"Women Belong on Corporate Boards. Let’s Stop Studying Why."

"The very language used in these studies presupposes a male audience. They set out to convince a room full of men that making room for a woman should be their next move because it’s “productive” and “profitable.” This language equates women’s involvement in a company to a monetary asset, at odds with the argument that women deserve to be in the room in the first place. The reduction of women to a financial asset reduces their representation to a strategy. The thing with strategies, though, is that they are employed to reach a goal and then dropped once that goal is met.

Most of these studies focus on boards as a microcosm of a persistent issue within the work environment, but it’s larger than just a work problem. It’s about validation, and who gets to give it. What we do when we correlate a woman’s worth to her consumable output is take away the freedom to fail, a privilege that men exercise freely and regularly. Positioning the inclusion of women as a strategic decision, in any context, means they must behave like one; it means we are only making room for one, the best one. This is not inclusion, this is exceptionalism, and it only reinforces an environment where women are not inherently valued but instead merely allowed to participate when needed."

https://medium.com/@GenderAvenger/women-belong-on-corporate-boards-lets-stop-studying-why-e0686d6d82e9#.f6s5aew4m

It's so real. These environments are still addressed as the domain of white men. I've written about this before --

Related: HBR's "Women and minorities punished..."

FB: "Most of these studies focus on boards as a microcosm of a persistent issue within the work environment, but it’s larger than just a work problem. It’s about validation, and who gets to give it."

"Why Can’t We Agree on What It Means to Be Friends?"

"Most of us apply the label “friend” to a shockingly wide range of people. Sure, everyone knows that a Facebook contact is not the same as your oldest confidante is not the same as your office-lunch buddy. But these categories are nebulous and often shifting. It’s strange to suddenly realize that a work friendship has become something more, just as it can be awkward to realize our bestie tier has emptied out and it’s time to invest in some new friendships. And we almost never have these conversations explicitly... 

Most of us spend a lifetime learning how to articulate our needs and expectations in romantic relationships. With friends, we rarely attempt it. If you’re using a dating app, chances are you have some idea of whether you’re looking for deep commitment or just someone to sleep with. And when romances get more serious or come to an end, typically there’s a conversation about the change. But explicit intentions and “discuss the relationship” talks are rare among friends. Even if we can feel that something has shifted between us, we almost never directly acknowledge it."

http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/08/how-to-make-friends-its-not-just-hobbies-its-timing.html

Related: 10 types of friends, breaking up with best friends, 

"Do women’s periods really synchronise when they live together?"

"Well if you are one of the 80% of women who believes in synchronicity – brace yourself. It isn’t a thing. Since McClintock’s study there has been enough research with negative results to move menstrual synchronicity into urban mythology. Many studies have tried to replicate McClintock’s findings – some have succeeded, but more have not."

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/15/periods-housemates-menstruation-synchronise

I have had multiple groups of friends that joked about our cycles lining up, and it now occurs to me that we were really just noticing the order of our periods - and that, if you have something that happens once a month for several days and you have a lot of people with periods hanging out together and discussing it, eventually you are going to find yourself in a group with similar "times of the month" and then you will rely on each other for emergency period supplies and bond over it. Actually, I wonder if people with periods around the same time of the month are more likely to become friends, just because we're going to like be in the bathroom more together and are more likely to have that moment where you completely save someone's day with a pad and a motrin. 

"Jerks and the Start-Ups They Ruin"

"Bro cos. become corporate frat houses, where employees are chosen like pledges, based on “culture fit.” Women get hired, but they rarely get promoted and sometimes complain of being harassed. Minorities and older workers are excluded.

Bro culture also values speedy growth over sustainable profits, and encourages cutting corners, ignoring regulations and doing whatever it takes to win.

Sometimes it works. But often the whole thing just flames out. The bros blow through the money and find they have no viable business. For example: Quirky, founded in 2009 by the 20-something Ben Kaufman. It raised $185 million to build a “social product development platform” that sold kooky gadgets, but filed for bankruptcy basically because the “brash” and “unorthodox” chief executive had no business being a chief executive. One indication that Mr. Kaufman is a bro? Well, the first reference he lists on his LinkedIn page is: “He’s a dick … but hilarious."...

Bro C.E.O.s are better at raising money than making money. So why do venture capitalists keep investing in them? It may be because many of the venture capitalists are bros as well."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/opinion/sunday/jerks-and-the-start-ups-they-ruin.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

FB: "Uber’s collapse should not come as a surprise but it does offer a lesson: Toxic workplace culture and rotten financial performance go hand-in-hand. It’s possible for a boorish jerk to run a successful company, but jerks do best when surrounded by non-jerks, and bros do best when they hire seasoned executives to help them. Without “adult supervision” and institutional restraints, the C.E.-Bro’s vices end up infecting the culture of the workplaces they control."

"The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England"

"the kaleidoscope of the early-and mid-1800s wasn’t just a child’s toy. In fact, it wouldn’t become child’s toy for at least several decades. Instead, this new mobile device was in the hands of everyone from children to the elderly; from professors to pastors and was seen on nearly every public street in the UK where it was first invented. How this beloved device went from adult obsession to throwaway juvenilia turns out to be a long, strange journey, one that has profound implications for the mobile devices you are carrying right now... 

while experimenting with the relationship between optics, light, and mirrors that he began to notice that when the reflectors were inclined toward each other, they created circular patterns as the image multiplied across the surfaces.

As other scientists began working with the kaleidoscope, some found it useful as a tool to visualize massive numbers; the possible variations produced by a single kaleidoscope were unprecedented...Many people of the era argued that giving attention to the patterns built from such scraps was a waste of time. This was especially pronounced, they argued, when true beauty was all around. All a kaleidoscope viewer had to do was put down the instrument of false beauty and look up at real beauty in nature. Such admonitions could have easily been lifted directly from recent op-eds on our society’s use of cell phones... 

Within a couple of decades, near the beginning of the Victorian era, there were no “penny for a peek” signs to be seen on city streets and the kaleidoscope was now sold with a stand, meant to be placed on a table in the Victorian parlor. It was a conversation piece in the home. It was less mobile than it was portable within the owner’s house. Essentially, the kaleidoscope had been “domesticated.”"

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-forgotten-kaleidoscope-craze-in-victorian-england

This made me think a lot about "spheres", public and private and social and work. And it's interesting, there aren't that many objects that we carry between them; we dress differently for each, use different tools, even have different personalities quite often. But now we have smartphones, and we use them to create a private sphere in non-private places and to push our private sphere moments into the public.

Like, my phone is full of articles and podcasts and games that I consume privately and that pull my focus away from my setting and the pose - earbuds in,  phone in hand, head bent towards the screen - creates a tiny bubble around us wherever we are. In this pose,  we can politely ignore each other, we are less available for public perusal, and other people practically have to knock to get in. 

And then, of course, when we are alone I'm our truly private spheres,  we can enter public spheres online with our phones and share pictures of our breakfast or instantly post our inner thoughts. 

And I think that's important to be able to do, I think that work is intruding on time and space that used to be private, and that a lot of us in our 20s have these fuzzy borders between spheres and that smartphones are important tools for navigating that. 

FB: "Visual media that challenge ideas of authentic beauty also bring up the question about what scholar Nicholas Mirzoeff calls “the right to look,” (from his book by the same name), that is, what are the cultural priorities of our visual attention. Where should our eyes be directed? In what kinds of things are we allowed be immersed (nature, a religious scripture, mediation, a lover’s gaze)? What can we look at and what can we ignore?"

"For 18 years, I thought she was stealing my identity. Until I found her"

"Finally, the DMV told me that I wasn’t the victim of identity theft; there was simply another Lisa S Davis with the same birthday in New York City. Our records were crossed. When cops run a license, they don’t check the person’s address, signature, or social security numbers. They check the name and the birthday, and both the other Lisa S Davis’s and mine were the same. We were, in the eyes of the law, one person, caught in a perfect storm of DMV and NYPD idiocy... 

I convinced her to give me copies of all the unpaid tickets and scoured them for clues. Who were these Lisa Davises and why were they in trouble? Lisa Davis in East New York had jaywalked, but never paid the fine. Lisa Davis on the Bed Stuy/Bushwick border had an unleashed dog. Lisa Davis in Clinton Hill had an open container. So did two different Lisa Davises with different home addresses in the Soundview area of the South Bronx, as did a Lisa Davis near the Gun Hill Houses in the Bronx. Lisa Davis in East Harlem got a disorderly conduct citation for fighting. So did Lisa Davis in Bed-Stuy. Lisa Davis in Harlem was trespassing (code for shoplifting), though the cop’s handwriting was so hard to read that I couldn’t discern the details. I could read the defendant’s statement, though: “I just needed some soap.”... 

It was then that it became clear to me: the reason for the tickets wasn’t that these Lisa Davises were petty criminals. The reason was likely that they lived in highly policed areas where even the smallest infractions are ticketed, the sites of “Broken Windows” policing. The reason, I thought, was that they weren’t white.

That could have been the “proof” I offered to the judge. Brownsville’s population is less than 1% white. It almost couldn’t have been me. My neighborhood, though fairly diverse (and cheap) when I moved there in the early 90s, is now 76% white. I have never heard of anyone getting tickets in my neighborhood for any of the infractions committed by the Lisa Davises in neighborhoods of color."

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/03/identity-theft-racial-justice

Okay, so, don't be this woman so excited that a black woman called her an "ivory twin", or feeling like you know what it is to be non-white because you also had to deal with the criminal justice system being absurd at you. 

But, this is an interesting story about obtaining about identity and how that functions in intersection with the government 

"THE DRAMATIC HISTORY OF AMERICAN SEX-ED FILMS"

"

"From the outset, films helped lend an air of authority and importance to sex education, which has always been on the defensive in America. Even now, when polls show that more than 80 percent of Americans supportteaching comprehensive sex education, filmmakers creating material for public schools are extremely aware that their every scene will be dissected by political opponents. This century-long fight over the validity of teaching the birds and the bees has shaped the way sex-ed videos are framed, with an overwhelming focus on venereal disease and the benefits of abstinence rather than a more positive approach to sexuality. And, perhaps predictably, they have had a specific tendency to ignore both pleasure and women’s sexuality.

Instead of becoming steadily better in quality over time, the content, messages, and accuracy of sex-ed films have fluctuated with the moral and political forces of each era. What’s especially surprising in looking at the history of sex-ed films is how the medium has changed in its approach to contraception. Condoms, over time, have gone from being framed as a straightforward way to prevent disease to a failure-prone and risky option...

Although sex-ed films are meant to resonate with American students from all walks of life, they have tended, over time, to omit key details. In his research, Eberwein found that mentions of the clitoris as a part of female anatomy were relatively rare in the canon of sex-ed films. No film mentioned how the clitoris relates to female pleasure until the 1980s. Films have been far more likely to discuss male masturbation than to consider that women masturbate and have sexual needs. While educational films that discuss hormone changes in boys often made reference to “nocturnal emissions,” the exploration of girls’ hormone changes focus on menstruation and the emergence of child-bearing hips, rather than on desire.

In addition to erasing female sexual agency, sex-ed films for a long time represented only white children. In early films, people of color were used as “others” whom the presumed white audience would observe. In that significant first film, Human Growth, the main, white teens’ curiosity about how humans develop is piqued by looking at a picture book that featured Native American children wearing loincloths. African-Americans are almost entirely absent from sex-ed films shown in schools until the 1960s, when more films begin including some African-American, Asian, and Latino characters.

Same-sex relationships and happy premarital sex apparently remain taboo topics in sex-ed films—with only a few exceptions, LGBT relationships are absent from sex-ed films and consensual sex among teens is discouraged."

http://feministing.com/2014/06/17/the-dramatic-history-of-american-sex-ed-films/

FB: "Films from the 1970s are distinctly more open-minded and free-form than in other eras. There’s full-frontal nudity as couples romp in tall grass. In one film shown in Sex(Ed): The Movie, 1976’s Masturbatory Story, a country song about masturbation plays while a white guy plays with himself in the tub. “My eyes rolled round, my toes curled under, flashes of lightning, rolls of thunder,” sings the narrator. A girl appears and seems delighted at the situation, but doesn’t touch herself in any way.  There is ample use of kazoo throughout."

"Hands Off the Belly"

"I went to a small private elementary school in Pacific Palisades called The Village School, and the quote “It takes a village to raise a child” was used in many a speech there. I believe it was even written on a wall. It’s not that I don’t believe in it. I believe that it takes parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and mentors to shape a child’s education, and I believe that teachers come in all shapes and sizes. I am grateful for the strong community around my husband and me and feel blessed that the “bean” will have a multitude of friends and role models. But it doesn’t take a village to carry a pregnancy to full term."

https://medium.com/life-tips/hands-off-the-belly-1fdc203102d5

"THE LONG HISTORY OF AFRICAN IMMIGRANTS IN SPAIN"

"For thousands of years, people have passed back and forth across the Strait of Gibraltar from Spain to North Africa blending the artistic, cultural, and religious traditions of both regions into the Spain we know today...

The most infamous interaction between North Africa and Southern Spain came in 711, when Islamic North Africans took control of the Iberian peninsula and held it, despite strong opposition, for more than 700 years...

Recent studies have shown that many of modern Spain’s inhabitants have a significant amount of African ancestry, presumably from this time period. This is apparently true of the vast majority of Southern Europeans including Italians and Greeks, as well as the Spanish.

Yet this blended ancestry is very rarely acknowledged, especially now as anti-African sentiment seems to be on the rise in Spain"

http://daily.jstor.org/african-history-in-spain/?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=facebook

I feel like, in a different version of history, the area around the Mediterranean would have been considered its own region. It kind of sparked everything that happened in Europe, at least, and had huge impacts on East Africa and the Middle East. 

"Kontextmaschine"

"But the Disney World commercials in particular - you notice they don’t really make a case for going to Disney World, or even really explain what Disney World is. Because they’re not pitching Disney World, they’re reminding you of Disney World. It’s not “hey, Disney World is a thing you could go to”, it’s “hey, maybe it’s time for this generation’s pilgrimage”.

Disney’s weird. It’s kind of a company, but also custodian of some of the cultic functions of American culture, something like the priestly colleges of ancient Rome.

Like, they maintain sites of pilgrimage. I’m not saying that as a joke. Back of the envelope calculation, Americans go to Disney parks at a rate 7 times higher than Muslims go to Mecca. (The line between “tourist trap” and “religious site” has always been thin.)

And they’re custodians of the national narrative. Like I’ve said, they pitch “continuity with midcentury small town and earlier frontier culture” as a fundamental, almost taken-for-granted aspect of Americanness with a confidence and charm you don’t often see these days. And I mean, hell, the Disney animated canon itself basically is to America what Grimm’s was to Germany."

http://kontextmaschine.tumblr.com/post/131125761963/so-if-i-told-you-someone-was-using-century-old

"How Slavery Changed the DNA of African Americans"

"The McGill researchers found that most of the European DNA among blacks today probably entered the African-American gene pool long before the Civil War, when the vast majority of blacks in the U.S. were slaves living in the South. The genetic patterns observed by the researchers suggest that, for at least a century before the Civil War, there was ongoing admixture between blacks and whites. After slavery ended, this interracial mixing dropped off steeply.

The implication of these findings won’t be surprising to anyone: Widespread sexual exploitation of slaves before the Civil War strongly influenced the genetic make-up of essentially all African Americans alive today...

They argue that the Great Migration of African Americans out of the South was genetically biased: African Americans with a higher fraction of European ancestry, who often have lighter skin, had better social opportunities and were thus in a better position to migrate to northern and Western states. Though it will take further evidence to show this definitively, the McGill researchers’ results imply that, even after the end of slavery, discrimination that varied with shades of skin color continued to influence the genetic history of African Americans."

https://psmag.com/how-slavery-changed-the-dna-of-african-americans-c5ba430ebd90#.1x0o7emqc

I don't know if it is useful to label this "genetic history" as opposed to "history that is reflected in genomic analysis", but it is still interesting and I hope that this field continues

Related: Dutch study

"Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume"

"Even though all educational and work-related histories were the same, employers overwhelmingly favored the higher-class man. He had a callback rate more than four times of other applicants and received more invitations to interview than all other applicants in our study combined. But most strikingly, he did significantly better than the higher-class woman, whose resume was identical to his, other than the first name...

Just like the employers in our audit study, the attorneys we surveyed favored interviewing the higher-class man above all applicants, including the higher-class woman. This time, though, we were able to understand why. Attorneys viewed higher-class candidates of either gender as being better fits with the culture and clientele of large law firms; lower-class candidates were seen as misfits and rejected. In fact, some attorneys even steered the lower-class candidates to less prestigious and lucrative sectors of legal practice...

But even though higher-class women were seen as just as good “fits” as higher-class men, attorneys declined to interview these women because they believed they were the least committed of any group (including lower-class women) to working a demanding job. Our survey participants, as well as an additional 20 attorneys we interviewed, described higher-class women as “flight risks,” who might desert the firm for less time-intensive areas of legal practice or might even leave paid employment entirely...

When it comes to social class, the answer is simple: ditch the extracurricular activities. We were able to conduct our study only because employers and career services offices encourage (if not require) students to lists hobbies and activities on resumes. Without this information, we would not have been able to indicate social class background effectively."

https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume

Related: two negatives make a positive (perceptions of black + gay men)

FB: "Parenting strategies vary between social classes, and the intensive style of mothering that is more popular among the affluent was seen as conflicting with the “all or nothing” nature of work as a Big Law associate. One female attorney we interviewed described this negative view of higher-class women, which she observed while working on her firm’s hiring committee. The perception, she said, was that higher-class women do not need a job because they “have enough money,” are “married to somebody rich,” or are “going to end up being a helicopter mom.” This commitment penalty that higher-class women faced negated any advantages they received on account of their social class."

"The Clique Imaginary"

"Though the most common stories of sadistic hazing rituals on high school campuses feature young men’s sports teams, it is young women’s lunch tables that bear the brunt of most critiques of traumatizing adolescent social behaviors. In the public imaginary, cliques are almost universally characterized as not only female but as hyper-feminine, and they are held to demonstrate the absolute worst that young women have to offer: cattiness, exclusivity, cruelty, and ruthless social ambition...

Much of the academic literature about adolescent cliques views them as something closer to intentional communities, with stated missions and values, than elitist in-groups. “Positively oriented cliques, based on values of caring, empathy and respect for others provide learning experiences that augment those opportunities available in the family unit during adolescence,” writes Bette J. Freedson, LCSW, on social worker resource site Help Starts Here. But because cliques consist of members who only interact frequently and intimately with fellow members—as both the social science and lay definitions suggest—it should not be surprising that some outsiders can’t perceive that a clique’s values are “positively oriented.” If these outsiders assume that their non-inclusion is actually an intentional exclusion, that may say more about their imagination than anything about the clique...

“Clique-y” is the pejorative used to describe young women in a friend group that is perceived to be exclusionary. But this dismissal dehumanizes them and disregards their personal reasons for maintaining a tight-knit circle of friends. The suspicion aimed at cliques targets female intimacy, particularly when it shared between women with social capital. My friend and fellow writer Rachel Syme once noted, “Two powerful men being friends is an inevitability. Two powerful women being friends is a conspiracy.”

Women who orient their social lives around a select group are held in distrust, as if women’s duty is to cast their friendship nets widely and superficially. The expectation that they do so signals that a woman’s social life is not considered her own: it must be arranged for the benefit of the family, of strangers, anyone really besides herself."

http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/the-clique-imaginary/?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%205/31/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

There is something in here about boundaries and cultivating strong social support and distrust of female social capital. And also, visibility of women's actions. I'm imagining a future in which Hillary is president and there is a crisis around some issue and all her advisors on that topic happen to be female, and suddenly they are a clique whose discussions - because they happen away from the ears of men - can't be trusted.

Related:  The women are emailing

"The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form"

"a concept first invented (or perhaps discovered) in pre-Arab Sumer, modern-day Iraq, and later given symbolic form in ancient India. This twining of meaning and symbol not only shaped mathematics, which underlies our best models of reality, but became woven into the very fabric of human life... 

"The disquieting question of whether zero is out there or a fiction will call up the perennial puzzle of whether we invent or discover the way of things, hence the yet deeper issue of where we are in the hierarchy. Are we creatures or creators, less than – or only a little less than — the angels in our power to appraise?"... 

Zero, still an unnamed figment of the mathematical imagination, continued its odyssey around the ancient world before it was given a name. After Babylon and Greece, it landed in India. The first surviving written appearance of zero as a symbol appeared there on a stone tablet dated 876 AD, inscribed with the measurements of a garden: 270 by 50, written as “27°” and “5°.”

https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/02/zero-robert-kaplan/

FB: "It is, in a sense, an archetypal story of scientific discovery, wherein an abstract concept derived from the observed laws of nature is named and given symbolic form. But it is also a kind of cross-cultural fairy tale that romances reason across time and space" 

"Interracial couple charged $700 per week for racist graffiti on their home"

"Lindsay, 59, said at least three neighbors have shouted the n-word at her husband, Lexene Charles, who is black, and their home has been vandalized several times before.

“That’s why we’re leaving it up,” she told The Post. “Because I’ve had it.”

“This is a racist community,” Lindsay added. “It’s just gotten more and more aggressive.”"

http://nyp.st/2lDAROf

I hope I would be that brave under the circumstances. 

"White Men Behaving Sadly"

"Why are white men so sad? Well, in this film, they are sad because women are fucked up shrews and alcoholics who drag them down, give them heart attacks and, for god’s sake, try to talk to them and offer them food. They are also sad because they work for very little money and do the worst jobs in the world. They clean other peoples’ toilets, fix their showers and live in small garrets alone and with very bad furniture. Poor sad white men. This sad white man also has to take on the burden of parenthood after his brother’s death. His brother left his only son in Lee’s care and Lee and the boy tussle about girls, sex and authority until Lee learns to see the boy as his heir, as another white man who should enjoy his adolescence because soon everything will be taken from him too...

While critics fall over themselves to give this film an Oscar, we should ask what the film is really about. If this film is an allegory then it is a perfect symbolic landscape of the territory that ushered Trump into office – the film sees the world only through the eyes of working class white men. It sees such men as tragic and heroic, as stoic and moral, as stern but good. The film knows that the tragedy from which the white man suffers is of his own making but nonetheless the film believes that the tragedies that they have created happen to them and not to other people."

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2017/02/22/white-men-behaving-sadly-by-jack-halberstam/

FB: "This film gives us a clue as to how powerful white men see the world, women, love, loss and violence – it is all one tragic narrative about how hurt and misunderstood they really are."

"I Was a Call Girl in Trump Tower"

"The wall opposite us was almost completely covered by an enormous flat-screen TV, which was cycling through a Chromecast screensaver consisting of close-ups of dew-laden flowers. This was what I looked at while replying to Derek's questions about myself. I didn't hold back, but answered honestly, and I enjoyed our conversation. I was conscious of performing a feminine charm. It came naturally, being a mode in which I was well trained, and which inflected many of my interactions with older men, with men in positions of authority, and with my dad. When I think of this flirtatious manner I am reminded of a line from a novel: “Most people, he had discovered, won't go out of their way to punish a clown.” I had discovered that most men won't go out of their way to punish a pretty woman who flatters them with her attention. In fact, they will reward her.

But punishment and the avoidance of it—being, perhaps, the original currency—are the more intuitive terms in which to think of it. For me, anyway. Because I had always been afraid of my father. And it was out of fear that I learned the charm, the flattery, and the dissimulation that made me, that night, such a good prostitute...

Though I was bad at asking for things, I was okay with being transactional. I thought the “non-transactional” relationship that Derek envisioned would be like working for a nonprofit, the kind that expects its workers to put in extra unpaid hours for love of the cause. I suspected that he wanted the transactional side obscured both so he could feel more loved and desired, and so he could have me at his beck and call.

But this, I now realized, was exactly the opposite of what appealed to me about sex work. I didn't want an overbearing boyfriend or, worse yet, “mentor” (as some sugar daddies like to fashion themselves). No, I wanted to instrumentalize my body for my own purposes. If that form of use symbolically dispossessed my father of the body he sought to control, so much the better. But more important was to deny the meaning entirely: to deny the sanctity that others attributed to my body. I would fuck for money, and I would do it like any other job."

http://hypocritereader.com/73/trump-tower

You know that thing where you look at a building and wonder "What's going on in there?"

"The Pap smear: groundbreaking, lifesaving — and obsolete?"

"Proponents of HPV self-testing say its biggest appeal is in expanding the reach of cancer screenings, both to impoverished areas abroad, and also to women closer to home.

A trial underway now looks to test that idea in a woefully underserved region of the US — Appalachia.

“Cervical cancer really is such a cancer of disparities,” said Emma McKim Mitchell, the lead investigator for the trial. In Appalachian Virginia, those disparities are glaring. The state overall has some of the lowest rates of cervical cancer in the country — but women living in its Appalachian counties are diagnosed with cervical cancer about 13 percent more often than women elsewhere in the state, according to the Appalachia Community Cancer Network.

The women in the study get information about screening and a take-home kit with a long swab and instructions. They insert the swab like a tampon to collect vaginal and cervical cells, put that into an included test tube, and then mail the sample to the lab. There, technicians, instead of looking for precancerous cells as in a Pap test, look for the DNA of the dozen or so carcinogenic HPVs."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/01/pap-smear-cervical-cancer-hpv/

This sounds so much better...

FB: "With fewer actual cases of cervical cancer in the population due to vaccination, the Pap test’s positive predictive value — which is the chance that a person with a positive test result actually has the disease being tested for — is expected to decrease."

"Reader beware: Science covered in the news is pretty likely to be overturned"

"Their analysis of media coverage indicates that studies written about in newspapers are highly likely to be later overturned.

“This is partly due to the fact that newspapers preferentially cover ‘positive’ initial studies rather than subsequent observations, in particular those reporting null findings,” the researchers note in their study, which appears in the journal PLOS ONE...

Also unsurprising (but by no means encouraging), news outlets were far more likely to report on initial studies than follow-up research, covering roughly 13 percent of the former but only 2 percent of the latter.

And who says readers love bad news? Not in science, apparently: All 53 initial studies that generated news coverage reported positive findings. As for the 174 studies with null, or negative, results, the number of resulting stories was zero. Journalists did a slightly better job covering negative findings in follow-up studies, but only slightly."

https://www.statnews.com/2017/03/02/science-media-news/

"When High-Class Ladies Wore Masks That Made It Impossible to Speak"

"Along with the mask, a small glass bead was discovered that would have been attached to a string behind the visard’s mouth hole. This bead (sometimes a button) was how the visard was kept on the face. As opposed to unseemly head straps, a lady sporting a visard would hold the bead between her teeth to keep the mask in place. If she wanted to talk, she’d have to remove the mask. This had the side effect of essentially silencing the wearer. In the Elizabethan era, when visards were at their pinnacle of popularity, this silence was generally viewed as adding mystery to a lady’s character."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/visard-mask-elizabethan-visor-blank-16th-century?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page

Gotta maintain your whiteness and silence ladies

"Time-sucking academic job applications don't know enormity of what they ask"

"Some hiring departments, however, are going in the direction of less standardization, not more. I saw a job ad today that asked for two sample syllabi -- not merely syllabi for courses previously taught -- but rather syllabi for specific courses in the hiring department, and I was outraged. Asking applicants to write full syllabi for courses not only requires an incredible amount of time for applicants who don't make the cut.

It also perpetuates a cycle of privilege in which only candidates with enough time to carefully put together syllabi (again, above and beyond the norms of regular job applications) are considered for the position. (And this is not even considering cases where there have been accusations on the part of job applicants that their sample syllabi have been used, without permission or pay, to develop actual course content.)"

http://rabble.ca/blogs/bloggers/2017-03-20t000000/time-sucking-academic-job-applications-dont-know-enormity-what-they

FB: "If 50 applicants each put together one syllabus (and the train from Chicago was going 65 miles per hour), then for one specific syllabus request, the hiring committee will have wasted nearly a year of unpaid academic labour. And beyond the work involved, I think about who it is that has the capacity to fulfil these kinds of requests. If contingent faculty members are applying for this job (a group that includes a disproportionate number of women and people of colour), they will write these syllabi after long days of driving between campuses. They will do so while sacrificing time that they could spend publishing their research, painstakingly crafting a syllabus they may not ever get the chance to teach."

"The Scientific Reason Parents Are Always Mixing Up Their Kids' Names"

"According to a review in Memory and Cognition that studied the phenomenon of misnaming, it tends to occur among people that you have an equally close relationship with. From the 1,700 participants, most of those who called someone by the wrong name were moms, and their mix-ups typically included all people they love. "Overall, the misnaming of familiar individuals is driven by the relationship between the misnamer, misnamed, and named," the study states."

http://www.popsugar.com/moms/Why-Moms-Call-Kids-Wrong-Names-43221453?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=post&utm_campaign=moms

Posting because I do this to my friends All The Time, and this is how I explained it to myself - so I'm glad to see I'm correct. 

I think more generally, though, this phenomenon could be defined as: when we put two people in the same strongly-defined category, we will be likely to mix up their names. 

"The case for going to bed at 2:30 am"

"The daily pattern I share with many of the chronic night owls of the world is known as delayed sleep phase disorder. Essentially, our internal clocks end up set a few hours behind typical sleeping and waking hours.

For us, staying up late is the easy part. The real challenge comes when we wake up and face the early risers, who still see night owls as lazy, juvenile, and unhealthy. And today’s hyperawareness around the importance of sleep has only made our reputations worse... 

Because so many teens and college kids naturally stay up late and sleep in longer, people associate that pattern with immaturity and childishness. Staying up until the wee hours is something you’re expected to grow out of; adulting means you embrace your 6 am wakeup with joy. (For bonus grown-up points, you complain that you can’t make it to midnight, even on New Year’s Eve.)

Those of us still hours from our alarms when others have completed their morning routines know we’re getting the figurative side-eye for staying in bed... 

Even though I work from home in a job that allows me to shift my schedule, I still try to conceal when I’m up and when I sleep to avoid confusing people or having to defend my weird hours. I’ll write a batch of emails after 1 am and schedule an alarm to send them at 9."

http://newsletters.vox.com/t/d-l-hiphht-kktkdddur-tt/

^ My life.

"What’s Behind Pop Culture’s Love for Silent, Violent Little Girls?"

"If you find yourself suddenly overcome with déjà vu while watching Laura slice and dice her way through the bad guys, it’s probably because not even a year has passed since a little girl named Eleven broke out of her nefarious experimental facility only to speak in monosyllables while a bunch of boys looked after her and learned important lessons. In the case of Stranger Things, the silent, deadly little girl wasn’t the show’s only female character, but it’s interesting to note that she’s been the most lasting emblem of the show (well, besides Barb). Like River Tam, Eleven was the focal point of all the action, while possessing very little in terms of human traits besides being damaged and loyal (two things any young actress must learn how to play convincingly if she wants to make it).

Eleven was a collection of clichés and references charismatically embodied by Millie Bobbie Brown, who turned her into an avatar of sorts for men and women alike. Similarly, Dafne Keen’s Laura has been christened as a new heroine of the X-Universe, largely based on the assured magnetism of her screen presence. Sometimes a performance transcends what’s on the page, but that doesn’t change the fact that Laura hasn’t been given nearly the same level of texture as her cigar-chomping forebear. Perhaps we just don’t need it: For whatever reason, it’s easy for us to see a preteen girl who’s been traumatized by years of paramilitary experimentation and who oscillates between shell-shocked silence and bone-crunching violence, and say “it me.”...

Laura and her ilk aren’t characters. And their age and increasing silence has become a handy crutch for writers who might otherwise have a harder time bringing female leads to life. (Look to the lackluster characterization of Stranger Things’ Nancy and Joyce for evidence of this.) So while the device aims for gee-whiz novelty — A little girl who can fight? Now I’ve seen everything! — it ends up being a part of a fusty and familiar trend in genre writing."

http://www.vulture.com/2017/03/logan-and-pop-cultures-love-for-silent-violent-little-girls.html?mid=twitter_vulture

FB: "The lack of a shared language between her and her male counterpart means they won’t connect on an intellectual level; she exists to be observed as an object of contemplation."

"The methods, myths and mysteries of hashing"

"Such childlike debauchery is all part of the fun. Hash names are the best example of that. When virgins start out, they’re known only by their first names, with a “just” placed in front: Just Jill, Just Tony, Just Mark. When they are deemed worthy of a hash name, after they’ve participated in a certain number of hashes, the moniker is inspired by a probing Q&A in front of the entire group. Nothing is off limits.

The stories behind such names as Hot Tub Slime Machine, Tragic Carpet Ride and Close Your Eyes and Hope for the Breast are not discussed with outsiders (and they’re likely unsuitable for publication anyway).

Once a hash name is given, legal names are never used again. Hashers are their hash name, and the sharing of personal information — place of employment, especially — need never happen again...

Heading north again, the group spotted “BN” written in chalk.

“Beer near!”

The stop was a parking lot, where coolers of water and frothy refreshment foreshadowed what was to come. There were still 10 minutes to run, and the hares who laid the path were already setting up an area for the final round of singing and drinking.

The hares covered a plastic folding table with the necessary post-run goods: Pringles, Pop-Tarts, Wheat Thins, spray cheese and Cheetos. Cheetos are a favorite of Just Miles, who has been to many hashes and is still without a hash name, because he is a dog."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/goingoutguide/the-methods-myths-and-mysteries-of-hashing/2014/08/28/8eb0c074-1734-11e4-9349-84d4a85be981_story.html?utm_term=.060306e329f0

Sometimes I miss DC

"The Racist History of Dr. Seuss & What it Means in Today’s Social, Political & Educational Context"

"From 1941-43, Seuss was the chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper, PM, and used this highly-influential platform to create propaganda dehumanizing, stereotyping and even vilifying people of color.

Dr. Seuss repeatedly depicted Africans and African-Americans as monkeys. In fact, his cartoons only depict Black people as monkeys. This cartoon he made for “Judge” Magazine in 1929 was up for auction in 2015 for $20,000 and has African American men up for sale with a sign reading: “Take Home A High Grade N*gger For Your Wood Pile.”... 

He branded all people of Japanese-descent as anti-American and depicted Japanese and Japanese-Americans as categorically evil... His racism towards Asians was not isolated to his political cartoons. He made statements about it and is quoted by his biographer, Richard H. Minear, as saying, “If we want to win, we’ve got to kill Japs.” It was even incorporated into his early children’s books. In his first book, And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street, he references a “Yellow-faced Chinaman who eats with sticks.”... 

Beyond impacting our student’s ability to engage in school, discrimination, fear and loss of safety affects our student’s life trajectories. What message is being sent when we ask them to celebrate a man with a well documented history of reinforcing this same type of hate and division against people of color? How is it shaping their perceptions of what is racially acceptable and normalized? How will it impact their future engagement with reading and books?"

http://www.therealafrican.com/2017/03/the-racist-history-of-dr-seuss-what-it-means-in-todays-social-political-educational-context/

Hm. My parents met him once, weird to think. 

It's also so real, I have thoroughly been taught that I have to just accept that someone wouldn't think of me as human and would possibly be abstractly accepting of my violent death, as long as that person has been deemed sufficiently valuable by American society/historians. It's hard to expect anything of important people or the system at large, when you have been taught to accept something so awful. 

FB: "The problem with attempting to defend, rationalize, or sweep the racism Dr. Seuss espoused under the rug — is that it condones the very real implications those kind of narratives had (and continue to have) on oppressed groups.

"Committee Outsiders: a quick win"

"here’s one tangible, simple recommendation for an academic department: Let your doctoral students have a non-academic member on their thesis committee. Presumably such an examiner should be someone of repute and in good standing in their professional community—preferably even someone with some alphabet soup after their name. This kind of bridge to the non-academic world can provide valuable insights into the applicability of knowledge and skills to non-academic contexts (for both the academic and non-academic folks!), help doctoral candidates to plant the seeds of a professional network, and later on provide an invaluable reference from someone who’s seen the world outside of academia and can speak with authority about the aptitude of a potential job candidate. It’s similar to a cross-sectoral internship, except it’s sustained rather than punctual, and requires far less formal infrastructure to implement."

http://www.sciencemetrics.org/committee-outsiders-quick-win/

Interesting suggestion

"An English Sheep Farmer’s View of Rural America"

"Economists say that when the world changes people will adapt, move and change to fit the new world. But of course, real human beings often don’t do that. They cling to the places they love, and their identity remains tied to the outdated or inefficient things they used to do, like being steel workers or farmers. Often, their skills are not transferable anyway, and they have no interest in the new opportunities. So, these people get left behind.

I ask myself what I would do if I didn’t farm sheep, or if I couldn’t any longer farm sheep. I have no idea...

for my entire life, my own country has apathetically accepted an American model of farming and food retailing, mostly through a belief that it was the way of progress and the natural course of economic development. As a result, America’s future is the default for us all.

It is a future in which farming and food have changed and are changing radically — in my view, for the worse. Thus I look at the future with a skeptical eye. We have all become such suckers for a bargain that we take the low prices of our foodstuffs for granted and are somehow unable to connect these bargain-basement prices to our children’s inability to find meaningful work at a decently paid job."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/03/01/opinion/an-english-sheep-farmers-view-of-rural-america.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&smvar=wkndbau&referer=http://m.facebook.com/

FB: "The future we have been sold doesn’t work. Applying the principles of the factory floor to the natural world just doesn’t work. Farming is more than a business. Food is more than a commodity. Land is more than a mineral resource.

Despite the growing scale of the problem, no major mainstream politician has taken farming or food seriously for decades. With the presidential campaign over and a president in the White House whom rural Kentuckians helped elect, the new political establishment might want to think about this carefully."

"A NOVEL ABOUT REFUGEES THAT FEELS INSTANTLY CANONICAL"

"They learn that the doors have become a global system of exit and entry. The “doors out, which is to say the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured.”

Throughout Saeed and Nadia’s story, Hamid intersperses vignettes of magic-realist migration, in which the circumstances and desires that govern the outcome of each crossing are as unpredictable as the trickster doors themselves. An old man from Brazil crosses to Amsterdam, meets another old man, and wordlessly falls in love. While contemplating suicide, a man in England comes across a portal to Namibia, where he remakes his life. A man sees two Filipino girls emerge in Tokyo, and follows them, “fingering the metal in his pocket as he went.” When refugees emerge from doors in San Diego, an elderly veteran asks the police if he can be of assistance; they ask him to leave, and the veteran realizes that he, like the migrants, doesn’t have anywhere to go.

There is, in “Exit West,” constant underlying movement, and a sense that intrinsic laws of moral physics are at work."

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/a-novel-about-refugees-that-feels-instantly-canonical

FB: "Hamid rewrites the world as a place thoroughly, gorgeously, and permanently overrun by refugees and migrants, its boundaries reconfigured so that “the only divisions that mattered now were between those who sought the right of passage and those who would deny them passage.”"

"THE FUTURE OF DRIVERLESS CARS IS A BUS"

"Rather than take passengers from their own door to the destination of their choosing — the ease of travel that self-driving cars appear to promise — these autonomous pods simply carry passengers from one specific, set point to another.

The pod currently being trialed is named Harry. It clearly necessitated a name because it's adorable. With bug-eye windows, a smile on its front nose, and blue-green colors, it looks like a land-based robotic dolphin. Harry maxes out at 10 MPH and is limited to the pavements, not yet braving car-and-bike-filled roads. And while the shuttle is fully autonomous, with a camera watching up to 100 meters ahead, there's a “technician” on board to stop it if something goes awry.

This isn't a car. It's a bus — not that there's anything wrong with that."

https://theoutline.com/post/1349/the-future-of-driverless-cars-is-a-bus

^ this model is infinitely more exciting to me than individual autonomous cars. Honestly, I don't want a car, I want to avoid that life as much as possible, having to care for and manage this vehicle that spend the vast majority of its time parked somewhere. (and can we talk about the disaster of finding parking spots??). 

And when you think about it, public transportation is kind of a miracle of human collaboration, the idea that we realize that people need to get from place to place and so what if we all paid a little bit and there was always something around to take us around? 

And there is every reason why driving should be a specialized skill. It's SO dangerous, it requires a ton of training to be a legitimately safe driver and that's under contexts of highly standardized driving conditions - try driving on the other side of the street, or with different traffic laws; I think we've learned the rules, not the skills. These are expensive, complex machines that have somehow become ubiquitous - the the point at which the standardized government ID is our license to operate these machines <-- this blows my mind all the time (how did this happen???).

"Why is Marin County So White?"

"look back at Marin County’s history and you’ll find that it wasn’t always that way. In fact, its demographic history is not too far off from the rest of the Bay Area’s. Archives at the Anne T. Kent California Room show that what is now Marin County was once almost completely occupied by tribes of the Coast Miwok Indians.

In 1817, the Spanish established Mission San Rafael Arcangel in what is now the city of San Rafael. Between 1834-1846, significant portions of Marin were owned by people of Spanish and Mexican descent.

Finally, there was a huge influx of African-Americans who came to work in the shipyards during World War II, though it wasn’t enough to change the demographics significantly.

So what explains the county’s demographics as they look today?...

The county’s demographics looked a lot like Westchester County in New York, which became the site of a famous fair housing lawsuit related to patterns of residential segregation. Officials suspected the same thing might be happening in Marin County.

“When you talk about Marin County, you really have to look at the history of segregation,” said Caroline Peattie, executive director of Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California and another co-author of the audit. “In some ways it’s not atypical. It just played out in slightly different ways.”...

“What we saw by and large was that the effective opposition to affordable housing had a corollary effect of creating impediments to housing choice to people in protected classes,” said Sparks. “[That includes] people of color, people with children, people with disabilities.”"

https://ww2.kqed.org/news/2017/02/16/why-is-marin-county-so-white/

Related: Some other intensely white spaces - the whiteness of national parks, environmental movement, Oregon, 

Also - why economics doesn't explain racism

FB: "A report from the Center for Responsible Lending found that people of color in California who can afford to move into expensive neighborhoods typically choose not to. Instead, they mostly still choose to live in low-income, majority-minority neighborhoods... “The desire to avoid those settings is not driven by an affinity to live with their own kind, but a desire to avoid negative treatment by their neighbors,” says Krysan. “Certainly a perception or reputation of a community, and its openness to people of your own race and ethnicity, is something that comes up more often for African-Americans and Latinos than it does for whites.”"