"Millions Of Women Face Astonishing Pain When They Have Sex. Why Don’t Their Doctors Take Them Seriously? "

"Since no one seemed to believe her, she turned to self-medication, using information she found on a website describing vaginismus, a vaginal disorder known to cause spasms and the clenching of pelvic muscles. The recommended cure? A set of incrementally larger dilators that would, in theory, strengthen her vulvar muscles and eventually ease her pain.

So Jones sat in her bedroom and forced the instruments inside of her, starting with the smallest one. That it would even “go in,” she says, felt like a sign of progress. But her agony persisted, and the dilators seemed to have triggered a new problem: She felt like she had to urinate all the time...

When I looked up vulvodynia up on the internet, I found myself on YouTube, where the entire first page of results featured videos from the heavy metal band Vulvodynia, save for two exceptions: a well-intentioned man giving a flawed definition of vulvodynia under the guise of “health & wellness” (he recommends “avoiding intercourse” and bathing in baking soda) and a Pilates instructor named Laura Lehrhaupt dangerously claiming to have cured her vulvodynia with something called the Acid Alkaline Diet...

From the top down, reliable information about the condition and its causes isn’t readily available, which Mate attributes to the fact that vulvar pain treatment has a funding problem.

“It’s not taught in medical schools, it’s not taught in residency training programs, it’s not available as a topic at the NIH to have grants funded for,” says Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the director of a prominent Southern California clinic called San Diego Sexual Medicine, as well as the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health.

It’s frustrating, he says, that there are more vulvodynia cases than those of breast or even “prostate cancer...

last year, at her regular physical, Panzer’s determination for a healthy sex life with Barenboim spurred her to ask her internist offhandedly if pain during sex was normal. “Um, no,” the doctor told her. But he misdiagnosed Panzer with a partially torn hymen and sent her to an OB/GYN at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who told her the issue was psychosomatic.

“He said to me, ‘This is definitely in your head,’” says Panzer bitterly. “He was like, ‘I can see your hymen is broken; I think this is probably in your head.’ I was like, ‘Listen, I will tell a stranger I have this condition. It’s not in my head.’”...

Haunting the research of any women’s sexual dysfunction done by the NIH is that the Gynecological Health and Disease Branch is couched within the NICHD, which means that women’s sexual health studies are drawing from the same money needed to support obstetrics and pediatrics."

https://health.good.is/features/vulvodynia-women-sexual-health-not-taken-seriously

A friend of mine has this diagnosis. Well, like, at least one - after I read this, I sent it to someone who had once described these symptoms to me. ~Tell your friends when you're in pain~

I strongly recommend the essay on pain linked in the article - here's my summary of it from a few years ago **add link**, it's one of the best things I've posted.

Related: problem with trusting your doctor; several others on female pain

FB: "Murphy saw four different gynecologists, who each gave her various misdiagnoses and mistreatments before she hit a dead end. “I felt a little too comfortable with the pain,” she says. “I had accepted the compromised position and felt like giving up and living with it was the only option.”"

"Black Women Deserve Real Love, Too"

"To some, Black women are not afforded the luxury of finding a better relationship. Black women are not worthy of magical love stories. Successful love stories for Black women are marked solely by our ability to endure suffering and continue to stand with partners who demean, abuse and cheat on us with grace...

Love and happiness are not experiences society is prepared to watch Black women have. Ciara was never supposed to find her fairytale. Russell Wilson was never supposed to see value, love, appreciate and exalt a Black woman, one like Ciara who loved herself too much to stay in a relationship that wasn’t giving her what she needed. Black women are supposed to exist only for carnal consumption and discard."

http://www.ebony.com/news-views/ciara-pregnant#ixzz4ONjhA3FK 

Yes. Sometimes it feels like there isn't a cultural expectation for us to lead happy and healthy lives (the way there is thus expectation girl white women); it's more like an expectation for us yo be bravely and independently struggling like good, Strong Black Women

"What is Scottish Witchcraft (or not)? – the role of the wise women"

"It is important to note here that I am not using the word Witch.  Witchcraft in Scotland was known as buidseach(male) or bana-bhuidseach (female) and only appears after the 16th century, about the time of the witch hunts. Amait was used before this and meant witch, then later referred to a “foolish women”. Those who would consider themselves buidseach would work and call on the spirits or powers of the north and left hand direction for self gain and self aggrandisement and work against their community, this is important to note. This wouldn’t be something that a wise woman would do , go against their community, unless perhaps in war times as shown in the Irish and Scottish Tales where this approach would support her “tauth” or family and community to be successful.  We can’t really be sure but I doubt the diaone sith would let harm come to those they had relationships with and the community they helped support so action would have been needed in some form. They dealt with both sides I’m sure, but in support not hindrance of the greater good. Also the modern term Witch is so conflated with different religious overtures from neopaganism, Wicca to Luciferian and Hedgewitch practices that it helps to not use it when referring to folk practices at all... 

So what is the role of the wise woman or man in Scotland? Their role would have been to help their communities and to combat malign influences. This help, more often than not, was given to the wise woman by the blessing of the daoine sith. They were specialists, other healers or charmers couldn’t match because they dealt with the world of the unseen. Wise woman and men had a relationship with the otherworld or world of the sidhe/sith that helped them in various tasks... 

This is very different from the English cunning folk who were far more likely to emphasise their learning coming from exotic occult books and less emphasis on tradition, if any... 

So where does this leave us today? Perhaps the role of the wise person in their community was one of community nurse/midwife/social worker/herbalist/seer/intuitive/community worker/counsellor/ pharmacist/medium. All of which are roles that are considered very different and separate from one another today, if at all related. Spirit Medium Social worker does sound like an awesome job title though!"

http://www.cailleachs-herbarium.com/2015/09/what-is-scottish-witchcraft-or-not-the-role-of-the-wise-women/

Indigenous Scottish practices 

"Privilege"

"Microaggressions enable the privileged to be polite as they offload their discomfort. (When the oppressed make their discomfort known, it’s never polite.) For the most part, I don’t respond. There’s nothing truthful I could say that wouldn’t get me branded as either provocative or paranoid—much the way black people get labeled “angry,” or women “shrill.” Who would ever want to hire me? Now that I’ve joined an oppressed minority, I rely on my friend Marvin, a black attorney, for wisdom. He tells me my problem is that I’m unwilling to see things from their point of view. “But they can’t see this,” I say. “Right,” he says."

https://theamericanscholar.org/privilege/

"The Critic Who Refuted Trump’s World View—in 1916"

"To Bourne, America wasn’t some citadel in need of defending: it was a project, one that continually enfolded new participants, dynamically renewed its character. The ethnonationalist looks backward for familiarity, security, a sense of control. Bourne, the child of a hopeful century, looked ahead with ecstatic optimism: “America is a unique sociological fabric, and it bespeaks poverty of imagination not to be thrilled at the incalculable potentialities of so novel a union of men.” Other cosmopolitans, such as the philosopher Horace Kallen, had articulated the shortcomings of the melting pot, but Bourne was rare in his ability to glimpse the shining ideal that could replace it: the “Beloved Community,” a new kind of society in which citizens are bound together by the loyalty of each to all, regardless of race or creed...

Less than a year after he wrote his essay, the United States joined the war on the Allied side, unleashing a wave of “100 percent Americanism” more virulent than he had dreamed possible. Nativist attacks, vigilantism, race riots, and censorship were inflicted on a terrorized citizenry, native-born and immigrant alike."

http://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/the-critic-who-refuted-trumps-world-view-in-1916?mbid=social_facebook

FB: "The unique challenge of America, a teeming “nation of nations,” is to define itself in terms broad enough to suit its transnational population, not to mimic other countries’ exclusive, backward-looking pride. “We must perpetrate the paradox that our American cultural tradition lies in the future,” he wrote."

"The Armadillo Applies for the Job of Comfort Animal"

"Conveniently, I’m nocturnal, offering you optimal access to snuggles when your savage soul needs soothing in the dark of night. Contrary to rumor, the chances of contracting leprosy from handling an armadillo are minimal — so embrace me as I tuck myself into a ball and wrap my tapered tail around your face. I think you’ll agree that the ravages of the real world recede when you look into my earnest, beady eyes.

I can travel from my native forests and grasslands to meet with humans on an individual or group basis to spread cheer through private home visits or at a corporate group rate."

https://imissyouwheniblink.com/2016/07/11/armadillo-applies-for-job-comfort-animal/

I don't know why but I found this snuggly and comforting

maybe it's because I've always kind of wanted a pet hedgehog, which is like half way to armadillo.

"Why Do We Love Images Of Emptiness? Scientists And Artists Explain"

"Ann Sussman, an architect and co-author of Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment, has had similar results in her investigations. "In a sense, once people are in a shot, we can’t really ‘see’ the place for what it is," she says. "Our brain, because of its evolution, will not let us do this."... 

Ellard, the neuroscientist, thinks that "mystery" may have something to do with the ability of empty images to draw a viewer in. But he doesn't mean mystery in the sense you might imagine. "Mystery" is a concept in environmental psychology that refers to the mental sense that an image or setting has the promise of more information around the corner. Looking at a photo of a man-made space devoid of people may trigger this impulse—that there's more to be learned about the depicted place, effectively drawing you into the image."

https://www.fastcodesign.com/3062926/why-do-we-love-images-of-empty-spaces-neuroscientists-and-artists-explain

Hmm. 

"The brain: a radical rethink is needed to understand it"

"A neuroscientist who finds a correlation between a neuron or brain region and a specific but in principle arbitrary physical parameter, such as pain, will be tempted to draw the conclusion that this neuron or this part of the brain controls pain. This is ironic because, even in the neuroscientist, the brain’s inherent function is to find correlations – in whatever task it performs.

But what if we instead considered the possibility that all brain functions are distributed across the brain and that all parts of the brain contribute to all functions? If that is the case, correlations found so far may be a perfect trap of the intellect. We then have to solve the problem of how the region or the neuron type with the specific function interacts with other parts of the brain to generate meaningful, integrated behaviour. So far, there is no general solution to this problem – just hypotheses in specific cases, such as for recognising people...

In particular, neuroscience needs to start investigating how network configurations arise from the brain’s lifelong attempts to make sense of the world. We also need to get a clear picture of how the cortex, brainstem and cerebellum interact together with the muscles and the tens of thousands of optical and mechanical sensors of our bodies to create one, integrated picture."

https://theconversation.com/the-brain-a-radical-rethink-is-needed-to-understand-it-74460

This feels really accurate. I think it's what sometimes annoys me about systems neuroscience: it can seem reductive, like we're still focused on constructing a comforting map instead of actually primarily focused on the nature of these behaviors and how they are generated by the substrate of our brains. But then again, in order to do an actual study with a clear methodology and to perform a productive analysis of the data, you need to be concrete. You need to test a specific part of the brain, using specific stimulations.

But good news: the inadequacies of the physical mapping approach means that we'll never be able to make standardized mind-reading devices. If you put someone in an fMRI and train an algorithm to their brain for a really long time, with that person's full cooperation, you can get some basic things (ex. "they are visualizing a house; they are visualizing a cat; they are feeling a kind of sadness that is very distinct from other emotional states"). Individuals' neurological networks are so different - and individuals change across their lifetimes and evidently when they are on LSD - that we won't ever have mass biotech mind control. That's a dystopia we can cross off our lists.

(What we can do is create devices to help people with, say, PTSD to be aware of what is going on in their brains and better understand their triggers and what is healing.)

(also this essay says SSRIs don't work, and that's wrong; they just don't work for everyone and they probably don't work for the reasons we theorized in the 1960s but lots of scientists are working on it...)

Related: The amygdala; optogenetics might not be accurate; 

FB: why standardized "mind reading" devices will never be a thing --> "Some researchers now believe the brain and its diseases in general can only be understood as an interplay between tremendous numbers of neurons distributed across the central nervous system. The function of any one neuron is dependent on the functions of all the thousands of neurons it is connected to."

"Thomas Pynchon Shows Us How White Writers Can Avoid Appropriation"

"The story goes that Pynchon stumbled on the genocide while looking for a pamphlet on Malta. He then devoted himself to reading everything he could on it — consulting German reports, anthropological studies, Herero dictionaries, anything. It’s no small feat, considering that V. was published in 1961 and most of the history books on the genocide were written in the 2000s. The Herero massacre wasn’t even really talked about until mid-1990s, since the Namibia was controlled by the South African government — and its apartheid — until then...

You learn about the way the Germans tortured the Hereros, the way they killed them — and you learn it from the point of view of a German character, Kurt Mondaugen. This deliberate choice is part of Pynchon’s responsible storytelling technique: first, it’s one of the only ethical ways of recounting the genocide as a foreign author, since the Herero point of view is not appropriated. The massacre should be told by the Herero people: it is their trauma, their story. Pynchon couldn’t just put words in their mouths, words they didn’t choose. It would have been a third silencing of the tribe: the first being the literal silencing of the people by death, the second the silence of history on the event, and the third, the bleaching of the Herero’s (fictional) voice. Instead, by telling the story slant, Pynchon leaves space for the true voice to come...

In the [later Pynchon] novel, the Hereros have traversed continents and now find themselves in Germany. There, they grapple with their identities, their displaced condition, the massacre of their people... through his fully-fledged Herero characters — you’ll find no essentialist, indeterminate ‘African’ descriptions here — we learn more about the tribe’s rich history: we are introduced to their culture, language and religion, an account that is well-researched and highly accurate. In this way, the Hereros aren’t seen as faceless victims of a genocide: they are a people, with history, with culture, identity...

What about the would-be Pynchons of today? The justice warriors, sickened by events around the globe, wanting to help but afraid of speaking for the Other? If that’s you, then the greatest thing you can do is help us speak for ourselves, and read our work: be an ethical megaphone. Social media, obviously, provides multiple platforms for you to engage with writers and showcase their work. A Google search will easily tell you all about authors in different, ‘remote’ countries: contact them, and if they write in a foreign tongue, contact their translator or agent... 

Or if you want to tell our stories, tell them with us."

https://electricliterature.com/thomas-pynchon-shows-us-how-white-writers-can-avoid-appropriation-8902a5563a1c

"Meet the DC resident who filed thousands of the city’s noise complaints"

"researchers at George Mason University published a report on the peculiar distribution of airport noise complaints. Across the country, the vast majority of complaints about aircraft noise tended to come from a handful of residents... 

The tale of the mysterious serial complainer culminated in a Washington Post article titled “Are you the person who filed 6,500 noise complaints against National Airport?”... 

Vittori spent thousands of dollars installing half-inch-thick windows throughout his house. But his efforts to mitigate the low frequencies emitted from plane engines were futile. Vittori says the sounds can get up to 80 decibels (the legal nighttime noise limit in Washington, DC is 55 decibels) and penetrate walls and windows.

When replacing his windows didn’t work, Vittori started sending noise complaints to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA). Very detailed complaints...  The technical language used in the complaints are a holdover from Vittori’s former career as an astronaut with NASA and the European Space Agency... 

According to a letter Vittori received back from the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, he is not the sender of those 6,500 complaints. His number of 3,000 or so seems to be closer to the truth."

https://theoutline.com/post/834/the-dc-resident-who-filed-thousands-of-the-city-s-noise-complaints?utm_source=FB

"Of Evolution, Culture, and the Obstetrical Dilemma"

"The assumption that “women are compromised bipedally in order to give birth,” is widely accepted says anthropologist Holly Dunsworth of the University of Rhode Island. But Dunsworth sees flaws in this premise. Women already have a range of dimensions in their birth canal, she thought, and they are all walking just fine. Indeed, research on human skeletons by anthropologist Helen Kurki of the University of Victoria in Canada has shown that the size and shape of the human birth canal varies very widely, even more so than the size and shape of their arms... 

“The obstetric dilemma, in its definition, has housed this idea that women aren’t as good as men in some things because they have to give birth,” adds Cara Wall-Scheffler, an evolutionary anthropologist who studies human locomotion at Seattle Pacific University. “I have a number of papers that show that women are great walkers, and in some particular tasks women are better — they don’t use as much energy, they don’t build as much heat, they can carry heavier loads with less of an energetic burden.”... 

In another study of 96 countries, Wells and his colleagues found “strong associations” between societal gender inequality and the prevalence of low birth weight, stunting, wasting, and child mortality. “On this basis,” he says, “societies with high levels of gender inequality are more likely to produce adult women of smaller body size,” which will impact the dimensions of the pelvis."

https://undark.org/article/obstetrical-dilemma-hips-risk-childbirth/?utm_content=buffer240fe&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

This Wells guy seems awful. He's being a weird mansplainer. 

(Now that I've said this, I'm going to meet him somehow and he'll be fine, it will turn out he was misquoted) 

FB:"The days of simply describing the human birth process — and women themselves — as evolutionarily compromised seem to be coming to an end." 

“YOU’RE NOT PSYCHIC AND NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU”

“When I emailed Sheldrake to ask him why there hasn’t been more research on this subject, he explained, “This is a taboo area because the sense of being stared at ought not to happen if our minds are confined to the inside of our heads, as the current scientific orthodoxy assumes.”

That’s the kind of response that blows your mind when you’re a freshman in college, but Ilan Shrira, a social psychologist at Lake Forest College, says it’s nonsense. There’s “no convincing evidence” that humans have an ability to detect a gaze outside of their line of sight, he said, but confirmation bias dupes us into thinking we do. In other words, we tend to remember the times we catch someone staring and forget the times we don’t.

Shrira also pointed out that anything that feels like ESP is really just our peripheral vision actively looking for and logging small changes in our environment without us explicitly realizing it. Even out of the corner of an eye, we take notice when someone’s body or head is facing us as if they’re trying to get our attention.”

Related: the world’s most adorable and comforting cartoon

FB: I just love the title of this article “We overestimate how often people are actually looking at us — especially at night, or when the other person is wearing dark sunglasses, or if you can’t see them at all.”

"How to Talk to Famous Professors"

"Imagine, instead, that you are a grad student at a philosophy conference, and you suddenly find yourself sitting next to Aristotle. You might want to gush. You might try to impress him so much that he’ll stay in touch and someday write you a recommendation. You may even fantasize that he’ll pick you as his new protégé and guide you to academic stardom. Or you may feel scared, intimidated, or even angry, and want to snub him before he can snub you.

Resist all of those impulses.

Instead, say something simple and sincere: "Hi, I’m [full name]. I’m a doctoral student in philosophy at X University, and your work has helped me think about metaphysics." Say that only if it’s true. If your work engages extensively with his, you can elaborate without getting effusive...

Well, he might take the lead and ask about your research, in which case you should speak briefly, neither yammering nor pressuring yourself to say something brilliant. Tell Aristotle a little about your evidence, your working hypotheses, the questions that most excite you. Conversation might just flow from there.

But in case that doesn’t happen, here’s a cheat sheet with five time-tested approaches."

https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-to-Talk-to-Famous/240518?cid=gs&elq=6c4f9ff31ce94c858307a0c34a99c4e3&elqCampaignId=6210&elqTrackId=af2f5c04ebe742f6a35b96527eba6224&elqaid=14689&elqat=1&utm_medium=en&utm_source=gs

"How the sandwich consumed Britain"

"If you have been eating a packaged sandwich while reading this, you will have probably finished it by now. One industry estimate says that, on average, they take 3.5 minutes to consume. But no one really knows, because no one pays attention. One of the great strengths of the sandwich over the centuries has been how naturally it grafts on to our lives, enabling us to walk, read, take the bus, work, dream and scan our devices at the same time as feeding ourselves with the aid of a few small rotational gestures of wrist and fingers. The pinch at the corner. The sweep of the crumbs...

“It is sometimes hard to tell how much has changed with our sandwich consumption, because we feel really nostalgic towards them,” Bee Wilson, the food writer, told me. “But actually, eating sandwiches five days a week, as lots of people do now, or even seven days a week – that is what has changed. They have invaded every area of our lives.”...

The most obvious – and ambitious – plot of the sandwich industry is to make us eat them throughout the day. People in the trade, I noticed, rarely talk about breakfast, lunch or dinner. They speak instead about “day parts”, “occasions” and “missions”, and any and all of these is good for a sandwich. In 2016, the British public carried out an estimated 5bn food-to-go “missions”, and these are spread ever more evenly across the day parts. In recent years, the biggest development in the sandwich business has been its successful targeting of breakfast. (The best-selling filling of the last 12 months has been bacon.) And the next frontier, logic dictates, is dinner – or, as it was described to me at Adelie Foods, “the fragmentation of the evening occasion”...

Large-scale sandwich making is fearsomely complicated and operates on tiny profit margins. As a result, it is secretive. “It’s totally crazy,” Rachel Collinson, the former commercial director of a plant in Northampton that was acquired by Greencore in 2011, told me. Collinson helped push through the introduction of the cardboard skillet, which was designed for Pret in 1999, and became widespread throughout the industry in the 2000s. On any given morning, her factory would receive 800 different ingredients, which it would turn into 250,000 sandwiches by the early afternoon. “I have worked in nearly every single food category,” she told me. “There is nothing like sandwiches. It’s super-fast, super-fresh. It’s the leading edge.”"

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/24/how-the-sandwich-consumed-britain?CMP=share_btn_fb

Some days it's nice to just read a whole long thing about sandwiches.

FB: "Boltman has been round the block a few times. He had a McDonald’s franchise for a while. He observed that, even as sandwiches function as an accelerant of our harried, grinding lives, they also offer a moment of precious, private escape. “People want to eat,” he said, leaning close. “They want comfort. They want solace. I’ve had a shit morning. I’ve fallen out with my boss. I’ve had a fucking horrible journey in. A poxy lettuce-and-whatever concoction in a plastic bowl is not going to do it for me. I want a cup of tea, a chocolate biscuit and I actually want to cry. I am going out for a fucking sandwich.”"

"The Unconscionable Gap Between What We Know and What We Do"

"Policy-makers, especially if they are elected to their positions, have strong incentives to consider seriously the positions of powerful advocacy groups. For example, strong and effective advocacy by parents of children with ASDs led to substantial policy changes in the United States and other high-income countries, ranging from the provision of services (often paid for by school systems) to markedly increased government funding for research. However, the advocates for autism care and research were largely parents who were able to throw off decades of stigmatization during which they were often blamed by badly misguided mental health professionals as the psychological causes of their children’s autism. For mental disorders such as schizophrenia and mood disorders, however, for which symptoms begin in teen years or adulthood, the illnesses themselves often rob those affected of the ability to advocate effectively. In addition, the pharmaceutical industry has largely abandoned new research on mental disorders as being scientifically too challenging (22), thus sidelining advocacy based on commercial interests. The relative absence of voices advocating for individuals with mental illness puts an even greater onus on policy-makers to attend to the implications of public health data. The question then follows as to whether most policy-makers take data about mental disorders seriously. On the basis of their actions, I have come to believe that they do not...

"I believe that a seemingly more arcane but powerful cognitive distortion also plays a role in the deprioritization of mental illness: the belief that mental disorders should somehow be controllable, if only the affected person tried hard enough or adhered to a better set of beliefs. Given powerful and ubiquitous human intuitions seemingly (albeit falsely) confirmed by introspection, we generally believe that we have transparent insight into the reasons behind our choices and actions. In fact, nearly the entire weight of modern cognitive neuroscience argues that this belief is illusory and that the underlying mechanisms of thought, emotion, and behavior are largely, if not entirely, opaque to us. I have too often seen policy-makers from LMICs and high-income countries alike verbally attest to the importance of mental disorders on the basis of public health data, but then behave as if other disorders are more deserving of attention. My inference, perhaps flawed, is that many do not really believe that mental disorders are bona fide illnesses like any other or that the associated disability, with its invisible causes, is fully credible.

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/253/253cm9.full

"Hpnotiq, a Love Story "

"Introducing: The Wintertime Incredible Hulk. Ingredients: Hpnotiq (obviously) and a Lemon Zinger hot tea K-Cup from the office kitchen. Not only is the warmth soothing the chest pains that may never leave, it’s beyond tasty.

I’m in an incredible mood. Pretty much everyone has left work, but I’m just hitting my stride. Just jumped into a little transcribing, and the Hamilton soundtrack has never sounded better. If you haven’t listened to Hamilton after finishing three-fourths of a bottle of Hpnotiq, you haven’t truly experienced the theater.

In addition to 2005 being the year that people embraced the true power of the mix, it’s also the moment, perhaps, when Hpnotiq got too big for Hpnotiq. It was actually everywhere. A little-known rapper, Kendrick Lamar, named a song of his “Hpnotiq,” and he didn’t even reference it in the lyrics. It was just a good, cool thing to name the song."

http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/hpnotiq-a-love-story-one-mans-epic-journey-to-rediscover-hip-hops-most-notorious-blue-liquor/

This was fun

"Historically, men translated the Odyssey. Here’s what happened when a woman took the job."

"As a woman, Wilson believes she comes to the Odyssey with a different perspective than translators who have gone before her. “Female translators often stand at a critical distance when approaching authors who are not only male, but also deeply embedded in a canon that has for many centuries been imagined as belonging to men,” she wrote in a recent essay at the Guardian. She called translating Homer as a woman an experience of “intimate alienation.”

“Earlier translators are not as uncomfortable with the text as I am,” she explained to me, “and I like that I’m uncomfortable.” Part of her goal with the translation was to make readers uncomfortable too — with the fact that Odysseus owns slaves, and with the inequities in his marriage to Penelope. Making these aspects of the poem visible, rather than glossing over them, “makes it a more interesting text,” she said."

https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/11/20/16651634/odyssey-emily-wilson-translation-first-woman-english

FB: "small details can tell us something about even the most frustrating of characters. At one point in Book 21, Penelope unlocks the storeroom where Odysseus keeps his weapons — as Wilson writes in her translator’s note, this act sets in motion the slaughter of the suitors and the resolution of the poem. As she picks up the key, Homer describes her hand as pachus, or “thick.” “There is a problem here,” Wilson writes, “since in our culture, women are not supposed to have big, thick, or fat hands.” Translators have usually solved the problem by skipping the adjective, or putting in something more traditional — Fagles mentions Penelope’s “steady hand.” Wilson, however, renders the moment this way: “Her muscular, firm hand/ picked up the ivory handle of the key.”"

"How To Apologize For Sexual Harassment (Hint: It Takes More Than 'Sorry')"

"any good apology should make clear that the wrongdoer will carry some of the pain. Lerner offers an ideal example: "I will be struggling — perhaps forever — because of the harm I've caused women who trusted me to mentor and help them. What I have done will not slip out of my brain after the media attention has dimmed. I also understand that a reparation or restitution is due, and one that fits the emotional pain I have caused."

She adds a semi-serious coda: "For a start, I plan to give $50 million to organizations and institutions that are fighting to end harassment, abuse and violence against women."

Another important thing to remember while issuing an apology — any apology, Lerner adds — is not to ask for forgiveness."

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/22/565913664/how-to-apologize-for-sexual-harassment-hint-it-takes-more-than-sorry?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2050

FB: "Lerner says, "It's not the words 'I'm sorry' that heal or soothe the harmed party. What the harmed party wants and needs to hear is an emotionally packed corroboration of the reality that occurred: 'Yes, I get it. It was terrible. It was unconscionable. Your feelings make sense.' "" 

"The Last of the Iron Lungs"

"By 1961, there were only 161 reported cases in the US. But in 1988, there were still an estimated 350,000 cases worldwide. That year, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and the Rotary Club began an aggressive campaign to end polio everywhere. Last year there were 37 cases reported in Afghanistan, Nigeria, and Pakistan.

According to Bruno, if an infected person in either of those countries visited family in an area like Orange County, California, where many parents are opting out of vaccinating their children, “then we could be talking about the definition of a polio epidemic.”

Wenger said that’s why the Gates Foundation recently joined the other organizations in the global effort to eradicate polio. “If there’s a virus anywhere in the world, it could just come back in,” Wenger said. “Some little kid could get on a plane and fly in and reinfect an area. And if the kids in that area are not vaccinated, you could start the virus circulating again.”

But even though the last wild case of polio in the US was in 1979, it still haunts this country. “A lot of people think of polio as a disease of the past and don’t realize there are people here today that are still suffering the effects of polio.” said Brian Tiburzi, executive director of Post-Polio Health International (PPHI), an advocacy group for the estimated 350,000 to 500,000 polio survivors living in the US.

FB: "When I met with the Randolphs, Mark gave me photocopies of old service manuals and operating instructions. He filled me in on little-known history about the Emerson iron lung and its inventor, whom they met at a Post-Polio convention. I realized what each of these iron lung users have in common are the aid of generous, mechanically skilled friends and family. And that’s probably the main reason they’ve been able to live long and full lives, despite the hardships and anxieties of depending on aging machinery to survive."

“Not Every Kid-Bond Matures”

“Under ordinary circumstances, the institutions built by the old are repopulated by the young, who adjust them for new circumstances but leave them basically the same, in turn handing them over to the next generation. The possibility of successful passage through the institutions of society is what makes a person follow a normative rather than deviant life course... On the other hand, if the institutions aren’t processing enough people into the proper form—if too many can’t or won’t do family or school or work or sex approximately the way they’ve been done before—then large-scale historical continuity can’t happen. The society can’t look tomorrow like it does today...

In Harris’s view, we are, down to our innermost being, the children of neoliberalism. The habits so often mocked and belittled in the press are in fact adaptations to tightening repressive and exploitative pressures, the survival strategies of a demographic “born into captivity.”

Capitalism’s generation-long crisis, in Harris’s diagnosis, has imposed enormous competitive pressure on the young to produce “human capital.”...

When they do schoolwork, children labor on themselves. “By looking at children as investments, we can see where the product of children’s labor is stored: in the machine-self, in their human capital.” The steady increase in homework, the growing apparatus of testing and school accountability, and the pressure for longer schooldays and schoolyears is just what you would expect once children have been turned into financial assets. Many of the observed social-psychological attributes of the young generation result from undergoing such processing into a human commodity-form. Childhood is a “high-stakes merit-badge contest,” teaching kids to be “servile, anxious, and afraid.”...

Indeed, the meme itself conveys something distinctively millennial: not just precarious employment, but awareness of our own precariousness, which our elders refuse to accommodate or even acknowledge...

It is, in its way, a generational question. If you kill your parents, you won’t hear their warnings, and then you’ll eventually just become them by accident later on without realizing it. If you listen to them, you’ll become them on purpose. The question is how to become new and stay that way, how to be a stable point moving steadily from past into future without a neurotic relation to either—neither clinging nor leaping. This is the existential core of the strategic question on the left. It’s a question about growing up.”

https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/book-review/not-every-kid-bond-matures/

Exactly what it became to grow up in Palo Alto. Exactly. 

The article also mentions Chief Keef, and there is a great article on the super self-aware self-capitalizing that is happening with rap in Chicago gangs *link*

related: “The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism”

FB: this essay is too true “The hidden hand shaping millennials, producing our seemingly various and even contradictory stereotyped attributes, is the intensifying imperative—both from the outside, and also deeply internalized—to maximize our own potential economic value. “What we’ve seen over the past few decades is not quite a sinister sci-fi plot to shape a cohort of supereffective workers who are too competitive, isolated, and scared to organize for something better,” writes Harris. “But it has turned out a lot like that.” Capitalism is eating its young. It’s only feeding us avocados to fatten us up first.”

“The Cost Of Assuming Your Doctor Knows Best”

“I never met her — pathologists rarely meet their patients — so, I do not know if she was told that her doctors, both the clinician and pathologist, had missed earlier signs of her cancer. We, the doctors, did not talk to each other about the missed diagnosis.

Doctors wear an impenetrable mask of supreme confidence and of always being right. Admitting a mistake is an admission of failure. Discussing one is worse still. Everyone would know that I had made a mistake. I might get sued, causing me both potential financial and professional harm. And so, I kept quiet. In so doing, I may have even caused more harm.”

http://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2017/11/13/diagnostic-medical-error-mistake-vinita-parkash?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2041

This is very real to me because I experienced this problem repeatedly for several years. I had some vague symptoms that were slowly getting worse, to the point where they were interfering in my everyday life, and I would see doctors who tell me that they couldn’t find anything wrong so I was either fine or iron-deficient. I was finally, finally, diagnosed with a rare bacterial infection after I used my Harvard.edu email address to worm my way into an appointment with a specialist.

I don’t blame my doctors for not being able to diagnose me - it’s a weird thing that had only had one documented human case by the time I first noticed symptoms - but I am frustrated by the fact that none of them said “I don’t know. The tools that I have are not enough to tell you what is going on. It would be a reasonable choice for you to go and ask someone else.”

Because they didn’t do this, I spent years, years, feeling like a hypochondriac and ignoring my symptoms. I leaned more and more on self-hatred to motivate me though my life plans: everyone is tired, everyone gets back and joint pain, everyone gets headaches, you’re just being weird about it. Until it got really bad, I didn’t bother telling friends and family about it for the most part; I was ashamed. And when I finally committed to believing myself and finding a solution, I found that I didn’t know how to describe my symptoms or how long I’d had them because I never talked about them.

It takes a lot to decide that you know better than your doctor, and it’s really scary on the other side. But when you can’t admit that you don’t know something, the only other answer is “nothing is happening. Your experiences are a lie.”

Related: medicine bias killing women (add https://thenib.com/medicine-s-women-problem)

FB: “A lot rests on that diagnosis, and the doctor takes full responsibility for it. And the good doctor does not get that diagnosis wrong, ever. Because that is what we believe defines being a good doctor. And so, as doctors, we convince ourselves that we do not make diagnostic errors. When we simply cannot overlook the fact that we did make a diagnostic error, we feel intense guilt and shamefully hide the error. We most certainly do not discuss them, or report them, or log them.”

“NYT’s Campus Free Speech Coverage Focuses 7-to-1 on Plight of Right”

“The New York Times did sporadically cover the dozens of laws throughout the country seeking to criminalize BDS, but never put it in the broader context of college free speech. (For example, musician Roger Waters’ “Congress Shouldn’t Silence Human Rights Advocates”—9/7/17—criticized laws that target “individuals and businesses who actively participate in boycott campaigns in support of Palestinian rights,” not specifically student activists.) A  piece defending BDS speech rights by anti-BDS CUNY professor Eric Alterman did run in March 2016, outside the timeframe of the study.

Professors silenced or fired over anti-Israel activities, like Berkeley’s Paul Hadweh or SUNY Plattsburgh’s Simona Sharoni, were not covered, much less defended, in the Times during the study period. The broader trend of anti-BDS activity threatening college free speech was almost never touched upon, and when it was, it was given only a fraction of the pearl-clutching reserved for the lack of far-right professors or the mean things said about Trump supporters by undergrads.

A similar phenomenon emerged during the primaries, when reporters would parachute in to document the oppression of Hillary Clinton backers by Bernie Sanders supporters on college campuses; both conceits were based on the false notion that college campus should be 1-to-1 hospitable to all ideologies and candidates at all times. The idea that certain viewpoints—like supply-side economics, racial eugenics or a Eurocentric view of history—are underrepresented on campus because they aren’t intellectually credible is never entertained.”

http://fair.org/home/nyts-campus-free-speech-coverage-focuses-7-to-1-on-plight-of-right/?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

I’ll be honest, I no longer have any patience for the whole free speech argument. It just feels so disingenuous and oppressive. There is a grain of a problem in there, and it just gets entirely blown out of scale so that I don’t even know how to engage with it anymore without getting way more upset wbout some random thing like the original intent of the constitution than I should be.

None of this is about the constitution.

Related: free speech isn’t principled, maybe one other

Related: NYT is not built for this

“Engels was Right: Early Human Kinship was Matrilineal”

“In the immediate aftermath of World War I, anthropology in Britain and America became established for the first time as a professional discipline. This new discipline was set up with a political mandate: to overturn the materialist paradigm established in the pre-war period by Lewis Morgan, Frederick Engels and Karl Marx. In particular, the mission of the new anthropology was to debunk the theory – until then accepted by almost everyone – that the primordial human social institution had been not the individual family but the matrilineal clan. The last prominent exponent of the ‘matrilineal group motherhood’ theory of human origins was Robert Briffault, who published his encyclopaedic three-volume work, The Mothers, in 1927. As it turned out, Briffault’s monumental effort – nowadays comprehensively forgotten – was the final gasp of the Morgan-Engels paradigm. It served as a red rag to a bull. The principal founder of the new professional discipline of anthropology – the LSE’s Bronislaw Malinowski – responded as if personally affronted. Group motherhood, he declared, is not only a false but a dangerous idea. Society was, is and will always remain founded on individual marriage and the family... 

According to Morgan, this arrangement – known technically as ‘matrilocal residence’ – originally prevailed in all human societies across the world. So what happened to change such time-honoured arrangements? According to Morgan, the key factor was the domestication of animals, notably cattle. A man possessing a herd could bargain with his future bride’s kinsfolk, allowing them to keep his cows in exchange for their daughter, whom he could now take away. Under the previous matrilocal system, his bride would have been free to remain with her natal family, benefitting from shared childcare, the children’s father being considered just a visitor. The introduction of cattle triggered a general shift from matrilocal to patrilocal residence...

Once Engels had incorporated Morgan’s findings into the socialist canon, however, no one could write neutrally on such topics any more...

when scholars turn to ultimate origins, thy tend to return to the old stereotypes. Most continue to invoke paternity certainty as key to the process leading from Plio-Pleistocene hominin to modern Homo sapiens.

In typical versions of the story, paternal investment is linked directly to the sexual division of labour, food sharing, lengthy juvenile dependency, ovulation concealment and continuous female sexual receptivity. The idea is that since the human female produces such unusually helpless and dependent offspring, she needs a man to provide long-term pair-bonding commitment and support. The catch is that no man should enter such a contract unless confident that his partner will be faithful to him in return...

Embarrassingly for proponents of the patrilocal band model, genetic data on sub-Saharan African hunter-gatherers indicates a long-term historical preference for matrilocal residence. Studies of mitochondrial versus Y-chromosomal dispersal patterns show that over thousands of years, hunter-gatherer women across this vast region have tended to reside close to their mothers following marriage, migration rates for women being lower than those for men.[47]

A census among the Hadza – bow-and-arrow hunters of Tanzania – showed 68 per cent of married women whose mothers were alive residing with them in the same camp.[48] ‘Across all societies’, concludes the major specialist on this topic, ‘the greater the dependence on gathering, hunting, and fishing, the less likely that residence is virilocal [patrilocal]’.[49] Hunting has the strongest effect and, contrary to proponents of the standard model, results in less patrilocality, not more.”

http://libcom.org/history/engels-was-right-early-human-kinship-was-matrilineal

I’m kinda skeptical about any theory that rests on the assumption that we are all obsessed with passing down our genes. You can make that argument when anthropomorphizing bacteria, but humans make decisions based on culture as well as biology. And for the vast majority of human history, we weren’t aware of what biological features could be passed on to our children, or how (see: LaMarck)... I wonder if it wouldn’t be more important to a parent 5000 years ago that their child shared their cultural practices and carried on familial knowledge, rather than everyone having a widow's peak or whatever. 

And why was the “individual family” so important to those early 20th century authors? Like, there must have been some principled reason at least articulated at some point. Obviously, today, we see this as a gross patriarchal move to oppose rights for women. But, like, the way they talk about it isn’t just in terms of women’s rights, I have to imagine that there was something greater. 

Last thought - there is something really special about reading about the “grandmother hypothesis”. I think it’s the only place I’ve seen the theoretical-primordial-woman centered. It’s always “man wants to pads down his genes, so he manipulates and controls people”, never “woman reasonably would have the same impulse, would develop power to be able to ensure the same thing, would therefore prefer daughters”. (obviously, as described above, I’m skeptical... but it’s still nice to read)

Related: two others at least on “matriarchal”, one from Science, one about understanding sex creates children

FB: “A study conducted in 2004 reviewed the evidence behind the standard doctrine that patrilocality is the hunter-gatherer norm. Most of the widely used classifications turn out to have been based on totally inadequate data and ignore insightful discussions that took place in early anthropology. The few ethnographies in which camp data are available show that individuals use a variety of kin and other links to decide where to live, the only discernible statistical bias being in favour of mother-daughter interdependence and proximity.”