End-of-school madness being what it is, I had no time whatsoever for the internets this week. I will be moving to a more sporadic and reduced schedule for the summer, but intend to be back at full strength this fall. In the meantime, please go on sending me links even if you don't see me around on Twitter — I'll see them eventually, and be grateful that you passed them along.
As ever, thanks for reading! And have a great summer.
Sunday, June 8, 2014
Sunday, June 1, 2014
Links for the week ending 1 June 2014
"Every day, Mr. Nasr, 68, a Transportation Ministry employee, pads around his offices in the Ottoman-era building, where light filters through red, yellow and blue stained glass. He imagines the past — the few short years a century ago when the place bustled with travelers headed for Mecca." Lovely color piece from Anne Barnard at the NYT on the lost railway culture of Syria and the greater region.
"He has also received marriage proposals, which he declines. One woman asked whether electricity was working in Syria so she could bring a hair curler. 'Advice to people who want to come is, Don’t bring your hair curlers,' he said." Also at the NYT, Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura talks to Westerners who have traveled to Syria to become jihadis.
"That’s partly because stigma, like all vulnerability in the rural north, doesn’t affect only the girl who has been assaulted." BuzzFeed's Jina Moore reporting from Nigeria, where contingency plans are being drawn up to address the needs of the kidnapped Chibok teenage girls, should they be successfully rescued.
"Violent extremism entices those who long to lash out at a system they believe has cheated them, but lack they courage to think for themselves, beyond the easy answers they are offered by pedlars of hate. Misogynist extremism is no different." Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.
"The experience of feeling simultaneously threatened and unable to speak, of feeling as if I would be persecuting this man who was committing a sexual impropriety were I to pipe up and tell him to knock it off, was unsettlingly familiar. " Sasha Weiss at The New Yorker.
"Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. " Amanda Hess at Slate. (Via Jody T.)
" Let’s talk about how many conventions have been forced to use disturbingly careful language to basically say, Don’t assault people. Let’s talk about how much pushback statements like that have gotten from people whining, 'Aw, c’mon, can’t I assault someone just a little?'" N.K. Jemison's speech at Wiscon 38, republished on her blog. (Via Rachel Hartman.)
"Bookstores are a privilege. They’re not accessible to everyone, and when they are accessible, they’re not always worth it. Why would I or anyone else want to spend time in a shop where my presence isn’t welcomed?" Kelly Jensen at Bookriot making an important argument (sez someone who grew up in a bookstore desert). (Via Malindo Lo.)
"Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up." From the Fall, 1990, issue of the Paris Review, an interview with Maya Angelou.
"In the city’s post-Katrina reform frenzy, New Orleans has shut down all but five of its traditional public schools, kicked out tenured teachers, and replaced schools with charters and a predominantly black teaching force with young, overwhelmingly white recruits from the controversial education reform and teaching training program Teach for America." Julianne Hing at Colorlines on a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the school systems of Newark, Chicago, and New Orleans. (Via Carla Murphy.)
"Each morning around 6, Mary Ellen Snodgrass swallows a computer chip. It’s embedded in one of her pills and roughly the size of a grain of sand. " Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post. (Via Katie Zezima.)
"The problem with these philosophies isn’t that they seek to abolish, or challenge, the state; it’s that, in their current incarnation, they appeal mostly to individuals like Gogulski, who by accident of birth start off on top of the global pile. They aren’t solutions that management consultants would characterize as 'scalable'; rather, they’re limited, solipsistic. That makes ideologies like Gogulski’s more symbolic than globally meaningful." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on an intentionally stateless person in Bratislava.
"To know a lot of smart, complicated adults is to know a lot of escapists and a lot of social media/booze/TV addicts and a lot of moms who obsess about every dimension of their kids' development and a lot of hothouse flowers with insanely complicated, expensive needs." Heather Havrilesky hits this particular edition of Ask Polly out of the park. At The Awl.
"There was a spelling bee in which anybody who participated was given extra credit. And I figured I could make up for some bad homework grades. I won the spelling bee, and I kept going along." Sarah Kilff at Vox with a delightful interview with five former champions of the National Spelling Bee.
"Ayn Rand's Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone" is worth it for the tags alone. From Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, of course.
"Ninety-five-year-old Beverly Wilson was the only one who had been alive during the trial, though she didn’t remember much about 1925 except her parents arguing—not about theology or science but whether to name her baby brother 'Evolution.'" Finally, at the Oxford American, a wonderful piece by Rachael Maddux about Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial took place.
"He has also received marriage proposals, which he declines. One woman asked whether electricity was working in Syria so she could bring a hair curler. 'Advice to people who want to come is, Don’t bring your hair curlers,' he said." Also at the NYT, Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura talks to Westerners who have traveled to Syria to become jihadis.
"That’s partly because stigma, like all vulnerability in the rural north, doesn’t affect only the girl who has been assaulted." BuzzFeed's Jina Moore reporting from Nigeria, where contingency plans are being drawn up to address the needs of the kidnapped Chibok teenage girls, should they be successfully rescued.
"Violent extremism entices those who long to lash out at a system they believe has cheated them, but lack they courage to think for themselves, beyond the easy answers they are offered by pedlars of hate. Misogynist extremism is no different." Laurie Penny at the New Statesman.
"The experience of feeling simultaneously threatened and unable to speak, of feeling as if I would be persecuting this man who was committing a sexual impropriety were I to pipe up and tell him to knock it off, was unsettlingly familiar. " Sasha Weiss at The New Yorker.
"Women who have experienced this can recognize that placating these men is a rational choice, a form of self-defense to protect against setting off an aggressor. But to male bystanders, it often looks like a warm welcome, and that helps to shift blame in the public eye from the harasser and onto his target, who’s failed to respond with the type of masculine bravado that men more easily recognize. " Amanda Hess at Slate. (Via Jody T.)
" Let’s talk about how many conventions have been forced to use disturbingly careful language to basically say, Don’t assault people. Let’s talk about how much pushback statements like that have gotten from people whining, 'Aw, c’mon, can’t I assault someone just a little?'" N.K. Jemison's speech at Wiscon 38, republished on her blog. (Via Rachel Hartman.)
"Bookstores are a privilege. They’re not accessible to everyone, and when they are accessible, they’re not always worth it. Why would I or anyone else want to spend time in a shop where my presence isn’t welcomed?" Kelly Jensen at Bookriot making an important argument (sez someone who grew up in a bookstore desert). (Via Malindo Lo.)
"Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up." From the Fall, 1990, issue of the Paris Review, an interview with Maya Angelou.
"In the city’s post-Katrina reform frenzy, New Orleans has shut down all but five of its traditional public schools, kicked out tenured teachers, and replaced schools with charters and a predominantly black teaching force with young, overwhelmingly white recruits from the controversial education reform and teaching training program Teach for America." Julianne Hing at Colorlines on a federal civil rights lawsuit filed against the school systems of Newark, Chicago, and New Orleans. (Via Carla Murphy.)
"Each morning around 6, Mary Ellen Snodgrass swallows a computer chip. It’s embedded in one of her pills and roughly the size of a grain of sand. " Ariana Eunjung Cha at The Washington Post. (Via Katie Zezima.)
"The problem with these philosophies isn’t that they seek to abolish, or challenge, the state; it’s that, in their current incarnation, they appeal mostly to individuals like Gogulski, who by accident of birth start off on top of the global pile. They aren’t solutions that management consultants would characterize as 'scalable'; rather, they’re limited, solipsistic. That makes ideologies like Gogulski’s more symbolic than globally meaningful." Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on an intentionally stateless person in Bratislava.
"To know a lot of smart, complicated adults is to know a lot of escapists and a lot of social media/booze/TV addicts and a lot of moms who obsess about every dimension of their kids' development and a lot of hothouse flowers with insanely complicated, expensive needs." Heather Havrilesky hits this particular edition of Ask Polly out of the park. At The Awl.
"There was a spelling bee in which anybody who participated was given extra credit. And I figured I could make up for some bad homework grades. I won the spelling bee, and I kept going along." Sarah Kilff at Vox with a delightful interview with five former champions of the National Spelling Bee.
"Ayn Rand's Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone" is worth it for the tags alone. From Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, of course.
"Ninety-five-year-old Beverly Wilson was the only one who had been alive during the trial, though she didn’t remember much about 1925 except her parents arguing—not about theology or science but whether to name her baby brother 'Evolution.'" Finally, at the Oxford American, a wonderful piece by Rachael Maddux about Dayton, Tennessee, where the Scopes trial took place.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Links for the week ending 25 May 2014
Oh, look, another entitled white dude with parental fundage and a gun massacred people. Ain't it great that the powers-that-be collect data on every move we make online — but white dudes who rant about hating and/or killing women (or racial/ethnic/religious minorities, for that matter) on YouTube are not treated with the same controlling dystopian force that meets a teenage black kid trying to get to school in the morning? What is even the point of linking to news stories about it? There is nothing here you don't already know twenty times over. But, here, if you never saw this essay the first time, it's worth a read: I am not a puzzle box," by Felicity Shoulders. (Via @saltypepper.) And now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Alas, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a dude, and thus beyond the purview of this here project. But! Tressie McMillan Cottom — who, like Coates, is one of the few truly essential public intellectuals at work in America today — is at her blog this week riffing on Coates' piece and writing about why more equal access to education is not going to undo the effects of structural racism: "No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees."
"You might never have heard of petcoke before, but it’s a term that some people in the industrial Midwest have become all too familiar with in the last couple of years. It’s short for petroleum coke, and it’s a dusty byproduct of the tar-sands oil refining process." While we're thinking about structural racism in general and Chicago neighborhoods in particular, Sarah Goodyear's article at Citylab seems all too relevant.
"While the jail initially said there had been no health concerns, multiple inmates say they suffered problems ranging from minor rashes to respiratory infections and fainting spells. Prisoners also described a policy implemented after the spill, which could land someone in solitary confinement for asking to see a nurse too many times." Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on how incarcerated West Virginia prisoners during the recent chemical spill that contaminated Charleston's water supply. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post." Dude Zach Carter and Kate Sheppard reporting on why you can expect more and worse resource-extraction pollution in your neighborhood.
"Now—three months after a violent uprising in which Ukrainians were united perhaps by only one thing: revulsion at the tyranny of the corrupt oligarchy that has dominated the country since independence— the billionaire is also the strong frontrunner in presidential elections scheduled for this Sunday, May 25." Excellent profile of Petro Poroshenko by Sarah A. Topol at Politico.
"'You have taken away my right to make sure that my grandchildren know that this tragedy must never repeat itself.'" At The New Yorker, Natalia Antelava on the suppression of observance of the seventieth anniversary of the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars.
"Egypt’s scorching summer heat and dwindling natural-gas supplies are expected to trigger nationwide blackouts at about the same time that Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the popular former defense minister who led the coup against Morsi in July, is widely anticipated to assume the presidency after elections this weekend." Erin Cunningham at The Washington Post.
"Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. " Ariel Kaminer and dude Sean O'Driscoll at the NYT on NYU's deal with the devil to build its new campus in Abu Dhabi.
"'The government of Nigeria is not serious,' he said. 'Had it been their children, they would have gone to get these girls.'" Alexis Okeowo reporting for The New Yorker.
"One year she managed to make offerings at the spot where her son, Wang Nan, died on the sidewalk beside the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. The next year she was forbidden to leave her home. To this day, a closed-circuit camera is trained upon that spot, awaiting her return." Chilling account at The Washington Post by Louisa Lim about the risks of telling stories about 1989 in China. Her book comes out next month; I'll be looking for it.
"Such attitudes are leading to a new gender wealth gap in the market-reform era. Evidence is found in legal setbacks to married women's property rights, a sharply widening gender income gap, report of an 'epidemic of domestic violence', as well as the orchestrated state media campaign to stigmatise single, educated women in their late 20s as 'leftover' women." Leta Hong Fincher at The Guardian on the complex interplay between growing gender inequality and the real estate boom in China.
"The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and solar power firms, marking the first time that the United States has leveled such criminal charges against a foreign country." Ellen Nakashima and dude William Wan at The Washington Post.
"But China also uses panda loans (as well as the trade deals themselves) to exert political pressure on countries. " Oh, dear. Maybe you wanna plan that trip to the National Zoo soon, suggests Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Sarah Kliff.)
"So the Bryans delivered their girls in the District. It was a two-hour drive from home, friends and family, but it’s a place that offers the surest way for Lily Mae and Mia Lynn to have two mothers in the eyes of the law." Carol Morello at The Washington Post on why lesbian couples are choosing to give birth in Washington, D.C. And, no, it's not so that their newborns can go visit the pandas. (Via Katie Zezima.)
"Our repeated attempts since 2010 to seek funding through federal grant mechanisms have been rejected." Harvard researchers Michelle Holmes and Wendy Chen making an op-ed pitch for funding their study asking whether aspirin might be an effective weapon against breast cancer. Is this the future of scientific research? Oy.
"Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming?" Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker on the futility of reality-based arguments. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"Though the bill is currently known as the 'Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,' it’s becoming clear that if some House Republicans had their way, they would like to call it the 'Hungry, Healthy-Free Kids Act.' The new object, at least in the House, is to ensure that less food, and less healthy food, finds its way to fewer kids." The previously cited article notwithstanding, it sure is satisfying to see Dahlia Lithwick and Amy Woolard refusing to pull punches at Slate.
"Government officials had estimated as many 60,000 unaccompanied kids—the majority of them from Central America—would be apprehended at the border this year, but now officials predict it will be 70,000 or more." Melissa del Bosque for the Texas Observer with a short piece that sketches the outlines of tremendous human suffering, particularly when you read in an earlier article that "U.S. asylum law doesn’t recognize poverty and violence as credible claims for asylum."
"It is a war that the island’s holiday industry wants to remember and forget simultaneously. Since the conflict ended, Sri Lankans themselves have established a macabre domestic tourist trail in silence." From the previous week, Kim Wall at Vice on the rapid transformation of former Tamil strongholds into sites for triumphal Sinhalese tourism. (Via Louisa Loveluck.)
"You’ll smell the molasses as you walk through the exhibit anchored by a 35-foot tall sphinx made of what the artist has called “blood sugar” and sculpted into the shape of a naked mammy. You’ll also see white people. Lots of white people." Fascinating piece by Jamilah King at Colorlines on the racial politics of art and museum-going in the United States. (Via Julianne Hing.)
"This is the catalogue author’s one and only piece of presented evidenced which he claims indicates a female scribe and possible female illuminator." By Whitney Burkhalter at The Toast, the best piece on controversies involving sexism and medieval art that you will read all week.
"'Why should the individual who has been wronged bear the burden to police the system and then spend years of her life, emotional and financial capital trying to enforce the laws of the land? I am convinced that equality will never be realized as long as the victim has to police the system, be the whistleblower and then spend an average of ten years navigating a complicated legal system at great personal and financial cost.'" Rebecca Greenfield at The Hairpin with the money quote from her mom on the latter's years spent pursuing a gender discrimination case.
"Rather, what troubles him is the potential exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens as they go about their lives in public. Online, we are all tracked. But to Dr. Atick, the street remains a haven, and he frets that he may have abetted a technology that could upend the social order." At the NYT from last Sunday, Natasha Singer on the terrifying promise of facial recognition technology.
"This is because all computers are reliably this bad: the ones in hospitals and governments and banks, the ones in your phone, the ones that control light switches and smart meters and air traffic control systems. Industrial computers that maintain infrastructure and manufacturing are even worse." If you appreciate the chance to laugh all the way to the apocalypse, this piece by Quinn Norton at Medium is for you.
"I want to encourage the building of technologies that see students’ lives and learning not as a resource to be extracted but as something they themselves can control and cultivate." Notes from a talk on education technology by Audrey Watters. At her blog.
"O.K., well, let’s—no, Paula, go right ahead. You just root around in your bag and shout, 'I’m coming!' when it rings? O.K., well, Paula, that’s interesting, but it’s not a solution." Sarah Miller killing it at The New Yorker with "Turning Your Cell Phone Off For Folks Born Before 1950."
"Our youngest had his 13th birthday the other day and I got a wonderful text from my dad saying, 'All I remember about turning 13 is being allowed to smoke in the bomb shelter.'" Tracey Thorn at the New Statesman. I hope the musical icons of today's teens write half so well in thirty years as my icons do. (See also: Kristin Hersh.)
"The sexually fluid and gender fluid don’t necessarily stand up with the rest of the TV-friendly, marriage-campaigning queers and say, 'I’ve always been this way.' I understand that descriptors like that align with how many people have experienced their gender and sexuality, but I have always experienced these parts of me as mutable things that I had some degree of choice in expressing." Great piece by Jade Sylvan at The Toast.
"'Well what did you study?' she booms, her voice a constant invite to a party you didn’t know you even wanted to attend. And just like that, she has the resident’s full attention once more." At Colorlines, Carla Murphy profiles young labor organizer Michelle Crentsil, who amazes the reader more with each successive paragraph.
"Pietro was a humble man who lived in an enchanting region famed throughout the land for its delicious and abundant hazelnuts. Times were hard and chocolatey delights were not for the common people. Still, he dreamed of a magic formula that would enable everyone to enjoy his sweet treats." Dany Mitzman at the BBC on the "modern fairy tale" — and the reality — of the history of Nutella. Is it lunchtime yet? (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"I will be there on opening night to see The Fault in Our Stars movie, largely because I am the parent to a pre-teen girl who wants to see it. But when you write your articles about him and YA lit, do a better job. Do it in a way that doesn't diminish the accomplishments of all the other authors working hard out there to reach teen audiences." On-point rant by Karen Jensen at Teen Librarian's Toolbox. (Hat tip to Els Kushner, another badass teen librarian!)
"The story’s first-person narrator, Breq, speaks a language that doesn't make gender distinctions, and, consequently, refers to all characters by the same default pronoun, rendered she in English." Linguist Gretchen McCulloch with an illuminating analysis of this year's winner of the Nebula Award — and how it reflects the real world. At Slate. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman.)
"In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood, and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency." Finally, from last year, but they retweeted it this week, don't ask me why — the inimitable Vivian Gornick at The Paris Review.
Alas, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a dude, and thus beyond the purview of this here project. But! Tressie McMillan Cottom — who, like Coates, is one of the few truly essential public intellectuals at work in America today — is at her blog this week riffing on Coates' piece and writing about why more equal access to education is not going to undo the effects of structural racism: "No matter what black college grads do, they are more sensitive than non-blacks to every negative macro labor market trend. They are more likely to be unemployed, underemployed, and hold low quality jobs even when they have STEM degrees."
"You might never have heard of petcoke before, but it’s a term that some people in the industrial Midwest have become all too familiar with in the last couple of years. It’s short for petroleum coke, and it’s a dusty byproduct of the tar-sands oil refining process." While we're thinking about structural racism in general and Chicago neighborhoods in particular, Sarah Goodyear's article at Citylab seems all too relevant.
"While the jail initially said there had been no health concerns, multiple inmates say they suffered problems ranging from minor rashes to respiratory infections and fainting spells. Prisoners also described a policy implemented after the spill, which could land someone in solitary confinement for asking to see a nurse too many times." Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on how incarcerated West Virginia prisoners during the recent chemical spill that contaminated Charleston's water supply. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"The European Union is pressing the Obama administration to expand U.S. fracking, offshore oil drilling and natural gas exploration under the terms of a secret negotiation text obtained by The Huffington Post." Dude Zach Carter and Kate Sheppard reporting on why you can expect more and worse resource-extraction pollution in your neighborhood.
"Now—three months after a violent uprising in which Ukrainians were united perhaps by only one thing: revulsion at the tyranny of the corrupt oligarchy that has dominated the country since independence— the billionaire is also the strong frontrunner in presidential elections scheduled for this Sunday, May 25." Excellent profile of Petro Poroshenko by Sarah A. Topol at Politico.
"'You have taken away my right to make sure that my grandchildren know that this tragedy must never repeat itself.'" At The New Yorker, Natalia Antelava on the suppression of observance of the seventieth anniversary of the mass deportations of Crimean Tatars.
"Egypt’s scorching summer heat and dwindling natural-gas supplies are expected to trigger nationwide blackouts at about the same time that Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, the popular former defense minister who led the coup against Morsi in July, is widely anticipated to assume the presidency after elections this weekend." Erin Cunningham at The Washington Post.
"Virtually every one said he had to pay recruitment fees of up to a year’s wages to get his job and had never been reimbursed. N.Y.U.’s list of labor values said that contractors are supposed to pay back all such fees. " Ariel Kaminer and dude Sean O'Driscoll at the NYT on NYU's deal with the devil to build its new campus in Abu Dhabi.
"'The government of Nigeria is not serious,' he said. 'Had it been their children, they would have gone to get these girls.'" Alexis Okeowo reporting for The New Yorker.
"One year she managed to make offerings at the spot where her son, Wang Nan, died on the sidewalk beside the Avenue of Heavenly Peace. The next year she was forbidden to leave her home. To this day, a closed-circuit camera is trained upon that spot, awaiting her return." Chilling account at The Washington Post by Louisa Lim about the risks of telling stories about 1989 in China. Her book comes out next month; I'll be looking for it.
"Such attitudes are leading to a new gender wealth gap in the market-reform era. Evidence is found in legal setbacks to married women's property rights, a sharply widening gender income gap, report of an 'epidemic of domestic violence', as well as the orchestrated state media campaign to stigmatise single, educated women in their late 20s as 'leftover' women." Leta Hong Fincher at The Guardian on the complex interplay between growing gender inequality and the real estate boom in China.
"The Justice Department has indicted five members of the Chinese military on charges of hacking into computers and stealing valuable trade secrets from leading steel, nuclear plant and solar power firms, marking the first time that the United States has leveled such criminal charges against a foreign country." Ellen Nakashima and dude William Wan at The Washington Post.
"But China also uses panda loans (as well as the trade deals themselves) to exert political pressure on countries. " Oh, dear. Maybe you wanna plan that trip to the National Zoo soon, suggests Dara Lind at Vox. (Via Sarah Kliff.)
"So the Bryans delivered their girls in the District. It was a two-hour drive from home, friends and family, but it’s a place that offers the surest way for Lily Mae and Mia Lynn to have two mothers in the eyes of the law." Carol Morello at The Washington Post on why lesbian couples are choosing to give birth in Washington, D.C. And, no, it's not so that their newborns can go visit the pandas. (Via Katie Zezima.)
"Our repeated attempts since 2010 to seek funding through federal grant mechanisms have been rejected." Harvard researchers Michelle Holmes and Wendy Chen making an op-ed pitch for funding their study asking whether aspirin might be an effective weapon against breast cancer. Is this the future of scientific research? Oy.
"Here, Nyhan decided to apply it in an unrelated context: Could recalling a time when you felt good about yourself make you more broad-minded about highly politicized issues, like the Iraq surge or global warming?" Maria Konnikova at The New Yorker on the futility of reality-based arguments. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"Though the bill is currently known as the 'Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act,' it’s becoming clear that if some House Republicans had their way, they would like to call it the 'Hungry, Healthy-Free Kids Act.' The new object, at least in the House, is to ensure that less food, and less healthy food, finds its way to fewer kids." The previously cited article notwithstanding, it sure is satisfying to see Dahlia Lithwick and Amy Woolard refusing to pull punches at Slate.
"Government officials had estimated as many 60,000 unaccompanied kids—the majority of them from Central America—would be apprehended at the border this year, but now officials predict it will be 70,000 or more." Melissa del Bosque for the Texas Observer with a short piece that sketches the outlines of tremendous human suffering, particularly when you read in an earlier article that "U.S. asylum law doesn’t recognize poverty and violence as credible claims for asylum."
"It is a war that the island’s holiday industry wants to remember and forget simultaneously. Since the conflict ended, Sri Lankans themselves have established a macabre domestic tourist trail in silence." From the previous week, Kim Wall at Vice on the rapid transformation of former Tamil strongholds into sites for triumphal Sinhalese tourism. (Via Louisa Loveluck.)
"You’ll smell the molasses as you walk through the exhibit anchored by a 35-foot tall sphinx made of what the artist has called “blood sugar” and sculpted into the shape of a naked mammy. You’ll also see white people. Lots of white people." Fascinating piece by Jamilah King at Colorlines on the racial politics of art and museum-going in the United States. (Via Julianne Hing.)
"This is the catalogue author’s one and only piece of presented evidenced which he claims indicates a female scribe and possible female illuminator." By Whitney Burkhalter at The Toast, the best piece on controversies involving sexism and medieval art that you will read all week.
"'Why should the individual who has been wronged bear the burden to police the system and then spend years of her life, emotional and financial capital trying to enforce the laws of the land? I am convinced that equality will never be realized as long as the victim has to police the system, be the whistleblower and then spend an average of ten years navigating a complicated legal system at great personal and financial cost.'" Rebecca Greenfield at The Hairpin with the money quote from her mom on the latter's years spent pursuing a gender discrimination case.
"Rather, what troubles him is the potential exploitation of face recognition to identify ordinary and unwitting citizens as they go about their lives in public. Online, we are all tracked. But to Dr. Atick, the street remains a haven, and he frets that he may have abetted a technology that could upend the social order." At the NYT from last Sunday, Natasha Singer on the terrifying promise of facial recognition technology.
"This is because all computers are reliably this bad: the ones in hospitals and governments and banks, the ones in your phone, the ones that control light switches and smart meters and air traffic control systems. Industrial computers that maintain infrastructure and manufacturing are even worse." If you appreciate the chance to laugh all the way to the apocalypse, this piece by Quinn Norton at Medium is for you.
"I want to encourage the building of technologies that see students’ lives and learning not as a resource to be extracted but as something they themselves can control and cultivate." Notes from a talk on education technology by Audrey Watters. At her blog.
"O.K., well, let’s—no, Paula, go right ahead. You just root around in your bag and shout, 'I’m coming!' when it rings? O.K., well, Paula, that’s interesting, but it’s not a solution." Sarah Miller killing it at The New Yorker with "Turning Your Cell Phone Off For Folks Born Before 1950."
"Our youngest had his 13th birthday the other day and I got a wonderful text from my dad saying, 'All I remember about turning 13 is being allowed to smoke in the bomb shelter.'" Tracey Thorn at the New Statesman. I hope the musical icons of today's teens write half so well in thirty years as my icons do. (See also: Kristin Hersh.)
"The sexually fluid and gender fluid don’t necessarily stand up with the rest of the TV-friendly, marriage-campaigning queers and say, 'I’ve always been this way.' I understand that descriptors like that align with how many people have experienced their gender and sexuality, but I have always experienced these parts of me as mutable things that I had some degree of choice in expressing." Great piece by Jade Sylvan at The Toast.
"'Well what did you study?' she booms, her voice a constant invite to a party you didn’t know you even wanted to attend. And just like that, she has the resident’s full attention once more." At Colorlines, Carla Murphy profiles young labor organizer Michelle Crentsil, who amazes the reader more with each successive paragraph.
"Pietro was a humble man who lived in an enchanting region famed throughout the land for its delicious and abundant hazelnuts. Times were hard and chocolatey delights were not for the common people. Still, he dreamed of a magic formula that would enable everyone to enjoy his sweet treats." Dany Mitzman at the BBC on the "modern fairy tale" — and the reality — of the history of Nutella. Is it lunchtime yet? (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"I will be there on opening night to see The Fault in Our Stars movie, largely because I am the parent to a pre-teen girl who wants to see it. But when you write your articles about him and YA lit, do a better job. Do it in a way that doesn't diminish the accomplishments of all the other authors working hard out there to reach teen audiences." On-point rant by Karen Jensen at Teen Librarian's Toolbox. (Hat tip to Els Kushner, another badass teen librarian!)
"The story’s first-person narrator, Breq, speaks a language that doesn't make gender distinctions, and, consequently, refers to all characters by the same default pronoun, rendered she in English." Linguist Gretchen McCulloch with an illuminating analysis of this year's winner of the Nebula Award — and how it reflects the real world. At Slate. (Hat tip to Rachel Hartman.)
"In the drugstore I run into ninety-year-old Vera, a Trotskyist from way back who lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in my neighborhood, and whose voice is always pitched at the level of soapbox urgency." Finally, from last year, but they retweeted it this week, don't ask me why — the inimitable Vivian Gornick at The Paris Review.
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Links for the week ending 18 May 2014
"These glaciers already contribute significantly to sea level rise, releasing almost as much ice into the ocean annually as the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. They contain enough ice to raise global sea level by 4 feet (1.2 meters) and are melting faster than most scientists had expected. Rignot said these findings will require an upward revision to current predictions of sea level rise." That's from a news release by Carol Rasmussen from the NASA Earth Science News Team. Have a nice day.
"But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be more serious." In case you're not already gibbering in terror, here's Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker to take you the rest of the way there.
"Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original." Laura Parker reports from the Oklahoma panhandle for National Geographic. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
"No one involved in the brewing court battle over who owns San Antonio’s wastewater is calling it 'potty water,' as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram did in a recent story about the Wichita Falls plan. " Neena Satija for the Texas Tribune reports that the future of drinking water is already here.
"The United States Fish and Wildlife Service says homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals per acre than farmers do. Some of these chemicals rub off on children or pets, but most are washed with rainwater into our streams, lakes and rivers or are absorbed into our groundwater." Yes, I am subtweeting my neighbors with this piece from last week in the NYT by Diane Lewis.
"There will be only dryness or downpour, no more metronomic rains like the one that kept me awake the other night. Like the economy, the climate is expected to change in ways that only advance inequality: The wet regions of the world will get wetter; the dry regions of the world will get drier." Casey N. Cep at Pacific Standard.
"Although it will vary by region, these characteristics fomented by climate change, don’t bode well for West Nile outbreaks. And although it may be possible to disregard the slow changes happening within our climate, it’s less easy to ignore the effects of a disease ravaging a family." Brittany Patterson at The Atlantic last week on West Nile virus. (Via Maryn McKenna.)
"Ameer has been following the most recent news reports anxiously and closely, as has every literate citizen of Saudi Arabia, but this latest suggestion, that MERS-CoV might somehow be tainting the kingdom's camels, had caused him to recoil. He was not willing to believe it. He was about to do a defiant thing." Great story at National Geographic by Cynthia Gorney on MERS and camels and people in Saudi Arabia.
"One woman, Umm Ahmed, told how a driver for one charity demanded $7 to take refugees' names to receive boxes of food and soap distributed by a nearby mosque." Diaa Hadid reports for the AP on corruption seeping into the distribution of aid for Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
"A bullet smashed through the window next to my head, hissed through the hair of my driver but miraculously left both of us unharmed. Since then I have probably become the only woman in the world to convert their United Nude shoe bag into a gunshot trauma kit which I’ve since carried with me at all times." Dispatch from Iona Craig, the last accredited Western journalist in Yemen — as she leaves the country maybe forever. At Index on Censorship. (Via Erin Cunningham.)
"This seemed to confirm what opponents of the A.K.P. already believed—that the government would take measures to help businesses develop Turkey, even at the expense of Turkish citizens." At The New Yorker, Jenna Krajeski on the mine disaster at Soma.
"Most of the coverage of the group has been about 'the amount of people who died, and here’s what the politicians think of it,' says Saratu, a young Nigerian who prefers to go by only her first name, who began the project in February. 'No one is listening to the voices of the people affected.'" At BuzzFeed, Jina Moore on the testimony of Nigerians afflicted by Boko Haram violence.
"Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a historic mandate in the country’s general election on Friday, emerging with 282 of 543 parliamentary seats, more than enough to form a government without having to broker a post-election coalition." Ellen Barry at the NYT on the final results in India's elections, which spell the end of the Gandhi political dynasty, and the beginning of the next chapter in India's history. (Via Lydia Polgreen.)
"Grace, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, doesn't smoke – at 15, she's too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, anyway – but she might as well have had a regular habit. At her job on a tobacco farm last summer, she handled tobacco plants for up to 12 hours a day, steadily absorbing nicotine through her skin." Human Rights Watch's Margaret Wurth at The Guardian on the health risks to child laborers on American tobacco fields.
"The Boston FBI agent who fatally shot a Chechen friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Florida last year had a brief and troubled past at the Oakland Police Department in California. In four years, Officer #8313 took the Fifth at a police corruption trial and was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations." Maria Sacchetti at The Boston Globe. (Via Sarah Jeong.)
"There is little choice for an Afghan Muslim man who is not fluent in English, sitting in an NYPD office and being questioned about his family back home, his religion, and his leisurely activities." Commentary on the NYPD's recruitment of informers among Muslim immigrants, by Rozina Ali at her tumblr. (Via Anne Barnard.)
"More than one in every four black boys identified as having disabilities was suspended in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (PDF)." Just one of the many eye-opening statistics in Julianne Hing's excellent reportage on race, disability, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At Colorlines.
"Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers." The future is now, and it is fucking terrifying. Er, I mean, here is an interesting article about data mining in schools, by Stephanie Simon for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"While social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been instrumental in facilitating social movements across the world, their democratic utility does not guarantee their democratic ethos. They are instead predictably and abidingly corporate; the primary freedom they go to bat for is market freedom." Clear, incisive piece by Meagan Day at Full Stop reviewing Astra Taylor's new book. (Via Dayna Tortorici.)
Do you all read "5 Useful Articles" by dude Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong? You should. You'll be smarter (and funnier) about the latest techno/legal disasters because of it.
"Student news and opinion blog the Lion covered the grassroots action as the list of alleged assailants—all of whom, the anonymous scribbler claimed, had already been found responsible for sexual misconduct through the university’s judicial process but were allowed to remain at school—spread from bathrooms to classrooms to printed fliers." Amanda Hess at Slate on what happened at Columbia University when the student publication that had been covering sexual assault issues found one of the accused on its own staff. (Via Kayla Webley.)
"Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1." Roni Carin Rabin at the NYT on a new directive aimed at reducing the gender bias in basic science research.
"Unbeknownst to her, however, Colorado’s marijuana law need not explicitly state exceptions to legalized adult marijuana use for such exceptions to exist. The complicated, incentive-based relationship between federal and state child abuse laws obscures parents’ protections under legalization." Kristen Gwynne at RH Reality Check on holes in marijuana legalization that have resulted in prosecutions against mothers and pregnant women.
"I stood there, shaking, gaping at my jeans and T-shirt. What about my clothes said I wasn’t 13? What about me kept telling the rest of the world I wasn’t a child?" Lovely essay by Ashley C. Ford about that stage in which she had not yet grown into her maturing body. At BuzzFeed. (Via Shani O. Hilton.)
"When it comes to kids and recreational reading, here are the questions I have. Look at those readers from 30 years ago. Look at them now. Do they have better jobs? Are they earning more money? Did they go on to higher education? Are they happy? In other words, does reading for pleasure mean anything other than.... someone likes to read for pleasure?" Liz Burns at her blog skewering this week's edition of Kids These Days Don't Read. (Hat tip and fist-bump to Jody T. — god knows we have asked each other that last question frequently enough over the years!)
"Was my two-year-old ready for this? I figured probably not, but watching myself edit the book for her level turned out to be a strange pastime. I wasn’t just editing out the hatred but was also failing to explain why the kids were moving to a new school at all. It was as if I was afraid that mentioning race to her would cause her to say embarrassing things at daycare the next day, something I wanted desperately to avoid. " At Fuse #8, Betsy Bird on the perils, pitfalls, and absolute necessity of finding diverse books for children.
Wait, did something happen at the NYT this week? I kid, I kid. "She got fired with less dignity than Judith Miller, who practically started the Iraq War." Kate Aurthur at BuzzFeed. (Via Miriam Elder.)
"Observing the sharp contrast between this kinder, gentler transition and the cold glee with which Abramson was tossed on her ass today made me hope that eventually we will learn that she was stealing from the company cash register. Because that’s pretty much the only crime I can think of that would merit as swift and brutal an exit for a woman who—good or bad at her job, or, more likely, like most bosses in the world, some combination of the two—represented an undeniably historic first in journalism and at The New York Times." Rebecca Traister at The New Republic.
"To their surprise, she turned up at the noisy Manhattan bar, leaned in close, answered every one of their questions, and told dishy anecdotes about how she’s dealt with men who projected their own biases onto her work. 'It was awe-inspiring, the way she took that time out of her life to powwow with us, without ever seeming ceremonial about it,' one female staffer in attendance told me." Amanda Hess again at Slate. (Via @rsp1661.)
Sarah Miller at The Hairpin writing as David Brooks on Jill Abramson, which wins the internets this week, unless you are also counting "How To Fall Asleep: A Step-By-Step Guide," by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
"The Great Society did not just seek to redistribute wealth. Johnson also set out to shift power in America — from states to Washington, from the legislative branch to the executive, from corporations to federal regulators, from big-city political machines to community groups." Finally, at The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty's evocative essay on the fiftieth anniversary of The Great Society. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
"But the unfortunate fact about uncertainty is that the error bars always go in both directions. While it is possible that the problem could turn out to be less serious than the consensus forecast, it is equally likely to turn out to be more serious." In case you're not already gibbering in terror, here's Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker to take you the rest of the way there.
"Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original." Laura Parker reports from the Oklahoma panhandle for National Geographic. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
"No one involved in the brewing court battle over who owns San Antonio’s wastewater is calling it 'potty water,' as the Fort Worth Star-Telegram did in a recent story about the Wichita Falls plan. " Neena Satija for the Texas Tribune reports that the future of drinking water is already here.
"The United States Fish and Wildlife Service says homeowners use up to 10 times more chemicals per acre than farmers do. Some of these chemicals rub off on children or pets, but most are washed with rainwater into our streams, lakes and rivers or are absorbed into our groundwater." Yes, I am subtweeting my neighbors with this piece from last week in the NYT by Diane Lewis.
"There will be only dryness or downpour, no more metronomic rains like the one that kept me awake the other night. Like the economy, the climate is expected to change in ways that only advance inequality: The wet regions of the world will get wetter; the dry regions of the world will get drier." Casey N. Cep at Pacific Standard.
"Although it will vary by region, these characteristics fomented by climate change, don’t bode well for West Nile outbreaks. And although it may be possible to disregard the slow changes happening within our climate, it’s less easy to ignore the effects of a disease ravaging a family." Brittany Patterson at The Atlantic last week on West Nile virus. (Via Maryn McKenna.)
"Ameer has been following the most recent news reports anxiously and closely, as has every literate citizen of Saudi Arabia, but this latest suggestion, that MERS-CoV might somehow be tainting the kingdom's camels, had caused him to recoil. He was not willing to believe it. He was about to do a defiant thing." Great story at National Geographic by Cynthia Gorney on MERS and camels and people in Saudi Arabia.
"One woman, Umm Ahmed, told how a driver for one charity demanded $7 to take refugees' names to receive boxes of food and soap distributed by a nearby mosque." Diaa Hadid reports for the AP on corruption seeping into the distribution of aid for Syrian refugees in Lebanon.
"A bullet smashed through the window next to my head, hissed through the hair of my driver but miraculously left both of us unharmed. Since then I have probably become the only woman in the world to convert their United Nude shoe bag into a gunshot trauma kit which I’ve since carried with me at all times." Dispatch from Iona Craig, the last accredited Western journalist in Yemen — as she leaves the country maybe forever. At Index on Censorship. (Via Erin Cunningham.)
"This seemed to confirm what opponents of the A.K.P. already believed—that the government would take measures to help businesses develop Turkey, even at the expense of Turkish citizens." At The New Yorker, Jenna Krajeski on the mine disaster at Soma.
"Most of the coverage of the group has been about 'the amount of people who died, and here’s what the politicians think of it,' says Saratu, a young Nigerian who prefers to go by only her first name, who began the project in February. 'No one is listening to the voices of the people affected.'" At BuzzFeed, Jina Moore on the testimony of Nigerians afflicted by Boko Haram violence.
"Mr. Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party won a historic mandate in the country’s general election on Friday, emerging with 282 of 543 parliamentary seats, more than enough to form a government without having to broker a post-election coalition." Ellen Barry at the NYT on the final results in India's elections, which spell the end of the Gandhi political dynasty, and the beginning of the next chapter in India's history. (Via Lydia Polgreen.)
"Grace, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy, doesn't smoke – at 15, she's too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, anyway – but she might as well have had a regular habit. At her job on a tobacco farm last summer, she handled tobacco plants for up to 12 hours a day, steadily absorbing nicotine through her skin." Human Rights Watch's Margaret Wurth at The Guardian on the health risks to child laborers on American tobacco fields.
"The Boston FBI agent who fatally shot a Chechen friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in Florida last year had a brief and troubled past at the Oakland Police Department in California. In four years, Officer #8313 took the Fifth at a police corruption trial and was the subject of two police brutality lawsuits and four internal affairs investigations." Maria Sacchetti at The Boston Globe. (Via Sarah Jeong.)
"There is little choice for an Afghan Muslim man who is not fluent in English, sitting in an NYPD office and being questioned about his family back home, his religion, and his leisurely activities." Commentary on the NYPD's recruitment of informers among Muslim immigrants, by Rozina Ali at her tumblr. (Via Anne Barnard.)
"More than one in every four black boys identified as having disabilities was suspended in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights (PDF)." Just one of the many eye-opening statistics in Julianne Hing's excellent reportage on race, disability, and the school-to-prison pipeline. At Colorlines.
"Students shed streams of data about their academic progress, work habits, learning styles and personal interests as they navigate educational websites. All that data has potential commercial value: It could be used to target ads to the kids and their families, or to build profiles on them that might be of interest to employers, military recruiters or college admissions officers." The future is now, and it is fucking terrifying. Er, I mean, here is an interesting article about data mining in schools, by Stephanie Simon for Politico. (Via Audrey Watters.)
"While social media giants like Twitter and Facebook have been instrumental in facilitating social movements across the world, their democratic utility does not guarantee their democratic ethos. They are instead predictably and abidingly corporate; the primary freedom they go to bat for is market freedom." Clear, incisive piece by Meagan Day at Full Stop reviewing Astra Taylor's new book. (Via Dayna Tortorici.)
Do you all read "5 Useful Articles" by dude Parker Higgins and Sarah Jeong? You should. You'll be smarter (and funnier) about the latest techno/legal disasters because of it.
"Student news and opinion blog the Lion covered the grassroots action as the list of alleged assailants—all of whom, the anonymous scribbler claimed, had already been found responsible for sexual misconduct through the university’s judicial process but were allowed to remain at school—spread from bathrooms to classrooms to printed fliers." Amanda Hess at Slate on what happened at Columbia University when the student publication that had been covering sexual assault issues found one of the accused on its own staff. (Via Kayla Webley.)
"Bias in mammalian test subjects was evident in eight of 10 scientific disciplines in an analysis of published research conducted by Irving Zucker, a professor of psychology and integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. The most lopsided was neuroscience, where single-sex studies of male animals outnumbered those of females by 5.5 to 1." Roni Carin Rabin at the NYT on a new directive aimed at reducing the gender bias in basic science research.
"Unbeknownst to her, however, Colorado’s marijuana law need not explicitly state exceptions to legalized adult marijuana use for such exceptions to exist. The complicated, incentive-based relationship between federal and state child abuse laws obscures parents’ protections under legalization." Kristen Gwynne at RH Reality Check on holes in marijuana legalization that have resulted in prosecutions against mothers and pregnant women.
"I stood there, shaking, gaping at my jeans and T-shirt. What about my clothes said I wasn’t 13? What about me kept telling the rest of the world I wasn’t a child?" Lovely essay by Ashley C. Ford about that stage in which she had not yet grown into her maturing body. At BuzzFeed. (Via Shani O. Hilton.)
"When it comes to kids and recreational reading, here are the questions I have. Look at those readers from 30 years ago. Look at them now. Do they have better jobs? Are they earning more money? Did they go on to higher education? Are they happy? In other words, does reading for pleasure mean anything other than.... someone likes to read for pleasure?" Liz Burns at her blog skewering this week's edition of Kids These Days Don't Read. (Hat tip and fist-bump to Jody T. — god knows we have asked each other that last question frequently enough over the years!)
"Was my two-year-old ready for this? I figured probably not, but watching myself edit the book for her level turned out to be a strange pastime. I wasn’t just editing out the hatred but was also failing to explain why the kids were moving to a new school at all. It was as if I was afraid that mentioning race to her would cause her to say embarrassing things at daycare the next day, something I wanted desperately to avoid. " At Fuse #8, Betsy Bird on the perils, pitfalls, and absolute necessity of finding diverse books for children.
Wait, did something happen at the NYT this week? I kid, I kid. "She got fired with less dignity than Judith Miller, who practically started the Iraq War." Kate Aurthur at BuzzFeed. (Via Miriam Elder.)
"Observing the sharp contrast between this kinder, gentler transition and the cold glee with which Abramson was tossed on her ass today made me hope that eventually we will learn that she was stealing from the company cash register. Because that’s pretty much the only crime I can think of that would merit as swift and brutal an exit for a woman who—good or bad at her job, or, more likely, like most bosses in the world, some combination of the two—represented an undeniably historic first in journalism and at The New York Times." Rebecca Traister at The New Republic.
"To their surprise, she turned up at the noisy Manhattan bar, leaned in close, answered every one of their questions, and told dishy anecdotes about how she’s dealt with men who projected their own biases onto her work. 'It was awe-inspiring, the way she took that time out of her life to powwow with us, without ever seeming ceremonial about it,' one female staffer in attendance told me." Amanda Hess again at Slate. (Via @rsp1661.)
Sarah Miller at The Hairpin writing as David Brooks on Jill Abramson, which wins the internets this week, unless you are also counting "How To Fall Asleep: A Step-By-Step Guide," by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
"The Great Society did not just seek to redistribute wealth. Johnson also set out to shift power in America — from states to Washington, from the legislative branch to the executive, from corporations to federal regulators, from big-city political machines to community groups." Finally, at The Washington Post, Karen Tumulty's evocative essay on the fiftieth anniversary of The Great Society. (Via @pourmecoffee.)
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Links for the week ending 11 May 2014
"The once graceful historic district has been bombarded into grim lacework by the government. Its streets have been mined, and in some places burned, by fleeing fighters. Its last residents are leaving, except for six Christian families, who survived the siege alongside mainly Sunni fighters and civilians," writes Anne Barnard in the NYT from Homs, Syria.
"Traveling in the front seat of an armored Humvee, the general brushed off questions about a thick black plume of smoke to the south. It would turn out to be a suicide bombing at an army checkpoint that killed two soldiers. The general’s own house in Ramadi had been blown up a week earlier." Loveday Morris reports for The Washington Post from Anbar province in Iraq.
"The flaws in the idea were apparent to planners — the city’s poor would be forced to commute great distances to their jobs, and private developers would be reluctant to build there — but those who were present kept their reservations to themselves, and the belt was added." Ellen Barry reports for the NYT on the ongoing elections in the world's largest democracy, India.
"The 'Bring Back Our Girls' hashtag—retweeted nearly two million times so far by Twitter users including the Vatican, the first lady and celebrities including singers Mary J. Blige and Chris Brown—wasn't created by Ms. Mosley but by Nigerian Ibrahim Musa Abdullahi, a 35-year-old attorney in the capital Abuja who adapted a chant he heard on television there." Elizabeth Williamson, Natalie Andrews, and dude Michael M. Phillips for the Wall Street Journal on a textbook case of hashtag appropriation. (Via Kayla Webley.)
"It was Nigerians who took their good for nothing President to task and challenged him to address the plight of the missing girls. It is in their hands to seek justice for these girls and to ensure that the Nigerian government is held accountable. Your emphasis on U.S. action does more harm to the people you are supposedly trying to help and it only expands and sustain U.S. military might." At compareafrique.com, Jumoke Balogun argues that hashtag activism in support of American intervention is the last thing Nigerians need. (Via Jamilah King.)
"Progressives are often perplexed at why blue-collar guys blame their economic frustrations on people of color and not Wall Street or corporate titans. This is a learned response. In the South, especially, ever since Reconstruction threatened to create a biracial democracy responsive to the working classes, economic elites have stoked racial tensions in order to avoid redistributive policies." At Salon, an excerpt from Sheryll Cashin's new book about affirmative action and white, working-class anger. (Via Nikole Hannah-Jones.)
"Like Aziga and Ssenyonga, 52 percent of heterosexual men charged have been black, even though blacks make up only 6 percent of HIV-positive men in Canada. According to Tim McCaskell, of AIDS Action Now, 'The trope of the sexually predatory diseased black immigrant helped marshal racism to harden public opinion behind HIV criminalization.'" At Slate, Sarah Schulman on Canadian law criminalizing nondisclosure of HIV status — and the racism that fuels it.
"The Northwest Territories was fully open for exploration and development, but now, 70 percent of oil and gas contracts went to Inuvialuit businesses—a marked difference from the Alberta Tar Sands region, where First Nations have no ownership stake and also bear the brunt of the industry’s destructive and toxic effects (First Nations communities in the Tar Sands regions exhibit especially high levels of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases)." At n+1 from the end of last month, Audrea Lim reports from the front lines of Canada's "Arctic energy frontier."
"Oil field deaths reached 545 during America's drilling and fracking frenzy from 2008 to 2012, with Texas' 216 reported fatalities leading the nation." Lise Olsen reports for the Houston Chronicle.
"Epidemiologically, MERS is probably like an iceberg, with the severe cases making up the visible tip. But as none of the affected countries have been testing broadly to see how many people have been infected, it’s impossible at this point to even guess at how much lower the real death rate might be." Helen Branswell at Slate (big points to Slate for finding the best woman for the job) telling you what you need to know about the newest worrisome virus on the block. (Via Jody T.)
"The biggest declines happened for conditions that are more likely to be deadly if not caught early — for example, infections from complications of diabetes, heart attacks and cancer." Sabrina Tavernise for the NYT on a new studying showing that death rates in Massachusetts dropped following the institution of mandatory universal health coverage.
"Ever since 1988, the Brazilian constitution has promised free public healthcare to every citizen. '"Health is a private right and a duty of the state,"' said Alexandre Chiavegatto Filho, a health policy professor at the University of Sao Paulo, quoting the statute. 'People do love that phrase. It would be crazy and impossible for any government to change that.'" Olga Khazan at The Atlantic with a fascinating look at how Brazil's immense inequality provides far more relevant lessons for American health care goals than the universal healthcare systems of Europe.
"Latino apprehension about healthcare goes deeper than issues of access. It also partially derives from a long history of preferring non-Western medicine, a cultural uneasiness with the American style of healthcare, and a tradition of privacy and individual pride that makes many Latinos believe we have no need to ask for help." Also at The Atlantic, Amanda Machado explores why Latinos in the U.S. "are the racial and ethnic group least likely to visit the doctor."
"At carbon dioxide levels that are projected for the year 2050, wheat lost more than 9 percent of its zinc content, 5 percent of iron and 6 percent of its protein." Maggie Fox at NBC News on one consequence of climate change: people will have to eat more calories to obtain the same amount of nutrients from common foods. Right, but let's go on blaming school bake sales for obesity, okay?
"The very top of "Big Green" is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn't look like change. It doesn't even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change?" Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian.
"In the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes for five justices, these benedictions are now free and unfettered 'prayer opportunities.' And 'prayer opportunities' are, like 'job creators' and 'freedoms,' what make America great." Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on this week's Supreme Court ruling ensuring that those of us who don't belong to the majority religions in our communities have more opportunities to feel excluded at public functions. Yay!
"Division services like Fair Outcomes and Spliddit offer a mathematical lens through which users can view their own motivations. Will they choose to emphasize envy-freeness or social welfare? If even an envy-free division feels unacceptable to them, are they motivated by vindictiveness?" At Nautilus, Erica Klarreich explains how math can help "set you free — from envy."
"With clumsy and inexact language, or language that chooses to be accurate only at designated moments, the media further clouds what is already the all-too-obscure world of what makes a family and how we get one and, now more than ever, how we keep it stitched together." Jennifer Gilmore at Dame Magazine with a hell of a piece about a celebrity custody battle, journalistic carelessness, and, ultimately, personal heartbreak. (Via Kera Bolonik.)
"She does everything that she didn’t do before. I guess she feels like she has to make up for it. I’m not going to say I’m over it, but I forgave her a long time ago. Now my siblings are the ones who will never let her forget what happened." At Rookie, four teenagers talk about foster care, abuse, and resilience. (Via Suzy Khimm.)
"'I had faith the authorities were going to do something about it,' she says. 'But they got back to me and said there was nothing they could do. The police contacted me at one point and said, "That person who you told us about, he sounds like he’s just concerned. I don’t think you have anything to worry about from him."'" Katie Van Syckle at Cosmopolitan on sexual violence and online harassment at Dartmouth. Tell me, college administrators, why exactly our young people should pay a quarter of a million dollars to run the risk of these kinds of experiences? (Via Maryn McKenna.)
"Her mom, friends, teachers, and coaches rallied around her, told her how much they loved her: 'All that shit that you just wish somebody would have said without there being an explicit reason to.'" From last week, Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed reflects on the homophobic hate crime hoax a troubled high school student staged against herself ten years ago. (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"Well, that's the kind of little detail you just know to include when you're a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I'm in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!" Heather Havrilesky at The Awl tells you how to be a real writer. For the record, 3:30 p.m. is the point at which I started laughing so hard that I strained something. (Like a real writer would!)
"We have no dominion over what the world will do to us, all of us. What the earth will make of our tinkering and abuse can be modeled by computers but is, in the end, beyond our reckoning, our science. Nature is not simply done to. Nature responds." Extraordinary piece by Eva Saulitis from the March/April issue of Orion, on facing her own death on the banks of a salmon stream. (Via Janine DeBaise.)
"In the immediate aftermath of this failed exchange, I did the only thing I could do: take to my room and fester. I had to figure out what had gone wrong. Soon I had decided the whole project of coming out had been bankrupt – that I had been misled by identity politics into a contraction of the political field to the microuniverse of the bourgeois family. The whole thing had been so petit bourgeois (I thought to myself, petit bourgeoisely) – an embarrassing political miscalculation." Finally, this amazing, wrenching, hilarious piece by Jordana Rosenberg at Avidly: "Gender Trouble on Mother's Day." (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin for this gem.)
"Traveling in the front seat of an armored Humvee, the general brushed off questions about a thick black plume of smoke to the south. It would turn out to be a suicide bombing at an army checkpoint that killed two soldiers. The general’s own house in Ramadi had been blown up a week earlier." Loveday Morris reports for The Washington Post from Anbar province in Iraq.
"The flaws in the idea were apparent to planners — the city’s poor would be forced to commute great distances to their jobs, and private developers would be reluctant to build there — but those who were present kept their reservations to themselves, and the belt was added." Ellen Barry reports for the NYT on the ongoing elections in the world's largest democracy, India.
"The 'Bring Back Our Girls' hashtag—retweeted nearly two million times so far by Twitter users including the Vatican, the first lady and celebrities including singers Mary J. Blige and Chris Brown—wasn't created by Ms. Mosley but by Nigerian Ibrahim Musa Abdullahi, a 35-year-old attorney in the capital Abuja who adapted a chant he heard on television there." Elizabeth Williamson, Natalie Andrews, and dude Michael M. Phillips for the Wall Street Journal on a textbook case of hashtag appropriation. (Via Kayla Webley.)
"It was Nigerians who took their good for nothing President to task and challenged him to address the plight of the missing girls. It is in their hands to seek justice for these girls and to ensure that the Nigerian government is held accountable. Your emphasis on U.S. action does more harm to the people you are supposedly trying to help and it only expands and sustain U.S. military might." At compareafrique.com, Jumoke Balogun argues that hashtag activism in support of American intervention is the last thing Nigerians need. (Via Jamilah King.)
"Progressives are often perplexed at why blue-collar guys blame their economic frustrations on people of color and not Wall Street or corporate titans. This is a learned response. In the South, especially, ever since Reconstruction threatened to create a biracial democracy responsive to the working classes, economic elites have stoked racial tensions in order to avoid redistributive policies." At Salon, an excerpt from Sheryll Cashin's new book about affirmative action and white, working-class anger. (Via Nikole Hannah-Jones.)
"Like Aziga and Ssenyonga, 52 percent of heterosexual men charged have been black, even though blacks make up only 6 percent of HIV-positive men in Canada. According to Tim McCaskell, of AIDS Action Now, 'The trope of the sexually predatory diseased black immigrant helped marshal racism to harden public opinion behind HIV criminalization.'" At Slate, Sarah Schulman on Canadian law criminalizing nondisclosure of HIV status — and the racism that fuels it.
"The Northwest Territories was fully open for exploration and development, but now, 70 percent of oil and gas contracts went to Inuvialuit businesses—a marked difference from the Alberta Tar Sands region, where First Nations have no ownership stake and also bear the brunt of the industry’s destructive and toxic effects (First Nations communities in the Tar Sands regions exhibit especially high levels of rare cancers and autoimmune diseases)." At n+1 from the end of last month, Audrea Lim reports from the front lines of Canada's "Arctic energy frontier."
"Oil field deaths reached 545 during America's drilling and fracking frenzy from 2008 to 2012, with Texas' 216 reported fatalities leading the nation." Lise Olsen reports for the Houston Chronicle.
"Epidemiologically, MERS is probably like an iceberg, with the severe cases making up the visible tip. But as none of the affected countries have been testing broadly to see how many people have been infected, it’s impossible at this point to even guess at how much lower the real death rate might be." Helen Branswell at Slate (big points to Slate for finding the best woman for the job) telling you what you need to know about the newest worrisome virus on the block. (Via Jody T.)
"The biggest declines happened for conditions that are more likely to be deadly if not caught early — for example, infections from complications of diabetes, heart attacks and cancer." Sabrina Tavernise for the NYT on a new studying showing that death rates in Massachusetts dropped following the institution of mandatory universal health coverage.
"Ever since 1988, the Brazilian constitution has promised free public healthcare to every citizen. '"Health is a private right and a duty of the state,"' said Alexandre Chiavegatto Filho, a health policy professor at the University of Sao Paulo, quoting the statute. 'People do love that phrase. It would be crazy and impossible for any government to change that.'" Olga Khazan at The Atlantic with a fascinating look at how Brazil's immense inequality provides far more relevant lessons for American health care goals than the universal healthcare systems of Europe.
"Latino apprehension about healthcare goes deeper than issues of access. It also partially derives from a long history of preferring non-Western medicine, a cultural uneasiness with the American style of healthcare, and a tradition of privacy and individual pride that makes many Latinos believe we have no need to ask for help." Also at The Atlantic, Amanda Machado explores why Latinos in the U.S. "are the racial and ethnic group least likely to visit the doctor."
"At carbon dioxide levels that are projected for the year 2050, wheat lost more than 9 percent of its zinc content, 5 percent of iron and 6 percent of its protein." Maggie Fox at NBC News on one consequence of climate change: people will have to eat more calories to obtain the same amount of nutrients from common foods. Right, but let's go on blaming school bake sales for obesity, okay?
"The very top of "Big Green" is as white and male as a Tea Party meet-up. It doesn't look like change. It doesn't even look like America. So is it any wonder environmental groups are having trouble connecting with the public on climate change?" Suzanne Goldenberg at The Guardian.
"In the hands of Justice Anthony Kennedy, who writes for five justices, these benedictions are now free and unfettered 'prayer opportunities.' And 'prayer opportunities' are, like 'job creators' and 'freedoms,' what make America great." Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on this week's Supreme Court ruling ensuring that those of us who don't belong to the majority religions in our communities have more opportunities to feel excluded at public functions. Yay!
"Division services like Fair Outcomes and Spliddit offer a mathematical lens through which users can view their own motivations. Will they choose to emphasize envy-freeness or social welfare? If even an envy-free division feels unacceptable to them, are they motivated by vindictiveness?" At Nautilus, Erica Klarreich explains how math can help "set you free — from envy."
"With clumsy and inexact language, or language that chooses to be accurate only at designated moments, the media further clouds what is already the all-too-obscure world of what makes a family and how we get one and, now more than ever, how we keep it stitched together." Jennifer Gilmore at Dame Magazine with a hell of a piece about a celebrity custody battle, journalistic carelessness, and, ultimately, personal heartbreak. (Via Kera Bolonik.)
"She does everything that she didn’t do before. I guess she feels like she has to make up for it. I’m not going to say I’m over it, but I forgave her a long time ago. Now my siblings are the ones who will never let her forget what happened." At Rookie, four teenagers talk about foster care, abuse, and resilience. (Via Suzy Khimm.)
"'I had faith the authorities were going to do something about it,' she says. 'But they got back to me and said there was nothing they could do. The police contacted me at one point and said, "That person who you told us about, he sounds like he’s just concerned. I don’t think you have anything to worry about from him."'" Katie Van Syckle at Cosmopolitan on sexual violence and online harassment at Dartmouth. Tell me, college administrators, why exactly our young people should pay a quarter of a million dollars to run the risk of these kinds of experiences? (Via Maryn McKenna.)
"Her mom, friends, teachers, and coaches rallied around her, told her how much they loved her: 'All that shit that you just wish somebody would have said without there being an explicit reason to.'" From last week, Sandra Allen at BuzzFeed reflects on the homophobic hate crime hoax a troubled high school student staged against herself ten years ago. (Hat tip to Els Kushner.)
"Well, that's the kind of little detail you just know to include when you're a former full-time professional TV critic like I am. I'm in the zone, too. THIS IS WHY I WRITE, I tell myself. FOR THIS FEELING RIGHT HERE. I AM FEELING IT TODAY! HIGH-FIVE!" Heather Havrilesky at The Awl tells you how to be a real writer. For the record, 3:30 p.m. is the point at which I started laughing so hard that I strained something. (Like a real writer would!)
"We have no dominion over what the world will do to us, all of us. What the earth will make of our tinkering and abuse can be modeled by computers but is, in the end, beyond our reckoning, our science. Nature is not simply done to. Nature responds." Extraordinary piece by Eva Saulitis from the March/April issue of Orion, on facing her own death on the banks of a salmon stream. (Via Janine DeBaise.)
"In the immediate aftermath of this failed exchange, I did the only thing I could do: take to my room and fester. I had to figure out what had gone wrong. Soon I had decided the whole project of coming out had been bankrupt – that I had been misled by identity politics into a contraction of the political field to the microuniverse of the bourgeois family. The whole thing had been so petit bourgeois (I thought to myself, petit bourgeoisely) – an embarrassing political miscalculation." Finally, this amazing, wrenching, hilarious piece by Jordana Rosenberg at Avidly: "Gender Trouble on Mother's Day." (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin for this gem.)
Sunday, April 27, 2014
Links for the week ending 27 April 2014
"CDC's current funding for gun violence prevention research remains at $0." Lois Beckett on politically motivated suppression of basic research.
"A common thread running through stories of the unenrolled is cost. Many people either do not qualify for federal subsidies or believe that the assistance is not enough to make insurance affordable, interviews with consumers and experts suggested." At the NYT, Abby Goodnough continues her valuable series on the implementation of the ACA.
"She waited for him to hang up. Then she smashed the receiver several times against the base of the phone. Then she went outside to face her friends. 'I guess my brother just killed my mom,' she said." Wrenching profile of an Ontario family trying to move on after one member's mental illness spiraled into violence. By Amy Dempsey at the Toronto Star. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"I’ve been reflecting lately on the young people who live in the world, unmoored. The ones who seem to be passing through and don’t have any expectations of staying for long." @prisonculture at her blog on a young man she knows who was recently shot.
"The 234 missing girls are not being seen as Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba; they are simply people's children." Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani at The Guardian on the response of ordinary Nigerians to the extremist kidnapping of students from a school in the northeast.
"In Bujumbura, the sleepy capital on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the radio echoes from shops, bicycle taxis, police handsets and cell phones. Around midday and in the evenings, when the main stations do their news programs — most in French (the colonial tongue) and Kirundi (the indigenous language) — it can feel as though the city itself is emitting the broadcasts." Cora Currier reports from Burundi, where radio has been a major player in preserving a fragile peace after civil war. At Al Jazeera America.
"Also important, the emails sent to professors were sent by 'prospective students' interested in working with the professor in a graduate program. This is noteworthy because it means that women and racial minorities are discriminated against before they even begin the application process to graduate school. Nicki Lisa Cole at About.com analyzes a recent study on racial and gender bias among professors. (Via @SocImages.)
"His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing." Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on the majority decision — and the dissent — in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
"To be isolated from history in a hall of mirrors is heaven to a young person, and the bliss of this collective, amnesiac atemporality on some campuses extends way beyond spring break." Jia Tolentino, who teaches at the University of Michigan, at The Hairpin, writing about the Schuette decision.
"Our resistance is corporate labor. Take the very structure of hashtags. If capitalism works on the principle of false scarcity, achieving trending status makes hashtags 'scarce.'" Every sentence of this piece is diamond-sharp. Tressie McMillan Cottom and dude Robert Reece at her blog.
"The impressive ad hoc capacity that can be focused via digital tools– and with the aid of trending topics and other social media affordances — allows citizens to carry out actions for which they would previously have needed to build powerful and robust social institutions. Such institutions could then do other things besides the specific actions of the moment for which the citizen-capacity came together." Zeynep Tufekci at Medium asking incisive questions about what social media does badly compared to traditional organizing.
"It’s a specious notion that free trade will singularly usher in political reform, when in fact China’s economic might has buoyed censorship beyond its national borders. At the same time, no one should expect heroism from for-profit enterprises; and I have a hard time begrudging people who make their livelihood in China, including foreign journalists, for proceeding with caution." Nuanced piece about working under censorship, by Leslie Anne Jones at Aeon.
"In today’s economy, it’s possible to insulate yourself from almost all embodied interactions with employees—Internet commerce, customer assistance live chat, and even self checkout at the grocery story provide a soothing buffer from class inequities. But you can’t mechanize the labor that takes care of your child—at least not yet—which is part of the reason that nanny politics, for lack of a better word, remain so fraught." Anne Helen Petersen at The Baffler from a couple of weeks ago, on her experiences as a "liberal arts nanny."
"And this is perhaps the biggest thing my parents have taught me, by example, which is always the best way for a parent to teach something: that you follow what you believe in and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t sit around whining. You find something else productive that you can feel good about. You contribute something." At The Billfold, Lauren Quinn on giving up her dream of writing a book.
"We shouldn’t be reading to check off boxes. We should be reading in a way that, when we look at what we’ve consumed, we recognize a diversity of perspectives and ways of seeing the world." Roxane Gay at Slate on "women you should be reading" lists.
"There are certain phrases that tip people off about gender bias. For example, if people do some kind of neuroscience study, let's say it's an MRI study with humans. These researchers will often say, 'This is a hardwired difference between males and females.' Well, if these are adults [who are being studied], it's not hardwired at all, right?" At Popular Science, a Q & A with Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin on a new fellowship (er) in feminist biology.
"Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen." From last month at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on repetition as a fundamental part of how we hear music.
"As Wikipedia moves forward, I hope to advocate for Wikipedia taking a keener interest in its labor practices as pertaining to digital volunteering. Most volunteers or unpaid interns sign a volunteer contract- are such contracts necessary for digital volunteering?" Wikipedia editor Dorothy Howard muses on the implications of who performs the free encyclopedia's labor. (Via Karen Gregory.)
"In a 2014 study that analyzed data from a private apparel retailer’s website, MIT’s Simester found that only about 1.5 percent of customers, or 15 out of 1,000, write reviews." Josephine Wolff at Nautilus on the unrepresentative nature — not to mention outright fraud — that limits the usefulness of online product and service reviews.
"In its simplest terms, gold-digging is trying to use someone else’s privilege for a leg up." Promising new column at The Billfold by a very young writer named Diana Clarke.
"The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing—as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion. Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf and accepting uncertainty. At The New Yorker. (Via Jody T.)
"That people came to the Tambopata to see something—as I first wanted to see it—as pristine, virgin, untouched. The 'real' Peru. But as I spent more time in the ensconced fantasy that the research center seemed to be, the real Peru was out there, through the television, in the streets, in the mines." At Vela, Amanda Giracca complicates a volunteer stint at a Peruvian nature reserve.
"If I think of anxiety as this entity separate from myself, a curse from a God who would test me, I become this divided person who is constantly trying to walk half of herself out the door." Lovely essay on faith and anxiety by Laura Turner at The Toast.
"Oy. Okay. So, the show is sort of a solo show. I call it an interactive baking comedy. I tell stories. There’s an emotional arc. I structured the stories around the baking process: DRY – WET – MIX – FORM – BAKE." Lili Loofbourow interviews comedian Heather Gold at The Hairpin.
"I want visitors to understand that our eighteenth-century forbears weren’t stupid. In the absence of key pieces of information—for examples, germ theory—they developed a model of the body, health, and healing that was fundamentally logical. Some treatments worked, and many didn’t, but there was a method to the apparent madness." This is so wonderful. Lindsay Keiter at The Appendix on what she teaches visitors to a Virginia living history museum's apothecary shop. (Bah, I don't have a record of where I got this link from. My apologies to whoever you are, and thank you!)
"What kind of an asshole doesn’t talk to their own mother? Let me try to answer that." Finally, from Gabrielle Moss at The Toast, an excellent essay on being estranged from one's parent(s).
I'm taking a vacation from the internets this coming week. I'll see you back here on 11 May. As always, thanks for reading!
"A common thread running through stories of the unenrolled is cost. Many people either do not qualify for federal subsidies or believe that the assistance is not enough to make insurance affordable, interviews with consumers and experts suggested." At the NYT, Abby Goodnough continues her valuable series on the implementation of the ACA.
"She waited for him to hang up. Then she smashed the receiver several times against the base of the phone. Then she went outside to face her friends. 'I guess my brother just killed my mom,' she said." Wrenching profile of an Ontario family trying to move on after one member's mental illness spiraled into violence. By Amy Dempsey at the Toronto Star. (Via Nicole Cliffe at The Toast.)
"I’ve been reflecting lately on the young people who live in the world, unmoored. The ones who seem to be passing through and don’t have any expectations of staying for long." @prisonculture at her blog on a young man she knows who was recently shot.
"The 234 missing girls are not being seen as Hausa or Igbo or Yoruba; they are simply people's children." Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani at The Guardian on the response of ordinary Nigerians to the extremist kidnapping of students from a school in the northeast.
"In Bujumbura, the sleepy capital on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, the radio echoes from shops, bicycle taxis, police handsets and cell phones. Around midday and in the evenings, when the main stations do their news programs — most in French (the colonial tongue) and Kirundi (the indigenous language) — it can feel as though the city itself is emitting the broadcasts." Cora Currier reports from Burundi, where radio has been a major player in preserving a fragile peace after civil war. At Al Jazeera America.
"Also important, the emails sent to professors were sent by 'prospective students' interested in working with the professor in a graduate program. This is noteworthy because it means that women and racial minorities are discriminated against before they even begin the application process to graduate school. Nicki Lisa Cole at About.com analyzes a recent study on racial and gender bias among professors. (Via @SocImages.)
"His defensiveness at having someone explaining the limits of his own understanding of racism is palpable. He feels that he has been called out, shamed, and silenced. It is not clear whether or not he understands that his horror at being condescended to, his opinion disregarded, is among the very experiences of racial injustice that Sotomayor is describing." Dahlia Lithwick at Slate on the majority decision — and the dissent — in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action.
"To be isolated from history in a hall of mirrors is heaven to a young person, and the bliss of this collective, amnesiac atemporality on some campuses extends way beyond spring break." Jia Tolentino, who teaches at the University of Michigan, at The Hairpin, writing about the Schuette decision.
"Our resistance is corporate labor. Take the very structure of hashtags. If capitalism works on the principle of false scarcity, achieving trending status makes hashtags 'scarce.'" Every sentence of this piece is diamond-sharp. Tressie McMillan Cottom and dude Robert Reece at her blog.
"The impressive ad hoc capacity that can be focused via digital tools– and with the aid of trending topics and other social media affordances — allows citizens to carry out actions for which they would previously have needed to build powerful and robust social institutions. Such institutions could then do other things besides the specific actions of the moment for which the citizen-capacity came together." Zeynep Tufekci at Medium asking incisive questions about what social media does badly compared to traditional organizing.
"It’s a specious notion that free trade will singularly usher in political reform, when in fact China’s economic might has buoyed censorship beyond its national borders. At the same time, no one should expect heroism from for-profit enterprises; and I have a hard time begrudging people who make their livelihood in China, including foreign journalists, for proceeding with caution." Nuanced piece about working under censorship, by Leslie Anne Jones at Aeon.
"In today’s economy, it’s possible to insulate yourself from almost all embodied interactions with employees—Internet commerce, customer assistance live chat, and even self checkout at the grocery story provide a soothing buffer from class inequities. But you can’t mechanize the labor that takes care of your child—at least not yet—which is part of the reason that nanny politics, for lack of a better word, remain so fraught." Anne Helen Petersen at The Baffler from a couple of weeks ago, on her experiences as a "liberal arts nanny."
"And this is perhaps the biggest thing my parents have taught me, by example, which is always the best way for a parent to teach something: that you follow what you believe in and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t sit around whining. You find something else productive that you can feel good about. You contribute something." At The Billfold, Lauren Quinn on giving up her dream of writing a book.
"We shouldn’t be reading to check off boxes. We should be reading in a way that, when we look at what we’ve consumed, we recognize a diversity of perspectives and ways of seeing the world." Roxane Gay at Slate on "women you should be reading" lists.
"There are certain phrases that tip people off about gender bias. For example, if people do some kind of neuroscience study, let's say it's an MRI study with humans. These researchers will often say, 'This is a hardwired difference between males and females.' Well, if these are adults [who are being studied], it's not hardwired at all, right?" At Popular Science, a Q & A with Janet Hyde at the University of Wisconsin on a new fellowship (er) in feminist biology.
"Repetitiveness actually gives rise to the kind of listening that we think of as musical. It carves out a familiar, rewarding path in our minds, allowing us at once to anticipate and participate in each phrase as we listen." From last month at Aeon, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis on repetition as a fundamental part of how we hear music.
"As Wikipedia moves forward, I hope to advocate for Wikipedia taking a keener interest in its labor practices as pertaining to digital volunteering. Most volunteers or unpaid interns sign a volunteer contract- are such contracts necessary for digital volunteering?" Wikipedia editor Dorothy Howard muses on the implications of who performs the free encyclopedia's labor. (Via Karen Gregory.)
"In a 2014 study that analyzed data from a private apparel retailer’s website, MIT’s Simester found that only about 1.5 percent of customers, or 15 out of 1,000, write reviews." Josephine Wolff at Nautilus on the unrepresentative nature — not to mention outright fraud — that limits the usefulness of online product and service reviews.
"In its simplest terms, gold-digging is trying to use someone else’s privilege for a leg up." Promising new column at The Billfold by a very young writer named Diana Clarke.
"The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think. It’s an extraordinary declaration, asserting that the unknown need not be turned into the known through false divination, or the projection of grim political or ideological narratives; it’s a celebration of darkness, willing—as that “I think” indicates—to be uncertain even about its own assertion. Rebecca Solnit on Virginia Woolf and accepting uncertainty. At The New Yorker. (Via Jody T.)
"That people came to the Tambopata to see something—as I first wanted to see it—as pristine, virgin, untouched. The 'real' Peru. But as I spent more time in the ensconced fantasy that the research center seemed to be, the real Peru was out there, through the television, in the streets, in the mines." At Vela, Amanda Giracca complicates a volunteer stint at a Peruvian nature reserve.
"If I think of anxiety as this entity separate from myself, a curse from a God who would test me, I become this divided person who is constantly trying to walk half of herself out the door." Lovely essay on faith and anxiety by Laura Turner at The Toast.
"Oy. Okay. So, the show is sort of a solo show. I call it an interactive baking comedy. I tell stories. There’s an emotional arc. I structured the stories around the baking process: DRY – WET – MIX – FORM – BAKE." Lili Loofbourow interviews comedian Heather Gold at The Hairpin.
"I want visitors to understand that our eighteenth-century forbears weren’t stupid. In the absence of key pieces of information—for examples, germ theory—they developed a model of the body, health, and healing that was fundamentally logical. Some treatments worked, and many didn’t, but there was a method to the apparent madness." This is so wonderful. Lindsay Keiter at The Appendix on what she teaches visitors to a Virginia living history museum's apothecary shop. (Bah, I don't have a record of where I got this link from. My apologies to whoever you are, and thank you!)
"What kind of an asshole doesn’t talk to their own mother? Let me try to answer that." Finally, from Gabrielle Moss at The Toast, an excellent essay on being estranged from one's parent(s).
I'm taking a vacation from the internets this coming week. I'll see you back here on 11 May. As always, thanks for reading!
Sunday, April 20, 2014
Links for the week ending 20 April 2014
"The principal struggles to explain to students how the segregation they experience is any different from the old version simply because no law requires it. 'It is hard, it is a tough conversation, and it is a conversation I don’t think we as adults want to have.'" This link is to the full-text version of Nicole Hannah-Jones' report for ProPublica on the resegregation of schools in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. You can see the Snowfall-style full graphic version here.
"Even in Mississippi, where a higher percentage of students get physically disciplined than in any other state, the paddle is starting to lose some of its might. The number of beatings fell 33 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a report by the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson." Sarah Carr at The Nation. (Via Dana Goldstein.)
"They all say they don’t really trust police or each other, that they are still trying to forgive the system and the shooter. They all say there is no justice here." Another multipart Snowfall-style series, this one on witness intimidation and suspicion of the cops in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By Joan Garrett McClane for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. (I can't remember how I got to this one, but if it was via you, thanks!)
"But the zones have ballooned to include entire cities. They now hit almost any urban drug crime with an extra felony, one that was meant to punish dealing to school kids. Meanwhile, drug offenders in whiter, wealthier, spread-out suburbs and towns rarely face the same consequences. " Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on the racial inequalities created by drug-free school zone laws.
"Missouri’s lifetime ban on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for people convicted of a drug-related felony is an artifact of the welfare reform effort of 1996. Most states have modified or removed the lifetime ban. Missouri is one of 10 states that have not." Marie French for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Via @prisonculture.)
"He is allowed to work up to 35 hours per week, but is usually assigned fewer, and he is never assigned enough to live on. If a worker gets 40 hours per week, he tells me, the manager could lose his bonus." Sarah Kendzior profiles fast-food workers in St. Louis, organizing to change working conditions that guarantee nothing but generations raised in poverty. At Medium. (Via David Hull.)
"Bernie likes to think of his job as if he’s building a baseball team. He knows he’s got to fill so many slots with so many applicants, but there’s potentially some wiggle room in how he does that. Can the guy who applied for first base play right field instead? What about the pitcher?" Fascinating piece by Monica Hesse at The Washington Post on staffing a newly planned Ohio factory.
"With fewer landing spots in the middle, the structure becomes less sound. This is the question buried in the rhetoric about the higher education crisis: what is college when there is no middle?" Tressie McMillan Cottom at Dissent about how the end of good middle-class jobs has hollowed out the advantage of a college education.
"She lies because she thinks she has to, because of the legal document she signed during her fourth month at Bagram air base, after she sneaked over to the hospital and asked to see the person who handles sexual assaults, after a nurse took Polaroid photos of bruises on her neck and scratches on her back, collected swabs and hair samples and put them in a brown paper bag." Stephanie McCrummen for The Washington Post on the terrible choice given to soldiers who have suffered sexual assault.
"Deregulating campaign finance is clearly part of his long-term project. In the course of his opinion, the chief justice made some moves that are worth highlighting for the way in which they illuminate both his method and his priorities." Linda Greenhouse on the Roberts Supreme Court, for the NYT. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"Both Intuit and CCIA declined to answer questions about their connections to the letters and op-eds. An Intuit spokeswoman, Julie Miller, said in an emailed statement that Intuit works with many types of groups to support 'taxpayer empowerment,' and 'we feel all points of view deserve to be heard.'" Liz Day at ProPublica on the not-so-grassroots campaign against prefilled tax returns.
"The United States spends more than $50 billion a year on spying and intelligence, while the folks who build important defense software — in this case a program called OpenSSL that ensures that your connection to a website is encrypted — are four core programmers, only one of whom calls it a full-time job." Julia Angwin on the Heartbleed bug for ProPublica.
" A military judge abruptly recessed the first 9/11 trial hearing of the year Monday after defense lawyers accused the FBI in open court of trying to turn a defense team security officer into a secret informant." Carol Rosenberg for the Miami Herald.
"From Homs to Damascus, even in landscapes of crushed and charred buildings, new posters of Mr. Assad are appearing, with an electioneering flavor. Anne Barnard for the NYT on proposed presidential elections in Syria.
For now though, no one is publicly questioning how and why the Kunming attackers organized the assault, why they chose that city, why authorities were unable to prevent it and why it took 10 minutes for an armed SWAT team officer to arrive on the scene and shoot five assailants." Julie Makinen at the LAT on suppression of discussion about the knife attacks at a Chinese railway station. (Via David Hull.)
"Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city's smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that ." At NPR, Louisa Lim writes about a single elderly woman determined to keep alive the memory of a massacre in the Chinese city of Chengdu that took place at the same time as the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.
"Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority." Sasha Sagan at New York Magazine on her father, Carl. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Drilling operations at several natural gas wells in southwestern Pennsylvania released methane into the atmosphere at rates that were 100 to 1,000 times greater than federal regulators had estimated, new research shows." Neela Benerjee at the LAT. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them." Pregnancy as war between the mother and the fetus, and the menstruation that evolved as a result, by Suzanne Sadedin at Quora. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"The owners of Hobby Lobby believe that IUDs actually cause abortions. Birth control activists say IUDs never cause abortions, and work by preventing pregnancy, just like you’d expect birth control to do. Who is right?" Nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing explaining the facts and the ambiguities about IUDs. (Hat tip to Rebecca Jeschke.)
"So, from 2001 until February of this year, I spent at least $60,000 in health insurance and associated medical costs (routine doctor’s visits, medication and the like) that were not covered by insurance. One could counter that my insurance premiums bought me peace of mind — but not with a $15,000 deductible for myself and my children." Writer Elizabeth Hand singing the praises of her new, affordable insurance. At Salon. (Via @rsp1661.)
"She is talking these girls back from a place where Cobain’s suicide appears reasonable, justifiable, attractive. She is showing them the other side of suicide: the aftermath. She is the aftermath." From two weeks ago at Guernica, Candace Opper on Kurt Cobain's suicide — and the way it changed how we talked about suicide prevention. (Via Jody T.)
"You die the way you live; you divorce the way you live. When, in 1990, my parents filed for joint custody of me, they thought they were doing something without clear precedent." At n+1, Claire Harlan Orsi on growing up in between two homes. (Via Mara Smith.)
"A lot of young people are rescued by art. And comics and cartoons, because they are so abstracted—a pure art form that is only very loosely tethered to the so-called real world—are maybe particularly useful for that." I gotta be honest and say that I am not entirely sure what this is, but it's by Maria Bustillos and it's published by The Awl and it's making me think that maybe the Cartoon Network went on to do worthwhile things even after the demise of my dearly beloved Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
"Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren't eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave." Ah, Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin saying more in two paragraphs than most of us will ever say in our entire lives.
"Do we have kitten posters hanging above our desks? If we do, who can say that we do not work in an office?" Finally, because anything containing an Elizabeth Bishop joke automatically wins the week, Patricia Lockwood at The Poetry Foundation asking: is poetry work? (Via Stephen Burt.)
"Even in Mississippi, where a higher percentage of students get physically disciplined than in any other state, the paddle is starting to lose some of its might. The number of beatings fell 33 percent between 2008 and 2012, according to a report by the Clarion-Ledger newspaper in Jackson." Sarah Carr at The Nation. (Via Dana Goldstein.)
"They all say they don’t really trust police or each other, that they are still trying to forgive the system and the shooter. They all say there is no justice here." Another multipart Snowfall-style series, this one on witness intimidation and suspicion of the cops in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By Joan Garrett McClane for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. (I can't remember how I got to this one, but if it was via you, thanks!)
"But the zones have ballooned to include entire cities. They now hit almost any urban drug crime with an extra felony, one that was meant to punish dealing to school kids. Meanwhile, drug offenders in whiter, wealthier, spread-out suburbs and towns rarely face the same consequences. " Christie Thompson at ThinkProgress on the racial inequalities created by drug-free school zone laws.
"Missouri’s lifetime ban on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, for people convicted of a drug-related felony is an artifact of the welfare reform effort of 1996. Most states have modified or removed the lifetime ban. Missouri is one of 10 states that have not." Marie French for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. (Via @prisonculture.)
"He is allowed to work up to 35 hours per week, but is usually assigned fewer, and he is never assigned enough to live on. If a worker gets 40 hours per week, he tells me, the manager could lose his bonus." Sarah Kendzior profiles fast-food workers in St. Louis, organizing to change working conditions that guarantee nothing but generations raised in poverty. At Medium. (Via David Hull.)
"Bernie likes to think of his job as if he’s building a baseball team. He knows he’s got to fill so many slots with so many applicants, but there’s potentially some wiggle room in how he does that. Can the guy who applied for first base play right field instead? What about the pitcher?" Fascinating piece by Monica Hesse at The Washington Post on staffing a newly planned Ohio factory.
"With fewer landing spots in the middle, the structure becomes less sound. This is the question buried in the rhetoric about the higher education crisis: what is college when there is no middle?" Tressie McMillan Cottom at Dissent about how the end of good middle-class jobs has hollowed out the advantage of a college education.
"She lies because she thinks she has to, because of the legal document she signed during her fourth month at Bagram air base, after she sneaked over to the hospital and asked to see the person who handles sexual assaults, after a nurse took Polaroid photos of bruises on her neck and scratches on her back, collected swabs and hair samples and put them in a brown paper bag." Stephanie McCrummen for The Washington Post on the terrible choice given to soldiers who have suffered sexual assault.
"Deregulating campaign finance is clearly part of his long-term project. In the course of his opinion, the chief justice made some moves that are worth highlighting for the way in which they illuminate both his method and his priorities." Linda Greenhouse on the Roberts Supreme Court, for the NYT. (Via Irin Carmon.)
"Both Intuit and CCIA declined to answer questions about their connections to the letters and op-eds. An Intuit spokeswoman, Julie Miller, said in an emailed statement that Intuit works with many types of groups to support 'taxpayer empowerment,' and 'we feel all points of view deserve to be heard.'" Liz Day at ProPublica on the not-so-grassroots campaign against prefilled tax returns.
"The United States spends more than $50 billion a year on spying and intelligence, while the folks who build important defense software — in this case a program called OpenSSL that ensures that your connection to a website is encrypted — are four core programmers, only one of whom calls it a full-time job." Julia Angwin on the Heartbleed bug for ProPublica.
" A military judge abruptly recessed the first 9/11 trial hearing of the year Monday after defense lawyers accused the FBI in open court of trying to turn a defense team security officer into a secret informant." Carol Rosenberg for the Miami Herald.
"From Homs to Damascus, even in landscapes of crushed and charred buildings, new posters of Mr. Assad are appearing, with an electioneering flavor. Anne Barnard for the NYT on proposed presidential elections in Syria.
For now though, no one is publicly questioning how and why the Kunming attackers organized the assault, why they chose that city, why authorities were unable to prevent it and why it took 10 minutes for an armed SWAT team officer to arrive on the scene and shoot five assailants." Julie Makinen at the LAT on suppression of discussion about the knife attacks at a Chinese railway station. (Via David Hull.)
"Protests continued into the next evening, and as June 5 turned into June 6, a crowd broke into one of the city's smartest hotels, the Jinjiang. It was there, under the gaze of foreign guests, that ." At NPR, Louisa Lim writes about a single elderly woman determined to keep alive the memory of a massacre in the Chinese city of Chengdu that took place at the same time as the brutal suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square.
"Then he told me, very tenderly, that it can be dangerous to believe things just because you want them to be true. You can get tricked if you don’t question yourself and others, especially people in a position of authority." Sasha Sagan at New York Magazine on her father, Carl. (Via Nilanjana Roy.)
"Drilling operations at several natural gas wells in southwestern Pennsylvania released methane into the atmosphere at rates that were 100 to 1,000 times greater than federal regulators had estimated, new research shows." Neela Benerjee at the LAT. (Via Kate Sheppard.)
"The growing placenta literally burrows through this layer, rips into arterial walls and re-wires them to channel blood straight to the hungry embryo. It delves deep into the surrounding tissues, razes them and pumps the arteries full of hormones so they expand into the space created. It paralyzes these arteries so the mother cannot even constrict them." Pregnancy as war between the mother and the fetus, and the menstruation that evolved as a result, by Suzanne Sadedin at Quora. (Hat tip to Sheila Avelin.)
"The owners of Hobby Lobby believe that IUDs actually cause abortions. Birth control activists say IUDs never cause abortions, and work by preventing pregnancy, just like you’d expect birth control to do. Who is right?" Nice piece by Maggie Koerth-Baker at Boing Boing explaining the facts and the ambiguities about IUDs. (Hat tip to Rebecca Jeschke.)
"So, from 2001 until February of this year, I spent at least $60,000 in health insurance and associated medical costs (routine doctor’s visits, medication and the like) that were not covered by insurance. One could counter that my insurance premiums bought me peace of mind — but not with a $15,000 deductible for myself and my children." Writer Elizabeth Hand singing the praises of her new, affordable insurance. At Salon. (Via @rsp1661.)
"She is talking these girls back from a place where Cobain’s suicide appears reasonable, justifiable, attractive. She is showing them the other side of suicide: the aftermath. She is the aftermath." From two weeks ago at Guernica, Candace Opper on Kurt Cobain's suicide — and the way it changed how we talked about suicide prevention. (Via Jody T.)
"You die the way you live; you divorce the way you live. When, in 1990, my parents filed for joint custody of me, they thought they were doing something without clear precedent." At n+1, Claire Harlan Orsi on growing up in between two homes. (Via Mara Smith.)
"A lot of young people are rescued by art. And comics and cartoons, because they are so abstracted—a pure art form that is only very loosely tethered to the so-called real world—are maybe particularly useful for that." I gotta be honest and say that I am not entirely sure what this is, but it's by Maria Bustillos and it's published by The Awl and it's making me think that maybe the Cartoon Network went on to do worthwhile things even after the demise of my dearly beloved Space Ghost: Coast to Coast.
"Bless the teenagers of Central Asia. These kids weren't eagle hunting but they were certainly better than me in almost every way: kinder, more generous, more spontaneous, more loving, more brave." Ah, Jia Tolentino at The Hairpin saying more in two paragraphs than most of us will ever say in our entire lives.
"Do we have kitten posters hanging above our desks? If we do, who can say that we do not work in an office?" Finally, because anything containing an Elizabeth Bishop joke automatically wins the week, Patricia Lockwood at The Poetry Foundation asking: is poetry work? (Via Stephen Burt.)
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