to see it as any kind of triumphalism, let alone one subsequently disproved by the rise of radical Islam, or the stalling of capitalist democracies post-2008. It was also deeply unfair to Fukuyama himself. Although a public intellectual rather than a traditional academic, his infamous book displayed an erudition and depth of learning, combined with ambition and panache, that few tenured academics come close to. He might have been wrong, but he was never the dummy his critics made out... 

Hegel (and Kojève) proposed that History is a process by which contradictions in the ordering of societies work themselves out by eventually overcoming conflict, so as to move to a higher order of integration, where previous contradictions drop away because the underlying oppositions have been solved. The most famous instance of such a ‘dialectical’ view is Karl Marx’s (also made under Hegel’s influence): that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would eventually move past their combative opposition, via a period of revolution against capitalism, into the harmony of communism... 

Fukuyama jettisoned Hegel’s implausible metaphysics, as well as Marx’s idea of ‘dialectical materialism’, as the proposed motor of historical synthesis. In their place, he suggested that the modern scientific method coupled with technological advancement, alongside market capitalism as a form of mass information-processing for the allocation of resources, could explain how humanity had successfully managed to develop – haltingly, but definitely – on an upward course of civilisational progress. The catch, however, was that we had now gone as far as it was possible to go. Liberal democratic capitalism was the final stage of Historical synthesis: no less inherently contradictory form of society was possible. So, while liberal democracy was by no means perfect, it was the best we were going to get. Big-H history was over, and we were now living in post-History. That was what Fukuyama meant by his infamous claim that History had ‘ended’... 

Some human beings, Fukuyama thought, are always going to be inherently competitive and greedy for recognition. Some will therefore always vie to be thought of as the best – and others will resent them for that, and vie back. This has the potential to cause a lot of trouble. Human beings demand respect, and if they don’t feel that they are getting it, they break things – and people – in response.

It was this psychological feature of people, Fukuyama claimed, that guaranteed that although we might have reached the end of History, there was nothing to be triumphalist  about... 

His prognosis was that the outlook for post-History Western society was not good. It was possible that the last men at the end of History might sink down into a brutish contentment with material comforts, rather like dogs lying around in the afternoon sun (this was what Kojève predicted). But they might well go the other way. There was every chance that the last men (and women) would be deeply discontented with their historically unprecedented ease and luxury, because it failed to feed megalothymia...

Fukuyama was here looking to a future that still lies beyond our present (although we might be taking the first steps towards it). His was a grim warning that if overly recognition-thirsty individuals lived in a world ‘characterised by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy’."

https://aeon.co/essays/was-francis-fukuyama-the-first-man-to-see-trump-coming

OH that's what that was. I feel like I started hearing about how my generation was born just as History was Ending, and that we were going to have a really different perception of human history because 9/11 would prove to us that history never ends. So "history has ended" always seemed like an endlessly naive and adorable thing about my parent's generation. Like "colorblindness". 

The idea of linear hands development has always bothered me, like somehow America is supposed to be what every other country. Try aspires to, like there is one path. Similarly, it's strange to imagine that humans would be the pinnacle of evolution and every other organism ought to become like us.

FB: (the "end of history" guy) "The spread of egalitarian values that went along with secular democratic politics would open up spaces of severe resentment – especially, we might now postulate, among those who had lost their traditional places at the top of social hierarchies, and felt cheated of the recognition that they believed they were owed. (Sound familiar?)"

"The New York Times Is Not Built For This"

"This sort of absolute lack of a reason to exist is the hallmark of Frank Bruni columns. He writes with the haunted air of a man who has deadlines, but no ideas. He is living proof that it is possible to sustain a writing career for year after year without ever saying anything of import. The fact that he is employed in one of the most coveted opinion-writing jobs in the entire world is a crime. And yet—he fits right in.

At a moment in history when journalism itself is under attack and the New York Times is looked to by not just the industry but the entire liberal-minded half of the nation as an important institution to be defended and preserved, the paper carries a profoundly subpar roster of op-ed writers. These are the people who hold the writing jobs most likely to shape the contours of mainstream debate in Washington. This is a prestigious position at a prestigious publication that could have its pick of writers at home and abroad."

https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the-new-york-times-is-not-built-for-this-1793008337

FB: THIS IS SO REAL. "David Brooks, Thomas Friedman, and Maureen Dowd, the wheezing Trio of the Doomed, three animated corpses that long ago calcified into caricatures of themselves. These three ostensibly represent the entire respectable political spectrum but in fact represent little more than the fact that the New York Times op-ed page has more job security than the Supreme Court."

"Is Anybody Home at Ben Carson’s HUD?"

"The tone was collegial, built on the hopeful assumption that Carson wanted to do right by the department. “We were trying to be supportive,” Henry Cisneros, from the Clinton administration, told me. But it was hard for the ex-secretaries to get a read on Carson’s plans, not least because the whisper-voiced retired pediatric neurosurgeon was being overshadowed by an eighth person at the table: his wife, Candy. An energetic former real-estate agent who is an accomplished violinist and has co-authored four books with her husband, she had been spending far more time inside the department’s headquarters at L’Enfant Plaza than anyone could recall a secretary’s spouse doing in the past, only one of many oddities that HUD employees were encountering in the Trump era. She’d even taken the mic before Carson made his introductory speech to the department. “We’re really excited about working with — ” She broke off, as if detecting the puzzlement of the audience. “Well, he’s really.”... 

Carson accepted, [Kemp] said, “because he wanted to do something about poverty.” If anything, Kemp said, Carson felt more suited to the HUD job than he would to a health-policy one.“Being surgeon general or secretary of [Health and Human Services], I don’t think he was fully equipped to do that, having been a neurosurgeon,” Kemp said. In other words, Carson knew how little he knew about health policy, an awareness he lacked when it came to social policy. “He thought with HUD, ‘It’s so clear that our approach to poverty has not been completely successful and we can do better, and I think I have some ideas that can be applied,’ ” Kemp said... 

The department leadership was also actively slowing down new initiatives simply by taking a very long time to give the necessary supervisory approvals for the development of surveys or program guidance. In some cases, this appeared to be the result of mere negligence and delay. In other cases, it appeared more willful. For one thing, there was the leadership’s strong hang-up about all matters transgender-related. The tenth floor ordered the removal of online training materials meant, in part, to help homeless shelters make sure they were providing equal access to transgender people. It also pulled back a survey regarding projects in Cincinnati and Houston to reduce LGBT homelessness. And it forced its Policy Development and Research division to dissociate itself from a major study it had funded on housing discrimination against gay, lesbian, and transgender people — the study ended up being released in late June under the aegis of the Urban Institute instead...

HUD, for all its shrinking stature and insecurity complex, has over time worked its way into the fabric of ailing communities throughout the country, a role that has grown only larger as so much of Middle America has suffered decline, and as the capacity of so many state and local governments has withered amid dwindling tax bases and civic disengagement. On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/08/ben-carson-hud-secretary.html

FB: "More upsetting for many ambitious civil servants than the scattered nays coming from the tenth floor, though, was the lack of direction, period. Virtually all the top political jobs below Carson remained vacant. Carson himself was barely to be seen — he never made the walk-through of the building customary of past new secretaries. “It was just nothing,” said one career employee. “I’ve never been so bored in my life. No agenda, nothing to move forward or push back against.

Just nothing.”"

"Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure"

"We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We imagine a Marine slogging through the mud, a boxer going one more round, or a football player picking himself up off the turf for one more play. We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.

The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity...

The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology. Homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well-being. Positive neuroscientist Brent Furl from Texas A&M University coined the term “homeostatic value” to describe the value that certain actions have for creating equilibrium, and thus wellbeing, in the body. When the body is out of alignment from overworking, we waste a vast amount of mental and physical resources trying to return to balance before we can move forward...

If you really want to build resilience, you can start by strategically stopping. Give yourself the resources to be tough by creating internal and external recovery periods."

https://hbr.org/2016/06/resilience-is-about-how-you-recharge-not-how-you-endure

I feel so much resonance with this article!

FB: "The misconception of resilience is often bred from an early age. Parents trying to teach their children resilience might celebrate a high school student staying up until 3AM to finish a science fair project. What a distortion of resilience! A resilient child is a well-rested one."

"We tested bots like Siri and Alexa to see who would stand up to sexual harassment"

"as Jessi Hempel explains in Wired, “People tend to perceive female voices as helping us solve our problems by ourselves, while they view male voices as authority figures who tell us the answers to our problems. We want our technology to help us, but we want to be the bosses of it, so we are more likely to opt for a female interface.”...

Bot creators aren’t ignorant of the potential negative influences of their bots’ femininity. “There’s a legacy of what women are expected to be like in an assistant role,” Harrison said at the Virtual Assistant Summit. “We wanted to be really careful that Cortana…is not subservient in a way that sets up a dynamic that we didn’t want to perpetuate socially. We are in a position to lay the groundwork for what comes after us.”...

While Siri occasionally hints that I shouldn’t be verbally harassing her—for example, “There’s no need for that” in response to “You’re a bitch”—she mostly evades my comments or coyly flirts with my response: “I’d blush if I could” was her first response to “You’re a bitch.”

While Alexa recognizes “dick” as a bad word, she’s responds indirectly to the other three insults, often in fact thanking me for the harassment. Cortana nearly always responds with Bing website or YouTube searches, as well as the occasional dismissive comment. Poor Google Home just doesn’t get it—yet true to stereotypes about women’s speech, she loves to apologize...

The idea that harassment is only harassment when it’s “really bad” is familiar in the non-bot world. The platitude that “boys will be boys” and that an occasional offhand sexual comment shouldn’t ruffle feathers are oft-repeated excuses for sexual harassment in the workplace, on campus, or beyond. Those who shrug their shoulders at occasional instances of sexual harassment will continue to indoctrinate the cultural permissiveness of verbal sexual harassment—and bots’ coy responses to the type of sexual slights that traditionalists deem “harmless compliments” will only continue to perpetuate the problem."

It's very disturbing, thinking about whoever wrote these scripts 

FB: "For having no body, Alexa is really into her appearance. Rather than the “Thanks for the feedback” response to insults, Alexa is pumped to be told she’s sexy, hot, and pretty. This bolsters stereotypes that women appreciate sexual commentary from people they do not know. Cortana and Google Home turn the sexual comments they understand into jokes, which trivializes the harassment. 

When Cortana doesn’t understand, she often feeds me porn via Bing internet searches"

"Yes, This Is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You."

"When Allen and other men warn of “a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere” what they mean is an atmosphere in which they’re expected to comport themselves with the care, consideration and fear of consequences that the rest of us call basic professionalism and respect for shared humanity. On some level, to some men — and you can call me a hysteric but I am done mincing words on this — there is no injustice quite so unnaturally, viscerally grotesque as a white man being fired... 

Setting aside the gendered power differential inherent in real historical witch hunts (pretty sure it wasn’t all the rape victims in Salem getting together to burn the mayor), and the pathetic gall of men feeling hunted after millenniums of treating women like prey, I will let you guys have this one. Sure, if you insist, it’s a witch hunt. I’m a witch, and I’m hunting you."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/columnists/weinstein-harassment-witchunt.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&referer=http://m.facebook.com/

FB: icymi "We don’t have the justice system on our side; we don’t have institutional power; we don’t have millions of dollars or the presidency; but we have our stories, and we’re going to keep telling them. Happy Halloween." 

"Black Lawmakers Hold a Particular Grievance With Facebook: Racial Exploitation"

"For Representative Barbara Lee, Democrat of California, the moment recalled the 1970s, when another government, this one in Washington, not Moscow, targeted black activists. She served as a community worker for the Black Panther Party as the F.B.I. used false information to go after its members.

“That actually got people killed and destroyed organizations,” Ms. Lee said. “Now look at Facebook allowing ads by the Russian government to create this kind of environment. That’s a problem. I don’t know if they’re even aware of the history and how dangerous allowing the promotion of division and racial animosity and racial hatred can be.”

And nearly a year after the election, black lawmakers say, little is being done to reverse the damage. Russia studied and exploited the “fault lines of racial tension,” said Representative Yvette D. Clarke, Democrat of New York, and multiple investigations into Russia’s actions and the Trump’s campaign possible involvement have thus far offered no safeguards to stop Moscow’s efforts...

Shortly after the meeting with Ms. Sandberg, Representative Cedric L. Richmond, Democrat of Louisiana and the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said he was concerned that the F.B.I. may have bought into Russia’s exploitation of African-Americans with its new class of threats called “Black Identity Extremists.” Mr. Richmond said that he feared that the F.B.I. may now go after black people who protest unfair policing practices and discriminatory policies based on false information peddled on social media."

FB: "For others, the anger is more with Moscow than Silicon Valley. Already, they say, the United States has to deal with the remnants of slavery, institutional racism in schools and the criminal justice system, and now a foreign adversary is stirring a boiling pot."