"Are You in Despair? That’s Good"

"According to a collection of studies, finely grained, unpleasant feelings allow people to be more agile at regulating their emotions, less likely to drink excessively when stressed and less likely to retaliate aggressively against someone who has hurt them.

Perhaps surprisingly, the benefits of high emotional granularity are not only psychological. People who achieve it are also likely to have longer, healthier lives. They go to the doctor and use medication less frequently, and spend fewer days hospitalized for illness. Cancer patients, for example, have lower levels of harmful inflammation when they more frequently categorize, label and understand their emotions...

It was natural to think that people with higher emotional granularity were just better at recognizing emotional states in themselves, but our lab found that this was not what was happening. Your brain, it turns out, in a very real sense constructs your emotional states — in the blink of an eye, outside of your awareness — and people who learn diverse concepts of emotion are better equipped to create more finely tailored emotions...

With higher emotional granularity, however, your brain may construct a more specific emotion, such as righteous indignation, which entails the possibility of specific actions. You might telephone a friend and rant about the water crisis. You might Google “lead poisoning” to learn how to better protect your children. You might call your member of Congress and demand change. You are no longer an overwhelmed spectator but an active participant."

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/05/opinion/sunday/are-you-in-despair-thats-good.html?login=email&login=email&login=email&smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=5

"You’re Not “Awkward” With Women. You’re Just Creepy"

"I’ve noticed that “being awkward” has become this weird shield for guys to excuse behavior that is way closer to creepy, harassing and downright rapey. They act as if “never learning how to talk to girls” is some sort of mental disability the rest of us should be tolerant of rather than a conscious choice on their part not to bother considering the feelings of others when they speak... 

This is not being “awkward.” Ross fromFriends was awkward when he would flirt with girls by naming types of gas. This is being a creep and hoping that a combination of societal expectations and fear of escalation on the part of the person you’re creeping on will allow you to get away with it consequence-free."

http://www.houstonpress.com/arts/you-re-not-awkward-with-women-you-re-just-creepy-8505416?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%206/24/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

It's not just randos in social situations, this "awkward" excuse gets guys out of trouble in professional situations too. In the academic science world, SO many professors get away with treating female grad students like shit because they are "awkward". In offices, managers are forgiven for their microagressions or for failing to communicate with female staff members. It's also a great, great way to get away with racist slips of the tongue. And for whatever reason, awkwardness is only forgivable in menmen and is only brought when they have harmed someone - it never seems to interfere with their career advancement. 

I want there to be a day when we #CallOutAwkwardMen, when women expose men to some of the shame and burden we were socialized with. A day when we ask men to make us more comfortable in social situations.

"Episode 10: International Brotherhood of Mothers"

http://thememorypalace.us/2009/05/episode-10-international-brotherhood-of-mothers

The real origin story of Mother's Day; it's fascinating and deeply political and beautifully told in 4 minutes.

"The Public Shaming of England’s First Umbrella User"

"Hanway was the first man to parade an umbrella unashamed in 18th-century England, a time and place in which umbrellas were strictly taboo. In the minds of many Brits, umbrella usage was symptomatic of a weakness of character, particularly among men. Few people ever dared to be seen with such a detestable, effeminate contraption. To carry an umbrella when it rained was to incur public ridicule. 

The British also regarded umbrellas as too French—inspired by the parasol, a Far Eastern contraption that for centuries kept nobles protected from the sun, the umbrella had begun to flourish in France in the early 18th century when Paris merchant Jean Marius invented a lightweight, folding version that, with added waterproofing materials, could protect users from rain and snow. In 1712, the French Princess Palatine purchased one of Marius’s umbrellas; soon after, it became a must-have accessory for noblewomen across the country. Later British umbrella users reported being called "mincing Frenchm[e]n" for carrying them in public... 

Fearing an interruption in their personal incomes, many hansom cab drivers and sedan chair carriers grew violent toward Hanway. "

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-public-shaming-of-englands-first-umbrella-user

I can't imagine an umbrella-less world. 

Also, how did the English achieve such intense cultural colonialism? So. Ridiculous.

"The Thesis That Everyone In My Family Is Talking About, When I Bring It Up"

"Respected research math is dominated by men of a certain attitude. Even allowing for individual variation, there is still a tendency towards an oppressive atmosphere, which is carefully maintained and even championed by those who find it conducive to success. As any good grad student would do, I tried to fit in, mathematically. I absorbed the atmosphere and took attitudes to heart. I was miserable, and on the verge of failure. The problem was not individuals, but a system of self-preservation that, from the outside, feels like a long string of betrayals, some big, some small, perpetrated by your only support system. When I physically removed myself from the situation, I did not know where I was or what to do. First thought: FREEDOM!!!! Second thought: but what about the others like me, who don’t do math the “right way” but could still greatly contribute to the community? I combined those two thoughts and started from zero on my thesis. What resulted was a thesis written for those who do not feel that they are encouraged to be themselves. People who, for instance, try to read a math paper and think, “Oh my goodness what on earth does any of this mean why can’t they just say what they mean????” rather than, “Ah, what lovely results!” (I can’t even pretend to know how “normal” mathematicians feel when they read math, but I know it’s not how I feel.) My thesis is, in many ways, not very serious, sometimes sarcastic, brutally honest, and very me. It is my art. It is myself. It is also as mathematically complete as I could honestly make it.

I’m unwilling to pretend that all manner of ways of thinking are equally encouraged, or that there aren’t very real issues of lack of diversity. It is not my place to make the system comfortable with itself. This may be challenging for happy mathematicians to read through; my only hope is that the challenge is accepted."

http://www.theliberatedmathematician.com/math/

"Introversion Is Not An Illness, But Society Sure Treats It Like One"

"Despite the constant misunderstandings, as many as 30-50 percent of people are thought to be introverted in some way (including ambiverts, who possess aspects of both personality types). You’d think that large number of introverted people in the world would make solidarity with them a priority, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Conversations about introversion/extroversion today are often superficial and based on this “us vs. them” dynamic that rests on introverts being pretentious and extroverts being overbearing. But now that people are having honest conversations, superficial or not, about what it’s like to be an introvert in the U.S. today, many people seem quick to dismiss introversion as a trend — another symptom of “special snowflake syndrome.”

But as a kid, there was never a moment where I wasn’t aware of the fact that I was “broken.” Even if I understood the material perfectly on my own, I was marked down on school assignments for not asking questions and participating in class. In college, a meeting with a professor ended with her calling me an ableist slur because I couldn’t and wouldn’t perform extroversion for her; I had a panic attack. (Even though I filed a complaint, she still works at the university in an advising capacity.) And once I began working full time, I was told repeatedly by supervisors that my work was stellar, but I wasn’t cut out for the job if I couldn’t be more “aggressive.” The criticism has been so widespread and consistent in my life — from family, friends, and random people on the street — that, in certain circumstances, even being called “quiet” becomes a trigger...

there’s an added benefit to giving people more space to be their authentic selves: when we stop creating hierarchies of personality, words like shy, awkward, reserved, or quiet stop being negative traits. Extroverts can be shy or want to hide from the world too, and the only reason they can’t admit that as openly is because popular understanding of these personality types is so rigid. And it has to be, if for no other reason than to privilege certain ways of being over others."

http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/2016/07/introversion-not-illness/

"When Pixels Collide"

"For April Fool's Day, Reddit launched a little experiment. It gave its users, who are all anonymous, a blank canvas called Place.

The rules were simple. Each user could choose one pixel from 16 colors to place anywhere on the canvas. They could place as many pixels of as many colors as they wanted, but they had to wait a few minutes between placing each one... 

First came the Creators. They were the artists to whom the blank canvas was an irresistible opportunity.

When Place was launched, with no warning, the first users started placing pixels willy-nilly, just to see what they could do. Within minutes, the first sketches appeared on Place. Crude and immature, they resembled cavemen paintings, the work of artists just stretching their wings... 

The Protectors who they had once welcomed with relief had become tyrants dictating fashion. They decided what could and couldn't be made. It wasn't long before Creators started chafing under their rule.

Meanwhile, with the issue of artwork resolved, the Factions had turned their sights on each other, forcing followers to choose sides in epic battles. They had little time to pay attention to the pathetic pleas of Creators who wanted approval for ideas of new art... 

They started on 4chan, Reddit's mangled, red-headed step-brother. It wasn't long before the pranksters on the Internet's most notorious imageboard took notice of what was happening on Reddit. It was too good an opportunity for them to pass up. And so they turned to the color closest to their heart -- black. They became the Void... 

It is a beautiful circle of art, life and death."

http://sudoscript.com/reddit-place/

Related: there is at least one other on Reddit... 

FB: "The Blue Corner wasn't alone. Another group started a Red Corner on the other side of the canvas. Their users claimed a leftist political leaning. Yet another started the Green Lattice, which went for a polka-dot design with interspersing green pixels and white. They championed their superior efficiency, since they only had to color half as many pixels as the other Factions.

It wasn't long before the Factions ran head-on into the Creators. Charmander was among the first battle sites."

"Ask Polly: How Do I Dump My Crappy Best Friend?"

"At the center of this bizarre reenactment is one driving assumption: “I am someone who deserves punishment. If I were better, this person wouldn’t reject me and treat me like toe cheese.” This belief makes it incredibly tough to confront the bad friend in question. Not only do you already know that you won’t be heard, but you also suspect that merely stating your needs or standing up for yourself makes you mean and hypocritical. Also: The bad friend is somehow always in the middle of a crisis of her own. So how dare you bring up your own crisis when her crisis is so much more dramatic and terrible than yours?

So you wait. For a long time. You accept that you need to be kept at arm’s length. As long as you’re going through something that requires her to hear a word about your feelings (even if they’re unrelated to her, even after her crisis passes), then you still have to be kept away. Plus, you really don’t deserve to be going through anything or to need anyone because, unlike her, you’re doing just fine, you have the tools you need, you don’t need any help from anyone else.

See how it works? When you have feelings, you’re exaggerating or being dramatic. When you need something, you’re just being petulant and needy. Your needs aren’t real to her, somehow. Even when you show up for her, that’s a liability, too. Because she doesn’t like to lean on people, and your intimacy and inside knowledge of her challenges make her anxious. You are a faucet that gets turned on and off. If you decide you want any control of your own, you’re treated like a faucet that isn’t working correctly...

Is she a shitty person? Probably not! Maybe you remind her of someone from her family and she needs to work something out with that person, through you. She has just as much of a right to her issues as you do to yours. Issues are just deep, passionate desires covered in shame, dripped in extra shame, boxed up in shame, and tied up in a big shame bow. But once someone treats your issues like a big pile of unnecessary garbage, it’s hard to treat theirs with care, too. Two people with issues and baggage and subconscious confusion and shame in the mix need a lot of generosity and goodwill between them not to feel like they’re perched in the middle of an enormous garbage dump."

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/07/ask-polly-how-do-i-dump-my-crappy-best-friend.html

"How Breakfast Became a Thing"

"During the campaign, which marketers named “Eat a Good Breakfast—Do a Better Job”, grocery stores handed out pamphlets that promoted the importance of breakfast while radio advertisements announced that “Nutrition experts say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

Ads like these were key to the rise of cereal, a product invented by men like John Harvey Kellogg, a deeply religious doctor who believed that cereal would both improve Americans’ health and keep them from masturbating and desiring sex. (Only half of his message made it into the ads.)

Before cereal, in the mid 1800s, the American breakfast was not all that different from other meals. Middle- and upper-class Americans ate eggs, pastries, and pancakes, but also oysters, boiled chickens, and beef steaks...

Historians tend to agree that breakfast became a daily, first thing in the morninginstitution once workers moved to cities and became employees who worked set schedules. In Europe, this first began in the 1600s, and breakfast achieved near ubiquity during the Industrial Revolution. With people going off to a full day’s work, breakfast became a thing... 

Cereal was seen as a solution to the nation’s dyspepsia, author Abigail Carroll argues, and since it didn’t need to be cooked, it was a convenience food at a time when the Industrial Revolution meant people had less time and less access to a kitchen or farm."

http://priceonomics.com/how-breakfast-became-a-thing/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%207/6/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Related: don't need to eat 3 meals one

"'Implicit Bias' May Account For A Glaring Disparity In Health Care Screening"

"they are two times more likely than whites to develop diabetes, despite having lower obesity rates. This isn’t a surprise to physicians who treat mostly Asians, but it was news to Dr. Hu when he relocated to Massachusetts over a decade ago. That’s because back in Pennsylvania most of his patients were white...

Tung theorizes that “either patients don’t ask for diabetes screening because they think they are not at risk, or physicians don’t screen their patients because they think their Asian patients are healthier and at lower risk.”

It goes back to the model minority myth. You know, the one where Asian Americans don’t do drugs, don’t commit crimes and are really healthy.

“I do think that a lot of people out there think that Asians likely eat healthier because they likely eat a diet of vegetables and rice or fish and rice,” said Tung. “And you know, as an Asian American, I know that that is not true.”

https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-02-09/implicit-bias-may-account-glaring-disparity-health-care-screening

Related: several other treatment disparities... (black people prejudice in general, black women alzheimers, women heart attacks, women adhd, women autism) 

FB: "there’s a certain resistance to accepting that implicit bias exists in health care because it goes against the Hippocratic oath." 

"THE VOICES IN OUR HEADS"

"Verbal rehearsal of material—the shopping list you recite as you walk the aisles of a supermarket—is part of our working memory system. But for some of us talking to ourselves goes much further: it’s an essential part of the way we think. Others experience auditory hallucinations, verbal promptings from voices that are not theirs but those of loved ones, long-departed mentors, unidentified influencers, their conscience, or even God... 

Fernyhough has based his research on the hunch that talking to ourselves and hearing voices—phenomena that he sees as related—are not mere quirks, and that they have a deeper function. His book offers a chatty, somewhat inconclusive tour of the subject, making a case for the role of inner speech in memory, sports performance, religious revelation, psychotherapy, and literary fiction. He even coins a term, “dialogic thinking,” to describe his belief that thought itself may be considered “a voice, or voices, in the head.”... 

In his work at Durham, Fernyhough participated in an experiment in which he had an inner conversation with an old teacher of his while his brain was imaged by fMRI scanning. Naturally, the scan showed activity in parts of the left hemisphere associated with language. Among the other brain regions that were activated, however, were some associated with our interactions with other people. Fernyhough concludes that “dialogic inner speech must therefore involve some capacity to represent the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes of the people with whom we share our world.” This raises the fascinating possibility that when we talk to ourselves a kind of split takes place, and we become in some sense multiple: it’s not a monologue but a real dialogue... 

Romme came to sympathize with her point of view, and decided that it was vital to engage seriously with the actual content of what patients’ voices said. The pair started to publicize the condition, asking other voice-hearers to be in touch. The movement grew from there. It currently has networks in twenty-four countries, with more than a hundred and eighty groups in the United Kingdom alone, and its membership is growing in the United States. It holds meetings and conferences in which voice-hearers discuss their experiences, and it campaigns to increase public awareness of the phenomenon... 

Fernyhough and his colleagues have tried to quantify this phenomenon. Ninety-one writers attending the 2014 Edinburgh International Book Festival responded to a questionnaire; seventy per cent said that they heard characters speak. Several writers linked the speech of their characters to inner dialogues even when they are not actively writing. As for plot, some writers asserted that their characters “don’t agree with me, sometimes demand that I change things in the story arc of whatever I’m writing.”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/the-voices-in-our-heads?mbid=social_facebook

"Social Justice Must Be Complicated, Because Oppression Is Never Simple"

"Systemic oppression is built throughout all of our most important systems — our education system, our workplaces, our government, our arts and entertainment. It is in the air that we breathe and it is upheld with almost every action we take. That is how it has lasted so long...

Do you think all unvalued women are unvalued for the same reasons?

Because a black woman is not poor simply because she’s a woman and the patriarchy undervalues the role of women. She is also poor because her skin color and hair texture labels her as unprofessional, unreliable, volatile, unskilled, and unintelligent. She is poor because society sees her as someone from whom labor is to be taken, not compensated. She is also poor because she is more likely to be the sole caregiver of children in a system that locks away black men. Any efforts to address the poverty of women that do not address these issues will leave black women behind...

People look at the last election and say that we failed to come together against Trump because we were all too caught up in our “individual” wants. If our failure in 2016 was anything other than massive amounts of white people deciding to vote for White Supremacy (and it’s really not much more than that), I’d say it was the insistence that people all pretend they were on the “left” for the same reason, and that we would all rally around a very narrow set of goals that would only meet a very narrow set of needs."

https://theestablishment.co/social-justice-must-be-complicated-because-oppression-is-never-simple-3a24ea6c9f88#.oluifc1pb

FB: "What we have today is a very complex and enduring system of multiple oppressions designed to reinforce and interact with each other in a way that makes it impossible to address one without addressing another.

So if you say, “Our goal is to fight racism” or “Our goal is to fight sexism” or “Our goal is to fight the Trump Administration” you are saying equally huge and complicated things. You are saying, “Our goal is to fight multiple, complicated, interwoven systems at once.”"

"The last untouchable in Europe"

"As Marie-Pierre avers, the truth about the Cagots is obscure. The people first emerge in documents around the 13th century. By then they are already regarded as an inferior caste, the "untouchables" of western France, or northern Spain. In medieval times the Cagots – also knows as Agotes, Gahets, Capets, Caqueux, etc – were divided from the general peasantry in several ways. They had their own urban districts: usually on the malarial side of the river. These dismal ghettoes were known as Cagoteries; traces of them can still be found in Pyrenean communities such as Campan or Hagetmau... 

On occasions, the bigotry was brutally enforced: in the early 18th century a prosperous Cagot in the Landes was caught using the font reserved for non-Cagots – his hand was chopped off and nailed to the church door. Another Cagot who dared to farm his fields (strictly verboten) had his feet pierced with hot iron spikes. "If there was any crime in a village," says Marie-Pierre, "the Cagot was usually blamed. Some were actually burned at the stake."... 

Their provenance is opaque. That is partly because the Cagots themselves have disappeared from view. During the French Revolution, the laws against Cagots were formally abandoned – indeed many Cagots pillaged local archives and erased any record of their ancestry. After 1789, the Cagots slowly assimilated into the general populace; many may have even emigrated.

Nonetheless, there are historical accounts that afford an intriguing glimpse. Contemporary sources describe them as being short, dark and stocky. Confusingly, some others saw them as blonde and blue eyed. Francisque Michel's Histoire des races maudites (History of the cursed races, 1847), was one of the first studies. He found Cagots had "frizzy brown hair"... 

her theory, of the Cagots being converted but still-distrusted Muslims, is supported by many French experts: because it neatly explains the religious disapproval of the Cagots."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-last-untouchable-in-europe-878705.html

"How Capicola Became Gabagool: The Italian New Jersey Accent, Explained"

"The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms—Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily (they were called different things at the time, but roughly correspond to those regions now)—those were, basically, different countries. Its citizens didn’t speak the same language, didn’t identify as countrymen, sometimes were even at war with each other...

each of the old Italian kingdoms had their own…well, D’Imperio, who is Italian, calls them “dialects.” But others refer to them in different ways. Basically the old Italian kingdoms each spoke their own languages that largely came from the same family tree, slightly but not all that much closer than the Romance languages, like French, Spanish, or Portuguese. The general family name for these languages is Italo-Dalmatian (Dalmatian, it turns out, refers to Croatia. The dog is from there, too.). They were not all mutually comprehensible, and had their own external influences. Calabrian, for example, is heavily influenced by Greek, thanks to a long Greek occupation and interchange. In the northwest near the border with France, Piedmont, with its capital of Turin, spoke a language called Piedmontese, which is sort of French-ish. Sicilian, very close to North Africa, had a lot of Arabic-type stuff in it... 

this gets weird, because most Italian-Americans can trace their immigrant ancestors back to that time between 1861 and World War I, when the vast majority of “Italians,” such as Italy even existed at the time, wouldn’t have spoken the same language at all, and hardly any of them would be speaking the northern Italian dialect that would eventually become Standard Italian."

http://newsletters.vox.com/t/d-l-hjihluy-kktkdddur-jt/

FB: "There’s something both a little silly and a little wonderful about someone who doesn’t even speak the language putting on an antiquated accent for a dead sub-language to order some cheese." 

"Psychologists Explain Your Phone Anxiety (and How to Get Over It)"

"So why, to so many people, does the phone seem like a scarier option than texting? After all, a typed message is also stripped of all those nonverbal cues. But with written communication, at least, you have time on your side: time to gather your thoughts, time to edit, time to reconsider before hitting send. The phone gives you no such luxuries, meaning that until you hang up, you’re thinking on your feet — and that every word is more of a gamble."

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/02/psychologists-explain-your-phone-anxiety.html

"Revenge of the Lunch Lady"

"To those unfamiliar with the absurdist theater of school lunch, it is puzzling, even maddening, that feeding kids nutritious food should be so hard. You buy good food. You cook it. You serve it to hungry kids.

Yet the National School Lunch Program, an $11.7 billion behemoth that feeds more than 31 million children each day, is a mess, and has been for years. Conflicts of interest were built into the program. It was pushed through Congress after World War II with the support of military leaders who wanted to ensure that there would be enough healthy young men to fight the next war, and of farmers who were looking for a place to unload their surplus corn, milk and meat. The result was that schools became the dumping ground for the cheap calories our modern agricultural system was designed to overproduce...

Since the 1990s, the USDA has made many improvements—it now requires that canned vegetables have less salt and insists that ground beef be 95 percent lean. But school lunch is still a disgrace, and the timidity of Congress is largely to blame. In 2011, the USDA proposed limiting the amount of potatoes and other starchy vegetables permitted in school lunches so that cafeterias could make room for healthier options. But the Senate, led by members from two top potato producers, Maine and Colorado, killed the idea in a unanimous vote...

by the early 1960s, schools weren’t receiving enough to feed all their students, and many pulled out of the program. As a result, middle-class students, whose parents could cover the difference between the government subsidy and the actual cost of a meal, ended up benefiting the most from school lunch, while the truly needy went hungry... Once school lunch was perceived as welfare, it became a target...

It’s weirdly beautiful watching one of McCoy’s kitchens at work.  At many U.S. schools, the food arrives ready to be reheated. Mixing a jar of commercial sauce into boil-in-the-bag pasta is considered “cooking.” But at Cabell Midland High School, the 18 cooks—all women, all dressed in medical scrubs, all engaged in constant small talk with one another—start arriving at 6 a.m.; it’s the only way to make sure that lunch is ready for the first wave of students who eat at 10:49.  Over the course of one morning, I watched two cooks quarter red potatoes and toss them in olive oil with a shake of garlic powder and paprika, then move on to rubbing chicken breasts with a 17-spice seasoning. I saw cooks top rounds of pizza dough with homemade tomato sauce and cheese and mix olive oil and vinegar for salad dressing. (Commercial dressings, packed with sodium and calories, undermine the health benefits of most salads.) One cook’s full-time job consisted of making homemade desserts and fresh bread—fluffy, delicious parkerhouse rolls whose yeasty scent wafted down the school’s hallways...

It’s weirdly beautiful watching one of McCoy’s kitchens at work.  At many U.S. schools, the food arrives ready to be reheated. Mixing a jar of commercial sauce into boil-in-the-bag pasta is considered “cooking.” But at Cabell Midland High School, the 18 cooks—all women, all dressed in medical scrubs, all engaged in constant small talk with one another—start arriving at 6 a.m.; it’s the only way to make sure that lunch is ready for the first wave of students who eat at 10:49.  Over the course of one morning, I watched two cooks quarter red potatoes and toss them in olive oil with a shake of garlic powder and paprika, then move on to rubbing chicken breasts with a 17-spice seasoning. I saw cooks top rounds of pizza dough with homemade tomato sauce and cheese and mix olive oil and vinegar for salad dressing. (Commercial dressings, packed with sodium and calories, undermine the health benefits of most salads.) One cook’s full-time job consisted of making homemade desserts and fresh bread—fluffy, delicious parkerhouse rolls whose yeasty scent wafted down the school’s hallways."

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/school-lunch/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email#

This was informative #understatements

"Why does the United States still let 12-year-olds get married?"

"While most states set 18 as the minimum marriage age, exceptions in every state allow children younger than 18 to marry, typically with parental consent or judicial approval. How much younger? Laws in 27 states do not specify an age below which a child cannot marry...

Based on the correlation we identified between state population and child marriage, we estimated that the total number of children wed in America between 2000 and 2010 was nearly 248,000... In this way, U.S. lawmakers are strongly at odds with U.S. foreign policy...

Minors such as Siddiqui can easily be forced into marriage or forced to stay in a marriage. Adults being pressured in this way have options, including access to domestic-violence shelters. But a child who leaves home is considered a runaway; the police try to return her to her family and could even charge our organization criminally if we were to get involved. Most domestic-violence shelters do not accept minors, and youth shelters typically notify parents that their children are there. Child-protective services are usually not a solution, either: Caseworkers point out that preventing legal marriages is not in their mandate...

Bills introduced last year in New York and Maryland languished and eventually died, though Maryland’s was just reintroduced. Other states have not acted at all. “Some of my colleagues were stuck in an old-school way of thinking: A girl gets pregnant, she needs to get married,” said Maryland Del. Vanessa Atterbeary, who introduced the bill to end child marriage in her state."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/02/10/why-does-the-united-states-still-let-12-year-old-girls-get-married/?utm_term=.186b16d40114&wpisrc=nl_most-draw16&wpmm=1

"WHAT COLLEGE CAN’T DO"

"In recent years, essays lamenting the culture of overwork—and the superficial, self-centered, self-destructive busyness that development from it—have become a genre unto themselves. Ostensibly, these essays are about manageable subjects, subjects about which it’s possible to have a single opinion, like higher education, parenting, or “mindfulness.” But they are also about another, larger subject, which, in its glacial, impersonal force, seems to transcend opinion. That subject, more or less, is modernity...

That’s not to say that Deresiewicz’s essay doesn’t tell us something important about élite colleges. It puts into relief the stresses they are under, and the sometimes impossible demands that we make upon them as modern people looking for comfort in a changing world...

Deresiewicz makes a mistake in ascribing to his students, as personal failings, the problems of the age in which they live. He finds their practical striving distasteful, and complains that they “dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.” Who cares how they dress? In “The Waste Land”—a poem that is about, among other things, modern busyness—people seem superficial, hollow, disengaged, and exhausted. But the problem isn’t their individual choices; it’s the age, which shouts, at every opportunity, “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME.” Inside, they are as alive as ever—but in ways that are “not to be found in our obituaries / Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider / Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor / In our empty rooms.”"

http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/what-college-cant-do

Did college/study ever do this? Maybe for wealthy white men, reading about themselves, engaging with the texts that created the ideas of masculinity, whiteness, and capitalism. But does that exist for anyone else? And honestly, that sounds... stifling. 

FB: "Perhaps it was once the case that, during the four years of college, you could build a self by reading books. But things are no longer so straightforward, because we have an ambivalent relationship to the knowledge of the past."

"An army of history nerds is turning archival material into beautiful gifs"

"“There’s a conception that maps and vintage things are dusty and good for research and not much else,” says DPLA’s Kenny Whitebloom. GIF It Up seeks to bust open this once-dusty trove for greater visibility online. Whitebloom points to the vast archive available — with items ranging from artwork to patent paperwork to wartime news reel — as proof that these cultural heritage materials have a life off the shelves and on the Internet... 

Many GIF-makers splice still images together — from different documents, different creators and different periods of history — to juxtapose old with new, high with low and sweet with surreal... 

Artists are also welcome to add their own artistic elements to the archived material. Ting Sun of New Zealand mashed together a still of fungi cellsseparating in a petri dish with a small surprise of his own: two pop-up googly eyes."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/11/20/an-army-of-history-nerds-is-turning-archival-material-into-beautiful-gifs/?utm_term=.5d51e2f379be

These are great, scientists should get into it. 

"Decolonising Desire: The Politics of Love"

"In 2014, OkCupid released data demonstrating how ‘response rate’ to dating profiles is profoundly affected by how you are racialised. There is a plethora of blogs and think pieces – particularly by women of colour – documenting traumatic and degrading experiences during dating and sex that specifically happens through and alongside their racialisation. Writer Junot Diaz – credited with coining the loosely defined term ‘decolonial love’ – explores in his novel Monstro the dynamics of a half-Dominican half-Haitian girl’s “search for – yes – love in a world that has made it a solemn duty to guarantee that poor raced girls like her are never loved.”...

Looking back at my own experience, a nascent adolescent sexual curiosity was rapidly crushed by a combination of bodily mockery and – most often – total invisibility. A series of small lessons learned through film, television and personal experience, accumulated to the eventual understanding that people who look like me cannot be the subject of love. If lucky, we can be objects of fetishisation – but that is very different to being perceived as lovable...

The construction of the racialised woman’s body during colonisation and slavery as dirty, hypersexual and close to nature was specifically through their opposition to the chaste cleanliness of the Victorian woman, who, for her part, was bound to domesticity... What connects these highly embodied categories of undesirable women is that they are specifically constructed in opposition to the discourses of love, romance, marriage and family. Their bodies are fascinations, adventures, scandals and pathologies – these subjects are not worth even the premise of the emotional labour of commitment."

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3094-decolonising-desire-the-politics-of-love?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=UK+UTM+-+Decolonising+Desire%3A+The+Politics+of+Love

Related: Blak women Asian men; other essays...; violnce in the name of white women (after Dylann Roof);

FB: "we can build an understanding of how ‘love’, represented as an apolitical, transcendent realm of affect into which you unwittingly fall, is actually deeply politicized, and linked to broader structural violences faced particularly by women of colour globally."

""Saviors" Believe That They Are Better Than the People They Are "Saving""

"This paucity of imagination has led to a bleaker life for all of us. If all of our "solutions" are just tinkering within the system, how can we truly imagine, let alone build, a better world? It's also disempowering -- it teaches that most people will have no role in affecting the problems that afflict them.

For some, the journey to more accountable activism can be difficult. People with privilege often respond with defensiveness when their privilege is pointed out. Robin DiAngelo coined the term white fragility to describe white reactions to criticism from people of color, including "the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation." All of which, she notes, serves to "reinstate white racial equilibrium."...

People with privilege are raised to see their own experience as central and objective. We can't imagine a story in which we are not the protagonist. We can't imagine a different, better economic system. We can't imagine a world without white, cisgendered, male dominance.

Saviors are not interested in examining their own privilege. We don't want to see that the systems of race and class and gender that keep us in comfort where we are -- in the "right" jobs and neighborhoods and schools -- are the same systems that created the problems we say we want to solve."

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/38989-saviors-believe-that-they-are-better-than-the-people-they-are-saving

FB: "Sixty percent of US nonprofits see their mission as serving people of color. Sixty-three percent say that diversity is a key value of their organization. Yet 93 percent of nonprofit chief executives, 92 percent of their boards, and 82 percent of their staff are white. Thirty percent of nonprofit boards are all-white. These statistics suggest that the people directing and funding these organizations have absorbed the idea that people of color are not the experts in what they need."

"All hail partisan politics"

"there’s a lot more to our democracy than these formal structures. If you were trying to understand the human body, you might start by looking at a skeleton. This is obviously the basic structure and we couldn’t survive without it. But studying the skeletal structure, by itself, isn’t nearly enough for you to understand what a living human being is. The truth is that in a working democracy there are all sorts of institutions that matter, formal as well as informal. The informal institutions are not specifically defined or in many cases are not even referenced in the Constitution. But they can and do play a pivotal role. A very familiar example would be the press...

GAZETTE: You argue that though democracy is fragile, political conflict at every level of society is vital to a vibrant democracy. That seems counterintuitive. What do you mean?

MOSS: I think political conflict — even intense political conflict — is absolutely essential in a democracy. Conflict is what generates and surfaces good ideas. There’s a competition in the marketplace of ideas just like in the economic marketplace. Competition in the business world is immensely productive because it plays a vital role in generating innovation, new ideas, and new products. The same is true in the policy sphere. Policymakers need to identify problems, and some people are better at doing this than others. Then there’s the need to diagnose the problems and come up with solutions, and of course implement those solutions effectively. All of these things require ideas and creativity. Conflict within the context of political competition is important for this, and conflict is also essential to help keep at bay some fundamental threats to the democracy, from undue special-interest influence to tyranny of the majority... 

So today, for those who worry about the health of our democracy, what I think we need to be looking at most carefully is our “culture of democracy,” including our commitment to democratic values and processes. We need to ask ourselves as honestly as we can whether our commitment to the democracy stands above our particular partisan and policy preferences. To the extent that the answer is yes, then I think we can handle the intense conflict that we’re seeing in our political system these days. To the extent the answer tilts toward no or even leans in that direction, then I think we need to be extraordinarily vigilant because that’s when we can get into real trouble. The right question is not “How do we tamp down the conflict?” Instead, it’s “How do we make sure that what we share in common is rock solid and ultimately stronger than our differences?”"

http://links.repoint.harvard.edu/ctt?kn=14&ms=MTQyMjI1NzcS1&r=MTUxMjQwNjQ1NDE0S0&b=0&j=OTIzMjU1MjEwS0&mt=1&rt=0

Related: take it from a German, Americans too afraid of conflict 

FB: "when Americans have shown a strong common faith in the democracy— when they have sought above all to safeguard the democracy and sustain it and strengthen it — this common faith has been the glue that held them together. This is what rendered political conflict constructive, rather than destructive. In America, we don’t all share a common ethnic heritage or common religious beliefs. We never have. So long as Americans have, deep down, put protection of the democracy first — above their partisan differences — individual citizens and political leaders have been careful not to push political conflict too far. They have been willing to give a little for the sake of the democracy."

"We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews. Here’s what happened."

"Since we started working on interviewing.io, in order to achieve true interviewee anonymity, we knew that hiding gender would be something we’d have to deal with eventually but put it off for a while because it wasn’t technically trivial to build a real-time voice modulator. Some early ideas included sending female users a Bane mask.

When the Bane mask thing didn’t work out, we decided we ought to build something within the app... during a few of these rounds, we decided to see what would happen to interviewees’ performance when we started messing with their perceived genders...

After the experiment was over, I was left scratching my head. If the issue wasn’t interviewer bias, what could it be?...

What I learned was pretty shocking. As it happens, women leave interviewing.io roughly 7 times as often as men after they do badly in an interview. And the numbers for two bad interviews aren’t much better. You can see the breakdown of attrition by gender below (the differences between men and women are indeed statistically significant with P < 0.00001)...

Since gathering these findings and starting to talk about them a bit in the community, I began to realize that there was some supremely interesting academic work being done on gender differences around self-perception, confidence, and performance. Some of the work below found slightly different trends than we did, but it’s clear that anyone attempting to answer the question of the gender gap in tech would be remiss in not considering the effects of confidence and self-perception in addition to the more salient matter of bias."

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/