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We all participate in the propagation of gendered ideas in one way or another. Even ignoring your assigned gender and being an eclectic mix of traits that you don’t see as gendered can serve as a point of reference to people around you. Every aspect of a person can serve as a source of inspiration for others that helps unlock a part of themselves they weren’t aware of before, or it can serve as an example of what they are not. Every instance of identification is also an instance of a meme reproducing.

"In his 'photosonic' process, Dudon shines light through a series of semi-transparent, rotating discs that slow and modify the light waves’ frequencies; the resulting waveforms are picked up by photoelectric (solar-power) cells connected to standard analog amplifiers."

Each year people accept salaries less than what they deserve. It seems like employers always have the upper hand, but that doesn't have to be the case.

Underrated for most of her life, the author of "The Lottery" is at last experiencing a revival.

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One minute he was a hip-hop sensation starting a viral dance craze, the Shmoney Dance, and rhyming about guns and drugs and murder. The next he was locked up, indicted on a slew of charges involving… guns and drugs and murder. The government’s case against Bobby Shmurda, now heading to trial, raises all kinds of nagging questions, but none more troubling than this: Does the justice system fundamentally misunderstand the world of rap?

Is it really that hard, being a First World woman? Is it really so tough to have the career and the spouse and the pets and the herb garden and the core strengthening and the oh-I-just-woke-up-like-this makeup and the face injections and the Uber driver who might possibly be a rapist? Is it so hard to work ten hours for your rightful 77% of a salary, walk home past a drunk who invites you to suck his cock, and turn on the TV to hear the men who run this country talk about protecting you from abortion regret by forcing you to grow children inside your body?

Histories of discrimination can live on in digital platforms, and if they go unquestioned, they become part of the logic of everyday algorithmic systems.

Though many black folks joke about it, there is no such thing as “calling in black.” To call in black would be a radical act of self care, were it available to most black people. On the day after we have watched yet another black body be destroyed by modern day slave patrols, it would be helpful for us to be able to take a day away to process. To grieve. To hurt. To be angry. To try to once again come to grips with the fact that many people in this country, especially those in power, consider us disposable at best.

As with many famous samples, this coo has a storied history in pop music. The same baby has crawled its way onto several songs, from the Rascals’ “Look Around” (1969), to Prince’s “Delirious” (1982), to TNGHT’s “Bugg’n” (2012). It’s like the Wilhelm Scream of baby samples, and it even mirrors the cadence of that famed cinematic sound effect. But even the identity of the Wilhelm Screamer is known (it’s actor Sheb Wooley). Who made this baby coo? Where is this person now?

For as long as we’ve had kids on the Internet, we’ve worried about adults with bad intentions luring them into an in-person meeting. … The truth is that all available data sets indicate that young Americans are increasingly safe from accidental and intentional victimization alike. The people who are most likely to violate children are known to them: Acquaintances, peers, and, yes, parents. Strangers only commit 1 to 10 percent of child abuse. Almost no one wants to harm children, and the ones who do tend to target kids close to them.

Pokémon Go probably isn't going to change the world or anything, but for the brief period of time it is in the cultural zeitgeist, it is changing my small part of it. It is a reason to leave the hovel I call home. It is a reason to go places I haven't been before. It’s a reason to see all those friends I love and miss so much. Because of Pokémon Go, I have been able to meet and pet a lot of cute dogs and if nothing else, I am grateful for that. I texted my friend, Fontaine, about this game and told her that I’m so happy to finally have my Pokémon adventure. She called the game a dream come true — and it is. It’s a childhood dream fulfilled, it’s a rope to lift you out of that hole, it’s a small joy in a world of great terrors, and I cherish the ability to see the world with fresh eyes.

In the 1990s, LaCroix was the favorite drink of Midwestern moms. How did it get so cool?

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

By ignoring illegitimate policing, America has also failed to address the danger this illegitimacy poses to those who must do the policing.

Colin Stokes on Arnold Lobel, his Frog and Toad illustrated children’s series, and its lessons about friendship and acceptance.

How to make a short block of text center-aligned but left-aligned when it's longer. Use `text-align: center` on the container and `display: inline-block` on the text container.

It is not a question of whether babies will be born in the United States with Zika-related microcephaly — it is a question of when and how many. For years to come, these children will be a visible, human reminder of the cost of absurd wrangling in Washington, of preventable suffering, of a failure of our political system to respond to the threat that infectious diseases pose. … These are not random lightning strikes or a string of global bad luck. This growing threat is a result of human activity: human populations encroaching on, and having greater interaction with, habitats where animals spread these viruses; humans living more densely in cities where sickness spreads rapidly; humans traveling globally with increasing reach and speed; humans changing our climate and bringing disease-spreading insects to places where they have not lived previously. From now on, dangerous epidemics are going to be a regular fact of life. We can no longer accept surprise as an excuse for a response that is slow out of the gate.

The mastering engineers I spoke to for this story kept using the same phrase when describing their job: “to make the song competitive in the marketplace.” That is, making the music sound better in audio quality—clearer, louder, more vibrant—than anything else out there. Traditionally, the “marketplace” has been radio, where a well-mastered song hits that sweet spot where you feel immersed in the music but not battered by it. If your song is poorly mastered, the logic goes, people won’t want to buy your album. Worse yet, they might switch stations. And now, the marketplace also includes online streaming, which has raised the popularity of listening to music on headphones or portable devices with lousy speakers—platforms that require their own kind of mastering.

The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it's attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren't that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes.

I enjoy spending time in temporarily deserted places that usually bustle during daylight hours. Examples include San Francisco during Burning Man weekend, Penn Station at 2pm on Christmas day, almost everywhere in the US on Easter Sunday, the Financial District in Boston on Saturdays and Sundays, many major European cities during August.

Transgender is an umbrella word that is used to describe a very large and diverse group of people. "Transgender" can refer to transsexual people; to genderqueer and gender-variant people; to crossdressers; even to feminine men who still call themselves men, and masculine women who still call themselves women. If someone says "I am a woman," or "I am a man," or "I am ____," please take that person seriously. Our cultural framework tends to tell us that their bodies may contradict their statements — that there's no way you could be a guy with XX chromosomes, or a genderless person with an obvious beard. But the trans person is the one who's right, and the simplistic framework is the model that's wrong. Gender is not dependent on physical appearances, or on the word of doctors, friends, family. The individuals are the ones who get to assert their own identity.

A very common initial reaction is to be defensive. You probably didn’t mean to make a mistake or cause harm. Unfortunately, you did whether you meant to or not. It’s ok to feel defensive – it’s an incredibly human response. However, it’s usually one you want to keep to yourself (and maybe a few close friends). Responding defensively is an intentional act that defends your mistake instead of admitting fault. It can do additional harm and is unlikely to improve the situation. Take a little time to sit with any feelings of defensiveness.

I keep saying that impromptu, unwanted feminism 101 discussions are exhausting and not a good use of my resources. Then people ask what I mean by 101, so I’m starting to make a list.

Below is a list of common issues in the ever popular internet quiz style to help you determine if yourself or someone else might be a bad ally.

In every case, these AIs are designed to seamlessly take care of things for you: to answer questions, schedule meetings, provide directions, refill the milk in the fridge, and so on. So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”

That MSG isn’t the poison we’ve made it out to be has been well-established. News stories are written regularly about the lack of evidence tying MSG to negative health effects. (Read here and here, for example. Or here, here, here, here and here.) Still, Yelp reviews of Chinese restaurants tell tales of racing hearts, sleepless nights and tingling limbs from dishes “laden with MSG.” Even when the science is clear, it takes a lot to overwrite a stigma, especially when that stigma is about more than just food.

There is ample evidence that we treat these foods as inferior, as Krishnendu Ray, the chair of nutrition and food studies at New York University, writes in his new book "The Ethnic Restaurateur." Ray points to the comparatively low price ceiling for various "ethnic cuisines," as a telling sign. Despite complex ingredients and labor-intensive cooking methods that rival or even eclipse those associated with some of the most celebrated cuisines — think French, Spanish and Italian — we want our Indian food fast, and we want it cheap.

Who among us hasn’t logged into Twitter only to find friends one-upping each other with meta-meta-meta-ironic jokes about something that happened five minutes ago, and no longer is anyone actually mentioning the thing they’re joking about? Who among us has not followed someone because of a really excellent viral photo or tweet, and then hundreds of posts later it’s like Oh my God, stop talking about your cat, or your car, or your loneliness?

Why do so many startups fail? Why are all the hosts on CouchSurfing male? Are we going to be tweeting for the rest of our lives? Why do Silicon Valley billionaires choose average-looking wives?