Leettaschmidt

Several times this spring, coyotes made national headlines when spotted roaming the streets of New York, from Manhattan to Queens.

In recent years, a host of charismatic wild species, the coyote being only the most famous, have returned to American cities in numbers not seen for generations. Yet the official response in many areas has been, at best, disorganized, and people’s responses varied. The time has come for us to accept that these animals are here to stay, and develop a new approach to urban wildlife.

Most big American cities occupy sites that were once rich ecosystems. New York and Boston overlook dynamic river mouths. San Francisco and Seattle border vast estuaries, while large parts of Chicago, New Orleans and Washington, DC rest atop former wetlands. Even Las Vegas sprawls across a rare desert valley with reliable sources of life-giving fresh water, supplied by artesian aquifers the nearby Spring Mountains. All of these places once attracted diverse and abundant wildlife.

In the early days of urban growth, which for most American cities was in the 18th or 19th centuries, charismatic native species were still common in many increasingly populated areas. These creatures disappeared due to numerous causes, from overhunting to pollution.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the country’s metropolitan fauna had been reduced to a motley collection of exotic rodents and birds, packs of mangy dogs, and the urban environment’s most fearsome apex predator, the house cat, which terrorized any remaining native songbirds.

Return of big animals

It is impossible to point to a precise date when wildlife began to return to American cities, but the release of Walt Disney’s Bambi, in 1942, is a good place to start.

For Bambi, people were careless arsonists and bloodthirsty predators who forced woodland creatures “deep into the forest.” Ironically, however, the film’s success helped pave the way for deer populations to explode in developed areas.

After World War II, in part due to changing attitudes toward wild animals, hunting declined as an American pastime. At the same time, suburbs spread into the countryside. Deer, which had nearly disappeared in several northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, multiplied on golf courses, ball fields and front yards.

Beginning in the 1960s, new laws sought to recover threatened species, and many states curtailed predator control programs. New nature reserves also provided spaces where wildlife populations could recover, and from which they could disperse into nearby cities.

The results were swift and unmistakable. Foxes, skunks, raccoons and possums became ubiquitous American urbanites. So did many raptors, such as peregrine falcons, which thrilled geeky birders and corner office CEOs alike with their aerial acrobatics and fondness for nesting on skyscrapers.

By the 1990s, larger mammals began to appear in the shadows. Coyotes, bobcats and black bears turned up miles from the nearest woodlot, and mountain lions prowled the urban fringe.

And there is more. Alligators bounced back from near extinction to populate creeks and ponds from Miami to Memphis. Aquatic mammals such as beavers and sea lions staged remarkable comebacks, including in urban waters. Fishers, members of the weasel family once regarded as reclusive denizens of northern forests, found homes from cushy Philadelphia suburbs to the mean streets of New York. In the Southern California city where I live, the newest addition to our urban menagerie is a small population of badgers.

How long will it be until wolves show up in the Denver suburbs?

New animals, new policies

Human residents of these cities tend to react in one of two ways — with surprise or fear — to reports of such charismatic wildlife in their midst. There are historical reasons for both responses, but neither makes much sense today.

People react with surprise because most still cling to the old belief that wild animals need wild areas. What these animals actually need is habitat. A suitable habitat does not have to be a remote wilderness or protected sanctuary; it must only have sufficient resources to attract and support a population. For a growing cadre of wild species, American cities provide a wealth of such resources.

People react with fear because they have been led to believe that any wild animal bigger than breadbox must be dangerous. Wild animals certainly deserve our respect. A little caution can help people avoid unpleasant encounters, and extra vigilance is a good idea whenever pets or children are involved. Large wild animals can carry diseases, but proper management can reduce the risks. And predators can help control diseases by consuming rodent and insect pests.

Despite their reputations, large wild animals are just not very dangerous. By far the most dangerous animals in North America, as measured in human fatalities, are bees, wasps and hornets. Next are dogs — man’s best friend — followed by spiders, snakes, scorpions, centipedes and rats. The most dangerous animal, globally and throughout human history, is undoubtedly the mosquito. Coyotes are nowhere on the list.

Nevertheless, officials have responded to coyote sightings in New York and other cities by rounding them up and moving them to more “appropriate” habitats. Usually, these efforts end with little trouble. But in at least one recent Manhattan case, the critter in question escaped after a chaotic and expensive three-hour pursuit that embarrassed the authorities and revealed the ad hoc nature of our policies.

This is an uncoordinated, unaffordable, unscientific, and unsustainable form of wildlife management.

A 21st-century approach to urban wildlife must include four elements:

• research is crucial for any management effort, but it is especially urgent in this case because wildlife scientists, who have long preferred to work in more pristine areas, know so little about urban ecosystems
• educational programs can help dispel myths and foster public support
• infrastructure upgrades — such as street signs, wildlife resistant trash bins, and nonreflective treatments that make glass windows more visible to birds — can help prevent unwanted human-wildlife encounters while protecting animals from injury and disease
• finally, clear policies, including rules of engagement and better coordination among the various agencies responsible for urban wildlife, are crucial for both long-range planning and responding to rare but genuine emergencies.

All of these measures are essential if America’s increasingly urban human population is to live in peace with its increasingly urban wildlife.

Peter Alagona receives funding from the National Science Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

At Wired, our Laura writes about the emerging media cycle surrounding rape scenes in TV shows and the euphemistic bullshit used to justify the bottom-shelf storytelling they embody: "If you’re a woman in media, you’re basically the sexy Halloween costume of human beings in a world where Halloween never ends." Read the rest

This is more fun to watch than most romantic comedies. Read the rest

Daniel and Katina Mercadentes' new short film "Colors" is a delightful piece of montage moviemaking. It's the feel-good film of the day! (more…)

The Charleston murders have renewed the sporadic debates over whether gun control might have prevented this latest of tragedies.

To quote President Obama the day after the shooting in the AME Church,

“At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this kind of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency. It is in our power to do something about it.”

So far, however, the US has not done “something about it.”
The National Rifle Association (NRA), it seems, has so much power over politicians that even when 90% of Americans (including a majority of NRA members) wanted universal background checks to be adopted following the Newtown killings of 2012, no federal action ensued. Certainly, it’s unlikely that any useful legislation will emerge in South Carolina.

The NRA stranglehold on appropriate anti-crime measures is only part of the problem, though.

The gun culture’s worship of the magical protective capacities of guns and their power to be wielded against perceived enemies – including the federal government – is a message that resonates with troubled individuals from the Santa Barbara killer, who was seeking vengeance on women who had failed to perceive his greatness, to the Charleston killer who echoed the Tea Party mantra of taking back our country.

I’ve been researching gun violence – and what can be done to prevent it – in the US for 25 years. The fact is that if NRA claims about the efficacy of guns in reducing crime were true, the US would have the lowest homicide rate among industrialized nations instead of the highest homicide rate (by a wide margin).

The US is by far the world leader in the number of guns in civilian hands. The stricter gun laws of other “advanced countries” have restrained homicidal violence, suicides and gun accidents – even when, in some cases, laws were introduced over massive protests from their armed citizens.

The state of gun control in the US

Eighteen states in the US and a number of cities including Chicago, New York and San Francisco have tried to reduce the unlawful use of guns as well as gun accidents by adopting laws to keep guns safely stored when they are not in use. Safe storage is a common form of gun regulation in nations with stricter gun regulations.

The NRA has been battling such laws for years. But that effort was dealt a blow earlier this month when the US Supreme Court – over a strident dissent by Justices Thomas and Scalia – refused to consider the San Francisco law that required guns not in use be stored safely. This was undoubtedly a positive step because hundreds of thousands of guns are stolen every year, and good public policy must try to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children.

The dissenters, however, were alarmed by the thought that a gun stored in a safe would not be immediately available for use, but they seemed unaware of how unusual it is that a gun is helpful when someone is under attack.

For starters, only the tiniest fraction of victims of violent crime are able to use a gun in their defense. Over the period from 2007-2011, when roughly six million nonfatal violent crimes occurred each year, data from the National Crime Victimization Survey show that the victim did not defend with a gun in 99.2% of these incidents – this in a country with 300 million guns in civilian hands.

In fact, a study of 198 cases of unwanted entry into occupied single-family dwellings in Atlanta (not limited to night when the residents were sleeping) found that the invader was twice as likely to obtain the victim’s gun than to have the victim use a firearm in self-defense.

The author of the study, Arthur Kellerman, concluded in words that Justice Thomas and Scalia might well heed:

On average, the gun that represents the greatest threat is the one that is kept loaded and readily available in a bedside drawer.

A loaded, unsecured gun in the home is like an insurance policy that fails to deliver at least 95% of the time you need it, but has the constant potential – particularly in the case of handguns that are more easily manipulated by children and more attractive for use in crime – to harm someone in the home or (via theft) the public at large.

More guns won’t stop gun violence

For years, the NRA mantra has been that allowing citizens to carry concealed handguns would reduce crime as they fought off or scared off the criminals.

Some early studies even purported to show that so-called right to carry laws (RTC) did just that, but a 2004 report from the National Research Council refuted that claim (saying it was not supported by “the scientific evidence”), while remaining uncertain about what the true impact of RTC laws was.

Ten years of additional data have allowed new research to get a better fix on this question, which is important since the NRA is pushing for a Supreme Court decision that would allow RTC as a matter of constitutional law.

The new research on this issue from my research team at Stanford University has given the most compelling evidence to date that RTC laws are associated with significant increases in violent crime – particularly for aggravated assault. Looking at Uniform Crime Reports data from 1979-2012, we find that, on average, the 33 states that adopted RTC laws over this period experienced violent crime rates that are 4%-19% higher after 10 years than if they had not adopted these laws.

This hardly makes a strong case for RTC as a constitutional right. At the very least more research is needed to estimate more precisely exactly how much violent crime such a decision would unleash in the states that have so far resisted the NRA-backed RTC laws.

In the meantime, can anything make American politicians listen to the preferences of the 90% on the wisdom of adopting universal background checks for gun purchases?

Gun control around the world

As an academic exercise, one might speculate whether law could play a constructive role in reducing the number or deadliness of mass shootings.

Most other advanced nations apparently think so, since they make it far harder for someone like the Charleston killer to get his hands on a Glock semiautomatic handgun or any other kind of firearm (universal background checks are common features of gun regulation in other developed countries).

• Germany: To buy a gun, anyone under the age of 25 has to pass a psychiatric evaluation (presumably 21-year-old Dylann Roof would have failed).
• Finland: Handgun license applicants are only allowed to purchase firearms if they can prove they are active members of regulated shooting clubs. Before they can get a gun, applicants must pass an aptitude test, submit to a police interview, and show they have a proper gun storage unit.
• Italy: To secure a gun permit, one must establish a genuine reason to possess a firearm and pass a background check considering both criminal and mental health records (again, presumably Dylann Roof would have failed).
• France: Firearms applicants must have no criminal record and pass a background check that considers the reason for the gun purchase and evaluates the criminal, mental, and health records of the applicant. (Dylann Roof would presumably have failed in this process).
• United Kingdom and Japan: Handguns are illegal for private citizens.

While mass shootings as well as gun homicides and suicides are not unknown in these countries, the overall rates are substantially higher in the United States than in these competitor nations.

While NRA supporters frequently challenge me on these statistics saying that this is only because “American blacks are so violent,” it is important to note that white murder rates in the US are well over twice as high as the murder rates in any of these other countries.

Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996

The story of Australia, which had 13 mass shootings in the 18-year period from 1979 to 1996 but none in the succeeding 19 years, is worth examining.

The turning point was the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania, in which a gunman killed 35 individuals using semiautomatic weapons.

In the wake of the massacre, the conservative federal government succeeded in implementing tough new gun control laws throughout the country. A large array of weapons were banned – including the Glock semiautomatic handgun used in the Charleston shootings. The government also imposed a mandatory gun buy back that substantially reduced gun possession in Australia.

The effect was that both gun suicides and homicides (as well as total suicides and homicides) fell. In addition, the 1996 legislation made it a crime to use firearms in self-defense.

When I mention this to disbelieving NRA supporters they insist that crime must now be rampant in Australia. In fact, the Australian murder rate has fallen to close one per 100,000 while the US rate, thankfully lower than in the early 1990s, is still roughly at 4.5 per 100,000 – over four times as high. Moreover, robberies in Australia occur at only about half the rate of the US (58 in Australia versus 113.1 per 100,000 in the US in 2012).

How did Australia do it? Politically, it took a brave prime minister to face the rage of Australian gun interests.

John Howard wore a bullet-proof vest when he announced the proposed gun restrictions in June 1996. The deputy prime minister was hung in effigy. But Australia did not have a domestic gun industry to oppose the new measures so the will of the people was allowed to emerge. And today, support for the safer, gun-restricted Australia is so strong that going back would not be tolerated by the public.

That Australia hasn’t had a mass shooting since 1996 is likely more than merely the result of the considerable reduction in guns – it’s certainly not the case that guns have disappeared altogether.

I suspect that the country has also experienced a cultural shift between the shock of the Port Arthur massacre and the removal of guns from every day life as they are no longer available for self-defense and they are simply less present throughout the country. Troubled individuals, in other words, are not constantly being reminded that guns are a means to address their alleged grievances to the extent that they were in the past, or continue to be in the US.

Lax gun control in one nation can create problems in another

Of course, strict gun regulations cannot ensure that the danger of mass shootings or killings has been eliminated.

Norway has strong gun control and committed humane values. But they didn’t prevent Anders Breivik from opening fire on a youth camp on the island of Utoya in 2011? His clean criminal record and hunting license had allowed him to secure semiautomatic rifles, but Norway restricted his ability to get high-capacity clips for them. In his manifesto, Breivik wrote about his attempts to legally buy weapons, stating, “I envy our European American brothers as the gun laws in Europe sucks ass in comparison.”

In fact, in the same manifesto (“December and January – Rifle/gun accessories purchased”, Breivik wrote that it was from a US supplier that he purchased – and had mailed – ten 30-round ammunition magazines for the rifle he used in his attack.

In other words, even if a particular state chooses to make it harder for some would-be killers to get their weapons, these efforts can be undercut by the jurisdictions that hold out from these efforts. In the US, of course, gun control measures at the state and local level are often thwarted by the lax attitude to gun acquisition in other states.

John Donohue does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.

In last summer's Unlocking the Gates of Alexandria: DRM, Competition and Access to E-Books , Ana Carolina Bittar of the Fundação Getulio Vargas Law School at São Paulo does an outstanding, thorough, and easily understandable job in explaining the ways in which ebook DRM ends up hurting writers, readers and publishers by shifting market power to the ebook vendors like Amazon, Google Play, Apple and B&N. Read the rest

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is trying to work out the rules for facial recognition -- whether and when cameras can be put in public places that programatically identify you as you walk past and then save a record of where you've been and who you were with. Read the rest

Columbia University awarded a doctorate in education to Nick Sousanis for Unflattening, a graphic novel about the relationship between words and pictures in literature. Read the rest

This article is part of the Democracy Futures series, a joint global initiative with the Sydney Democracy Network. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.

WARNING: This article contains graphic language of a violent sexual nature.

Have you noticed that variations on the phrase “as a woman online” are kick-starting more and more conversations in the cybersphere? A recent example involves the writer Alex Blank Millard.

Millard conducted a Twitter experiment in which she changed her profile photo to that of a man. When Millard tweeted as a woman about rape culture, fat shaming and systemic oppression, the standard response was a deluge of rape and death threats, and a bunch of guys calling her fat. When she tweeted about these exact same things as a straight-looking white man, something incredible happened. Instead of cyberhate, she got retweeted and favourited.

As a woman on the internet, Millard’s tweets resulted in abuse. As a man, they sparked debate.

The phrase “as a woman online” reflects the fact that engaging on the internet has become a very different experience for women as opposed to men. I have certainly noticed that if you express an opinion on pretty much anything, odds are it is just a matter of time before a horde of furious man-trolls tell you that you’re too fat/ugly/gay to rape/maim/kill, but they’ll do it anyway because that’s just the kind of generous individuals they are.

Gendered cyberhate is not a private problem but a public crisis. Among other ramifications, it poses a challenge for digital citizenship and raises serious questions about how we do democracy in the digital century.

Feminism, democracy and the digital divide

The traditional feminist critique of democracy is that – as per George Orwell’s Animal Farm – on paper all genders may be equal, but in practice some are more equal than others. While universal suffrage is a good start, it’s simply not the end of the story with regards to equity of citizenship and political participation.

Political theorist Carole Pateman begins Feminism and Democracy with the wry observation that feminists could dispose of this subject extremely briskly.

For feminists, democracy has never existed; women have never been and still are not admitted as full and equal members and citizens in any country known as a “democracy”.

Pateman’s point here is that confining “the political” to voting obscures many economic and social inequities. A parallel scenario emerges when we look at issues of equity and citizenship in digital domains. While everyone in a given community may have the raw tools to access the internet – let’s call it the computer version of universal suffrage – people’s actual experiences are not the same.

Gender, class and race are all key markers of difference and inequality in terms of digital citizenship. For many women, this manifests in a stark choice: put up with the deluge of misogynist abuse, withdraw from the internet or find ways of e-engagement that don’t attract attention – like tweeting in drag.

Around this point in the conversation, sceptics often chime in with some variation on “surely it is not that bad”. I have also been called a princess and told to lighten up. Rather than attempting to argue the point in the abstract, my usual response is to suggest they check out some unexpurgated examples.

But first, an adult content warning…

One of the big dilemmas when attempting to speak of gendered cyberhate is that so much of it is metaphorically unspeakable. It is often referred to via generic descriptors such as “unpleasant”, “sexually explicit”, “in bad taste” and so on. My concern is that euphemisms do an exceptionally poor job of capturing the toxic nature of what has become a lingua franca in much of the cybersphere.

Compare the difference between the following two sentences:

One: Women online are receiving rape threats.

Two: Women online are receiving rape threats such as, “I will fuck your ass to death you filthy fucking whore. Your only worth on this planet is as a warm hole to stick my cock in.”

Call me old-fashioned but version one really doesn’t capture the je ne sais misogyny of version two. To really understand what it’s like to be a woman online in 2015 we must examine actual examples of gendered cyberhate regardless of how unpleasant the experience might be.

So let’s brace ourselves and have a look.

A good place to start is the experience of women in video-game culture. This is the subject of a new documentary, GTFO, by Shannon Sun-Higginson. The title stands for “Get The F— Out” and refers to the response many women receive when they participate in the $20 billion gaming industry. This is despite – or maybe because of – half of all gamers being women.

None of this is new. Women in the technology and gaming industries have historically been subjected to an especially noxious version of what I call e-bile, or online vitriol.

In 2007, for instance, Kathy Sierra, then one of the most visible women in computing, withdrew from public life after a campaign of harassment. This included the circulation of doctored images of her as a sexually mutilated corpse accompanied by posts such as “fuck off you boring slut … i hope someone slits your throat and cums down your gob”.

Five years later, feminist blogger and gamer Anita Sarkeesian was targeted after launching a crowd-funding campaign for a series of short films examining sexist stereotypes in video games. Her efforts to expose new media misogyny prompted a cyber mob attack that included the usual deluge of ultra-violent “rape rape” and “kill kill” communiqués, plus a dash of “Jew Jew” hate speech for good measure.

The rampant discrimination and sexism in gaming came to the fore again in 2014 thanks to that misogynist-fuelled storm dubbed Gamergate. Gamergate began when the disgruntled ex-boyfriend of a games designer called Zoe Quinn implied (baselessly) that Quinn had slept with a journalist to secure positive reviews for her game Depression Quest.

Quinn’s attackers used two common e-bile tactics:

1) “doxxing”: publishing personally identifying information to incite internet antagonists to hunt targets in offline domains; and

2) “revenge porn”: uploading sexually explicit material – usually of a former female partner – without the consent of the pictured subject.

As Gamergate unfolded, both Quinn and Sarkeesian cancelled their public speaking engagements. They left their homes after receiving graphic death threats that included their home addresses.

Female journalists and gamers who publicly defended Quinn and/or who questioned the Gamergate movement were also attacked. In October, for instance, the personal details of American game designer Brianna Wu were posted online. Within minutes she had begun receiving threats such as: “I’ve got a K-bar and I’m coming to your house so I can shove it up your ugly cunt”.

Wu also left her home because she feared for her safety. This was not, she observed “just casual sexism, it’s angry, violent sexism”.

Signal characteristics of e-bile

Four striking features of gendered e-bile can be observed by looking at these examples.

First, e-bile spikes in response to feminist activism and perceived feminist gains.

Second, attempts by women to “call out” online attacks or to support other targets tend to result in an escalation of abuse.

Third, gendered e-bile has a quasi-algebraic quality in that the names of the targets can be substituted infinitely without affecting in any way the structure of the discourse. It always sounds like the exact same man talking to the exact same woman.

Fourth, attacks online are more and more frequently moving offline, to the extent that it’s not possible to separate online and offline anymore. This often occurs via the aforementioned practices of doxxing and revenge porn.

Media outlets have also reported an increase in the number of men publishing faux advertisements claiming their ex-partners are soliciting sex. One US man posted a Craigslist ad entitled “Rape Me and My Daughters”. He was sentenced to 85 years in prison after more than 50 men arrived at his ex-wife’s home.

In addition to these attempts at rape by proxy, online abuse has been linked to offline domestic violence against women. The significance of such studies is not just that violent partners and ex-partners are using the internet as another dimension of their abuse of women, but that violent partners and ex-partners are able to use the internet to incite others to join their attacks.

Déjà vu

As with rape, domestic violence and workplace sexual harassment in the 1960s, gendered e-bile is frequently trivialised, mocked, dismissed as a personal matter and framed as legally intractable. In her new book, American legal scholar Danielle Keats Citron provides a meticulous survey of the various ways gendered cyberhate, cyber-harassment and cyber-stalking is underplayed, overlooked or ignored by those responsible for law enforcement, policy development and platform management.

Also paralleling more “traditional” forms of sexual assault and harassment is the tendency to blame the female victims. Media commentator Brendan O’Neill has dismissed female targets as being “peculiarly sensitive”, while another accuses those complaining about online death threats of indulging in “narcissistic victimhood”. Law-enforcement officers are known to counsel female cyberhate targets to simply “take a break” from the cybersphere.

Such attitudes shift the responsibility for e-bile to targets. What’s more, they penalise women by advising them to withdraw from a domain that is widely acknowledged as being an integral – and essential – part of contemporary life and citizenship.

The cybersphere in 2015 is no longer an optional extra or adjunct to “real” life. As American technology journalist Nilay Patel puts it:

You don’t do things “on the internet”, you just do things.

As a woman online, I certainly reject the suggestion that complaining about gendered e-bile is akin to “jumping into a dustbin and then complaining that you’re covered in rubbish”. I don’t accept that the price of entry to the public cybersphere should include having to endure threats of death, rape, K-barring and so on.

After all, the whole point of it being public is that you don’t tell half the population to GTFO.

Acknowledgement: Many thanks to Nikki Stevens for alerting me to the prevalence of “as a woman online”.

Emma A. Jane is recruiting interviewees for a new, three-year, government-funded study into gendered cyberhate. If you have experienced rape threats or other hostility online and would like to participate, visit: cyberhateproject.

Emma A. Jane is currently receiving funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) under the Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) scheme.

Occasionally I will be posting about non-fiction books.  I enjoy a good non-fiction book from time to time, especially books about all-natural and healthy living (hippie books, as my husband would call them).  The most recent one I read that really stood out to me was Farmacology.  I picked it up as a Kindle book one day when it was on sale for the rock-bottom price of $2.99.  I had never heard of it, but thought it sounded worth a shot, and if not, I wasn’t out much. Much to my pleasant surprise I adored this book, and am almost ready to read it again. I’ve recommended it to my sister like 10 times now (as she also subscribes to the hippie ways and I know she would enjoy it), but now I get to recommend it to you too!

REVIEW

Title: Farmacology

Author: Daphne Miller, M.D.

Published: 4/16/2013

Format I Read: Kindle

Rating: 5/5

Synopsis: Dr. Daphne Miller set out to discover if farming and agriculture have an impact on our bodies and health.  She traveled around the country living and working on six different types of farms.  In the resulting book, she tells six different stories about what she learned in each place and how we can use that information to improve our health and our world.  In her own words, “Farmacology explores what the science and art of sustainable agriculture can teach us about health and healing.”

Thoughts: In case you didn’t pick up on this earlier, I love, love, love this book.  If I had enough money, I would buy multiple copies of it and hand it out to everyone I meet. Miller is a great writer.  Her words are fluid and descriptive, and she manages to explain everything in a very understandable way.  It feels like sitting down with a friend while she shares her journey and her insights with you.

Each chapter is its own story, and they are all fascinating.

• Chapter one is about a biodynamic farm and how it relates to gaining back health (or rejuvenation as Dr. Miller calls it).
• Chapter two is about a dairy farm and it’s relationship to raising resilient children.
• Chapter three is set at an egg farm and focuses on what it can teach us about stress management.
• Chapter four is about integrated pest management at a winery and what that can mean for cancer treatment options.
• Chapter five is about an urban farm and it’s lessons regarding community medicine.
• Chapter six is about an herb farm and sustainable beauty.

As a doctor, Miller actually took the information that she learned and helped her patients apply the solutions in real life.  She recounts the stories of those patients in the book as well.  If you have any interest in natural agriculture, healthy living, or are just looking for a very interesting take on how nature, food, and health interact, I highly recommend this book.

"Dude" was the "hipster" of the 1880s.

The kappa is one of the most famous traditional yokai in modern day Japan. Even if you think you’ve never heard of it, you’ve probably encountered a reference at your local sushi bar. Ever wonder why cucumber roll is kappa maki when the word for cucumber is きゅうり? Come with us on a journey through the legend of the kappa. You may never look at that particular menu item the same way again.

Know Your Kappa

As with many creatures both mythical and real, the kappa doesn’t always look exactly the same. But if you encounter a vaguely reptilian creature walking upright or hanging around in a body of water, you may be dealing with a kappa. They’re the size of a small child or large monkey, with humanoid arms and legs. Otherwise they have mostly reptile or amphibian-like qualities. They have webbed digits for swimming and may be scaly or slimy. They’re reminiscent of a giant frog or turtle. Usually they have something like a turtle shell on their back and a beaky sort of snout. Kappa are said to smell fishy, and they’re often a bluish or greenish color.

What will always be distinctive despite these variations is the top of their head. You may momentarily wonder why this creature has the haircut of a European monk, with a frill around its bald spot. Look closer and you’ll see that the “bald spot” is actually a small dish of water. Keep an eye on this, because it will be critical to your upcoming lesson on Defense Against Kappa.

The other most consistent feature of the kappa is its favorite food. They have a fondness for eggplant and for several plants of the cucurbit family: melons, squash, and most especially cucumber. So that cucumber sushi roll isn’t named for its ingredients, but for its most famous devotee.

Where the Kappa Came From

The name “kappa” means “river child,” and it’s often called a “water sprite” in English explanations. Both of these give a much cuter impression than is good for your safety. The regional variations went by many different names, including gawappa, kawatarō, suiko, kawappa, kawako, kawaso… There seems to have been a basic east-west difference at one time. The turtle-shell-bearing kappa came from the east and the kawatarō in the west, which is more hairy and monkeylike. By the nineteenth century the reptilian eastern kappa seems to have edged out his western counterpart. Modern depictions of kappa are usually along those lines. We can be glad for this, because somehow the hair on top of everything else is just too creepy.

Some of the other names for the kappa suggest the animals it might have been partly based on: monkeys, turtles, and the now-extinct Japanese river otter. The river otter was about two feet long and nocturnal, so a glimpse of it standing on its hind legs in the middle of the night, combined in your mind with the features of other creatures that you know frequent the dark watery depths, could indeed make a fearsome monster. The otter certainly seems like a plausible origin for the hairy-but-aquatic kawatarō.

Another suggestion is that the kappa is based on the Japanese giant salamander. As far as I can tell that theory only goes back as far as a 2012 TV show. But having personally seen how aggressively this otherwise slow-moving, globby aquatic creature goes after its food, I find it pretty plausible.

Or maybe the simpler theory is that what people were seeing…. was actually a kappa. You’ll have to decide that one for yourself.

Danger: Kappa

I think it’s fair to say that the yokai Big Three are kitsune, tanuki and kappa. The first two are basically real animals, and their powers of mayhem are largely based on their shape-shifting abilities. Kitsune and tanuki can pretend to be something or someone else and cause supernatural trouble. Kappa, though, are an entirely different kettle of fish. They don’t correspond precisely to any non-magical animal, and they don’t have to pretend to be something else. They’re dangerous just the way they are.

Kappa live in water and we don’t. Thus gives them an advantage and a weapon, since we can’t breathe the stuff. They’re strong for their size, and can drag people into the water and hold them till they drown. In the old days they would even try to drown horses and cattle despite their difference in size (although they were often less successful than with humans). Children were warned about the kappa to keep them from swimming in dangerous places, and you’ll still see kappa in signs like the one above. The skeptical might even think they were made up for this purpose. In some ways they seem to be an embodiment of the dangerous and dark aspects of water.

Kappa Kink

Kappa are not just strange and dangerous. They’re kind of kinky. They don’t want to drown you just for the hell of it. They go after people because they want your shirikodama (尻子玉). This is a ball that supposedly is found inside the human anus. (The origin of the shirikodama story is said to be from the open anuses of drowning victims. Although this loosening of the sphincter isn’t exclusive to that manner of death.) The kappa supposedly reaches into your butthole with its hand to get this precious item or else – ick – sucks it out. And if that doesn’t kill you, the drowning will.

What is this thing exactly? Some says it’s the human soul. I have to say that if there is such a thing as a soul, that isn’t where I’d choose to keep it. Another idea is that it’s the Buddhist hojo, a sort of onion-shaped jewel that grants wishes (likewise on the the storage location choice for that one). Yet another is that the ball is either actually the liver, or it’s just in the way of getting at the liver, which the kappa is really after.

The kappa’s obsession with our heinies also leads them to hide in toilets and try to stroke women’s buttocks. But if that’s all that happens, you’re getting off easy: there are also tales of them raping women and leaving them pregnant with grotesque children. Most of these are killed at birth, although this tale from The Legends of Tono tells of someone who had a better idea just a bit too late:

A child looking something like a kappa was born into a certain family in Kamigo village. There was no definite proof that it was a kappa’s, but it had bright red skin and a large mouth. It was indeed a disgusting child. Loathing the child and wanting to get rid of it, someone took it to a fork in the road and sat it down. After having walked only a short distance, he realized that he could make money by showing it. He went back, but it was already hiding and was nowhere to be seen.

Defense Against Kappa

The kappa has a couple of weaknesses you can use against it: one, it loses its power if the water bowl on its head is dry, and two, it’s very polite. So if you bow to it, it is compelled to bow back, and there’s the trick. For instance, kappa like to challenge people to sumo matches, and are very strong on land, so it’s bound to be a losing battle. But of course you have to bow before a sumo match, and there you go: the kappa has to bow back, and is rendered powerless when the water in its head dish spills out.

If you want to try to catch a kappa and kill it, your best bet is to use its worst desires against it. In the print above, the guy who’s mooning the river is actually the bait: the idea is to lure the kappa in and catch it when it goes after the guy’s shirikodama. If you’ve got a really brave and/or foolish friend who’s willing to play that role, let us know how it goes.

A few more helpful facts are that kappas dislike gourds, sesame, ginger, and iron. In some places eating a cucumber and then swimming is said to attract kappas to attack, but in others, it’s said to be protective. Check with the locals, I guess, before you try it.

Masters of Gasses

The jewel in our butthole is not the only buttocks-related aspect of the kappa legend. They’re also renowned for something they do with their own behinds: farting. Experts that I consulted had no explanation for why kappa are supposedly so good at farting, so I can only assume it has something to do with their cucumber-heavy diet.

Despite their fondness for their own gas, they don’t care for anyone else’s (more or less how most of us feel, I guess.) You can see this from the print above, where it’s clear that the kappa can toot it out but they can’t take it.

Matt Alt explained to me that this print is an ad for a professional fart entertainer, sometimes called a fartiste (and we are not making this up, there was really such a thing). Apparently if you’re in Japan and you want to convince people you have a talent for flatulence, this is the obvious comparison.

“I think the idea is that this guy’s so good at what he does that he can even beat kappa at their own game,” Alt says. “There’s a famous saying in Japanese, “he no kappa” (“like a kappa farting”) which is kind of used like our “piece of cake!” when someone does something easily.”

You probably won’t have such expert aim as a professional fartiste. But if you’ve got kappa trouble and all else fails: try farting at them.

Getting Along with Kappa

Kappa are said to be helpful to humans sometimes, although I suspect only when there’s something in it for them. At least it’s possible to make a deal with one in certain circumstances. One odd feature of the kappa is that it supposedly is talented in health care, making salves and medicines and setting broken bones. If you yank off a kappa’s arm (like when it’s sticking it up out of the toilet to fondle you) it knows how to reattach it, if it gets it back in time. They’ve been known to teach someone their medical secrets in return for getting their arm back.

There are shrines to kappa where you can leave cucumbers to appease them. Some are even devoted to kappa who have been helpful to people (probably because once they’ve been nice to us, we better stay on their good side). At Sogenji Temple in Asakusa, Tokyo, also known as Kappa-dera, the story is that the area was subject to repeated floods till a bunch of kappa helped build flood-control structures. So now they are venerated there. For you skeptics, Sogenji even has a relic to prove it: the mummified hand of an actual kappa. (Check out this video at about 19:25 to see Matt Alt visiting it.)

Talking Kappa

Along with “he no kappa,” there are other sayings and proverbs that involve the kappa. “Kappa no kawanagare” means “even a kappa can drown,” a warning that it’s possible to screw up even the thing you know best. A kappa-hage is a man with bald spot on top of his head. Amagappa (雨合羽 rain-kappa) means raincoat, referring to another weird feature of the kappa: they need to take off their skin to sleep. Without it, they are defenseless and can’t go back into the water.

There’s another story about kappa and raincoats that connects to another familiar reference to the kappa: the famous Kappabashi bridge in Tokyo. Apparently the first Kappabashi bridge was constructed by a raincoat merchant who hired kappa to labor on it. No word if they were the same kappa who built the floodworks honored by Sogenji Temple, but it’s in the same place as that original bridge, so who knows?

Modern Kappa

Like a lot of other yokai, such as the tanuki, kappa are often more cute than scary nowadays. Once a frightening “other,” in the 20th century, stories about the kappa began to use them metaphorically, as stand-ins for humans. By the 1960s, Mizuki Shigeru drew the kappa in Sanpei the Kappa as perfectly adorable, with basically the same face as his (mostly) human friend, and wrote stories where they are mistaken for one another.

Kappa are now used in advertising and as logos in a way that wouldn’t make sense if people still mainly pictured them as a fearsome anus-attacking drowner of humans and livestock. There are cute character goods and local specialties like these buns:

Ironically, now they can even be used to invite you into the onsen, which would have been the worst possible idea in the old days:

In the 1970s, rural revitalization projects and festivals started using the kawaii-ized kappa as a symbol, playing on its association with nature and the disappearing country lifestyle. While it’s still used in signs to warn against swimming, some look more like friendly advice than a threat. They’re also used in posters asking people not to litter and in campaigns to protect the environment, including clean water.

Nowadays, it seems like there’s a sense in which the kappa is as much at risk from us as vice versa: once a personification of the dangers of nature, now it’s often used as a symbol of the natural world we need to protect. As Michael Dylan Foster puts it, “A yokai that used to represent the violence and unpredictability of the natural world, and especially water, has now literally become a poster child for the effort to stop the sacrifice of nature.”

Like that quote implies though, nature has a lot to be mad at us for… so if you do run into a kappa, it’s still best to take care, because it might be angry.

Bonus Wallpapers!

[Desktop ∙ 5120×2880 / 1280×720] ∙ [Mobile]

Sources:

• Kamiki.net
• Matthew Meyer, The Night Parade of One Hundred Demons
• Hyakumonogatari.com
• Pechakucha.org
• The Book of Yokai, Michael Dylan Foster
• Yokai Attack, Hiroko Yoda and Matt Alt
• The Legends of Tono, Kunio Yanagita

The post Kappa: Japan’s Aquatic, Cucumber-Loving, Booty-Obsessed Yokai appeared first on Tofugu.

This week police in Overton, Texas shut down two sisters (aged 7 and 8) who were operating an illicit lemonade stand. These kinds of stories have become an annual summertime tradition, complete with that cool and refreshing thanks Obama! subtext about government overreach. The part we seem to forget? America has always been at war with kids’ lemonade stands. Even back in the good ol’ days.

Read more...

Atena Farghadani is a 28-year-old Iranian artist. She was recently sentenced to 12 years and 9 months in prison for drawing a cartoon.

This cartoon, that she posted on her Facebook page last year, depicts members of the Iranian parliament as animals. It was drawn in protest of new legislature in Iran that will restrict access to contraception and criminalise voluntary sterilisation. Atena’s charges include ‘spreading propaganda against the system’ and ‘insulting members of parliament through paintings’.

Last August, 12 members of the elite Revolutionary Guard came to Atena’s house, blindfolded her and took her to the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. According to Amnesty International:

“While in prison last year, Atena flattened paper cups to use them as a surface to paint on. When the prison guards realised what she had been doing, they confiscated her paintings and stopped giving her paper cups. When Atena found some cups in the bathroom, she smuggled them into her cell. Soon after, she was beaten by prison guards, when she refused to strip naked for a full body search. Atena says that they knew about her taking the cups because they had installed cameras in the toilet and bathroom facilities – cameras detainees had been told were not operating.”

She was released in November and gave media interviews and posted a video on YouTube detailing her beatings, constant interrogations and humiliating body searches. She was then rearrested possibly in retaliation for speaking out and has been imprisoned ever since. In January, Atena went on a hunger strike to protest the horrible prison conditions. Her health suffered dramatically, and after losing consciousness and suffering a heart attack in February, she was forced to eat again.

The quote used in the comic is taken from the speech Atena gave at her trial. It has been translated into English by the Free Atena Facebook page. You can read the whole thing here.

Time is now against her, she has just two weeks to lodge an appeal. Michael Cavna, comic journalist for The Washington Post, has launched a campaign appealing to artists to help bring awareness to Atena’s case by creating their own artwork in support of Atena and using the hashtag #Draw4Atena. Can a bunch of artists and a hashtag really make a difference and put pressure on the Iranian Government to release Atena? Probably not. But just remember that Atena is currently in prison enduring horrible conditions, and if her appeal isn’t successful, she will be there for another twelve years. FOR DRAWING A CARTOON AND POSTING IT ON FACEBOOK. Don’t we owe it to her to at least try?

RELATED COMICS: Malala Yousafzai. Sophie Scholl. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

As we’re about to get down and dirty with summer, you can always find us scouting ways to help enjoy the boiling hot months. Our newest favorite? Kodama Zomes, which we discovered at this year’s Dwell on Design. These hanging geodesic domes are part love seat, part bed, and part private space, equalling the perfect place to relax and enjoy the outdoors with your loved ones.

The suspended Zomes were designed by licensed structural engineer Richie Duncan with the latest 3D engineering software, letting you gently sway towards ultimate relaxation.

Each Kodama Zome has a powder coated steel structure, outdoor grade polyester webbing, marine grade 316 stainless steel hardware, custom mattress and cushions, and a storage cover. The cushions come in a range of colors in Sunbrella outdoor canvas upholstery fabric.

They also offer a lot of extras like, hanging accessories, a freestanding stand, waterproof outdoor covers, etc.

“Based on data from the National UFO Reporting Center, the map displays over 90,000 reports of UFO sightings dating back to 1905. (more…)

Some 41 superhero movies are in the works at various movie studios, and they're all due to be released over the next five years. Read the rest

Marcela Telehanicova, of Ivybridge, England, woke last week to find an army of gnomes neatly arranged in formation in her front yard, thirty rows deep.

The bespoke, designer Whaletone piano looks like the oceanic offspring of the 1969 Fender Rhodes Student Piano. (more…)

Image by Flickr user tweng (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In Brief:

Despite the growing body of research on our professional demographics and multi-year diversity initiatives, librarianship in the United States remains overwhelmingly white. I suggest the interview process is a series of repetitive gestures designed to mimic and reinforce white middle class values, which ultimately influence the hiring decisions—and relative lack of diversity—of librarianship as a whole. I consider how the whiteness of librarianship may manifest long before the hiring process. By identifying and interrogating the body of white, middle class values inherent to both librarianship and professional job searching, I offer suggestions to encourage an authentically diverse pool of applicants.

Defining Whiteness

Whiteness is a shifting status bestowed by those in power, intertwined with class relationships and the production of structural inequalities. See the transformation of Italian, German, Irish, and Polish people from white ethnics to white over the 20th century in the United States. “The Italian comes in at the bottom, and in the generation that came over the sea he stays there. In the slums he is welcomed as a tenant who ‘makes less trouble’ than the contentious Irishman or the order-loving German.” (Riis, 1890)

For the sake of brevity, whiteness in this essay means: white, heterosexual, capitalist, and middle class. Whiteness is “ideology based on beliefs, values behaviors, habits and attitudes, which result in the unequal distribution of power and privilege.” (http://www.ucalgary.ca/cared/whiteness) Beliefs, values behaviors, habits, and attitudes become gestures, enactments, and unconsciously repetitive acts which reinforce hegemony.

Soliciting Performance, Hiding Bias

Librarianship is paralyzed by whiteness. This will continue unabated without interrogating structures that benefit white librarians, including the performative nature of recruitment and hiring. The interview and academic job talk conceal institutional bias under the guise of “organizational fit” or a candidate’s “acceptability”, while the act of recruiting presents an aspirational version of the library to candidates.

The standing-room-only presentation at Association of College & Research Libraries 2015 on the experience of academic librarians of color suggests librarianship is at least aware of its demographics. Some libraries are attempting to recruit broader pools of applicants, with a few offering ever-popular diversity residencies and fellowships. The fellowship model is mutually beneficial and offers chances to experiment with otherwise risky initiatives. However, fellowships mask precarity under the illusion of faculty status and support, when librarians accepting these positions may have neither (Salo, 2013).

While recruiting initiatives and fellowships are reasonable starting points, they become meaningless gestures for institutions which screen on performing whiteness. These actions are further undermined by framing diversity as a problem to be solved rather than engaging in reflective work to dismantle institutional bias. Framing diversity as the problem implicitly suggests a final outcome, locating responsibility and discomfort away from white librarians while marginalizing colleagues who do not perform whiteness to the satisfaction of gatekeepers.

Finally, when librarians who are not white and middle class arrive, they are alienated as “the diversity hire”, erasing their skills, talents, and expertise (Sendula, 2015). Librarians with visible minority status are assigned more work, as many marginalized librarians are appointed to diversity and hiring committees by default. This strands non-white and middle class librarians in a “murky place between gratitude and anger” (Bennett, 2015) as their visibility changes to suit the needs of the organization. That librarianship remains overwhelmingly white suggests marginalized librarians are seen when the institution finds it convenient, but rarely heard during critical stages of the hiring process.

The current librarian job market solicits performance and creates barriers to entry in three ways: cultural negotiation, conspicuous leisure, and access to wealth.

Image by Flickr user wolframburner (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Barriers to Entry

Culture

The whiteness of librarianship begins long before the job application process, as traditionally underrepresented students come to university systems with varying experiences in libraries. Conclusions on this subject vary: libraries can be a source of anxiety for marginalized students (Haras, Lopez & Ferry, 2008); the university library can feel overwhelming compared to underfunded or nonexistent K-12 libraries (Adkins and Hussey, 2006); or the library as a site of abundance and discovery. Nearly all scholarship on the subject agrees the library is a site where information seeking and cultural hegemony are negotiated (Long, 2011; Sadler and Bourg, 2015). For marginalized students, an academic library may be the largest they’ve ever encountered. “For students from a nondominant culture, knowing how to use library resources is not merely about finding information but also about navigating culture.” (Adkins and Hussey, 2006)

White Savior narratives are found throughout librarianship, where white librarians are framed as benevolent actors toward people of color, who “lack the agency necessary to enact positive changes in their own lives. The underlying assumption is that people of color, on their own, fail to enact resilience,resistance, and success…Any achievements in these areas seem to result from the initiatives of the white savior.” (Cammarota, 2011)

Rather than disarm the “structural, systemic, oppressive conditions disproportionately affecting the most economically disadvantaged people”(Groski, 2008) the middle class White Savior perpetuates myths about poverty. Marginalized patrons in libraries become the saved and lifted, without necessarily seeing themselves in the space of the library.

Students not reflected in the culture of the library are unlikely to see librarianship as a possibility (Williams and Van Arnhem, 2015). Marginalized students employed outside the university system face additional barriers as their work typically does not cultivate the development of a white collar professional identity. The hospitality industry, food service work, call centers, and other low income employment offers prescriptive identities, removing most agency from the employee. Marginalized students in graduate programs arrive after enduring lifetimes of institutionalized oppression surrounding their origins, with a painful awareness the they of “professional language” refers to themselves (Overall, 1995; Johnson Black, 1995; Bennett, 2014).

Moving from a prescriptive work environment to a professional one requires a certain amount of socialization into white culture. I don’t think of myself as an ex-hotel night clerk, but will always be a librarian even if my job title doesn’t reflect this. Librarianship is not simply what we do at work but a component of how we identify as people (Gonzalez-Smith, Swanson & Tanaka, 2014). This creates a dissonant sense of self and belonging in the profession, when our identity does not conform to professional expectations, “worldviews, or emotional orientations” (Costello, 2005).

Librarians themselves manufacture the culture of whiteness, with its ever-shifting criteria and continuous trading in surfaces (Ewen, 1988). Our policies embrace the fiction of neutrality, while our spaces, practices, and culture are not neutral entities (Sadler and Bourg, 2015). The idea of library-as-neutral is seductive because of its usefulness and minimal intellectual effort required from white librarians: neutrality is the safest position for libraries because it situates whiteness not only as default, but rewards and promotes white cultural values.

Whiteness-as-default allowed the conversation about 2015’s Banned Books Week poster to incorrectly assume no Muslim women were part of the image’s construction, effectively acknowledging librarianship’s tendency to reproduce inequalities and in many cases manufacture them in our systems and practices. From organizational structures and descriptions, to images and policy, librarians engage numerous fictions upholding cultural hegemony (Drabinski, 2013).

“Libraries and professional organizations have put together documents and policies on information ethics and intellectual freedom in an attempt to broaden the professional perspective. While these are important policies and procedures, they still reinforce cultural hegemony as they are primarily written in the language of those in power. For example, statements on professional ethics are put together by professional organizations, the overwhelming majority of whose members are white. Intellectual freedom is influenced by the discursive formations of those who write and enforce these policies. It is those in power who decide what level of intellectual freedom the library will support.” (Adkins and Hussey, 2006)

While librarians may fill social media with images of what librarians look like, our professional organizations and policy language articulate further what successful librarians look like: how they organize, what voices are heard, how they construct strategy, which crisis are acceptable to address and which should be suppressed under tone arguments or claims of unprofessional behavior.

The fiction of neutrality became apparent to me as a circulation desk clerk in a large public library system. Over winter break I visited an affluent suburb of Cleveland, Ohio where my partner’s family lives. We toured the public library and I was impressed with the college and career prep resources available. At my home branch I asked if I could make a similar display. I was told “Our kids aren’t really the college type,” and reluctantly allowed to maintain a small collection in the young adult section. This same system employed several librarians who insisted on business wear for work in a casual dress environment, explaining “Children in this neighborhood need a model for what a professional is, because they don’t have contact with any.” Many public library systems continue to address poverty from a deficit theory framework, ignoring the connection between treating poor people as inherently flawed and the profession’s inability to recruit marginalized workers.

A question posted to Librarian Wardrobe suggests one applicant’s struggle to be comfortable, yet professional during interviews. “I tend towards a ‘soft butch’ style and a very broke budget, but I have a major interview coming up. Any suggestions for an outfit that gets across my personal identity, my willingness to crawl around looking for a book, but also my professionalism?” This poster reveals their gender performance during an interview is necessary to maintain the comfort of others, not to present the ‘authentic self’ search committees claim to want. Their question, like so many others I found during my research, is about this maintenance.

• How can I be butch, but not too butch?
• Should I buy a plain band for my left hand if I am unmarried?
• Should I dye my hair or have it relaxed?
• How provocative is a suit that isn’t gray, black, or navy?
• Where can I buy a button down shirt that will not gape at my chest?
• Will not wearing makeup cost me a job?
• If transcripts are required, how will I explain a differently gendered name?

Each question reflects problems about how to address the cultural expectations of whiteness in the context of othered bodies. Librarians who wear natural hair, whose shape/stature make it difficult to find professional dress, or librarians with disabilities have found their bodies as they exist to be deemed unprofessional. Rather than assign this failure to designers’ inability to account for variations in bodies, this is passed on to applicants. Few blame manufacturers for ill-fitting suits. We blame bodies for not conforming to them.

Such anxieties are pervasive, even when acknowledged. In 2014, I sat on a panel discussing gender, agency, and resistance where one presenter–a scholar from India–expressed concern in the context of her research how wearing a sari during her talk would mean risking objectification and dismissal in a room full of feminist folklorists. The academic job talk is similarly concerning, as the growing tendency to record and make available such talks transforms the interview process into a mediated performance. An intellectual understanding of bias isn’t enough, it must be interrogated to dismantle the mechanisms which produce bias.

Conspicuous Leisure and Wealth

In flooded job markets, barriers to entry can include requiring prior library service for any library job. While MLIS students benefit from on the job experience, such screening policies would exclude promising applicants unable to enroll in face-to-face programs: rural students, students with nonstandard work schedules, students with family obligations, students transitioning careers, and other MLIS-holders outside the fictions of “ideal worker” (Davies, 2014).

Hiring Librarians has documented responses from hiring managers claiming students in online programs cannot work in teams or learn effectively, when many students choose online programs for the exact opposite reasons. As with myths about poverty which overshadow the well-established resourcefulness of poor students, online MLIS students are dismissed as asocial and not “team players”. Bias against online MLIS students is especially harmful to rural and underfunded libraries, in light of the geography of MLIS-holders (Sin, 2011).

The reality of post-MLIS education includes thousands of webinars, MOOCs, chats, listservs, virtual meetings, systems work, and other collaborative technologies. Suggesting online programs lack rigor or cannot result in “real” learning is harmful, technophobic, and helps maintain the whiteness of academic libraries. This attitude favors applicants with the wealth and time to enroll in face to face programs, even though very little of their development as librarians occurs in lecture style, classroom settings. “Candidates must prove that they want it enough, prove that they are ‘the best’, where ‘the best’ sometimes just means the most willing and able to work for free” (Hudson, 2014).

Conspicuous leisure manifests in the time lost learning to perform whiteness and the wealth required to do so effectively. Unpack for a moment what the notion of being “put together” professionally involves: hairstyles, makeup, becoming comfortable in costuming which may or may not be designed for our bodies, voice coaching to eliminate accents and modify tone, time for exercise to appear “healthy”, orthopedics to address poor posture, orthodontics and teeth whitening, eye contacts if our lenses distort our appearance, concealing body modifications, and the countless ways marginalized librarians modify gesture, develop behavioral scripts, and otherwise conceal their authentic selves in the interest of survival.

Favoring applications with access to time and wealth is a larger manifestation of problems in hiring for libraries: we choose people like us because it is easy, rather than advocating for different views by picking “unfamiliar” candidates who might interrogate the processes. This manifests in micro (but no less harmful) aggressions if librarians who aren’t white and middle class manage to get hired and do not perform to “model minority” standards or otherwise refuse to sit quietly. “Our reviews are full of words like ‘shrill’, ‘abrasive’, ‘hard to work with’, ‘not a team player’, and ‘difficult’. We’re encouraged to be nicer and less intimidating and more helpful. Action items and measurable metrics are nowhere to be found.” (tableflip.club)

For marginalized librarians, the successful performance of whiteness may include integrating aspects of the self which allow White Saviors to feel good: I am resilient; I overcome; I have transcended my station. Such gestures convey applicants understand the rules of whiteness and hidden curriculum of the academy. Strategically revealed narratives of working nonstandard hours, surviving “bad” neighborhoods, single parents, holding multiple jobs while attending school, and similar stories can become currency in white culture (Cecire, 2015).

White culture embraces stories of overcoming intense odds while learning to perform whiteness, in the same way it creates and consumes stories of poverty tourism and role play for self-promotion: food stamp challenges, homeless awareness “sleep outs”, and the ever-expanding White Savior industrial complex. Recently, these stories have migrated away from individual librarians to libraries as institutions: media coverage of uprisings in Ferguson, Baltimore, and others center the library as a character in resiliency narratives. While the institution benefits in the short term from increased attention and support, this reinforces an ongoing messaging problem: libraries are most visible in the context of state sponsored violence. Libraries cannot simply possess inherent value, they must be framed as populist defenders or as sanctuary. Above all else they must struggle.

By contrast, librarianship assumes access to wealth or tolerance for debt to afford tuition, professional membership, and service opportunities. If I activate my American Library Association membership for all divisions and sections applicable for my job, the annual fee would come to $223 USD. This does not include conference registration fees, travel costs, a safe place to rest, or food. Activity in local and regional groups varies in cost, depending on the organization’s philosophy.

Competitiveness in the current job market requires at minimum a well-placed practicum experience conducting librarian level work, but only students with access to money can afford to take an unpaid internship. Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums throughout the United States continue exploiting unpaid labor, insuring the pool of well-qualified academic librarians skews white and middle class.

In the application process, asking for salary history is careless and further privileges a particular kind of applicant. For marginalized hires, salary history is another instance in a lifetime of humiliating scrutiny and surveillance on behalf of the state: the Free Application For Student Aid (FAFSA), housing vouchers, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), charity organizations, free or reduced cost student lunches, and invasive discussions with intervention professionals. FAFSA and SNAP programs are specific to the United States, but surveillance apparatus can be found wherever the “dole” exists.

Librarianship as a profession suffers when practitioners conflate sacrifice with worth, as though receiving comparatively lower salaries were justified due to our status as workers with a “calling”. Marginalized librarians–especially women–are taught to avoid negotiation and highlighting their accomplishments, to say nothing of diminished opportunities to build a livable salary history. This is culturally reinforced, as women pay measurable social costs for promoting themselves (Bowles, 2007). Marginalized librarians find themselves trapped in a rigged process: provide salary history and be underpaid, demand more and be rejected, all with the knowledge that salary will provide access to professional development opportunities.

For marginalized librarians, functioning at work requires navigating white cultural norms, conforming to professional orientations potentially at odds with their identity, taking on the additional work of speaking for an entire group of people (Gonzalez-Smith, Swanson & Tanaka, 2014) and for women, engaging in emotional labor to “be nicer” rather than producing tangible results. Librarianship can claim to recruit a diverse workforce, but without interrogating whiteness, the only winning move for marginalized librarians is not to play. The responsibility of fostering an inclusive workforce must fall to white librarians in power.

Interrogating Whiteness

How can we interrogate the process? As I watch other marginalized librarians go through their job searches, a few ideas come to mind:

• In the absence of paid internships, offer professional development: pay for a conference or workshop attendance fees. If this is not possible, integrate opportunities for networking and mimicking the gestures of professional socialization.
• Offer hands-on, project driven assignments, and create opportunities to showcase critical thinking and data-driven decision making to interns. Weeding books for three weeks and journaling the experience in a blog is not a solid project, yet I’ve seen this offered as one a half dozen times. Practicum requirements in library and information science graduate programs are meant to be process assignments; a conversation about meaningful, engaging work is part of that process.
• Offer flexible times for internships. Requiring specific availability is the prerogative of the library, but understand this limits the diversity of your applicant pool. Partial or fully virtual internships offer tremendous opportunities for the library to expand as a truly 24-hour entity.
• Update boilerplate job descriptions to remove salary history requirements. Given the profession’s reliance on unpaid labor and part-time work, salary history does not reflect individual worth or ability.
• Screen interview notes for biased language.
• “Doesn’t seem professional” as criticism without articulating why is a problem.
• When someone says “I just like them better,” find out why.
• If search committees consistently defer to one member, find out why.
• Decide what you are attempting to measure with interview questions. Open-ended questions have answers that feel correct–there’s nothing wrong with behavioral interviews but hiding bias in a “correct” answer or “gut feeling” is a problem.
• Avoid using White Savior narratives when dealing with communities and patrons in poverty.
• When seeking marginalized employees to serve on diversity, hiring, or outreach committees, consider if this is the only kind of service work they’re asked to do.  Consistently asking the same people to perform emotional labor causes burnout and suggests the organization is not listening to marginalized staff.
• Remember diversity is not always visible, and people should not have to disclose their lived experience to be heard by the organization. Provide anonymous options for employee feedback.
• Give people the power to do their jobs. Actionably curious librarians without basic agency required to explore reskilling and shifting responsibilities causes breathtaking harm to our profession. Research suggests a number of librarians are bypassing this conversation altogether to avoid paternal IT policy, hostile administration, and often both (Yelton, 2015). Librarians in environments with agency and trust consistently build wonderful things.

Conclusions

Librarianship in the United States lacks diversity because the existing workforce functions within oppressive structures, while the culture of whiteness in libraries maintains them. Recruiting and retaining a diverse workforce is the responsibility of all librarians, but this process will move faster with individual voices in power interrogating bias in their practices. While these suggestions are not exhaustive nor universal in their application, I hope they can function as starting points for difficult but necessary discussions.

Thanks to Cecily Walker, Jessica Olin, and Annie Pho for asking hard questions and wading through my rusty prose. Cecily in particular tolerated many stream-of-consciousness Twitter DMs. This essay would not exist without Stephanie Sendaula, Brit Bennett, and many other librarians and writers whose work shaped my thoughts. I am grateful for the library and information science job seekers who shared their anxieties, their victories, and infectious tenacity.

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Hey gang. I know it seems like I've been slinging a lot stuff lately. So bear with me once again while I tell you about Monster! #17. My article about Lady Frankenstein inspired the cover art for the issue. Am I honored? YES! Am I proud? YES! Am I going to walk like an Egyptian? NO! Or maybe I will. As some of you may know, I love Lady Frankenstein more than most everything else and I think my article captures that love in wordy things. But wait, there's more! This issue is 118 pages of monster movie love with a bunch of rad writers including my pal Troy Howarth.

You can get this issue at Amazon or Createspace.

The folks over at Morphsuits decided to break down the Marvel universe by a rather unusual metric: Murder. Read the rest

The National Low-Income Housing Coalition has released a new report with a startling fact Read the rest