Thursday, May 31, 2018

"Leak: How NYT Editor James Bennet Justifies The Op-Ed Page To His Colleagues"

"The opinion section in general is a case study in how essentially liberal institutions are undermined by the tools of their own liberalism. Illiberalism seeps into the hollows created by seemingly high-minded values about debate and the marketplace of ideas. The settled science about climate gets quickly unsettled by a columnist like Bret Stephens, a Bennet hire, who smuggles climate denialism onto the page by couching it in progressive-sounding language about debate, certainty and ecumenicism...

In any case, none of Stephens’ infelicities really matter if writing and thinking are valued primarily as exercises in provocation rather than persuasion. In the December meeting, Bennet described columnists as “people who are paid to have very, very strong convictions, and to believe that they’re right.” This creates what he called the “real moral hazards in the opinion environment in which we want to, say, we want to convene lots of voices from lots of point of view.”

In Bennet’s view, editorials — the unsigned pieces attributed to the Times editorial board as a whole — offer an antidote to morally or factually ambiguous pieces published on the opposite page. While the rest of the section is enacting a spirited performance of epistemological inquiry, the editorials get to carry the tablets down the mountain... 

“People were not satisfied with his answers,” one staffer who attended the meeting told HuffPost in a text message, “since his answers were equivocal bullshit that didn’t really address that the opinion section abuses fact and elevates white male conservative voices under the guise of ‘diversity of thought.’ And that he admits to making mistakes without any concern or even acknowledgement of what the consequences of those ‘mistakes’ actually are.”

https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5a8db27de4b0273053a70f47



Related: at least two others on the NYT opinions page

"Focus On Infants During Childbirth Leaves U.S. Moms In Danger"



"American women are more than three times as likely as Canadian women to die in the maternal period (defined by the Centers for Disease Control as the start of pregnancy to one year after delivery or termination), six times as likely to die as Scandinavians. In every other wealthy country, and many less affluent ones, maternal mortality rates have been falling; in Great Britain, the journal Lancet recently noted, the rate has declined so dramatically that "a man is more likely to die while his partner is pregnant than she is." But in the U.S., maternal deaths increased from 2000 to 2014... 

In recent decades, under the assumption that it had conquered maternal mortality, the American medical system has focused more on fetal and infant safety and survival than on the mother's health and wellbeing... 

When women are discharged, they routinely receive information about how to breastfeed and what to do if their newborn is sick but not necessarily how to tell if they need medical attention themselves... 

As Larry suspected, Lauren's blood pressure readings were well past the danger point. What he didn't know was that they'd been abnormally high since she entered the hospital — 147/99, according to her admissions paperwork. During labor, she had 21 systolic readings at or above 140 and 13 diastolic readings at or above 90, her records indicated; for a stretch of almost eight hours, her blood pressure wasn't monitored at all, the New Jersey Department of Health later found. Over that same period, her baby's vital signs were being constantly watched, Larry said... 

California researchers who studied preeclampsia deaths over several years found one striking theme: "Despite triggers that clearly indicated a serious deterioration in the patient's condition, health care providers failed to recognize and respond to these signs in a timely manner, leading to delays in diagnosis and treatment.""


I think there are some kinds of "female pain" that are still sort of subconsciously accepted as necessary/important/meaningful. Pregnancy morbidites and mortalities are just part of being a woman, no? Part of the long-term ramifications of allowing men to do sex to us. 

FB: what I've learned - if you have to give birth in the US, give birth in California (added benefit: your kid could claim California citizenship if the country implodes and CA casually claims sovereignty)


"In the U.S., unlike some other developed countries, maternal deaths are treated as a private tragedy rather than as a public health catastrophe. A death in childbirth may be mourned on Facebook or memorialized on GoFundMe, but it is rarely reported in the news. Most obituaries, Lauren's included, don't mention how a mother died."

Wednesday, May 30, 2018

"Her Husband Was Dying From A Superbug. She Turned To Sewer Viruses Collected By The Navy."


"This is strange, not least because mainstream scientists have long dismissed phage therapy as a fringe idea pushed by eccentrics who enjoy fishing in sewage (where many phages live). But over the past 15 years, as more and more bacteria have evolved ways to evade our antibiotic arsenal, Navy scientists have turned to phages as a last line of defense. A run-of-the-mill freezer in the Maryland lab holds what’s one of the world’s largest phage libraries: more than 300 viruses, collected on ship-based laboratories all over the world. None of the phages had ever been tested in an infected person — until Tom... 

Phage therapy blossomed in Eastern Europe after World War II, largely because researchers there were blocked from developing the mass-produced antibiotics sweeping the West... 

Schooley sent a sample of the mutated bacteria back to the Navy. Hamilton’s team screened their phage library again, and sent back a new, tailor-made cocktail to attack the new phase of Tom’s infection.

It all happened within a few days, which Hamilton sees as one of phage therapy’s many advantages over traditional pharmaceuticals. “There’s absolutely no comparison,” Hamilton said. “It could be years to develop a new drug.”"... 

Money, too, stands in the way of bringing phage therapy to the masses. Because phages, like antibiotics, are only taken for short periods of time and will never be blockbusters like Viagra or Lipitor, few pharmaceutical companies would make the investment to bring them to market. And, since phages can be found in nature, patenting would also be difficult. “If a company invests money in phages, there’s nothing to keep somebody from isolating another phage that’s close to it and doing the same thing,” Young said. “That’s a problem.”

The barriers mean that phage therapy is almost certainly not going to be the solution to the growing antibiotics crisis. But with no new antibiotics in the pipeline, this unusual treatment is one of the only things that might actually help. “I doubt that we’re going to turn away from antibiotics any time in the near future,” David Weiss, director of the Antibiotic Resistance Center at Emory University School of Medicine, told BuzzFeed News. But, he added, “traditional antibiotic therapy and phages might in theory be used together.”"



This makes a lot of sense. If antibiotics were not so effective for all of the 20th century, I'm sure that this would have been the dominant technology.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

“What Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer Means for Hip-Hop”




I would argue that the award is a bigger event for the Pulitzers than it is for Lamar, or for hip-hop’s morale. “Fate is being kind to me. Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young,” Duke Ellington said in 1965, when he was sixty-six, after the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board denied a recommendation that he receive a special-citation recognition for his contributions to jazz. With Lamar, just thirty years old, likely sitting on future compositions that will outdo the odysseys on “damn.”—and on “To Pimp a Butterfly” and “good kid, m.A.A.d. city,” which came before it—the Pulitzers push a reformation campaign, finding a canny opportunity to stake a place ahead of the curve. (The win bears some relation to Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016, although in that case the referendum had to do with what constituted literature.) Most glaringly, it sets the stage for the argument that the prize of the intelligentsia, which has been disinterested in the flow of popular music, may have a shrewder grasp on cultural impact than the Grammys, which for its top honor, Album of the Year, has snubbed not only Lamar—this year and in the past—but every other black hip-hop artist other than Lauryn Hill and OutKast. I certainly did not expect the Pulitzers to be what finally proved the Grammys irrelevant. David Hajdu, a critic at The Nation and one of the Pulitzer jurors, told Coscarelli that recognizing “damn.” meant recognizing that rap “has value on its own terms and not just as a resource for use in a field that is more broadly recognized by the institutional establishment as serious or legitimate.” Rap has not primarily depended on the recognition of traditional bodies to flourish and to change. It’ll be fun to hear how Lamar finesses a verse to include the word “Pulitzer.””


https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/what-kendrick-lamars-pulitzer-means-for-hip-hop

"Are CEOs Less Ethical Than in the Past?"



"over the last 15 years, the environment and context in which companies operate has changed dramatically as a result of five trends. First, the public has become more suspicious, more critical, and less forgiving of corporate misbehavior. Second, governance and regulation in many countries has become both more proactive and more punitive. Third, more companies are pursuing growth in emerging markets where ethical risks are heightened, and relying on extended global supply chains that increase counterparty risks. Fourth, the rise of digital communications has exposed companies and the executives who oversee them to more risk than ever before. Finally, the 24/7 news cycle and the proliferation of media in the 21st century publicizes and amplifies negative information in real time."


Monday, May 28, 2018

"YOU CAN’T JUST TELL EVERYONE TO LEAVE FACEBOOK"




"While social media addictionlikely plays a role in this, leaving the platform is about more than just preferences: Facebook may be required for someone’s job, the only way to keep in touch with far-flung family and friends, or simply the cheapest and easiest way to connect with like-minded individuals... 

Like the larger slow-living movement, slow-tech encourages people to re-adopt behaviors that used to be ordinary and unavoidable. But, like shopping at a farmers market or growing food in an urban garden, these behaviors are now less convenient and more expensive than newer options; thus, the people likely to adopt them have at least some extra time and cash to burn.
These movements also emphasize personal choice and discipline as solutions to systemic problems caused by the profit motivations of large corporations... 

Facebook is even more firmly entrenched with users in its newer markets in Southeast Asia and Africa. And this is by design: Facebook has aggressively pursued them through initiatives to bring affordable internet access to places that lack it."

https://theoutline.com/post/4040/you-cant-just-tell-everyone-to-leave-facebook?utm_source=FB&zr=2b2zxvya&zd=5&zi=ofhqpleb

Related: individuals can't stop climate change 

FB: "History has shown that simply telling consumers to avoid a product—because it’s bad for them and/or bad for society—won’t effect large-scale change, and it demonstrates the inherent privilege required to abandon a technology." 

"ON “MY FAMILY’S SLAVE” & NECESSARY DISCUSSIONS"



"I’m saying that a large part of the reason why my country is in the shitty state that it’s in is because the USA exploited us for its own means. The playing field was never, ever even. It still isn’t. Cursory reading on the history of Filipino migration to the United States will show you that.

So, yes. It’s the epitome of arrogance, entitlement, and hypocrisy to see white people outraged at Tizon’s piece, and crashing into the conversation like they have some sort of moral ascendancy on the matter. They focus on the horrifying events (because they WERE horrifying, I’ll get to that), and not on the fact that Tizon’s work was also a story of immigration, of dying/surviving/dying/surviving in the West, countries that are more often than not complicit in the formation of the systems of abuse and exploitation that they are running from... 

Tizon’s piece is powerful because it is honest. He was complicit in a terrible practice, and he wrote all about it. He’s not a hero, but he also does not deserve the vitriol that is writing itself out over social media. The only thing I got from the piece was the story of a man struggling with abuse happening under his roof, tangled up in the complex dynamics of an immigrant family. Could he have done more? Maybe. But do all the shoulda-woulda-coulda of Tizon really contribute anything to this conversation?"


This 1000% isn't my conversation, so I'm not posting this to "take a side" but I appreciated something about the way this author contextualized the story. 

Sunday, May 27, 2018

"'Black Panther' raises difficult questions in museum community"



"In one five-minute sequence, “Black Panther” raises issues central to the modern museum world, including cultural appropriation and repatriation, the racial composition of museum staffs, and lingering stereotypes regarding visitors of color. Some of these concerns have been in the public consciousness since the 1980s, when the Greek government began campaigning forcefully — and so far unsuccessfully — for the British Museum to repatriate the Elgin Marbles, a group of classical sculptures removed from the Parthenon. But these issues have a fresh relevance today as society increasingly shifts away from a Eurocentric points of view and gains a renewed appreciation for the indigenous culture of formerly colonized nations... 

He suspects that when he approached the desk clerks, they didn’t realize that Rucker is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, or that he will bring his own set of slave shackles along when he delivers a TED talk in Vancouver next month. They just saw a black man who they assumed was uneducated and misinformed, he believes. Instead of contacting a curator, they nodded politely and dismissed what he told them.

“People make a lot of assumptions about who you are based on skin color,” Rucker said. “The experts sometimes don't know as much as people who actually visit museums.”... 

Most U.S. museums were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and for about 100 years, individual collectors and institutions happily snapped up cultural treasures from the world’s great civilizations without asking too many unpleasant questions about the circumstances under which those objects been obtained. Attitudes began to shift in the 1970s after UNESCO adopted provisions allowing for the seizure of stolen artworks if corroborating documentation could be provided. Many museums will say now that they have a policy of not acquiring artworks unless a clear chain of ownership has been established; whether they always adhere strictly to that policy varies by institution."


http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/movies/bs-fe-black-panther-museums-20180227-story.html

“The Science Community's "S**thole countries" Problem”



Similarly, when we criticize developing-country governments for not leading local investment in research and science we ignore the many years in which these same governments were advised to invest in primary education, basic infrastructure, anything but higher education and research. We allow international funders to justify taking a back seat and continue funding science disproportionately in wealthy countries...

I frequently hear it argued that such scientists should therefore build their base by focusing on training students and practicing introductory level research, leaving the cutting-edge work to scientists in more advanced economies. In the most recent instance, I was told by an American scientist that a colleague in southern Africa should work on “setting up basic molecular biology techniques” and leave such things as CRISPR development to scientists like her. This argument is fundamentally patronizing and relegates scientists in certain countries to being hobbyists and not “real scientists”...

Reversing this broad-based level of implicit bias is not going to be simple. It has to be rooted out on many fronts. At the most significant level, the investment in leveling the playing field for scientific infrastructure must be everyone’s responsibility—governments of all countries as well as independent foundations and multilaterals. We must take into account the longstanding under-investment in certain regions and provide adequate funding to leapfrog researchers to a competitive level of infrastructure as well as fund them to carry out genuinely cutting-edge research.”

https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-science-communitys-s-thole-countries-problem/


FB: “in science we highlight the individuals who have managed to establish global reputations and produce unassailably respectable results in cutting-edge fields. These individuals rightly deserve funding, collaborations and accolades, but by celebrating them we do not absolve ourselves of bias against their countries and compatriots. Rather, we reinforce the “there can be only one” narrative and the idea that only superhuman efforts are evidence of worth, which in turn reinforce the implication that their environments as a whole are short on potential.”

"Against Little Free Libraries"



"He adds, “But then what happens in the community is they say, ‘Hey, you know what? Where they really need those libraries is down at the laundromat, or down at the trailer park, or in this high-needs neighborhood.’ And so the community starts spreading them.”
In the paper, Hale and Schmidt describe Little Free Libraries as “neoliberal politics at street level.”


“It’s very important to consider the role that private property plays, in terms of who is able to build one, whose values are represented in it, and what kind of effect does this have on those who either drive by it, walk by it, see it in front of a community center or school, or even seeing it on Instagram,” Hale says. “What does it mean that this is the way in which ‘library services’ are being presented to community members?”... 

The case against Little Free Library is not necessarily a case against little free libraries. “I wouldn’t go down hard and say that Little Free Libraries harm public libraries,” Schmidt says—although she and Hale expressed lasting anxiety over the library budget attacks waged by former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his austerity agenda. Both librarians are eager to acknowledge places where Little Free Libraries are put to good use by public-library systems. They mention Winnipeg, where librarians give book-exchange stewards in marginalized neighborhoods first dibs (and free access) to the system’s friends-of-the-library book sales. “I don't think we can definitively say that they [don’t] reduce inequality,” Schmidt says. “I just don’t think they can say they reduce inequality, either.”



FB: "We submit that these data reinforce the notion that [Little Free Libraries] are examples of performative community enhancement, driven more so by the desire to showcase one’s passion for books and education than a genuine desire to help the community in a meaningful way."

Saturday, May 26, 2018

"Swing Low, White Women"



"An attempt to vest a nineteenth-century radical black woman with the accoutrement of twenty-first century mainstream white feminism misses the mark by evoking a false comparison. The statue of Tubman depicts her in the act of one of her several emancipatory journeys. In her dress we see embedded the faces of enslaved people she helped to free, at personal risk to herself. Behind her are the “roots of slavery” attempting to drag her back. Women’s March attendees generally occupy a place that is safe enough that they voluntarily bring their children with them. The vast majority of participants (myself included) are privileged in one or more ways, and extremely so by comparison. While not explicit, the image brings up the comparison of white women’s oppression to slavery – an argument resurrected from white liberalism’s antislavery past. Then and now, the too-easy comparison of Tubman’s struggle to that of free white women elides black women’s presence and activism... 

those shortcomings range from de-centering, omitting, and silencing women of color’s voices to the prioritization of biological sex and subsequent exclusion of transgender women to individual accounts of microaggression like the one I encountered last year. And they are utterly, utterly unsurprising to women of color in 2018."

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/2018/01/22/swing-low-white-women/


FB: "When one 2018 attendee claims in her sign, “If Hilary was president we would all be at brunch right now,” women of color know who the “we” here is and wonder how deliberate that “we” is in imagining that a white woman president would miraculously leave nothing left to protest."

"Hello. I am a person. What are YOU?"



"Through high school, as a straight Black guy, I had no sense of myself as someone girls might be attracted to. I didn’t think I was unattractive, exactly. More that I didn’t see myself registering romantically with the girls and young women around me. It wasn’t that they graded me poorly; it seemed that they didn’t grade me at all.

In retrospect, I felt the way I imagine “black girls” might have felt in a world chockfull of Bobs... 

Dehumanization isn’t just perceptual fluff. Participants who saw an evolutionary gap between Muslim Americans and themselves preferred funding greater surveillance and more policing over more schools and libraries in those communities. The belief that target groups were subhuman also predicted less concern about African American and Arab victims of injustice, less support for Hispanic immigration, lower donations to a Chinese charity, and more.


Not registering at all is exactly what it is. 


FB: "In high school I felt dehumanized. Later, like the peasant in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who had been turned into a newt, I got better. But it took a lot of love and friendship to convince me that I wasn’t a newt. All the people complicit in my dehumanization were ordinary people — peers mostly, but also teachers, friends’ parents, coaches — not avowed racists or Neo-Nazis. So, too, were the people who helped restore my humanity."

Friday, May 25, 2018

"The science behind cancer warnings on coffee is murky at best"




"Some studies have found an increased cancer risk in mice and rats who were fed acrylamide, but those studies used doses between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than levels that people would be exposed to in food. There have not been strong studies in humans to demonstrate the carcinogenicity of acrylamide.

While some research has linked acrylamide to kidney, endometrial and ovarian cancer, the American Cancer Society website notes that the results have been mixed and have relied on questionnaires that may not accurately reflect people’s diets.

“Most experts are going to look at the risk of acrylamide in coffee and conclude that this is not something that’s going to have a meaningful impact on human health,” Lichtenfeld says... 

As for how much coffee is too much, research suggests that a few cups a day may be perfectly fine, and even better for long-term health than not drinking any coffee."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/science-behind-cancer-warnings-coffee-murky-best

"On the Blackness of the Panther"



"Many movies made by Hollywood have engaged in thought experiments about Africa. Some, made for American whites, resurrect colonial fantasy (“I once had a farm in Africa”), with the African roles either brutish or naive. Others, made for American blacks, have a goal of uplift, cloaking the African experience with a fictional grandeur. These fantasies, white and black, are always simplifications. There are fifty four African countries. What would it mean to dream with these already-existing countries themselves? What would it mean to dream with Mozambique, Sudan, Togo, or Libya, and think about their politics in all their hectic complexities? What would it look like to use that as a narrative frame, even for works of fiction?...

The nations and cities of Africa, as they are now, are each so consumed with the complexity of being their distinct selves from day to day that they cannot take on the thankless task of also being Hollywood’s “Africa.” African countries have always been in conversation with the world: an isolationist blackness is incoherent and impossible: we already been cosmopolitan. In the modern world, black is as unimaginable without white as white is unimaginable without black. What we are is shaped by the other, for better or worse (for us, mostly worse), but interaction is real. The way out is through. We can’t wish that away, not even as a storytelling fantasy...

against the high gloss white of anti-black America, blackness visible is a relief and a riot. That is something you learn when you learn black. Marvel? Disney? Please. I won’t belabor the obvious. But black visibility, black enthusiasm (in a time of death), black spectatorship, and black skepticism: where we meet is where we meet."


I found this bit weirdly inspiring - "Those who have to learn black also expand what black can be."


FB: I love Teju Cole's writing style "It turns out a black panther is two different animals, and no animal at all. It is “no animal at all” in the sense that a panther is not a distinct scientific species. A black panther is two animals because a jaguar with a black coat is a black panther, and a leopard with a black coat is a black panther. The blackness of the panther, in the case of the jaguar, is due to a dominant gene for coat coloration. In the case of the leopard, the blackness of the panther is due to a recessive gene. Both are melanistic variants and when deh mutated gene for the bleck color is expressed, deh big cat receives the powa of deh Bleck Pentha."

"White Women Drive Me Crazy"

"

"Sometimes they look through us with a hard, vacant stare after we have said something funny or clever, or when we look even better than we usually do. This look is also employed when it becomes no longer convenient or safe to be allied with us, and can be turned on very quickly and without warning. They say, “Are you okay?” when they know we are thriving. They say, “Are you okay?” instead of “I feel uncomfortable,” because they are not used to feeling uncomfortable and they are happy for us to be the problem instead.

Sometimes, when we defend ourselves, white women look at us with the utmost fragility. They claim access to emotions such as fear and pain without missing a beat, like they were born to do it, before we can even dare to consider that we may be frightened or hurt, too. Their eyes rattle in their sockets, saying, “Why do you punish me for having such a big heart?”...

The look at the yoga studio felt familiar, like an old relative I had not seen in a while and didn’t want to see. As I registered the look, I regressed to the childhood version of myself who did not know why I was being looked at or what I had done wrong, but knew what humiliation felt like and knew what panic felt like and knew what it was like to be a wild animal, a beast or a pet...

A couple of years after that panic attack, I was standing in a huge crowd of white people at a music festival, wearing a backpack with some wires inside. I opened it to get something out and I registered a sharp feeling of gratitude that none of them seemed frightened of me. Guilt, even, that I had put them in a situation that could be perceived as a threat. I’m the bomb, I realized, standing there. I am the bomb."



FB: "“It starts so young,” Y says, when I stop talking. “How we learn to doubt ourselves, second-guess our intuition, mistrust what we know to be true, and all because white people are meant to teach and not to be taught.” Eighteen years later, the affirmation still feels fresh, like it feels godly to tell this story to the person I love and not have to explain the experience of constant emotional contortion, not have to explain why it hurts."

Thursday, May 24, 2018

"Trump and the Evangelical Temptation"


"Fundamentalism embraced traditional religious views, but it did not propose a return to an older evangelicalism. Instead it responded to modernity in ways that cut it off from its own past. In reacting against higher criticism, it became simplistic and overliteral in its reading of scripture. In reacting against evolution, it became anti-scientific in its general orientation. In reacting against the Social Gospel, it came to regard the whole concept of social justice as a dangerous liberal idea. This last point constituted what some scholars have called the “Great Reversal,” which took place from about 1900 to 1930. “All progressive social concern,” Marsden writes, “whether political or private, became suspect among revivalist evangelicals and was relegated to a very minor role.”

This general pessimism about the direction of society was reflected in a shift away from postmillennialism and toward premillennialism. In this view, the current age is tending not toward progress, but rather toward decadence and chaos under the influence of Satan. A new and better age will not be inaugurated until the Second Coming of Christ, who is the only one capable of cleaning up the mess. No amount of human effort can hasten that day, or ultimately save a doomed world. For this reason, social activism was deemed irrelevant to the most essential task: the work of preparing oneself, and helping others prepare, for final judgment... 

Compare this with the Catholic Church, which is more than one-third Hispanic. This has naturally stretched the priorities of Catholicism to include the needs and rights of recent immigrants. In many evangelical communities, those needs remain distant and theoretical (though successful evangelical churches in urban areas are now experiencing the same diversity and broadening of social concern). Or consider the contrasting voting behaviors of white and African American evangelicals in last year’s Senate race in Alabama. According to exit polls, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Roy Moore, while 95 percent of black evangelicals supported his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones. The two groups inhabit two entirely different political worlds."


https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/?utm_source=atlfb

"You should’ve asked"

"Here is the english version of my now famous “Fallait demander” !"
https://emmacliten.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/you-shouldve-asked_010.png?w=1024


I've been thinking about the question "what can I do to help" a lot. It's ostensibly the right thing to ask, but there is so much labor involved in answering the question. A friend of mine got married recently and, of course, got the question all the time. Even when she had a concrete thing for them to do, she found that people would do it distractedly and then do the thing they ACTUALLY wanted to help with (like undesired elaborate plans for the flower arrangements or whatever). 


I've been trying to avoid asking people that question and instead proposing a thing and asking if that would be helpful. Or even better, just doing what seems useful and monitoring their reaction. There is some working out of boundaries, figuring how much ownership they are willing to give you and how much they expect you to have. But I realize how nice it feels when someone really acts on the implied intention to help you, or implicitly sees the space they can be responsible for. 

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

"Lost in the Digital Swamp, Link by Link"



"I went on that ride courtesy of one of the internet’s many “content discovery solutions.” These companies occupy real estate at the margins of websites like CNN, Politico and TMZ, and fill them with links to content landfills with names like Buzz-Hut, CollegeFreakz, Dogsome and TimezOff. The links are often ads for stuff like bedsheets and dental implants that are disguised as news articles — or else barrel-scraping clickbait that tempts the reader toward still more ads — and because the thumbnails and headlines are written by the individual advertisers themselves, they range in caliber from straightforward sales pitches to gross body stuff. The links appear under the banner of “Related Content,” “You May Also Like,” or — their most accurate descriptor — “Around the Web.”...

These “Around the Web” widgets both haunt and tantalize us because they’re designed to stoke our most primal browsing habits. Clicking these links feels like taking a tour through the internet’s id — each grotesque screenshot and gender stereotype that manages to override our thinking brains and reduce us to pure click monsters. Below, a taxonomy of the basest impulses on display."


It would be an interesting study, to see which demographics actually click on those links, and why (do they think they are real journalism? Bored and mindlessly surfing? Embarrassed curiosity? Trying to fill a sibling's browser with weird cookies and malware?)

FB: I love the tone of this article about those random links at the bottom of news sites - slightly affronted, slightly amused, slightly too serious...

"A disproportionate amount of content involves maritime mysteries. Among them: “Mom Vanishes Aboard Carnival Cruise”; “Disney Worker Missing at Sea”; “Little Girl Was Found Alone at Sea, Decades Later She …”; and “30 Things the Ocean Is Hiding From You.”...


A consistent hook is a photograph that appears to be a private part but is not a private part."

Tuesday, May 22, 2018

"WHAT SCIENCE IS LIKE IN NORTH KOREA"



"Whenever they came up with a food that could enhance the health of the dictators, Hyeongsoo said it was immediately sent to the Kims. Their work included studies on Italian olive oil, fiber, and a sweet Chinese fruit whose sugar content isn’t entirely absorbed by the body, the extracts of which were added to the Kims’ meals to improve the way they tasted. An entire team conducted research on alcohol and tobacco, “which the Kims really enjoyed,” he said.
Electric fences circled the compound, as the health of the Kims was a state secret. The scientists got free food once a week, but like all scientists in the country, Hyeongsoo said he and his colleagues were forbidden from discussing their work. “[I had a colleague] with a PhD in medicine who told his friends what he was studying. He was arrested as a political prisoner together with his family,” he said...

When they publish in local journals, their articles begin by “citing the teachings of the supreme leaders” and extolling the virtues of voluntary research as “an honorable, revolutionary task for the people.” The findings only take one or two pages, which is short compared to mainstream U.S. scientific journals. A great proportion of the papers are devoted to folk medicine, which is claimed to be effective 95 percent of the time...

“Scientists don’t believe what the propaganda feeds them, but they cannot discredit it either. You have to think what the party tells you to think.”"



FB: "scientists in this country still manage to maintain a leading nuclear weapons program and make other strides, including developing an artificial knee joint, ultrasound machine, and CT scanner. Nuclear and chemical weapons get priority in North Korea, Hyeongsoo said, followed by research into the health of the ruling family. Isolation means North Korean scientists have a hard time getting access to the global knowledge base, much less specialized or expensive equipment. When they encounter a problem, the regime expects them to find solutions on their own, Hyeongsoo said. Chemists, for instance, find smugglers to sell them reagents brought in from China."

"The Immortal Life of White Saviors and Black Stories"



"The entire film is through Skloot’s gaze. Look at them pray. Look at them eat. Look at them catch The Holy Ghost. Look at them yell. Look at them be black people. Oprah Winfrey’s performance as Deborah is given equal screen time. But in just about every scene, Byrne is shocked, amused, dismayed, frustrated or scared of something Deborah or her family has done or said. She merely reacts to everyone around her and the flat acting makes it hard to understand why her character was necessary in this version of the story at all."



This makes me so sad

Monday, May 21, 2018

"'Let me reverse your threat': how 'bullying' Roald Dahl was fired by his publisher"


"Gottlieb was Jewish, and Dahl was openly anti-semitic. The British author didn't respect his editor, and undermined his knowledge of modern art. He was belligerent to him, and his staff, and prone to explosive arguments over money, among other things.
One day in 1981, Dahl, was making increasingly abusive demands about a particular brand of pencil across the Atlantic. Gottlieb, in the US, reached breaking point. So he wrote this perfectly worded letter... 

Dahl would go on to work with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, who would cautiously turn his twisted, child-inappropriate  manuscripts into some of the best-loved works of children's literature (The BFG was originally a paedophile; Matilda not the victim of child neglect, but the cause of parental torture; The Witches "took a lot of abuse)."


This seems to be true of so many beloved figures, that they were rude or frustrating or actively prejudiced in real life. 

Sunday, May 20, 2018

"Down With 8 A.M. Classes: Undergrads Learn Better Later In The Day, Study Finds"

"While most colleges have start times of around 8 a.m., Jonathan Kelley advises NPR Ed that the ideal start time would be more like 10 or 11 a.m.

The reason: People fall into different "chronotypes," which people know as "early birds" and "night owls." In this sample, night owls outnumbered early birds by far.

The reasons for this are biological, says Evans.

"There has been evidence over time from specific studies indicating that teenagers' body clocks are set at a different time than older folks," she says. "Medical research suggests that this goes on well into your 20s, so we decided to look at college students.""



Related: CDC on high school, mine on morning stuff... 

Saturday, May 19, 2018

"NEVERTHELESS, HE PERSISTED: TALES OF MASCULINE PERSEVERANCE"



"Francis Whiting III, 76, was the last of a dying breed: a true gentleman. The light of chivalry may yet be extinguished from the face of the earth, he lamented, but it would not disappear before he did. He rehearsed this thought, or some variation thereof, dozens of times each day: when, for example, he held the door for a woman slightly too far away for it to be strictly necessary, and when he stood as a woman approached his table, and when he assigned the most challenging cases at his firm to men, and when he noticed a woman at the office looking tired, and told her so, and urged her to get more rest. It was no simple matter, being chivalrous. Nevertheless, he was a man of principle, and persisted."



The realness. Like, it's the kind of humor that gets incredibly serious

"A Look Inside Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Humble’: Extraordinary Blackness, Grey Poupon & Women"



"What makes “Formation” and “Humble” resonate deeply with black people is the way it juxtaposes black excellence and authenticity with black struggle and the black come up. In both visuals, we are stunned by the capacity of our wonder, and the gravity of our community’s issues, such as racism, police brutality and more. The result: iconic, moving visuals that speak volumes."



Pretty much just posting for those 3 sentences. The rest of the post is fine if you are still looking for analysis of Humble

Friday, May 18, 2018

"Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria"



"By 2004, Google had started scanning. In just over a decade, after making deals with Michigan, Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, the New York Public Library, and dozens of other library systems, the company, outpacing Page’s prediction, had scanned about 25 million books. It cost them an estimated $400 million. It was a feat not just of technology but of logistics.

Every weekday, semi trucks full of books would pull up at designated Google scanning centers. The one ingesting Stanford’s library was on Google’s Mountain View campus, in a converted office building. The books were unloaded from the trucks onto the kind of carts you find in libraries and wheeled up to human operators sitting at one of a few dozen brightly lit scanning stations, arranged in rows about six to eight feet apart.

The stations—which didn’t so much scan as photograph books—had been custom-built by Google from the sheet metal up. Each one could digitize books at a rate of 1,000 pages per hour. The book would lie in a specially designed motorized cradle that would adjust to the spine, locking it in place. Above, there was an array of lights and at least $1,000 worth of optics, including four cameras, two pointed at each half of the book, and a range-finding LIDAR that overlaid a three-dimensional laser grid on the book’s surface to capture the curvature of the paper. The human operator would turn pages by hand—no machine could be as quick and gentle—and fire the cameras by pressing a foot pedal, as though playing at a strange piano...

At the heart of the settlement was a collective licensing regime for out-of-print books. Authors and publishers could opt out their books at any time. For those who didn’t, Google would be given wide latitude to display and sell their books, but in return, 63 percent of the revenues would go into escrow with a new entity called the Book Rights Registry. The Registry’s job would be to distribute funds to rightsholders as they came forward to claim their works; in ambiguous cases, part of the money would be used to figure out who actually owned the rights...

Those who had been at the table crafting the agreement had expected some resistance, but not the “parade of horribles,” as Sarnoff described it, that they eventually saw. The objections came in many flavors, but they all started with the sense that the settlement was handing to Google, and Google alone, an awesome power. “Did we want the greatest library that would ever exist to be in the hands of one giant corporation, which could really charge almost anything it wanted for access to it?”, Robert Darnton, then president of Harvard’s library, has said.

Darnton had initially been supportive of Google’s scanning project, but the settlement made him wary. The scenario he and many others feared was that the same thing that had happened to the academic journal market would happen to the Google Books database. The price would be fair at first, but once libraries and universities became dependent on the subscription, the price would rise and rise until it began to rival the usurious rates that journals were charging, where for instance by 2011 a yearly subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology could cost as much as $25,910."


This whole saga was weirdly compelling, like it shouldn't be this interesting but the levels of complexity totally are.

FB: "What happened was complicated but how it started was simple: Google did that thing where you ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and forgiveness was not forthcoming. Upon hearing that Google was taking millions of books out of libraries, scanning them, and returning them as if nothing had happened, authors and publishers filed suit against the company, alleging, as the authors put it simply in their initial complaint, “massive copyright infringement."...


The irony is that so many people opposed the settlement in ways that suggested they fundamentally believed in what Google was trying to do."

Thursday, May 17, 2018

"Tools of war: Why cannibalism has disappeared but rape hasn’t"



"when the anthropomorphized wolf consumes Grandma and Red, “Little Red Riding Hood” conflates eating and rape in a strangely cannibalistic act. In this connection, “Little Red Riding Hood,” whose oral tradition dates to at least 1000 CE, suggests a place we modern humans might look to the demise of one ancient behavior—cannibalism—to find the end of another ancient human behavior—rape...

In terms of war, sexual violence has functioned a lot like cannibalism. Both rape and cannibalism were ways for nascent states to consolidate power. Both acts create fear and both have the long-term effect of absorbing one culture into another, cannibalism through consumption and rape through procreation...

Europeans exported their ideas of cannibalism as a taboo as they colonized the world. But it’s all kind of a great big fat people-eating lie because as late as the Victorian Age, Europeans and others practiced medicinal cannibalism, which is exactly what it sounds like. Pulverized mummies, executed men’s blood, human fat—human remains appeared as nostra for a variety of illnesses. It was a cultural blind spot that allowed Europeans to condemn—and even colonize—others for being cannibals while retaining their #NotAllCannibals status...

If statistics are stacked against the bystander model, if young men are fuzzy over the concept of consent, and if men shut down at the word “rape,” what alternatives are there? How, for example, can rape prevention education make rape unpalatable? One way might be to tell stories differently—or to tell different stories."


There is no real solution here, but it's interesting as a comparison of taboos 


FB: "while cannibalism has died out in a rich brocade of taboo woven from narrative, religion and sometimes law, rape lives on. The question becomes what cannibalism can teach us about new ways of looking at, understanding and ultimately preventing rape."

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

"Do You Want to Be Known For Your Writing, or For Your Swift Email Responses?"



"Women are not taught to do this. We are conditioned to ever prove ourselves, as if our value is contingent on our ability to meet the expectations of others. As if our worth is a tank forever draining that we must fill and fill. We complete tasks and in some half-buried way believe that if we don’t, we will be discredited. Sometimes, this is true. But here is a question: Do you want to be a reliable source of literary art (or whatever writing you do), or of prompt emails?...

I find opportunities to prove myself alluring. I spent a long time trying to maintain relationships with people who wanted more than I was capable of giving. The truth is, I do need to cancel plans regularly. I need to disappear for a few days or even months to attend to my writing. Friends or lovers who resent this, who interpret it as a personal rejection, are often angry with me. And feeling at a deficit makes me want to work harder to make it up to them. In recent years, I’ve learned the relief of letting go of this debt. It is possible to do so with love. Being a good friend doesn’t mean adhering to your friend’s ideal of a good friend. It means devising your own ideal, and then applying it to friends who share that ideal. This application requires a working knowledge of “boundaries.”"



FB: weirdly rousing essay on why we should all let ourselves be shitty at email "Institutional sexism (like racism, ableism, and other isms) teaches us to feel indebted to anyone who acknowledges our value, because they also have the power to take it away, because our value only exists in the esteem of others. Your job is not to repay the people who acknowledge you by giving them what they want."

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

"How a Single Gene Could Become a Volume Knob for Pain"

"Throughout his body today, Pete has a strange feeling: “a weird radiating sensation,” as he describes it, an overall discomfort but not quite pain as you and I know it. He and others born with his condition have been compared to superheroes—indomitable, unbreakable. In his basement, where the shelves are lined with videogames about biologically and technologically enhanced soldiers, there is even a framed sketch of a character in full body armor, with the words painless pete. But Pete knows better. “There’s no way I could live a normal life right now if I could actually feel pain,” he says. He would probably be constrained to a bed or wheelchair from all the damage his body has sustained...

pharmaceutical researchers are now deep into clinical trials on a new type of drug that seeks to mimic Pete’s condition to treat Costa and others living with chronic pain. Such a drug would not merely dull inflammation the way ibuprofen does or alter our neurochemistry the way opioids do: It would block the transmission of pain signals from cell to cell without ruinous side effects on the brain or body...

Acute pain persists, but it also goes away. Acute pain is also easier to empathize with: Show someone an image of a pair of scissors cutting a hand, and the observer’s brain will react as much as if their own hand were being pinched.

Chronic pain, on the other hand, is a phantom: an enduring ache, a tenderness that does not turn off. It can be inflammatory (brought on by diseases like arthritis) or neuropathic (affecting the nerves, as in some cases of shingles, diabetes, or chemotherapy treatments). Some chronic pain never even traces back to a coherent cause, which makes it that much harder to understand. Give us broken bones, burn marks, blood—in the absence of proof (or personal experience), the hidden pain of others is easy to dismiss...

Waxman was interested in the sodium channels found in the membranes of neurons—portals that allow charged particles to flow in and out of the nerve cells. In particular, he believed that one of those sodium channels, Nav1.7, played an especially powerful role in how we experience pain. In his theory, a stimulus triggers the Nav1.7 channel to open just long enough to allow the necessary amount of sodium ions to pass through, which then enables messages of stinging, soreness, or scalding to register in the brain. When the trigger subsides, Nav1.7 closes. In those with faulty Nav1.7 channels, sensations that typically wouldn’t register with the brain are instead translated into extreme pain...

Xenon found a common trait among those with insensitivity to pain: mutations in a single gene, SCN9A, and the non­functioning sodium channel it encodes, Nav1.7...

“At least a half dozen companies are trying to develop sodium-channel blockers that preferentially or selectively block 1.7,” Waxman says. And while obstacles remain—ensuring that only the Nav1.7 channel is affected; creating compounds that will allow some pain to register without cutting it off altogether; surviving the rigors of FDA approval—he and many others see a way forward."


There is so much great, fascinating work going on in neuroscience on pain. The history of pain treatment is FASCINATING, all the ways that our species has encountered opium and then the last 200 years of trying to make them safe for chronic use (heroin was developed in the 19th century and advertised as the non-addictive version of morphine. Really).

And outside of drugs, there are studies on engaging the placebo effect and other "mind-body" methods to dull chronic pain - which can often be a progressive neurological disorder that emerges from acute pain, and which can get locked into these stress-inflammation-pain loops. 

I think it's partly our society, and how we are encouraged to internalize our pain, grit our teeth and push through because that's what it means to be a strong-resilient-Western-individual. We end up wrapping it into our identities, instead of living lives where we can rely on our communities to help us deal with any pain that might emerge.

Also - call your state and federal legislators and make sure that they support research funding, applied AND basic. These findings are presented as a direct process of examining patients with specific diseases, but they rely on an incredible platform of basic research:

The human genome project was probably responsible for originally establishing the "normal" sequence of these genes - and then later, a basic cell biologist probably went searching for sodium channel genes based on sequence similarity to known sodium genes and "annotated" Nav1.7 (you can tell when something was found in a generalized screen when it has a boring, numbered name). There are whole labs that just work on the electrochemical properties of ion channels, and some grad student probably characterized the behavior of Nav1.7 and someone else solved the protein structure and showed which part of the protein did what and therefore which parts of the genetic sequence contributed to which functions. So, finally, when the two research groups described here were looking at these familial pain disorders, they were able to find the mutations that differed from the normal sequence, and identify how that would change the protein function and therefore the pain signaling properties of the neuron (I haven't even gotten into the basic research that let them but the neuroscience together!)

FB: this is why I do science -- "Pain has always been the price of being alive, but according to the National Institutes of Health, more than one in 10 American adults say that some part of their body hurts some or all of the time. That’s more than 25 million people. In study after study, more middle-aged Americans than ever before say they suffer from chronic pain...

Waxman pulled up an image of a normal person’s sodium channel on the screen, the strings of amino acids that form it neatly folded. Then he pulled up another image: The protein here was a tangled clump, amino acids zigzagging almost off the screen. “This is you,” he said.


“I’ll never forget,” Costa says. Her entire life, she could only tell others how she felt—she could never show them. To see the medical proof of her pain for the first time, Costa says, “was the most validating experience in my entire life.”"