"How Do You Explain the ‘Obvious?’"

"This is because the obvious is, essentially, a shortcut: It appeals to a set of values we’d formed some consensus around, a set of ideas we once agreed no serious person would question. To call something “obvious” or “common sense” is to call it settled and refuse to relitigate it or revisit all the work that went into determining it was so inarguable in the first place. In a recent book, “At War With the Obvious,” the psychoanalyst Donald Moss writes that “the obvious is adaptive. It mutates under pressure, like cells.” If you need evidence of this, he writes, consider the status of gay, queer and trans people over the past few decades. In the 1990s, the American mainstream found it obvious that gay people should have no right to marry; today, it’s regarded by many as broadly obvious that they should. An idea that was once marginal enough to require laborious defense gradually became so self-evident that it was hardly worth explaining; like the crumpled letter, its presence was taken for granted... 

Politicians and the press still invoke obviousness in the hope of summoning some conviction we all still share, some bedrock of group belief we can agree on. To see them fail, repeatedly, is unsettling; it makes our deepest values seem impotent. It had seemed obvious to some that a modern presidential administration would not defend white nationalists or that the United States government would seek to avoid taking babies from their parents’ arms — or that a man who bragged about harassing women wouldn’t be elected in the first place."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/magazine/how-do-you-explain-the-obvious.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

FB: "America is built on an appeal to the obvious. The Declaration of Independence holds its truths to be “self-evident” — axiomatic, irreducible, not needing justification because they justify themselves. (It was not obvious to the authors that those truths applied to all Americans, though this seems obvious to most of us now.))"

"CALLS TO ABOLISH ICE ARE BECOMING MORE MAINSTREAM. IS WASHINGTON READY FOR THE CONVERSATION?"

"The argument to shut ICE down revolves around its cultural ecology. The agency has become corrupted with a military mentality that doesn’t respect civilian oversight and has little effective oversight. Once an institution’s culture has metastasized, reforming it can become impossible, with the only solution to abolish it and disperse its various authorities elsewhere.

“What’s happened is as we’ve created ICE and given more and more authority with no accountability to ICE, in my opinion, it’s become a rogue agency,” Jayapal told The Intercept...

“ICE is now the second-largest criminal investigative agency in the United States, second only to the FBI. And the fact that they operate without the accountability of the Department of Justice is extremely concerning to us all,” she told The Intercept in May, explaining her position that it is better for the Department of Justice to oversee enforcement of those sort of matters — as it did under ICE’s predecessor, Immigration and Naturalization Services — rather than the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE. Both DHS and ICE were created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. (Ocasio-Cortez went in depth into why ICE should be abolished, and what that would mean for immigration enforcement, in an interview with Jeremy Scahill.)

https://theintercept.com/2018/06/27/abolish-ice-alexandria-ocasio-cortez/

FB: "Jayapal emphasized that they are not calling for zero enforcement.

“We’re not saying that you have to abolish all functions of ICE, but we used to have all those functions before ICE got created. So I believe that we need to start again with how we have accountable, transparent immigration enforcement,” she said."

"THE HARMFUL HISTORY OF “GYPSY”"

"Outside of a Stevie Nicks song, the Romani people are an oppressed ethnic minority whose diasporic roots date back to 10th-century India and are currently in the midst of a centuries-long human rights crisis—one that is, in part, perpetuated by the stereotypes of the Gypsy. Yet almost no one but the Roma themselves are pushing back on the series’ title slur, the writing to the network and producers, or creating a petition to change the show’s title. Along with simple ignorance, anti-Romani sentiment is so normalized that in 2017, a premier streaming service can release a show that takes an actual racial slur as its title and no one bats an eyelash... 

People who are oddly attached to the slur like to argue that the word can be used with good intentions. I often hear, “You don’t understand, ‘Gypsy’ means a free-spirited person!” But that image of the carefree wanderer exists alongside an ugly and continued history of persecution. When Roma first arrived in Europe around the 11th or 12th century, the Catholic church denounced these dark-skinned people with many gods and would not allow them to settle anywhere. The book Roads of the Roma: a PEN Anthology of Gypsy Writers notes that as early as the 1300s, European countries began persecuting Roma by driving them off the land, enslaving them, or ordering them killed... 

Today, Romani women and girls are among those the most targeted by sex traffickers due to our supposedly sex-crazed, deviant nature, Romani women are also routinely forcibly sterilized. We see the specter of this dangerously sexual, mysterious seductress in countless pop songs: From Santana and Leonard Cohen to Lady Gaga and Hilary Duff, the list of Gypsy muses rolls on. Stephen King made sure to squeeze both an evil witch and a sexpot Gypsy into Thinner, and the racist TLC travesty My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding did its very best to misrepresent us as ignorant despots who are somehow both sexually repressed and oversexed."

https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/gypsy-slur-netlflix

Mmmm. I didn't watch the show since its premise sounded questionable, but I definitely remember thinking the title was cute, whimsical. I 100% thought about the stereotype of the 'gypsy girl' and 0% about the actual people it referenced. 

I'm super glad the show was canceled, and I'm also really glad I read this article, my consciousness is expanded. 

Fb: "Gypsy stereotypes offer escapism for gadje, or non-Roma people. Jean wants to be special, swirling above the world of work, parenting, and upper-middle-class white-lady obligations with a glass of Bulleit bourbon in hand. She expresses this yearning through lying, debauchery, near-cheating, and boundary issues. The show plays on Gypsy stereotypes honed through history, including dishonesty, promiscuity, hedonism, and mental instability, that actively hurt and erase an already marginalized community. In depicting “Gypsy” ways as a lifestyle choice for carefree travelers and adventurers, the real system of oppression is also erased."

"What Men Say About #MeToo in Therapy"

"I began to feel the effect in my work not long after the stories about Harvey Weinstein broke, with a noticeable uptick after a report on the comedian Aziz Ansari. Though the accusations against famous men were in one sense far from the people I saw, they were relevant to the questions they often brought to therapy. Why did they so misunderstand the women in their lives? Why were they often being accused of hurting them?...

The majority of men who enter my office appear either flat and emotionless or superficially engaged but hiding behind impenetrable niceness. When I ask a man, for example, how he feels when his girlfriend says, “I’m so upset, I can’t even be around you right now,” I usually get an answer like “It’s frustrating.” That’s a word that is used a lot yet conveys essentially nothing. Most men have spent little time with their feelings and have very limited vocabulary to describe what is going on in their hearts.

A newly single photographer has done such a good job of disconnecting from his feelings that he can’t ever really tell if he’s had a good time on a date. An investment banker in his 40s offers a weak shrug when I ask him how he feels when his wife lays into him.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/30/opinion/sunday/men-metoo-therapy-masculinity.html

FB: "I have found that for many men, underneath the anxiety that is always humming along are layers of shame. Shame at having feelings at all, shame because they believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with them, shame that they are not men, they are just boys.

Shame is the emotional weapon that allows patriarchal behaviors to flourish. The fear of being emasculated leads men to rationalize awful behavior. This kind of toxic shame is in direct contradiction with the healthy shame that we all need to feel in order to acknowledge mistakes and take responsibility"

"Sleep Deprivation Is a Surprisingly Effective Way To Treat Depression"

"If you’re healthy and you don’t sleep, you’ll feel in a bad mood. But if you’re depressed, it can prompt an immediate improvement in mood, and in cognitive abilities. But, Benedetti adds, there’s a catch: once you go to sleep and catch up on those missed hours of sleep, you’ll have a 95 per cent chance of relapse... 

A handful of American studies had suggested that lithium might prolong the effect of sleep deprivation, so they investigated that. They found that 65 percent of patients taking lithium showed a sustained response to sleep deprivation when assessed after three months, compared to just 10 per cent of those not taking the drug.

Since even a short nap could undermine the efficacy of the treatment, they also started searching for new ways of keeping patients awake at night, and drew inspiration from aviation medicine, where bright light was being used to keep pilots alert... 

“When people are seriously depressed, their circadian rhythms tend to be very flat; they don’t get the usual response of melatonin rising in the evening, and the cortisol levels are consistently high rather than falling in the evening and the night,” says Steinn Steingrimsson, a psychiatrist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who is currently running a trial of wake therapy.

Recovery from depression is associated with a normalization of these cycles. “I think depression may be one of the consequences of this basic flattening of circadian rhythms and homeostasis in the brain,” says Benedetti. “When we sleep-deprive depressed people, we restore this cyclical process.”... 

The bias towards pharmaceutical solutions has kept chronotherapy below the radar for many psychiatrists. “A lot of people just don’t know about it,” says Veale."

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/yw59bv/sleep-deprivation-is-a-surprisingly-effective-way-to-treat-depression

I have experienced this; when I only get 5 hours of sleep, I'm sometimes confusingly functional. I used to think that maybe it was because that's all the sleep I got some nights in high school and college and so my brain became accustomed to being productive in that state. But I also realize that I can only stay sleep deprived for a few days before the negatives outweigh the positives. So it's a balance. 

"You Should Actually Send That Thank You Note You’ve Been Meaning to Write"

“They think it’s not going to be that big a deal,” said Amit Kumar, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies well-being.

They also overestimate how insincere the note may appear and how uncomfortable it will make the recipient feel, their study found.

But after receiving thank-you notes and filling out questionnaires about how it felt to get them, many said they were “ecstatic,” scoring the happiness rating at 4 of 5. The senders typically guessed they’d evoke a 3... 

Along with underestimating the value of sending a note to another person, many seemed to be concerned with how much their writing would be scrutinized.

As it turned out, most recipients didn’t care how the notes were phrased, they cared about warmth, Dr. Kumar and his co-author Nicholas Epley, a professor at the University of Chicago, found. Participants were also judged to be more competent at writing than they expected."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/science/thank-you-notes.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Send a thank you!

Related: gratitudes 

"Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction"

"The genre ranges broadly in tone and topic, from dark, foreboding dramas to broad, slapstick comedies; from neo-Confederate romances to futuristic dystopian nightmares. They’re dangerous and disgusting, for sure, but they’re also absurdly stupid and, on the whole, very badly written. As a playwright who specializes in edgy humor, I find them endlessly fascinating. Their vocabulary of broad stereotypes, paranoid fantasies and preposterous global-takeover schemes is the stuff comedy is made of.

I have a particular affinity for the sci-fi books. One of the most popular is Ward Kendall’s 2001 “Hold Back This Day,” which imagines a future in which the evil all-powerful “World Gov” has forcibly united the population of Earth under one religion and, by way of enforced race-mixing, one uniformly brown-skinned population. Jeff Huxton is a “skoolplex” administrator and one of the world’s few remaining white people. He slowly learns to cherish his white skin, becomes radicalized and joins a terrorist group called “Nayra” (“Aryan” spelled backwards!). They hijack a spaceship and travel to Avalon, a secret all-white colony on Mars, which has been transformed into a paradisiacal homeland...

It is unlikely that Mr. Trump has read any of these books. But members of his staff undoubtedly have. His former aide Steve Bannon is a fan of “The Camp of the Saints” and refers to it often — in knowing, offhand ways that betray both his familiarity with racist literature and his awareness of his target audience’s reading habits. Another administration official, Julie Kirchner, was named ombudsman at the Customs and Border Protection after spending 10 years as the executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. That organization, which Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, was founded by John Tanton, who runs The Social Contract Press, which is the current publisher of “The Camp of the Saints.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/opinion/inside-the-world-of-racist-science-fiction.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

FB: "“The Turner Diaries” was an innovation of sorts, a hybrid of fantasy and how-to, and it has inspired hundreds of terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and injured 684 others. The attack was a copycat of the one Mr. Pierce outlined in the book, right down to the time of day and type of explosives used. Pages of the book were found in a plastic bag in the car of the plot’s leader, Timothy McVeigh. The mainstream attention caused a kind of miniboom in the genre that lasted into the early 2000s, as other would-be authors, Mr. Kendall and Ms. Williams among them, tried their hand at writing fiction."

"Improving Ourselves to Death"

"In retrospect, “The Secret,” which sold more than twenty million copies worldwide, seems a testament to the predatory optimism that characterized the years leading up to the financial crisis. People dreamed big, and, in a day of easy money, found that their dreams could come true. Then the global economy crashed, and we were shaken violently awake—at least for a time.

In our current era of non-stop technological innovation, fuzzy wishful thinking has yielded to the hard doctrine of personal optimization. Self-help gurus need not be charlatans peddling snake oil. Many are psychologists with impressive academic pedigrees and a commitment to scientific methodologies, or tech entrepreneurs with enviable records of success in life and business. What they’re selling is metrics...

Where success can be measured with increasing accuracy, so, too, can failure. On the other side of self-improvement, Cederström and Spicer have discovered, is a sense not simply of inadequacy but of fraudulence...

“We’re living in an age of perfectionism, and perfection is the idea that kills,” [Store] writes. “People are suffering and dying under the torture of the fantasy self they’re failing to become.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/15/improving-ourselves-to-death

FB: “In a consumerist society, we are not meant to buy one pair of jeans and then be satisfied,” Cederström and Spicer write, and the same, they think, is true of self-improvement. We are being sold on the need to upgrade all parts of ourselves, all at once, including parts that we did not previously know needed upgrading.

"How We Imagine Aliens"

"Researchers who explore the possibility of microbial life beyond Earth, the different chemistries and microscopic structures that could give rise to life, do so with a practical eye. Their work can offer search parameters to astronomers pointing increasingly sensitive telescopes at planets beyond our solar system, with the chance to detect signs of life — not to mention for researchers designing probes to visit Mars and the possibly habitable moons of the outer solar system. Far fewer scientists spend time thinking about the possible forms of complex life, not just cells that use energy and hold information in DNA or its analogue, but the analogue of animals, the analogue of us.

Aside from the lack of applications for such thought experiments, there just aren’t enough constraints to call that speculation science. Astrophysicist Adam Frank told me, “If you want to use the constraints that science gives you to try and say something about life, then you’re limited to things that are super simple and things that are as complicated as we are.” Frank’s research includes modeling alien civilizations — he prefers the term “exocivilizations,” to match “exoplants” — as agents of climate change. Any technological civilization will necessarily have an impact on the energy balance of its home planet. So we can model that, and we can model exotic cell chemistries, but anywhere in between those two extremes is impossibly murky. At least for science...

This isn’t about policing pop culture for scientific accuracy, of course. (That would be a very bad way to do science outreach.) (That last parenthetical was a direct address to Neil deGrasse Tyson.)"

https://medium.com/s/the-possibility-of-life/how-we-imagine-aliens-8abda2236e8

Related: Dolphins as aliens one; NDT one

FB: "All of our imaginings are inherently incredibly limited. It’s like trying to imagine a new color or a new sense. Our frame of reference is what scientists call n=1, one example to extrapolate from: one sentient species, one planet, one evolutionary tree. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, told me, “We always extrapolate from what we are to what we figure they are. It’s a little bit self-centered.” Moreover, it misses the point. “If you think about it, the most important thing we’re doing in this century is inventing our successors.” What Shostak means by that is intelligent machines. Far less romantic to commune with than big-eyed ET."

"It’s fine to be mean to racists and ghouls"

"long with an inexplicable spike in soft-focus profiles of racists, scolding op-eds about how college students are ruining free speech, and demands that we respect decrepit, brain-dead Republican senators in spite of their monstrous beliefs and actions, we’ve seen an increase in sanctimonious public pleas from journalists to liberals, begging that they stop “bullying” the party that controls all three branches of government. This, of course, has won liberal outlets precisely zero fans from the Trump camp so far... 

In that last line — which references the ratio of (typically angry) replies to (typically supportive) retweets — he casts himself as a martyr for decency. Because he weeps over the prospect of Don Jr.’s obscenely wealthy heirs having to split their time between two penthouse apartments, he is superior to those of us who don’t give a shit. This is the morality of children."

https://theoutline.com/post/4626/its-fine-to-be-mean-to-racists-especially-aaron-schlossberg?utm_source=FB&zr=ydosobea&zd=3&zi=txu2qur6

FB: "Aaron Schlossberg and Don Jr. would never return such a favor in a million years — because they are narcissistic sociopaths. Conservatives aren’t going to stop loathing journalists if they say enough nice things about the people rounding up immigrant children and trying to start wars, and even the most milquetoast #Resistance liberals find this sort of thing incredibly off-putting."

"Everybody was telling me there was nothing wrong"

"in 2016, the Brain Tumour Charity released a report on the treatment of brain tumour patients in the United Kingdom. It found that almost one in three of them had visited a doctor more than five times before receiving their diagnosis. Nearly a quarter weren’t diagnosed for more than a year.

Women, as well as low-income patients, experienced longer delays... 

The tendency to attribute women’s physical complaints to mental illness has its roots in the history of ‘hysteria’ – that mythical female disorder that, over the centuries, was blamed on a ‘wandering womb’ or sensitive nerves and eventually, post-Freud, came to be seen as a psychological problem. The terms have changed over the last century, but the concept – that the unconscious mind can ‘produce’ physical symptoms – has remained alive and well in medicine.

There is a high risk of misdiagnosis inherent in this concept, whether it’s called hysteria, somatisation, or ‘medically unexplained symptoms’ due to stress... 

Consider the experience of patients with rare diseases, who go more than seven years, on average, before being correctly diagnosed. Along the way, they visit four primary care doctors and four specialists and receive two to three misdiagnoses.

While some delay in diagnosing an uncommon disease may be inevitable, this staggering seven-year gap is not simply because it takes that long for doctors to crack a challenging case. According to a Eurordis survey of 12,000 rare disease patients in Europe, those who were initially misdiagnosed experienced longer diagnostic journeys. And, while being misdiagnosed with the wrong physical disease doubled the time it took to get to the right diagnosis, getting a psychological misdiagnosis extended it even more – by 2.5 up to 14 times, depending on the disease."

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare?ocid=socialflow_facebook

I've personally heard about two different women - one a friend from college now a grad student at Stanford, the other a friend's aunt who is a doctor in London - who had brain tumors go undiagnosed for months.

FB: "Studies in the 1990s suggested that as many as 30-50% of women diagnosed with depression were misdiagnosed. Furthermore, depression and anxiety are themselves symptoms of other diseases, which often go unrecognised in women. And, of course, the stress of suffering from an undiagnosed – and therefore untreated – disease often takes its mental toll. As one article points out, “Ironically, medical misdiagnoses of physical conditions may induce depressive reactions in female patients.”"

"Is This Pigeon Meme a Think Piece?"

"The pigeon meme is part of the rich internet tradition of establishing difference through memes. Think of Hillary Clinton versus Bernie Sanders, or the Krusty Krab/Chum Bucket binary, or of Drake eschewing one thing and pointing approvingly at another. Each of these memes attempt to distinguish between two things.

Importantly, in each of these memes, the distinction is between something “good” and something “bad” — something to be kept and something to be rejected. The pigeon meme, however, expresses a different sort of bias. It is not preferential. It says “these two things are not the same thing,” and little more.

In this sense it is refreshing."

https://medium.com/new-york-magazine/is-this-pigeon-meme-a-think-piece-ba3880a1fda3

FB: "This particular gesture, the neutral cleaving apart of two conflated but distinct phenomena, feels particularly necessary. Social media has spiraled out into a continuous performance of bad faith. Whataboutism, false equivalency, sea-lioning, concern trolling, and derailing all represent attempts, in various ways, to muddy the waters, to make it difficult to distinguish between right and wrong, to mislabel and misapprehend. The internet is made to link one thing to another. “Is this a pigeon?” is made to reestablish that those things are separate. It is a meme suited for this particular moment, when something good might actually be something bad."

"Immortal Gatito"

"The boy’s parents are both university professors. When they discover the affair, they lodge a complaint in court for corruption of a minor. Suppose that this charge is serious when it is levelled against a woman but not very serious if the accused is a man. The reason for this would be not only a long history of American jurisprudence but a prevailing belief that a Don Juan is simply exercising a normal role in society, whereas women have been troublemakers ever since Genesis...

Imagine that habeas corpus does not exist in American law but that preventive detention does: anyone can be put in prison without a trial and kept as long as the judge conducting the preliminary investigation sees fit. This judge is sovereign. He is not obliged to consult anybody or give a reason for whatever he decides. When the teacher is arrested and held without a trial, public opinion is aroused, because it is utterly unusual for someone of her class and background to be jailed. If she is being treated like the illiterate and the poor, then something must be wrong... 

Given that particular climate, it was easy for someone like Gabrielle Russier, who was intellectually developed but emotionally very young, to become fatally mistaken about possibilities and consequences. The specific sexual situation of the young boy and the older woman is a repeated theme in French novels and plays. She knew it, because she taught Racine and Stendhal, Colette and Radiguet; she grew up in a society where books are revered, but she obviously knew nothing about what that same society would tolerate in practice...

Calling herself Dyana Rossa is odder still, beyond any conclusions a stranger can come to without impertinence. It is just simply not usual for a grown woman to identify herself with classical heroines or with automobiles... 

The question of what people see in each other still defies analysis. The mystery of what a couple is, exactly, is almost the only true mystery still left to us, and when we have come to the end of it there will be no more need for literature—or for love, for that matter... 

One can’t help noticing that everyone connected with this case was either irritable or violent. Christian broke Gabrielle’s door in; she threw a young boy’s luggage out a train window; in one of her letters Gabrielle cautions her ex-husband that it will not help her cause if he blows up at people. As for members of the legal profession, they were at the end of their patience when proceedings were barely under way. Even the Minister of Justice was to explain the case by saying, after her death, that the boy’s parents had begun the whole affair because they had lost patience too."

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1971/06/26/immortal-gatito?mbid=contentmarketing_facebook_citizennet_paid_magazine_the-affair-that-scandalized-france%3Fsource%3D_5-6-visit

I don't know why but I found this article (from 1971) utterly striking; it was the writing style but also the way it completely pulls you into another society. I feel like I understand so much more about France now, but also the difference between the US and Europe. And then also the complexities of sexism. 

It's LONG but engaging in a really special way. 

"For too long, African languages have been defined by the European colonialists who wrote them"

"A mother tongue is taken to be a language that has a name: Xhosa, Tswana or Sotho, for instance. It refers to the standard version of that language, transcribed in most cases by 19th century European missionaries based on how they understood and conceptualized the way people spoke in the immediate vicinity of the rural mission station.

But what they were transcribing were actually regional dialects, not pure versions of pristine languages tied to an authentic and timeless cultural identity. Decades of schooling practices institutionalized and continuously reinforced the missionaries’ notions.

Here’s the problem: those supposedly “pure” languages often bear only a loose family resemblance to the way that modern people in both rural and urban areas actually speak."

https://qz.com/1279484/languages-in-africa-are-still-defined-by-white-european-colonialists/

FB: "The frame of reference for European missionaries and colonizers when transcribing African language practices was an idea of languages existing as autonomous structures, each spoken by a distinct group of people.

Versatile and flexible African listeners and speakers communicating efficiently without necessarily agreeing on one distinct, correct way of speaking did not fit this 19th century European frame of reference."

"Cod and ‘Immune Broth’: California Tests Food as Medicine"

"The group is now participating in an ambitious, state-funded study to test whether providing daily nutritious meals to chronically ill, low-income people on Medi-Cal — California’s version of the Medicaid program — will affect their prognosis and treatment, or the cost of their medical care.... 

Poor people can have an especially hard time controlling chronic diseases, because they often eat cheap foods laden with sugar and salt and avoid costly fruits and vegetables.

“Sometimes there is a short-term sacrificing of food to pay the rent, or they go without medications because they can’t afford the co-pay,” said Dr. Sanjay Basu, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford who will be involved in the new study. “That’s when they unintentionally end up in the E.R.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/11/health/food-as-medicine-california.html?utm_source=Small+Victories+Newsletter&utm_campaign=79d9d6d6fc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_05_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_636f315e88-79d9d6d6fc-142026401

"WHY THE MEDITERRANEAN DIET ONLY WORKS FOR THE Rich"

"The challenge with a Mediterranean diet is that it calls for high-quality and expensive foods — such as wild-caught fish and extra virgin olive oil — making it difficult for a low-income family to follow, says Jackie Arnett Elnahar, a registered dietitian based in the New York City area and CEO and co-founder of TelaDietitian. For example, whole grain bread is pricier than white bread and wild-caught salmon from Alaska is more expensive than farm-raised salmon from China, which is more likely to contain fish coloring and pollutants, she says. And low-income families are less likely to spend extra money on organic produce or try a new fruit or vegetable, she notes.

Similarly, the study found that a €2 bottle of extra virgin olive oil is unlikely to have the same nutritional properties as a €10 bottle. The hypothesis: “Differences in the price may yield differences in healthy components and future health outcomes,” Bonaccio said."

https://www.ozy.com/acumen/why-the-mediterranean-diet-only-works-for-the-rich/80122?%3Futm_medium=SM&utm_source=FB&utm_name=PROSP1&utm_term=unen

"The Growing Emptiness of the “Star Wars” Universe"

"When the universalization of “Star Wars” is complete, it will no longer be a story but an aesthetic. We’ll be able to debate which actor played Han Solo best, just as we weigh the pros and cons of different James Bonds. We’ll keep up with the new movies not because we want to find out what happens—the plot, if one exists, will be an impenetrable trellis of intersecting arclets—but because we like their vibe, their look, and their general moral attitude. Collectively, the “Avengers” and DC Comics universes address a common set of issues: terrorism, globalization, inequality, the failure of states, and the responsibilities of élites. Similarly, “Star Wars” may become an endless meditation on adolescence through which different actors precipitate, first as teen-agers, then as parents. In film after film, interchangeable young people will wrestle with the dark side before embracing hope."

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-growing-emptiness-of-the-star-wars-universe?mbid=social_facebook

Bloop bloop

Probably 

"Have you ever noticed how often the origin of breasts is explained as “for men”?"

"This variability is a significant factor upon which many of the hypotheses founder. If you’re going to argue that breast size has been selected for, you either have to show that small-breasted women have a reduced fitness, or that there are trade-offs with other factors that can favor a variable distribution. You also have to do the hard work of actually gathering observational evidence and assessing correlations — you don’t get to do experimental work on humans — and another of the failings of many of these hypotheses is that the evidence just isn’t there.

Another problem many of these hypotheses have is that they fail to address another dimension: why does your hypothetical advantage only apply to women? You have to explain why your explanation applies to only half the human population...

The sexual maturity hypothesis

This is the idea that breasts are basically a visible meter to allow one to judge the sexual maturity of the female — you can easily assess whether a female is prepubertal, and therefore infertile, and the breast shape changes also allow one to see at a glance when a female is old and post reproductive.

Notice that once again we’re in a male-centered domain: men are judging, women are being passively judged. No one ever seems to consider that it is to the woman’s selective advantage to exercise control over her reproduction, so why are we assuming it is evolutionarily favored for her to advertise? We can hypothesize about women evolving cryptic ovulation to hide their fertility, but at the same time argue that males were selecting females for visible fertility signals... 

So the first cause for breasts: pure chance. An intelligent primate species could just as well have evolved that had fatty deposits on male chests, while the females grew beards. Evolution doesn’t care." 

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/06/07/have-you-ever-noticed-how-often-the-origin-of-breasts-is-explained-as-for-men/

I like this partially because it's such a great example of how a scientist thinks through a question. Starting with some basic principles that they have observed about the phenomenon - in this case, sex-specificity and high variability - and then looking for ways to explain those things and then Looking For Ways to Test Those Explanations. 

I feel like that last part is what is missing a lot of the time. It's why scientists are always a little frustrated with the rest of society.

Related: Obstetric dilemma https://medium.com/science-and-innovation/of-evolution-culture-and-the-obstetrical-dilemma-a3b7ce47e207

FB: "I’ll say it again: we’re ignoring the variability. Are women with small breasts bad at advertising their sexual maturity? Then there’s the flip side: there’s variability in the male response. Creepy as it is, there are men who are attracted to small, childlike bodies, where small breasts are an indicator of youth. What is being signaled? How is it being received? We are in a world of mixed messages here, which could, in part, be one of the reasons there is so much variability…but it also means we lack a consistent context to explain the origin of the phenomenon."

"The phrase ‘necessary and sufficient’ blamed for flawed neuroscience"

"The logic of the term is at the heart of the dispute. It’s too often used as shorthand to mean ‘linked to’ or ‘important for’, the authors say. And this sloppy use, they argue, can lead scientists in the wrong direction, especially in genetics.

If a gene is necessary and sufficient for something (as often claimed), strict logic demands that that gene alone can do the job. For example, the gene eyeless is certainly necessary for a retina to develop. But it is not sufficient — if it were, then logic would demand that ‘if eyeless exists, then a retina will develop’. This is false; other genes and factors are needed as well. Yet eyeless is often described as being necessary and sufficient for retinal development."

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05418-0?utm_source=fbk_nnc&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=naturenews&sf191598053=1

This is so validating, I have noticed the use of this term and been skeptical but assumed that I was missing something. I would go back over the definition of sufficient, try to twist it to match what the authors were saying... It just seemed impossible that someone would use the phrase wrong. 

FB: "The duo argues that its objection to such incorrect use is more than pedantry. The combination of necessary and sufficient is excessively strict, and its widespread use has meant, for example, that some ‘command’ neurons have failed to be identified as such because they don’t satisfy the required criteria. (The agreed definition of a command neuron is one that is necessary and sufficient to initiate a behaviour.)"

"Braces Have Made Snoring a Modern Health Problem"

"Bulky braces can further constrict this vital breathing pathway, but in Ehrlich and Kahn’s view, the problem is really that they are a cosmetic fix with a short duration. While not banning orthodontics altogether, they advocate developing stronger jaws to begin with. Breast-feeding babies helps because it takes more effort on the child’s part than sucking on a bottle. Encourage your children to chew thoroughly—Ehrlich and Kahn even advocate gum. They warn that “poor oral posture” contributes to constricting airways. A particular culprit is mouth-breathing, often exacerbated by the fact that we find ourselves indoors so much, where concentrated allergens help stuff up our nasal passages. Mouth-breathing is a sign of a slack jaw and is an indication you are not getting enough oxygen. It’s harder for us to breathe than it was for our jaw-endowed ancestors."

http://m.nautil.us/blog/braces-have-made-snoring-a-modern-health-problem

"South America’s Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors"

Trepanation likely started as a treatment for head wounds, says David Kushner, a neurologist at the University of Miami in Florida. After a traumatic injury, such surgery would have cleaned up skull fractures and relieved pressure on the brain, which commonly swells and accumulates fluid after a blow to the head. But not all trepanned skulls show signs of head injuries, so it’s possible the surgery was also used to treat conditions that left no skeletal trace, such as chronic headaches or mental illnesses. Trepanned skulls have been found all over the world, but Peru, with its dry climate and excellent preservation conditions, boasts hundreds of them... 

Techniques also seemed to improve over time, resulting in smaller holes and less cutting or drilling and more careful “grooving,” which would have reduced the risk of puncturing the brain’s protective membrane called the dura mater and causing an infection. “What we’re looking at is over 1000 years of refining their methods,” says Corey Ragsdale, a bioarchaeologist at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville who wasn’t involved in the study. “They’re not just getting lucky. … The surgeons performing this are so skilled.” Several patients appear to have survived multiple trepanations; one Inca-era skull showed five healed surgeries.

Kushner and Verano then compared those success rates with cranial surgeries on soldiers in the American Civil War, which used similar methods. Battlefield surgeons also treated head wounds by cutting away bone while trying not to puncture the brain’s delicate dura mater membrane. According to Civil War medical records, some 46% to 56% of cranial surgery patients died, compared with just 17% to 25% of Inca-era patients."

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/south-america-s-inca-civilization-was-better-skull-surgery-civil-war-doctors?utm_source=sciencemagazine&utm_medium=facebook-text&utm_campaign=incasurgery-19850

I'm also imagining if some American found descriptions of these surgeries, or if the practice had survived Spanish genocide in a small pocket of practitioners and they taught someone who brought it to American doctors. Like, it would have been described as "an ancient mystical practice" instead of an advanced surgical technique. 

"A View from the Edge — Creating a Culture of Caring"

"As a patient, I was privy to failures that I’d been blind to as a clinician. There were disturbing deficits in communication, uncoordinated care, and occasionally an apparently complete absence of empathy. I recognized myself in every failure.

When I overheard a physician describe me as “trying to die on us,” I was horrified. I was not trying to die on anyone. The description angered me. Then I cringed. I had said the same thing, often and thoughtlessly, in my training. “He was trying to die on me.” As critical care fellows, we had all said it. Inherent in that accusation was our common attribution of intention to patients: we subconsciously constructed a narrative in which the doctor–patient relationship was antagonistic. It was one of many revelatory moments for me.

I heard my colleagues say things to me in ways that inflicted more suffering, even when they believed they were helping.

“We’re going to have to find you a new liver, unless you want to live here forever.”

“Are you sure your pain is an eight? I just gave you morphine an hour ago.”"

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1614078

FB: "How do you build and maintain a culture of shared purpose in the infinitely complex arena of health care? How do you ensure that you engender in employees a dedication and commitment to doing what’s right? Identifying the gaps between the stated mission and values of an institution and its actual delivery of care is critical."

"Laziness Does Not Exist"

"when I see a student failing to complete assignments, missing deadlines, or not delivering results in other aspects of their life, I’m moved to ask: what are the situational factors holding this student back? What needs are currently not being met? And, when it comes to behavioral “laziness”, I’m especially moved to ask: what are the barriers to action that I can’t see?

There are always barriers. Recognizing those barriers— and viewing them as legitimate — is often the first step to breaking “lazy” behavior patterns... 

when you don’t fully understand a person’s context — what it feels like to be them every day, all the small annoyances and major traumas that define their life — it’s easy to impose abstract, rigid expectations on a person’s behavior. All homeless people should put down the bottle and get to work. Never mind that most of them have mental health symptoms and physical ailments, and are fighting constantly to be recognized as human. Never mind that they are unable to get a good night’s rest or a nourishing meal for weeks or months on end. Never mind that even in my comfortable, easy life, I can’t go a few days without craving a drink or making an irresponsible purchase. They have to do better... 

For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well."

https://medium.com/@devonprice/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01

FB: "If a person’s behavior doesn’t make sense to you, it is because you are missing a part of their context. It’s that simple. I’m so grateful to Kim and their writing for making me aware of this fact. No psychology class, at any level, taught me that. But now that it is a lens that I have, I find myself applying it to all kinds of behaviors that are mistaken for signs of moral failure — and I’ve yet to find one that can’t be explained and empathized with."

"ICE Came for a Tennessee Town’s Immigrants. The Town Fought Back."

"the day Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Southeastern Provision plant outside the city and sent dozens of workers to out-of-state detention centers was the day people in Morristown began to ask questions many hadn’t thought through before — to the federal government, to the police, to their church leaders, to each other.

Donations of food, clothing and toys for families of the workers streamed in at such volume there was a traffic jam to get into the parking lot of a church. Professors at the college extended a speaking invitation to a young man whose brother and uncle were detained in the raid. Schoolteachers cried as they tried to comfort students whose parents were suddenly gone. There was standing room only at a prayer vigil that drew about 1,000 people to a school gym...

No charges have been filed against the company...

Two nights later, St. Patrick Church’s center still brimmed with activity as immigrants and supporters gathered to make posters and banners for a procession through downtown Morristown. Ms. Smith brought her 8-year-old daughter, Laurel, figuring it was an important lesson. “This community is a snapshot of the dissonance of America on immigration,” Ms. Smith said."

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/06/11/us/tennessee-immigration-trump.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

“White People Are Noticing Something New: Their Own Whiteness”

“So long as we aren’t hanging out with white nationalists, marrying into a family of color or chuckling over jokes about our dancing, we have endless opportunities to avoid thinking much about our own race. We generally prefer to frame identity in ethnic terms instead: Identifying as Italian or Irish or Jewish seems to come with zest, pathos and a chance to take pride in some shared history. Plain undifferentiated whiteness, on the other hand, is a “toggle between nothingness and awfulness,” writes Nell Irvin Painter, an emeritus professor of history at Princeton and author of the 2010 book “The History of White People.”...

Since handing Trump 58 percent of the white vote, we have been the subject of newspaper and magazine analyses about our race-based resentment, fear of declining status and supposed economic anxiety. The satire “Dear White People” was picked up by Netflix, and the film “Get Out,” which turned self-proclaimed Obama-supporting white people into figures of horror, became the think-piece blockbuster of 2017. Suddenly it is less tenable than ever for white people to write our whiteness out of the story of race in America or define ourselves only in terms of what we are not.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/magazine/white-people-are-noticing-something-new-their-own-whiteness.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

FB: “In each of these cases, as well as a string of others, white people didn’t get the usual benefit of assumed normalcy. They were portrayed, instead, as a distinct subculture with bizarre and threatening habits. “White people” were suddenly identified as the subgroup of Americans most likely to call the police on black people over a barbecue or to complain about whether every single football player stands for the anthem — stereotypes that rang true even to other white people.”

"Suicide in a Culture of Mandated Happiness – Who’s to Blame?"

"As Noel Hunter said, “When 45,000 people a year would rather die than live in this world any longer, it might behoove us all to consider what is happening in the world to cause this.” What is happening in the world. One of the main stories we repeat to ourselves is that mental illness causes suicide. We perpetuate this idea that people who take their own lives are sick, perhaps as an unconscious way of attempting to avoid feelings of guilt or regret about what we could have done or who we could have been for the people we’re losing to this public health crisis. It’s almost like neuroscience hasn’t shown us how harmful isolation is for human beings. We then turn right around and express shock that Kate Spade, Anthony Bourdain, Robin Williams, etc., were feeling so awful — “they were always so happy” say the people “closest” to them... 

This is an increasingly terrifying and painful world for an increasing number of people — in large part because of metastatic capitalism as I’ve discussed in the past. If psychotherapy is less effective for poor people, maybe poverty and runaway inequality, which are not incidental but direct results of the unbridled capitalism we have all accepted as part of “the way things are,” are the problems rather than the individual seeking therapy. Maybe it’s legitimately painful and despair-inducing to live poor in a world where the few self-appointed elites flaunt their wealth and power and show no concern for life that cannot enrich their empires. If you care about depression, organize an eviction blockade; stand up to the corporate giants willing to pollute our air, water, soil and food; learn who has political power in your community and relentlessly petition, picket, protest them until they practice justice."

https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/06/suicide-culture-mandated-happiness/

FB: "The combination of capitalism, individualism and the ruthlessly propagated conception of human beings as competitive by nature have demonized weakness and made it into a bogeyman rather than a fact about the human condition that, if embraced, could lead to healing relationships and more resilient communities, two bulwarks against suicide. Isolation — that is, the felt sense that you are alone and without meaningful connections or people who care about you — kills. Directing people toward professionals rather than learning how to have real, lasting friendships deepens isolation."

"Hereditary"

"Belief in the devil (and all his works) is, I believe, an attempt to grapple with the same fear that drives and sustains Pizzagate and The Storm, the same fear that drove the Satanic Panic and the Salem trials, and the blood libel, and all of the other expressions of that same fear that are re-emerging now “in 2010s clothing.”

That fear is something like the question posed in a classic Mitchell and Webb sketch: “Are we the baddies?” It’s the fear, the ever-present suspicion, that we’re not good.

We’re not afraid that there might be monsters out there in the dark, we’re afraid that there might not be. We need those monsters. We want them to be there because without them, without their superlative, extravagant, ridiculous-on-its-face evil to contrast ourselves favorably against, we would be forced to reckon with ourselves as we are. As long as there are Satanic baby-killers, we can think of ourselves as relatively good.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/06/14/hereditary/

FB: Ach this is so wise "I think these folks cannot be receptive to reality until they’re persuaded that reality might somehow, someday allow them to think of themselves as good. That, in turn, requires convincing them to reconceive of goodness as a pursuit rather than as an identity — to start understanding goodness as something they might do instead of something they can possess, to start thinking in terms of better than I was before rather than in terms of better than those people over there."

"Innocence Abroad"

"to explain everything through the lens of American power is to explain less. One ends up reflecting back the mirage of American omnipotence instead of the reality of U.S. blundering, blindness and internal dissent, of our inability to address the most basic needs of our own society (gun control, health care, an end to police brutality, economic inequality), let alone to confront global challenges such as climate change. One also risks turning all non-Americans into pawns, vassals and victims. Conspiracy theories that ascribe everything to American power diminish the responsibility of local regimes and elites, and the autonomy of people who have staked their own claim to the United States’ proclaimed principles, challenging it to live up to its rhetoric... 

For all his hard-bitten clarity, Baldwin expressed hope that America could see itself and could change “in order to deal with the untapped and dormant force of the previously subjugated, in order to survive as a human, moving, moral weight in the world.” He argued for what I think of as a sort of useful idealism, one that acknowledges reality as it is but does not accept that it has to remain so. He wagered that people could be better than they are: “We are capable of bearing a great burden, once we discover that the burden is reality and arrive where reality is.”"

https://thepointmag.com/2018/criticism/innocence-abroad

FB: "Hansen argues that American prosperity and identity are based on imperialism abroad as much as on racism at home. I agree, yet I have trouble seeing how most Americans prospered from the invasion of Iraq. Instead, I wonder at how much the fraudulent freedom we export abroad resembles the version we extol at home—a freedom that is undercut by economic bondage, by a barely concealed determination to disenfranchise so many."

"Are Google and Facebook Responsible for the Medical Quackery They Host?"

"More worrying, though, is that the digital platforms that host such material and conversations aren’t always passive participants in the recruitment process. Their algorithms, after all, are trained to give visitors more of the kind of content that they like — whatever that might be. While researching this column, for example, I started watching a lot of AIDS denialism videos on YouTube. Immediately, the site began suggesting other denialist videos that I might want to watch, essentially serving up content to keep me on the site longer. Had I been an HIV-positive YouTube user looking for answers about a troubling diagnosis, the effect, perhaps, would have been powerful. (Google did not respond to repeated requests for comment and chose not to answer a list of questions submitted by Undark)."... 

Lidsky advocates for more education to help citizens become savvier consumers of media, while recognizing the limits of oversight policies. “Respect for individual autonomy says that individuals get to make choices,” she said, “which includes them having a right to make bad choices that cause them harm.”... 

Facebook isn’t just offering a space for people to meet; its algorithms and search functions are helping them find each other. And YouTube isn’t just a neutral platform for incendiary content: It actively organizes it, and then algorithmically nudges people to view more of it. If a city government actually helped fringe groups put together mailing lists and distribute leaflets, citizens might, understandably, grow more suspicious."

https://undark.org/article/aids-denialism-quackery-facebook-youtube/

I don't know what the solution is here, exacrly, but it is a worthy observation that these platforms are active and not passive. It would be reasonable to have a committee of health workers identify topics of public health concern and ask these platforms to include some disclaimer on those videos. If only as a thing to try, to see what would happen. 

"Fuck civility"

"Puzzlingly, columnists in mainstream newspapers — who are typically the first group to raise alarm whenever Trump violates a norm or deviates from standards of decency set by George Washington — are also fond of the idea that the president and his cohorts are holding back their worst impulses as part of an unspoken non-aggression pact with Democrats. If liberals decide to yell at Sarah Huckabee Sanders in public, it will give Trump and his notoriously demure supporters the excuse they were waiting for to act like assholes. This is absurd on its face, as are the hypotheticals it begets: “How hard is it to imagine, for example, people who strongly believe that abortion is murder deciding that judges or other officials who protect abortion rights should not be able to live peaceably with their families?” It is not, in fact, very hard to imagine that. Abortion providers and patients are routinely hassled by protesters all over the country, and as recently as 2015 a right-wing zealot killed three and injured nine at a Planned Parenthood in Colorado. The Post editorial board is either completely unfamiliar with the history of anti-abortion violence, or believes that conservatives are a few bad restaurant experiences away from launching a violent insurrection."

https://theoutline.com/post/5070/fuck-civility?utm_source=FB&zr=vxyk5uwn&zd=6&zi=iipfegrb

FB: "Again, the idea that shouting “shame” at a Trump cabinet member in public will violate an unspoken truce between liberals and conservatives is completely ahistorical; the best evidence for this is that Trump, a hugely stupid man, believes this truce to exist"

"I am now an alarmist"

"When he says “I was not a Communist,” he was understating the case. He was anti-Communist. He had no sympathy for them and was inclined to excuse and minimize what he was seeing because, in his view, they brought it on themselves. They broke the law, or what he thought maybe should have been the law. They were them, not us, not me or mine. So it wasn’t alarming... 

Hitler’s “Aryan paragraph” is what finally roused Niemöller to shift from vague concern to something more like alarm. But even still he wavered and faltered. His alarm had to do with the fact that some of his fellow Lutherans might be affected by that. If “they came for the Jews,” that might include some of his fellow Christians who were of Jewish background. So even as he became alarmed and joined with others sounding the alarm, his resistance wavered with something like qualification... 

We’re still more alarmed about the possibility of alarmism than about what we’re seeing — what we are undeniably, actually seeing unfold. They are coming for the immigrants. First for the illegal immigrants, because most Americans will respond to that the same way Niemöller responded to coming for the Communists.

But they are also coming for the refugees, for those lawfully seeking asylum, for legal immigrants who have committed any misdemeanors in their lifetime, for naturalized citizens."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/06/28/i-am-now-an-alarmist/

Fb: "that’s where we differ from Niemöller, and why we respect the sentiments of his poem only in the abstract. Because we are far more concerned about the potential danger and shame of speaking out too soon. We do not wish to be seen by others as alarmists. Chicken Little. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Etc. We are hyper-vigilant about never being perceived by others as hyper-vigilant."