CULTURE/PEDAGOGY/BELONGING
Just in time for Christmas mass, photographer Piero Pazzi, has delivered his annual “Hot Priest Calendar” where he has selectively photographed some of the sexiest Roman Catholic priests from Vatican City, Italy.
More images at the Daily Grind: http://www.thegailygrind.com/2013/12/09/meet-hottest-catholic-priests-vatican-city-new-2014-calendar/
On Detroit’s Heidelberg Street, where a local artist turned the shell of a crime-ridden neighborhood into an interactive public art project, visitors coming to see offbeat display are noticing something that’s not part of the quirky exhibition: yellow fire tape.
The Guardian reports that “There have been at least eight fires since early May – the latest last Sunday – leading to questions about who might be
targeting the installation known as the Heidelberg Project, and why they want to burn it down.
“Founder and artistic director Tyree Guyton and his compatriots vow to carry on, make more art and overcome the assault on his vision, yet worry threatens the whimsy as the fires snuff out building after building.
“Now, piles of rubble alternate with the three remaining house installations within the two-block area on the city’s east side that has become famous over the years for the exhibition featuring shoes, clocks, vinyl records, stuffed animals and other found or discarded objects.
“The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been investigating along with Detroit authorities. An ATF spokesman, Donald Dawkins, said investigators have interviewed several people, some more than once, but he said there is no one yet that officials consider a suspect or person of interest. El Don Parham, chief of the Detroit Fire Department’s arson unit, said it’s far too early to speculate on a motive but believes that “someone is pinpointing” the Heidelberg Project. Continue reading “Suspicious fires plague Detroit public art”
The thought-provoking installation “SELFMADE” (2013), currently on display at The Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, reveals the importance of microbes in our environment. Microbiologist Christina Agapakis (US) & scent artist Sissel Tolaas (NO) teamed up to create artisanal cheese made from lactobacillus swabbed from the skin of human beings. Lactobacillus is the bacteria responsible for curdling and preserving milk and giving cheese its characteristic smell and texture. Agapakis maintains that the cheese in the exhibit is not intended for human consumption but for investigating the unique microbial environment that humans participate in daily.
Through the installation Agapakis calls into question the prevailing paradigm of good/bad bacteria and offers a more complex view of the world of microbes, both biologically and culturally. She emphasizes the paradox of the modern paradigm: “We not only live in a biological world surrounded by rich communities of microorganisms, but in a cultural world that emphasises (sic) total antisepsis.”i Noting the inconsistency between modern human habits of consumption and bacterial intolerance in the environment, she asks: “Can knowledge and tolerance of bacterial cultures in our food improve tolerance of the bacteria on our bodies?”ii
Agapakis’ use of traditional cheesemaking methods underscores the connection between microbial culture and human culture. In her Pop!Tech lecture, she explains the biological and artistic process of her installation and of creating, by accident, the famed Sardinian “maggot cheese” casu marzu. The cheese can only be consumed when its larvae are, in fact, living. While some might recoil at the idea of consuming “rotten” cheese replete with squirming insects, Agapakis argues through her example of “encountering prejudice toward the macrobiological” for an increased awareness of cheese and its relationship to culture. Cheese, she notes, is about three things: “culture,” “biological context,” and “care” or “the way that we interact with and take care of the environment around us.”iii
Her exhibit poignantly illustrates cheese as a living object. Cheese, by its very nature, can never be an aseptic environment. Each cheese is filled with living organisms that interact with and mirror its culture both physically and sociologically.
Breakthrough ideas often come from the least expected sources. For Daniel Friedman, the flash came from a woman named Rachel Tutera. Friedman makes custom men’s suits, mostly for corporate clients in his end of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
As the New York Times recently reported, “Ms. Tutera runs a blog called The Handsome Butch. When she wrote to him last year, seeking a sales job, she had a proposition: Why couldn’t Mr. Friedman, with his expertise in men’s suits, make them for women like her — not women’s suits, but the same gear he was making for guys, with the same masculine profile, but fitted to women’s bodies? It was a question he had never considered.
“In a coffee shop near his home the other day, he seemed still struck by the world that opened to him after that initial email.
“The whole thing is really strange, and sometimes I can’t — ” he said, his voice evaporating into the wonder of it all. He was not even sure how to identify Ms. Tutera, gender-wise. Was she transgender or just mannish? Sometimes it was hard to know such things. What he knew was that she had changed his life. “When we started this business, it was for money,” he said. “And now it’s not. It was the emotion, the excitement that people had, that became everything for the company. At least for me. You don’t expect to turn a corner and that’s what you’re going to find.”
“On another November morning in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, Ms. Tutera took a turn at describing what she brought to Mr. Friedman, 34, and his company, Bindle and Keep. Arriving from an appointment with her barber, Ms. Tutera, 28, who identifies herself as navigating “a very tiny space that exists between being a butch dyke and being a trans man,” wore a man’s cable-knit sweater and oxford shirt, her short hair plastered back on her scalp.
“I personally don’t ever put on women’s clothes,” she said. “I just can’t. Buttons are on the wrong side. I don’t know what size I am in women’s clothes. I feel I know how to dress in men’s clothes. I’m sure I could put on women’s clothes and not be completely freaked out, but I just wouldn’t want to.” For most of her life, Ms. Tutera said, this meant choosing between clothes that did not fit her physique and those that did not fit her sense of self. Then in 2010, she went to a tailor in Midtown to have a men’s suit made for her. It cost $1,500, a towering sum.
“I was trembling to be there,” she said. Where women’s clothing tends to accentuate the hips and breasts, she said, she wanted a silhouette like a man’s. She bound her breasts to make them less prominent (she has since had surgery to remove them). The suit turned out to be more than just an article of clothing, she told Mr. Friedman in her email. That moment started his education.“The suit really helped me in ways I never expected it to,” she said. “I hadn’t ever felt handsome before. I had put together these makeshift outfits for special occasions and always felt like I was being overlooked in some way. I felt like I was ready to be paid attention to. It brought me to the precipice of becoming who I am now.”
For more than 20 years, the rap duo Insane Clown Posse has courted controversy by rhyming about depravity, brutality and insanity.
Now it causes trouble by making fun of Miley Cyrus.
“A few days ago, Insane Clown Posse, a pioneering act in a rap genre called horrorcore, was approached by Fuse, the music-oriented cable channel, to record its commentary for a roundup of supposedly shocking music videos. Though the rappers have enjoyed their increasing visibility on Fuse (where a second season of their television series “Insane Clown Posse Theater,” will debut on Wednesday), they were dismayed to find that those videos included nonthreatening artists like Robin Thicke and Adam Levine.
“How are we going to sit there and talk about how shocking Maroon 5 is?” asked Joseph Utsler, an Insane Clown Posse co-founder who goes by the stage name Shaggy 2 Dope. His musical partner, Joseph Bruce, known as Violent J, added: “We had to do it I.C.P.-style or it would have looked bad for us.” The band’s solution was to mock the performers that Fuse had asked them to discuss. (“Justin Bieber started off as a teeny-bop child artist,” explained Violent J. “Now he’s a teeny-bop child artist with tattoos. Shocking!”) Continue reading “Insane Posse sees a shrink”
Some of the biggest names in the tech world joined forces Monday to tell Uncle Sam that enough’s
enough:
Quit spying on their customers.
According to the LA Times, “AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo said in an open letter to President Obama that in light of recent revelations about the National Security Agency snooping
on websites and communications networks, there’s an “urgent need to reform government surveillance practices worldwide.”
“That’s a pretty bold claim to the moral high ground considering that each of these companies routinely mines customer data for their own purposes (read: profit)
“Moreover, the telecom giant said the company shouldn’t have to come clean with shareholders about helping the feds peek into people’s lives. This stuff is top secret, AT&T said, so it has no obligation to address the issue at its annual shareholder meeting this spring. The company’s letter was a response to calls from the ACLU of Northern California and other groups for phone companies to be more upfront about their dealings with the NSA. The private sector always has had a troubled relationship with consumer privacy. Continue reading “Time to protect consumer privacy”
f you can believe all the hand-wringing and soul-searching these days among artists, art critics, 
and sundry other arts professionals, you’d imagine that nobody is really happy about the $142.4 million paid for a Francis Bacon triptych at Christie’s the other day—or the $58.4 million for a Jeff Koons at the same auction or the $104.5 million for a Warhol at Sotheby’s the following night.
As The New Republic suggests: “Those prices are as repellent as Leonardo DiCaprio’s baronial frat house shenanigans in the coming attractions for Martin Scorsese’s new tale of Gilded Age excess, The Wolf of Wall Street. Among the most revolting sports favored by the super-rich is the devaluation of any reasonable sense of value. At Christie’s and Sotheby’s some of the wealthiest members of society, the people who can’t believe in anything until it’s been monetized, are trashing one of our last hopes for transcendence. They don’t know the difference between avidity and avarice. Why drink an excellent $30 or $50 bottle of wine when you can pour a $500 or $1000 bottle down your throat? Why buy a magnificent $20,000 or $1 million painting when you can spend $50 or $100 million and really impress friends and enemies alike?
“These questions will not go away. And it is a little too easy to blame it all on the super-rich and the various counselors and courtiers who cheer them on at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. Of course there’s nothing we can do about what Steven A. Cohen and Peter Brant choose to sell at the auctions or what Roman Abramovich and Sheikha al Mayassa Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani choose to buy. But the total lack of embarrassment with which everybody involved conducts themselves must at least in part be blamed on an educated public that has become embarrassed about discussing—much less advocating for—anything that suggests a principle or standard of taste. While the professional people who worry about every $10,000 in their 401(k) may shake their heads at the stratospheric auction prices, they get a kick out of them, too—too much of a kick, I tend to think. Continue reading “The rich ruin art for everyone”
The Harvard Institute of Politics survey released Wednesday has garnered a lot of attention for its findings about Millennials’ views of Obamacare, in addition to their opinions on President Obama himself, reports The Atlantic.
“Between 56 and 57 percent of the 18- to-29-year-old respondents didn’t approve of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare (depending on how the question was asked); 40 to 44 percent thought their quality of care would get worse under the new law; and 50 to 51 percent said they expected costs to increase.
“This has led to a giant round of Oh my God, Obamacare is going to be a giant failure because young people hate it, won’t enroll, and the insurance plans will go into death spirals. Well, no. Ryan Cooper argues this morning that Millennials “will come around on Obamacare.” But do they even need to? More than half the Millennials in the IOP study said they’d at least consider to signing up for Obamacare exchange insurance if and when they are old enough to need it.
“According to the survey, 22 percent said they’d definitely or probably enroll in Obamacare, and another 29 percent said they were 50-50 on whether they’d enroll or not. Only 45 percent said they definitely would not enroll. The whole survey sample was asked those questions, according to topline data provided by the pollsters. Sounds dismal—until you see that only 22 percent of those surveyed individuals were uninsured! Another way of looking at the data: 22 percent of people in a sample that was 22 percent uninsured said they would definitely or probably sign up for Obamacare. And 29 percent of people in a sample that was 35 percent covered by their parents’ insurance said they were 50-50 on enrolling if and when eligible. That paints a very different picture than just focusing on the large percentage who think their costs will go up while their quality of care goes down. Obamacare’s long-term health depends on whether people who are already insured support the program, but their opinion matters much less in the short term. Continue reading “Millennial skepticism over Obamacare”
The Safe Schools Improvement Act (SSIA), a bill spelling out specific groups of the student population currently victim to bullying and harassment, of which LGBTQ youth is one, has reached record support in Congress, with 176 bipartisan cosponsors in the House and 43 bipartisan cosponsors in the U.S. Senate.
Part of the larger Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that is currently up for routine reauthorization, the solid support for SSIA increases its chance of passage and would mandate that all 50 states not only recognize LGBTQ youth as vulnerable, but report all recorded incidents of bullying and harassment, so state and federal agencies can accurately measure the extent of the problem.
“We are extremely encouraged by the increased support for the Safe Schools Improvement Act, particularly among our Republican friends who recognize that all students deserve to be safe in school regardless of who they are,” says Eliza Byard, executive director at the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN), the organization consulted for the wording of SSIA.
As bullying is not an LGBTQ issue alone, SSIA addresses harassment for all victimized students, with race, color or perceived race, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion and disability marked as identifiers. States are free to add to this list as required – Illinois already enacted a similar law, and includes military families/status among the afore-mentioned categories. Continue reading “Congress weighs in against bullying”
Cooking wine has about double the alcohol as regular wine and can be bought by grocery store customers of any age.
Anyone have a problem with that?
According to the CBS Philadelphia, “Some teens are turning to the grocery store to get drunk, buying cooking wine. Cooking wine is readily available on most Pennsylvania grocery store shelves even though the alcohol-by-volume can be as high as 17 percent. It’s not regulated by the state liquor control board because it’s considered non-potable, loaded with so much salt that most people wouldn’t consider drinking it.
“A whole bottle of cooking wine is equivalent to three or four beers,” says Emily Rubin, a registered dietician with Jefferson University Hospital. Rubin says although the alcohol is the major concern among teens, a 12-ounce bottle of cooking wine carries nearly 1½ times the recommended daily allowance of sodium. “It is very high in sodium, so consuming that in conjunction with, if they’re eating a fast-food meal or pretzels or popcorn or snack food, they are eating close to 10,000 milligrams of sodium per day.” Which, she warns, could be a problem in the long term, especially if there’s a family
history of high blood pressure, kidney disease, or liver disease.
The weekly meetings of Mouthing Off!, a group for students at Mills College in Oakland, Calif., who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender, always start the same way, reports a story in today’s Sacramento Bee.
“Members take turns going around the room saying their names and the personal pronouns they want others to use when referring to them — she, he or something else.
“It’s an exercise that might seem superfluous given that Mills, a small and leafy liberal arts school historically referred to as the Vassar of the West, only admits women as undergraduates. Yet increasingly, the “shes” and “hers” that dominate the introductions are keeping third-person company with “they,” “ze” and other neutral alternatives meant to convey a more generous notion of gender.
“Because I go to an all-women’s college, a lot of people are like, ‘If you don’t identify as a woman, how did you get in?'” said sophomore Skylar Crownover, 19, who is president of Mouthing Off! and prefers to be mentioned as a singular they, but also answers to he. “I just tell them the application asks you to mark your sex and I did. It didn’t ask me for my gender.”
“On high school and college campuses and in certain political and social media circles, the growing visibility of a small, but semantically committed cadre of young people who, like Crownover, self-identify as “genderqueer” — neither male nor female but an androgynous hybrid or rejection of both — is challenging anew the limits of Western comprehension and the English language. Continue reading “Gender diversity growing at colleges”
“I’ve come today to represent all the silent Wal-Mart workers that are afraid to stand up for their rights.”
As reported in InTheseTimes, Elaine Rozier, a Wal-Mart employee of eight years, told a crowd of about 150 labor activists and community supporters—accompanied by raucous musicians with Occupy Guitarmy and the Rude Mechanical Orchestra—on Friday in Secaucus, N.J., across the street from a well-guarded Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club (the wholesale club owned by Wal-Mart and named for the company’s celebrated founder, Sam Walton). “I’m standing up for my rights, my kids, my grandkids, and their kids,” Rozier said.
Perhaps because of the fear she mentioned, Rozier, who comes from Miami, was one of the only identified Wal-Mart employees in the crowd. Along with Mark Bowers and Colby Harris, two Wal-Mart workers from Texas, Rozier traveled to New Jersey for Black Friday, Wal-Mart’s biggest retail sales day, to demonstrate to the workers inside the Secaucus store that they, too, could stand up for their rights.
Accompanied by ten supporters, the three workers blocked traffic on the street alongside the Wal-Mart, chanting, singing and clapping until police took them away in handcuffs.
The protest was one of hundreds of Black Friday actions organized by OUR Walmart, a United Food and Commercial Workers-backed group of Wal-Mart workers—including Rozier, Bowers and Harris—that has been putting on strikes, protests, and direct actions at Wal-Mart for over a year in support of better wages, benefits and conditions. The first wave of strikes hit in October of 2012, and on Black Friday of that year, some 400 workers reportedly went on strike at stores around the country.
“Stand up, live better” has become the rallying cry of the movement, a twist on the retail giant’s own slogan, “Save money, live better.” On Friday, workers in Secaucus repeatedly echoed the “stand up” line. Continue reading “Walmart workers stand on Black Friday”
Since their birth as a science-fair curiosity at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the late 1950s, video games have moved inexorably towards higher and more central cultural ground, much like film did in the first half of the 20th century.
Games were confined at first to the lowbrow carnival of the arcade, but they soon spread to the middlebrow sphere of the living room, overran this private space, and burst out and upwards into the public spheres of art and academia. With prestigious universities like NYU and USC now offering graduate-level programs in game design, and major museums like MoMA, MAD, and SF MoMA beginning to acquire games and curate game exhibitions, preserving the early history of the medium appears more important than ever. But what exactly does it mean to preserve a digital game?
The answer is surprisingly simple: It means, first and foremost, preserving a record of how it was played and what it meant to its player community. Ensuring continued access to a playable version of the game through maintenance of the original hardware or emulation is less important—if it matters at all.
That, at least, was the provocative argument Henry Lowood made at Pressing Restart, which recently brought preservationists, teachers, academics, and curators together at the NYU Poly MAGNET center for a day of “community discussions on video game preservation.” Lowood is no contrarian whippersnapper; as a curator at the Stanford Libraries, he has been professionally involved in game preservation efforts for well over a decade. Continue reading “History and video games”
Movies and books have long been used to advocate for causes, such as climate change or breast cancer. As video games become more mainstream, advocates are beginning to see how this art form can be a new way to reach out and get people engaged in a cause.
Take Half the Sky, a book about the struggles of women and girls in the developing world. Teacher and mom
Suzy Kosh read it in her book group. When she heard there was a Facebook game based on it, she checked it out, and her 6-year-old son noticed.
“He got on my lap, and I started explaining it to him, and then he was so intrigued that we kept playing,” she says. “You were going and helping people and saving people, and he was really interested in doing that.”
The game puts the player in the shoes of Radhika, a poor woman in India who lives on a farm. As Kosh plays with Dylan on her lap, Radhika’s goat gives birth.
“Remember what happens when they have a baby?” Kosh asks Dylan. “How does that help everybody in the community?”
“We can, um… so then we can get goat milk!” he says. Continue reading “Video game activism”
California declined about 12 percent last year and has dropped by more than one-third over the past decade, the state attorney general’s office said Wednesday.
There were 930 reported hate crimes in 2012, down from 1,060 in 2011 and 1,491 in 2003, reports SF Gate
“Hate crimes based on the victim’s race, ethnicity or national origin dropped 10 percent, from 587 in 2011 to 528 last year. But they still accounted for nearly 57 percent of complaints. Black people have been the most common target, accounting for about one-third of victims in the past decade.
“Hate crimes targeting a victim’s sexual orientation was the next largest category. Reports fell nearly 4 percent, from 244 in 2011 to 235 in 2012.
“Within that category, hate crimes against gay men dropped from 111 in 2011 to 88 last year. But there were 77 crimes targeting gay men in 2003, making that category the only one to show an increase in the 10-year comparison. Those involving a victim’s religion dropped nearly 28 percent last year, from 201 in 2011 to 145 in 2012. Jews were once again the most common target. The reports are submitted to the attorney general’s office by California law enforcement agencies and district attorney’s offices.
“While overall numbers are down this year, any hate crime hurts the people and values of California,” state Attorney General Kamala Harris said in a statement. Continue reading “California hate crimes decrease”
Americans’ eating habits have deteriorated in 2013, as fewer adults report eating healthy all day “yesterday” in every month so far this year compared with the same months in 2012, reports Gallup.
“In particular, healthy eating in June, July, August, and September declined by at least three percentage points from the same months in 2012. Moreover, in most months this year, healthy eating has been at its lowest in Gallup trends since 2008.Gallup and Healthways ask at least 500 Americans each day about their eating habits as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index.
“Healthy eating generally follows a seasonal pattern, gradually declining in the spring, ticking up in the late summer months, and then falling steeply in November and December. The increase between December 2012 and January 2013 was 1.9 percentage points, which is lower than the typical New Year’s uptick. Additionally, May and June 2013 brought steeper-than-usual declines.
“In terms of a more specific dietary practice, fewer Americans have reported eating at least five servings of fruits and vegetables at least four days per week in most months so far in 2013 compared with the same months in 2012. The only exceptions were March and October. This decline in produce consumption could be related to the worsening of Americans’ self-reported eating habits.
“Healthy eating, which is linked to lower risk of obesity, is down for all months in 2013 when compared with 2012. Additionally, the percentage of Americans who report eating five or more servings of fruits and vegetables at least four times a week has dropped in eight out of 10 months so far in 2013. Both healthy eating and produce consumption tend to decrease in November and December, likely attributable to Americans’ indulging during the holiday season. As the U.S. obesity rate continues to increase across almost all demographic groups, it is critical that Americans begin to eat healthier and exercise more.
More at: http://www.gallup.com/poll/166070/americans-eating-habits-worsening-2013.aspx?utm_source=feedly
“Physicians also have an important role to play in improving Americans’ eating habits, given their ability to advise patients about best dietary practices. Last summer, 66% of Americans told Gallup their physician speaks with them about the benefits of a healthy diet. That may go up, now that the American Medical Association has classified obesity as a disease, possibly encouraging more doctors to try to positively influence their patients’ dietary choices. Additionally, according to Gallup data, doctors themselves are more likely to have a healthy diet and to frequently consume produce than other employed adults, potentially making their message more credible.”
Younger people with HIV may experience more isolation and stress than older people with the disease, according to a recent study.
Researchers from Case Western Reserve University found that people younger than age 50 with HIV feel more disconnected from their support group of family and friends, largely because of stigma they felt because of their disease, researchers found, reports Huffington Post
“Meanwhile, people age 50 and older with HIV had a stronger support group they could rely on.
“The younger, newly diagnosed individual may not know anyone in their peer group with a chronic illness, much less HIV,” study researcher Allison Webel, Ph.D., RN, an assistant professor at the university’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing, said in a statement.
“The researchers also found that people with HIV generally experienced higher levels of stress than those without. Specifically, HIV-positive people were 30 to 40 percent more stressed than people without the disease. Women were especially likely to experience stress from HIV.
“The findings, published in the journal AIDS Care, are based on data from 102 people with HIV between ages 18 and 64 who were surveyed on their feelings of stress and isolation. They also had their heart rate variability measured. The average participant in the study was African-American, had been managing HIV for almost 14 years, was of low-income, and was age 48.”
More at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/26/younger-hiv-stress-isolation_n_4339721.html
The University of California at Los Angeles has come under fire multiple times this fall for the state of race relations there, reports InsideHigherEd.
“First, concern over the treatment of minority professors prompted a sobering report detailing instances of race-based discrimination against faculty members. Next, Sy Stokes and other black male undergrads made their now-viral video about their slim ranks on campus.
“Now some graduate students are weighing in on what they see as a climate of hostility toward minority students, both in the Graduate School of Education’s Information’s Social Science and Comparative Education division and at UCLA as a whole. But the grad students’ interruption of a class session with a sit-in has other graduate students questioning their tactics — and some say their accusations are unfair.
“What we’re speaking to is part of a larger, institutionalized culture on campus,” said Kenjus Waston, a black Ph.D. candidate in the division and an organizing member of UCLA Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color. The group staged a sit-in, or what it called a “teach-in,” during a second-level dissertation preparation course in the division this month. Watson said members hoped to address racially motivated “microagressions” – seemingly innocuous but ultimately hurtful comments or actions – that have marked their time at UCLA.
“About 25 students participated in the sit-in, in the classroom of Val Rust, professor emeritus of education. Watson – a student in that class – said Rust’s course was one of many in which students of “color and consciousness” have experienced discrimination. Of about 10 students in the class, 5 participated in the sit-in. Participants read a letter listing their complaints and a series of demands for reform. Regular coursework was suspended for about an hour because of the sit-in. Continue reading “UCLA protest over racial hostility”
Nearly one fourth of Fortune 500 companies, such as Apple and General Mills, cover medical expenses associated with transgender care, according to gay and transgender rights group Human Rights Campaign.
That’s up from 19 percent last year. When the group began tracking transgender benefits in 2002, no Fortune 500 companies offered them, reports Newsday.
“The trend shows how much companies want their workplaces to be perceived as welcoming and progressive. Since the Human Rights Campaign began grading companies on the inclusiveness of their benefits for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees, many companies have beefed up their benefits for those groups.
“Beginning in 2011, companies could only receive a 100 percent rating on the group’s Corporate Equality Index by offering at least one insurance plan covering up to $75,000 worth of counseling, hormone therapy and sexual reassignment surgery — the medical term for a sex-change operation. The number of Fortune 500 companies meeting the requirement jumped to 121 this year from 39 in 2011.
“Companies are recognizing that . . . in order to remain competitive in corporate America, you can’t offer discriminatory plans,” says Jennifer Levi, a professor at the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at Western New England University in Springfield, Mass.
“While more companies offer transgender benefits, most government programs like Medicare and Medicaid classify sexual reassignment surgery as cosmetic or experimental and do not cover it. Continue reading “Corporations expand transgender health care”
Only a few miles separate the Baltimore neighborhoods of Roland Park and Upton Druid Heights. But residents of the two areas can measure the distance between them in years—twenty years, to be exact. Today’s edition of The Nation explains:
“That’s the difference in life expectancy between Roland Park, where people live to be 83 on average, and Upton Druid Heights, where they can expect to die at 63.
“Underlying these gaps in life expectancy are vast economic disparities. Roland Park is an affluent neighborhood with an unemployment rate of 3.4 percent, and a median household income above $90,000. More than 17 percent of people in Upton Druid Heights are unemployed, and the median household income is just $13,388.
“It’s no secret that this sort of economic inequality is increasing nationwide; the disparity between America’s richest and poorest is the widest it’s been since the Roaring Twenties. Less discussed are the gaps in life expectancy that have widened over the past twenty-five years between America’s counties, cities and neighborhoods. While the country as a whole has gotten richer and healthier, the poor have gotten poorer, the middle class has shrunk and Americans without high school diplomas have seen their life expectancy slide back to what it was in the 1950s. Economic inequalities manifest not in numbers, but in sick and dying bodies.
“On Wednesday, Senator Bernie Sanders convened a hearing before the Primary Health and Aging subcommittee to examine the connections between material and physiological well-being, and the policy implications. With Congress fixed on historic reforms to the healthcare delivery system, the doctors and public health professionals who testified this morning made it clear that policies outside of the healthcare domain are equally vital for keeping people healthy—namely, those that target poverty and inequality. Continue reading “How income inequality kills”