Entries for July 2020
At John Lewis’s funeral yesterday, Barack Obama delivered a eulogy for his friend and mentor, praising him for his achievements in the struggle for civil rights. He also took the opportunity to suggest what politicians might do to honor Lewis and to continue his struggle, beyond just words. From the text of his speech:
If politicians want to honor John, and I’m so grateful for the legacy of work of all the Congressional leaders who are here, but there’s a better way than a statement calling him a hero. You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for. And by the way, naming it the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, that is a fine tribute. But John wouldn’t want us to stop there, trying to get back to where we already were. Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching to make it even better.
By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance.
By adding polling places, and expanding early voting, and making Election Day a national holiday, so if you are someone who is working in a factory, or you are a single mom who has got to go to her job and doesn’t get time off, you can still cast your ballot.
By guaranteeing that every American citizen has equal representation in our government, including the American citizens who live in Washington, D.C. and in Puerto Rico. They are Americans.
By ending some of the partisan gerrymandering — so that all voters have the power to choose their politicians, not the other way around.
And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.
There’s some really good stuff in this profile of Choire Sicha. “Not meddling with talent and not diluting great ideas by committee are two smart strategies in a creative workplace that are rarely deployed successfully.”
The Auralnauts, who have rejiggered the dialogue and sounds from your favorite movies with hilarious results (most notably Star Wars), have reimagined Bane from The Dark Knight Rises as a coronavirus mask advocate for their latest video.
Do I look like I live in fear of anything?! I’m wearing this mask for you, the people of Gotham, who, I can’t help but notice, are not social distancing!
A new study argues for a greater appreciation of hedonism in our lives. “Enjoying short-term pleasurable activities that don’t lead to long-term goals contributes at least as much to a happy life as self-control.”
In a piece for Essence, prison industrial complex abolitionists Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie challenge us to consider whether arresting and prosecuting the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor (or George Floyd or Elijah McClain) will result in justice.
Beyond strategic assessments of what is most likely to bring justice, ultimately, we must choose to support collective responses that align with our values. Demands for arrests and prosecutions of killer cops are inconsistent with demands to #DefundPolice because they have proven to be sources of violence not safety. We can’t claim the system must be dismantled because it is a danger to Black lives and at the same time legitimize it by turning to it for justice. As Angela Y. Davis points out, “we have to be consistent” in our analysis, and not respond to violence in a way that compounds it. We need to use our radical imaginations to come up with new structures of accountability beyond the system we are working to dismantle.
Noting that “turning away from systems of policing and punishment doesn’t mean turning away from accountability”, Kaba and Ritchie argue that use of a reparations framework would be more effective in delivering justice to Taylor’s family and in preventing future killings and violence by police.
Under a reparations framework Breonna’s family — and all of us — are also entitled to more than an individualized response to what is a systemic problem. We are entitled to immediate cessation of the actions that caused her death — no knock warrants, to be sure, but also short knock warrants, and dangerous drug raids in all their forms. And all of us are entitled to non-repetition, an end to the conditions that produced her death, including an end to the drug war that killed her, and the forces of gentrification that brought police into her neighborhood. It is long past time for an approach to drug use that saves lives instead of ending them — whether in a raid or in a cell — and a reckoning with the ways in which economic policies are driving deadly policing practices.
Read the entire piece at Essence.
“Screen time expert” Anya Kamenetz reflects on what she’s learned about kids & screens during the intense pandemic lockdown time. “Lean into video chat and real-time interactions. And play games, watch TV and videos together as a family.”
TheirTube lets you see YouTube recommended videos for preppers, liberals, climate deniers, fruitarians, conservatives, etc. Here’s the climate deniers home page from a couple of days ago:
Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas. Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real Youtube users who experienced being inside a recommendation bubble through recreating a Youtube account with a similar viewing history.
The simulator was developed by Tomo Kihara after he got into an argument with someone who lived in a completely different filter bubble:
This whole project started when I was in a heated discussion with a person who thought climate change was a hoax and 9/11 was a conspiracy. Through conversations with him, I was surprised to learn that he thought everyone’s YouTube feed had the same information as his own feed. When we showed each other our YouTube homepages, we were both shocked. They were radically different. And it got me thinking about the need for a tool to step outside of information bubbles.
The project is open-sourced on GitHub so you can make your own personas, etc. (via craig mod)
Update: Leveraging Twitter’s lists functionality, Vicariously lets you see the timelines of other Twitter users. And not only that, but you can merge the timelines of several users, only the mutual follows of those users, and other options.
Ever since O, The Oprah Magazine launched back in 2000, founder Oprah Winfrey has been featured on every single cover. Until now. For the September issue, the magazine is featuring an illustration of Breonna Taylor, who was murdered in her apartment in March by three Louisville police officers.
Winfrey writes in an introduction to the issue:
I think about Breonna Taylor often. She was the same age as the two daughter-girls from my school in South Africa who’ve been quarantining with Stedman and me since March. In all their conversations I feel the promise of possibilities.
Their whole lives shine with the light of hopefulness. That was taken away from Breonna in such a horrifying manner.
Imagine if three unidentified men burst into your home while you were sleeping. And your partner fired a gun to protect you. And then mayhem.
What I know for sure: We can’t be silent. We have to use whatever megaphone we have to cry for justice.
And that is why Breonna Taylor is on the cover of O magazine.
I cry for justice in her name.
The illustration of Taylor is by Dallas digital artist Alexis Franklin.
Update: Franklin wrote about the process of working on Taylor’s portrait.
Working as a digital portrait artist, I reimagine an existing image and can quickly switch moods or colors. The original photo is one Breonna took herself and has been featured in the news many times. Looking at it, I see an innocence, simple but powerful. It was critical for me to retain that. And there was a sparkle in Breonna’s eyes-a young Black woman posing in her Louisville EMS shirt, happy to be alive.
The funeral of US Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis will be held today in Atlanta, GA. Before he died, Lewis wrote an essay to be published posthumously. From the NY Times, Together, You Can Redeem the Soul of Our Nation by John Lewis.
Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble. Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.
You must also study and learn the lessons of history because humanity has been involved in this soul-wrenching, existential struggle for a very long time. People on every continent have stood in your shoes, though decades and centuries before you. The truth does not change, and that is why the answers worked out long ago can help you find solutions to the challenges of our time. Continue to build union between movements stretching across the globe because we must put away our willingness to profit from the exploitation of others.
Though I may not be here with you, I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. In my life I have done all I can to demonstrate that the way of peace, the way of love and nonviolence is the more excellent way. Now it is your turn to let freedom ring.
I quite like this work by New Zealand artist Joshua Davison, who uses a palette knife to build these sculptural paintings of flowers. Mmmm, gradients. (via colossal)
One of the downsides of running a laundry shop is sometimes people drop off their clothes to be cleaned and they never come back to pick them up or, crucially, to pay the bill for services already rendered. About a month ago, Reef Chang came up with the idea of styling his octogenarian grandparents in some of the forgotten clothes from their Taiwan laundry shop and posted the results to Instagram. The internet, starving for positivity in the midst of global turmoil, responded energetically to the upstart modeling careers of Chang Wan-ji and Hsu Sho-er. The NY Times reports:
They are naturals in front of the camera. Ms. Hsu, 84, exudes the haughtiness of a supermodel but retains an air of playfulness. Mr. Chang, 83, is the perfect foil, complementing his wife’s swagger with a chill disposition while rocking bountiful eyebrows.
“His eyebrows really are something else,” Ms. Hsu said smiling in an interview in the rear of the laundry shop, next to a small shrine to the earth god Tudigong, a common feature of traditional Taiwanese homes.
The clothes they model are eclectic, funky and fun. Both can be seen in matching laced sneakers, and jauntily perched caps and hats. He sometimes sports brightly colored shades. One photo shows her leaning coolly against a giant washing machine, arms crossed, as he casually holds the open door, grinning. They pose at a place they know well — their shop, which provides an industrious backdrop of customers’ laundry, stacked and rolled into plastic bundles or hanging from racks.
Check out the couple’s continuing fashion journey on Instagram.
What Vermont and Its History Might Teach the Nation About Handling the Coronavirus. Whatever the reason for the state’s success during the pandemic so far, I feel very lucky to be living here right now.
A compilation of TV news clips of people saying “mask debate” (which sounds very much like another unrelated word when spoken — try saying it out loud right now to see what I mean), stitched together by the folks at Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. It feels good to laugh at infuriating things sometimes.
BTW, the actual debate over masks will continue to wane — science and then culture will win most people over and it’ll just become a normal thing that most people do in public all the time, like wearing shoes or carrying a bag.
Filmmaker Errol Morris has uploaded the entire two-season run of his 2000-2001 TV series First Person to YouTube for free viewing: season 1 playlist, season 2 playlist. Each of the show’s 17 episodes is a one-on-one interview with someone who Morris finds fascinating, shot in the style that would find a wider audience and greater critical acclaim in The Fog of War two years later.
In the first season, Morris interviewed Temple Grandin about slaughterhouse design:
And Tony Mendez, former espionage expert for the CIA, whose work was the subject of the 2012 film Argo:
In season two, he profiled Josh Harris, one of the first internet celebrities:
Again, you can find every episode of First Person on YouTube: season 1, season 2.
Update: There’s an episode of First Person that has not been uploaded to YouTube: the one about Tanya Corrin (more on her here). That episode is also not listed on Morris’s site. I wonder what the story is here? (thx, @endquote)
The Washington Post recently ran a profile of DC-area resident Dan Smith. Smith is 88 years old, participated in the March on Washington, and, along with other activists, crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. He is also the living child of a former enslaved person.
The whipping post. The lynching tree. The wagon wheel. They were the stories of slavery, an inheritance of fear and dread, passed down from father to son.
The boy, barely 5, would listen, awed, as his father spoke of life in Virginia, where he had been born into bondage on a plantation during the Civil War and suffered as a child laborer afterward.
As unlikely as it might seem, that boy, Daniel Smith, is still alive at 88, a member of an almost vanished demographic: The child of someone once considered a piece of property instead of a human being.
Smith is an example of The Great Span, the link across seemingly long periods of history by individual humans. In this case, just two people span almost two-thirds the history of the United States, linking slavery and the Civil War to the civil rights movement and eventually to George Floyd. 155 years may seem like a long time, but Smith’s story is a testament to how slow progress has been in the struggle for social justice for Black Americans. After all, up until earlier this year the US government was still paying out a Civil War pension to the daughter of a former Confederate and US soldier.
See also an eyewitness to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln lived to be a guest on a television game show and 106-year-old Virginia McLaurin dances in the White House with the Obamas. (via @tinmanic)
A new study may show why SARS-CoV-2 causes a temporary loss of smell and taste. “SARS-CoV-2 infection is unlikely to permanently damage olfactory neural circuits and lead to persistent anosmia.”
I Am a Scientist is an effort to introduce children to scientists outside of the narrow stereotypes that our culture typically offers (old, male, white, nerdy). They’re doing this through “scientist-of-the-month toolkits” that tell stories about contemporary working scientists who embody an “incredible range of personalities, interests, backgrounds, and pursuits”. From a blog post about the program:
Science has been the driving force in the modernization of the world as we know it, yet science as an industry has failed to adequately diversify with the times. While the new digital age offers opportunities to expand interest in and appeal of STEM careers, many barriers still hinder equitable access for all students. Conversations of famous scientists often draw answers such as “Albert Einstein” and “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. While accurate references of scientific leaders, the lack of diversity in the public image of scientists can contribute to the lack of diversity in STEM fields.
Introducing the “I Am A Scientist” initiative, which provides opportunities for students, specifically those in Junior High School and High School, to interact with the science and stories of today’s scientists-breaking down barriers like race, gender, and personal interests.
The program’s collection of classroom toolkits provide real-life stories of modern scientists, classroom resources, posters, career resources, and more. The initiative aims to help students engage with scientists that may look, act, or think like them, and are making great strides in remarkable fields that are often left out of career planning discussions. With featured scientists that range from multidimensional graduate students to globally recognized innovators at the top of their field, “I Am A Scientist” tunes into the power that comes from discovering a wide range of role models.
Ten years on from the release of Christopher Nolan’s Inception, Andrew Saladino of The Royal Ocean Film Society smartly traces the key influences of the film, rejecting the simplistic notion that Inception is just a rip-off of Paprika or The Matrix. Instead, he delves into long-standing themes in science fiction and other genres that Nolan is able to synthesize into something new. (Remember, everything is a remix.)
Also, kudos to Saladino to getting through an entire video on the ideas that influenced Inception without making an inception joke or reference, e.g. “Dark City incepted Nolan into including malleable architecture”. Clearly I could not have resisted.
An oral history of Quokka Sports. This team did incredible, experimental things on the web back in the mid-90s.
Estelle Caswell talks to Tony Hawk and architectural historian Iain Borden (author of
Skateboarding and the City) about some of skateboarding’s most iconic spots and how skate architecture has changed over the years, from sidewalks to empty swimming pools in the desert to home-built halfpipes to “if you can see it you can skate it” structures (curbs, handrails, hydrants) all over cities.
Plus, their reference list of historic skateboard videos should keep you occupied for several hours/days/lifetimes.
Matthew Highton is recreating the opening credit sequences of TV shows using only stock video footage. Here’s the intro to Friends and (my favorite) the Duck Tales intro:
He’s also done Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Happy Days, The Young Ones, and the OC. Check out the entire playlist on YouTube or his thread on Twitter.
From We Can Eliminate Covid-19 if We Want To by Andy Slavitt:
We can virtually eliminate the virus any time we decide to. We can be back to a reasonably normal existence: schools, travel, job growth, safer nursing homes and other settings. And we could do it in a matter of weeks. If we want to.
Take New Zealand. With its fancy curve and life back to normal. Why can’t we? Not fair, you say. It’s an island nation. Okay. What about Germany? Not an island nation, large, growing diversity. Don’t like that comparison? What about countries that have been in big trouble? There’s Italy, France, and Spain. Those countries had it reasonably bad the same time we did. In fact, pick virtually any country you want.
But don’t tell me the United States can’t take action if we want to. And we can’t face the families of 150,000 people who didn’t have to die and tell them this had to happen. And I think it’s why our national political leaders won’t go near these families and the grieving process.
The good news — and it is good news — is we are always four to six weeks from being able to do what countries around the world have done.
I know this article is supposed to be hopeful and optimistic, but people have known what to do about Covid-19 since at least March. Instead the United States has not done it and indeed has done mostly the opposite. The “we” that are supposed to decide to lead this effort won’t because they don’t want to put in the work (it’s easier to blame the virus, Democrats, and China), they don’t want to just give money to people to stay home (a huge no-no for Republicans), and they don’t care that much about who is dying (urbanites, low-income, the elderly, Black & brown people).
As long as Republicans control the Senate and White House, the current scattershot approach of each state/county/city/person deciding what is best (or most in their self-interest) is what we’re stuck with. Treatments will improve, vaccines will be developed, many people will do the right thing and mostly stay home for many more months (sacrificing their mental health to do so), and Covid-19 will eventually come under control, but hundreds of thousands more people will die, many more will recover but carry chronic illnesses for years, vital years of the survivors’ lives will have been lost, and we will collectively grieve these losses for generations.
The kids and I were talking about how slow motion video works the other day, so I was happy to see this new video from Phil Edwards detailing how the technique works and its history in cinema, from Eadweard Muybridge to Wes Anderson and from Seven Samurai to The Matrix.
I am an unabashed fan of slow motion; you can check out dozens of slow motion videos I have posted over the years, including this video of Alan Rickman dramatically drinking tea.
“Where Is My Name?” is a campaign by women in Afghanistan to be able to freely use their names in public. “Women are generally only referred to as the mother, daughter or sister of the eldest male in their family…”
Magnum Photos and Vogue are teaming up for a week-long print sale to benefit the NAACP.
Solidarity, the July 2020 Square Print Sale, will bring together over 100 images by international visual artists in support of the NAACP. In a year of global societal and political upheaval that has seen the Black Lives Matter cause taken up around the world as well as hundreds of millions facing government restrictions on movement, this theme challenges participating photographers to reflect upon the power of togetherness in tumultuous times.
The photographers and their subjects include bold-faced names like Muhammad Ali, Angela Davis, Bruce Davidson, Barack Obama, and Robert Capa, but there is strong work throughout from amazing photographers all over the world. Each print is $100 and either signed by the photographer or stamped by their estate and 50% of the proceeds will go to the NAACP. Check out the full selection here; the sale ends on Aug 2.
Above from top to bottom, activist Angela Davis by Philippe Halsman, Sapphire by Khalik Allah, and Groupe Acrobatique de Tanger by Hassan Hajjaj. (via colossal)
How Police Unions Fight Reform, a long piece in the New Yorker by William Finnegan. “Imagine a nurses’ union that hated patients, that went on TV and talked about how much trouble the patients give them.”
From Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, a list of 10 Ways To Reduce Our Reliance On Policing And Make Our Communities Safer For Everyone, which includes proposals like having mental health and social workers to respond to crises, have crime labs operate independently of law enforcement, and replacing cops in schools with counselors & safety coaches.
For children growing up during the era of mass incarceration, seeing armed officers in their schools is commonplace. Federal grants have supported more and more cops in schools. Federal programs like the Community Oriented Policing Services (“COPS”) have provided millions of dollars to hire and train local police, including police in schools.
Police officers do not have specialized training in adolescent or childhood development. They are not mental health experts, social workers with licensed degrees, psychologists, or school counselors. They are not educators. To be clear, school resource officers are career law enforcement officers, with arresting authority, and a license to carry a weapon. Police officers patrol school hallways just like they do city streets. More than one and a half million students attend schools with an SRO, but no counselor.
There are better, safer, and cheaper alternatives. In 2016, Intermediate School District 287, a school west of the Twin Cities with a high concentration of students with special needs and mental health needs that can result in behavior issues, replaced their school resource officers with Student Safety Coaches. The Student Safety Coaches specialize in mental health, restorative justice, de-escalation, and building positive relationships with their students. Arrests decreased by 80 percent in the pilot school after implementation of the program.
The common, and commonsense, thread through all of these proposals is to replace armed, untrained responders who make difficult situations less safe with people & organizations that are specifically trained to help people in distress or crisis.
See also Police Abolition: The Growing Movement to Defund the Police.
A new poll indicates that “an increasingly broad majority of Americans are wearing masks in public”. The numbers are up significantly since June. Common sense and public health are winning out. Thanks for wearing a mask! Keep going!
The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter is not even at its closest distance to the Sun and its telescope has already captured some images that reveal new information about our star, including features called “campfires” that are too small to have been captured by previous instruments. From the description of the video embedded above:
This animation shows a series of close-up views captured by the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) at wavelengths of 17 nanometers, showing the upper atmosphere of the Sun, or corona, with a temperature of around 1 million degrees.
These images reveal a multitude of small flaring loops, erupting bright spots and dark, moving fibrils. A ubiquitous feature of the solar surface, uncovered for the first time by these images, have been called ‘campfires’. They are omnipresent miniature eruptions that could be contributing to the high temperatures of the solar corona and the origin of the solar wind.
The Solar Orbiter can also peek around the back side of the Sun for the first time:
“Right now, we are in the part of the 11-year solar cycle when the Sun is very quiet,” says Sami Solanki, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, and PHI Principal Investigator. “But because Solar Orbiter is at a different angle to the Sun than Earth, we could actually see one active region that wasn’t observable from Earth. That is a first. We have never been able to measure the magnetic field at the back of the Sun.”
As revealing as these first images are, at its closest approach later in the mission the Solar Orbiter’s resolving power will roughly double. Can’t wait to see what else it turns up.
The Atlantic’s Sarah Zhang has A Vaccine Reality Check for us.
Biologically, a vaccine against the COVID-19 virus is unlikely to offer complete protection. Logistically, manufacturers will have to make hundreds of millions of doses while relying, perhaps, on technology never before used in vaccines and competing for basic supplies such as glass vials. Then the federal government will have to allocate doses, perhaps through a patchwork of state and local health departments with no existing infrastructure for vaccinating adults at scale. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has led vaccine distribution efforts in the past, has been strikingly absent in discussions so far — a worrying sign that the leadership failures that have characterized the American pandemic could also hamper this process. To complicate it all, 20 percent of Americans already say they will refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine, and with another 31 percent unsure, reaching herd immunity could be that much more difficult.
I am the least anti-vaxxer person in the world, but I have to say that getting a vaccine for Covid-19 that was rushed through trials in time for the election (October surprise!) and signed off by a Trump administration that has completely politicized science does not sound like something I want to go near. Which, for me personally, is a really really depressing thing to even think.
Update: I got a lot of flack for suggesting that I’d be skeptical of a Trump-approved vaccine rushed to market in time for the election (a very specific set of circumstances). But his buddy Putin is attempting something similar in Russia (skipping phase 3 trials), so if you don’t think Trump can try to bully the FDA and CDC into signing off on a vaccine that hasn’t been fully tested — perhaps made by a company whose CEO has donated millions to a Trump SuperPAC? — in order to salvage his reelection chances, I suggest that you haven’t paying proper attention over the past 4 years.
Update: A poll suggests that many Americans across the political spectrum are worried about a politicized FDA being forced to approve a Covid-19 vaccine before it’s adequately tested.
Seventy-eight percent of Americans worry the Covid-19 vaccine approval process is being driven more by politics than science, according to a new survey from STAT and the Harris Poll, a reflection of concern that the Trump administration may give the green light to a vaccine prematurely.
The response was largely bipartisan, with 72% of Republicans and 82% of Democrats expressing such worries, according to the poll, which was conducted last week and surveyed 2,067 American adults.
The sentiment underscores rising speculation that President Trump may pressure the Food and Drug Administration to approve or authorize emergency use of at least one Covid-19 vaccine prior to the Nov. 3 election, but before testing has been fully completed.
Donald Trump’s idiotic brag about how well he did on a cognitive test (“Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”) set to Daft Punk’s Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.
You just have to laugh because if you actually stop to think about how much harm this man has done and will continue to do in his remaining time in office, the incandescent rage might make you pass out.
A photo of Comet Neowise photobombed/ruined by SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. Yuck. I know most people on Earth can’t even see the night sky anymore because of light pollution, but this sucks.
Earlier this week, Republican Representative Ted Yoho accosted Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the steps of the Capitol Building and called her “disgusting”, “crazy”, “dangerous”, and, as a parting shot, a “fucking bitch”. After Yoho offered a non-apology on the House floor, Ocasio-Cortez responded to both the incident and his remarks in a short speech before the House.
The video is only 10 minutes long — I urge you to watch the whole thing if you haven’t seen it. It’s masterful. Here are some excerpts from the transcript.
This is not new, and that is the problem. Mr. Yoho was not alone. He was walking shoulder to shoulder with Representative Roger Williams, and that’s when we start to see that this issue is not about one incident. It is cultural. It is a culture of lack of impunity, of accepting of violence and violent language against women, and an entire structure of power that supports that. Because not only have I been spoken to disrespectfully, particularly by members of the Republican Party and elected officials in the Republican Party, not just here, but the President of the United States last year told me to go home to another country, with the implication that I don’t even belong in America. The governor of Florida, Governor DeSantis, before I even was sworn in, called me a “whatever that is”. Dehumanizing language is not new, and what we are seeing is that incidents like these are happening in a pattern. This is a pattern of an attitude towards women and dehumanization of others.
…
I do not need Representative Yoho to apologize to me. Clearly he does not want to. Clearly when given the opportunity he will not and I will not stay up late at night waiting for an apology from a man who has no remorse over calling women and using abusive language towards women, but what I do have issue with is using women, our wives and daughters, as shields and excuses for poor behavior. Mr. Yoho mentioned that he has a wife and two daughters. I am two years younger than Mr. Yoho’s youngest daughter. I am someone’s daughter too. My father, thankfully, is not alive to see how Mr. Yoho treated his daughter. My mother got to see Mr. Yoho’s disrespect on the floor of this House towards me on television and I am here because I have to show my parents that I am their daughter and that they did not raise me to accept abuse from men.
As a reminder, properly apologizing to someone requires:
1. An expression of regret - this, usually, is the actual “I’m sorry.”
2. An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification).
3. An acknowledgment of responsibility.
4. A declaration of repentance.
5. An offer of repair.
6. A request for forgiveness.
As Ocasio-Cortez correctly notes, Yoho’s attempt does not make the grade.
And so what I believe is that having a daughter does not make a man decent. Having a wife does not make a decent man. Treating people with dignity and respect makes a decent man, and when a decent man messes up as we all are bound to do, he tries his best and does apologize. Not to save face, not to win a vote, he apologizes genuinely to repair and acknowledge the harm done so that we can all move on.
Lastly, what I want to express to Mr. Yoho is gratitude. I want to thank him for showing the world that you can be a powerful man and accost women. You can have daughters and accost women without remorse. You can be married and accost women. You can take photos and project an image to the world of being a family man and accost women without remorse and with a sense of impunity. It happens every day in this country. It happened here on the steps of our nation’s Capitol. It happens when individuals who hold the highest office in this land admit, admit to hurting women and using this language against all of us.
Again, I urge you to watch the whole thing — it’s full of powerful truths expertly and passionately delivered. Among many thoughts I had while watching it, one in particular kept rising in my mind: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will one day be President of the United States and we will be very lucky to have her.
Update: Ocasio-Cortez didn’t write out her speech ahead of time; she jotted down a few notes just minutes before she started speaking.
Many have asked me if my speech was pre-written. The answer is no. But in some ways, yes. Yes because this speech was a recounting of thoughts that so many women and femme people have carried since the time we were children. It flowed because every single one of us has lived this silent script: stay silent (why?), keep your head down (for whom?), suck it up (to whose benefit?). But my chosen words were largely extemporaneous. I got to the House floor about ten minutes before my speech and scribbled down some quick notes after reflecting on what had transpired over the last few days. Pictured here are all the notes I had, and from there I improvised my composition and spoke live.
Update: In a profile of Ocasio-Cortez in Vanity Fair, a new detail in this story:
This part hasn’t been reported: The next day Ocasio-Cortez approached Yoho and told him, “You do that to me again, I won’t be so nice next time.” She felt his actions had violated a boundary, stepping “into the zone of harassment, discrimination.” His mocking response, straight out of Veep: “Oh, boo-hoo.” Publicly, Yoho doubled down, issuing a non-apology on the House floor, citing his wife and daughters as character witnesses.
As part of their NYC Dance Project and in partnership with Harper’s Bazaar, photographers Ken Browar and Deborah Ory photographed Misty Copeland, a principal dancer with the prestigious American Ballet Theatre, recreating scenes from the works of French artist Edgar Degas. Above, Copeland poses as the subject of Degas’ La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (Little Dancer of Fourteen Years) dressed in a $9000 Alexander McQueen dress & corset.
The Harper’s piece vaguely hints at his representation of the ballerinas being “far from sympathetic” but as Julia Fiore wrote in The Sordid Truth behind Degas’s Ballet Dancers, the reality of the Parisian ballet that he was depicting was unsettling.
The formerly upright ballet had taken on the role of unseemly cabaret; in Paris, its success was almost entirely predicated on lecherous social contracts. Sex work was a part of a ballerina’s reality, and the city’s grand opera house, the Palais Garnier, was designed with this in mind. A luxuriously appointed room located behind the stage, called the foyer de la danse, was a place where the dancers would warm up before performances. But it also served as a kind of men’s club, where abonnés — wealthy male subscribers to the opera — could conduct business, socialize, and proposition the ballerinas.
Degas himself did not partake in this scene; he was a misogynist celibate, a Belle Époque incel if you will:
For Degas, the fact that young dancers had sex with old men read not as abuse on the part of the latter but as sin on the part of the former. He assumed girls’ transactions with powerful men meant they could pull strings from behind the scenes, a thought that elicited both horror and fascination. Degas clearly saw something vital in his recurring subjects, who spurred quotes from him like, “I have locked away my heart in a pink satin slipper.”
Degas’ disdain for women — and ballerinas in particular — is writ across “Little Dancer” itself, whose sculptural features were altered to emphasize van Goethem’s moral degeneracy. Degas subscribed to physiognomy, which presumes that criminal behaviors are passed on genetically and thus manifest in physical features. And so he flattened van Goethem’s skull and stretched her chin so she appeared especially “primitive,” a visual reflection of an internal state.
The subject of La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans, Marie van Goethem, did not remain a ballerina for that long after posing for the sculpture:
Marie van Goethem was the “petit rat” who posed for the sculpture, and she likely engaged in the sexually predatory economy of the ballet world to survive. Van Goethem disappeared from the public eye shortly after the sculpture was completed; after being late to a rehearsal, the Paris Opera Ballet dismissed her. The teenager probably returned home to follow in the footsteps of her mother — a laundress and likely prostitute — and older sister, who was also a sex worker.
I wonder if the photographers were aware of this context when taking these photos? Is there something about the photos, about Copeland’s life story or status as a prominent Black ballerina, or about dressing her in thousands of dollars of contemporary couture that subverts Degas’ work and its themes? If so, I’d be fascinated to read an expert analysis that explored these issues. (via cup of jo)
What You Need To Know About The Battle of Portland. This is a good summary of the situation in Portland written by someone who “has worked as a conflict journalist in Iraq and Ukraine”.
Isamu Yamamoto is 17 years old and has been one of the world’s best freestyle skateboarders for years — he won his first world championship in 2014 at the age of 11. He started skating because he saw a video of Rodney Mullen and now Mullen says of Yamamoto:
The way he links his tricks together and the speed of them — it’s beautiful to watch. I would dare say that not many could do that, in that way, if they tried.
The three videos above show off Yamamoto’s seemingly effortless virtuosity on a skateboard; from top to bottom: a session from 2019, a 2017 short film, and his routine for the World Freestyle Round-Up, held virtually due to the pandemic — he ended up finishing second. (via @cdevroe)
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