"The Answer Is Never: Rewriting the false narrative of childlessness"

"Spoiler alert: I don’t have a change of heart at the end of this essay. This is a story about not changing my mind and not having regret. To hives lady, the contractors and all the other bodega owners with cats: I am writing my final no-thank-you note...
I sometimes wonder whether the impulse to have children is fueled by our need to create something outside of ourselves. Something that then continues on without prompting, a perpetual motion machine that allows us to always start over and make up for our parents’ and our own shortcomings. But who am I to say why people have children? I can only speak for myself. I can tell you that it is hard to find purpose and surprise just within yourself. As a writer, the question what to do with myself, how to find and keep enthusiasm for a project, particularly in times when everything around me seems to be falling apart, is a struggle. I often wish there were something other than an empty page that would allow me to externalize or, at least, distract me from my fears. On those days, when my attempts to get responses from editors fail and sources refuse to talk, when I am too lazy to conceptualize new ideas and move further into a project, when I am ready to collapse under the burden of the page—on those days, I understand why one might want to push it all aside for the sake of a child. But it seems misguided to devote yourself to someone else instead of dealing with your own struggles."
http://blog.longreads.com/2015/04/02/the-answer-is-never/

I have several male and female friends who don't want children, and the struggle is real.

"The strange, short career of Judeo-Christianity"

"The term ‘Judeo-Christian’ supposedly recognises the deep and ancient common heritage of Protestants, Catholics and Jews. The idea would have sent shivers down the spine of Puritans, who saw a diabolical Catholic ‘Papism’ lurking around every corner. Such a shared heritage would have been news to the authors of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution, which required office-holders to ‘acknowledge the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be given by Divine inspiration’, and which effectively banned Jews from public office.

The phrase ‘Judeo-Christian’ first became popular in the late 1930s, when President Franklin Roosevelt began trying to mobilise Americans against Nazism. So Judeo-Christianity was actually popularised to oppose the anti-Semitism of another predominantly Christian nation. FDR’s repeated recourse to religion in public addresses set him apart from his predecessors, who preferred civic principles."

 

https://aeon.co/opinions/the-strange-short-career-of-judeo-christianity?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=4/26/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

This is interesting to know. The rest of the article is about the political history of the term through the rest of the 20th century, but it feels like much too pat a narrative for some reason, so I am hesitant to pull more to this blog.

"All Bodies, No Selves"

"If your work concerns sexuality, you will be made a body. You will be reminded — by the media, even if you are part of it, and by the people who make laws for you — that your body constitutes the limits of your contributions.

If you have something political to say about gender or sexuality, you will be expected to voice it through what your body is and what it has done, what has been done to it...

Abortion remains shorthanded as “what women want to do with their bodies.” (Of course, it’s not just women.) Prostitution is (according, mostly, to people who have never done it) “selling women’s bodies.” Rape is (so we are told) the worst thing to happen to your body. If that is going to happen (who makes it happen?) it would be better not to have a body."

https://psmag.com/all-bodies-no-selves-45aa1e61ee1c#.b51fo32rz

"How to tell if other people think you're hot, according to science"

"The crux of this technique is that people think about themselves in very different ways than they think about other people... That's in part because you have a huge amount of information about yourself -- far more information than you have about other people. You know what your hair looked like yesterday, a month ago, and four years ago. You know whether you've put on weight recently, or if you look tired today. Compare how you evaluate yourself to how you evaluate a stranger: You might make judgments about their overall level of attractiveness, their outfit, their mannerisms, but not much else.

"We're experts about ourselves, and others aren't. That makes it hard for us to understand what we look like in the eyes of others," Epley says...

Epley and Eyal found that the students who were told that their photograph would be rated several months later were much more accurate at predicting how other people would rate their attractiveness... Notice that this technique is a little different from the traditional advice of "putting yourself in someone else's shoes."...

Epley says the takeaway is that you can't imagine what other people are thinking just by trying to do so. "A rich person can't imagine what it's like to be poor just by trying. ... Someone from a stable democracy can't imagine what it's like to be living in an unstable one."

This is kind of worrying, because so much of our public policy is based on the idea that people can imagine what it's like to walk in someone else's shoes. And that myth is so widespread that people are very confident about their ability to do so. "The problem we find over and over again in our data on these social cognition studies, the problem isn't incompetence, it's not that people are idiots, it's that they're overconfident. The problem is hubris," Epley says."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-hot-or-not-science-family-20160402-story.html?track=ct_social_keywee_acquisition-subscriber_facebook_fb-post&kwp_0=134899&kwp_4=601676&kwp_1=313056

This technique of time delay to gain perspective, and temporal-nearness to develop detailed empathy with someone, it's really interesting. I hope I remember to try this the next time that I feel like everything is terrible, or when I feel that I can't understand someone else's behavior.

(Credit to AI)

"How The Rhetoric of Imposter Syndrome Is Used to Gaslight Women in Tech"

"Imposter syndrome is when you can’t internalize your own accomplishments, despite being high achieving. It is cited as one of the biggest problems facing women in tech, the biggest obstacle to their success.

I believed in the rhetoric. I thought the process of self-acceptance would mean professional acceptance by my peers. I thought I would stop experiencing negative actions in tech once I could just believe in my worth, and show it to others. I thought that if I worked hard enough and completed enough projects, I would eventually reach a point where I didn’t feel like a fraud. And to cope with the racist and sexist comments along the way, I just focused on reaching that point of power, when my accomplishments would shine brightly.

But I’d fallen into a trap...

I thought it was my job to fix my “imposter syndrome,” but my environment was what triggered that state of mind: Constant, blatantly paternal and dismissive responses to my technical suggestions. Stress from microaggressions... With the cloud of imposter syndrome hovering over me, I convinced myself that I did not work hard enough to deserve a moment to relax. Instead of putting the laptop down, I was focused on learning everything I could in my free time. I began to suffer from more frequent anxiety attacks, weight gain, and an overall clouded state of mind.

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-the-rhetoric-of-imposter-syndrome-is-used-to-gaslight-women-in-tech

Thissss --> "It’s virtually no one simply believing me the way they do my non-Black or non-woman counterparts."

FB: "Being a “strong Black woman” is an easy role to fall into because that’s when we are seen as most useful. In technology, our struggle to be not only seen but valued isoften used to get us to work on diversity initiatives for free. We are told to view all the negative events in our path as a source of “strength,” when they’re actually taking our strength away."

"How Washingtonians like me became emotionally attached to the Secret Safeway"

"I am seeing in its last days just how full of psychic data that Safeway is. One person runs into a friend in the toilet paper aisle. Another watches a neighbor sweating all over the onions on a post-run shopping outing every week. Another sees My-T-Fine Pudding, remembers a childhood in New York and tells her impatient daughter stories to distract her from the supermarket’s ennui. Somewhere in there a community finds its home. No one notices.

Tied up in the material the store sells are snippets of the lives supermarkets sustain, including mine. Thousands of neighbors, many of whom I knew and more of whom I didn’t, have walked these aisles and wondered why they could never find the sauerkraut or the beer (my Safeway did not sell beer; the sauerkraut was just hard to find). They went at the end of a long day and then had to wait 25 minutes in the checkout line. Maybe someone consoled himself by buying a tub of ice cream. Transactions and acquisitions are the profile of our days: Safeway had them."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/04/29/how-washingtonians-like-me-became-emotionally-attached-to-the-secret-safeway/

Wow, how is this so poetic?

"12 Struggles Of Having An Outgoing Personality But An Anxious Mind"

"We still find it easy to talk and connect with people – we can be charming creatures and when we do choose to grace a party with our presence, we are the life of it.But then we wake up in the morning and of course, we are over-thinking everything– Ahhh what did I say to that one person thatrather die than act like an idiot in front of? Did I talk too much? And what did they mean by “I’ll see you soon?” What does “soon” even mean? Like soon soon? Or “soon”?""

http://newsforamerica.co/12-struggles-of-having-an-outgoing-personality-but-an-anxious-mind/

Oh my gosh yes yes yes.

"Why America Is Ready For Novelist Angela Flournoy"

"Flournoy's characters feel authentic because they are complicated and messy, but also because they speak like real people. Sometimes — as when one of the characters, David, is talking to his mother's neighbor, who lives on the street on the East Side where the Turners grew up, and says "I seen Troy Turner a couple weeks ago" — they speak in AAVE, or African-American Vernacular English. And sometimes — as when David is talking to nearly anyone else — they don't. And here is where Flournoy has become a quiet revolutionary of craft, because this is not the way you're supposed to do things in literature: If a character drops his G's at the end of gerunds, he always drops his G's at the end of gerunds; there's no going back and forth.

"That's not how people talk though," Flournoy says. "I think part of the reason it feels normal is because it's a book in which every single black person has their own sort of relationship with AAVE. Some people use it all the time, some people use it less of the time. But it really just comes down to instinct. It has to do with what you imagine a character sounds like. When Lelah talks to [her daughter] Brianne, she does not really employ AAVE, because she wants Brianne to go out in the world and not employ AAVE. Which in my very liberal, I guess, opinion, you're giving Brianne a handicap. She won't feel comfortable communicating in other spaces. I'm very happy I know how to code switch because even though some people may say that I don't always sound right doing it, I can communicate in a lot of spaces."...

Flournoy is matter-of-fact about working within the system. "I've had wonderful experiences, but that doesn't mean that it was not a host of white women. I just got the right mix of them who cared, who didn't want to put me in a box. But if the deck had been shuffled any other way something else might have happened.""

https://www.buzzfeed.com/doree/america-is-ready-for-angela-flournoy?utm_term=.xsD8g7Vld#.fa7YDNnR9

"If You’re the Only Woman or Person of Color Being Considered for a Job, You Won’t Be Hired"

"A series of studies described in a recent Harvard Business Reviewarticle indicate that having a single woman or a single person of color in the finalist pool for a job is effectively equivalent to having zero women or people of color. “If there’s only one woman in your candidate pool, there’s statistically no chance she’ll be hired,” write business professors Stefanie K. Johnson and David R. Hekman and Ph.D. candidate Elsa T. Chan.

Johnson, Hekman, and Chan suspected that since “people have a bias in favor of preserving the status quo,” they’d be more likely to select candidates who conform to the status quo—which, in most business settings, means white men...

By looking at the demographics of 598 job candidates who were finalists for academic positions at a university, the researchers found that in groups of finalists with a single non-white-male, the non-white-male had virtually no chance of being hired, regardless of how big the group of finalists was. It was as though hiring managers patted themselves on the back for being progressive enough to consider a candidate who wasn’t a white man, and then went right ahead and hired the white man they’d been planning to hire all along.

This is, needless to say, infuriating. But the silver lining of Johnson, Hekman, and Chan’s research is that putting more than one woman or person of color in your pool of job finalists improves their chances dramatically. “The odds of hiring a woman were 79.14 times greater if there were at least two women in the finalist pool,” they write. “The odds of hiring a minority were 193.72 times greater if there were at least two minority candidates in the finalist pool.”"

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/04/28/if_you_re_the_only_woman_or_person_of_color_being_considered_for_a_job_you.html

As with many of these bleak HBR studies, I find myself unsurprised.

"Should you take Tylenol, Advil, or aspirin for pain? Here's what the evidence says."

"I was surprised when I found out there's a huge gap between how pain researchers think about this drug and how the public does. More specifically, every researcher I contacted for this piece said some variation of what Andrew Moore, a pain researcher at Oxford University, told me: Tylenol doesn't actually work that well for pain. To be more exact, "I can't imagine why anybody would take acetaminophen," he said...

Ibuprofen seems to work best, followed by acetaminophen, and then aspirin...

Aspirin is safer than acetaminophen, though to be used as a pain reliever it requires much higher doses — which can have side effects like stomach upset. Aspirin also interferes with blood coagulation for days after taking it...

Ibuprofen doesn't have these two problems — it's less toxic than the others in the doses that give people pain relief. But it has other side effects. "Ibuprofen puts people at risk of bleeds in the gastrointestinal tract and kidney damage — so it's not free of risk," said Brune. Using it in high doses also seems to increase the risk of heart attack and stroke"

http://www.vox.com/2015/8/17/9165189/best-painkiller-tylenol-aspirin-advil

Greattttt.

"Salt"

"It's easy to take salt for granted - its abundance on supermarket shelves, coupled with the development of refrigeration and freezing for our food, means we can all too readily overlook its vital and multiple role in our history. In part one of 'Salt', BBC Breakfast's Steph McGovern sets out to explain this role. She hears how it has taken root in our language, visits a chemistry class to find out about how it's produced and its importance to our physical well being, talks with history professor Peter Wallenstein about the unexpected importance of salt in military strategy right up until the 20th Century, and also Pierre Laszlo who explains how salt not only helped shape economies and cities like Salzburg, Munich and Venice, but also played a crucial role in revolutions across France, America and India."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b051rjpm

This was super, super interesting. How soldier is from salt; how much history revolves around salt.

"Inshallah Is Good for Everyone"

"Inshallah is the Arabic version of “fuggedaboudit.” It’s similar to how the British use the word “brilliant” to both praise and passive-aggressively deride everything and everyone. It transports both the speaker and the listener to a fantastical place where promises, dreams and realistic goals are replaced by delusional hope and earnest yearning.

If you are a parent, you can employ inshallah to either defer or subtly crush the desires of young children.

Boy: “Father, will we go to Toys ‘R’ Us later today?”

Father: “Yes. Inshallah.”"

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/opinion/sunday/inshallah-is-good-for-everyone.html

I want this word now!

"Woman Vocalizes Suicidal Feelings at Brunch but Melissa Talked Over It"

"“I thought the candle read ‘Pumpkin Spice Cupcake’ but when I took it home I realized that what I had actually bought was ‘Pumpkin Spice Candy,’ which is such a ‘me’ thing to do!” says Melissa, who thinks depression is “just negativity”. She adds, “Honestly, I don’t even really remember Sharon being at that brunch. She’s so quiet lately.”

Another brunch attendee, Emma Miller, also doesn’t remember Russo’s failed attempt. “Um, I remember Melissa saying this hilarious thing about candles? Also I think Sharon started crying at one point, which she does all the time these days,” says Miller, “but last time she told us it was her allergies, so she’s probably fine. She would tell us if something were up. The candle thing though—so ridiculous!”

While Melissa did blithely intercept Russo’s barely-mustered attempt at a cry for help, Russo says she blames her own bad timing for the interruption. “I should have known Melissa would have had a fun anecdote to share with the group. She’s full of fun anecdotes.” Sighing, Russo adds, “I used to have fun.”"

http://reductress.com/post/woman-vocalizes-suicidal-feelings-at-brunch-but-melissa-talked-over-it/

A reminder that we have to give each other room to talk about the hard stuff

"The Myth of Ethidium Bromide"

"ethidium bromide, as far as can be told from the data, is not a human mutagen. It’s not a mouse mutagen or rat mutagen either. Nor apparently a mutagen in cows and other farm animals, where it’sused in veterinary medicine at concentrations one thousand times higher than the red solutions that are so feared in biology labs, seemingly with no bad effects...

"toxicity of gel staining solutions is trivial compared to the risks of of burns from melted agarose or slipping on spilled gel buffer.""

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/04/18/the-myth-of-ethidium-bromide

What! Glad I'm not going to get cancer. Irritated that I've spent so much time being slightly nihilistic about it.

"Interviewing the President of the Sovereign Nation Inside Nevada"

"Molossia is ostensibly a micronation, an independent country that isn’t recognized officially by other world governments. They live just off the page of geography books, but are very much real, physical places. Baugh explains how his own country had evolved over the past 39 years, split between northern Nevada and California.

It was, like most other micronations, a fun project, beginning when Baugh was a teenager in 1977. Back then, Molossia was a fantastical kingdom created with a friend. Now, he describes it as “a real place.”...

Baugh likens the sensibility of the Molossian people (at present 31 citizens) to a form of political satire. For example, Molossia claims to have been at war with the now-defunct East Germany since 1983."

http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/interviewing-the-president-of-the-sovereign-nation-inside-nevada

I love stories about micronations

Related: Conch Key West nation; Snap Judgment story about the one on the island...

"Who Gets To Be The “Good Schizophrenic”?"

"Living under the shadow of a new “code” bore no curative function, but it did imply that to be high-functioning would be difficult, and it warned me that to live beyond that code would be a tricky gambit. A therapist had already told me in my mid-twenties that I was her only client who was able to hold down a full-time job. Having a job, among psychiatric researchers, is considered one of the major characteristics of being a high-functioning person.

During my first inpatient experience at a psychiatric hospital, I met two patients who were treated as markedly different from the rest of us — I will call them Pauline and Laura. Pauline was middle-aged and chatty; Laura was the only other Asian woman on the ward, and spoke to no one. We patients rarely spoke of our diagnoses — at the time, I was labeled as having bipolar disorder, with traits of borderline personality disorder — but everyone knew that Pauline and Laura were the two with schizophrenia...

I’ve seen the psychiatric hierarchy elsewhere — a hierarchy of who can be seen as high-functioning and “gifted,” and who can be seen as not being capable of either. A much-liked meme on Facebook circulated months ago, in which a chart listed so-called advantages to various mental illnesses. Depression bestowed sensitivity and empathy; ADHD allowed people to hold large amounts of information at once; anxiety created useful caution. I knew before reading it that schizophrenia wouldn’t make an appearance. As with most marginalized groups, there are those who are considered more socially appropriate than others. Being seen as inevitable failures by the dominant culture causes a desire to distance yourself from other, similarly marginalized people who are seen as even less capable of success."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/esmewwang/who-gets-to-be-the-good-schizophrenic?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%204/18/16&utm_term=.uqjZ6V81E#.mmWgAY1v3

I appreciate this essay, with a woman who is struggling with her own prejudices and with the severely limiting impact of stereotypes on her life.

(also, it's much shorter than the page makes it seem).

FB: "Like Saks, I am high-functioning, but I’m a high-functioning person with an unpredictable and low-functioning illness. I think of this while contemplating Susan, a woman described in Andrew Solomon’s book Far From the Tree, who is described as responding well to antipsychotic medication: “Intermittently, I have little things trigger here and there, but they only last a day or two. … Some people get stressed and their back goes out. I get stressed and my mind goes out. But then it comes back.” I may not be the “appropriate” type of crazy. Sometimes, my mind does go out, leaving me frightened of poison in my tea or corpses in the parking lot. But then it comes back."

"I Was a Men’s Rights Activist"

"I had never even seen the word “misandry” before, but I was able to deduce its meaning immediately: If misogyny is hatred of women, then misandry must be hatred of men.

Well, that’s kind of edgy and countercultural, I thought. I had never seen anything that said I — a white, heterosexual male — was actually the one being discriminated against. It was so provocative. The cover art was a white guy in a business suit being strangled by his necktie.

I was in that strange, formative period when you’re trying to find your adult identity, flirting with contrarian worldviews, so I thought, What the hell? I’ll read this.

I bought it hook, line and sinker. I was studying political science at the time, so I had never thought about social processes like misogyny and sexism. It was revelatory. The book talked about how pop culture demonized straight, white men because they’re the only demographic left that it’s acceptable to make fun of...

My real life was entirely devoted to school, so my men’s rights activism occurred exclusively in the classroom. We’d talk about the Equal Rights Amendment in a political science class and I’d say, “Well, what about men?” We’d talk about feminist epistemology in philosophy class and I’d say, “Doesn’t anyone care about the way men see the world?” I saw myself as more than just a provocateur... I despised sociology...

Men are socialized to be stoic, rational beings. The only emotions we’re allowed are anger and joy, and in a precious few instances, we’re allowed to cry — like if our sports team loses. As an MRA, I always believed it was women and feminism putting men in this box. But these feminist texts not only validated the crisis of masculinity, they pointed out men are the biggest policers of masculinity."

https://features.wearemel.com/i-was-a-men-s-rights-activist-55a0d2eb6052#.jbz09snwh

I gotta stop reading these narratives, I'm probably not learning anything new, probably just reinforcing my existing assumptions, but there is something about getting to go on that journey into a place that scares me and back...

Related: At least one other one; are you man enough for MRA

"Has the Internet Really Changed Everything?"

"Huddled into icy plains of North Dakota, Napoleon is essentially the same place it was 25 years ago. And by most accounts, 50 and 75 years ago. The demographics and economics are static. Most of my high school classmates have taken over their family farms, tilling and planting the land of their parents’ parents’ parents. The same people drive the same block of Main Street to the same three-lane grocery store owned by the same family. The same houses have fresh coats of paint, but the grain elevator still towers over all else.

The farming community around Napoleon had no economic boom, unlike the far northwestern part of the state, where fracking detonated everyone’s lives. And Napoleon had no bust, like the drought-infected farmers of the southwestern part of the country...

I am finding the rhythm of my pitch.

“All scientific experiments require two conditions: a static environment and a control — a testable variable that changes. Napoleon is the static environment; technology, the control. With all else being equal, this place is the perfect environment to explore societal questions like, What are the effects of mass communications? How has technology transformed the way we form ideas? Does access to information alone make us smarter?”...

“I was talking to a friend on my PS4 who lives in Portland, Oregon,” he says, yanking me from reverie. He knows people in Portland! I didn’t even know people in Fargo. “He said his senior class is like 600 kids, and the class under him is 500. That’s more than this whole town.” His sense of himself in the world intrigues me. Trying to sympathize, I tell them my apartment building in New York also contains more people than the entire population of Napoleon...

I ask about their favorite rappers. They amass a respectable list: Kendrick, Wiz, Jeezy, Kanye, Juicy J.

But what’s your favorite music?

“AC/DC,” says Jaden, without hesitation.

“My parents are driving to the AC/DC concert tonight in Fargo,” adds Tyler. “The whole town is going.”

https://backchannel.com/the-internet-really-has-changed-everything-here-s-the-proof-928eaead18a8#.orj6cuxl3

I guess the answer that he comes to is 'no' or 'in some ways'. It makes me think about what we mean by "change" and what we mean when a place/home/town changes. It feels like something to do with the continuity of people and "kinds" of people or people who share in the same culture and are part of the same named community.

It sounds like Napoleon hasn't changed, but there are more ways for people to spend them time, more tools for them to achieve the same things they used to - like shop for dresses.

"A Maddening Sound"

"The experience described by Steinborn and Taylor, and many others, is what’s come to be known as “the Hum,” a mysterious auditory phenomenon that, by some estimates, 2 percent of the population can hear. It’s not clear when the Hum first began, or when people started noticing it, but it started drawing media attention in the 1970s, in Bristol, England. After receiving several isolated reports, the British tabloid the Sunday Mirror asked, in 1977, “Have You Heard the Hum?” Hundreds of letters came flooding in. For the most part, the reports were consistent: a low, distant rumbling, like an idling diesel engine, mostly audible at night, mostly noticeable indoors. No obvious source...

Dismissed by governments and mainstream researchers, Hum sufferers become demoralized, despondent...

“I love science. I love mysteries. I love figuring things out,” said Glen MacPherson, the high school teacher and founder of the World Hum Map and Database Project, a site that has, since 2012, gathered and mapped reports of the Hum worldwide, including its location, intensity, and relevant biographical facts on the individual reporting it...

Deming, who has taught at the University of Oklahoma since 1992, was one of the first scientists to take the problem of the Hum seriously. (He also heard the Hum.) Crucially, Deming was able to distinguish the Hum from tinnitus. Tinnitus, usually a ringing in the ear, can take a number of forms, but while its intensity may wax and wane, it is more or less omnipresent, and those who suffer from it tend to hear it in any environment. The Hum, which is constant but only under certain circumstances (indoors, rural areas, etc.), defies a simple correlation with tinnitus. Additionally, Deming notes that if the Hum were related to tinnitus, one would expect a fairly normal geographic distribution rather than clusters in small towns.

https://newrepublic.com/article/132128/maddening-sound?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%204/15/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Related: another unexpected thing - pine nut syndrome

FB: It's not just tinnitus. "Hearing is complicated. It’s not just the physical sound waves that matter; it’s also what your brain does with that information."

"BAD CORGI LETS YOU RUN WILD AS A MISCHIEVOUS DOG"

"In Bad Corgi, a new app from artist Ian Cheng, you “embody” a corgi to help herd a flock of sheep. Well, perhaps “help” isn’t the right word. In your role as a bad corgi your goal is to do the opposite of maintaining a perfect herding formation—running amok among the livestock before entering into an uncontrollable fury that sends your perfection rating infinitely deep into negative figures. After one session it’s clear that Bad Corgi courts defiance and disorder above all else.

Interestingly, Bad Corgi is billed as a mindfulness app and sorted into the Health & Fitness category of Apple’s storefront. Cheng sees Bad Corgi as an experience that allows players to engage with our human instincts. those that don’t want us to be perfect but would prefer to misbehave. At a certain point in Bad Corgi, your corgi is so bad that it flashes the text “beyond control” in the middle of the screen as shrubs and sheep smolder and scatter in your corgi’s wake. There is a certain satisfaction in being a bad corgi, and even if it’s just a cute little scenario, there is a devilish glee to the endeavor that is somewhat cathartic."

https://killscreen.com/articles/bad-corgi-lets-you-run-wild-as-a-mischievous-dog/

The designer lays out his whole philosophy about the game in an interview

"HOW TO NEGOTIATE A RAISE (IF YOU’RE A WOMAN)."

"During the conversation, maintain eye contact and smile, but not too much of either so as not to appear bitchy nor ditzy. Remember that men are often confused by straightforward expressions of composure and will decide you are “cold,” a particularly damning determination from which there is little hope of return. Alternate eye contact and smiling at eight-second intervals to properly position yourself as somehow miraculously both a woman and a capable employee. Do not wear too much makeup as this will make you look “cheap and unprofessional” nor should you avoid makeup as you will look “old and tired” and therefore more invisible than Wonder Woman’s plane. Question how Wonder Woman was able to afford that plane given the wage gap. Look into government grants.

Speak clearly and firmly. Women say “sorry” too much and should refrain from using it. If you knock over your boss’s coffee or accidentally set fire to his desk, lock eyes and nod slowly. Refrain from common female speech traps like uptalk, vocal fry or using the word “like.” In fact, avoid similes altogether. Employ metaphors if you absolutely must, but only those that reference sports or vaguely allude to penises. Never ever allude to vaginas."

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/how-to-negotiate-a-raise-if-youre-a-woman?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%204/15/16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Ayyyy.

The weird thing is how real this is. In college, I had this idea that anti-woman bias was a thing, but I figured it was mostly at the 'bad' jobs and that if it was really so widespread then SOMEONE would have to be doing SOMETHING about it, right?

So. Wrong. I had a friend who was told that she was working too hard, which indicated that she didn't have work/life balance, and therefore she was not going to get a promised promotion. I have had an untold number of conversations about what to wear on the first day in a new lab environment; or how to phrase an email so that you don't come off as threatening to a male boss. About how 'well, yes, that was an uncomfortable interaction, but everyone knows how he is, you just have to learn to give him space'.

There is so much labor that goes into being a woman in a workplace and not in any way disrupting the masculine-dominated structures of your environment.

It still feels like someone is benevolently letting us in, and they don't have to, and if we screw up this could all be over for everyone.

FB: "Remember that all negative statements from a woman are irrational emotional over-reactions."

"Oh, So Now I’m Bangladeshi?"

"The Man Booker Prize administration released a statement congratulating Mr. Stothard, a former judge of its award, and mentioning the two other appointees: “Vicky Featherstone, artistic director of the Royal Court Theater, and Zia Haider Rahman, a Bangladeshi banker turned novelist.”

I have no idea what citizenships my fellow panelists hold; unhelpfully, Man Booker did not provide that information. I was, however, surprised to learn that I’m Bangladeshi. I don’t have a Bangladeshi passport, though I do hold a British one. In fact, I’ve lawfully held two valid British passports (to facilitate travel to so-called incompatible countries, like Israel and Jordan).

Clearly, holding two British passports doesn’t make me doubly British. But surely, for a bastion of the British establishment to call me Bangladeshi, it should have sufficient reason to believe that I am precisely that. Shall we put the error down to mere ignorance of the fact that millions of British citizens were born in, or are descendants of people born in, the post-colonies? Of course, keeping me Bangladeshi has the advantage of enabling some people to tell me to go back to my own country.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/opinion/oh-so-now-im-bangladeshi.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

mmmmm the last two lines of this essay.

"My First Virtual Reality Groping"

"In between a wave of zombies and demons to shoot down, I was hanging out next to BigBro442, waiting for our next attack. Suddenly, BigBro442’s disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest.

“Stop!” I cried. I must have laughed from the embarrassment and the ridiculousness of the situation. Women, after all, are supposed to be cool, and take any form of sexual harassment with a laugh. But I still told him to stop.

This goaded him on, and even when I turned away from him, he chased me around, making grabbing and pinching motions near my chest. Emboldened, he even shoved his hand toward my virtual crotch and began rubbing.

There I was, being virtually groped in a snowy fortress with my brother-in-law and husband watching."...

As VR becomes increasingly real, how do we decide what crosses the line from an annoyance to an actual assault? Eventually we’re going to need rules to tame the wild, wild west of VR multi-player. Or is this going to be yet another space that women do not venture into?"

https://medium.com/@jordanbelamire/my-first-virtual-reality-sexual-assault-2330410b62ee#.f2xnhkczz

eugghhhh

Related: (ironically) women rule VR; something on rape cullture

FB: Men ruin everything ~ "What had just happened? I hadn’t lasted three minutes in multi-player without getting virtually groped."

"The Power of Cherokee Women"

"Europeans were astonished to see that Cherokee women were the equals of men—politically, economically and theologically. “Women had autonomy and sexual freedom, could obtain divorce easily, rarely experienced rape or domestic violence, worked as producers/farmers, owned their own homes and fields, possessed a cosmology that contains female supernatural figures, and had significant political and economic power,” she writes. “Cherokee women’s close association with nature, as mothers and producers, served as a basis of their power within the tribe, not as a basis of oppression. Their position as ‘the other’ led to gender equivalence, not hierarchy.” ...

Johnston says that both men and women were sexually liberated, and unions were typically based on mutual attraction. The concept of being ashamed of one’s body or physical desires was foreign to the Cherokee mind-set. Even though married men and women were expected to be faithful to one another, adultery was not considered a grand crime, and divorce based on loss of attraction was not uncommon: “Sometimes they will live together till they have five or six children and then part as unconcernedly as if they had never known one another, the men taking the male children and the women the female and so each marry with contrary parties.” Cherokee couples going through divorce did not seem to experience the same level of emotional or financial trauma that is almost expected for modern day Euro-American couples dealing with separation and divorce...

“The U.S. government and missionaries made a concerted effort to transform Cherokee gender roles and attitudes towards sexuality and the body,” says Johnston. “They sought to inculcate Euro-American values of true womanhood and confine Cherokee women to the domestic sphere. They met with resistance from the traditional Cherokees, but, over the course of contact, wealthier members of that society, often of mixed ancestry, readily accepted both Christianity and the ideals of true womanhood. This gender inequality intersected with class inequality because more affluent women were freed from most domestic labor by hired help of slaves, and they had the means to acquire education and gentility. By the end of the 18th century, Cherokee women no longer agreed among themselves what it meant to be a woman.”

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/01/10/power-cherokee-women-3767

Mmmm cultural imperialism. I encountered... somewhere... the idea that the sexual mores of Abrahamic religions are relatively unusual, starting with this body-shame and sex-only-for-procreation pragmatism of the Jewish tribes living hard lives thousands of years ago. And then this perspective kind of ended up sweeping across the world in the Jewish diaspora and especially in the imperialist cultures that adopted Christianity and Islam.

Related: where African sodomy laws come from; that Vietnamese group with the maiden homes or whatever they were called...

"Which Generation is Most Distracted by Their Phones?"

"if you want to characterize a large group of people, you want to have something to compare them to. And when you compare technology use among young people and middle-aged people, you discover something that, in hindsight, should seem pretty obvious—at least to always-connected working parents:

Adults are as addicted—if not more addicted—to technology as teenagers...
To say that American adults are always connected would be an understatement. One survey has found that over 50% of employees check their company email over the weekend and before or after work. Another found that 40% of employees think it’s fine to respond to important work emails during family dinners. Yet another revealed that most workers expect responses to emails within an hour if not in minutes.
Whenever you read or hear something about teenagers’ obsession with Snapchat, remember to compare it to adults’ email addiction. Nearly 60% of adults check their work email while on vacation, and 6% have checked their email while a spouse is in labor. Another 6% have checked email at a funeral, and 10% at a child’s school event."

http://priceonomics.com/which-generation-is-most-distracted-by-their/?utm_source=nextdraft&utm_medium=email

Feeling so vindicated. I'm not a teenager, but I am a member of the maligned millennial generation and surrounded by people telling me that I am addicted/diseased/flawed for my lifestyle habits.
I feel lucky to be places where I am, generationally; these technologies don't feel imposed on me, I am give a certain amount of social ownership and so I feel like I can choose to adopt or not adopt apps or habits, without looking like I am fearfully avoiding something or hungrily chasing a trend. That privilege might erode in the next 5 or so years, but hopefully I can develop a solid and acceptable screens philosophy by then...
Related: the case for looking at your phone
https://medium.com/p/937c2a649625?source=linkShare-7f7e96203de2-1460054614

FB: "It’s worth considering: When we criticize teens who are glued to their screens, are we offering wise advice? Or are we projecting our own mixed feelings onto them?"

"Doubling Up Prisoners In 'Solitary' Creates Deadly Consequences"

"With a toilet, sink, shelf and beds, the men were left with a sliver of space about a foot-and-a-half wide to maneuver around each other. If one stood, the other had to sit. They could palm both walls without fully extending their arms. There was no natural light, just a fluorescent bulb and small Plexiglas windows that looked out onto the hall. The solid door muffled the cacophony of shouting and door-banging ricocheting off the tier. It also blocked ventilation.

The space itself appeared to be decomposing. The front wall, next to the door, was made of corroded metal. The paint on the wedge-shaped shelf had almost completely chipped away; the beds were caked in rust; and the floor underneath the toilet was stained brown and black. Dust and crumbs accumulated in every corner.

When guards locked the door, Sesson didn't know anything about Simmons — not his name, not what he had done to wind up in prison or what he did to end up in solitary. But Sesson says Simmons had heard a few things about him. He knew he was a "bug," someone who attacks his cellmates. And while Simmons was three inches taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, Sesson outweighed him by more than 100 pounds.

The two started arguing immediately. Each had to prove that he would not be messed with, because if something happened — if one attacked the other — there was no escape. The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din."...

While there are no national statistics on the number of people confined in double-cell "solitary," at least 18 state prison systems double-up a portion of their restrictive housing, and over 80 percent of the 10,747 federal prisoners in solitary have a cellmate...

Inmates in the segregation unit receive two showers and nine hours of recreation time each week, according to prison officials (inmates, lawyers and advocates claim it is often far less). Check-ins with medical and mental-health staff often take place through the cell door, forcing prisoners to report intimate physical and psychological problems in front of their cellmates, or not at all.

Across the country, double-celled inmates have lashed out against crowded conditions in extreme ways.

One prisoner, Aaron Fillmore, started feeling an unexplainable aggression toward his cellmate. "It was a level of discomfort that I never experienced before," he wrote in a letter. Fillmore was double-celled at Lawrence Correctional Center in Illinois for three months. "I had thoughts of just punching him in the face. Why? I have no idea. I just had the urge to do it.""

http://www.npr.org/2016/03/24/470824303/doubling-up-prisoners-in-solitary-creates-deadly-consequences

"Yes, I'm a Solid 5.5-6, And I'm Traveling Alone"

"While traveling solo to cultivate a love of diverse cultures is a fantastic, if ill-conceived, notion, it's not why I travel. I travel for money. I travel because Chinese people pay me gobs of cash to sit in meetings and be white, and I do it alone because I have no real roots to speak of anywhere else. I don't expect everyone to understand that I majored in English Literature and have a complicated relationship with my parents, and so had to move to Asia to achieve financial security, but don't automatically assume that I've moved to this ridiculous place because I am misguidedly failing to acknowledge my own lack of a personal identity.

I know a lot of people think that your 20s are the time to explore and be free, but honestly, McDonald's tastes the same on every continent. I know because I've tried."
http://drohandeconstructs.blogspot.com/2015/08/yes-im-solid-55-6-and-im-traveling-alone.html?m=1

This is amusing and random and acerbicly cuts through easy (and orientalist) narratives about a white man in China.