"The World Capital of Plastic Surgery"

"It has been estimated that between one-fifth and one-third of women in Seoul have gone under the knife, and one poll reported by the BBC puts the figure at fifty per cent or higher for women in their twenties. Men, by one account, make up fifteen per cent of the market, including a former President of the country, who underwent double-eyelid surgery while in office. Statistics in this field are iffy because the industry is not regulated and there are no official records, but we’ll get to that in a grimmer paragraph...

The national fixation on plastic surgery began in the aftermath of the Korean War, triggered by the offer made by the American occupational forces to provide free reconstructive surgery to maimed war victims. Particular credit or blame—you choose—goes to David Ralph Millard, the chief plastic surgeon for the U.S. Marine Corps, who, in response to requests from Korean citizens wishing to change their Asian eyes to Occidental ones, perfected the blepharoplasty. As Millard wrote in a 1955 monograph, the Asian eye’s “absence of the palpebral fold produces a passive expression which seems to epitomize the stoical and unemotional manner of the Oriental.” The procedure was a hit, and caught on fast, especially with Korean prostitutes, who wanted to attract American G.I.s. “It was indeed a plastic surgeon’s paradise,” Millard wrote."


http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/about-face

"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

"Why I Stand Up to Politically Incorrect Jokes"

"When we can see the humanity behind the people who these jokes target, and when we understand the implications of the privileged laughing at the marginalized, we lose our ability to laugh at their expense.

We lose the ability to laugh at jokes that make sweeping generalizations about groups of people.

We lose the ability to laugh at jokes that mock and ridicule people who already experience countless oppressions in their lives.

And that’s a good thing"
http://everydayfeminism.com/2013/04/why-i-stand-up-to-politically-incorrect-jokes/

This thing about laziness is so in line with my perception - I vent my irritation by keeping a list of lazy jokes and secretly laughing at people who use them. But lazy speech in general is full of statements with implications the speaker probably wouldn't want to state directly but which they are implicitly supporting, and why it can be so exhausting to chat with people who don't know me well or who aren't really trying - those conversations are a minefield.

"We Rage"

"We are numb. We are angry. We are incredulous. We are afraid. We are hopeful. We are hopeless. We are all the things. Let us be."

http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2014/11/25/we-rage/

I kind of want these words on a poster, on a mug, embroidered on a pillow, all over.

"WHY WE NEED TO GET OVER CLAIR HUXTABLE"

" We laud these women for their strength, but never consider what it takes to embody such strength. We don’t consider the interior lives of these women. It’s acutely felt when discussing black women, because they have been the pillars of our communities, the only thing that has kept us going.

But they weren’t all Clair Huxtable. And they never needed to be. They were and are fully human, and everything that comes with that. So if slaying this pivotal pop culture figure can be a means of helping us explore the inner lives of black women, then slay we must."

http://feministing.com/2014/10/24/why-we-need-to-get-over-clair-huxtable/

(a) this is from a while ago, before Bill Cosby's sexual assaults became so massively discussed

and (b) It probably is healthier to love her without idolizing her. I realize that I might have bought a dress because, on some level, it reminds me of the dress she was wearing in that scene where she offers to get Elvin coffee while being mad feminist, and so it's going to be a process de-mythologizing her in my mind.