Tag: 09.07.15

Where Microaggressions Really Come From

Jonathan Haidt looks at “a most extraordinary paper” by two sociologists who argue that Western societies moved from being “cultures of honor” to “cultures of dignity” in the 18th and 19th centuries – and are now in transition to a new “culture of victimhood” – one with striking similarities of the culture of honor.

Female Students Demand Right To Act In Harvard’s Hasty Pudding Shows – And They May Well Get It

While woman have worked behind the scenes on Hasty Pudding’s burlesque productions since the 1950s, the casts have been all-male since the group’s first show in 1844. When two young women announced that they had signed up to audition and began a social media campaign, Hasty Pudding’s president said the group has been discussing co-ed casts for months.

AI Fear: In The Future We May All Be Unemployed

“The risk workers face today is that we have passed a technological turning point, and as a result, a new kind of creative destruction will unfold. Smart, learning algorithms will power robots, self-service systems, and increasingly capable mobile devices, and this will inevitably drive labor intensive industries like retail, fast food, and hospitality toward employing ever-fewer workers. At the same time the new industries that we hope will create replacement jobs will rely on artificial intelligence and robotics right from their inception.”

‘Yellowface In Poetry’: That White Guy Using An Asian Pen Name Was ‘Crass And Offensive’, Argues The Angry Opposition

Brian Spears: “The implication [is] that the writer’s lack of whiteness was, in this case, a help rather than a hindrance to getting the work noticed. I am here to say that Hudson and his defenders are full of it. … In poetry, as in pretty much every other walk of life, there is no greater advantage to publication and all that follows from it than being a straight white male.”

Sherman Alexie Explains – Beautifully – Why He Kept The ‘Yi-Fen Chou’ Poem In Best American Poetry 2015

“Listen, I was so angry that I stormed and cursed around the room. I felt like punching the wall. … But I had to keep that pseudonymous poem in the anthology because it would have been dishonest to do otherwise. If I’d pulled the poem then I would have been denying that I gave the poem special attention because of the poet’s Chinese pseudonym. … I would have pulled it because I didn’t want to hear people say, ‘Oh, look at the big Indian writer conned by the white guy.’ I would have dumped the poem because of my vanity.” (The entry is long, but it’s worth reading all of it.)

How Kim Dotcom Planned To Save The Music Business

“So it’s no surprise that his scheme to save the music industry, which Dotcom laid out in detail in a call with Universal Music Group executives days before Megaupload got shut down by authorities in early 2012, wasn’t exactly about playing by the books either. The real surprise is that his take-no-prisoners scheme apparently was well-received by execs of the world’s biggest music label.”