In another public relations disaster for the NFL, fans have started to retire at earlier ages, citing numerous health and moral reasons. In an emotional press conference, Mark Davidson announced his retirement from NFL fandom while in the prime of his fan career.
SAN FRANCISCO—On Friday, 15 members of a jury (12 regular jurors and three alternates) were given a rare opportunity that had all reporters in the room seething with envy. They were given permission to write down their questions for Ellen Pao, the plaintiff who’s asking for $16 million from her former employer, the lauded venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, holding that the firm discriminated against her because she is a woman.
Kleiner contends that Pao was confrontational and unsuited to be an investor, and that she never clearly articulated what actions she wanted Kleiner to take.
After two days of questioning by her lawyers and two days of cross examination, Pao today turned to Judge Harold Kahn as he read juror questions, and then turned to the jury as she answered them. (Juror questions were vetted by the judge and the lawyers before they were asked, but Kahn said that only one question was omitted because its content dealt with information that was protected under attorney/client privilege.)
Founded in 1957, Wesleyan University Press has an editorial program that focuses on poetry, music, dance, science fiction studies, film, and Connecticut history and culture. Our internationally renowned poetry series has garnered five ... Employer: Wesleyan University Location: Wesleyan Campus Middletown, CT 06459 Posted: 03/13/2015
Late last year, a new volcanic island formed in the South Pacific. Located about 40 miles (65 km) from the region's main island of Tongatapu, the island could become Tonga's latest tourist attraction. But scientists warn it could still be unstable and dangerous.
'It’s taken a little while. But with what looks to be a well-funded launch in Portland this summer, the company Spinlister is trying a novel idea for doing exactly that with their Smart Bike model.
Here’s the twist: every bike in the system would be independently owned by individual Portlanders, who would also pocket the revenues.
The company announced today that starting in “late summer,” Portlanders will be able to order black and white Spinlister-branded shared bicycles equipped with Bluetooth-activated chain locks … for free … and then roll them directly into service on the street.'
Rapper Rick Ross and Bill Murray crossed paths this weekend, when they both attended the Rhode Island vs. La Salle basketball game in Philadelphia last Saturday. (Bill's son Luke is an assistant coach for Rhode Island). After the Rhode Island Rams' win, it appears nobody was ready for the night to end, and the unlikely pair somehow ended up in the studio together.
Agh why! Soup2Nuts, the animation studio behind the best show ever on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim, Home Movies (you’re free to disagree but also free to be wrong), and Comedy Central’s Dr Katz: Professional Therapist is closing!
More recently, the Boston-based studio has been producing Word Girl as part of Scholastic, but a “restructuring” of the parent company has spelled the end of Soup2Nuts. “We are realigning some of the operations from Scholastic Media,” said Kyle Good, senior vice president of corporate communications for Scholastic, when speaking to Boston Globe’s Betaboston. “We are restructuring that part of the business closer to our core businesses which are children’s publishing and education.”
The studio was founded by Tom Snyder in 1993 as Tom Snyder Productions, became Soup2Nuts in 1999, and was purchased by Scholastic in 2001. It will be remembered for its excellent comedy animation, literally holding the patent to Squigglevision, and for introducing us all to the human wonder that is H. Jon Benjamin. No? Just me?
Jesse Darley has designed Beer Cap Maps, a brilliant series of laser cut plywood maps filled with pre-drilled holes that allows people to display bottle caps from the location of the beer’s brewery in the Continental United States and soon world. It’s a lot like the maps that allowed collectors to display the 50 quarters that represented each state in the USA. Maps of the entire Continental USA, select states in the USA, and international maps are available to purchase and preorder online.
Each map is laser cut from ~1/4 inch thick plywood with holes sized to snugly hold bottle caps. The state capital is etched into each map. Small holes provided for hanging, though a hook through one of the cap holes works great as well.
You remember those old kids’ books that had numbered reading levels told the really truncated life stories of important historical figures? Well, my grade school’s after-care program had quite a few of those, and I went through them over and over again.
One of these books was Great Black Heroes: Five Black Explorers. Besides polar explorer Matthew Henson and Jean du Sable, the founder of Chicago, it also introduced me to Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman in space. And Jemison is all kinds of great. Besides being the first woman of color in space, Jemison was an outstanding doctor with the Peace Corps before she even joined NASA and, in addition to a professorship at Cornell, is currently the head of the 100 Year Starship project.
Oh yeah, and she’s also the first ever astronaut to appear in a Star Trek production.
Like a lot of professional scientists and astronauts, Jemison grew up a huge Star Trek fan. Memory Alpha, the official Trek wiki, has an anecdote that while in space, Jemison would apparently begin each shift by telling Mission Control, “Hailing frequencies are open.”
So in 1993 (the same year Jemison left NASA), LeVar Burton—the Internet’s favorite English teacher—found out she was a huge Trek fan while directing his first episode of The Next Generation and asked her if she’d be willing to appear on the show. Without hesitation, Jemison said yes. Thus if you watch the Season 6 TNG episode “Second Chances”—which Trekkies might remember as “The One Where Riker Finds His Eerily Identical Double”—you’ll see Jemison as transporter operator Lt. Palmer. (I can’t find the actual clip, but here’s a fun NOVA clip of Jemison talking about the experience.)
It’s only a cameo; it’s not like she swoops in and steals Picard’s heart or something (although that would’ve been fun). Still, it’s pretty cool to think the first actual astronaut to be in a Trek production was so thrilled at just being a part of the Enterprise-D crew.
Also, Jemison got to meet her own hero (and one of NASA’s most effective ambassadors), Nichelle Nichols, who visited her on the set. Given how iconic Nichols is in Trek—and in general pop culture—that must’ve been amazing.
(If you’re wondering, the next astronautsto appear in a Trek production got stuck with being on the Enterprise finale. Poor bastards.)
Tom Speelman is a staff writer and reviewer—primarily of comics—for Another Castle, and is an accomplished academic, having presented at the Comics Arts Conference at Comic-Con as well as being published in The Baker Street Journal. Currently finishing up degrees in Literature and Writing at Calvin College, he rants about comics, anime, Star Trek, television and Transformers @tomtificate on Twitter and blogs about all those and more at his personal blog, tomtificate.
The most expensive peanut butter in the world is sold by the U.S. government. The $761 jar of peanut butter, created to calibrate machines in food science labs, went viral last month. But "Standard Reference Material 2387," aka peanut butter, is only the tip of the iceberg of a strange and fascinating world.
Joe Biden is 72-years old, and he still has time to interrupt his phone conversation with the Nintendo Power Line to tell you how important it is to do curls. That's right, he'll never finish his copy of "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" on his 3DS now.
The curls are part of the First Lady's "#GimmeFive" initiative to increase health and wellness. Biden is sure to launch a workout video soon.
WellDeserved by is a farcical online marketplace where the privileged can sell their advantages to the less fortunate. The idea was submitted as part of the Cultivated Wit event Comedy Hack Day held in San Francisco this year. The launch video for the service gives examples of the privileged “helping” like a Google employee selling his free lunch, and a man offering to walk with women so they won’t be harassed.
I’ve been excited about Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell‘s Jem and the Holograms comic since before IDW even announced that there was a Jem comic to be excited about, so getting an advance review copy was a pretty big deal. It’s easily my most anticipated new series of the year, but at the same time, that means that I’m expecting an awful lot from it. Outside of our own Betty Felon, I’m the biggest Jem fan here, and there’s nothing that’ll disappoint me faster than a book that just doesn’t get it quite right.
Which is why I’ve decided that the first issue can only be judged on the objective criteria laid out in the theme song. With that in mind, I’m happy to announce that a) Jem is excitement, b)Jem is adventure, and, perhaps most importantly, c)Jem is truly outrageous, truly truly truly outrageous.
The thing that really gets me about the first issue of the comic is that it improves on the first episode of the show in virtually every way. Don’t get me wrong, I love that cartoon to bits, but the origin story was always the weakest part of it, if only because it didn’t really go far enough in justifying the elements that formed its central premise.
There’s no real reason for Jerrica to have a secret identity — and really, there’s no reason for her to keep it up other than Rio’s grumpy hatred of “liars and deception” — and the Holograms just sort of randomly form a band once a supercomputer gives them a bunch of instruments. There’s a lot of it that comes up later, like Kimber wanting to make it as a solo songwriter, but in that first episode, that’s really all there is to it. Aja does some air-drumming, then they find a room full of instruments and decide to go win a contest being thrown by a record label that they actually own.
It could use some work, is what I’m getting at here.
In the comic, on the other hand, Thompson and Campbell seem to be going out of their way to address those problems and streamline that origin story. They are not, for example, owners of a record label, at least from what we know in this first issue. They’ve made music a part of the characters’ lives from the beginning; four sisters who are already in a band at the start of the story and are trying to make their big break and shake off the pain of their father’s death. And best of all, they’ve given Jerrica a reason to be Jem.
Campbell’s art in this comic is spectacular – it’s pretty close to being my favorite thing she’s ever drawn, and considering it’s stacked up against Glory and some amazing issues of TMNT, that’s saying something — and a lot of it has to do with the new designs that are on display. Rather than the cookie-cutter bodies of the original cartoon, the Holograms (and the Misfits for that matter, even though they haven’t shown up yet) have a great amount of diversity in terms of their body types, and while that’s great, what surprised me was Jerrica herself.
In true Jem and the Holograms fashion, the promo art only featured her superstar alter-ego, so actually reading the comic was my first time seeing her, and I loved how small Campbell made her.
She’s tiny – even though she’s the oldest sister, she’s dwarfed by the rest of the Holograms, especially Kimber, who’s basically David Bowie in stiletto heels on the stage.
Campbell draws her relatively plain, too, at least when she’s contrasted against the rest of the Holograms. Shana’s got her awesomely towering purple mohawk and Aja’s got that dramatic slash of blue hair and the Sonic the Hedgehog spikes, but Jerrica just has that simple blonde bob and a little bit of barely-there facepaint that seems more like a concession to the look the others are going for rather than something she would’ve chosen for herself.
With every panel she’s in, Campbell is underscoring the shyness that makes Jem necessary for Jerrica to perform with her sisters. She constantly draws Jerrica huddled up, slumped over, flinching away from attention and worried about how other people are going to see her, which makes it work beautifully when she finally finds a way to control exactly what people are going to see.
I don’t really think it’s a spoiler to say that this issue ends with Jerrica using a supercomputer named Synergy to turn into Jem — that is, after all, the entire deal with this comic — but when it finally happens, it feels more like a transformation than it ever did on the show.
Jem’s not just more glamorous, she’s six inches taller, has five feet of hot pink hair, and the pink wings on her eyeliner are ten times more vivid than Jerrica’s. She’s an idealized version, the person who can go out on stage and belt out a song about how sharing is caring without having to worry about what people are going to think, and the dramatic shift between the two identities makes everything snap into place perfectly. It’s the sudden flash of Jerrica realizing who and what she needs to be to feel more comfortable with what she’s doing, something that was always missing from the franchise before now. Jerrica Benton is suddenly the glam rock Billy Batson, and it’s awesome.
Plus, the reactions from the characters who see it are amazing. Just check out Kimber when the issue comes out and see how stoked she is that things are going to be even bigger and more covered in glitter and lasers than she could’ve possibly imagined. It’s great.
The whole issue is built towards that, and while there are spots where it moves maybe a little too quickly over the details — Jerrica immediately recognizes that the earrings are miniature hologram projectors with no explanation, for instance — but none of those little details matter. What matters is that the characters come through beautifully, with everything about their situation and their relationships building elegantly and engagingly to the setup of the first issue and the reveal of Jerrica’s new identity.
The only thing it’s missing is the Misfits, but hey, it’s only the first issue. Not every first Jem story can have them riding into an office on motorcycles shaped like giant guitars.
Singer/songwriter Jonathan Coulton and comics scribe Greg Pak speak with CBR News about the inspiration behind their new, all-ages Kickstarter project.
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Conceptual image of NASA’s ATHLETE (all-terrain hex-limbed extra-terrestrial explorer) from 2009.
A lewd text in the middle of the night, disturbing comments made in the waning hours of some work event, offhand jokes about sexual escapades in company-wide emails—decades after the Mad Men era of patriarchal office etiquette, data suggests our more casual workplace may be making it difficult for some employees to identify and protect themselves against gendered harassment.
Take, for example, Ellen Pao’s closely followed lawsuit against venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
Pao’s lawsuit demonstrates how subtle prejudicial slights and double standards can lead to a hostile workplace, especially when said workplace does not have an HR process. The charges made against Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are prosaic: Pao was excluded from a company ski trip because she was a woman, and told she needed to speak up more only to be subsequently told she was intimidating and too pushy. Pao’s case demonstrates that micro-iniquities—so common in today’s workplace—are hard to define and even harder to prove in the courtroom, but it also hints at a darker workplace problem.
Ellen Pao arrives at court in San Francisco, California on Mar. 3, 2015.(Reuters/Robert Galbrait)
A poll featured in Cosmopolitan is the latest example of this troubling trend, highlighting the extent to which employees—and presumably employers—do not understand what constitutes harassment: when researchers asked women whether they’d been sexually harassed in the office, 16% of those who said “no” changed their answer to “yes” when asked if they’d experienced “sexually explicit or sexist remarks” of any kind at work.
The poll, which included 2,235 full-time and part-time female employees and was conducted by SurveyMonkey, concluded that one out of three women between the ages of 18 and 34 have been sexually harassed at work.
Eighty-one percent reported incidents of spoken harassment while 25% said they received texts or emails that crossed the line, and 44% said that they had encountered unwanted touching and sexual advances.
The study also concluded that 71% of women who have been sexually harassed don’t report it.
A slimmed-down management structure creates grey areas
Start-up culture in particular—with its emphasis on innovation and flexibility in management—may be contributing to this confusion. “It might be that you need that to get rid of the sort of traditional and entrenched types of structures to build companies that can move quickly,” Joelle Emerson, a former sexual harassment lawyer at non-profit women’s rights organization Equal Rights Advocates (ERA), told Quartz.
“But companies need to be a lot more thoughtful about the balance … while also keeping people happy and comfortable and safe and productive.”
Emerson, who left her role with the ERA in October to start Paradigm, a strategy firm which works with tech companies to foster better gender diversity, said companies will start seeing a lot of issues in the coming years if they don’t adopt proper protocol.
In their purest form, casual workplaces are designed to allow workers room to think freely and develop camaraderie with coworkers. But when personal and work life becomes heavily intertwined, it can be challenging to set the types of boundaries that Emerson says are important to keep employees safe. 71% of women who have been sexually harassed don’t report it.
“The use of technology plays a role too,” said Christy Holstege, a civil rights attorney and women’s rights activist based in Palm Springs, Calif. “Your boss is texting you and all of a sudden, you’re getting [texts] at 11 p.m., then late at night, then getting them all the time.”
Adding to these issues is a simple lack of awareness: employees, especially women, are struggling to delineate when an overbearing, insomniac boss becomes a harassing one
“When I talk to women, we know the lines,” says Holstege, who established a legal aid clinic for domestic violence survivors while at Stanford Law School. But too often that generalized awareness gets muddled when filtered through the lens of workplace power and politics.
“Damn, girl, look at that body”
Just ask Loren, an employee who experienced several instances of harassment in her new job last year, but remained quiet due to worries that she might be overreacting. Before the harassment, Loren—who asked that we change only use her first name for privacy issues—had left an influential staffing agency in NYC to work for a small tech one. She wanted the benefits of working with a smaller, friendlier team, she said.
Unfortunately, the very thing that appealed to Loren would soon result in her leaving to return to a larger firm. Before Loren’s first day as the only female recruiter in the office, two male co-workers Googled her name and discovered she had once been an NFL cheerleader; her old cheerleading photos were quickly circulated around the office. In one instance, Loren noticed pictures of her in a bathing suit from a calendar shoot displayed on a male co-worker’s computer screen. When she asked about the photo, one co-worker responded with, “Damn, girl, look at that body,” while the other asked Loren how much weight she had gained since the photos were taken.
“I didn’t know how to respond,” she recalled to Quartz. “I felt embarrassed. I packed up for the day and went home, didn’t tell my boss or anyone else where I was going.”
Depressing? Yes. But based on both statistical and anecdotal evidence, Loren’s story isn’t all that rare. Employees, especially women, are struggling to delineate when an overbearing, insomniac boss becomes a harassing one.
Who could forget tech entrepreneur Gesche Haas’ horrifying tale of receiving a late-night message from a conference’s angel investor that read, “Hey G. I will not leave Berlin without having sex with you. Deal?” Or the male co-worker who emailed her, “Take off your underwear, put it in a bag, and leave it on my desk.” Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of career advice site The Muse, was essentially ambushed by an amorous investor during what she thought was a business meeting. Meanwhile, career expert Heather Huhman has talked openly about being sexual harassed in not one, but two of her previous workplaces. On one occasion, Huhman reported a male co-worker after he followed her home. Although he was ultimately fired, the several months during which she waited for her complaint to go up the chain of command was terrifying, reported the Huffington Post.
“Women are very accustomed to experiencing some kind of harassment or discrimination in the world,” said attorney Holstege. “We’re used to street harassment, so when we hear our coworkers say degrading things about women, we just push them aside.”
Creating a safe environment takes work—literally
Knowing when to speak up is a difficult. Some of the women listed above worried that they were making mountains out of molehills. But just because the experience might not be fodder for a true crime episode doesn’t mean it’s not a serious issue.
Holstege encourages men and women to speak out about micro-actions, both for themselves and for their fellow employees.
“These minor actions can lead to a hostile work environment,” she says. “When I’m street harassed, I try to share that with the world because people don’t understand how common it is.”
Besides speaking out, employees feel harassed have several official options. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines harassment in the workplace as severe or pervasive incidents that result in a work environment “that would be intimidating, hostile, or offensive to reasonable people.” Importantly, while women have filed the most sexual harassment claims with the EEOC (as of 2011, the latest data provided), 16% of those claims were made by men. In other words, sexual harassment victimizes both genders. One out of three women between the ages of 18 and 34 reported being sexually harassed at work.
Whether the behavior is illegal or just uncomfortable, Holstege said it’s your right to take complaints to human resources or an attorney. If an incident does occur, Emerson advises documenting your case, checking out the company’s handbook (any companies without one is making a huge mistake), and telling your boss what you want in your complaint. Then file your claim with the EEOC, and seek counsel—even if you’re not planning on suing.
While sexual harassment in the modern workplace may have changed its outward appearance, it hasn’t gone away. And neither has its stigma. As companies around the world transition to increasingly fluid, casual environments, it’s vital that they remember not to blur the lines lines between work, play and consent to do either.
Because whether it’s soliciting sex in exchange for a promotion, or an unwanted message flashing across your phone in the middle of the night, harassment hurts everyone.
It is a seminal moment for medicine. Surgeons in South Africa declared today that they have performed the world’s first penis transplant with a successful long-term result. The patient, a 21-year-old man, was operated on in December and has, according to surgeons at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital, “regained all function in the newly transplanted organ.”
“It’s a massive breakthrough,” says professor André van der Merwe, head of the university’s division of urology. After a nine-hour operation in December, surgeons expected the transplant to take two years to become fully functional. But the patient surprised doctors with the speed with which he gained full use of the organ.
“There is a greater need in South Africa for this type of procedure than elsewhere in the world, as many young men lose their penises every year due to complications from traditional circumcision,” according to Van der Merwe. Thousands of young men undergo ritual circumcision, without anaesthetic, as part of initiation in the bush—and those who have not been circumcised are ridiculed, according to a 2012 BBC report. Already this year, 26 boys have died from the ritual. Some 250 penis amputations are performed in South Africa every year as a result of botched circumcisions.
But things are looking up for these young men. The patient is the first of a 10-man pilot programme to go undergo a transplant. His success makes him a member of a small, but growing club.
Three powerful tropical cyclones are currently swarming the waters surrounding Australia: Olwyn (left), Nathan (center), and Pam (right).
Pam, a category 5 storm, has already made landfall on the Vanuatu islands, causing widespread flooding and power outages. Dozens are already feared dead in the northeastern province of Penama. Pam is the strongest storm to ever hit Vanuatu and the strongest to hit the region since Haiyan hit the Philippines in 2013 and killed over 6,000 people. After Vanuatu, Pam is expected to head toward northern New Zealand.
Nathan has been circling the coast of Queensland, Australia, the last few days, but is expected to dissipate over the course of Friday. Olwyn made landfall over Western Australia early this morning, but will now move south by southeast into the Indian Ocean.
Here are some photos of the fearsome threesome, taken by NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. (The image above is a composite of all three.)
Looking at the most visible exemplars of epic fantasy — from J.R.R. Tolkien to such bestselling authors as George R.R. Martin and Robert Jordan — a casual observer might assume that big, continent-spanning sagas with magic in them are always set in some imaginary variation on Medieval Britain. There may be swords and talismans of power and wizards and the occasional dragon, but there often aren’t any black- or brown-skinned people, and those who do appear are decidedly peripheral; in “The Lord of the Rings,” they all seem to work for the bad guys.
Our hypothetical casual observer might therefore also conclude that epic fantasy — one of today’s most popular genres — would hold little interest for African-American readers and even less for African-American writers. But that observer would be dead wrong. One of the most celebrated new voices in epic fantasy is N.K. Jemisin, whose debut novel, “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms,” won the Locus Award for best first novel and nominations for seemingly every other speculative fiction prize under the sun. Another is David Anthony Durham, whose Acacia Trilogy has landed on countless best-of lists. Both authors recently published the concluding books in their trilogies.
Although they came to the genre from different paths, both Jemisin and Durham have used it to wrench historical and cultural themes out of their familiar settings and hold them up in a different light. “I never felt that fantasy needed to be an escape from reality,” Durham told me. “I wanted it to be a different sort of engagement with reality, and one that benefits from having magic and mayhem in it as well.”
In Durham’s trilogy, four royal siblings are deposed and then fight their way back to the throne in an empire presided over by the island city of Acacia. Their dynasty’s power resides in a Faustian bargain made with a league of maritime merchants: the League supplies a rabble-soothing drug in exchange for a quota of the empire’s children, who are sent off across the sea to meet an unknown fate. As promised, “Acacia” is a sweeping yarn filled with adventure, intrigue, sorcery and battles.
Jemisin’s series, too, is set in the capital of an empire that has been run by an aristocratic clan for generations. The power of the Arameri family, however, resides in the gods — specifically a pantheon of deities whom they have imprisoned and enslaved. The narrator of “The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms” is the daughter of a renegade member of the clan who ran off with a foreigner. Raised in a remote kingdom with its own fiercely independent customs, she returns to the capital seeking information about her mother and, once there, becomes embroiled in vicious palace intrigues.
She made the main character a woman and, in an even more marked departure from the norm, she decided to have that character narrate the book in the first person. “I knew that what I was writing was inherently defiant of the tropes of epic fantasy,” Jemisin said, “and I wasn’t sure it would be accepted.”
When Durham decided to write an epic fantasy, he set out to recapture the enchantment he felt as a 12-year-old, discovering Tolkien at his father’s house in Trinidad, while “brushfires and buzzards” ranged over the neighboring hills. Jemisin, on the other hand, based her trilogy on “the old-school epics: not Tolkien, but Gilgamesh.” The gods in her imaginary world evoke the squabbling divine families of the world’s great myths: “The ancient tales of mortals putting up with gods and trying to outsmart gods, of trickster gods outsmarting other gods: That’s the basis of my work.”
“The genre can go many, many more places than it has gone,” said Jemisin. “Fantasy’s job is kind of to look back, just as science fiction’s job is to look forward. But fantasy doesn’t always just have to look back to one spot, or to one time. There’s so much rich, fascinating, interesting, really cool history that we haven’t touched in the genre: countries whose mythology is elaborate and fascinating, cultures whose stories we just haven’t even tried to retell.”
Reblogging for the books tag! (I’ve read both these series myself and they are quite good.)
