Racing the light with Rachel

Rachel Maddow ended her Friday show by celebrating what she called an historic week in the gay rights movement in America.

In a poetic monologue that seemed at times to leave her slightly choked up, Maddow compared the effect of the work done by pioneers in the fight for LGBT equality–from now-dead activists of the 1970s to Thea Spyer, the late wife of Edie Windsor, whoselawsuit against the Defense of Marriage Act was heard by the Supreme Court this week–to the light that reaches the night sky from stars that have actually been gone for years, reports Huffington Post today.images-1

“There are all sorts of people and all sorts of fights that technically are not still around,” she said. “But they live, and we can see them. We can see their light in some of the biggest-deal and most difficult things that we do today. Continue reading “Racing the light with Rachel”

College students worry … and think

Today’s college age generation has been disillusioned by a decade of recession, the decline of the U.S. in the world, and a general loss of confidence in democratic capitalism as a promise for their futures.images

Hence they are less likely to buy into the idealism and work ethic of 90s kids. But who knows, maybe they have better critical instincts. David Brooks is worried about all of this, as he writes in today’s New York Times:

“Twelve years ago, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic, called “The Organization Kid,” about the smart, hard-working, pleasant-but-cautious achievatrons who thrive in elite universities. Occasionally, somebody asks me how students have changed since then. I haven’t been perceptive enough to give a good answer.

“But, this year, I’m teaching at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale, and one terrifically observant senior, Victoria Buhler, wrote a paper trying to capture how it feels to be in at least a segment of her age cohort. She’s given me permission to quote from it. Buhler points out that the college students of 12 years ago grew up with 1990s prosperity at home, and the democratic triumph in the cold war abroad. They naturally had a tendency to believe deeply “in the American model of democratic capitalism, which created all men equal but allowed some to rise above others through competition.” Continue reading “College students worry … and think”

Those naughty boomers

Some time back, researchers writing in The New England Journal of Medicine decided to ask older Americans about their sex life and discovered something interesting: very often, they have one.

When Robin G. Sawyer, an associate professor in the University of Maryland School of Public Health, shares this information with his students, some seem horrified, reports today’s New York Timesimages

“Maybe they are troubled by the thought of “wrinklies,” as a character in the Christopher Buckley novel “Boomsday” calls them, being intimate. But maybe what gets them is just how often many baby boomers boom — at least two or three times a month, the study found. “That’s better than some of my undergraduates,” Dr. Sawyer said. Continue reading “Those naughty boomers”

Reflections on Islamic feminism

In some Muslim circles, the “f” word (feminism) raises as many tensions as eyebrows, immediately conjuring images of the dominating, angry, family-hating woman, writes Rachelle Fawcett in todays Al Jazeera.images

“But like other images that come to mind upon mention of any label – including the image of the oppressed woman that often comes to mind when one hears “Muslim” – this gut reaction is based on stereotypes that may be true in a very specific historical and social context, but does not hold water when compared to a larger reality, and therefore does not justify the hostility that follows.

“While popular Islamic rhetoric touts the liberation of women with the coming of Islam over 1,400 years ago, to continually return to this story does nothing to alleviate women’s suffering today except by going back to the beginning, starting with Islam’s foundational text, the Quran. Continue reading “Reflections on Islamic feminism”

Arizona reverses again to worse law

Last night the Arizona House Appropriations Committee passed a new version of the notorious “Bathroom Bill.”

SB1045 makes it against state law for local governments to pass laws or regulations which ensure access to public access to “privacy areas” based on “gender identity or expression,”  reports Huffington Post.

“It nullifies existing laws that do, and states that business owners can’t be held accountable if they deny access to an individual if the individual’s gender expression doesn’t meet the business owner’s approval. Almost as appalling was the designation of this bill as an emergency measure. Continue reading “Arizona reverses again to worse law”

Arizona backs down on transgender law

Faced with an outcry from advocacy groups, an Arizona lawmaker has changed his proposed legislation that would have made it a crime for a transgendered person to use a bathroom other than his or her birth sex, reports the Huffington Post.

“The new bill by state Rep. John Kavanagh ditches that effort and instead seeks to shield businesses from civil or criminal liability if they ban people from restrooms that don’t match their birth sex. The House committee Kavanagh chairs voted to advance the so-called “bathroom bill” late Wednesday on a 7-4 party-line vote as a crowd broke out in chants of “shame, shame, shame.”imgres-6

“The hearing room was packed with people from the LGBT community who opposed the bill and complained that even the revised version was based on fear. Patty Medway, a transgendered woman who was born a man, said she’s been using female bathrooms for years without a problem. She called on Kavanagh to back away from his effort.

“I’ve been using washrooms for 15 years and I don’t want to be discriminated against, and I’m scared to go to a male washroom,” she said.The conservative Republican said he listened to the criticism of what one local television station dubbed the “Show Me Your Papers Before You Go Potty” bill.

“The revised bill is designed to shield businesses from lawsuits while protecting people from being exposed to what he described as “naked men in women’s locker rooms and showers,” Kavanagh said. It doesn’t prohibit businesses from allowing transgender people from using the restroom they want. To Kavanagh’s point that he worried about young girls being exposed to transgendered people in restrooms, Medway said that just doesn’t happen.”

 

Full story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/27/arizona-transgender-bathroom-bill_n_2967997.html

Publishing’s new love affair with bullying

Nobody likes a bully — but these days the book industry loves having them to kick around.

Publishing houses are flooding the market with titles that tackle bullying, reports today’s New York Times. imgres-5“The books are aimed at all age groups — from “Bully,” a picture book for elementary-grade students, to the “The Bully Book,” for middle school children, about an average kid who suddenly becomes everyone’s favorite victim, to “Sticks and Stones” by Emily Bazelon, a recent release for adults that includes both stories and analysis. According toWorldCat, a catalog of library collections worldwide, the number of English-language books tagged with the key word “bullying” in 2012 was 1,891, an increase of 500 in a decade. Continue reading “Publishing’s new love affair with bullying”

How one war on terror turned against women

imgres-4“Once, as a reporter, I covered wars, conflicts, civil wars, and even a genocide in places like Vietnam, Angola, Eritrea, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, keeping away from official briefings and listening to the people who were living the war,.”  writes Victoria Brittain in a recent edition of Le Monde. “In the years since the Bush administration launched its Global War on Terror, I’ve done the same thing without ever leaving home.

“In the last decade, I didn’t travel to distant refugee camps in Pakistan or destroyed villages in Afghanistan, nor did I spend time in besieged cities like Iraq’s Fallujah or Libya’s Misrata. I stayed in Great Britain. There, my government, in close conjunction with Washington, was pursuing its own version of what, whether anyone cared to say it or not, was essentially a war against Islam. Somehow, by a series of chance events, I found myself inside it, spending time with families transformed into enemies. Continue reading “How one war on terror turned against women”

Brain scans that predict criminality?

Brain scans of convicted felons can predict which ones are most likely to get arrested after they get out of prison, scientists have found in a study of 96 male offenders, reports Wired Science today

“It’s the first time brain scans have been used to predict recidivism,” said neuroscientist Kent Kiehl of the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who led the new study. Even so, Kiehl and others caution that the method is nowhere near ready to be used in real-life decisions about sentencing or parole.imgres-3

“Generally speaking, brain scans or other neuromarkers could be useful in the criminal justice system if the benefits in terms of better accuracy outweigh the likely higher costs of the technology compared to conventional pencil-and-paper risk assessments, says Stephen Morse, a legal scholar specializing in criminal law and neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. The key questions to ask, Morse says, are: “How much predictive accuracy does the marker add beyond usually less expensive behavioral measures? How subject is it to counter-measures if a subject wishes to ‘defeat’ a scan?” Continue reading “Brain scans that predict criminality?”

And all is always now

imgres-2By now, you’ve probably heard people call themselves “slaves” to their phones or their computers. We all know what that means — but why are we allowing ourselves to be slaves to the very instruments of technology we’ve created?

Douglas Rushkoff, who spends his days thinking, writing and teaching about media culture, says it’s time for people to stop chasing every ping and start using technology in a way that makes us feel more free. NPR.org today discusses “Rushkoff’s latest work is called Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. He joined NPR’s Audie Cornish to talk about the book.

“Most simply, ‘present shock’ is the human response to living in a world that’s always on real time and simultaneous. You know, in some ways it’s the impact of living in a digital environment, and in other ways it’s just really what happens when you stop leaning so forward to the millennium and you finally arrive there.

“In my life, it’s sort of the experience of being on Facebook and seeing everyone from my past suddenly back in my present. And the inability to distinguish between who may have been friends of mine in second grade, and people who I’ve met just yesterday, and people who are actually significant relationships. That collapse of my whole life into one moment, where every ping, every vibration of my phone might just pull me out of whatever it is I’m doing, into something else that seems somehow more pressing on the moment.” Douglas Rushkoff founded the Narrative Lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, and lectures about media, art, society and change at conferences and universities around the world. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

” ‘Digiphrenia’ is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There’s your Twitter profile, there’s your Facebook profile, there’s your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel. And that’s not a really comfortable position for most human beings.It’s interesting — I was at Disney World and I saw this little girl who was looking at one of those signs that said, like, ‘Forty minutes until you get on this ride,’ and she looked up to her dad, and she said, ‘What’s a minute?’ And I thought that, you know, in the industrial age, and in analog clocks, a minute is some portion of an hour, which is some portion of a day. In the digital age, a minute is just a number. It’s just 3:23. It’s almost this absolute duration that doesn’t have a connection to where the sun is or where our day is. It’s this very abstracted way of experiencing time. And what I’m arguing in Present Shock is that that timelessness is very characteristic of living in the digital age, in the age that we’re in. And it’s very hard for us to orient ourselves, to look forward to things, to join movements with goals, to invest in the future, to think about our long-term careers. We’re just kind of in this moment of pause.”

More at: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/25/175056313/in-a-world-thats-always-on-we-are-trapped-in-the-present

The new corporate feminism

The book Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead has been getting a lot of attention recently. In a thoughtful piece in Al Jazeera today, Catherine Rottenberg argues that the “new” brand of feminism offered by such books is devoid of concerns for social justice.imgres-1

“A new trend is on the rise. Suddenly high-powered women are publically espousing feminism. In her recently published book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg advocates for a new kind of feminism, maintaining that women need to initiate an “internalised revolution”.

“Sandberg’s feminist manifesto comes on the heels of Ann-Marie Slaughter’s much-discussed Atlantic opinion piece, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, which rapidly became the most widely read essay in the magazine’s history. In her piece, Slaughter explains why professional women are still finding it difficult to balance career demands with their wish for an active home life: social norms and the inflexibility of US workplace culture continue to privilege career advancement over family.  Continue reading “The new corporate feminism”

Are science students more moral people?

Want to be a better person? Spend more time thinking about science.

That’s the implication of newly published research, which finds people who study science — or who are even momentarily exposed to the idea of scientific research — are more likely to condemn unethical behavior and more inclined to help others, reports Salon.com. imgres-4

“Thinking about science leads individuals to endorse more stringent moral norms,” report psychologists Christine Ma-Kellams of Harvard University and Jim Blascovich of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research is published in the online journal PLOS One. The researchers describe four experiments, all conducted at UCSB, that back up their surprising conclusion. Continue reading “Are science students more moral people?”

Male losers and the “traditional” family

imgres-3“Culture of poverty” and “cycle of dependency” theories have largely been discredited as biased and often ethnocentric. They also often don’t square well with popular American ideals of individual achievement and upward mobility.

But recent economic studies looking at the changing gender gap in education and income suggest new reasons for explaining the shrinking numbers of people living in what used to be called the “traditional” nuclear family, as discussed this week in the New York Times

“The economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners. Continue reading “Male losers and the “traditional” family”

David Bowie’s androgynous legacy

The new David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum was already a hot ticket even before the show opens to the public this weekend. “David Bowie is” shows how, in the 1970s, David Bowie’s passport to fame was his daringly ambiguous gender presentation. But in a piece on today’s BBC asks, did appearances deceive?imgres-2

“These days Dylan Jones is editor of British GQ magazine and very accustomed to living the high-life. But in July 1972 he was an ordinary 12-year-old living with his parents in an ordinary part of Kent. Then one evening, his life changed.”I can picture the exact moment: my father was away and my mother was out in the garden,” he says. “So I was alone in a terrace house in Deal watching Top of the Pops.”Normally it would have been a forgettable Thursday but I was about to be astounded. It was the first time we were exposed to Ziggy Stardust in all his androgynous glory. Continue reading “David Bowie’s androgynous legacy”

Smith college transgender confusion

imgres-1As colleges and universities adopt increasingly inclusive stances toward transgender students, some institutions are finding themselves confused by an array of contradictory laws and government policies nationwide. As Huffington Post reports,

“An exclusive, women’s liberal arts college has rejected a transgender applicant because a government financial aid document still registers her as male.

“Calliope Wong, a student at Amity Regional Senior High School in Connecticut,posted a picture of her official rejection letter to Tumblr on March 10. Signed by Smith College’s Dean of Admission Debra Shaver, the letter thanked Wong for her application but said that “Smith is a women’s college, which means that undergraduate applicants must be female at the time of admission.” The problem, according to the letter, is that Wong’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) identified her as male. Continue reading “Smith college transgender confusion”

Australia’s forced adoptions

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has delivered a historic national apology in parliament to the thousands of unwed mothers who were forced by government policies to give up their babies for adoption over several decades, reports Al Jazeera

“More than 800 people cried and cheered as they listened to the apology in the Great Hall of Parliament House on Thursday. They responded with a standing ovation when it was finished.imgres

“A national apology was recommended a year ago by a senate committee that investigated the impacts of the now-discredited policies. Continue reading “Australia’s forced adoptions”

Here come the Arizona bathroom police

If you think you might need to use a public restroom while you’re out and about, you might want to make sure you have your birth certificate handy, reports the Arizona Daily Star.imgres-2

“A House panel will consider legislation today to make it a crime to enter a public restroom designated for one gender or the other if you are “not legally classified” on your birth certificate as a member of that sex. The measure, SB 1432, also would apply to showers, baths, dressing rooms or locker rooms marked “men” or “women.” Continue reading “Here come the Arizona bathroom police”

Photography now booming in museums

imgresA new generation of museum curators and directors is pushing photography to unprecedented heights – and audiences seem to love it.

On a recent wintry afternoon, Jeff Rosenheim, the newly appointed head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s photography department, stopped in at its special exhibition galleries, reports today’s New York times.  “He was checking on the installation of a new acquisition: a 61-minute video called “Street,” by the British-born artist James Nares.

“As brilliantly colored images splashed across a 16-foot-long screen, teams of art handlers and curators were placing photographs, drawings, sculptures and paintings in adjacent galleries. “This is exactly what we’re trying to do,” Mr. Rosenheim said, “to show photography in the context of many different kinds of art.” Continue reading “Photography now booming in museums”

Grown up cyber bullies in Japan

Japan’s version of the “Comment Crew” – a Shanghai-based group believed to be behind Chinese hacking of Western computers – aren’t working inside a military unit like the alleged Chinese hackers, reports Asia Times

images“They are often foreigners with jingoistic views similar to Japanese “netto-uyo” (“Internet rightists”). Their targets include journalists, anti-nuclear campaigners, English teachers and anyone who questions the Japanese government’s handling of immigration, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, the killing of dolphins and whales, and Japan’s hardline stance against China, South Korea and North Korea. Continue reading “Grown up cyber bullies in Japan”

The bishops against women club

imgresNow that the Sistine Chapel’s makeshift chimney has been dismantled, the American Sunday talk show pundits have speculated on Pope Francis’ potential, and all the religion correspondents have departed Vatican City for home, it is time to reopen a mystifying chapter in the most recent saga of American Catholic ecclesiastical missteps. As Al Jazeera reports:

“On the eve of President Obama’s signature on the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, five leaders of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops earlier last week attacked the necessary legislation. This move not only confirms that the bishops are out of touch with American society, but also proves that they are ready to disregard their own longstanding justice commitments – and millions of domestic violence victims – for the sake of a few unrelated legal points. Continue reading “The bishops against women club”