Back in 2009 I began pestering friends and random strangers. I would walk up to them with a pen and a sheet of paper asking that they immediately draw me a men’s bicycle, by heart. Soon I found out that when confronted with this odd request most people have a very hard time remembering exactly how a bike is made. Some did get close, some actually nailed it perfectly, but most ended up drawing something that was pretty far off from a regular men’s bicycle.

I can’t imagine how I might have conceived of myself and my possibili­ties if, in my formative years, I had moved through a city where most things were named after women and many or most of the monuments were of powerful, successful, honored women.

What also makes O’Connor’s article so troubling is that he wraps the usual scurrilous myths about SNAP in a veneer of health promotion — a framing that’s sure to win over some left-leaning readers who’d otherwise recoil at the usual trumped-up claims about food stamps. Yet in the end, O’Connor’s health paternalism doesn’t just run aground morally, but empirically: the study provides no evidence that SNAP encourages soda purchasing, and no evidence that SNAP funds (as opposed to personal funds) were used to buy soft drinks. O’Connor writes a lot about sugar, and not much about social policy. So perhaps his main target here is the sugar industry. If so, he has thrown millions of food-insecure Americans — most of whom work or have significant disabilities — under the bus to advance his agenda. Just as political attacks on social protections are on the rise, the article panders to the worst stereotypes of “welfare,” ignoring the SNAP program’s many successes. In the process, it tells people who imagine the worst about food stamps that they’ve been right all along. Facts be damned.

How to fix Sierra not remembering SSH keys. As described in detail on https://openradar.appspot.com/27348363, macOS/OS X till Yosemite used to remember SSH keys added by command ssh-add -K . Unfortunately this way no longer works and command ssh-add -K in macOS Sierra no longer saves SSH keys in OS's keychain. As Apple Developer stated: "That’s expected. We re-aligned our behavior with the mainstream OpenSSH in this area."

Starter project for designing and testing HTML email templates

The United States has a rich history with effective uses of nonviolent resistance. It’s time to become familiar with it.

All throughout human history, there have been people who have been trying to establish a beloved community somewhere on the planet earth. And always where there've been people who try to establish a beloved community, there have also been people who oppose them.

Fashwave is championed on the same forums that gave voice to the so-called alt-right movement that aggressively supported Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, including the Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, and the National Policy Institute. It’s the intuitive musical expression of that movement’s less self-serious, more sardonic tone, and has roots in the online imageboards, video games, and sci-fi propagated among young, white racists on the outer perimeters of the internet. Just as the alt-right surprised mainstream observers this year by effectively organizing to advance its political vision, it has now set its sights on remaking culture, consolidating around and promoting a music scene it can call its own.

“Thomasson: noun \ to-ma-son \ a preserved architectural relic which serves no purpose”. We’ve all come across an example at one time or another– probably didn’t give it too much thought and surely had no idea these random urban oddities actually had a name, let alone an entire movement dedicated to observing them as conceptual art. That’s right, art. People have written books about Thomasson, formed street observation societies to find them (notably in Japan) and even identified a classification system of categories for them.

If you still want to make changes, understand that you are where you are not because you’re weak or you’re flawed, but because you’ve adapted to an environment that encourages you to drive instead of bike or walk, to watch TV instead of doing anything else. It’s a lot for three hours a week of gym time to counteract, Professor Wharton says. His suggestion is to go big. Don’t just swap half-and-half for skim milk, or take the stairs. Reorder your life to reflect your values and your priorities instead of just tinkering at the margins.

We are taught in school—to our everlasting disadvantage—that our elected officials, regardless of where they stand on various issues, are rational public servants who can be reasoned with. If we make enough polite phone calls, write enough letters, hold enough rallies, our voice will be heard. Nobody believes in this idealized version of our government other than progressives. (Conservatives are much more clear-eyed, and that’s why they win so often.)

Manage your local ‘learned words’ dictionary on macOS.

Since I forget how to do this or have problems every six months or so, and these instructions are concise and correct and always work.

A history of the first African American White House—and of what came next.

We all have the ability to blame others. It comes natural, feels powerful and cathartic, and is essential to a society that seeks to dismantle oppressive systems and those who oversee them. If we can do this, then we can all take part in the radical act of blaming ourselves for this year and the years to come. Give it currency. Rate, like, and subscribe to culpability to help reverse the flow of democracy.

You would go into a listening booth and peruse 3,000 popular songs dating as far back as the ’50s before purchasing individual singles (each priced from 75 cents to $1.50) for your own custom mixtape up to 90 minutes long, made in just five to ten minutes. … The music industry was fearful that the service would cannibalize album sales at a time when illegal home-taping reportedly accounted for $1.5 billion in revenue losses. But Garvin says there was evidence of much more business to be had from people who weren’t ready to shell out $20 for an album but would pay a dollar for a single; the iTunes Store, particularly when paired with the iPod, proved this.

Studies suggest that, like the RateMyProfessors rankings, student evaluations too reveal predictable patterns of gender bias (and likely biases regarding race, age, and sexual orientation as well), and yet it’s mandatory for instructors to submit to their assessment. Student evaluations are deeply embedded in the body of educational institutions both logistically and ideologically — so much so that one can’t even begin to critique them without seeming like one is trying to defraud students somehow, deny them an oversight that feels somehow to be “rightfully” theirs. Even as I write this I feel the need to perform within the ideological space they inscribe: I want to showcase their deliciously quantifiable numbers, the ones that prove that I’m a good instructor, or at least above average. These numbers are available to the system; they help me to keep my job. It’s going to be hard, over the next four years, to have a conversation about gender bias in student evaluations or about the conditions of part-time contingent faculty or about doing the hard work of making the tools of a liberal education more accessible to marginalized populations. It’s going to be hard, because it’s hard to have difficult conversations when it feels like you’re under assault; it’s hard to look critically at your colleagues when it feels like it’s time to lock arms against the oafish villains roaring at you.

Fantano is not unaware of his detractors, who range from viewers who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about to fellow critics who think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The things that make him a successful vlogger—his speed, his unpretentious humor, his willingness to review everything regardless of his genre fluency, his refusal to assume a deep understanding of an artist’s politics or feelings—are at odds with traditional print and online criticism. He brought up an interaction with a Pitchfork writer who eagerly introduced himself at South by Southwest. The writer told Fantano he was only joking when he previously wrote on Twitter, “Anthony Fantano makes me want to quit my job.” Every music writer we spoke to is at least aware of Fantano’s work—some of them find it dumb, and at any rate, don’t want to talk about it on the record. It doesn’t bother Fantano too much, but it does bother him. “It obviously took time and took a lot of effort,” he says of his work. “I would at least like to be treated with the same amount of legitimacy. That’s all.”

A brilliant piece of literary criticism for a novelette I loved and am looking forward to the next installment of. As a metaphor for acculturation into empire, this works almost too well. You can walk in the halls of empire, yes, as long as you're willing to accept invasive alien tentacles into your mind, to put alien needs above your own, to allow yourself to be instrumentalized.

A fully culturally authentic film requires having people of that culture at the helm; and that's not what Disney's done.

By making fun of professors who spoke in language that most people considered incomprehensible (“The Lesbian Phallus”), wealthy Ivy League graduates could pose as anti-elite. By mocking courses on writers such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, they made a racial appeal to white people who felt as if they were losing their country. As the 1990s wore on, because multiculturalism was associated with globalisation – the force that was taking away so many jobs traditionally held by white working-class people – attacking it allowed conservatives to displace responsibility for the hardship that many of their constituents were facing. It was not the slashing of social services, lowered taxes, union busting or outsourcing that was the cause of their problems. It was those foreign “others”.

This is a kind of neo-liberalism of the emotions, in which happiness is seen not as a response to our circumstances but as a result of our own individual mental effort, a reward for the deserving. The problem is not your sky-high rent or meager paycheck, your cheating spouse or unfair boss or teetering pile of dirty dishes. The problem is you. It is, of course, easier and cheaper to blame the individual for thinking the wrong thoughts than it is to tackle the thorny causes of his unhappiness. So we give inner-city schoolchildren mindfulness classes rather than engage with education inequality, and instruct exhausted office workers in mindful breathing rather than giving them paid vacation or better health care benefits.

Spoiler: It’s wage theft.

GIPHY is the platform that animates your world. Find the GIFs, Clips, and Stickers that make your conversations more positive, more expressive, and more you.

Shush is a utility app for Mac OS X to quickly mute and unmute your microphone using a hotkey.

‘A platform for collaborative research.’ On Are.na, you organically combine images, links, files and texts into collections (we call them channels). Use it collaboratively, publicly or privately. Once you get the hang of it, its dead-simple to use for just about any idea. Think of it as a connected archive of human knowledge.

Our Album of the Month for November is the Books' The Lemon of Pink. In these original liner notes, Jeremy D. Larson writes about the transformative patience the record brings to bear on listeners, who are rewarded for unpacking its multitude of charms.

Using WebPageTest to its fullest.

Customize admin columns, including inline editing, sorting, and custom fields.

What the different types of donuts are.