Big, annotated Thursday roundup

Erdogan's Putin move.

Britain's rape epidemic.

Doctors (i.e., not just hippies) are concerned about antibiotics in livestock.

Hog farms are making people sick (people who are disproportionately non-white).

Science is inherently human, and humans have to actively, deliberately check their biases. Methodology is important, and the Hollaback video was a science fail in that respect.

The science-worship community would rather slam Bill Nye than accept as legitimate his doubts about GMOs.

Virgin Galactic is arguably more about status and consumption than exploration.

Racism is (often) class-blind, and it's easy to dismiss data points as isolated incidents when you're not living it. That's not different from many dudes' reactions to harassment.

Scalzi on Ghomeshi. When will it end?

The workologist on how, no, harassment is not just part of "being a man." Just because street harassment is age-old, doesn't make it acceptable;* it makes it a power play:

It seems to me that some men will target whomever they think they can safely fuck with, and that women are always deemed fuck-with-able.

*I asterisked the Elon James White piece because it's a must-read.

I'm not even going to link to the sexism-in-science-is-dead op-ed, but I will link to the harassment story from Yale.

Cultural appropriation is a terrible thing to do, but Robin Givhan explains it brilliantly.

Re: Lena Dunham, read this and especially this. I think Roxane Gay addresses the issue in a very comprehensive, nuanced way. Note: I don't have a dog in the LD fight. I don't watch her show, I don't identify with her demographic, and I she's not my feminist icon. From that impartial perspective, taking the thinkpieces has been interesting.

Please don't do any of this, not least because the concept of the friend-zone is bullshit. Whoever hexjackal is, this is awesome:

Friendzoning is bullshit because girls are not machines that you put Kindness Coins into until sex falls out.

How to listen to your kids' first-world problems without dismissing or encouraging them.

This woman is married to my mom! If you can help it, stay away from people who try to invalidate your feelings. Here's how to address concerns without invalidating someone else's feelings.

Catholic and Jewish guilt are not any guiltier than any other guilt:

There’s no link between guilt feelings and particular religious backgrounds, Dr. Tangney says. Her years of study show Protestants, Muslims, atheists and everyone else feel, on average, just as guilty or shameful as Catholics and Jews.

Women report feeling more guilt and shame than men, she says. But women generally report feeling more emotions than men, both positive and negative, with the exception of anger.

“We don’t know if women actually feel more guilty than men, or are more attuned to their feelings, or are more comfortable acknowledging them,” Dr. Tangney says.

How many of us have been here:

Or, it could be that your birthday is just the messenger, alerting you to the fact that your boyfriend has essentially checked out of the relationship. Or, it could be that your boyfriend is a taker who temporarily stepped out of that mode to reel you in, and, having succeeded, is showing his true self.

See my earlier link re: the history of Halloween (particularly Victorian Halloween): not only are sexy Halloween costumes not anti-feminist; they're full-out feminist. 

OMG who are these people?

This woman's politics didn't ruin her parenting; it's apparently her confusion about what the basic concepts underlying her politics actually mean.

While I'm slamming people: this article is a train-wreck. I don't know where to start... only I do. First of all, ffs and for the fiftieth time, “radioactive” is not the key trait that makes an isotope (and yes, she should have used “isotope” instead of “element”) usable in a nuclear weapon. A lot of things are radioactive. Not a lot of things are fissile.

But it’s this inapt jump to the “In the 1970s…” paragraph—where she again, incidentally, misuses “radioactive”—and where she’s really all over the place. She jumps from surplus plutonium to nuclear waste in general, and procedes to conflate the two (not for the last time in a short article). She never seems to make clear—in her hasty jump, or perhaps her editor's poor judgment—how or why commercial nuclear power leads to plutonium accumulation. Also, there is more in nuclear waste than plutonium. Her “that means that today” doesn’t mean what she says it means, or just doesn’t follow.

It gets worse after the picture. First: it’s not true that no state or city wants to be known as the site of nuclear waste (Texas has been inviting it). Later, she randomly brings uranium into the picture, which has nothing to do with anything (except her confusion about materials meant for weapons versus those produced as waste). She talks about advanced reactors, and implies that somehow those with advanced safety features are going to “make a dent” in existing plutonium supplies.

Okay I'm done. Read some better science writing, about triton.

Then read about how to correct mistakes without making someone feel stupid (which is more important in the classroom than on the internet, so I don't take back my "train-wreck" comment).

Confusion is conducive to learning. Indiscriminate praise is not:

A lot of employers and coaches have said, “My employees cannot get through the day without accolades and validation.” Even professional coaches have said they cannot give feedback without these people feeling that they’ve crushed them. We’ve created several generations now of very fragile individuals because they’ve been praised and hyped. And feel that anything but praise is devastating.