Saturday roundup

Hi, guys! I'm back, with a new laptop, so I should be able to blog more regularly.

I feel odd taking a cheery tone in light of the Paris attacks. I have nothing to say about those apart from what's already been said, except that, if you're wondering why those and not Beirut, etc.--all of that. All of the attacks are tragic and devastating, but it hits closer to home when it's a city you know and love.

That said, here's your roundup.

Read about the link between lead and crime and think even more about how the gasoline industry tried to buy/threaten scientists and hide the truth from the public in order to protect their profits.

The odd campaign to save Tim Hunt.

Maybe more on this in another post, but please check out this entire thread.

[TW: sexual abuse, domestic violence] so, here's the thing about predators: they're good at making you ignore every single red flag.

— jay, literally who? (@jaythenerdkid) November 12, 2015

From the obituary of Rene Girard, renowned French social scientist:

Professor Girard’s central idea was that human motivation is based on desire. People are free, he believed, but seek things in life based on what other people want. Their imitation of those desires, which he termed mimesis, is imitated by others in turn, leading to escalating and often destructive competition.

His first work, published in French in 1961 and in English in 1965 as “Deceit, Desire, and the Novel,” introduced the idea of mimesis through readings of classic novels. Over time, the idea has been used to explain financial bubbles, where things of little intrinsic value are increasingly bid up in the hope of financial gain. It has also been cited to explain why people unsatisfied by high-status jobs pursue them anyway.

Look at the way people talk about, talk to, and refer to renowned economists who are women.

Look at the way people reduce renowned women (and the rest of us) to our reproductive status.

In the traditional worldview happiness is essentially private and selfish. Reasonable people pursue their self-interest, and when they do so successfully they are supposed to be happy. The very definition of what it means to be human is narrow, and altruism, idealism, and public life (except in the forms of fame, status, or material success) have little place on the shopping list. The idea that a life should seek meaning seldom emerges; not only are the standard activities assumed to be inherently meaningful, they are treated as the only meaningful options.

People lock onto motherhood as a key to feminine identity in part from the belief that children are the best way to fulfill your capacity to love, even though the list of monstrous, ice-hearted mothers is extensive. But there are so many things to love besides one’s own offspring, so many things that need love, so much other work love has to do in the world.

Love, love this:

And yet, when people ask me what I do, I’m sometimes tempted to answer “whatever I want.” This is not a boast — I have financial obligations like everyone else, and only myself to rely on for meeting them — so much as a statement of fact, and a reminder that I belong to the first generation of women for whom this can be a real truth. But it also feels like I’ve discovered some sort of secret — like, Oh my god, you guys, it’s so great over here and no one wants you to know about it.

and

Which is not to say it can’t also be really fucking hard to be alone, and sometimes deeply lonely in a soul-shaking sort of way. Inevitably there are the middle-of-the-nights when it is also terrifying. And sometimes it’s just plain exhausting. When you are the person free to do what you want, what you often end up doing is taking care of other people with less options. More than once in the past year I have crawled home to my empty apartment emotionally gutted and feeling like I’d been run over by a truck; thinking enviably it’d be worth it to be married just to have someone else who is obligated to deal with my family, and also cork the wine and load the dishwasher.

Fortunately, I’m old enough to know that people in marriages, and with children, feel all of these things (and how much worse is it to feel lonely in a relationship, which is something so few people talk about and so many experience) at one time or another. No matter how often we imagine marriage as the solution to women's problem, it is simply another way of living.

More--in continuity with last week's post--on women and sex.

I certainly identify with having done "so much holding," from this:

And why is it that the placeholders we choose — the dozen red roses, the fragrant white lilies, the long-stemmed French tulips — are so fleeting? Hold on to them for too long and you end up with a mess of petals, pollen and foul-smelling water...

This piece on beauty--specifically about being honest about it--leaves out the very important fact that beauty may be power, but it is an uneven, unreliable, unwieldy form of it.