"How Do You Explain the ‘Obvious?’"

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

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

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

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

"How Chinese Americans won right to attend SF schools"

"By the 1920s, most Chinese Americans were attending integrated public schools in San Francisco, despite that the law requiring school segregation was still on the books. The law was not repealed until 1947." 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/How-Chinese-Americans-won-right-to-attend-SF-11107543.php

"Gwyneth, Ivanka, and the End of the Effortless White Woman"

"The Effortless White Woman is successful both personally and professionally. The Effortless White Woman is married, usually to a white man. The Effortless White Woman is a mother — she is not too barren or too busy with work to fulfill her feminine obligations — yet her children seem to raise themselves, to self-maintain, like potted cactuses. The EWW does not raise children—she enjoys them, is fulfilled by them. The EWW ponders her children, with great regret, as she goes off to work. The Effortless White Woman makes a kajillion dollars at work, so she must not ponder her children that much, because, unlike most women, her earning potential has not been compromised by them. The Effortless White Woman also enjoys and is fulfilled by her career. In between the time spent maintaining her children and her marriage and her job — this amounts, somehow, to endless free time — the Effortless White Woman finds ways to enjoy and fulfill herself... 

she remains stubbornly dominant, in part because she represents such a canny marriage of feminist principles with pre-feminist ideals. The EWW is still white, still wealthy, still straight and married and fertile and domestic and beautiful. But she is doing all this because she likes it. She is not trying to meet anyone else’s standards. She is doing what makes her happy, caring for herself, loving herself, except that doing so accidentally makes her beautiful and stylish in ways lesser women have to work to achieve...

Not every Effortless White Woman is equally guilty. There are important moral distinctions between serving as an apologist for the Trump regime and telling people to stick crystals up their vaginas. But the rejection of the EWW is an inevitable product of the populist moment."

https://medium.com/s/story/gwyneth-ivanka-and-the-end-of-the-effortless-white-woman-9d8c4e01a026

FB: "This seemingly leaves women stuck in the familiar, dreary bind always created by internalized misogyny: hating ourselves, and hating other women because they remind us of how much we hate ourselves, with only a few callous opportunists getting out ahead. But the anger under the Effortless White Woman has, of late, been transforming into something potentially illuminating—not deferred self-loathing, but an actual recognition of injustice."

"'Lies My Teacher Told Me,' And How American History Can Be Used As A Weapon"

"The book is called Lies My Teacher Told Me. What's the biggest lie in the book?

Usually when I'm asked, "What's the biggest lie?" I put my hand out in front of me slanting upward and to the right. And what I mean by that is the overall theme of American history is we started out great and we've been getting better ever since kind of automatically. And the trouble with that is two things. First of all, it's not always true... 

And the second part is what it does to the high school student. It says you don't need to protest; you don't need to write your congressman; you don't need to do any of the things that citizens do, because everything's getting better all the time."

https://www.npr.org/2018/08/09/634991713/lies-my-teacher-told-me-and-how-american-history-can-be-used-as-a-weapon?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180809

"Too Many Jobs Feel Meaningless Because They Are"

"one of the more convincing explanations comes from an anthropologist who has looked beyond narrow economic reasoning to examine the actual social or psychological functions served by many of the jobs in today’s service and knowledge economy. David Graeber of the London School of Economics argues in a recent book that the prevailing myths about the efficiency of capitalism blind us to the fact that much of economic reality is shaped by jockeying for power and status and serves no economic function at all... 

But even outside of finance, a lot of today’s business seems to aim less to produce economic value than to grab a bigger share of existing wealth. MIT economist Xavier Gabaix has shown that the wealthiest individuals in recent years really have skewed the playing field in their favor, finding ways — such as access to better information, legal or tax planning services — to capture more of the profits coming from productive work. Luigi Zingales has argued that the behavior of businesses has changed as corporations have grown so large. Large corporations now see wielding political influence through campaign donations or lobbying as a major part of securing their economic advantage... 

Of course, neither Graeber nor anyone else can be a final judge which jobs are useful or not, but the people who offer this view of their own jobs come most frequently from the service sector."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-01/too-many-jobs-feel-meaningless-because-they-are

FB: "This is a long way from true capitalism, as Graeber notes, and actually looks more like classic medieval feudalism. Much within the modern corporation is less about making things or solving problems and more about the political process of gaining control over the flows of resources. The result is a proliferation of jobs that actually serve very little if any economic function, and only make sense from the perspective of rent seeking and power relations"

"New Hampshire is a fraud"

"The question is not who they think they are, to be holding us hostage every four years with their presidential primary. Instead, who do we think they are, to let them get away with it, this white, tight and right smidgen of a place, this myth-mongering bastion of no-tax/no-spend conservatives with no minorities to speak of and a total of .43 percent of the American people? As Thomas Jefferson said, after New Hampshire town meetings had attacked his Embargo Act, “The organization of this little selfish minority enabled it to overrule the union.”...

The dream of New England hangs over the New Hampshire hills like an anesthetic gas, easing the pains of New Hampshire’s tackiness, erasing the phone wires, the mini-golf courses, the sense of chronic opportunism that lurks behind the white clapboard purity of all those houses with dates over the doors instead of street numbers. You don’t have to look very hard, though, to see the uneasy compromise of land and people that is New Hampshire...

In 1889 the state’s Department of Agriculture published a booklet entitled “Price List of Abandoned Farms in New Hampshire.” In 1891, a woman named Kate Sanborn wrote a book called “Adopting an Abandoned Farm,” which she followed with an even more successful sequel called “Abandoning an Adopted Farm.”...

The high WASPery of St. Paul’s also evokes what historian John Higham has called “the image of America that Anglo-Saxon intellectuals cherished. The tradition of racial nationalism had always proclaimed orderly self-government as the chief glory of the Anglo-Saxons — an inherited capacity so unique that the future of human freedom surely rested in their hands.” That New Hampshire is 98.8 percent white links it in some minds with the tradition of English freedoms, and resonates in the darkest caverns of an America that still defines moral and political attributes in terms of race or national ancestry."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/new-hampshire-is-a-fraud/2016/02/05/6960855e-cc21-11e5-a7b2-5a2f824b02c9_story.html?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Vox%20Sentences%202.8.16&utm_term=Vox%20Newsletter%20All

Interesting - written in 1988, what a different style, what a set of sharp but amorphous observations/critiques. I want to know what is different now, and I want to know how people in New Hampshire answer to these impressions.

"How the Blog Broke the Web"

"In ‘94, a college student named Justin Hall broke free from the table of contents format. He added to the top of his homepage daily, and he headlined each section with the date. He shared everything: from interesting links he found to his experiments with sex and drugs.

Justin’s Links became the first daily web diary.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblogcame a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)...

When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah. No doubt he missed many — and a bunch had lived and died by then, including mine — but by what kind of multiplier? Five? Ten times? So there were what, maybe 230 web logs?...

Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Chronological content was in the minority."

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

I fully miss homepages. 

I miss the old weird internet where you went to a site because your friend told you about it and spelled it for you, and you looked through every section and peeked into someone's mind that way. Found weird quizzes and puzzles and flash games and stories. 

but when I really think about it, I don't actually want to go back. I think I just wish that that internet still existed for someone, for some 12-year-old waiting to be picked up from school, exploring secret silly worlds in the library with their friends

FB: "the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

There are no more quirky homepages."

"Our Attitude Toward Aliens Proves We Still Think We’re Special"

"The strong Fermi’s paradox became even stronger, so to speak, in 2001, with the work of Charles Lineweaver and collaborators on the age distribution of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way. His calculations show that Earth-like planets in our galaxy began forming more than 9 billion years ago, and that their median age is 6.4 ± 0.9 billion years, which is significantly greater than the age of the Earth and the solar system. This means that a large majority of habitable planets are much older than Earth. If we believe that humans and the planet we live on are not particularly special compared to other civilizations on other planets, we would conclude that the stage of the biosphere and technology on other occupied planets must be, on average, older than the corresponding stages we see on Earth. If we humans are now on the cusp of colonizing our solar system, and we are not much faster than other civilizations, those civilizations should have completed this colonization long ago and spread to other parts of the galaxy... 

Many of us choose to ignore Fermi’s paradox, or even fight it, because it requires too complete an acceptance of our cosmic mediocrity. We would rather secretly believe we are special than confront the real consequences of the paradox—consequences like, for example, intelligence being a maladaptive trait, or our universe being a simulation, or us living in a cosmic zoo. "

http://m.nautil.us/issue/63/horizons/our-attitude-toward-aliens-proves-we-still-think-were-special

Related: Other one on imagining aliens

FB: "Now that we know that the Earth is a latecomer, and believe the foundations of life have the power to take hold quickly, Fermi’s paradox is more puzzling than ever. In the evocative words of physicist Adrian Kent: It’s just too damn quiet in the local universe."

"The classist vilification of the Black Friday shopper"

"This was in a Walmart with a majority black staff and clientele, and it was kind of covered in a way that the LA riots were. There were helicopter shots of throngs of black bodies; there was a lot of the same kind of discourse, the fear of a black underclass coming for Beverly Hills, coming for your stuff in your gated communities.

There were similarities in the way the coverage was racialized, footage of people ransacking goods while there’s a whole host of social problems and they’re living in a veritable police state. It looked identical if you turned the sound off; it was very striking.

So from there, I started to look at the history of the crowd and the discourse around crowds. Really from the rise of historical modernity, crowds have been associated with danger, disease, race. Today, for example, we see how Trump has mobilized mobs...

After the 9/11 attacks, [George W.] Bush told people to go out and shop, that it’s your civic duty. So blaming Black Friday shoppers for shopping sends a contradictory message. I think it’s also class shaming."

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/20/18103890/black-friday-shopping-coverage-classism-racism

It's true - there is a kind of voyeurism, a kind of sick superior glee in watching the images of hordes of people swarming big box stores, images of chaos and destruction in their wake, delivered to you on your full-price television in your warm, comfortable home while you eat copious leftovers. 

It's the new Thanksgiving Day Parade - bring your children to gawk and laugh at the undignified shopping experiences of poorer people. 

FB: "in very financially troubled times, Black Friday might be people’s only chance to have access to certain things, to buy what they need.

Also, the public is consistently told that in order to participate in our culture, they should be engaging in consumerism. It makes us feel this sense of connection, a sense of belonging to something."

"APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys" 

"something is amiss for men as well. Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the United States and represent 77 percent of homicide victims. They’re the demographic group most at risk of being victimized by violent crime. They are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide, and their life expectancy is 4.9 years shorter than women’s... 

just as this old psychology left out women and people of color and conformed to gender-role stereotypes, it also failed to take men’s gendered experiences into account. Once psychologists began studying the experiences of women through a gender lens, it became increasingly clear that the study of men needed the same gender-aware approach, says Levant.

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. Men socialized in this way are less likely to engage in healthy behaviors"

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/01/ce-corner.aspx?fbclid=IwAR1sXHtCpQbkxfIfkurzXAGdwubZbYFBiNmMMLYAuNDTMryzxcHj9OpyI2o

Related: myth of individualism, harm of striving, lone gunman

FB: "Thirteen years in the making, they draw on more than 40 years of research showing that traditional masculinity is psychologically harmful and that socializing boys to suppress their emotions causes damage that echoes both inwardly and outwardly." 

"How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation"

"the more I tried to figure out my errand paralysis, the more the actual parameters of burnout began to reveal themselves. Burnout and the behaviors and weight that accompany it aren’t, in fact, something we can cure by going on vacation. It’s not limited to workers in acutely high-stress environments. And it’s not a temporary affliction: It’s the millennial condition. It’s our base temperature. It’s our background music. It’s the way things are. It’s our lives... 

Financially speaking, most of us lag far behind where our parents were when they were our age. We have far less saved, far less equity, far less stability, and far, far more student debt. The “greatest generation” had the Depression and the GI Bill; boomers had the golden age of capitalism; Gen-X had deregulation and trickle-down economics. And millennials? We’ve got venture capital, but we’ve also got the 2008 financial crisis, the decline of the middle class and the rise of the 1%, and the steady decay of unions and stable, full-time employment... 

students internalize the need to find employment that reflects well on their parents (steady, decently paying, recognizable as a “good job”) that’s also impressive to their peers (at a “cool” company) and fulfills what they’ve been told has been the end goal of all of this childhood optimization: doing work that you’re passionate about. Whether that job is as a professional sports player, a Patagonia social media manager, a programmer at a startup, or a partner at a law firm seems to matter less than checking all of those boxes... 

When we talk about millennial student debt, we’re not just talking about the payments that keep millennials from participating in American “institutions” like home ownership or purchasing diamonds. It’s also about the psychological toll of realizing that something you’d been told, and came to believe yourself, would be “worth it” — worth the loans, worth the labor, worth all that self-optimization — isn’t... 

Josh Cohen, a psychoanalyst specializing in burnout, writes. “You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless.”"

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work?utm_source=dynamic&utm_campaign=bfsharefacebook&utm_term=.kaJrp9ea6&ref=mobile_share&fbclid=IwAR19se6rUpqcz-6s5CWliOm7pxcaMB5yfGG6ke_D00mQTqJtpRPqJQSUL5w

FB: this is how I should introduce myself "I never thought the system was equitable. I knew it was winnable for only a small few. I just believed I could continue to optimize myself to become one of them. And it’s taken me years to understand the true ramifications of that mindset."

"Inside the Radical, Uncomfortable Movement to Reform White Supremacists"

"The deradicalization movement combines insights gleaned from social work, 12-step programs, psychology, neurochemistry, and the personal experiences of “formers” who have left extremist groups. It’s tricky work. Few extremists make clean breaks with their past. Many liken hate to an addiction—hard to quit and easy to relapse into. The process is slow and one-on-one; it doesn’t promise to defeat hate groups so much as chip away at a movement that includes more than 400 organizations with thousands of members, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center... 

Kruglanski found that psychological signposts were better predictors of radicalization. He called these factors “the three Ns”—need, narrative, and network. It doesn’t matter if they are skinheads or jihadis; everyone who gets involved in hate movements has a deep urge to participate in a greater cause. Yet that cause, Kruglanski argued, needn’t be destructive. To successfully deradicalize a neo-Nazi, a new, constructive set of Ns—which might stem from education, a job, a partner—would have to replace the old, hateful ones."

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/07/reform-white-supremacists-shane-johnson-life-after-hate/

FB: "Many became hardcore racists only after they had joined white supremacist groups. Rather than preexisting anti-Semitism or xenophobia, a cocktail of experiences such as isolation, depression, anxiety, or childhood abuse typically served as the stepping stones to extremism. This suggested that the behavioral and social rewards of participating in hate groups are perhaps more fundamental to understanding—and stopping—extremist behavior than the ideology behind it."

"What Rep. Steve King Gets Wrong About The Dark Ages -- And Western Civilization"

"His comments also raised a lot of questions and concerns among historians who have pointed out that the idea of "Western Civilization" is itself a fiction of the late 19th and early 20th century. For more perspective on this, I reached out to T.J. Tallie, an African historian at Washington & Lee University. As many historians have recognized, the concept of "Western Civilization" is itself rather new. It grew from debates of East versus West in late 19th century European intellectual circles, but did not gain traction in the U.S. until it was time to explain to soldiers going into World War I why they should fight for the survival of Europe...

After World War I and then World War II, there was growing interest in the narrative of our connection to western Europe. As University of North Carolina historian Lloyd Kramer said in an earlier interview on thisdevelopment, this narrative was part of the "modernization theory of history, popular in the late 1940s and ’50s, which described the world, as we came out of the horrors of World War I and World War II, as moving toward secular modernization.""

https://www.forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2016/07/23/stevekingandthedarkages/#35e438155980

"We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned"

"Coler is a soft-spoken 40-year-old with a wife and two kids. He says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

He was amazed at how quickly fake news could spread and how easily people believe it. He wrote one fake story for NationalReport.net about how customers in Colorado marijuana shops were using food stamps to buy pot.

"What that turned into was a state representative in the House in Colorado proposing actual legislation to prevent people from using their food stamps to buy marijuana based on something that had just never happened," Coler says...

And as the stories spread, Coler makes money from the ads on his websites. He wouldn't give exact figures, but he says stories about other fake-news proprietors making between $10,000 and $30,000 a month apply to him. Coler fits into a pattern of other faux news sites that make good money, especially by targeting Trump supporters.

....Coler insists this is not about money. It's about showing how easily fake news spreads. And fake news spread wide and far before the election. When I pointed out to Coler that the money gave him a lot of incentive to keep doing it regardless of the impact, he admitted that was "correct.""

https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs?fbclid=IwAR3EJKTJbC5riwJJsA-C_uSoEIsJMYt_AuwxUKxqkb6Xrb9-JuUGmalDtH8

Related: "‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

FB: Seriously? Seriously?? ""The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says"

"‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America"

"“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”...

Each political page published several posts each day directly into Chapian’s feed, many of which claimed to be “BREAKING NEWS.”

On her computer the attack against America was urgent and unrelenting. Liberals were restricting free speech. Immigrants were storming the border and casting illegal votes. Politicians were scheming to take away everyone’s guns. “The second you stop paying attention, there’s another travesty underway in this country,” Chapian once wrote, in her own Facebook post, so she had decided to always pay attention, sometimes scrolling and sharing for hours at a time...

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible — that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time...

Blair said he and his followers had gotten hundreds of people banned from Facebook and several others fired or demoted in their jobs for offensive behavior online. He had also forced Facebook to shut down 22 fake news sites for plagiarizing his content, many of which were Macedonian sites that reran his stories without labeling them as satire.

What Blair wasn’t sure he had ever done was change a single person’s mind."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/nothing-on-this-page-is-real-how-lies-become-truth-in-online-america/2018/11/17/edd44cc8-e85a-11e8-bbdb-72fdbf9d4fed_story.html?fbclid=IwAR161IoFjlX3d7liaHM2EPxe7idRIOqU_lF9G3RN8fopcGMiVVCoNS3VjkQ&noredirect=on&utm_term=.2b72d1537416&wpisrc=nl_mustreads&wpmm=1

"How Flight Attendants Organized Against Their Bosses to End 'Swinging Stewardesses' Stereotyping"

"The airline industry enforced the widely held idea that for middle-class women, a job was a short-term stint between college and marriage. They sold stewardessing as a way of acquiring the skills needed as wife and hostess, as well as a means to meet wealthy, white, marriageable businessmen...

The airlines’ ideas about sexually attractive women were also deeply racialized. In 1971, only about six percent of the nation’s nearly 35,000 flight attendants were racial minorities—and this small number marked a significant increase from previous decades. In 1966, a Civil Rights commissioner in New York found that, “for too long there has been an underlying ‘white esthetic’ in the evaluation of physical attractiveness by American industry.”...

According to Paula Kane, an activist and former flight attendant with American Airlines, “pinching and patting” by men passengers increased significantly in the wake of the “Fly Me” campaign. Likewise, after Continental launched its “we move our tails for you” campaign, stewardesses received requests from men to wiggle provocatively for them. When they complained to Continental about the impact of the campaign, management advised flight attendants to respond to customers’ requests that they “move their tail” with flirty one-liners like “Why, is it in the way?” Flight attendants who responded more assertively to customers risked being written up or suspended....

Members leafleted persistently, dragged friends to meetings, and held consciousness-raising sessions in airport employee parking lots. These actions sensitized flight attendants to shared workplace problems and helped individual flight attendants recognize that they were not alone in their anger. Within two years, the organization had grown to 1,000 members. Within four years, it had 3,000 members...

The impact of these legal actions was dramatic. As the EEOC and the courts struck down marriage, pregnancy, and age requirements, the average job tenure of a flight attendant increased from 15 months in 1965 to over six years a decade later. While not all lawsuits and complaints were successful and some cases, especially those surrounding weight requirements, dragged on for years, flight attendants remade the face of the airline industry and created new employment opportunities for women through their sustained struggle in the courts and in the press."

https://pictorial.jezebel.com/how-flight-attendants-organized-against-their-bosses-to-1830282960?utm_source=jezebel_facebook&utm_campaign=socialflow_jezebel_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow&fbclid=IwAR2oz8LMZgn8QPovxhQeCzKmXzccob9yxhpX9xJ02iuh8XlQNRZeZWI2Kgk

FB: "The bodies of women flight attendants have long been an integral part of the airlines’ marketing strategy. In the postwar period, government regulations ensured that fares, routes, and planes were nearly indistinguishable. To stand out, airlines marketed their flight attendants’ looks and promised an exciting or erotic in-flight experience."

"What Is Glitter? A strange journey to the glitter factory."

"The tiny, shiny, decorative particles of glitter we are familiar with today are popularly believed to have originated on a farm in New Jersey in the 1930s, when a German immigrant invented a machine to cut scrap material into extremely small pieces. (Curiously, he did not begin filing patents for machines that cut foil into what he called “slivers” until 1961.) The specific events that led to the initial dispersal of glitter are nebulous; in true glitter fashion, all of a sudden, it was simply everywhere...

The jovial Mr. Shetty told me over the phone that people have no idea of the scientific knowledge required to produce glitter, that Glitterex’s glitter-making technology is some of the most advanced in the world, that people don’t believe how complicated it is, that he would not allow me to see glitter being made, that he would not allow me to hear glitter being made, that I could not even be in the same wing of the building as the room in which glitter was being made under any circumstance, that even Glitterex’s clients are not permitted to see their glitter being made, that he would not reveal the identities of Glitterex’s clients...

I met the elder Mr. Shetty in a conference room in the front of the office, where, beneath a glittering silhouette-style wall hanging of the pre-9/11 New York City skyline, he breezed through several advanced textbooks’ worth of chemical engineering in an attempt to tell me what glitter was...

Researchers and zookeepers sometimes mix glitter with animal feed to track animals (polar bears; elephants; domestic cats) via sparkly feces. Plywood manufacturers insert hidden layers of colored glitter in their products to prevent counterfeiting. Because glitter is difficult to remove completely from an area into which it has been introduced, and because individual varieties can be distinguished under a microscope, it can serve as useful crime scene evidence; years ago the F.B.I. contacted Glitterex to catalog samples of its products."

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/21/style/glitter-factory.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&fbclid=IwAR0wWUJRq3IX354ygALk7FjEfXJfbps7YGDj2OYCX3K3bWGEd_vJxWNKRo8

FB: This was a fun read "Most of the glitter that adorns America’s name brand products is made in one of two places: The first is in New Jersey, but the second, however, is also in New Jersey. The first, the rumored farm site of glitter’s invention, refused to answer any of my questions. “We are a very private company,” a representative said via email. The second is Glitterex."

"Martin Niemöller before the Nazis finally came for him"

"Would Niemöller’s contemporary admirers in the American public embrace the confession so enthusiastically if they knew of the pastor’s wholehearted support for Hitler during his climb to power? Indeed, the Nazis’ stigmatization and persecution of minorities did not initially trouble the nationalist pastor. Born in 1892, Niemöller grew up during the German monarchy’s struggle for world recognition and served proudly as a submarine officer in Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial Navy in World War I. After the war and the socialist revolution that overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy, Niemöller entered the seminary. Ordained a Lutheran pastor in 1924, he remained an archconservative during Germany’s short-lived liberal republic, the so-called Weimar Republic, casting his ballot for the Nazis in 1924 and again in 1933."

https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical-essay/martin-niem-ller-nazis-finally-came-him

"Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong"

"Studies have found that anywhere from one-third to three-quarters of people classified as obese are metabolically healthy. They show no signs of elevated blood pressure, insulin resistance or high cholesterol. Meanwhile, about a quarter of non-overweight people are what epidemiologists call “the lean unhealthy.” A 2016 study that followed participants for an average of 19 years found that unfit skinny people were twice as likely to get diabetes as fit fat people. Habits, no matter your size, are what really matter. Dozens of indicators, from vegetable consumption to regular exercise to grip strength, provide a better snapshot of someone’s health than looking at her from across a room...

Ask almost any fat person about her interactions with the health care system and you will hear a story, sometimes three, the same as Enneking’s: rolled eyes, skeptical questions, treatments denied or delayed or revoked. Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma. No matter what you go in for or how much you’re hurting, the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos...

Lesley Williams, a family medicine doctor in Phoenix, tells me she gets an alert from her electronic health records software every time she’s about to see a patient who is above the “overweight” threshold. The reason for this is that physicians are often required, in writing, to prove to hospital administrators and insurance providers that they have brought up their patient’s weight and formulated a plan to bring it down—regardless of whether that patient came in with arthritis or a broken arm or a bad sunburn. Failing to do that could result in poor performance reviews, low ratings from insurance companies or being denied reimbursement if they refer patients to specialized care...

in a remarkable finding, rich people of color have higher rates of cardiovascular disease than poor people of color—the opposite of what happens with white people. One explanation is that navigating increasingly white spaces, and increasingly higher stakes, exerts stress on racial minorities that, over time, makes them more susceptible to heart problems...

Many “failed” obesity interventions are, in fact, successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions. A review of 44 international studies found that school-based activity programs didn’t affect kids’ weight, but improved their athletic ability, tripled the amount of time they spent exercising and reduced their daily TV consumption by up to an hour. Another survey showed that two years of getting kids to exercise and eat better didn’t noticeably affect their size but did improve their math scores—an effect that was greater for black kids than white kids."

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/

FB: " “For something as emotional as weight, you have to listen for a long time before you give any advice. Telling someone, 'Lay off the cheeseburgers' is never going to work if you don't know what those cheeseburgers are doing for them.”...the decisive factor in obesity care was not the diet patients went on, but how much attention and support they received while they were on it. Participants who got more than 12 sessions with a dietician saw significant reductions in their rates of prediabetes and cardiovascular risk. Those who got less personalized care showed almost no improvement at all."

"To overcome decades of mistrust, a workshop aims to train Indigenous researchers to be their own genome experts"

"He kicked off his effort with a lecture at a reservation in Northern California. It was the first time he had spoken with a Native American community, despite years of studying their genetics. Expecting to gather dozens of DNA samples, "I brought a bunch of cheek swabs with me," he recalls. But at the end of his talk on DNA variation and the importance of filling in sampling gaps, the room fell uncomfortably silent. "Then one person stood up and said, ‘Why should we trust you?’" Malhi remembers. "That's a formative memory. I had not learned about anthropologists going to communities, taking samples, and just leaving."

He got no samples that day... 

SING aims to train Indigenous scientists in genomics so that they can introduce that field's tools to their communities as well as bring a sorely needed Indigenous perspective to research. Since Malhi helped found it at UI in 2011, SING has trained more than 100 graduates and has expanded to New Zealand and Canada. The program has created a strong community of Indigenous scientists and non-Indigenous allies who are raising the profile of these ethical issues and developing ways to improve a historically fraught relationship.

SING grads and professors say the experience has profoundly affected their work. At SING, "you can exist as your authentic self, as both Indigenous and as a scientist, without having to code-switch all the time. It's like coming up for air," says Savannah Martin, a Ph.D. student in biological anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and a member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians in Oregon." 

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/overcome-decades-mistrust-workshop-aims-train-indigenous-researchers-be-their-own

FB: "researchers working for the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP), a major international effort, were collecting samples from around the world to build a public database of global genetic variation. The project publicly emphasized the importance of collecting DNA from genetically isolated Indigenous populations before they "went extinct."

That rationale "was offensive to Indigenous populations worldwide," Gachupin says. "Resources for infrastructure and for the wellbeing of the community were not forthcoming, and yet now here were these millions and millions of dollars being invested to ‘save’ their DNA." The message from the scientific establishment was, she says, "We don't care about the person. We just want your DNA." Some activists dubbed the HGDP "the Vampire Project," believing the only beneficiaries would be Western scientists and people who could afford costly medical treatments."