"How does the literary canon reinforce the logic of the incel?"

"Where did these young men get the idea that male pathos (stereotypically defined by them as sexual frustration) is so pathetic, so worthy of tribute? One possible answer to the question, one we don’t discuss very much, is our culture’s literary history. The incel isn’t just a monstrous birth of our casually cruel and anonymous internet culture. He is also a product of anglo-American literary culture, which (particularly in the 20th century) treats the topic of male sexual frustration as if it is of prime importance to us all... 

I choose The Things They Carried to pick on here because it’s a favorite of mine. I think it’s brilliant, but it offers a prime example of the way our literary culture has long treated rage and aggression as if they are normal features of (white) male sexuality. (The racial component is of course significant here, since the exact opposite has long been true for depictions of black male sexuality, which have been represented as essentially and problematically aggressive.) The literature we choose to teach our children evidences how untroubled we are by this disturbing cliche that rage and a fascination with violation are characteristic features of (again, white) male sexuality. 

By contrast, novels of women’s frustration with society – not sex – like those of Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin, are classed as special interest pieces: feminist fiction or women’s fiction, not Great American Novels... 

This all becomes even more ironic when we consider the history – not literary, but real – of identifying women’s sexual frustration as the psychological problem of hysteria. For hundreds of years, women were literally committed because of a “disease” that male doctors attributed to a handful of sexual causes"

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/04/incel-movement-literary-classics-behind-misogyny

FB: "as a teenager I had read many fictional accounts of men’s rape fantasies long before I had ever read a literary account from the woman’s perspective of rape, or even of consensual sex. I was trained to accept that male sexual frustration was a serious issue because I read hundreds of pages about it before the age of 20, far more than I read about issues of undoubtedly greater social import, like the legacy of slavery, the alienation of women and people of color from public life, or the violence of the settler colonialism on which the United States was founded."

"OB/GYNs don’t learn the nerves and vasculature of the clitoris."

"It is notable that detailed illustrations of clitoral neurovascular anatomy were published by Kobelt in 1844. They are still arguably the best, most detailed illustrations to date, though in my own dissection so far, the dorsal nerve is far bigger relative to the size of the body. No modern illustrations have attempted to show the course of nerves and vasculature close up or from multiple angles.

These began to circulate in 19th century gynecology textbooks. However, within a few years, many English physicians would begin to claim the clitoris was useless and should be excised as a cure for hysteria. In 1884, it was established that the clitoris played no role in conception, reducing it’s perceived medical relevance. The final blow was dealt by Freud, who insisted that normal adult orgasms are vaginal.

Over the years I’ve been told I’m crazy for caring about this. People have told me I can’t do anything about it and should just move on. But can someone please envision a world where penile neurovascular anatomy is ignored in textbooks, and where urologists do surgeries without ever learning the nerves and vasculature of the penis? It should not be difficult to understand there is a problem."

https://medium.com/@jessica86/ob-gyns-dont-learn-the-nerves-and-vasculature-of-the-clitoris-ccc56e55ac90

FB: "As a urologist, I know from personal experience that the gynecology journals are generally not that interested in female genital anatomy, or don’t believe that there’s anything new to be learned, so most of my research is published in other types of journals. Gynecology textbooks generally get their information from gynecology journals, and then gynecology textbooks get used in medical schools. "

"College students are forming mental-health clubs — and they’re making a difference"

"researchers found that across 12 California colleges, such student-run efforts were associated with increased awareness of mental-health issues, reduced stigma and a rise in “helping behaviors.”

“Student-organized activities can improve college student mental-health attitudes and play an important role in improving the campus climate with respect to mental health,” said Bradley Stein, a senior physician policy researcher at the Rand Corp. and one of the paper’s lead authors.

He and his colleagues call the unmet need for mental-health care among students “a significant public health issue.”"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2018/06/28/college-students-are-forming-mental-health-clubs-and-theyre-making-a-difference/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.586bcc021254

"Scientists Rarely Admit Mistakes. A New Project Wants to Change That"

"there really is no effective way for scientists to quickly and publicly inform colleagues that they are no longer confident in their published work. Public declarations like Carney’s are one way to go, but they are often difficult to track. So an ambitious new effort, motivated by Carney’s move, is encouraging psychologists to own up to shortcomings in their published work via a website in the form of official loss-of-confidence statements — published at a single online clearinghouse for such confessions called the Loss of Confidence Project... 

Rohrer and her colleagues, Tal Yarkoni of the University of Texas at Austin and Christopher Chabris, at the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania, are currently accepting submissions of loss-of-confidence statements, focusing on psychology studies — and with some ground rules: Authors submitting a loss-of-confidence statement, for example, are expected take primary responsibility for methodological or theoretical problems with their paper — otherwise, the entry goes into whistleblowing territory and is not eligible for publication. The researchers eventually plan to publish the statements in an academic paper, Rohrer said."

https://undark.org/article/loss-of-confidence-project-replication-crisis/

FB: "more emphasis on self-correction will help to address the fact that some researchers whose work has not held up feel they have been treated unfairly, Rohrer said. Researchers are often too cautious about admitting errors because they assume the consequences will be negative, she adds, even though reactions to cases like Carney’s have been predominantly positive."

"Leaders Focus Too Much on Changing Policies, and Not Enough on Changing Minds"

"Among many potential explanations, one that gets very little attention may be the most fundamental: the invisible fears and insecurities that keep us locked into behaviors even when we know rationally that they don’t serve us well. Add to that the anxiety that nearly all human beings experience in the face of change. Nonetheless, most organizations pay far more attention to strategy and execution than they do to what their people are feeling and thinking when they’re asked to embrace a transformation. Resistance, especially when it is passive, invisible, and unconscious, can derail even the best strategy... 

We taught them very simple strategies to build renewal into their lives, and they left our workshops eager to change the way they worked.

Nonetheless, most of them struggled with changing their behavior when they got back to their jobs. They continued to equate continuous work and long hours with success. Taking time to renew during work days made them feel as if they were slacking. Even when organizations built nap rooms, they often went unused. People worried that if they rested at all, they wouldn’t get their work done, and above all, they feared failing. Despite their best intentions, many of them eventually defaulted back to their habitual patterns... 

We also developed an online site where leaders agreed to regularly share their progress on prioritizing, as well as any feelings of resistance that were arising, and how they managed them. Their work is ongoing, but among the most common feelings people reported were liberation and relief. Their worst fears failed to materialize...

the most effective transformation begins with what’s going on inside people — and especially the most senior leaders, given their disproportionate authority and influence. Their challenge is to deliberately turn attention inward in order to begin noticing the fixed patterns in their thinking, how they’re feeing in any given moment, and how quickly the instinct for self-preservation can overwhelm rationality and a longer term perspective, especially when the stakes are high."

https://hbr.org/2018/06/leaders-focus-too-much-on-changing-policies-and-not-enough-on-changing-minds

Fb: "What most organizations typically overlook is the internal shift — what people think and feel — which has to occur in order to bring the strategy to life. This is where resistance tends to arise — cognitively in the form of fixed beliefs, deeply held assumptions and blind spots; and emotionally, in the form of the fear and insecurity that change engenders. All of this rolls up into our mindset, which reflects how we see the world, what we believe and how that makes us feel."

"Music that upsets expectations is what makes your gray matter sing"

"Understanding the mechanisms of violated expectations in music elucidates some of the basic functions of learning, memory, and our perception of time. Along with enhancing our understanding of music, the study of how we process expectations, and learn to revel in ambiguity and uncertainty, is important in understanding how we appreciate many aspects of art and life that involve solving puzzles and deciphering codes, from poetry to painting, science to math...

In the 1970s, psychologists Robert Rescorla and Allan R. Wagner proposed that we learn one thing leads to another through the discrepancy between what we expect will occur and what actually transpires.1 When expectation is upended, the surprise makes a strong and lasting impression in our brains. Neuroscientists have found that the brain’s neural signals, critical to learning, are more active when confronted by surprise."

https://medium.com/s/nautilus-uncertainty/composing-your-thoughts-99f71bf9ec69

“How Faculty of Color Hurt Their Careers Helping Universities with Diversity”

“The failure of many top schools to make significant progress on diversity can mean that institutions are relying too heavily on a tiny fraction of the higher education community to smooth over racial problems. For academics of color, especially those vying for tenure, this added responsibility can hurt their careers.

New research backs up previous studies that suggest professors of color may be imperiling their tenure and promotion prospects by performing service work to help their institutions become more racially inclusive. It’s common knowledge in academic circles that publishing papers and acquiring research dollars are the most valuable activities for moving up the higher education ladder. Scholars who excel at research tend to get academic tenure.

On the contrary, professional work tied to improving diversity – such as building opportunity pipelines, recruiting and mentoring — are discountable. A study out this year, found that marginalized professors spent twice as much time mentoring, recruiting and “serving on various task forces,” than their White male counterparts. Higher education experts say that these activities take away time that could be applied to the more career-accelerating work of publishing.”

http://diverseeducation.com/article/105525/?utm_campaign=DIV1711+DAILY+NEWSLETTER+NOV28&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua

FB: “Aside from time consumption, this added work can also be isolating. Stephens echoed a familiar sentiment among professors of color who said that dealing with race issues that placed them in heated conversations with their colleagues and affected their working relationships.”

“Neuroscience Needs Behavior: Correcting a Reductionist Bias”

“Here we will argue, however, that detailed examination of brain parts or their selective perturbation is not sufficient to understand how the brain generates behavior (Figure 1). One reason is that we have no prior knowledge of what the relevant level of brain organization is for any given behavior (Figure 1A). When this concern is coupled with the brain’s deep degeneracy, it becomes apparent that the causal manipulation approach is not sufficient for gaining a full understanding of the brain’s role in behavior (Marom et al., 2009). The same behavior may result from alternative circuit configurations (Marder and Goaillard, 2006), from different circuits altogether or the same circuit may generate different behaviors...

Neuroscience is replete with cases that illustrate the fundamental epistemological difficulty of deriving processes from processors. For example, in the case of the roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans), we know the genome, the cell types, and the connectome—every cell and its connections (Bargmann, 1998, White et al., 1986). Despite this wealth of knowledge, our understanding of how all this structure maps onto the worm’s behavior remains frustratingly incomplete. Thus, it is readily apparent that it is very hard to infer the mapping between the behavior of a system and its lower-level properties by only looking at the lower-level properties...

Deep and thorny questions like “what would even count as an explanation in this context,” “what is a mechanism for the behavior we are trying to understand,” and “what does it mean to understand the brain” get sidelined. The emphasis in neuroscience has transitioned from these larger scope questions to the development of technologies, model systems, and the approaches needed to analyze the deluge of data they produce...

Accomplishing this task requires hypotheses and theories based on careful dissection of behavior into its component parts or subroutines (Cooper and Peebles, 2015). The behavioral work needs to be as fine-grained as work at the neural level. Otherwise one is imperiled by a granularity mismatch between levels that prevents substantive alignment between different levels of description...

This tendency to ascribe psychological properties to single neuron activity that can only be sensibly ascribed to a whole behaving organism is known as the mereological fallacy

https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(16)31040-6

I want to print out figure 1 here and post it on my wall so I can look at it whenever I am reading a study or thinking up experiments. So many assumptions baked into our experimental protocols!

FB: “we caution similarly against the idea that what is true for the circuit is true for the behavior. Monod’s line has echoed through to the present day with the argument that molecular biology and its techniques should serve as the model for understanding in neuroscience (Bickle, 2016). We disagree with this totalizing reductionist view but take it as evidence that excessive faith in molecular and cellular biology may be partially to blame for the current dominance of interventionist explanations in neuroscience”

“On the Body as Machine”

“Sontag was, at that time, on a crusade against the military metaphor that pervades medicine. Her initial wrath was centered on the “War on Cancer,” of which she was a part, having been diagnosed with (and recovered from) the disease herself. But she felt the military mindset introduced unhelpful meanings into our attempt to cure what was simply an illness. “We are not being invaded,” she wrote. “The body is not a battlefield. The ill are neither unavoidable casualties nor the enemy.”...

Such mechanical imagery contrasts sharply with equally visual French metaphors, which Payer observes are rooted in the idea of the body as terrain, or the ground in which things grow. This notion evokes a vineyard, and French physicians tend to see illness as something that needs fertile ground in which to take root. As a result, much of French medicine is geared toward fortifying the terrain to make it more difficult for illness to thrive. In America, the terrain is carpet bombed.

Metaphors do not control our thoughts, but they can set boundaries around the way we think... For the last century our machine metaphor has been sufficient to deal with infectious diseases. But in other areas it is less useful. And in the realm of mental health, it is practically useless.”

https://undark.org/article/mind-machine-medicine-militaristic-healthcare/?utm_content=buffer3a7ce&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer

“The Good Daughter Syndrome In Academic Medicine”

“Mentorship is critical to advancement in academic medicine, and as the majority of the upper faculty echelons are occupied by men, inexperienced women are usually paired up with older men. In the early days of these relationships, the mentee is eager to please her new boss, and the mentor is benevolent, happy to advise and guide a promising young woman. This often leads to a father-daughter dynamic, which at first seems fine for both parties—the mentor gets free labor and credit for the work of his underling, and the mentee gets a free ride on her boss’ coattails. What starts out as a congenial relationship can sew the seeds for later strife, however.

When women act like deferential daughters, they fail to prepare for future independence. Like Ivanka Trump, they become subsumed by their father’s brand; they are seen as helpmeets and extensions of the older man’s success. Unlike Ivanka Trump, however, ambitious junior faculty members cannot ride Daddy’s coattails forever. The time comes when they must apply for promotion, and that is often when things falls apart.”

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-good-daughter-syndrome_us_591f9a10e4b0b28a33f62c4d

“Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?”

“Elsevier’s business model seemed a truly puzzling thing. In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place...

[In the 1940s] Science publishers were mainly known for being inefficient and constantly broke. Journals, which often appeared on cheap, thin paper, were produced almost as an afterthought by scientific societies...

As science expanded, [Rosbaud] realised that it would need new journals to cover new areas of study. The scientific societies that had traditionally created journals were unwieldy institutions that tended to move slowly, hampered by internal debates between members about the boundaries of their field. Rosbaud had none of these constraints. All he needed to do was to convince a prominent academic that their particular field required a new journal to showcase it properly, and install that person at the helm of it. Pergamon would then begin selling subscriptions to university libraries, which suddenly had a lot of government money to spend...

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, in 1957, western scientists scrambled to catch up on Russian space research, and were surprised to learn that Maxwell had already negotiated an exclusive English-language deal to publish the Russian Academy of Sciences’ journals earlier in the decade...

“At the start of my career, nobody took much notice of where you published, and then everything changed in 1974 with Cell,” Randy Schekman, the Berkeley molecular biologist and Nobel prize winner, told me. Cell (now owned by Elsevier) was a journal started by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to showcase the newly ascendant field of molecular biology... What he created was a venue for scientific blockbusters, and scientists began shaping their work on his terms...

it was university librarians who first realised the trap in the market Maxwell had created“

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

FB: Wow, every scientist should know this history. It’s fascinating, and it informs our need to change the system “Even scientists who are fighting for reform are often not aware of the roots of the system: how, in the boom years after the second world war, entrepreneurs built fortunes by taking publishing out of the hands of scientists and expanding the business on a previously unimaginable scale. And no one was more transformative and ingenious than Robert Maxwell, who turned scientific journals into a spectacular money-making machine that bankrolled his rise in British society”

“Wisconsin’s Voter-ID Law Suppressed 200,000 Votes in 2016 (Trump Won by 22,748)”

“A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes...

The study also compared turnout in Wisconsin to Minnesota, which has very similar demographics but no voter-ID law, and found “turnout in African-American counties dropped off at significantly higher levels than in their Minnesota-counterparts.”...

This matters greatly today, because 87 bills to restrict access to the ballot have been introduced in 29 states this year, including voter-ID laws in 19 states. Arkansas and Iowa have already passed strict voter-ID laws in 2017.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/wisconsins-voter-id-law-suppressed-200000-votes-trump-won-by-23000/

he Human Toll of Protecting the Internet from the Worst of Humanity”

“The lawsuit offers a rare look into a little-known field of digital work known as content moderation. Even technology that seems to exist only as data on a server rests on tedious and potentially dangerous human labor. Although algorithms and artificial intelligence have helped streamline the process of moderation, most technology companies that host user-generated content employ moderators like Soto to screen video, text, and images, to see if they violate company guidelines. But the labor of content moderators is pretty much invisible, since it manifests not in flashy new features or viral videos but in a lack of filth and abuse. Often, the moderators are workers in developing countries, like the Philippines or India, or low-paid contractors in the United States. There’s no reliable figure for how many people are employed in this line of work, but it’s certainly in the tens of thousands. Content moderators are recent college graduates and stay-at-home mothers, remote workers in Morocco and employees sitting in giant outsourcing companies in Manila.”

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-human-toll-of-protecting-the-internet-from-the-worst-of-humanity?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

"The Names of the Enslaved People who Built the University of North Carolina"

"The joint efforts of researchers, archivists, historians, students, and administrators has resulted in the identification of more than 100 enslaved people who built and labored at the University from 1795 to 1865. Students in History 398, an undergraduate seminar on slavery taught by Professor Jim Leloudis in Fall 2017 contributed significantly to this research.  The list of 119 names enumerated below is neither exhaustive nor complete, and it is certain that countless enslaved people who built, worked at, and contributed to the University will never be identified. Enslaved women and children are likewise largely absent from this list, but it is hoped that future work will uncover more information about their presence at and contributions to the University."

https://blogs.lib.unc.edu/uarms/index.php/2018/04/the-names-of-the-enslaved-people-who-built-the-university-of-north-carolina/

FB: This absolutely factual sentence reflects a lot of bravery and, I'm sure, long years of persistence by a bunch of people "The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was founded in the midst of a slave society by slaveholders."

Like, literally, the story of that sentence includes at least one person who sacrificed a traditional academic career because their research is alienating people in power

"An Ancient Sect, A Brazen Theft And The Hunt To Bring The Manuscripts Home"

"The Samaritans trace their roots to the ancient Israelites and regard themselves as the most loyal followers of the word of God as transmitted to Moses. Women are kept apart from others when menstruating in adherence with ritual purity, and men sacrifice sheep each year on Passover, a biblical commandment Jews gave up millennia ago.

If the Samaritans are the true keepers of the biblical faith, their Torahs are title deeds: rare and sacred manuscripts, written in a variation of the original Israelite script that Jews abandoned long ago and featuring passages scholars say preserve some of the earliest drafts of the Bible. Of the three dozen old biblical manuscripts left in the community's coffers, the Samaritans say one is the oldest in the world, written by Moses' great-grandnephew...

In total, Benny estimates about 4,000 Samaritan manuscripts were sold in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, hauled away to the Vatican, Russia's National Library in St. Petersburg, Oxford University, Michigan State University and other corners of the globe...

Palestinian leaders embrace the Samaritans as an example of the Palestinian people's tolerance, diversity and deep roots, while Israeli leaders embrace the Samaritans as living proof of Jewish history in the West Bank. The Samaritans are poised between these two adversaries, and dependent on both. It's a matter of survival, reflected in Benny's own family: His brother is an activist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's conservative political party, while his cousin is a civil servant of the Palestinian Authority."

https://www.npr.org/2018/04/29/602836507/who-stole-the-torahs?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180429

FB: "[Benny] is among a select few in the world who can read the Samaritan Hebrew alphabet, and libraries frequently call upon him to catalog or appraise their Samaritan collections. He knows the texts like no one else does.

I've watched Benny crane his neck over Samaritan parchments. They are not just historical documents to him; they are part of the Samaritan family tree. Torah scribes enciphered their names within the text, so Benny knows who wrote each one. Often he can identify the scribe by the handwriting alone. Many old texts serve as tombstones, mentioning the names of Samaritan families who died out long ago."

"Lessons From Rust-Belt Cities That Kept Their Sheen"

"Can they learn anything from places like Stearns County? Its experience may offer some tips for its struggling peers: Smart industrial zoning can give an edge to local companies; higher-education institutions can serve as anchors for economic development. But its most salient advantages come from its location and industrial mix, more to do with serendipity than policy. A lot of it, Mr. Banaian told me, may have been “plain darn good luck.”... 

Desegregation in the South and immigration in the West added a pool of productive workers, while investment flowed in to take advantage of their cheaper labor force and the virtual absence of unions. “Jobs were leaving Michigan, Indiana and Ohio and going to Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee,” Mr. Berube observed. In the more successful industrial counties, construction employment doubled, on average, from 1970 to 2016, as they absorbed new populations... 

Can Decatur or Racine learn from Green Bay, Grand Rapids or St. Cloud? Perhaps the best example to follow would be to invest in education. Places with better-educated workers were generally the ones that managed the economic transformation of the last 50 years more successfully... 

Mr. Banaian noted how St. Cloud was smart to develop industrial parks along the transportation arteries connecting it to the rest of the country. Raw money may help, too. Electrolux is decamping to South Carolina from St. Cloud thanks, in part, to a tax incentive worth $73 million over 32 years, according to a state estimate cited by the company. Research by Enrico Moretti of the University of California, Berkeley, and Michael Greenstone of the University of Chicago suggests that for all policymakers’ gripes about government subsidies to corporate investment, they can yield a high return to the local economy."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/01/business/economy/rust-belt-cities.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

"The average American worker takes less vacation time than a medieval peasant"

"Go back 200, 300, or 400 years and you find that most people did not work very long hours at all. In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze.

"The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed," notes Shor. "Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure."

Fast-forward to the 21st century, and the US is the only advanced country with no national vacation policy whatsoever."

http://www.businessinsider.com/american-worker-less-vacation-medieval-peasant-2016-11?utm_content=bufferb1073&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer-ti

"What The Kanye Controversy Can Teach Us About Black Voters"

"What White and and three other researchers found in a recent study is that social pressure from other black people is how this Democratic norm gets policed. They found that the expectations around this norm were so powerful that simply having a black questioner ask a black respondent about their voting preferences made that respondent more likely to say they were voting for a Democratic candidate.

Chryl Laird, one of the study's authors, said this is how everyone votes. We like to think of our voting choices as purely rational, but we take cues from the people around us, especially when we don't know much about a candidate or an issue. Laird said social influence and pressure partly explain why most white evangelical voters in Alabama supported Senate candidate Roy Moore last fall, even after he was accused of sexual misconduct involving minors... 

Kanye has cast himself as an iconoclast, brave enough to flout prevailing expectations for black people. But it makes sense to ask how much his current ideological trajectory owes to his own changing personal arithmetic around social sanction and social rewards. He is not in Chicago anymore. And Kanye, ever the solipsist, could just be looking for affirmation from the people in his current social universe who can give it to him. (That math is different for John Legend and Chance, who are more closely tied to black communities through their activism.)"

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2018/05/04/605531828/what-the-kanye-controversy-can-teach-us-about-black-voters

This was a kind of great analysis 

FB: "black conservatives differ from mainstream conservatism because they aren't organized around white interests. Black conservatives get black people whereas white conservatives who applaud Kanye for "escaping the Democrat plantation" are so removed from black folks that they think it makes sense to invoke the language of slavery to describe the overwhelming majority of black voters."

"Old people can’t open new tabs and it’s fueling our descent into hell"

"It should go without saying that, outside of maybe the executive level, there are very few grandparents working at tech companies. Because of this, there’s rarely anyone in the room who’s truly able to understand what it must have been like to be a 78-year old logging onto Facebook for the first time in 2016, in a world where internet memes go 9000 levels deep and the web is an information battleground where governments and corporations unscrupulously compete for our attention. Amid all of this, your friend of 60 years posts a link to a Denver Guardian article saying that the Pope endorsed Donald Trump; you’re excited, click “share,” and move on...

The challenge is that this is precisely the sort of epistemic cover that governments need to assert their will without the risk of oversight. Social media had a brief burst of power to coordinate protests against decrepit regimes (like in the Arab Spring), but political actors have now caught on; political scientists have repeatedly shown how modern regimes use social media to distract and sow confusion and doubt. It seems likely that something similar will happen here."

https://theoutline.com/post/4428/the-political-ramifications-of-not-being-able-to-open-up-that-tab?utm_source=FB&zd=1&zi=pfwbfwwk

"When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching"

"Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history...

Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as “fiends,” “brutes,” “born criminals” or, that catchall favorite, “troublesome Negroes.” The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/southern-newspapers-justified-lynching.html

FB: "The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star “to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses.” Harkey was reviled — and shot at — by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs”; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes."

"When Southern Newspapers Justified Lynching"

"Historians have paid scant attention to the role that the white Southern press played in the racial terrorism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which saw thousands of African-Americans hanged, burned, drowned or beaten to death by white mobs. This issue surfaced in dramatic fashion recently when the nearly two-centuries-old Montgomery Advertiser printed a front-page editorial apologizing for lynching coverage that dehumanized black victims. The apology coincided with the recent opening in Montgomery, Ala., of a memorial to lynching victims, and it sets the stage for a timely discussion of a deeply dishonorable period in Southern press history...

Newspapers even bragged about the roles they had played in arranging particularly spectacular lynchings. But the real damage was done in terse, workaday stories that justified lynching by casting its victims as “fiends,” “brutes,” “born criminals” or, that catchall favorite, “troublesome Negroes.” The narrative that tied blackness inextricably to criminality — and to the death penalty — survived the lynching era and lives on to this day."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/05/opinion/sunday/southern-newspapers-justified-lynching.html

FB: "The newspaper editor Ira Harkey, who was white, incurred outrage in 1949 when he abandoned the Southern journalistic practice of automatically labeling black people by race in stories and began cautiously extending the courtesy title Mrs. in the pages of The Pascagoula Chronicle-Star “to certain carefully selected Negro women such as teachers and nurses.” Harkey was reviled — and shot at — by racists in Mississippi for championing civil rights. He wrote bitterly of his earlier years at The New Orleans Times-Picayune, where there was “a flat rule that Negroes were not to appear in photographs”; it was required that they be airbrushed out of crowd scenes."

"Schizophrenia Affects Your Body, Not Just Your Brain"

"My colleagues and I examined evidence of physiological changes around the body at the onset of schizophrenia and compared it with evidence of changes within the brain in the same group of people. We pooled data from multiple studies, examining markers of inflammation, hormone levels and heart disease risk factors, including glucose and cholesterol levels. We also pooled data from studies examining brain structure, levels of different chemicals within the brain, and markers of brain activity.

We showed that compared with the general population, early schizophrenia is associated with changes in brain structure and function. We also showed that early schizophrenia is associated with various changes around the body. We calculated the magnitude of these changes using a statistical measure known as the effect size. At the onset of schizophrenia, we observed that there was no difference in the effect size for changes within the brain compared with the effect size for changes around the body, suggesting that schizophrenia might indeed be a whole-body disorder, and one that should be treated as such."

http://neurosciencenews.com/schizophrenia-body-brain-9036

FB:"symptoms of schizophrenia and physical health disorders may arise via different mechanisms but from a common risk factor. An example of this is how famine experienced by a pregnant mother increases the chances of her child developing both diabetes and schizophrenia in adult life."

"How to not photograph Nigerian women… again"

"Despite the stated goals of this project — to recapture on film the dignity of these young women — in the end what we get are 83 portraits that evoke only a single frozen moment in each women’s life, one that has everything to do with suffering and sorrow.

Although it seems that the young women might be in a limbo of officialdom, they still, one imagines, have come out of a harrowing time with different stories of before and after, different identities, different dreams and different possibilities in their lives ahead. Yet, there is nothing of this either in Searcy’s phenomenally tone-deaf rendition of the lament of the newspaperman in Africa nor in the images that resulted from all her hard work. The portraits are shot through the lens (sic) of an historical artefact from Nigeria’s past — the 1974 portrait of Adetutu “Tutu” Ademiluyi, by Ben Enwonwu. This portrait, though beautiful, also has a story of expropriation and disappearance and rediscovery attached to it...

It is, though, astonishing that the New York Times would juxtapose such a collection of images with the story of a journalist’s tough road to capture them. It is quite literally a ludicrous juxtaposition between the extreme trauma and violence all of the photographs’ subjects have experienced and the pathetic struggles of an American writer in search of a particular image. It is, too, this image that beggars belief."

https://africasacountry.com/2018/05/how-not-to-photograph-nigerian-women-again

FB: "The women in Ferguson’s photographs are young but seem old, they are beautiful but worn, stoic but sad. We can tell they are different women through the changing cloth of their head wraps or dresses or perhaps a slightly different angle of the body or head. There are glimpses of particular selves, a glint of anger in the eyes, an attempt to smile, a direct look into the camera. But these are flattened out by this choice to photograph women with such complex lives through the medium of a single portrait"