April 2012
xoJane: Totally Tubal Adventures: The Initial... →
Tubal ligation, or tubal litigation as I called it when I was a small child and somewhat fuzzy on the details, has been pretty much a lifelong dream. This year I decided to make it a reality, plunging into the magical world of consults and presurgical consults and more consults in order to lie on an operating table sometime in June (hopefully) while a surgeon delves around in my abdomen, hunting...
this ain't livin': Public Defenders: Underpaid,... →
Rather than increasing funding for public defenders and expanding access, some states are actually cutting it. As with other forms of social services intended to preserve fundamental human rights, the government seems to be assuming that private organisations will pick up the torch and carry on. Many are, because the alternative is sitting by while people are treated unfairly by the justice...
Tiger Beatdown: On Anesthesia, Assault, and Fear →
This post has a strong content warning for medical assault, sexual assault, rape, and mutilation.
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BBC News: Australian billionaire Clive Palmer to... →
“It is going to be designed so it won’t sink,” he added.
The Guardian: Many young cancer patients fail to... →
A quarter of young people with cancer visited GPs four times or more before their symptoms were taken seriously and they were referred to a specialist, according to research.
A survey at a Teenage Cancer Trustconference for 300 young cancer patients asked for the experiences of 13- to 24-year-olds after they first experienced symptoms.
The researchers said their findings highlighted “the...
Michelle Diament at Disability Scoop: Lawmakers... →
A bill introduced in Congress late last week would establish a five-year federal grant program to allow school districts to team with universities and nonprofits to train general education teachers and other school staff to best support students with autism.
“We’ve learned a lot about autism spectrum disorder over the last 10 years, and over that time period the number of children diagnosed...
What's the Difference Between Artificial and... →
sexartandpolitics:
The Food and Drug Administration requires that natural flavors come from a natural material, but that’s a broad category. It usually means developing flavors from plant or bacteria by-products, or chemically treating naturally occurring molecules. Chemists then tinker with these to enhance their taste. The sweet strawberry taste of your naturally flavored ice cream? That...
The Economist: Waiting for the sun →
Despite the uncomfortable cult of personality around Mr Modi, Gujarat is an easy place to do business. And solar power would appear to be an obvious winner for India. The country has plenty of sun and flat, idle land. India is energy-hungry, but electricity supply is sporadic. Costly diesel generators are popular. Solar power could replace them. And solar parks, which look like giant Lego kits,...
Bernice Yeung at California Watch: Neglected for... →
In the Eastern Coachella Valley, residents in mobile home parks pipe sewage into aging septic tanks and cesspools. On the outskirts of the city of Tulare, Matheny Tract residents can’t tap into the city sewer treatment plant, and arsenic contaminates their well. Arsenic also taints the tap water in Lanare, a community near Fresno.
“It’s like people are living in colonies of the United States,”...
this ain't livin': Dark Stories for Dark Times →
New fairytales are part of the new young adult movement, as well as being produced in books explicitly intended for adults. And they are intense and dark and scary and twisted, and I love every minute of them, because this, in my mind, is how fairytales should be. They should be frightening, because they are about facing and exploring fears, in my world. Maybe other people want to read light,...
James Mottram at The Independent: Scarlett... →
I never wanted to be a sex symbol. I wanted to be a character actor. Those are the actors I mostly admire. I think women that are curvy can be pigeonholed in that bombshell thing. It’s not like I actively look for sexy roles. It’s not a requirement that my character be pretty and delicate. I never think about my character being sexy, unless that’s written in.
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Reggie Nadelson at BBC News: New York's pastry... →
In the office area, a young bride-to-be and her mother are poring over books of photographs: cakes in blue and pink, covered in edible lace; Art Deco cakes in black and silver; cakes with roses and lilies and golden orchids; cakes with seven tiers, or floating tiers, the flowers tumbling out with an impossible disregard for gravity.
For these days, the cake’s the thing. After the dress,...
Jon Boone and Shiv Malik at The Guardian:... →
“We are devastated,” said ICRC director general Yves Daccord. “Khalil was a trusted and very experienced Red Cross staff member who significantly contributed to the humanitarian cause.
“All of us at the ICRC and at the British Red Cross share the grief and outrage of Khalil’s family and friends.”
Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein at... →
We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is...
Gary Lapon at Socialist Worker: The right wing's... →
ALEC WAS instrumental in pushing for Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which authorizes the use of deadly force by those who “reasonably [believe] that such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm.” Those who use deadly force in these circumstances don’t have a “duty to retreat.”
“Stand Your Ground” laws are...
this ain't livin': There's A Whole Lot Going On... →
This is also about Emily Thorne’s personal journey, and here’s what I’m loving about Revenge. Emily VanCamp is a fantastic actress, and she does an absolutely stellar job of showing the character’s struggles on screen. There’s something very artificial and glittering about Emily, who carefully calculates and considers every action, and it’s hard to work to portray that kind of character; VanCamp...
Tim Harford at BBC: Black-Scholes: The maths... →
It’s not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn’t always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world.
J. Christian Walsh at LEO: Locavore Lore: Do... →
When Cowen writes about “outdoing the locavores,” he is promoting a healthy discussion about food. Locavores should try to outdo themselves as well. However, the economist seems overly dismissive of this group in the interest of sounding contrarian, using terms like “misguided,” “paternalistic,” “pessimistic” and “anti-innovative.” Worse, Cowen lumps all locavores in with “food snobs,” when, at...
Joel Dyer at Boise Weekly: First Amendment — 1, CU... →
As a result of the administration’s failed attempt to stop the 4/20 protest, it has embarrassed itself along with the institution. Thanks to the misguided efforts of its leaders, the University of Colorado and all of us in the city of Boulder received far more local and national press coverage concerning the police-state they created to deny the free speech and peaceful assembly of students and...
xoJane: Three More Dystopian YA Novels to Consider... →
Unsurprisingly, I have been reading a lot of YA lately, and I have three dark and delectable reading recs for you this week, as we face down the end of April and gird our loins for May. If you’re officially over dystopians, well, sorry, but some of these are dystopian. What they also are is lyrical; thematically, these books tie together because there’s some elegant and scrumptious language that...
Julianne Hing at Colorlines: Tucson’s Ousted... →
Two years ago, and mere weeks after signing Arizona’s SB 1070 into law, Gov. Jan Brewer signed HB 2281, which barred Arizona public schools from teaching courses which advocated “the overthrow” of the United States government; encouraged “ethnic solidarity” or “promote resentment” toward any other ethnic group. The law was directly specifically at Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, state...
Stacy Mitchell at Grist: The Walmart de Mexico... →
The Times story presents credible evidence that Walmart’s Mexican subsidiary spent millions of dollars bribing local officials in order to speed up permits for new stores, get “zoning maps changed,” and make “environmental objections vanish.” When top executives, including Duke, learned of the bribes in 2005, they declined to notify U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, shut down Walmart’s own...
this ain't livin': Are We the Overshare... →
It can feel like we are drowning in a wealth of intimate and very personal information, sometimes, that there is something frivolous, self-involved, and selfish about constant updates on the intimate lives of individuals. But there’s also something tremendously empowering about the collective of the overshare generation, the fact that we have made this information free and that there is so much...
David Biello at Scientific American: Where It... →
Warmer air allows for more water vapor. So scientists have long predicted that global warming will result in a more intense water cycle—the process by which water evaporates from the oceans, travels through the atmosphere and then falls as rain. Now new measurements of the ocean’s salinity prove that prediction—and suggest that global warming strengthens the water cycle even more than...
David Kestenbaum and Baldur Hedinsson at NPR: When... →
Its currency, the krona, is also in really bad shape. That’s led Icelanders to pose an existential currency question: Should they abandon the krona?
One key problem is size. Iceland has about as many people as Staten Island, so there just aren’t that many people on the planet who need to use the krona.
“There are more people using Disney dollars,” says Arsaell Valfells,...
BBC News: Cyber-security bill Cispa passes US... →
The bill passed the House on Thursday by a margin of 248 votes to 168. Cyber-security legislation is also being considered in the US Senate, but its bill differs considerably from Cispa and is not yet scheduled for a vote.
Global Comment: Where Did NBC’s Grimm Go Wrong? →
To my surprise, Grimm went rapidly downhill after my initial optimism for the show, while Once Upon A Time held steady. I’m not entirely in love with ABC’s entry in the fairy tale sweepstakes, but the creators have played much more with fairytales and haven’t been afraid to build a dark, complex, dynamic, and above all interesting world populated with a myriad of characters who all hold their...
xoJane: How Big Business is Killing Small Farms →
There’s a sense, looking at Monsanto, of living in an actual realfax dystopian novel, because what the company seems to be aiming for is utter control of all methods of food production not just in the US, but around the world. It’s actually not a bad move strategically if you are an evil biotech company, because once you control the source of the food, you control the populace. And with the...
this ain't livin': Boondoggle at the Public Pool:... →
I’m not sure we should have been put in the position we were put in with Measure A, where we were effectively asked to reward lazy planning and poor foresight, or vote against a public facility designed to be accessible and beneficial to all. And yet, it won’t be the first or the last time, because public officials seem to be unwilling to make hard economic choices. This way, they can blame us...
Laura Seay at Foreign Policy: How Not to Write... →
To Africa-watchers, there is a clear double standard for journalistic quality, integrity, and ethics when it comes to reporting on the continent. It’s enough to make us want to scream, or at least crawl into a corner and long for the days when Howard French covered West and Central Africa for theNew York Times. Although he had to cover some of the continent’s worst post-Cold War...
Jane Qiu at Science: Trouble on the Yangtze →
Last month, preparatory work began on the Xiaonanhai Dam, with more projects to follow. Within a few years, the Jinsha will slow to a sluggish pace and its temperature will drop as a series of large hydropower dams release cold bottom water from their reservoirs into the river. For species already threatened by the Three Gorges Dam downriver, ecologists say, the new dams will take away their...
Peter Pattakos at Cleveland Scene: The Curse of... →
“I’m here so my grandchildren can be proud of their heritage. People act like we’re trying to take their baseball away from them, but we’re not. It’s just, why do they have to turn us into Chief Wahoo?”
Jim Farrar, a member of the Cherokee Nation who drove from Michigan to join this year’s demonstration, speaks of re-education camps and...
“Teachers hurled insults like “bastard,” ”tard,” ”damn dumb” and “a hippo in a...”
– The Associated Press: Parents wire kids to prove teachers’ verbal abuse (via sexartandpolitics)
this ain't livin': What's So Bad About Feelings,... →
Attacking women for having emotions is rooted in misogyny. It’s rooted in the idea that women are too emotional and have an obligation to prove that they are ‘strong’ so they can engage with the world, and in the idea that women must present a ‘united front.’ Must be on their best behaviour all the time in order to impress people with their togetherness. Women tell each other to suppress their...
“There’s no stopping point for this competition; there’s no “you weigh this...”
– Marianne Kirkby, in ‘Six weeks to OMG: The diet that will make you disappear.’ Read more here. (via guardiancomment) 