Thursday evening roundup

Pew finds itself in a controversy over its report on Asian-Americans.

I'm so grateful to PC World for addressing the notification bar spam issue and to the tools recommended therein to get rid of it. This is one of those cases where the sneakiness ("no consent, no disclosure") was worse than the thing; I could have lived with the ads--as annoying as they were--but they came from out of nowhere and I thought they might be malware-based (I was not the only one, according to the article). So even once I found out they were harmless, I uninstalled the source, i.e. AroundMe-World.

It's okay to say you're busy, even if you're lying.

I agree, disparate communication styles are a relationship issue, and when I had a shitty phone, texting annoyed me because it was a huge effort to text back; if a response were required, it would be better to just discuss over the phone. Some texts still annoy me; "how are you?" is not a text topic; "I'm running late, be there in 5," is.

Excellent discussion of writers in John McPhee's reminiscences about his earlier days writing for the New Yorker:

The writing impulse seeks its own level and isn’t always given a chance to find it. You can’t make up your mind in a Comp Lit class that you’re going to be a Russian novelist. Or even an American novelist. Or a poet. Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment. If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre. You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.  doesn't discriminate.

What's offensive about this headline is the same that's offensive in Tracie McMillan's anti-woman rants: it's not the content, it's the presentation. Could we please get off the "cat lady" thing? Could we expunge that label from our vocabulary? It's the double standard: men have cats; families have cats; Toxoplasma gondii doesn't discriminate by marital status. Ironically, I was just complaining to a friend about one of my recent bad dates: I said it, it shouldn't be a double-standard--neither women, nor men should talk about their cats in detail on the first date. Her response was to further reinforce the stereotype, i.e. tell me to stay away from men with cats, period. Leaving the issue of cats, here's another example of an issue--in this case, an ad--that's offensive particularly because of the double standard it perpetuates (again, against single women). I challenge Piperlime to run an ad on coffee cup sleeves that says to men, "every time you wear sweatpants, a single woman believes that there really is a crisis of manhood."