(1) Raising (Young Children) - I loved this funny, abstract New Yorke piece about life with two kids.
"A year ago, I only had one kid. And I am a-hundred-per-cent certain that my wife has only been pregnant once between then and now. But I look around my apartment these days, and there are babies everywhere. I'm only supposed to have two. We had Simon. And then Sara had one more after that. I remember naming him Jasper. But I got home from work on Friday, and my wife was missing, and there was one kid in the bath, and two were watching Elmo on TV, and one was eating dinner, and one was crying, and they were all calling me daddy. Or at least the kids who could talk were. Some were babies, and some were toddlers, and they all had diapers that needed changing."
___________________
(2) The Husband Stitch - I had never heard of the husband stitch before this article, have you heard of it?
I was first introduced to the husband stitch in 2014, when a friend in medical school told me about a birth her classmate observed. After the baby was delivered, the doctor said to the woman’s husband, “Don’t worry, I’ll sew her up nice and tight for you,” and the two men laughed while the woman lay between them, covered in her own and her baby’s blood and feces. The story terrified me, the laughter in particular, signaling some understanding of wrongdoing, some sheepishness in doing it anyway. The helplessness of the woman, her body being altered without her consent by two people she has to trust: her partner, her doctor. The details of the third-hand account imprinted into my memory so vividly that the memory of the story feels now almost like my own memory. Later that year, Machado’s “The Husband Stitch” was published, and sometime after that, I read it, and the details of Machado’s scene were so similar, down to the laughter, down to the words “don’t worry” (though in Machado’s story they’re directed at the woman), that I’m not sure now what I remember and what I read.
. . . .
But this is not an essay about the husband stitch. It’s an essay about believing and being believed.
. . . .
Why are we disbelieved? Why am I skeptical of women’s chatter? Why does my husband think I don’t smell gas? Later, in the same piece, Baldwin writes, “There was a moment, in time, and in this place, when my brother, or my mother, or my father, or my sister, had to convey to me, for example, the danger in which I was standing from the white man standing just behind me, and to convey this with a speed, and in a language, that the white man could not possibly understand, and that, indeed, he cannot understand, until today. He cannot afford to understand it. This understanding would reveal to him too much about himself, and smash that mirror before which he has been frozen for so long.” Maybe this is why we don’t believe women. If their experience is true, we can’t stand to see our role in it.
_____________________
(3) Monstrous Men - In the Paris Review Claire Dederer asks, "What Do We Do with the Art of Monstrous Men?" (There's a lot to unpack in this article, I suggest reading the whole thing).
"A great work of art brings us a feeling. And yet when I say Manhattan makes me feel urpy, a man says, No, not that feeling. You’re having the wrong feeling. He speaks with authority: Manhattan is a work of genius. But who gets to say? Authority says the work shall remain untouched by the life. Authority says biography is fallacy. Authority believes the work exists in an ideal state (ahistorical, alpine, snowy, pure). Authority ignores the natural feeling that arises from biographical knowledge of a subject. Authority gets snippy about stuff like that. Authority claims it is able to appreciate the work free of biography, of history. Authority sides with the (male) maker, against the audience.
Me, I’m not ahistorical or immune to biography. That’s for the winners of history (men) (so far).
. . .
"My friend and I had done nothing more monstrous than expecting someone to mind our children while we finished our work. That’s not as bad as rape or even, say, forcing someone to watch while you jerk off into a potted plant. It might sound as though I’m conflating two things—male predators and female finishers—in a troubling way. And I am. Because when women do what needs to be done in order to write or make art, we sometimes feel monstrous. And others are quick to describe us that way.
Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you are going to do to it. In a way, this is a feminist revision of all of art history; a history she turns with a single acid, brilliant line into a morality tale of compensation.
Either way, the questions remain:
What is to be done about monsters? Can and should we love their work? Are all ambitious artists monsters? Tiny voice: [Am I a monster?]"
____________________
(4) Woody Allen - Speaking of monstrous men, the Washington Post reported on Richard Morgan's reading of Woody Allen's 56-box archive, which, according to Morgan, is filled with misogynist and lecherous musings. (Full disclosure, I've never liked Allen's movies, mainly because I find them boring and I could never relate to them, but I know many people really love his work).
"According to the staff at Firestone Library’s rare-books wing, I’m the first person to read Allen’s collection — the Woody Papers — from cover to cover, and from the very beginning to the very end, Allen drips with repetitious misogyny. Allen, who has been nominated for 24 Oscars, never needed ideas besides the lecherous man and his beautiful conquest — a concept around which he has made films about Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Manhattan, journalism, time travel, communist revolution, murder, writing novels, Thanksgiving dinner, Hollywood and many other things — because that one idea bore so much fruit for his career.
In many ways, Allen frustrates people because he seems to relish dancing on the edge of the outrage. There’s nothing criminal about an 82-year-old’s fixation with 18-year-olds, and it’s not whip-out-your-penis, button-under-the-desk bad. But it’s deeply, anachronistically gross. More than that, he seems not to care about bettering or changing himself in any way. He lives and thinks and creates as he did in the 1970s, nearly a half-century ago. He’s a reminder that our future, however woke it becomes, will not be full of social-justice valedictorians quoting James Baldwin and Roxane Gay. There will be 22nd-century dunces lagging by a half-century or more. Allen is worse than an augury of those trolls of tomorrow; he is a model for them, a validation."
____________
(5) Raising Teenagers - I loved Elizabeth Weil's short essay on raising a teenage daughter.
"The goal, now, is not just to keep your child alive (though there is that, too) but to steer your child through the hormonal hell-waters of adolescence onto the firm shores of adulthood where, with luck, your child won’t be an idiot or an ass.
It’s a tough task. How well do you know your child? How well do you know the situations your child is getting into? What makes it all seem so impossible is that you need to allow your child to get hurt because if you don’t, your child won’t be resilient and will definitely be an ass. But we’re not talking about losing at Candy Land. We’re talking about … it’s hard to say out loud.
. . . .
Hannah is the most competent person in our house, and she’s a puddle. She wants to know the correct answer, what other people would like her to say, but she’s furious if she thinks the right answer is untrue.
I want to say: I’ll give you all I’ve got, but I wasn’t that great at being a teenager, and I’m a pretty flawed adult, too."
_______________________
(6) Cat Person - Kristen Roupenian's New Yorker short story, Cat Person, already went viral. But if you haven't read it yet, it is really good.
"Margot sat on the bed while Robert took off his shirt and unbuckled his pants, pulling them down to his ankles before realizing that he was still wearing his shoes and bending over to untie them. Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back."
Showing posts with label Interesting Articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Interesting Articles. Show all posts
1/10/18
4/6/17
Things to Read - 6 Interesting Article From Around the Web (on Adult Friendships, The Handmaid's Tale, The Future of Not-Working, Guns Rights Advocates Meeting Gun Violence Victims, Richard Simmons, & Adjectives)
After we watched Captain Fantastic, F decided to ban the word "interesting" from daily use, because it vague and not descriptive enough. But yet I'm still going to call this random grouping of articles, "interesting", because I'm too lazy to come up with something better.
_____________
1. ADULT FRIENDSHIPS - Vox published an article that made me sad, but made so much sense - "How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult"
"[W]hen we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don't leave except to drive somewhere.
Thus, seeing friends, even friends within "striking distance," requires planning. "We should really get together!" We say it, but we know it means calls and emails, finding an evening free of work, possibly babysitters. We know it would be fun. But it's very easy just to settle in for a little TV."
. . . .
"But it is not inevitable. In fact it's quite new! For the vast majority of Homo sapiens' history, we lived in small, nomadic bands. The tribe, not the nuclear family, was the primary unit. We lived among others of various ages, to which we were tied by generations of kinship and alliance, throughout our lives. Those are the circumstances in which our biological and neural equipment evolved.
It's only been comparatively recently (about 10,000 years ago) that we developed agriculture and started living in semi-permanent communities, more recently still that were thrown into cities, crammed up against people we barely know, and more recently still that we bounced out of cities and into suburbs."
________________
2. THE HANDMAID'S TALE - In the NY Times, Margaret Atwood reflects on the what the Handmaid's Tale means today.
"Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven’t been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won’t get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life."
. . .
"In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not."
_________________
3. THE FUTURE OF NOT-WORKING - Annie Lowry wrote another great piece for the NY Times on "The Future of Not Working," which looks at the question, "is Silicon Valley about to put the world out of work? And if so, do technologists owe the world a solution?"
"GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet. “We have the resources to eliminate extreme poverty this year,” Michael Faye, a founder of GiveDirectly, told me. But these resources are often misallocated or wasted. His nonprofit wants to upend incumbent charities, offering major donors a platform to push money to the world’s neediest immediately and practically without cost.
What happens in this village has the potential to transform foreign-aid institutions, but its effects might also be felt closer to home. A growing crowd, including many of GiveDirectly’s backers in Silicon Valley, are looking at this pilot project not just as a means of charity but also as the groundwork for an argument that a universal basic income might be right for you, me and everyone else around the world too."
_________________
4. GUN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS MEET VICTIMS OF GUN VIOLENCE - In an "Experiment in Empathy" New York Magazine asks the question "He auctioned off the pistol that killed Trayvon Martin. She watched her child die in a mass shooting. Can they change each other’s minds about guns?" (Be prepared to cry while reading this one).
"Todd and Carolyn proved that radical empathy is at least possible. They were shape-shifters. They became each other. And in that moment, the videographers were crying. The organizers, who have seen versions of this a hundred times before, were crying. No one in the room that day will ever forget what they saw.
In that moment, the commonality of experience, the universality of human vulnerability, had been so obvious — and so breathtaking. Everyone in the room was separated not by a deep canyon but by a thin line. The dividing factor wasn’t really beliefs about gun control; it was about fear and how you respond to it. There were those who held to their gun ownership as an instrument of power and security in a world that too often seemed unsafe and uncertain, and there were those who knew too well that nothing on earth can guarantee safety and certainty for the people you love. They had lived through what the others so desperately feared. As David Peters, the former Marine, put it, “Am I safe or am I not safe?” That is, at some very basic level, always the question. No one quite knew where to go from there, but it seemed promising, this collective realization that all of their beliefs were coming from essentially the same human place.
But when the participants regathered after a break, it was as if a spell had been broken, as if this group, which had forged a fragile unity through vulnerability, couldn’t sustain so much heartbreak. Everyone was tired. They had tarried long enough in alternate realities."
________________
5. RICHARD SIMMONS AND LIFE IN THE PUBLIC EYE - NPR has a great piece about the podcast Missing Richard Simmons (which I haven't heard) and the nature of being "known".
"I don't really believe in the old Andy Warhol prediction that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. What I believe is that fame will indeed be served in small portions, limited not by time but by scope. If that's the case, then instead of being famous for 15 minutes, many will be famous to 15 people. Or perhaps 1,500 or 15,000 people — a small enough number that you can move through most of the world unnoticed, but a large enough number that the circle of people who follow you with intensity necessarily includes people who don't know you. What to do about that is something I think more and more people have faced.
. . . .
There is only so much energy. There is only so much to give, and there is only so much you can turn yourself inside out for so many people before something runs low, or runs out.
. . . .
Some thank-you's arrive written on rocks, and if you feel obligated to carry all of those rocks everywhere you go for the rest of your life, if you can't learn to look at them, be grateful for them, and set them down, even they become a lot to carry.
The more the gratitude is for what has already been done, the more it is written on paper: I'm so grateful for the thing you made; it meant the world to me. That is weightless; it is wonderful. The closer it gets to expecting something from you in the future, something that must continue, the more it is written on stone: You're the only one who understands me. You're the only reason I can get out of bed every day. I have a feeling Richard Simmons received a lot of gratitude written on stones, just as Judy Blume did, but it certainly sounds like it was much harder for him to put down."
________________
6. THE PERSON WITH THE POWER TAKES THE NOUN - And, last but not least, Gloria Steinem on "Women Have Chick Flicks, What About Men?"
"Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than talent, more about opinion than experience.
[Regarding the male equivalent of "chick flicks"], I realized the problem began with the fact that adjectives are mostly required of the less powerful. Thus, there are “novelists” and “female novelists,” “African-American doctors” but not “European- American doctors,” “gay soldiers” but not “heterosexual soldiers,” “transgender activists” but not “cisgender activists.”
As has been true forever, the person with the power takes the noun — and the norm — while the less powerful requires an adjective."
_____________
1. ADULT FRIENDSHIPS - Vox published an article that made me sad, but made so much sense - "How Our Housing Choices Make Adult Friendships More Difficult"
"[W]hen we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. Many if not most neighborhoods these days are not safe for unsupervised kid frolicking. In lower-income areas there are no sidewalks; in higher-income areas there are wide streets abutted by large garages. In both cases, the neighborhoods are made for cars, not kids. So kids stay inside playing Xbox, and families don't leave except to drive somewhere.
Thus, seeing friends, even friends within "striking distance," requires planning. "We should really get together!" We say it, but we know it means calls and emails, finding an evening free of work, possibly babysitters. We know it would be fun. But it's very easy just to settle in for a little TV."
. . . .
"But it is not inevitable. In fact it's quite new! For the vast majority of Homo sapiens' history, we lived in small, nomadic bands. The tribe, not the nuclear family, was the primary unit. We lived among others of various ages, to which we were tied by generations of kinship and alliance, throughout our lives. Those are the circumstances in which our biological and neural equipment evolved.
It's only been comparatively recently (about 10,000 years ago) that we developed agriculture and started living in semi-permanent communities, more recently still that were thrown into cities, crammed up against people we barely know, and more recently still that we bounced out of cities and into suburbs."
________________
2. THE HANDMAID'S TALE - In the NY Times, Margaret Atwood reflects on the what the Handmaid's Tale means today.
"Yes, women will gang up on other women. Yes, they will accuse others to keep themselves off the hook: We see that very publicly in the age of social media, which enables group swarmings. Yes, they will gladly take positions of power over other women, even — and, possibly, especially — in systems in which women as a whole have scant power: All power is relative, and in tough times any amount is seen as better than none. Some of the controlling Aunts are true believers, and think they are doing the Handmaids a favor: At least they haven’t been sent to clean up toxic waste, and at least in this brave new world they won’t get raped, not as such, not by strangers. Some of the Aunts are sadists. Some are opportunists. And they are adept at taking some of the stated aims of 1984 feminism — like the anti-porn campaign and greater safety from sexual assault — and turning them to their own advantage. As I say: real life."
. . .
"In the wake of the recent American election, fears and anxieties proliferate. Basic civil liberties are seen as endangered, along with many of the rights for women won over the past decades, and indeed the past centuries. In this divisive climate, in which hate for many groups seems on the rise and scorn for democratic institutions is being expressed by extremists of all stripes, it is a certainty that someone, somewhere — many, I would guess — are writing down what is happening as they themselves are experiencing it. Or they will remember, and record later, if they can.
Will their messages be suppressed and hidden? Will they be found, centuries later, in an old house, behind a wall?
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. I trust it will not."
_________________
3. THE FUTURE OF NOT-WORKING - Annie Lowry wrote another great piece for the NY Times on "The Future of Not Working," which looks at the question, "is Silicon Valley about to put the world out of work? And if so, do technologists owe the world a solution?"
"GiveDirectly wants to show the world that a basic income is a cheap, scalable way to aid the poorest people on the planet. “We have the resources to eliminate extreme poverty this year,” Michael Faye, a founder of GiveDirectly, told me. But these resources are often misallocated or wasted. His nonprofit wants to upend incumbent charities, offering major donors a platform to push money to the world’s neediest immediately and practically without cost.
What happens in this village has the potential to transform foreign-aid institutions, but its effects might also be felt closer to home. A growing crowd, including many of GiveDirectly’s backers in Silicon Valley, are looking at this pilot project not just as a means of charity but also as the groundwork for an argument that a universal basic income might be right for you, me and everyone else around the world too."
_________________
4. GUN RIGHTS ACTIVISTS MEET VICTIMS OF GUN VIOLENCE - In an "Experiment in Empathy" New York Magazine asks the question "He auctioned off the pistol that killed Trayvon Martin. She watched her child die in a mass shooting. Can they change each other’s minds about guns?" (Be prepared to cry while reading this one).
"Todd and Carolyn proved that radical empathy is at least possible. They were shape-shifters. They became each other. And in that moment, the videographers were crying. The organizers, who have seen versions of this a hundred times before, were crying. No one in the room that day will ever forget what they saw.
In that moment, the commonality of experience, the universality of human vulnerability, had been so obvious — and so breathtaking. Everyone in the room was separated not by a deep canyon but by a thin line. The dividing factor wasn’t really beliefs about gun control; it was about fear and how you respond to it. There were those who held to their gun ownership as an instrument of power and security in a world that too often seemed unsafe and uncertain, and there were those who knew too well that nothing on earth can guarantee safety and certainty for the people you love. They had lived through what the others so desperately feared. As David Peters, the former Marine, put it, “Am I safe or am I not safe?” That is, at some very basic level, always the question. No one quite knew where to go from there, but it seemed promising, this collective realization that all of their beliefs were coming from essentially the same human place.
But when the participants regathered after a break, it was as if a spell had been broken, as if this group, which had forged a fragile unity through vulnerability, couldn’t sustain so much heartbreak. Everyone was tired. They had tarried long enough in alternate realities."
________________
5. RICHARD SIMMONS AND LIFE IN THE PUBLIC EYE - NPR has a great piece about the podcast Missing Richard Simmons (which I haven't heard) and the nature of being "known".
"I don't really believe in the old Andy Warhol prediction that in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. What I believe is that fame will indeed be served in small portions, limited not by time but by scope. If that's the case, then instead of being famous for 15 minutes, many will be famous to 15 people. Or perhaps 1,500 or 15,000 people — a small enough number that you can move through most of the world unnoticed, but a large enough number that the circle of people who follow you with intensity necessarily includes people who don't know you. What to do about that is something I think more and more people have faced.
. . . .
There is only so much energy. There is only so much to give, and there is only so much you can turn yourself inside out for so many people before something runs low, or runs out.
. . . .
Some thank-you's arrive written on rocks, and if you feel obligated to carry all of those rocks everywhere you go for the rest of your life, if you can't learn to look at them, be grateful for them, and set them down, even they become a lot to carry.
The more the gratitude is for what has already been done, the more it is written on paper: I'm so grateful for the thing you made; it meant the world to me. That is weightless; it is wonderful. The closer it gets to expecting something from you in the future, something that must continue, the more it is written on stone: You're the only one who understands me. You're the only reason I can get out of bed every day. I have a feeling Richard Simmons received a lot of gratitude written on stones, just as Judy Blume did, but it certainly sounds like it was much harder for him to put down."
________________
6. THE PERSON WITH THE POWER TAKES THE NOUN - And, last but not least, Gloria Steinem on "Women Have Chick Flicks, What About Men?"
"Indeed, as long as men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women are not taken seriously when writing about ourselves, much less about men and public affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than talent, more about opinion than experience.
[Regarding the male equivalent of "chick flicks"], I realized the problem began with the fact that adjectives are mostly required of the less powerful. Thus, there are “novelists” and “female novelists,” “African-American doctors” but not “European- American doctors,” “gay soldiers” but not “heterosexual soldiers,” “transgender activists” but not “cisgender activists.”
As has been true forever, the person with the power takes the noun — and the norm — while the less powerful requires an adjective."
11/17/16
Things to Read - Eight Interesting Articles From Around the Web - NONE OF WHICH DEAL WITH THE ELECTION!!
(1) ENGLISH MAJORS - As a chemist turned lawyer turned photographer, Steven Pearlstein's Washington Post editorial, Meet the Parents Who Won't Let Their Children Study Literature, really spoke to me (and reminded me that I have to step back and let my kids make their own paths.
"You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. “Choosing a major is not choosing a career,” says Jeff Selingo, author of “There Is Life After College.”
. . .
It’s worth remembering that at American universities, the original rationale for majors was not to train students for careers. Rather, the idea was that after a period of broad intellectual exploration, a major was supposed to give students the experience of mastering one subject, in the process developing skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically.
As it happens, those are precisely the skills business executives still say they want from college graduates — although, to be fair, that has not always been communicated to their human-resource departments or the computers they use to sort through résumés. A study for the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 93 percent of employers agreed that a “demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than [a job candidate’s] undergraduate major.”
___________________________________
(2) HOUSEKEEPING - I loved Rachel Cusk's "Making House: Notes on Domesticity." (And thank you to Julia's Bookbag for the recommendation).
"Like the body itself, a home is something both looked at and lived in, a duality that in neither case I have managed to reconcile. I retain the belief that other people’s homes are real where mine is a fabrication, just as I imagine others to live inner lives less flawed than my own. And like my daughter, I, too, used to prefer other people’s houses, though I am old enough now to know that, given a choice, there is always a degree of design in the way that people live. The man who admired my peeling Formica was crediting me with, or accusing me of, doing something deliberate, and I don’t doubt that the apparent artlessness of my daughter’s adopted household is, however half-consciously, a result of a carefully considered set of convictions. That those convictions so closely echo my own makes the illusion — if illusion it is — more tantalizing still.
Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else. But in that house it is possible to forget entirely — as the passengers on the top deck of a liner can forget the blackened, bellowing engine room below — what is surely nonetheless true: that a home is powered by a woman’s will and work, and that a curious form of success could be measured in her ability to suggest the opposite. I can’t see any difference, in my daughter’s adopted household, between what it is and what it seems to be — the home of a kind, artistic and educated woman — and yet I find myself unable to believe that difference isn’t there."
____________________
(3) CAREGIVERS - Anne Marie-Slaughter has moved from saying mothers can't have it all to arguing that nobody can.
". . . the biggest change came when Slaughter’s husband’s aunt sent her a small book called “On Caring.” Published in 1971 by American philosopher Milton Mayeroff, the book is a treatise on caring for others as the foundational work of society.
“It was like, wow, this is about investing in others. And this is a set of skills,” Slaughter recalls. “That was the moment I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, there’s a big idea here.’ ”
Slaughter’s book, “Unfinished Business,” which is out in paperback this month, hasn’t reached nearly as many readers as the Atlantic article but approaches the topic with much more nuance. She argues that across the board, we give caregivers the shaft, dismissing stay-at-home parents at dinner parties, barely paying nannies a living wage and punishing those who take career breaks to focus on family with a challenging on-ramp back to the professional world. We have no national standard for paid parental leave or universal child care.
But she doesn’t define this simply as a woman’s issue. Slaughter heard from enough men to see an often overlooked end of the equation: that the pressure to be the breadwinner comes at the expense of time and relationships with family.
_____________________________
(4) - THE NOVELIST DISGUISED AS A HOUSEWIFE - New York Magazine's profile of Shirley Jackson, entitled "The Novelist Disguised as a Housewife", made me want to read more of her work.
Jackson often complained about the mental calisthenics required to be at once a mother and a writer — the “nagging thoughts” about finishing the laundry or preparing meals that often interrupted her creative work. When she was working on a novel, she once wrote to a friend, she preferred to “lock myself up in my cave for four dogged hours a day, and sneak a minute or so here and there for writing letters and making lunch (‘You will eat vegetable soup again today and like it; Mommy’s beginning chapter three’).” But many writers, especially women writers, learn to derive imaginative energy from their constraints. Alice Munro has said that she began writing short stories because as a young mother she had no time to write novels: “When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines, it’s hard to arrange for large chunks of time.”
. . . .
The housewife role also provided Jackson with a form of camouflage. Bowing to stereotypes, she preferred to present herself to reporters and critics — virtually all of whom were men — as a women’s-magazine-certified happy homemaker who tossed off her stories during breaks from dusting. “I can’t persuade myself … that writing is honest work,” she said cheerily in an interview with Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review. “Fifty percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to — well, create concrete things again.” The pose sometimes worked too well. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan myopically criticized Jackson as part of “a new breed of women writers” who wrote about themselves as if they were “‘just housewives,’ reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA.”
_______________________
(5) GROWING UP AS A WHITE NATIONALIST - The White Flight of Derek Black in the Washington Post is a must read on the "family" of racial supremacy. It is hard to excerpt, so if you have time, try to read the whole story.
"White nationalism had bullied its way toward the very center of American politics, and yet, one of the people who knew the ideology best was no longer anywhere near that center. Derek had just turned 27, and instead of leading the movement, he was trying to untangle himself not only from the national moment but also from a life he no longer understood.
From the very beginning, that life had taken place within the insular world of white nationalism, where there was never any doubt about what whiteness could mean in the United States. Derek had been taught that America was intended as a place for white Europeans and that everyone else would eventually have to leave. He was told to be suspicious of other races, of the U.S. government, of tap water and of pop culture."
________________
(6) - PERFECT HOMES - I seem to be smitten with articles about the home lately - Kim France wrote an excellent essay on the difference between a place you live and a home entitled "This Is Not My Beautiful House."
"I felt fortunate to live in rooms that were so beautifully composed. It was all completely my taste, but nothing I could ever had conjured myself, and it felt like such a cool trick that you could actually pay somebody to do that for you.
Less cool, unfortunately, was actual life in the Brooklyn house. The first problem was the place itself. There was so much room — too much room for two people by far — and yet there was not one spot in the entire house that felt comfortable or warm to me. Like home. The living room was beautiful, but the real thoroughfare of the house was the ground floor, and somehow, traveling up a floor to relax after work, instead of just plopping down at the kitchen table — with its stylish-but-none-too-comfortable midcentury chairs — never felt quite intuitive. The red room was dead space — the books lived there, but aside from that, there was really no reason to ever enter it. One afternoon, my husband settled into the womb chair to read a New Yorker, and that New Yorker stayed on stool next to the chair for the next six months."
. . . .
A few years after selling the house, I received a package at work. It was the bon vivant’s first coffee table book, warmly signed. I was giving it a quick flip-through when I saw something that looked awfully familiar: it was the red room from the brownstone in Brooklyn. And on the facing page, my old living room, with the two long, low sofas and the African gourd lamps. For a moment, I hadn’t recognized those pictures as my home, the place where I had lived while I was still married. The rooms had never felt particularly warm, and here they looked especially vacant: of any soul, all memories. I remembered how naked I felt when buyers came to tour the house once we put it up for sale; how obvious it was that the life of a typical Brooklyn family was not being lived there — that the three small bedrooms on the top floor hadn’t been filled with children and wouldn’t be — and I felt, for a moment, naked once more. But of course it was nothing the casual reader would ever pick up on, and that’s when I realized that a spell had been lifted: never again would I envy the lives of people whose homes I saw in books or magazines, no matter how perfect they may have appeared. Because mine looked pretty nice in those pages too."
_______________
(7) LEONARD COHEN - The New Yorker's profile of Lenoard Cohen is INCREDIBLE, since reading it I've played Cohen constantly.
"Leonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again. Cohen has an album coming out in October—obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called “You Want It Darker”—but friends and musical associates say they’d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less “confined to barracks.”
. . . .
There is probably no more touring ahead. What is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten near finishing up. I’ve finished up a few things. I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashem”—thank God—“have fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.”
Cohen has unpublished poems to arrange, unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish. He’s considering doing a book in which poems, like pages of the Talmud, are surrounded by passages of interpretation.
“The big change is the proximity to death,” he said. “I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.”
_______________________
(8) LIFE ATER BALLET - Elle Magazine's "The Afterlife of a Ballerina", profiles Alexandra Ansanelli. "At age 16, Alexandra Ansanelli was anointed a prodigy. By 22, she was a principal for the New York City Ballet. At 26, she was a principal for the Royal Ballet. By 28, she had given it all up."
"We know of no other occupation that requires such extensive training, that is held in such esteem as a contribution to culture, and that pays so little," the authors of the 2004 survey write. Even during peak earning years: in the U.S., an average dancer's annual total income is just $35,000—about half of which comes from non-dance activities. Even stars might not earn much more, or find themselves better equipped for life on the outside. After his body gave out in his late thirties, Edward Villella—a star at New York City Ballet in the 1950s and '60s, who had danced for four presidents—lived for a while on $5 a week.
. . . .
At 35, Alexandra has only recently come to a realization that most of us are forced to reckon with much, much earlier: "You can try to do everything right and it still may not work." Though she spends many of her days in an office, she says she's not an office person. Learning to communicate verbally has been a challenge. "I didn't realize how introverted I was. I had been so used to emoting silently and physically." Nonetheless, she is seemingly ahead of many of her peers. She is aware of the limitations that her career imposed, and actively working to overcome them.
When I ask her how her personal life has changed, she answers, "It exists now." But it's hard to catch up on everything her peers went through as teenagers and young adults. "I feel I'm learning all the time, what to do, what not to do." She worries about what new acquaintances will think of her past. "It's freaky to a lot of people," the way she left her career. "Did she have some kind of mental breakdown?" she imagines they wonder.
She wants a serious relationship; both of her sisters are married. She's tried Tinder and recently joined Bumble. For obvious reasons, she doesn't like the apps that make you fill in your whole biography. Does she miss her old life—the drama, the spotlight? "I don't think real life has enough glamour," she says. But she also says that she doesn't think glamour is "enough to base your life on."
"You might not expect college freshmen to understand that careers don’t proceed in straight lines, but surely their parents ought to. In the real world, most physics majors don’t become physicists, most psychology majors don’t become psychologists, and most English majors don’t become writers or teachers. You’ll find a surprising number of philosophy majors at hedge funds and lots of political-science majors at law firms. I was an American studies major. Among chief executives of the largest corporations, there are roughly as many engineers and liberal arts majors, in total, as there are undergraduate majors in business, accounting and economics combined. Indeed, one study found that only 27 percent of people have jobs that are substantially related to their college majors — a reality that applies even to the STEM fields. “Choosing a major is not choosing a career,” says Jeff Selingo, author of “There Is Life After College.”
. . .
It’s worth remembering that at American universities, the original rationale for majors was not to train students for careers. Rather, the idea was that after a period of broad intellectual exploration, a major was supposed to give students the experience of mastering one subject, in the process developing skills such as discipline, persistence, and how to research, analyze, communicate clearly and think logically.
As it happens, those are precisely the skills business executives still say they want from college graduates — although, to be fair, that has not always been communicated to their human-resource departments or the computers they use to sort through résumés. A study for the Association of American Colleges and Universities found that 93 percent of employers agreed that a “demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important than [a job candidate’s] undergraduate major.”
___________________________________
(2) HOUSEKEEPING - I loved Rachel Cusk's "Making House: Notes on Domesticity." (And thank you to Julia's Bookbag for the recommendation).
"Like the body itself, a home is something both looked at and lived in, a duality that in neither case I have managed to reconcile. I retain the belief that other people’s homes are real where mine is a fabrication, just as I imagine others to live inner lives less flawed than my own. And like my daughter, I, too, used to prefer other people’s houses, though I am old enough now to know that, given a choice, there is always a degree of design in the way that people live. The man who admired my peeling Formica was crediting me with, or accusing me of, doing something deliberate, and I don’t doubt that the apparent artlessness of my daughter’s adopted household is, however half-consciously, a result of a carefully considered set of convictions. That those convictions so closely echo my own makes the illusion — if illusion it is — more tantalizing still.
Entering a house, I often feel that I am entering a woman’s body, and that everything I do there will be felt more intimately by her than by anyone else. But in that house it is possible to forget entirely — as the passengers on the top deck of a liner can forget the blackened, bellowing engine room below — what is surely nonetheless true: that a home is powered by a woman’s will and work, and that a curious form of success could be measured in her ability to suggest the opposite. I can’t see any difference, in my daughter’s adopted household, between what it is and what it seems to be — the home of a kind, artistic and educated woman — and yet I find myself unable to believe that difference isn’t there."
____________________
(3) CAREGIVERS - Anne Marie-Slaughter has moved from saying mothers can't have it all to arguing that nobody can.
". . . the biggest change came when Slaughter’s husband’s aunt sent her a small book called “On Caring.” Published in 1971 by American philosopher Milton Mayeroff, the book is a treatise on caring for others as the foundational work of society.
“It was like, wow, this is about investing in others. And this is a set of skills,” Slaughter recalls. “That was the moment I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, there’s a big idea here.’ ”
Slaughter’s book, “Unfinished Business,” which is out in paperback this month, hasn’t reached nearly as many readers as the Atlantic article but approaches the topic with much more nuance. She argues that across the board, we give caregivers the shaft, dismissing stay-at-home parents at dinner parties, barely paying nannies a living wage and punishing those who take career breaks to focus on family with a challenging on-ramp back to the professional world. We have no national standard for paid parental leave or universal child care.
But she doesn’t define this simply as a woman’s issue. Slaughter heard from enough men to see an often overlooked end of the equation: that the pressure to be the breadwinner comes at the expense of time and relationships with family.
_____________________________
(4) - THE NOVELIST DISGUISED AS A HOUSEWIFE - New York Magazine's profile of Shirley Jackson, entitled "The Novelist Disguised as a Housewife", made me want to read more of her work.
Jackson often complained about the mental calisthenics required to be at once a mother and a writer — the “nagging thoughts” about finishing the laundry or preparing meals that often interrupted her creative work. When she was working on a novel, she once wrote to a friend, she preferred to “lock myself up in my cave for four dogged hours a day, and sneak a minute or so here and there for writing letters and making lunch (‘You will eat vegetable soup again today and like it; Mommy’s beginning chapter three’).” But many writers, especially women writers, learn to derive imaginative energy from their constraints. Alice Munro has said that she began writing short stories because as a young mother she had no time to write novels: “When you are responsible for running a house and taking care of small children, particularly in the days before disposable diapers or ubiquitous automatic washing machines, it’s hard to arrange for large chunks of time.”
. . . .
The housewife role also provided Jackson with a form of camouflage. Bowing to stereotypes, she preferred to present herself to reporters and critics — virtually all of whom were men — as a women’s-magazine-certified happy homemaker who tossed off her stories during breaks from dusting. “I can’t persuade myself … that writing is honest work,” she said cheerily in an interview with Harvey Breit of The New York Times Book Review. “Fifty percent of my life is spent washing and dressing the children, cooking, washing dishes and clothes, and mending. After I get it all to bed, I turn around to my typewriter and try to — well, create concrete things again.” The pose sometimes worked too well. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan myopically criticized Jackson as part of “a new breed of women writers” who wrote about themselves as if they were “‘just housewives,’ reveling in a comic world of children’s pranks and eccentric washing machines and Parents’ Night at the PTA.”
_______________________
(5) GROWING UP AS A WHITE NATIONALIST - The White Flight of Derek Black in the Washington Post is a must read on the "family" of racial supremacy. It is hard to excerpt, so if you have time, try to read the whole story.
"White nationalism had bullied its way toward the very center of American politics, and yet, one of the people who knew the ideology best was no longer anywhere near that center. Derek had just turned 27, and instead of leading the movement, he was trying to untangle himself not only from the national moment but also from a life he no longer understood.
From the very beginning, that life had taken place within the insular world of white nationalism, where there was never any doubt about what whiteness could mean in the United States. Derek had been taught that America was intended as a place for white Europeans and that everyone else would eventually have to leave. He was told to be suspicious of other races, of the U.S. government, of tap water and of pop culture."
________________
(6) - PERFECT HOMES - I seem to be smitten with articles about the home lately - Kim France wrote an excellent essay on the difference between a place you live and a home entitled "This Is Not My Beautiful House."
"I felt fortunate to live in rooms that were so beautifully composed. It was all completely my taste, but nothing I could ever had conjured myself, and it felt like such a cool trick that you could actually pay somebody to do that for you.
Less cool, unfortunately, was actual life in the Brooklyn house. The first problem was the place itself. There was so much room — too much room for two people by far — and yet there was not one spot in the entire house that felt comfortable or warm to me. Like home. The living room was beautiful, but the real thoroughfare of the house was the ground floor, and somehow, traveling up a floor to relax after work, instead of just plopping down at the kitchen table — with its stylish-but-none-too-comfortable midcentury chairs — never felt quite intuitive. The red room was dead space — the books lived there, but aside from that, there was really no reason to ever enter it. One afternoon, my husband settled into the womb chair to read a New Yorker, and that New Yorker stayed on stool next to the chair for the next six months."
. . . .
A few years after selling the house, I received a package at work. It was the bon vivant’s first coffee table book, warmly signed. I was giving it a quick flip-through when I saw something that looked awfully familiar: it was the red room from the brownstone in Brooklyn. And on the facing page, my old living room, with the two long, low sofas and the African gourd lamps. For a moment, I hadn’t recognized those pictures as my home, the place where I had lived while I was still married. The rooms had never felt particularly warm, and here they looked especially vacant: of any soul, all memories. I remembered how naked I felt when buyers came to tour the house once we put it up for sale; how obvious it was that the life of a typical Brooklyn family was not being lived there — that the three small bedrooms on the top floor hadn’t been filled with children and wouldn’t be — and I felt, for a moment, naked once more. But of course it was nothing the casual reader would ever pick up on, and that’s when I realized that a spell had been lifted: never again would I envy the lives of people whose homes I saw in books or magazines, no matter how perfect they may have appeared. Because mine looked pretty nice in those pages too."
_______________
(7) LEONARD COHEN - The New Yorker's profile of Lenoard Cohen is INCREDIBLE, since reading it I've played Cohen constantly.
"Leonard Cohen lives on the second floor of a modest house in Mid-Wilshire, a diverse, unglamorous precinct of Los Angeles. He is eighty-two. Between 2008 and 2013, he was on tour more or less continuously. It is highly unlikely that his health will permit such rigors ever again. Cohen has an album coming out in October—obsessed with mortality, God-infused, yet funny, called “You Want It Darker”—but friends and musical associates say they’d be surprised to see him onstage again except in a limited way: a single performance, perhaps, or a short residency at one venue. When I e-mailed ahead to ask Cohen out for dinner, he said that he was more or less “confined to barracks.”
. . . .
There is probably no more touring ahead. What is on Cohen’s mind now is family, friends, and the work at hand. “I’ve had a family to support, so there’s no sense of virtue attached to it,” he said. “I’ve never sold widely enough to be able to relax about money. I had two kids and their mother to support and my own life. So there was never an option of cutting out. Now it’s a habit. And there’s the element of time, which is powerful, with its incentive to finish up. Now I haven’t gotten near finishing up. I’ve finished up a few things. I don’t know how many other things I’ll be able to get to, because at this particular stage I experience deep fatigue. . . . There are times when I just have to lie down. I can’t play anymore, and my back goes fast also. Spiritual things, baruch Hashem”—thank God—“have fallen into place, for which I am deeply grateful.”
Cohen has unpublished poems to arrange, unfinished lyrics to finish and record or publish. He’s considering doing a book in which poems, like pages of the Talmud, are surrounded by passages of interpretation.
“The big change is the proximity to death,” he said. “I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun.”
_______________________
(8) LIFE ATER BALLET - Elle Magazine's "The Afterlife of a Ballerina", profiles Alexandra Ansanelli. "At age 16, Alexandra Ansanelli was anointed a prodigy. By 22, she was a principal for the New York City Ballet. At 26, she was a principal for the Royal Ballet. By 28, she had given it all up."
"We know of no other occupation that requires such extensive training, that is held in such esteem as a contribution to culture, and that pays so little," the authors of the 2004 survey write. Even during peak earning years: in the U.S., an average dancer's annual total income is just $35,000—about half of which comes from non-dance activities. Even stars might not earn much more, or find themselves better equipped for life on the outside. After his body gave out in his late thirties, Edward Villella—a star at New York City Ballet in the 1950s and '60s, who had danced for four presidents—lived for a while on $5 a week.
. . . .
At 35, Alexandra has only recently come to a realization that most of us are forced to reckon with much, much earlier: "You can try to do everything right and it still may not work." Though she spends many of her days in an office, she says she's not an office person. Learning to communicate verbally has been a challenge. "I didn't realize how introverted I was. I had been so used to emoting silently and physically." Nonetheless, she is seemingly ahead of many of her peers. She is aware of the limitations that her career imposed, and actively working to overcome them.
When I ask her how her personal life has changed, she answers, "It exists now." But it's hard to catch up on everything her peers went through as teenagers and young adults. "I feel I'm learning all the time, what to do, what not to do." She worries about what new acquaintances will think of her past. "It's freaky to a lot of people," the way she left her career. "Did she have some kind of mental breakdown?" she imagines they wonder.
She wants a serious relationship; both of her sisters are married. She's tried Tinder and recently joined Bumble. For obvious reasons, she doesn't like the apps that make you fill in your whole biography. Does she miss her old life—the drama, the spotlight? "I don't think real life has enough glamour," she says. But she also says that she doesn't think glamour is "enough to base your life on."
5/5/16
Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on Sex and the City, Writing Like a Man, Headscarfs, Angry White Females, Nannies, and Botox)
I haven't posted articles in a long time, mainly because I read very little nonfiction over the winter. But now that the weather is warmer I can return to reading the New Yorker while walking the dogs (random hobby). So here goes, I've been on a feminist kick lately:
__________________________
(1) Sex and the City - The New Yorker has a great article on "How Sex and the City Lost its Good Name." Do you still like the show or do you find it dated?
"Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely."
. . . .
"So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior."
_____________________
(2) Writing Like a Man - Claire Vaye Watkins' article "On Pandering" may be the best piece of nonfiction I've ever read.
"The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.
I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.
I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!
Here are the lampposts, here is the single-screen movie theater. It’s all an architecture of pandering. It’s for them.
She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write."
_____________________
(3) Headscarfs - I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Elif Batuman's essay on her personal conflicts with wearing a headscarf while traveling in Turkey.
"I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”?
I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?
And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those girls who smiled into my eyes—they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus—he thought I was his sister."
_______________________
(4) Angry White Females - I loved the LA Times article "Angry while female: Why it matters that Beyonce, Kelly Ripa and Samantha Bee won't hide their outrage."
"For women, though, it’s a bit trickier, as all those “angry feminists” can attest. As clashing reactions to Ripa and far too many studies reveal, women are still often penalized for getting angry, even when anger is the appropriate reaction to the situation.
During the recent #Oscarssowhite controversy, for example, both Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith announced they would not be attending the ceremony. But it was Pinkett Smith who became, and remained, the butt of angry jokes, many of which boiled down to “..., who said you were even invited?”
The b-word, of course, is cited in study after study about the different perceptions of male and female anger: Where men are considered “firm,” women are seen as “controlling” and worse.
As Ripa discovered, women who react when provoked are still often accused of seeming “crazy” (which, with its evocations of a time when women could be committed to an asylum for rebelling against their husbands or fathers, is in itself a provocation).
“Jealous or crazy,” Beyoncé sings over and over again in “Lemonade’s” “Hold Up,” blurring the words synonymous before deciding: “More like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately / I’d rather be crazy.”
Some of it is a simple question of volume: Men shout in righteous rage, but women who raise their voices are still often seen as losing control or, heaven forbid, “shrill.”
_______________________
(5) Nannies - In "the Cost of Caring", Rachel Aviv (somewhat heartbreakingly) profiles Filipino caregivers in America.
"During meals in Chappaqua, Emma sometimes felt guilty and lost her appetite. “If you are a mom, you want anything you eat to be shared by your kids,” she said. Sometimes, as she dressed the girls in the morning, she cried as she imagined her youngest children preparing for school with the assistance of the helpers. One of the helpers had a young son. Emma asked her children who cared for the boy while his mother was at their house, but her daughters didn’t know. Emma imagined a chain of mothers parenting other mothers’ children around the globe."
. . . .
"Timing one’s departure from America is a precarious art. Emma, Ivy, and their friends speak of their return to the Philippines as a kind of afterlife, an endless family celebration, where they will finally reap the rewards of their sacrifice. The window for return begins once they’ve put their children through school—often their grandchildren, too—but then the calculation becomes more complex. Should they stay longer, save for retirement, and risk growing ill in America? Or leave prematurely, run out of money, and be poor again in the Philippines?
Recently, one of Emma’s friends tragically mistimed her return. She was given a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in December and, less than two months later, died without having seen her husband or her children in years. Emma and her friends raised money for “death aid.” They wanted to help the woman’s husband, who ran a poultry farm that Emma used to visit, pay for his wife’s body to be shipped home. The day after the body was flown overseas, I accompanied Emma to her nannying job on the Upper East Side, where she was struggling to put the memory out of her mind. When she viewed the body, three days earlier, she was shocked by how thin her friend had become. “What kind of life is this?” Emma said."
________________________
(6) Botox - And finally, Amanda Peet's anti-Botox essay went viral this week (I feel that I should disclaim that I'm personally a Botox fan, but I still found the essay a great read).
"Another frightening scenario is that one or both of my daughters will do as I did in my youth: go to college, take Feminist Texts and Theory, and stop shaving their legs and armpits. As hard-core feminists, they'll write me off. I'll cry, Why aren't you coming home for Thanksgiving? And they'll be like, You're nothing but a foot soldier for the beauty industrial complex. Letting my face age naturally will be my ace in the hole. My counterclaim. Proof that I didn't pander to the male gaze.
. . . .
our cultural obsession with beauty and self-improvement is compounded by the fact that we're living in the Age of Digital Narcissism; and how, because of this phenomenon, girls as young as nine — the age of her [my sister's] daughter and my eldest — show a "disturbing level of anxiety" about their looks."
__________________________
(1) Sex and the City - The New Yorker has a great article on "How Sex and the City Lost its Good Name." Do you still like the show or do you find it dated?
"Carrie and her friends—Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte—were odder birds by far, jagged, aggressive, and sometimes frightening figures, like a makeup mirror lit up in neon. They were simultaneously real and abstract, emotionally complex and philosophically stylized. Women identified with them—“I’m a Carrie!”—but then became furious when they showed flaws. And, with the exception of Charlotte (Kristin Davis), men didn’t find them likable: there were endless cruel jokes about Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), and Carrie as sluts, man-haters, or gold-diggers. To me, as a single woman, it felt like a definite sign of progress: since the elemental representation of single life at the time was the comic strip “Cathy” (ack! chocolate!), better that one’s life should be viewed as glamorously threatening than as sad and lonely."
. . . .
"So why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior."
_____________________
(2) Writing Like a Man - Claire Vaye Watkins' article "On Pandering" may be the best piece of nonfiction I've ever read.
"The stunning truth is that I am asking, deep down, as I write, What would Philip Roth think of this? What would Jonathan Franzen think of this? When the answer is probably: nothing. More staggering is the question of why I am trying to prove myself to writers whose work, in many cases, I don’t particularly admire? I recently finished Roth’s Indignation with nothing more lasting than a sincere curiosity as to whether Roth is aware that these days even nice girls give blow jobs.
I am trying to understand a phenomenon that happens in my head, and maybe in yours too, whereby the white supremacist patriarchy determines what I write.
I wrote Battleborn for white men, toward them. If you hold the book to a certain light, you’ll see it as an exercise in self-hazing, a product of working-class madness, the female strain. So, natural then that Battleborn was well-received by the white male lit establishment: it was written for them. The whole book’s a pander. Look, I said with my stories: I can write old men, I can write sex, I can write abortion. I can write hard, unflinching, unsentimental. I can write an old man getting a boner!
Here are the lampposts, here is the single-screen movie theater. It’s all an architecture of pandering. It’s for them.
She can write like a man, they said, by which they meant, She can write."
_____________________
(3) Headscarfs - I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about Elif Batuman's essay on her personal conflicts with wearing a headscarf while traveling in Turkey.
"I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”?
I found myself thinking about high heels. High heels were painful, and, for me at least, expensive, because they made walking more difficult and I ended up taking more taxis. Yet there were many times when I wore heels to work-related events in New York, specifically because I felt it made people treat me with more consideration. Why, then, would I refuse to wear a head scarf, which brought a similar benefit of social acceptance, without the disadvantage of impeding my ability to stand or walk?
And yet, when I thought about leaving the scarf on for the rest of my stay, something about it felt dishonest, almost shameful, as if I were duping people into being kind to me. Those girls who smiled into my eyes—they thought I was like them. The guy who helped me on the bus—he thought I was his sister."
_______________________
(4) Angry White Females - I loved the LA Times article "Angry while female: Why it matters that Beyonce, Kelly Ripa and Samantha Bee won't hide their outrage."
"For women, though, it’s a bit trickier, as all those “angry feminists” can attest. As clashing reactions to Ripa and far too many studies reveal, women are still often penalized for getting angry, even when anger is the appropriate reaction to the situation.
During the recent #Oscarssowhite controversy, for example, both Spike Lee and Jada Pinkett Smith announced they would not be attending the ceremony. But it was Pinkett Smith who became, and remained, the butt of angry jokes, many of which boiled down to “..., who said you were even invited?”
The b-word, of course, is cited in study after study about the different perceptions of male and female anger: Where men are considered “firm,” women are seen as “controlling” and worse.
As Ripa discovered, women who react when provoked are still often accused of seeming “crazy” (which, with its evocations of a time when women could be committed to an asylum for rebelling against their husbands or fathers, is in itself a provocation).
“Jealous or crazy,” Beyoncé sings over and over again in “Lemonade’s” “Hold Up,” blurring the words synonymous before deciding: “More like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately / I’d rather be crazy.”
Some of it is a simple question of volume: Men shout in righteous rage, but women who raise their voices are still often seen as losing control or, heaven forbid, “shrill.”
_______________________
(5) Nannies - In "the Cost of Caring", Rachel Aviv (somewhat heartbreakingly) profiles Filipino caregivers in America.
"During meals in Chappaqua, Emma sometimes felt guilty and lost her appetite. “If you are a mom, you want anything you eat to be shared by your kids,” she said. Sometimes, as she dressed the girls in the morning, she cried as she imagined her youngest children preparing for school with the assistance of the helpers. One of the helpers had a young son. Emma asked her children who cared for the boy while his mother was at their house, but her daughters didn’t know. Emma imagined a chain of mothers parenting other mothers’ children around the globe."
. . . .
"Timing one’s departure from America is a precarious art. Emma, Ivy, and their friends speak of their return to the Philippines as a kind of afterlife, an endless family celebration, where they will finally reap the rewards of their sacrifice. The window for return begins once they’ve put their children through school—often their grandchildren, too—but then the calculation becomes more complex. Should they stay longer, save for retirement, and risk growing ill in America? Or leave prematurely, run out of money, and be poor again in the Philippines?
Recently, one of Emma’s friends tragically mistimed her return. She was given a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in December and, less than two months later, died without having seen her husband or her children in years. Emma and her friends raised money for “death aid.” They wanted to help the woman’s husband, who ran a poultry farm that Emma used to visit, pay for his wife’s body to be shipped home. The day after the body was flown overseas, I accompanied Emma to her nannying job on the Upper East Side, where she was struggling to put the memory out of her mind. When she viewed the body, three days earlier, she was shocked by how thin her friend had become. “What kind of life is this?” Emma said."
________________________
(6) Botox - And finally, Amanda Peet's anti-Botox essay went viral this week (I feel that I should disclaim that I'm personally a Botox fan, but I still found the essay a great read).
"Another frightening scenario is that one or both of my daughters will do as I did in my youth: go to college, take Feminist Texts and Theory, and stop shaving their legs and armpits. As hard-core feminists, they'll write me off. I'll cry, Why aren't you coming home for Thanksgiving? And they'll be like, You're nothing but a foot soldier for the beauty industrial complex. Letting my face age naturally will be my ace in the hole. My counterclaim. Proof that I didn't pander to the male gaze.
. . . .
our cultural obsession with beauty and self-improvement is compounded by the fact that we're living in the Age of Digital Narcissism; and how, because of this phenomenon, girls as young as nine — the age of her [my sister's] daughter and my eldest — show a "disturbing level of anxiety" about their looks."
Labels:
Interesting Articles,
Things to Read
11/5/15
Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles (on a Syrian refugee, Instagram, Lonely Death, School Shootings, Japanese Kids, and Travel Photography)
1. (A Syrian Refugee) - Ten Borders - The New Yorker documents a Syrian refugee's escape.
"Ghaith said that he couldn’t help but feel lucky: “I made it, while thousands of others didn’t. Some died on the way, some died in Syria. Every day, you hear about people drowning. Just think about how much every Syrian is suffering inside Syria to endure the suffering of this trip.” He paused. “In Greece, someone asked me, ‘Why take the chance?’ I said, ‘In Syria, there’s a hundred-per-cent chance that you’re going to die. If the chance of making it to Europe is even one per cent, then that means there is a one-per-cent chance of your leading an actual life.’ ”
________________
2. (Instagram Fame) - New York magazine published a profile of the "Prom Queen of Instagram" that made me want to hide my children from all main stream culture.
Hymowitz asked her friends if they thought her Instagram captured her personality. “Definitely not,” Lee said. “Your Instagram is like, ‘She does cool stuff.’ It’s a lifestyle that people want to live.” Everyone agreed that Hymowitz was sweeter in person than the cool, even tough, persona she presented online.
The table also agreed that building a high-profile online presence was practical. “When I decide what I wanna do in general with life, having followers could help,” said Hymowitz.
. . .
"Everyone’s like, ‘There’s so many people in New York, if you don’t want to be around the same people, why don’t you just meet new friends?’ ” she said. “But you can’t just wander the streets and pick out new friends.” As she crested the halfway point of high school, she seemed stuck between being an aspiring adult and a romantic teen who still posts pictures of Drake and says that all she needs is a man who would treat her like he would. Instagram offered a concrete measure of her popularity, which could be reassuring but also, she now realized, paranoia-inducing. “How do you even know why someone is hanging out with you? Is it for them to tag you in their Instagram, or is it because they like you?” Hymowitz wondered."
_______________
3. (Dying Alone) - New York Times' article "The Death of George Bell" about how the state deals with the death of a reclusive horder was both sad and fascinating (I've always wondered who comes in to clean out the apartment and deal with the estate).
Distance and time never dampened the emotional affinity between [Eleanore] and George Bell. They spoke on the phone and exchanged cards. “We had something for each other that never got used up,” she said. She had sent him a Valentine’s Day card just last year: “George, think of you often with love.”
And unbeknown to her, he had put her in his will and kept her there.
Her life finished up a lot like his. She lived alone, in a trailer. She died of a heart attack. A neighbor who cleared her snow found her. She had gotten obese. Her brother had her cremated.
A difference was that she left behind debt, owed to the bank and to credit card companies. All that she would pass on was tens of thousands of dollars of George Bell’s money, money that she never got to touch.
Some would filter down to her brother, who had no plans for it. A slice went to Michael Garber, her nephew, who drives a bus at Disney World. A friend of his aunt’s had owned a Camaro convertible that she relished, and he might buy a used Camaro in her honor.
Some more would go to Sarah Teta, a niece, retired and living in Altamonte Springs, Fla., who plans to save it for a rainy day. “You always hear about people you don’t know dying and leaving you money,” she said. “I never thought it would happen to me.”
______________
4. (Japanese Kids) - Citylab has a short, interesting piece on Why Japanese Kids are So Independent.
What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.
This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This “distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance,” Dixon says.
Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.
_______________
5. (School Shootings) - This article on How School Shootings Spread, which concentrates on the idea of "social thresholds" for violence, scared the crap out of me.
"Social processes are driven by our thresholds . . . defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
. . . .
. . . the sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. “School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,” she writes. She mentions one who “refers to Cho as a brother-in-arms”; another who “points out that his cultural tastes are like those of ‘Eric and Dylan’ ”; a third who “uses images from the Columbine shooting surveillance camera and devotes several videos to the Columbine killers.” And she notes, “This aspect underlines the fact that the boys actively take part in associating themselves to a group.”
. . . .
In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
__________________
6. (Travel Photography) - And, finally, I loved this article by Teju Cole on finding one's own voice in writing and in photography.
"The question I confronted in Switzerland is similar to that confronted by any camera-toting visitor in a great landscape: Can my photograph convey an experience that others have already captured so well? The answer is almost always no, but you try anyway. I might feel myself to be a singular traveler, but I am in fact part of a great endless horde. In the 1870s, Mark Twain was already complaining: ‘‘Now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing hive of restless strangers."
. . . .
Technically proficient mountain pictures were good, but I also had to develop my own voice. In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice. I could not decide ahead of time that I would take only ugly pictures or only beautiful ones, or that everything would be in focus or blurred, or that I would use only color or only black and white.
. . . .
I let go of some ‘‘good’’ photos, the way you strike out pretty sentences from a draft, and I learned how a number of tightly argued photos should be followed by one or two that are simpler and more ventilated. Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.
Along the way, I felt the constant company of doubt: my lack of talent, my impostor’s syndrome, my fear of boring others. Every once in a great while, there was finally a superb picture, but when I looked at it the following week, I would see that it actually wasn’t very good: too obvious, too derivative. Three thousand photographs and three thousand doubts."
"Ghaith said that he couldn’t help but feel lucky: “I made it, while thousands of others didn’t. Some died on the way, some died in Syria. Every day, you hear about people drowning. Just think about how much every Syrian is suffering inside Syria to endure the suffering of this trip.” He paused. “In Greece, someone asked me, ‘Why take the chance?’ I said, ‘In Syria, there’s a hundred-per-cent chance that you’re going to die. If the chance of making it to Europe is even one per cent, then that means there is a one-per-cent chance of your leading an actual life.’ ”
________________
2. (Instagram Fame) - New York magazine published a profile of the "Prom Queen of Instagram" that made me want to hide my children from all main stream culture.
Hymowitz asked her friends if they thought her Instagram captured her personality. “Definitely not,” Lee said. “Your Instagram is like, ‘She does cool stuff.’ It’s a lifestyle that people want to live.” Everyone agreed that Hymowitz was sweeter in person than the cool, even tough, persona she presented online.
The table also agreed that building a high-profile online presence was practical. “When I decide what I wanna do in general with life, having followers could help,” said Hymowitz.
. . .
"Everyone’s like, ‘There’s so many people in New York, if you don’t want to be around the same people, why don’t you just meet new friends?’ ” she said. “But you can’t just wander the streets and pick out new friends.” As she crested the halfway point of high school, she seemed stuck between being an aspiring adult and a romantic teen who still posts pictures of Drake and says that all she needs is a man who would treat her like he would. Instagram offered a concrete measure of her popularity, which could be reassuring but also, she now realized, paranoia-inducing. “How do you even know why someone is hanging out with you? Is it for them to tag you in their Instagram, or is it because they like you?” Hymowitz wondered."
_______________
3. (Dying Alone) - New York Times' article "The Death of George Bell" about how the state deals with the death of a reclusive horder was both sad and fascinating (I've always wondered who comes in to clean out the apartment and deal with the estate).
Distance and time never dampened the emotional affinity between [Eleanore] and George Bell. They spoke on the phone and exchanged cards. “We had something for each other that never got used up,” she said. She had sent him a Valentine’s Day card just last year: “George, think of you often with love.”
And unbeknown to her, he had put her in his will and kept her there.
Her life finished up a lot like his. She lived alone, in a trailer. She died of a heart attack. A neighbor who cleared her snow found her. She had gotten obese. Her brother had her cremated.
A difference was that she left behind debt, owed to the bank and to credit card companies. All that she would pass on was tens of thousands of dollars of George Bell’s money, money that she never got to touch.
Some would filter down to her brother, who had no plans for it. A slice went to Michael Garber, her nephew, who drives a bus at Disney World. A friend of his aunt’s had owned a Camaro convertible that she relished, and he might buy a used Camaro in her honor.
Some more would go to Sarah Teta, a niece, retired and living in Altamonte Springs, Fla., who plans to save it for a rainy day. “You always hear about people you don’t know dying and leaving you money,” she said. “I never thought it would happen to me.”
______________
4. (Japanese Kids) - Citylab has a short, interesting piece on Why Japanese Kids are So Independent.
What accounts for this unusual degree of independence? Not self-sufficiency, in fact, but “group reliance,” according to Dwayne Dixon, a cultural anthropologist who wrote his doctoral dissertation on Japanese youth. “[Japanese] kids learn early on that, ideally, any member of the community can be called on to serve or help others,” he says.
This assumption is reinforced at school, where children take turns cleaning and serving lunch instead of relying on staff to perform such duties. This “distributes labor across various shoulders and rotates expectations, while also teaching everyone what it takes to clean a toilet, for instance,” Dixon says.
Taking responsibility for shared spaces means that children have pride of ownership and understand in a concrete way the consequences of making a mess, since they’ll have to clean it up themselves. This ethic extends to public space more broadly (one reason Japanese streets are generally so clean). A child out in public knows he can rely on the group to help in an emergency.
_______________
5. (School Shootings) - This article on How School Shootings Spread, which concentrates on the idea of "social thresholds" for violence, scared the crap out of me.
"Social processes are driven by our thresholds . . . defined as the number of people who need to be doing some activity before we agree to join them. In the elegant theoretical model Granovetter proposed, riots were started by people with a threshold of zero—instigators willing to throw a rock through a window at the slightest provocation. Then comes the person who will throw a rock if someone else goes first. He has a threshold of one. Next in is the person with the threshold of two. His qualms are overcome when he sees the instigator and the instigator’s accomplice. Next to him is someone with a threshold of three, who would never break windows and loot stores unless there were three people right in front of him who were already doing that—and so on up to the hundredth person, a righteous upstanding citizen who nonetheless could set his beliefs aside and grab a camera from the broken window of the electronics store if everyone around him was grabbing cameras from the electronics store.
. . . .
. . . the sociologist Nathalie E. Paton has analyzed the online videos created by post-Columbine shooters and found a recurring set of stylized images: a moment where the killer points his gun at the camera, then at his own temple, and then spreads his arms wide with a gun in each hand; the closeup; the wave goodbye at the end. “School shooters explicitly name or represent each other,” she writes. She mentions one who “refers to Cho as a brother-in-arms”; another who “points out that his cultural tastes are like those of ‘Eric and Dylan’ ”; a third who “uses images from the Columbine shooting surveillance camera and devotes several videos to the Columbine killers.” And she notes, “This aspect underlines the fact that the boys actively take part in associating themselves to a group.”
. . . .
In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts."
__________________
6. (Travel Photography) - And, finally, I loved this article by Teju Cole on finding one's own voice in writing and in photography.
"The question I confronted in Switzerland is similar to that confronted by any camera-toting visitor in a great landscape: Can my photograph convey an experience that others have already captured so well? The answer is almost always no, but you try anyway. I might feel myself to be a singular traveler, but I am in fact part of a great endless horde. In the 1870s, Mark Twain was already complaining: ‘‘Now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing hive of restless strangers."
. . . .
Technically proficient mountain pictures were good, but I also had to develop my own voice. In photography, as in writing, there’s no shortcut to finding that voice. I could not decide ahead of time that I would take only ugly pictures or only beautiful ones, or that everything would be in focus or blurred, or that I would use only color or only black and white.
. . . .
I let go of some ‘‘good’’ photos, the way you strike out pretty sentences from a draft, and I learned how a number of tightly argued photos should be followed by one or two that are simpler and more ventilated. Authorship, after all, is not only what is created but also what is selected.
Along the way, I felt the constant company of doubt: my lack of talent, my impostor’s syndrome, my fear of boring others. Every once in a great while, there was finally a superb picture, but when I looked at it the following week, I would see that it actually wasn’t very good: too obvious, too derivative. Three thousand photographs and three thousand doubts."
9/17/15
Things to Read - Five Articles About Education (Just in Time For Back to School)
1. (Overparenting) - NPR's article about How Schools Are Handling an Overparenting Crisis contains the following advice (personally, I'm frightened that all three bullet points aren't obvious to everyone):
Three things parents can do right away:
1. Stop saying "we" when you mean your kid. "We" aren't on the travel soccer team, "we" aren't doing the science project and "we" aren't applying to college. Our kid is. These are their efforts and achievements. We need to go get our own hobbies to brag about.
2. Stop arguing with all of the adults in our kids' lives. As Jess well knows, teachers are under siege from overinvolved parents insistent upon engineering the perfect outcomes for their kids. Principals, coaches and referees see the same thing. If there's an issue that needs to be raised with these folks, we do best for our kids in the long run if we've taught them how to raise concerns on their own.
3. Stop doing their homework. Teachers end up not knowing what their students actually know, it's highly unethical, and worst of all it teaches kids, "Hey kid, you're not actually capable of doing any of this on your own."
______________
2. (College) - The New Yorker asks (but can't really answer) What Is College Worth?, a question I ask myself more and more lately as tuition rates continue to skyrocket along with unemployed 20-somethings, plus can't we all learn everything we need on the internet now?)
" . . . . Studies, and there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents and students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as one in four—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”
________________
3. (Gifted) - Brainchild takes on gifted elementary programs, suggesting they create unnecessary anxiety and/or overconfidence.
"But what did it mean that he was “gifted”—in elementary school? That he was a quick learner? An early reader? In the top math group? That he has a higher than average IQ? If children are truly “gifted” (however that word might be defined), shouldn’t school communities wait to apply the label until it’s more obvious, until it really matters—in middle school or beyond. Why lock a child into a label with tattoo-like permanence at an age when they are still changing so rapidly?
Instead of inspiring these young kids, the expectation that gifted kids will automatically excel and succeed can often lead to anxiety and meltdowns over the fear of failure or getting an answer wrong. Or, in the case of my son, now fifteen, it leads to believing he’s smart enough that he doesn’t need to put forth much effort, creating a false sense of security when faced with an inevitable academic or emotional stumble.
“There’s a good chance Daniel will go all the way through high school without needing to study for a single test,” Mr. C., Daniel’s third grade teacher, boasted as he adjusted his stylish thick-framed glasses. But didn’t I want my son to study for tests, I wondered, shifting uncomfortably in my miniature chair? And how could Mr. C. predict into my son’s future? Is this the message the teachers, as well as the TAG program, had been sending my child?"
____________________
4. (Sex Ed) - PBS makes a compelling case for starting sex education in kindergarten (based on the Netherlands' education system).
"You’ll never hear an explicit reference to sex in a kindergarten class.In fact, the term for what’s being taught here is sexuality education rather than sex education. That’s because the goal is bigger than that, says Ineke van der Vlugt, an expert on youth sexual development for Rutgers WPF, the Dutch sexuality research institute behind the curriculum. It’s about having open, honest conversations about love and relationships.
By law, all primary school students in the Netherlands must receive some form of sexuality education. The system allows for flexibility in how it’s taught. But it must address certain core principles — among them, sexual diversity and sexual assertiveness. That means encouraging respect for all sexual preferences and helping students develop skills to protect against sexual coercion, intimidation and abuse. The underlying principle is straightforward: Sexual development is a normal process that all young people experience, and they have the right to frank, trustworthy information on the subject."
_________________
5. (Children's Sports) - And, finally, although this Harpers' article doesn't deal with education per se, it deals with coaching, which is similar right?
"According to a survey conducted by ESPN, 23 percent of parents believe that youth sports are putting a strain on their families. Perhaps this is because an astonishing 32 percent believe that their child has a good chance of winning a Division I athletic scholarship. Eleven percent believe that their child could be a professional athlete someday. I took some comfort knowing that other parents, at least some of them, cared as deeply as I did. But why? What was actually at stake? Nothing.
My daughter, it was obvious, was not going to play basketball at a high level, or perhaps even for another season, given the experience she was having. As a dad, I had previously taken my daughter’s athletic endeavors lightly, rooting for her but not obsessing over wins and losses. But now that I was coaching, the metronomic regularity of the beatings my team was taking wore me down so much that I became irritable around the house. My wife and my father both told me to quit."
. . . .
I couldn’t persuade my girls to walk down the line and shake hands with the Sky. I could barely shake Coach Stan’s hand. Most of the girls left without their second-place trophies. Half were still crying. Parents emailed me into the next day, vowing to withdraw their children from the league.
I struggled to find a lesson we could draw from the experience.
We simply lost. And maybe that’s the lesson, the most brutal of all. Sometimes you will lose, regularly, decisively, completely. And there will be nothing you can do about it."
Three things parents can do right away:
1. Stop saying "we" when you mean your kid. "We" aren't on the travel soccer team, "we" aren't doing the science project and "we" aren't applying to college. Our kid is. These are their efforts and achievements. We need to go get our own hobbies to brag about.
2. Stop arguing with all of the adults in our kids' lives. As Jess well knows, teachers are under siege from overinvolved parents insistent upon engineering the perfect outcomes for their kids. Principals, coaches and referees see the same thing. If there's an issue that needs to be raised with these folks, we do best for our kids in the long run if we've taught them how to raise concerns on their own.
3. Stop doing their homework. Teachers end up not knowing what their students actually know, it's highly unethical, and worst of all it teaches kids, "Hey kid, you're not actually capable of doing any of this on your own."
______________
2. (College) - The New Yorker asks (but can't really answer) What Is College Worth?, a question I ask myself more and more lately as tuition rates continue to skyrocket along with unemployed 20-somethings, plus can't we all learn everything we need on the internet now?)
" . . . . Studies, and there are lots of them, usually find that the financial benefits of getting a college degree are much larger than the financial costs. But Cappelli points out that for parents and students the average figures may not mean much, because they disguise enormous differences in outcomes from school to school. He cites a survey, carried out by PayScale for Businessweek in 2012, that showed that students who attend M.I.T., Caltech, and Harvey Mudd College enjoy an annual return of more than ten per cent on their “investment.” But the survey also found almost two hundred colleges where students, on average, never fully recouped the costs of their education. “The big news about the payoff from college should be the incredible variation in it across colleges,” Cappelli writes. “Looking at the actual return on the costs of attending college, careful analyses suggest that the payoff from many college programs—as much as one in four—is actually negative. Incredibly, the schools seem to add nothing to the market value of the students.”
________________
3. (Gifted) - Brainchild takes on gifted elementary programs, suggesting they create unnecessary anxiety and/or overconfidence.
"But what did it mean that he was “gifted”—in elementary school? That he was a quick learner? An early reader? In the top math group? That he has a higher than average IQ? If children are truly “gifted” (however that word might be defined), shouldn’t school communities wait to apply the label until it’s more obvious, until it really matters—in middle school or beyond. Why lock a child into a label with tattoo-like permanence at an age when they are still changing so rapidly?
Instead of inspiring these young kids, the expectation that gifted kids will automatically excel and succeed can often lead to anxiety and meltdowns over the fear of failure or getting an answer wrong. Or, in the case of my son, now fifteen, it leads to believing he’s smart enough that he doesn’t need to put forth much effort, creating a false sense of security when faced with an inevitable academic or emotional stumble.
“There’s a good chance Daniel will go all the way through high school without needing to study for a single test,” Mr. C., Daniel’s third grade teacher, boasted as he adjusted his stylish thick-framed glasses. But didn’t I want my son to study for tests, I wondered, shifting uncomfortably in my miniature chair? And how could Mr. C. predict into my son’s future? Is this the message the teachers, as well as the TAG program, had been sending my child?"
____________________
4. (Sex Ed) - PBS makes a compelling case for starting sex education in kindergarten (based on the Netherlands' education system).
"You’ll never hear an explicit reference to sex in a kindergarten class.In fact, the term for what’s being taught here is sexuality education rather than sex education. That’s because the goal is bigger than that, says Ineke van der Vlugt, an expert on youth sexual development for Rutgers WPF, the Dutch sexuality research institute behind the curriculum. It’s about having open, honest conversations about love and relationships.
By law, all primary school students in the Netherlands must receive some form of sexuality education. The system allows for flexibility in how it’s taught. But it must address certain core principles — among them, sexual diversity and sexual assertiveness. That means encouraging respect for all sexual preferences and helping students develop skills to protect against sexual coercion, intimidation and abuse. The underlying principle is straightforward: Sexual development is a normal process that all young people experience, and they have the right to frank, trustworthy information on the subject."
_________________
5. (Children's Sports) - And, finally, although this Harpers' article doesn't deal with education per se, it deals with coaching, which is similar right?
"According to a survey conducted by ESPN, 23 percent of parents believe that youth sports are putting a strain on their families. Perhaps this is because an astonishing 32 percent believe that their child has a good chance of winning a Division I athletic scholarship. Eleven percent believe that their child could be a professional athlete someday. I took some comfort knowing that other parents, at least some of them, cared as deeply as I did. But why? What was actually at stake? Nothing.
My daughter, it was obvious, was not going to play basketball at a high level, or perhaps even for another season, given the experience she was having. As a dad, I had previously taken my daughter’s athletic endeavors lightly, rooting for her but not obsessing over wins and losses. But now that I was coaching, the metronomic regularity of the beatings my team was taking wore me down so much that I became irritable around the house. My wife and my father both told me to quit."
. . . .
I couldn’t persuade my girls to walk down the line and shake hands with the Sky. I could barely shake Coach Stan’s hand. Most of the girls left without their second-place trophies. Half were still crying. Parents emailed me into the next day, vowing to withdraw their children from the league.
I struggled to find a lesson we could draw from the experience.
We simply lost. And maybe that’s the lesson, the most brutal of all. Sometimes you will lose, regularly, decisively, completely. And there will be nothing you can do about it."
8/6/15
Things to Read - Six Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on Ben and Jen's divorce, Kalief Browder, Advertising, How Doctors Die, Early Memories, and the Life of a Refugee)
1. (The end of Ben/Jen) - Why Do We Care So Much About Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner's Divorce? (link via Cup of Jo) Because I really care. As in really really really care.
"Whereas most celebrities choose to paint a picture of domestic bliss in interviews and profiles, Ben and Jen didn’t shy away from confessing that maintaining a long-term relationship doesn’t always come easy. Affleck famously acknowledged that their marriage was a product of hard work during his acceptance speech at the 2013 Oscars when Argo won for Best Picture. “I want to thank you for working on our marriage for ten Christmases. It’s good. It is work but the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with.” They both even poked fun of the mass speculation his speech sparked during an SNL opening monologue skit, leading us all to mistakenly believe that a couple who makes fun of each other together, stays together."
________________
2. (Kalief Browder) - Kalief Browder, Rachel Dolezal, and Race in America in the Atlantic. If Kalief's Browder's story doesn't make you angry, then I don't know what will.
"By some cosmic coincidence we are confronted with the death of Kalief Browder at exactly the moment American media is obsessing over the life of Rachel Dolezal. Coincidental as it may be, it is also instructive. Through duplicitous means, Dolezal was able to masquerade as a member of the black race. Such masquerades are neither novel nor original. What fuels the fascination is the way in which it taps into one of America’s greatest and most essential crimes—the centuries of plunder which birthed the hierarchy which we now euphemistically call “race.”
Kalief Browder died, like Renisha McBride died, like Tamir Rice died, because they were born and boxed into the lowest cavity of that hierarchy. If not for those deaths, if not for the taking of young boys off the streets of New York, and the pinning of young girls on the lawns of McKinney, Texas, the debate over Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade would wither and blow away, because it would have no real import nor meaning. It is the killing of John Crawford III and the beating of Marlene Pinnock which elevates this charade beyond what Jeb Bush calls himself or what Elizabeth Warren called herself.
“I think race is oppression,” writes Richard Seymour, “and nothing else.” Indeed. It is the oppression that matters. In that sense, I care not one iota what Rachel Dolezal does nor what she needs to label herself. I care solely, totally, and completely about what this society does to my son, because of its need to label him."
___________________
3. (Advertising) - Stop Trying to Convince Me I'm Beautiful (link via Cup of Jo).
It’s insulting because it assume beauty is something I mourn for and desire. Honestly, it’s something I give very little thought. And when I see it constantly referred to, it makes me feel bored and ask if my sex really seems that one-dimensional. Advertising to men plays on the desires to be powerful, admired, respected, and even feared. For us girls, it stops at small pores and doe eyes.
. . . .
I don’t like it when adverts attempt to enter my life and my mind. To pretend they know me and my insecurities. I don’t want them to pose as a knowing friend who loves me, but also want to correct me and tell me I’m wrong all the time. To blindly insist a woman is beautiful when she isn’t isn’t comforting, it’s creepy. If a person walked up to me and congratulated me on my conversational Korean I would think they’re crazy (FYI I’m regrettably very unilingual)—so why should I embrace them when they congratulate me on another quality I don’t have."
____________
4. (How Doctors Die) - NPR published a short piece on how doctors choose to die.
"It was about 10 years ago, after a colleague had died swiftly and peacefully, that Dr. Ken Murray first noticed doctors die differently than the rest of us.
"He had died at home, and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember any of our colleagues who had actually died in the hospital," Murray says. "That struck me as quite odd, because I know that most people do die in hospitals."
Murray then began talking about it with other doctors.
"And I said, 'Have you noticed this phenomenon?' They thought about it, and they said, 'You know? You're right.' "
_________________
5. (Early Memories) - Where Do Children's Earliest Memories Go? on Aeon. We shred them? Isn't that terrible? Just like Bing Bong in Inside Out.
"Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. A recent study by the neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto suggests that this process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.
. . .
Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present, according to Bauer. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.
_______________
6. (The Life of a Refugee) - Finally, last but not least, Clemantine Wamariya's essay in Matter - "Everything is Your's, Everything is Not Your's" is the most powerful piece of non-fiction I've read lately. Wow, just wow.
"One day, in a philosophy seminar, I sat around a table with my fellow students, the boys in sports jackets, the girls in sweaters. It was a beautiful, crisp fall day. The professor gave us a thought experiment: You’re a ferry captain with two passengers. Your boat is sinking. One passenger is old and one is young. Who do you save?
With this, my veneer of decorum started to crack. Before I arrived on campus I asked the headmaster not to share my history. Nobody knew who I was. “Do you want to know what’s that really like?” I blurted out. “This is an abstract question to you?” Everybody stared."
"Whereas most celebrities choose to paint a picture of domestic bliss in interviews and profiles, Ben and Jen didn’t shy away from confessing that maintaining a long-term relationship doesn’t always come easy. Affleck famously acknowledged that their marriage was a product of hard work during his acceptance speech at the 2013 Oscars when Argo won for Best Picture. “I want to thank you for working on our marriage for ten Christmases. It’s good. It is work but the best kind of work and there’s no one I’d rather work with.” They both even poked fun of the mass speculation his speech sparked during an SNL opening monologue skit, leading us all to mistakenly believe that a couple who makes fun of each other together, stays together."
________________
2. (Kalief Browder) - Kalief Browder, Rachel Dolezal, and Race in America in the Atlantic. If Kalief's Browder's story doesn't make you angry, then I don't know what will.
"By some cosmic coincidence we are confronted with the death of Kalief Browder at exactly the moment American media is obsessing over the life of Rachel Dolezal. Coincidental as it may be, it is also instructive. Through duplicitous means, Dolezal was able to masquerade as a member of the black race. Such masquerades are neither novel nor original. What fuels the fascination is the way in which it taps into one of America’s greatest and most essential crimes—the centuries of plunder which birthed the hierarchy which we now euphemistically call “race.”
Kalief Browder died, like Renisha McBride died, like Tamir Rice died, because they were born and boxed into the lowest cavity of that hierarchy. If not for those deaths, if not for the taking of young boys off the streets of New York, and the pinning of young girls on the lawns of McKinney, Texas, the debate over Rachel Dolezal’s masquerade would wither and blow away, because it would have no real import nor meaning. It is the killing of John Crawford III and the beating of Marlene Pinnock which elevates this charade beyond what Jeb Bush calls himself or what Elizabeth Warren called herself.
“I think race is oppression,” writes Richard Seymour, “and nothing else.” Indeed. It is the oppression that matters. In that sense, I care not one iota what Rachel Dolezal does nor what she needs to label herself. I care solely, totally, and completely about what this society does to my son, because of its need to label him."
___________________
3. (Advertising) - Stop Trying to Convince Me I'm Beautiful (link via Cup of Jo).
It’s insulting because it assume beauty is something I mourn for and desire. Honestly, it’s something I give very little thought. And when I see it constantly referred to, it makes me feel bored and ask if my sex really seems that one-dimensional. Advertising to men plays on the desires to be powerful, admired, respected, and even feared. For us girls, it stops at small pores and doe eyes.
. . . .
I don’t like it when adverts attempt to enter my life and my mind. To pretend they know me and my insecurities. I don’t want them to pose as a knowing friend who loves me, but also want to correct me and tell me I’m wrong all the time. To blindly insist a woman is beautiful when she isn’t isn’t comforting, it’s creepy. If a person walked up to me and congratulated me on my conversational Korean I would think they’re crazy (FYI I’m regrettably very unilingual)—so why should I embrace them when they congratulate me on another quality I don’t have."
____________
4. (How Doctors Die) - NPR published a short piece on how doctors choose to die.
"It was about 10 years ago, after a colleague had died swiftly and peacefully, that Dr. Ken Murray first noticed doctors die differently than the rest of us.
"He had died at home, and it occurred to me that I couldn't remember any of our colleagues who had actually died in the hospital," Murray says. "That struck me as quite odd, because I know that most people do die in hospitals."
Murray then began talking about it with other doctors.
"And I said, 'Have you noticed this phenomenon?' They thought about it, and they said, 'You know? You're right.' "
_________________
5. (Early Memories) - Where Do Children's Earliest Memories Go? on Aeon. We shred them? Isn't that terrible? Just like Bing Bong in Inside Out.
"Frail as they are, children’s memories are then susceptible to a process called shredding. In our early years, we create a storm of new neurons in a part of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus and continue to form them throughout the rest of our lives, although not at nearly the same rate. A recent study by the neuroscientists Paul Frankland and Sheena Josselyn of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto suggests that this process, called neurogenesis, can actually create forgetting by disrupting the circuits for existing memories.
. . .
Memories are less vulnerable to shredding and disruptions as the child grows up. Most of the solid memories that we carry into the rest of our lives are formed during what’s called ‘the reminiscence bump’, from ages 15 to 30, when we invest a lot of energy in examining everything to try to figure out who we are. The events, culture and people of that time remain with us and can even overshadow the features of our ageing present, according to Bauer. The movies were the best back then, and so was the music, and the fashion, and the political leaders, and the friendships, and the romances. And so on.
_______________
6. (The Life of a Refugee) - Finally, last but not least, Clemantine Wamariya's essay in Matter - "Everything is Your's, Everything is Not Your's" is the most powerful piece of non-fiction I've read lately. Wow, just wow.
"One day, in a philosophy seminar, I sat around a table with my fellow students, the boys in sports jackets, the girls in sweaters. It was a beautiful, crisp fall day. The professor gave us a thought experiment: You’re a ferry captain with two passengers. Your boat is sinking. One passenger is old and one is young. Who do you save?
With this, my veneer of decorum started to crack. Before I arrived on campus I asked the headmaster not to share my history. Nobody knew who I was. “Do you want to know what’s that really like?” I blurted out. “This is an abstract question to you?” Everybody stared."
Labels:
Interesting Articles,
Things to Read
5/14/15
Things to Read - Interesting Articles from Around the Web (on THAT family, Redundancy, A Finnish Town that Went on a Diet, On Demand Everything, and Sally Mann)
1. (THAT family) - The New York Times asks (and tries to answer), "Where Would the Kardashians Be Without Kris Jenner?"
"There are still people who dismiss Kris Jenner, 59, and her family — Kourtney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian, all in their 30s; her son, Rob Kardashian, 28; and Kendall and Kylie Jenner, 19 and 17 — as “famous for being famous,” a silly reality-show family creating a contrived spectacle. But we have reached the point at which the Jenners and the Kardashians are not famous for being famous: They are famous for the industry that they’ve created, the Kardashian/Jenner megacomplex, which has not just invaded the culture but metastasized into it, with the family members emerging as legitimate businesspeople and Kris the mother-leader of them all."
___________________
2. (Redundancy) - Do you sometimes feel like everything looks the same?
"Ok, I’m exaggerating a little, but let me explain for a second. I was walking down the street with my friend Alexandra recently, and we passed by a new home decor store, and I asked her if she liked it. I loved her response:
“Yeah, it’s ok. I mean, it’s basically the ambient taste right now.”
Me: “What do you mean, ambient taste?”
“Oh, you know – it’s kind of what everyone likes these days, you see it everywhere, and you like it too without even really thinking about it.”
__________________
3. (Unintentionally Dieting Finns) - The Finnish Town that Went on a Diet
"Puska and his team approached the Martha Organization, a powerful women’s organization with several local clubs, to help spread the word. Together, Puska and the clubs hatched the idea of holding afternoon “longevity parties,” where a member of Puska’s team would give a short talk encouraging them to replace butter with oil, meat with vegetables, cut salt, and stop smoking. They gave the women a recipe book that added vegetables to traditional North Karelian dishes and cooked and served them. North Karelian stew, for instance, typically had only three main ingredients—water, fatty pork, and salt—but the team replaced some of the pork with rutabagas, potatoes, and carrots. The women liked the new version of the dish, which they named “Puska’s stew.” By showing these women how to cook plant-based meals that tasted good, Puska had found a way to disseminate the health message better than any leaflet could.
Inspired by a former professor, Everett Rogers, who came up with the idea of “opinion leaders,” Puska next went from village to village recruiting “lay ambassadors.” Believing that the best way to spark cultural change was from the bottom up, he recruited some 1,500 people, usually women who were already involved in other civic organizations. He gave each ambassador an identification card, taught them simple messages about reducing salt and animal products, and encouraged them to talk to their friends."
____________________
4. (On Demand Everything) - Lauren Smiley documents The Shut in Economy.
"Five months ago I moved into a spartan apartment a few blocks away, where dozens of startups and thousands of tech workers live. Outside my building there’s always a phalanx of befuddled delivery guys who seem relieved when you walk out, so they can get in. Inside, the place is stuffed with the goodies they bring: Amazon Prime boxes sitting outside doors, evidence of the tangible, quotidian needs that are being serviced by the web. The humans who live there, though, I mostly never see. And even when I do, there seems to be a tacit agreement among residents to not talk to one another. I floated a few “hi’s” in the elevator when I first moved in, but in return I got the monosyllabic, no-eye-contact mumble. It was clear: Lady, this is not that kind of building.
Back in the elevator in the 37-story tower, the messengers do talk, one tells me. They end up asking each other which apps they work for: Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com. A woman hauling two Whole Foods sacks reads the concierge an apartment number off her smartphone, along with the resident’s directions: “Please deliver to my door.”
____________________________
5. (Sally Mann) - What an artist captures, what a mother knows and what the public sees can be dangerously different things.
"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering. When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-writer called them “mean”) based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Even the children understood this distinction. Once, Jessie, who was 9 or 10 at the time, was trying on dresses to wear to a gallery opening of the family pictures in New York. It was spring, and one dress was sleeveless. When Jessie raised her arms, she realized that her chest was visible through the oversize armholes. She tossed that dress aside, and a friend remarked with some perplexity: “Jessie, I don’t get it. Why on earth would you care if someone can see your chest through the armholes when you are going to be in a room with a bunch of pictures that show that same bare chest?”
Jessie was equally perplexed at the friend’s reaction: “Yes, but that is not my chest. Those are photographs.”
Exactly."
"There are still people who dismiss Kris Jenner, 59, and her family — Kourtney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian, all in their 30s; her son, Rob Kardashian, 28; and Kendall and Kylie Jenner, 19 and 17 — as “famous for being famous,” a silly reality-show family creating a contrived spectacle. But we have reached the point at which the Jenners and the Kardashians are not famous for being famous: They are famous for the industry that they’ve created, the Kardashian/Jenner megacomplex, which has not just invaded the culture but metastasized into it, with the family members emerging as legitimate businesspeople and Kris the mother-leader of them all."
___________________
2. (Redundancy) - Do you sometimes feel like everything looks the same?
"Ok, I’m exaggerating a little, but let me explain for a second. I was walking down the street with my friend Alexandra recently, and we passed by a new home decor store, and I asked her if she liked it. I loved her response:
“Yeah, it’s ok. I mean, it’s basically the ambient taste right now.”
Me: “What do you mean, ambient taste?”
“Oh, you know – it’s kind of what everyone likes these days, you see it everywhere, and you like it too without even really thinking about it.”
__________________
3. (Unintentionally Dieting Finns) - The Finnish Town that Went on a Diet
"Puska and his team approached the Martha Organization, a powerful women’s organization with several local clubs, to help spread the word. Together, Puska and the clubs hatched the idea of holding afternoon “longevity parties,” where a member of Puska’s team would give a short talk encouraging them to replace butter with oil, meat with vegetables, cut salt, and stop smoking. They gave the women a recipe book that added vegetables to traditional North Karelian dishes and cooked and served them. North Karelian stew, for instance, typically had only three main ingredients—water, fatty pork, and salt—but the team replaced some of the pork with rutabagas, potatoes, and carrots. The women liked the new version of the dish, which they named “Puska’s stew.” By showing these women how to cook plant-based meals that tasted good, Puska had found a way to disseminate the health message better than any leaflet could.
Inspired by a former professor, Everett Rogers, who came up with the idea of “opinion leaders,” Puska next went from village to village recruiting “lay ambassadors.” Believing that the best way to spark cultural change was from the bottom up, he recruited some 1,500 people, usually women who were already involved in other civic organizations. He gave each ambassador an identification card, taught them simple messages about reducing salt and animal products, and encouraged them to talk to their friends."
____________________
4. (On Demand Everything) - Lauren Smiley documents The Shut in Economy.
"Five months ago I moved into a spartan apartment a few blocks away, where dozens of startups and thousands of tech workers live. Outside my building there’s always a phalanx of befuddled delivery guys who seem relieved when you walk out, so they can get in. Inside, the place is stuffed with the goodies they bring: Amazon Prime boxes sitting outside doors, evidence of the tangible, quotidian needs that are being serviced by the web. The humans who live there, though, I mostly never see. And even when I do, there seems to be a tacit agreement among residents to not talk to one another. I floated a few “hi’s” in the elevator when I first moved in, but in return I got the monosyllabic, no-eye-contact mumble. It was clear: Lady, this is not that kind of building.
Back in the elevator in the 37-story tower, the messengers do talk, one tells me. They end up asking each other which apps they work for: Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com. A woman hauling two Whole Foods sacks reads the concierge an apartment number off her smartphone, along with the resident’s directions: “Please deliver to my door.”
____________________________
5. (Sally Mann) - What an artist captures, what a mother knows and what the public sees can be dangerously different things.
"For all the righteous concern people expressed about the welfare of my children, what most of them failed to understand was that taking those pictures was an act separate from mothering. When I stepped behind the camera and my kids stepped in front of it, I was a photographer and they were actors, and we were making a photograph together. And in a similar vein, many people mistook the photographs for reality or attributed qualities to my children (one letter-writer called them “mean”) based on the way they looked in the pictures. The fact is that these are not my children; they are figures on silvery paper slivered out of time. They represent my children at a fraction of a second on one particular afternoon with infinite variables of light, expression, posture, muscle tension, mood, wind and shade. These are not my children at all; these are children in a photograph.
Even the children understood this distinction. Once, Jessie, who was 9 or 10 at the time, was trying on dresses to wear to a gallery opening of the family pictures in New York. It was spring, and one dress was sleeveless. When Jessie raised her arms, she realized that her chest was visible through the oversize armholes. She tossed that dress aside, and a friend remarked with some perplexity: “Jessie, I don’t get it. Why on earth would you care if someone can see your chest through the armholes when you are going to be in a room with a bunch of pictures that show that same bare chest?”
Jessie was equally perplexed at the friend’s reaction: “Yes, but that is not my chest. Those are photographs.”
Exactly."
3/12/15
Things To Read - Five Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on the fall of neighborhoods, destructive tweets, food safety, fairness, & internet trailblazing)
1. (The Fall of Neighborhoods) - Would You Call 911 on Another Parent? - "The real issue? We can’t rely on our neighbors to help look out for our kids, and that’s why our neighborhoods don’t feel safe enough. When you let a 10- and 6-year-old walk home on their own, it feels scary because they’re fully responsible for their own safety. What’s missing is the sense that we’re all responsible for everyone’s children.
. . . .
I understand that the reasons for this are vast, starting with the disappearance of the front porch and ending with the disconnectedness of the Internet. These structural shifts can seem too big to push against on our own.
But here are some simple things we can each do:
We can invite a next-door neighbor over for dinner.
We can make a point of attending neighborhood events, such as farmers markets or park dedications or festivals.
We can make an effort to chat with other parents when we pick up our kids from daycare or school.
We can walk instead of drive, so that we see our neighbors and have a chance of talking to them.
We can teach our children that if they’re alone and feeling scared, they can seek out a woman with children and ask for help. Teach them not to fear all strangers.
We can tie the shoe of someone else’s kid at the playground, or reach out a hand when someone else’s kid wants to get down from the playground ladder. We can ask a parent who’s juggling too much stuff: “Please let me carry that for you.” We can accept offers of help instead of demurring. These small things say “We’re in this together” when every message around us says “It’s all on you.”
__________
2. (Destructive Tweets) - How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life - “I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation. Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety."
____________
3. (Food Safety) - Why Last Night's Chicken Made You Sick - "Identifying the cause of an outbreak is much simpler than trying to stop one. Once officials have traced the contamination to a food producer, the responsibility to curb the problem falls to the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, or F.S.I.S. In the summer of 2013, as the outbreak spread, F.S.I.S. officials shared the C.D.C.’s conclusion that Foster Farms meat was behind the outbreak, but they had no power to force a recall of the tainted chicken. Federal law permits a certain level of salmonella contamination in raw meat. But when federal limits are breached, and officials believe that a recall is necessary, their only option is to ask the producer to remove the product voluntarily. Even then, officials may only request a recall when they have proof that the meat is already making customers sick. As evidence, the F.S.I.S. typically must find a genetic match between the salmonella in a victim’s body and the salmonella in a package of meat that is still in the victim’s possession, with its label still attached. If the patient has already eaten the meat, discarded the package, or removed the label, the link becomes difficult to make, and officials can’t request a voluntary recall."
. . . .
Some products, such as cut-up chicken parts, have no performance standard at all. A hundred per cent of the product in supermarkets may be contaminated without running afoul of federal limits. Rangan told me that she was stunned when she discovered this, just recently: “We’ve asked the U.S.D.A. point blank, ‘So does that mean there aren’t standards for lamb chops and pork ribs?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we don’t have standards for those.’
______________
4. (Fairness) - Believing that Life is Fair May Make You a Terrible Person - "The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep. Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can – but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.
Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves."
____________
5. (Internet Trailblazing) - How Your Travels Around the Internet Expose the Way You Think - "Trailblazer gave me an x-ray view of my own mental activity. Clicking on random memes triggered a curious search query and—boom—20 pages later I’d find a useful scientific paper. (I’m now more forgiving of falling down a Twitter hole.) Traditional academic citations never capture serendipity, the stumbling, associational nature of how knowledge relates to itself. Trailblazer does.
Imagine if trail sharing became routine. Reporters could enrich their stories by showing how they came to their conclusions. You could send funny or jokey pathways, like cognitive emoji. Trails are like Proustian cookies, teleporting us back to mental states from weeks ago. Vannevar Bush was right: The journey is a destination."
. . . .
I understand that the reasons for this are vast, starting with the disappearance of the front porch and ending with the disconnectedness of the Internet. These structural shifts can seem too big to push against on our own.
But here are some simple things we can each do:
We can invite a next-door neighbor over for dinner.
We can make a point of attending neighborhood events, such as farmers markets or park dedications or festivals.
We can make an effort to chat with other parents when we pick up our kids from daycare or school.
We can walk instead of drive, so that we see our neighbors and have a chance of talking to them.
We can teach our children that if they’re alone and feeling scared, they can seek out a woman with children and ask for help. Teach them not to fear all strangers.
We can tie the shoe of someone else’s kid at the playground, or reach out a hand when someone else’s kid wants to get down from the playground ladder. We can ask a parent who’s juggling too much stuff: “Please let me carry that for you.” We can accept offers of help instead of demurring. These small things say “We’re in this together” when every message around us says “It’s all on you.”
__________
2. (Destructive Tweets) - How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life - “I cried out my body weight in the first 24 hours,” she told me. “It was incredibly traumatic. You don’t sleep. You wake up in the middle of the night forgetting where you are.” She released an apology statement and cut short her vacation. Workers were threatening to strike at the hotels she had booked if she showed up. She was told no one could guarantee her safety."
____________
3. (Food Safety) - Why Last Night's Chicken Made You Sick - "Identifying the cause of an outbreak is much simpler than trying to stop one. Once officials have traced the contamination to a food producer, the responsibility to curb the problem falls to the U.S.D.A.’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, or F.S.I.S. In the summer of 2013, as the outbreak spread, F.S.I.S. officials shared the C.D.C.’s conclusion that Foster Farms meat was behind the outbreak, but they had no power to force a recall of the tainted chicken. Federal law permits a certain level of salmonella contamination in raw meat. But when federal limits are breached, and officials believe that a recall is necessary, their only option is to ask the producer to remove the product voluntarily. Even then, officials may only request a recall when they have proof that the meat is already making customers sick. As evidence, the F.S.I.S. typically must find a genetic match between the salmonella in a victim’s body and the salmonella in a package of meat that is still in the victim’s possession, with its label still attached. If the patient has already eaten the meat, discarded the package, or removed the label, the link becomes difficult to make, and officials can’t request a voluntary recall."
. . . .
Some products, such as cut-up chicken parts, have no performance standard at all. A hundred per cent of the product in supermarkets may be contaminated without running afoul of federal limits. Rangan told me that she was stunned when she discovered this, just recently: “We’ve asked the U.S.D.A. point blank, ‘So does that mean there aren’t standards for lamb chops and pork ribs?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, we don’t have standards for those.’
______________
4. (Fairness) - Believing that Life is Fair May Make You a Terrible Person - "The world, obviously, is a manifestly unjust place: people are always meeting fates they didn’t deserve, or not receiving rewards they did deserve for hard work or virtuous behaviour. Yet several decades of research have established that our need to believe otherwise runs deep. Faced with evidence of injustice, we’ll certainly try to alleviate it if we can – but, if we feel powerless to make things right, we’ll do the next best thing, psychologically speaking: we’ll convince ourselves that the world isn’t so unjust after all.
Hence the finding, in a 2009 study, that Holocaust memorials can increase antisemitism. Confronted with an atrocity they otherwise can’t explain, people become slightly more likely, on average, to believe that the victims must have brought it on themselves."
____________
5. (Internet Trailblazing) - How Your Travels Around the Internet Expose the Way You Think - "Trailblazer gave me an x-ray view of my own mental activity. Clicking on random memes triggered a curious search query and—boom—20 pages later I’d find a useful scientific paper. (I’m now more forgiving of falling down a Twitter hole.) Traditional academic citations never capture serendipity, the stumbling, associational nature of how knowledge relates to itself. Trailblazer does.
Imagine if trail sharing became routine. Reporters could enrich their stories by showing how they came to their conclusions. You could send funny or jokey pathways, like cognitive emoji. Trails are like Proustian cookies, teleporting us back to mental states from weeks ago. Vannevar Bush was right: The journey is a destination."
Labels:
Interesting Articles,
Things to Read
12/18/14
Things to Read - Seven Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on mom friends, Chris Rock, the most powerful woman in the free world, the central sadness, busyness, college admissions, and Elf on the Shelf)
1. (Mom Friends) - Meaghan O'Connell's article about needing to make mom friends after having a baby reminded me of how hard those early years can be (it really does get easier - kids, babies, mom friends, the whole thing).
" 'Well, are any of them cool?' my friend asked me.
Actually, I said, yes. Most of these women are cool individually. One woman at story time had these great sparkly shoes. Another is a midwife. One woman started her own company and is really funny. Another writes for the Times. Collectively, though, they are mothers. They park their goddamn strollers everywhere and they are alternately dressed like shit or way overdressed for someone who has nowhere to be at all. They’re either miserable or fake happy or smug. They’re lost, too, scrambling for affirmation that they’re doing things the right way, that their kid is going to be okay. Okay or a genius. They’re knee-jerk judgmental, compensating for their own lack of conviction, a little defensive, hiding their deep fear just below the surface. They’re tired. Their clothes don’t fit. They miss work, miss people, miss drinking. They have no idea what they’re doing and have spent way too much time reading about it on the internet. They are, I’m sorry to say, just like me."
2. (Chris Rock) - I feel like social media is abuzz with talk of Chris Rock's New York magazine interview, but have you read it yet? The whole thing is quite brilliant. As in every quote.
"I don’t think I’ve had any meetings with black film execs. Maybe one. It is what it is. As I told Bill Murray, Lost in Translation is a black movie: That’s what it feels like to be black and rich. Not in the sense that people are being mean to you. Bill Murray’s in Tokyo, and it’s just weird. He seems kind of isolated. He’s always around Japanese people. Look at me right now."
3. (The Most Powerful Woman In the Free World) - And speaking of influential people, the New Yorker has a fascinating profile of Angela Merkel, "the most powerful woman in the free world."
"She once joked to the tabloid Bild Zeitung, with double-edged self-deprecation, “The men in the laboratory always had their hands on all the buttons at the same time. I couldn’t keep up with this, because I was thinking. And then things suddenly went ‘poof,’ and the equipment was destroyed.” Throughout her career, Merkel has made a virtue of biding her time and keeping her mouth shut.
. . . .
Merkel, at sixty, is the most successful politician in modern German history. Her popularity floats around seventy-five per cent—unheard of in an era of resentment toward elected leaders. Plainness remains her political signature, with inflections of Protestant virtue and Prussian uprightness. Once, with a group of journalists at a hotel bar in the Middle East, she said, “Can you believe it? Here I am, the Chancellor! What am I doing here? When I was growing up in the G.D.R., we imagined capitalists with long black cloaks and top hats and cigars and big feet, like cartoons. And now here I am, and they have to listen to me!” Of course, there’s something calculated about her public image. “She’s so careful not to show any pretensions—which is a kind of pretension,” the senior official said."
4. (The Central Sadness) - New Yorker also published a wonderful essay on "the childless, the parentless, and the Central Sadness."
"I thought I’d undertaken volunteer work with kids because I was, above all, a realist. I thought it showed the depth of my understanding of my own psyche. I thought it was a way of turning my limitations, specifically my reluctance to have children, into new and useful possibilities. I thought the thing I felt most guilty about could be turned into a force for good. But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflexive idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.
I’d also tricked myself into believing that trying to help these kids would put the Central Sadness on permanent hiatus, that my husband and I could find peace (not just peace but real fulfillment) in our life together. Instead, we continued to puzzle over the same unanswerable questions. Were we sad because we lacked some essential element of lifetime partnership, such as a child or an agreement about wanting or not wanting one, or because life is just sad sometimes—maybe even a lot of the time? Or perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling but, simply, the dull ache of aging. Maybe children don’t save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from aging is in fact much of the point of parenting."
5. (Busyness) - Another great article on the "disease of being busy."
"Whatever happened to a world in which kids get muddy, get dirty, get messy, and heavens, get bored? Do we have to love our children so much that we overschedule them, making them stressed and busy — just like us?
What happened to a world in which we can sit with the people we love so much and have slow conversations about the state of our heart and soul, conversations that slowly unfold, conversations with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?
How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just . . . be?"
6. (College Admissions) - Another article on "letting Harvard go."
"Q - How do I motivate my child to get straight A's? (I wish, actually, the question was: how do I set reasonable academic expectations for my child?)
A - you don't. Encourage your child to do his or her best work. Check in often to feel out how much and how well they're learning. Offer support if your child is struggling. And when your child gets a B, C, or D -- or even if he fails -- don't overreact. Review mistakes. Ask the child to fix them, even if it's not for credit. Ask how he feels about his performance and what he might do differently next time. Never express disappointment, but it's okay to encourage improvement. There's a line, and you know it. Expecting A's is pressure. Expecting learning is awesome."
7. (Elf on the Shelf) - And finally, this article on why "Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state" sounded absurd, until I read it. And now all I can say is "ummm??? (Full disclosure, we are an "Elf family", my children know no other way).
“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”
" 'Well, are any of them cool?' my friend asked me.
Actually, I said, yes. Most of these women are cool individually. One woman at story time had these great sparkly shoes. Another is a midwife. One woman started her own company and is really funny. Another writes for the Times. Collectively, though, they are mothers. They park their goddamn strollers everywhere and they are alternately dressed like shit or way overdressed for someone who has nowhere to be at all. They’re either miserable or fake happy or smug. They’re lost, too, scrambling for affirmation that they’re doing things the right way, that their kid is going to be okay. Okay or a genius. They’re knee-jerk judgmental, compensating for their own lack of conviction, a little defensive, hiding their deep fear just below the surface. They’re tired. Their clothes don’t fit. They miss work, miss people, miss drinking. They have no idea what they’re doing and have spent way too much time reading about it on the internet. They are, I’m sorry to say, just like me."
2. (Chris Rock) - I feel like social media is abuzz with talk of Chris Rock's New York magazine interview, but have you read it yet? The whole thing is quite brilliant. As in every quote.
"I don’t think I’ve had any meetings with black film execs. Maybe one. It is what it is. As I told Bill Murray, Lost in Translation is a black movie: That’s what it feels like to be black and rich. Not in the sense that people are being mean to you. Bill Murray’s in Tokyo, and it’s just weird. He seems kind of isolated. He’s always around Japanese people. Look at me right now."
3. (The Most Powerful Woman In the Free World) - And speaking of influential people, the New Yorker has a fascinating profile of Angela Merkel, "the most powerful woman in the free world."
"She once joked to the tabloid Bild Zeitung, with double-edged self-deprecation, “The men in the laboratory always had their hands on all the buttons at the same time. I couldn’t keep up with this, because I was thinking. And then things suddenly went ‘poof,’ and the equipment was destroyed.” Throughout her career, Merkel has made a virtue of biding her time and keeping her mouth shut.
. . . .
Merkel, at sixty, is the most successful politician in modern German history. Her popularity floats around seventy-five per cent—unheard of in an era of resentment toward elected leaders. Plainness remains her political signature, with inflections of Protestant virtue and Prussian uprightness. Once, with a group of journalists at a hotel bar in the Middle East, she said, “Can you believe it? Here I am, the Chancellor! What am I doing here? When I was growing up in the G.D.R., we imagined capitalists with long black cloaks and top hats and cigars and big feet, like cartoons. And now here I am, and they have to listen to me!” Of course, there’s something calculated about her public image. “She’s so careful not to show any pretensions—which is a kind of pretension,” the senior official said."
4. (The Central Sadness) - New Yorker also published a wonderful essay on "the childless, the parentless, and the Central Sadness."
"I thought I’d undertaken volunteer work with kids because I was, above all, a realist. I thought it showed the depth of my understanding of my own psyche. I thought it was a way of turning my limitations, specifically my reluctance to have children, into new and useful possibilities. I thought the thing I felt most guilty about could be turned into a force for good. But now I know that I was under the sway of my own complicated form of baby craziness. Wary as I’ve always been of our culture’s reflexive idealization—even obsessive sanctification—of the bond between parent and child, it seems that I fell for another kind of myth. I fell for the myth of the village. I fell for the idea that nurture from a loving adoptive community could erase or at least heal the abuses of horrible natural parents.
I’d also tricked myself into believing that trying to help these kids would put the Central Sadness on permanent hiatus, that my husband and I could find peace (not just peace but real fulfillment) in our life together. Instead, we continued to puzzle over the same unanswerable questions. Were we sad because we lacked some essential element of lifetime partnership, such as a child or an agreement about wanting or not wanting one, or because life is just sad sometimes—maybe even a lot of the time? Or perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling but, simply, the dull ache of aging. Maybe children don’t save their parents from this ache as much as distract from it. And maybe creating a diversion from aging is in fact much of the point of parenting."
5. (Busyness) - Another great article on the "disease of being busy."
"Whatever happened to a world in which kids get muddy, get dirty, get messy, and heavens, get bored? Do we have to love our children so much that we overschedule them, making them stressed and busy — just like us?
What happened to a world in which we can sit with the people we love so much and have slow conversations about the state of our heart and soul, conversations that slowly unfold, conversations with pregnant pauses and silences that we are in no rush to fill?
How did we create a world in which we have more and more and more to do with less time for leisure, less time for reflection, less time for community, less time to just . . . be?"
6. (College Admissions) - Another article on "letting Harvard go."
"Q - How do I motivate my child to get straight A's? (I wish, actually, the question was: how do I set reasonable academic expectations for my child?)
A - you don't. Encourage your child to do his or her best work. Check in often to feel out how much and how well they're learning. Offer support if your child is struggling. And when your child gets a B, C, or D -- or even if he fails -- don't overreact. Review mistakes. Ask the child to fix them, even if it's not for credit. Ask how he feels about his performance and what he might do differently next time. Never express disappointment, but it's okay to encourage improvement. There's a line, and you know it. Expecting A's is pressure. Expecting learning is awesome."
7. (Elf on the Shelf) - And finally, this article on why "Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state" sounded absurd, until I read it. And now all I can say is "ummm??? (Full disclosure, we are an "Elf family", my children know no other way).
“I don’t think the elf is a conspiracy and I realize we’re talking about a toy,” Pinto told The Post. “It sounds humorous, but we argue that if a kid is okay with this bureaucratic elf spying on them in their home, it normalizes the idea of surveillance and in the future restrictions on our privacy might be more easily accepted.”
10/30/14
Things to Read - Seven Interesting Articles From Around the Web (on The Right to Be Forgotten, Concealing Pregnancy, Adolescence, Slow TV, Life Off the Grid, Harvard Schmarvard, & A Story With A Bird)
1. (The Right to Be Forgotten) - European courts have recently recognized an individual's right to "prohibit Google from linking to items that [are] “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed and in the light of the time that has elapsed.” Jeffrey Toobin, writing for the New Yorker, analyzes possible consequences.
"Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, also supports the existence of a right to be forgotten that is enforceable against Google. “This is not about free speech; it’s about privacy and dignity,” he told me. “For the first time, dignity will get the same treatment in law as copyright and trademark do in America. If Sony or Disney wants fifty thousand videos removed from YouTube, Google removes them with no questions asked. If your daughter is caught kissing someone on a cell-phone home video, you have no option of getting it down. That’s wrong. The priorities are backward.”
. . . .
“Many countries are now starting to say that they want rules for the Internet that respond to their own local laws,” Jennifer Granick, of Stanford, said. “It marks the beginning of the end of the global Internet, where everyone has access to the same information, and the beginning of an Internet where there are national networks, where decisions by governments dictate which information people get access to. The Internet as a whole is being Balkanized, and Europeans are going to have a very different access to information than we have.”
____________
2. (Concealing Pregnancy) - Abigail Rasminsky asks the question, "when a woman conceals the first trimester of her pregnancy, who is she trying to protect?"
But after spending many years mourning the two babies she lost, my mother had other advice too: “Tell as many people as you like. Tell them now.” “If something does go wrong,” she told me, “you’re going to need your friends. You’re not going to want to lie about how you’re feeling to everyone in your life.”
. . . .
I wonder whose anxiety we’re trying to protect in concealing these first few difficult months. Is this supposed to be for my sake? Are we trying to protect me from the embarrassment of admitting that I can’t go 45 minutes without eating and am gaining weight at a rapid clip? That I spend most of the day crying and moaning on the couch, Alicia Florrick my fictional companion? That I’m afraid of losing the pregnancy but can’t fathom that this debilitating state of being has anything to do with an actual baby? Are we really trying to save me from having to share the news if I have a miscarriage? Or are we trying to protect our culture from admitting that not all pregnancies are beautiful and easy and make it to term, and that the loss can be absolutely devastating?
. . . .
The most alarming thing I’ve heard from friends who’ve had miscarriages is their surprise (only upon miscarrying) at hearing about how many of their friends, aunts, cousins, sisters, mothers and grandmothers have had them, too. If miscarriages are so common, why do we hide them behind a wall of shame and silence? If women could announce their pregnancies immediately, wouldn’t we learn that a pregnancy is truly awesome and terrifying and precarious and unknown — that anything can and does happen, and that women deserve all the love and support and understanding that comes with the act of trying to make another human being?
___________
3. (Adolescence) - Emma Cline published a fantastic piece in the Paris Review on "adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson girls".
"In the days after my trip, I watched those videos, and read the blogs devoted to tracking the Manson girls who are still alive, who now have families and jobs and ended up in places like Vermont and Arizona. In interviews, a few of them look wistfully into the camera. They speak fondly of their time on the ranch. It was something I could understand. They had been welcomed at the ranch, given nicknames both childish and aspirational. They had been held tightly and told they were unlike anyone else. I was not so different. We all wanted to be chosen in some way. Maybe it’s just an accident which women are chosen by violence.
I wonder all the time how easily things could have turned out badly for me; my life gone curdled and sour, ending viciously. The girls kidnapped by strangers, by handymen, by men who keep them in sheds or basements. If it hadn’t been Rodney Bingenheimer, a lonely and pitiable man, who had decoded my message—if it had been someone with more agency, someone like Charles Manson, who brushed his girls’ hair with his fingers and smiled at them, who told them to call him father. Or Jim Jones, cooing “darling” in his followers’ ears, and writing feverish letters to runaways like a jilted lover until they returned to the fold, to his ever-open arms.
I see it now, sometimes in my own face, but also in the faces of younger girls on the subway, their pinkies linked, their eyes darting and wounded. See me, they say. Their legs sheened with moisturizer, specked with faint bits of glitter. Braces thickening their mouths. The tightness of a pimple they worry slyly with their fingers, ashamed.
I try to smile at them, but it isn’t me they want."
______________________
4. (Slow TV) - Would you watch the real-time recording of a train journey, from Bergen to Oslo? "The show was nearly seven and a half hours long, and consisted mostly of footage from the train’s exterior as it moved. The landscape often changed. Even when it did, though, it did not change much."
"Slow TV is usually grouped within the so-called “slow movement”: a nebulous federation of campaigns to slow down things like food production, manufacturing, education, religious services, and (perhaps a bit gratuitously) sex. . . . . The aesthetic challenge of slow TV is less about attention, in other words, than about use. Yes, the screens have won, it grants. But no, we needn’t employ them as directed. Look: you can avoid the consciousness-devouring rush of “The Good Wife” . . . and use your flat screen to view the regular world. Though slow TV appears to reach back to simpler times, it is in many ways the realization of twenty-first-century media technology, relying, for its full effect, on footage that’s high-definition, organic, and continuous. (The hours of unbroken footage for “Bergensbanen” would have been all but impossible in an era when high-quality images needed to be shot on film.) At its best, it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism, a global window with a formless and subjective meaning. There’s no zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz in that."
________________
5. (Life Off the Grid) - I'm somewhat obsessed with people who live off the grid and I really enjoyed this Aeon article, which emphasizes that even for people who go back on the grid, they don't necessarily view their time off as a failure.
"Now I see the mesa as a kind of training ground, a place that prepared us to begin another experiment. We’re trying to take what we learned off the grid and sustain it in a new place, one that’s embedded in society instead of isolated from it.
Our Colorado ghost commune persists without us, populated by a rotating cast of strangers and old friends. A few have settled there for good, but most will move on as we did, taking their stories and, with luck, their new habits with them. Yet all of us — the seven original pioneers, my young daughter, the families that come and go after us — leave some piece of ourselves behind. As we scatter over states and continents, we remain connected, a human grid tempered in flickering campfires."
______________
6. (Harvard Schmarvard) - Michelle Rose Gilman tells us why getting our kids into Harvard should be the least of our concerns.
"We have strangled the creativity out of our children by forcing them to do things they may not want to do, but as good parents we have to check the box that reads competitive sports -- check! We have robbed them of their childhood so that we can feel good about their chances at college entrance. Many of our kids don't even know what it is they like to do because we have been telling them what to like for their whole lives. Our children are riddled with anxiety and we are medicating them more now than ever. Why are we doing this? So that they can get into college and be successful! Let me tell you something -- college acceptance does not make a person succeed, nor does it say one thing about your parenting."
__________________
7. (Story, With Bird) - And, finally, I know this doesn't quite count as an "article", but Kevin Canty's short story is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read in quite a while.
"We didn’t get married, though both of us had thought we would. And we never got a dog. We’d wanted one, but we’d never agreed on a breed: she wanted a corgi, and I wanted a golden retriever. It’s strange the way those plans we made are still floating out there, without us. The possibilities. What if I had agreed to the corgi? What would have happened after that?"
"Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, also supports the existence of a right to be forgotten that is enforceable against Google. “This is not about free speech; it’s about privacy and dignity,” he told me. “For the first time, dignity will get the same treatment in law as copyright and trademark do in America. If Sony or Disney wants fifty thousand videos removed from YouTube, Google removes them with no questions asked. If your daughter is caught kissing someone on a cell-phone home video, you have no option of getting it down. That’s wrong. The priorities are backward.”
. . . .
“Many countries are now starting to say that they want rules for the Internet that respond to their own local laws,” Jennifer Granick, of Stanford, said. “It marks the beginning of the end of the global Internet, where everyone has access to the same information, and the beginning of an Internet where there are national networks, where decisions by governments dictate which information people get access to. The Internet as a whole is being Balkanized, and Europeans are going to have a very different access to information than we have.”
____________
2. (Concealing Pregnancy) - Abigail Rasminsky asks the question, "when a woman conceals the first trimester of her pregnancy, who is she trying to protect?"
But after spending many years mourning the two babies she lost, my mother had other advice too: “Tell as many people as you like. Tell them now.” “If something does go wrong,” she told me, “you’re going to need your friends. You’re not going to want to lie about how you’re feeling to everyone in your life.”
. . . .
I wonder whose anxiety we’re trying to protect in concealing these first few difficult months. Is this supposed to be for my sake? Are we trying to protect me from the embarrassment of admitting that I can’t go 45 minutes without eating and am gaining weight at a rapid clip? That I spend most of the day crying and moaning on the couch, Alicia Florrick my fictional companion? That I’m afraid of losing the pregnancy but can’t fathom that this debilitating state of being has anything to do with an actual baby? Are we really trying to save me from having to share the news if I have a miscarriage? Or are we trying to protect our culture from admitting that not all pregnancies are beautiful and easy and make it to term, and that the loss can be absolutely devastating?
. . . .
The most alarming thing I’ve heard from friends who’ve had miscarriages is their surprise (only upon miscarrying) at hearing about how many of their friends, aunts, cousins, sisters, mothers and grandmothers have had them, too. If miscarriages are so common, why do we hide them behind a wall of shame and silence? If women could announce their pregnancies immediately, wouldn’t we learn that a pregnancy is truly awesome and terrifying and precarious and unknown — that anything can and does happen, and that women deserve all the love and support and understanding that comes with the act of trying to make another human being?
___________
3. (Adolescence) - Emma Cline published a fantastic piece in the Paris Review on "adolescence, pen pals, and the Manson girls".
"In the days after my trip, I watched those videos, and read the blogs devoted to tracking the Manson girls who are still alive, who now have families and jobs and ended up in places like Vermont and Arizona. In interviews, a few of them look wistfully into the camera. They speak fondly of their time on the ranch. It was something I could understand. They had been welcomed at the ranch, given nicknames both childish and aspirational. They had been held tightly and told they were unlike anyone else. I was not so different. We all wanted to be chosen in some way. Maybe it’s just an accident which women are chosen by violence.
I wonder all the time how easily things could have turned out badly for me; my life gone curdled and sour, ending viciously. The girls kidnapped by strangers, by handymen, by men who keep them in sheds or basements. If it hadn’t been Rodney Bingenheimer, a lonely and pitiable man, who had decoded my message—if it had been someone with more agency, someone like Charles Manson, who brushed his girls’ hair with his fingers and smiled at them, who told them to call him father. Or Jim Jones, cooing “darling” in his followers’ ears, and writing feverish letters to runaways like a jilted lover until they returned to the fold, to his ever-open arms.
I see it now, sometimes in my own face, but also in the faces of younger girls on the subway, their pinkies linked, their eyes darting and wounded. See me, they say. Their legs sheened with moisturizer, specked with faint bits of glitter. Braces thickening their mouths. The tightness of a pimple they worry slyly with their fingers, ashamed.
I try to smile at them, but it isn’t me they want."
______________________
4. (Slow TV) - Would you watch the real-time recording of a train journey, from Bergen to Oslo? "The show was nearly seven and a half hours long, and consisted mostly of footage from the train’s exterior as it moved. The landscape often changed. Even when it did, though, it did not change much."
"Slow TV is usually grouped within the so-called “slow movement”: a nebulous federation of campaigns to slow down things like food production, manufacturing, education, religious services, and (perhaps a bit gratuitously) sex. . . . . The aesthetic challenge of slow TV is less about attention, in other words, than about use. Yes, the screens have won, it grants. But no, we needn’t employ them as directed. Look: you can avoid the consciousness-devouring rush of “The Good Wife” . . . and use your flat screen to view the regular world. Though slow TV appears to reach back to simpler times, it is in many ways the realization of twenty-first-century media technology, relying, for its full effect, on footage that’s high-definition, organic, and continuous. (The hours of unbroken footage for “Bergensbanen” would have been all but impossible in an era when high-quality images needed to be shot on film.) At its best, it affords a visceral kind of armchair tourism, a global window with a formless and subjective meaning. There’s no zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz in that."
________________
5. (Life Off the Grid) - I'm somewhat obsessed with people who live off the grid and I really enjoyed this Aeon article, which emphasizes that even for people who go back on the grid, they don't necessarily view their time off as a failure.
"Now I see the mesa as a kind of training ground, a place that prepared us to begin another experiment. We’re trying to take what we learned off the grid and sustain it in a new place, one that’s embedded in society instead of isolated from it.
Our Colorado ghost commune persists without us, populated by a rotating cast of strangers and old friends. A few have settled there for good, but most will move on as we did, taking their stories and, with luck, their new habits with them. Yet all of us — the seven original pioneers, my young daughter, the families that come and go after us — leave some piece of ourselves behind. As we scatter over states and continents, we remain connected, a human grid tempered in flickering campfires."
______________
6. (Harvard Schmarvard) - Michelle Rose Gilman tells us why getting our kids into Harvard should be the least of our concerns.
"We have strangled the creativity out of our children by forcing them to do things they may not want to do, but as good parents we have to check the box that reads competitive sports -- check! We have robbed them of their childhood so that we can feel good about their chances at college entrance. Many of our kids don't even know what it is they like to do because we have been telling them what to like for their whole lives. Our children are riddled with anxiety and we are medicating them more now than ever. Why are we doing this? So that they can get into college and be successful! Let me tell you something -- college acceptance does not make a person succeed, nor does it say one thing about your parenting."
__________________
7. (Story, With Bird) - And, finally, I know this doesn't quite count as an "article", but Kevin Canty's short story is one of the best pieces of fiction I've read in quite a while.
"We didn’t get married, though both of us had thought we would. And we never got a dog. We’d wanted one, but we’d never agreed on a breed: she wanted a corgi, and I wanted a golden retriever. It’s strange the way those plans we made are still floating out there, without us. The possibilities. What if I had agreed to the corgi? What would have happened after that?"
Labels:
Interesting Articles,
Things to Read
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
LinkWithin
