A.N

"A napping infant is busy learning and memorizing, a new study suggests." Yes…same.

The concept of "general intelligence"—the idea that people who are good at one mental task tend to be good at many others—was considered radical in 1904, when Charles Spearman proposed the theory of a "g factor." Today, however, it is among the most replicated findings in psychology. But whereas in 1904 the US economy was a network of farms, mills, and artisans, today's economy is an office-based affair, where the most important g for many companies doesn't stand for general intelligence, but, rather, groups.

So, what makes groups smart? Is there any such thing as a "smart" group, or are groups just, well, clumps of smart people?

As a team of MIT scientists write in this Sunday's New York Times, research suggests that just as some individuals are smarter than others, some groups are smarter than others, across a range of tests and tasks. In other words, there is a "c factor" for collective intelligence. Teams that are successful at solving visual puzzles also tend to be good at brainstorming and beating computers in video games. The authors provide a nice summary of the characteristics of smart groups in their original study (not directly linked in the Times piece, but accessible on page 686 of Science, October 2010):

In two studies with 699 people, working in groups of two to five, we find converging evidence of a general collective intelligence factor that explains a group’s performance on a wide variety of tasks. This “c factor” is not strongly correlated with the average or maximum individual intelligence of group members but is correlated with the average social sensitivity of group members, the equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking, and the proportion of females in the group.

That bolded sentence is hiding a lot of heavy conclusions in plain sight. First, neither the average intelligence of the group nor the smartest person in the group had much to do with the group's "c" factor. Just as great artists don't necessarily form great bands when they pool their talents, smart people don't automatically make smart groups.

Furthermore, the predictable troupe of buzzwords you would expect to correlate with successful groups—"cohesion," "motivation," and "satisfaction"—didn't have much to do with effective teams, either. Instead, the single most important element of smart groups, according to the researchers, was their "average social sensitivity." That is, the best groups were also the best at reading the non-verbal cues of their teammates. And, since women score higher on this metric of emotional intelligence, teams with more women tended to be better teams.

What the heck is average social sensitivity? It is, essentially, mind-reading. When a member of your team—Michelle, we'll call her—says "I guess Danny really does have the answer for everything," and you detect a hint of aggrieved irony in Michelle's statement, while further noting the simultaneous drop in Michelle's chin as she makes the comment, coinciding with a deflated air of preemptive surrender in Michelle's tone, and you begin to think, hmmm, maybe what Michelle is actually saying is that Danny is a know-it-all jerk?, you are detecting what scientists would call "non-verbal clues." In plain-speak, you are reading between the lines. Indeed, like reading, social sensitivity is a kind of literacy, and it turns out that women are naturally more fluent in the language of tone and faces than the other half of their species.

Women are better at reading the mind through the face even online, when they can't see their teammates' faces. In a follow-up study (the full paper, which again isn't linked in the Times piece, lives here), MIT scientists gave participants a "Reading the Mind in the Eyes," or RME, test, where they were asked to identify complex emotions (e.g., shame or curiosity, rather than sadness or joy) in pictures of other people's eyes. Then they divided participants into teams and had them perform a number of tests, like brainstorming and group Sudoku. Again, teams with more women, who scored higher on the RME test, performed the best across the tasks. From the paper:

The [RME] scores of group members were a strong predictor of how well the groups could perform a wide range of tasks together, even when participants were only collaborating online via text chat and could not see each other’s eyes or facial expressions at all.

Reading these studies and the Times piece, I could think of two obvious objections.

• First: Isn't it possible that there are specific personality traits—like openness or empathy—that might make some men just as good as women at reading the minds of their teammates?
• Second: Is it really true that smarter teammates have so little to do with smart groups?

The MIT scientists answer the first question explicitly, with a no. "We found no significant correlation between a general factor of personality and collective intelligence or RME," they write. Mind-reading isn't a personality trait. It's a skill.

Second, the relationship between smart teammates and smart groups is complicated by the fact that groups are sometimes assigned problems that only require one person to solve. If you ask a team of highly emotionally sensitive people to solve a differential calculus problem, and none of them knows calculus, it's unlikely that they will come to grasp Taylor polynomials by looking deeply into each others' eyes and really, truly listening. When the problem can be solved by one really smart cookie (e.g.: who remembers calculus), it's nice to have a really smart cookie. If, however, the solution requires deep collaboration, EQ trumps IQ.

I found these studies eye-opening for two further reasons. First, there is a growing sense that the Internet can destroy interpersonal skills, kill our emotional intelligence, and turn us into warm-blooded versions of the very robots that we fear will one day take our jobs. But these studies suggest that the rules of empathy hold both on- and offline. Emotionally sensitive people are gifted at reading between the lines, whether the literal lines are brow wrinkles or text messages.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/the-secret-to-smart-groups-isnt-smart-people/384625/

Since the Supreme Court’s order Friday agreeing to hear four same-sex marriage cases, some professors and reporters have raised a troubling possibility: Could the Court have “stacked the deck” against full marriage equality by the way it phrased the “questions presented” by the cases? These are framed in terms of the states’ powers rather than of individual rights. These court watchers have suggested that they may point to a “compromise” that would mean less than full marriage equality—that is, a holding that states must recognize marriages performed by other states but may continue to refuse to marry same-sex coulples themselves.

Others, including Supreme Court go-to guy Michael Dorf of Cornell, suggest that the editing simply aligns the diverse cases and claims around a common set of issues. I incline to the Dorf view. The Court is, after all, combining four different lawsuits, each with its own parties and briefs, into one. But it’s worth thinking about how the change, if somehow deliberate, might play out in an opinion by, say, the Court’s bull elk, Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Here’s what the Court’s order asked:

1. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to license a marriage between two people of the same sex?
2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment require a state to recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out-of-state?

The case was brought by four different sets of plaintiffs; it challenges same-sex marriage bans in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. The parties phrased their questions in terms of the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment (Kentucky & Michigan); Due Process, Equal Protection, and the Full Faith and Credit Clause of Article of IV Section 1 (Ohio); and Due Process, Equal Protection, and the “fundamental right to interstate travel” (Tennessee).

So some cleaning up was necessary. Two of the cases involved already-married parties who want recognition of their out-of-state marriages (Ohio and Tennessee), while two involve parties who want to marry in their own states (Michigan and Kentucky). Thus, it was necessary to separate the “recognition” issue (must a state recognize out-of-state marriages and accord them marital benefits?) from the “celebration” issue (must a state allow same-sex couples to marry?). The Court’s phrasing, in fact, is not all that different from that of some of the petitions. And judicial rephrasing of questions presented, while not the norm, is far from unheard of in complex cases.

But an alert lawyer can certainly find some daylight—however small—between “recognition” and “celebration.” Steve Sanders of Indiana-Bloomington has highlighted this division (without advocating it), calling the recognition issue “the right to remain married.” In this scheme, same-sex marriages lawful under one state’s law would have to be valid under all others, even in states that don’t allow such marriages; but in-state couples in those states would have to go elsewhere to enter a valid marriage, because a state’s same-sex-marriage ban would remain valid.

Imagine for a moment, then, that this is a cunning land mine laid by conservative justices in the path of marriage equality. It might, at first glance, seem likely to appeal to Kennedy, who loves the majesty of the states as much as he loves his concepts of liberty and dignity. So imagine further that Kennedy sits down to write a “split-the-baby” opinion. Such an opinion could begin with “recognition.” This part writes itself, because Kennedy’s opinion in United States v. Windsor, the Defense of Marriage Act case, is emphatic about how awful it is when one sovereign (in that case, Uncle Sam) refuses to recognize a marriage deemed lawful by another (in that case, New York):

The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the States.

If that’s the law, who can invent a right of some states to impose stigma on legally married same-sex couples? Done and done. The justice continues on to “celebration.” This section begins with paeans to federalism, sovereign dignity, dignified sovereignty, the Framers, and the ballot initiative. It then suggests that, protected by these shields, no state must take a “sovereign act”—such as conducting a marriage—contrary to the will of its people. So far, so suitably abstract.

Thus, a state may be required by the Constitution to recognize marriages valid elsewhere but not be required to allow them on its soil. Its people in their wisdom can refuse celebration to the state’s own consenting, competent, adult committed same-sex couples because ...

Because ...

Because what exactly? What is there about same-sex couples, resident in a state, that makes it permissible for their own state to refuse them equal dignity and status with other couples who crossed a state line to marry? Can a state impose “a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma” on them and their children by refusing these families legal status equal to others—including other same-sex couples who are no different at all?

It can’t be simple dislike of homosexuals; that’s illegitimate “animus,” as defined by Kennedy in Romer v. Evans, the Colorado anti-gay initiative case. It can’t be disapproval of homosexual sex; Kennedy’s opinion in Lawrence v. Texas, by voiding Texas’s homosexual “sodomy” statute, has ruled that state interest “illegitimate.” It can’t be desire to favor “procreation”; the Windsor opinion notes that same-sex couples often form families with children, and then proclaims that the children of those unions are entitled to recognition of their parents’ union, and harmed when states withhold it.

Can it be the wonders of citizen lawmaking by initiative? Presumably not. In Romer, the Court struck down a ballot initiative as a violation of equal protection. Can it be “the will of the people”?  That “interest,” in effect, is just a restatement of the others, because the people can’t constitutionally “will” any law that has no legitimate interest behind it. Can it be, as Judge Jeffrey Sutton argued in one of the opinions the Supreme Court will now review, that it would be better for gays and lesbians themselves to win at the ballot box instead of at the Court? That would be a perverse ruling indeed, holding that a group protesting against legal inequality is in fact so meritorious that they deserve the glory of marching across the finish line rather than vindicating their rights in court. Of course, the opinion could point out that same-sex couples can always take an out-of-state trip, marry there, and return home to full recognition. That almost sounds okay; but Southern states used to send black students out of state for graduate and professional schools. While sexual orientation isn’t the same as race, there’s still something seamy about endorsing that old “separate but equal” dodge.

As an appellate clerk I once was assigned an opinion in a jailhouse suicide lawsuit. Two police officers brought a man to the lockup and told the jailer, “he may kill himself.” The jailer paid no attention. With no suicide watch assigned, the inmate was able to hang himself with his own shoelaces.

To me, all three had shown what the law calls “deliberate indifference,” and thus should have paid damages to the widow. I wrote page after purple page justifying that result; but when I got the opinion back, the judge had left in the jailer but struck out the two officers. At the top of the page he wrote two words: “You tried.”

Kennedy may try. But I think that, like my jailhouse-suicide case, this opinion “won’t write.” It would, in fact, sound about as authentic as a late-night infomercial. Some justices (I name no names) seem to enjoy writing like patent-medicine pitchmen. But even those most critical of Kennedy must admit that his written opinions are achingly, crushingly sincere. He is never just President of Hair Club for Men; he is always a member too.

“Recognition” and “celebration” go together like a horse and carriage. I don’t see a way to split them that would allow the Court—or its key justice—to escape this term’s rendezvous with destiny.  

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/on-same-sex-marriage-no-way-to-dodge-the-question/384638/

The Old Straight Track

A woman drives a sinister car down a sinister road. She is texting. She is in the hospital after being struck by a driver who was texting; the first half of the episode is only a dream. Her physician "blocks" her on Facebook after having an argument with his son, which kills her in real life. She goes to Hell. In Hell she is forced to derive ironic punishments for other women who have texted while driving.

The Clearinghouse Dolls
A bunch of dolls just kill everybody because they're all so busy staring at their phones.

Be Seeing You
The hypocrities of our modern society are exposed.

Read more Next On “Black Mirror” at The Toast.

To understand just how much progress there's been when it comes to depictions of gay people in popular culture, it helps to read part—part—of Billy Crystal’s comments at the Television Critics Association on Sunday. Asked about his role on the ‘70s sitcom Soap, he talked about how “it was awkward and it was tough” to be the actor playing one of the first gay characters on network TV:

I did it in front of a live audience, and there were times where I would say to Bob, “I love you,” and the audience would laugh nervously, because, you know, it’s a long time ago, that I’d feel this anger. I wanted to stop the tape and go, “What is your problem?”

When some of the most-watched new network dramas of the past year (How to Get Away With Murder, Empire) prominently feature gay characters, when one of the most popular ongoing sitcoms (Modern Family) revolves around men married to each other, when an out gay man (Neil Patrick Harris) is enlisted to host the Oscars, it's good to remember when there was a time not too long ago when depicting any sort of same-sex affection was met with nervous laughter on set.

That's not why Crystal's kicking up publicity right now, though. As part of his TCA comments on Soap, he also suggested that he thought the march of progress had gone too far: “I’ve seen some stuff recently on TV in different kinds of shows where the language or the explicit sex is really you know, sometimes I get it, and sometimes I just feel like, ‘Ah, that’s too much for me.’” The implication as a lot of people saw it: Crystal objects to the presence of gay love scenes on TV.

He quickly issued a statement saying that he had been referring to explicit sex of all kinds, heterosexual and not, and that he didn’t mean to imply that gay sex in particular was being “shove[d] in our face.” In an interview he gave to an Xfinity writer, he also provided the less-than-clarifying elaboration about disliking TV sex depictions “when I feel it’s ‘You’re going to like my lifestyle,’ no matter what it is.”

If Crystal says he didn't really want to single out gay stories on TV for rebuke, there's no reason not to believe him. He appears to earnestly believe himself to be an open-minded ally to LGBT people. But that's exactly why his comments feel so revealing, and possibly important. At TCA, he was asked a question about his specific experience playing a gay character. He was not asked about sex. But that’s what he almost immediately began talking about—explicit sex, and the feeling of being weirded out by it. You can’t know his thought process for sure, but it appeared, at least, like “gay” was associated with “gross” on some level to him. This is how homophobia often works—insidiously, in the gut rather than the intellect. And that's precisely why so many people think it's important that depictions of gay life become, to Crystal's disapproval, an "everyday thing"—to fight the socially ingrained attitude that gay life is deviant.

In a recent interview, the comedian Kevin Hart said he didn’t think he could ever play a gay character because his insecurities about how he’d be perceived would undercut his performance. Coming from another self-proclaimed friend of gay people, that’s a disheartening remark for anyone who thinks insecurity about sexuality part of the same phenomenon that causes discrimination, suicide, youth homelessness, and murder. But it's also, as Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak wrote, a striking and helpful piece of honesty. Crystal unwittingly seems to have provided something similar: A sign of how far gay acceptance has come, and how far it has yet to go.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/billy-crystal-and-useful-homophobia/384674/

In his announcement last spring that a new version of the SAT would be launched in 2016, The College Board President David Coleman drew on a favorite buzzword: opportunity.

In his speech, Coleman finally acknowledged the common criticism that the current SAT has little to do with the work students do in high school and will do in college. He promised that the redesigned test would be more in tune with what happens in the classroom. "No longer will the SAT stand apart from the work of teachers in their classrooms," he said. The preview last week of 94 sample questions—half of which were previously released—from the redesigned test helps reveal whether the new SAT will deliver on its promise. Early indicators are not encouraging.

The new test will correspond with the Common Core Standards—the controversial math and reading benchmarks whose design and implementation Coleman happened to spearhead before taking over the College Board. That means the new SAT could have the opposite of its intended effect, at least in the near term, closing opportunities for students who aren’t yet well-versed in the standards. Kids who lack access to in-person test preparation from tutors like me—who are trained to analyze the new test material and develop strategies for raising scores—could also suffer. The most vulnerable students are those who live in low-income areas or don’t speak English as a first language.

The College Board's decision to eliminate the vocabulary component from the reading section and redesign the essay portion has garnered lots of attention. But it’s the revision of the math section that could have particularly egregious consequences.

The new SAT will focus on fewer types of math than the current version does, sacrificing breadth for depth and testing students on the material the College Board believes to be most essential to "college and career success." That might sound like good idea. But with this change in focus comes a change in question style. And that’s problematic.

The SAT has always been what essentially amounts to an IQ exam, testing no math beyond basic high-school geometry. The new version includes fewer questions that deal simply with figures and equations, giving more space to questions like this:

This question, ranked by the College Board as "easy," is very much a product of the Common Core Standards, which ask students to both link abstractions (like the graph of a line) with real-world phenomena (such as the link between a person’s height and the length of his or her metacarpal bone) and express such connections verbally. (The answer, by the way, is A.)

It is fine—good, even—to ask students to carry out these tasks, but in many cases these are skills that students unfortunately haven’t yet mastered. If they aren’t being taught to think about graphs that way, let alone articulate their reasoning in that matter, chances are only the smartest (or well-prepared) teens will be able to arrive at the correct answer under the time and emotional pressure of the test.

Even more concerning, few math teachers are ready and able to teach students these new skills. Mark Driscoll of the nonprofit Education Development Center, which in part develops K-12 math and science programs, was recently quoted in Education Week lamenting this shift: "Language hasn't traditionally played much of a role in the training of math teachers," he said. "In my experience, many teachers lack the guidance and tools to foster communication of mathematical reasoning [with] English-learners." The Common Core makes noble demands on teachers and students. But, at the end of the day, they are still demands, and it will take students and teachers time and effort to fulfill them.

One problem with tying the SAT to these new standards is that it will force students and schools to play a long game of catch-up. Most states will be gradually implementing the standards over the next few years—assuming it will only take that long and assuming that any student taking the exam attends a school that is successfully using standards. At last check, 42 states are in the process of implementing the Common Core standards—three of the original participants dropped out—but they are doing so at different rates.

The other consequence of (theoretically) basing the new SAT on what students are doing in their classrooms is that it threatens to makes success on the exam even more subject to socioeconomic background. Students at struggling schools—where teachers tend to have less experience and and support and where Common Core-related textbooks can be scarce—could be at a disadvantage. After all, they haven’t had exposure to the very materials and instruction integral to performing well on the test. This could all amount to an ironic twist: For all the faults of the SAT, one of its merits, at least in theory, is that it can identify students whose formal education might be lacking but who have the mental firepower to succeed given the opportunity.   

There are valid reasons, of course, for questioning the reality of that merit. But the new SAT could provide even more reasons for doubting the exam’s fairness. Students at good schools will have that much more of a leg up on this test because their teachers will be able to get them up to speed on the new SAT content. Because the current version of the test corresponds so poorly with real high school coursework, good teachers presently provide less of an advantage on the SAT than they might on the new version. Exposure to particular components of the Common Core standards will matter on the revised exam, and teachers who know the standards and know how to teach them will provide their students an advantage. Consider another "easy" question from the sample set:

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Identifying the answer to this question depends on fairly basic knowledge of statistics, which is part of the Common Core standards—but very few students take statistics in high school. Though the number of students taking AP Statistics appears to be on the rise—in 2013 more people took the Advanced Placement course than ever before— the roughly 170,000 participants who took the course that year represented just 1 percent of the total number of students enrolled in high school in the U.S. then. When I asked Doug Pierce, a longtime SAT tutor in New York City who recently got his Ph.D. in political science, about the above statistics test question, he challenged the College Board’s "easy"ranking, dubbing it "intermediate" instead. Pierce, who’s taught statistics classes in college, emphasized that the question assumes the student knows margins of error are based on sample sizes—a rule that isn’t "necessarily intuitive."

On his blog about test-prep, Akil Bello, another veteran SAT instructor, pointed to a different problem altogether: The new test permits calculators for certain sections that include questions like the statistics one. The question’s appearance in a calculator-approved section, rather than one that prohibits the device, could easily mislead students, particularly ones who haven’t had SAT training, into thinking that the question requires a calculator.

And test-prep fails to address another unintended consequence of the new exam’s emphasis on real-world math: These kinds of questions require more context and thus more text. That could disproportionately hurt students who don’t speak English as a first language, slowing them down or even hampering their comprehension.

Consider the following "real-world" question (that is, if your "real world" involves international travel and regular visits to currency-exchange providers):

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(The correct answer turns out to be 7,212.)

Coleman and the College Board tout the SAT as a measure of what they define as "college readiness," but what this peek at some questions suggests is that the revised exam is being used as yet another assessment exam that shapes rather than reflects what kids learn in school. It’s a classic case of the tail wagging the dog.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/new-sat-new-problems/384596/

People who are starting a rigorous new exercise regimen might be told (and tell themselves) to "keep their eyes on the prize"—the prize being the personal best record, a completed marathon, or some other milestone. Anything to coax yourself away from the Netflix and out onto the freezing streets for a run.

But new research suggests that taking the "eyes on the prize" mantra literally can help with performance. A study published in the journal Motivation and Emotion found that focusing on a stopping point in the distance, like a building or tree, can cause distances to appear shorter. This, in turn, encourages exercisers to move more quickly and reduces the feeling of exertion.

“These findings indicate that narrowly focusing visual attention on a specific target, like a building a few blocks ahead, rather than looking around your surroundings, makes that distance appear shorter, helps you walk faster, and also makes exercising seem easier," said New York University psychology professor Emily Balcetis in a release.

This concept is known as "attention narrowing." In their experiments, the researchers took participants to a park in New York in the summertime and positioned them in front of, first, a cooler filled with cold drinks and, in a second experiment, in front of a traffic cone. One set of subjects was told to focus solely on the cooler or cone in the distance. The others were told to look around as they naturally would. "Keeping their eyes on the prize," it turns out, made a big difference:

Those in the narrowed attention group perceived the cones to be 28 percent closer than did those in the natural condition group. In addition, those in the narrowed attention group walked 23 percent faster than did those in the natural attention group. Finally, those in the narrowed attention group reported that the walk required less physical exertion than did those in the natural condition group—a finding that may serve as an incentive to exercise.

The researchers write that they aren't sure why focusing on the object made the task seem easier and encouraged the participants to walk faster. It could be that the shorter-seeming distance made the subjects feel more capable of completing the task.

Or, it might have kicked their bodies into high-gear. "When people see goals as within reach, it may mobilize action, producing bursts of energy that result in quicker walking times and an experience of ease," they wrote in the study.

This might explain, they add, why in a previous study people who were randomly assigned to run on a treadmill were slower and found the workout harder than those told to run outside.

While this is a small study, the idea that people work harder when they feel closer to reaching a goal has borne out previously. Everyone seems to have a different trick (be it Taylor Swift on loop or the prospect of Ben & Jerry's after dinner) for getting through their winter workouts. For those who find their motivation flagging, keeping an endpoint in sight seems like a reasonable strategy to try.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/running-faster-by-focusing-on-the-finish-line/384653/

Everywhere we go, James gets a lot of attention. It’s not uncommon for strangers to stop us and gush over James’ big blue eyes, porcelain skin, and easy smile. Annabel always stands there quietly. They rarely say anything to her other than, “What a cute baby brother you have.” She used to beam with pride. I’m not sure when that stopped.

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Not long ago I found Annabel standing in front of a mirror, frowning. “What are you looking at, Buddy?” I asked. “My skin…I wish it was lighter.” After some careful questioning, she said, “I just wish it was beautiful skin, like Jamesie’s skin.”

—

Last year I wrote about Annabel’s confidence. Until a month ago, I would have told you it was as strong as ever. Now I see cracks. She compares herself to her friends in ways I didn’t do until I was much older. She tells me that she doesn’t think she’s good enough at certain activities. It’s been sad and frustrating, because I don’t know where this is coming from. We’ve always been very careful to compliment her looks and talents/behaviors equally.

—

A few nights ago, I laid next to Annabel in bed and listened carefully as she tried to explain to me why she “didn’t feel beautiful when [she] looked in the mirror.” It was hard for her to articulate, but I was able to isolate that she didn’t like her skin tone or eye color – the two things James gets complimented on the most.

I started to point out all the things on her that were beautiful. “Your skin is beautiful, because it always looks sun-kissed. Your nose is shaped perfectly. Your eyes sparkle like stars. Your hair is shiny and healthy.” I then explained to her that beauty is more than just how a person looks on the outside. I talked about how generous she is to her friends, and how sweet and loving she is to her brother. I reminded her that she’s kind to her dog and other animals. I said that if a person isn’t beautiful on the inside, it doesn’t matter what they look like on the outside. I told her she was beautiful on the inside and out. “I want you to say, ‘I am beautiful.’ Will you say that?” “But Mommy…what if my body hears me say that and it doesn’t believe me?”

—

When Mike went to kiss her goodnight after our talk she told him, “Don’t worry, Daddy. I think that I’m beautiful.”

But I worry.

© copyright Heather Spohr 2015 | All rights reserved.

This content may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means, without the prior written permission of the author.

In what is perhaps the most French thing to ever happen, a handsome, stubble-faced marcher wearing a manscarf at the Charlie Hebdo rally was photographed holding a sign that said: “I’m marching, but I’m aware of the confusion and hypocrisy of the situation.” I love this guy because this is precisely how I feel about a great many political and social things and most recently, the 2015 Golden Globes.

By now we’ve all heard that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler went in on Bill Cosby in their opening monologue (dialogue?). This is a good thing for anyone who is generally against people being raped and their attackers being shielded from consequence by fame, wealth, and patriarchy.  And yet, even as a person who is very happy to make Bill Cosby suffer, despite his status as my childhood hero, I did not feel relieved. The second joke made me uncomfortable and sad. While others were laughing, I’m pretty sure I looked more like Don Cheadle in this reaction pic. He’s…um…easy to spot.

The fact that the joke hinged on an imitation of Cosby’s voice was one problem for me. Any time a white person derisively imitates a black person’s voice, no matter the context, it just kind of gives me the heebie jeebies. I grew up in a fairly racist environment around fairly racist white people who loved imitating black voices for kicks, which, to put it mildly, hurt. But I’m not the only one. Our entire nation has had that experience. America has such a long and painful history of black imitation that it’s damn near impossible for a white person to do so in a way that doesn’t send chills down the spine of anyone that has actually been face to face with white violent aggression masquerading as “just a joke.”

Understandably, not everyone saw a racial tinge to the joke. In a twitter convo I had with New Yorker TV Critic Emily Nussbaum (who proved pretty good at being open minded), she pointed out that it didn’t come across as racial for her. This, to me, is kind of the point. Part of being Black is experiencing race where others don’t. I would imagine this holds true for any long-suffering group. This does not make others racist or wrong for not getting it. (It’s highly doubtful to me that Tina Fey and Amy Poehler were like “Finally!  A joke that lets us take down a rapist AND offend those PESKY BLACKS!” ) It simply speaks to nature of the disconnection between oppressed groups and their allies. It’s more about tone deafness. Ignorance. The disappointment for me is not that these two women whose work I love, whose success gives me inspiration, are racist. It’s that they just sort of forgot about my history in their enthusiastic takedown.

One common way to misinterpret any criticism of of Fey and Poehler is to somehow cast it in the camp of “Black people defending Bill Cosby.” No one at this keyboard is doing anything like that. Sure, he’s innocent until proven guilty, but in the meantime it’s my belief that Cosby should be dragged over the coals and through the mud with gleeful abandon. Black Twitter has no problem doing so. And neither do I. It’s really a question about how to lambast Cosby without the side-effect of inadvertently making innocent people feel like shit.

And this leads to the second problem. We talk about Fey and Poehler’s joke being important. Which it was. But in doing so we lose track of the fact that it wasn’t actually funny. I don’t mean in a “dude, that’s not funny.” way. I mean from a purely comedic perspective. The Bill-Cosby-Pudding-Voice Imitation hasn’t been a quality punchline since about 1997, and also has zero to do with rape, so it made for a disappointing denouement to what was, in the Cinderella joke, a decent warm up.  There must have been a thousand witty quips that emerged when the best comedic writers in Hollywood were in a room preparing to roast Cosby. By which logic did saying “I raped people” in a hackneyed Cosby voice emerge as the wittiest? Why not a joke about the frequency of rape sexual coersion in Hollywood? Why not a joke that rapists are probably in the room? This creates a bigger problem than just comedy nerdery. It makes me wonder what it must feel like to be one of Cosby’s victims hearing celebrities make a poor-to-mediocre joke, low on wit and high on goofiness.  Would I feel relieved? Vindicated? Or would it feel like my dignity and experience had been ridiculed and minimized on some half-assed Hollywood bullshit? If someone is going to take a swipe at my attacker, I’d want them to do with with a very, very sharp blade, and not the comedy equivalent of those giant Q-tips from American Gladiator. The “pills-in-the-people” joke highlights Cosby’s silliness. I’d want one that highlights his monstrosity. That, to me,  would be the right kind of rape joke.

Speaking of monstrosity, you know who else I wonder about? Woody Allen. There were no jokes about him at all and I am definitely not the first to notice this double standard. It impacts the way I see the Cosby jokes. Allen received a lifetime achievement award at last years Golden Globes, and on that occasion Poehler and Fey, who also hosted, were noticeably quiet about his child rape allegations. One has to wonder why. Is it because child rape is still too scary and frightening to approach? Is it because Woody Allen, Poehler, and Fey operate in overlapping professional circles? Is it because Allen still wields political power over projects which Fey and Poehler could be involved? Or is there another reason? Whatever it is, this silence is difficult to ignore and casts further shadow on the Cosby joke.

In America, we have a habit of dismissing things that are too complex or nuanced. I find this to be relatively true on both sides of the political aisle. But the thing about intersectionality is that it is complex and nuanced.  And for us to succeed at grasping it we have to become very good at seeing and understanding when things have multiple dimensions. We have to be able to hold competing ideas in our heads at the same time, like that Charlie Hebdo protester. So I don’t want to piss on anyone’s snow cone here, but it makes me sad when a moment that is fraught and confusing and tinged with ugliness is held up by allies as an unequivocal victory. I’d rather see it hailed as a moment in progress, but one that proves we have further to go. The parallel movements against misogyny and racism should not compete. We should not have to be offended racially at the precise moment when two talented, successful and heroic women are making a stand. I want white feminists to win. I don’t want it to mean that we have to lose.

Carvell Wallace is a father, writer and tech founder. He fears only scrambled eggs and The Babadook. He tweets at @carvellwallace.

Matthew Carpenter was already hard at work at 4:30 this morning, at his home in Australia, filling the orders pouring in at ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com. “The house looks like it’s 1975 and Donna Summer has just hit the stage,” he told The Washington Post. The 2016 elections may just be gearing up, but glitterbombing, the most unusual protest tactic of the 2012 cycle, is back with a vengeance.

The sparkly stuff, traditionally associated with fairy godmothers, a much-ridiculed Mariah Carey film, and New Year’s dresses, has found a second, darker use. The "glitterati" gleefully flung the stuff at politicians, to express anger and disdain for their positions on LGBT rights and marriage equality.

ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, an Australian-based venture, is trying to strike gold with glitter. The site’s launch—and subsequent crash—on Tuesday means that it hasn’t been able to ship glitter to your enemies quite yet, but, as founder Mathew Carpenter told The Washington Post, “We are a real service, we actually do send glitter to your enemies.”

Glitter is an ingenious tool of protest. Its shimmery sheen carries an innocence and sparkling carefreeness that prompted The New York Times to declare it "a kinder, gentler form of pranksterism." Its association with fanciful things make glitter easy to dismiss as silly, random, even fun. Even the first glitterbomber, Nick Espinosa, believed glitter to be essentially "harmless," as he told news outlets after launching the first glitter attack: "I knew he wasn't going to be hurt by it, but I also knew that it would stick with him and that, you know, for the days to come he'd be remembering what I said as he pulled the glitter sparkles form his hair. And that you know, of course, who doesn't want to see Newt Gingrich covered in glitter?"

One reason why glitterbombs are so effective is that they make their targets look ridiculous. They make an explosive statement, but without hurting their targets. Glitterbombing, in essence, makes a serious point about the status quo without the serious side effects.

But glitter's sparkle disguises its ability to be intensely annoying—it's been derided as "craft herpes" for a reason (“Like the STD herpes, once you have glitter on you, you cannot get rid of it”). Glitter’s—and glitterbombing’s—associations with the gay community and flamboyance have made it a popular tool for protesting stances against marriage equality. What makes it perfect in this context is its symbolism. It's immediately identifiable with the LGBT platform and makes a not-so-subtle statement about what protesters want. Unlike classic protest staples like pie, it can’t easily be wiped away, making glitter an ideal means for LGBT activists to make their point.

The first instance of glitterbombing can be traced to Espinosa, a then-25-year-old activist who took a Cheez-It box of glitter to presidential candidate Newt Gingrich while screaming, "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics. It's dividing our country, and it's not fixing our economy!"

At least 21 glitter attacks soon followed, their targets overwhelmingly Republican—former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Karl Rove. But even liberals—a group one might think would be exempted from such attacks—were not immune. Dan Savage, the popular and openly gay sex columnist, got showered in pounds of sparkles for his controversial comments regarding transgender people and rape. Savage, for his part, "laughed it off and said that, being gay, he loves glitter."

Its sparkle, though, may hide some real danger. The spate of glitterbombings against Republican candidates had doctors warning the public of glitter's corneal crushing capacity.

"If it gets into the eyes, the best scenario is it can irritate, it can scratch," Dr. Stephen Glasser told The Hill. "Worst scenario is it can actually create a cut. As the person blinks, it moves the glitter across the eye and can actually scratch the cornea." Snort or sniffle and your sinuses could take the shimmery dust and stab it in your lungs.

But Lauren Dyer, manager at Glitterex Corporation, a worldwide supplier of wholesale glitter, doesn’t think ordinary glitter has the capacity to inflict harm. “The stuff kids use in school is plastic,” she explained. When asked if glitter could be ingested or inhaled without harm, Dyer said: “Our glitter is 100 percent safe. Everything is tested.”

That hasn’t stopped those assaulted by glitter from claiming that they’ve experienced pain and danger, which in turn, raises a Constitutional question. Is glitterbombing a protected form of political speech or is it, as former presidential candidate and ex-Governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee argued, "an assault"?

Gingrich and Santorum, the most frequent targets of activists, actually cited glitterbombing to justify their requests for Secret Service details. Gingrich complained to the Times that "glitter-bombing is clearly an assault and should be treated as such." Is he right?

“This is easy: Glitterbombing is not protected by the First Amendment,” Erwin Chemerinsky, a First Amendment law expert at the University of California-Irvine School of Law, told me. “There is no First Amendment right to throw something at a person, whether glitter or anything else.”

Chemerinsky explains that glitter is no different than pie or shoes or any other object thrown at a person’s face. It’s assault. “A person cannot punch another and then say it was just to express anger,” he said. “[It] is a nuisance. There’s no right to throw ashes or paint or glitter or feces at someone else. It would be an assault and there is no First Amendment right to assault another.”

It's too early to tell whether glitter will become even more popular as a tool of protest during the 2016 campaign, or if it will disappear as a historical footnote, a sparkly, curious form of protest associated with the 2012 race. Marriage equality is gaining momentum across the country, though it's not federally mandated and has faced setbacks at various levels.

But newer issues in the LGBT community have come to the forefront, and activists will want their voices heard during the election season. Transgender rights have become a hot-button topic—thanks in no small part to pop-culture phenomena like Orange Is the New Black and Transparent, which snagged a Golden Globe. Given the success they enjoyed with the tactic in 2012, it's hard to believe that activists won't use it again.And with ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, a tactic that debuted on the 2012 campaign trail has gone global, expanding the range of potential targets from a small group of American political figures to everyone on the planet.

Ironically, Carpenter, the founder of ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com, is apparently the victim of his own success. On Wednesday afternoon, he posted a plea to the public to "stop buying this horrible glitter product—I'm sick of dealing with it." But it might be too late: Thousands of orders are in, and we may be in for an ultra-sparkly 2016 election season.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/glitterbombs-are-back/384527/

Every now and then, I stumble upon a business idea that makes me laugh out loud and nearly spill my coffee, Ship Your Enemies Glitter is one of them. As a parent of crafty little ones, I can fully attest that glitter is the most annoying thing that anyone could spill in your house.

(via Thierry)

Suggested evening reads.

Previously: Ayn Rand, Cat Fancier.

The Letters of Ayn Rand is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. It is a perpetual source of comfort and inspiration to me. Every morning, Ayn Rand must have thrust herself forth from her steel bed and asked herself "What is the most Ayn Rand thing that I can do today?"

On May 22, 1949, the answer was to write a letter to her young niece, who had sent her a short note asking to borrow $25 for a new dress. Here was Ayn's reply.

Read more An Actual Letter Ayn Rand Wrote To An Actual Teenage Girl at The Toast.

We’ve both seen it happen again and again. When a woman speaks in a professional setting, she walks a tightrope. Either she’s barely heard or she’s judged as too aggressive. When a man says virtually the same thing, heads nod in appreciation for his fine idea. As a result, women often decide that saying less is more.

[...]

As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.

OK, so I'll be real with you: I don't have a NYT subscription and I am always very wary about clicking around aimlessly on the Internet out of fear I will waste a click. (Article compilers: ALWAYS TELL ME WHAT I AM GOING TO CLICK ON. I ONLY HAVE 4 ARTICLES LEFT TO READ THIS MONTH FOR FREE AND I AM NOT WASTING THEM.) The Women at Work series is always worth a read, but if you're already out of articles for the month, here's all you need to know: everything is still the worst. Women who speak up more at work are thought to be bossy, unhelpful, and less competent than their male counterparts.

Remember Sheryl Sandberg's (who co-wrote this article with Adam Grant) whole push to eliminate bossy? That never really did it for me—I genuinely don't mind being called "bossy," because I am bossy. It's true! I tend to take control of situations and assume I'm in charge. Fine! So sue me (please don't sue me). Sandberg and Grant provide some solid, realistic solutions to change this—namely, diversify offices and hire more women in leadership roles, which I am 100% behind—but this might be a good way to start: why don't we just embrace bossy? When people call women bossy, we know now what they really mean—"she's a woman who dares to share her opinion!"—so to that I say: "That's me!" It reminds me of Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's (two women who are not afraid of the bossy moniker) fantastic Weekend Update sketch about people calling Hillary Clinton a bitch, where they implored us not to get offended by it and prompted a million Tumblr GIFs and thinkpieces with the reminder that "bitches get stuff done." And we do (research shows, when it comes to leadership, men are more confident but women are more competent). Just focus on the subtext: when a man calls a woman a "bitch" or "bossy," he is saying "I don't like that you are speaking out, I don't like your good ideas, I want to put you in your place and shame you for doing this." Screw that guy—let's reclaim those words, because being a powerful, outspoken, confident woman is never anything to be ashamed about.

But really: who cares what people say? I'm too busy bossing people around to think about that.

Here's a story that will resonate with anyone who has flown in China. On Friday night, after a three-hour weather delay, passengers boarded a Beijing-bound flight in Dhaka, Bangladesh that had a stopover in Kunming, a provincial capital in southwest China. Scheduled to leave Kunming at 8:45 p.m., the connecting flight was delayed until 11 p.m. by additional poor weather. This did not make the passengers happy. Several refused to board and demanded compensation, but by 1:45 a.m. the airline had persuaded everyone to board.

But that wasn't the end of the passengers' problems. After they boarded, the airport staff had to clear snow from the runway, which took over an hour. Finally, the plane began to taxi at 3:15 p.m.—15 minutes after the pilot inexplicably shut off the air conditioning. When passengers complained, the pilot reportedly asked: "Are you going to die soon? If not, just wait." Two passengers then burst open the emergency exits, which resulted in their arrests. And scene.

This was not the first time, even this month, that an airline passenger in China has opened an airplane's emergency exit in a non-emergency situation. More broadly, dramatic incidents of customer dissatisfaction with air travel are remarkably common in the country. After I moved to China in 2004, I witnessed the following over the course of six years, during which I took dozens of domestic flights:

• A passenger leaping on top of a check-in counter and lunging for a staff member who, for whatever reason, would not issue him a boarding pass. He was restrained before he could reach her.
• A group of 25 adults standing on top of a tables positioned near a gate, waving their jackets like fans waving towels at a football game, and chanting. Their flight was delayed without explanation.
• Two men getting into an enormous fist fight (eye gouging attempts and everything) after one accused the other of cutting in line.

Flying is a miserable experience just about everywhere, and China is hardly the only country that experiences air rage. Just ask Koreans, who winced with embarrassment when an airline executive lost it over the inadequate presentation of macademia nuts in first class. But in my experience, flying in China is worse than it is elsewhere, in many tangible ways.

First, there are the delays. In July 2013, fewer than one in five flights departed on time from Beijing Capital Airport. The percentage of on-time flights from JFK—an airport of comparable size in the U.S.—is 65 percent. Beijing's legendary pollution plays a part in these delays, but only a small one. The real problem is that the Chinese military controls 80 percent of the country's airspace. Last July, the military ordered 12 airports across the country to reduce departures by 25 percent over a three-week period in order to accommodate large-scale army drills. Communication, too, is a problem. Airport staff often announce delays without providing an explanation, causing immense frustration among passengers who don't know what to do.

The journalist Matt Sheehan, who in 2013 described a Chinese airport melee in hugely entertaining fashion, told MSNBC that “Chinese people have just begun waking up to this idea that as a consumer you're entitled to certain protections, but they don't have any of the institutions like consumer rights groups that do this professionally.”

Airlines—and the airline industry—are a useful lens for viewing China's development as a whole. In his excellent book China Airborne, Atlantic national correspondent and aviation buff James Fallows described how China is attempting to condense a century's worth of developments in aviation into a few decades. This breakneck pace has resulted in a dazzling array of new airports scattered across the country, but has included some serious growing pains.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/01/the-unique-misery-of-flying-in-china/384417/

During the Academy Awards show of 2013, Seth MacFarlane performed a song. It was directed at the female actors in the show’s live audience. It was titled “We Saw Your Boobs.”

The number played out exactly as you'd expect, given its name and the setting of its performance: It was cringe-worthy and awkward, one of those satires-wrapped-in-satires-wrapped-in-satires that tend to leave audiences angered and/or indignant and/or mystified. It left many of the people who watched it looking like this:

“We Saw Your Boobs,” and the various laughs and eye-rolls and thinkpieces that sprang from it, were the result of, among so many other things, the fact that awards shows are one of the few remaining opportunities for appointment viewing: hours-long spans when swaths of TV-watchers are watching the same thing—and reacting to that thing—in unison. Producers are acutely aware of the commercial opportunities offered by these rare concentrations of human attention, which means that they often treat their shows not just as spectacles of entertainment, but also as opportunities to make political points.

The shows' stars do, too. Kanye’s “Imma let you finish” interruption of Taylor Swift, Miley’s twerk upon the thrusting undercarriage of Robin Thicke, Ellen’s star-studded mega-selfie, Beyonce’s dance before a billboard emblazoned with the word “FEMINIST” … these are fleeting moments in awards shows, yes, but they're also culture-wide status symbols. They're little dots that, connected by a collection of far-flung human eyes, offer a fuzzy impression of who, and where, we are.

Last night’s Golden Globes show was the exception that proved the rule: It featured not a single, notable moment of politics-laid-bare, but rather an ongoing infusion of those moments. From its honoring of culturally progressive shows like Transparent and Jane the Virgin to its scripted jokes and banter, the show was uncommonly unified in its political message. And that message was: feminism. (Actually, more accurately, it was a more emphatically Beyonce-esque FEMINISM.) As a theme, this was presented with the aggression of nonchalance—feminism (FEMINISM) not as something to be debated or discussed or thinkpieced, but as something that's as present and unmistakable as the disco-ball gowns that swathed so many of the women on last night's red carpet.

It started, as so many feminist developments do these days, with the glorious life partnership that is otherwise known as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. The pair reveled in their status as “queens” and “goddesses” last night. They daringly made fun of the dethroned god Bill Cosby. They delighted in gender-bending outfits (Tina Fey's tuxedo! Amy Poehler's boob-butterfly!), and also in, via a show-introducing game of "Would You Rather," the objectification implicit in any show that exists primarily to broadcast images of beautiful people.

The show also featured Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, former stars of the sexist-boss-murdering romp Nine to Five and future stars of the upcoming Netflix show Grace and Frankie, dismissing the women-aren't-funny conversation by mocking it. (Fonda: "It's nice that men at last are getting the recognition they deserve for being good at comedy." Tomlin: "We can put to rest that negative stereotype that men just aren't funny.") It featured Julianne Moore celebrating her Still Alice win in the face of being told that "no one wants to see a movie about a middle-aged woman." It featured Patricia Arquette, in her acceptance speech for Boyhood, thanking the single mothers who inspired her performance. And Gina Rodriguez, who won for Jane the Virgin and who once noted that “I have a real responsibility to all the little girls out there to be the story-teller I was born to be,” thanking her sisters. And Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt, clearly surprised to have won, dedicating her acceptance to rape victims.

As Maggie Gyllenhaal put it in her speech, as the show's cameras panned across the faces of female actors:

I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately, and when I look around the room at the women who are in here, and I think about the performances that I’ve watched this year, what I see, actually, are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not. Sometimes sexy, sometimes not; sometimes honorable, sometimes not.

She added: "And, what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That’s what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary, and it’s what’s turning me on."

Similarly, Amy Adams, accepting her award for her role in Big Eyes, celebrated quiet women. “I am so grateful to have all the women in this room,” she said. “You speak to her [Aviana, Adams’ daughter] so loudly. She watches everything and she sees everything, and I am just so, so grateful to all of you women in this room.”

Which is not to say that feminism was the only order of the evening, or that progress—in awards shows as anywhere else—is not without its frictions. There was a robotic Jeremy Renner making a predictable, yet nonetheless groan-worthy, joke about J-Lo's "golden globes." There was the fact that Fey and Poehler's "Would You Rather?" bit was explicitly aimed at objectifying men. The evening's overarching tension—what does feminism mean, in the context of Hollywood?—was perhaps best captured by the show's unofficial star: Amal Clooney, the internationally acclaimed human rights lawyer who recently took a trophy husband named George and who, as Fey pointed out last night, is a "human rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, an advisor to Kofi Annan on Syria and was a appointed to a three-person commission investigating rules of war violations in the Gaza strip."

Fey paused, letting the irony sink in. "So tonight," Fey said of this accomplished woman, "her husband is getting a lifetime achievement award.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/strong-female-lead-a-feminist-golden-globes-show/384437/

Disorganized because every time I try to organize my thoughts on these topics recently they kind of squirm away. So, fine, disorganized it is, then.

1. As noted in one of the tweets shown above, as a newspaper journalist, as well as, you know, writing here, I’ve done my share of enraging people with words, by mocking ideas that they hold dear, because I thought they deserved mocking. I have had my share of angry responses and even the occasional threat, and my response to those typically has been to poke harder. When I took up the #JeSuisCharlie hashtag, that’s what it meant to me. I’ve been that guy.

2. I also recognize that I know almost nothing about Charlie Hebdo, the newspaper, or the tradition of satire and comment that it exemplifies in French culture. From where I sit, a lot of what I’ve seen of it looks kind of racist and terrible. And I understand that Charlie Hebdo didn’t just go after Islamic extremists, and that it went after other groups and people just as hard (and just as obnoxiously). But it reminds me that “we go after everyone equally” doesn’t mean that I feel equally comfortable with all of it, or that it has equal effect. When I say #JeSuisCharlie, it doesn’t mean I want to create or post what I think are racist caricatures and justify them as satire, applied on a presumed equal opportunity basis.

3. But then again my comfort level is about me, not about Charlie Hebdo or anyone else. Free speech, taken as a principle rather than a specific constitutional pratice, means everyone has a right to share their ideas, in their own space, no matter how terrible or obnoxious or racist or stupid or inconsequential I or anyone else think they and their ideas are. I also recognize that satire in particular isn’t about being nice, or kind, or fair. Satire is inherently exaggerated, offensive and unfair, in order to bring the underlying injustice it’s calling attention to into sharper relief. Trust me, I know this. (Satire also has a high failure rate, and the failure mode of satire, like the failure mode of clever, is “asshole.”) A lot of what I’ve seen from Charlie Hebdo isn’t for me and seems questionable, and that’s neither here nor there in terms of whether it should have a right to be published.

4. At the moment there’s an argument about whether news organizations are being cowardly about showing the Charlie Hebdo covers that allegedly were part of the reason it was attacked — the ones with visual depictions of the prophet Muhammad, who many Muslims feel is not supposed to be depicted visually (let us leave aside for the moment the discussion of whether all Muslims feel this way (they don’t) or whether Muhammad has been visually represented in the past even in Muslim art (he has, here and there) and focus on the here and now, in which many Muslims believe he should not be represented visually). The argument seems to be that by not showing the covers (or Muhammad generally), newspapers and other media are giving in to the extremists.

I’m not going to argue that very large media companies don’t have multiple reasons for what they do, including making the realpolitik assessment that displaying a Charlie Hebdo cover puts their employees (and their real estate, and their profits) at risk for an attack. But a relevant point to make here is that aside from the asshole terrorists who murdered a dozen people at Charlie Hebdo, there really are millions of Muslims who are just trying to get through their day like anyone else, who also strongly prefer that Muhammad is not visually represented. It’s not a defeat for either the concept or right of free speech for people or organizations to say they’re factoring these millions or people who neither did nor would do anything wrong into their consideration of the issue.

5. Which is a point that I think tends to get elided at moments like this — free speech, and the robust defense of it — does not oblige everyone to offend, just to show that one can. I can simultaneously say that I absolutely and without reservation have the right to visually depict Muhammad any way I choose (including in some ways devout Muslims, not to mention others, would consider horribly blasphemous), and also that, with regard to depicting Muhammad, as a default I’m going to try to respect the desire of millions of perfectly decent Muslims, and not do it. Because it’s polite, and while I’m perfectly happy not to be polite when it suits me, I usually like to have a reason for it.

6. But isn’t Muslim extremists shooting up a newspaper a perfect reason? For some it may be, and that’s fine for them. But I tend to agree with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar here: shit like this isn’t about religion, it’s about money and recruiting for terrorist groups who use religion, at best, as a very thin binding material for their more prosaic concerns. I’m also persuaded by Malek Merabet, brother of Ahmed Merabet, the policeman and Muslim who was killed by the terrorists. He said: “My brother was Muslim and he was killed by two terrorists, by two false Muslims.” In which case, why offend the good and decent Muslims to get back at two very bad and false Muslims. I’m a reasonably clever writer; I have the capability to make my point regarding these asshole terrorists without a gratuitous display of Muhammad.

7. Hey, did you know that according to the UN, Christian militia in Central African Republic have carried out ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population during the country’s ongoing civil war? And yet I hear nothing from the so-called “good” and “moderate” Christians around me on the matter! Why have the “moderate” Christians not denounced these horrible people and rooted them out from their religion? Is it because maybe the so-called “moderate” Christians are actually all for the brutal slaughter? Christians say their religion is one of peace! And yet! Jesus himself says (Matthew 10:36) that he does not come to bring peace, but the sword! Clearly Christianity is a horrible, brutal murdering religion. And unless every single Christian in the United States denounces these murders in the Central African Republic and apologizes for them, not just to me but to every single Muslim they might ever meet, I see no reason to believe that every Christian I meet isn’t in fact secretly planning to cut the throat of every single non-Christian out there. That’s what goes on in those “churches” of theirs, you know. Secret murder planning sessions, every Sunday! Where they “symbolically” eat human flesh! 

Please feel free to cut and paste the above paragraph the next time someone goes on about how all Muslims must do something about their co-religionists (of which there are more than a billion, all of whom apparently they are supposed to have on speed dial), and how Islam is in fact a warrior religion, and look, here are context-free snippets from the Koran, and so on and so forth until you just want to vomit from the stupidity of it all. And don’t worry, there are similar cut-and-pastes for any major religion you might want to name, as well for those who have no religion at all, although I’m not going to bore you with those at the moment.

The point is that, no, in fact, I don’t see why I or anyone else should demand that every Muslim is obliged to denounce and apologize for any bad thing that happens in the world done by someone who claims to be doing it in the name of Allah. As it happens, many prominent Muslims and Muslim organizations did condemn the Charlie Hebdo attacks, just like pretty much everyone else. But silence isn’t complicity or endorsement, and if you demand that it is, you may be an asshole.

8. If there is one silver lining to the horribleness of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, it is that people have been confronted with the fact of something they take for granted — the right to say what they want to say, how they want to say it — is something that others will literally kill to punish. That Charlie Hebdo is a problematic example — that is offensive, and intentionally so, and it does make people uncomfortable and angry — is, well, good isn’t the right word. Instructive. Sometimes we have to be reminded that free speech isn’t just for the speech we like, or the speech that’s easy to be reasonable about.

At the same time it’s okay to ask if this welcome outpouring of solidarity is because free speech was attacked, and it was decided that it was worth fighting for, or because a newspaper that mocked Islam was attacked by gunmen purporting to be Muslims, and that this may be less about free speech than another front in a religious/ethnic clash of culture.

My thoughts are that it’s probably some amount of both, and that neither is cleanly delineated. The two men who shot up Charlie Hebdo say they were Muslim; so were some of the people they shot. Those people — the Muslims who died — have been mourned, at least it seems from here, equally with all the other dead. They haven’t been pushed out of frame for a convenient narrative.

And maybe that’s part of the silver lining to this very dark cloud, too — that this isn’t just “us vs. them,” or at least that “us” now contain people in it who might have previously been considered “them.” And that all the people who are saying #JeSuisCharlie, and #JeSuisAhmed, or who are standing for free speech, or any combination of the three, are standing in memory of them as well.

Buffer - Instead of asking the category of your problem, Buffer asks how frustrated you are on its customer support form.

/via Eduardo Arcos

This makes me feel better about any awkward encounter I may have ever had with a woman.

The Tonight Show

“Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.”

You’re a parent or simply interested in how teenagers and young adults use Social Media? Read this post. It’s written by Andrew Watts, a 19 year old. Such insights. Fascinating!

(via Mark)

There are (of course!) already a handful of articles about why this probably isn't a good idea, but I'm kind of loving this lame-duck President who's trying to stick it to as many for-profit colleges as possible before he heads out.

Read more That Free Community College Thing at The Toast.

Binge-drinking may seem like a primarily youthful indiscretion, linked as it so often is to college in general, and fraternities in particular. About half of college students who drink binge, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, and there are indeed all kinds of problems that come along with that, including assault, injury, and death.

But it’s middle-aged adults who are most at risk when it comes to dying of acute alcohol poisoning specifically—drinking so much that the high concentration of alcohol in the blood shuts down parts of the brain. A report published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 76 percent of alcohol poisoning deaths between 2010 and 2012 were adults between the ages of 35 and 64.  Men accounted for 75 percent of the deaths, leaving men aged 45 to 54 with the highest death rate: 25.6 deaths per 1 million people. Previous research has found most binge-drinking episodes to be reported by adults older than 26, and that men binge-drink twice as much as women, logically putting those groups at higher risk of alcohol poisoning.

It may be that older adults have had more time to develop alcohol dependence, thus putting them at higher risk than college-aged drinkers. But while alcohol dependence was a contributing cause (though not the main cause) in 30 percent of these deaths, the CDC notes that 90 percent of binge-drinkers are not alcohol-dependent. Of course, both alcohol abuse and dependence can lead to other kinds of deaths that aren’t included here, such as those from liver disease, or drunk driving.

Alcohol-Poisoning Death Rates by State

Other findings from the report include that non-Hispanic whites account for 68 percent of deaths, followed by Hispanics at 15 percent; and Alaska has the highest death rate (46.5 per 1 million people) while Alabama has the lowest (5.3 per 1 million people), which is in line with previous CDC research correlating colder winters with more binge-drinking.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/01/alcohol-poisoning-deaths-are-most-common-in-middle-age/384360/

It is no surprise, then, that director Ava DuVernay chose two-time Oscar nominee Ruth Carter to bring such a complex history to life. Carter has worked on more than 50 films, including Amistad, Malcolm X and Lee Daniels’ The Butler. I recently spoke with Carter, who offered exclusive details about how she and her small team of five crafted all of the looks for Selma. As a historian of the civil rights movement who writes about gender and fashion politics, I can say that Carter gets it right.

Black activists who dressed in their Sunday best as they marched through Selma, Ala., in 1965 consciously chose a strategy of visibility that challenged the social hierarchy. Carter aimed to represent the sense of collective action that unified Selma residents of various ages, classes and occupations.

Tanisha C. Ford talks to Ruth Carter about using clothing to communicate history, and it's perfect. Read the entire profile here.

It’s 3 a.m. and the emails are coming in fast and furious. My iPhone is pinging like a Vegas slot machine that’s come up all cherries. What’s the emergency? I had just joined a discussion thread for a popular online poetry class—ModPo—and Emily Dickinson’s "Volcanoes Be in Sicily" is the subject of hot debate. Within 24 hours, there are over a hundred posts about this poem alone: "Why the archaic use of 'be'?" "What of the perplexing 'lava steps'?" One participant lapses into German and has started a discussion group in Switzerland. Another gushes, "ModPo=cyber peyote."

It’s the third year of the Modern & Contemporary American Poetry course, the brainchild of University of Pennsylvania English professor Al Filreis. ModPo is taught out of UPenn but it’s delivered as a MOOC—also known as a "massive open online course"—meaning it’s a virtual, free class available to Internet users around the world. ModPo enrolled 42,000 students in its first year and some 38,000 this past semester. Enrollees get access to a syllabus, links to texts, and prerecorded discussions of the poems, along with other video clips. They take periodic quizzes and write optional essays. And every Wednesday features a live webcast from UPenn’s Kelly Writers House in Philadelphia. Filreis stresses that the community aspect—study and meetup groups, real or virtual—is integral to the online coursework, and he and his team strive to make themselves available to students. After our recent phone interview, Filreis even invited me to a meetup in Manhattan to see ModPo in action.

I shuffled down a dark stairwell into the basement of the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library, one of ModPo’s newest partners. Nearly 50 people of all ages were already sitting in a circle under blinking fluorescent lights by the time I arrived, a few minutes late; more students streamed in after. Like an AA meeting, we introduced ourselves one-by-one and then divulged our secret—that we were, in fact, interested in poetry.

Gregarious and welcoming, Filreis listened carefully as we identified ourselves and explained our backgrounds. The group included architects and archivists, lawyers and therapists, business people and more than one "science-y guy." Few of the attendees actually majored in English, though many were repeat offenders to ModPo. After reading Dickinson’s poem aloud, we each received our assignment—a word or phrase from the text for discussion. (Someone even got the word "I.") This meetup proceeded just like any of ModPo’s online sessions, the main difference being the time spent on each poem and the in-person interaction we shared with Filreis and his cadre of graduate students. The online course, which lasts 10 weeks, covers the whole canon of modern and postmodern poetry, from Allen Ginsberg to Rae Armantrout.

Contrary to popular belief, the "MOOC need not be impersonal," said Filreis, who describes close reading as "a social act." Filreis isn’t a fan of conventional lectures. Instead, he wants to show students a new way of consuming literature, how to "slow down and read intensely, get excitement out of aesthetics and form, not content." Filreis wants to engage a range of of people—not just students and educators, but doctors and engineers, immigrants who are still learning English. The diversity of the discussion groups isn’t surprising; ModPo discussion groups have exploded in popularity nationally and even internationally. As of last Fall, Filreis or other ModPo staff were moderating groups in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, D.C., San Francisco, and Prague. That’s on top of the dozens of user-led groups hosted around the world.

But ModPo offers just one example of how poetry is increasingly making its mark on the online-education world. Harvard University literature professor Elisa New, for example, has launched a similar virtual course called Poetry in America. Now in its third year, the class is being expanded to include a two-year exploration of the entire American poet tradition. Like Filreis, New’s mission is to make poetry resonate with a broader audience: "We have to get outside the gates. What we have [in poetry] is too precious. We have to stop beating ourselves up about how the humanities are dying and instead ask, 'How do we reach all those intelligent people who love language, all those kids who delight in the rhymes of hip hop?'"

New is also interested in how poetry "creates a sense of cultural self-understanding"—how it’s used as a tool to reflect on identity, relationships, society, and history. To help guide members of the Harvard basketball team through Edward Hirsch’s poem "Fast Break," for example, New dons an athletic t-shirt. She talks about Hirsch’s use of adverbs, the effect of the long "i" sounds, high and gliding; she concludes by comparing basketball to a poem and life itself, each of which has an "overall form that can be seen if we pause to look at it."

And now, in addition to the online class, New is targeting even more "casual" learners: She just developed a television show based on her course. The pilot features well-known public figures ranging from Bill Clinton to Sonya Sanchez reading their favorite poems. Like ModPo, New’s course is popular among users around the world, with students representing nearly 150 countries. Certain topics, such as Whitman, are more popular among participants than others. Others, meanwhile, have attracted specific populations. The section on Puritan poetry, for example, gained particular traction with users in the Middle East.

But skeptics of online education still question if academic subjects, let alone poetry, can be taught on the web. They stress that true scholarship takes patience and time—values that aren’t inherent to online education. Even though many MOOCs offer certificates of completion, only 5 percent of of those who enroll actually stick to it. And, despite their popularity, both UPenn and Harvard’s poetry classes have experienced high dropout rates as well.

But Filreis suggests that the courses’ objectives are more important than their measurable outcomes. ModPo, he said, isn’t about the number of people who complete it—and it certainly isn’t designed to replace a traditional college seminar. After all, data indicates that most of the students who sign up already have some formal higher education under their belt. Rather, ModPo—and Poetry in America—are about reaching more minds and opening more people to the possibilities of language. They're about finding Whitman not only under boot soles but on smartphones, too.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/01/web-poets-society/384283/

When people accuse a public figure of private monstrousness, some friends naturally come to that figure’s defense. So it’s unremarkable to see Phylicia Rashad dismiss the rape allegations against her former sitcom husband Bill Cosby. But what is remarkable, shocking even, is the way she encapsulated a whole culture’s attitude and tradition about fame and abuse and gender with three words: “Forget these women.”

She’s talking about the more than 20 people who’ve said that Cosby sexually assaulted them, in many cases after allegedly drugging them. “Forget these women,” Rashad told Showbiz411 writer Roger Friedman at a Selma luncheon. "What you're seeing is the destruction of a legacy. And I think it's orchestrated. I don't know why or who's doing it, but it's the legacy. And it's a legacy that is so important to the culture."

This isn’t “innocent until proven guilty,” the line from Cosby actress Keshia Knight Pulliam a mere day earlier. It’s not “that’s not the man I knew,” the response from anyone who grew up watching the Huxtables. It’s not even “don’t listen.” It’s “hear, then forget”—a straightforward assertion that a person’s cultural product is more important than whatever individual harm that person may have caused.

This is the logic that has allowed many, many men to live fondly in the public’s mind despite strong evidence they gravely mistreated women. The list is enormous. It’s near the logic that allows people to ignore Thomas Jefferson’s slaveholding and infidelity, or John Lennon’s domestic abuse and neglect of his child.

What’s been surprising about the Cosby case is how people woke up to accusations that had been in the public sphere for years; how America seemed on the verge of forgetting these women but then, perhaps because of the sheer magnitude of the accusations or perhaps by some combination of cultural conditions, started paying attention. For anyone who believes the voices of assault victims have been unduly minimized and erased throughout history, that was progress. Rashad probably isn't the only one who would like to undo it.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/01/the-horror-of-forget-these-women/384295/

Looking to find a new show on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I enjoyed House of Cards, Scandal, Weeds and The Good Wife. Recommendations anyone?

— Tina Roth Eisenberg (@swissmiss) January 6, 2015

I don’t own a TV, I watch shows on Netflix or Amazon Prime. I asked my Twitter followers what show I should watch next. OMG! So many answers! Thanks to everyone that responded. I went with Transparent and ‘devoured’ the first three shows right away.

I love the internet so much.

Previously, from the same author.

When my employer called me into his office and granted me paternity leave on the birth of my first child, I had no idea what I was in for. Most of my male coworkers had already left the office at this point, having impregnated willing strangers in order to take twelve weeks' paid time off in exchange for eighteen years of financial and personal responsibility.

"It's twelve weeks' time off," Daniel shouted when he learned he'd successfully created a child with the head of the mechanics department. "I'm going to finally finish my heli-skiing novel!"

I simply wasn't prepared for what all of this free time would do to me. I had planned, of course, to participate actively as a member of the household and as my wife's partner -- grease the dryer, dust the teakettle, rearrange the cat, and so on -- but then, shortly after I walked in the door, I was tragically trapped under something heavy and have been unable to move from this spot in the living room. No one can move this burden from me, save the pure-hearted seventh son of a seventh son, and I do not believe that such a person exists.

Read more I’d Love To Help My Wife Do The Dishes, But I’m Trapped Under Something Heavy at The Toast.

I could stare at this all day.

(via)