October 2011
XO Jane: I Use Hormones For Things You Might Not... →
The use of hormone replacement therapy and reconstructive surgery in the trans community is a topic many cis people seem deeply fascinated by; either they’re always asking if we’ve had you know, the surgery,” or they want to condemn us for doing things that are “unnatural” by “destroying” the bodies we were born with. These things, though, are pretty basic and necessary medical treatments.
Just...
this ain't livin': The Basement →
Something is dripping in the basement again. She can’t recall why she went down in the first place, and fumbles for a light switch while the noise grows in the darkness. The air is heavy and musty, with a sharp coppery, metallic note, which surprises her, because it seems like half the household staff is in and out of the basement on a regular basis; for all that ventilation, she’d expect it to...
MB Quirk at Consumerist: Americans Spend About... →
Even when the economy is shuffling along like a zombie, American aren’t scared to spend big bucks on Halloween. A recent survey says the average person will spend $72.32 on Halloween — or about $6.8 billion nationwide.
David G. Savage at Los Angeles Times: Election... →
What is happening in Florida is part of a national trend, as election law has become a fierce partisan battleground. In states where Republicans have taken majority control, they have tightened rules for registering new voters, reduced the time for casting ballots and required voters to show photo identification at the polls. The new restrictions were usually adopted on party-line votes and signed...
Tiger Beatdown: Unionbusting at Qantas Causes... →
This event matters not just for Australian workers, but on a global level. Anti-union sentiment is on the rise in many regions, as seen in the rash of unionbusting legislation in the US that occurred this year, and increasingly, unions seem to be regarded as the enemy. In this case, Qantas set itself up as the victim in a series of woeful press statements about how sorry it was that things have...
Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal at The Guardian:... →
Britain’s largest police force is operating covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area.
The surveillance system has been procured by the Metropolitan policefrom Leeds-based company Datong plc,...
Greg Allen at NPR News: Students Born To... →
Wendy Ruiz, a 19-year-old sophomore at Miami Dade College with a 3.7 grade point average, has a plan. She expects to graduate later this year with a two-year associate’s degree in Biology.
Ruiz pays three times what most other students pay for tuition at Miami Dade College. When she enrolled last year, she was told that because her parents lack legal immigration papers, she has to pay...
Brian Wheeler at BBC News: The rise of the... →
These people know their frights. But then Halloween has always been a big deal in the US - Americans spend $1.8bn (£1.1bn) on costumes alone - and a visit to one of more than 2,000 haunted houses around the country is increasingly part of it.
Haunted houses began in the 1970s at charity events and have since grown into a $500m (£312m) a year industry.
They are neither haunted nor, in most...
Robert Verkaik and Arifa Akbar at The Independent:... →
An analysis of the Queen’s wealth shows that she holds assets worth £17bn in trust for the nation.
But access to these treasures is restricted by hundreds of years of obfuscation over what the Queen owns as sovereign and what belongs to her as Elizabeth Windsor.
Which paintings and other works of art are shown to the public is still decided solely by the Palace and the trustees of the Royal...
this ain't livin': Voice Recognition Software and... →
And dictation is also just not how I work. I’m not an oral communicator, I have trouble gathering and expressing my thoughts orally. I can dictate in short bursts, as ideas explode into my head, but then I freeze up. I want my hands on the keyboard, which is so much a part of the process, for me. I want to feel the keys clacking under my fingers as I think about the way I want to express...
Ken Bensinger at Los Angeles Times: A vicious... →
Lee, who described that night as “one of the worst experiences of my life,” had stumbled into the bare-knuckle world of Buy Here Pay Here used-car sales. In this little-known but fast-growing corner of the auto market, dealers command premium prices for road-worn vehicles and finance the sales at interest rates that can top 30%. In a kind of financial alchemy, they have found a way to turn...
W. Joseph Campbell at BBC News: The Halloween myth... →
The panic and terror so routinely associated with The War of the Worlds dramatisation did not come close to a nationwide dimension that night 73 years ago.
Sure, some Americans were frightened or disturbed by what they heard. But most listeners, overwhelmingly, were not. They recognised it for what it was - a clever and entertaining radio play.
The War of the Worlds dramatisation was the...
James Angelos at Foreign Affairs: What Integration... →
Despite such policies intended to make Germany a more inclusive society, much of the political rhetoric has remained far behind. The so-called integration debate reached a fever pitch after August 2010, when the then Bundesbank official Thilo Sarrazin published Germany Abolishes Itself, a best-selling book warning of the alleged economic and cultural dangers posed by immigration, with special...
NPR Staff: NPR's 'Hard Times' Series Reporters... →
Veteran correspondents Debbie Elliott, who’s based in Alabama, and Richard Gonzales of NPR’s San Francisco bureau, will spend the month reporting from places we don’t often visit, telling the stories of people we don’t often hear from.
With the 2012 election one year away, Elliott hopes to learn more from everyday people in small towns and communities across America....
this ain't livin': Challenged Books: Harry Potter →
Prior to the late 1990s, a lot of book challenges focused on sexual content, bad language, and ‘moral’ topics. Books were deemed inappropriate for children because they contained mature subjects. Many of these challenges were rooted in the Christian morality that dominates public thought in the United States, but they were not made on explicitly religious grounds. Many were also very politically...
Kelly Crow at Wall Street Journal: The Art of... →
Nothing has shaken up the art world this year like the arrest and nearly three-month detention of Ai Weiwei (pronounced “Eye Way-Way”), the 54-year-old son of a poet whose irreverent photographs and conceptual sculptures—often made from porcelain, tea or temple wood—have earned him a coveted spot among China’s pivotal, post-Mao generation of artists. Major museums like New...
David Bianculli at NPR News: 'Primetime' TV, Like... →
And when these people talk about TV, they don’t feel the need to play nice and agree. While most writer-producers in this show talk about television drama series as a novel, allowing an examination of characters over dozens of hours instead of just a movie-length drama, Sopranos creator David Chase asks what’s so great about that? Who needs a Casablanca II, III or IV? And when it...
Daniel Nasaw and Matt Danzico at BBC News:... →
The scanner uses x-rays to shoot thousands of images of the object in thin slices. Computer software then reassembles the images to create highly accurate, detailed three-dimensional models and reconstructions.
“We could probably do the same with a traditional autopsy,” says Bruno Frohlich, a physical anthropologist with the museum, “but there would be nothing left for future...
this ain't livin': Mental Health Parity Laws:... →
The divide in coverage between what I’ll call, for our purposes, mental and physical health2 illustrates a larger cultural divide in the way people think about illness and disability. Disability is often framed as something embodied; the very name implies this. A disability is something physical, not mental. The brain is something different. The mind/body divide is stark, when it comes to the...
Allison Good at Gambit: The Young Entrepreneurs →
Three years ago, Leslie Jacobs initiated 504ward, an organization “dedicated to retaining young talent in New Orleans.” For Jacobs, the issue is personal. “What prompted me to start 504ward was watching what was happening with my daughters,” Jacobs says. “They felt they’d never come back, but they did, and some of their friends moved here as well. I hired a...
Frank Garcia was executed in Texas last night →
The lethal injection, the 12th this year in the nation’s most active death penalty state of Texas, came some 30 minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Garcia’s appeals. His attorneys argued Garcia, 39, was mentally impaired and ineligible for the death penalty. They also argued lawyers earlier in the appeals process and at his trial in 2002 were ineffective in failing to...
Josh Bell at ACLU: Fighting for a Day in Court for... →
The ACLU was in court yesterday trying to hold officials accountable for the torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. In 2002 he was taken from a New York jail by the military, declared an “enemy combatant,” and secretly transported to a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
He was imprisoned without charge for nearly four years, subjected to extreme abuse, and unable to communicate...
Julian Guerrero at Socialist Worker: Battling the... →
Alexander focused on what she calls the “collateral consequences of mass incarceration”—including the disproportionate numbers of African Americans behind bars and the millions denied the right to vote, employment and access to public housing, all because of a felony conviction.
Seeing such strong support from the public, this loose coalition was inspired to take the...
Daniel Strain at Science: The Incredibly Expanding... →
At the end of Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the titular villain undergoes a literal change of heart. His blood-pumping organ swells to three times its prior size. The ticker of the Burmese python (Python molurus) similarly balloons, but the cause isn’t Christmas cheer—it’s a big meal. A new study of recently fed snakes suggests that a precise mixture of fatty...
Joel Millman at Wall Street Journal: These Inmates... →
Although 40 of 50 states still produce license plates behind bars, prison businesses have diversified. Inmates at Arizona Correctional Industries at the Lewis prison complex in Buckeye fix diesel tractors. Nearly a thousand Tennessee and South Carolina convicts use draw knives and hand scrapers to “antique” floors for a company that markets interiors with a vintage look.
The...
Sylvia Poggioli at NPR News: Greeks Fear They Are... →
World markets rallied Thursday after European leaders agreed on a plan to deal with the eurozone debt crisis. But in Greece, the most imperiled country, there was skepticism that the deal will do much to help the country out of recession.
In addition, many Greeks also fear that they are losing their sovereignty and are uncomfortable about the role Germany will be playing in the country’s...
this ain't livin': Outsourcing? Lax US Labour Laws... →
The United States was once a very strong nation for labour. Activists fighting for better working conditions brought about sweeping, important changes that reshaped the landscape of this country. In recent decades, this has shifted, as the country becomes increasingly anti-union, less interested in protecting the rights of workers and more interested in making sure corporations stay wealthy....
Global Comment: Once Upon A Time twists the fairy... →
Uh, spoilers, if you care.
Tiger Beatdown: Occupying Europe, when the... →
redlightpolitics:
My latest at Tiger Beatdown.
The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth...
Jason Palmer at BBC News: How woodpeckers avoid... →
The birds have little “sub-dural space” between their brains and their skulls, so the brain does not have room to bump around as it does in humans. Also, their brains are longer top-to-bottom than front-to-back, meaning the force against the skull is spread over a larger brain area.
A highly-developed bone called the hyoid - which in humans gives the “Adam’s apple”...
Shani Hilton at Washington City Paper: Oakland... →
Funny enough, this morning the Post’s print coverage of the events last night amounted to an AP picture of your friendly local Oakland police officer petting a kitten and a headline which read: “Protesters Wearing Out Their Welcome Nationwide.”
Chris Williams at Socialist Worker: Green light... →
Extracting oil from tar sands has only become economical as we have approached the End of the Age of Easy Oil and the price has shot above $100 per barrel. There’s plenty more out there, but it’s dirty, dangerous, hard to extract and hence ripe for environmental calamities such as last year’s massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
This explains not only the development of...
Tiger Beatdown: Who Exactly IS the 1%? →
One way to think about things is in terms of income: What are people making per year? Even this, though, is complicated. Many members of the 99% associate income specifically with work. You go to an office, or work behind the counter at a bakery, or report for duty on highway crews, and receive a regular paycheque. Income, however, also includes proceeds from investments like stocks, bonds,...
