"What Social Scientists Learned from Katrina"

"If a group of poor Americans are stuck in a bad place, then either the place they are stuck in needs to be improved or they need to move to a better place. Over the years, there have been numerous efforts to advance the second of these approaches—experimental projects, government initiatives —but they have been hard to execute on a large scale. Then came the storm...

The Lower Ninth had twenty thousand people before Katrina. Five years afterward, there were six thousand. In Mid-City, there are still abandoned houses and empty lots. Many of these people may have wanted to come back right after the storm. But the public schools were shut down, the city’s main public hospital was a wreck, and the city’s public-housing projects were shuttered...

One of the tragedies of Katrina was that so many of New Orleans’ residents were forced to move. But the severity of that tragedy is a function of where they were forced to move to. Was it somewhere on the Salt Lake City end of the continuum? Or was it a place like Fayetteville? The best answer we have is from the work of the sociologist Corina Graif, who tracked down the new addresses of seven hundred women displaced by Katrina—most of them lower-income and black...

A few years after the hurricane, researchers at the University of Texas interviewed a group of New Orleans drug addicts who had made the move to Houston, and they found that Katrina did not seem to have left the group with any discernible level of trauma. That’s because, the researchers concluded, “they had seen it all before: the indifferent authorities, loss, violence, and feelings of hopelessness and abandonment that followed in the wake of this disaster,” all of which amounted to “a microcosm of what many had experienced throughout their lives.”"


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/24/starting-over-dept-of-social-studies-malcolm-gladwell

"A Leslie Knope In A World Full Of Liz Lemons"

"Why did we love Liz so much? In part, I think, it was because women — that is, career-minded, often-single, mainly white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered women—weren’t used to seeing representation of ourselves on TV. How many women bosses were there on primetime? How many who were as interesting, as talented, or as funny as Liz? Who didn’t also look like they were moonlighting as faces for Covergirl? Who were candid about their issues? Who bought a wedding dress that later turned into a ham napkin?

But Liz is also deeply flawed — and maybe that’s why we liked her...

During the run of 30 Rock, Liz became more flawed, her comedically-bad choices and qualities blown up for laughs. The Liz who bought all the hotdogs just to make a point about righteous waiting was written nearly into oblivion, leaving behind a character who was basically a series of issues, stuck together with used chewing gum and sadness...

Now, compare Liz with another TV heroine, Leslie Knope, who also went through a character reinvention. Whereas Liz slowly became a caricature of flailing white womanhood, Leslie was empowered by the writers, growing into a powerhouse, a politician, and an example of actually having it all...

To be likeable as a woman, it seems, you have to ensure that you’re also non-threatening and slightly useless. You have to point loudly to your “flaws,” but not your, you know, actual flaws. Perpetually single? It’s definitely because you sometimes eat too much cheese stew, and not because you have never figured out how to actually be a caring, intimate, ambitious partner."

https://medium.com/@mshannabrooks/a-leslie-knope-in-a-world-full-of-liz-lemons-61726b6c6493

Related: Parks and Rec as therapy. Such a necessary and wonderful show.

"Two Years in the Life of a Saudi Girl"

"For two years, Majd Abdulghani recorded an audio diary of her life in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- where women cannot drive, and where they only make up 16 percent of the workforce. But the society is changing, and Majd's story of studying to be a scientist, learning karate, and ultimately navigating the world of arranged marriages is a glimpse into a world rarely seen by outsiders."

http://www.wnyc.org/story/two-years-life-saudi-girl/

I am so. so glad that I encountered this. 

We never, ever get to hear from women living in middle eastern countries but we spend a lot of time staring at them (or, rather, our poorly informed ideas of them).

Related: My collection of essays/articles by muslim women about their experiences

"What Does It Mean To Be A Muslim Woman In The Modern World?"

In support of the pop-up magazine **link** that is highlighting the voices of Muslim women, I am pulling together this collection of essays and articles by Muslim women. I've been meaning to do it for a while - I feel that I have gained so much from reading their words and hearing their experiences. Speaking as a non-Muslim woman to what I am assuming is an audience that mostly falls outside of this group as well, I strongly encourage you to explore the pop up magazine (which is curated by actual members of this group) and I hope that my collection can also be a resource.  

(Sara Ahmed, problem at the dinner table thing, is she muslim? if so, add...) (also add podcast from OTM I think with woman from Saudi Arabia)

"What Does It Mean To Be A Muslim Woman In The Modern World?"

"Rather than continue fixating on how I was a bad Muslim, I decided a few years ago to redefine how Islam fit into my life. While I don’t observe Islam in the same way that my sister or parents do, that doesn’t mean I’m not Muslimenough. In fact, I resent that somebody could decide that for me. I feel very Muslim; what does that say about me?

The Internet, I found, was the best place for me to articulate my struggles and find other like-minded Muslim women. Sometimes these women were hushed in tones of fear and resentment; other times our communication was hurried and fast, as though we had been waiting to talk our whole lives, to divulge our feelings to one another felt like a blessing. As we opened up these dark places of ourselves that we’d been shamed into hiding, we felt less abnormal, less alone...

Over the next few weeks, I’ve asked half a dozen Muslim women to join me in exploring some of the things we’ve been to scared or ashamed to discuss in the past — things like wearing or not wearing the hijab, navigating sex and virginity, or coming out as queer. While the publication is geared towards Muslim women and femme-identifying folks, anyone who has had similar experiences or feelings is invited to participate."

https://medium.com/muslim-women-speak/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-muslim-woman-in-the-modern-world-ab8fc460814#.s02shhd0i

This is a "pop-up" magazine that I'm very excited to be following.

It has inspired me to create my first collection: a round-up of the essays and articles by Muslim women that I have posted to this blog. [https://medium.com/intersections-of-identities/tagged/islam]

"The next thing Silicon Valley needs to disrupt big time: its own culture"

"We’ve created a make-believe cult of objective meritocracy, a pseudo-scientific mythos to obscure and reinforce the belief that only people who look and talk like us are worth noticing. After making such a show of burning down the bad old rules of business, the new ones we’ve created seem pretty similar...

Suppose that it’s a scientific fact that wearing a suit signals that a candidate is unfit for duty. Assuming that’s true, then what does teaching the poor bastard how to camouflage himself actually accomplish? Does clothing indicate a person’s inner qualities or not? What, exactly, is the moral we’re supposed to learn from this grubby little drama?

The theme is familiar to anyone who’s tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is—I am not making this up—non-conformity , one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up.

The theme is familiar to anyone who’s tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It’s not supposed to make sense. The Culture can’t really be written about; it has to be experienced. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth...

If spam filters sorted messages the way Silicon Valley sorts people, you’d only get email from your college roommate. And you’d never suspect you were missing a thing."

http://qz.com/225782/the-next-thing-silicon-valley-needs-to-disrupt-big-time-its-own-culture/

My dad is a black man who has worked in Silicon Valley since the mid-90s (he's been at big, established companies and also at companies he's started; now he is at a 1st gen tech firm with two very Silicon Valley-y titles) and whenever we talk about the problems of diversity in the tech world, he points to the term "culture fit" as the problem, full stop. I get the sense that he sees it often - people (esp. women) not getting a chance because they don't signify the culture of the gatekeepers. Just now, it occurs to me to wonder if it's ever happened to him... Although, I guess, from the outside you can never quite tell.

And I know that I am totally in the Culture; this is a huge, huge privilege of growing up in the area. As long as I get an introduction from someone or am wearing a nametag that indicates I'm supposed to be there (like, say, a Princeton class ring) that lets people see my skin color second, I can totally charm any techie.

And that information could do something, could cause people to be reflective and change their behaviors, but these people are making too much money and receiving too much praise for them to feel that it is at all necessary. Like, I don't think anything is going to change until they lose the ego, and the only thing I can think of that might actually impact that is if the bubble bursts and people start losing money? Or maybe something that cracks the clique, like two important figures getting into a massive debate that makes everyone choose sides? Ooooh, or a company could start doing things differently and suddenly start beating everyone. Until then, everything in our society is going to continue to let them know that they are Good and Right.

Also - "It’s astonishing how many of the people conducting interviews and passing judgement on the careers of candidates have had no training at all on how to do it well." (!!!!)

FB: there are lots of articles like this, but I really like this one.

"Hold Fast to Blackness"

"Growing up, Black people and white people alike said, “But why do you say you’re Black? You don’t have to. Say you’re half white. Say you’re mixed.” Everything you need to know about the value of Blackness and whiteness in America is in that statement. “You don’t have to.” Like being Black is a burden. Like it is something to be avoided. “Say you’re half white,” like white is something to want, to have, to get if you can. “Say you’re mixed,” like I’m part of a new special and superior breed, to be distinguished from the older, darker model...

I have resented the unnecessary interrogation about my race from white people at work; learned to accept that from other brown-skinned people, they are often wondering if I am with them, on their side... Darker skinned people have been suspicious of lighter skinned people in this country for centuries and for good reason in many cases: we have not always been on the right side of history. Sometimes we supported our father masters and benefited from their skin colorist hierarchies...

I would like the conversation about “mixed” identity to move away from those of us with mixed parentage thinking we are special. We’re not. Many Black Americans have mixed heritage without the privilege of knowing and being loved by the non-Black descendents of their ancestors. I would like the conversation about biracial and multiracial identity to move away from claiming whiteness, first of all because a lot of people who have mixed parentage are not of European descent, but secondly because whiteness and the tent of whiteness are part of a powerful and dangerous social structure. I would like other people who know and love a white parent or grandparent to join me in changing the conversation"

https://medium.com/@chanda/hold-fast-to-blackness-3e4fa529917d

"Feminism shouldn't make men comfortable"

"It isn’t that men haven’t been called to the conversation, but rather that they’ve constantly rejected the invitation. Men have consistently and deliberately turned to women in feminist movements and said that their concerns are not urgent, or important, or even real. They’ve sought ways to blame women for the oppression they face, or in the most charitable version of events, attempted to derail conversations by saying, “The real issue is…” Some men flat out deny there is a problem at all, while some of even the self-proclaimed progressive men try to find ways to again center men in the fight for equality and justice...

There’s something to be said for meeting people where they are, but lightly massaging around the hardest parts so as not to upset anyone accomplishes only mild reform. It’s like Dana was trying to get us to understand earlier this week in her post on the “It’s On Us” campaign. Anything that doesn’t get us to challenge the status quo will only reinforce it."

http://feministing.com/2014/09/26/feminism-shouldnt-make-men-comfortable/

"When Heroin Hits the White Suburbs"

"Although there has been some push to enhance criminal sanctions to combat the heroin surge, much of the institutional reaction to the renewed popularity of the drug has sounded in the realm of medicine, not law.

One public official after another, in states both “red” and “blue,” has pressed in recent years to treat increased heroin use as a public-safety problem as opposed to a criminal-justice matter best left to police, prosecutors, and judges. This is good news. But it forms a vivid contrast with the harsh reaction a generation ago to the sudden rise in the use of crack cocaine, and from the harsh reaction two generations ago to an earlier heroin epidemic...
Some experts and researchers see in the different responses to these drug epidemics further proof of America’s racial divide. Are policymakers going easier today on heroin users (white and often affluent) than their elected predecessors did a generation ago when confronted with crack addicts who were largely black, disenfranchised, and economically bereft? Can we explain the disparate response to the “black” heroin epidemic of the 1960s, in which its use and violent crime were commingled in the public consciousness, and the white heroin “epidemic” today, in which its use is considered a disease to be treated or cured, without using race as part of our explanation?"

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/08/12/when-heroin-hits-the-white-suburbs?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sprout&utm_source=facebook

"Choosing to Skip the Upgrade and Care for the Gadget You’ve Got"

"“That’s how I think about a lot of my tech stuff: candidates for 11th-hour pet rescue,” said Mr. Lai, adding that he was fired from the recycling facility in 2010 after continuing to take home unwanted gadgets, against the wishes of his boss. Now he works for the Fixers Collective, a social club in New York that repairs aging devices to extend their lives.

Many tech companies are trying to train people to constantly upgrade their gadgets — part ways with a device, the argument goes, as soon as something newer and faster comes along. Companies like Apple, AT&T and T-Mobile USA now offer early upgrade plans that allow consumers to buy a new cellphone every year. Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president for worldwide marketing, said at a product event last month that it was “really sad” that more than 600 million computers in use today are more than five years old.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/21/technology/personaltech/choosing-to-skipthe-upgrade-and-care-for-the-gadget-youve-got.html?contentCollection=weekendreads&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region&_r=0

So valid! Why we gotta upgrade so often? How long can we continue to pretend that these capitalist behaviors aren't ruining the planet? I mean, it's amazing economic engineering by the phone companies, but they need to stop.

"RNA Spray Could Make GMOs Obsolete"

"Instead of modifying the crop’s genes, they’ve sprayed RNA that shuts down a gene the insects need to survive directly onto the crops. When the beetles eat the plant, the ingested RNA will eventually cause them to die through inhibiting the necessary gene...

These sprays can be created and applied quickly, providing protection if the plants are infested by a never-before-seen virus or insect. They could even be used to endow plants with advantageous, temporary traits. For example, farmers could spray RNAis that bestow corn plants with drought-resistance, saving a harvest during hot, dry weather."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/rna-spray-could-make-gmos-obsolete/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=pbsofficial&utm_campaign=nova_next

This is super cool. GMO concerns are typically based on a combination of over-covered bad science and over-generalized concerned about Monsanto, that has been exacerbated by poor science communication on the topic. I would be curious about the response that people have to this RNA spray, which I actually seems like a more ideal technology if it can be made cheaply and quickly.

"Teju Cole's instagram feed just gave us a masterclass on human behaviour"

"The Louvre, it turns out, had in the early days of the smartphone, uploaded a terrible photograph of the Mona Lisa on Instagram. Cole uses this to explain human fondness for our flawed pasts.

"Virtually indistinguishable from millions of crappy tourist photos, it is beautiful and charged with the patina of 'bad' digital photography. A rare example of affective strength from an official quarter. As the sages have long observed, the mixtape tends to be better than the album. It is inevitable that the artifactual eccentricities of compressed digital files will create a nostalgia in future generations, the way black and white photos from the 19th century all now look 'good' to us.""
http://www.catchnews.com/culture-news/teju-cole-s-instagram-feed-just-gave-us-a-masterclass-on-understanding-human-behaviour-1439988410.html

Mmmmm

Relate do: thing on selfies and Kardashians

"The Science of Love: How Positivity Resonance Shapes the Way We Connect"

"far beyond feeling good, a micro-moment of love, like other positive emotions, literally changes your mind. It expands your awareness of your surroundings, even your sense of self. The boundaries between you and not-you — what lies beyond your skin — relax and become more permeable. While infused with love you see fewer distinctions between you and others. Indeed, your ability to see others — really see  them, wholeheartedly — springs open... The new take on love that I want to share with you is this: Love blossoms virtually anytime two or more people — even strangers — connect over a shared positive emotion, be it mild or strong...

Odds are, if you were raised in a Western culture, you think of emotions as largely private events. you locate them within a person’s boundaries, confined within their mind and skin... Defining love as positivity resonance challenges this view. Love unfolds and reverberates between and among people — within interpersonal transactions — and thereby belong to all parties involved, and to the metaphorical connective tissue that binds them together, albeit temporarily. … More than any other positive emotion, then, love belongs not to one person, but to pairs or groups of people. It resides within connections."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/28/love-2-0-barbara-fredrickson/

I kind of really want to read this book... I was honestly thinking about this this morning, how I would love to ask everyone I meet: when was the last time you felt a random moment of love for a stranger or distant aquisntance? Just that second where you feel like you are in something with someone, even someone walking past you on the street who you will never interact with again.

I feel like this totally describes that thing where some people really just bring love into the room with them, sort of launching this emotional interconnectedness.

And it really is a remarkable thing with people you love, even when they are far away, experiencing their emotions vicariously when you hear their news.

(Also, I totally recommend the book linked to at the end of this article, A General Theory of Love; I lent it to a friend, but when I get it back I might write up a review, it made me think differently about human connection)

"Black academics expected to ‘entertain’ when presenting, new study says"

"Thirty-three African American faculty members from institutions across the country were surveyed on their personal experiences, providing a unique perspective on “presenting while black.”...

Interviews with the scholars revealed that an overwhelming majority were advised regularly by white peers to be “more entertaining” when making research presentations, as well as to “lighten up” and “tell more jokes.”...

For any academic, presenting their research to peers can open doors to departmental collaborations, research funding opportunities and job offers. They must present effectively and persuasively to stand out from the crowd. But scholars of color face additional hurdles for acceptance that range from microaggressions to outright racism. Faced with “racial battle fatigue,” many try to change who they are in order to fit in, or simply give up and change careers."
http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2015/08/black-academics-expected-to-entertain-when-presenting-new-study-says/

#exhausting.

But I love the term at the end, "minoritized". I have so many feelings about the term 'minority', it just feels like it labels a whole set of identifies as absolutely minority positions; it feels like a word that is used because it is more comfortable than other terms (for white people) and not because it's actually useful. But, like, ya, forces in the world PUT me in the minority - not my racial/ethnic identity.

"WHAT HAPPENED TO THE ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE?"

"Silly though the Ice Bucket Challenge may seem now, it had far-reaching effects. It raised a reported two hundred and twenty million dollars worldwide for A.L.S. organizations; in just eight weeks, the American A.L.S. Association received thirteen times as much in contributions as what it had in the whole of the preceding year. Public awareness rose: the challenge was the fifth most popular Google search for all of 2014. Brian Fredrick, the vice-president for communications and development at the A.L.S. Association, told me, “The challenge suddenly made a lot of people who probably didn’t even know who Lou Gehrig was aware of the disease. It really changed the face of A.L.S. forever.”... 

It’s true that the vast majority of the people who made A.L.S. donations during the challenge haven’t done so again. But contributions to the A.L.S. Association have stayed about twenty-five per cent higher than in the year before the challenge, and the average donor age dropped from above fifty to thirty-five."

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/als-and-the-ice-bucket-challenge?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

I was a critiquer, but I was eventually turned around by the number of ALS researchers I've talked to who were genuinely getting more money and having conversations about more projects and seeing their work become more high-profile. 

"A New Way To Look At Emotions"

"the thought is not that there are no emotions but, rather, that when it comes to these, membership isn't fixed by the instantiation of one fixed, shared essence common to all, and only, members of the species or the class of emotions. Variation is the norm. And, crucially, this is consistent with there being norms and regularities in the variation that are what justify treating members of the class as members of the class.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance helps here. Members of a family may all look alike without there being one distinct look that each of them has. We have overlapping similarities and differences in appearance here. There are norms in the variation in appearance."

http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2015/08/07/430334253/on-simple-minded-views-of-the-emotions?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20150807

"Joe Biden Said Guys Who Ignore Misogyny Are 'Accomplices' to Sexual Assault"

"Directly addressing the men in the audience, Biden said, "We've got to overcome this social discomfort of calling out the misogyny that happens when no women are present: the locker room talk, the bar banter, the rape jokes. As a man, maybe it makes you uncomfortable, but if you let it pass because you wanna become of the one guys, you become an accomplice."

Biden explained that men on college campuses especially need to hold their peers accountable, saying, "It's a fraternity party, you see a co-ed that is absolutely stone drunk, you see one of your brothers walking her upstairs. If you don't have the courage to walk up and say, 'Hey, Jack, not in my house,' you are an accomplice. You are an accomplice.""

http://www.vice.com/read/joe-biden-shames-misogynistic-tendencies-vgtrn

"How mass incarceration creates ‘million dollar blocks’ in poor neighborhoods"

"This is the perverse form that public investment takes in many poor, minority neighborhoods: "million dollar blocks," to use a bleak term first coined in New York by Laura Kurgan at Columbia University and Eric Cadora of the Justice Mapping Center. Our penchant for incarcerating people has grown so strong that, in many cities, taxpayers frequently spend more than a million dollars locking away residents of a single city block.

In Chicago, Daniel Cooper, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Matt Barrington and the civic technology company DataMade have reprised the concept for one of the most divided cities in America . By their count, there are 851 blocks in Chicago where the public has committed more than a million dollars to sentencing residents to state prison for all kinds of crime. The total tops a million dollars for nonviolent drug offenses alone in 121 of those blocks...

What if we spent $2.2 million dollars not removing residents from the corner of West Madison and Cicero but investing in the people who live there? What if we spent that money on preschool and summer jobs programs and addiction treatment? Evidence suggests that such investments could do more to deter crime than locking people away.

"People hear that there’s a very big violence problem in Chicago, but nobody’s really talking about the drivers of it," says Cooper, the co-executive director of the Institute for Social Exclusion at Adler University in Chicago. "They're talking about the individuals who take part in shootings. But nobody’s asking the question, 'why are there shootings in the first place?' What’s further upstream? What are the bigger determinants of this problem?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/07/30/how-mass-incarceration-creates-million-dollar-blocks-in-poor-neighborhoods/

"‘NeuroTribes,’ by Steve Silberman"

"Over his many years at the Children’s Clinic in Vienna, Hans Asperger studied more than 200 children he would ultimately treat for what he called autistische Psychopathen  (autistic psychopathy)... When he finally shared his findings with the world, the only reason he focused on his higher-­functioning patients, Silberman contends, was a chilling function of the era: The ­Nazis, on a mad campaign to purge the land of the “feebleminded,” were euthanizing institutionalized children with abandon. In so doing, Asper­ger accidentally gave the impression that autism was a rarefied condition among young gen­iuses, not the common syndrome he knew it to be. His paper on the subject, published in 1944, remained unavailable in English for decades, and his records were “buried with the ashes of his clinic,” which was bombed the same year.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a brilliant, energetic child psychiatrist named Leo Kanner was developing a radically different picture of autism, one that stipulated the condition was uncommon and unique, affecting only young children (anyone older was schizophrenic, psychotic — anything else) and, though biological in origin, somehow activated by cold and withholding parents. “By blaming parents for inadvertently causing their children’s autism,” Silberman writes, “Kanner made his syndrome a source of shame and stigma for families worldwide...

because Kanner’s needle-­narrow definition of autism prevailed for so long, the public labored under the misapprehension that there was a sudden “epidemic” of autism when the DSM-III-R, published in 1987 (and just as critically, the DSM-IV in 1994), finally expanded the definition to include those who had slipped through the sieve for ­decades."
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/books/review/neurotribes-by-steve-silberman.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%208.17.15&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All&_r=0&referrer

"Why words get stuck on the tip of your tongue, and how to stop it recurring"

"Psychologists studying this phenomenon say it occurs when there is a disconnect between a word's concept and it's lexical representation. A successful utterance requires these two steps are bridged, but in the tip-of-the-tongue state, only the concept is activated (and possibly a letter or two) while the complete translation into letters and sounds fails. What's more, new research shows the very act of being in this state makes it more likely that it will recur...

The way to help someone in a tip-of-the-tongue state, then, is to nudge them towards a spontaneous resolution. When the researchers helped their student participants resolve a tip-of-tongue state by giving them the first few letters of the solution, this prevented the state from recurring on later testing. Point the hiker in the right direction and if he finds the right way himself, he will remember the correct route in future. This nicely complements an established phenomenon from research on word learning known as the generation effect: that is, generating words from clues (such as a word stem) leads to better memory for those words than being told them whole."
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/07/why-words-get-stuck-on-tip-of-your.html?m=1

Watch out, this website has way too much interesting stuff on it

"The politics of anger"

"Proponents of globalisation, including this newspaper, must acknowledge that technocrats have made mistakes and ordinary people paid the price. The move to a flawed European currency, a technocratic scheme par excellence, led to stagnation and unemployment and is driving Europe apart. Elaborate financial instruments bamboozled regulators, crashed the world economy and ended up with taxpayer-funded bail-outs of banks, and later on, budget cuts.

Even when globalisation has been hugely beneficial, policymakers have not done enough to help the losers. Trade with China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and brought immense gains for Western consumers. But many factory workers who have lost their jobs have been unable to find a decently paid replacement.

Rather than spread the benefits of globalisation, politicians have focused elsewhere. The left moved on to arguments about culture—race, greenery, human rights and sexual politics. The right preached meritocratic self-advancement, but failed to win everyone the chance to partake in it. Proud industrial communities that look to family and nation suffered alienation and decay. Mendacious campaigning mirrored by partisan media amplified the sense of betrayal."

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21701478-triumph-brexit-campaign-warning-liberal-international-order-politics

FB: [Trade] liberalism 

"Decertifying the worst voting machine in the US"

"If an election was held using the AVS WinVote, and it wasn’t hacked, it was only because no one tried. The vulnerabilities were so severe, and so trivial to exploit, that anyone with even a modicum of training could have succeeded. They didn’t need to be in the polling place – within a few hundred feet (e.g., in the parking lot) is easy, and within a half mile with a rudimentary antenna built using a Pringles can. Further, there are no logs or other records that would indicate if such a thing ever happened, so if an election was hacked any time in the past, we will never know...

in the November 2014 election, voting machines in one precinct were repeatedly crashing, and it was hypothesized to be due to some interference from someone trying to download music using their iPhone...

So how would someone use these vulnerabilities to change an election?
Take your laptop to a polling place, and sit outside in the parking lot.
Use a free sniffer to capture the traffic, and use that to figure out the WEP password (which VITA did for us).
Connect to the voting machine over WiFi.
If asked for a password, the administrator password is “admin” (VITA provided that).
Download the Microsoft Access database using Windows Explorer.
Use a free tool to extract the hardwired key (“shoup”), which VITA also did for us.
Use Microsoft Access to add, delete, or change any of the votes in the database.
Upload the modified copy of the Microsoft Access database back to the voting machine.
Wait for the election results to be published.
Note that none of the above steps, with the possible exception of figuring out the WEP password, require any technical expertise.  In fact, they’re pretty much things that the average office worker does on a daily basis."
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jeremyepstein/decertifying-the-worst-voting-machine-in-the-us/

Can we have some of the people concerned about voter fraud getting involved in fixing stuff like this? That would be nice.

"A Future History of the United States"

"From the colonial period to the postbellum, the authors Ned and Constance Sublette cast slavery, and the slave-breeding industry, as the center of American history... Slavery, in simplest terms, was unpaid labor. Slaves were shipped from Africa to the American South, where they cultivated tobacco and picked cotton and served owners but didn’t get paid and couldn’t leave. Slowly, reformers and abolitionists chipped away at the institution, first banning the Transatlantic trade, then fighting a civil war to eliminate human bondage. Freeing the slaves destroyed the South’s pseudo-feudal economy, ending the region’s economic dominance. That’s the story.

But to think about American slaves merely as coerced and unpaid laborers is to misunderstand the institution. Slaves weren’t just workers, the Sublettes remind the reader—they were human capital. The very idea that people could be property is so offensive that we tend retroactively to elide the designation, projecting onto history the less-noxious idea of the enslaved worker, rather than the slave as commodity. Mapping 20th-century labor models onto slavery spares us from reckoning with the full consequences of organized dehumanization, which lets us off too easy: To turn people into products means more than not paying them for their work...

“The South,” the Sublettes write, “did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.” Slavers called slave-breeding “natural increase,” but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually.

Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had...

The Civil War, as part of the American myth, cleanses the nation of this evil. The nation tore itself apart, but in the end slavery was gone, the country re-baptized in an ocean of fraternal blood. It’s a compelling, almost Biblical narrative, with Abe Lincoln looming like an Old Testament patriarch. But, as the Sublettes make clear, the full renunciation of slavery never really happened."

http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/a-future-history-of-the-united-states?utm_source=Pacific%20Standard%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=55776c0da7-daily-rss-newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_a4fd1bcb7e-55776c0da7-80553321%2F

It's weird because I know this, but I guess I've never seen it written out like this. This made me feel physically nauseous. These are the real things.

Some of my ancestors were enslaved, but in a different country, and I'm having this moment of denial right now about whether or not they were "bred".

I have lots of thoughts now, and they are slightly too horrifying for me to write down at the moment. Maybe if I come back to this later.

FB: This is unsettling in a very deep way. But if we want to fix this country we have to see it honestly first.

"What Is Rape Culture?"

""Rape culture" is a culture in which sexual violence is considered the norm — in which people aren't taught not to rape, but are taught not to be raped. The term was first used by feminists in the 1970s but has become popular in recent years as more survivors share their stories.

Here, a beginner's guide to the major elements of rape culture"
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ryanhatesthis/what-is-rape-culture#.frjaGa0rVG

This is extremely thorough. It's like 2-3 paragraphs and a comic or illustration about "no means yes", "gray rape", "anti-rape wear", "the friend zone"...

For anyone who doesn't know or who knows someone who doesn't know.

"The Meaning Of The Rio Opening Ceremony Is To Own The Sins Of Your Past"

"It's no secret that many of the modern countries of the world were built through a combination of conquest and slavery. Whole books have been devoted to the Age of Discovery, i.e. the time in world history when the European countries decided to annex more land to their empires, whether or not there were already people living on those lands. The atrocities committed in each country's history is often glossed over or swept under the rug, especially during an event like the Olympics, which is meant to be a time to celebrate and showcase your country.

But Brazil seems to say that you can celebrate and showcase your country and acknowledge the atrocities that your country committed. That you need to take the bad with the good in order to get a true and complete picture of a country. And that anything less would be doing a disservice to the same history they are sharing with the world. The Rio opening ceremony seems to be Brazil saying that they aren't perfect, that it's impossible to look far into their history without seeing some truly awful things, but that they're learning, they're growing, and they've come this far to produce some really beautiful buildings, performers, and people who are a blend of all the cultures that have ever set foot on this land."

http://www.bustle.com/articles/177094-the-meaning-of-the-rio-opening-ceremony-is-to-own-the-sins-of-your-past

I'm not that into the "melting-blending" language (do white people have to melt/blend?) but I like this interpretation of the Brazilian Opening Ceremony.

"Texas Woman Is the First Person to Undergo Optogenetic Therapy"

"The therapy uses optogenetics, a technology that uses a combination of gene therapy and light to precisely control nerves. The therapy should make certain nerve cells in the woman’s eye, called ganglion cells, light-sensitive. The eye was injected with viruses carrying DNA from light-sensitive algae. If it works, the cells will do what the healthy retina’s cones and rods do: fire off an electrical signal in response to light, restoring some vision."

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601067/texas-woman-is-the-first-person-to-undergo-optogenetic-therapy/

(Credit to MK)

"Internet mob justice is random and severe. So is formal criminal justice."

"The problem with mob justice, Vox's Max Fisher wrote, is that it's random and severe. That's why the dentist who killed Cecil was punished by an internet mob, while other killers of rare wild animals were not. Mob justice "treats justice as a sort of random lightning bolt from the sky; one is reminded of the vengeful but arbitrary gods of Greek or Roman lore," he wrote...

Beau Kilmer, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, in July described how the criminal justice system works with a comparison to parenting: "You tell a kid to not take cookies from the cookie jar. You don't give them a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist, a slap on the wrist, and then give them a time-out for six weeks. But that's kind of what we do in our criminal justice system with respect to substance abuse — we say don't do this, don't do that, don't do that, and then all of a sudden after maybe the eighth failed test, we revoke their probation or parole and throw them in prison for years."

It would be one thing if these severe punishments deterred crime. But people don't tend to look at severe stories like Angelos's as a warning for using or selling drugs; they see them as outrageous aberrations. And there's a good reason for that: If you were born in 1991, the chances of you going to federal or state prison were roughly 5.2 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Those are low odds for a population of which roughly 4 in 10 have told Gallup that they used marijuana, breaking the law, at some point in their lives."
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9078777/criminal-justice-cecil-the-lion

"[psych/anthro/soc, Patreon] Class (American)"

"It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class. But what what differentiates, say, the middle class from the working class is not mere wealth or earning power; as we all know, a plumber (presumed working class) may make much more money than a professor (presumed professional).

To use myself as an illustration: I make very little money, so I am heir to the misfortunes that disproportionately impact the impecunious – the almost-certain forthcoming hike in T fares looms large in my anxieties right now – but I am a professional with an advanced degree and possession of the shibboleths of the professional class. I didn't stop being in the social class I had been in when I dropped to a much lower economic class. The privileges I lost were only those attendant to economic might; I retained the privileges of social position...

It has long been commented (e.g. Fussell, Class) that discussing class is basically taboo in American culture: but, specifically, the class which it is taboo to discuss is social class. This presents a problem for Americans because social class is a real phenomenon, an important phenomenon around which huge amounts of American policy, politics, and culture organizes. It's the elephant in the American living room.

Social class is taboo to discuss, but economic class is not, and that presents an obvious "solution": Americans conflate social and economic class so they can talk about social class under the guise of talking about economic class...

The social classes of the US are cultural groups: people who largely share values in what is good in dress, speech, occupation, food, recreation, family relations, personal style, worship, power relations, music, manners, morals, and so on and so forth.

Social classes function like ethnicities or nationalities. They have entitativity. They command loyalty. They have customs. They have territories. They have insiders and outsiders; they Other others. They have rivalries. They are performative...

The ban on smoking in restaurants – which, let me be clear, I am wildly in favor of, being someone who can't patronize a business with cigarette smoking in it – was instituted largely by middle-class people to coerce lower-class people from engaging in a behavior that violated middle-class norms. It was not done to that purpose, but it was de facto classist.

The ruthless suppression of discussion of social class as culture means we cannot perceive, much less consider, reason, and debate about situations such as these...

Because people gravitate to people of their own class, and their daily lives tend to bring them into social contact predominantly with people who are members of the social classes one degree above and below, most people are very ignorant of the norms and values of the social classes more than one degree above or below their own...

The limiting factor is not money, it is this: it is impossible to join a culture the ways of which you know nothing. You may come by money, but the ignorance of how to use it to perform that higher class will keep you out as adamantly as if there were a wall built around it...

The one great instrument of social mobility in the US is college. But it's not the degree. It's the socialization. College – residential college – is most people's one great shot (or not so great shot) at being socialized into a higher social class."

http://siderea.livejournal.com/1260265.html?format=light

Really useful