Kariann

Rev. Blanchard and Dominique James

A Kentucky Baptist minister protested on behalf of same-sex marriage by refusing to leave the county clerk’s office until he and his partner received a marriage license. Rev. Maurice “Bojangles” Blanchard and Dominique James walked in — already knowing they would be refused — and were later arrested when the office closed. Blanchard said the sit-in showed they would not be “silent accomplices to our own discrimination.”

In an interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal, Blanchard pointed out that religious leaders stand behind his right to marriage:

We’re here today to give nonviolence witness and let folks know that even people of faith, most definitely people of faith are going to stand up to and say this is wrong [...] We anticipate being denied and upon that denial we are going to sit down and not be moved and not leave as a sign of a method of nonviolent resistance. Because we feel if we do not resist we’re silent accomplices to our own discrimination.

Watch the interview and their arrest:

 

Same-sex couples have sought to expose discrimination in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia by applying for marriage licenses, only to be denied because of state law. Polls show that most Americans endorse marriage equality, while the movement has strong backing from the religious community.

It was 1991: “Roseanne was on TV, Terminator 2  was on the big screen, Color Me Badd was on the radio and Hypercolor t-shirts were on the backs of millions of middle- and high school-age kids across America.

The Hypercolor fad gripped the nation that year, thanks to the Seattle-based sportswear company that created them, Generra. In fact, in a brief three-month span, between February and May 1991, the company sold a whopping $50 million worth of color-changing, heat-sensitive T-shirts, shorts, pants, sweatshirts and tights.

Touchable Hypercolor T-shirts in action.

In addition to its color-morphing cool factor, the “mood-ring of the ’90s” also had game-changing potential for a young adult brimming with hormones. Imagine: You could walk up to your crush in the hallway between classes, take note of the shirt he or she was wearing emblazoned with “Hypercolor,” casually place your hand on him or her, and the warmth of your touch would change the shirt’s color before the eyes of both of you. Let the sparks fly!

Besides functioning as a flirtation device, Hypercolor was a mysteriously rad technology you could wear on your back for about $20. But how simple was it?

The “Metamorphic Color System,” as Generra cryptically called the manner in which body heat (or excessive perspiration, for those unfortunately prone to sweaty armpits) changed the fabric’s color using thermochromatic pigments as its special sauce. Mental Floss explains that the shirts were dyed twice: first with a permanent dye and again with a thermochromatic dye. The thermochromic dye is usually a mixture of a leuco dye, a weak acid, and salt. (Leuco dye is also used on the side of a Duracell battery to see if it’s still charged or on food packaging to gauge temperature.)

When the shirt heated up or cooled down, the molecules in the dye changed shape and shifted from absorbing light to releasing it, making the color transform, as if by magic!

Sadly, though, after a handful of washes, or one laundering misstep in too-hot water, the magic powers faded and the shirt froze permanently into a purple-brown mushy color.

But that wasn’t Hypercolor’s only misfortune. As a result of mismanagement and overproduction, Generra couldn’t handle its overnight success and declared bankruptcy only a year later, in 1992. An article in the Seattle Times in 1992, Generra: Hot Start, Then Cold Reality—Company Reflects Industry’s Woes, recounts company principal Steven Miska saying, ”We tried to make too much product available in too short a period of time.” If he could do it again, Miska said, he would have limited distribution, “which would have done a lot to prolong the life of the product.”

Hypercolor went the way of Color Me Badd: from Casey Kasem’s Top 40 to a one-hit wonder.

Attempts to reinvigorate the brand, the concept or the lifestyle—if you were a real Hypercolor fanatic—never quite gained the momentum of the initial early ’90s fad. Around 2008, Puma, American Apparel and other indie designers dipped their toes into the color-changing concept with sneakers, T-shirts and scarves, but the “special effects garments” as Body Faders calls current-day Hypercolor have nowhere near the cachet  they had a couple decades ago.

"The cat lobby here is just as feral, self-centered and as balmy as your gun lobby is"

Alexis Madrigal/The Atlantic

It might strike you as a sick Internet joke, but Gareth Morgan isn't kidding: The prominent New Zealand economist and environmentalist wants his country 100 percent cat-free and he's willing to go extraordinary lengths to make it a reality.

Cats are a "friendly neighborhood serial killer" of birds and other wildlife, Morgan said in the New York Times. He has called for the neutering of all living cats in New Zealand to ensure that this is the country's last kitty generation and has gone as far as to encourage citizens to set up cage-traps on their properties to snatch wanderers.

We emailed Morgan to ask him about his campaign. A lightly edited transcript of our correspondence is below.

THOMPSON: New Zealand reportedly has the highest cat-ownership rate in the world. How come?

MORGAN: Because we have virtually no obligations on cat owners (bit like you guys with your guns) and so people own them, abandon them, and generally take no responsibility for the unintended consequences of their actions. The most oft-heard and erroneous utterance we get here from cat owners is, "Oh but my pussy only kills rats and mice, he'd never harm a native bird." As you can see this denial verges on explicit stupidity.

Why is it so important to protect bird species that are endangered by New Zealand's cats?

Because our natural environment is arguably our greatest asset. And because the economic value of [our environment] has hardly been capitalized on, and it is continuing to rise at an exponential rate, as the rest of the world cursed by high population density sits in its own nest.

I'm currently in Shanghai where wildlife is at a minimum because of callous disregard -- actually I think they eat cats over here. The environment here is not very pleasant at all, as pollution is horrible. When people ask where I'm from, and I say NZ, they immediately talk about our fantastic environment and how much better it is than theirs. [There was] an article was in the Shanghai Times yesterday on our campaign, and people have shown a lot of interest in the subject. I think they yearn for an environment that is now pretty much lost to them.

In NZ we have a ridiculously large opportunity to monetize our environmental assets and we are letting it slip away, as the government instead eases restrictions on resource exploitation and rolls back protection of our environment. I want to not just raise New Zealanders' consciousness about this but also make them think of the huge economic opportunity we are letting slip through our fingers.

What is your plan to eliminate the NZ cat population?

To educate the public and have them carry out the action. Here are the main elements of what would do it;

1. All cats to be registered, chipped & neutered -- raising the barriers to cat ownership to those similarly already faced by dog owners. Chipping instead of collars is because cats more easily slip collars. [Ed: Chipping, or micro-chipping, means inserting an implant under the skin for identification.]
   

2. Citizens to be encouraged to cage-trap cats wandering on their properties and turn them in to the local authority.

3. Cats surrendered to the local authority Pound, to be euthanized if unregistered, to returned to registered owner who is fined.

4. Councils to offer free disposal of cats. Vets are prohibitively expensive.

Does New Zealand have a history of tax and regulatory policy around cats, or is your suggestion blazing a new path here?

It's a new path, we are quite strict on dogs and prohibit lions and tigers but on cats we are totally negligent.

Do you wonder whether a campaign to eliminate ALL cats might be un-strategic? Why not press for a cat limit per household, or seek ways to preserve certain bird species that don't involve forcibly neutering the cat population? 

Neutered cats still kill for pleasure, and unless research has shown that neutering projects fail to reduce the size of feral cat colonies materially -- the problem being that getting 100% neutering coverage is too expensive for people and so they disobey such laws -- abandoned kitten litters and feral populations actually rise. Birds are only one of the species at risk, we have heaps of unique skunks, geckos, and insects that also are under siege from the cats humans have introduced to these islands.

Why not go through tax policy: Just tax cats more, or give people a tax credit if they neuter their cat?

As I said above, registering cats is one part of the approach, encouraging people to set cage traps on their properties to capture wandering cats and then have them euthanized is the other.

Are you looking to other public policy examples for lessons, for example gun control? Your ambition to take away a popular but lethal product from households seems similar in ways to the United States' (and particularly American liberals') ambition to strictly regulate gun ownership.

Agree totally, and the cat lobby here is just as feral, self-centered and as balmy as your gun lobby is. Have you been surprised at the groups that have come out in support/or against your cat elimination plan? Not really, the idea was to galvanize a public reaction, that has been achieved. Stage II will be released in the next month and will wind up the ante

In the last 30 years, the country has become steadily more racially diverse -- and so have many American colleges. In 1980, more than 80% of the country was white, and whites accounted for about eight in ten students at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Today, less than 65% of the country is white, and it's non-whites who now account for a majority at all three of those institutions.

The four graphs below compare national racial composition averages in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 to six elite universities: three top-flight private schools in the northeast -- Harvard, Yale, and Princeton -- and three top-flight public schools across the country -- the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, and the University of California, Berkeley.* (University data comes from the National Center for Education Statistics. National data comes from the Census.) It is notable that the data below starts in 1980, two years after the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California vs. Baake that race could not exclude a candidate but could serve as one of many factors in college admissions.

There are any number of conclusions various people could draw from the data -- the under-representation of blacks is, of course, striking; some might say the flattening out of Asians at elite private schools suggests an unofficial quota system -- but I'll let the graphs speak for themselves. This post isn't meant to be a polemic, but rather a starting point, a primary source.

*Some final notes about state demographics that will inform some of the public school figures, according to the 2010 Census.:

California: 40 percent white; 38 percent Hispanic 14 percent Asian; 6.6 percent black; 13.6 percent Asian.

Texas: 45 percent white; 38 percent Hispanic; 12 percent black; 4 percent Asian.

Michigan: 76 percent white; 14.2 percent black; 4.4 percent Hispanic; 2.4 percent Asian.

When I first moved to Montreal in 2004, people would tell me they were going to “London” and I’d get excited for them because I thought they were going to the UK.  Then they’d say “London, Ontario” and it would be slightly disappointing.  Nine years later, last night, I’m checking in at the airport to fly to London, Ontario for the first time and the woman says to me “can I see your passport?”  When I explain it’s Ontario, she said “oh, sorry” and gave me a disappointed look.

Some cosmic loop has just closed.

“In a news release, CEO Wade said “the growth of southern female co-eds seeking the Sugar Lifestyle is a move in the right direction to bring back Southern charm.””

- Florida colleges rank high in ‘sugar daddies’ paying student tuition - Florida - MiamiHerald.com

I Fucking Love Science.

Despite the economic crisis, Brazil announced Thursday it planned to give workers here a 50-real ($25) monthly stipend for cultural expenses like movies, books or museums. “In all developed countries, culture plays a key role in the economy,” Culture Minister Marta Suplicy said in an interview on national television. She recalled that popular former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva created “Bolsa Familia” (Family Grant), the program of conditional cash transfers to the poor which his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, expanded. “Now we are creating food for the soul; Why would the poor not be able to access culture?” the minister said. Suplicy said the new incentive, approved by Congress and endorsed by Rousseff late last month, is expected to be introduced some time this year. “The money will be put in the hands of the worker who will decide how to spend it, by going to the movies, to the theater, to an exhibition or the museum,” she explained. Other possible uses include purchases of books, music or DVDs. The “Culture Stipend” will be paid through an electronic card, with employers deciding whether to extend the benefit to workers earning up to five times the minimum wages (up to $1,700 a month.) Employers will cover 90 percent of the cost of the stipend but can then deduct the amount from their income tax. Workers will pay the remaining 10 percent, but can opt out if they choose to do so. “There are many Brazilians, 17 million, who today earn up to five minimum wages, which could potentially means an injection of $3.5 billion in the cultural sector,” Suplicy said in an editorial published in the Folha de Sao Paulo this week.

By Guest Contributor Izzie, cross-posted from Muslimah Media Watch

Sania Mirza is a source of pride in India. She is the first Indian woman to:

1. Win a WTA (Women’s Tennis Association) tour title of any kind
2. Win a Grandslam Title
3. Surpass $1M in career earnings

Tennis player Sania Mirza on the cover of  Time. Image via idiva.com

She has also won the Arjuna Award, which is the highest sports honour in India, and the Padma Shri, which is the fourth highest civilian award in India; she was  named one of the “50 heroes of Asia” by Time, and named by The Economic Times in the list of “33 women who made India proud.”

She also happens to be a Muslim woman, who according to her father and coach, is a deeply religious girl who prays five times a day, tries hard not to play during the holy month of Ramadan, and reads the Quran every day.

However, to many Indian Muslims, she is a media personality, who doesn’t wear the “proper” attire that a Muslim woman is supposed to be seen in. She dresses like any other tennis sports star, and is popular for her style statements as for her skill with the racket. This resulted in a Maulvi in Midnapore (West Bengal, India) issuing a fatwa on her dress code stating “The dress she wears on the tennis courts … leaves nothing to the imagination.” He also said she should follow the example of Iranian women who wore head scarves and long tunics when they played in badminton tournaments. Islamist groups such as Jamiat-ulema-e-Hind allegedly threatened to disrupt her tennis matches.

Recently another fatwa was also issued against her, for living together with her current husband, before their marriage: the fatwa stated that ”It’s un-Islamic for a man and woman to see each other during the ceremonies before the ‘nikah.’” (Mirza’s husband stayed in her parental home for few weeks prior to their wedding. )

Mirza was also heavily criticized for hugging non-Mahram men after a match and for wearing t-shirts with bold statements on them. She also spoke in a conference about safe sex, which was understood as implying that she supported premarital sex, following which her effigy was burnt.

Fatwas have caught the fancy of the people worldwide and is popularly used by media, to project Islam as a misogynist religion with impractical restrictions. Zakir Naik, in his speech on the subject, explains why Muslims or Ulemas should not be giving so much importance to Sania Mirza’s dress code. Naik speaks about the importance of “diluting” the global effect of labeling Sania Mirza’s dress code as Haraam for the sake of a positive representation of Islam in the media. He further says that she is a “lesser sinner” than Muslim male cricketers who do not offer Salah at all. However, he also mentions her world ranking is “only” 34th and doesn’t deserve all the attention it is garnering.

In another related article, Dr Mookhi Amir Ali, while stating that he has better work to do than follow Sania Mirza’s career, goes onto say that she should have used her stature, as a successful Muslim woman, to question the short skirts and bring modesty into the game. She also should have worn a wrap right after the game was over, or chose not to wear the tennis dress, in all the advertisements she was featured in–the very advertisements which chose to feature her because she was a tennis star. The only attribute which will make her a good Muslim, according to him, is if she brought about any changes in the accepted “dress codes” for women in professional tennis.

Image via newstribe.com

Sadly, in the Islamic world, a Muslim woman’s piety is often closely related to her dress code. If she misses a prayer or a fast, not many go berserk as they would if she doesn’t wear a hijab. Does being a good Muslim woman begin and end with a hijab? Are Muslim women defined only by their modest dress codes alone? By mentioning that she is a “lesser” sinner, and by repeatedly saying that “at least” she offers Salah, Naik, while diluting some of the hype around her clothing, still suggests there’s a sense of shame in Sania Mirza being Muslim.

Mirza’s interviews where she states that she derives her mental strength from her regular prayers aren’t mentioned. Her father’s statement of her religiously observing her Ramadan fasts are forgotten. What is camouflaged all along in her spunky attire, and her sportswear, is that she is an extremely successful sports woman who publicly attributes it to her religion. The glory she brings to Islam, with or without her tennis skirts, is forgotten by all, including the factual Naik. Being an international sports star, and the first Indian woman to achieve everything she has achieved, should, in effect, be the reason people should be more attracted to Islam.

India is a country where Muslims are the minority, the literacy rates of Muslim women are much lower than for women of other religions, and Muslims in general are largely discriminated against.  So instead of being a “lesser sinner,” or an “OK” Muslim, Sania Mirza deserves recognition for bringing positive attention to Islam. For being the first Indian woman to achieve so many laurels that no one of any faith was able to do before her.

actualfacebookgraphsearches:

“Islamic men interested in men who live in Tehran, Iran“… “Places where they’ve worked.”

actualfacebookgraphsearches:

“Mothers of Jews who like Bacon”.

[Yes, that’s ambiguous. Getting Facebook to understand which way round I wanted it to parse the sentence was difficult.]

actualfacebookgraphsearches:

“People who like Focus on the Family [anti gay marriage] and Neil Patrick Harris [very gay and due to be married with kids]”

“I know Girls is supposed to be some pseudo-realistic version of life in NYC after college, but I find myself wondering if it’s not too realistic. In striving for that authentic friends-in-New-York vibe, it’s like Lena Dunham forgot that things have to happen on a television show–even when you only have 30 minutes. In addition, there has to be at least one character you care enough to keep you watching week after week. They can’t all be horrible and/or boring people with nothing interesting to say.”

- Black People Review Girls (2.2): Dear Joe, Nothing Happened | Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture

wheninacademia:

““A collection of sonic emissions from the insect kingdom and the humans who imitate them. Highlight include hypnotic cicada choruses, cacophonous swarms of bees, the peculiar similarities between crickets and electronics and a thrilling (but tragic) sonic tour of a day in the life of a fly. 800,000 species can’t be wrong!””

- DJ Compilation Of The Month: Bethany’s Fly On The Wall - WFMU’s Beware of the Blog

Gramsci was born January 22nd, 1891. I wanted to use the opportunity to correct three common misperceptions about Gramsci.

1. Gramsci’s concept of “hegemony” is important because it allows Marxists to talk about “culture.”

The truth is the other way around. Gramsci did not so much provide a way for Marxists to think about culture as he sought to ground the study of culture in Marxism. That is to say, his work was a critique of idealist philosophy which viewed language and culture as having their own internal logic separate from that of political economy. His work was an attempt to ground the study of these subjects in a Marxist history of the Italian state.

The concept of hegemony is very much rooted in the history of Italian class relations and can’t be understood without talking about what Gramsci termed “The Southern Question” which referred to the internal colonization of Italy’s agrarian South by the industrialized North. The central argument being that the hegemony of the Italian state is based on the principle of divide-and-conquer: dividing the working class from the peasantry. Watch Visconti’s masterful films “La Terra Trema” and “Rocco and His Brothers” to get a sense of what he was talking about. One can see very similar dynamics at work in Mexico and China. (The U.S., on the other hand, the working class has largely been divided on ethnic lines, as has South Africa.) Gramsci saw such divisions as explaining the failure of Communists to win power.

I would thus argue that for any account of “hegemony” to be properly Gramscian it needs to be similarly grounded in a theory of the state. All too often it seems to be little more than an excuse for cultural studies types to avoid discussing political economy. Gramsci is evoked as a means of legitimating a self-indulgent obsession with Buffy rather than the kind of historically grounded work Gramsci was actually doing.

2. Gramsci’s work is too fragmented to make any sense.

This might have been true for English speakers a few decades ago, but as more and more of his work has been translated from the Italian and more and more secondary literature has been written about him, it has become clear that there is a solid and coherent core to his ideas.

What is difficult is his historicism. Without a decent grasp of Italian history it can be difficult to follow his arguments. And because of his emphasis on local history (he was very concerned with arguing about why the Italian Communist experience was different from that of the Russians) his ideas may not seem to have wide applicability. I would argue, however, that there is a clear methodology to his work built upon a few core ideas. In this respect he is very much like an anthropologist, with all the strengths and weakness of a historical ethnographer.

3. Gramsci is primarily important for understanding intellectual history since all the important lessons of his work have already been incorporated and surpassed by later scholars.

I think this impression comes from the first two myths I’ve already discussed. When people use Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in a way divorced from his work and fail to engage with the original texts, his ideas do seem moribund; however, I have consistently found that scholarship which actively engages with Gramsci’s work to be some of the best and most stimulating scholarship around.

I think there is no better way to make my last point then to link to some excellent work on Gramsci:

Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology by Kate Crehan.

The sociology of political praxis: an introduction to Gramsci’s theory by Leonardo Salamini.

Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School by Peter Ives.

And many, many more. See the amazing list of recent publications posted by the International Gramsci Society.

Happy Birthday Gramsci!

In the debate over the legal status of marijuana, one of the major obstacles to more lenient federal treatment is the Drug Enforcement Administration’s classification of cannabis as a dangerous drug with no medical use. A federal appeals panel declined Tuesday to change that classification, finding that the DEA’s decision not to reschedule marijuana was not so improper that it warranted court invalidation:

On the merits, the question before the court is not whether marijuana could have some medical benefits. Rather, the limited question that we address is whether the DEA’s decision declining to initiate proceedings to reschedule marijuana under the CSA was arbitrary and capricious. [...]

Petitioners … are left with the difficult task of showing that the DEA has misapplied its own regulations. [...]

[W]e are obliged to defer to the agency’s interpretation of “adequate and well-controlled studies.” Judged against the DEA’s standard, we find nothing in the record that could move us to conclude that the agency failed to prove by substantial evidence that such studies confirming marijuana’s medical efficacy do not exist.

Since the Controlled Substances Act was first passed in 1970, marijuana has been classified as a Schedule I drug, the most restrictive of the five schedules. The initial House of Representatives report recommended that Congress classify marijuana as Schedule I at least temporarily “until the completion of certain studies now underway to resolve the issue,” reasoning that uncertainty remained about the effects of the drug. But multiple requests that the DEA reconsider its decision have failed, on the grounds that there is still insufficient research to make a determination.

Plaintiffs in this case had cited more than 200 peer-reviewed studies, and argued that larger-scale studies are precluded precisely because the government doesn’t support research on Schedule I drugs. The Schedule I designation also means no prescriptions can be written for the drug, and Rhode Island Gov. Lincoln Chafee cited the designation as the reason for blocking that state’s medical marijuana law. Both Chafee and Washington Gov. Christie Gregoire have called for the drug to be rescheduled.

In a deferential and unsurprising ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said it was bound by the DEA’s determination about what types of studies constitute “adequate and well-controlled.” But as the court explains, this decision represents courts’ extreme hesitance to disturb the determinations that agencies make, rather than any assessment of the medical benefits of the drug.

Nonetheless, it signifies the intractable battle to remove one of the major hurdles in reforming federal marijuana law. The classification of marijuana as a drug with no medical value appears increasingly at odds with the opinions of many doctors who attest to the medical benefits of the drug, and of patients, who take advantage of dispensaries in the 18 states where they are now legal.

A number of highly addictive and potent drugs, such as cocaine, opium poppy, morphine and codeine, are listed as Schedule II, designated for those drugs that have a high potential for abuse and dependence, but which have “a currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States or a currently accepted medical use with severe restrictions.” And the synthetic version of THC, known as dronabinol, is listed as Schedule III, even though THC is the ingredient in cannabis that causes psychoactive effects.

Updated 1:10 p.m., January 23 The commander of the Afghanistan war didn’t have sex with or engage in any otherwise inappropriate behavior with a Tampa socialite, according to the Pentagon’s inspector general. This is how the bizarre downfall of ex-CIA ...

One of the problems with the move to digital humanities and big data is a kind of “gadget logic” taken from the advertising rhetoric of consumer electronics.  Lots of the reportage around digital humanities work on the big data side of the field focuses on what computer could do that people couldn’t.  By that I mean there is a “look! now you can ______” rhetoric that to my ears sounds exactly like an ad for a new consumer electronics product.  “Look, now you can update your friends on what you’re doing in real time” is not all that far from “look, now you can manipulate data in this new exciting way.”

The point, as a friend put it to me recently, is not whether you can do this or that kind of analysis, but whether you do carry it out and whether it tells us anything we don’t know.

Take this piece from The Awl for instance.  It’s all very cool, except for the following problems:

1.  The two main examples are feats of good research, but at least as summarized, they generate no substantial new knowledge OR don’t transform ongoing debates scholars are having — which is what I look for when reading new material (though I suspect that a reading of the Lim book would suggest deeper knowledge than the article represents–I did have a look at the article).  I realize the actual work may be more sophisticated than the article, but since the article is claiming that there’s a revolution in knowledge, I’d say it’s got a burden of proof to demonstrate that claim.  We knew that press use of sources was biased toward men (and as a comment points out, they are also biased toward official sources put forward by PR departments and agencies, which likely means more men).  We also knew that presidential rhetoric got less flowery and pedagogical over the course of the 20th century.

2.  The method discussion in the journalism article does not even approach giving us something that would look like reproducible science. If it’s going to claim to be scientific, then this is a major failure.  If, on the other hand, we’re doing some kind of interpretive humanities work, that’s fine, but then they can’t claim the mantle of science.  They use words like “data mining” and “machine learning” and “automatic coding” but good luck trying to figure out what judgments were encoded into their software and whether you might want to make different ones if you were to do the study yourself.

I agree with the authors that

Our approach — apart from freeing scholars from more mundane tasks – allows researchers to turn their attention to higher level properties of global news content, and to begin to explore the features of what has become a vast, multi-dimensional communications system.*

But that begs two questions: will that attention to higher-level properties of a phenomenon yield greater or more profound insight?  Only if scholars know how to ask better questions, which implies a greater sophistication with both theory and synthetic thought–two areas where current AI is woefully lacking.  There is also the question of the degree to which scholars should be free of direct engagement with the data.  Another group of people in the digital humanities seems to argue that you can’t be a real scholar anymore if you can’t code.  As I suggested yesterday, that’s a silly proposition, but people should of course know how stuff works, which would include their data.

Synthetic, abstract, large-scale work requires a good thinker needs to move between scales–something Elvin Lim appears to do more effectively in the article’s representation of The Anti-Intellectual Presidency.  The description makes it look more like real scholarship to me because Lim utilizes digital methods when they suit the specific question he’s asking, and utilizes other approaches when called for, and approaches the topic from multiple registers.  If you’re hearing echoes of what I said yesterday about writing tools, you’d be right.

Good work comes from good questions, and not shiny new tools.  In the hands of a skills craftsperson, a new tool and yield beautiful and unexpected results, and that’s ultimately what we want.  But we can also sometimes get those from old tools.

See also: musicians and instruments, surgeons and their instruments, drivers and cars, cooks and kitchens.

We also need to question the value of speed as a universal good.  For some things, like getting out an op-ed, speed is good.  But for certain kinds of scholarship, slowness is better–the time with a topic helps you to understand it better and say smarter things.  If everyone can write books and articles twice as fast as they used to–or faster–nobody will be able to read them and keep up, except for machines.

Oh, wait.  That already happened.

As one of my teachers told me, the hardest thing to do after jumping through all the institutional hoops is to remember why you got into academia in the first place.  But that’s also the most important thing.  Much as I love talk of and experimentation with new tools and processes, I worry that some of the DH discussions slide over into old fashioned commodity fetishism, and loses track of the purpose of the work in the first place.  As my friend said, it’s not whether you can that matters in scholarship.  It’s what you do.

—

*I disagree with the authors’ assertion that the modern media system is more complex and multilayered than earlier systems.  Have a look at Richard Menke’s Critical Inquiry essay on the Garfield assassination (which I just taught last week).  Sure, it’s different, but from a perspective of cultural analysis there is every bit as much complexity (perhaps more since less it automated and systematized) though people walking around and writing on giant bulletin boards isn’t really well enough archived to be data mined.

The Jetsons, Star Wars and Back to the Future promised us cars that would levitate and hover inches off the ground. So what happened? Well, due to the laws of physics, wheels just make more sense. But, what if hover cars did hover?

Recently ousted French President Nicolas Sarkozy is planning to move to London in order to found a multi-billion dollar hedge fund, a move that would conveniently avoid France’s new tax hike on the super-wealthy and stymie a police investigation into Sarkozy’s allegedly corrupt campaign tactics. Sarkozy’s intentions were discovered in a police raid on his home:

If the move goes ahead, the former French president could escape a planned top tax rate of 75 per cent in his home country.

He and wife Carla Bruni would be likely to settle in an affluent area such as South Kensington, and would become the most high-profile Gallic celebrity couple in the capital.

Though France is currently restructuring its plan to tax citizens with incomes over one million euros ($1.33 million) at a 75 percent marginal rate, Sarkozy is not the first rich man to run away: actor Gérard Depardieu fled to Russia on explicitly tax-related grounds, favorably comparing Russian authoritarianism to French democracy in the process.

Upon taking office in 2007, Sarkozy more than doubled his personal salary.

““Minds have wandered since the beginning of time and the computer gives employees new ways to procrastinate, by g-chatting with friends, playing games, shopping or watching sports highlights. Such activities are routinely prohibited by many computer-use policies, although employees are seldom disciplined for occasional use of work computers for personal purposes. Nevertheless, under the broad interpretation of the CFAA, such minor dalliances would become federal crimes…. Ubiquitous, seldom-prosecuted crimes invite arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” In a footnote, the court added, “Enforcement of the CFAA against minor workplace dalliances is not chimerical. Employers have invoked the CFAA against employees in civil cases. In a recent Florida case, after an employee sued her employer for wrongful termination, the company counterclaimed that plaintiff violated section 1030(a)(2)(C) [of the CFAA] by making personal use of the internet at work — checking Facebook and sending personal email — in violation of company policy.” The court’s message: Bad laws can and will be used against you. All it takes is a prosecutor looking for a trophy case — someone willing to swat a fly with a sledgehammer to make a point. As Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig wrote of the prosecution of his friend Swartz, “Somehow, we need to get beyond the “I’m right so I’m right to nuke you’ ethics that dominates our time.””

- Why the Prosecution of Aaron Swartz Matters to You | Commentary and analysis from Simon Dumenco - Advertising Age

A eye-opening new paper comparing U.S. students to their international peers by social class finds that the richest Americans are world-class readers, and in math, our disadvantaged kids have improved more than almost any other country

Reuters

Here's what everybody knows about education in the United States. It's broken. It's failing our poorest students and codding the richest. Americans are falling desperately behind the rest of the developed world.

But here's what a new study from the Economic Policy Institute tells us about America's education system: Every one of those common assumptions is simplistic, misguided, or downright wrong.

When you break down student performance by social class, a more complicated, yet more hopeful, picture emerges, highlighted by two pieces of good news. First, our most disadvantaged students have improved their math scores faster than most comparable countries. Second, our most advantaged students are world-class readers.

Why break down international test scores by social class? In just about every country, poor students do worse than rich students. America's yawning income inequality means our international test sample has a higher share of low-income students, and their scores depress our national average. An apples-to-apples comparison of Americans students to their international peers requires us to control for social class and compare the performances of kids from similarly advantaged and disadvantaged homes.

That's precisely what Martin Carnoy, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and Richard Rothstein have done in their new paper, "What Do International Tests Really Show About U.S. Student Performance?" Carnoy and Rothstein dive into international standardized tests and compare U.S. performance, by social class, to three post-industrial countries (Germany, the UK, and France) and three top-scoring countries (Canada, Finland, and Korea).

"The US happens to have a very high fraction of low-social-class kids taking the PISA test," said Carnoy. "The composition of our test sample is very different from the higher-scoring countries and post-industrial countries. If you want to more clearly see how much students are getting from the school, you have to find some way to control for their families."

READING: A HAPPY STORY

One of the most heartening findings from the paper is that Americans are awesome readers. Literally, world-class. Our most advantaged students not only perform better than our European competitors, but also they perform about as well as any top-scoring country in the world, as the charts to the right show. [Hard lines compare most advantaged students; dotted lines are most disadvantaged.]

As you can see at the bottom of each chart, the story is equally inspiring for our poorest students, who are closing the gap in reading in Canada, Finland, and Korea.

"I was surprised that reading scores among our advantaged kids are so strong compared to all other countries," Carnoy said, pointing me to the graph on our right. "We're slightly lower than Finland, but it's hardly a difference. Our reading scores have gone up faster at the bottom, and they are as high or higher for advantaged kids as all other countries."

What's the explanation? Are American reading curricula the best in the world? Maybe. But there is a complicated story to be told, and it might start with immigration. Rich countries attract multicultural immigrants, Carnoy said, and it's predictable that immigrant children initially would have trouble with a new language barrier. In the U.S., a country with a long but decelerating legacy of Spanish-speaking immigrants, our schools along the border might be better prepared to deal with the language barrier than European countries whose African and Muslim immigration trends provide fresher challenges.

MATH: BEHIND, BUT CATCHING UP FASTER THAT YOU'D THINK

The single most surprising finding from the new paper might be in math. The conventional wisdom about U.S. math scores is that we're falling behind the rest of the world, and that's certainly reflected in our national averages, where we finished 25th in the last PISA test. But a closer look reveals that it's low-income American students who are clearly closing the gap with similar countries.

"It's not just [Americans] have been improving over time, but also that low-income students in similar countries have been getting worse, except for in Germany," Carnoy said. 

In the graphs to the left [again: hard lines are rich students; dotted lines are poor], U.S. math scores in dark blue are compared to France, Germany, and the UK.

"What's really interesting is that, at the bottom, disadvantaged kids actually do as well as disadvantaged kids in France, Germany, and the UK," Carnoy said. "The problem is that our top-scoring kids do worse than every country we compared them to, except Great Britain."

When you hear pundits and politicians lament our math program, he pointed out, it's interesting to note that the real story isn't how bad our low-income students are doing, but instead how our advantaged kids are falling behind our competitors. "That points to a policy that focuses on our top scoring kids," he said.

***

The lugubrious pundits and politicians aren't entirely wrong. No matter how you slice the data, Canada, Finland, and Korea are beating us, at every level. There is no social class in the U.S. that out-performs a similar group of students in these high-flying countries in either reading or math.

But by focusing on misleading national averages rather than apples-to-apples comparisons, U.S. education critics are missing lessons that could lead to good policy.

"The big takeaway is that we're not doing as badly as the pundits are claiming," Carnoy said. "Our advantaged kids are doing very well in reading, as well as anybody in the world, and in math, disadvantaged kids have improved more than almost any other country. We're making progress, and we should be finding out why we're making that progress, or identifying what appears to be working, rather than saying we should all run over to Finland. Don't run to Finland if you want to learn about disadvantaged kids, because they're going in the wrong direction."

So, you've probably seen someone drift a car before. But what about two cars at the same time?

Yesterday’s inauguration ceremony might be the most singular American political event in decades. To mark both the second swearing in of the country’s first black president and the day set aside to honor civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., the ceremony included a prayer by Medgar Evers’ widow, Myrlie Evers-Williams. President Obama’s own speech was one of his most insistently progressive, calling for the civil rights of LGBT Americans to be recognized. Gay Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco recited “One Today,” a meditation on the diversity of the country we all (sometimes begrudgingly) share.

Even the singers chosen for the ceremony might have been a nod to our need for democracy in entertainment, with American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson singing a powerful rendition of “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.” But the most surprising moment was Beyonce’s performance of the national anthem. In a ceremony dedicated to celebrating the expansion of the American experience, the country’s most recognizable singer may have given one of the most conservative live performances of her career:

Of course, “conservative” is a relative term. Beyonce’s singing is always flawless and sometimes needlessly acrobatic; there are times when she sounds so perfect that it’s hard to find the emotion behind her voice. But yesterday she seemed focused on the song and its significance rather than technique. And even during her runs and other touches of color, Beyonce stayed disciplined and controlled; she brought drama with her gestures and a determined expression, but her voice was strong without being overpowering.

Four years ago, Beyonce was clearly giddy when she sang “At Last” for the Obamas at the 2009 Neighborhood Ball. Yesterday, she paid respect to the occasion with an almost muted performance. There are so few classic renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner because it’s sung so often as to be unremarkable—but Beyonce’s toned-down version could join that short list.

Many thanks to Alyssa for hosting me, my fellow guest bloggers for keeping me on my toes, and the Think Progress readers. This has been kind of awesome.

Eating alone doesn't have to be so depressing anymore. MisoSoupDesign's "Anti-loneliness ramen bowl" fills your tummy up with warm and delicious noodles and also provides companionship for single men and women.

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The New York Times Thinks Male Magazine Founders Are Intellectuals But Their Female Peers Are Fashionistas

Congratulations to relatively new “intellectual magazines” The New Inquiry and Jacobin: the New York Times thinks you’re both worthy of coverage! Well, not equally so. The 20-something female founders of The New Inquiry were deemed “literary cubs” in a November 2011 Styles section profile, while Jacobin, the brainchild of 23-year-old Bhaskar Sunkara, was featured on the Books page this weekend. Back in 2011, the paper described The New Inquiry’s co-founder Rachel Rosenfelt as “young, Web-savvy and idealistic.” She wore “a black sweater, miniskirt and combat boots.” Her cohorts donned “untucked oxford shirts and off-brand jeans” and, shockingly, “despite the fact that everyone was young and attractive, no one seemed to flirt or network” at a staff meeting. Imagine that! Overall, the magazine’s founders came off as intelligent but also naive; The New Inquiry was “a scrappy online journal and roving clubhouse that functions as an Intellectuals Anonymous of sorts for desperate members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment.” I’m a fan of The New Inquiry now, but I didn’t know much about the magazine when I read about it in the Times back in November 2011. I’ll be honest: I was turned off by the profile. Based on the piece alone, the editors came off as pseudo-intellectuals who were full of themselves and playing dress-up. Here are some excerpts from this weekend’s article on Jacobin: It has also earned Mr. Sunkara, now a ripe 23, extravagant praise from members of a (slightly) older guard who see his success as heartening sign that the socialist “brand” - to use a word he throws around with un-self-conscious ease - hasn’t been totally killed off by Tea Party invective. “I had no right to start a print publication when I was 21,” he said in an interview in a cafe near his apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. “Looking back, I see it as a moment of creative ignorance. You have to have enough intelligence to execute something like this but be stupid enough to think it could be successful.” His multitasking work ethic hardly shows signs of flagging. Sunkara sounds (and is) young, but also deserving; not so much “scrappy” as unapologetically wise beyond his years, a man to keep on our radar. What do you think he was wearing? On Twitter, a number of The New Inquiry’s contributors and fans said they were happy that Jacobin was profiled, but were upset by the gendered coverage. A few pointed out that The New Inquiry wasn’t the only female-founded magazine to be delegated to the Styles section; a recent piece on The American Reader also fixated on the founder’s stunning looks and wardrobe. (Sample line: “Sometimes there is cat-eye makeup. Sometimes there is not.”) It’s bullshit to pretend (as NYT social media editor Michael Roston is arguing) that there’s no difference between being profiled on the Books page and on the Styles page. There’s a massive difference. Books reporters don’t typically focus on what their subjects are wearing or whether they enjoy flirting. They don’t typically profile their subjects in a slightly patronizing manner, as if they were not founders of an exciting new publication but extras on Girls. This is not to say that fashion is less important than literature. But The New Inquiry and The American Reader are not fashion magazines. The lead Styles section story this weekend was about Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J. Crew; the lead Books story was about a New Yorker writer’s investigation into Scientology. Why did editors decide that only the female-founded magazines had more in common with Fashion Week than critical thinking? Roston tweeted that “more people probably read Styles” and all criticism was “trolling” because “concern with ‘gender’ presumes that Styles is only for the ladies, and is thus taken less seriously. It isn’t.” Rosenfelt’s argument — she pointed out that “lots of minor biases and thoughtless decisions add up” and tweeted a Vida link detailing gender discrimination in the literary world — is more convincing. She’s right, and those who go out of their way to deny that are part of the problem.

”

- The New York Times Thinks Male Magazine Founders Are Intellectuals But Their Female Peers Are Fashionistas

Oh, the dreaded red pen, the scarlet letter of the academic world. Sure it's easier to read where we screwed up, but according to a recent study it erodes any warm, fuzzy feeling we might have about our teachers.

The White House continues its fatally counterproductive strategy of promoting climate silence.

Reuters reports this remarkable story:

The White House asked that a discussion about climate change at the mayors’ meeting on Thursday take place behind closed doors, frustrating some participants, even as hot button topics from immigration to gun control got public airings.

“This should be discussed openly,” said Jim Brainard, the Republican mayor of Carmel, Indiana, who co-chaired the climate panel.

White House liaison for climate change Heather Zichal led the discussion, but declined to comment on why the meeting was closed.

While one academic political scientist seems to think Obama’s climate silence is not significant, real-world politicians know the President is the only person who can single-handedly change the media coverage and public conversation — and the national agenda:

“We are looking for leadership from the president in detailing to the American people the magnitude of this issue,” [Seattle Mayor Michael] McGinn said after the meeting with about two dozen peers….

“There is a lot of call for the president to use his ‘bully pulpit’ and explain the consequences here,” said Brainard.

Hear! Hear! Or, rather, Speak! Speak! and Act! Act!

Related Post:

• Democrats Taking “Green” Positions on Climate Change “Won Much More Often” Than Those Remaining Silent