The horrendous Central American
human trafficking problem.
Historical
horrors unearthed in Poland.
Unfathomable
Soviet nostalgia in the Ukraine.
There's a correlation between pesticides and
farmer suicides.
GMOs
do not reduce soil loss.
Just
don't even eat pork. Just don't.
Alzheimer's
treatments?
Just imagine the nightmare adults that these
coddled cubs will grow into.
The Nobel Prize in
LEDs, explained.
Wow, I didn't realize things were so
bad at AAAS.
I also had no idea that mapmakers used to
willfully insert misinformation in order to catch plagiarizers.
Sigh; I feel like the Citizen Radio folks make the same mistake here of which they accuse MTV:
underestimating their audience. No, I don't agree with them on everything; yes, I'm still reading. I'm not only willing but insistent upon considering disparate viewpoints. What they say about veganism and the liberal rejection of it, however, is spot on. For example, where is this
you care more about animals than people coming from? Is caring about either, mutually exclusive?
Kilstein: "But what if you were on a desert island -
" I'm not. I'm not. I'm never gonna be on a desert island. The bottom
line is, when you look at why I'm vegan, it's climate change, it is the
terrible labor practices of factory farms. It was the UN, not PETA or a
Mercy For Animals zine, that talked about how factory farming is a
bigger contributor to climate change than every mode of transportation
put together. At the very least if you are a liberal and not vegan, you
should be saying to your friends "Yeah, I know I should be" - and then
go and eat your bacon burger or whatever. But we don't want to talk
about it because it's a sacrifice.
On a quasi-related note: Roxane Gay's most recent book--which I haven't read but would like to--appears to be about
doing what you can even if you can't do everything. She had a really good essay recently, on celebrity feminism...
here it is. Key takeaway: "The idea of women moving through the world as freely as men should sell itself."
On another quasi-related note: social justice warrior
fails as a slur, wins otherwise.
Fareed Zakaria on why
Bill Maher and Sam Harris are wrong.
This does resonate: in retrospect, I'd have gone further in math had I not gotten so
caught up in understanding everything.
I'm about a week behind on Carolyn but I
love this:
One of the most important things to know about someone, if not the
most, before you make a home together is how she handles people who get
on her bad side. It’s just a clear, concise, extremely reliable measure
of character.
Does she turn on people lightly or arbitrarily, or
only on matters of substance and only when they present her with no
other choice?
Does she stoop to silent treatments, duplicity,
gossip, revenge and other emotional war crimes, or is she forthright and
civil in choosing to keep her distance?
Does she close herself
off permanently once crossed, or is she open to forgiveness based on the
relative severity of the harm done to her and/or on the sincerity of
efforts to make amends?
The reason the beauty-industrial complex kicks up an acidic taste of
contempt in so many of our mouths is that it can never quite capture the
intoxicating magic of real-life intrigue and attraction and romance... Real-life beauty is a blur of motion, a flash of disbelief, an assured
gesture, a long sigh that sings with intelligence and self-acceptance.
We can't capture in two dimensions, or reduce to a series of numbers,
the feelings that real human beings experience in the company of a woman
with the confidence to own exactly who she is, to show where she's
been, to listen closely and understand completely. A woman who loves her
life, who can laugh at herself, but whose head isn't crowded and noisy.
A woman who can focus and make room — real space — for you, and bathe
you in her generosity and her compassion...
The guy who won't sleep with you because
you're overweight is not a far cry from the guy who will only
sleep with you because you've got a hot body. Either way, you feel like
the main event, the REAL YOU, is a footnote... Everyone wants to be seen and loved for who they really are. Or they should want that, even if they can't want it, deep down inside, because they don't love themselves enough to believe that they are enough.
There's nothing like being loved for exactly who you are. This is not
outside of your reach, or anybody's reach. Not to state the obvious,
but men who like you for YOU roll with whatever you're serving up. Men
like to be turned on (hello, understatement), and if they dig the cut of
your jib, they are going to find something hot about you to focus on.
They are not sitting at their desks with a copy of Photoshop, zooming in
on problem areas.
So
don't go on a crash diet just to find love. Don’t tell yourself that
you'll only deserve love once you starve yourself for a while. Even if
you're wildly successful at losing weight and then wildly successful at
finding a man, you'll still be at risk of wasting a decade dating men
who have no interest in the real magic of you, beneath your rocking-hot
ass.
Here's one practical thing I do want you to do: 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...
It's
okay. Some people won't like you. Some people will reject you. That's
fine. That happens to everyone. The goal is to adapt, to learn not to
take it personally. You know in your heart that you're not looking for
just anyone. You're looking for someone who is turned on by YOU — your
charms and your flaws and all of the magic inside of you. Maybe there
are only a few people out there who can really appreciate YOU. That's
okay. You don't need to appeal to everyone, or even 90 percent of the
guys out there. You're hunting a rare species. Most of us are. Recognize
that and don't read into every rejection.
And while I'm excerpting: this is from a (LARB)
review of Lena Dunham's book:
The hyphenated word “self-involved” describes any story that involves
the self. Yet the term is wielded mostly against women with an interest
in expressing their experiences in a direct manner, without filtering
their reflections through layers of metaphor, or packing them into a
serious historical context, or lacing them with literary references, or
intellectualizing so relentlessly that every shred of emotion is ground
to a fine dust. Women writers can’t tell a few simple stories — “Here’s
what happened to me and here’s how it felt” — the way Chuck Klosterman
or David Sedaris might, without inspiring the herd to pull out their
poison pens and scrawl those same words: SELF-INVOLVED.
and
In one chapter, for instance, she explains that she somewhat
recklessly assumed that she was smart enough, and practical enough, to
endure the company of a guy who treated her badly. She figured she could
maintain “a strong sense of self-respect” even while putting up with an
overbearing, detached boyfriend. The resulting insights are deceptively
simple, but they resonate, thanks to Dunham’s straightforward
conversational style:
When someone shows you how little you mean
to them and you keep coming back for more, before you know it you start
to mean less to yourself. You are not made up of compartments! You are
one whole person! What gets said to you gets said to all of you, ditto what gets done.
Wow.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the
abstainer-moderator. I've become more of a moderator since I've stopped caring. Sometimes just a little bit of something is perfect.
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