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Javier E

Europe shows the way to protect privacy from Facebook-like violations - MarketWatch - 0 views

  • Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, recently noted that the public scrutiny of Facebook is “very much overdue,” declaring that “it’s shocking to me that they didn’t have to answer more of these questions earlier on.”
  • Stefano Quintarelli, one of Europe’s top IT experts and a leading advocate for online privacy (and, until recently, a member of the Italian Parliament), has been a persistent and prophetic critic of Facebook’s abuse of its market position and misuse of online personal data
  • He has long championed a powerful idea: that each of us should retain control of our online profile, which should be readily transferable across portals. If we decide we don’t like Facebook, we should be able to shift to a competitor without losing the links to contacts who remain on Facebook.
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  • Quintarelli says that the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which takes effect on May 25, following six years of preparation and debate, “can serve as guidance in some aspects.
  • Under the GDPR, he notes, “non-compliant organizations can face heavy fines, up to 4% of their revenues.
  • Had the GDPR already been in place, Facebook, in order to avoid such fines, would have had to notify the authorities of the data leak as soon as the company became aware of it, well in advance of the last U.S. election.”
  • the GDPR should help, because it “introduces the concept of profile portability, whereby a user can move her profile from one service provider to another, like we do when porting our telephone profile — the mobile phone number — from one operator to another.”
  • Just as important is “interconnection: the operator to which we port our profile should be interconnected to the source operator so that we don’t lose contact with our online friends. This is possible today thanks to technologies like IPFS and Solid, developed by the web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.”
  • Spiekermann, a global authority on the trafficking of our online identities for purposes of targeted advertising, political propaganda, public and private surveillance, or other nefarious purposes, emphasizes the need to crack down on “personal data markets.”
  • “personal data markets have thrived on the idea that personal data might be the ‘new oil’ of the digital economy as well as — so it seems — of politics.”
  • “more than a thousand companies are now involved in a digital information value chain that harvests data from any online activity and delivers targeted content to online or mobile users within roughly 36 seconds of their entry into the digital realm.”
Javier E

Facebook, the Company That Loves Misery - WSJ - 1 views

  • For more than a decade Mark Zuckerberg has been running an experiment in openness. We are the test subjects. So what does he think about the fact that being “open and connected,” Facebook -style, is making us miserable?
  • Several studies, most recently one out of San Diego State University analyzing the leisure activities of a million teens, have concluded that the more time spent on Facebook, the less happy we tend to be
  • In 2010 Mr. Zuckerberg announced that the old social norm of privacy had “evolved”—a fortuitous discovery for someone who had devoted his life to whittling others’ privacy away. Indeed, Facebook’s essential conceit is that privacy is outmoded—the corset we never wanted and are so much freer without
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  • We’ve known for a while that Facebook enables online communication with friends and family—but also a sharply targeted form of bullying. That it wastes our time. That, whatever relationships it nurtures, it kills off others entirely.
  • We registered as Facebook users imagining ourselves vacationing at a new resort, but it turned out to be a nudist colony
  • The Cambridge Analytica scandal came on like a slap, the kind that breaks the spell and makes you wonder what on earth you’ve been doing. How had we given so much away? We squandered assets we may never regain—privacy, dignity—and for what?
  • But privacy is also a shield, and it protects subject and observer alike
  • Mr. Zuckerberg’s promise to protect our data is laughable because exploiting our data is precisely his business.
  • Over the years, Facebook pushed us to share more of ourselves. “What are you doing right now?” became “What’s on your mind, Abigail?” It jiggered the order of posts to keep our navels and our friends’ well-gazed, all the while rendering us more vulnerable to abuse
  • When we discovered our pockets had been picked, Facebook suddenly seemed more hustler than host; its endless party, one great confidence scheme.
  • And now, Congress is calling on Mr. Zuckerberg to fix the problem as if the problem weren’t Facebook itself
  • Is there any piece of data about us that, on principle, Mr. Zuckerberg wouldn’t monetize
Javier E

Now Is the Time to Talk About the Power of Touch - The New York Times - 1 views

  • In 1945, the Austrian physician René Spitz investigated an orphanage that took extra care to make sure its infants were not infected with disease. The children received first-class nutrition and medical care, but they were barely touched, to minimize their contact with germs. The approach was a catastrophe. Thirty-seven percent of the babies died before reaching age 2.
  • It turns out that empathetic physical contact is essential for life. Intimate touch engages the emotions and wires the fibers of the brain together.
  • The famous Grant Study investigated a set of men who had gone to Harvard in the 1940s. The men who grew up in loving homes earned 50 percent more over the course of their careers than those from loveless ones. They suffered from far less chronic illness and much lower rates of dementia in old age. A loving home was the best predictor of life outcomes.
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  • For this reason, cultures all around the world have treated emotional touching as something apart. The Greeks labeled the drive to touch with the word “eros,” and they meant something vaster and deeper than just sexual pleasure.
  • “Animals have sex and human beings have eros, and no accurate science is possible without making this distinction,” Allan Bloom observed.
  • The Abrahamic religions also treat sex as something sacred and beautiful when enveloped in loving and covenantal protections, and as something disordered and potentially peace-destroying when not.
  • Over the past 100 years or so, advanced thinkers across the West have worked to take the shame out of sex, surely a good thing. But they’ve also disenchanted it
  • “One of the principal outcomes of the sexual revolution was to establish that sex is just like any other social interaction — nothing taboo or sacred about it.” Sex is seen as a shallow physical and social thing, not a heart and soul altering thing.
  • One unintended effect of this disenchantment is that it becomes easy to underestimate the risks inherent in any encounter.
  • The woman who talked in an online article about her date with Aziz Ansari is being criticized because what happened to her was not like what happened to the victims of Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K
  • The assumption seems to be that as long as there’s consent between adults, everything else is kosher.
  • Everything we know about touch suggests that even with full consent, the emotional quality of an encounter can have profound positive or negative effects. If Ansari did treat her coldly or neglectfully, it’s reasonable to think that the shame she felt right after was the surface effect of a deeper wound. Neglectful, dehumanizing sex is not harassment, but it’s some other form of serious harm.
  • Disenchanting emotional touch also causes people to underestimate the way past experiences shape current behavior.
  • Agency is learned, not bred. And one of the things that undermines agency most powerfully is past sexual harm.
  • The abuse of intimacy erodes all the building blocks of agency: self-worth, resiliency and self-efficacy (the belief that you can control a situation).
  • It is precisely someone who lives within a culture of supposedly zipless encounters who is most likely to be unable to take action when she feels uncomfortable.
  • I hate the way Babe, which published the story about the Ansari date, violated everybody’s privacy here. But it seems that the beginning of good sense is to take the power of touch seriously, as something that has profound good and bad effects.
  • It seems that the smarter we get about technology, the dumber we get about relationships. We live in a society in which loneliness, depression and suicide are on the rise.
  • The guiding moral principle here is not complicated: Try to treat other people as if they possessed precious hearts and infinite souls. Everything else will follow.
Javier E

Opinion | Grifters Gone Wild - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Silicon Valley has always had “a flimflam element” and a “fake it ’til you make it” ethos, from the early ’80s, when it was selling vaporware (hardware or software that was more of a concept or work in progress than a workable reality).
  • “We’ve been lionizing and revering these young tech entrepreneurs, treating them not just like princes and princesses but like heroes and icons,” Carreyrou says. “Now that there’s a backlash to Silicon Valley, it will be interesting to see if we reconsider this view that just because you made a lot of money doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re a role model for boys and girls.”
  • Jaron Lanier, the scientist and musician known as the father of virtual reality, has a new book out, “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He says that the business plans of Facebook and Google have served to “elevate the role of the con artist to be central in society.”
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  • “Anytime people want to contact each other or have an awareness of each other, it can only be when it’s financed by a third party who wants to manipulate us, to change us in some way or affect how we vote or what we buy,” he says. “In the old days, to be in that unusual situation, you had to be in a cult or a volunteer in an experiment in a psychology building or be in an abusive relationship or at a bogus real estate seminar.
  • “We don’t believe in government,” he says. “A lot of people are pissed at media. They don’t like education. People who used to think the F.B.I. was good now think it’s terrible. With all of these institutions the subject of ridicule, there’s nothing — except Skinner boxes and con artists.”
  • “But now you just need to sign onto Facebook to find yourself in a behavior modification loop, which is the con. And this may destroy our civilization and even our species.”
  • As Maria Konnikova wrote in her book, “The Confidence Game,” “The whirlwind advance of technology heralds a new golden age of the grift. Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change” when we are losing the old ways and open to the unexpected.
  • now narcissistic con artists are dominating the main stage, soaring to great heights and spectacularly exploding
haubertbr

Trump Seeks Inquiry Into Allegations That Obama Tapped His Phones - 0 views

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    WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - President Trump, a day after leveling a widely disputed allegation that President Barack Obama had ordered the tapping of his phones, demanded a congressional inquiry into whether Mr. Obama abused the power of federal law enforcement agencies before the 2016 presidential election.
sissij

The Increasing Significance of the Decline of Men - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
  • But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
  • From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.
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  • For boys and girls raised in two-parent households, there were only modest differences between the sexes in terms of success at school, and boys tended to earn more than their sisters in early adulthood.
  • At the same time, the divorce rate for college graduates has declined from 34.8 percent among those born between 1950 and 1955 to 29.9 percent among those born between 1957 and 1964. In contrast, the divorce rate for those without college degrees increased over the same period from 44.3 percent to 50.6 percent.
  • First, there are irreversible changes in the workplace, particularly the rise of jobs requiring social skills (even STEM jobs) that will continue to make it hard for men who lack those skills.
  • Females consistently score higher on tests of emotional and social intelligence. Sex differences in sociability and social perceptiveness have been shown to have biological origins, with differences appearing in infancy and higher levels of fetal testosterone associated with lower scores on tests of social intelligence.
  • This vulnerability, in turn, makes boys more susceptible toattention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and conduct disorders as well as the epigenetic mechanisms that can account for the recent widespread increase of these disorders in U.S. culture.
  • Schore argues that a major factor in rising dysfunction among boys and men in this country is the failure of the United States to provide longer periods of paid parental leave, with the result that many infants are placed in day care when they are six weeks old.
  • Men are really going to have to change their act or have big problems. I think of big guys from the cave days, guys who were good at lifting stuff and hunting and the things we got genetically selected out for. During the industrial revolution that wasn’t so bad, but it’s not going to be there anymore.
  • Second, male children suffer more from restricted or nonexistent parental leave policies and contemporary child care arrangements, as well as from growing up in single-parent households. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • It has been a longstanding objective of right-wing regimes to push women back into traditional gender roles. Is that what’s going on here? Or could it be something less pernicious and more important?
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    I think this research is very interesting. It takes a different perspective when discussing gender issues. It notices that there are actually a decline of men in the society. Although there are still wage inequality and other gender problems that women are usually in disadvantages, men are having more and more disadvantages now as the the society shift from physical work to mental work. As the society evolved, the social structure also evolves. Gender equality means we should put equal attention to all genders (there are more than two). --Sissi (3/16/2017)
anonymous

Opinion | I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement - The New York Times - 0 views

  • I Survived 18 Years in Solitary Confinement
  • Mr. Manuel is an author, activist and poet. When he was 14 years old, he was sentenced to life in prison with no parole and spent 18 years in solitary confinement.
  • Imagine living alone in a room the size of a freight elevator for almost two decades.
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  • As a 15-year-old, I was condemned to long-term solitary confinement in the Florida prison system, which ultimately lasted for 18 consecutive years
  • From age 15 to 33.
  • For 18 years I didn’t have a window in my room to distract myself from the intensity of my confinement
  • I wasn’t permitted to talk to my fellow prisoners or even to myself. I didn’t have healthy, nutritious food; I was given just enough to not die
  • These circumstances made me think about how I ended up in solitary confinement.
  • United Nations standards on the treatment of prisoners prohibits solitary confinement for more than 15 days, declaring it “cruel, inhuman or degrading.”
  • For this I was arrested and charged as an adult with armed robbery and attempted murder.
  • My court-appointed lawyer advised me to plead guilty, telling me that the maximum sentence would be 15 years. So I did. But my sentence wasn’t 15 years — it was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
  • But a year and a half later, at age 15, I was put back into solitary confinement after being written up for a few minor infractions.
  • Florida has different levels of solitary confinement; I spent the majority of that time in one of the most restrictive
  • I was finally released from prison in 2016 thanks to my lawyer, Bryan Stevenson
  • Researchers have long concluded that solitary confinement causes post-traumatic stress disorder and impairs prisoners’ ability to adjust to society long after they leave their cell.
  • In the summer of 1990, shortly after finishing seventh grade, I was directed by a few older kids to commit a robbery. During the botched attempt, I shot a woman. She suffered serious injuries to her jaw and mouth but survived. It was reckless and foolish on my part, the act of a 13-year-old in crisis, and I’m simply grateful no one died.
  • More aggressive change is needed in state prison systems
  • In 2016, the Obama administration banned juvenile solitary confinement in federal prisons, and a handful of states have advanced similar reforms for both children and adults.
  • Yet the practice, even for minors, is still common in the United States, and efforts to end it have been spotty
  • Because solitary confinement is hidden from public view and the broader prison population, egregious abuses are left unchecked
  • I watched a corrections officer spray a blind prisoner in the face with chemicals simply because he was standing by the door of his cell as a female nurse walked by. The prisoner later told me that to justify the spraying, the officer claimed the prisoner masturbated in front of the nurse.
  • I also witnessed the human consequences of the harshness of solitary firsthand: Some people would resort to cutting their stomachs open with a razor and sticking a plastic spork inside their intestines just so they could spend a week in the comfort of a hospital room with a television
  • On occasion, I purposely overdosed on Tylenol so that I could spend a night in the hospital. For even one night, it was worth the pain.
  • Another time, I was told I’d be switching dorms, and I politely asked to remain where I was because a guard in the new area had been overly aggressive with me. In response, four or five officers handcuffed me, picked me up by my feet and shoulders, and marched with me to my new dorm — using my head to ram the four steel doors on the way there.
  • The punishments were wholly disproportionate to the infractions. Before I knew it, months in solitary bled into years, years into almost two decades.
  • As a child, I survived these conditions by conjuring up stories of what I’d do when I was finally released. My mind was the only place I found freedom from my reality
  • the only place I could play basketball with my brother or video games with my friends, and eat my mother’s warm cherry pie on the porch.
  • No child should have to use their imagination this way — to survive.
  • It is difficult to know the exact number of children in solitary confinement today. The Liman Center at Yale Law School estimated that 61,000 Americans (adults and children) were in solitary confinement in the fall of 2017
  • No matter the count, I witnessed too many people lose their minds while isolated. They’d involuntarily cross a line and simply never return to sanity. Perhaps they didn’t want to. Staying in their mind was the better, safer, more humane option.
  • Solitary confinement is cruel and unusual punishment, something prohibited by the Eighth Amendment, yet prisons continue to practice it.
  • When it comes to children, elimination is the only moral option. And if ending solitary confinement for adults isn’t politically viable, public officials should at least limit the length of confinement to 15 days or fewer, in compliance with the U.N. standards
  • As I try to reintegrate into society, small things often awaken painful memories from solitary. Sometimes relationships feel constraining. It’s difficult to maintain the attention span required for a rigid 9-to-5 job. At first, crossing the street and seeing cars and bikes racing toward me felt terrifying.
  • I will face PTSD and challenges big and small for the rest of my life because of what I was subjected to.
  • And some things I never will — most of all, that this country can treat human beings, especially children, as cruelly as I was treated.
  • Sadly, solitary confinement for juveniles is still permissible in many states. But we have the power to change that — to ensure that the harrowing injustice I suffered as a young boy never happens to another child in America.
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    A very eye-opening article and story told by a victim about young children facing solitary confinement.
lucieperloff

Amazon Walks a Political Tightrope in Its Union Fight - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It backs a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage. It has pledged to meet all the goals of the Paris climate agreement on reducing emissions. It has met with the administration to discuss how to help with the distribution of Covid-19 vaccines.
  • staying on the good side of Washington’s Democratic leaders while squashing an organizing effort that President Biden has signaled his support for.
  • Approval would be a first for Amazon workers in the United States and could energize the labor movement across the country.
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  • Labor leaders and liberal Democrats have seized on the union drive, saying it shows how Amazon is not as friendly to workers as the company says it is.
  • Lawmakers and regulators — not competitors — are some of its greatest threats, and it has spent significant time and money trying to keep the government away from its business.
  • I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”
  • we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,”
  • In February, Mr. Biden appeared in a video that didn’t mention Amazon explicitly but was seen as a clear sign of support to the union.
  • We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”
  • They have also attacked Mr. Bezos, the richest person in the world by some measures, for his personal wealth.
  • In the final quarter of last year, Amazon paid Jeff Ricchetti $60,000, according to disclosure forms he filed with the government.
  • He has deep relationships with Mr. Biden’s inner circle, and has played in a garage band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
  • Amazon has promoted the $15-an-hour minimum in ads in publications frequently used to reach government officials, including Politico and The New York Times. Its lobbyists have pushed for a federal law raising the wage.
  • When professors at Georgetown and New York Universities asked Americans in 2018 which institutions they had the most confidence in, only the military ranked higher than Amazon
  • That absolutely includes the Amazon workers in Alabama, just like workers in Washington State and across our country.”
  • “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace to our constituents,”
clairemann

Why Some People Lie in Therapy | TIME - 1 views

  • Lying is, for better or worse, a behavior humans take part in at some point in their lives. On average, Americans tell one to two lies a day, multiple studies have suggested. But it’s where some people are fibbing that might come as a surprise.
  • Laura is far from alone. In a comprehensive 2015 study published by the American Psychological Association book Secrets and Lies in Psychotherapy, 93% of respondents admitted they had lied during therapy at least once.
  • The 2015 study found 61% of participants cited embarrassment as the main reason for dishonesty with their therapist.
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  • Morin acknowledges many clients are scared of “getting in trouble” for what they confess in therapy. “They may worry that the therapist will terminate their sessions because they aren’t making progress or they may be concerned the therapist will somehow punish them,” she says.
  • “Sometimes people don’t really mean to lie, but they minimize their problems because they can’t quite accept them yet,” Morin says. “Someone with a substance abuse problem might insist she didn’t drink much this week even though she drank heavily every day. Individuals often need help coming to terms with their problems before they can be honest with themselves.”
  • “I don’t want to talk about trauma because discussing it is going to overwhelm me,” Farber says of this mindset. “It’s going to bring me back to an experience or experiences that have been so difficult [and] so overwhelming, and I’m fearful that if I talk about it, it will re-traumatize me.”
  • Altering the truth in an attempt at kindness is still problematic, though, because it limits how effective treatment can be. “If you’re censoring your experience, then the therapist can’t be helpful to you,” Kolod says. Therapists are aware clients sometimes omit the truth or downplay the significance of certain life experiences, and there has been research on how mental health professionals can better spot dishonesty and adapt their treatment accordingly.
clairemann

Mitt Romney Receives JFK Profile In Courage Award For Trump Impeachment Vote | HuffPost - 1 views

  • Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) on Friday was named the recipient of the 2021 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for his “courageous” vote to impeach former President Donald Trump for abuse of power. 
  • During Trump’s first impeachment trial last year, Romney became the first senator in U.S. history to vote to convict a president from his own party. 
  • “Senator Romney’s commitment to our Constitution makes him a worthy successor to the senators who inspired my father to write ‘Profiles in Courage,’”
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  • “What I’ve found throughout life is doing those things which you know are right, which respond to the promptings of your conscience, allows you to have a greater degree of happiness and satisfaction than if you just do things to try and get ahead,”
cvanderloo

Lockdown, violence and understanding women's anger - 1 views

  • In early March, reports of a white, middle-class missing woman, Sarah Everard, had hit the news. A few days later, a white serving Metropolitan Police officer, Wayne Couzens, was charged with her kidnap and murder.
  • Countless stories have been shared online of women being frightened to walk alone, of holding their keys as a weapon, and of feeling a sense of constant threat and anxiety. At a time when lockdown has curtailed freedom of movement, it felt especially cruel that women felt safe nowhere – in their homes, in the street or online.
  • If there is an image that has come to represent what transpired on the night of the vigil, it is the photo of a young woman, who we now know to be Patsy Stevenson, clad in a face mask and pinned to the ground by a group of male police officers, her head held up, as she stares into the camera.
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  • Much of the searing power of this viral image comes from how it captures what appears to be the aggressive demeanour of the police officers, while also showing the outrage and defiance of Stevenson. Serious questions are now being raised about the Met’s handling of the situation.
  • As a research team, we are not surprised by women’s outrage. But we are surprised at the government’s response of proposing that increased infrastructure alone, like better lighting or CCTV cameras, will make women’s lives any safer.
  • Rather than teaching women how to protect themselves, our research dating back over a decade shows there is a need for education that tackles the gendered and sexual inequities that normalise violent, predatory forms of masculinit
  • Young people struggle to know how to deal with this kind of online sexual harassment and abuse. The numbers of young people who reported their experiences were staggeringly low with only 6% reporting it to the social media platform, 3% telling parents and a mere 1% reporting it to their school.
  • As recent petitions show, there is a demand from young people for better education, regardless of their gender, on issues such as consent, healthy relationships and sexual violence. And in an increasingly digital world, this education must account for everyday online practices, like pestering girls for nudes or sending unwanted dick pics, in addition to offline forms of sexual violence.
  • Education is not just needed for young people, but also for teachers, school leaders and parents.
  • Although our evaluation of these resources is ongoing, our preliminary findings show that schools adopting our training and policies have led to dramatic reductions in online sexual harassment, increased teacher confidence in handling these issues and improved student mental health.
anonymous

Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children's Book Author, Dies at 104 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Beverly Cleary, Beloved Children’s Book Author, Dies at 104
  • Her funny stories about Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the sisters Ramona and Beezus Quimby, and a motorcycling mouse named Ralph never talked down to readers.
  • Beverly Cleary, who enthralled tens of millions of young readers with the adventures and mishaps of Henry Huggins and his dog Ribsy, the bratty Ramona Quimby and her older sister Beezus, and other residents of Klickitat Street, died on Thursday in Carmel, Calif
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  • She was 104.
  • Always sympathetic, never condescending, she presented her readers with characters they knew and understood, the 20th-century equivalents of Huck Finn or Louisa May Alcott’s little women, and every bit as popular: Her books sold more than 85 million copies
  • “Cleary is funny in a very sophisticated way,
  • At her library job in Yakima, Ms. Cleary had become dissatisfied with the books being offered to her young patrons
  • The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
  • “I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”
  • After marrying Clarence Cleary, a graduate student she had met at Berkeley, she moved to San Francisco and, while her husband served in the military, sold children’s books at the Sather Gate
  • Book Shop in Berkeley and worked as a librarian at Camp John T. Knight in Oakland.
  • “She gets very close to satire, which I think is why adults like her, but she’s still deeply respectful of her characters — nobody gets a laugh at the expense of another. I think kids appreciate that they’re on a level playing field with adults.”
  • She had been particularly touched by the plight of a group of boys who asked her, “Where are the books about us?”
  • “Why didn’t authors write books about everyday problems that children could solve by themselves?”
  • “Why weren’t there more stories about children playing? Why couldn’t I find more books that would make me laugh? These were the bo
  • oks I wanted to read, and the books I was eventually to write.”
  • “When I began ‘Henry Huggins’ I did not know how to write a book, so I mentally told the stories that I remembered and wrote them down as I told them,”
  • Ramona Quimby, introduced in a small role as the annoying younger sister of Henry’s friend Beatrice, better known as Beezus, emerged as a superstar.
  • “I thought like Ramona, but I was a very well-behaved little girl.”
  • By the time “Beezus and Ramona” was published, Ms. Cleary had twins, Malcolm and Marianne, to provide her with fresh material. They survive her, along with three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. Her husband died in 2004.
  • Ramona mounts a campaign to have her father quit smoking, a habit he abuses after losing his job.
  • That book won the Newbery Medal in 1984. A sequel, “Strider,” followed in 1991.
  • “That little girl, who has remained with me, prevents me from writing down to children, from poking fun at my characters, and from writing an adult reminiscence about childhood instead of a book to be enjoyed by children.”
anonymous

$1 Million Raised After Attack on Asian Woman Will Go to Fight Racism, Family Says - Th... - 0 views

  • $1 Million Raised After Attack on Asian Woman Will Go to Fight Racism, Family Says
  • The woman, Xiao Zhen Xie, 75, was punched by a white man last week.
  • Her family raised money through GoFundMe to pay for her medical expenses. Now, they want to use it to fight anti-Asian racism.
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  • After a Chinese grandmother was attacked by a white man in broad daylight in San Francisco last week, she fought back.
  • Ms. Xie holding a wooden board; a representative of the family said she picked it up to defend herself but did not hit her assailant.
  • A suspect was arrested, and Ms. Xie was left with several injuries, including two black eyes.
  • The assault, which traumatized Ms. Xie and left her with long-term injuries, according to her family, happened during a surge of anti-Asian violence in the Bay Area and across the United States.
  • The public response to his fund-raiser far exceeded the family’s goal: By Thursday, about $1 million had been raised.
  • On Monday Mr. Chen said on the GoFundMe website that the family was planning to donate all the money to fight anti-Asian racism.
  • The AAPI community is bleeding from this violence and hatred,”
  • “We as a community cannot stay silent nor be silenced anymore. That is why our family plans to donate ALL funds generated in this GoFundMe to help the AAPI community recover, and combat racism.”
  • The report was released on the same day that eight people, six of them Asian, were fatally shot at three Atlanta-area massage parlors. Stop AAPI Hate called the shootings “an unspeakable tragedy” for the victims’ families and the Asian-American community, which has “been reeling from high levels of racist attacks.”
  • The attack against Ms. Xie was one of several that have been captured, at least in part, on video.
  • Her assailant, whom the police identified as Steven Jenkins, 39, first attacked an 83-year-old Vietnamese man, Ngoc Pham, who had been grocery shopping on March 17
  • According to the police, the attacker was then chased by a security guard; he punched Ms. Xie while being pursued.
  • Video footage from the immediate aftermath of the assault shows Ms. Xie holding an ice pack to her face and telling officers and bystanders about her attacker.
  • “One big punch came down on me,” she said in Cantonese, wailing in distress.
  • “Investigators are working to determine if racial bias was a motivating factor in the incident,”
  • Mr. Jenkins has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, which included elder abuse and assault,
  • “It’s been difficult on the Asian-American community — of course I understand,”
  • “These elderly, first-generation immigrants who give up the world to give their kids the American experience — there should be an award for people like this.”
  • “As more information is shared,” he said, “I think that people will see that this is more complex.”
  • Ms. Xie “has been severely affected mentally, physically, and emotionally,” adding that she said she was “afraid to step out of her home from now on.”
  • On Tuesday, Mr. Chen wrote that his grandmother was finally able to open her swollen left eye and that she was in better spirits than before.
  • “She insists on making this decision, saying this issue is bigger than her.”
  • “Right now, the funds are being safely held by our payment processor and will be transferred at the direction of Ms. Xie and her family,
  • “We are in close touch with the family and will ensure the funds are transferred to the appropriate place.”
anonymous

Opinion | Biden Plots a Revolution for America's Children - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Biden Plots a Revolution for America’s Children
  • National pre-K and affordable day care don’t have to be a dream.
  • The most revolutionary part of President Biden’s agenda so far is his focus on a constituency that doesn’t write whiny op-ed columns, doesn’t vote, doesn’t hire lobbyists and so has been neglected for half a century: children.
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  • Biden’s proposal to establish a national pre-K and child care system would be a huge step forward for children and for working parents alike.
  • You drop a kid off at a high-quality prekindergarten program in the morning and pick the child up on the way home from work.
  • When my wife and I lived in Japan in the late 1990s, we sent our kids to one of these nurseries, and they were a dream.
  • But the United States never developed such a system, because for half a century as other countries were investing in children, the United States was stiffing them.
  • Today one of our saddest statistics is this: American children ages 1 to 19 are 57 percent more likely to die than children in other rich countries.
  • Some of those kids die because the United States doesn’t provide universal health care to children — only to senior citizens, who vote and thus are a priority.
  • Just as Franklin Roosevelt revolutionized conditions for the elderly by instituting Social Security, Biden may be able to do the same for children.
  • But still more important for America’s future, in my view, will be the elements focused on children.
  • Making his child allowances permanent.
  • Expanding home visitation programs that help at-risk moms and dads from pregnancy through early childhood
  • Working toward universal access to high-quality pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds.
  • Ensuring high-quality affordable day care for parents
  • One model the White House is studying is the excellent day care system offered by the U.S. military,
  • For some of my middle-aged friends wrestling with homelessness, mental health crises and decades of addiction, with more of a criminal record than an educational record, it may not be possible to turn lives around. For their kids and grandkids, we have to try.
  • please, President Biden, push on. This is about America’s future. This is your chance to preside over a Rooseveltian revolution that sprinkles opportunity and averts tragedies for decades to come.
  • he question isn’t whether we can afford to invest in children and break cycles of poverty, educational failure and substance abuse. It’s whether we can afford not to.
caelengrubb

The future's in the past | Culture | The Guardian - 1 views

  • Whenever the importance of history is discussed, epigrams and homilies come tripping easily off our tongues: How can we understand our present or glimpse our future if we cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are if we don't know who we were?
  • While history may be condemned to repeat itself, historians are condemned to repeat themselves. History is bunk or possibly bunkum.
  • Historians, more than any other class, spend a great deal of time justifying their trade, defining it and aphorising it, seeming to lavish more attention on historiography than history.
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  • Historians are no longer grandees at the centre of a fixed civilisation; they are simply journalists writing about celebrities who haven't got the grace to be alive any more
  • There are those who wonder if the whole of history is now valuable only as a politically correct lesson in the stupidity and cruelty of monarchs, aristocrats, industrialists and generals
  • You don't even have to dignify it with ideological abstractions any more; history is really the story of a series of subjugations, oppressions, exploitations and abuses.
  • The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters.
  • A history in which historians have to stand on one side of an argument or another, for, in between, they are nothing but dry-as-dust statisticians
  • we measure the exponential growth in the public appetite for history
  • History, then, as one long, grovelling apology or act of self-abasement and self-laceration.
  • After all, isn't that what poetry and novels show, that humanity is best comprehended by understanding humans rather than ideas? But for some, this leads to the worry that history can now only mean witness
  • Certainly, history is popular in grand traditional forms, but new subgenres of history have, for the last 20 years, exploded in popularity, too.
  • We haven't arrived at our own moral and ethical imperatives by each of us working them out from first principles; we have inherited them and they were born out of blood and suffering, as all human things and human beings are.
  • This does not stop us from admiring and praising the progressive heroes who got there early and risked their lives to advance causes that we now take for granted.
  • In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts
  • If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: 'Wilkes and Liberty!' or, indeed, cried: 'Death to Wilkes!', if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.
  • History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier
  • History is memory
Javier E

A News Organization That Rejects the View From Nowhere - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic - 1 views

  • For many years, Rosen has been a leading critic of what he calls The View From Nowhere, or the conceit that journalists bring no prior commitments to their work. On his long-running blog, PressThink, he's advocated for "The View From Somewhere"—an effort by journalists to be transparent about their priors, whether ideological or otherwise.  Rosen is just one of several voices who'll shape NewCo. Still, the new venture may well be a practical test of his View from Somewhere theory of journalism. I chatted with Rosen about some questions he'll face. 
  • The View from Nowhere won’t be a requirement for our journalists. Nor will a single ideology prevail. NewCo itself will have a view of the world: Accountability journalism, exposing abuses of power, revealing injustices will no doubt be part of it. Under that banner many “views from somewhere” can fit.
  • The way "objectivity" evolves historically is out of something much more defensible and interesting, which is in that phrase "Of No Party or Clique." That's the founders of The Atlantic saying they want to be independent of party politics. They don't claim to have no politics, do they? They simply say: We're not the voice of an existing faction or coalition. But they're also not the Voice of God.
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  • NewCo will emulate the founders of The Atlantic. At some point "independent from" turned into "objective about." That was the wrong turn, made long ago, by professional journalism, American-style.
  • You've written that The View From Nowhere is, in part, a defense mechanism against charges of bias originating in partisan politics. If you won't be invoking it, what will your defense be when those charges happen? There are two answers to that. 1) We told you where we're coming from. 2) High standards of verification. You need both.
  • What about ideological diversity? The View from Somewhere obviously permits it. You've said you'll have it. Is that because it is valuable in itself?
  • The basic insight is correct: Since "news judgment" is judgment, the product is improved when there are multiple perspectives at the table ... But, if the people who are recruited to the newsroom because they add perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked are also taught that they should leave their politics at the door, or think like professional journalists rather than representatives or their community, or privilege something called "news values" over the priorities they had when they decided to become journalists, then these people are being given a fatally mixed message, if you see what I mean. They are valued for the perspective they bring, and then told that they should transcend that perspective.
  • When people talk about objectivity in journalism they have many different things in mind. Some of these I have no quarrel with. You could even say I’m a “fan.” For example, if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes. 
  • By "we can do better than that" I mean: We can insist on the struggle to tell it like it is without also insisting on the View from Nowhere. The two are not connected. It was a mistake to think that they necessarily are. But why was this mistake made? To control people in the newsroom from "above." That's a big part of objectivity. Not truth. Control.
  • If it works out as you hope, if things are implemented well, etc., what's the potential payoff for readers? I think it's three things: First, this is a news site that is born into the digital world, but doesn't have to return profits to investors. That's not totally unique
  • Second: It's going to be a technology company as much as a news organization. That should result in better service.
  • a good formula for innovation is to start with something people want to do and eliminate some of the steps required to do it
  • The third upside is news with a human voice restored to it. This is the great lesson that blogging gives to journalism
jmfinizio

Opinion: America was lucky to be saved by its democracy -- even if some don't realize i... - 0 views

  • America's extraordinary privileges of law and functionality seemed to sustain, even in a brief moment of collapse
  • Americans perhaps also took that for granted
  • not fear at the new unknown - dominated. Chaos normally follows disorder, but in the United States the cogs kept whirring.
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  • This short moment of ugly collapse should not lead Americans to dismiss the extraordinary eloquence and value of their system.
  • Wednesday's violence didn't really fit the conventional description of an "attempted coup"
  • It was uglier.
  • the departing President's supporters did not take over parliament and change the government. The army did not switch sides. The rightful winner of the last election is not in hiding
  • Yet remember, between horror at what a sense of privilege among a small mob can do, there is also a moment of hope. Values worked.
  • But when you woke up each morning in Donetsk, the system continued to fall apart. In Washington DC, the opposite was true.
  • Now is not a time for chest-thumping over American values that have slowly deteriorated for years to get to this point.
  • The singular reason the US system has advantages over its authoritarian rivals is that it is based on the open competition and truth of ideas.
  • Many perhaps taking for granted how lucky they are to live in a nation where such a staggering abuse of democracy can still be eclipsed by its virtues.
jmfinizio

Jacksonville Jaguars hire Urban Meyer as head coach - CNN - 0 views

  • three-time national champion as a college football coach -- will now lead the Jacksonville Jaguars, the team announced Thursday.
  • "Urban Meyer is who we want and need, a leader, winner and champion who demands excellence and produces results
  • Meyer had a 187-32 record during head coaching stints at Ohio State, Florida, Utah and Bowling Green.
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  • That final season with the Buckeyes also was one with controversy. Meyer was suspended for three games without pay in the wake of an investigation into what he did about spousal abuse allegations against former assistant coach Zach Smith, the university said.
huffem4

Accommodating Children's Anxiety Can Do More Harm Than Good | Psychology Today - 1 views

  • Parents face great challenges raising kids in our increasingly complex, frightening and uncertain world. The CDC reports that anxiety is on the rise among children, affecting 7.1 percent of children 6 to 17 years of age, about 4.4 million U.S. kids. The majority are untreated.
  • Children face myriad challenges—bullying, developmental trauma, information overload, global political upheavals and conflict, climate change, high rates of family breakup, and so on.
  • Learning to ride out anxiety and negotiate firm-but-flexible boundaries is a language much harder to learn in adulthood.
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  • Parental consistency can help protect children from emotional problems. Children can and do become caught in the middle between parents who aren’t getting along. Such "triangulation" distracts children from addressing their own needs. Compassion buffers empathy, allowing parents to tolerate their children's distress without getting overwhelmed, numbing out, or becoming enraged. Parents are encouraged to engage their curiosity when they feel the urge to accommodate or try to overpower children.
  • Perception was important for mothers. Mothers who reported that their children showed more severe symptoms were more likely to use accommodation, but maternal accommodation was unrelated to the mothers' own reported distress and emotional state. It may be that mothers wish to spare their children anticipated distress, and that this desire is different from overall distress. Including measures of empathy and parental distress due specifically to child's distress could tease this apart in future studies.
  • Accommodation increases anxiety because youngsters never have a chance to fail and persist. This can stunt self-efficacy, preventing “fear extinction” and “habituation” to anxiety-provoking situations. It's a vicious cycle, increasing the chance of giving up too easily with future challenges, though innate resilience, related to child temperament, can mitigate the effects of problematic environmental factors.
  • Higher child distress and emotional dysregulation, as measured by parents, was associated with increased parental accommodation. Parental accommodation was not correlated with child-reported distress and emotional dysregulation.
  • maternal accommodation was correlated with child anxiety and externalizing behaviors (in which emotions are directed outward, typically in aggressive or destructive ways, rather than processed in healthy ways or bottled up)
  • Accommodation fixes problems short-term—for instance when a parent "gives in" to a child's tantrums to get them to stop screaming, or bribes a child to do something rather than building intrinsic motivation with a longer-term process of rewarding effort and building an inner sense of confidence
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