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newleftmedia: NEW VIDEO! - OHIO ROMNEY RALLY - Interviews with...

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 12:13:00 -0400

NEW VIDEO! - OHIO ROMNEY RALLY - Interviews with Supporters

Interviews were conducted with Ohio voters at a recent Romney rally in Defiance, OH. These are the voters who will choose our next President.

Produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviewer) & Erick Stoll.

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RTNT’s Editor, Chase Whiteside, interviews Romney supporters about the election, perfectly demonstrating our mantra You are what you read (or in this case, what you watch.)

Grizzly Bear May Be Indie-Rock Royalty, But That Doesn’t...

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 15:50:43 -0400

Grizzly Bear May Be Indie-Rock Royalty, But That Doesn’t Mean They Make Any Money

Nitsuh Abebe writes for Vulture magazine about Grizzly Bear’s origins and unlikely success, and the surprisingly humble lives of its members as they make their way in a changing music industry:

Musicians often find themselves in the position they occupied before the rise of the LP, working as accessories to other, more profitable industries: nightlife, advertising, film and television, “music discovery” engines, streaming services, press, social networks, branding. (Grizzly Bear once licensed an unreleased track to the Washington State lottery.) But these industries also require musicians to approach what they’re doing as an art—something with authentic, organic connections to style, aesthetics, and youth culture—not a craft to be dutifully plied for a living. And in a trend-driven art, success has a tendency to end.

Droste doesn’t expect a middle-class living, but he wouldn’t mind one. “I’d like to someday own a house, and be able to have children, and be able to put them through school, in an urban environment that one enjoys living in,” says Droste. “A lot of people do it. And doing it through music is harder than doing it as a lawyer.” I ask him if Grizzly Bear, with all its success, offers the beginnings of that. “No,” he says, very quickly. “I’d have to keep doing this forever. But the biggest thing you can’t do is focus on money.”

Read the full article here.

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Living Under Drones This report from the International Human...

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:27:01 -0400

Living Under Drones

This report from the International Human Rights and Conflict Resolution Clinic of Stanford Law School and the Global Justice Clinic at New York University examines the recent history of American drone strikes in Pakistan and the myriad ill effects had upon the people of Pakistan.

In the United States, the dominant narrative about the use of drones in Pakistan is of a surgically precise and effective tool that makes the US safer by enabling “targeted killing” of terrorists, with minimal downsides or collateral impacts.

This narrative is false.

Read the full report here.

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The Irony of Obama In an article of sweeping scope, Ta-Nehisi...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 19:03:10 -0400

The Irony of Obama

In an article of sweeping scope, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes for The Atlantic on race, America, and the irony of the Obama Presidency:

Before President Obama spoke, the death of Trayvon Martin was generally regarded as a national tragedy. After Obama spoke, Martin became material for an Internet vendor flogging paper gun-range targets that mimicked his hoodie and his bag of Skittles. (The vendor sold out within a week.) Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team.

The irony of Barack Obama is this: he has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being “clean” (as Joe Biden once labeled him)—and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts—one, an oft-stated love of democracy; the other, an undemocratic white supremacy inscribed at every level of government. In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to “get to the bottom of exactly what happened,” he was not protesting or agitating. He was not appealing to federal power—he was employing it. The power was black—and, in certain quarters, was received as such.

Read the full article here.

Pussy Riot Closing Statements A few days late, but here are the...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 14:46:55 -0400

Pussy Riot Closing Statements

A few days late, but here are the closing statements delivered by three members of the Russian feminist punk band Pussy Riot. The women were sentenced to two years in prison for staging a guerrilla protest against Vladimir Putin in a Russian Orthodox church.

We put on political punk performances in response to a government that is rife with rigidity, reticence, and caste-like hierarchal structures. It is so clearly invested in serving only narrow corporate interests, it makes us sick just to breathe the Russian air. We categorically oppose the following, which forces us to act and live politically:

—the use of coercive and forceful methods for regulating social processes; a situation when the most important political institutions are the disciplinary structures of the state: the security agencies (the army, police, and secret services), and their corresponding means of ensuring political “stability” (prisons, pre-emptive detention, all the mechanisms of strict control over the citizenry);

—imposed civic passivity among the majority of the population,

—the complete dominance of the executive branch over the legislative and judicial.

Read the full article here.

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A Glimpse Inside Syria’s Civil War Last week, C. J....

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 13:02:11 -0400

A Glimpse Inside Syria’s Civil War

Last week, C. J. Chivers spent five days embedded with Syrian rebels in the Aleppo province. For the New York Times, he offers a candid look at operations on the front line of the guerrilla war and the people - farmers, nurses, business men, army defectors - who have taken up arms against President Bashar al-Assad.

Using Skype, Jamal Abu Houran contacted an activist from Tal Rifaat who invited him to desert his post and head to a nearby village, where he would be picked up by a waiting car. Soon he was in a hidden guerrilla office. He told the activists there that he had studied weapons well, and asked to join the rebels’ fight.

An activist phoned Mr. Yasin, who quickly appeared and stood before him. Jamal recalled his new commander’s first words. “You are my brother,” he said. “And your blood is more precious than mine.”

Jamal Abu Houran’s reply set his life on its new course. “I hope God will give me the strength to defend people like you,” he said. This was his oath.

He had switched sides.

Read the full article here.

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Welcome to our blog!

Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:14:39 -0400

nyrblit:

This will be a blog for news about NYRB Lit. In order to describe the goals and aims of this new e-book series, we’ll begin with an interview that our editor, Sue Halpern, did with Barbara Hoffert at Library Journal’s Prepub Alert blog:

“As a writer and a reader, Halpern understands that with the multiplicity of books out there‚ and with the struggles of libraries and indie bookstores, historically the two institutions that offer big support for book culture, as Halpern observed‚ it’s getting harder for many of us to decide what to read. One of her goals, then, is to reposition literary fiction in the market. I’d like to be involved in making literary fiction a genre. One thing that’s clear in the social media world is that people love genres, and one thing that publishers love about genre readers is that they are highly identifiable because they identify themselves.

Halpern sees the distinction between literary and commercial fiction as questionable; obviously, plenty of literary fiction is juicy good and sells like hotcakes. But literary fiction does stand out for its allegiance to language, in her felicitous phrase, as well as its commitment to ideas, to a larger sense of where we are. To find authors who rivetingly deliver that one-two punch of gorgeous words and gorgeous thought, she’s been actively soliciting agents both here and abroad‚ and shaking off the illusion that if we get a book Monday, we can publish it Tuesday. With ebooks, there’s not the physicality, but the rest of the process is the same.

NYRB Lit will publish monthly ten times a year (skipping February and August), and the books Halpern has found so far are richly promising. September brings us Whitbread Award winner Lindsay Clarke, whose The Water Theater won the 2011 Fiction Uncovered Award in the UK. Its protagonist, reporter Martin Crowther, is fighting a personal battle as he tries to convince the estranged children of his dying mentor to visit him one last time.”

Welcome, welcome! Friends, if you’ve an interest in contemporary literature, you’re going to want to follow NYRB Lit.

Two Girls, One Mind In something of a follow-up to...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:28:00 -0400

Two Girls, One Mind

In something of a follow-up to Monday’s post regarding linguistic conceptualization of the self, I turn to a 2011 feature from New York Times Magazine about conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana Hogan. Susan Dominus writes on the unique connection they share and the complicated nature of self as illuminated by two young girls whose minds are joined by a bridge that is effectively unknown to science.

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

Read the full article here.

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atomvincent: nytimes: If you live in Butler or Warren counties...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:50:34 -0400

atomvincent:

nytimes:

If you live in Butler or Warren counties in the Republican-leaning suburbs of Cincinnati, you can vote for president beginning in October by going to a polling place in the evening or on weekends. Republican officials in those counties want to make it convenient for their residents to vote early and avoid long lines on Election Day.

But, if you live in Cincinnati, you’re out of luck. Republicans on the county election board are planning to end early voting in the city promptly at 5 p.m., and ban it completely on weekends, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer. The convenience, in other words, will not be extended to the city’s working people.

The sleazy politics behind the disparity is obvious. Hamilton County, which contains Cincinnati, is largely Democratic and voted solidly for Barack Obama in 2008. So did the other urban areas of Cleveland, Columbus and Akron, where Republicans, with the assistance of the Ohio secretary of state, Jon Husted, have already eliminated the extended hours for early voting.

County election boards in Ohio, a closely contested swing state, are evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. In counties likely to vote for President Obama, Republicans have voted against the extended hours, and Mr. Husted has broken the tie in their favor. (He said the counties couldn’t afford the long hours.) In counties likely to vote for Mitt Romney, Republicans have not objected to the extended hours.

This is just the latest alarming example of how Republicans across the country are trying to manipulate the electoral system by blocking the voting rights of their opponents. These actions have a disproportionate effect on blacks, Hispanics and other ethnic minorities who struggled for so long to participate in American democracy.

Cincinnati, for example, is 45 percent black, and Cleveland 53 percent. Butler County, however, is 8 percent black, and Warren 3.5 percent. This kind of racial disparity is clearly visible wherever Republicans have trampled on voting rights during Mr. Obama’s term.

In Florida, more than half of black voters went to the polls early in 2008 largely to support Mr. Obama. So, last year, Republican lawmakers there severely curtailed the early voting period. In Pennsylvania and other states that have imposed strict voter ID requirements, the impact will be felt hardest by blacks, Hispanics, older citizens and students, all of whom tend to lack government ID cards at a higher rate than the general population. At the trial in Pennsylvania over the constitutionality of the state’s voter ID law, the plaintiffs introduced clear evidence, compiled by a geographic data analysis firm, that registered voters in Philadelphia who lack government ID cards are concentrated in minority and low-income areas.

In Ohio, as in other states, the Republican Party is establishing a reputation for putting short-term political gain ahead of the most fundamental democratic rights.

On Pronouns and the Self Writing for the Los Angeles Review of...

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 16:31:00 -0400

On Pronouns and the Self

Writing for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dana Levin considers the complicated intersection of gender and pronouns in the English language and Western society.

“Who cares!” you might exclaim, or, less generously, “What feminist harangue is about to ensue!”; No, my friends — think instead on the words of Loren Cannon, transgender triathlete from Northern California, as quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle on June 3, 2011: “It makes it hard to participate in society when all you want to do is order a Coke and people are so confused about what pronoun to use.”

…

Pronoun: an argument for a name. To which Waite says, “the lake/has no saint/after which/to take its name.” Who watches over the trans: the neither/nor, the both/and? If the language cannot name you, how can you be referred to, represented? This is of more than legal and commercial import; it’s of crucial psychospiritual significance. If language, via naming, is meant to “distill (your) real being,” what happens when the language fails you?

Read the full article here.

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Super-sizing Medicine Writing for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande...

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 18:23:42 -0400

Super-sizing Medicine

Writing for The New Yorker, Atul Gawande argues that emulating the standardization of chain restaurants like The Cheesecake Factory can help fix our health care system:

“It is unbelievable to me that they would not manage this better,” Luz said. I asked him what he would do if he were the manager of a neurology unit or a cardiology clinic. “I don’t know anything about medicine,” he said. But when I pressed he thought for a moment, and said, “This is pretty obvious. I’m sure you already do it. But I’d study what the best people are doing, figure out how to standardize it, and then bring it to everyone to execute.”

This is not at all the normal way of doing things in medicine. (“You’re scaring me,” he said, when I told him.) But it’s exactly what the new health-care chains are now hoping to do on a mass scale. They want to create Cheesecake Factories for health care. The question is whether the medical counterparts to Mauricio at the broiler station—the clinicians in the operating rooms, in the medical offices, in the intensive-care units—will go along with the plan. Fixing a nice piece of steak is hardly of the same complexity as diagnosing the cause of an elderly patient’s loss of consciousness. Doctors and patients have not had a positive experience with outsiders second-guessing decisions. How will they feel about managers trying to tell them what the “best practices” are?

Read the full article here.

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"Right now, our system does not allow us to reset passwords. I don’t know why."

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:01:00 -0400

“Right now, our system does not allow us to reset passwords. I don’t know why.”

-
An Apple customer service representative • Speaking to Wired over the phone about the iCloud password-reset function, which appears to be down at least for a full day, in the wake of an epic article their writer Mat Honan wrote about his hacking incident. (Presumptively to close a certain security loophole, though Apple has not confirmed this.) The representative told the magazine to go to Apple’s iCloud Web site to reset the iCloud password. Amazon also tightened security as a result of Honan’s article, closing a loophole which allowed users to gain control of accounts with just a name, e-mail address and mailing address. It’s good to see the loophole closed after the fact, even if it did cost Honan much of his digital identity. (via shortformblog)

Longform journalism at work!
(See Honan’s excellent article that we shared earlier today.)

How Apple’s Lax Security Allowed One Man’s Digital...

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:24:58 -0400

How Apple’s Lax Security Allowed One Man’s Digital Life To Be Erased

Mat Honan writes for Wired about the pitfalls of having interconnected online accounts, and the ease with which 19-year-old hackers were able to erase his digital life (and takeover Gizmodo’s Twitter) via security oversights in Amazon and Apple’s systems.

At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack….

On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers’ access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them….

As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren’t followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case — that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes — then the problem is widespread….

I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on.

Read the full article here.

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Dropping Acid Writing for the Morning News, Tim Doody profiles...

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 15:07:00 -0400

Dropping Acid

Writing for the Morning News, Tim Doody profiles Dr. James Fadiman, investigates the back-and-forth history of government involvement with psychedelic drugs, and explores the broad benefits - both personal and societal - that could (and have) stemmed from the use of psychedelics.

Who knows, their latest findings may one day affirm some ancient hypotheses. If reality isn’t shaped with the psychically aware, self-organizing units that Giordano Bruno called monads in the sixteenth century, then perhaps it’s woven with Indra’s net, the jeweled nodes of which stretch into infinity, each one a reflection of all others. To entertain such ontologies is to re-contextualize one’s self as a marvelous conduit in a timeless whole, through which molecules and meaning flow, from nebulae to neurons and back again. If certain of these molecules connect with our serotonin receptors like a key in a pin tumbler, and open a door to extraordinary vistas, why shouldn’t we peek?

Read the full article here.

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Fiction and Philosophy Gore Vidal, the American writer and...

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 18:58:51 -0400

Fiction and Philosophy

Gore Vidal, the American writer and political activist, died yesterday at the age of 86. In this 1974 interview for The Paris Review, he discusses the art of fiction and why so many people hated him:

INTERVIEWER

Why will you always get a bad press?

VIDAL

That’s more for you to determine than for me. I have my theories, no doubt wrong. I suspect that the range of my activity is unbearable to people who write about books. Lenny Bernstein is not reviewed in The New York Times by an unsuccessful composer or by a student at Julliard. He might be better off if he were, but he isn’t. Writers are the only people who are reviewed by people of their own kind. And their own kind can often be reasonably generous—if you stay in your category. I don’t. I do many different things rather better than most people do one thing. And envy is the central fact of American life. Then, of course, I am the enemy to so many. I have attacked both Nixon and the Kennedys—as well as the American empire. I’ve also made the case that American literature has been second-rate from the beginning. This caused distress in book-chat land. They knew I was wrong, but since they don’t read foreign or old books, they were forced to write things like “Vidal thinks Victor Hugo is better than Faulkner.” Well, Hugo is better than Faulkner, but to the residents of book-chat land Hugo is just a man with a funny name who wrote Les Misérables, a movie on the late show. Finally, I am proud to say that I am most disliked because for twenty-six years I have been in open rebellion against the heterosexual dictatorship in the United States. Fortunately, I have lived long enough to see the dictatorship start to collapse. I now hope to live long enough to see a sexual democracy in America. I deserve at least a statue in Dupont Circle—along with Dr. Kinsey.

Read the full article here.

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The Post-Literate Election In 2003, Harper’s published...

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 09:21:00 -0400

The Post-Literate Election

In 2003, Harper’s published this essay by Benjamin DeMott, which describes the ‘junk politics’ that have eroded our sense of historical context and moral imperative, the foundations of sincere political debate.

Junk politics personalizes mainly through tropes of heart—feel-your-pain chatter and touchy-feel personal testimony. The implicit message is that leadership’s chief concern should be with setting an upbeat tone and demonstrating a sensitive response to hardship, rather than with homing in on injustice, spelling out practical correctives, arguing for the correctives in public forums, working for their ultimate enactment.
…

Great causes—they still exist—nourish themselves on firm, sharp awareness of the substance of injustice. The country’s very foundations, indeed, lie in clearly defined understanding of injustices. Blunting such understanding is a major product of junk politics. And tropes of the heart are among the projectors’ key tools.

Read the full article here.

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The Decline of Brutalist Architecture For n+1 Thomas de Monchaux...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 09:56:50 -0400

The Decline of Brutalist Architecture

For n+1 Thomas de Monchaux writes about the now-unpopular modernist architectural movement known as Brutalism.

Gerhard Kallmann’s competition-winning design for Boston City Hall, developed in collaboration with Michael McKinnell, embodied a similar idea of heaviness poised above lightness. The building is a brooding, fortress-like mass of concrete resting on fins and columns rendered in concrete and brick. The brick was also used for a stepped podium and vast plaza that physically isolated the monumental building from its surroundings but materially connected it to the federal and colonial architecture nearby. From some angles, the building looks like a cement spaceship perched on more firmly terrestrial landing pads. From others, it looks like a ruin almost Roman in its complexity, with a thousand cutouts and panels and skylights and landings and lines that speak both to its designers’ anxious virtuosity and their desire to produce something timeless. There is something deeply moving about seeing the words “Boston City Hall” incised over the uncompromisingly modern entry in lettering that would not be out of place on Trajan’s Column.

Read the full article here.

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Grindr, adam4adam, and the Death of Flirting (NSFW) We...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 15:59:00 -0400

Grindr, adam4adam, and the Death of Flirting (NSFW)

We don’t publish a lot of original material here at RTNT, but I wanted to throw this up somewhere now that its original home is offline. Its target audience is gay men, but I have a feeling that some of my grumblings speak to a larger feeling that this brave new digital world has made what it means to “know” one another a little less human.

This column was first published in December 2010 by MTV’s now-defunct 365Gay.com, in a censored form. My editor at the time wrote: “We are a Viacom-owned site, so words like ‘cock’ aren’t appropriate,” I guess to preserve the sanctity of the company behind the Jersey Shore.

- Chase Whiteside, Editor

As most 365Gay.com readers know, previous generations of gay men had to walk three miles uphill in the snow to hookup. Today, we have Grindr. Getting a blowjob is about as difficult as ordering a pizza.

If you’re not hip to Grindr or you don’t have a smartphone, you might be familiar with one of the many other online services gay men utilize—adam4adam, Manhunt, DList, Find Fred, Gay.com, Out in America, etc.

Like gay bars, these services serve a practical need. While straight men live in a world where most of the women they encounter could at least potentially be attracted to them, gay men live in a world where most of the men they encounter would not be, under any circumstance. So we seek situations where the probability of meeting someone is higher. We want better odds.

Lest you think my familiarity with these services comes merely from research for this column, I’ll admit right now that I have profiles on more than one.

At 9PM on a Wednesday, logging onto adam4adam and filtering for Dayton returns 287 options, with handles like “TeddyBare57,” who notes that he’s “looking for love” alongside a picture of his unremarkable penis, and “AbercromBGuy86,” whose otherwise blank profile suggests that the only thing I need to know about him is where he buys his cargo shorts.

Page after page of available men willingly share their “stats” and desires: age, weight, height, and cock size; for safe sex or bareback, group sex or one-on-one, rimming, nipple play, sex toys, and much, much more. With so many acronyms to decipher—S&M, B&D, PNP—it can feel a bit like playing Scrabble. In a bathhouse.

You can specify if you’re looking for “right now” or later, lock and unlock photos for specific users, and friend them or “block” them. You can even see the people who looked at your profile and decided not to contact you, triggering distressing little moments of self-doubt.

After a few minutes, a buzzer announces new messages from “StraightActN,” a bottom who introduces himself with a not-especially-thoughtful “u r hawt,” and “CumSlam80,” who inquires of my profile,“whats a cinephile?”

Something tells me he’d be disappointed to find out.

Grindr differs from browser-based services like adam4adam in that it harnesses the awesome power of GPS to reveal other Grindr-enabled gays in your vicinity, who are terrifyingly sorted by proximity down to the foot, turning your cellphone into a literal “gaydar.”

If you fancy a nearby user’s one allowed photo and 180-character limited profile, you can attempt to chat with him. If he fancies your profile back, maybe he’ll respond. Good luck.

For me, these services are bad internet habits, browser tabs and mobile apps I open not because I’m looking to hookup or meet Mr. Right on a Wednesday night, but because I’m bored and they can be sort of fun.

But they can also make for a lonely, wasted evening.

These services encourage us to turn our predilections into requirements, confusing improbable fantasies with expectations. As a result, many gay men fear succeeding with someone as much as they fear rejection—why settle if you can hold out for the man of your dreams?

A user functions as the product and consumer, the objectified and the objectifier. An inch too tall, a year too old, or a mile too far, and you may be filtered out of consideration by an unsympathetic search algorithm.

Never mind that in person you might break some boy’s usual rules and surprise him with your shared love of chess: if he isn’t sold by your photo and line of text, you’ll never get the chance. Alternatively, it may be you who filters someone out that you shouldn’t.

You are just another option in the grid, little more than your stats. But while these stats might tell us far more about someone than we could comfortably glean in person—cock size tends not to be a real-life opener—they might not be the most important things to tell.

Perhaps worse, these services’ abundance of offerings hastens the social-networking phenomenon of replacing a few deep relationships with a mass of shallow contacts. Intimacy is cheap, online and off. We juggle multiple possibilities only to readily and callously dismiss those we tire of, perhaps for fear of investing too deeply in one.

To be sure, these services have positives. Many younger gays find affirmation of their normality using them, especially in rural areas where they may feel isolated. I found my first boyfriend online, years before I’d set foot in a gay club.

But the last time I set foot in a gay club I was mystified. Approaching a guy the “old-fashioned” way meant vying with their device for attention. Looking at all of the guys who ostensibly came to the club to meet one another instead transfixed like bugs by the glow of tiny, private screens had me feeling ‘double-rainbow’ incredulous: what does it mean!?

It means lonely gay men whose hard-earned, real-world communities have been hijacked by for-profit web services. It means that the experience of finding someone is rigidly dictated and limited by the design whims of programmers. It means the death of flirting and the rise of people who’d rather virtually “poke” someone than face the absolute social horror of approaching them in the flesh.

I worry that we’re becoming tools of our tools, a community of strangers connected for connection’s sake. It’s dehumanizing. And unsexy.

(Source: chasewhiteside)

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Can Our Brains Become Immortal? Writing for The Chronicle...

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 11:01:51 -0400

Can Our Brains Become Immortal?

Writing for The Chronicle Review, Evan R. Goldstein explores the mapping of the human brain to create a “connectome” - the brain equivalent of our cellular genome - and whether it will allow us to preserve our brains and achieve immortality:

Among some connectomics scholars, there is a grand theory: We are our connectomes. Our unique selves—the way we think, act, feel—is etched into the wiring of our brains. Unlike genomes, which never change, connectomes are forever being molded and remolded by life experience. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a prominent proponent of the grand theory, describes the connectome as the place where “nature meets nurture.”

Hayworth takes this theory a few steps further. He looks at the growth of connectomics—especially advances in brain preservation, tissue imaging, and computer simulations of neural networks—and sees something else: a cure for death.

…

J. Anthony Movshon, of NYU, takes a dimmer view. More than 25 years after the C. elegans connectome was completed, he says, we have only a faint understanding of the worm’s nervous system. “We know it has sensory neurons that drive the muscles and tell the worm to move this way or that. And we’ve discovered that some chemicals cause one response and other chemicals cause the opposite response. Yet the same circuit carries both signals.” He scoffs, “How can the connectome explain that?”

Read the full article here.

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Adding Up to the End of the World Bill McKibben writes for...

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 14:43:41 -0400

Adding Up to the End of the World

Bill McKibben writes for Rolling Stone on the staggering - and horrifying - realities of climate change as spelled out through three simple numbers.

But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. “Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices,” says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. “But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It’s what they do.”

Read the full article here.

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