"The Weight of James Arthur Baldwin"

"On good days, being the first black intern meant doing my work quickly and sounding extra witty around the water cooler; it meant I was chipping away at the glass ceiling that seemed to top most of the literary world. But on bad days I gagged on my resentment and furiously wondered why I was selected. I became paranoid that I was merely a product of affirmative action, even though I knew wasn’t. I hadn’t mentioned my race in either of my two accepted applications. Still, I never felt like I was actually good enough. And with my family and friends so proud of me, I felt like I could not burst their bubble with my insecurity and trepidation...

What makes us want to run away? Or go searching for a life away from ours? The term “black refugees” applies most specifically to the black American men and women who escaped in 1812 to the British navy’s boats and were later taken to freedom in Nova Scotia and Trinidad, but don’t many of us feel like black refugees. Baldwin called these feelings, the sense of displacement and loss that many Black Americans ponder, the “heavy” questions, and heavy they are indeed...

Baldwin left the States for the primary reason that all emigrants do — because anywhere seems better than home. This freedom-seeking gay man, who deeply loved his sisters and brothers — biological and metaphorical — never left them at all. In France, I saw that Baldwin didn’t live the life of a wealthy man, but he did live the life of man who wanted to travel, to erect an estate of his own design, and write as an outsider, alone in silence. He had preserved himself...

Last week, when I got back from seeing his brown typewriter, I wrote down the word “joy” and underlined it three times, like it was an obligation, a chore, something that I would have to find, if not fight for. I did this because isn’t the more intimate, tenebrous story the one where we recognize each other not only in our despair but also in our joy? In your rainbow ink and your sleeplessness nights, in your demands and, in your nieces and nephews who love you like a black god. I will find you — in the enthusiasms of our people’s style, our verve and our wit, the way you slouched in your seat and crossed your legs, in the ways that they will misunderstand you but we will always know you, in the abridgments that we will make to history, changing it forever."

http://www.buzzfeed.com/rachelkaadzighansah/the-weight-of-james-arthur-baldwin-203?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Longform%2036&utm_content=Longform%2036+CID_1f6cbfdaead99b8325fe82ef937cbe64&utm_source=BuzzFeed%20Newsletters&utm_term=.gaa33kAJjJ#.qwV44qKP2P

"Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary"

"The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity...

And a third – and perhaps most important – defect of this approach is that increased wealth, especially as measured in the standard monetary terms of today, has few actual consequences for people's feelings of wellbeing once there is a sufficiency to meet basic needs, as there is in Britain. In pursuing "growth" in these terms, as a means to realise people's life goals and desires, economies are pursuing a chimera.

Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"... We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/neoliberalism-hijacked-vocabulary?CMP=share_btn_fb

FB: "This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core. A rethinking of work could lead us to address more creatively both the social relations of work and the division of labour within society (including a better sharing of the tedious work, and of the skills).""Neoliberalism has hijacked our vocabulary"

"The message underlying this use of the term customer for so many different kinds of human activity is that in all almost all our daily activities we are operating as consumers in a market – and this truth has been brought in not by chance but through managerial instruction and the thoroughgoing renaming of institutional practices. The mandatory exercise of "free choice" – of a GP, of a hospital, of schools for one's children – then becomes also a lesson in social identity, affirming on each occasion our consumer identity...

And a third – and perhaps most important – defect of this approach is that increased wealth, especially as measured in the standard monetary terms of today, has few actual consequences for people's feelings of wellbeing once there is a sufficiency to meet basic needs, as there is in Britain. In pursuing "growth" in these terms, as a means to realise people's life goals and desires, economies are pursuing a chimera.

Instead of an unrelenting quest for growth, might we not ask the question, in the end: "What is an economy for?", "What do we want it to provide?"... We need to question that familiar categorisation of the economy as a space into which people enter in order to reluctantly undertake unwelcome and unpleasing "work", in return for material rewards which they can use for consuming."

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/11/neoliberalism-hijacked-vocabulary?CMP=share_btn_fb

FB: "This is a view that misunderstands where pleasure and fulfilment in human lives are found. Work is usually – and certainly should be – a central source of meaning and fulfilment in human lives. And it has – or could have – moral and creative (or aesthetic) values at its core. A rethinking of work could lead us to address more creatively both the social relations of work and the division of labour within society (including a better sharing of the tedious work, and of the skills)."

"A Feminist Walks Into a YouTube Science Video…"

"In aggregate, this sentiment I’ve repeatedly noticed betrays a fearful sense of invasion. Through this panicked lens, science preserves logic, whereas sexism invokes emotion, and never the twain shall meet. Therefore by extension, science communication ought to be comfortably sheltered from conversations about human accountability, inclusion and representation...

research suggests many fellas who consume lay science media not only chafe against feminism, but also don’t believe sexism exists, particularly within STEM. In 2015, a team of psychologists analyzed 831 comments posted on a trio of articles reporting on studies confirming various STEM-related gender biases. Men posted 68 percent of the comments denying sexism exists, between 79 and 88 percent of comments justifying gender biases and 95 percent of sexist remarks directed at women...

Stanford historian Londa Schiebingerwho’s extensively studied the relationship between gender inclusion and scientific innovation would likely agree. “Once you start looking, you find that taking gender into account can improve almost anything with a human endpoint — stem cell research, assistive technologies for the elderly, automobile design, transportation systems, osteoporosis research in men, and natural language processing" Schiebinger told the University."

https://medium.com/@CristenConger/a-feminist-sweatshirt-walks-into-a-youtube-science-video-29a4c575381c#.fzg77sl3w

There are so many reasons why a proper scientific establishment would be deeply concerned with society - and I suspect that it's the lay scientists who don't have the opportunity to see this, and who have this weird image of what the science world is, who have the most rage about feminist scientists.

Related: Neil Degrasse Tyson being amazing on that video

"MASSAGE"

"Susan tells me that her job as a masseuse is not necessarily to get rid of the pain, but rather to bear witness to it. To recognize it. To affirm it. She says that we live in a country — a world — that teaches us at every level that our hurt is a story we made up. And we internalize that to our core and write it into every muscle in our body. “I am wrong, I am wrong, I am wrong.” She says that sometimes acknowledgment can be its own sort of antidote. That sometimes people just need to hear that what happened to them was not their fault. That people tend to know what is best for themselves, they’ve just been told over and over again that they don’t."

www.returnthegayze.com

"The Gender Gap in Public Sculpture"

"Statues of women never get names. They’re archetypes, symbols, muses, forces. The Statue of Liberty. The Statue of Freedom. Day and Night. The Three Graces. Women appear in memorials galore, as the Victims of, the Spirit of, the Contemplation of, the Apotheosis of—but hardly ever as real women from lived history, with first and last names.

Across the hundreds and hundreds of statues in New York City, just five depict historic women. There are 22 statues of men in Central Park alone, but not one (non-fictional) woman. In Washington, D.C., a city chock-a-block with marble memorials, there are five statues depicting women from history: Joan of Arc, Olive Risley Seward, Mary McLeod Bethune, Crown Princess Märtha of Sweden, and Eleanor Roosevelt...

Public history will be fine (and more accurate) with more monuments to women, even if that means scaling back on sculptures celebrating men. Finding the right balance—well, we are a long way off from any balance at all."

http://www.citylab.com/design/2016/02/the-gender-gap-in-public-sculpture/463170/

"Laughter Doesn’t Scale"

"This is one of the reasons why Twitter is such an existential pit, because the moment you have any success (i.e. lots of retweets) you are immediately punished by complete inanity, forced misunderstanding, nonsense—and, sometimes, if you’re a woman, by a miscellany of invasive threats. There’s no medium that punishes success like the Internet.

It’s not that people don’t get the jokes you make; they don’t even get that there is a joke at all. To them you are not funny, and never will be. They are the ones who are perfect for the medium, because they will repeat the same nostrums over and over, while funny people just drift away. (This is the market gap that Slack fills. It is a product that lets less funny people feel hilarious, successfully marrying enterprise groupware to local improv groups.)

This factor is rarely considered by product people, or by anyone, but it’s real. Humor is an amazing means of reaching a large audience, jokes are naturally viral—but there is a powerful immune system that kicks in with any successful joke."

https://trackchanges.postlight.com/laughter-doesn-t-scale-89d3e5687a24#.5bm9m5y15

"A Social Network Designed to Combat Depression"

"Starting with the desired effect of helping people deal with depression, he developed Panoply, a crowdsourced website for improving mental health. The site, which was the focus of his doctoral thesis at MIT Media Lab, trained users to reframe and reassess negative thoughts, embedding an established technique called cognitive behavioral therapy in an engaging, unthreatening interface. After a study confirmed the site’s effectiveness, Morris formed a company and is now working on turning the idea into a polished consumer app."

http://www.wired.com/2015/04/social-network-designed-combat-depression/?mbid=psocial_slate

(credit to DK)

(finish reading?)