Posts Tagged ‘transgender issues’
A Few More Tuesday Links While I Procrastinate
* Penn Puts Hiring Ban on Smokers.
* A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene — with a consumer-grade DVD drive. That was groundbreaking in and of itself, but the real surprise came when Maher El-Kady, a researcher in Kaner’s lab, wired a small square of their high quality carbon sheets up to a lightbulb.
* Talkin’ TNG at Grantland and An und für sich.
* Fraternities on the side of good. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria.
* More massive profits for banks. I guess the crisis really is over!
* Tennant says he’s starting to ‘give up hope’ for Who 50th return. You bastards. This was a gimme.
Weekend Links
* The Center for 21st Century Studies has announced its postdoc theme for 2013-2014: “Changing Climates.” Applications due March 1.
* What’s coming out with this UNC rape case is astounding. UNC’s Former Dean of Students Says She Was Forced to Underreport Sexual Assault Cases. And then this, from the assistant vice underprovost of sickening analogies:
“When I went to report my assault in 2007, I asked an administrator what the process would look like,” Clark said. “Instead, that person told me, ‘Rape is like a football game, Annie. If you look back on the game, and you’re the quarterback and you’re in charge, is there anything that you would have done differently in that situation?’”
* Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only if They’re Male: A new study of history professors shows that married men get promoted faster than their single colleagues, while the opposite is true for women.
* The union at Kalamazoo Valley Community College launches a food drive for its own adjuncts.
* UC aims to bleed its grad students.
* “Fear and loathing in academia” and “Some historical notes on the decline of the universities,” from anthropologies issue 16: The Neoliberalized, Debt-plagued, Low Wage, Corporatized University. Also: Passing with Pills: Redefining Performance in the Pharmaceuticalized University.
* The CEO of Whole Foods is laughing at you.
* Naked Capitalism on Hayek’s Delusion: The Origins of Neoliberalism: 1, 2, 3. Via MeFi.
* As I say, I have no dog in this race, except a belief that no one, in this sea of riches, should have to be poor. But staring dumbfounded at the lessons unlearned in Britain, Europe and the United States, it strikes me that the entire structure of neoliberal thought is a fraud. The demands of the ultra-rich have been dressed up as sophisticated economic theory and applied regardless of the outcome. The complete failure of this world-scale experiment is no impediment to its repetition. This has nothing to do with economics. It has everything to do with power.
* Theater of Pain: Tom Junod on injury in the NFL.
The perspective of pain is what this story is about. For fans, injuries are like commercials, the price of watching the game as well as harrowing advertisements for the humanity of the armored giants who play it. For gamblers and fantasy-football enthusiasts, they are data, a reason to vet the arcane shorthand (knee, doubtful) of the injury report the NFL issues every week; for sportswriters they are kernels of reliable narrative. For players, though, injuries are a day-to-day reality, indeed both the central reality of their lives and an alternate reality that turns life into a theater of pain. Experienced in public and endured almost entirely in private, injuries are what players think about and try to put out of their minds; what they talk about to one another and what they make a point to suffer without complaint; what they’re proud of and what they’re ashamed by; what they are never able to count and always able to remember
* An oral history of Fringe: 1, 2, 3, 4.
* Scandal in Lance-ville! Scandal in Gleetown!
* Well, it’s been a month since @dronestream started and we’re up to January 2011. Two years left.
* Claire Danes performs The Handmaid’s Tale.
* The kids are all right: Barbara Walters interviews a twelve-year-old transgender teen she first interviewed in 2007, when Jazz was six.
* A Lawyer’s Amazingly Detailed Analysis of Bilbo’s Contract in The Hobbit.
* Rules for kids: The book, discovered by a 20-year-old Walmart employee, Raymond Flores, became an Internet sensation after Flores contacted the media to try to find its owner and its touching rules - including the rules “Don’t bite the dentist” and “If you’re going to wet your bed, wear a pull-up” - went viral.
* Two years before his death, legendary science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov kicked off a TV pilot dedicated to exploring the faint and ever-shifting boundary separating science from science fiction.
* And Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, on robots.
Thursday Night! Drones, The Swedish Chef, Cross-Dressing Dads, and More
* Texas and Florida get told they can’t suppress the vote.
* Swedes think the Swedish Chef sounds Norwegian.
* Dad sports skirt to support cross-dressing son.
* Getting Rid of the College Loan Repo Man.
* Jonathan Chait: The Legendary Paul Ryan.
* A Brazilian judge has recognized a three-way marriage.
* And from monkey utopia to monkey hell: Chimps don’t care if someone else gets robbed.
Monday Links
* A tale that grew in the telling: The Hobbit is officially a trilogy. Oh, all right, I’ll allow it.
* 84-minute David Foster Wallace TV interview from 2003. Go ahead, I’ll be here when you’re done.
* Symbolism a bit on the nose, don’t you think? Ancestry.com is claiming Barack Obama is descended from the first slave in America—on his mother’s side.
* Postscript on the Society of Control: Twitter can predict when you’ll get sick a week before you do, with 90% accuracy.
* Just remember, the Koch brothers can buy anything, but they can’t buy science.
* What everyone is linking today: How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: A Remembrance.
* Predatory For-Profit Colleges Pay Executives Based On Corporate Profitability, Not Student Outcomes. Meanwhile, 86% of these companies’ revenue is coming from the federal government.
* A proposed court-supervised agreement filed today will ease restrictions for transgender people born in Illinois to obtain new birth certificates that reflect their correct gender.
* The People of the Future have finally come to collect Chris Marker. Rest in peace.
* And today in obscenity: Sexual Assault Victims Charged Up To $1,200 In Wisconsin For Cost Of Their Rape Kits. That’s not okay at all.
Still Others Are Being Secretly Investigated for Displaying Overly Manly Characteristics
There are female athletes who will be competing at the Olympic Games this summer after undergoing treatment to make them less masculine.
Still others are being secretly investigated for displaying overly manly characteristics, as sport’s highest medical officials attempt to quantify — and regulate — the hormonal difference between male and female athletes. Via MeFi.
Saturday!
* Today, Trina is one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers. I was pretty cranky about this the other day on Twitter with respect to the Mitt Romney bullying story (on which subject fellow UNCG MFA alum Steve Almond gets biblical here).
* Brazilian politicians and journalists were not placated. “We’re going to show this gang that they can’t come down here and create whatever environmental mess they want,” Carlos Minc, a co-founder of Brazil’s Green Party and environmental secretary of Rio state, told the newspaper O Globo. “I want to see the CEO of Chevron swim in that oil.” Great!
* The free market as more efficient than central planning, case 751.
* All of the current administrative solutions are perverse and/or unsustainable. Public universities cannot solve their financial problems by raising tuition even more quickly in the face of the tuition bubble, the student debt bubble, public anger after decades of similar annual increases at 3-4 times inflation, a pro-education president who is campaigning to punish tuition increases with further funding cuts, and mounting damage to an entire academic generation symbolized by the recent tripling of the number of PhDs on food stamps.
* Funny how this works: Saying he had no discretion under state law, a judge sentenced a Jacksonville, Florida, woman to 20 years in prison Friday for firing a warning shot in an effort to scare off her abusive husband.
Marissa Alexander unsuccessfully tried to use Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law to derail the prosecution, but a jury in March convicted her of aggravated assault after just 12 minutes of deliberation.
* A quick note from Jameson about base and superstructure.
* The Lego Lord of the Rings Videogame Is Really Happening. I’ll take one of each applicable video game system, please.
* Wes Anderson Tumblr blogs. It’s early going, but “Directed by Wes Anderson” may eventually be your winner here.
* And I’d have paid good money to see a Maurice Sendak Avengers.
FNL
* My students last summer insisted Mass Effect was important science fiction. Now io9 is telling me the same thing.
* American University’s adjunct faculty have voted to unionize.
* How to design a movie poster.
* You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. What could possibly go wrong?
* Gay marriage passes in New Jersey, only to be vetoed by Chris Christie. Meanwhile marriage equality looks likely to pass the Maryland state legislature. Meanwhile Obama announces it won’t defend laws that ban same-sex couples from receiving military benefits.
* WTFEverywhere: Sweden is only one of 17 countries that require transgender people to undergo sterilization.
* Apple still trying to find some way to make the Foxconn scandal go away.
* And Springsteen explains Wrecking Ball.
“Previous to Occupy Wall Street, there was no push back at all saying this was outrageous – a basic theft that struck at the heart of what America was about, a complete disregard for the American sense of history and community … In Easy Money the guy is going out to kill and rob, just like the robbery spree that has occurred at the top of the pyramid – he’s imitating the guys on Wall Street. An enormous fault line cracked the American system right open whose repercussion we are only starting to be feel.”
Wednesday Night Links
* Gingrich’s support is plateauing just when he finally won my heart. Who will bomb Cuba now?
* With all this insane cash it’s making, you’d almost think Apple doesn’t actually need to use slave labor.
* Now you can see global warming at work in your very own garden.
* Actually existing media bias: Sunday Morning Talk Shows Featured Twice As Many Republicans As Dems Last Year.
* Little known fact about Sweden, that supposed bastion of liberal idealism: If a Swedish transgender person wants to legally update their gender on official ID papers, a 1972 law requires them to get both divorced and sterilized first.
* Worst idea ever? NBC plans to spin Dwight off The Office.
* The Daily Show really let Mitt Romney have it last night. This Colbert interview with Maurice “Where the Wild Things Are” Sendak is great too.
* More Romney tax follies: If you count things that aren’t taxes as if they were taxes, his tax rate is actually much higher. And his kids got $100 million tax-free.
* Kottke: President John Tyler’s grandsons are still alive!!
* And all I can say is: What took so long?
Monday Reading™
* Well, that’s one way to do it: Tennessee Tea Party ‘Demands’ That References To Slavery Be Removed From History Textbooks.
* Russian scientist claims to have evidence of life on Venus.
by the 1960s, the American Mariner probes and their Soviet Venera counterparts had revealed Venus was just about the most inhospitable place imaginable, an acidic world with surface temperatures of about 900 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures nearly 92 times that of Earth.
That’s why the new paper by Russian astronomer Leonid Ksanfomaliti, due to appear in the Russian publication Solar System Research, seems to sit slightly outside the scientific consensus. He says that photos taken in 1982 – presumably either by Venera 13 or Venera 14, both of which visited Venus in March of that year – depict a “disk”, a “black flap”, and, perhaps most boldly, “a scorpion.”
Well, it checks out.
* Why a white knight won’t save the GOP from the Mitt-Newt trainwreck.
* Speaking of which: Gingrichmentum!
* Brown and Warren agree to ban third-party ads in Massachusetts. What’s the force of this, if the ads are genuinely third-party?
* Gay rights victories in New Jersey and Washington State.
* Evidence of cooperative play between dolphins and whales.
* …it is now possible to recognize that there are four discrete corridors of cisnormative resistance toward trans people’s readiness to transition.
First corridor, pre-adolescence: “You don’t know any better. You’re too young to understand”;
Second corridor, during adolescence: “It’s a confusing time. Wait until after puberty’s done”;
Third corridor, late development: “You should wait until you’re totally sure. You’ll never pass”; and
Final corridor, maturation: “You’re having a mid-life crisis. What about your kids, spouse, and career?”
* Someone on Facebook just told me Object Lessons from Duke’s Own™ Robyn Wiegman is now out.
* How fluctuations in the academic job market affect time-to-degree.
* And some recent notes on mental health and the Ph.D., via here, via Twitter.
Monday!
* The Brad Delong That Failed: “Things that I think I have gotten really, really wrong so far in my career.”
* TPM games out the early primaries and says Mitt Romney may be in even worse shape than it seems. Of course, with the way horse-race political coverage works in this country, this could just be setup for the inevitable “comeback kid” narrative. Meanwhile, I hope the Republican primary never ends.
* Newt’s Tax Plan: Just give rich people free money. It can’t fail!
* And more Newt: Rick Santorum’s consistency and courage on Iran has been a hallmark of why, if we do survive, it will be in part because of people like Rick who’ve had the courage to tell the truth about the Iranians for a long time. If!
* Military-industrial-academic complex: Blackwater to change its name again to Academi.
* Next year’s Supreme Court schedule should be interesting.
* The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
* The case against charts, Fox News Edition.
* The twin boys were identical in every way but one. Discussion at MeFi.
* The last question American Morning asked the two is what they would call an Occupy Wall Street-themed flavor. “Choccupy?” suggested Ben Cohen. Guys, really, I already solved this.
* When Verizon trolled New Jersey.
* Two from Longform’s Best of 2011: The Movie Set That Ate Itself and This Tech Bubble Is Different. #1:
Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home
and #2:
There’s always someone out there crying bubble, it seems; the trick is figuring out when it’s easy money—and when it’s a shell game. Some bubbles actually do some good, even if they don’t end happily. In the 1980s, the rise of Microsoft (MSFT), Compaq (HPQ), and Intel (INTC) pushed personal computers into millions of businesses and homes—and the stocks of those companies soared. Tech stumbled in the late 1980s, and the Valley was left with lots of cheap microprocessors and theories on what to do with them. The dot-com boom was built on infatuation with anything Web-related. Then the correction began in early 2000, eventually vaporizing about $6 trillion in shareholder value. But that cycle, too, left behind an Internet infrastructure that has come to benefit businesses and consumers.
…So if this tech bubble is about getting shoppers to buy, what’s left if and when it pops? Perlman grows agitated when asked that question. Hands waving and voice rising, he says that venture capitalists have become consumed with finding overnight sensations. They’ve pulled away from funding risky projects that create more of those general-purpose technologies—inventions that lay the foundation for more invention. “Facebook is not the kind of technology that will stop us from having dropped cell phone calls, and neither is Groupon or any of these advertising things,” he says. “We need them. O.K., great. But they are building on top of old technology, and at some point you exhaust the fuel of the underpinnings.”
And if that fuel of innovation is exhausted? “My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood,” says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. “An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn’t fundamentally increase American competitiveness.”
* And then there’s Abed Is Joker Now.
