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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.

Reframe.js is a javascript plugin that makes unresponsive elements responsive.

When everything becomes a story, the value of concrete truth seems diminished. There’s too much going on in the world to dive this deep into something as frivolous as entertainment, you might say. Worse still, you can begin to treat politics — the hammer and forge of our national reality — as a similar form of “show.” Sure, seeking out entertainment is a perfectly human impulse; it feels joyless to sharpen yourself into a hypervigilant instrument, ever ready to poke a hole in these swelling mythologies; we all know those people, who are no fun. But when we feel ourselves becoming too consumed with mastering the language of whatever unreality is currently holding our gaze, it might not hurt to consider the overarching forces subtly directing our attention and prepare ourselves to step back if we’re not comfortable with benefiting less than they do.

Doing work that doesn’t exceed your ability has traditionally been the exception for software developers. We are so used to the feeling that we can do everything, anything, but unfortunately only relatively poorly and with low predictability, that it takes conscious effort to focus on doing what you know how to do. Especially if there isn’t a lot of continuity in the type of work that you do, it can be hard to recognize that even though you are fairly certain about a technical solution you’ve chosen, you don’t know enough about it for it to qualify as a Safe Bet. In fact, most of the work programmers do lives somewhere on the spectrum between those categories. If you want others to rely on you, it is better to underestimate your abilities and overestimate risks than to go in a direction that actually involves more uncertainty than you can justify.

Learn how to pronounce names correctly.

If Trump’s rallies operated according to affective dynamics, should we assume that online spaces work differently? Trump supporters did not vote for him because they were misinformed online—rather, they consumed and circulated misinformation because they loved Trump, because it was an enormously pleasurable thing to do, and because they imagined (correctly) that it drove the educated classes crazy. Like the rest of us, they deployed their abilities to reason and select information in accord with their affective investments, worldview, and sense of self. For better and for worse, digital technologies are rechanneling and amplifying these aspects of human nature that we all recognize, but have a difficult time integrating into our “infocentric” research models.

Some thoughts on "diversity" in sf/f and discovering that I'm apparently a "writer of colour" and all that. I never actually use these words myself, whether to refer to either myself or anybody else. Though at the same time I don't object to their use to refer to myself or anybody else either. It's complicated. … If essentialism is the pernicious idea that categories are more real than people, strategic essentialisms are a rhetorical technique when you’re aware that the essentialism in question is bullshit but you temporarily accept being identified with a category in order to achieve something, even if that something is just making a point. There are all sorts of good, practical reasons to collectivize identity in this way, but I think it works best when it’s goal-oriented and time-bound. Because when it’s not, then it can also mean just signing up to be reduced to a category for somebody else’s convenience.

Curated directory of the best store pages

Vanilla Javascript parallax library.

Reaching the unreachables is what RBMA is all about. It’s worrying. Especially when you consider what’s in the stuff.

It was due to a stupid thing done in a fit of panic that Fwadausi Bello altered her life forever.

All the things I should've told my students about being a Muslim and a woman and an American.

Create custom passes for Apple Wallet (formerly Passbook).

People who say karaoke is art are both precious and wrong. Karaoke is a sport. It involves turning art into a very fun and loud game.