Kevin M. Folta is here to help:

… Read the rest

And then there’s Matt Taibbi.

There’s more than one way to harass women. A raft of men in recent weeks have paid for accusations of sexual harassment with their companies, their jobs, their plum political posts. But one point has been overlooked in the scandals: Men can be belittling, cruel and deeply damaging without demanding sex. (Try sloughing off heaps of contempt with your self-esteem intact.) We have no consensus — and hardly any discussion — about how we should treat behaviors that are misogynist and bullying but fall short of breaking the law.

Short of breaking the law but not short of a reason to say Go away and don’t come back. Misogynist bullying is not a trivial … Read the rest

Now they’re micromanaging the words civil servants can use. They’ve made a List of forbidden words.

The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

That’s…ridiculous.

Especially the last four. With the first three I … Read the rest

Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The rot at the core.

To borrow another useful distinction from Margaret Heffernan it’s not just about authority, but also conformity. Unlike obedience/submissiveness to authority conformity feels voluntary (or “voluntary”) and doesn’t presuppose any imbalance in formal rank or status (hence the expression “peer pressure”), only the normal fear of conflict, embarrassment, or social isolation. And even female bosses are not immune to the influence of their male peers as well as patriarchal society at large.

On a deeper level I guess conformity can be understood as a form of obedience/submissiveness to the authority of the perceived majority. I say “perceived” because the people “setting the standard” don’t even have to … Read the rest

Kenan Malik has a wonderful essay at Art Review on “cultural appropriation” and why it’s a pernicious concept.

The very term ‘cultural appropriation’ is inappropriate. Cultures work not through appropriation but through messy interaction. Writers and artists, indeed all human beings, necessarily engage with the experiences of others. Nobody owns a culture, but everyone inhabits one (or several), and in inhabiting a culture, one finds the tools for reaching out to other cultures.

Cultural interaction is necessarily messy because the world is messy. Some of that messiness is good: the complexity and diversity of the world. Some of it is damaging: the racial, sexual and economic inequalities that disfigure our world.

Such damaging messiness will not be cleaned up

There’s this fella interviewing for an exciting new job as a Federal District Court judge in the District of Columbia, who turned out to know not very much about the judging.

Matthew S. Petersen, a member of the Federal Election Commission, was one of five of President Trump’s judicial nominees being questioned by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday when Senator John N. Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, singled him out for an interrogation.

Thus commenced what appeared to be an excruciating five minutes of ignorance on Mr. Petersen’s part, as he answered most of Senator Kennedy’s questions in the negative.

No, he had not ever handled a jury trial, or even a bench trial. In fact, he had not

It’s not so much about sex as it is about work, Rebecca Traister points out.

[I]n the midst of our great national calculus, in which we are determining what punishments fit which sexual crimes, it’s possible that we’re missing the bigger picture altogether: that this is not, at its heart, about sex at all — or at least not wholly. What it’s really about is work, and women’s equality in the workplace, and more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.

It’s like dogs pissing on the shrubbery. “This is ours.” You can leave the house if you … Read the rest

Say goodbye to net neutrality in the US.

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

The agency scrapped so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone services.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the

Dahlia Lithwick on being both victim and accomplice of one of those men.

She first met Judge Alex Kozinski in 1996, when she was clerking for another judge. She doesn’t remember what they talked about but she does remember “feeling quite small and very dirty.”

Without my prompting, my former co-clerk described this interaction in an email to me this week. “He completely ignored me and appeared to be undressing you with his eyes,” he wrote. “I had never seen anyone ogle another person like that and still have not seen anything like it. Was so uncomfortable to watch, and I wasn’t even the subject of the stare.”

Later she had occasion to talk to him on the phone … Read the rest

The liars at Fox News are trying to provide cover for Trump to fire Mueller.

[I]n Fox’s alternate universe, the investigation is “illegitimate and corrupt,” or so says Gregg Jarrett, a legal analyst who appears regularly on Mr. Hannity’s nightly exercise in presidential ego-stroking. “Mueller’s stooges literally are doing everything within their power, and then some, to try and remove President Trump from office,” Mr. Hannity said last Wednesday.

“What a total travesty! They should all step aside,” Ms. Ingraham said last week, almost gleefully, about the supposed conflicts of interest permeating the special counsel’s highly experienced team of investigators. “Including Bob Mueller.”

How do they manage to convince themselves that of the two parties involved, Mueller is the corrupt … Read the rest

Being an unabashed racist isn’t always a winning strategy.

According to CNN exit polling, 30 percent of the electorate was African-American, with 96 percent of them voting for Mr. Jones. A remarkable 98 percent of black women voters supported Mr. Jones. The share of black voters Tuesday was higher than the share in 2008 and 2012, when Barack Obama was on the ballot.

That’s despite the obstacles created since Shelby v Holder.

Michael Nabors, 54, and his wife, Ella, 55, were among the black voters soaking up the Democratic good cheer after news agencies called the race for Mr. Jones.

“We knew the world was looking at us,” he said.

Mr. Nabors said that black voters were paying

Going back into the archives, the NY Times in April 2001.

With the families of four black girls watching solemnly from the front row, prosecutors opened the long-delayed murder trial of Thomas E. Blanton Jr. today by depicting him as a rabid segregationist who helped dynamite the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 and then insisted for years on driving obsessively past the scene of the crime.

Doug Jones, the United States attorney here, took jurors back in time to a Birmingham where efforts to desegregate schools and lunch counters met with determined and often violent resistance from whites, including Mr. Blanton and other members of his Ku Klux Klan cell who plotted in the darkness under a Cahaba

That was fun.

Doug Jones, a Democratic former prosecutor who mounted a seemingly quixotic Senate campaign in the face of Republican dominance here, defeated his scandal-scarred opponent, Roy S. Moore, after a brutal campaign marked by accusations of sexual abuse and child molestation against the Republican.

The upset delivered an unimagined victory for Democrats and shaved Republicans’ unstable Senate majority to a single seat.

But better than that, it’s a smack in the face to President Pussygrabber and Steve Wifebeater Bannon.

The abandonment of Mr. Moore by affluent white voters, along with strong support from black voters, proved decisive, allowing Mr. Jones to transcend Alabama’s rigid racial polarization and assemble a winning coalition.

Despite all those closed voting precincts … Read the rest

A thing happening in Oxford:

The University of Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries is set to open a new exhibition looking at some of the earliest examples of English graphic design.

On display at the Weston Library from next month, Designing English: Graphics on the Medieval Page will largely showcase the work of Anglo-Saxon and Medieval scribes, painters and engravers dating from the fifth to the 15th century.

Last time I was at the Bodleian (which was a long time ago) I think I bought just about every postcard they had with medieval graphic design on it.

I just wanted to share the illustration Design Week chose:

Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford… Read the rest