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Hope is elusive, but it will return eventually. What I’m afraid of, this December, are the conditions that allow hope to take hold. I’m worried that the “worst year ever” feeling is half a condition of the Internet, of the way we experience the news as delivered through social media. Everything feels too intimate, too aggressive; the interfaces that were intended to cheerfully connect us to the world have instead spawned fear and alienation. I’m worried that this sense of relentless emotional bombardment will escalate no matter what’s in the news.

Dynamic Wallpapers for macOS Mojave.

Muslims thus arrived in America more than a century before the Virginia Company founded the Jamestown colony in 1607. Muslims came to America more than a century before the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Muslims were living in America not only before Protestants, but before Protestantism existed. After Catholicism, Islam was the second monotheistic religion in the Americas. The popular misunderstanding, even among educated people, that Islam and Muslims are recent additions to America tells us important things about how American history has been written. In particular, it reveals how historians have justified and celebrated the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to valorise the United States of America has been to minimise the heterogeneity and scale – the cosmopolitanism, diversity and mutual co-existence of peoples – in America during the first 300 years of European presence. [...] If there is any religious group who represents the best version of religious freedom in America, it is Muslims such as Zemourri and al-Rahman. They came to America under conditions of genuine oppression, and struggled for the recognition of their religion and the freedom to practise it. In contrast to Anglo-Protestants, Muslims in America have demurred the impulse to tyrannise others, including Native Americans. The most persistent consequence of the Puritan effect has been a continuing commitment to producing a past focused on how the actions, usually courageous and principled, of Anglo-Protestants (almost always in New England and the Chesapeake) led to the United States of America, its government and its institutions. The truth is that the history of America is not primarily an Anglo-Protestant story, any more than the history of the West more broadly. It might not be a straightforward or self-evident matter what, exactly, constitutes ‘the West’. But the more global era in history inaugurated by the European colonisation of the Western hemisphere must be a significant part of it. If the West means, in part, the Western hemisphere or North America, Muslims have been part of its societies from the very beginning. Conflicts over what the American nation is and who belongs to it are perennial. Answers remain open to a range of possibilities and are vitally important. Historically, Muslims are Americans, as originally American as Anglo-Protestants. In many ways, America’s early Muslims are exemplars of the best practices and ideals of American religion. Any statement or suggestion to the contrary, no matter how well-meaning, derives from either intended or inherited chauvinism.

Switchboard is the place where members of the Portland Startups community gather to share resources, advice, and help of all kinds. Join and post your own ASK or OFFER.

The rise of a multiracial identity dovetails with an utopian ideal of a pan-ethnic, post-racial America—one where everyone is a little something. But that post-racial space doesn’t yet exist, with one of the effects being that multiracial people are often pulled between identities. Whether someone identifies more with one race or the other is strongly attributable to their upbringing, their family history, their surroundings, and their physical appearance, making no two multiracial experiences totally alike. [...] That hard work and a high salary helped turn Asians into a model minority clues us into how whiteness works. Being “white” doesn’t just refer to skin tone. It means you’re industrious and rich, that you believe in meritocracy and respect the status quo. Be respectable and diligent like a white person, and you’ll succeed. Whiteness, at its most pernicious, is an unquestioned belief in the American dream without acknowledging that America has historically denied the rewards of meritocracy to hard workers who didn’t look the right way. And if playing by the rules means you’re still on the outside, what minority would see assimilation as a worthwhile goal in 2015? [...] If Republicans can get away with only a cursory examination of modern racial relations—to say nothing of the frequency with which they appeal to outmoded stereotypes—then what does it say about our progress toward that supposedly glorious post-racial future? This is the dark side of the post-racial, which was supposed to be within sight after Obama’s election. To presume that race is over without resolving any of its conflicts is obviously no solution at all—a limited view of the post-racial that David Theo Goldberg, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, defined to me as “whiteness in fear of its loss of its own power and its own status, and its own standing. It reaches for the post-racial as a way of entrenching the given racial distributions as they stand.”

No one should be surprised that the eccentricities of “the English” never became a thing, of course. We do not tend to confuse “The English” with “speakers of English” for the same reason that there is no common-sense idiom about how their many words for water are derived from centuries as a seagoing empire based on a rainy island. They do not become a they because they are us. [...] One interesting thing is how boring the answer to the underlying question is. On the one hand, people who live in the Arctic—and whose languages developed in that environment—will naturally have more sophisticated and nuanced and complex language for describing their environment, exactly as you’d expect them to. No one really denies that they tend to, even if this fact isn’t easily grasped by counting words. But exoticizing Eskimos is also a function of ignorance, conjecture, and projection. “Eskimos Have Fifty Words for Snow” is an amazing phrase, because every word in it is wrong. But reversing it—announcing proudly that they don’t—only replicates that wrongness; you can’t say no to a bad question and be right. [...] What’s fascinating to me about actually reading Whorf’s work—after working my way debunkers who gesture at his ignorance as disqualifying—is how simple the point he was trying to make actually was: that ignorance is, itself, a pathway towards new knowledge. Precisely because other languages show us things we didn’t know—and didn’t know we didn’t know—we can learn new things by engaging with that ignorance. What, for example, might an Inuktitut know about a world that distinguishes between aput, qana, piqsirpoq, or qimuqsuq that an America won’t know about “snow”? To translate “aput” into “snow on the ground” doesn’t solve the problem, it only buries it under the illusion of comprehension; better to ask, he says, what it is that isn’t being translated.

Research has found racially prejudiced attitudes to be persistent among the youngest generation of white Americans.

What we hear from companies like T and F and Y is that monitoring communication at this scale, preventing that harm, is an unprecedented technical challenge. That’s correct. However… no one asked for communication at this scale! To be clear, it’s a challenge these companies designed for themselves; a challenge they enlarged through relentless, ingenious growth; a challenge they now invoke as if it’s some longstanding problem in fundamental physics. [...] Social media platforms should run small, and slow, and cool to the touch.

Get this: All bodies are different. But I don’t mean this in some flip way. I mean it in a bone-deep, beautiful, complicated way. All of the dogs’ bodies are so different.

How many combinations of unintended consequences and human reactions to them does it take to detour us into a future that seems to defy any obvious trend? Not many. That’s why predicting the future accurately is so difficult. Some of the most mistaken predictions I’ve seen are of the straight-line variety–that’s the kind that ignores the inevitability of unintended consequences, ignores our often less-than-logical reactions to them, and says simply, “In the future, we will have more and more of whatever’s holding our attention right now.” [...] So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see ourselves drifting in dangerous directions. Because prediction is a useful way of pointing out safer, wiser courses. Because, most of all, our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try to shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.

A number-one on the Billboard R&B chart from 1946. Apparently, this phrase originated in the early 1900s as a racist joke about a slave stealing chickens. An excerpt here from ‘Everybody’s Magazine’ from 1908: A Southerner, hearing a great commotion in his chicken-house one dark night, took his revolver and went to investigate. “Who’s there?” he sternly demanded, open the door. No answer. “Who’s there? Answer, or I’ll shoot!” A trembling voice from the farthest corner: “’Deed, sah, dey ain’t nobody hyah ’ceptin’ us chickens.” So, yeah: pretty racist and awful! In a radio show excerpt that I listened to (https://www.waywordradio.org/us-chickens/), the hosts suggest that by the time it had been turned into a hit song in 1946, it had lost all of that context. I think that’s an awfully convenient assertion for two white people to make over a hundred years later!

While the phrase “How might we” seems pretty basic, each word is intended to serve a specific purpose. “How” asks employees to be descriptive, “might” suggests there are good answers, but not a single correct answer, and “we” evokes inclusivity and teamwork. [...] Asking “How would we do this” or “How do we do this” can give employees performance anxiety, she says: People may stay silent for fear of giving half-baked or incorrect answers. By contrast, “the beauty of the phrase ‘How might we do this’ is that it eliminates fear, stress, and anxiety by supportively implying that there may be more than one solution, and that nothing more is needed at the moment than ideas,” says Greaves. “This is the language that primes our mind for having fun exploring, and pushing beyond what’s already known.”

People whose gender is not male or female use many different terms to describe themselves, with non-binary being one of the most common. Other terms include genderqueer, agender, bigender, and more. None of these terms mean exactly the same thing – but all speak to an experience of gender that is not simply male or female.

Organize your Spotify music by any of a wide range of musical attributes including genre, mood, decade of release and more.

Musical treats from the entire world for over a century. Pick a country anywhere on the map. Pick a decade from 1900 to now.

A big resource. How to run a WordPress site at scale.

This is a very helpful overview. Caching in WordPress is often misunderstood. In this post, learn more about some of those misconceptions & get a little clarity on the minefield that is WordPress caching.

In his statements to the committee, Judge Kavanaugh said that the allegations against him had ruined his life even though he may well be confirmed to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Mr. Hockenberry and Mr. Ghomeshi also lament how their lives have been ruined. The bar for a man’s ruin is, apparently, quite low. May we all be so lucky as to have our lives so ruined. History is once more repeating itself and will continue to do so until we, as a culture, begin not only to believe women but also to value women enough to consider harming them unacceptable, unthinkable.

A cultural critic and multimedia savant breaks up with his radio show after 30 years.

I’m sometimes misquoted as saying the performance advantage is irrelevant. It’s not, per se, that the advantage question is irrelevant. Its that the way that we think about human rights, in that legal and ethical standards of when it’s OK to override a person’s human right, is that the performance advantages aren’t high enough. If you look at elite athletics, every single elite athlete has some kind of genetic mutation that makes them amazing at their sport. Michael Phelps, his joint structure and body proportion, make him a like a fish, which is awesome. But we shouldn’t say that he has an unfair competitive advantage. The question is not whether there is a competitive advantage, the question is whether there is an unfair advantage. Sports is about competitive advantages. We have coaching and equipment and training, nutrition, rest all of these things are meant to produce competitive advantages over other people. Just because there is a competitive advantage doesn’t make it unfair.

Each national park has a unique soundscape. The natural and cultural sounds in parks awaken a sense of wonder that connects us to the qualities that define these special places. They are part of a web of resources that the National Park Service protects under the Organic Act. From the haunting calls of bugling elk in mountains to the patriotic calls of bugling horns across a historic battlefield, NPS invites you to experience our parks through this world of sound.

Mental illness is a very much a matter of physiology and not one of will. Anyone who tells you to just try yoga or change your diet or think happier thoughts should have their teeth turn to ashes in their mouth. And I understand the importance of destigmatizing mental illness by rendering it within a medical framework. For too long we have viewed it as a moral indictment, to disastrous effect. However, I also think this tends to throw a certain responsibility back onto those of us who struggle with it. Yes, my own personal brain chemistry is something I must reckon with, but doing so while navigating a cruel health care system, with the goal of remaining healthy enough to face a laughably uncertain financial future, all in service to surviving a world that is everywhere immiserating, hardly seems a good way to answer “how do I live.” The best answer I’ve managed to come up with is that you live with intention of making that question easier for other people to answer. For me, the worst aspect of chronic depression (besides the boredom of it all) is the urge to be alone. If you’ve read my previous columns, you’ll notice that I almost always find a way to bring up our beholdenness to others. This is because I’m a lazy writer, but also because the fact of mutual obligation is what gives me the motivation to write at all. It’s also what animates any politics worth having.

In any case, I think the way forward is by letting go of your guilt as much as possible, since nobody wants to feel that someone is reaching out to them out of a sense of obligation. You don’t need to begin with a weighty conversation about how terrible you feel, or how sorry you are. A simple “Hey I’m going to be in town next week want to get a drink?” is probably a good start. You can also gently encourage him to open up to you by… opening up to him. During the worst periods of my depression I often find it burdensome when caring, well-meaning people want to talk about me. All I do is lay in bed all day and think about my bad brain; a reprieve from that can be very welcome. It’s also a nice thing to let someone know you trust them and value their judgment by asking them for advice. In all honesty, writing this column has done wonders for my own mental health. So consider confiding some of your own struggles to your smart, kind, and funny brother. But however you decide to start, just start. There are countless barriers the world puts up between us — we work too much, and are burdened by financial stress, we receive a steady stream of just enough information to make it seem like we are in touch, the whole way we raise men, the fact that there is some idiot tweeting stupid shit we need to get mad about. I can’t stress enough how much the work of a life is in overcoming these. Close this dumb website and text your brother.

Here is something that I rarely, if ever, disclose: I am often overwhelmed by a terrible, howling loneliness. Depression tends to flatten my experience of the world, and grief has lately made it sharp, but loneliness is the thing that really forecloses; it is the sense that whatever I am doing or feeling it will not be shared or understood, that I will be unknown. It’s a hard thing to admit, and I’m very glad you wrote me about it. It’s strange the things we admit and those we don’t. Despite a general disposition toward vulnerability — on social media, at least, many of us are willing to freely say we’re depressed or anxious or want to die — we seem loathe to admit we are lonely. It feels like a personal failing — to admit we have trouble making friends, to bend toward care and be met with indifference. Besides, the message the world is constantly hammering out is that this is the era of connection! It’s so easy to stay in touch! If you are not constantly awash in the joy of companionship, well — that sounds like a you problem, right? [...] I think your problem is both simpler and more deeply entrenched. You are an adult in a time when the architecture of the world is designed to keep us separated from each other all while telling us we are ever-less alone.

I am both compelled by the idea of companionship and repulsed by the idea of not being able to just be completely and totally inert and do whatever the hell I want while sliding pickle spears into my face like a cartoon sawmill.

Ants are a problem that can’t be fixed in one go. Like anxiety, they will come and go and probably come again. The trick with both is to remember how you handled the situation last time. Rather than panicking, you must calmly walk through a set of practiced steps, even if they seem as if they’ll never work. They do, and they will — and that’s the only way out.

A 1948 flood washed away the WWII housing project Vanport—but its history still informs Portland's diversity.

Our vision is to be the premier resource for Oregon’s African American culture and heritage information. We aspire to preserve this largely unknown and rich heritage and culture through collections and programs that promote scholarly research and public use. We envision becoming a center for study of Oregon’s African American life, heritage and culture. Our goal is to secure a place and forum in which this heritage can be shared with the greater public. Oregon Black Pioneers Corporation’s mission, also doing business as Oregon African American Museum Project (OBP/OAAMP), is to research, recognize and commemorate the culture and heritage of African Americans in the State of Oregon.

Powell’s ultimate conclusions regarding the malignancy of a “military style,” appropriated along hyper-masculine, hyper-nationalist, and highly commodified lines in American civil society, are correct. But Powell’s analysis erroneously refers to the same cultural zeitgeist to explain both military conventions, and the civilian appropriation of the “military style.” Treating both as manifestations of the same overarching culture effectively ignores the material concerns that distinguish the military’s appearance and design standards from the “future fascist paramilitary participants” Powell rightly warns us about. [...] There are many service members and veterans, myself included, who are uncomfortable with the various ways that civil society has been militarized, from the entanglements between sports and the military to the weapons of war found in American streets. Their voices are important in our discourse because they carry the weight of credibility. They are difficult to dismiss, especially for those who fetishize the military. Yet, criticisms of the “military style” that mischaracterize the military create a space for people to flippantly dismiss valid criticisms of militarization as just more political posturing, even when those criticisms come from military veterans.

Death and surrender to power in the clothing of men. [...] All of this—skulls, trucks, flags, guns—form the edges of a commodified, weaponized identity. [...] Those same political and market forces have successfully rebranded the American flag as both consumer product and cultural signifier. Merchandizing and uniformed services have considerably shifted associated symbolism away from a (debatable) neutrality toward a fully masculinized, militarized icon eager to make way for an authoritarian future. The breakdown governing its authorized use asserts that allegiance is above its own laws (and flag code). The incremental push remove color [from the flag] extends far beyond its obvious symbolic value. It’s no stretch to see how emphasis on rigidity and lack of depth helps reframe any spectrum as weakness: vibrancy, nuance, interpretation are signs of vulnerability.