A.N

Add it to the list of ways Norway wins—soon the country will have a passport that reveals an image of the Northern Lights when placed under a black light.

That design element alone might make it coolest passport in the world (although Australian passports’ images of kangaroos, camel races, and platypuses pose a strong challenge). The black-light aurora borealis image is an innovative approach to security—it’s common for passports to have images that can be seen only under UV light, but the Norwegian design gives this functional feature an element of beauty and relevance to its purpose.

Here’s what the passport’s internal pages look like in normal light:

The juxtaposition is intentional—"The landscape with its vast variation from the south to the north, is the starting point for the design concept," according to an emailed statement from Neue, the design studio that won the nationwide competition to redesign the country’s passport.

The design beat out other competitors because of signature Norwegian traits: sleek design and attention to the natural elements that Norwegians—or at least the jury of Norwegians who chose the passport—hold dear. The jury’s statement praised the design’s “simplicity” and said, according to the Neue press release, “the design is attractive and stylish, the colors are subtle and the abstraction of the landscapes are exciting.”

The inside isn’t all that’s striking about the passports. Forget the dull earth tones so prevalent on other passport covers. The Norwegians will be bringing pops of color to international borders everywhere:

But you won’t see any of these documents out in the wild just yet. The new designs will roll out some time in the next two years.

This article was originally published at http://qz.com/298495/behold-the-coolest-passport-on-the-planet/

by Lili Loofbourow

27 Comments

Google Maps - Building shadows display accurately according to the time of day.

by Jay Caspian Kang

Serial, the hit crime podcast from the hit podcast makers at This American Life, is an immigrant story. Adnan Syed, the man currently serving a life sentence for the murder of Hae-Min Lee, comes from a Muslim family; the deceased is the daughter of Korean immigrants. Sarah Koenig, the journalist telling their story, is white. This, on its face, is not a problem. If Serial were a newspaper story or even a traditional magazine feature, the identities of all three could exist alone as facts; the reader could decide how much weight to place upon them. But Serial is an experiment in two old forms: the weekly radio crime show, and the confessional true-crime narrative, wherein the journalist plays the role of the protagonist. The pretense of objectivity is stripped away: Koenig emerges as the subject as the show’s drama revolves not so much around the crime, but rather, her obsessions with it. Syed and Lee’s lives, then, are presented through Koenig’s translations of two distinct cultures.

To borrow a This American Life-ism: What happens when a white journalist stomps around in a cold case involving people from two distinctly separate immigrant communities? Does she get it right? (Spoilers ahead.)

On Tuesday, I called Rabia Chaudry, one of the prominent voices in Serial. Chaudry, a civil rights attorney, grew up in the same circles as Syed; it was she who initially reached out to Koenig to see if she might be interested in the story. Chaudry said that while Koenig had spent upwards of a year talking to people in the community, she has faced significant stumbling blocks in her understanding of it. “Initially she was kind of confused by the dynamics, especially that dating was such a difficult thing and the extremes people take to cover it up,” Chaudry told me. “I could sense when she was telling the story, the parts where she was confused.”

An example: In the show’s second episode, Koenig says, “Since [Syed] and Hae both had immigrant parents, they understood the expectations, and the constraints: Do well in school, go to college, take care of your younger brother, and for Adnan, no girls.”

Koenig follows up with this statement from Syed:

“You know, it was really easy to date someone that kind of lived within the same parameters that I did with regards to, you know, she didn’t have the expectation to me coming to her house for dinner with her family, you know, she understood that if she was to call my house and speak to my mother or father, I would get in trouble, and vice versa.”

At first blush, Koenig has done her job as a journalist. She has supported her statement about immigrant parents with a quote from the source. The problem is that Syed never says the word “immigrant.” Instead, he says “parameters,” which is about as neutral and clinical of a word as one could come up with in that situation. It’s possible that there are other parts, not heard, in which Syed explains the point further, but if they exist, they have been excised, meaning that all we’re left with is Koenig’s inference that those “parameters” necessarily mean “immigrant culture.” In a startling omission, the Lee family has not yet appeared in Serial. Without their presence, and Koenig’s insistence on directing the reader towards the typical immigrant family who raised the typical American teenager, the Lees and the Syeds have been rendered as Tiger Parents—overbearing and out-of-touch. The problem isn't just the leap itself—that we would hear about strict parents and assume they were all similar—but Koenig's confidence that we will make it with her.

It gets worse. Also in the second episode of Serial, Koenig reads passages from Hae’s diary. Koenig notes, “Her diary, by the way—well I’m not exactly sure what I expected her diary to be like but—it’s such a teenage girls diary.” (My emphasis added.) This statement seems to suggest a colorblind ideal: In Koenig's Baltimore, kids will be kids, regardless of race or background. But I imagine there are many listeners—especially amongst people of color—who pause and ask, “Wait, what did you expect her diary to be like?” or “Why do you feel the need to point out that a Korean teenage girl’s diary is just like a teenage girl’s diary?” and perhaps, most importantly, “Where does your model for ‘such a teenage girl’s diary’ come from?” These are annoying questions, not only to those who would prefer to mute the nuances of race and identity for the sake of a clean, “relatable” narrative, but also for those of us who have to ask them because Koenig is talking about our communities, and, for in large part, getting it wrong.

The accumulation of Koenig’s little judgments throughout the show—and there are many more examples—should feel familiar to anyone who has spent much of her life around well-intentioned white people who believe that equality and empathy can only be achieved through a full, but ultimately bankrupt, understanding of one another’s cultures. Who among us (and here, I’m talking to fellow people of color) hasn’t felt that subtle, discomforting burn whenever the very nice white person across the table expresses fascination with every detail about our families that strays outside of the expected narrative? Who hasn't said a word like "parameters" and watched, with grim annoyance, as it turns into "immigrant parents?" These are usually silent, cringing moments – it never quite feels worth it to call out the offender because you’ll never convince them that their intentions might be as good as they think they are.

Koenig does ultimately address Syed’s Muslim faith in Serial, but only to debunk the state’s claim that Syed’s murderous rage came out of cultural factors. The discussion feels remarkably perfunctory—Koenig quickly dispenses with Syed’s race and religion. She seems to want Syed and Lee, by way of her diary, to be, in the words of Ira Glass, “relatable,” which, sadly, in this case, reads “white." As a result, Chaudry believes Koenig has left out an essential part of Syed’s story—that his arrest, his indictment and his conviction were all influenced by his faith and the color of his skin. “You have an urban jury in Baltimore city, mostly African American, maybe people who identify with Jay [an African-American friend of Syed's who is the state’s seemingly unreliable star witness] more than Adnan, who is represented by a community in headscarves and men in beards,” Chaudry said. “The visuals of the courtroom itself leaves an impression and there’s no escaping the racial implications there.”

“I don’t know to what extent someone who hasn’t grown up in a culture can really understand that culture,” Chaudry added. “I think Sarah tried to get it, but I don’t know if she ever really did. I explained to her that anti-Muslim sentiment was involved in framing the motive in this case, and that Muslims can pick up on it, whereas someone like her, who hasn’t experienced this kind of bigotry doesn’t quite get it. Until you’ve experienced it, you don’t really know it or pick up on it"

Koenig and Serial are hardly alone. The staffs of radio stations, newspapers, and magazines tend to be overwhelmingly white, which leaves reporters and writers with a set of equally troubling options: either ignore stories from communities of color, or report them in the same sort of shorthand that Koenig uses throughout Serial. In loftier media outlets, the second choice usually goes unnoticed because the writer comes from the same demographic as the intended audience. Even the best works of journalism produced by white journalists about minority communities, which includes The Last Shot, Darcy Frey's chronicle of high school basketball in Coney Island, have the same problem: The writer can feel like an interloper, someone who will stay long enough to write a story and then leave.

This certainly doesn't mean that people should only write and report about the communities they know or are born into, but if we judge lengthy narratives by their thoughtfulness, the depth of their inquiry and their care, Serial lacks the hard-earned and moving reflections on race found in Frey's book, or, in, say, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random Family. Instead, the listener is asked to simply trust Koenig's translation of two distinct immigrant cultures. I can think of no better definition of white privilege in journalism than that.

There’s a reading of Serial that’s a bit more sympathetic, one in which Koenig has been intentionally presented as a quixotic narrator with Dana, her occasional sidekick on the show, playing the role of Sancho Panza. There’s ample evidence that this is what’s the show is striving for—from the unexpected asides where Dana interrupts one of Sarah’s obsessive rants with a roadside observation (“There’s a shrimp sale at the Crab Crib!”) to the reporting blunders to the callous way in which Koenig sometimes talks to Syed, as if he should be eminently grateful that she, a journalist, has decided to dig into his life. But if Serial is not so much a story of a murder, but rather, the story of how a journalist goes about reporting a story that has grabbed her; and if Koenig is a flawed, unreliable narrator, we should add “cultural tourist” to the list of flaws. That Koenig keeps in the bad, impolitic parts is a testament to the integrity and ambition of the project. But while I am willing to cut “Serial” enough slack to regard it as an experiment in form, I am still disturbed by the thought of Koenig stomping around communities that she clearly does not understand, digging up small, generally inconsequential details about the people inside of them, and subjecting it all to that inimitable “This American Life” process of tirelessly, and sometimes gleefully, expressing her neuroses over what she has found.

In a recent interview with Vulture, Koenig admitted that she was mostly making Serial up as she went along. "Yes, I could say, there was a point where I thought I knew the truth," she says. "And then I found out that I didn't know as much as I thought I did, and I did more reporting, and now I don't know what I don't know again! Are you mad at me? Don't be mad at me!"

When one considers the full extent of what Koenig does not know, this tone, which runs throughout the show, becomes particularly frustrating. Sarah, we're not mad at you for accomplishing the difficult feat of both whitewashing and stereotyping Hae and Adnan. We're just cringing, silently, every time you talk about them.

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Keep your holiday entertaining simple with this sweet-and-savory appetizer: smoky bourbon brie flatbread with fig jam and crispy prosciutto. 


Regular readers know that The Ninj is all about quick-and-easy real-food recipes, especially for weeknight dinners. But that holds true for all my recipes -- even for holiday entertaining.

I don't know about you, but whether I'm hosting or simply attending a holiday party, I like to focus on the company, the conversation and the cocktails (not necessarily in that order, heh heh), rather than fret over the appetizer prep. That's why I often turn to flatbreads for parties; it's easy to use a variety of spreads and toppings to turn a simple flatbread into a great appetizer pizza.

Clearly the good folks at Alouette Cheese think the same way I do, since they have teamed up with Stonefire Flatbreads to share some "flavorology" this holiday season. Simply put, it's their term for the art of creating unique, simple and delicious flavor combinations using flatbreads and soft cheese spreads. What could be easier (or yummier)?

Stonefire and Alouette invited me to come up with my own favorite flatbread flavorology combination: with cheese flavors like wasabi cheddar, smoky jalapeño and roasted red pepper, it was hard to choose. But of course I was pulled like a moth to a flame to the Smoky Bourbon Creme de Brie -- you know, because nothing says "holiday" to The Ninj like bourbon. Except bourbon and cheese.

Continue reading >>

Courtesy of the guys over at Tastefully Offensive comes this definitive, two-and-a-half minute long supercut of clumsy baby elephants being super clumsy. How clumsy are baby elephants, though, you may ask? Well, it’s basically like watching a bunch of drunk-ass little elephants, like somebody poured a bottle of Smirnoff into their little elephant drinking troughs and then sat back and watched them stumble around like college freshman on the first weekend of university. Only better, because clumsy drunk baby elephants are at least 99% vomit free.

SVA Product of Design Student Eden Lew created Nutshell, aimed at reducing stress and providing a kind of respite from urban life. It’s a pod-inspired platform for productive break-taking.

I’d use it. Read more.

(Thanks Allan)

by Sara Lautman

Sara Lautman draws.

2 Comments

A "like" on Facebook is a treat. You get a little red pop-up on your notifications icon, you see the little box on the-hand corner of your screen describing the like, and you get that warm, albeit fleeting sense of pride. Someone liked your post. Your post! You savor it. You inevitably want more likes. You wait.

To keep its 1.3 billion users clicking and posting (and stalking), Facebook scatters numbers everywhere. While it collects many metrics that users never see, it tells users plenty of others, too. Facebook tells you the number of friends you have, the number of likes you receive, the number of messages you get, and even track the timestamp to show how recently an item entered the news feed.

And these numbers, programmer and artist Ben Grosser argues, directly influence user behavior by being the root of Facebook addiction. In October 2012, he set out to find exactly what Facebook's metrics were doing to users after noticing how much he depended on them.

"There were times when I was more focused on the numbers than the content itself," he remembers. "I was more interested in how many likes I had instead of who liked it. I realized every time I logged in looked at those numbers. Why was I caring? Why do I care so much?"

In response, he built a browser extension called The Facebook Demetricator, which, when installed and activated, hid all numbers on Facebook. Instead of seeing the little red pop-up showing the number of notifications you have, you'd simply see the icon take on a lighter blue color. Instead of seeing the number of likes a post received, you'd see the phrase "people like this."

Since releasing the extension two years ago, more than 5,000 users have adopted the tool, sending Grosser feedback on how the tool influenced their understanding of the social network. Grosser used their observations to write a paper examining the impact of metrics, published Monday in the journal Computational Culture.

His findings are illuminating. Sure, Facebook addiction is probably the oldest social-network-related epidemic, but Grosser's tool allowed users to experience a pressure-free Facebook. This experience demonstrated that metrics changed user behavior by encouraging competition (the more likes, the better), emotional manipulation (deleting posts when there weren't enough likes), reaction (liking more recent posts instead of older ones), and homogenization (liking because others liked).

Put simply, the numbers encouraged users to feel compelled to want more numbers. For example, friend count is seen as a mark of status because Facebook places a small "+1" next to the "Add Friend" button. Even if the user isn't aware of doing so, the number encourages her to make more connections, because she's shown that adding a friend is a positive action. That results in an overall and innate need for more on Facebook.

The more competition, the more the numbers matter, creating a vicious cycle that eventually creates what Grosser calls the "graphopticon" model, where the many watch the many. You log on, see how many likes other posts have received, and feel compelled to like as well. Facebook users therefore contribute data while pressuring others to do the same.

Which is why many users of Grosser's Demetricator tool found it difficult to leave the numbers behind.

"People realized when the numbers were gone, they had been using them to decide whether to like something," he tells me. "I certainly didn't expect these tendencies of people saying, 'I literally don't know what to do [without knowing the metrics].'"

Some Demetricator users rejected the tool completely, seeing it as going against the benefits of using Facebook in the first place.

"A huge category of response was, 'Why would I want to [hide the numbers]? The numbers are the whole point,'" Grosser says. "Some people really like their metrics."

It's not just Facebook where users have been conditioned to appreciate more notifications and likes. On Instagram, the hashtag #100likes is applied to photos that, well, achieve at least 100 likes, a mark of success used mainly among teens competing to enter "The 100 Club." Twitter prominently places the follower count at the top of users's profiles, and tracks the number of retweets and favorites. Even Ello, which has promised it won't involve advertisers, displays timestamps and the number of views.

Not all users of the Demetricator found the lack of numbers paralyzing. Instead, most continued using the tool, finding it "enjoyable that their emotional well-being was restored to some extent," Grosser says. No numbers, no pressure.

But whatever the outcome, the influence of the Demetricator is clear: The numbers made a difference in the way people used Facebook, often affecting their behavior. Which, Grosser says, isn't necessarily a bad thing. His project served only as an experiment reminding users to think about why metrics matter.

"I think it's a problem when we don't know what those likes mean, when we start focusing on wanting more likes," he says. "If we aren't aware of how these numbers are telling us to interact, then it's a problem."

And perhaps that's where users are already headed. As users become more aware of news posts and advertisements catered to their preferences, they seek alternatives to avoid that control.

Or they'll just keep liking those likes. Because even if we are conditioned to want them, likes still don't have to mean anything at all. They can remain treats, tidbits of gratification used only on social media. It's an idea Grosser had once previously toyed with in another project called "Reload the Love," which allowed users to see their notification count go up, just for the satisfaction of seeing the engagement. He found then, just as he found with the Demetricator, that the smallest numbers deeply affected the way users felt.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/how-numbers-on-facebook-change-our-behavior/382005/

A new "net neutrality" plan released by the White House on Monday morning includes an endorsement of an old idea that some activists have been pushing for years: the treatment of the Internet as a public utility.

In a letter and a video posted on the White House website, President Obama said he believes "the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act," allowing Internet Service Providers to be more heavily regulated. According to Obama, the change would acknowledge that "the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life."

Obama's argument explicitly rejects proposed rules that FCC considered earlier this year to allow paid prioritization, a plan by which content providers can make deals with ISPs to get faster service to their websites. (Those rules are still under consideration and have not been finalized.) The White House proposal calls for no paid prioritization, no blocking of any content that is not illegal, and no throttling of Internet services, where some customers have their Internet speeds artificially slowed down.

The proposal also asks that any new rules include mobile broadband, which is already the primary access point for many users.

As the president himself reminds us, the FCC does not answer to him, and does not have to listen to (or even consider) his suggestions. So there are no guarantees that any of these rules will even come to pass. However, an endorsement by the White House would be the strongest push yet toward an FCC that treats all Internet traffic as equal.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler responded to the White House plan with a "Thanks, we'll call you," response—"I am grateful for the input of the President and look forward to continuing to receive input from all stakeholders—but also included one ominous sounding warning: "The reclassification and hybrid approaches before us raise substantive legal questions. We found we would need more time to examine these to ensure that whatever approach is taken, it can withstand any legal challenges it may face."

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/obama-internet-utility-fcc-regulation-net-neutrality/382561/

I think I've found my ASMR trigger: watching YouTube videos of ballet dancers preparing their pointe shoes.

Don't get me wrong, I like the actual ballet well enough. But there's something so uniquely soothing and satisfying about seeing these women (it's mostly women—male dancers are usually too heavy to go on pointe) ready the tools of their trade.

There's the slipping of the original, light-pink shoe out of its bag, and then the hours spent scraping, ripping, crushing, sewing, and burning (!!), only to end up with a shoe that looks identical to the layman but is uniquely tailored to the ballerina.

In this video from the Australian Ballet, dancer Jessica Fyfe explains how she has six to eight pairs going at once, including "a pair that's good for jumping in, a pair that's stage-perfect..." Her colleague Natasha Kusen, meanwhile, shellacks her shoes to extend their life and outfits them with ouch-pouches.

The principal dancer, Amber Scott, describes how she covers her feet in tape and sews on big elastics—a lesson learned from past injuries. "It's time consuming, but what would be more annoying is being unable to dance because of the pain," she says.

Then there's this hyperlapse, which shows a dancer cutting and ripping out the sole of her shoes (to allow for greater flexibility), and then super-gluing it all back together:

It's almost like the dance's most distinctive qualities—exterior perfection, inner struggle, insane physicality—get concentrated in the shoes. Even early retirement: After one or two stage performances, the shoes begin to "die."

In this one, Pennsylvania Ballet Principal Dancer Arantxa Ochoa says she goes through 60 pairs per season. To make them last slightly longer, she glues the tips. Like many other dancers, she also cuts off the material around the toes to keep herself from slipping.

At one point in my ballet-shoe wormhole journey, I began to wonder why the shoes don't just already come the way dancers like them. It would be like if I got a new tape recorder and then had to pound it with a hammer for a few hours before I was able to use it.

But then I realized that each woman likes her shoes slightly different, and the specifications can get rather complicated. The Western Australian Ballet's Andrea Parkyn, for example, not only rips out the entire sole lining, she marks the shoe where her arch is and then breaks it in half with her hands:

The ritualistic aspect gets passed down between generations of dancers. Here, a New York City ballet dancer describes how, her first year with the company, she had to use other dancers's shoes. Only later did an older ballerina show her the art of crafting her own perfect pair:

You would think all these hours of shoe preparation would make dancing on the very tips of the toes less painful, and you would be wrong. Dancers describe using everything from alcohol soaks to tooth-numbing gel to get through their practice sessions.

Though Scott said dancers's feet "look worse than what they feel," here, the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Kaori Nakamura opens with, "Does it hurt? Yes." Especially right now that she's dancing Sleeping Beauty, she adds, "Yep. Very painful."

Still, without the perfectly bespoke shoes, the gravity-defying art of pointe would be all but impossible. "They're part of my body," she says, "like skin."

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/11/ballerinas-preparing-their-pointe-shoes/382495/

“The day after our Halloween party, I woke up to this…”
- Krewski

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of meeting artist and photographer Julia Sherman of Salad for President when she interviewed my Julia for her blog. Salad for President is a fascinating project that involves a wide range of artists coming to the MoMA PS1 Salad Garden (which Julia S. maintains) and creating a salad. It’s a mixture of food and art in a way that highlights fresh local ingredients and artistic presentations. I’ve been following the blog’s projects all fall and was excited to hear that Julia had been working on a new project: a cocktail syrup made from the Shiso-Jalapeno grown at the MoMA PS1 Salad Garden.

Along with Morris Kitchen, Julia created this unique cocktail syrup and has been perfecting it in cocktail-form with some help from her friend and bartender, Arley Marks. Arley and Julia came up with a drink that combines concord grapes and tangy sumac. The tart flavor of the grapes pairs perfectly with the sumac (which has a lemony taste) and the syrup adds a kick to the drink that Julia loves. I’m so excited to share this here today and am excited to see what else Julia will create next! xo, grace

*Julia is hosting a giveaway on Instagram to win a bottle of cocktail syrup! Check out her Instagram @SaladForPresident feed for more details.The winner will be announced by 5 pm tomorrow.

Click through for the full recipe after the jump!

(more…)

by Haley Mlotek

I didn't think "read it and weep" was a real thing that people did, but this afternoon I proved myself wrong!

The thought of staying awake 12 more hours and then actively pushing was unfathomable. I looked at Dustin. “What do you think?” I asked him, begged him to tell me. He was at a loss, too.

“Whatever you want to do, it’s your body.”

I hated this. Stop reminding me. It was my goddamn body, I had to endure the physical, at the very least someone else should have to do the mental arithmetic.

I wanted the c-section so badly. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house, but you still feel like you should demur. I wanted it the way I wanted someone to stick a finger in my butt during sex, but would never ask for. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.

Meaghan O'Connell has been sending out her birth story, chapter by chapter, as an e-mail newsletter, but it is now available in it's glorious, terrifying, hilarious, beautiful entirety. Her complete story is 14,248 words, will take you an estimated 57 minutes to read, and is so, so worth your time, energy, and tears. Read it. Weep.

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by Jessica Olien

Jessica Olien is a writer and illustrator who moves a lot.

22 Comments

by Laura June

I don't remember the time before I could read. Reading has always been an integral part of who I am, how I define myself, and how I structure my days. When work or life interferes to the point that I don't get hours of reading squeezed in every week, I get antsy, and feel depressed and confused. It's how I recharge my batteries and refresh myself.

And then I had a baby. Given an hour alone these days, it turns out, I'd much rather lay on my bed or stare at a wall, just being, than pick up a book.

In the early days of Zelda-life, I hadn't realized that yet, and I felt frantic to read anything. We spent twenty-four hours a day together, and she was mostly just laying around, swaddled up in some container—a basket, a bassinet, her crib. It didn't, at first, feel natural to me to have a one-sided conversation with my daughter. That passed very quickly, but before then, I filled our time together with reading. Sometimes I read the paper, sometimes The New Yorker (though sadly, she didn't seem to enjoy it). Then I started buying her books I had cherished as a child, and we read them together.

The third book I read to Zelda was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (I'll get to the first two in a second). Then The Wizard of Oz. Then The Little Prince, The Canterbury Tales (boy did she love them!), Me & Fat Glenda, and then Island of the Blue Dolphins. Then we chomped through The Phantom Tollbooth, and The Call of the Wild. Then we branched out from children's literature and read My Struggle: Book One. Just kidding, I wouldn't do that to her. That one I read alone.

Alone. Reading is largely a solitary activity, but reading aloud to someone is very different. During a series of long car trips years ago I read my favorite book—Jane Eyre—aloud to my husband. It took hours and hours, and I remember noticing how different this book, which I've read probably a dozen times, seemed when reading it together with someone. So Zelda has changed reading into a social activity, one which I really cherished in the first six months, before she could move around, when she was patient and happy just to listen to the sound of my voice.

But reading a book aloud to a baby, even one who doesn't understand a word of what you're saying, certainly changes your perception of the book. The first two books I read to Zelda were childhood favorites: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie. When I was eight or nine, I inhaled these books, compelled to begin reading them simply because the author and I shared a first name. I checked them out of the library one-by-one, slowly becoming obsessed with the idea of a pioneering lifestyle, so foreign and unknown to me. Then I asked for, and received, a boxed set of the books of my own.

But I hadn't read the books since I was in middle school when I started to read them to Zelda, and though my memory of them was really quite solid—a testament to the vibrancy of the writing—I looked at these books with new eyes, and I didn't like what I saw. It started off with little things. Pa skins a deer, sets some bear traps, and makes a ball for Laura and her sisters from the bladder of a pig. "It doesn't hurt him, Laura," Pa tells a whopper of a lie about butchering a pig on page thirteen. Of course, the pioneer life was all about these harsh realities, and I'm sure it's at least partly what drew me to the books as a child. We don't read to see an exact reflection of our own lives, or lives as we think they should be, after all.

But then Pa sings a song on page ninety-nine. Here are its lyrics (imagine that Pa is also fiddling):

There was an old darkey
And his name was Uncle Ned,
And he died long ago, long ago.
There was no wool on the top of his head,
In the place where the wool ought to grow.

There is a second verse but the first is enough, right? Imagine me reading these lyrics aloud to my daughter in her crib, just two weeks old. I didn't. I started, then saw what the words said, and skipped right over the whole song. I imagined her, eight or nine years old, reading the words. Would she even know what it meant? Would she need an explanation? Would she ask me about it? "Oh you know, they were preeeettty racist back then, so sometimes people called black people 'darkeys' but not anymore. Great book though, right?" We kept going, even though at this point the varnish had started to wear thin on my childhood memories.

Nothing prepared me for Little House on the Prairie, formerly my favorite book of the series, which details the Ingalls family's move from Wisconsin to Kansas in 1869, which at the time was still Indian Territory. This book is brimming with casual racism about Native Americans. They are described as "savages" and "wild," and both Ma and the family dog dislike them openly. "Why don't you like Indians, Ma?" Laura asks on page forty-six. "I just don't like them; and don't lick your fingers, Laura," Ma said.

The Ingalls family are Manifest Destiny personified. The Osage Indians they encounter are a brooding pack of inconvenience, and just one Native American gets the role of the "noble savage"—a chief who supports the settlers against his own people to keep peace. Pa implies the worst about them (on page one hundred and forty-six) when he tells Laura and her sister that if given the opportunity, the Indians would certainly off the family pooch, Jack, but "that's not all" he says. "You girls remember this: You do as you're told, no matter what happens."

I didn't remember any of this from my childhood reading. I probably glossed right on over it in favor of the juicy details of skinning a rabbit or how Pa builds the cabin. The good stuff.

Zelda and I finished the book, but we decided (well, I did) not to read any further installments. These books are a fascinating and incredibly flawed version of a series of events which actually occurred, remembered through the eyes of a small child, and written in the nineteen thirties. As an adult, I can make sense of what I'm reading. I have context. I know history. And the events as described make me terrifically sad. I don't think that a child of eight or nine can make sense of these books without a lot of context, a lot of explanation, and honestly, I'm just not sure they're worth it. I'm not sure that their literary value is so high that I can overlook what I see as grave and deeply integral flaws. I think that they are outdated and old, and sometimes things just need to have an expiration date; they're like curdled milk to me. I've thrown them into the garbage with the Velveteen Rabbit, which I have decided not to read to Zelda either, because the name Skin Horse is creepy and why bother worrying her about When Toys Become Real? Reality is tough enough without thinking about that. I put them into the garbage with the many other books which reflect a largely white, very Christian ideal conception of the world, because that conception is both innately flawed and also outdated.

That's not to say that I think certain books should be censored or kept out of schools, or that they shouldn't be read. (I don't.) That's also not to say that I think she is or will be "too young" to read them and understand. If I have learned anything in parenting it's that babies and children pick up on things much faster than adults, and that she is capable of understanding so much, so easily. But parenting is all about making small judgements. When Zelda is seven or eight and can read, she will be allowed to read anything her heart desires. If she wants to read Laura Ingalls Wilder, I'll explain to her how racist they are, and how flawed their vision of the world is, was, and always will be. Until then, we're going to try to read something better. Like A Wizard of Earthsea.

THE PARENT RAP is an endearing new column about the fucked up and cruel world of parenting.

Laura June is a writer and a very cool mom. She is also the author of "The Vampire Diaries."

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I’m a big fan of this lovely mug, which cleverly uses the “C” of the handle to let you be terrible in person:

 …and it really inspired me so I designed this:

And then Victor was like “The whole point of the first mug is so you can walk around with profanity on your glass but not have it be noticed” and I was like, “Yeah.  Obviously.”  And he was all, “I’m pretty sure everyone will know what ‘unnilingus’ means”, but I just typed it in and spellcheck was like “THAT’S NOT A WORD.  NO GUESSES FOUND” so I’m pretty sure that proves it’s more subtle than Victor thinks.

Then Victor argued that, “You can’t just expect spellcheck to suggest ‘cunnilingus'” and I was like, “God, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that.“

Because then I’d have one nickel.

I also thought about making a mug that said “amel-toe” but that seemed weird and so instead I just wrote “WORD” on a mug.  That way you can carry it around  and people will think you’re just really into Vanilla Ice, but really it says another thing completely.

If you don’t see it then you aren’t looking hard enough.

PS. Use the promo code: VETERANDAY14 at checkout to get 15% off all my profane mugs until Friday.

PPS. Some fabulous(ly disturbing) requests and suggestions have come in.  See the comments for even more terrible things.

In February of this year, Ann Leckie’s book Ancillary Justice won a Golden Tentacle Award from The Kitschies—an award that celebrates “the year's most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” Leckie was elated. The Kitschie trophy is a hand-sewn stuffed tentacle of sorts, and it sits proudly on Leckie’s mantle. “I was like, ‘Oh that’s really wonderful, how could anything be more validating,’” she says. “I love my golden stuff tentacle with the sparkly pom poms.”

Then the rest of the awards rolled in. First there was the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Then the Nebula Award. Then the Arthur C. Clarke. Scattered amongst them is a BSFA Award and a Locus Award. It was hard for Leckie to believe. “It was kind of like hallucinating,” she says. “It’s still kind of like hallucinating. I’m sitting here on my couch and I can turn my head and see them on the mantle and it’s really hard to see that they’re there.”

It appears as though women in science fiction are having a moment, and perhaps even more. This year, women were nominated for, and won, close to half of the major science-fiction awards out there. And much of that work touched upon gender in some way. In Ancillary Justice, the main character is a space ship (this sounds strange, but it’s worth reading the book to see what I mean) and the genders of the characters are continuously ambiguous. LIGHTSPEED magazine Kickstarted a series called “Women Destroy Science Fiction” that showcases work entirely written and edited by women. It asked for $5,000 and got $53,136 in return.

But to say that all of this represents progress for women in the traditionally male-dominated world of sci-fi oversimplifies the history of the genre a bit.

As with anything else, women have long been working alongside men to create fiction that covers on science, the future, technology and more. Mary Shelly’s book Frankenstein is often cited as one of the first classics of the sci-fi genre, and even before that Margaret Cavendish wrote The Blazing World—a satirical utopian vision—in 1666. “We’ve been doing this for ever,” says writer Kameron Hurley. This idea, that women have always been beside men everywhere from the battlefield to the writers’ room, is one that Hurley thinks about a lot. This year, her essay “‘We Have Always Fought': Challenging the 'Women, Cattle and Slaves' Narrative” on the long history of female fighters and why history writes them out of the picture, won a Hugo Award for Best Related Work. (She also won another Hugo this year for Best Fan Writer.)

Like the fighters she wrote about, Hurley says that female science-fiction writers are often forgotten. “It’s always Asimov and Heinline,” she says. “You don’t hear about Russ or LeGuin. And there are very particular ways that people talk about it. One of those is by saying ‘well she did it, but it wasn’t really science fiction,’ or ‘her husband has a big impact.’”

Today, both Hurley and Leckie say that female voices in science fiction are far louder than they used to be, largely thanks to blogs and social media. Now, when men wonder aloud (as they often do on their blogs) where all the women in science fiction are, those women can take to the comment section and point out that they’ve been there all along. They can use Twitter and Facebook not just to promote their work, but to connect with one an other. “We mirror a lot of what the overall culture is doing now,” Hurley says, “which is saying that we have always been here you’re just not listening. And we’re able to do that now because there are more channels. There’s incredible profusion of all of these other avenues for us to get our voices out there, and to collaborate right. To say okay let’s go flood that comment system, and have dialogue around that.”

Leckie agrees, saying that there is a community of women writers who have been bolstered by their ability to find and support one another. “The Internet really lets people connect that wouldn’t have in the past, and lets conversations happen and connections happen. That’s really something that happens, I’m not sure it’s a club with membership cards but I think there’s some kind of community.”

But both Leckie and Hurley express a combination of optimism and cynicism when it comes to whether or not women in the science fiction world are actually making progress, and how quickly. Leckie points out that this isn’t the first time women have been in the spotlight for writing award winning science fiction. “Sometimes I feel very optimistic about it, I say look at this, there are more women getting awards,” she says. “And then I look back and the ‘70s. The ‘70s was a decade that was crammed with prominent women science fiction writers, and a lot of women made their debut in that decade or really came to prominence.”

This was the time of Ursula K. Le Guin and Vonda McIntyre, who both won joint Nebulas and Hugos. Anne McCaffrey, Kate Wilhelm, Joan Vinge, and Marion Zimmer Bradley were all nominated for Hugo Awards that decade. In 1973, the Alice Bradley Sheldon, who wrote under the pen name James Tiptree, Jr. wrote the famous, feminist short story called “The Women Men Don’t See.” Joanna Russ’s feminist science fiction book The Female Man was published in 1975 and nominated that year for a Nebula.

Then, Leckie says, the ‘80s and ‘90s happened. The rate of women nominated and winning awards dipped down again. And today, once again, society has this idea that women who write science fiction are a strange and interesting breed. In other words, today the community is having the same conversation it had in the ‘70s about women writing science fiction.

And the challenges to being a female writer today are, while not entirely the same, quite similar to those of the earlier female writers. The Hugo Awards, for example, are decided by a vote—those who are members of the World Science Fiction Society decide on who is nominated and who, ultimately, takes home the prize. Which means that winning involves some amount of self-promotion—something women are discouraged from doing far more than men. Hurley points to the different reactions people have to Seanan McGuire (who sometimes writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant) and John Scalzi as one example. Both have been on the Hugo ballots regularly for the past 10 years. Both self promote on social media, reminding readers that if they liked their books or stories, they could vote for them. But McGuire gets flack for her promotion, while Scalzi does not.

Whether or not science fiction is going to repeat its own history, ducking back into the male-dominated years, remains to be seen. But Leckie and Hurley are generally, if cautiously, optimistic. “When I won I felt it was more of a win for the community,” says Hurley. “I think the community certainly had things to say and they were saying them by voting for me.” And Hurley also points out that winning isn’t everything. “It came with this sense of Peter Parker: With great power comes great responsibility. You realize wow people are listening to me, so I better be really clear about using my powers for good.”

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/11/women-rise-in-science-fiction-again/382298/

The most contentious issue Maine voters are facing in Tuesday's midterm election isn’t the Affordable Care Act or the Common Core but rather a referendum on bear hunting that seeks to eliminate the use of bait, traps, and dogs.

Attracting millions of dollars in outside money, the issue has been making national headlines and inciting passion from both sides of the debate, so much so that several employees of Maine’s Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife, which opposes the referendum, are under protection due to credible death threats.

What is it about bear hunting that provokes such strong emotions? The history of bear hunting is unusually complex, because the “bear” referred to in bear hunting is actually many species of bears, occupying a range of cultural categories from “predator” to “pet.” From the twelfth century onward, for example, courtiers and kings in Europe refused to hunt brown bears, but it wasn’t because they were too cute to kill: It was because they were ignoble beasts. This is why Molière’s play from 1664, La princesse d’Elide, included a scene where peasants ran after thieving bears while the princess hunted “noble game” (in this case, red deer).

Over time, the negative perception of bears shifted. Several bear species became endangered. Today, the polar bear, the panda, the koala, and the grizzly have become prominent symbols of habitat loss and accelerated rates of extinction. But to Americans, the most iconic bear of all isn’t a species but a stuffed toy, the teddy bear.

Famously, the teddy bear was the unexpected artifact of an actual bear hunt undertaken by president Theodore Roosevelt in the American South. Histories of the beloved toy typically foster a narrative that goes something like this: Chased by dogs, an injured black bear had been tied to a tree. When the president refused to shoot the sad creature, a charmed nation embraced “Teddy’s bear” to acknowledge his compassion for helpless animals.

Yet it wasn’t compassion so much as a hunter’s code that informed Roosevelt’s seemingly noble actions. In 1887, before he became president, Roosevelt founded the Boone & Crockett Club to champion big-game hunting, which he resumed with gusto after he finished his second term in office. Perplexingly, the Boone & Crockett Club is also the country’s oldest wildlife conservation organization, fighting to keep the wilderness wild because it supports hunting.

Still, on the face of it, the idea of naming a toy bear after a big game hunter would seem perverse, were it not for the fact that in 1902, this presidential hunt was taking place under fraught political conditions, elevating an otherwise mundane activity to the level of national discourse.

Roosevelt was touring Mississippi to resolve a border dispute. He decided to take a needed vacation, and accepted a longstanding invitation to hunt with Andrew Longino, the Democrat Governor of Mississippi. It was November and bear hunting season—and also the scene of a vicious fight for the governorship.

Up for reelection, Longino faced Mississippi senator James Vardaman, an ardent white supremacist who would go on to defeat Longino the following year. To Vardaman, African Americans were “lazy, lying, lustful animal[s], which no amount of training can transform into a tolerable citizen.” His solution was lynching.

Against a background of inflammatory rhetoric, the presidential bear hunt embarked with a former slave named Holt Collier leading the way. For Collier to guide the sitting president through the backwoods of Mississippi carried immense symbolic weight. Among other things, it affirmed a particularly American version of the hunt, which challenged the European, aristocratic version by infusing it with a form of meritocratic individualism. Whatever else they may have thought of Collier, historian Douglas Brinkley noted, plantation owners “bragged” that that this former slave, who had served as a Confederate scout during the Civil War, knew the local terrain better than any other man and was an exceptional bear hunter.

The terrain was wide-ranging and dangerous, requiring fifty dogs to scent the quarry and give chase. After days of hard hunting, the pack cornered an adult black bear of 235 pounds. Collier successfully tied it to a tree, then blew the hunter’s bugle to summon the president to his location. When Roosevelt refused to raise his rifle to deliver the fatal shot, the other men in the hunting party killed it, threw it on the back of a horse. They brought it to their base camp, where they undoubtedly ate it for supper, as bear meat was a culinary delicacy.

On November 17, 1902, cartoonist Clifford Berryman created the now-famous image showing Roosevelt refusing to shoot a miniaturized black bear with a rope around its neck, captioned, “Drawing the Line.” The president’s great-grandson, Theodore Roosevelt IV, stressed in a telephone conversation with me that the caption was understood to be a double entendre. As he explained, the president’s refusal to shoot the bear not only reinforced the ethics of the hunt (which distinguishes itself from slaughter or extermination by requiring that the quarry has a chance to escape or fight), but drew a personal line against lynching, which at the time was a national problem and an especially acute one in the South.

In Berryman’s subsequent sketches, the black bear became smaller, rounder, and cuter, turning into an anthropomorphic baby bear named “Bruin.” The cartoon bear was so adorable that, as Roosevelt IV related to me, Brooklyn toymaker Rose Michtom had the idea to turn him into a stuffed toy and rechristen him “Teddy” after the president. (Roosevelt IV adds that the president didn’t think an association with him would help these toys sell, but was nonetheless flattered by the idea.)

The bear became an immense hit, in no small part because it had emerged out of the progressive, idealistic values of a nation struggling unsuccessfully to pass anti-lynching laws and contend with the legacy of slavery. Without the historical moment shaping the toy’s reception, turning it into a panacea for political guilt, naming a stuffed black bear after a Great White Hunter would have seemed ridiculous.

In 1907, Roosevelt’s vice president, Charles Fairbanks, sought the Republican nomination for presidency. Roosevelt did not support Fairbanks’ bid, prompting the satirical magazine Puck to mock his campaign by drawing him as a “Charliebear … to combat the alarming popularity of the Teddybear [sic].”

Neither Fairbanks nor the “Charliebear” won the public’s heart. Instead, William H. Taft snagged the nomination. When Taft won the presidency the following year, his boosters tried to replace the teddy bear with a stuffed opossum called “Billy Possum”.

Despite a flood of marketing pushing the new toy, Billy Possum was a dud. But the fact that Taft thought he could replace a baby bear with a beady-eyed marsupial helps place their shifting cultural status into historical perspective. Possums have remained varmints, an image that bears have largely shed. Much of that revised status can be attributed to the enduring popularity of a plushy whose success could hardly have been predicted.

A succession of his golden cousins—Teddy Ruxpin, Care Bear, Paddington Bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Fozzie Bear, and many more—have since tied the bear to an image of childhood innocence and thence back to “nature” again. Ironically, that protective net was first cast by Roosevelt over a century ago, starting with the founding of Boone & Crockett. When his presidency created the U.S. Forest Service and America’s national parks, he launched the wilderness conservation movement that gave rise to the politics of sentiment now buoying today’s anti-hunting groups.

With each successive generation, the reality of the hunt has retreated, replaced with pop culture caricatures ranging from perverted rednecks (Deliverance) or gritty goddesses (Katniss of The Hunger Games). In real life, however, hunting is a study in patience. Kelly Meggison, a native of Cornish, Maine, hunts bear over bait, and passed up opportunities such as an adult sow (a female bear) because he suspected she had cubs. “Three cubs showed up,” he told me. Legally, he could have shot the mother but didn’t, because of the hunter’s code. In five years of bear hunting, he has filled one tag. The meat went into his freezer.

The story is a common one. Because the Maine woods are dark and deep, hunting over bait isn’t like shooting fish in a barrel, and hardly anyone uses traps or dogs because of the time involved. The low numbers of tags being filled is partially what is driving the exploding black bear population in Maine, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere, leading to increasingly common collisions between man and bear.

These bears are on their way to becoming nuisance animals due to their sheer quantities, which is why Maine state wildlife biologists do not support the referendum. The alternatives to legal hunting are much worse for the bears, in part because a bear that kills a human is never allowed to live even when the human is at fault.

If the politics of this issue are confusing, blame the teddy bear.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/11/maine-teddy-bear-midterm-election-roosevelt/382302/

Fun identity work by Moscow-based Denis Bashev for Russian bookstore Respublica University.

“The idea was to use a tiger as the key symbol, but in the style of a university emblem.”

“There are many departments in the store; each of them is presented by the emotions of the tiger.”

“Additional icons are directly associated with specific departments.”

Denis created accompanying patterns using the bookstore’s corporate colour.

“Each department has its own small emblem. The one with scissors for the office, one covered by drawings for the children’s section, etc.”

“Each department-related tiger can be shown holding a relevant icon — the skull for classic literature, the plunger for gadgets, and so on.”

The department emblems can be further enhanced with the addition of a heraldic shield incorporating the brand patterns.

A larger emblem was created that included icons from all departments, in order “to reflect the general values of the store.”

The project was topped off with a simplified logo for use at small sizes.

Denis Bashev is currently working as creative director at Sila Sveta. View a few more of his identity projects on Behance.

Tip of the hat to Christian Lindig.