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I ask her some easy questions, but she answers them with increasing irritation. When we have been together for three hours, I feel it's time to ask The Question. It's the same question that other black interviewers have asked her. A question she seems to deeply dislike—so much so that she complains about the question in her book. But even in the book, it's not a question she actually answers: How is her racial fluidity anything more than a function of her privilege as a white person? If Dolezal's identity only helps other people born white become black while still shielding them from the majority of the oppression of visible blackness, and does nothing to help those born black become white—how is this not just more white privilege?

But, crucially, Dolezal does explain what she thinks blackness entails, and what she thinks it means to be black. She talks about civil rights activism and black authors. She talks about hair. She does hair. She brags that none of her black clients dropped her in light of the scandal. Dolezal proudly mismanages her own haggard braids, which she clearly regards as a crucial set piece in her grotesque production of blackness. Dolezal talks about blackness as if it were reducible to two qualities, and only two qualities: scholarship and aesthetics. It cannot occur to her that blackness—a social construction, indeed—is a comprehensive and involuntary realm of experience. White power invented it, and white power enforces it, but, paradoxically, black people own blackness. Throughout the documentary, several black women tell Dolezal as much. Dolezal disputes their authority in the vaguest terms, but nonetheless assuredly. She has decided that she is black, so she’s black. Dolezal

“Anyone perusing the list of past winners cannot help noticing that many if not most of the country’s greatest musical minds are conspicuously missing,” composer John Adams told the New York Times in 2003, the year he won the prize for “On the Transmigration of Souls,” a commissioned reflection on the 9/11 attacks. Adams listed off many of the notable musicians who never earned a Pulitzer, from “Monk (Meredith or Thelonious)” to Philip Glass to Laurie Anderson. “Most if not all of these genuinely creative spirits have been passed over year after year, often in favor of academy composers who have won a disproportionate number of prizes.” The sentiment was clear: prize jurors prefer the safe and scholarly to the unpredictable and world-shifting.

A neat way to create clean screenshots of code. Create and share beautiful images of your source code. Start typing or drop a file into the text area to get started.

Single parents across race and class lines struggle to secure safe and affordable childcare on short notice, and often those parents are faced with hard decisions. They can take the children to work or to a job interview with them and risk violating company policy (and, by extension, their chances of maintaining or securing a position with the company). They can leave the children at home, if they’re old enough, in “latchkey” situations. They can leave them with a childcare provider they don’t know and haven’t had time to vet. Or they can cancel their obligation, risking much-needed income. No decision is without its consequences, but black mothers find themselves making these decisions (and facing legal and penal consequences) disproportionately. These institutional consequences compound the economic stress and hardship one-income households already face.

Ehhhhhhh I’m *real* skeptical of the ‘this is it’ thing ‘cause we‘ve heard it a thousand times now. But I want to save this for posterity. The raid on the offices of President Trump’s personal lawyer makes clear that Trump’s battle with the special counsel, Robert Mueller, is entering its final chapter.

Mainly, just listen to women. Listen to us and believe us. It’s the only place to start if you actually want all women to have a “Happy International Women’s Day.”

A new type of Payola is taking place on Spotify, with artists using third-party services to get added to influential playlists, and the company is inadvertently paying for it.

The true believers won’t stop until they’ve remade the world. Some of it will be thrilling. Some of it will keep us up at night. [...] What Silicon Valley loves most isn’t the products, or the platforms underneath them, but markets. “Figure out the business model later” was the call of the early commercial internet. The way you monetize vast swaths of humanity is by creating products that people use a lot—perhaps a search engine such as Google or a social network like Facebook. You build big transactional web platforms beneath them that provide amazing things, like search results or news feeds ranked by relevance, and then beneath all that you build marketplaces for advertising—a true moneymaking machine. If you happen to create an honest-to-god marketplace, you can get unbelievably rich.

Krasner’s mass incarceration memo outlining criminal justice reforms is a dream come true.

It’s time for a digital protection agency. It’s clear ethics don’t scale, and it’s not just Facebook’s problem.

Are there rules when it comes to edits? Should there be? RA's Will Lynch explores all sides of a thorny issue that shows no sign of going away. [...] Is it really enough to tweak a platinum-selling record and put your name on it? It doesn't help that many edits, not least those in the Wolf + Lamb camp, replace the original artist's name with that of the editing artist ("Soul Clap - Extravaganza" instead of "Jamie Foxx - Extravaganza (Soul Clap Edit)"). Granted, this is only meant to keep snooping lawyers from stumbling upon an illegal edit through Google, and when the edit is of a widely known pop song, the assumption is that listeners will recognize the original. But is that valid?

Unlocking the mysteries behind the Scottish electronic duo’s hallucinatory classic, which turns 20 this month.

Functioning societies depend on shared, socially-mediated sources of knowledge. It's the glue that holds societies together. Conspiracy theories ask us to give up more & more of our trust in each other, and in our knowledge-generating mechanisms. Conspiracy theories come at a cost. They ask us to give up on our trust in knowledge, in knowledge-producing institutions, and in each other. And so ultimately, they ask us to give up on the fabric of society altogether.

Not all of the damage he did was dramatic; not every life was ruined. But in every case, he left behind a new increment of self-doubt and regret, a story arc sent somewhat askew. None of the women in his wake were granted closure or redemption. Listening to them tell their own stories -- Hazen was not the first or only manipulative man they had encountered -- made me think about how, for women, these little incidents just pile up, and pile up, and pile up, creating an extra weight they must lug everywhere. If we valued women as individual human beings, autonomous and freestanding, with their own talents and stories, due the basic respect all humans are due -- not as caricatures & archetypes in men's heroic journeys -- we would see this accumulation as an ancient and ongoing tragedy, an enormous squandering of human potential stretched out over generations and generations, still underway as we speak. We would be horrified. That we still think of these stories as men's stories, think of men as the protagonists, worry over men's jobs and reputations, shows that we do not. We say we do, but we do not.

Experts recommend people stay on antidepressants for four to nine months after remission, but some keep taking them for years.

The tech giant’s rise has pushed mail clerks and carriers to the breaking point.

So as work on the Third was winding down he took another step to address a kind of question that only a computer could easily answer: he set the typing staff the new task of creating a 3”x5” slip for virtually every word that appeared in boldface in the dictionary typed backward, each letter followed by a space (and spelled normally, without the extra spaces, below its backward spelling).

What follows is the text of a “sermon” that I gave as a “congregational reflection” to an all White audience at the Bethel Congregational United Church of Christ on Sunday, June 28th. The sermon was begun with a reading of The Good Samaritan story, and this wonderful quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Credit for this speech goes to Chaédria LaBouvier, who’s “Why We Left“ inspired me to speak out about racism; to Robin DiAngelo, who’s “White Fragility“ gave me an understanding of the topic; and to Reni Eddo-Lodge who said “Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race“ long before I had the courage to start doing it again.

NYT needs "a voice from the right," but not a voice from the ACTUAL right (which is oriented around white resentment, not any discernible governing philosophy). They need a voice from the Conservatism of the Mind, the noble, principles-base conservatism they imagine. [These conservative columnists] are just playing their role in a very old parlor game, where Serious Conservatives tell liberals they are bad and wrong (that's what "intellectual diversity" means to elite center-lefties) and liberals proceed to engage in self-loathing hand-wringing about it. In the name of "exposing readers to diverse viewpoints," NYT is, in practice, obscuring the true nature of today's right. Virtually the entire political elite & most NYT readers are in denial about what the right has become & that denial is increasingly dangerous.

The untold story of the fight over the legacy of “H.M.” — the patient who revolutionized the science of memory.

Therapy can be hard and make you feel worse because 1) it’s uncovering feelings you’ve never before processed, 2) it’s wearing down defenses, and 3) your therapist *might* be making a mistake about your treatment. In any case, it’s important to keep attending sessions and talk about the difficulty directly with your therapist.

This extinct animals icons project is but a salute to all the conservation efforts of so many people and conservation organizations, from our line of work; this may not bring back the animals gone extinct in recent years, but hopefully will inspire people.

After IDM flourished in the UK in the post-rave mid-1990s, the US struggled to respond to a sound that felt so distant and alien. But a diverse group of ambitious teenagers began to make the links between Autechre and Aphex Twin’s glitchy electro experiments and hip-hop, Miami bass and breaks. Laurent Fintoni examines how the USA re-cast IDM in its own image, birthing Phoenicia, Prefuse 73, Machinedrum, Push Button Objects, Richard Devine and more.

Meet the Great Slate — a fundraising campaign that raised nearly a million dollars in 2017, mostly through Twitter, for eight seemingly random Congressional candidates from across the country. The Great Slate has no splashy slogans, no slick logos: just a bare-bones website, a donate button, and a lot of jokes on Twitter.

The opposite of a dog can be a cat, or a different dog, or nothing at all, The Absence of Dog.

Maria Bustillos picked Ernest Becker’s ‘Escape from Evil’. Becker won a Pulitzer for his previous book, The Denial of Death, but this one, published posthumously and building on ideas from that earlier work, is far, far better, to my mind, more compact, more advanced, more compelling. This book is pragmatic synthesis of multiple disciplines in the science of man, the place where humanities and science collide. Theories about Becker's work abound, but for me his great gift was the way he seemed to have led us to the threshold of a new enlightenment, clear-eyed, undeceived, ready to take the next step. It's a step the reader may be able to intuit, and perhaps even gain, and make practical use of in his or her own life: '[W]e have to take a full look at the worst in order to begin to get rid of illusions. Realism, even brutal, is not cynicism.'

This is about whether it’s okay to create collateral damage by deliberately denying people access to web features in order to further a completely separate agenda. This isn’t about you or me. This is about all those people who could potentially become makers of the web. We should be welcoming them, not creating barriers for them to overcome.

Fact-checking some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments shows they're full of holes.

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