Fashion model learning to be a man after being pushed to transition...
trying to be everything. will i become nothing? | tala's blog
If I am trying to be everything, will I end up being nothing?
There’s a tension I incessantly carry: the pull between curiosity and mastery. I want to write beautifully till I run my own magazine. I want to draw till my pieces are installed in galleries. I want to understand the intricacies of chemical engineering till I become distinguishable in the industry. I don’t want to just dabble in these disciplines. No, I want to know them in depth, in profundity.
But what happens if I keep stretching myself across too many directions? Will I dilute my potential? Is there a point where breadth undermines depth?
Mastery is not claiming expertise, but in staying committed. In showing up again and again to each craft, even if progress feels slow with each, even if I am unsure where it will all lead.
(I wasn't sure how to end this, but I had a thought: I wonder if, perhaps, instead of mastering each thing in isolation - engineering, writing, drawing - I can weave a larger net, one that forms nuance and connections among all of which, till it becomes something uniquely my own? Could that be its own kind of mastery? Well, only time will tell.)
Niche Internet#blog#multidisciplinary#introspection#existential#ambition#work-life#identities#careersWho Goes MAGA? | Techdirt
Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.
The Contrarian Intellectual
His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like “Uncomfortable Truths” or “Against the Grain.” He has an advanced degree and a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.
He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.
But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.
The Wellness Influencer
Her Instagram is a masterpiece of soft-focus selfies and inspirational quotes. She sells courses on “authentic living” and posts about the importance of “doing your own research.” She’s got 50K followers who hang on her every word about manifestation, healing crystals, and toxic relationships.
She already went MAGA during the pandemic, though she’d never admit it. It started with “questioning the narrative” about vaccines and evolved into sharing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. content and ranting about “globalist elites.” She doesn’t post Trump content directly—that would hurt her brand—but she’s constantly sharing adjacent conspiracy theories about child trafficking, fluoride in water, and the “plandemic.”
The Venture Capitalist
His Twitter is a constant stream of complaints about “woke employees” destroying productivity and liberal professors poisoning young minds. He’s worth $500 million because of a few home run investments that he lucked into thanks to his Stanford network, but talks like he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy. His feed alternates between humble-brags about his latest investment and rants about how universities are churning out unemployable graduates who expect “participation trophies.”
He’s already MAGA, though he’d never admit it publicly—bad for fundraising. He privately complains that diversity hiring is destroying meritocracy while his portfolio companies are run entirely by Stanford MBAs who look exactly like him. He thinks workers asking for fair wages are “entitled” and students protesting genocide are “indoctrinated.”
The Legacy Media Reporter
His bio says “Covering politics for [Major News Outlet]” and he takes pride in his “objectivity.” He writes careful both-sides pieces about every issue and treats Trump’s fascist rhetoric as just another political strategy worth analyzing.
He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth
The Business Owner
She runs a small business—maybe a restaurant, maybe a retail store. She posts about “entrepreneurship” and “the American dream.” She works seventy hours a week and takes pride in “building something from nothing.”
She’s prime MAGA material because she’s been trained to see her success as purely individual and her struggles as evidence of government overreach. When COVID restrictions hurt her business, she blamed “bureaucrats” rather than the virus. When she can’t find workers, she blames unemployment benefits rather than wages.
Her MAGA turn will be complete when she decides that her business problems are caused by taxes, regulations, and lazy workers rather than market forces and systemic issues. She’ll vote for anyone who promises to “get government out of the way” and let “job creators” like her prosper.
The Normie
He doesn’t post about politics much. His feed is mostly sports, vacation photos, and memes. He seems reasonable, moderate, unengaged with the culture wars. He’s the kind of person who says “I don’t really follow politics” and means it.
But he’s susceptible to MAGA because he’s politically lazy. He gets his information from headlines and assumes that “both sides” are equally bad. He’s annoyed by political discussions and just wants everyone to “get along.”
His MAGA evolution will happen gradually, through exposure to right-wing content disguised as non-political entertainment. He’ll start sharing “funny” memes that happen to have political undertones. He’ll begin to believe that liberals are “too sensitive” and conservatives are “more reasonable.”
The Ones Who Won’t
Take the small-town Republican from Ohio who should be MAGA by every demographic marker—pickup truck, church every Sunday, straight GOP for twenty years. But her childhood best friend came out as trans, and suddenly the culture war had a face she loved. Now she’s at city council meetings defending the very people she once thoughtlessly condemned.
They don’t need enemies to blame for their problems. They don’t need simple answers to complicated questions.
They’re the teacher who posts about her students’ achievements without making it about herself. They’re the small business owner who pays his workers well because he knows it’s right and actually better for business, not because he has to. They’re the veteran who talks about service without wrapping it in nationalism. They’re the parent who worries about their kids without blaming teachers for everything.
MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness.
It’s not about education or geography or even politics. It’s about character. It’s about whether you can tolerate complexity, whether you can admit mistakes, whether you can see other people as fully human.
The scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good. It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.
Saved by Medicaid: New Evidence on Health Insurance and Mortality from the Universe of Low-Income Adults
We examine the causal effect of health insurance on mortality using the universe of low-income adults, a dataset of 37 million individuals identified by linking the 2010 Census to administrative tax data. Our methodology leverages state-level variation in the timing and adoption of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and earlier waivers and adheres to a preregistered analysis plan, a rarely used approach in observational studies in economics. We find that expansions increased Medicaid enrollment by 12 percentage points and reduced the mortality of the low-income adult population by 2.5 percent, suggesting a 21 percent reduction in the mortality hazard of new enrollees. Mortality reductions accrued not only to older age cohorts, but also to younger adults, who accounted for nearly half of life-years saved due to their longer remaining lifespans and large share of the low-income adult population. These expansions appear to be cost-effective, with direct budgetary costs of $5.4 million per life saved and $179,000 per life-year saved falling well below valuations commonly found in the literature. Our findings suggest that lack of health insurance explains about five to twenty percent of the mortality disparity between high- and low-income Americans. We contribute to a growing body of evidence that health insurance improves health and demonstrate that Medicaid’s life-saving effects extend across a broader swath of the low-income population than previously understood.
Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?
Skeptics argue that many of the classic symptoms of the disorder — fidgeting, losing things, not following instructions — are simply typical, if annoying, behaviors of childhood. In response, others point to the serious consequences that can result when those symptoms grow more intense, including school failure, social rejection and serious emotional distress.
There are two main kinds of A.D.H.D., inattentive and hyperactive/impulsive, and children in one category often seem to have little in common with children in the other. There are people with A.D.H.D. whom you can’t get to stop talking and others whom you can’t get to start. Some are excessively eager and enthusiastic; others are irritable and moody.
Although the D.S.M. specifies that clinicians shouldn’t diagnose children with A.D.H.D. if their symptoms are better explained by another mental disorder, more than three quarters of children diagnosed with A.D.H.D. do have another mental-health condition as well, according to the C.D.C. More than a third have a diagnosis of anxiety, and a similar fraction have a diagnosed learning disorder. Forty-four percent have been diagnosed with a behavioral disorder like oppositional defiant disorder.
This all complicates the effort to portray A.D.H.D. as a distinct, unique biological disorder. Is a patient with six symptoms really that different from one with five? If a child who experienced early trauma now can’t sit still or stay organized, should she be treated for A.D.H.D.? What about a child with an anxiety disorder who is constantly distracted by her worries? Does she have A.D.H.D., or just A.D.H.D.-like symptoms caused by her anxiety?
The subjects who were given stimulants worked more quickly and intensely than the ones who took the placebo. They dutifully packed and repacked their virtual backpacks, pulling items in and out, trying various combinations. In the end, though, their scores on the knapsack test were no better than the placebo group. The reason? Their strategies for choosing items became significantly worse under the medication. Their choices didn’t make much sense — they just kept pulling random items in and out of the backpack. To an observer, they appeared to be focused, well behaved, on task. But in fact, they weren’t accomplishing anything of much value.
Farah directed me to the work of Scott Vrecko, a sociologist who conducted a series of interviews with students at an American university who used stimulant medication without a prescription. He wrote that the students he interviewed would often “frame the functional benefits of stimulants in cognitive-sounding terms.” But when he dug a little deeper, he found that the students tended to talk about their attention struggles, and the benefits they experienced with medication, in emotional terms rather than intellectual ones. Without the pills, they said, they just didn’t feel interested in the assignments they were supposed to be doing. They didn’t feel motivated. It all seemed pointless.
On stimulant medication, those emotions flipped. “You start to feel such a connection to what you’re working on,” one undergraduate told Vrecko. “It’s almost like you fall in love with it.” As another student put it: On Adderall, “you’re interested in what you’re doing, even if it’s boring.”
Socially, though, there was a price. “Around my friends, I’m usually the most social, but when I’m on it, it feels like my spark is kind of gone,” John said. “I laugh a lot less. I can’t think of anything to say. Life is just less fun. It’s not like I’m sad; I’m just not as happy. It flattens things out.”
John also generally doesn’t take his Adderall during the summer. When he’s not in school, he told me, he doesn’t have any A.D.H.D. symptoms at all. “If I don’t have to do any work, then I’m just a completely regular person,” he said. “But once I have to focus on things, then I have to take it, or else I just won’t get any of my stuff done.”
John’s sense that his A.D.H.D. is situational — that he has it in some circumstances but not in others — is a challenge to some of psychiatry’s longstanding assumptions about the condition. After all, diabetes doesn’t go away over summer vacation. But John’s intuition is supported by scientific evidence. Increasingly, research suggests that for many people A.D.H.D. might be thought of as a condition they experience, sometimes temporarily, rather than a disorder that they have in some unchanging way.
For most of his career, he embraced what he now calls the “medical model” of A.D.H.D — the belief that the brains of people with A.D.H.D. are biologically deficient, categorically different from those of typical, healthy individuals. Now, however, Sonuga-Barke is proposing an alternative model, one that largely sidesteps questions of biology. What matters instead, he says, is the distress children feel as they try to make their way in the world.
Sonuga-Barke’s proposed model locates A.D.H.D. symptoms on a continuum, rather than presenting the condition as a distinct, natural category. And it departs from the medical model in another crucial way: It considers those symptoms not as indications of neurological deficits but as signals of a misalignment between a child’s biological makeup and the environment in which they are trying to function. “I’m not saying it’s not biological,” he says. “I’m just saying I don’t think that’s the right target. Rather than trying to treat and resolve the biology, we should be focusing on building environments that improve outcomes and mental health.”
What the researchers noticed was that their subjects weren’t particularly interested in talking about the specifics of their disorder. Instead, they wanted to talk about the context in which they were now living and how that context had affected their symptoms. Subject after subject spontaneously brought up the importance of finding their “niche,” or the right “fit,” in school or in the workplace. As adults, they had more freedom than they did as children to control the parameters of their lives — whether to go to college, what to study, what kind of career to pursue. Many of them had sensibly chosen contexts that were a better match for their personalities than what they experienced in school, and as a result, they reported that their A.D.H.D. symptoms had essentially disappeared. In fact, some of them were questioning whether they had ever had a disorder at all — or if they had just been in the wrong environment as children.
The work environments where the subjects were thriving varied. For some, the appeal of their new jobs was that they were busy and cognitively demanding, requiring constant multitasking. For others, the right context was physical, hands-on labor. For all of them, what made a difference was having work that to them felt “intrinsically interesting.”
“Rather than a static ‘attention deficit’ that appeared under all circumstances,” the M.T.A. researchers wrote, “our subjects described their propensity toward distraction as contextual. … Believing the problem lay in their environments rather than solely in themselves helped individuals allay feelings of inadequacy: Characterizing A.D.H.D. as a personality trait rather than a disorder, they saw themselves as different rather than defective.”
For the young adults in the “niche” study who were interviewed about their work lives, the transition that helped them overcome their A.D.H.D. symptoms often was leaving academic work for something more kinetic. For Sonuga-Barke, it was the opposite. At university, he would show up at the library at 9 every morning and sit in his carrel working until 5. The next day, he would do it again. Growing up, he says, he had a natural tendency to “hyperfocus,” and back at school in Derby, that tendency looked to his teachers like daydreaming. At university, it became his secret weapon
I asked Sonuga-Barke what he might have gained if he grew up in a different time and place — if he was prescribed Ritalin or Adderall at age 8 instead of just being packed off to the remedial class.
“I don’t think I would have gained anything,” he said. “I think without medication, you learn alternative ways of dealing with stuff. In my particular case, there are a lot of characteristics that have helped me. My mind is constantly churning away, thinking of things. I never relax. The way I motivate myself is to turn everything into a problem and to try and solve the problem.”
“The simple model has always been, basically, ‘A.D.H.D. plus medication equals no A.D.H.D.,’” he says. “But that’s not true. Medication is not a silver bullet. It never will be.” What medication can sometimes do, he believes, is allow families more room to communicate. “At its best,” he says, “medication can provide a window for parents to engage with their kids,” by moderating children’s behavior, at least temporarily, so that family life can become more than just endless fights about overdue homework and lost lunchboxes. “If you have a more positive relationship with your child, they’re going to have a better outcome. Not for their A.D.H.D. — it’s probably going to be just the same. But in terms of dealing with the self-hatred and low self-esteem that often goes along with A.D.H.D.
The alternative model, by contrast, tells a child a very different story: that his A.D.H.D. symptoms exist on a continuum, one on which we all find ourselves; that he may be experiencing those symptoms as much because of where he is as because of who he is; and that next year, if things change in his surroundings, those symptoms might change as well. Armed with that understanding, he and his family can decide whether medication makes sense — whether for him, the benefits are likely to outweigh the drawbacks. At the same time, they can consider whether there are changes in his situation, at school or at home, that might help alleviate his symptoms.
Admittedly, that version of A.D.H.D. has certain drawbacks. It denies parents the clear, definitive explanation for their children’s problems that can come as such a relief, especially after months or years of frustration and uncertainty. It often requires a lot of flexibility and experimentation on the part of patients, families and doctors. But it has two important advantages as well: First, the new model more accurately reflects the latest scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. And second, it gives children a vision of their future in which things might actually improve — not because their brains are chemically refashioned in a way that makes them better able to fit into the world, but because they find a way to make the world fit better around their complicated and distinctive brains.
“They are the consummate consumers of a culture that they don’t produce.”
Interview: Far-Right Women’s Appropriation of Feminism in France (Charlène Calderaro) - Reactionary Politics Research Network
Columbia Student Hunted by ICE Sues to Prevent Deportation
Ghost Lovers | Are.na
‘The Interview’: Dr. Lindsay Gibson on ‘Emotionally Immature' Parents
I just started watching “The Sopranos” for the first time. If you listen to the dialogue, they completely nailed it, because everything always comes back to the viewpoint of the emotionally immature character. It’s always all about them. Another one is the lack of empathy. The parent just doesn’t get it. They say, “Why are you so upset about this?” Or, “This is not a big deal.” They cannot enter into the reality of their child’s emotional truth
The broad definition of emotionally immature parents is parents who refuse to validate their children’s feelings and intuitions, who might be reactive and who are lacking in empathy or awareness. But can you give me examples of emotionally immature behaviors?
how do people distinguish between normal, flawed parental behavior and behavior that’s detrimental enough to rise to the label of “emotionally immature”? If you think of emotional maturity and immaturity as being on a continuum, all of us have a spot that we tend to hang out on. It doesn’t mean that we stay there. If you’re tired or you’re sick or you’re stressed, you are not going to be as emotionally mature as you could be when you’re rested and well and not stressed. However, if you’re in one of these compromised states, you may do some things that look immature, but it’s going to bother you. You’re going to think about what you did. The emotionally immature person, it’s like: “That was in the past. Why are you wallowing in it?” The more emotionally mature person would get why you’re still upset, and they’re going to do something that indicates that they have felt for the other person’s experience.
‘Isn’t labeling someone’s parent “emotionally immature” a kind of pathologizing? You could argue that. There’s no way of getting around that you’re boiling down this person that they love into a set of traits, and it calls them a name. It’s pejorative. But when you say “emotionally immature,” it’s not from the diagnostic manual. Although it is a way of categorizing them, it has a more explanatory tone. If you say, “Your father is narcissistic,” I get an immediate caricature of a narcissist. If I say, “Your father sounds like he may be emotionally immature,” there’s a little grace in that.
If somebody goes to their parent and says, “I think you were an emotionally immature parent,” how would a parent ever disprove that? If they would only say, “Tell me what you mean by that.” It would be the curiosity and the caring about what their child was expressing. Emotionally immature people shut the door because they know they don’t handle emotional things very well, and their best defense is to not get into it and to point the finger back at you.
When is estrangement the best option? That is something I start thinking about when they start having physical or emotional problems directly associated with their contact with their parents. Say, a woman who had very demanding, egocentric, emotionally immature parents, and they expected her to come at the drop of a hat, help them out, do something for them. They were as needy as her own children and also entitled, so she was exhausted because when they pulled her into these interactions there was no exchange of energy. It’s like, they need more, and she’s a bad person because she’s trying to set a boundary. It’s always frustrating, and you never feel like you’re doing enough
This woman I’m thinking about, she was developing stress-related physical symptoms, and it was like, OK, let’s talk about the effect on your health. So then you may bring up to the person, “Do you want to keep visiting them?” Lots of times, that’s the first time that thought’s ever crossed their mind.
There’s a moral obligation that is not only implied but explicitly stated: If I have a need, you should be there because you’re my kid. I’m trying to get them to feel the cost of it to them, which often they have completely tuned out because they don’t want to be a bad person.
I think the book’s ongoing popularity has been due to the fact that it said something about the cultural stereotype that we’ve had about parents for eons: that all parents love their children; all parents only want the best for their children; all parents put their children first; children can depend on their parents to be there for them when no one else is. I think people’s actual experience is that these stereotypes and these tropes don’t match up with their emotional experience.
Once we call something something, we think we know all about it. On the other hand, sometimes when you reduce and isolate out the operative factors, it gives you a way to not only recognize it but to control it and do something about it. So it’s a valid point, David, but it is a point that you could say about anything where you have an effective categorization: that it oversimplifies and leads to black-and-white conclusions that are not helpful. I’ve just tried to moderate that by helping people see more of the big picture about why these people became emotionally immature, what they’re trying to do with that kind of behavior and what you can do about it.
Do children owe parents anything? I look at that question differently. I look at it as, do any of us owe anybody else anything?
What’s the answer? The answer is, yes, I think we do. If I’m walking down the street and somebody trips and falls, I’m going to stop and help them get up. I wouldn’t want to live in a world where that wasn’t there, but what has happened is that there has been such an assumption that because you’re my child, you owe me something. Or, I’m entitled to your attention, and I can treat you any way I want because we’re family. That’s where you get to a point where there should be a boundary
People could decide, Hey, my unhappiness has to do with being raised by emotionally immature parents, and I’ll work on that. Then six months down the line, they realize there’s still a bunch of things they’re unhappy about. So how do we understand what our expectations for happiness should be? If you ever watch little kids, their default mode is happiness, and that’s because they’re spontaneously going and doing the next interesting thing. They naturally are following their energies. I think that’s what happens with people too. If they feel released to say no to the things that kill their energy, if they don’t feel guilted into acting more compassionate or loving than they really feel, if we take these things off of them, it’s like a cork that bobs to the top of the water.
When we can get the idea that we’re not in this world to function as a sort of auxiliary coping mechanism for people who can’t do it for themselves, we begin to feel our energy coming back. That’s what happiness is. Happiness is like free energy.
what I’m talking about is that with the people that I work with in psychotherapy, the adult children of these emotionally immature parents, the problem was really an excess of compassion. What I’ve seen is that the compassion takes over the instinctual self-preservation, and the person feels too guilty, too ashamed and too self-doubting to even think about what’s healthy for them.
don’t think there’s much possibility of change unless you have self-reflection, and you have self-reflection because you have a sense of self. You developed a sense of self because your emotional needs have been met and you have been responded to as a human being early enough that that sense of self gets in there.
I think there are earth-shattering moments that permanently shift your view of something or your way of thinking. That kind of change can happen in a flash. It’s like a joint goes back into place. There’s a click and it’s like, ah, everything starts to reorganize around that new realization. What I have found, though, is that the biggest change that people seem to have gotten from therapy is that they have a realization of their own inner experience. They now know how things affect them, what they really feel, what they really think, and they use that to guide themselves through relationships and their lives. The insight is not an intellectual exercise. It is like a becoming — an awareness that this is who I am.
What if I’ve come up with something that is most palatable for me? Well then you’ve got a problem, and what will happen is that reality will spank you. [Laughs.]
When we’re talking about relationships between people, is there such a thing as “the truth”? Just to use my own example: I have what I think is a truthful understanding of my relationship with my biological father and how it affected me as an adult. I think he has his own interpretation that is true for him. So what does truth mean in your context? Well, there’s no eye in the sky that’s going to one day give us the answer, but I think we can sense the truth for ourselves. Even if it’s a bad thing, even if it’s a painful thought, you still have those experiences of, I’ve touched on the truth of something. As far as human beings go, the best we can get is that internal sensing of what our truth is. And of course the next question’s going to be, What if I am a conspiracy theorist or a paranoid personality?
if our expectation about childhood is one where happiness is the default, might that retrospectively lead us to feelings of disappointment as adults? I think what I was trying to get at is that if children’s basic needs are met, they want to go and experience things that make them even happier.
you can mess it up early if you don’t pay attention to what something needs when it’s young
My mom and I have a great relationship because I was able to articulate to her, and was willing to, how she hurt me. She was blown away at first and we fought for months about it. Now she has come to terms with yes, she did some pretty terrible things. No she didn’t hit me, but what her and your generation doesn’t understand is there are many ways a parent can hurt their child without putting a finger on them, creating difficulties for them in later years. The fact that my mom could own those things, sit with them, accept that she had hurt me and accept that she had been the villain at times, saved our relationship. We never talk about it anymore. We never fight. We talk everyday. She is now not only the mother I want and need at 36 but my friend and confidant. My father however refuses to accept anything I tell him about how he hurt me. We can’t talk about it because he believes I’m making it up and the culture has taught me my parents are the root of all my problems, that he is the victim, that I have to do what is best for me if that means cutting him off. I did, and don’t regret it
When therapy knocks up against economic reality, one sees how meager therapy’s promise is. The most psychologically healthy person today is limited by destructive environments. If only my outlook was emotionally healthy— maybe then I would be able to—- able to what? Find an affordable rental, send my child to a good school, take time off when I am sick, feel secure about the steps taken to combat global warming, eat healthy food….
Has anyone in the comments actually read this book? The misplaced assumptions are astonishing. It is not about holding a grudge against your parents or about sidestepping personal responsibility. It is about better understanding the emotional landscape we come from so that we can understand what, specifically, we can take responsibility for, and how, specifically, we can truly and wholly forgive. I am a parent, and my mother fits the definition of emotionally immature. Reading this book has helped me have MORE compassion for her and more compassion for myself. It has not made me feel like I’m walking on eggshells around my daughters. It has helped me develop a roadmap for how I can repair our relationship when those rifts inevitably happen
My husband noticed when I was in my 30s that seeing or talking to my dad was hard for me. He said, ‘you get wound-up for a couple of weeks before you see him and it takes you a month to come down.’ So seeing my father once took me 6 weeks to cope. So I didn’t see him much. This story is clearly longer and more complex than the comments section can allow. In the end, I helped him - with his doctor appointments, hospitalizations, moving to assisted living, running errands. I did it for the basic idea of his humanity, and I excused his behavior to help him. But I exposed myself to a lot of toxicity in the process.
if a parent was not emotionally, physically, or mentally abusive then have a conversation. Let the parent know whats happening and how you’re thinking about the relationship. I did understand that she has her own journey and gets to choose those she will share it with. But she didn’t tell me any of that until i asked directly. I want my adult child to be satisfied with her life and to have autonomy. She didn’t have to break my heart to get there. Folks who write books like these make it black and white but people, families, are so many different shades in between. The author should recognize and callout the difference between extreme and repairable.
My own mother has started being able to talk with me about what she wishes she'd done differently while raising me, and that's helping me go easier on her. It's easier to forgive someone who says, "I'm sorry, I didn't handle that well," or, "If I'd known then what I know now," I would've handled that differently."
I think it’s fair to say that one of the problems with contemporary life is how we label other people in ways that are reductive or don’t acknowledge multidimensionality. Is there any part of you that thinks it’s not a good thing for the people who have read your book to be thinking about a parent, Oh, you’re emotionally immature, and that is what defines you now? Absolutely, I think it’s a danger. That is the problem with the categorizing part of our mind.
you owe it to all versions of yourself
- Multiple selves exist simultaneously across three dimensions:
- Temporal (past/present/future)
- Contextual (work/family/friends)
- Developmental (child/teen/adult)
- Each self deserves moral consideration and ethical treatment
My Life As a Homeless Man in America
AI summary: "This deeply personal account chronicles the author's experience becoming homeless in Rhode Island in late 2023, living out of his Toyota Corolla with his rescue dog Lily. As a former journalist and art critic who became disabled by severe bipolar disorder in 1997, the author details the daily challenges of surviving on $960 monthly disability payments while navigating police harassment, seeking assistance from social services, and maintaining his dignity and creative work despite severe financial constraints. The piece illustrates how America's homeless crisis affects even educated professionals, revealing the systemic failures in affordable housing, mental health care, and social services that leave vulnerable people with nowhere to go."
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances, which need to include all kinds of people, from trans to working people to those taxi drivers that J. K. Rowling is worried about. Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.
Judith Butler with a Pretty Damn Good Indictment of Identity Politics!
Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world.
“Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception.
you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections.
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
The surrogates Trump assembled were able to appeal to the "frat bro or finance bro culture," says Janfaza, because "to them, many of these men who have built these companies, ecosystems and media platforms, show them a version of success to work toward."
"The way that Trump was able to include many of these male figures in his cohort was very impactful," she added. "And while yes, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Beyonce also have massive, massive audiences, we have to understand that the way young people are consuming their media and entertainment just looks drastically different than it did for prior generations."
Frustrated with science denial : r/QAnonCasualties
The Free-Time Gender Gap - Gender Equity Policy Institute (GEPI)
Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average.
Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family
Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age
Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined
Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time
Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work
Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work
The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.
Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men.
Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.
getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).
Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not.
Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.
Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.
Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.
there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.
Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.
Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.
Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.
The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.
One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.
when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.
Rewilding your attention
our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.
Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?
Smart and Illicit - Who becomes an Entrepreneur and do they earn more?
How to Crush it on Twitter When You Don't Want to Do That
Multipotentiality - Wikipedia
The Other Two Captures the Strangeness of Social Media Stardom
Social media is the lens for a lot of the show’s biggest bits and even plotlines. It is, just as in life, omnipresent, and so, even as the show spotlights the inherent ridiculousness of the extremely online, it also understands the way social media is a deranging accelerant of everyday problems, and thus a medium of everyday life.
These are all just a bunch of funny jokes about people who are too online, celebrities whose shallow fame exists only by way of the apps, and a contemporary American culture hypnotized by the blue light of screens.
In her book The Drama of Celebrity, the scholar Sharon Marcus argues that celebrity, as we know it, is a cultural phenomenon with three distinct authors. There’s the celebrity, who expresses themself through whatever art or product they make; there are the journalists who write about and photograph and criticize and otherwise construct the celebrity’s public image; and then there’s the public, who contribute devotion and imagination, and money, and love and hate.
There was a time when Marilyn Monroe emerged as an illusion, a trick of the light produced between herself, her studio’s massive press apparatus, and an adoring and vampiric public. Today, anyone can be an illusion like this, if at smaller scale.
The show by no means wants to redeem the industry, but, this season especially, it’s become invested in exposing the lazy nihilism that can come along with seeing the worst in people. If you run into a craven, soulless industry hack in the morning, you ran into a craven, soulless industry hack; if you run into them all day, you are the craven, soulless industry hack.
The Other Two is about identity. It’s a flimsy, fungible thing, and it’s a trap. It’s a point of pride and a point of embarrassment. There’s the real you that we all struggle to find and to express truthfully; there’s the version of yourself that you perform for the public; there’s the version of you that others create in and against their own image.
Don't Worry, You'll be Fine
When you observe a human life from a far enough distance, all the trials and tribulations just become rounding errors.
Dostoyevsky said that to love someone means to see them as God intended, so why on earth shouldn’t you also be a ‘someone’? This makes me think that sometimes you have to try to look at yourself through the eyes of God: how tiny and lacking, yet how precious and important; how flawed and powerless, yet unique and loved.
There’s something very calming about believing that nobody cares about what you do, that you could just be whatever you want to be. It grants you a kind of unlimited confidence, like flooring the gas pedal on your free will. It’s liberating to think that you’re not special — not because you aren’t valuable, but because you aren’t as offensively powerful as you might think. Humility, or the simple act of focusing less on yourself without reducing your sense of self-worth, can be the ultimate source of peace.
I want to see, in hindsight, that misfortunes haven’t hardened my heart — I want to look back and see a survivor. I want to see that heartaches have not smothered my passion and that sadness was not able to keep me down for long.
You may be existentially “trapped” in the present, but your perspective doesn’t have to be. With enough distance from your own timeline, every mistake blurs into a minor miscalculation, and every letdown diminishes to insignificance. Even a bad memory, with enough time, will appear trivial — it might transform you but its colors will fade into a wistful sepia.
A ★★★★ review of Monster (2023)
It's not Just the same story seen from different point of views, it's the same story in which people act and behave every time with different attitudes according to Who Is watching and his or Her fears, feelings or expectations
Let's talk about 'Killers of the Flower Moon's ending
With his epilogue, Scorsese offers salient commentary on how mainstream entertainment has — to ensure white comfort — frequently sanitized such brutality against Native Americans, and how this specific tale has been reduced to an oft-forgotten footnote in the pages of white supremacy.
In concept, the idea of a director centering himself during a film's emotional denouement echoes the prototypical image of an ego-driven auteur. However, there's a knowing and mournful humility to Scorsese's performance here, which warps the film's most farcical scene into its most poignant.
David Grann on ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Getting Swept Up in the Culture Wars: “You Can’t Obliterate History”
Income Inequality & Monopoly — Open Markets Institute
Retire the Word "Terrorism"
Rupert Murdoch steps down.
“Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes, the man he hired to create the network, saw a market that felt ignored and stereotyped when attention was paid. Like any good business — and journalism is a business — they set out to reach that market.
“Fox News had some good early ambitions. But fairly early on in its existence, the network pivoted far away from straight news and intelligent conservative commentary, and leaned heavily toward the loudmouths. And after that, it went from promoting the bloviators to platforming the outright liars. That was the moment the network completely jumped the shark and pivoted from presenting alternative viewpoints to presenting an alternate reality. This is Rupert Murdoch’s most meaningful political legacy—dutifully carrying water for Trump’s MAGA movement that banished real conservatism,” Lewis wrote. “Instead of elevating conservatism, Murdoch helped undermine conservatism as a serious philosophy, skewing instead toward tabloid conspiracy theories like birtherism and ‘rigged’ election allegations.”