"Letter of Recommendation: Ghosting"

"If healthy relationships — especially in the digital age — are predicated on answerability, it makes sense that a lack of communication would feel like a breach of trust. But articulating negative feelings with tact is a task most often assigned to those whose feelings are assumed to be trivial. When fear for my family — black, migratory and therefore targets of the state — is equated with the mundane anxiety of a standardized test, I find it a relief to absent myself from the calculation. Saying, without anger, ‘‘This is how you hurt me’’ feels routine, like a ditty, and articulating the need for isolation — ‘‘Now I intend to disappear’’ — is always a betrayal of the need itself. Because society demands that people of color both accept offense and facilitate its reconciliation, we are rarely afforded the privacy we need. Ghosting, then, provides a line of flight. Freed from the ties that hurt us, or bore us, or make us feel uneasy, finally we can turn our attention inward."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-ghosting.html?_r=0&referer=android-app://com.google.android.gm

"Word up! This is the story behind The New York Times’ most famous tweet"

"Another weekend, a custodian accidentally unplugged a cord on the server, prompting the Times’ main Twitter account to stop tweeting for a weekend.

“I wasn’t at work, so I was like, ‘Whatever, it’s just a side project,'” Harris recalled. “But I came into work and there were several different emails asking who did support for this product, what the contingency plan was. That’s sort of the time when I realized: Oh, I guess this is a product.”"

http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/word-up-this-is-the-story-behind-the-new-york-times-most-famous-tweet-which-is-10-years-old-today/

Twitter became Twitter by accident. 

Or, I guess, "social media" became Social Media by accident 

"Civil Warfare in the Streets"

"By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect, everywhere,” one Landsmann enthused...

For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had wanted to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not endear them to longtime St. Louisans... 

Missouri’s Germans had been slow to unite behind Abraham Lincoln in the recent presidential election—the folksy rail-splitter held little charm for the acolytes of Goethe and Hegel. But support from intellectuals like Boernstein encouraged them: the editor, fast becoming one of Missouri’s top Republican power brokers, hailed his party’s nominee as “the man who will see his way through a great struggle yet to come, the struggle with the most dangerous and ruthless enemy of freedom.”... 

The sentries waved her through; clearly this was just a widow paying a visit to her militiaman son, and her basket must be full of sandwiches she had lovingly prepared for her dear boy.

In fact, the wicker basket held two loaded Colt revolvers. And if the sentries had peered under the old lady’s veil, they would have glimpsed something even more surprising: a bushy red beard.

Surely there must have been a hundred simpler ways to reconnoiter the rebels’ picnic ground...

Grant himself would believe for the rest of his life that but for Lyon and his Germans, the Arsenal, and with it St. Louis, would have been taken by the Confederacy. By seizing the initiative—by transforming the Wide Awakes into soldiers and moving against the secessionists before they could properly organize—the “damn Dutchmen” had sent their enemies reeling, never to regain their balance."

https://theamericanscholar.org/civil-warfare-in-the-streets/#

This is one "white saviors" movie that I would watch. The identity stuff here is fascinating. 

FB: This is wild. "

Missouri Germans flocked to join the semisecret political groups, known as Wide Awakes, that formed across the North in support of Lincoln’s candidacy. Capes! Torches! Nighttime parades!... Although Lincoln lost Missouri decisively, the Wide Awake clubs did not disband after the election. In fact, they began arming themselves: not with torches now, but with Sharps rifles provided by certain unofficial sources in the East. (Some of the Germans’ new weaponry arrived hidden, appropriately enough, in empty beer barrels.) Under the supervision of General Sigel and veterans of the Prussian officer corps, they began their clandestine drills."

"Easter Islanders Didn’t Cause Ecological Disaster on Their Island, New Research Finds"

"These activities demonstrate considerable adaptation and resilience to environmental challenges — a finding that is inconsistent with an ‘ecocide’ narrative.

“The Rapa Nui people were, not surprisingly, smart about how they used their resources,” Professor Lipo said.

“And all the misunderstanding comes from our preconceptions about what subsistence should look like, basically European farmers thinking, ‘Well, what should a farm look like?’ And it didn’t look like what they thought, so they assumed something bad had happened, when in fact it was a perfectly smart thing to do.”"

http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/easter-islanders-ecological-disaster-05033.html

Related: American Indians don't actually have higher susceptibility to alcohol 

"America’s hidden philosophy"

"Allen’s justification for doing this became known across the country as the ‘Allen Formula’. The core of it ran like this: members of the Communist Party have abandoned reason, the impartial search for truth, and merely parrot the Moscow line. They should not be allowed to teach, not because they are Marxists – that would indeed be censorship – but because they are incompetent...

Moreover, and conveniently, rationality was now a matter of following clear rules that went beyond individual disciplines. This meant that whether someone was ‘competent’ or not could be handed over to what Allen called members of ‘the tough, hard-headed world of affairs’ – in practice, administrators and trustees – rather than left to professors actually conversant with the suspect’s field...

The Cold War lasted until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and Cold War philosophy is still with us today. Thus, humanists long ago abandoned McCarthy-era attempts to subject their work to scientific method (as New Criticism was held to do). But in universities at large, intellectual respectability still tends to follow the sciences... 

Cold War philosophy also influences US society through its ethics. Its main ethical implication is somewhat hidden, because Cold War philosophy inherits from rational choice theory a proclamation of ethical neutrality: a person’s preferences and goals are not subjected to moral evaluation. As far as rational choice theory is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I want to end world hunger, pass the bar, or buy myself a nice private jet; I make my choices the same way. Similarly for Cold War philosophy – but it also has an ethical imperative that concerns not ends but means. However laudable or nefarious my goals might be, I will be better able to achieve them if I have two things: wealth and power. We therefore derive an ‘ethical’ imperative: whatever else you want to do, increase your wealth and power!"

https://aeon.co/essays/how-cold-war-philosophy-permeates-us-society-to-this-day

If you only have time for a 5 minute read, ctrl-f 'disidentification' and read from there

This quote though - - "when rational choice theory becomes Cold War philosophy, it applies to everything, and everything about me becomes a matter of choice."

FB: this essay has been one of those things I read and then incorporated into my understanding of reality - "US academics also faced the task of coming up with a philosophical antidote to Marxism. Rational choice theory, developed at the RAND Corporation in the late 1940s, was a plausible candidate. It holds that people make (or should make) choices rationally by ranking the alternatives presented to them with regard to the mathematical properties of transitivity and completeness. They then choose the alternative that maximises their utility, advancing their relevant goals at minimal cost. Each individual is solely responsible for her preferences and goals, so rational choice theory takes a strongly individualistic view of human life. The ‘iron laws of history’ have no place here, and large-scale historical forces, such as social classes and revolutions, do not really exist except as shorthand for lots of people making up their minds. To patriotic US intellectuals, rational choice theory thus held great promise as a weapon in the Cold War of ideas."

"CONTROVERSIAL NEW THEORY SUGGESTS LIFE WASN'T A FLUKE OF BIOLOGY—IT WAS PHYSICS"

"The paper strips away the nitty-gritty details of cells and biology and describes a simpler, simulated system of chemicals in which it is nonetheless possible for exceptional structure to spontaneously arise—the phenomenon that England sees as the driving force behind the origin of life. “That doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed to acquire that structure,” England explained. The dynamics of the system are too complicated and nonlinear to predict what will happen.

The simulation involved a soup of 25 chemicals that react with one another in myriad ways. Energy sources in the soup’s environment facilitate or “force” some of these chemical reactions, just as sunlight triggers the production of ozone in the atmosphere and the chemical fuel ATP drives processes in the cell. Starting with random initial chemical concentrations, reaction rates and “forcing landscapes”—rules that dictate which reactions get a boost from outside forces and by how much—the simulated chemical reaction network evolves until it reaches its final, steady state, or “fixed point.”...

In these cases, it evolves to fixed points far from equilibrium, where it vigorously cycles through reactions by harvesting the maximum energy possible from the environment... Living creatures also maintain steady states of extreme forcing: We are super-consumers who burn through enormous amounts of chemical energy, degrading it and increasing the entropy of the universe, as we power the reactions in our cells...

Coffee cools down because nothing is heating it up, but England’s calculations suggested

that groups of atoms that are driven by external energy sources can behave differently: They tend to start tapping into those energy sources, aligning and rearranging so as to better absorb the energy and dissipate it as heat. He further showed that this statistical tendency to dissipate energy might foster self-replication...

Understanding what distinguishes life, she added, “requires some explicit notion of information that takes it beyond the non-equilibrium dissipative structures-type process.” In her view, the ability to respond to information is key: “We need chemical reaction networks that can get up and walk away from the environment where they originated.”

 

https://www.wired.com/story/controversial-new-theory-suggests-life-wasnt-a-fluke-of-biologyit-was-physics/

Physics is so much fun after 1st year physics. And if you are just reading about it and not competing with 300 people for the only A the professor will deign to give out. 

FB: Basically, we all learned an over-simplified version of the 2nd law of thermodynamics that ignores possible feedback loops. (i.e. your hot coffee doesn't cool to room temperature if the heat coming off the coffee starts a chain reaction in the air that re-heats your coffee by sucking heat out of your desk) It's super cool. 

"How likely is an all-male speakers list, statistically speaking? A mathematician weighs in."

"If you’ve ever followed a debate about why an event has so few women speakers, you’re likely familiar with the argument that gender was not a factor (AKA “we chose the best speakers, regardless of gender”), and that speakers were chosen in an unbiased fashion, on merit alone. Well, if I understand the math correctly, the odds of that assertion being true are next to nothing.

It delights me to no end that Greg has found a way to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. So naturally, I asked if he’d be willing to share a little more about how he arrived at his calculations."

http://www.laurenbacon.com/how-likely-is-an-all-male-speakers-list-statistically/

The rest of the post is a detailed stats lesson and instructions for how to make the calculations in your field.

It's a very simplistic model, there are a ton of social-heirwrchy wieghting systems I can imagine that would pull in info about, like, bias toward more prestigious universities or better-funded sub-fields or "sexier" topics more likely to get media attention, and then you could look at gender disparities there too.

FB: spoilers - it's not.

" "Everything Except Country and Rap:" What You Really Mean"

"

Where there’s class issues, there are race issues. This is no surprise. But that’s where the story of “everything but country and rap” starts: a formal racial division... 

While they seem completely separate, hip hop and country sit on the extremes of the spectrum of popular musical genres, and find themselves subject to many of the same criticisms. This, to me, threw open the door on why “everything but country and rap” is a bigger deal than it seems.

Authenticity is important in both musical communities, both policed inwardly and from outside listeners. Can you be a country singer if you didn’t grow up on a farm? Can you be a rapper if you didn’t grow up on the streets of a big city?... 

To admit you like country music is admitting you like something inherently and purely working class, which jeopardizes your status as middle class. There’s a real anxiety in this, and country music is an immediate “flashpoint,” in Hubbs’ words, for this internal struggle of outward presentation.

“Country music’s potency as a creator of classed taste and identity is evident in the derision and anxiety it arouses in the dominant culture,” Hubbs explained."

http://www.runoutnumbers.com/blog/2015/11/16/everything-except-country-and-rap#

So fascinating. There is a lot of common work to be done

Related: Anti-racist rednecks 

FB: "

The middle class white actively avoid identifying with country music and hip hop because it represents something they’re afraid of being perceived as: something other than white, and something lower than middle class." 

" Osama bin Laden’s family on the run: ‘I never stopped praying our lives might return to normal’"

"Many al-Qaida members had witnessed the screaming rows Osama had with Omar, the teenage son he had been training as his heir, who bore a striking resemblance to his father. Omar had never shared his father’s obsession with war, and after he learned of his father’s coming Planes Operation, he became determined to leave. He had gone to his mother, Najwa, pleading with her to come with him. But she had never disobeyed her husband, so Omar had slipped away alone. “[My father’s] violent path had separated us for ever,” he later recalled.

But by the end of August 2001, Najwa had a change of heart. With Omar’s words playing on her mind, she asked to return to her parents in Syria – an unexpected act of rebellion from a woman who had stuck by her husband’s side for 26 years and given him 11 children.

Najwa had never intended to be a jihadi bride. Glamorous and beautiful, she was a Ghanem, from an old, cultured Syrian family, and had grown up in the cosmopolitan seaside resort of Latakia, where women wore bikinis. She had married Osama in 1974, when she had just turned 16 and he was still forging a reputation as a demon soccer player at his university, and for driving fast cars recklessly... 

Mahfouz debated with his colleagues for days what to do with Osama’s family. CIA agents were closing in everywhere. US helicopters flew along the Pakistan border. He needed to escort his charges to somewhere that was completely off limits to America. They were among the world’s most wanted, and relatively easy to spot: tall, fine-boned Arabs, several of whom closely resembled Osama, and who spoke no local languages.

In the end, they reached an unlikely conclusion: send the wives and children of Osama bin Laden, leader of an outlawed Sunni militia, to seek asylum in Iran, the centre of Shia power... 

By 2007, Osama’s family in Iran had expanded, with the birth of several grandchildren, and they had been relocated to another building in the complex, this one called Block 300. Tensions with their hosts, terrible food and unsanitary conditions had taken their toll. Saad, 28, was by now the father of three children, a boy named Osama and two little girls. A few months earlier his wife, Wafa, had had another son who died because the Iranians had refused a hospital visit. Another shura member’s wife had also died for want of medical treatment; Khairiah suffered excruciating dental problems and walked with a cane.

As tensions reached breaking point, Mahfouz, who lived with the family, fought for concessions. 

Family

 groups were taken out on day trips by Iranian escorts to visit famous landmarks in Tehran, where they mingled with American tourists. Once or twice Osama’s sons and the shura members were taken to a sports complex in Elahieh. Saif al-Adel, who had a $5m bounty on his head in the west, swam lanes alongside foreign diplomats."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/06/osama-bin-laden-family-on-the-run-after-9-11

This is a group of people I never think about, who were at the center of these incredibly important world events for a decade

There's also this weird thing I realized while reading, that the mid-2000s smell like dry dirt and heat to me, because I spent so much of that time reading the news and imagining "what it was like". That smell came back to me while I was reading this 

FB:  "

At the end of the first month, some of Osama’s sons were offered their first phone calls. Whisked to the Afghan border and given a Thuraya satellite phone – a location and device that were intended to confuse American eavesdroppers – they were ordered to say nothing about their precise location. They reached Omar bin Laden, Osama’s son who had left Afghanistan before 9/11 and was now living in Qatar with his British wife Zaina. Over the years, Omar and his mother, Najwa, had written to the International Red Cross and the United Nations in search of their family. Now, stunned, they got a call from the desert. Omar promised to help."

"Dear White Parents Of My Black Child’s Friends: I Need Your Help"

" As the parents of the white friend of my black child, I need you to be talking to your child about racism. I need you to be talking about the assumptions other people might make about my son. I need you to talk to your child about what they would do if they saw injustice happening.

I know that in a white family it is easy to use words like “colorblind” and feel like we’re enlightened and progressive. 

But if you teach your kids to be colorblind

, they may not understand the uniquely dangerous situations my child can find himself in. If you tell your kids racism happened a long time ago and now it’s over and use my family as an example of how whites and blacks and browns can all get along together, you are not doing me any favors. Just because you haven’t seen obvious examples of racism in your own life doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist...

If your child is with my child playing soccer at the park and the police drive by, tell your child to stay—just stay right there with my son. Be a witness. In that situation, be extra polite, extra respectful. Don’t run and don’t leave my son by himself. If you are with my son, this is not the time to try out any new risky behaviors. Whatever trouble you get into, he will likely not be judged by the same standard you are. Be understanding that he can’t make the same mistakes you can."

http://www.scarymommy.com/black-child-friends/?utm_source=FBOnsite

Related: “You can’t ignore racism and raise anti-racist children. You have to tackle it head-on”; friendship race and knowing your place

FB: " 

Your kids are listening and learning from you even in the jokes you tell. Be conscious of what media messages your kids are getting about race. Engage in tough conversations about what you’re hearing in the news. Don’t shy away from this just because you can. He can’t. We can’t."

"THE INCREDIBLE LOST HISTORY OF HOW “CIVIL RIGHTS PLUS FULL EMPLOYMENT EQUALS FREEDOM”"

"If all you know about the modern civil rights movement comes from TV or one class in high school, it seems like it started with Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954 and was mostly about desegregating schools, lunch counters, and water fountains.

In fact, its roots were in the Great Depression of the 1930s and then World War II in the 1940s. And the war powerfully demonstrated something that had only been theoretical before: that democracies can set government policies that create full employment.

This meant more for African-Americans than anyone. Blacks had always been locked out of decent work, with unemployment rates far higher than that of whites. But the war created the demand for so much labor that for the first time significant numbers of blacks could find good jobs and gain a small toehold of economic security. The question was what would happen when the war ended...

The most powerful, lasting impact of the Full Employment Act is that (together with the Federal Reserve Act of 1977) it made it explicit that Congress was giving the Fed a “dual mandate” of maintaining reasonable price stability and maximizing employment. The 0.1 percent had always preferred that the Fed focus solely on inflation, pushing it to raise interest rates and throw people out of work at any sign of rising prices, real or imagined."

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/17/the-incredible-lost-history-of-how-civil-rights-plus-full-employment-equals-freedom/

Honestly, black activists have been fighting for the well being of all Americans since there have been black activists.

FB: "the Kennedy administration showed some openness to the civil rights part of that equation — but none at all to the full employment part. So two of the movement’s leaders, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, drafted the “Freedom Budget for All Americans.” One of its central demands was “more effective public control of the Federal Reserve.” King called the Freedom Budget “essential if the Negro people are to make further social progress.”"

"It’s Okay to Be a Coward About Cancer"

"One of the things I know nothing about is cancer, especially my own. I never researched it, never went online to read up on it, never “stared it down” and never really asked my doctor much of anything. I didn’t even know he was cutting out my rib until I was lying in my recovery bed and it wasgone. My spirit animal is whatever happens when you get a chicken and an ostrich drunk and give them a room.

But I do know this: Cancer doesn’t give a damn how tough you are. Cancer doesn’t care if you stared down the North Koreans, or won the Tour De France, or wrote two seasons of a scary robot show.

Since the Senator from Arizona’s diagnosis became public, I’ve watched well-meaning people tell a brave man to be brave. “Give it hell, John.” “Fight.” They’re worthy words and always spoken from the best place. But they’re not the words I’ve heard from other cancer survivors in the last few days. We know the dirty secret.

You don’t battle cancer. You don’t fight it. If cancer wants you it sneaks into your room at night and just takes you. It doesn’t care if you’re John Wayne or John McCain."

http://time.com/4868301/john-mccain-cancer-fight-bravery-cowardice/

Ya, we reallllyyyyy need to stop pretending that a positive attitude can be a cure, or that your genuine human emotional response is what will actually kill you.

FB: "As a storyteller I think hard about the tales we tell. Toughness and courage are staples of our cultural business. But these are not how we survive cancer. We survive cancer through luck, science, early detection and real health insurance. If we survived through courage, I probably wouldn’t have."