Good Reads

[trysail]

Obamacare Website Costs Exceed $2 Billion, Study Finds


The federal government’s Obamacare enrollment system has cost about $2.1 billion so far, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis of contracts related to the project.

Spending for healthcare.gov and related programs, including at the Internal Revenue Service and other federal agencies, exceeds cost estimates provided by the Obama administration, the analysis found. The government’s most recent estimate, limited to spending on computer systems by the agency that runs the site, through February, is $834 million.

Healthcare.gov and its associated programs are the main portal for millions of Americans to sign up for coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act known as Obamacare. Spending for the system has been a matter of dispute between the administration and Republican opponents in Congress, who have tried to block funding for the law.

Health Insurance Exchanges

“The way in which Obamacare has been rolled out has been very messy,” with spending scattered across dozens of contracts, many of them predating the law and amended afterward, said Peter Gosselin, a senior health-care analyst at BGov and lead author of study. “One of the reasons it has been implemented in the way it has been, financially, is precisely to deny opponents of the law a clear target.”

Contractor Infighting

The construction of healthcare.gov involved 60 companies, supervised by employees of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services instead of a lead contractor, according to the inspector general at the Health and Human Services Department. The project was marked by infighting among the contractors, CMS officials and top officials at HHS, the Cabinet-level department that oversees CMS...





...Healthcare.gov opened on Oct. 1 last year and promptly collapsed...


​

- read the full article
Obamacare Website Costs Exceed $2 Billion, Study Finds (from Bloomberg)​

 

[RobDownSouth]

It took twenty years and a very obscure account from a small Nazi concentration camp in the Ukraine, but now we know what exactly killed the knucklehead from the book "Into The Wild"



The New Yorker Feature Story: How Chris McCandless Died

 

[JohnnySavage]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/mccandless-580.jpeg

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver’s license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner’s report, was starvation.

In “Into the Wild,” the book I wrote about McCandless’s brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.
[...]
The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless’s death.​

- read the full article How Chris McCandless Died (from The New Yorker)​

Bob is trying to steal Laurel's story from a year ago!!

 

[Radiohead]

The sexual threats against Emma Watson are an attack on every woman.




Read the full text here: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832243/the-sexual-threats-against-emma-watson-are-an-attack-on-women

I just love that this was a Hollywood scam to shut down 4chan.

 

[Laurel]

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/30/1412091996388/086394ce-e7a2-449b-bc0a-e1c1b179e13c-460x276.jpeg

According to new research, the sense of smell is the canary in the coalmine of human health. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, shows that losing one’s sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins.
[...]
Five years later, the researchers tracked down as many of the same participants as they could, and asked them to perform this smell test a second time. During the five-year gap between the two tests, 430 of the original participants (or 12.5% of the total number) had died. Of these, 39% who had failed the first smell test died before the second test, compared to 19% of those who had moderate smell loss on the first test, and just 10% of those with a healthy sense of smell.
[...]
The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odours. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.​

- read the full article Your nose knows death is imminent (from The Guardian)​

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

The Beat of My Own Drum: A Memoir
Sheila E.
At goodreads.com

 

[IrezumiKiss]

http://bitchmagazine.org/sites/default/files/u2583/screen_shot_2014-10-08_at_12.04.32_pm.png

Laverne Cox and bell hooks Had a Discussion About Gender and Pop Culture

Social Commentary post by Sarah Mirk on October 8, 2014 - 12:12pm

bell hooks is a scholar-in-residence at the New School in New York City this month and this week talked with none other than Laverne Cox in front of a packed crowd.

The conversation was a rare and honest discussion of race, gender, and pop culture. hooks explained that she was interested in talking to Cox because she wanted to see how her feminist theory is affecting people outside of academia. "People read bell hooks and write their papers and have their discussions. When I heard through the grapevine that Laverne Cox was a big bell hooks reader, I thought, I this is somebody I need to talk with," said hooks. Working as a black trans woman in Hollywood is inherently complicated, added hooks: "She has an awareness of the need to decolonize, but still working within a very colonizing system."

For her part, Cox explained that hooks' book Teaching to Trangress changed her life:

"You were writing about unessentialized ideas about what is a woman, you were moving away from these ideas of essentialized womanhood that held feminism back. I found myself there, as a gender-nonconforming college student. I was not quite able to accept my womanhood, but I was able to say, 'Maybe there's a space for me here.' I was able to draw links between the bullying I was experiencing in my own life and the violence I was experiencing as a gender-nonconforming person and how that was an attack on femininity. It made me realize as a college student that we cannot talk about ending homophobia without talking about ending patriarchy, we cannot talk about ending transphobia without talking about ending patriarchy. I love that you talked about pop culture, the space that I longed to be in—but not uncritically. When I read a script now, so much of your work has influenced the way I read scripts and the way I read images."

hooks voiced criticism of the show Orange is the New Black, saying that the backstories of the characters "seduce you into thinking that there is a kind humanity operating" where there is actually a lot of cruelness being acted out. Cox explained that the show has helped her feel comfortable speaking about race and oppression in public. When Cox first started getting famous, she said, her friend Janet Mock pointed out, "You speak so eloquently about race and yet you so rarely talk about it publicly." That made Cox realize she was afraid to use her public platform to talk about race. "I was painfully aware that it scares me to go on national television and use the phrase 'imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.' I was like, 'I'm already black and trans, this is enough for people. I can't be too political.'" Cox went on to say that because Orange is the New Black is set in a prison, it's inherently political. That gave her a chance to start talking about politics in interviews. "I was like, 'Okay, I can talk about incarceration, I can talk about race.' It gave me permission to go there. I found the more I go there, the more I'm connecting with a lot of folks and a lot of folks are hearing truth in that," said Cox.

The conversation went in a lot of interesting directions, but later turned to Cox's expression of femininity. “One of the issues I think that many people have with trans women is the sense of a traditional femininity being called out and reveled in—a femininity that many feminist women feel, ‘Oh, we’ve been trying to get away from that,’” said hooks.

Cox had a thoughtful response that ended with, "Am I feeding into the patriarchal gaze in my blond wigs?”

“Yes,” said hooks.

“It’s one of those things where I’m sort of like, here I am," responded Cox. "If I’m embracing a patriarchal gaze with this presentation, it’s the way that I’ve found something that feels empowering. And I think the really honest answer is that I’ve sort of constructed myself in a way so that I don’t want to disappear… I’ve never been interested in being invisible and erased. So a lot of how I’m negotiating these systems of oppression and trying not to be erased is perhaps by buying into and playing into some of the patriarchal gaze and white supremacy.”

Watch the whole conversation right here, the entire thing is great.

http://new.livestream.com/accounts/1369487/events/3446294

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/laverne-cox-and-bell-hooks-had-a-discussion-about-gender-and-pop-culture

 

[Laurel]

https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1309/557760200_481fa01c76.jpg
image courtesy Skye Suicide (Flickr)

In the heart of Washington, DC, in a generic-looking 11-story office building whose owners boast of its “high window ratio,” sits a 52-year-old tax-exempt organization named Morality in Media (MiM). It is perhaps the nation’s loudest voice against adult pornography. With a coalition that reads like a who’s who of conservative Christian organizations, the group is determined to get U.S. Department of Justice to enforce what it calls “existing federal obscenity laws” to crack down on “pornography and indecency.”

Their efforts have not been going very well.
[...]
The group still tries to stay relevant. Last month, when Attorney General Eric Holder announced he would soon leave the Department of Justice, MiM responded with glee. “For the last 6 years, we have worked to try to get him to enforce federal obscenity laws – and thus to help curb sexual exploitation,” it lamented, but Holder “refused and even disbanded the task force appointed to do such cases.” On its Facebook page, the group’s president wrote posted “The resignation of Attorney General Holder can only give hope to those suffering the ravages of the pornography pandemic in America. Holder was all that stood between that pandemic and its destruction.”

It is true that Holder’s Department of Justice has not made prosecuting adult pornography a priority, and it is unlikely that anyone President Barack Obama appoints will share MiM’s priorities. Regardless of who the next AG is, MiM and other anti-porn advocates are very likely to be disappointed. The reason is simple: they have, for all intents and purposes, already lost their war. While public opinion remains divided on the morality of porn, the forces that would use the power of government to criminalize it have seen their cause become underfunded, usurped, unpopular — and quite possibly unconstitutional.​

- read the full article This Is The Way The War On Pornography Ends (from Think Progress)​

 

[Brollyanna]

I just love that this was a Hollywood scam to shut down 4chan.

Maybe, though it seems that it was all about money in the end - just an attempt to drive visits to their site for ad revenue.

But whoever was responsible for the site, they used the fact that Emma Watson was vulnerable to sexual exposure threats because she is a woman in the public eye. In choosing to exploit that vulnerability for their own ends, they made way for tons of misogynistic Twitter and 4chan hate for Emma Watson on the way. So, still nasty shit.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/30/1412091996388/086394ce-e7a2-449b-bc0a-e1c1b179e13c-460x276.jpeg

According to new research, the sense of smell is the canary in the coalmine of human health. A study published today in the open access journal PLOS ONE, shows that losing one’s sense of smell strongly predicts death within five years, suggesting that the nose knows when death is imminent, and that smell may serve as a bellwether for the overall state of the body, or as a marker for exposure to environmental toxins.
[...]
Five years later, the researchers tracked down as many of the same participants as they could, and asked them to perform this smell test a second time. During the five-year gap between the two tests, 430 of the original participants (or 12.5% of the total number) had died. Of these, 39% who had failed the first smell test died before the second test, compared to 19% of those who had moderate smell loss on the first test, and just 10% of those with a healthy sense of smell.
[...]
The tip of the olfactory nerve, which contains the smell receptors, is the only part of the human nervous system that is continuously regenerated by stem cells. The production of new smell cells declines with age, and this is associated with a gradual reduction in our ability to detect and discriminate odours. Loss of smell may indicate that the body is entering a state of disrepair, and is no longer capable of repairing itself.​

- read the full article Your nose knows death is imminent (from The Guardian)​

Uh...genes come with stacks of one-time use counters that allow the gene to do its job. When the stack is exhausted the gene is spent. So over time our hair turns grey or falls out, we stop menstruating, etc. And sooner or later we die. The nose is simply a gage like every other part of the body.

 

[Laurel]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/files/2014/10/nobel-prize.jpg

“There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [he mimes a disk roughly the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.

“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.

“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”​

- read the full article What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize through Airport Security (from Scientific American)​

 

[bluebell]

http://usatlife.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/louis-ck.jpg?w=1000
(Image: FX)

Ask Polly: Do I Have to Lose Weight to Find Love?

Dear Polly,

How do you make yourself ready to drop your defenses?

Let me explain. I'm a single lady in my late 30s who has been pretty much on my own for the last few years, since my only long-term relationship broke up. I have a decent-ish career and a fairly active social life. I guess I should start dating, but the idea of Putting Myself Out There in That Way fills me with dread — blame it on a childhood where I was mocked for having crushes, followed by a post-childhood where dudes I felt sparks with would date other people because I was too chickenshit to make anything even resembling a move. (The long-term relationship came about in a kind of roundabout way — the old "hanging out at the same bar turning into spending a lot of time together and then developing into a Thing after resistance on my part" plot. Which is not very serviceable at my age.)

I watch friends of mine find partners and I feel like they've been given access to a manual that will only be open to me if ... well, if I lose weight. I've always been heavier than normal, but after maintaining in the 12–14 range for a long while, through all the teenage and twentysomething trips to Weight Watchers and ambient sucking-up of information that I don't even want to read from the beauty-industrial complex, I have landed in that gray area where the top of "regular" sizing and the bottom of "plus" sizing overlap. I have spent most of my dating-age life hoping to ignore my corporeal self in the hopes that it'll go away, somehow, or that my other characteristics — my wit! my compassion! my ability to throw a really good party! — will at least serve as mitigating factors. I haven't even watched That Episode Of Louie because I feel like hearing the words in Sarah Baker's monologue spoken aloud, instead of just in my head, will make me legit break down.

"I'll lose the weight," I think sometimes, "and that will make people less repelled by me." But I have trouble exercising because my schedule is unpredictable and sometimes I need to be working for unbroken stretches to tackle big projects.

And in my darker moments (which often come after I screw up my regime in some way), I despair and think that I'll never lose it because what's the point. Friends suggest people I should date and I laugh it off because yeah, right, who would want to take a chance on me? I develop romantic interests and subsequently get super anxious when I'm around them; all that energy eventually settles into friendship, which is fine! I have met lots of great people, and I have been very lucky in that sense. I am just tired of feeling like a fuck up, even WITH the high divorce/etc. rate. And the idea of putting myself out there on OKCupid or a site of its ilk is low-level terrifying for multiple reasons, from the sociopathic spammy way that some dudes operate to someone I know finding me on one of those sites and rolling their eyes at the idea of me being even casually dateable.

What is wrong with me? Why am I so freaked out by even voicing the desire to look for someone out loud? Am I just preemptively rejecting anyone who would love me for me? Or am I just being practical?

Signed,

I Wanna See Me Be Brave

...

Dear Brave,

Fuck practical, if “practical” is searching for your statistical match — weight, height, race, IQ, income level — instead of meeting real, imperfect human beings with souls that erase all of those numbers with their originality and warmth. If that's practical, then practical is the territory of unimaginative warthogs.

...

I know a lot of people are haunted by that Louis C.K. Fat Girl monologue. And I know that feeling of meeting a guy and thinking, "Hey, look! We match!" and then finding out he only dates supermodels. (Why? And … how?) But that speech feels a little hopeless to me. No One Dates Fat Girls. I understand why it would be a relief to voice that feeling. But it falls in line with Older Men Only Want Younger Women and Successful Women Can't Find Love and No One Wants a Short Guy and a million other self-defeating mantras. Once you start down that road, you might as well just move into the glossy fucking magazines and sit right next to the teenager in the feathered get-up and weep into your hands. Do you want to live in a two-dimensional, imaginary world, or do you want to live in the real world, which is full of surprises and real love and magic?

I know some people found that episode emancipating. I don't want to diminish that. I just want to say: DON'T LIVE THERE.

Don't live in that two-dimensional, reductive space where you already know what's going to happen next, where you imagine that all affection for you is just pity, where you think people are rolling their eyes at the idea of you as remotely dateable, where you accept less than you deserve from a soulless mathematician.

...

You need to exercise every day. That's my recommendation to you and every other person reading this, no matter what size they happen to be. Because people — especially very smart people — require exercise to stay sane. They do. Exercise will help you feel vibrant and relaxed and gorgeous in your own skin. Exercise will improve your chemistry and that will improve your view of yourself. You also need to remind yourself that you're up for a challenge, that you can do something hard, even when you're swamped with big projects and you feel like shit and you just don't want to. You need to give yourself that gift every day.

"What kind of a gift is THAT, to sweat and pant like crazy?" you ask. It's a gift that sometimes looks like punishment, but that's actually a sensual thing, a way of feeling vigorous and alive.

The primary goal here is to feel connected to your body. Exercise won't make you more lovable. You're already lovable, that’s the point. Exercise will help you to feel that.

As a writer, I'm trapped in my head most of the day. Exercise helps me to acknowledge my body. And I do mean ACKNOWLEDGE. Because when you're sort of blocking your body out of the equation, because it's too big or its textures aren't photogenic enough for your poisonous two-dimensional taste, that's a way of not existing. That's a way of holding your breath. That's a way of valuing what you're told over what you feel. That's a way of making no space for yourself.

You need to make some space, and breathe, and feel how good your body can feel. You need to savor your senses a little. Smart, busy people like you, who overthink things sometimes, need that. Daily exercise will give you a tiny feeling of control over one dimension of your life — not how you look, but how you feel.

...

You want to see YOU be brave? Look in the mirror. You are already brave. You need to see yourself clearly, so the world can see you clearly, too. Recognize how beautiful you are, and the world will recognize it, too.

Read the whole letter: New York Magazine, Ask Polly


(It's long. I think I copy-pasted the best bits. I liked that Louie episode, too. But she's right about that mindset!)

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/files/2014/10/nobel-prize.jpg

I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”​

- read the full article What It’s Like to Carry Your Nobel Prize through Airport Security (from Scientific American)​

At last, an intelligent question.

 

[gotsnowgotslush]

goodreads.com

Hild
Nicola Griffith

The Early Dark Ages were not as quite as dark as they're painted.
A time of transition, from the ancient pagan religions to the new
beliefs.

Hild will become St. Hilda of Whitby, and she will be feted for
advancing the written word.

Sister Fidelmas Society ?

Thank you, Peter Tremayne !

 

[JohnnySavage]

I just got the second and third books in the Wool series. I'm all atwitter.

 

[Laurel]

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--7Ab_qgLh--/wehwlgrku0cliotccq6i.gif

In 1994, a South Florida man who goes by the name Gelding was surgically castrated. In 2011, he had his penis removed as well. He's a "nullo": A cisgender man who removes his external genitalia completely as a form of body modification, and he recently agreed to answer our questions—from "why?" to "what do balls taste like?"

Gelding is a nudist and describes himself as a submissive bear. Apart from his desire to use a pseudonym, he let it all hang out (so to speak) when I reached out to him and graciously answered every question I had.

Is nullo your preferred term to describe yourself and others like you who are castrated and have removed their penis?

Yes, the reason that we use that it is not transgender. It's simply nullification of what you've got. A friend of mine Mack in San Francisco likes to use the term "mascunull", because I remain as masculine as they come with fur and so forth. But I no longer have the parts.​

- read the full article "I Still Unload": This Man Is a "Nullo" Who Removed His Penis and Balls (from Gawker)​

 

[Laurel]

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3869/15304453736_b597e3df96.jpg
image courtesy Jared Polin (Flickr)

One of the exhibits at the Memorial and Museum at Auschwitz Birkenau in Oswiecim, Poland, is a room of human hair. The room has an odd purplish tint to it, cast by the climate- and light-control systems that slow the hair's decay. A display case holds two tons of human hair from an estimated forty thousand people. “Please do not photograph the room of hair,” Pawel Sawicki, a press officer of the museum and my group’s guide, told us. “We don’t know exactly when it will all turn to dust."

Photographing the hair might hasten its disintegration. But also, the museum balks at letting patrons take pictures of human remains; a crematorium on the grounds of Auschwitz I, one of three Auschwitz camps in the Oswiecim area, where seventy thousand corpses were burned, is also off-limits to cameras.

Still, many take pictures. Crowds gather in front of the ARBEIT MACHT FREI gate in waves, photographing it almost synchronously, because you can't not take a picture of it. Some people pose under it and have their companions take their pictures. A few people take selfies. It’s weird. Where does the impulse to take a picture of the entrance to a place of horror come from? Because hardly anyone took pictures when it was happening? As evidence that you have visited?
[...]
I asked Sawicki how he felt about people taking selfies at the memorial. “I think that there is some universal tendency in us—people—to document,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “And a self-portrait made in a place that you visit is a kind of a proof that ‘I was there.’ Family albums are full of such pictures.” He continued: “But there are photographs being made—not only selfies—with a different motivation. If they just use the site as a background, if they are meant to be funny or are disrespectful in any way or they are manipulative, etc.—then of course this is simply wrong.”
[...]
But the impulse to continue photographing Auschwitz isn't wrong. The number of survivors continues to dwindle, and time barrels on further and further from the event. We should keep posting—and sharing—photographs of places where horror has happened until these places inevitably disintegrate, even if the photo of such a place does not fit so neatly into a social network, where the crass language of the sharing community—“likes,” “hearts,” “selfie,” "re-gram" etc., etc., can denigrate the austerity of an image. If we use social media for only the happy or banal events in life—weddings, brunches, signs with terrible grammar—well, why bother?

In her last book, Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag went further: "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." Therefore, let us ask: What are you doing when you “like” a photo posted at Auschwitz? You’re not “liking” the Holocaust. You’re acknowledging that the history is real.​

- read the full article Instagrams from Auschwitz (from The Awl)​

 

[Saint Peter]

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--7Ab_qgLh--/wehwlgrku0cliotccq6i.gif
​

Damn.​

 

[Laurel]

'Am I being catfished?' An author confronts her number one online critic

Thought you all might find this an interesting read.

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/10/15/1413376951610/Illustration-of-woman-fis-012.jpg

When a bad review of her first novel appeared online, Kathleen Hale was warned not to respond. But she soon found herself wading in

In the months before my first novel came out, I was a charmless lunatic – the type that other lunatics cross the street to avoid. I fidgeted and talked to myself, rewriting passages of a book that had already gone to print. I remember when my editor handed me the final copy: I held the book in my hands for a millisecond before grabbing a pen and scribbling edits in the margins.
[...]
For the most part, I found Goodreaders were awarding my novel one star or five stars, with nothing in between. “Well, it’s a weird book,” I reminded myself. “It’s about a girl with PTSD teaming up with a veteran to fight crime.” Mostly I was relieved they weren’t all one-star reviews.
[...]
Blythe went on to warn other readers that my characters were rape apologists and slut-shamers. She accused my book of mocking everything from domestic abuse to PTSD. “I can say with utmost certainty that this is one of the worst books I’ve read this year,” she said, “maybe my life.”
[...]
“But there isn’t rape in my book,” I thought. I racked my brain, trying to see where I had gone wrong. I wished I could magically transform all the copies being printed with a quick swish of my little red pen. (“Not to make fun of PTSD, or anything,” I might add to one character’s comment. “Because that would be wrong.”)
[...]
“If you still feel you must leave a comment, click ‘Accept and Continue’ below to proceed (but again, we don’t recommend it).”

I would soon learn why.​

- read the full article 'Am I being catfished?' An author confronts her number one online critic (from The Guardian)​

 

[Laurel]

Interesting follow-up piece with more background/context:
http://jezebel.com/author-stalks-anonymous-blogger-who-gave-her-a-1-star-r-1648545005

 

[trysail]

http://www.bloomberg.com/image/iuYu1WONS9Pk.png​

By Stepan Kravchenko

Tamara Nekrasova never really hated Ukrainians, not even when a shell fired from Ukrainian territory struck her house just a short walk from the Russia-Ukraine border, sending her to the hospital and killing a neighbor. It wasn’t until later, after months of relentless anti-Ukraine reports on Russian television, that anger and antipathy began to consume the 55-year-old former mineworker.

“I feel it now,” Nekrasova said as she packed boxes to move out of her wood-frame hut, where holes from the shrapnel still scar the walls. “I just feel it from the things they’re showing on TV.”

I met Nekrasova on a six-day journey along the Russia-Ukraine frontier -- 2,164 kilometers (1,345 miles) of highways, two-lane roads and muddy paths. Not so long ago, the border was a mostly imaginary line through wheat fields and birch forests. To most Russians, it meant what it did in Soviet times, when it meant nothing at all. That ended with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea in March and the ensuing conflict with Ukraine.

Since then, both sides have plowed up fields and cleared forests to build defensive earthworks, and the locals are erecting equally formidable barriers in their minds. As a Muscovite who was just 8 when the Soviet Union collapsed, I’d never felt any animosity toward or from Ukraine. Like most of my countrymen, I considered Ukraine a sister nation -- different but not quite foreign. And like other Russians, I saw nothing unusual or wrong with friendships, families, and marriages that straddled the border.

My friend Nikolai and I embarked on the journey to see just how much things have changed among those living closest to the frontier. We spoke with dozens of residents of the restricted border zone, and to my dismay discovered a country turning inward, a back-to-the-future reversion to old Soviet habits in which citizens and authorities alike are searching for enemies, internal and external, who can be blamed for the tension...




​

- read the full article Mud and Loathing on Russia-Ukraine Border (from Bloomberg)



​

 

[Laurel]

https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2884/10138487754_1e59e5b28f.jpg
image courtesy Mr Hicks46 (Flickr)

One day in the fall of 1981, eight men in their 70s stepped out of a van in front of a converted monastery in New Hampshire. They shuffled forward, a few of them arthritically stooped, a couple with canes. Then they passed through the door and entered a time warp. Perry Como crooned on a vintage radio. Ed Sullivan welcomed guests on a black-and-white TV. Everything inside — including the books on the shelves and the magazines lying around — were designed to conjure 1959. This was to be the men’s home for five days as they participated in a radical experiment, cooked up by a young psychologist named Ellen Langer.

The subjects were in good health, but aging had left its mark. “This was before 75 was the new 55,” says Langer, who is 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard. Before arriving, the men were assessed on such measures as dexterity, grip strength, flexibility, hearing and vision, memory and cognition — probably the closest things the gerontologists of the time could come to the testable biomarkers of age. Langer predicted the numbers would be quite different after five days, when the subjects emerged from what was to be a fairly intense psychological intervention.

Langer had already undertaken a couple of studies involving elderly patients. In one, she found that nursing-home residents who had exhibited early stages of memory loss were able to do better on memory tests when they were given incentives to remember — showing that in many cases, indifference was being mistaken for brain deterioration. In another, now considered a classic of social psychology, Langer gave houseplants to two groups of nursing-home residents. She told one group that they were responsible for keeping the plant alive and that they could also make choices about their schedules during the day. She told the other group that the staff would care for the plants, and they were not given any choice in their schedules. Eighteen months later, twice as many subjects in the plant-caring, decision-making group were still alive than in the control group.
[...]
The men in the experimental group were told not merely to reminisce about this earlier era, but to inhabit it — to “make a psychological attempt to be the person they were 22 years ago,” she told me. “We have good reason to believe that if you are successful at this,” Langer told the men, “you will feel as you did in 1959.” From the time they walked through the doors, they were treated as if they were younger. The men were told that they would have to take their belongings upstairs themselves, even if they had to do it one shirt at a time.
[...]
At the end of their stay, the men were tested again. On several measures, they outperformed a control group that came earlier to the monastery but didn’t imagine themselves back into the skin of their younger selves, though they were encouraged to reminisce. They were suppler, showed greater manual dexterity and sat taller — just as Langer had guessed. Perhaps most improbable, their sight improved. Independent judges said they looked younger. The experimental subjects, Langer told me, had “put their mind in an earlier time,” and their bodies went along for the ride.

The results were almost too good. They beggared belief. “It sounded like Lourdes,” Langer said.​

- read the full article What if Age Is Nothing but a Mind-Set? (from New York Times)​

 

[trysail]

I am not making this up— it has become necessary for Park Rangers to warn idiots that taking a "selfie" with a bear is not a particularly good idea


​

 

[Amy_K]

http://usatlife.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/louis-ck.jpg?w=1000
(Image: FX)

Ask Polly: Do I Have to Lose Weight to Find Love?



Read the whole letter: New York Magazine, Ask Polly


(It's long. I think I copy-pasted the best bits. I liked that Louie episode, too. But she's right about that mindset!)

Thank you so much for that read.

 

[IrezumiKiss]

To celebrate the release of my new book, Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, I've invited some of my favorite creators and thinkers to write about their philosophy on the arts and the Internet. Today, Molly Crabapple presents her 15 iron laws of creativity. -Cory Doctorow

Molly Crabapple's 15 rules for creative success in the Internet age

I'm a visual artist and writer. What this means is that I have done most things one can do that involve making pictures (as to making words, I'm far newer). I've drawn dicks for Playgirl. I've painted a six foot tall replica of my own face and carefully calligraphed things people have said to me on the Internet, then displayed it in a Tribeca gallery, as a sort of totem. I've live-sketched snipers in Tripoli. I've illustrated self-published kids books for ten dollars a page. I've balanced on jury-rigged scaffolding on a freezing British dawn, painting pigs on the walls of one of the world's poshest nightclubs.

I've made my living as an artist for eight years, almost entirely without galleries, and until relatively recently without agents. It was a death-slog that threw me into periodic breakdowns . I'm pretty successful now. I make a good living, even in New York, have a full time assistant who gets a middle-class salary, and have a book coming out with a major publisher. I feel so lucky, and so grateful, for every bit of this.

My success would not have been possible without the internet. I've used every platform, from Craigslist and Suicide Girls to Livejournal, Myspace, Kickstarter, Tumblr and Twitter. I'm both sick of social media and addicted to it. What nourishes you destroys you, and all that. The internet is getting increasingly corporate and centralized, and I don't know that the future isn't just going back to big money platforms. I hope its not.

Here's what I've learned.

1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.

2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.

3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.

4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.

5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more

6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.

7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?

8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.

10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.

11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.

12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.

13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.

14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.

15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.

Finally...

The Internet will not save creators.

Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.

Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.

Now make some beautiful things.

-Molly Crabapple

http://boingboing.net/2014/11/04/molly-crabapples-rules-for-c.html