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Do you think this links to Dorian Gray? Is Dorian's case one of desensitisation or hedonic adaptation?

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Do you think this links to Dorian Gray? Is Dorian's case one of desensitisation or hedonic adaptation?

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Hedonic adaptation or “the hedonic treadmill” are terms that define how people generally return to the same level of happiness despite their circumstances.

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"Politicians promise you heaven before an election and give you hell after," wrote the anarchist Emma Goldman. The experience of the legendary Doctor Faustus, who sells his soul to the demon Mephistopheles in return for worldly knowledge and pleasure, has been treated as a metaphor for unholy political pacts. It may even shed light on our own populist moment, from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump. Why does this 500-year-old folk legend resonate in times of crisis, and why does it continue to haunt the Western imagination?

The legend is loosely based on the life of Johann Georg Faust (c 1480-1540), an alchemist and practitioner of necromancy, a form of 'black magic'. A chapbook speculating on his infamous exploits circulated in the late 16th Century, inspiring Christopher Marlowe's play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, first performed in London around 1592. At approximately the same time, the legend of Pan Twardowski, a sorcerer who sold his soul to the devil, began to take root in Polish folklore.
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The most influential interpretation of the Faust legend was written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). The project dominated his intellectual life: the first part of his dramatic poem, Faust, appeared in 1808; the second part was completed in 1831, the year before his death. With the exception of Frankenstein, published by Mary Shelley in 1818, it is difficult to think of a more enduring modern legend - both stories reflect unease about the dawning of a new world, full of possibility and anxiety.

The Faust legend has penetrated every cultural space, including classical music and opera (Schubert, Wagner, Berlioz), fiction (Bulgakov, Turgenev, Wilde), poetry (Pushkin, Byron, Heine), and drama (Havel, Mamet, Gertrude Stein), as well as ballet, sculpture and painting. The folklore has suffused popular culture, from The Simpsons to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody. It has been the subject of dozens of films, musicals, fairy tales, video games, graphic novels, comics and manga.

The legend seems to have particular resonance at times of moral crisis. Mephisto (1936), a novel by Klaus Mann, offers a thinly-veiled portrait of an actor who ingratiates himself with the Nazi regime in order to advance his career. This 'devils-bargain' ( teufelspakt) helps him become Germany's most celebrated actor, but when he plays Mephistopheles in a production of Faust, he realises that he is acting the wrong part - he has become Faust, morally compromised with evil.

Mann's father Thomas wrote the most notable post-war treatment of the legend, Doktor Faustus (1948), which the author described as "the novel of my epoch". The protagonist is a composer who renounces love in exchange for heightened creative powers, which he acquires by infecting himself with syphilis: as Mann wrote in a précis, "The poison works as intoxication, stimulant, inspiration; transports of exaltation allow him to create wonderful works of genius". Based in part on the life story of Nietzsche, the novel explores how nihilism and primitivism usurp bourgeois culture. In the dying embers of the Third Reich, the physiological, mental and spiritual degradation of Mann's protagonist becomes a metaphor for Germany's moral corruption.
Fascists and finance
The temptations of fascism dominate 20th-Century Faustian parables, most notably Friedrich Dürrenmatt's play The Visit (1956), in which townspeople are offered a bribe to murder one of their fellow citizens. The corrupting influence of money is also a theme of Stephen Vincent Benét's short story The Devil and Daniel Webster (1936), written at the height of the Great Depression, in which a beleaguered farmer sells his soul for seven years of prosperity. His lawyer tries to argue that the buyer is a foreign imposter, but the devil proclaims he was present at America's birth: "When the first wrong was done to the first Indian, I was there. When the first slaver put out for the Congo, I stood on her deck" - an inspiration for the Rolling Stones' song Sympathy for the Devil.

Perhaps inevitably, the theme of demonic bribery has been the subject in electoral propaganda. An intriguing example is an unaired broadcast by the Conservative party in the run-up to the 1997 UK general election. The premise of the five-minute film is unsubtle: Tony Blair is Faust, encouraged to deceive the electorate by a spin-doctor of the 'dark arts', Peter Mandelson. The broadcast was cancelled at the last moment on the insistence of Prime Minister John Major, as he feared its negativity would damage his own party and that the analogy would offend Blair, a devout Christian.

Despite its theological underpinning, the Faust legend has thrived in secular consumer societies, particularly in a culture of instant gratification. From credit cards to fast food, we opt for immediate pleasure even in the knowledge that it brings long-term pain. Faustus states that the only God he serves is his "own appetite", and Goethe's Mephistopheles offers him the opportunity to "sample every possible delight... grasp at what you want!" In David Luke's lyrical translation:

Your palate also shall be sated,
Your nostrils sweetly stimulated,
Your sense of touch exhilarated.

The Faust legend gained traction at a time when the 'closed' medieval world was being cleaved open by a new mercantile culture. Karl Marx identified the influx of gold from the New World as the dawn of capitalism, a system he compares to a sorcerer who is no "longer able to control the powers of the underworld he has called up". This system necessitates exploitation and colonisation, and Marlowe's Faustus sounds like the giddy first capitalist:

I'll have them fly to India for gold,
Ransack the ocean for orient pearl,
And search all corners of the new-found world
For pleasant fruits and princely delicates.

Faustus embarks on a grand tour, meeting the Pope in Rome, the German Emperor Charles, and the spirits of Alexander the Great, Darius of Persia, and Helen of Troy (to whom he waxes lyrical: "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships?"). It is a dazzling if ultimately unfulfilling excursion: "A great show! Yes, but only a show". The doctor finds that "riches, pleasures, pomps" cannot stave off his spiritual malaise - a sentiment shared in the 1999 poem Mrs Faust, written by Carol Ann Duffy: "I grew to love the lifestyle, / not the life".

Goethe's major innovation is the introduction of Margareta (also referred to as Gretchen), whose story provides the most poignant episode of the drama. Faust pursues her, seduces her, and then - unwittingly - destroys her and her family. Mephistopheles guides his hand but Faust's actions are unbearably his own (the demon goads him: "Who was it who ruined her? I, or you?"). The Gretchen story has become a powerful cultural motif, inspiring elegies such as Byron's:

Her faults were mine - her virtues were her own -
I loved her, and destroy'd her!...
If I had never lived, that which I love
Had still been living; had I never loved,
That which I love would still be beautiful.

Faust tells Gretchen: "My sweet, believe me, what's called intellect / Is often shallowness and vanity", and almost every iteration of the legend underscores this disenchantment: it is Byron's Manfred who discerns "the fatal truth, / The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life". Intellectual pursuits have isolated Faust, and failed to provide him with wisdom: "The very thing one needs one does not know / And what one knows is needless information". Even when the quest for knowledge is successful, it conjures up dark forces, as in Frankenstein.
Compromising circumstances
Faust casts aside his scholarship in order to become a man of action, redrafting the opening of St John's Gospel: "In the beginning was the Deed ". Part Two of Goethe's drama charts Faust's attempt to forge the world in his own image. It is a distinctly Enlightenment project: Faust will create a new civilisation by taming the wild forces of nature, whose unproductivity fills him with anxiety ("This drives me near to desperate distress! / Such elemental power unharnessed, purposeless!"). His project is beyond human scale and insensitive to human needs, but it is all in the name of progress and "the masses' bold, industrious will".

As the critic Marshall Berman points out, this ambitious scheme of modern development is intolerant of those who do not acquiesce to the plan. Faust learns that an elderly couple, Baucis and Philemon, wish to remain in their remote cottage and refuse to be bought off. The couple's quiet contentment is a rebuke to Faust's will to power: he is infuriated by their resistance ("Their stubbornness, their opposition / Ruins my finest acquisition"), and he orders their land to be seized.

The ecological and human cost of this insatiable appetite for expansion is evident in the 21st Century. Climate change is perhaps the most fitting contemporary analogy for the Faustian bargain - decades of rapid economic growth for an elite, followed by grave global consequences for eternity. Similarly, the temptation of nuclear energy has been described in Faustian terms: those "powers of the underworld" unleashed, with the potential of fuelling - and destroying - the planet.

Technology has highlighted our daily Faustian choices: who reads the "terms and conditions"? Smartphones make our attention spans fleeting, and we are like Faust, who promises to part with his soul if ever he lingers to savour an experience ("If ever I to the moment shall say: / Beautiful moment, do not pass away!"). Goethe's epic ends with Faust envisioning the completion of a project that would liberate not only his workers, but also himself from "restless activity".

"Every notable historical era will have its own Faust," wrote Kierkegaard. Our challenge today is that, to some extent, we are all in a Faustian bind. We are plagued by politicians offering easy answers to complex problems - especially when those easy answers are empty promises. The legend warns us to be wary of the cult of the ego, the seductions of fame and the celebration of power. These are hollow triumphs, and short-lived; indeed, "what good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?"

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The legend of a man selling his soul to the devil 'seems to have particular resonance at times of moral crisis', writes Benjamin Ramm.

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Why do we love thinking about Schrodinger's cat?

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Why do we love thinking about Schrodinger's cat?

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Why Do We Love Thinking About Schrödinger’s Cat? - JSTOR Daily

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In physics, the whole point of the thought experiment is that it’s absurd. But in literature, it’s been used to explore all sorts of ideas and possibilities.

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Is the epistemological crisis a global crisis?

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Is the epistemological crisis a global crisis?

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Five Facets of Our Epistemological Crisis — Brett McCracken

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We are facing a crisis of epistemology in today’s world. How we know things? How we distinguish between true beliefs and delusions, facts and fiction? What can be trusted? There are many angles we could explore in this crisis of epistemology. Here are just five.

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Is there any creativity in using AI to create art?

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Is there any creativity in using AI to create art?

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When Jason Allen entered his work into the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition, he was hoping to make a splash. But he couldn't have anticipated that his artwork Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which took home the blue ribbon in the digital art category, would cause such a stir. Allen's artwork, which was created using the AI image generator Midjourney, has sparked a fierce debate about the role of artists and the use of AI in fine art.

Allen, who owns a gaming company, proudly wrote about his win on the Midjourney Discord. Midjourney creates images based on text prompts, and Allen explained that he'd spent 80 hours and created 900 images before honing in on the perfect combination. That result is Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which he printed on canvas and entered into the digital art category, stating that it had been created using Midjourney.

His post was quickly picked up by Twitter, where artists felt slighted by the fact that an AI-generated artwork could win an art competition. "We're watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes-if creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete," tweeted @OmniMorpho. "What will we have then?"

For his part, Allen knew that his win would ruffle some feathers, but he was also hoping that it would spark conversation. "How interesting is it to see how all these people on Twitter who are against AI generated art are the first ones to throw the human under the bus by discrediting the human element! Does this seem hypocritical to you guys?" he wrote on Discord.

TL;DR - Someone entered an art competition with an AI-generated piece and won the first prize.

Yeah that's pretty fucking shitty. pic.twitter.com/vjn1IdJcsL

- Genel Jumalon ✈️ ARTapalooza Cedar Falls (@GenelJumalon) August 30, 2022

One issue that several people worried about was whether or not the judges understood that the artwork was generated using AI. This is a similar issue that has concerned many AI ethicists. While Allen said that he disclosed the program that he used to create his winning artwork, at least one judge told journalists that they had no idea that AI had been used.

Author and art historian Dagny McKinley, a judge in the category, was immediately drawn to the otherworldly image of three women dressed in historic clothing standing near what looks like a glowing moon. "It had an immediate story: People looking out into another world, everyone with their backs to you, no one facing or engaging with the viewers," she said. "You get interested: What are they seeing?"

While McKinley confessed that she did not know that Midjourney was an AI image generator, she did state that it wouldn't have changed her vote either way. For her, it was Allen's concept and vision that won him the top prize, not whether or not he'd used a digital paintbrush or created a Photoshop collage.

In some ways, this debate between the merits of the idea versus technical execution is nothing new. Throughout the Italian Renaissance, scholars debated whether it was the idea or who actually painted the canvas that mattered. Allen's victory is a contemporary version of that same debate.

For Allen, who broke no rules in the contest, the hours of meticulous curation and tweaking that he spent to create the image is what's important. For others, his victory is an affront to human artists who manually create every part of their art. No matter what side of the debate you fall on, it's impossible not to see that AI is here to stay. In fact, My Modern Met often features artistic projects that use AI. Therefore, these conversations are an essential part of making the public aware that computer-generated materials are everywhere-even in places they might not expect.

When Jason Allen's AI-generated image won the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition, it sparked debate online.

For the record, I think AI can be a useful tool for artists. The issue I have at hand is someone straight up taking full credit and in this case not properly informing the judges what Midjourney is.

Going forward AI art should have it's own category. pic.twitter.com/6qBzVkfeey

- Genel Jumalon ✈️ ARTapalooza Cedar Falls (@GenelJumalon) September 1, 2022

Some were outraged that the image, which was created using the AI image generator Midjourney, won.

And many were worried about what this meant for the future of artists.

We're watching the death of artistry unfold right before our eyes - if creative jobs aren't safe from machines, then even high-skilled jobs are in danger of becoming obsolete
What will we have then?

- OmniMorpho (@OmniMorpho) August 31, 2022

At the same time, others pointed out that new technology in art has precedent.

And some felt that good AI artwork still requires creativity.

No matter what you agree with, it's hard to deny that AI is here to stay.

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AI-Generated Artwork Wins Contest and Sparks Fierce Online Debate

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When Jason Allen entered his work into the Colorado State Fair's annual art competition, he was hoping to make a splash. But he couldn't have anticipated that his artwork Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which took home the blue ribbon in the digital art category, would cause such a stir.

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Do fairy tales act as scripts that pass along specific messages about women’s bodies and attractiveness?

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Do fairy tales act as scripts that pass along specific messages about women’s bodies and attractiveness?

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Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was likely one of the main characters of stories aimed at young children.

Women's Studies professor Lori Baker-Sperry and Sociology professor Liz Grauerholz looked into the prevalence of what they call "the feminine beauty ideal" in fairy tales.

"Children's fairy tales, which emphasize such things as women's passivity and beauty, are indeed gendered scripts and serve to legitimize and support the dominant gender system," they explain.

They analyzed stories from a 1992 English-language translation of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, which is based on the seventh edition of Children and Household Tales (1857). The collection includes 250 stories, but Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz didn't consider fairy tales without human characters nor ones that weren't available in English in the 1800s. Consequently, only 168 fairy tales are represented in their dataset. They framed their review of the literature with a few pointed questions, such as "Is there a clear link between beauty and goodness?" and "Are there instances where danger or harm is associated with beauty or desirability?"

Some 31 percent of the fairy tales associate beauty with goodness, while 17 percent associate evil with ugliness.

Ninety-four percent of the fairy tales include descriptions of human characters, both female and male, with the average number of mentions per story being 13.6. "There is no substantive gender difference in the number of times physical appearance is mentioned (the average number of times that physical appearance is mentioned in reference to men is 6.0 and for women is 7.6)," they note, "but there is a notable difference in the range of references for men and women. The number of references to men's physical appearance ranges from 0 to 35 per story, whereas the range for women is 0 to 114."

Digging deeper into mentions of beauty/handsomeness by gender and age revealed that "women's beauty is highlighted more than men's attractiveness, and that beauty plays a more dominant role for younger women than for older ones." They found "approximately five times more references to women's beauty per tale than men's handsomeness (the average number of references to women is 1.25 and 0.21 for references to men's handsomeness)."

As to their initial research questions, Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz found "a clear link between beauty and goodness, most often in references to younger women, and between ugliness and evil." Some 31 percent of the fairy tales associate beauty with goodness, while 17 percent associate evil with ugliness.

One example of this connection can be read in the story Mother Holle, which begins, "A widow had two daughters, one who was beautiful and industrious, the other ugly and lazy." As the story plays out, beauty is rewarded with good fortune, lack of beauty is punished.

Still, while fairy tales may uphold standards of gendered beauty, Baker-Sperry and Grauerholz recognize that they "cannot determine the extent to which messaging concerning feminine beauty found in fairy tales have in fact been internalized or by whom." And though not the norm, movies such as Shrek, in which the main character, Fiona, is transformed into an ogre rather than a "beautiful maiden," can be seen as a challenge to traditional constructs of beauty and goodness.

However, "such retellings of fairy tales are rare, and the cumulative effect of the more traditional tales, in conjunction with the unidirectional nature of media, makes such agency difficult," they conclude.
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Children's Fairy Tales and Feminine Beauty - JSTOR Daily

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Once upon a time, there was a beautiful princess who was likely one of the main characters of stories aimed at young children. Women's Studies professor Lori Baker-Sperry and Sociology professor Liz Grauerholz looked into the prevalence of what they call "the feminine beauty ideal" in fairy tales.

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How did marketing make guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood?

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How did marketing make guns a fundamental element of contemporary boyhood?

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While Americans stayed "home together" in 2020, depleting flour reserves in pursuit of the perfect sourdough starter, another commodity sold out and skyrocketed to record sales. Guns.

Americans bought an estimated 22.8 million of them in 2020-the highest number in U.S. history. In 2021, just under 20 million guns were sold, making it the second highest year of purchases. Forty percent of those purchases went to first-time gun buyers, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation. NORC at the University of Chicago estimates that one in five American households bought a gun between March 2020 and March 2022.

At the same time, guns have broken other recent records, becoming the leading cause of death among children and teenagers. There were more deadly school shootings in the 2020-2021 school year than any other year on record. And researchers report that the number of teens who carry handguns has grown by 41% in the last two decades.

Experts disagree about what accounts for the rise in gun purchases, first-time ownership, and youth gun-carrying. But as death rates increase in tandem with sales figures, some turn to the gun industry itself for answers and accountability. And some, like California governor Gavin Newsom-who signed an emergency order in June banning the marketing of guns to minors-are examining the role that marketing plays in this twin surge.

Courts have long held that marketing guns to children is protected speech under the First Amendment because it's assumed that kids already know guns are deadly.

The 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act protects gunmakers from responsibility for crimes committed with their weapons. But the law is murky in one respect-marketing. In February, the families of nine of the Sandy Hook shooting victims won a landmark $73 million dollar settlement against Remington Arms for its marketing of the AR-15 to young men. The Uvalde families are mounting a similar lawsuit against Daniel Defense.

This isn't the first time that Remington's marketing to youth has come under legal scrutiny-it's just the first time they were held liable. In 1991, a Texas woman filed a lawsuit arguing that a 16-page advertising supplement in Boys' Life magazine, sponsored by Remington and others, led her 12-year-old son and his friends to experiment with a gun, resulting in the boy's death. The court eventually found that the fatality was not a "reasonably foreseeable consequence" of Remington's advertising.

Courts have historically erred on the side of preserving a gunmaker's right to market to children, write lawyers Anne G. Kimball and Sarah L. Olson, holding that "the unfortunate fact that firearms can be misused, either criminally or carelessly, to cause injury cannot form the basis for liability...because that fact is common knowledge." In other words, courts have long held that marketing guns to children is protected speech under the First Amendment because it's assumed that kids already know guns are deadly.

The 2022 Remington settlement changed that. The Sandy Hook families prevailed on the argument that Remington marketed their weapons to teenage boys by glorifying militaristic killing and death. Concerns over this very gun glorification prompted Newsom to make his announcement about California's gun marketing ban. He released a video; in it Newsom stands in front of two cartoon skull and crossbones with pacifiers in their mouths-ad graphics for the JR-15, an assault-style rifle for children released by WEE1 Tactical earlier this year. Its marketing copy speaks directly to kids; the mini assault rifle "looks, feels, and operates just like Mom and Dad's gun."

The Remington settlement and Newsom's description of an assault rifle for kids as "vile" represent a significant change in the conversation around gun violence and children-and what marketing has to do with it. Throughout much of the 20th century, shooting was marketed - and, in many cases, perceived by the public-as a "wholesome, clean sport that everyone in the family could enjoy" writes Jay Mechling in "Boy Scouts, the National Rifle Association, and the Domestication of Rifle Shooting." This was due, in no small part, to aggressive marketing campaigns targeting millions of boys and a partnership between the National Rifle Association (NRA) and The Boy Scouts of America (BSA).

While rural boys learned to shoot rifles in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of farm and frontier life, gunmakers drastically expanded production during and after the Civil War, and found that post-war rural and hunting demands couldn't keep up with supply. The early 20th century saw a concerted effort on the part of the gun industry to nurture a desire for guns in urban and suburban youth. This market didn't need guns, but gun manufacturers with eyes on their bottom line believed that boys should be taught to want them. At the same time, there was a sense of national "panic," writes Mechling, over American manhood. He describes the years following the Civil War as "decades marked by economic uncertainty, increased immigration, urbanization, and social Darwinian worries that modern society was feminizing American men."

The NRA responded to national concerns over the waning of "masculine virtue" by founding its youth programs in 1903, aimed at urban and suburban boys. Soon thereafter, in 1910, the BSA was founded "for the boys who'd paid the price of urban civilization and who were far removed from the wilderness experience that fostered manly virtues like self-reliance and physical fitness," Mechling continues. The BSA actively distanced itself from being perceived as a paramilitary organization, instead "linking rifle marksmanship to responsible democratic citizenship and to masculine virtues of self-control." Boys were taught to see guns, not as weapons of war and killing, but as symbols of American patriotism and peacekeeping. (In line with this vision of guns as keepers of the peace-the Colt revolver was known as the "Peacemaker." "The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other," Samuel Colt once wrote, "my arms are the best peacemakers.")

Gunmakers, too, promoted guns as tools for a boy's character development-not killing. In The Gunning of America, historian Pamela Haag details how The Winchester Repeating Arms Company developed a "boy plan" in 1918, to invite 3,363,537 boys into their Junior Rifle Corps through direct-mail campaigns. Ad slogans decreed that every "real boy" wanted a Winchester rifle to cultivate "sturdy manliness." When parents resisted-dealers often complained that Mom and Dad weren't eager customers-"Winchester urged retailers to appeal to the source, not to the parents, and tell their 'boy customers' about their rifles," Haag details. Marketing for the Daisy Air Rifle similarly directly addressed their target consumers: "Tell Dad that you want a Daisy...that you want as much good, clean, fun, and as much chance to be a man, as he had." Daisy promised children their product "makes you ready for the big gun-the kind Dad uses now."

To win over parents, Winchester published headlines proclaiming, "Your boy should be taught to shoot." Such ads reinforced shooting as a natural part of a child's development into manhood, with copy that read, "Has your boy's voice begun to change? ... Then, his yearning for a gun demands your attention...earn his lifelong gratitude and add to your own pleasure and self-esteem by giving him the proper start. Naturally, you want him to become a good shot...just as a boy should learn to swim."

In this way, Winchester, Daisy, and the BSA were in lockstep around positioning the gun as a "wholesome" part of outdoor fun. In 1916, Remington released its own children's book with the same approach: How a Boy Made the First Remington. In an eerie foreshadow of the Remington lawsuit over the romanticization of guns to teenage boys, The National Hardware Bulletin wrote that the book "deals with firearms in a way that is actually tingling with romance."

This romantic emphasis on guns as a building block to American manhood continued into the 1940s. But while organizations like the BSA worked to separate youth shooting from images of war, the beginnings of the Cold War era saw a resurgence in national anxiety about the feminization of American men and boys. "The rhetoric of the Cold War was filled with talk about strength and weakness," writes Mechling, "about 'hard' and 'soft' bodies, about 'hard' and 'soft' stances toward Communism, and about aggressiveness and passivity. A strong America required strong male bodies that embodied (literally and metaphorically) American national identity."

Parents who once had to be convinced to buy their boys a gun now "gladly bought toy guns and plastic armies," Mechling says. Television stations played Western and World War II films, dime store novels about gunslingers and war heroes abounded, and, in turn, boys brought these stories into their play. Toy guns were fixtures of "playing soldier" or "cowboys and Indians." The BSA may have tried to distance guns from war and killing, but for middle-class boys of the time, masculinity was entwined with the war and death scenes they saw on the news, in movies, and in popular books-often sponsored by Winchester and Remington. Gun marketers more overtly linked patriotism and death than they had in years before, all in the name of peacekeeping. A 1950s Remington comic book features teenagers holding rifles. "Remington rifles helped blaze the trail to America's glory," its text reads. But it was the beginning of the end of the gun's largely unblemished reputation as a "wholesome" emblem of American values.

According to Mechling, the 1950s were "the golden age of sport hunting for the middle class." This was in in contrast to the stark shift that took place in the following two decades, as gun violence rose and the antiwar movement took shape. Toy guns and war toys became increasingly controversial. The BSA began distancing its youth shooting programs from the NRA and focused its messaging around wildlife conservation and safety. Accordingly, gunmakers scaled back their ads targeting youth, while adapting their adult ads to focus on animals, not people, as targets. "Winchester's New Model 770 is designed to make coyote, cougar, caribou and the competition bite the dust," reads one 1970 magazine ad, depicting a lone gun against a brown leather background. Contrast this with a 1944 Winchester ad featuring a soldier aiming a rifle at the "enemy" with the headline: "Now...He Shoots For Freedom."

At the end of the 1970s, gun ownership started to steadily decline, continuing downward for over three decades. After that, what Mechling calls a "remasculization" of American culture took hold in response to "the Vietnam syndrome," and the perceived accompanying emasculation of the nation. Gun marketing boomed once again and, with it, a new kind of war toy "that represented males as machines," as Wendy Varney details in "Of Men and Machines: Images of Masculinity in Boys' Toys." The 1980s and '90s saw a surge of technology-based toys like Men of Steel, Beast Machines, and Transformers that were half man, half weapon, linking masculinity to being machine-like.

Still, gunmakers grappled with plummeting profits and an aging market. They responded by grooming younger customers. In 1996, the NRA's then-president Marion Hammer declared the organization in "an old-fashioned wrestling match for the hearts and minds of our children... we'd better engage our adversaries with no holds barred." In 2002, the NRA invested $100 million "in a campaign to bring together children and guns," writes Garen J. Wintemute. This campaign to "recruit a new generation of young shooters," Mechling further explains, included "publishing a magazine, Junior Shooters, giving firearms and ammunition to youth groups; sponsoring shooting competitions; and marketing rifles specifically designed and advertised to appeal to young shooters."

Twenty years on, some may look at the historic gun sales of 2020 and 2021 and call these efforts successful. Others want to leave the era of marketing guns to kids to history. Gun manufacturers and advocates decidedly do not. They invoke First Amendment rights and brand recent marketing bans as as "an attempt to wipe out the next generation of hunters and shooters," according to California Rifle & Pistol Association President and General Counsel, Chuck Michel.

The next frontier for gunmakers to sponsor "kidfluencers" as a way to skirt rules prohibiting firearm sales on social media. A century ago, Winchester slogans declared that "every real boy" wants a gun. Today's advertisers don't need those slogans, since real boys sell that message themselves.
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While Americans stayed "home together" in 2020, depleting flour reserves in pursuit of the perfect sourdough starter, another commodity sold out and skyrocketed to record sales. Guns. Americans bought an estimated 22.8 million of them in 2020-the highest number in U.S. history.

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Why is context important when analysing an image?

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Why is context important when analysing an image?

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By many counts, we live in an age of mis- and disinformation. Scholars and media alike recognize the necessity of vigilant appraisal of text-based information online and in the news. However, this same attentiveness is rarely afforded to images. Conversations around manipulation of information in images focuses largely on content manipulation-where images, often photographs, are purposefully edited-but missing or misleading context, even when it is unintentional, can just as easily skew the interpretation of images.

Investigation into an image's context can recover some of what is missing.

Context shapes our understanding and interpretation of all the visual material we encounter. Context for images can take many forms, including accompanying text, other images of the same subject, and even cultural knowledge of the audience. When context is missing, obscured, lost, or forgotten, meaning becomes skewed and difficult to discern. Investigation into an image's context can recover some of what is missing.

When presented with a single image, it is easy to draw conclusions about the subject matter based on what is visible within the frame, especially when the subject is unfamiliar.

The first step when approaching an unfamiliar image is to begin with close looking. This is followed by hypothesizing, asking, "What do I think I see? What might be going on? Why do I think this image was created? What visual cues have led me to these hypotheses?" Viewers tend to deemphasize the inherent uncertainty and speculation in this line of questioning when encountering images for the first time. They also rarely move past this step to seek additional contextual information, satisfied with the conclusions they've drawn.

But consider the following image.

Preliminary close looking identifies: a color image of a crowd of young people gathered around a picnic table, seated and standing. Some smile, some look attentively to the left of the frame. Textual information can provide more context: the title of the image identifies this as a divestment protest and the collection title points to Wellesley College as the site of this protest. Looking back at the image, the figures' matching black and red attire and small buttons that read "DIVEST" corroborate the information provided in the title.

Seeking information in the image's own metadata provides context in the form of a time and place that leads to further context: in October 1986, Wellesley students were engaged in protests urging their university to divest from investments with South African ties due to apartheid policies and practices in South Africa. Still, different viewers may interpret this differently based on their own experiences in campus protests or during apartheid. For viewers without direct experience with the subject matter, it may be difficult to draw conclusions or make connections with anti-apartheid divestment protests, generally.

It is impossible, however, to draw reasonable conclusions about entire historical moments, groups of people, or any subject based on one image. Nevertheless, single images are frequently used to define an event or illustrate a story, which can distort viewers' understanding.

Even the October 1986 divestment protest pictured here, cannot be accurately described by one image. To make matters more complex: additional visual information can sometimes provide clarity, but it can just as easily confuse and muddle interpretations. The image below, for instance, paints a very different picture of this divestment protest despite being taken only hours before.

Here, the scene pictured might evoke the drama, and even violence, of other well-publicized protests. Most of the figures are faceless, except for the central figure. Viewers may be quick to read anguish and distress on this person's face which the bodies lying on the pavement and the lurking police presence seem to confirm. Seen in isolation, this image seems to fit neatly into a familiar narrative of conflict and violence that viewers might accept without seeking context, because it confirms their existing beliefs and expectations confirmation bias. Even from just a few images like these, viewers tend to make initial assumptions about an event based on the first information they encounter and reflexively attempt to fit new information into their first hypothesis, even when it is contradictory. This is sometimes called the " Semmelweis reflex" or "idea rejection."

It is essential, then, to continue investigating and seeking additional context before drawing conclusions about an image. Ask: "What do I already know about the context? What additional information would help me understand this better?" The answers to these questions vary from viewer to viewer. Yet each viewer must remember at every turn that the things they consider "facts" may themselves be assumptions warranting investigation.

While photographs in particular may give the illusion of veracity, they cannot be taken as a full and true representation of events themselves. As Alan Trachtenberg asserts, "Neither photographs nor the experience of them are innocent acts." Approaching photographs critically and exploring their context can reveal nuance and even challenge assumptions made at first glance. Often, this means actively seeking out related images, identifying information, and texts on the subject to broaden one's understanding beyond the original context where the image was first encountered.

Consider that these photographs were taken on the campus of a women's college, Wellesley College, during the 1980s, a period of increased anti-apartheid sentiment and action in the United States and around the world. Universities like Wellesley were being confronted with student movements and protests pushing for divestment from investments related to South Africa. Context for these photographs extends far beyond Wellesley in October 1986, from other campus protests across the country back to the 1960s origins of this growing discontent with apartheid policies and their consequences. Context even extends past these events into the way they influenced and informed a legacy of action around divestment at Wellesley.

How does this added context clarify our interpretation of these archival photographs? What nuances do these images bring to our understanding of this era of political action? Reflect on these questions as you explore the images below and consider what additional context they provide to the images above.

1. Students blocking campus road in protest of Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, October 23, 1986. 2. Part of a divestment protest at Wellesley College, 1988. 3. A flyer announcing a protest against apartheid in South Africa at a Chase Bank in New York City, 1977. 4. A placard reading "Sanction South Africa Now!" The placard is somewhat larger than an average human torso. 5. A student is arrested for blocking a campus road in protest of the Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, October 23, 1986. 6. A student rally against University of Pennsylvania investment in South Africa, held by the Anti-Apartheid Coalition and 250 to 300 others. Photo by Ben Argov, Daily Pennsylvanian, University of Pennsylvania University Archives. 7. Anti-Apartheid Coalition members building a shanty on College Hall Green as part of the movement to secure Penn divestment from companies in apartheid South Africa. Photo by Marc Poulshock, Daily Pennsylvanian, University of Pennsylvania University Archives. 8. An "Abolish Apartheid" button. 9. Students being arrested for blocking a campus road in protest of a Trustee vote on divestment, Wellesley College, Oct. 23, 1986.

And, of course, consider what context might be left out of the images provided in this article. Always seek out additional context to further enrich and complicate this narrative on your own.
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Exploring Images In (and Out of) Context - JSTOR Daily

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By many counts, we live in an age of mis- and disinformation. Scholars and media alike recognize the necessity of vigilant appraisal of text-based information online and in the news. However, this same attentiveness is rarely afforded to images.

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A total of 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets have been analysed with AI algorithms in a study of online newspapers.

The study, led by a team from the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, used data mining, machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyse the news content of mainstream media for a period of ten months. The 2.5 million articles were automatically annotated into 15 topic areas (such as "Sports" and "Politics"), and scored on their readability, their linguistic subjectivity and for gender imbalances.

An article's readability was assessed using the Flesch Reading Ease Test, which gave the text a score between 0 to 100; the higher the score, the "easier" it was to read. The topics of Sports, Arts and Fashion were found to be the most readable, while Politics, Environment and Science proved the hardest to read. (Head to the gallery to quickly see some results from the study.)

The readability scores of the articles also indicated that online tabloid newspapers were more readable than broadsheets, and they were more likely to employ sentimental language than their highbrow media fellows. In a case study of 15 leading newspapers from the US and the UK, The Sun was found to be the easiest to read (with a readability score similar CBBC's <span class="Apple-style-span">Newsround), while <span class="Apple-style-span">The Guardian was scored as the least readable.

The percentage of adjectives expressing a judgment was also measured for each article, giving a quantity the study viewed as "linguistic subjectivity". Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fashion and Art were the most subjective topics, given their reliance on expressive adjectives; it would be quite a challenge to write a piece on a new art exhibition or fashion collection without use of mildly subjective language. Business, Politics and Elections were the least overtly subjective topics.

Those articles that were more readable also tended to be more subjective -- a point that the study sought to draw attention to, without going so far as making any conclusions of its own: "...for example, the failure of many citizens to engage with political news (Lewis, 2005) or with environmental problems like climate change may, in part, reflect the fact that these news topics tend to be written in less readable language than most others. Indeed, the failure of many citizens (notably those in countries like the US and the UK) to understand what climate change is or the scale of the scientific consensus and alarm about it (Lewis and Boyce, 2009) may not simply be a product of efforts to make it appear controversial."

The research also indicated that in the ten months it carried out its study, men dominated the media content, with Sport and Finance articles the most male biased -- men were mentioned in sport news eight times more often than women. Fashion and Arts were the least biased, with Fashion articles being one the few topics featuring equal proportions of men and women.

The research paper emphasised that its algorithm-generated findings remained "suggestive" rather than conclusive. It proposed that the technology it was exhibiting might complement the skills of human scholars, allowing future investigations into media trends and bias to be both more ambitious and more comprehensive in scale.

Coauthor of the paper Nello Cristianini, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bristol, said: "The automation of many tasks in news content analysis will not replace the human judgement needed for fine-grained, qualitative forms of analysis, but it allows researchers to focus their attention on a scale far beyond the sample sizes of traditional forms of content analysis."

Justin Lewis, Head of the School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff, added: "Even some of the more predictable findings give us pause for thought. The extent to which news is male dominated shows how far we are from gender equity across most areas of public life. The fact that articles about politics are the least readable might also explain widespread public disengagement."

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Algorithm deems The Sun easiest tabloid to read, comparable to CBBC

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A total of 2.5 million articles from 498 different English-language online news outlets have been analysed with AI algorithms in a study of online newspapers. The study, led by a team from the University of Bristol's Intelligent Systems Laboratory and the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, used data mining, machine learning and natural language processing techniques to analyse the news content of mainstream media for a period of ten months.

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There are people who believe that we do not need feminism today, but nothing could be further from the truth. Women have struggled for equality and against oppression for centuries, and although some battles have been partly won - such as the right to vote and equal access to education - women are still disproportionally affected by all forms of violence and by discrimination in every aspect of life.

It is true that in some areas and on certain issues, there have been improvements: for example, in Saudi Arabia women were allowed, for the first time, to vote and run for office in 2015(!). However, on other issues there has been little or no progress: for example, there have been insignificant reductions in cases of violence against women. Women continue to receive lower pay for the same work as men in all parts of the world; there are still countries that do not have laws against marital rape and still allow child brides, and practices such as 'honour' killings and female genital mutilation still exist.

Jokes about feminism and stereotypes about feminists persist, and many of these are also homophobic and assume that being lesbian is something 'bad'. In fact, being a feminist is not something particular to any sex or gender: there are women and men who consider themselves feminists, some are gay or lesbian, some heterosexual, bisexual or transgender - and some may identify differently.

The concept of feminism reflects a history of different struggles, and the term has been interpreted in fuller and more complex ways as understanding has developed. In general, feminism can be seen as a movement to put an end to sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression and to achieve full gender equality in law and in practice.

Women's movements and the history of feminism

There have been many extraordinary women who have played an important role in local or world history, but not all of these have necessarily been advocates of women's issues. The women's movement is made up of women and men who work and fight to achieve gender equality and to improve the lives of women as a social group. In most societies, women were traditionally confined to the home as daughters, wives and mothers, and we are often only aware of women in history because of their relation to famous men. Of course many women throughout history did in fact play an important role in cultural and political life, but they tend to be invisible. An organised women's movement only really started in the 19th century, even though women activists and the struggle for equality have always been part of all human societies.

One of the early pioneers, who thought and wrote about women as a group, is the Italian writer Christine de Pizan, who published a book about women's position in society as early as 1495. Christine de Pizan wrote about books she had read by famous men, who wrote books about the sins and weaknesses of girls and women, and questioned whether women were really human beings at all, or whether they were more similar to animals. Christine de Pizan's work offers a good example of the early stages of the struggle for women's equality. However, she was very unusual in being able to read and write, which was not at all common for women of that time.

In later history, women took part in the French revolution from the very beginning: the demonstrations that led to the revolution started with a large group of working women marching to Versailles to demand not only food to feed their families, but also political change. However, the French Revolution did not lead to proper recognition of women's rights. For that reason, in September 1791, Olympe de Gouges wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and with the intention of exposing the failure of the French Revolution to recognise gender equality. As a result of her writings de Gouges was accused, tried and convicted of treason, resulting in her immediate execution.

The women's movement began to develop in North America, mainly because women there were allowed to go to school earlier than in Europe - and women who can read and write, and who are encouraged to think for themselves, usually start to question how society works. The first activists travelled around North America and fought for the end of both slavery and women's oppression. They organised the 'First Women's Rights Convention' in 1848, and continued to campaign to improve the social position of all women. The movement also began in Europe with the same broad aims: activists collected signatures demanding that working women should receive their own wages and not their husbands', that women should be able to own a house and have custody of their children.

First wave of feminism

The fight for women's right to vote in elections is known as the 'suffragette movement'. By the end of the 19th century, this had become a worldwide movement, and the words 'feminism' and 'feminist movement' started to be used from that point on.

This first wave of feminism activism included mass demonstrations, the publishing of newspapers, organised debates, and the establishment of international women's organisations. By the 1920s, women had won the right to vote in most European countries and in North America. At around the same time, women became more active in communist, socialist and social democratic parties because increasing numbers of women began to work outside the home in factories and offices. Women were first allowed to go to university in the early 20th century, having both a career and a family. In certain countries, when fascist parties gained power the feminist movement was banned.

Women started organising again after the end of the Second World War, and they soon gained equal political rights in most European countries, with women's emancipation becoming an important aim and most women being allowed to take on full-time jobs, divorce their husbands and go to university.

Second wave of feminism

In Western Europe and the USA, the feminist movement was resurgent by the 1970s. Although this second wave of feminism aimed to achieve 'women's liberation', different groups had different ideas about how this should be done. Liberal feminists wanted better equality laws and reform of institutions such as schools, churches and the media. Radical feminists argued that the root cause of women's inequality is patriarchy: men, as a group, oppress women. They also focused on violence against women by men and started to talk about violence in the family, and rape. Socialist feminists argued that it is a combination of patriarchy and capitalism that causes women's oppression.

The second wave of feminism also resulted in new areas of science: women's studies became a discipline to be studied at university, and books began to be published about women's achievements in literature, music and science, and recording women's previously unwritten history.

Finally, the women's movement played an important role in the drafting of international documents about women's rights, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979).

Third wave of feminism

The third wave of feminism mainly refers to the American movement in the 1990s, and was a reaction to the backlash of conservative media and politicians announcing the end of feminism or referring to 'post-feminism'. The term 'backlash' was popularised by Susan Faludi in her book Backlash. The Undeclared War against Women, published in 1991, and describing the negative reaction of the patriarchal system towards women's liberation. This was hardly a new phenomenon: women's movements had always been met with antagonism. However, in the 1980s, institutionalised forms of attacks on women's rights grew stronger. The third wave of feminism can be characterised by an increased awareness of overlapping categories, such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation. More emphasis was also placed on racial issues, including the status of women in other parts of the world (global feminism). This was also a moment when a number of feminist non-governmental organisations were established, but focusing on specific feminist issues, rather than claiming to represent general feminist ideas.

Third wave feminism actively uses media and pop culture to promote its ideas and to run activities, for example by publishing blogs or e-zines. It focuses on bringing feminism closer to the people's daily lives. The main issues that third wave feminists are concerned about include: sexual harassment, domestic violence, the pay gap between men and women, eating disorders and body image, sexual and reproductive rights, honour crimes and female genital mutilation.

Cyberfeminism and networked feminism (fourth-wave feminism)

The term cyberfeminism is used to describe the work of feminists interested in theorising, critiquing, and making use of the Internet, cyberspace, and newmedia technologies in general. The term and movement grew out of 'third-wave' feminism. However, the exact meaning is still unclear to some: even at the first meeting of cyberfeminists The First Cyberfeminist International (FCI) in Kassel (Germany), participants found it hard to provide a definition, and as a result of discussions, they proposed 100 anti-theses (with reference to Martin Luther's theses) on what cyberfeminism is not. These included, for example, it is not an institution, it is not an ideology, it is not an -ism.

Cyberfeminism is considered to be a predecessor of 'networked feminism', which refers generally to feminism on the Internet: for example, mobilising people to take action against sexism, misogyny or gender-based violence against women. One example is the online movement #metoo in 2017, which was a response on social networks from women all over the world to the case of Harvey Weinstein, a Hollywood producer who was accused of sexually harassing female staff in the movie industry.

Sexism

This term is very often present in feminist literature as well as in the media and everyday life, and it is an important concept in understanding feminism. Sexism means perceiving and judging people only on the basis of their belonging to a particular sex or gender. It also covers discrimination of a person on the same basis. It is important to note that sexism applies to both men and women, however, women are more affected by sexism than men in all areas of life. Everyday sexism takes different forms, sometimes not easily recognisable - for example, telling jokes about girls, commenting on the female body (objectifying women), reacting to the way women are dressed, assigning women easier tasks in Internet games or objectifying women in advertising.

The literature mentions three types of sexism

Traditional sexism: supporting traditional gender roles, treating women as worse than men, employing traditional stereotypes which portray women as less competent than men.

Modern sexism: denying gender discrimination ('it is not a problem anymore'), having a negative attitude towards women's rights, denying the validity of claims made by women

Neosexism: This notion refers to ideologies that justify discrimination towards women on the basis of competences - 'men are effectively better competent for some things' - for example in managerial or leadership positions, and not on a direct discrimination of women. Defenders of these ideas tend to ignore or deny the difficulties faced by women in society as having an influence on 'competences'.

If it is true that the situation of women's human rights has improved in recent years, this does not mean that sexism has ended.
In March 2019, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe adopted Recommendation CM/Rec(2019)1 on preventing and combating sexism. The Recommendation defines sexism as
any act, gesture, visual representation, spoken or written words, practice or behaviour based upon the idea that a person or a group of persons is inferior because of their sex, which occurs in the public or private sphere, whether online or offline, with the purpose or effect of:

Violating the inherent dignity or rights of a person or a group of persons;

Resulting in physical, sexual, psychological or socio-economic harm or suffering to a person or a group of persons;

Creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment;

Constituting a barrier to the autonomy and full realisation of human rights by a person or a group of persons;

Maintaining and reinforcing gender stereotypes.

The Recommendation stresses that sexism is a manifestation of historically unequal power relations between women and men, which leads to discrimination and prevents the full advancement of women in society. The Committee of Ministers asks Governments of member states to take measures to prevent and combat sexism and its manifestations in the public and private spheres, and encourage relevant stakeholders to implement appropriate legislation, policies and programmes.

Women's rights are human rights

Why do we need women's rights, when these are simply human rights? Why do we need human rights treaties about women's rights, when we have already general human rights instruments? Almost everywhere in the world, women are denied their human rights just because of their sex or gender. Women's rights should not be seen as special rights: they are human rights enshrined in international human rights treaties and other documents, and include such rights as freedom from discrimination, right to life, freedom from torture, right to privacy, access to health, right to decent living conditions, right to safety, and many others. However, there are also human rights instruments that take into account the specific situation of women in society with regards to accessing or exercising their human rights, or which aim to protect them from violence.

52. 100 anti-theses
53. Based on: Todd. D. Nelson, Psychology of Prejudice, Pearsons Education, Inc. publishing as Allyn and Bacon, 2002

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Feminism and Women's Rights Movements - Gender Matters - www.coe.int

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There are people who believe that we do not need feminism today, but nothing could be further from the truth. Women have struggled for equality and against oppression for centuries, and although some battles have been partly won - such as the right to vote and equal access to education - women are still disproportionally affected by all forms of violence and by discrimination in every aspect of life.

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Can over-analyzing a piece of work nullify it’s actual purpose?

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Can over-analyzing a piece of work nullify it’s actual purpose?

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Bianca Plowman (10) completes literary analysis worksheets in her English class. English classes often overanalyze stories and lose the true meaning behind them.
Photo by Sadie Tresnit

As someone who has loved reading books from a very young age, I can't stand analyzing books in school. Too often, teachers turn to overanalysis, and the poor book is picked apart and studied to death. Plot is sacrificed for symbolism, and many truly important parts of the story can be lost. When this happens, I usually sit at my desk mourning the arbitrariness of the American English curriculum. When I read a book, of course I care about the deeper meaning, but I also value the plot of the story that is being told. When the plot is lost, the universal theme of the story loses its real-world context, and this takes away from the whole point of the literature, which is to tell a story with both metaphor and roots in reality.

Currently in my sophomore English class, we're studying Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck. It's a fine book. There's nothing wrong with it. In fact, the first time I read it, I liked it a lot. The ending surprised me, and as a whole, the book really made me think. I was able to make connections between Steinbeck's work and other pieces of writing. I thought a lot about the human mind and difficult decisions. I pondered questions that had never occurred to me before, things that would later keep me up at night. Although that may sound like a lot, it all happened in one class period in which I had nothing else to do.

When I rehashed the book in my English class, the writing lost its spark. I had to deal with everyone trying to read out loud, sticking long pauses wherever they saw fit. The language didn't flow anymore; it stumbled drunkenly in the dark and hit its leg on a table. We read certain scenes over and over again, to the point where nothing new was realized, but we were all tired of the same five paragraphs. In short, the story was no longer interesting because we placed too much focus on analysis.

My fellow Of Mice and Men studier Bianca Plowman (10) shares my sentiments. "I think that analysis is fine. However, when you're reading realistic fiction, and you're asked, 'now, what do you think these creaky floorboards represent?' I don't know. Maybe my [joints] after you've made me sit here for the past hour and a half," she says. Oftentimes, overanalysis can seem pointless, and that's because it usually is. Students can clearly make connections on their own without drowning in purportedly helpful worksheets, such as those for finding ten similarities between the main characters of different stories. Of Mice and Men is, as Plowman says, realistic fiction, so it stands to reason that while some parts of the story are metaphorical, others are no doubt meant to show and explain real experiences and must be taken at face value.

Of course, I'm not arguing for the complete removal of all analysis, because that would be ridiculous. As Franklin English teacher Anne Meadows puts it, "I think [analysis] helps to appreciate the power of story, and how theme is universal, usually, to human experience. I think we can miss those deeper meanings if we don't slow down and analyze the text." Analysis can certainly help clarify ideas that literature is meant to represent and explain. It's a good way to process reading, whether it's for an assignment or entertainment.

Based on this, I advocate for more thoughtful analysis. High school English classes often employ overanalysis, which is when the plot gets lost. Instead of overanalyzing, I propose that we focus more on discussion-based processing, in which students have the opportunity to have conversations about their ideas. Instead of just answering questions on paper, students should be able to actually receive feedback for their thoughts and help each other discover new multifaceted layers to literature. Discussion keeps analysis fascinating and allows students to collaboratively build upon their ideas, making it a beneficial experience for entire classes. To instill a love of reading in more high schoolers, English classes must place more importance on keeping lessons focused on real, impactful analysis.

Of course, this won't work for every single student. I know that in my classes and others, there are students who need to write things down and hear the words read aloud, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, sometimes hearing a book read aloud can help even me process the story better. However, this isn't the case for every student at Franklin, and the current system doesn't allow for that. Because of this, it is my belief that students should be given a more active role in how they analyze literature, choosing on their own whether they want to read outside of class and discuss ideas or whether they would prefer to read in class and complete written analysis. By giving students a more active role in this, they will be more focused on a learning method that works for them, leading to more insightful analysis and genuine interest in classwork.

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Bianca Plowman (10) completes literary analysis worksheets in her English class. English classes often overanalyze stories and lose the true meaning behind them. Photo by Sadie Tresnit As someone who has loved reading books from a very young age, I can't stand analyzing books in school.

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To what extent is our perception of reality impacted by subliminal messaging?

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To what extent is our perception of reality impacted by subliminal messaging?

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Demand for cosmetic intervention has gone up significantly over the course of the pandemic, fuelled by increased self-scrutiny, Zoom overexposure, and prolonged periods of isolation. It has been reported that filler treatments are up 75% from 2019 and Botox up 54%, with a parliamentary body image survey finding that 58% of people under 18 and 53% of adults said lockdown has damaged their view of their appearance. Social pressure for self-betterment has clearly infiltrated all aspects of our lives, with some foregoing the needles in favour of some more unconventional routes to reach their aesthetic goals.

Videos promising " MANIFEST EXTREME PHYSICAL BEAUTY", " powerful surreal beauty" and the " ULTIMATE BEAUTY & BODY COMBO " have been cropping up all over the internet, attracting up to millions of views each. The key to these miracle-fixes? Rather than going for a run or taking a trip up to Harley Street, these results are supposedly achieved from the comfort of your own home through a technique known as subliminal messaging. As one viewer commented, "at first I was like... mmm fixing my life with subliminals... as a JOKE... but bro.. I don't think it's a joke anymore".

Subliminal messages are messages you can neither see nor hear. But that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Below the limits of normal perception they consist of images or sounds that slip past our mental radar, bypassing critical awareness and logical reasoning and embedding in the subconscious mind. These messages then work at sneakily influencing our behaviours, which consequently have a ripple effect on our lives. On YouTube and TikTok there is a deluge of spiritually-inclined life-hacks; a rabbit hole of manifestation tips and tricks and law of attraction affirmations. For the sceptics among us, the idea that you can hijack your life while doing the washing up sounds a lot like the plot to a budget sci-fi flick. But for others, they are a short-cut to their goals.

So how does it work? Our subconscious is, in theory, far more susceptible and open to change than our conscious mind, which typically puts up barriers, influenced by external sources, to certain information. With billions of bits of information coming at us every minute, the Reticular Activating System works as a filter in our brains to decide which bits of information are permitted into our conscious mind. The thoughts we let in are normally the ones that match our existing beliefs. Struggling financially? Keep failing in relationships? Unhappy with your appearance? The idea goes that you've created a blockage in your mind that will hinder you from making progress in these areas. The solution, then, may be to embrace subliminal messaging as an answer to your problems, and luckily, the internet is awash with videos to help you do it.

During the pandemic, Ariana, 20, an actor from New York, was browsing YouTube when she stumbled into the world of subliminals. "I was feeling lost and really just had a strong urge to learn how to connect with life and myself more. I use subliminal messages for relaxation, self-love, self-esteem, confidence, cleansing my mind of old negative thought patterns, and getting in the energy of love and happiness." Putting them on before she falls asleep, Ariana lets the video then play for 8-10 hours overnight.

Janell, 31, a self-employed content creator from New Orleans, first started listening to subliminals three years ago. Her YouTube channel features a range of videos with titles including, " Become BEAUTIFUL OVERNIGHT subliminal" and " Extremely powerful weight loss subliminal ". In order to create the videos, she picks a topic, writes out a script with affirmations and specific details for the subconscious mind, then the auditory message is delivered hidden beneath another sound. "I use them for self-love, weight loss, releasing stress, increasing my energy, whatever I need mentally, emotionally, physically, or spiritually, I find a subliminal for it."

Well, does it actually work? While older studies, such as one conducted in 1991 by the University of California, found that any positive gains from subliminal self-help audiotapes were most likely the result of placebo, more recent research has shown that our brain responds to subliminal messages in measurable ways, recording change in the activity levels in the amygdala, which processes emotions, and the insula (involved in conscious awareness).

In the mid-20th century, the subliminal famously captured popular attention when quick-flashing words began to be used during television programs to advertise consumer goods. For some, subliminal messages became synonymous with a form of dystopian mind control, manipulating our unconscious desires and altering our behaviours in the name of capitalism. Subliminal advertising was subsequently banned in 1958; however, its usage appears to have gained traction within the self-development space, with users supposedly harnessing its power to fast-track success or certain changes they want to make in their lives or selves.

Thomas Zoëga Ramsøy, who has a Ph.D in neuroscience and is an applied neuroscience expert, believes the subject of the subliminal functions on two different paths: the academic route, which has been studied and proven to be a viable concept, and the popular notion of the subliminal, that contains limited academic research. "The big disconnect is that when it comes to subliminal messaging, we know that it can work for a couple of seconds and that it can affect your decision making, but it fades extremely quickly. That's the debunking moment for the popular notion of subliminal messaging. You can still use it for inducing people into particular states of mind, but it doesn't change your behaviour beyond that moment."

With that in mind, a subsection of subliminal content claims to offer extreme and radical physical changes that predictably conform to the current beauty ideals, pushing for weight loss and promoting conventionally attractive features as desirable. With regard to its legitimacy, Ramsøy explains, "The thing is if you feel something works, for example when people feel more confident, they tend to stand more upright, they tend to smile more, and that alone makes you appear more attractive. It's also an example of attention bias because you start to pay attention to the way people act towards you because now you expect people to be more positive. It becomes this kind of positive reinforcement loop."

However, as with most internet trends, there is a problematic side. Psychotherapist Sophie Boss warns that "it's almost obvious in the culture we live in today that the more society tells people they need to look a certain way, this pressure impacts people's well-being. But particularly with these subliminal messages, the idea that you can change your appearance just by watching these videos, it then adds another layer to the issue. Then not only do people feel bad about not looking a certain way but then they feel bad that they are not managing to achieve that look. Consequently, people feel that it is their fault which in itself can be more damaging."

As a means of rewiring negative thought patterns and behaviours, subliminals may have their merit. Yet, research on their effects is varied and generally inconclusive, and with certain strands of subliminals risking encouraging the harmful chasing of appearance ideals, it seems that effort would be best placed on dispelling these beauty standards altogether. While the idea of psychologically-photoshopping your face may seem tempting to some, as with most things you find on the internet, take it with a pinch of salt.

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The internet says subliminal messaging will make you hot

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Demand for cosmetic intervention has gone up significantly over the course of the pandemic, fuelled by increased self-scrutiny, Zoom overexposure, and prolonged periods of isolation. It has been reported that filler treatments are up 75% from 2019 and Botox up 54%, with a parliamentary body image survey finding that 58% of people under 18 and 53% of adults said lockdown has damaged their view of their appearance.

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Why do disasters have to occur for human beings to change?

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Why do disasters have to occur for human beings to change?

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Does it take a tragedy to jump-start a habit change? Does a death, a disease, or a downfall--one of the "dreadful Ds"--have to occur for someone to think about changing a hurtful habit like smoking, over-drinking, procrastinating, or over-eating?

How to become more willing is the subject of this series of blogs. In this one, we'll muse about the role of tragedy in change. There is no doubt in my mind that a tragedy can open people up and make them more willing to change or at least to consider change.

Maybe I believe this because a tragedy in my own life jolted me out of the fog I had put myself in with my smoking habit. Of course when I was a smoker, we were all still a bit hazy about the dangers of cigarettes, thanks to the suppression of research about the harms of smoking and a bombardment of ads touting smoking's joys and benefits. ("More doctors choose Camels than any other brand!")

However, when my aunt died of lung cancer because she couldn't stop smoking, I could no longer deny how deadly my habit was. I made a vow to quit and did so within weeks of her funeral. I am not the only one who was inspired to change by tragic events. Many of my students report that they or a family member reversed a self-destructive course because of a loved one's death.

Why would tragic events become a catalyst for change? In part, these events provide a person with vivid motivators--"I want to live," "I don't want to end up carrying around an oxygen tank," "I will not drink myself to death the way my father did." It can take a death, or a near-death experience, to realize just how much you want to live.

I only recently discovered a possible biological explanation for this sudden willingness to change. According to Stephen Johnson in Mind Wide Open, events that trigger strong emotional responses leave detailed memories in our brains. The strongest memories tend to be negative ones--memories of events that were frightening, infuriating, or...tragic. Evolutionary biologists believe that our brains do this to help us survive--"Remember this event! Avoid it from now on!" This is how powerful emotions can make us determined to change and to take action steps toward a better path.

So does this mean people need to "hit bottom" before they become willing to consider change? This idea, once an article of faith with many addictions professionals, has been challenged by research into new models of change, such as motivational interviewing (MI). Motivational interviewing seeks to help people activate their own internal motivation. In many cases, people with destructive habits or addictions can persuade themselves to change before they "bottom out."

Other people can thwart a tragedy with imagination. If you can imagine the tragic consequences of a harmful habit, you just might be able to avoid those consequences by transforming yourself. One of my students became willing to quit smoking after a vivid dream. In this dream, she was able to lift off the skin on her chest (as if it were a turtleneck sweater) and peer into her blackened, butt-littered lungs. This vision of tragedy spurred her to change--before a real tragedy could occur.

Did you ever experience a tragedy that made you willing to change?

Next: Can positive events open your mind to change?

Sources:
Johnson, Stephen. Mind Wide Open (2004), NY: Scribner, p. 148 ff.

I am the author of Changepower! 37 Secrets to Habit Change Success (Routledge, 2009), reviewed here. For more insights, quotes, and stories about habit change, willpower, and motivation, please like my Facebook page and/or follow me on Twitter.

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Does It Take a Tragedy to Trigger a Habit Change?

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Does it take a tragedy to jump-start a habit change? Does a death, a disease, or a downfall--one of the "dreadful Ds"--have to occur for someone to think about changing a hurtful habit like smoking, over-drinking, procrastinating, or over-eating? How to become more willing is the subject of this series of blogs.

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Does the good of conspiracy theories outweigh the bad?

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Does the good of conspiracy theories outweigh the bad?

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https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200522-what-we-can-learn-from-conspiracy-theories

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From political upheavals to anxieties about sex, technology and women, it turns out conspiracy theories can tell us a lot about what's going on in our societies - and how to fix them.

In 331 BC, something was wrong with Rome. Across the city, swathes of eminent men were succumbing to sickness, and practically all of them were dying. The losses were as baffling as they were alarming.

Then one day, a slave approached a curule aedile - a kind of magistrate - and hinted that she might know why. The girl led a team of investigators to various houses, where she claimed they would find an alliance of upper-class women secretly preparing poisons. They did.

The accused were dragged to the central square, and asked to prove their innocence. Since they claimed their concoctions were medicinal, would they drink them?

Alas, two of the suspects obliged - and promptly dropped dead. Mass arrests followed, and a further 170 women were found to be involved. The incident was a huge scandal. In the aftermath, the people of Rome elected a dedicated official to perform a ritual banishment of evil, a tactic which had previously only been used as a last resort after extreme civil unrest.

Or, at least, this is the version of events that was dutifully recorded by the respected historian Livy, who was born a few hundred years later. But he wasn't convinced that the women were really responsible, and neither are modern-day experts. Instead, Livy pointed to a far more rational explanation: an epidemic.

At the time, the city was in the grip of an unknown plague - a common cause of death in the classical world. Mass poisonings, on the other hand, were unheard of. The case discussed by Livy was the first of its kind, and the whole affair had struck Roman citizens as distinctly odd.

In fact, the women probably really were preparing medicines - and the rest of the story was heavily embellished or entirely made up. The infamous poisonings of 331 BC are thought to be a conspiracy theory, to explain deaths that had an obvious cause all along.

Amid the current pandemic, this scenario is oddly familiar. Since the beginning of April, at least 77 phone masts and 40 engineers have been attacked in the UK, after some people bought into the erroneous idea that Covid-19 is somehow being spread by powerful forces in the global telecommunications industry. Now the rumour has spread to the US, where there are fears it may lead to further violence. Yet again, reason is being cast aside, in favour of a niche explanation that involves a convoluted secret plot. ( Find out why 5G is not responsible for transmitting Covid-19.)

The question is, why did these alternative stories catch on?

The Romans viewed slaves and upper-class women with suspicion (Credit: Alamy)

From alien lizard rulers to shark attacks instigated by spies and elaborate multi-billion-dollar hoaxes, the menagerie of conspiracy theories in existence is so bizarre, the reasons some take off - and others vanish without a trace - may seem almost random. There's even a conspiracy theory about how conspiracy theories were invented (in keeping with the standard conspiracy formula, the CIA were allegedly involved).

But there are patterns hidden in their strangeness. The latest thinking suggests that conspiracy theories are filtered by a kind of natural selection, which allows those that fit certain requirements to spread rapidly through our societies - while others are confined to the darkest corners of the internet.

What makes a conspiracy appealing to the masses? And is there anything they can teach us about the problems we face - and how to fix them?

First up - successful conspiracies always have the right villain. Throughout history, many widely accepted conspiracy theories have conveniently placed the blame for distressing incidents or trends on the population's favourite baddies.

According to an analysis by Victoria Pagan, a classical historian at the University of Chicago, the success of the Roman poisonings conspiracy is likely to be partly down to the way it portrayed upper-class women and slaves, who powerful male elites found threatening.

Though the civilisation relied heavily on the exploitation of both these groups, men were constantly worried that their subordinates would turn on them. High-status women were generally viewed with suspicion, and often portrayed as secretive and dangerous. Slaves, on the other hand, had been known to murder their masters from time to time - and there was a long-standing paranoia that they sometimes acted as spies, and so couldn't be trusted.

In short, a conspiracy involving a gang of murderous women being betrayed by their slaves was ideal - it was always going to be more appealing than the truth.

Meanwhile, in the modern world, it's no accident that popular conspiracies tend to concern themes such as alien life, religious minorities, powerful elites, rival nations, mysterious technologies and the destruction of the environment. "Across the world, people generally believe in theories that are related to the cultural and historical events that have happened in particular places," says Karen Douglas, a social psychologist at the University of Kent.

Each society has its own anxieties and obsessions - and successful conspiracy theories generally tap into them. Take Romania, where many women decline to have their daughters vaccinated against HPV, the virus responsible for 99% of cervical cancers.

Successful conspiracy theories generally tap into a society's anxieties and obsessions (Credit: Getty Images)

In 2008 - the first year the vaccine was offered - just 2.5% of eligible Romanian women had it. The rates were so low, the school-based vaccination programme was eventually abandoned altogether. This is particularly surprising, when you consider that elsewhere in Europe, the HPV jab is extremely popular, with uptake at around 80% or higher, and that the nation has a long track record of having the highest fatality rates from cervical cancer on the continent.

There are several reasons for Romanian mothers' suspicion of the vaccine, but research has shown that one is the abundance of conspiracy theories about the true motivations for providing it, including the idea that it's an attempt to control the world's population by making women infertile and that it's a medical experiment by the pharmaceutical industry - though there is no evidence for either.

These, in turn, may have been fed by the country's history of meddling with women's fertility, along with a general lack of trust in the healthcare system; it's still common for patients to bribe medical staff for even basic care, and many of the women in the study reported suspicion about why the vaccination programme was free of charge.

In some cases, it's thought that concerns like these remain dormant in our minds, until certain events - such as political change - activate them. This can lead them to fuel our collective belief in conspiracy theories.

Anti-Semitic theories - such as the idea that Jews are powerful and engaged in secret evil plots - have historically emerged during times of societal stress, such as periods of unemployment - possibly because they allow people to consolidate blame for what can be the result of a complex set of societal and economic circumstances instead on a single scape-goat. Research has shown that people who have a social identity centred around victimhood are more susceptible to conspiracy theories that villainise Jews, and this might also be true at a societal level.

This fits with another common ingredient in popular conspiracies - they make us feel good about our own social group, often while putting down those we see as our rivals. "That can be your national group, or your gender group or whatever," says Douglas. "There's some evidence that people are attracted to conspiracy theories that satisfy these prejudiced attitudes."

By emphasising the distinctions between "ingroups" and "outgroups", conspiracy theories may also lead to stronger social bonds - and provide a sense of protection against those people find threatening. Accordingly, conspiracy theories are often widespread in groups that are involved in mutual conflict.

In Romania, there is a general lack of trust in the healthcare system, which might explain the abundance of conspiracy theories about the HPV vaccine (Credit: Alamy)

"There is some research to suggest people turn to conspiracy theories more when they're confronted with crisis situations," says Douglas.

The idea that 5G and other earlier mobile phone networks are somehow bad for our health has been around for years - ever since the technology entered widespread use around 30 years ago. To begin with, it was falsely accused of being responsible for causing autism, infertility and cancer, among other things - but generally confined to the most hardcore conspiracy theorists.

The emergence of a mysterious new coronavirus in December 2019 set the stage for a new slant on this enduring idea. On the 22 January - when the virus still had infected just 314 people, leading to six fatalities, an article was published that changed everything. It was an interview with obscure family doctor in a Belgian newspaper, and titled "5G is life-threatening, and no one knows it". Crucially, it linked the dangers of 5G to the new coronavirus even though there is no evidence to support the claim. And that was it.

"Conspiracy theories tend to emerge quite quickly when something important happens," says Douglas. "They come out of the blue when there's some kind of crisis or conflict that people really want to explain and want to have answers for." She points out that the recent bushfires in Australia also led to a number of trendy conspiracies.

There's this effort by politicians to erase facts and evidence and remake the world into something more conducive to their goals - Russell Muirhead

The 5G theory has been called a " conspiracy cocktail ", since it involves several of humanity's greatest fears, shaken together in one deliciously appetising mixture. As well as the perennial fear of new or invisible technology, which seems to pervade many popular conspiracy theories, it also taps into an undercurrent of anxiety about the emergence of China as a global superpower.

Another reason the 5G conspiracy might be more appealing than the truth is that it's a story. Fairy tales, legends, anecdotes and gossip are how our brains make sense of the world - they go back tens of thousands of years, and they're arguably what makes us human. In times of crisis, it's possible that we turn to conspiracies because we find them reassuring.

Conspiracy theories have all the elements of a good story - terrifying villains, creative plots, and moral lessons. Because of this, a well-constructed conspiracy can have a powerful hold on the public imagination, in a way that a narrative about a "virus emerged entirely unpredictably and killed thousands for no reason" is unlikely to be able to rival.

Some psychologists have compared conspiracy theories to religious beliefs, in the way that they help us to feel more in control, by taking unpredictable or random events and making them seem somehow predestined or shaped by human hands.

Others have gone so far as to suggest that this is why they stick: in their content, storylines and purposes, they come uncannily close to the beliefs perpetuated by many organised religions. Some people believe in conspiracy theories to such an extent that they will even put their lives on the line, in their attempts to prove themselves right.

It's thought that people are more susceptable to conspiracy theories during a crisis (Credit: EPA)

Similarly, leading conspiracy theories often address some kind of ambiguity or mystery, from unexplained plane crashes to sudden celebrity deaths.

Where the authorities either can't or won't provide more information, these knowledge gaps combine with a general mistrust - driving the public straight into the arms of those who claim they have the answers. This is compounded by the fact that science, government inquiries and other legitimate forms of information-gathering can be painfully slow, in the meantime leaving a temporary void in which other sources can become established.

After the disgraced scientist Andrew Wakefield falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine can lead to autism in the 1990s, it took decades of research to establish beyond reasonable doubt that this had absolutely no scientific basis - in which time, the conspiracy had time to do serious damage.

Eventually, conspiracy theories can become so popular that they enter a positive feedback loop, in which the more they're discussed, the more legitimate they seem.

For example, a recent analysis of Tweets that mention 5G and Covid-19 found that just 34.8% included a suggestion that the two are linked, while the majority either denounced the theory or didn't express an opinion. Unfortunately, whether the users were making fun of the idea or explaining why it's false, they were still raising the profile of the idea.

Indeed, the advent of social media and the rise of new technologies have been big moments in the history of conspiracy theories. "Of course you will find more geographically localised conspiracies in certain countries that other people don't even know about," says Douglas. "But it is true that the way that we communicate with people now and the way we consume information is much more global than it was before, so some conspiracy theories are just very, very well-known across the world."

Some conspiracy theories, such as those that involve exclusive groups of people secretly running the world, are now ubiquitous, she observes.

As politics becomes more polarised, some experts think that it's becoming easier for conspiracy theories to take hold (Credit: Reuters)

As our societies are changing, so are conspiracies - and Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, is concerned about the direction they're taking.

"Classically, conspiracy theories are propagated by people on the margins - they're almost a weapon of the powerless, for holding the powerful to account," he says. "But right now the new stuff is coming directly from the powerful, which is really quite extraordinary."

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, numerous world leaders have announced their public support for related conspiracy theories, which often align remarkably well with their own agendas. For example, US President Donald Trump recently suggested he has seen evidence the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab while his own intelligence agencies have said there is no evidence for this. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has also claimed it's the other way around - the pandemic was caused by a bioweapon that was unleashed on China (but again there is no evidence for this).

We are, Muirhead suggests, being manipulated by our own weapons. "There's this effort by politicians to erase facts and evidence and remake the world into something more conducive to their goals."

It's thought that a new type of conspiracy is emerging, which doesn't require any evidence or justification (Credit: Alamy)

The whole scenario is also being exacerbated by the fact that many countries, such as the United States, are experiencing record levels of political polarisation at the moment. "That's kind of motivated this new conspiratorial talk," says Muirhead.

He gives the example of "Pizzagate", the entirely discredited and widely condemned conspiracy that linked former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign manager to an alleged child abuse ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Despite being entirely made-up, it gained widespread support in 2016, culminating in a man firing an assault rifle inside the business.

"This conspiracy doesn't try to explain anything about the world," says Muirhead. "What it does do is paint Hillary Clinton, not just as somebody who [in some people's opinions] is, on balance, less desirable than her opponent, but as the sort of human being who is worse than a Nazi."

In the book " A Lot of People Are Saying ", which Muirhead co-authored with the political scientist Nancy Rosenblum from Harvard University, he introduces a second new trend in the conspiracy world: conspiracy without the theory.

"Not only were there no children being held captive at the pizza restaurant, there wasn't even a basement," says Muirhead. "What surprised us was the way this narrative was a complete fabrication, from beginning to end."

He explains that normally conspiracy theories would start with a kernel of truth - an event in the real world that's easy to see and hard to understand, like an assassination or an attack - and build on it. But the latest generation of conspiracies skip this first step and seem to be successful regardless of how blindingly obvious it is that they're false.

"I'm worried that ordinary people trying to understand the world are going to become very disoriented as they try to navigate this kind of whiteout blizzard of conspiratorial fictions and lies," says Muirhead.

The "Pizzagate" conspiracy gained widespread support in 2016, despite being entirely made-up (Credit: Reuters)

So what should we do about it?

"We can't just take on the conspiracy charges one by one by one," says Muirhead. In his view, part of the problem is that people have gradually lost trust in experts, governments and powerful institutions. To fix the system, he suggests that we need to re-legitimise democracy - reform our governments and retrain our institutions. "In the United States that was done in the early decades of the 20th Century. It rehabilitated the government for new generations, and led to all sorts of progressive reforms, culminating in female suffrage."

Douglas, on the other hand, thinks more research is needed. "I think it is really, really important to understand where conspiracy theories come from and how they spread, because there's strong evidence that believing them has significant consequences."

In particular, she explains that there have been very few studies into why some have extraordinary longevity, such as the Flat Earth, Illuminati and Moon Landing conspiracies, while others die out relatively quickly - though this is something she is starting to look into.

In fact, despite decades of research and an endlessly captivated public audience, there are still many unanswered questions in the field. "I think there's a general consensus amongst researchers that we are in an age of conspiracy, but again, there's no real evidence for that," says Douglas.

Who knows, perhaps that could be the next conspiracy...

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From political upheavals to anxieties about sex, technology and women, it turns out conspiracy theories can tell us a lot about what's going on in our societies - and how to fix them.

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Do certain racial groups have particular strengths or abilities?

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Do certain racial groups have particular strengths or abilities?

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Historically, Khoisan people from southern Africa were used as scientific subjects in racist experiments. hecke61/Shutterstock

There has been justified outrage about a recently published - and hastily retracted - academic article written by academics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

The article suggested that "coloured" women in South Africa "present with low cognitive function and which is significantly influenced by education". Coloured is a racial classification legalised during apartheid for people of "mixed race". This allegedly low cognition was also linked to unhealthy lifestyle behaviours.

A myriad of articles have been written that criticise the authors' work, and take aim at their university's ethics committee for allowing the study to be conducted. They have been accused of racial essentialism; of methodological flaws; and of connecting race with medical conditions.

There's one particularly important concept that's been given a lot of attention in the debates - the notion of "race science", which is also called scientific racism. The article and the opprobrium that followed are a reminder that race and racism are still deeply embedded in science, and must be exorcised.

This can only be achieved by decolonising modern western science. By "decolonise", I mean "decentre" rather than destroy modern western science. It must be stripped of the epistemological and methodological privileges it enjoys. It must be placed on the same plane as other approaches to knowledge and research. In this way, it can be compared equitably with other ways of knowing.

If this approach becomes commonplace, then new knowledge spaces will be created. In these spaces, those from different knowledge traditions can produce new knowledge through the negotiation of trust. They can apply different lenses and ask different questions that won't lead them to racialised ways of thinking and operating. But, this will require a willingness to accept that modern western science is one way and not the only way of understanding the natural world.

Over the years progress has been made to excise racism from science or to compensate those who were victims of scientific racism. One example is the compensation of the families of the African American men who were denied diagnosis and treatment for syphilis in the well-known Tuskegee study. Another is the universal acceptance of the principle in ethics that states "do no harm". However, this has not arrested enduring racism in science.

Race science rising

Race science concerns the use of science as a vehicle to advance racist agendas, or where race is used as a variable in science for the purpose of labelling certain groups of people negatively or defining them in deficit terms.

There are many examples of this in history. Carolus Linnaeus, who developed the modern system of classifying living things, classified Khoisan (first nations people of southern Africa) as Homo monstrosus: monstrous or abnormal people. And in 1937, scientists in the Zoology Department at Stellenbosch University used 80 measurements to confirm the category "coloured man" as distinctive from "white man".

British science journalist Angela Saini points out that race science is on the rise again internationally. And, she argues, it's being advanced in subtle ways by well-educated people who wear smart suits. This includes academics at leading universities around the world.

It's important to be alive to the dangers of race science because it can be used to justify racism in broader society.

But it continues to exist because it is part of a system of thought that I call modern western science. I'm referring here to science embedded in Eurocentrism: a way of thinking that prioritised anything from the western world - and particularly from Europe - and that was spread and entrenched through colonisation.

Given its original site of production, this school of thought necessarily centres European history. Through its various incarnations, an ideal identity of human was formed that is male, white, heterosexual, able-bodied - and this is a screen against which others are declared different. Positing others as "different" (and inferior) opened the door to race science.

A new approach

Of course, modern western science did not develop free from the influence of other knowledges. Through colonising places, it picked up certain ideas and approaches from different countries or regions. For example, Indigenous peoples in North America helped settlers to treat life-threatening scurvy through the application of tonics made from conifer needles, which were rich in Vitamin C.

Read more: How Indigenous knowledge advances modern science and technology

However, such knowledges were absorbed into a western cultural archive and represented in western terms. For example, the pain-reliever Aspirin was first discovered by Indigenous people - they used willow bark, which contains the active ingredient from which Aspirin was created. More importantly, modern western science has not paid homage to the influence of other knowledge systems.

There is no denying that modern western science has brought some benefits to humanity. But this does not mean it shouldn't be interrogated and, as I suggested earlier, de-centred. The upshot of this would be the democratisation of science in two ways. First, by broadening who participates in the production of scientific knowledge; and second, by broadening what counts as science. This would help to root out race science.

Science has always been and will always remain the product of human will and intention. Scientific knowledge will always be culturally and historically produced. And if we are to speak in any sense about objectivity in science, this must be produced by science that is multicultural and not universal.

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How controversial "racist" research opens door for a decolonisation drive

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There has been justified outrage about a recently published - and hastily retracted - academic article written by academics from Stellenbosch University in South Africa. The article suggested that "coloured" women in South Africa "present with low cognitive function and which is significantly influenced by education".

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Are history lessons biased for cutting out informations, painting some countries in a bad light?

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Are history lessons biased for cutting out informations, painting some countries in a bad light?

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Racial bias in history textbooks and curricula is a persistent problem. Often, teachers in US history classrooms downplay or overlook racism. Many attempts at teaching America's racist history fall woefully short, such as when a fifth grader in New Jersey was "sold" in class at a mock slave auction, or when a fourth grader in Wisconsin was asked in a homework assignment to "give three 'good' reasons" for chattel slavery.

Additionally problematic, some textbooks figure as apologetics for slavery. As recently as 2018, a Texas school assigned Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States, which posits that "many [slaves] may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other." Another College Board-approved textbook that "meet(s) the curricular requirements of AP U.S. History" includes a map that refers to forcibly imported Africans in 1775 as "immigrants."

How Systemic Racism Influences History Curricula

Bias in history textbooks perpetuates widespread ignorance about racism and its legacy in the US today. Graduate programs that train future educational leaders have a responsibility to use an antiracist pedagogical approach. How has systemic racism influenced history curricula?

When Racism Goes Unnamed

In the first edition of the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, historian and sociologist James Loewen analyzed over a dozen major high school history textbooks for bias and inaccuracies. Loewen found that out of 12 textbooks, only five listed "racism," "racial prejudice," or any term beginning with "race" in their indexes.

A fifth-grade Milwaukee teacher who sorted through his state-approved US history textbooks found the situation even more dismal in his home state: "Even though publishers make claims about being 'multicultural' and honoring our nation's 'diversity,' none of the 5th-grade United States history textbooks-even those exceeding 800 pages-examines the role of racism in U.S. history or even mentions the word "racism.'" Only two textbooks included the term "discrimination."

Despite its omission in textbooks, systemic racism was no accidental feature of the American colonies. The founders understood slavery as a driving power of territorial expansion and industry-so much so that they codified protections for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade into the US Constitution. While textbooks often emphasize that document's lofty democratic goals, few teach how it guaranteed inequality for future generations.

Loewen also found that curricula frequently approach topics such as the Civil War and Reconstruction in incomplete and misleading ways. For example, many textbooks frame the Reconstruction era after the Civil War as a tumultuous period whose chaos was attributable to the uncivilized governance of newly freed slaves; what these textbooks fail to mention is how white supremacists sowed this narrative specifically to justify the disenfranchisement of Black voters.

Biased Portrayals of Slavery in US History Textbooks

Historians agree that when the Southern states seceded, they did so to preserve slavery. Yet, the portrayal of slavery in US history textbooks has changed over time to serve the powers that be, leading to a deluge of misinformation. Ignorance about American slavery is evidenced in polling data. As Pew Research Center polls show, the majority of adult Americans wrongly believe that "states' rights" was the primary cause of the Civil War. According to a Southern Poverty Law Center report, only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed knew that slavery was the central cause.

What evidence do we have of bias in history textbooks? In the 1920s, Florida and other Southern states passed laws requiring "a Correct History of the U.S., Including a True and Correct History of the Confederacy." State law required textbooks to refer to the Civil War as "the War Between the States." Before the growth of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, many textbooks held that differences over tariffs, blundering politicians, and conflict between the "agrarian" Southern lifestyle and the industrial North caused the Civil War.

Since then, as textbooks expanded coverage of slavery, white authors downplayed the role of slavery in the North, suggesting that slavery was a regional rather than a national concern. Few textbooks pointed out that the first colony to legalize slavery was not Virginia but Massachusetts, and that in 1720, New York City's Wall Street was a marketplace where enslavers could hire out their slaves by the day or week. In the 1980s and '90s, religious conservatives in Indiana influenced textbooks to include misleading messages about how white wives of slave owners played a maternal role for enslaved people and how their Christian faith helped enslaved people endure "hard times."

As for what may have caused racism in the US, Loewen found that only two history textbooks attempted an explanation. In The American Tradition, this attempt takes the form of a single sentence: "In defense of their 'peculiar institution,' southerners became more and more determined to maintain their own way of life." These omissions and obfuscations of the truth of slavery serve to cast the US as intrinsically and increasingly democratic, with slaveholding a mere temporary aberration.

How History Educators Are Combating Systemic Racism

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Hard History: American Slavery initiative, "The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the deep, abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as 'progress.'" Rather than repeating a story of unyielding moral and social ascent, educators and activists are unearthing and teaching the histories of people of color that emphasize resistance to domination and oppression.

Resources for Having Difficult Conversations Around Racial Bias

Combating racial bias in history textbooks and curricula is no easy task.

Educators can look outside of textbooks for resources to bolster their antiracist history curricula. Teaching Tolerance's Teaching Hard History Series provides content on teaching slavery to K-5 students. Then there is the 1619 Project from the New York Times. The aim of the 1619 Project is to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619-when the first cargo ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in the British colony of Virginia-as our nation's birth year.

The 1619 project centers the contributions of Black Americans in American history. Since its inception, the project has grown to include a visual history of slavery created by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African-American History and Culture along with essays, podcasts, poetry, and fiction composed by contemporary Black writers inspired by the past 400 years. Educators can choose from this wide array when covering topics such as capitalism and the plantation, racial disparities in US health systems, and Black music and advancements in the arts.

Advancing Equitable, Antiracist Education

Confronting bias in history textbooks and curricula is essential for coming to grips with racial disparities in education today. American University's professional development resources can help educators who want to learn more about bias in US history textbooks and curricula. Discover how American University's Online Master of Arts in Teaching, Online Master of Education in Education Policy and Leadership, and Online Doctorate in Education Policy and Leadership programs equip educators with training to address racial bias in history classrooms.

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The Problem of Bias in US History Textbooks and Curriculum

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Racial bias in history textbooks and curricula is a persistent problem. Often, teachers in US history classrooms downplay or overlook racism. Many attempts at teaching America's racist history fall woefully short, such as when a fifth grader in New Jersey was "sold" in class at a mock slave auction, or when a fourth grader in Wisconsin was asked in a homework assignment to "give three 'good' reasons" for chattel slavery.

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Should dreams be pursued or abandoned? Would abandoning them mean abandoning a part of yourself?

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Should dreams be pursued or abandoned? Would abandoning them mean abandoning a part of yourself?

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I realised I would never be an actor – now I’m a big advocate of giving up on dreams | Imogen West-Knights

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Life forces us to give up all the time, and being able to let things go is also a skill, says Imogen West-Knights, a writer and journalist

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Will Neopronouns ever be considered an "official" part of the English language?

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Will Neopronouns ever be considered an "official" part of the English language?

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Kit Wilson's introduction when meeting other people is: "Hi, I'm Kit. I use they/them pronouns." That means that when people refer to Kit in conversation, the first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would prefer them to use "they" rather than "she" or "he".

As a child, Wilson never felt entirely female or entirely male. They figured they were a "tomboy" until the age of 16, but later began to identify as "genderqueer".

"Neither end of the [male/female] spectrum is a suitable way of expressing the gender I am," Wilson says. "Sometimes I feel 'feminine' and 'masculine' at the same time, and other times I reject the two terms entirely."

Earlier this year, Wilson asked friends to call them "Kit," instead of the name they (Wilson) had grown up with, and to use the pronoun "they" when talking about them.

Sharing one's pronouns and asking for others' pronouns when making introductions is a growing trend in US colleges.

For example, when new students attended orientation sessions at American University in Washington DC a few months ago, they were asked to introduce themselves with their name, hometown, and preferred gender pronoun (sometimes abbreviated to PGP).

"We ask everyone at orientation to state their pronouns," says Sara Bendoraitis, of the university's Center for Diversity and Inclusion, "so that we are learning more about each other rather than assuming."

A handful of universities go further and allow students to register their preferred pronouns in the university computer systems - and also a preferred name.

At the University of Vermont, which has led this movement, students can choose from "he," "she," "they," and "ze," as well as "name only" - meaning they don't want to be referred to by any third-person pronoun, only their name.

"It maximises the student's ability to control their identity," says Keith Williams, the university's registrar, who helped to launch the updated student information system in 2009. Most people stick to the default option, "none", which means they are not registering a pronoun - presumably because they are content to let people decide whether they are a "he" or a "she".

Out of about 13,000 students currently enrolled, some 3,200 have entered preferred names in the system, and about half of them have specified preferred pronouns, Williams says. He adds that this doesn't necessarily mean they are transgender - they could be non-transgender students specifying "he" and "she".

At Harvard University, which followed Vermont's example at the beginning of this academic year, about half of the approximately 10,000 students registered in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences have specified preferred pronouns, and slightly more than 1% of those - about 50 out of 5,000 - chose pronouns other than "she" or "he", according to registrar Mike Burke.

At most other US universities the growing use of "non-binary" pronouns remains less formalised but is often encouraged in various ways. Signs and badges found throughout campuses display slogans such as Pronouns Matter or Ask Me About My Pronouns. Professors may be invited to training sessions at the start of each year and are sometimes urged to include their pronouns in their email signature, for example, "John Smith (he/him/his)".

A card developed by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee LGBT Resource Center in 2011 has been widely reproduced and distributed across the US.

One side of the card lists eight pronouns, from "ey" to "zie," and illustrates how they change depending on their role in a sentence. Instead of "he/she," "him/her," "his/her," "his/hers," and "himself/herself" it would be:

The other side of the card has fill-in-the-blank sentences to give people an opportunity to practise using the unfamiliar pronouns.

"The intention behind it was to ensure that the campus was fostering an inclusive environment," says Jennifer Murray, the director of the resource centre.

All the pronouns on the card were already in use, Murray says, either among students or members of Milwaukee's LGBT community. Although it might have been simpler to suggest just one non-binary pronoun, she says the staff of the resource centre didn't want to "limit folks' choices".

Some terms come from foreign languages - such as the German-inspired "sie" - others from fiction. For example, "ze" and "per" are the pronouns of a future utopia Marge Piercy describes in her feminist sci-fi novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Some are drawn from the plant or animal worlds, or refer to mythical beings with which the individual may identify.

It's is not the first time people have tried to coin new pronouns. Writers have long been frustrated by the lack of a neat way to refer to someone of unknown gender - "he or she" is clunky, and if you use it several times in quick succession, "your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants' factory", as Guardian columnist Lucy Mangan once put it.

Most of these made little impact, though one - "thon", a contraction of "that one" - got into two American dictionaries.

This use of "they" annoys some grammarians. While it does feel natural for most English speakers to say something like "Someone lost their wallet," critics argue that "they" should really only be used to refer to plural nouns. And even those comfortable with "Someone lost their wallet" may have doubts when "Someone" is replaced by a person's name.

It's for this reason that when the pronoun registration system was developed at the University of Vermont in 2009, professors at first argued "ze" would be acceptable, but "they" would not. "They" was only added as an option in 2014.

But English has a precedent for a plural pronoun coming to be used in the singular - the pronoun "you". Until the 17th Century a single person was addressed with "thou" and "thee". Later "you" became perfectly acceptable in both plural and singular. Neither McConnell-Ginet nor Baron sees any reason why the same could not happen with "they".

Most students have "some level of understanding about pronouns", which was not the case a few years ago, says the National Union of Students' LGBT officer, Fran Cowling. NUS name badges now include space for preferred pronouns.

Cambridge University students started a campaign called Make No Assumptions about a year ago. One of its badges (above) prompts readers to ask about the wearer's pronouns. Another has empty spaces for pronouns to be filled in.

Emrys Travis, Cambridge University Student Union's LGBT+ campaigns officer, uses "they," "them," and "their," but also "ey," "em," and "eir" with trans friends. "A lot of them mess up - repeatedly, often," Travis says. "As long as I think they're trying, it doesn't bother me."

Travis asked their director of studies to email each of their (Travis's) lecturers with a request to use "they" and "them" when referring to Travis and none objected. "Cambridge, in general, is a great place to be trans," they say.

However, learning to use new pronouns or the singular "they" is not easy.

Like Harvard, Ohio University gave students the option to register their preferred name and pronoun this year, but not all professors were ready for it. Some thought "they" was a typo on their student rosters, says LGBT centre director delfin bautista (bautista writes their name without any capital letters).

Slip-ups with preferred names are rarer than with preferred pronouns, bautista says, but can happen too. Calling someone by their rejected birth name is termed "deadnaming". More broadly, referring to a person in a way that does not reflect their gender identity is called "misgendering".

When students suspect that professors may not get the point of gender-neutral pronouns, they may play it safe and stick with "he" or "she".

Sarah Grote, an Ohio University student, uses "they/them" with close friends but hasn't entered this in the student information system to avoid inconveniencing or alienating professors. "I still need their recommendations... and this is still south-eastern Ohio," Sarah says.

In another socially conservative region, one university had to swiftly backtrack after tentatively starting a discussion about pronouns this summer. Donna Braquet, director of the Pride Center at the University of Tennessee posted an explanation of gender-neutral pronouns on the university website in August and encouraged people on campus to ask one another about their pronouns.

The goal was to make the climate more trans-friendly, but it was widely mistaken for a change in university policy. Some of the press coverage imagined that "he" and "she" were being outlawed. One opinion column even used the headline "New pronouns for the traveling freak show". State and federal lawmakers complained to the university, and the post was removed the following week.

It's not just in US universities that gender-neutral language is advancing. Last year, Facebook gave users the option to customise gender beyond male and female, and pick a pronoun from "he", "she", and "they". This summer the Oxford Dictionaries website added the honorific "Mx", defining it as "a title used before a person's surname or full name by those who wish to avoid specifying their gender or by those who prefer not to identify themselves as male or female". Meanwhile, Caitlyn Jenner and the controversy over Benedict Cumberbatch playing a non-binary character in the film Zoolander 2 have kept the subject of gender identity topical.

Universities, however, remain the most fertile ground for new pronouns.

kat baus, a non-binary student who graduated from Harvard this year - and who also writes their name without capital letters - regrets that the university's computer system was not introduced earlier. "It would have been a lot easier and less awkward," baus says.

baus sent emails or visited professors during office hours to explain their gender identity and pronouns. In smaller classes they (baus) brought it up when introducing themself.

"I don't know a single trans person who likes having that conversation," baus says.

Being able to do it with the click of a mouse would have allowed them to get straight down to their work in class, baus says - and would have allowed their classmates to get straight down to theirs.

It is sometimes difficult to determine somebody's gender by sight but what if you're blind? Mike Lambert recently experienced this problem when he attended a course on equality and diversity.

"I listen hard to Nina's voice. There's something soft and tentative about it - but the pitch is unmistakeably male... I tell myself that any concerns I have about Nina's gender are a thing of little consequence. The whole point of the day is equality and diversity, and I shouldn't get so hung-up trying to slot people into neat pigeon-holes. And then, I'm struck by a horrifying thought. How am I going to get through more than a couple of sentences without committing myself to 'he' or 'she', 'his' or 'hers'?"

Subscribe to the BBC News Magazine's email newsletter to get articles sent to your inbox.

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Beyond 'he' and 'she': The rise of non-binary pronouns

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Kit Wilson's introduction when meeting other people is: "Hi, I'm Kit. I use they/them pronouns." That means that when people refer to Kit in conversation, the first-year student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee would prefer them to use "they" rather than "she" or "he". As a child, Wilson never felt entirely female or entirely male.

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Mr Lazarus, a 22-year-old music student, said before his arrest that it was a "Hay Wain that demonstrates our road to disaster".

He took part in the protest alongside 23-year-old Ms Hunt, a psychology student who helped found Just Stop Oil after orchestrating protests for Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.

She released a statement that said: "You can forget our 'green and pleasant land' when further oil extraction will lead to widespread crop failures, which means we will be fighting for food. Ultimately, new fossil fuels are a death project by our government."

The group said it had targeted the National Gallery because it had "no choice but to continue to target major cultural events and locations in order to gain attention for the biggest crime against humanity".

The value of The Hay Wain is unclear, but the record price for a Constable at auction was £22.5 million for The Lock in 2012.

It is the latest demonstration by Just Stop Oil, which in the past week has allegedly targeted a Scottish art gallery and stormed the British Grand Prix on Sunday.

Five men, aged between 21 and 46, and two women, aged 20 and 44, were arrested after a track invasion on the opening lap of the race at Silverstone.

The incident was not shown on F1's global television feed, but eyewitness footage emerged of five people - understood to be representing Just Stop Oil - entering the circuit at the Wellington Straight. They then sat down on the tarmac.

Five Just Stop Oil members are also said to have attached themselves to My Heart's In The Highlands, a 19th century landscape by Horatio McCulloch in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.

They are also alleged to have sprayed the group's logo on the walls and floor of the gallery in orange paint.

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Constable masterpiece The Hay Wain damaged in Just Stop Oil protest

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Mr Lazarus, a 22-year-old music student, said before his arrest that it was a "Hay Wain that demonstrates our road to disaster". He took part in the protest alongside 23-year-old Ms Hunt, a psychology student who helped found Just Stop Oil after orchestrating protests for Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain.

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Fair warning: The language here could get a little strong for some tastes.

Raise your hand if you've ever slipped up and said a curse word in front of your boss, your grandma, or anyone else you probably shouldn't have. We're right there with you (totally raised our hands).

Don't be too hard on yourself. Swearing has a long history-words tend to stick around when they fill a need for a language or society, and swear words do just that. What useful purpose could expletives possibly serve? Glad you asked. Keep reading to see just a few.

Evoking Emotion

Think of swearwords like verbal exclamation points: They express emotion and emphasize emotional responses to the world around us. You know how cathartic they can be when you step on a LEGO or bump your elbow. And you know who has your back on that? Science.

A professor at Keele University in the UK led a study in 2009 where he had 67 student volunteers plunge their hands into icy water and repeat either an expletive or a neutral word, keeping their hands submerged for as long as they could. Sounds fun. They found that the students who picked expletives were able to keep their hands in the water for an average of 40 seconds longer, and they reported feeling less pain.

They also found that swearing stimulates the same part of the brain that governs your "fight-or-flight" response. You know, the ancient lizard part of your brain. So not only does swearing relieve pain, it lets you express the "fight" part of that response without resorting to physical violence. So really, those so-called "naughty words" are doing a public service to us all.

Provoking Emotion

A lot of Western culture has been influenced by Christianity. As a result, a lot of our swearing is religious, or has to do with being irreverent toward religion. A curse is "the expression of a wish that misfortune, evil, or doom befall a person, group." Something that's profane is "characterized by irreverence or contempt for God or sacred principles or things; irreligious." To swear is "to make a solemn declaration or affirmation by some sacred being or object, as a deity or the Bible."

Basically, because the Bible (and the Torah and the Koran, actually) says " You shall not misuse the name of the Lord," it's provocative and rebellious to say things like "God, I hate that guy," or...

Swearing/cursing/profanity doesn't necessarily need to be religious to be provocative. When a six year old starts swearing, what do they say? They usually don't pick a religious word for their first one. They go big. They drop an f-bomb or whip out the s-word, then quickly look at you to see if/how you react. But that's the thing. Kids (especially little ones) like to test and explore their limits. They push the boundaries of rules to learn where those boundaries are. And let's not pretend it stops at childhood. You've probably said one recently just to get a rise out of someone, too. It happens, you know? When you feel something, you want others to feel it with you (for better or for worse).

Fitting In

In some cases, you might not be able to fit in unless you do swear. While swearing can be a thing we do to grab and command attention, there are some circles where it's just such a part of the landscape that you stand out by choosing not to swear. Think of rappers and stand-up comics. Jim Gaffigan is widely known as a "clean" comic. The fact he uses little to no profanity in his work comes up in almost every interview. Hell, it's the third sentence on his Wikipedia page.

Your anti-swearing friend might say "Sure, but that's entertainment. You can't do that in a professional setting." You know what proves them wrong? Science.

The BBC wrote an intensely researched article on swearing in March 2016. In one section, they described a study about swearing at work:

A study in New Zealand for example examined the interactions and use of the term "fuck" by a team of workers at a soap factory. Researchers from Victoria University of Wellington found that while the workers regularly swore amongst themselves, they didn't swear as much with colleagues from other teams.

They concluded that in this work context, the word "fuck" was associated with expressions of solidarity, and was used to bond members of the team, ease tensions and equalise members with different levels of power and responsibility, "as if they are saying 'I know you so well I can be this rude to you.'"

You read that right. Swearing can be a sign of community within a work team. It's an intimate type of language, and using it signals that you have a close enough relationship with someone to speak candidly around them. Not all studies agree on this idea, but more on that later (promise).

Fun

Let's be real. You don't only swear when you're at an emotional extreme. Sometimes you just do it because it's fun. An expletive is actually "a syllable, word, or phrase that serves to fill [a sentence] out." Another definition is "a word considered as regularly filling the syntactic position of another, as it in It is his duty to go." Basically, expletives just exist to fill up space in a sentence without adding any extra meaning. It makes sense if you think about it. You know that when you swear, you don't always mean the words literally. But when you do, we can agree it's much more fun to say the dirty word than the clean one.

Why do We Even Have These?

Don't let people blame today's music or TV for swearing, either. Even the Romans did it. The citizens of Pompeii famously immortalized their obscenities in some of the same ways we do today: on the walls of public buildings, restrooms, and bars. Yes, graffiti artists can trace their proud tradition back to the ancient Romans. The Romans, too, used expletives as insults, but because they saw each other naked more often than we see each other today (think public baths and bathrooms), not all expletives referring to body parts were obscene. It was considered far more offensive to refer to someone as feminine or imply they took a passive role during sex (unfortunately, misogyny has also been around for a long time).

We started getting the idea that bodies and bodily functions were "unclean" around the time of the Black Death. Widespread disease and death can de-romanticize human bodies really fast.

So Should I Do the Thing?

The short answer is "It depends." Let's maybe not give Grandma a heart attack today.

Not everyone is okay with swearing. Some even go so far as saying it makes you sound dumb, disrespectful, low class, or unprofessional (or all of the above). A study from 1973 found that using swearwords in a professional setting made you less credible and persuasive. Also, surprise, they found the effect was even worse if you were a woman. People assumed that choosing to use swearwords meant you were too dumb to think of different, better, or more polite words. But.

Newer research (from 2015) shows that someone using expletives has nothing to do with a lack of overall vocabulary. If anything, having a larger vocabulary could also mean you have a proportionally larger number of swearwords in it. Basically, if you're intimately familiar with a language, you have a better understanding of how its insults (including slurs, expletives, and "expressive expressions" like ouch!) can or should be used.

That said, you really should be careful with expletives that are disparaging toward people of any kind (including genders, races, ethnicities, etc.). There's a really fine line between terms that have been "reclaimed" and words that are just not okay across the board. The hard part is that different words fall into different categories for different people. Maybe you're okay with saying bitch but the person you're talking to isn't. That's totally fair, and it's important to be mindful of other people's boundaries. Just like those soap factory workers wouldn't use the f-word among other teams than their own, you should really make 100% sure that whomever you're swearing around is okay with it before you do the thing.

Another important thing to realize is that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Swearing tends to lose its power if you do it all the time. Sorry.

So, once again: Raise your hand if you've ever felt personally victimized by Regina George. Just kidding, raise your hand if you've ever said a dirty word in the wrong context. Yeah, us too. As much as we try to filter ourselves, swearing happens. There are plenty of great reasons to do it, and the words really do serve a good purpose in today's English. As long as you're among company that's on the same page with your swearing policies, let that $h!t rip.

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The Reasons to Swear. A Lot. - Dictionary.com

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Fair warning: The language here could get a little strong for some tastes. Raise your hand if you've ever slipped up and said a curse word in front of your boss, your grandma, or anyone else you probably shouldn't have. We're right there with you (totally raised our hands).

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Have Hollywood war movies traditionally whitewashed history?

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Have Hollywood war movies traditionally whitewashed history?

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Director Spike Lee's new film, Da 5 Bloods, is a Vietnam war film with a difference. It tells the story of four African-American veterans, played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr and Norm Lewis, who reunite after decades apart and return to Vietnam to find the body of their former colleague (Chadwick Boseman) and locate a hoard of gold bars that were being used by the US to pay their South Vietnamese allies. As they do so, Lee shows how they all carry trauma specific to them as black soldiers from the failure to appreciate their war effort, on top of the ongoing prejudices targeting all black Americans.
Warning: This article contains strong language that might cause offence.
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In the flashback scenes, meanwhile, Lee shows how the US's history of systemic racial prejudice and abuse was exploited by the Vietcong, who dropped leaflets about American civil rights crimes and the assassination of leading black figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr in order to try and persuade black soldiers to stop fighting.

When Lee first received the script for Da 5 Bloods, it was about four white veterans, and had once been destined to be filmed by Oliver Stone. Working with his regular co-scriptwriter Kevin Wilmott Jr, Lee then made these characters African-American and recontextualised the whole story. In looking at war through an explicitly racial prism, it feels revelatory.

Powerfully, it all begins with archive footage of the legendary boxer Muhammad Ali talking on camera in 1978 about why he refused to fight in Vietnam: "[The Vietnamese] didn't put no dogs on me, they didn't rob me of my nationality," he said.

Over a decade earlier, Ali had been sentenced to five years in jail for draft dodging; his heavyweight title and boxing licence were revoked, though he stayed out of prison while he appealed against the decision. Then, in 1971, the Supreme Court finally sided with the boxer, declaring that he was a bona-fide conscientious objector and not an illegal draft dodger.
War on two fronts
Ali's words come at the beginning of a montage featuring stills of African-Americans fighting in Vietnam, Neil Armstrong landing on the moon, Malcom X delivering a heartfelt speech, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising a fisted glove on the medals podium at the Mexico '68 Olympics, images of poverty in Harlem, and civil rights activist Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) arguing "America has declared war on black people". Then comes perhaps the most potent soundbite - philosopher Angela Davis arguing "if the link is not made between what is happening in Vietnam and what is happening here, we may very well face a period of full-blown fascism soon."

Originally, Lee created the sequence because, in framing his tale of the Vietnam war, he wanted to remind people of the wider context of what was happening at home in the late 1960s and 1970s. "There was a war in Vietnam, but there was a war in America too." At the time, Ali was one of those who helped emphasise that what was going on in Vietnam had these parallels at home, aligning the civil rights battle with that of the communist Vietcong fighting against imperial oppressors - and suggesting how the enemy of African-Americans was the same as the enemy of the North Vietnamese.

But the film's emphasis on the parallel conflict on the home front now feels horribly timely, landing at a moment when protestors have taken to the streets around the world demanding an end to US state brutality following a police officer being charged with the murder of George Floyd. Some would say that the US seen in the montage seems no different from today. Indeed, the day before I spoke to Lee about Da 5 Bloods, he put up a short film, 3 Brothers, on his Instagram account. The film mixes real footage of the deaths of Eric Garner in New York City in 2014 and George Floyd in Minneapolis last month, with the scene from his landmark 1989 masterwork Do the Right Thing of the character Radio Raheem dying after being put in a police chokehold (itself inspired by the death of graffiti artist Michael Stewart in 1983.)

"Maybe, it was the plan of the highest, highest," says Lee about Da 5 Bloods being released at this time of agony. "I try not to spend too much time thinking about why things happen. You just have to accept things that you have no control over, and I know that this thing is bigger than me. But I am happy that this film is coming out now, because a lot of the stuff in the film is speaking directly about a lot of the stuff that is happening."

In the flashback scenes to the war, Lee uses the same actors but doesn't age them down, a la Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, a decision that reinforces the idea that our history is part of our present. We are our past - as individuals and nations. It's also in keeping with Lee's Brechtian filmmaking style, which breaks the fourth wall, and is at pains to remind us that the story has social relevance to our present.
How black soldiers were marginalised
It's a damning insight on the US movie industry, that more than 40 years after America pulled troops out, Da 5 Bloods can lay claim to be the first film centring the experience of African-American Vietnam soldiers. For decades, they have been kept on the periphery of films depicting the conflict, even though in 1967, the demographic represented 23 percent of all combat troops in Vietnam, and in 1965, a quarter of all US combat deaths.

Watch films from John Wayne's The Green Berets (1968) onwards and you'll find the African-American experience is rarely reflected, while the treatment of the Vietcong and even the South Vietnamese allies is arguably even worse. Typically, the story of Vietnam is told from the perspective of a white American soldier, and theirs is the only experience made to count.

It should be pointed out that this whitewashing of war is not just the preserve of 'Nam movies. Lee states that the first germ of his desire to reframe the 'Nam movie came from watching black and white World War Two films as a child. "Growing up in Brooklyn, my late brother Chris and I used to watch [them] on television. And we liked them. But my father would see us and tell us that black folks fought in World War Two."

Cinematic history is almost exclusively made up of war films that celebrate the white hero. You only have to look at the big war films of the last few years to get a glimpse into the enduring problem. Take Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, for example: in 2017, the writer and academic Sunny Singh wrote an article about the film titled ' Why the lack of Indian and African faces in Dunkirk matters ', in which she described it as a "fantasy disguised-as-historical war film". Singh decried Nolan's complete erasure of the Royal Indian Army Services Corp companies, which were tasked with transporting supplies; the lascars - mostly from South Asia and East Africa - who counted for one of four crewmen on British merchant vessels; and the north African troops in the French army. It's important, Singh argues, "because, more than history books and school lessons, popular culture shapes and informs our imagination not only of the past, but of our present and future".

The tradition of racial erasure in war movies means that even when filmmakers do the right thing, critics often suggest that the truth is a lie and claim wrongly it's an example of diversity gone mad. The most infamous recent British example of this came when the outspoken British actor Laurence Fox criticised "the oddness in the casting" of a Sikh soldier in Sam Mendes' World War One film 1917. Hardeep Singh, writing in The Spectator, ironically thanked Fox for his misinformed contribution: "He has done more (in the space of 48-72 hours) to highlight the inordinate contribution of Sikh soldiers during the Great War, than most Sikhs could ever wish to achieve in this life or the next."

Lee tried to redress the balance with his 2008 adaptation of James McBride's World War Two novel Miracle at St Anna, which focused on the 92nd all-black infantry division known as the Buffalo Soldiers. However the film was greeted by critics as one of the prolific director's minor works, even as many acknowledged the significance of its undertaking.
A critique of Vietnam movies
Da 5 Bloods is a much more entertaining and complex film which, following on from 2018's BlacKkKlansman, shows Lee is in the middle of a second golden period. It is a work that is clearly aware of its own position in the pantheon of Vietnam war movies - and implicitly critiques its predecessors throughout. One of the first scenes takes place in a club called Apocalypse Now, and as in the Francis Ford Coppola film of the same name, those words are seen on screen as graffiti. Lee explains that he paid homage to Coppola's film because of its inclusion of two African-American characters: the soldiers played by Laurence Fishburne, who was 14 years old at the time, and Albert Hall.

These characters were far from central protagonists in the movie - that honour fell to Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando. But they were given defined personalities - Fishburne's Clean loves rock 'n' roll, motorcycles and freedom - and the film also showed some awareness of the fact African-Americans were more likely to die in action: in the infamous Do Lung Bridge battle scene, all the soldiers fighting on the frontline are black, an implicit acknowledgement of the disproportionate number of African-American serviceman who were sent to the frontline and died in action.

Certainly, when it came to race, Coppola's film was a step forward from the most famous 'Nam film up that point, The Green Berets. The only film about the war to come out during the war itself, it follows Colonel Kirby (Wayne) and his Green Berets from their training camp in the United States to a Special Forces Outpost in Vietnam. It was produced with government aid, and was rightly slammed as propaganda. As well as featuring just a single token black character - Doc McGee, played by Raymond St Jacques, the dependable medic, who is praiseworthy because of his unquestioning patriotism and deference to his white colleagues - it depicted both the South Vietnamese allies, and the north Vietnamese enemy forces, in a way that completely dehumanised them and rendered them indistinguishable, offering a continuation of the 'yellow peril' trope, that saw Hollywood portray East Asians as homogenous adversaries to Western values.

In the mid-1980s, Oliver Stone's Platoon followed in Apocalypse Now's footsteps by offering a slightly more sophisticated depiction of the conflict. It portrayed racial divides amongst American troops, that were mainly defined by cultural ties: soldiers were either predominantly white 'juicers', who drank, or predominantly black 'heads', who smoked marijuana. However, while Stone highlighted issues of race and class, the representations of black soldiers we see are all refracted through the memories of a white veteran: Stone himself, who wrote the script based on his experiences as well as directing. And its depiction of the Vietnamese was still crude to say the least: indeed, from Platoon to Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, it's difficult to remember a 'classic' Vietnam war film with an Asian woman who is not a sex worker, or in which the Vietcong are not depicted as faceless savages.

One film that did better on this front was Barry Levinson's Good Morning, Vietnam, loosely based on the career of real-life Armed Forces Radio Services DJ Adrian Cronauer. Released in 1987, it surprised at the time in its depiction of its Vietnamese characters with their own interior lives, as family members, friends and lovers.
Vehicles for white supremacy?
Most popular and most egregious, however, were the Reagan-era films that tried to rewrite the conflict as a victory for white supremacy, with pumped-up action heroes like Chuck Norris (Missing in Action) and Sylvester Stallone (Rambo First Blood: Part II) playing Vietnam veterans returning to the country to rescue prisoners of war and gun down their old enemies. In another post-modern nod, the characters in Da Five Bloods debate and slam these very movies ("Do you all remember those fugazi Rambo movies?" "All those Holly-weird [people] trying to go back and win the Vietnam war.")

"If I may say so respectfully, America got their ass kicked by a very small nation, in the same way France did, so [these films] had to rewrite the narrative," says Lee, reflecting on this sub-genre. "I guess there is a large part of Americans who couldn't deal with reality."

Since then, there have been few depictions of Vietnam that have had much impact on the public consciousness or revised Westerners' understanding of the conflict (though one notable work was Randall Wallace's We Were Soldiers (2002), which gave the North Vietnamese soldiers a human face by giving as much time to the perspective of Lt Colonel Nguyễn Hữu An (Đơn Dương) as it did to Colonel Hal Moore (Mel Gibson)). So Da 5 Bloods feels long overdue.

Lee was conscious of redressing the problematic history of 'Nam movies on two fronts: not just in his depiction of black soldiers, but in his portrayal - and casting - of the Vietnamese characters. A major issue with nearly all previous films about the war is how directors were happy to cast anyone from Asia as Vietnamese. But Lee made sure to use only Vietnamese actors, even though a lot of the film was shot in Thailand, so it would have been expedient and cost-effective for the director to use Thai actors, especially for background extras. "A lot of films would be like 'fuck it, we can't get any Vietnamese people, and just employ someone from China, Japan, no one is going to notice.' It's racism. I was not doing that."

Casting aside, Vietnamese characters are also given a proper voice. The principal ones are Vinh (Johnny Tri Nguyen), a tour guide whose father fought in the war for the South, while his uncle was on the side of the Viet Cong; and the savvy businesswoman Tiên (Lê Y Lan), who had an affair with one of the serviceman, with whom she had a mixed-race daughter, subsequently finding herself demonised as a result. Among other Vietnamese the main quartet encounter are those ready to fight them over the gold, which they see as rightfully theirs, and those unwilling to forgive the atrocities of the war.

Our US protagonists are similarly varied. They argue over everything, including politics - one is a Trump supporter - and money. Some are absent or bad fathers, and they are all characters with massive foibles. Their lives have been defined, and broken, by the war.

Hopefully, with its global Netlix platform at a time when few other major films are being released, Da 5 Bloods will enjoy the kind of visibility that could open the door to a more diverse range of stories about war: ones that offer a truer, less archetypal reflection, of what happened on and off the battlefield. War movies have been some of the worst culprits in propagating racist, white-focused narratives. Though of course they are just a microcosm of a problem that runs through Hollywood, as Lee points out. "I think as far as Hollywood goes, for the most part the story has always been told from the white narrative, so that's not restricted to war. It's from top to bottom."
Da 5 Bloods will be available on Netflix from 12 June. Love film and TV? Join If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

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The long history of racism in war movies

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Director Spike Lee's new film, Da 5 Bloods, is a Vietnam war film with a difference. It tells the story of four African-American veterans, played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr and Norm Lewis, who reunite after decades apart and return to Vietnam to find the body of their former colleague (Chadwick Boseman) and locate a hoard of gold bars that were being used by the US to pay their South Vietnamese allies.

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(Credit: Alamy)

And why does concern about it matter? Bel Jacobs explores the cultural collaborations that work well, and why a 'spirit of equal exchange' is essential in fashion.

In 2019, a major Italian fashion house launched a collection of maxi dresses and skirts in cotton poplin, broadly edged with contrasting ethnic prints of distinctive swirls and star shapes. Only if you'd visited the small Oma communities in northern Laos, would you have noticed that the designs were simply digital prints of the tribe's traditional clothing: handspun, indigo-dyed garments with vibrant appliqué and embroidery. Lauren Ellis, at the time an employee of Traditional Arts and Ethnology Centre, had. "They had copied the patterns exactly," she told the Laotian Times. "I couldn't believe that this major brand would sell such blatantly stolen designs."

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Working with the Oma, the centre launched a campaign highlighting the situation. "The handmade textiles of the Oma are incredibly detailed, taking a huge amount of time, skill, and patience," said co-director Tara Gujadhur. "To see them reduced to a printed pattern on a mass-produced garment is heart-breaking." Dr Marie-Pierre Lissoir, the centre's ethnomusicologist and researcher, added: "Communities and their traditions are in constant change. They adapt themselves and get inspired by other cultures." However, this was not a case of a brand being inspired by motifs, and reinterpreting them, she says. "They simply scanned a handmade piece and printed it on clothes without even mentioning the existence of Oma community. This is not cultural appreciation. This is not creative interpretation."

The Akha Oma of Phongsali province, Laos, create exquisite traditional dresses and headdresses (Credit: Getty Images)

The fashion industry is no stranger to such controversies. Just the year before, D&G's tone-deaf campaign showing a Chinese model attempting to eat pizza with chopsticks led to an eruption of fury on China's social media platform Weibo, and a public apology from the designers. Pre-pandemic, pre-Black Lives Matter, the fashion house Comme des Garçons was taken to task after white models wore wigs of what appeared to be cornrows during its men's autumn/winter 2020 show. And of course, there is the ongoing trend at music festivals for tribal accoutrements, including Native American headdresses, in an attempt to ape the mystic of indigenous tribes, if only for a weekend.

Why does our concern about cultural appropriation matter? Designers and artists have been drawing inspiration from each other for millennia. Cut off that blood supply of creative exchange and communities would be left, not only with a smaller palette of ideas but far narrower views of the world and the other ways of being on it. Plus, the difference between cultural appropriation and appreciation can be thin; after all, why copy something if you don't love it?

This magpie mentality, where all of culture and history is up for grabs as 'inspiration', has accelerated since the proliferation of social media - Tamsin Blanchard

However, for many cultural commentators, the nature of the relationship continues to be problematic. Tamsin Blanchard is curator of Fashion Open Studio, an initiative by campaign group Fashion Revolution showcasing the work of ethical designers. This year, working with Not Enough, a collective of South American women looking at how art and design have worked to perpetuate colonialism, Fashion Open Studio is co-curator of the prestigious State of Fashion Biennial in Arnhem. "Traditionally, designers were taught at fashion schools to pick and mix from the world around them, be that from an art exhibition, film, the natural world, or the culture and heritage of global communities," reflects Blanchard.

"We're all drawn to an exquisite piece of embroidery, a colourful textile or even a style of dressing that might have originated from another heritage. [But] this magpie mentality, where all of culture and history is up for grabs as 'inspiration', has accelerated since the proliferation of social media," she continues. "Where once a fashion student might research the history and traditions of a particular item of clothing with care and respect, we now have a world where images are lifted from image libraries without a care for their cultural significance. It's easier than ever to steal a motif or a craft technique and transfer it on to a piece of clothing that is either mass produced or appears on a runway without credit or compensation to their original communities."

Knowledge matters. How many white people wearing cornrows (hello, Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry) know that, in 15th-Century Africa, hair was a way to distinguish a person's age, religion, social rank and marital status; that braiding took hours, even days, to complete, and were times of great bonding; or that, during the slave trade, heads were shaved, tearing from the African peoples not only their hair, but also their identities? How many festivalgoers are aware that Native American headdresses are made from eagle feathers, symbolic of the Great Spirit, only gifted to wearers when they have done something of note for the community? How many know that the bindi, another festival favourite, is thought to enhance the powers of the third eye, by facilitating one's ability to access their inner wisdom or gurus.

Blending influences, but not appropriating, the brand Anciela draws on its Colombian heritage and folklore, along with traditional British tailoring (Credit: Olga de la Iglesia)

And how many would have known that in the past - and even now - the originators of the cornrows, the headdresses, the bindis, would have been persecuted for wearing them? In a 2018 BBC Stories documentary Cultural Appropriation: Whose Problem is it?, interviewee Ayesha says: "When you are part of a society that has told you how you look is wrong, for someone in that society to then say, 'well, I'm going to do it because it's fashionable, and it's a music festival so who cares', is very ignorant to the people who have had to go through those things." Interviewee Karisha adds: "When one racial group in their history has taken from a different racial group, and then in the future, wears the same things, it's like a slap in the face."

Cultural anthropologist Sandra Niessen has researched Indonesian Batak weaving for more than 40 years. In 2020, she wrote a paper called Fashion, its Sacrifice Zones and Sustainability. Inspired by the concept of the "sacrifice zone", Niessen dug deep into the colonial underpinnings of the industry, going far beyond whether black models were included in a catwalk show to an exploration of the way the traditions of the indigenous peoples have been simultaneously plundered and erased. "Sacrifice zones are resource-rich lands, generally associated with minority communities that are considered dispensable, and exploited for economic gain," Niessen explained in the paper.

"Rather than expendable physical landscapes, fashion sacrifice zones are dress traditions, and their makers, associated with fashion's 'other half', that are destroyed for, and by, the expansion of industrial fashion. These zones facilitate industrial expansion because they are a source of cheap labour and also indigenous design (commonly appropriated) important for style change." This catalogue of injustices continues: "[These sacrifice zones] also serve as markets when indigenous dress is replaced with industrially produced dress. Finally, they are the major sites of waste disposal, including second-hand clothing." The paper is a searing critique of fashion's wilful systems of inequity, and remains seminal to those seeking to address cultural imbalances.

"All peoples everywhere derive inspiration from elsewhere," says Niessen, by email from her home in the Netherlands. "The problem is the hierarchy, with designers at the top and indigenous clothing at the bottom, to be pillaged from but not acknowledged. The system is skewed, not the creative work of designers per se. To recruit indigenous people to make luxury fashion acknowledges their skills but not their right to their own clothing systems. And to reduce their clothing systems to design and skill is to do it a fundamental disservice; it's a form of erasure. Working within the fashion system is the problem, not the exciting process of cultural contact."

Textiles designer Ellen Rock works in close collaboration with artisans in Nepal, exchanging ideas and skills (Credit: Ellen Rock)

What would she like to see? "The fashion business supporting the needs and desires of indigenous dress makers and not the other way around," she says. "To place 'them' first would be a restitution, perhaps revival, of 'their' systems. It's time to ask what fashion can do for them, not what they can do for fashion. They need the chance to be able to live their own cultural lives. They need their lands revitalised, their systems respected, self-determination. They need clean air and clean water. Our debt to their health and their way of life can't even begin to be tallied up."

The issues of respect and of concern for other cultures - of which Niessen's paper is such a nuanced expression - has become more marked in a world still battling a global pandemic, jolted awake by Black Lives Matter, and damaged beyond recognition by global warming, itself directly caused by consumption. Within this context, many are questioning whether the extractive model of infinite growth, born from a history of colonial exploitation, is all it's cut out to be; whether it may, in all that matters, actually be one of the worst ways of moving forward. Attention is turning, with a renewed humility, to indigenous practices, tried and tested for millennia, for stewarding the Earth.

And it is turning to what other practices - of organising communities, of exchanging skills and of making clothing - may have to offer as alternatives to the hyper-industrial, hegemonic Western fashion industry. "The Black Lives Matter [movement has led to a] mass realignment and re-education, and an understanding of how our colonial past and empire-building was built on the exploitation of people and theft of indigenous land and resources," says Blanchard. "There's a new awareness of cultural imbalances and the inequalities within the fashion industry, where a thousand-pound dress has been made by garment workers who are not paid a living wage, or where a motif has been taken from a community's cultural textile heritage without permission."

Increasingly, the industry is asking itself: what are the new systems that can take us into the future? And what are the ways of working across cultures that ensure that each party is adequately represented and recognised? "For cultural collaboration to exist, a shared vision needs to be established," muses Kerry Bannigan, executive director of the Fashion Impact Fund. "Collaborative collective leadership is necessary along with assessment of all processes in the project. Designers and brands need to understand that they have a responsibility to value the skills that bring their collections to life, and that support is required across the full value chain and fashion community globally. Respect, inclusion, consent, and communication are key to ensure that brands are not diminishing something of intrinsic cultural value when adopting elements from another culture."

Groups are working hard to address imbalances. The Cultural Intellectual Property Rights Initiative (CIPRI), founded by Monica Moisin, connects designers with traditional textile artisans within a framework that ensures that the artisans' cultural intellectual property is respected with what CIPRI describes as the "three Cs": consent, credit, and compensation. Meanwhile, the British Council's Crafting Futures Community Couture project brings together designers from different cultures to create collaborative garments that can be rented. Digital resources capture the garment's evolution, making sure its full story, beyond the physical, is told. "This is the future of craft and community, where projects like this allow techniques to evolve and be relevant to new generations in a spirit of equal exchange," says Blanchard.

Slow fashion label Welana highlights the beauty of Ethiopian artistry - and works alongside the communities that create it (Credit: Welana)

While in an imperfect world, no example is perfect, some designers are coming close. "Indonesian designer Toton Januar, one of the designers in residence at the Biennial, has a very respectful exchange with Indonesian artisans, bringing their craft into contemporary fashion, while their work is fairly compensated," offers Blanchard. "Through her brand, Anciela, Jennifer Droguett mixes her Colombian heritage and folklore with traditional British tailoring to create her own sartorial language." Ethiopian fair trade company Sabahar and textile weavers Maraki together source and produce fabrics for slow fashion label Welana, using traditional weaving techniques. "Our whole concept revolves around shining a light on the beauty of Ethiopian artistry, and empowering the community responsible for it," says Berlin-based co-founder Welella Negussie.

Award-winning Syrian-British designer and course leader at the London College of Fashion, Nabil El Nayal, was invited to develop a new type of embroidery stitch with refugees living in the Za'atari refugee camp, a stitch that would symbolically connect Syria with Za'atari. "All planning including workshops and presentations went out the window as soon as we met the women," El Nabal told Fashion Trust Arabia. "You have to get good at picking up on the invisible, listening to the inaudible, and seeing solutions to problems as they arise. The women we worked with had the most incredible and diverse range of abilities. We became the students who would go on to learn from them all." The project aims to help support the development of a self-sustaining business for the women, who have already faced immeasurable challenges.

My approach to fashion is about the collision of cultures, past and present, distant and close - Nabil El Nayal

In 2018, after being granted the Artists International Development Fund by Crafting Futures, artist and textiles designer Ellen Rock was invited to work with the Janakour Women's Development Centre (JWDC) in Mithila in Nepal, by the foothills of the Himalayas. From the start, her approach was careful and considered, first spending two months as an artist-in-residence, observing and immersing herself in the art, to create a platform of trust and a foundation for collaboration. "I asked the centre what they might like to learn from my practice, what they felt they were missing and what they might like to share with me," she says. "From this, we developed a workshop plan where we could exchange skills and knowledge which gradually led us to textile development."

Screen printers printed Rock's original designs, before the embroiderers and hand painters added detailing on top. "My work focuses on graphic symbols as communication while Mithila art is rooted in cultural identity such as fertility, religion, love - and, more recently, daily activities such as bicycling to work, owning a mobile phone and working as an artist," says Rock. One of the prints, titled Eye See You features a combined illustration of a daily cycle with Rock's signature illustrations, integrating Mithila hands - a key motif in Rock's own work - adorned with tattoos and featuring embroidery interpretation of the print. "Ellen showed us how to apply our designs on to clothes and textiles; she also helped us create a lot of new designs," says one of the artisans, Madhumala Mandal.

Rock and the artisans spent time thinking about the most beneficial skill that could be exchanged - and that had longevity. "The centre wanted to develop a product, both to apply their designs but also to generate income," says Rock. "We decided to focus on products, such as embroidered patches or bags, that could be re-produced, not only with our collaborative designs but with original Mithila patterns." The idea was to create a knowledge transfer that would last long after Rock had left.

Creating bold, graphic prints, Ellen Rock collaborated with Madhumala Mandal and other women hand painters of Mithila, Nepal (Credit: Ellen Rock)

Rock adds: "Appropriation usually involves the removal of origins and heritage, and a re-purposing in a way that only benefits the end company. Without dialogue, this can eradicate ancient wisdom and heritage whilst also removing income streams and livelihoods. A collaboration needs authentic connection, built up over weeks or months. But, I believe that, if designers set measurable impacts which directly involve and consult artisan groups, collaboration can be a powerful tool of amplification and preservation. Ultimately, at the heart of collaboration, is the core belief from both parties that the outcome is stronger."

For both El Nayal and Rock, cultural collaboration remains a rich source not simply of inspiration, but of equity and global rebalancing. "My approach to fashion is about the collision of cultures, past and present, distant and close. We are living in increasingly polarised times, and my work can speak to that while seeking connections through the medium of fashion; pursuing a highly contemporary outcome, while preserving traditional Syrian dress and textile history," says El Nayal. "But working with the community needs to be mutually beneficial. I'm keen to protect our combined legacy and cultural identity. Our rich textile culture goes back many centuries, and it's important to ensure it goes on for many more to come."

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And why does concern about it matter? Bel Jacobs explores the cultural collaborations that work well, and why a 'spirit of equal exchange' is essential in fashion.

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Does Cancel Culture run the risk of destroying the arts?

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Does Cancel Culture run the risk of destroying the arts?

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am the producer and co-creator of a piece of theatre that was cancelled before it had even been seen. It started like this: a group of people online began to call for the show to be shut down. It gained some traction and led to a petition on the platform Citizen Go, which is believed to have links with extremist hard-right Christian groups in the US. My company, as well as the staff at the theatre venues we were due to be performing at, faced threats of violence and abuse against staff.

The show is called The Family Sex Show. Its aim is to reimagine the way we think and talk about relationships and sex. Making it was a process of collaboration with a diverse group of people who have varied life experiences. The show is a fun and playful performance made up of songs, dances and personal stories. It is about bodies and how society views them. It also explores themes including gender, sexuality, pleasure and boundaries. But really, the show is about care and mutual respect - and it exists in the hope that it can be a part of breaking down some of the systems of oppression alive today.

Whether you agree with the show's aims or not, it has not yet been seen, publicly. Still, an online group thought it should not even be seen so it could be judged fairly.

The Family Sex Show is a piece of theatre for everyone. We suggest that this can include children over the age of five too; and we ask that anyone under 16 is accompanied by a guardian. Children are naturally curious about themselves and other people. Toronto's public health department suggests that children begin to form a sense of identity - which includes attitudes towards their own bodies and genitals - before the age of four. They also understand the expected behaviours for different genders by this age. The NSPCC also suggests that children under five show curiosity about naked bodies.

It is a show for adults too. We have a lot to learn from one another, no matter what our age. No one is an expert on anything other than themselves.

The campaigners said the show was "grooming" children by inviting them into the theatre, where some of the content of the show would include naked bodies. To be clear, this nakedness is limited to one scene and is not of a sexualised nature. There are bodies on stage, and no one touches themselves or each other. The reason for including nakedness is to present bodies as just that - bodies. The conflict and questions that arise in us around this are natural. Watching as an adult, we are confronted with our own conscious and unconscious expectations and prejudices.

The outcry on social media and the subsequent petition used words and ideologies that are rooted in queerphobia, racism, fatphobia, ableism, misogyny and transphobia.

In reality, the world - especially the digital world - we live in means that we don't have control over what we or our children see. We have a responsibility to provide children and young people with the tools to understand, challenge and put into context certain situations and media they might encounter. By not talking about issues relating to relationships and sex we are putting them in a position of vulnerability increasing the potential for harm.

As a performance, The Family Sex Show is an invitation to experience something together as a family (whatever family means to you), encourage questioning and signpost places for audiences to figure out answers for themselves. As a guardian, the show is designed to help open conversations with your child about relationships and sex. I believe that honesty builds trust. Where transparent conversations are able to be had, children and young people might include guardians in their ongoing decision-making processes - and surely that's a wonderful thing.

The team behind The Family Sex Show are committed to rights-based relationships and sex education. One of their aims is to promote safeguarding children, young people and vulnerable adults from abuse and harm. It has been made with the understanding that informing young people about consent, their rights and bodies is a key aspect in their protection.

We must disrupt the culture in which children and young people are taught shame and fear, in which sexual violence is normalised.

We believe the cancellation of the show is reflective of this shame and fear, of structural and societal attitudes towards relationships and sex education. Removing work that celebrates freedom of expression from stages cannot be the answer.

Simply put, The Family Sex Show is an offer. If you have the privileges that allow you to go to the theatre, you choose to buy a ticket or not. Except that option - to engage in this show and the themes it addresses - has been taken away.

A relatively small media storm closed a show no one had watched. Beyond arts and culture, what does this reveal about the health and resilience of our public conversation? How does this event speak to power in the UK? Who has it, and how will they use it? Who gets to decide what on behalf of other people? I think what has happened is far more frightening than the performance.

We still hope to find a home for this show. And now I am left in the position to wonder: where do we go from here?
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.com

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Cancel culture? My play was shut down by rightwing activists before it even opened | Josie Dale-Jones

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am the producer and co-creator of a piece of theatre that was cancelled before it had even been seen. It started like this: a group of people online began to call for the show to be shut down.

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How has the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard defamation trial turned into a trial by TikTok?

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How has the Johnny Depp vs Amber Heard defamation trial turned into a trial by TikTok?

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‘Amber Heard v Johnny Depp’ has turned into trial by TikTok – and we’re all the worse for it | Amelia Tait

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Screaming fans have spread deranged rumours and mocked accusations of abuse that should be taken seriously, says tech writer Amelia Tait

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Tesco Mobile advertising campaign offensive, watchdog rules

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The Advertising Standards Authority banned the campaign which used swear word substitutes like “shiitake”.

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Are dad jokes universal? What is the essence of humour?

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The Dubious Art of the Dad Joke - JSTOR Daily

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Is it really only dads who can tell dad jokes? And is this corny humor universal? Our linguist takes a deep dive.

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Time Moves Fast and Slow

What is time, and how do we talk about it? Aristotle defines time as "the calculable measure of motion with respect to before and afterness." In the English language, an abundance of expressions exists to talk about time, phrasal verbs being among the most numerous. Their formulas consist of a few words in a string comprising a verb and particle, e.g., "We ran out of time, so we scheduled a follow-up meeting." These phrasal verbs are tricky to memorize for second language learners of English dialects; a missing, stray, or incorrect element can throw off the meaning and result in a humorous or harmful gaffe, and at the least, charming miscommunication, as in "We to time, so we scheduled a follow-up meeting." Native speakers of English may not think about using phrasal verbs consciously, yet they are everywhere we speak. Staying with the example of time, we: make, use, and put in time; have it to spare and also run out of it; carve it out; spend, waste, and save it; take a time out; and take time off. More poetically, we set it aside, and idle, while, and fritter it away. Time is money. It flies, and it heals all wounds.

Verbal expressions about time can be quite playful. During COVID, social media users parodied our perception of time's length: days of the week and dates took on amusing monikers such as "Blursday"; it's February 44th!; March had 32 days this year. At work, the day drags, it flies, or is a slog; math or language arts class makes junior high school slow as molasses.

Beyond the verbal expression of time, the expanse of our nonverbal communication systems is vast and fascinating, especially when viewed across cultures. From the perspectives of monochronic (fixed) cultures, time is linear and universal. From those of polychronic (adaptable) cultures, time is cyclic and relative. Although both frameworks can exist on the same continents, this dichotomy may aid us with intercultural communication, especially in understanding what is expected from the other party. Dolce far niente-in Italian, the sweetness of doing nothing-might seem wastefully idle to more monochronic-leaning cultures, who value time as something more linear, goal-oriented, and productive. The opposite- time is money -may seem far too rushed and focused on a live-to-work model to polychronic cultures.

Pointing at our watch-less wrists with questioning eyebrows and shoulders, we can, even silently, ask a stranger what time it is.

As we understand and measure time in limitless ways, we use it to communicate in as many frames and contexts: commuting, school drop-offs, train schedules, pregnancy months, New Year's Eve countdown seconds, the moments among weapons firing in a war, the spaces between notes of a song and movements in a symphony. So little and so much can happen in 10 seconds; some years seem like a blink, and others seem to move like mercury. Whose grandmother did not say, "Time goes much faster when you're old?" And whose child does not ask, "Are we there yet?" We may drum our fingers on the table or wiggle our feet, signaling impatience at the passage of time or awaiting someone's arrival. In a line or a queue, and depending on the country, we might look around to make sure we're in the fastest line or that no one has cut in front of us. Pointing at our watch-less wrists with questioning eyebrows and shoulders, we can, even silently, ask a stranger what time it is.

Chronemics is the study of the relationship between time and communication, or as Dawna Ballard of the University of Texas at Austin describes it, as it is bound to human communication. Through the lens of chronemics, we can examine why time appears to have a different essence at, well, different times.

During the Covid era, for example, time seemed to have a different rhythm or pace born of adding all the tasks we never had to consider before and the anxiety, vigilance, and new habit-forming that ensued, such as making sure a mask was close at hand or waiting in a "physically distanced" line that may have stretched out the door and around a building. All these new inputs seemed to actually quicken our daily pace. Furthermore, concurrently yet paradoxically, they caused a sense of overall slowness to emerge from a density of new demands.

In addition, the dismantling of what was "normal" and the repositioning and prioritizing of balance and routines now described as remote, hybrid (a blend of in-person and virtual), or school back in unmasked session, we've had to relearn, readjust, or redefine what our former markers of time used to dictate. Perhaps a twice-weekly flight for consultants is now monthly, or seeing a healthcare professional or therapist might remain in a virtual space. Working several jobs and scrambling to find and afford childcare shifted into a new iteration of those challenges.

I'll Text You

Yet another image (among a multitude of potential illustrations) of chronemics as it relates to interpreting nonverbal communication is offered in the realm of computer-mediated communication (CMC). How often have you sent a text message and then stared at the screen waiting for that quick response? And then, if too many seconds, minutes, hours, days, or weeks pass by in the interim, what then? What profound meaning can be assigned to such spans of time in this space now. Although text messages may not offer the same nonverbal cues as those of a human in the presence of another, they do include time stamps; markers of messages sent; read receipts; and often "last seen online" options (the infamous WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram ticks come to mind, signaling whether a message has been received, opened, and/or read). If the read receipt option is turned on, for instance, the sender of a message, while waiting to receive a response, can not only see whether the recipient has opened it, but when s/he has actually read it, thereby participating in a time-stamped cycle of send-wait-interpret-receive-reply-wait again.

In this age of immediate and global connection, the sense of time and urgency is greatly influenced by the ease of sharing message and response; the technology and romance of handwritten correspondence echoes faintly. This current pacing stands in opposition to the experience in the more romantic days of yore, during which a letter on stationery delivered by horseback riders, stagecoach, steamboat, Pony Express, railroad, airplane, or postal worker might create anticipation and a certain yearning or excitement (depending on context, of course; a letter from a beloved or close friend being quite different than a notice about rent being due or a rejection letter from a lover or a creditor).

General semantics, a discipline created in the 1930s by Alfred Korzybski, may offer some explanation to the perception of time and pacing. The discipline maintains that humans are limited to what they know by the structure of their nervous systems and the structure of their languages. They experience the world only through the nonverbal expression of their abstractions. Within the realm of general semantics exists a concept called time binding, through which human progress and developments in technologies such as SMS and the postal system can be viewed as examples.

In Olden Times

Sending a letter overseas three centuries ago took many weeks; the first transatlantic contract service was initiated by the British government in 1702, conveying mail between the West Indies and Falmouth, England. One penny was given to the ship captain for each letter delivered to the post office. Across the Atlantic, Benjamin Franklin served as colonial postmaster, working much of the time remotely in England in the 1750s (using the mail system to do his job) before he was appointed first Postmaster General in 1775 back in the American colonies. Subsequently, he established the Post Office Department, the predecessor of the United States Postal Service, in the process dismantling Britain's Royal Mail. Until the telegraph in the 1840s, the invention of the telex service in Germany in 1933, and subsequent telecommunication systems in the 20th century, it was understood by default there would be weeks spanning letter dispatch and reply. A literal stamp on a stamp upon arrival shows the time posted, the post office or mailbox door squealing open with the heightened enthusiasm of the recipient, about to consume the emotional and reflective discourse emerging from the letter.

In the 20th century, SMS (Short Messaging Service) would emerge from the radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers, conceived in 1984 at the Franco-German GSM corporation. Fast forward to the 21st century, when billions of text messages are sent daily and instantaneously, leading us to a different kind of time stamp altogether: a digital one. Imagine if a sending and receiving a text message suddenly reverted to the time it took to send a letter across a country or an ocean.

In the present day, the digital time stamp nuances text communications, as demonstrated in a study by Walther and Tidwell (1995). Within the SMS code of chronemics, a message can be perceived quite differently depending on the time stamp; e.g., a message sent by a superior to a subordinate during the day was perceived as less intimate but more dominant than that of a message sent at night. Perceptions of the social cues and socioemotional orientation of the communicators are revealed by the time of day a message was sent and the time lag until a reply was sent.

Other layers of complexity exist in different contexts. In an interpersonal setting, perhaps there is a perceived expectation of immediate or quick response, an inherent sense of strategy with regard to time, emoji use, and even punctuation. All combine to create fluctuations in the tension of anticipation and dopamine flow. In a more transactional context, it's just that: yes or no... what time... did you get coffee from the market? The new digital "postal service" provides yet another opportunity to reflect on time and how we use it and talk about it, at the very moment it is being redefined. Our nonverbals are reappearing and presenting themselves apace with unmasking and in-person communication, a real and present shift for all: the skillfully textual, the socially awkward and agile, the introverted and extraverted, the traveling and more homeward bound, all of us moving fast and slow.

Come what come may
time and the hour runs through the roughest day.
-Shakespeare, Macbeth

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Chronemics and the Nonverbal Language of Time - JSTOR Daily

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What is time, and how do we talk about it? Aristotle defines time as "the calculable measure of motion with respect to before and afterness." In the English language, an abundance of expressions exists to talk about time, phrasal verbs being among the most numerous.

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God and robots: Will AI transform religion? - BBC Reel

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Artificial intelligence is changing how we interact with everything, from food to healthcare, travel and also religion. Experts say major global faiths are discussing their relationship with AI, and some are starting to incorporate this technology into their worship. Robot priests can recite praye…

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Information is central to the litigation before America's courts. Every day they're in session, courts wrestle not just with interpretations of the law, but with the facts of the cases themselves. Yet legal scholar Frederick Schauer argues that the way our court system is structured makes it " more difficult for [judges and juries] to obtain the information they need than it is for most other public decision-making institutions."

The courts, writes Schauer, are "informationally disabled." And since the higher courts essentially make policy affecting all our lives, this may be a big problem.

Schauner has five reasons for thinking that courts may, in fact, not be "suited to the task of adequate factual determination."

Every case results in a decision, what Schauner calls the "output." What he's concerned with is the "input"-the world of facts. From criminal courts through the appellate system to the final arbitrator, the Supreme Court, decisions are based on the "seemingly mundane factual questions that comprise most of what [judges and juries] do: determining just who did what; and how, why, and when they did it."

Among such facts are many complicated "scientific, technical, financial" ones. Neither judges nor juries are, generally, experts in such matters. So, are courts "equipped to make the factual determinations that have important consequences for individual litigants and, increasingly, for social policy as well"?

Schauner has five reasons for thinking that courts may, in fact, not be "suited to the task of adequate factual determination":

1. The rules of evidence. Because of our common law heritage, the typical trial "continues to exclude a large amount of information that historians, journalists, detectives, and anyone else trying to make a factual determination would likely consider relevant to their inquiries."

2. The adversarial judicial process itself may not be the best way of evaluating contested factual questions. A court is not a laboratory nor a controlled clinical trial. It's also not a "persistent investigation," expanding into new "avenues of inquiry" as the evidence grows.

3. Courts don't investigate, observe or experiment on their own; they deal with strictly secondhand information. Yet we now know that there are many issues of reliability with human perception and recollection."Cross-examination is a far less effective method of exposing error in real life than it is on television."

4. "The limited and at times artificially constrained domain of inquiry" of a case. The fact-finder(s)-the judge or the jury-are not supposed go outside the court and "look for what may appear to be relevant information." At the appellate level, judges are expected to limit themselves to the record received from the court below, not do any new exploration on their own.Schauner notes that a few judges who have made a point of going outside the record to look up "issues of scientific and technical facts." In one instance on the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia "chastised Justice Breyer for relaying on sources that were nowhere found in the record of the case." Breyer's sources were the large number of social science studies on the issue at hand, information many outside the hermeneutical world of the courts might very well consider relevant.

5. When courts make "policy about such salient issues as products liability, affirmative action, environmental harm, and insider trading, among many others" they do so based on individual cases which may not be at all "representative of the range of events that policies will cover."

These "restrictions on the access to and evaluation of information" all have their justifications, notes Schauner, "some better than others." That courts are "systemically informationally disabled is thus not necessarily or always to be lamented," he writes. But when considering the "role of the courts in decision-making and policy-making," we need to take into account "[t]he way in which courts (when compared to individuals, institutions, and other decision-making bodies) operate under procedures and traditions that produce a systematically and predictably information-poor decision-making environment."
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Fact-Based Courts, but What Facts? - JSTOR Daily

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Information is central to the litigation before America's courts. Every day they're in session, courts wrestle not just with interpretations of the law, but with the facts of the cases themselves. Yet legal scholar Frederick Schauer argues that the way our court system is structured makes it " more difficult for [judges and juries] to obtain the information they need than it is for most other public decision-making institutions."

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M&M's has decided to make its candy mascots more "inclusive," but not everyone is sweet on the idea.

On Thursday, Mars, Incorporated, the company that makes the popular chocolate treats, declared its "global commitment to creating a world where everyone feels they belong and society is inclusive," according to The Hill.

The candies have long been represented in ads by a series of anthropomorphized characters with loosely established personalities. Now, the company claims each M&M mascot has been better defined and refined ― although a lot of the changes seem to revolve around the various characters' footwear.

The brown and green M&Ms, who are both female, have new shoes. The brown M&M still wears heels, but now at a more sensible height. Meanwhile, the green M&M has given up her go-go boots for what the company calls "cool, laid-back sneakers to reflect her effortless confidence."

The red and yellow M&Ms, for their part, now have shoelaces in their shoes, and the orange one has finally tied his laces, according to People.

In addition, the M&Ms will no have prefixes on their names, in order to help emphasize personality over gender.

As you might expect, the rebranding inspired lots of Twitter snark ― and it was glorious.

Losing the voting rights bill and getting woke M&Ms instead feels about right
- Laura Bassett (@LEBassett) January 20, 2022

WHAT DO WE WANT?
M&MS WITH BETTER-RIGGED CGI MOUTHS
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
TWENTY YEARS AGO AT LEAST
- David M Willis! (@damnyouwillis) January 20, 2022

one of the M&Ms definitely did something fucked up and this is just their way of quietly replacing them
- Johnny McNulty's Seasonal Display of Plumage (@JohnnyMcNulty) January 20, 2022

YES!!!

Who needs equitable pay, healthcare, voting rights?

That stuff is for chumps. What we need is Woke M&Ms to carry us through these tough times. https://t.co/bzrZoi5GKV
- Johnny Akzam (@JohnnyAkzam) January 20, 2022

Some people focused on the orange M&M, who seems to be on a journey toward self-actualization.

Some had more pressing concerns...

will somebody just tell me which m&ms I'm allowed to be attracted to
- octave (@curtofranklin) January 20, 2022

And some people jokingly complained that the female M&Ms aren't hot enough now.

But while there were lots of jokes about "woke" M&Ms, some people put things in the proper perspective.

Really curious if anyone's gotten offended that M&Ms have become "woke" with character redesigns, because, because they've been the pride flag of chocolates for years.
- Will Greenwald no Densetsu (@AggroWill) January 20, 2022

Everyone's talking about woke m&ms but Reese's peanut butter cups have been promoting inclusion for decades by reminding us that there's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.
- Sara Morrison (@SaraMorrison) January 20, 2022

Iconic Brand Mascots

See Gallery

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Twitter Users Hilariously Pan 'Inclusive' M&M's Rebrand That Nobody Asked For

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M&M's has decided to make its candy mascots more "inclusive," but not everyone is sweet on the idea. On Thursday, Mars, Incorporated, the company that makes the popular chocolate treats, declared its "global commitment to creating a world where everyone feels they belong and society is inclusive," according to The Hill.

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Should bad science be censored by social media?

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Should bad science be censored by social media?

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Rachel SchraerHealth and disinformation reporter

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Should bad science be censored on social media?

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A Royal Society report recommends against censoring scientific misinformation online.

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In 1959, as a response to what was commonly known as the Wolfenden Report, Lord Devlin, an English judge, delivered the Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence at the British Academy. The lecture that would later be published as The Enforcement of Morals. The Wolfenden Report was more correctly called the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution. Two years before Devlin's lecture, the Committee had recommended by a majority of 12 to 1 that, in Britain, "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a crime." Devlin's objections to this recommendation would spark a passionate public debate between himself and H. L. A. Hart, Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford University.

In his lecture, Devlin countered the Wolfenden Report, arguing that law should both be and is used " to achieve uniformity" in society. He went further, stating that the laws against homosexuality were there because the strong feeling of "disgust" was "deeply felt" in society. The presence of disgust, he claimed, "is a good indication that the bounds of [tolerance] are being reached... No society can do without intolerance, indignation and disgust; they are the forces behind the moral law."

"It is generally accepted," he continued, "that some shared morality... is an essential element in the constitution of any society. Without it there would be no [social] cohesion."

After Lord Devlin's lecture, Hart, who described himself privately in letters to friends as a "suppressed homosexual," felt compelled to speak out on BBC radio. As he would state in an interview in later life, he had felt obligated to act because, as he put it: "I think Devlin's arguments are really bad and misleading and enable reactionary people to claim a philosophical mantle."

Hart, in his response to Devlin, agreed with the Wolfenden Report's statement that "there must remain a realm of private morality or immorality which is, in brief and crude terms, not the law's business." This idea, Hart argued, had a close connection to John Stuart Mill's doctrine in his essay On Liberty that stated, "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community against his will is to prevent harm to others."

As Hart would argue in his famous The Concept of Law, morality may influence the law, but laws and morals are distinct social phenomena.

Hart was a legal positivist, meaning that he took a social scientific approach to the law, regarding the law as a social fact. What the law is, he argued, and what it ought to be are two distinct questions. As he would argue in his famous The Concept of Law, morality may influence the law, but laws and morals are distinct social phenomena.

In what would become known as Hart's "separability thesis," he argued that a law such as the one as obligates a person drive on the right-hand side of the road might be a good law, but it is not a moral principle. One would never go to Britain and say, my morality commands me to drive on the right, and I feel morally compromised driving on the left. Morality can, he argued, influence the law, but it is not synonymous with the law. On the other hand, laws against dangerous driving (or, say, murder), for example, are no doubt influenced by morality, but they are also part of social-bureaucratic order. And well-ordered states are not necessarily moral states. Devlin's claim that laws are there to enforce morality was, Hart pointed out, simply factually incorrect.

But the problem Hart had with Devlin's argument were deeper than Mill's doctrine and his separation of law and morality. Hart was also, along with his great friend Isaiah Berlin, one of the most important twentieth century liberal philosophers who believed in an open, free, democratic, and plural society. Within these societies, both Hart and Berlin argued, are differing moral codes and beliefs. Berlin articulated what was a constant theme in Hart's writings: that moral principles are incommensurate and often come into direct conflict with one another. One example of this conflict can been in the debate around abortion: pro-life and pro-choice (among others) are conflicting positions, but they both come from a recognizable moral framework.

To this problem, both philosophers suggested that an open, tolerant, and democratic society was the only moral solution (ironically). "Plural moralities in the conditions of modern large scale societies," Hart wrote, "might perfectly well be mutually tolerant." And in fact, "there actually are divergent moralities living in peace" in almost all open democratic societies.

For social cohesion to exist in a society, Hart argued, there is no need for the law to impose a singular "seamless web" of morality over its people, as Devlin had claimed. In fact, to live in a state of freedom, we must be allowed to choose our own moral systems. The law should not impose one way of life on people, a way of life that denies them perfectly harmless and consensual actions in private. As Hart argued in his Liberty, Law and Morality, the private sphere is neither the law's business, nor society's.

When asked in an interview if he saw Devlin as threatening liberalization, Hart answered:

He was. Although paradoxically I got to know him and quite liked him... After he produced his arguments against me and Mill, he then wrote a letter to The Times saying he thought the law [on homosexuality] ought to be altered.

In many ways Devlin's letter was one of the success stories of the liberalization process in mid-twentieth century Britain. Like his friend Isaiah Berlin, Hart was never afraid to discuss issues openly with those who held divergent views. And Devlin's letter is a testament to just how open and engaged dialogue (and even friendship) can be a persuasive force in society.

It was in this spirit that Hart addressed the issue of abortion in several lectures. For Hart, moral pluralism meant that there was nothing necessarily wrong with a society that contained within it divergent views on the morality of abortion. As he said in the interview mentioned above, "I can see how Catholics might object to abortion." His legal positivist beliefs did not allow him into any obfuscation of facts. As he openly acknowledged, medical facts confirm that "the physical structure... of a foetus is remarkably similar to that of a new born baby" and "the legal facts are those which show that the law recognises the unborn foetus as having rights."

He would also go on to caution those who dismiss out of hand that the "foetus is at any stage a person," suggesting that this position had led to a failure to convert "many to a different view of the moral status of the foetus." But, he pointed out, "only rarely has English law equated any form of abortion with murder." Hart's point was that, in England, some traditional belief, that can be seen in the law's formulation, held that there was some distinction between a foetus and a new-born baby.

He also pointed out that what is now commonly called a "pro-choice position" is most often held by people who do not disregard the sanctity of human life. "Many of those who have campaigned for the relaxation of [the abortion] law," he pointed out, are quite often "opponents of capital punishment and pacifists." As he went on, "similarly, at the national level, the Scandinavian countries who have been the foremost and most consistent supporters of liberalisation of the law were also among the earliest to abandon capital punishment."

Hart believed that a free society should allow for morally autonomous choice on matters such as homosexuality and abortion. But all laws, he believed, should be scrutinized for what harm they might cause. Hart in this pursuit addressed the issue of the harm that the abortion laws produced in Britain before their liberalization in 1967. In 1950s and 60s, it was thought that around 10,000 illegal abortions took place in Britain per annum. This meant that, in 26 years, 260,000 women from all walks of life were guilty of a crime punishable by a prison sentence. But when Hart looked at the statistics, he discovered that there were only around 55 convictions each year. This, to Hart, suggested that the society had little interest in upholding this law, and that it had become a dead letter. He also pointed out that illegal abortion was part of a "high profit criminal industry," which offered "targets for the blackmailer and corrupting temptations to law enforcement agencies."

As he discussed this issue in front of an Australian audience in 1971, he pointed out that relaxation of abortion laws in Britain were at least in part helping to solve the problem of "unwanted children, particularly illegitimate children, the reduction of maternal mortality through illegal abortion, and the reduction of illegal abortion."

Hart would not allow himself to disregard the negative impact of liberalization. There had been, he observed, "the growth of a vast private sector where often very high fees are charged and large profits may be made by doctors." This industry was bound to compound unwanted inequality in society, creating one "abortion law for the rich and another for the poor." He also had "not the slightest doubt that a large scale racket has developed in this sector." Doctors were making significant amounts of money at the expense of the unhappiness of women.

Abortion law reform, Hart would go on to say, was not like the relaxation of the law against homosexuality. It had deeply significant social impacts that must be addressed by government. It required "careful planning of available resources" and "should be accompanied, and if possible preceded by a really effective provision of free contraceptive services and education in their use."

Consistent with his separability thesis, Hart's philosophical positions were always accompanied by strong moral convictions. As he would argue, laws "must in the end be submitted to a moral scrutiny." And in this regard, the liberalization of abortion laws had made it "possible for large numbers of pregnant women who do not wish to continue their pregnancy to lay their case frankly before doctors and to discuss it without shame and without fear."

In the 1960s, liberal legislation pushed through parliament, and England witnessed the likes of the conservative Lord Devlin softening his position. But as the reactionary movements of the 1980s took hold, a handbrake to liberalization was applied: Margaret Thatcher would do her level best to place the liberalization vehicle into reverse. In 1988, her government pushed through "a new law to reduce the legal limit for abortions... from 28 weeks of pregnancy to 18." Some months later, her government would pass a law that "prohibited local authorities and schools from 'promoting' homosexuality."

Interviewer David Sugarman asked Hart in 1988, "What do you think about the current tendencies to reverse liberalization of the 60s in terms of abortion, homosexuality, and so?" Hart responded emphatically, "I loathe it."
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Does Law Exist to Provide Moral Order? - JSTOR Daily

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In 1959, as a response to what was commonly known as the Wolfenden Report, Lord Devlin, an English judge, delivered the Maccabaean Lecture in Jurisprudence at the British Academy. The lecture that would later be published as The Enforcement of Morals. The Wolfenden Report was more correctly called the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution.

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Do period dramas reclaim the past and give voice to those who were previously silenced?

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Do period dramas reclaim the past and give voice to those who were previously silenced?

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Period pieces are often thought of as soothing escapes to a simpler past. Not so in the 21st Century. Discussing Small Axe, his politically-charged, revisionist series about West Indians in Britain from the 1960s through to the '80s, Steve McQueen told the BFI, "That's what art can do: rewrite history in the way it should be written... That's what you do with your TV programmes."
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- Why May I Destroy You is the future of TV

McQueen's assertion could be a mantra for the best, most ambitious television dramas today. From the quietly subversive The Crown and Downton Abbey to the jolting, radical Small Axe, The Underground Railroad and Pose - all on BBC Culture's poll of the 100 greatest series of the 21st Century - television is correcting history's distortions in matters of race, gender, class and power. The gay footman Thomas in Downton and the runaway slave Cora in The Underground Railroad are presented to us as avatars of change. And now is an especially rich moment for series to reclaim the past. Previously muted voices from black, gay and transgender creators are offering new, more authentic ways of seeing their histories. Their series are clear-eyed period pieces for the present.

Barry Jenkins' The Underground Railroad and McQueen's Small Axe make the point that racism, whether in the antebellum American South or the UK's recent past, has been and remains deeply embedded in the fabric of society. It's notable that the series' creators are also two of today's finest filmmakers, taking full advantage of what television has to offer: the time to delve into thorny social issues from multiple angles, and the ability to reach a large global audience through drama that engages us with the personal lives and loves of characters over years.

In the dazzling, imaginative Underground Railroad (number 59 in the poll), based on Colson Whitehead's novel, the metaphorical route leading escaped slaves to freedom becomes a physical railroad line. Artistic licence becomes a way to access harsh truths.

The first instalment of the series is the most graphic, showing an enslaved person punished by being burned alive. Jenkins carefully modulates the violence he depicts, and includes scenes of lyrical beauty. But he also uses the power of the screen to immerse his audience in the characters' worst experiences. It is not enough to acknowledge the horrors of slavery in an abstract way. Cora (Thuso Mbedu), escapes from the plantation, only to find herself in an apparently better world that cannot last, as a slave hunter pursues her into hiding and eventually out of a town in which lynched bodies of black people hang on trees lining the road.

Through Cora and the other enslaved characters, Jenkins creates a tragedy that exists on both an immediate, intensely personal level and on a grand, historical scale. Nothing in flat, school-room stories of slavery can compete with this harrowing vision on screen. And the 2021 series arrives at a time when some school boards in the US are resistant to teaching the history of racism at all.

Jenkins' acknowledged purpose is to reclaim the truth of the past as a way of moving forward. In an interview with Buzzfeed, he pointedly tied his series to the Trump years and the distortions that history has passed down. While he was working on the series, he said, "There was this president who kept talking about 'Make America Great Again'... I realised that there was this vacuum that kept travelling that needed to be filled. Because America hasn't always been great." He added, "Because we've been afraid to re-experience some of these traumas, because we've been afraid of triggering people to re-experience that trauma, we've inadvertently almost avoided some of this history."

With a more directly realistic style, McQueen's searing Small Axe (number 51 in the poll) achieves the same goal, reconceiving a past that echoes through to the present. Four of the five independent instalments in the series are fact-based stories that reposition people from recent decades in a new, heroic light. It is remarkable, and deliberate, that those stories resonate so powerfully with the Black Lives Matter movement and calls for police reform today.
A rush of authenticity
In Mangrove, one of those heroes is Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes) whose restaurant in London was repeatedly the subject of police harassment in the late 1960s and early '70s, leading to street protests, police violence against the activists, and charges against the protest leaders, who became known as The Mangrove Nine. In Red, White and Blue, John Boyega plays the real-life Leroy Logan, who joined London's Metropolitan Police in 1983, defying the racist atmosphere to try to change it from within. Together, the five stories tell us that the racism on screen is not due to an occasional rogue action or racist cop, but evidence of a deeply accepted social bias.

"These films should have been made 35 years ago, 25 years ago, but they weren't," McQueen said in the BFI interview. "There's no way anyone would have given me, or anybody else... money at that time to make a film about the Mangrove Nine. You were not welcome."

While racism went mostly unexplored on TV for many decades, there were rare exceptions. The 1977 miniseries Roots earned one of the biggest television audiences ever, and brought the brutality of slavery into more than 100 million homes. But it didn't expand opportunities for black actors, writers or directors. And except for the writer, Alex Haley, whose book Roots was based on, behind the scenes, the major creators were white.

McQueen and Jenkins, black artists reclaiming black history, and the gay and trans creators of Pose (number 62), about the LBGTQ+ world in the late 20th Century, are advocating for change while also representing at least some movement toward that change themselves. Although a handful of voices from disenfranchised groups aren't enough, these creators have cracked the door a bit wider in the television industry, and expanded the audience's perspective in a major way.

Steven Canals brought his original idea for Pose to Ryan Murphy. Those two gay co-creators (along with Brad Falchuk) were joined by the trans producers Janet Mock and Our Lady J, and a cast of gay and trans actors, bringing a bold rush of LGBTQ+ authenticity to the television landscape. As the title suggests, Pose began with a focus on the world of drag balls in New York City. Over its three seasons, spanning 1987-1996, it increasingly focused on the Aids crisis and gay rights. Its main and most beloved characters, the ballroom host and father figure Pray Tell (Billy Porter) and the trans, maternal Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) both contracted HIV. In the final season, Pray and Blanca call out government neglect of black people in an experimental Aids drug trial, a racial crisis within a health crisis. Like Small Axe, Pose uses recent decades to create resonance with inequalities that remain today.

Reshaping history doesn't always mean being a flame-thrower. Some of the most elegantly escapist series of the 21st Century question the power structures that support the characters and the sumptuous settings we love. The Crown (number 16 in the BBC Culture poll) is an interpretation of real events that takes a humanising approach to the monarchy. From the series' start, when we see Princess Elizabeth (Claire Foy) as a young woman in 1947, Peter Morgan's series speculates about what happened behind the public image, and with enormous sympathy takes us into her private life. We see all the personal insecurities and tensions of any family, magnified by an enormous weight of responsibility to the country.

That sense of duty is shown as even stronger in the middle-aged Queen (Olivia Colman) in seasons three and four. But so is the portrayal of how emotionally damaged her children may be, particularly Charles (Josh O'Connor). By the time the series arrives in the 1980s, and the family is seen choosing Diana (Emma Corrin) to be Charles's wife, presented as a cold-blooded decision all around, the mood of the country we see on screen has shifted. The monarchy's hold on power is still firm, but not in the unquestioned way it was when Elizabeth inherited the crown in 1952. Her role and her authority are increasingly challenged by striking miners, politicians like Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson), and a less deferential press.

The ultrasharp Mad Men (number two in the poll), set in the very different and more overtly vicious world of US advertising, charts a similar, realistic cultural shift, far from a comforting vision of the past. As the timeline moves from 1960 to 1971, each season focuses more on the sexism its women characters endure, from Peggy's (Elisabeth Moss) need to hide her pregnancy to the way Joan (Christina Hendricks) is used as a sex object by the men around her, until she finally asserts some power and business acumen of her own. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is ever the handsome charmer, but the world around him is leaving his type behind.

Even the sublime Downton Abbey (number 36), known as the ultimate in blissful escapism, is more rooted in the real world than it gets credit for. Its characters know that the old, hierarchical class order is shifting under their feet. The order itself threatens them in the very first episode, when the heir to Downton, who is also Mary Crawley's (Michelle Dockery) fiancé, dies in the Titanic. Of course a woman cannot inherit their beloved Downton. Lucky for them she falls in love with the new heir, Matthew (Dan Stevens).

But sympathising with the Crawleys and their downstairs staff isn't the same as believing in inherited wealth and power. Spurred by the reality of World War One, the story deals with the gradually shifting mores of a new world. Thomas (Rob James-Collier) still hides his homosexuality, which was then illegal, and in one episode is hauled in by the police. Perhaps fancifully, the open-minded Crawleys not only don't dismiss him; eventually they make him the new butler. More realistically, in the 1920s cousin Rose (Lily James) falls in love with a black jazz musician, though that relationship is doomed by the prejudices they face.

These themes of sexuality and race are not sops to an enlightened 21st-Century audience, but signals that the world is changing. The characters are less aware of how significant those changes will be than we are. As 21st-Century viewers, these enticing, truth-telling period dramas are telling us more and more about who we are - and how we got to the reality of today.
Read more about BBC Culture's 100 greatest TV series of the 21st Century:
- How the way we watch TV has changed
- What makes The Wire such a great number one - Twenty-five series that define the 21st Century

How many of these series have you seen? Let us know using the hashtag #TVOfTheCentury on our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
Love film and TV? Join And if you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called The Essential List. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. BBC Culture Film and TV Club on Facebook, a community for cinephiles all over the world.

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Historical drama and TV's reckoning with the past

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Period pieces are often thought of as soothing escapes to a simpler past. Not so in the 21st Century. Discussing Small Axe, his politically-charged, revisionist series about West Indians in Britain from the 1960s through to the '80s, Steve McQueen told the BFI, "That's what art can do: rewrite history in the way it should be written...

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Does dark tourism exploit tragedy for profit?

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Does dark tourism exploit tragedy for profit?

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Does Dark Tourism Exploit Tragedy for Profit? - JSTOR Daily

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Thanatourism, as one scholar calls it, has a long history. And some historic sites of mass death do offer thoughtful educational experiences.

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How can an obsessive focus on grammatical rules destroy the beauty and spontaneity of language?

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How can an obsessive focus on grammatical rules destroy the beauty and spontaneity of language?

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Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schooling a seven-year-old. Forgive me if in mentioning it I retraumatise members of category c).

'Fronted adverbials' have become something of a cause célèbre among the parents of primary school children. They even occasioned a prime ministerial joke, interpreted in some quarters as a dig at a certain former education secretary, about 'every detail of the syllabus, from fronted adverbials to quadratic equations'. This term for what others know as a sentence modifier - essentially, a word or clause that qualifies the main part of a sentence - has become a metonym for a whole approach to language teaching. It's an approach that has baffled many parents, exasperates experienced educators (try getting Michael Rosen started on this stuff), and seems to issue in some very odd and potentially counterproductive ideas about how sentences are best formed.

Let's take that example, to start with. Why the special interest in 'fronted' modifiers? 'Fronted', by the way, is a gruesomely clumsy usage to indicate that it's a pre--modifier, i.e. coming at the beginning of a sentence. 'Before he could teach me any more grammar, I scarpered' isn't intrinsically more valuable than 'I scarpered before he could teach me any more grammar'. Indeed, a sensible piece of advice on clear writing is to form 'right-branching' sentences - i.e. to put the main clause as close to the beginning of a sentence as possible. If you're rewarded for rewriting a whole block of text inserting pre-modifiers, you might arrive at the idea that sentences that start that way are better than the other sort.

It's not just fronted adverbials. The other day, for instance, my nine-year-old was asked to rewrite a series of sentences using modal verbs. I have - humblebrag alert - a semi-decent amateur grasp of this sort of material. I studied English at university, whipped through Saussure, Chomsky, Pinker and co, wrote about pidgins and creoles as part of my finals, and have published a general-audience book about English grammar. Still, I hesitated. What the hell is a modal verb?

I had to check my own book to remind myself what counts as a modal verb ('could' and 'should', yup; 'may' and 'might', sure - but 'will' or 'won't'?). Pretty soon I was into the thickets of epistemic and deontic modality, which was no help to anyone. In any case, it was quite unclear in the examples we were given why the insertion of a bunch of modal verbs would improve those sentences. At other times we've been asked to add two or three adjectives to every noun in order to make the sentences more vivid and exciting: but if you do that you just end up sounding like the late Lynda Lee-Potter, bless her adjective-bothering heart.

One problem with all this, it seems to me, is that we're mistaking teaching nine-year-olds how to use language for teaching them something closer to linguistics. It's a meta-subject: if you're teaching a young person to drive, you want them to learn the Highway Code, not how to strip and reassemble an internal combustion engine. The other problem is that the advice is a mishmash, and often questionable if not outright wrong. Undergraduate-level snatches of linguistics are mixed up with decades-old shibboleths of the sort that please pedants and cause actual linguists to slap their foreheads.

I've had my seven-year-old telling me off for starting sentences with conjunctions. And it came out not long ago that examiners had determined that no sentence ending in an exclamation point could be marked correct unless it began with 'How' or 'What'. That is flat wrong. Even hoary old Fowler allows wishes, commands, calls for attention, cries of alarm, shouting.

Grammarian-in-chief Michael Gove, who has driven much of this, once sent a memo to his staff deploring - another of those ancient shibboleths - the passive voice: 'Use the active, not the passive voice. Ministers have decided to increase spending on the poorest children. Poorer children are not having a harder time under this government.' Both the sentences he quoted were - duh! - in the active voice. Shades, here, of the one-time US vice-president Dan Quayle solemnly correcting the word 'potato' to 'potatoe' for the world's media.

The impression I have is that teachers - much against many of their best instincts - have had foisted on them a primary-school curriculum that looks for ways of teaching language that can be marked and quantified: that is, in which you can count the number of modal verbs or fronted adverbials or attributive adjectives there on the page. Reassuring to Whitehall, which likes metrics. Not a great idea, I suspect, for kids.

The thing is this. You can mark grammar when it makes writing bad - put a big red cross against that dangling modifier, that borked agreement or misconjugated verb - but the way in which a particular construction will improve a piece of writing is a much, much more fugitive question. The things that make sentences sing are situational, and instinctive - not formulaic.

That's hard to teach, of course. You learn by doing - by reading and writing and listening. But be not discouraged: the amazing thing is that kids learn grammar instinctively. And as the teacher and writer Kate Clanchy's experience shows (she shares the extraordinarily good poems her teenage students write online), they learn a lot more than just grammar given encouragement. My worry is that they may unlearn it if they're getting a row of ticks for bollocksing up a perfectly good piece of prose by stuffing it full of random grammatical objects just to show it's possible to do so.

Modifying clauses, modal verbs, adjectives, shifts of voice - these are all just objects in the toolkit. They only make sense inasmuch as they are called into use, in a particular situation, to serve their purposes at the right time. I'm reminded of the old parable about people finding a great number of large rocks near the shore, counting and measuring and cataloguing them - and not at any point realising that if you stacked them up one on the other, and climbed to the top, you could see many miles out to sea.

Oh, yeah: 'probably'. That was the fronted adverbial. Probably.

If you're teaching someone to drive, you want them to learn the Highway Code, not how to strip an engine

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How to kill the English language | The Spectator

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Probably, most of you will have only the dimmest idea what a 'fronted adverbial' is. I used one in the last sentence. Can you spot it? Very good. Those among you who did are either a) professional linguists, b) seven-year-olds, or c) are, like me, recovering from several long months of home-schoolin...

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How has media communication evolved through quarantine?

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How has media communication evolved through quarantine?

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Nidhi Sinha, Strategy Director, Open Strategy and Design

When the habit of FaceTime surpassed the occurrence of face time, our immersion into the digital world was complete.

Did Apple know the import of naming its video calling feature 'FaceTime' when it launched? Did anyone think GIFs could become a utility, not just a frivolity, to keep emotions moving in our suddenly static lives? Could text have become the medium of choice in our celebrated oral culture? Not to forget, did you think emojis could have spawned the next generation of crossword puzzles?
Tools of the new world: New Media Languages
Emojis, GIFs, Memes have been around for a while. But the year of social distancing gave them a real reason to exist, as private messaging took over from traditional social media and our screens had to convey more emotion, context and meaning than we usually demand from it.
The language of new media is the language of the private internet
The early language of the internet came from public communication platforms like blogs, websites, and more recently, social media. But as private messaging came along, public internet became a platform for performance. This made room for sophisticated ways of one-to-one and one-to-many grammar to evolve on private internet corners like email, WhatsApp and finally direct messaging channels of social media.
A rich visual library of moods
GIFs are possibly the richest visual library of moods and emotions expressed via gestures, facial expressions and many other non-verbal cues. In other words, all emotions/ moods/ states that words cannot express. Especially the written word.
From Greetings to Feelings
Compared to 2019, the usage of GIFs did not only reach a new peak, but also found highly contextual personal use cases - a behaviour diametrically opposite to the primary usage of GIFs as animated greeting cards for Diwali, New Years, birthdays and so on.
We see ourselves in the GIFs we share
We are a people constantly bingeing on slick media; Netflix/ Instagram has ensured we are well fed and hungry for content the next day. The same content, when condensed into a lo-fi 8 bit mute media format is stripped of its fiction and used abundantly in real life contexts.

In fact, Netflix creates GIF libraries for a lot of its shows, making its characters a part of people's digital lives.

Because life doesn't come with background music and uniquely staged circumstances. But can it come with a ready reckoner of reaction GIFs? Of course.

The original digital natives, emojis have come a long way from being happy shiny yellow balls to representatives of 'ambiguous' feelings & ideas. Emojipedia's analysis of 68 million tweets reveal a steady decline in the use of the "happy" smiley face.

Positive sentiment emojis, which contributed the maximum volume of emojis used on social media, are at an all-time low post 2020. Meanwhile, complex sentiments like the 'pleading face' are surging.

We can hardly blame ourselves, given that the emojis *really* looming in our heads is *mask* and *microbe* - two previously obscure keyboard personalities that are enjoying their time in the spotlight.

The human capacity for hope, however, does not allow our keyboard representatives to stay too grim. If you want to map the evolution of human representation in the digital age, look no further than the emoji keyboard. We got genders, skin tones, hair colour, family structures, professions, flags that include (or are in the process of including) all cultures and ideas. Emojis are our inclusive, politically correct, utopian cousins. They have a heart of yellow gold.

And so, as we humans swallowed the bitter pill of life behind a mask, the mask emoji got a smile behind its veil. It had to.

Memes are modern folklore: they pack cultural information in highly contagious little capsules that people can't get enough of. A good meme points to (or points out) something so real, that once you've seen it, it cannot be un-seen. You might even keep it in your pocket for the next time you need to describe that exact situation/emotion, and before that, you might share it because you know lots of people would relate to it. It's real, it's funny, it's human.
Humanity's biggest shared experience is also its most meme-d one.
It is therefore, not much of a surprise that the ordinary, everyday history of the pandemic has been written in memes. Our biggest shared experience happened because of a global pandemic. Staying locked in has been a forced mimetic action that created the rare opportunity for a common perspective.

Making the times a minefield of memes: as a way of coping with and gaining perspective on a situation (and state of mind) we might have struggled to describe with words alone.
Modern Muhavras
Depending on which corner of the internet you are on, there is a universe of memes suited to your life experiences and interests. It's a unique language for communities that have shared experiences, one that captures a whole felt experience in a sentence and a visual.

In many ways, memes are modern muhavras . Like everything modern, they can be personalised to your experience.
The Language of 2020s
Today a conversation on WhatsApp/ Messenger/ Instagram might begin and end with a meme, it might be entirely made up of GIFs or generously sprinkled with emojis. For a fundamentally oral culture, the shift from the good old face time to FaceTime has forced us to work out a new kind of grammar using tools that we never thought of as 'tools' to begin with.

As our digital lives become second nature, we will surely consume lots of slick content sitting on our couch, but our thumbs will always stop for that (humble) lo-fi meme or gif and then immediately get to work, furiously typing the response it deserves.

Disclaimer

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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How to talk in the 2020s: A guide to new media languages

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Nidhi Sinha, Strategy Director, Open Strategy and Design When the habit of FaceTime surpassed the occurrence of face time, our immersion into the digital world was complete. Did Apple know the import of naming its video calling feature 'FaceTime' when it launched?

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Have the "mental hygiene" videos of the 1940's and 50's been replaced by a new, more subtle form of cultural indoctrination in Hollywood movies?

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Have the "mental hygiene" videos of the 1940's and 50's been replaced by a new, more subtle form of cultural indoctrination in Hollywood movies?

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Not sure how to become popular? Control your emotions? Settle conflicts? Develop self-reliance? They're hard questions. But if you were a teenager in the 1940s or 1950s, you could get the answers from social guidance films.

Also called mental hygiene films, social guidance films were short instructional videos designed to educate the youth of America about life. A uniquely postwar product, they demonstrated-in extremely corny fashion-preferred behaviors and attitudes, showing their impressionable audience what a model U.S. citizen looked like. Although several companies made these movies, they are most commonly associated with a now-defunct studio run by one of the founders of Esquire, based out of the Chicago suburbs: Coronet Films.

"Hitler's use of the motion picture as an indoctrination tool was frightening to Smart, but he saw the potential of the medium as an aid to education."

The production company was the brainchild of David A. Smart, the publisher of Esquire and a lesser-known general interest magazine called Coronet. Smart began his career selling ads for the Chicago Tribune before he worked his way up to the top of the media ladder with his own publishing company. His Esquire colleague Arnold Gingrich once described him in a 1934 letter to Ernest Hemingway as "lazy," "impulsive," and "extravagant," yet an undeniably shrewd businessman:

Today he has the heads of old-line publishing businesses asking how he figured out the answers... He has not guessed wrong in a single venture since 1929 (he made plenty of wrong guesses before that).

Coronet Films initially specialized in military training videos, but Smart decided to pivot to educational films more generally after World War II ended. As usual, he did not guess wrong. The company dominated its market, producing a new release "on average, each three and a half working days," according to the Chicago Tribune. Smart was invested in education and storytelling, but he was also a veteran, and that factored heavily into his new direction. "Behind the venture into classroom films was a visit to Nazi Germany by the late David A. Smart," the Tribune wrote in 1964. "Hitler's use of the motion picture as an indoctrination tool was frightening to Smart, but he saw the potential of the medium as an aid to education."

What lessons did Coronet Films aim to impart? Although it made movies about ancient Egypt, the powers of Congress, and the solar system, it's most famous for its social guidance shorts, which parroted specific cultural values. Smart wasn't the only WWII veteran working there-frequent director Ted Peshak as well as head writer Melvin Waskin both served-and it's hard not to see these movies as preaching to a world stage as much as high school students. The postwar period was an opportunity to build a better society, one that would never tolerate another Hitler. Coronet Films planned to seize it.

That better society looked extremely middle class, suburban, and white- as the scholar Michelle Anne Boulé notes, "interracial films did not sell"-and it had a distinctly retrograde attitude toward sexuality. The Coronet short " Are You Popular? " links likeability to chastity in its first few minutes by slut-shaming a girl named Ginny who dates too many boys. "Ginny thinks that she has the key to popularity, parking in cars with the boys at night," the narrator explains. "When Jerry brags about taking Ginny out, he learns that she dates all the boys, and he feels less important."

We then see Ginny approach a table of boys in her high school cafeteria, and watch as they fall silent, dodging her friendly questions and giving her the cold shoulder. "No, girls who park in cars are not really popular, not even with the boys they park with, not when they meet at school or elsewhere," the narrator surmises.

Coronet wasn't just concerned with dating, though. "Good Eating Habits" advised kids to savor their breakfast with their family before school, chewing carefully and sipping, not gulping, their orange juice to avoid stomach aches later. "School Rules: How They Help Us" taught students that asking for exceptions to rules was unfair because they "spoiled the game," likening keeping an overdue library book to requesting another swing after striking out at baseball. "How to Be Well Groomed" showed teenage siblings battling over the iron on a weeknight, wisely taking advantage of the quiet evening to prepare for their Friday night dates.

Boulé marks the "heyday" of social guidance films as occurring between 1947 and 1957. After that, the shorts about etiquette, dating, and family life faded-and movies about science and communism took their place. Sputnik, she argues, was the driving factor. Still, Coronet Films continued making instructional shorts in some form for two more decades, offering an extraordinarily regulated vision of the world that left little room for nuance or real human impulses.

"Mental hygiene films were popular because they showed life not as it was but as their adult creators wanted it to be," Ken Smith, author of Mental Hygiene: Social Guidance Films 1945-1970, told the Los Angeles Times. For Coronet and studios like it, life was full of well-mannered, immaculately groomed, rule-abiding teens who dated people just like them. Keeping messy emotions and messy libidos at bay was part of their daily routine.
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Not sure how to become popular? Control your emotions? Settle conflicts? Develop self-reliance? They're hard questions. But if you were a teenager in the 1940s or 1950s, you could get the answers from social guidance films. Also called mental hygiene films, social guidance films were short instructional videos designed to educate the youth of America about life.

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What is Critical Race Theory and why is it under attack?

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What is Critical Race Theory and why is it under attack?

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Is "critical race theory" a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.

In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government's role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile.

School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.

Just what is critical race theory anyway?

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.

CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.

This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics-often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into "oppressed" and "oppressor" groups; and urges intolerance.

Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like "anti-racism" and "social justice," with which it is often conflated.

To an extent, the term "critical race theory" is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it's actually informed those programs.

One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California's recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline-such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. "When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based," the organization claimed.

(A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn't that racist, too?

The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people-white or nonwhite-who don't intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.

Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals' own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism-tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.

What does any of this have to do with K-12 education?

Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they've studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students' ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it's related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don't necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.

As one teacher-educator put it: "The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: 'Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?' That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers." Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.

An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can't coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.

As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that "white people are inherently privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized"; that "achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness"; and that "the United States was founded on racism."

Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students-especially white students-will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.

While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it's not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.

What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools?

The bills are so vaguely written that it's unclear what they will affirmatively cover.

Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism-like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces-be considered in violation of these laws?

It's also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.

It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.

The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and "action civics"-an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.

How is this related to other debates over what's taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars?

The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.

In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country's history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other-between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994 attempt to set national history standards.

The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.

"It's because they're nervous about broad social things, but they're talking in the language of school and school curriculum," said one historian of education. "That's the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations."

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What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

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Here's what you need to understand about the academic concept-and how it's portrayed in political circles.

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How has the language of nutrition changed over time in relation to scientific research?

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How has the language of nutrition changed over time in relation to scientific research?

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What should we eat? That's a question with implications for health, pleasure, ethics and politics. As political scientist Tripp Rebrovick writes, views of these issues in European and white American society have shifted over time, from a framework based on bodily humors to one centering on nutrition and then to a holistic, ecological point of view.

For centuries, the reigning dietary framework for many Europeans was based on the four humors, which physicians believed ruled the human body: blood, yellow bile or choler, black bile, and phlegm. The humors defined individuals' personalities and corresponded to the seasons of the year, the stages of a human life, and the qualities hot, cold, dry, and wet. This meant that the correct food to eat depended on individual constitutions and their circumstances.

"A sanguine person, in whom blood predominates, is hot and moist by nature and should therefore favor hot and moist foods..."

"A sanguine person, in whom blood predominates, is hot and moist by nature and should therefore favor hot and moist foods, especially in autumn, in adulthood, or in a cold, dry environment," Rebrovick writes.

Balancing the humors correctly was a matter of both health and morality, while gluttony could cause illness and vice. This view of eating emerged in ancient Greece and remained powerful into the early modern era.

Things changed in the nineteenth century, as new ideas about science took hold. Influential chemist Justus von Liebig explained food in terms of its component parts, which can be either incorporated into the body or burned for energy. Later, the calorie allowed scientists to quantify the value of food in terms of human energy. The complex view of dietary rules based on individuals' characteristics and circumstances faded.

"For Liebig, the human body is universally the same, rather than radically individualized," Rebrovick writes. "And Liebig justifies this claim by arguing that all human bodies-indeed, all bodies-are composed of the same chemicals."

"Nutritionism" elevated the power of experts and supported state projects to advance public health. Counting calories and grams of protein allowed administrators to organize food supplies for prisons and armies, and eventually label food with nutritional information.

Around the 1960s, Europeans' and Americans' views of food began to shift again. A variety of movements-organic, slow food, buy local, and so on-promoted versions of what Rebrovick calls an eco-dietetic discourse. Here, healthy food is also ecologically virtuous and tasty. As Alice Waters, an icon of the organic, local food movement writes, "environmentalism can be something that actually affects you in the most intimate-and literally visceral-way. It can be something that actually gets inside you and gets digested."

Rebrovick writes that eco-dietetics emerged largely as a critique of the nutritionist model, rejecting industrial-style food systems and the treatment of foods as interchangeable bundles of chemical components. But it also differs sharply from a humors-based view of food, presenting eating as a question of values that extends outside the individual to the ecological community in which they live.
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The Idea of "Good Nutrition" Has Changed Over Time | JSTOR Daily

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What should we eat? That's a question with implications for health, pleasure, ethics and politics. As political scientist Tripp Rebrovick writes, views of these issues in European and white American society have shifted over time, from a framework based on bodily humors to one centering on nutrition and then to a holistic, ecological point of view.

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Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot

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Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot

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Although the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described it as a two-act play where "nothing happens ... twice", an Italian production of Waiting for Godot has been having a rather busier time off-stage.

Lawyers representing Samuel Beckett's estate, known for its iron grip on the playwright's works, objected to the use of female actors in the two main roles of Vladimir and Estragon, issuing an injunction against the theatre in Pontedera, Tuscany, to try to stop the performances.

The director and cast ignored the legal challenge, continuing the run of the play, and a court in Rome has now supported their position. It ruled this week that men did not have a monopoly on the roles, at least on this occasion. The theatre company's lawyer, Maurizio Fritelli, hailed the decision as a victory for civil liberties. "The sentence is valuable, not just from the technical point of view of the interpretation of the law," he said. "It reiterates that men and women have equal rights, given that it still seems necessary to point this out."

Lawyers for L'Agenzia Teatrale D'Arborio, which holds the rights to the Irish playwright's works in Italy, and the Society of French Authors, had claimed Beckett would have been unhappy about the use of women in his play about two tramps who wait in vain by a roadside for the arrival of Godot.

They said that, before his death in 1989, the Nobel Literature prizewinner had objected to previous attempts to use women in the production. They also cited a ruling in Paris in 1992, when a director was refused permission to use female leads after a judge said it was "violation of Beckett's moral rights".

The Pontedera theatre counter-claimed, saying that although sisters Luisa and Silvia Pasello were playing the parts, the characters remained totally male. There had been no attempt to alter Beckett's work, they said.

The actors, who have worked for the theatre company for years, and are near-identical twins and were brought in after two male actors who were originally cast pulled out of the production.

The theatre company showed the court a clause in its contract with the Beckett estate which said that if performers could not continue in the roles, it was permitted to change them. The clause does not mention the sex of the performers.

Director Robert Bacci said he was pleased the Pontedera theatre had won its case and called the legal challenge absurd. He said: "Silvia and Luisa look like men on stage and I chose them because they have played male roles before. We have used the text in its entirety and have in all other ways remained completely faithful to Beckett's work. We have followed his stage instructions down to the tiniest detail ... There is no element in the directing, acting, costumes or make-up that refers to a change in the characters."

He said he had invited Edward Beckett, the playwright's nephew, to see the production before deciding if it was acceptable, but he had refused.

Waiting for Godot is a comedy and was written in 1949. The play remains hugely popular and there have been many official productions as well as unauthorised versions where Godot actually arrives.

'A big enough classic to have own after-life'
It's an old battle: the freedom of the interpreter versus authorial prescription. And it's fascinating how many of these arguments focus on Beckett. In the case of Godot, there is certainly precedent for an all-female production: I know of at least one staged by Nora Connolly for Ireland's Taboo Theatre. Admittedly, Beckett scored the play for male voices but, as long as the rhythms of the text are scrupulously observed, where's the harm in a female version?

The play is a big enough classic to have achieved its own after-life.

Problems arise only when you start tinkering with Beckett's stage directions. In 1994 Deborah Warner and Fiona Shaw caused an almighty hoo-ha by fiddling with Beckett's Footfalls. The text insists that the confined heroine paces up and down a narrow strip of stage: Warner sent Shaw roaming all over the Garrick Theatre and the Beckett Estate prevented the production touring to Paris.

I could see their point: Beckett's later plays are like sculpted images and any deviation from the author's prescribed directions in effect de-natures them. But Godot is a different matter altogether. It is part of the universal language of theatre and has been played everywhere from America's San Quentin jail to Sarajevo after the bombing. If a group of Italian women now want to play it, it seems absurd to stop them.
Michael Billington

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Beckett estate fails to stop women waiting for Godot

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Although the Irish critic Vivian Mercier famously described it as a two-act play where "nothing happens ... twice", an Italian production of Waiting for Godot has been having a rather busier time off-stage.

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How has "woke" and its iterations evolved?

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How has "woke" and its iterations evolved?

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What is woke?

Aside from being the past participle of wake, for decades, it meant conscious and aware - but the slang word has come to represent an embrace of progressive activism, as well.

Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)." The Oxford dictionary adopted it the same year, defining it as "originally: well-informed, up-to-date. Now chiefly: alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice."

"Woke is a slang term that is easing into the mainstream from some varieties of a dialect called African American Vernacular English (sometimes called AAVE)," according to Merriam-Webster. "In AAVE, awake is often rendered as woke, as in, 'I was sleeping, but now I'm woke.'"

The meaning appears to have shifted sometime after Erykah Badu repeatedly used the line "I stay woke" in her 2008 song, "Master Teacher," which begins, "I am known to stay awake."

After the song came out, "'Stay woke' became a watch word in parts of the Black community for those who were self-aware, questioning the dominant paradigm and striving for something better," according to Merriam-Webster.
REP. CREWNSHAW, SEN. COTTON LAUNCH WHISTLEBLOWER EFFORT AGAINST MILITARY "WOKE IDEOLOGY"
Then in 2013 and 2014, after Florida man George Zimmerman was acquitted in Trayvon Martin's slaying and the police-involved death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a wave of Black Lives Matter activism emerged around the country. The phrase went from Twitter hashtag to rallying cry.

"The word woke became entwined with the Black Lives Matter movement; instead of just being a word that signaled awareness of injustice or racial tension, it became a word of action," according to Merriam-Webster. "Activists were woke and called on others to stay woke."

In 2018, the rapper Meek Mill took the phrase as the top single on his album "Legends of the Summer."

The BLM-themed "Stay Woke" was his first song since getting out of prison in April of that year.
DEMOCRATS GETTING INCREASINGLY NERVOUS ABOUT WOKE CULTURE
"How can I pledge allegiance to the flag," he raps in the final verse. "When they killin' all our sons, all our dads?"

But the meaning of woke evolved again with the rise of " cancel culture" -- as the two terms saw increased use, they became intertwined in the public consciousness. Often, someone gets canceled after they say something insensitive - something not woke.

So an addition to meaning aware and progressive, many people now interpret woke to be a way to describe people who would rather silence their critics than listen to them.

That's entirely different than what the word meant when it first appeared in print.

That was in a 1962 New York Times article about beatniks and pop culture absorbing jazz music and African American slang from Harlem, Oxford revealed in a June 2017 article about new words heading into the dictionary.

That article, written by the Black New York City novelist William Melvin Kelley was titled, "If you're woke, you dig it" - meaning if you're in the know, you understand.

As he noted at the time, a lot of jazz-era idioms became mainstream speech, and words like cool and hip. But the slang was already evolving in meaning back then.

"At one time, the connotations of 'jive' were all good," Kelley wrote. "Now they are bad, or at least questionable."

A decade later, in Barry Beckham's "Garvey Lives!" play about the Black Nationalist leader and publisher Marcus Garvey, a character named Strong vows that he "won't go to sleep" but instead will "stay woke."

"I been sleeping all my life," he says. "And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other Black folk."

Now it's not so much a racial term as an ideological one.

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What is woke? Aside from being the past participle of wake, for decades, it meant conscious and aware - but the slang word has come to represent an embrace of progressive activism, as well. Merriam-Webster added the word to its dictionary in 2017, defining it as, "aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)."

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How are culture and mask wearing correlated?

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How are culture and mask wearing correlated?

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Mask-wearing adherence is influenced more by a collective need than individual needs

More than 360 000 people participated in a survey on mask-wearing

They indicated their adherence on a scale from zero to four

Researchers have found evidence that adherence to mask-wearing tends to be higher in more collectivistic countries.

The study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at how adherence to mask-wearing during the Covid-19 pandemic can be accelerated by a culture of collectivism.

Collectivism and mask usage

The researchers surveyed 367 109 people in 29 countries to measure their mask usage.

They defined collectivism as the inclination to prioritise a group's needs over those of individuals.

The participants were asked to rate their mask-wearing outside their home on a scale of zero to four. Zero meant never and four indicated always. The ratio of men to women was almost equal.

To test the link between collectivism and mask usage, the researchers developed a large dataset by collecting information about the cultural, demographic, and socioeconomic variables of the different countries and combining them with the questions on mask usage.

The influence of culture

The study found that culture and mask usage were strongly correlated.

The study evidence shows that mask usage tended to be higher in more collectivistic countries. Collectivism positively predicted mask usage. While the study found high adherence to mask-wearing, the tightness or looseness of the mask was not investigated.

The authors say that it is important to ascertain mask-wearing as it indicates the role culture plays in present and future emergency situations.

"Understanding cultural differences not only provides insight into the pandemic but helps the world prepare for future crises," co-author Prof Jackson G. Lu said in a press statement.
*For more Covid-19 research, science and news, click READ|Good news for vaccinators? SA can now keep Pfizer jabs in a bar fridge for a month

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Global study finds that culture drives mask-wearing | Health24

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Mask-wearing adherence is influenced more by a collective need than individual needs More than 360 000 people participated in a survey on mask-wearing They indicated their adherence on a scale from zero to four Researchers have found evidence that adherence to mask-wearing tends to be higher in more collectivistic countries.

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How does syntactic form shape our interactions and perceptions of ourselves?

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How does syntactic form shape our interactions and perceptions of ourselves?

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For years, communities of color have expressed trepidation and concern about what can happen during police interactions. The conviction of former officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis may come to mind as a step toward justice, yet some encounters that should be routine-like traffic stops-can still prove deadly, as with the police shooting of Daunte Wright, who died just a few miles from where Floyd did.

Former US Attorney General William Barr has argued that Americans should simply be deferential to police and show them "the respect and support that law enforcement deserves." Barr has also suggested that no police orders should be ignored, even if they happen to be illegal, but that citizens should instead "comply first, and, if warranted, complain later." Those in more privileged positions, who may not have had many fraught encounters with the police, might presume that being always polite and obedient would be the best way to avoid being arrested or, in the worst-case scenario, killed at the hands of police.

But when it comes to the kind of language we're conditioned to use in the presence of the most powerful members of society, especially for more disadvantaged and marginalized groups, being polite may actually prevent us from exercising our civil liberties. Janet E. Ainsworth, in "In a Different Register: The Pragmatics of Powerlessness in Police Interrogation," explores how using more polite, indirect ways of speaking may affect whether suspects can successfully invoke their Miranda rights under police interrogation.

Certain groups tend to use indirect speech more, including women and ethnic minorities and relatively powerless groups in society.

The question of how we do things with words in the eyes of the law is a complex subject, considering the ambiguities within polite language. In performative speech acts like a judge's "I hereby sentence you to death" or a monarch's "I dub thee Sir John," it's the very act of saying something in direct and unequivocal language that makes things happen: someone is actually sentenced to die, or someone gets knighted. Much of the language of the law favors this kind of direct and explicit, and somewhat formulaic, language to get things done, such as a lawyer's common refrain "I object!" or a suspect's "I invoke my right to counsel."

But in many social situations that necessitate polite language, a lot of the ways we perform actions with words are with indirect speech. Because it's not always explicit, this more ambiguous politeness can run the risk of being misinterpreted. For example, "What time is it getting to be?" said at a party might be a hint that someone wants to leave, without explicitly saying "I want us to leave now." As Ainsworth points out, sociolinguistic research shows that certain groups tend to use indirect speech more, including women and ethnic minorities and relatively powerless groups in society, including many men. In interactions with police, linguistic markers of politeness are quite often used, such as lexical hedges ("I guess I should have a lawyer"), tag questions ("I should see a lawyer, shouldn't I?"), modal verbs ("I might need a lawyer"), avoiding imperatives ("Would you call my lawyer?"), and rising intonation (or what's popularly known as uptalk?).

Because of the seemingly gendered nature of this way of speaking, linguists such as Robin Lakoff have infamously claimed that these are markers of "women's language." For Lakoff, women who use this kind of indirect speech appear less certain and confident than those who use more direct, typically male speech patterns. Linguist William O'Barr (not to be confused with the former attorney general), after analyzing 150 hours of courtroom proceedings with testimony from both male and female participants, suggests that this "female" register of speech is actually more strongly correlated with powerlessness than with gender. It's just that, according to O'Barr, women more often "occupy relatively powerless social positions" than men do.

What the sociolinguistic research tells us is that this kind of indirect register has to be understood in terms of how extreme a power imbalance is in a social and speech context. The imbalance can lead less powerful speakers to choose to speak more equivocally and ambiguously, especially where more direct or assertive statements, such as commanding imperatives ("Get me a lawyer") might lead to negative consequences.

An interaction with the police, particularly in an interrogation, may be one of the most high-stress, nerve-wracking situations that speakers from relatively marginalized communities might find themselves in. Those powerless speakers then have a vested interest in being polite to the police, using these more powerless registers of language, lest they get on the wrong side of the law. On top of this, a police interrogation can be a fairly intimidating and often coercive proceeding, as the police attempt to extract information from suspects with all the tools at their disposal-linguistics included. As Ainsworth points out, the police may even attempt to manipulate the situation to increase a suspect's anxiety and magnify both the power of the interrogator and the extreme powerlessness of the person being interrogated in order to get the information they need. One way is to use the indirectness and perceived uncertainty of a suspect's polite language to actively work against them by either bypassing or denying them their Miranda rights. So, while a suspect might believe they're invoking their Fifth Amendment right to counsel, if they don't directly articulate something unambiguous, like "I want a lawyer and I won't talk to you without one," and instead request a lawyer more ambiguously using indirect speech, these rights may often be plausibly ignored by the police.

In several cases, suspects have repeatedly given statements like "I think I should call my lawyer" or even more specifically in one case, "Wait a minute. Maybe I ought to have an attorney. You guys are trying to pin a murder rap on me, give me 20 to 40 years." Neither the police interrogators nor the Illinois Supreme Court in the latter case decided this was direct enough to consider the suspect exercising a right to counsel, largely because of the linguistic hedge "maybe," even though hedges are frequently used not only in ordinary language, but even in scientific language.

What many of these cases show is that often if a suspect simply uses the wrong syntactic form, especially when being more polite and using a more submissive register, the courts may decide that those suspects have failed to invoke their right to a lawyer. This is even if ordinarily most of us would commonly understand these indirect statements as exactly that: requests for a lawyer.

One of the problems Ainsworth points out is that often the institutions that frame these laws, use them to judge suspects, or enforce them are male dominated and formally hold extreme power. In interactions with them, more-direct speech acts and imperatives, and the assertive language characteristic of male speech, are assumed to be a neutral human standard for understanding legal questions. Without taking into account the social context and the typically indirect speech of the less powerful, the way a law is framed may put more-powerless groups, such as women and marginalized minorities, at a distinct disadvantage in terms of exercising their rights, when more ambiguous, polite language may be a key to surviving an interaction with the police.
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How Being Polite with Police Can Backfire - JSTOR Daily

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For years, communities of color have expressed trepidation and concern about what can happen during police interactions. The conviction of former officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis may come to mind as a step toward justice, yet some encounters that should be routine-like traffic stops-can still prove deadly, as with the police shooting of Daunte Wright, who died just a few miles from where Floyd did.

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Backlash Against Feminism; Backlash Then, Backlash Now

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Backlash Against Feminism; Backlash Then, Backlash Now

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Today's modern woman is stressed and overworked, can't seem to find a partner, and is concerned about her prospects for fertility. These statements surely sound familiar and have a ring of truth. But wait: is this what's happening in 2021? Or was this the message of an earlier era? And, more importantly: are these assertions, then or now, even true?

Susan Faludi's 1991 breakout critique, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, tackles the third question. As a result of the Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s, women of the 1980s experienced a "backlash," Faludi argued. In her estimation, while not a true conspiracy, the backlash could be viewed as the subtle and pervasive effort-witnessed in everything from popular culture to marketing to misleading media reportage-that aimed to undermine the progress women had made in the previous decade by maintaining that women were worse off. The "backlash" narrative, in Faludi's view, also made a more brazenly harmful claim: that the women's movement was the culprit for women's newfound struggles. But these proclamations were not only damaging, Faludi noted, they were flat-out wrong.

While it may have been true that women in the 80s were carrying a greater load, or that family life was challenging, Faludi exposed how these kinds of narratives--that women were suffering because of the new freedoms they gained in the previous decade--hid deeper truths: that men, not women, benefitted from marriage; that women with children often showed signs of depression; and that employment was the greatest factor in measuring a woman's happiness. If women were struggling, the causes were more deeply rooted in systemic oppression and unequal policies than in the personal choices women made regarding their employment, relationships, and motherhood.

It's been 30 years since Backlash was published. While, in some ways, the circumstances of women in America have improved, in many critical ways, they have not. If a "backlash" blames ambitious individual women and the feminist movement for their current challenges, rather than focusing on the machinery that has enabled these circumstances, then today's "backlash" is dressed in different clothing-but no less real.

Let's start with the gender wage gap: The fact is, it's barely moved in decades. In 1979, the very first year that data comparing men and women's earnings is available, women earned 62% of what men did. In the 80s and 90s, the percentage has creeped up. However, in the nearly two decades between 2000 and 2018, the figure has barely shifted. It was 77% in 2000, and 81% in 2018.

"No feminist ever said the women's movement was about women 'having it all.'"

And here's another example: The pernicious issue of whether women can "have it all" still persists. The question itself-first posited by Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown-was never the right one to ask, Faludi points out.

"No feminist ever said the women's movement was about women 'having it all,'" she wrote to me in an email. "In the 80s, it was falsely held up as a feminist promise broken. Today, as then, the inability of women to lead a life that allows for both work and family has nothing to do with the consequences of feminism and everything to do with the refusal of government and corporate America to provide even the barebones basic structures to make that possible."

Whether women are aiming for "it all" or not, COVID-19 has been a wake-up call that they are still shouldering most of the load at home. Although egalitarian households have been shown to reap many benefits in terms of the couple's satisfaction, the stress of extra duties--childcare, tutoring, eldercare--exposes the fact that it's women, especially mothers, who have been saddled with these tasks.

In Backlash, Faludi argued that working-class men often felt challenged by the role-reversals in their relationships when women began out-earning them. While heterosexual couples today are more likely to have female breadwinners, this trend doesn't mean that men "aren't distressed by their loss of standing, income, occupational worth, and dignity," Faludi wrote to me. The solution, she posits, is to "redefine the terms so men's 'strength' isn't contingent on women's 'weakness.'"

I asked Faludi if marriage today, as in the 80s, still benefits men more than women.

"Depends on the marriage," she wrote. "But given the era we're in-with married women with children under the pandemic doing the vast share of the child care, home care, school care, and sacrificing their work life and independence, I'd say men still are getting a whole lot more out of the state of matrimony."

A report from the Council on Contemporary Families reflects the trends over the last few decades, showing that from the mid-90s to early 2000s, about the time that the "backlash" may have been having its real impact, "support for gender equality stalled, even reversed." While the curve has turned around since then, the global pandemic has illustrated how fragile support for gender equality can be, especially during challenging times. A New York Times investigation looked at the current effects:

The crushing toll on working mothers' mental health reflects a level of societal betrayal, according to Dr. [Wendy] Dean. "This isn't burnout - this is a societal choice," she said. "It's driving mothers to make decisions that nobody should ever have to make for their kids."

This toll, it should be clear, is quantifiable: over the past year, nearly 3 million women have dropped out of the workforce.

The New Media Backlash

In Backlash, Faludi was sharply critical of the media's role in supporting and promoting sexist ideas about women. I was shocked to read stories like this:

At Newsday, a male editor assigned reporter Marilyn Goldstein a story on the women's movement with these instructions: "Get out there and find an authority who'll say this is all a crock of shit."

The lack of factual evidence to support many claims made in feature stories, even in major publications, was startling. Today, in some ways, we're even worse off. While the gatekeepers of major publications can be helpful, today's social media landscape and fake news universe has opened the floodgates to misinformation.

"The media is a very different beast now," Faludi wrote to me. "When I was reporting Backlash, there was no social media and the press was a clearly defined set of institutions with a reputation to uphold. Now it's a free-for-all-and women are the worse for it, with very little recourse when they are attacked other than to retreat into silence," she said. The irony here, in her view, is that "the same technology that was supposed to 'liberate' women's voices has muzzled them."

Backlash in Context

For some historical context, I turned to Stephanie Coontz, historian and director of public education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

"Faludi did a powerful, excellent job of describing the misuse of science and the kind of propaganda that was being aimed at women," she wrote to me in an email.

Coontz, like Faludi, argues that it was precisely because the women's movement had made progress that anti-feminist voices emerged in response. She sees this response as a "sign of what we were accomplishing in comparison to the 60s and 70s... when we were still such a minority movement that our opponents weren't feeling threatened." Coontz, who deeply respects Faludi's work, does remember having a "strong reaction" to the term "backlash" when the book came out.

It is important, after all, to know the enemies of feminism, the faces behind misogynistic policies, and the subtle influences on these forces.

In her view, there was a "backlash" after the American Revolution and after World War II, but what happened in the 80s was different. A more appropriate term, according to Coontz, is to call it a "rearguard action-or perhaps a counter-offensive-to defend or regain ground that feminists have been steadily encroaching upon."

As a historian, she believed that "Faludi gave the impression that we were the ones having to fight a rearguard action, when in fact we were making enough progress to scare the crap out of people who had never supported us, stimulating them to reach for new arguments (and eventually to expose just how opposed to equality they really were and are)."

Coontz exposed an important distinction. It is important, after all, to know the enemies of feminism, the faces behind misogynistic policies, and the subtle influences on these forces. The term "backlash," however, may be understood to represent the effect of the forces, and its this effect on which Faludi shed light.

A Personal Note

When I first read Backlash, I felt that I'd finally come across something to sink my teeth into. It helped me understand the way the environment around me had the power to shift collective ideas about what we, as women, should be doing. And why we should be worried about failing to reach certain milestones.

As a single woman in my late 30s, I've pretty much given up on the milestone concept in my life. That's not to say that I don't want a partner. It's just that I don't want that as the goal. And I surely don't want that at the expense of my own autonomy or happiness. I'm sure other women my age feel this way too. It's difficult for us to complain about it, because no one is overtly telling us what we're doing is wrong.

But the expectations come across in the small things-the questions focusing on relationships, rather than personal achievements. Instead of asking what we want, others often ask about our "progress" on the relationship front. My friends could tell you that I'm all for discussing these matters to death. But I also don't want my relationship status to be viewed as an indicator of "how well I'm doing." There's so much to the world, and women deserve to enjoy all of it. As Faludi puts it, the essence of feminism is about being able to make our own choices, and for a variety of choices to be equally valid.

Backlash Then, Backlash Now

"Backlash," as Faludi defines it, "will always be with us in one phase or another-kind of like a virus, alas," she wrote to me. "The more women advance, or the more men feel they are slipping in status, the greater the pushback."

In the 2020 edition of Backlash, Faludi emphasizes this point: "If anything, a Backlash written in 2020 would be direr in many respects, starting of course, with the election of the most flagrantly misogynist president in our nation's history."

Still, we're seeing signs of progress. The #MeToo movement is the most recent example of feminism showing a comeback. Trump lost re-election, and we have our first woman as Vice President--both of which, I believe, should be seen as signs of progress for women. But where we see progress, Backlash instructs us, we should also expect pushback. I asked Faludi if we might now expect denigration directed toward Kamala Harris.

"I'm not keen on crystal-ball forecasting, but I'd be shocked if that wasn't the case," she wrote. "Already, we've seen the jaw-dropping vitriol directed her way-from the former Predator in Chief on down. Veep can play as 'wife' to a president, which lowers the fury level. The big backlash will come if/when Harris runs for president."
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Backlash Then, Backlash Now | JSTOR Daily

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Today's modern woman is stressed and overworked, can't seem to find a partner, and is concerned about her prospects for fertility. These statements surely sound familiar and have a ring of truth. But wait: is this what's happening in 2021? Or was this the message of an earlier era?

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Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds

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Racism in the Structure of Everyday Worlds

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Has Gender impacted our finance and lifestyle?

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Has Gender impacted our finance and lifestyle?

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If you shop at any online retailer or brick-and-mortar store, you'll get a crash course in advertising based on gender.

"Masculine" products come in black or navy blue packaging with boutique brand names like Bull Dog, Vikings Blade, and Rugged and Dapper. If the products have a fragrance, it's a muskier scent.

Meanwhile, "female" products are hard to miss: an explosion of pink and light purple, with an added dose of glitter. If scented, the fragrances are fruity and floral, like sweet pea and violet, apple blossom, and raspberry rain - whatever that is.

While scent and color are perhaps the most obvious difference between products traditionally aimed at men and women, there's another, subtler difference: the price tag. And it's costing those who buy products aimed at women significantly more.

Gender-based pricing, also known as "pink tax," is an upcharge on products traditionally intended for women which have only cosmetic differences from comparable products traditionally intended for men.

In other words, it's not actually a tax.

It's an "income-generating scenario for private companies who found a way to make their product look either more directed to or more appropriate for the population and saw that as a moneymaker," explains Jennifer Weiss-Wolf, a lawyer, vice president for the Brennan School of Justice at NYU School of Law, and co-founder of Period Equity.

"I think the motivations around the pink tax come more explicitly from a classic capitalist stance: If you can make money off of it, you should," she continues.

Yet pink tax is not a new phenomenon. Over the past 20 years, California, Connecticut, Florida, and South Dakota have released reports on gender pricing in their states. In 2010, Consumer Reports highlighted the matter nationally with a study that found, at the time, women paid as much as 50 percent more than men did for similar products.

The issue was delineated more finely in 2015 when the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs released a report about price disparities for 794 comparable products from 91 brands sold throughout the city.

The report examined five different industries, such as personal care products or senior/home healthcare products. These encompassed 35 product categories, such as bodywash or shampoo. In every single of those five industries, consumer goods marketed to women and girls cost more. The same was the case in all but five of the 35 product categories.

Researchers looked at 106 products in the toys and accessories category and found that, on average, those intended for girls were priced 7 percent higher.

The most egregious upcharges, however, were among personal care products.

For example, a five-pack of Schick Hydro cartridges in purple packaging cost $18.49, while the same count of Schick Hydro refills in blue packaging cost $14.99.

Again, other than their packaging color, the products look exactly the same.

NYC's report found women faced an average price difference of 13 percent for personal care products among the 122 products compared in the study. And the authors aptly noted that these items, such as shaving gel and deodorant, are the ones purchased most frequently compared with other categories - meaning that the costs add up over time. While this is unfair for all those shopping for these products, that 13 percent price increase hits women and girls who come from lower income households even harder.

Legislative attempts, however, could correct the pink tax. In 1995, then-Assemblywoman Jackie Speier successfully passed a bill that forbade gender pricing of services, such as haircuts.

Now as a Congresswoman, Rep. Speier (D-CA) is going national: She reintroduced the Pink Tax Repeal Act this year to specifically address products subject to the pink tax. (An earlier version of the bill introduced in 2016 failed to make it out of committee). If the new bill passes, it would allow state attorneys general "to take civil action on consumers wronged by discriminatory practices." In other words, they can go directly after businesses that charge men and women different prices.

The pink tax isn't the only upcharge that affects women. There's also the "tampon tax," which refers to the sales tax applied to feminine hygiene items such as pads, liners, tampons, and cups.

Currently, 36 states still apply sales tax to these necessary menstrual items, according to data from Weiss-Wolf's organization Period Equity. The sales tax on these products vary and are based on the state's tax code.

So what? You might wonder. Everyone pays sales tax. It seems fair that tampons and pads have a sales tax, too.

Not quite, said Weiss-Wolf. States establish their own tax exemptions, and in her book Periods Gone Public: Taking A Stand for Menstrual Equity, she elaborates on some very not-so-necessary exemptions some states have.

"I went through every tax code in every state that didn't exempt menstrual products to see what they did exempt, and the list is ridiculous," Weiss-Wolf tells Healthline. The tax-exempt items, listed both in Weiss-Wolf's book and ones Healthline tracked down, range from marshmallows in Florida to cooking wine in California. Maine is snowmobiles, and it's barbecue sunflower seeds in Indiana and gun club memberships in Wisconsin.

If barbecue sunflower seeds are tax-exempt, argues Weiss-Wolf, then feminine hygiene products should be, too.

The tampon tax is often incorrectly referred to as a luxury tax, Weiss-Wolf explains. Rather, it's an ordinary sales tax applied to all goods - but since only people who menstruate use feminine hygiene products, the tax disproportionately affects us.

Just like the upcharge on personal care items geared for women, the small amounts of sales tax we shell out every month to manage Aunt Flo adds up over a lifetime, and this adversely affects women from low-income households.

"This issue has real resonance for people," Weiss-Wolf tells Healthline. "I think partly because the experience of menstruation is so universal for anybody who's experienced it, as is the understanding that being able to manage it is so essential to one's ability to participate fully in daily life and have a dignified existence."

Both men and women of all political stripes understand that the "economics of menstruation," as Weiss-Wolf calls it, is involuntary. Her group Period Equity took this issue nationwide in 2015 by partnering with Cosmopolitan magazine on a Change.org petition to "axe the tampon tax." But sales tax must be addressed by advocates state by state.

And there's a long way to go.

Five states - Alaska, Delaware, New Hampshire, Montana, and Oregon - don't have a sales tax to begin with, so pads and tampons aren't taxed there. Meanwhile, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania had previously legislated on their own to remove sales tax from these items, according to Periods Gone Public.

Since 2015, thanks to increased advocacy around period equity, 24 states have introduced bills to exempt pads and tampons from sales tax. However, only Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, and New York have been successful in making these sanitary necessities tax-exempt so far. That said, Arizona, Nebraska, and Virginia introduced tampon tax bills in their legislatures in 2018.

So, why has it taken this long to even have this conversation?

"The most realistic scenario is that most of our legislators don't menstruate, so they weren't really thinking about it in any sort of constructive way," says Weiss-Wolf.

In addition to the tampon tax, menstrual equity advocacy is really gaining steam around the accessibility of feminine hygiene products for homeless women and women in prisons and public schools.

"They're as necessary as toilet paper," said a City Councilwoman in 2016 when NYC voted to make feminine hygiene products free in schools, shelters, and jails. Reportedly 300,000 schoolgirls ages 11 to 18 and 23,000 women and girls living in shelters in NYC were affected by this groundbreaking bill.

Having access to these sanitary items grant dignity and enable women and girls to fully participate in society.

"Even in this current political environment, which is so toxic and so polarized... this is one area [of accessibility that has] proven to transcend partisanship and have really strong support on both sides of the aisle," says Weiss-Wolf.

This year, New York State voted to provide free feminine hygiene products in girls' restrooms for grades 6 through 12.

"This issue has real resonance for people. I think partly because the
experience of menstruation is so universal for anybody who's experienced it, as
is the understanding that being able to manage it is so essential to one's
ability to participate fully in daily life and have a dignified existence." -
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf

In 2015 and 2017, a Wisconsin lawmaker introduced a bill to make pads and tampons available for free at public schools, schools that use the state's voucher program, and in government buildings. In Canada, a city councilor in Toronto proposed a similar bill for homeless shelters.

Menstrual equity has ways to go in the majority of America's states, and we can look to other countries to for inspiration of what could be.

Kenya ditched
its sales tax on feminine hygiene products in 2004 and has allocated millions
towards distributing pads in schools in an effort to boost girls' attendance.

Canada ditched
its goods and services tax (similar to sales tax) on tampons in 2015. Australia
voted
to do the same just last month, although it needs further approval by
individual territories.

A pilot program in Aberdeen,
Scotland is distributing
feminine hygiene products to women in low-income households as a test for a
possible larger program.

The United Kingdom also eliminated the tampon
tax, although there are Brexit-related reasons it won't go into effect yet. To
compensate, several major chains in the UK, such
as Tesco, have cut prices on feminine hygiene products themselves.

The United States is finally having a long overdue discussion about the costs associated with our biology. As many of us have grown to love a floral-scented deodorant, there's not much incentive for companies to stop making them different - but at least they can stop upcharging us for it.

And while having a period (and the cramps that go with it) may never be a pleasant experience, discussion around the economics of menstruation seems to be prompting more practicality and compassion for those that need products to manage it.
Jessica Wakeman is a writer and editor focusing on women's political, social, and cultural issues. Originally from Connecticut, she studied journalism and gender and sexuality studies at NYU. She has previously been an editor at The Frisky, Daily Dot, HelloGiggles, YouBeauty, and Someecards, and has also worked for Huffington Post, Radar Magazine, and NYmag.com. Her writing has appeared in a number of print and online titles, including Glamour, Rolling Stone, Bitch, the New York Daily News, the New York Times Review of Books, The Cut, Bustle, and Romper. She's on the board of directors of Bitch Media, a feminist media nonprofit. She resides in Brooklyn with her husband. See more of her work on her website and follow her on .

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Gender-based pricing, also known as "pink tax," is an upcharge on products intended for women with only cosmetic differences than products intended for men. In other words, it's not actually a tax but a way for private companies to make more money. Find out how these price discrepancies affect consumers.

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Are we getting Shakespeare's rhythms all wrong?

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Are we getting Shakespeare's rhythms all wrong?

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Have you ever gone to a performance of one of William Shakespeare's plays and found yourself confused about what an actor is going on about? Take heart. Mort Paterson is a Shakespearean actor and he writes that even he has the same problem sometimes.

"Even when all the words are audible, the thoughts and images packed into the verse seem to arrive as an intractable jumble," he writes. "Too often, after hearing a speech on stage or screen, have I turned to my companion and asked 'What did he/she just say?'-only to receive a shrug of incomprehension."

Schoolmasters in Shakespeare's own day discouraged it as too sing-songy to be appropriately "actorly."

It doesn't help, of course, that the plays' language is more than 400 years old. But Paterson argues that something else is going on as well. He writes that traditionalists call for Shakespeare's iambic pentameter to be spoken with alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. But, he notes, that tends to sound unnatural. In fact, schoolmasters in Shakespeare's own day discouraged it as too sing-songy to be appropriately "actorly." Today, some actors and drama coaches find it's too difficult to stick with the alternating pattern, though many still advocate it, at least in theory.

Pronouncing Shakespeare's verse in iambic pentameter may make it difficult for an audience to understand what's being said, since it naturally leads to stresses on unimportant words. Take a line from Hamlet, written in a traditionalist unstressed-stressed pattern: "Thus CONscience DOTH make COWards OF us ALL." Our brains interpret the stress on minor words like "doth" and "of" to mark these words as important, which hinders comprehension.

Paterson also argues that some ideas about Shakespearean rhythms, which involve spacing out lines so that each stressed syllable takes up equal time, make for very unnatural speech patterns, even creating slight spaces in the middle of words. It also seems to go against the playwright's own intentions. Hamlet, for example, encourages the Players to speak their lines "trippingly on the tongue." And, in Henry IV, Hotspur complains about "mincing" recitation of lines: "'Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag."

On the other hand, Paterson rejects the idea of speaking Shakespeare's verse like prose, with no particular rhythm at all. Instead, he suggests that the "beats" of each line should be regular, and should be organized around important words.

This is a sort of idealized version of the way people naturally arrange the rhythms of their words when speaking. Paterson quotes linguist Dwight Bolinger, who argues that "rhythmic regularity is something that speakers unconsciously strive for, though it seldom turns out so neatly."

Paterson suggests that the performance of Shakespeare's verse by actors like Judi Dench and Kenneth Branagh both conveys the meaning of the words and provides a pleasurable rhythmic cadence.

"It is like really good posture: we rarely see it, but when we do (as in ballet and sports) we admire it," he writes. "Thus for a performer on stage to speak with the semantic efficiency of rhythmic control indicates a character with whose admirable expressive qualities we can identify."
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Are We Getting Shakespeare's Rhythms All Wrong? | JSTOR Daily

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Have you ever gone to a performance of one of William Shakespeare's plays and found yourself confused about what an actor is going on about? Take heart. Mort Paterson is a Shakespearean actor and he writes that even he has the same problem sometimes.

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What is systemic inequality like in a financial context?

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What is systemic inequality like in a financial context?

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A few years ago, one of my friends confessed something over coffee. She leaned forward. Her voice fell to a hush: "I love my kids, but from a financial standpoint, I regret having them."

My friend is a tenured professor. She's published books with major presses, including Oxford. People beg her to speak at conferences.

Despite all this, her family is barely getting by. (Her husband is also a highly-regarded professor in engineering.) When she was done talking, her face glowed with shame.

It's a common story these days.

Here's something that might surprise you: The average cost of living in the U.S. far exceeds the average income of most professionals. We're talking about nurses and social workers, firefighters and police officers, school teachers and pediatricians, even carpenters and engineers.

They're the ones who keep society running, and they currently don't make enough to support their families.

Take a look at the average monthly living costs for a family of four. These are extremely conservative estimates gathered from multiple cost of living calculators, plus my own observations:

Housing: $1,500
Transportation (including gas): $800
Food: $1,000
Utilities: $400
Phones: $150
Entertainment: $50
Clothing: $200
Healthcare: $400
Emergency savings: $500
Total: $5,000

The median household income stands at $5,264 per month before taxes. That leaves just under $4,000 after taxes, and it doesn't include deductions for 401K and basic health insurance - or student loans.

All things considered, the average household is sinking into debt by about a thousand dollars per month.

Households with two incomes used to have extra cash to spend on things like vacations or private school tuition.

That's not true anymore.

Two years ago, The New York Times reported on the average incomes and expenses of parents with two children. Time and again, they found that even incomes barely brings in enough cash, since you wind up paying anywhere from $500 to $2,000 a month for childcare.

The reason is simple. The average job hasn't kept up with the cost of living. It doesn't even come close:

Basically, half of one parent's monthly income covers daycare, and the rest goes to offset the cost of living. It's pretty brutal. These days, the luckiest families break even. Everyone else is still going into debt, just not as much as they would be with a single income.

CNN has a new online calculator called "How much will it cost to raise your child?" It's fun to play with, in a perverse kind of way. Here's how much it's going to cost me to raise my daughter:

According to calculators like this, having just one kid adds about $17,000 a year to your annual cost of living. After all, you have to feed and clothe them. You have to move into a bigger house or apartment.

This might explain why the U.S. birthrate is the lowest it's been in 32 years. More than 40 percent of millennials report putting off children and buying homes because of financial instability.

This is going to have consequences for baby boomers. They should care, if only for selfish reasons. According to Joseph Coughlin of Forbes, it means they're not going to be able to sell their homes. That's important because older people typically want to downsize after they retire and cash in on their equity. Here's how Coughlin imagines that conversation going:

Boomer Seller: The town has great schools.

Millennial Buyer: I don't have kids.

Boomer Seller: The house has three bedrooms. My husband and I have enjoyed it for years.

Millennial Buyer: I live alone...with my dog.

Boomer Seller: Well, there is a big, wonderful yard for your dog to play in.

Millennial Buyer: It's a very small dog.

In other words, not great.

Sorry, boomers.

Gaslighting is when you construct a fake reality to excuse yourself from your own sinister actions and behaviors.

Abusers do it all the time.

Hoarding wealth is a kind of abuse the wealthy inflict on the entire world. To excuse it, they construct a series of lies that allow them to blame everyone for their own financial problems.

It's pretty easy to distract someone from systemic inequality and make them feel guilty about a financial situation that's not their fault. You just have to talk about flat screen televisions and smartphones, even if those make up a tiny fraction of someone's monthly budget. You call them lazy, and tell them they spend too much time watching Netflix.

You browbeat them for not investing in stocks, or pouring money into volatile assets. You shame them for working meaningful jobs that contribute something to civilization, instead of becoming rich so they can opt out of the economy altogether.

You accuse them of resenting wealth, and tell them they have a poor attitude toward money (whatever that means). Then you pump them full of fairy tales, about how someone made a fortune from nothing. Finally, you tell them money doesn't matter, and that no amount of it will ever make them happy unless they learn to love themselves. It works wonders, because it confuses the hell out of people. Sufficiently gaslight someone over their finances, and they won't know what to think anymore.

That's the point.

There's millions of desperate people out there. If they have a job, it doesn't pay enough. Here's the advice they're getting:

Invest in stocks.

Start a side hustle.

Go viral.

Start your own company.

Spend less money.

No offense, but this all sounds kind of like throwing a drowning person a paddle made out of lead. It might look helpful, but it's not. It does nothing but shift responsibilities from governments and economic structures to overwhelmed, overburdened individuals.

It's great to make extra income off a side hustle, or turn your talents into a job that doesn't exist yet. It's great to be exceptional, but being exceptional by definition means that not everyone can do it. You don't solve poverty and wage gaps by expecting everyone to be a genius.

Let's get real for a minute.

The economy needs baristas. It needs cashiers and servers and farmers. Society needs police officers and school teachers. It needs nurses and social workers. When someone gaslights them about their finances because they can't pay their bills, they're pretending we can live in a world without them. The truth is, we need them far more than we do lifestyle vloggers. The solution to widespread financial desperation isn't to turn everyone into millionaire YouTubers and Instagram models.

It's to pay them more.

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We Can't Afford to Live Anymore, and The Rich Are Gaslighting Us

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A few years ago, one of my friends confessed something over coffee. She leaned forward. Her voice fell to a hush: "I love my kids, but from a financial standpoint, I regret having them." My friend is a tenured professor. She's published books with major presses, including Oxford.

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"Is this patriot enough?" Asian-American veteran shows scars in powerful speech denouncing racism

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What is the connection between existential nihilism and your generation?

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What is the connection between existential nihilism and your generation?

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Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die"-Morty Smith from the Cartoon Network show, Rick and Morty. The idea that life has no intrinsic value is a common idea in Existential Nihilism. As younger generations look for answers, sharing their issues with the world through television and movie screens this concept is now prominent in pop culture. The younger generation begins to wonder what is left to find but nothingness.

The prominence of existential nihilism in pop culture affects several generations of people. The growing generation gap, caused by social media and lack of interaction, creates "disconnection" according to Alex Smith, writer for the daily mail. This disconnection leads to people feeling hopeless: No job, no house, student loans, and constant pressure to be social, many millennials and Gen Z's struggle to find a place in the world that their parents and grandparents left behind. This struggle leads to rising rates of depression and less interest in religious affiliations. According to the Public Religion Research Institute," One-third of millennials are religiously unaffiliated." So, what do you do when you don't have a belief system and you perceive the world around you is bleak.

We as a human race have consistently looked for the answer of the question "Why?" Some people turn to religion, but as mentioned above, a growing number of millennials have begun distancing themselves from that popular form of belief. The lack of a religious belief system leaves many to fend for themselves in terms of belonging, not only in their own social circles, but the universe itself. Those generations begin to ask questions like, "Why are we here?" and "Does my life mean anything?" This philosophical thought has now evolved into a prominent theme in pop culture evidenced by our television screens and record charts.

Existential nihilism explains the questions, that millennials and Gen Z are struggling to understand concisely. The philosophical doctrine "that begins with the notion that the world is without meaning or purpose" is one of the final stepping stones in this line of questioning. Existential Nihilism combines the philosophical theories of nihilism and existentialism. As Jeffery Franklin explains in his academic journal titled "Buddhism and Existential Nihilism," "The extent that existential nihilism was shaped by preceding understanding of- or failure to understand..." To further understand how the two concepts, of nihilism and existentialism work together, two philosophers' works, Fredrich Welheim Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre, must be taken into account. Nihilism is commonly associated with Nietzsche, who gave the word meaning.

Nihilism is believed to be 'the idea of nothingness' by most millennials. The ideas of nihilism are most often credited to Nietzsche, a German philosopher in the late 19th century, often described his nihilism as "Every belief, every considering [of] something true, is necessarily false because there is simply no true word." He believed that nihilism would expose all beliefs and sacrosanct truths as proof of a defective system. Nietzsche's ideas often expressed atheism, which led to criticism from many Christian scholars, especially with opinions such as this, "...nihilism [is] a condition in which 'the highest values devalue themselves' and in which [the] answer to the question why? Is missing" Sartre worked these ideas into existentialism work, which was also atheistic.

Sartre's existentialism revolves around the term, "existence precedes essence." He believed that when we abandon illusions, life is revealed as nothing: and for the existentialists, nothingness is the source of not only absolute freedom, but also existential horror and emotional anguish. The younger generations of the nation are dealing with this horror and anguish, as they try to grapple with the reality of life. Stanley Rosen, Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Boston University, states "again the nihilist despairs because he is fully enlightened (the ultimate consequence of enlightenment) or free from all illusions." Sartre believed the only way to be free was to accept the notion of nothingness.

Nothingness can be nothingness only by nihilating itself expressly as nothingness of the world; that is, in its nihilation it must direct itself expressly toward the world in order to constitute itself as refusal of the world. Nothingness carries being in its heart. But how does the emergence [of being] account for the nihilating refusal [of its ultimate Nothingness]?

The millennials ideas of existential nihilism and nihilism are correct, but has it evolved from its initial beginnings?

Nietzsche's and Sartre's philosophical ideas really came into play in the mid-20th century, as atheism grew in prominence. "Our whole...culture has been moving toward a catastrophe, with a tortured tension that is growing from decade to decade: relentlessly, violently, headlong, like a river that wants to reach the end." Sartre is credited with the "currency of existential nihilism in the popular consciousness" Yet Alan Pratt demonstrates that existential nihilism has been a part of the Western intellectual tradition from the beginning [of its history]. Many believe the atheistic existentialist movement of the 40's and 50's popularized the theory. This spread further into pop culture as the century progressed. The socioeconomic changes from Fordism, the system of mass production in the 20th century, to the never-ending stream of commodities in the media particularly affected young people in the late 20th century. As this tidal wave of media hit the nation's youth, they began retaliating with nihilist: movies, music, and tv shows, inspiring some of the greatest artists of that millennium.

In the early 1990's music was dominated by Trent Reznor and Kurt Cobain, the front men of Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana, respectively. Both bands' lyrics were dominated by nihilist themes. Trent Reznor's second album 'the Downward Spiral" particularly chronicled his nihilism. The third track on this album "Heresy" is a homage to his nihilism with lyrics such as: "He's got the answers to ease my curiosity, He dreamed a god up and called it Christianity, God is dead and no one cares, If there is a hell I'll see you there." He addresses this in a 1999 interview "I don't need anything, I don't need anyone, and I don't need to believe there's any reason to anything." James Toth describes Nirvana's nihilism perfectly, "Even Nirvana's lyrics-often nonsensical, cryptic, or just plain dumb-articulated the sort of suburban, post-Reagan nihilism commonly associated with the Alternative Nation." The lyrics of the hit song "Come as you are" are evidence of this "And I forget just why I taste, Oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile, I found it hard, it's hard to find, Oh well, whatever, nevermind"

As Kurt and other artists of that era had experienced those socioeconomic changes their music and art reflected that.

As the 20th century faded into the 21st, a new wave of nihilistic media arrived. The rise of social networks allowed people to communicate on a mass scale, allowing new forms of media to be introduced to the population. T.V shows that would not be picked up by major networks are now lasting for seasons due to the fast transfer of information between the consumer and television networks and the democratization of media due to network alternatives like, Youtube and Netflix.

With the alternative forms of entertainment came the rise of shows with cult followings particularly with the Adult Swim show, Rick and Morty, created by Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland. Premiering in 2013, Rick and Morty quickly amassed a large cult following. The animated parody of "Back to the Future" was crass and nihilistic, as it followed Morty and his grandfather on often ridiculous adventures through the never-ending universe.

The show's nihilistic tendencies pull on the fact that Rick is an all knowing genius, but showing only the bleak existence that comes from that knowledge, " When you know nothing matters the universe is yours."As the show progressed, people began to analyze it, Sarah Marshall writer for 'The Week" writes, "In the world of cartoons; there is nothing else to-do, but embrace nihilism: to realize that the point of existence is to stop searching for the point, and accept the chaos of the moment." This is what Nietzsche and Sartre were talking about, or as Stanley Rosen puts it, "Nihilism is fundamentally an attempt to overcome or repudiate the past on behalf of an unknown and unknowable, yet hoped for future."

As the rate of depression rises in college students and an endless stream of content is at our fingertips, we begin to share more and more on social networks. The rise of nihilist memes, symbols or images, has become a self-aware phenomenon on the internet with pages and articles are dedicated to sharing these. Is this the first step to realizing our nihilistic tendencies as a society? Allan Bloom describes it as this:

Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, as the language derived from nihilism has become a part of their educations and insinuated itself into their daily lives, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language. There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing - caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on, almost indefinitely.

With reddit pages and articles across the internet Rick and Morty has worked people into a frenzy, questioning if the show is nihilistic enough, while others argue in long exposes that people will never understand the show. Sam Theilman, writer for Vice Media, puts it in a nutshell, "It's the nihilism that makes the show such a relief to watch, we root for characters to get divorced for their sakes and for their children, thematically suicide loom large." These problems hold a mirror up to viewers asking them to reevaluate themselves too.

While the Millennials and Gen Z's await the next season of Rick and Morty, maybe existential nihilism will provide them the answers, they so long to seek. The choice between nothingness and illusion is a difficult one, Rosen ponders that "If good and evil are equally unreasonable, then it is impossible to discriminate among the various senses in which reason may be said to be 'beyond good and evil' the result [is] Nihilism." Their views of reason might even be put into question, as their search continues.

The path to finding our reason for existence in the world has a long and difficult history, with many different belief systems and opinions. Maybe 'Rick and Morty' have it right, maybe they don't. As the Millennials and Gen Z's search for their purpose, life will go on and the earth will still spin.

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Existential Nihilism: Do We Really Belong Here?

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Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die"-Morty Smith from the Cartoon Network show, Rick and Morty. The idea that life has no intrinsic value is a common idea in Existential Nihilism. As younger generations look for answers, sharing their issues with the world through television and movie screens this concept is now prominent in pop culture.

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How do dictionary definitions shape meaning, perceptions and stereotypes?

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How do dictionary definitions shape meaning, perceptions and stereotypes?

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Some of the words listed under the entry for 'woman' in Indonesia's official dictionary are sexualised and derogatory.

Last year the Oxford University Press said it would change entries for woman to include more positive descriptions.

Using her artwork to campaign against this, artist Ika Vantiani is hoping for a similar result.

Hussy, mistress, whore, evil woman - these are just some of the nine example compound words that artist Ika Vantiani was shocked to find listed under the entry for 'woman' or 'perempuan' in Indonesia's official dictionary.

All nine were sexualised or derogatory terms. In contrast, in the entry for 'laki-laki', one of the words for man, there is just one example, 'laki-laki jemputan', which means a 'man chosen as a son-in-law'. Another word for man, 'pria' also lists one term: 'pria idaman' meaning 'heartthrob'.

Since making this discovery in 2016, Ika has campaigned through her art for change and as part of that she has assiduously collected editions of the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia, which is compiled by a government agency and is the standard dictionary used in schools and by teachers.

"Perempuan jalang, this one actually means slut. That is the one word that keeps popping up in every edition," she told Reuters.

"The focus is on examples that include words like pelacur or jalang - meaning whore, a woman who loves to sell herself, nasty women, mistress."

Last November, the Oxford University Press said it would change the entries for 'woman' in its dictionaries to include more positive and active descriptions and Ika is hoping for a similar result.
READ MORE | why putting a rainbow halo on Virgin Mary almost landed LGBTQ+ activists in jail
The campaign has drawn attention to what critics say is a patriarchal culture in the world's biggest Muslim majority country. Ika has also gained the support of Indonesia's National Commission on Violence against Women which this year called for a revision.

Language, the commission said, "played an important role in building the values of gender equality and the elimination of violence against women".

Ika and her male colleague, Yolando Zelkeos Siahaya, have highlighted the issue in a series of workshops and exhibitions, including one at the Indonesian national gallery in 2018.

One work featured clear sheets of acrylic with the dictionary entry for 'perempuan' printed across them so that viewers could imagine being referred to in that way.

"Most people when they see this work of mine, they are shocked," said Ika. "They say: 'I never would have thought that is how the word 'woman' is defined in our dictionary.'"
READ MORE | #MustFall movements were 'an act of love'
Last month her work, which include t-shirts that call for change to the entry and were worn at a women's march in 2020, provoked a response from Badan Bahasa, the agency responsible for the dictionary.

The use of the terms, it said, was based on data showing they were among the most frequently used in tandem with 'perempuan'.

"As for the social picture that emerges from the presentation of information in the dictionary not being ideal, that is another discussion," it said in a statement posted on its website.

The response perplexes University of Indonesia linguist Nazarudin, who says Indonesian language data from 2013 collected by Leipzig University shows other phrases, such as women's empowerment or women's rights, were far more frequently used.

"The question is, what kind of data did they have?" he asked, "How can it be so negative?"

A Google search shows there are 98 million entries for 'hak perempuan' meaning women's rights compared to just 481,000 entries for perempuan jalang, the word for 'slut'.

Badan Bahasa told Reuters that in addition to the Leipzig data, it also referred to the Malay Concordance Project, a corpus of classical Malay texts.

Ika says she is hopeful of change.

"I am not saying I want it all to be changed into positive words," she said, "No. But I want objectivity and real conversations."

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Artist on mission to change Indonesia's misogynistic dictionary entry for 'woman' | Arts

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Some of the words listed under the entry for 'woman' in Indonesia's official dictionary are sexualised and derogatory. Last year the Oxford University Press said it would change entries for woman to include more positive descriptions. Using her artwork to campaign against this, artist Ika Vantiani is hoping for a similar result.

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Have any two words become more weaponised?

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Have any two words become more weaponised?

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A US president is banned from social media. A long-time national science reporter resigns in disgrace after repeating a racial slur. A school district drops the names of famous Americans from its buildings. A congresswoman is punished for spreading conspiracy theories.

Each one of these episodes has been cited as evidence of "cancel culture" - the idea that zealous activists, mostly on the left, are seeking to suppress disfavoured free expression by permanently shaming and ostracising individuals who have been deemed to have transgressed.

Just last week, Donald Trump's legal team derided his impeachment trial as "constitutional cancel culture". Disney severed ties with actress Gina Carano, who portrays a popular character in its Star Wars series The Mandalorian, reportedly because of inflammatory social media posts on mask-wearing and the US election.

The national media seems to have a steady supply of new sources of righteous outrage for both sides of the cancel culture debate.

The consequences of being "cancelled" include the loss of friends and social connections, the termination of employment or business opportunities, the denial of a platform from which to share their provocative views.

Sometimes the focus of the outrage is a public figure; other times a private citizen whose actions have been captured and disseminated on social media is in the cross-hairs. In either case, the response can be similarly ferocious. "Cancel culture" frequently makes no distinction.

"Those who embrace the idea (if not the precise language) of cancelling seek more than pat apologies and retractions, although it's not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a larger imbalance of power."

Let's take a closer look at those examples.

Donald Trump's Twitter exile

A survey of the landscape has to start at the top, however, with one of the most powerful people in the world being held to task.

On 9 January, just three days after Donald Trump gave a rally speech to supporters who just hours later stormed the US Capitol, social media company Twitter permanently banned his account from the site.

"Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation," he wrote in a series of tweets. "They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation."

The response from Trump's supporters was quick and furious, however. Trump adviser Jason Miller said that "big tech" was trying to cancel the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020.

If the president of the United States can be cancelled - his backers were saying, both explicitly and implicitly - then what chance do you have of navigating the treacherous waters of modern society?

Although some conservatives characterise the "cancel" movement as an attempt by liberal media to damage high-profile Republicans like Trump, its targets aren't always political figures - or conservatives.

New York Times reporter Donald McNeil had been with the paper for 44 years and taken on a particularly prominent role in 2020 as an expert on the catastrophic global spread of Covid-19. Last Saturday, he announced he was resigning because of what he called his "extraordinarily bad judgement".

During a 2019 trip with teenage students to Peru, he said, he had repeated a racial slur as part of a conversation about whether a 12-year-old should have been suspended from school for using the word.

"Originally, I thought the context in which I used this ugly word could be defended," he wrote. "I now realise that it cannot. It is deeply offensive and hurtful."

Times executive editor Dean Baquet had at first only internally disciplined McNeil for the incident.

But after a pressure from parents of the students on the trip - who alleged McNeil made other comments denigrating black teens - and a letter from other Times staffers calling for McNeil's termination, he said he welcomed the resignation and that the paper does not tolerate racist language "regardless of intent".

"The overarching rule of liberal media circles and liberal politics is that you are free to accuse anyone who deviates from liberal orthodoxy of any kind of bigotry that casually crosses your mind," he wrote. "Just smear them as a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, etc without the slightest need for evidence - and it will be regarded as completely acceptable."

As is often the case with headline-grabbing controversies like this, there's often more to the story than first reported. It's not black-and-white, and real humans - with all their complex mix of real faults and virtues - are involved. At some point, the details of the controversy become secondary to the debate that emerges from it.

For Greenwald, for instance, the Times episode is simply a new piece of evidence that there are two sets of standards at play - one for people who make controversial speech and those who make accusations.

Earlier this year, a member of Congress was the one whose controversial speech came in the form of accusations. Marjorie Taylor Greene stood charged with trafficking in conspiracy theories - about Democrats, about religious minorities and about events like school shootings and forest fires.

Shortly before Democrats and 11 Republicans in the House of Representatives voted to remove Greene from her congressional committee assignments for her past controversial statements, Congressman Jim Jordan took to the airwaves to issue a warning.

"No one is condoning the remarks she has made," Jordan said of Greene's seeming endorsement of violence directed at Democratic leaders and suggestion that high-profile school shootings were staged by anti-gun activists. "That is not the issue. The issue is once this starts, tell me where it ends. Who is next?"

Jordan offered a similar defence during Trump's impeachment vote in January - that the left's attempt to punish conservative politicians for their speech would, inevitably, lead to an environment where average Americans are also at risk.

"The cancel culture doesn't just go after conservatives and Republicans," he said. "It won't just stop there. It'll come for us all. That's what's frightening."

"Is there literally no limit to what a politician can say without consequence?" he asks. "And if the answer is that some limits exist, the question then becomes even more straightforward: why are Jordan and his far-right cohorts convinced that Greene's radicalism didn't go too far?"

At the centre of the debate over "cancel culture" is one of action and consequence. When do words merit punishment? And what form - and permanence - does that punishment take?

The push for accountability - or cancelling - isn't limited to recent words or even to people who lived in the past century. In January, the San Francisco Board of Education voted 6-to-1 to rename 44 of its public schools as a way to "dismantle racism and white-supremacy culture", in the words of board president Gabriela Lopez.

Buildings named after historical figures such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Paul Revere, as well as modern ones, like California Senator Diane Feinstein, are designated for rebranding.

"Lincoln isn't going away, but our school district is taking this opportunity to highlight someone else, highlight someone who normally isn't acknowledged but has contributed to the progress of people of colour, or the progress of the community that we're serving in San Francisco," she said.

That hasn't stopped the board's action from generating a firestorm of controversy. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, a Democrat, called the vote ill-timed, given the challenges schools are facing during the coronavirus pandemic

"The possibility that judging past figures by the standards of the present is both untenable and ethically suspect did not, apparently, occur to the committee," he wrote. "Nor did the committee decide that the towering achievements of Lincoln or Washington or Jefferson might just outweigh their shortcomings."

One of the warnings lobbed by those who rail against "cancel culture" is that it will eventually know no boundaries. The living and the dead will all be subject to judgement by the contemporary standards of the day - standards that can change according to political whim.

Free speech and accountability

"The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation," signatories like JK Rowling, Malcolm Gladwell and Noam Chomsky write in the letter. "The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."

Conservatives have been quick to latch onto the term as a political cudgel to use against liberals whenever they face political adversity.

"This is the left looking to cancel everyone they don't approve of," said Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who cited "cancel culture" as a reason publisher Simon & Schuster terminated his book deal after he supported challenges to Joe Biden's presidential victory. "I will fight this cancel culture with everything I have."

The response from the left, however, has been that there's a difference between cancelling someone and holding them accountable for their actions; that free speech is protected from government interference but its abuse has consequences within society.

Parker Malloy of the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America says that many of the conservative arguments against "cancel culture" are abandoned when the sides are switched and it is liberal words or actions that are found objectionable. She notes Hawley, for instance, celebrated a push to have credit-card companies stop doing business with adult website Pornhub.

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Cancel culture: Have any two words become more weaponised?

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A US president is banned from social media. A long-time national science reporter resigns in disgrace after repeating a racial slur. A school district drops the names of famous Americans from its buildings. A congresswoman is punished for spreading conspiracy theories.

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How do algorithms detect our emotions through online writing?

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How do algorithms detect our emotions through online writing?

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A quarter-century ago, social psychologist Anthony Greenwald of the University of Washington developed a test that exposed an uncomfortable aspect of the human mind: People have deep-seated biases of which they are completely unaware. And these hidden attitudes - known as implicit bias - influence the way we act toward each other, often with unintended discriminatory consequences.

Since then, Greenwald and his main collaborators, Mahzarin Banaji and Brian Nosek, have used the implicit association test to measure how fast and accurately people associate different social groups with qualities like good and bad. They have developed versions of the test to measure things such as unconscious attitudes about race, gender stereotypes and bias against older people. Those tests have revealed just how pervasive implicit bias is. (Project Implicit offers public versions of the tests on its website here.)

CREDIT: JAMES PROVOST (CC BY-ND)

Psychologist Anthony Greenwald

University of Washington

The researchers' work has also shown how much implicit bias can shape social behavior and decision-making. Even people with the best intentions are influenced by these hidden attitudes, behaving in ways that can create disparities in hiring practices, student evaluations, law enforcement, criminal proceedings - pretty much anywhere people are making decisions that affect others. Such disparities can result from bias against certain groups, or favoritism toward other ones. Today, implicit bias is widely understood to be a cause of unintended discrimination that leads to racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and other inequalities.

Discussions around the role of racism and implicit bias in the pattern of unequal treatment of racial minorities by law enforcement are intensifying following a roster of high-profile cases, most recently the killing of George Floyd. Floyd, an unarmed black man, died in Minneapolis last month after a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes.

As awareness of implicit bias and its effects has increased, so has interest in mitigating it. But that is much harder to do than scientists expected, as Greenwald told an audience in Seattle in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Greenwald, coauthor of an overview on implicit bias research in the 2020 Annual Review of Psychology, spoke with Knowable Magazine about what does and doesn't work to counter the disparities that implicit bias can produce.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How do you test for associations that people aren't aware they have?
The first implicit association test I created was one involving the names of flowers and insects, and words meaning things pleasant or unpleasant. You had to use left and right hands to classify them, tapping on a keyboard as they appeared on the screen. It was a very easy task when you had to use the right hand for both pleasant words and flower names, and the left hand for unpleasant words and insect names, because we typically think of flowers as pleasant and insects as unpleasant.

But then the task is switched to force the opposite associations - one hand for insect names and pleasant words, and the other hand for flower names and unpleasant words. When I first tried that reversed form, my response time was about a third of a second slower compared to the first version. And in psychological work where you're asking people to respond rapidly, a third of a second is like an eternity, indicating that some mental processes are going on in this version of the test that are not going on in the other.

Then I replaced the flowers and insects with first names of men and women that are easily classified as European American or African American. For me, giving the same response to pleasant words and African American names took an eternity. But when it was the European American names and pleasant words with one hand, and the African American names and the unpleasant words with the other hand, that was something I could zip through. And that was a surprise to me. I would have described myself at that point as someone who is lacking in biases or prejudices of a racial nature. I probably had some biases that I would confess to, but I actually didn't think I had that one.
How widespread is implicit bias?
That particular implicit bias, the one involving black-white race, shows up in about 70 percent to 75 percent of all Americans who try the test. It shows up more strongly in white Americans and Asian Americans than in mixed-race or African Americans. African Americans, you'd think, might show just the reverse effect - that it would be easy for them to put African American together with pleasant and white American together with unpleasant. But no, African Americans show, on average, neither direction of bias on that task.

Most people have multiple implicit biases they aren't aware of. It is much more widespread than is generally assumed.
Is implicit bias a factor in the pattern of police violence such as that seen in the killing of George Floyd on May 25, which sparked the ongoing protests across the country?
The problems surfacing in the wake of George Floyd's death include all forms of bias, ranging from implicit bias to structural bias built into the operation of police departments, courts and governments, to explicit, intended bias, to hate crime.

The best theory of how implicit bias works is that it shapes conscious thought, which in turn guides judgments and decisions. The ABC News correspondent Pierre Thomas expressed this very well recently by saying, "Black people feel like they are being treated as suspects first and citizens second." When a black person does something that is open to alternative interpretations, like reaching into a pocket or a car's glove compartment, many people - not just police officers - may think first that it's possibly dangerous. But that wouldn't happen in viewing a white person do exactly the same action. The implications of conscious judgment being shaped in this way by an automatic, implicit process of which the perceiver is unaware can assume great importance in outcomes of interactions with police.
Do the diversity or implicit bias training programs used by companies and institutions like Starbucks and the Oakland Police Department help reduce bias?
I'm at the moment very skeptical about most of what's offered under the label of implicit bias training, because the methods being used have not been tested scientifically to indicate that they are effective. And they're using it without trying to assess whether the training they do is achieving the desired results.

I see most implicit bias training as window dressing that looks good both internally to an organization and externally, as if you're concerned and trying to do something. But it can be deployed without actually achieving anything, which makes it in fact counterproductive. After 10 years of doing this stuff and nobody reporting data, I think the logical conclusion is that if it was working, we would have heard about it.

Can you tell us about some of the approaches meant to reduce bias that haven't worked?
I'll give you several examples of techniques that have been tried with the assumption that they would achieve what's sometimes called debiasing or reducing implicit biases. One is exposure to counter-stereotypic examples, like seeing examples of admirable scientists or entertainers or others who are African American alongside examples of whites who are mass murderers. And that produces an immediate effect. You can show that it will actually affect a test result if you measure it within about a half-hour. But it was recently found that when people started to do these tests with longer delays, a day or more, any beneficial effect appears to be gone.

CREDIT: PHOTOGRAPHEE.EU / SHUTTERSTOCK

Implicit bias is pervasive

Hundreds of studies have revealed the workings of implicit bias in a wide range of settings. Here are a few examples that demonstrate how it can occur in just about any situation in which people make decisions that affect other people.

In law enforcement: A study found that police in New York City stopped black and Hispanic pedestrians more often than white pedestrians, and a study in Oakland, California, found that black men were far more likely to be handcuffed, searched or arrested than anyone else when stopped by police.

In the office: Hiring managers were less likely to invite an obese applicant for an interview, people see older workers as less valuable and bias against Arab-Muslim men influenced hiring decisions in Sweden.

In the courtroom: Studies found that implicit bias against African Americans affects almost every step in the judicial system, from prosecutors deciding which cases to charge to judges handing down decisions.

In the classroom: Public high school teachers in Sweden gave higher test scores to students with Swedish backgrounds than those with foreign ones, while American psychology students rated young male teachers higher than older men, as well as younger and older women.

In the hospital: Doctors were more likely to offer a blood-clot-busting treatment to white patients with acute coronary disease than to black patients with the same symptoms, and nursing students showed a bias against overweight patients.

In a pandemic? A study showed that when people feel especially vulnerable to infectious disease, their negative attitudes toward older adults may be heightened.

- Betsy Mason

Other strategies that haven't been very effective include just encouraging people to have a strong intention not to allow themselves to be biased. Or trainers will suggest people do something that they may call "thinking slow" or pausing before making decisions. Another method that has been tried is meditation. And another strategy is making people aware that they have implicit biases or that implicit biases are pervasive in the population. All these may seem reasonable, but there's no empirical demonstration that they work.
It's surprising to me that making people aware of their bias doesn't do anything to mitigate it. Why do you think that is?
I think you're right, it is surprising. The mechanisms by which our brains form associations and acquire them from the cultural environment evolved over long periods of time, during which people lived in an environment that was consistent. They were not actually likely to acquire something that they would later have to unlearn, because the environment wasn't going to change. So there may have been no evolutionary pressure for the human brain to develop a method of unlearning the associations.

I don't know why we have not succeeded in developing effective techniques to reduce implicit biases as they are measured by the implicit association test. I'm not prepared to say that we're never going to be able to do it, but I will say that people have been looking for a long time, ever since the test was introduced, which is over 20 years now, and this hasn't been solved yet.
Is there anything that does work?
I think that a lot can be achieved just by collecting data to document disparities that are occurring as a result of bias. And maybe an easy example is police operations, although it can be applied in many settings. Most police departments keep data on what we know as profiling, though they don't like to call it that. It's what happens in a traffic stop or a pedestrian stop - for example, the stop-and-frisk policy that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken heat for. The data of the New York City Police Department for stops of black and white pedestrians and drivers were analyzed, and it was very clear that there were disparities.

Once you know where the problem is that has to be solved, it's up to the administrators to figure out ways to understand why and how this is happening. Is it happening in just some parts of the city? Is it that the police are just operating more in Harlem than in the white neighborhoods?

And once you know what's happening, the next step is what I call discretion elimination. This can be applied when people are making decisions that involve subjective judgment about a person. This could be police officers, employers making hiring or promotion decisions, doctors deciding on a patient's treatment, or teachers making decisions about students' performance. When those decisions are made with discretion, they are likely to result in unintended disparities. But when those decisions are made based on predetermined, objective criteria that are rigorously applied, they are much less likely to produce disparities.
Is there evidence that discretion elimination works?
What we know comes from the rare occasions in which the effects of discretion elimination have been recorded and reported. The classic example of this is when major symphony orchestras in the United States started using blind auditions in the 1970s. This was originally done because musicians thought that the auditions were biased in favor of graduates of certain schools like the Juilliard School. They weren't concerned about gender discrimination.

But as soon as auditions started to be made behind screens so the performer could not be seen, the share of women hired as instrumentalists in major symphony orchestras rose from around 10 percent or 20 percent before 1970 to about 40 percent. This has had a major impact on the rate at which women have become instrumentalists in major symphony orchestras.

But these data-collection and discretion-elimination strategies aren't commonly used?
Not nearly as often as they could. For example, instructors can usually arrange to grade almost anything that a student does without knowing the identity of the student. In an electronic age when you don't learn to recognize people's handwriting, instructors can grade essays without the students' names on them. I used that approach when I was last grading undergraduates in courses. It's easy to use, but it's often not used at all.

And in many other circumstances it is possible to evaluate performance without knowing the identity of the person being evaluated. But employers and others rarely forgo the opportunity to know the identity of the person they're evaluating.

Can artificial intelligence play a role?
People are starting to apply artificial intelligence to the task by mining historical records of past employment decisions. This is a way of taking the decisions that involve human discretion and putting them into the hands of a machine. The idea is to develop algorithms that identify promising applicants by matching their qualities to those of past applicants who turned out to be successful employees.

I think it's a great thing to try. But so far, efforts with AI have not succeeded, because the historical databases used to develop the algorithms to make these decisions turn out to be biased, too. They incorporate the biases of past decision-makers. One example is how biases affect facial-recognition technology, which inadvertently categorizes African American faces or Asian faces as criminal more often than white faces.

This is a problem that computer scientists are trying to cope with, but some of the people in AI that I have spoken to seem not so optimistic that this will be at all easy to do. But I do think that ultimately - and it might take a while - the biases may be expunged more readily from AI decision algorithms than from human decision-making.
Could more be done at the level of an individual company or department?
To help prevent unintended discrimination, the leaders of organizations need to decide to track data to see where disparities are occurring. When they discover disparities, they need to try to make changes and then look at the next cycle of data to see if those changes are improving things.

Obviously, it's easier for them not to do those things. In some cases there's a cost to doing them. And they may think it's like opening up Pandora's box if they look closely at the data. I think this is true of many police departments. They're bound to find things that they'd rather not see.

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Curbing implicit bias: what works and what doesn't

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Psychologists have yet to find a way to diminish hidden prejudice, but they do have strategies for thwarting discrimination

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Individualism vs collectivism: which one is better?

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Individualism vs collectivism: which one is better?

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Note: This essay is included in the anthology Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing, which makes an excellent gift and is available at Amazon.com.

The fundamental political conflict in America today is, as it has been for a century, individualism vs. collectivism. Does the individual's life belong to him-or does it belong to the group, the community, society, or the state? With government expanding ever more rapidly-seizing and spending more and more of our money on "entitlement" programs and corporate bailouts, and intruding on our businesses and lives in increasingly onerous ways-the need for clarity on this issue has never been greater. Let us begin by defining the terms at hand.

Individualism is the idea that the individual's life belongs to him and that he has an inalienable right to live it as he sees fit, to act on his own judgment, to keep and use the product of his effort, and to pursue the values of his choosing. It's the idea that the individual is sovereign, an end in himself, and the fundamental unit of moral concern. This is the ideal that the American Founders set forth and sought to establish when they drafted the Declaration and the Constitution and created a country in which the individual's rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness were to be recognized and protected.
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Collectivism is the idea that the individual's life belongs not to him but to the group or society of which he is merely a part, that he has no rights, and that he must sacrifice his values and goals for the group's "greater good." According to collectivism, the group or society is the basic unit of moral concern, and the individual is of value only insofar as he serves the group. As one advocate of this idea puts it: "Man has no rights except those which society permits him to enjoy. From the day of his birth until the day of his death society allows him to enjoy certain so-called rights and deprives him of others; not . . . because society desires especially to favor or oppress the individual, but because its own preservation, welfare, and happiness are the prime considerations." 1

Individualism or collectivism-which of these ideas is correct? Which has the facts on its side?

Individualism does, and we can see this at every level of philosophic inquiry: from metaphysics, the branch of philosophy concerned with the fundamental nature of reality; to epistemology, the branch concerned with the nature and means of knowledge; to ethics, the branch concerned with the nature of value and proper human action; to politics, the branch concerned with a proper social system.

We'll take them in turn.

Metaphysics, Individualism, and Collectivism

When we look out at the world and see people, we see separate, distinct individuals. The individuals may be in groups (say, on a soccer team or in a business venture), but the indivisible beings we see are individual people. Each has his own body, his own mind, his own life. Groups, insofar as they exist, are nothing more than individuals who have come together to interact for some purpose. This is an observable fact about the way the world is. It is not a matter of personal opinion or social convention, and it is not rationally debatable. It is a perceptual-level, metaphysically given fact. Things are what they are; human beings are individuals.

A beautiful statement of the metaphysical fact of individualism was provided by former slave Frederick Douglass in a letter he wrote to his ex-"master" Thomas Auld after escaping bondage in Maryland and fleeing to New York. "I have often thought I should like to explain to you the grounds upon which I have justified myself in running away from you," wrote Douglass. "I am almost ashamed to do so now, for by this time you may have discovered them yourself. I will, however, glance at them." You see, said Douglass,

I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons, equal persons. What you are, I am. You are a man, and so am I. God created both, and made us separate beings. I am not by nature bound to you, or you to me. Nature does not make your existence depend upon me, or mine to depend upon yours. I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine. I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself. We are distinct persons, and are each equally provided with faculties necessary to our individual existence. In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner. 2

Although one could quibble with the notion that "God" creates people, Douglass's basic metaphysical point is clearly sound. Human beings are by nature distinct, separate beings, each with his own body and his own faculties necessary to his own existence. Human beings are not in any way metaphysically attached or dependent on one another; each must use his own mind and direct his own body; no one else can do either for him. People are individuals. "I am myself; you are yourself; we are two distinct persons."

The individual is metaphysically real; he exists in and of himself; he is the basic unit of human life. Groups or collectives of people-whether families, partnerships, communities, or societies-are not metaphysically real; they do not exist in and of themselves; they are not fundamental units of human life. Rather, they are some number of individuals. This is perceptually self-evident. We can see that it is true.

Who says otherwise? Collectivists do. John Dewey, a father of pragmatism and modern "liberalism," explains the collectivist notion as follows:

Society in its unified and structural character is the fact of the case; the non-social individual is an abstraction arrived at by imagining what man would be if all his human qualities were taken away. Society, as a real whole, is the normal order, and the mass as an aggregate of isolated units is the fiction. 3

According to collectivism, the group or society is metaphysically real-and the individual is a mere abstraction, a fiction. 4

This, of course, is ridiculous, but there you have it. On the metaphysics of collectivism, you and I (and Mr. Douglass) are fictional, and we become real only insofar as we somehow interrelate with society. As to exactly how we must interrelate with the collective in order to become part of the "real whole," we'll hear about that shortly.

Let us turn now to the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge.

Epistemology, Individualism, and Collectivism

What is knowledge? Where does it come from? How do we know what's true? Knowledge is a mental grasp of a fact (or facts) of reality reached by perceptual observation or a process of reason based thereon. 5 Who looks at reality, hears reality, touches reality, reasons about reality-and thereby gains knowledge of reality? The individual does. The individual possesses eyes, ears, hands, and the like. The individual possesses a mind and the capacity to use it. He perceives reality (e.g., dogs, cats, and birds, and death); he integrates his perceptions into concepts (e.g., "dog," "animal," and "mortal"); he integrates his concepts into generalizations (e.g., "dogs can bite" and "animals are mortal"); he forms principles (e.g., "animals, including man, must take certain actions in order to remain alive," and "man requires freedom in order to live and prosper"). And so on. Knowledge is a product of the perceptual observations and mental integrations of individuals.

Of course, individuals can learn from other people, they can teach others what they have learned-and they can do so in groups. But in any such transmission of knowledge, the individual's senses must do the perceiving, and his mind must do the integrating. Groups don't have sensory apparatuses or minds; only individuals do. This, too, is simply unassailable.

But that doesn't stop collectivists from denying it.

The relevant epistemological principle, writes Helen Longino (chair of the philosophy department at Stanford University) is that "knowledge is produced by cognitive processes that are fundamentally social." Granted, she says, "without individuals there would be no knowledge" because "it is through their sensory system that the natural world enters cognition. . . . The activities of knowledge construction, however, are the activities of individuals in interaction"; thus knowledge "is constructed not by individuals, but by an interactive dialogic community." 6

You can't make this stuff up. But an "interactive dialogic community" can.

Although it is true (and should be unremarkable) that individuals in a society can exchange ideas and learn from one another, the fact remains that the individual, not the community, has a mind; the individual, not the group, does the thinking; the individual, not society, produces knowledge; and the individual, not society, shares that knowledge with others who, in turn, must use their individual minds if they are to grasp it. Any individual who chooses to observe the facts of reality can see that this is so. The fact that certain "philosophers" (or "dialogic communities") deny it has no bearing on the truth of the matter.

Correct epistemology-the truth about the nature and source of knowledge-is on the side of individualism, not collectivism.

Next up are the respective views of morality that follow from these foundations.

Ethics, Individualism, and Collectivism

What is the nature of good and bad, right and wrong? How, in principle, should people act? Such are the questions of ethics or morality (I use these terms interchangeably). Why do these questions arise? Why do we need to answer them? Such questions arise and need to be answered only because individuals exist and need principled guidance about how to live and prosper.

We are not born knowing how to survive and achieve happiness, nor do we gain such knowledge automatically, nor, if we do gain it, do we act on such knowledge automatically. (As evidence, observe the countless miserable people in the world.) If we want to live and prosper, we need principled guidance toward that end. Ethics is the branch of philosophy dedicated to providing such guidance.

For instance, a proper morality says to the individual: Go by reason (as against faith or feelings)-look at reality, identify the nature of things, make causal connections, use logic-because reason is your only means of knowledge, and thus your only means of choosing and achieving life-serving goals and values. Morality also says: Be honest-don't pretend that facts are other than they are, don't make up alternate realities in your mind and treat them as real-because reality is absolute and cannot be faked out of existence, and because you need to understand the real world in order to succeed in it. Morality further provides guidance for dealing specifically with people. For instance, it says: Be just-judge people rationally, according to the available and relevant facts, and treat them accordingly, as they deserve to be treated-because this policy is crucial to establishing and maintaining good relationships and to avoiding, ending, or managing bad ones. And morality says: Be independent -think and judge for yourself, don't turn to others for what to believe or accept-because truth is not correspondence to the views of other people but correspondence to the facts of reality. And so on.

By means of such guidance (and the foregoing is just a brief indication), morality enables the individual to live and thrive. And that is precisely the purpose of moral guidance: to help the individual choose and achieve life-serving goals and values, such as an education, a career, recreational activities, friendships, and romance. The purpose of morality is, as the great individualist Ayn Rand put it, to teach you to enjoy yourself and live.

Just as the individual, not the group, is metaphysically real-and just as the individual, not the collective, has a mind and thinks-so too the individual, not the community or society, is the fundamental unit of moral concern. The individual is morally an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others. Each individual should pursue his life-serving values and respect the rights of others to do the same. This is the morality that flows from the metaphysics and epistemology of individualism.

What morality flows from the metaphysics and epistemology of collectivism? Just what you would expect: a morality in which the collective is the basic unit of moral concern.

On the collectivist view of morality, explains "progressive" intellectual A. Maurice Low, "that which more than anything marks the distinction between civilized and uncivilized society is that in the former the individual is nothing and society is everything; in the latter society is nothing and the individual is everything." Mr. Low assisted with the definition of collectivism at the outset of this article; here he elaborates with emphasis on the alleged "civility" of collectivism:

In a civilized society man has no rights except those which society permits him to enjoy. From the day of his birth until the day of his death society allows him to enjoy certain so-called rights and deprives him of others; not . . . because society desires especially to favor or oppress the individual, but because its own preservation, welfare, and happiness are the prime considerations. And so that society may not perish, so that it may reach a still higher plane, so that men and women may become better citizens, society permits them certain privileges and restricts them in the use of others. Sometimes in the exercise of this power the individual is put to a great deal of inconvenience, even, at times, he suffers what appears to be injustice. This is to be regretted, but it is inevitable. The aim of civilized society is to do the greatest good to the greatest number, and because the largest number may derive benefit from the largest good the individual must subordinate his own desires or inclinations for the benefit of all. 7

Because Mr. Low wrote that in 1913-before Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, and company tortured and murdered hundreds of millions of people explicitly in the name of "the greatest good for the greatest number"-he may be granted some small degree of leniency. Today's collectivists, however, have no such excuse.

As Ayn Rand wrote in 1946, and as every adult who chooses to think can now appreciate,

"The greatest good for the greatest number" is one of the most vicious slogans ever foisted on humanity. This slogan has no concrete, specific meaning. There is no way to interpret it benevolently, but a great many ways in which it can be used to justify the most vicious actions.

What is the definition of "the good" in this slogan? None, except: whatever is good for the greatest number. Who, in any particular issue, decides what is good for the greatest number? Why, the greatest number.

If you consider this moral, you would have to approve of the following examples, which are exact applications of this slogan in practice: fifty-one percent of humanity enslaving the other forty-nine; nine hungry cannibals eating the tenth one; a lynching mob murdering a man whom they consider dangerous to the community.

There were seventy million Germans in Germany and six hundred thousand Jews. The greatest number (the Germans) supported the Nazi government which told them that their greatest good would be served by exterminating the smaller number (the Jews) and grabbing their property. This was the horror achieved in practice by a vicious slogan accepted in theory.

But, you might say, the majority in all these examples did not achieve any real good for itself either? No. It didn't. Because "the good" is not determined by counting numbers and is not achieved by the sacrifice of anyone to anyone. 8

The collectivist notion of morality is patently evil and demonstrably false. The good of the community logically cannot take priority over that of the individual because the only reason moral concepts such as "good" and "should" are necessary in the first place is that individuals exist and need principled guidance in order to sustain and further their lives. Any attempt to turn the purpose of morality against the individual-the fundamental unit of human reality and thus of moral concern-is not merely a moral crime; it is an attempt to annihilate morality as such.

To be sure, societies-consisting as they do of individuals-need moral principles, too, but only for the purpose of enabling individuals to act in ways necessary to sustain and further their own lives. Thus, the one moral principle that a society must embrace if it is to be a civilized society is the principle of individual rights: the recognition of the fact that each individual is morally an end in himself and has a moral prerogative to act on his judgment for his own sake, free from coercion by others. On this principle, each individual has a right to think and act as he sees fit; he has a right to produce and trade the products of his efforts voluntarily, by mutual consent to mutual benefit; he has a right to disregard complaints that he is not serving some so-called "greater good"-and no one, including groups and governments, has a moral right to force him to act against his judgment. Ever.

This brings us to the realm of politics.

Politics, Individualism, and Collectivism

The politics of individualism is essentially what the American Founders had in mind when they created the United States but were unable to implement perfectly: a land of liberty, a society in which the government does only one thing and does it well-protects the rights of all individuals equally by banning the use of physical force from social relationships and by using force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use. In such a society, government uses force as necessary against thieves, extortionists, murderers, rapists, terrorists, and the like-but it leaves peaceful, rights-respecting citizens completely free to live their lives and pursue their happiness in accordance with their own judgment.

Toward that end, a proper, rights-respecting government consists of legislatures, courts, police, a military, and any other branches and departments necessary to the protection of individual rights. This is the essence of the politics of individualism, which follows logically from the metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics of individualism.

What politics follows from those of collectivism?

"America works best when its citizens put aside individual self-interest to do great things together-when we elevate the common good," writes David Callahan of the collectivist think tank Demos. 9 Michael Tomasky, editor of Democracy, elaborates, explaining that modern "liberalism was built around the idea-the philosophical principle-that citizens should be called upon to look beyond their own self-interest and work for a greater common interest."

This, historically, is the moral basis of liberal governance-not justice, not equality, not rights, not diversity, not government, and not even prosperity or opportunity. Liberal governance is about demanding of citizens that they balance self-interest with common interest. . . . This is the only justification leaders can make to citizens for liberal governance, really: That all are being asked to contribute to a project larger than themselves. . . . citizens sacrificing for and participating in the creation of a common good. 10

This is the ideology of today's left in general, including, of course, President Barack Obama. As Obama puts it, we must heed the "call to sacrifice" and uphold our "core ethical and moral obligation" to "look out for one another" and to "be unified in service to a greater good." 11 "Individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations." 12

But modern "liberals" and new "progressives" are not alone in their advocacy of the politics of collectivism. Joining them are impostors of the right, such as Rick Santorum, who pose as advocates of liberty but, in their perverted advocacy, annihilate the very concept of liberty.

"Properly defined," writes Santorum, " liberty is freedom coupled with responsibility to something bigger or higher than the self. It is the pursuit of our dreams with an eye toward the common good. Liberty is the dual activity of lifting our eyes to the heavens while at the same time extending our hands and hearts to our neighbor." 13 It is not "the freedom to be as selfish as I want to be," or "the freedom to be left alone," but "the freedom to attend to one's duties-duties to God, to family, and to neighbors." 14

Such is the state of politics in America today, and this is the choice we face: Americans can either continue to ignore the fact that collectivism is utterly corrupt from the ground up, and thus continue down the road to statism and tyranny-or we can look at reality, use our minds, acknowledge the absurdities of collectivism and the atrocities that follow from it, and shout the truth from the rooftops and across the Internet.

What would happen if we did the latter? As Ayn Rand said, "You would be surprised how quickly the ideologists of collectivism retreat when they encounter a confident, intellectual adversary. Their case rests on appealing to human confusion, ignorance, dishonesty, cowardice, despair. Take the side they dare not approach; appeal to human intelligence." 15

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Individualism vs. Collectivism: Our Future, Our Choice - The Objective Standard

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Note: This essay is included in the anthology Rational Egoism: The Morality for Human Flourishing , which makes an excellent gift and is available at Amazon.com. The fundamental political conflict in America today is, as it has been for a century, individualism vs. collectivism.

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How did racist cartoons ignite a massacre?

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How did racist cartoons ignite a massacre?

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When a mob bent on insurrection stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, some onlookers labeled the event "unprecedented."

But the United States has witnessed coups d'etat before-both attempted and successful-within its borders. In 1898, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, engineered an overthrow of the city government and killed at least sixty Black townspeople. The morning of the massacre, Democratic Congressman Alfred Waddell stood in front of an audience of white men at the county courthouse and read from what would soon be termed the " White Declaration of Independence," which called for an end to "Negro rule."

White Democrats in Wilmington had planned to overthrow their Reconstruction-era Republican leaders for months.

White Democrats in Wilmington had planned to overthrow their Reconstruction-era Republican leaders for months. As scholar and artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams writes, these men used editorial cartoons to stoke racist violence against Wilmington's Black residents. Similar to how white-supremacist Internet culture fueled the January 6 mob, these 1898 newspaper cartoons "constructed political meaning and, to some extent, social reality for readers."

Josephus Daniels, editor of the News and Observer, which circulated widely in eastern North Carolina, hired cartoonist Norman Ethre Jennett to produce seventy-five editorial cartoons to stoke fears about Wilmington's Black citizens between August and November of 1898. Together, Jennett and Daniels created a racist propaganda campaign to "create a rape scare, demonize and humiliate Black men and women, spread a violent white supremacist ideology and reclaim the North Carolina Legislature for the Democratic Party," according to Williams.

In one cartoon Jennett drew a leering, winged creature emerging from a ballot box and swooping over the landscape with "Negro Rule" written across its wings, identified by the caption: "The Vampire That Hovers Over North Carolina." Other panels depicted Black office holders in the city, such as Lee Person, as "incompetent buffoons," Williams notes.

Jennett also cannily triggered white men's twin patriarchal and racial fears, raising the specter of miscegenation and tugging at what historian Glenda Gilmore calls their " racialized manhood." In one panel, a white woman dressed in stars and stripes weeps, with a black ball-and-chain attached to her foot reading "NEGRO RULE." "On the 8th of November these shackles will be broken," the caption declares. Jim Young, a Black politician active in state politics, appears in some panels as a predator that preys on vulnerable white women.

Other cartoons took aim at white leaders, such as one showing A. E. Holton, the chairman of the Republican Party, and Cyrus Thompson, the chairman of the populist People's Party, snuggled on a park bench as a newly married couple-a dig at the leaders' sexuality and a suggestion that by "betraying" their racial interests, these men also betrayed their masculinity.

Daniels's propaganda campaign succeeded: The 1898 massacre shattered Wilmington's once-thriving middle-class Black community, forced most Black residents of Wilmington to flee, and instituted white supremacist rule in the city. (The city had been majority-Black before the coup; by the time of the 1900 census, most of its citizens were white.)

Jennett, for his part, went on to a successful career as an illustrator in New York, where racist tropes popped up in his works with less frequency over time. Like the men who plotted the coup, Williams concludes, this cartoonist's legacy "is intertwined with the lynching of an undetermined number of African Americans and the beginning of the Jim Crow era in North Carolina."
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How Racist Cartoons Helped Ignite a Massacre | JSTOR Daily

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When a mob bent on insurrection stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, some onlookers labeled the event "unprecedented." But the United States has witnessed coups d'etat before-both attempted and successful-within its borders. In 1898, white supremacists in Wilmington, North Carolina, engineered an overthrow of the city government and killed at least sixty Black townspeople.

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After the Capitol Riot, who will govern speech online?

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After the Capitol Riot, who will govern speech online?

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The January 6 attack on the Capitol has transformed politics in the United States in ways that journalists, lawyers and politicians are still struggling to understand. It was at once the chaotic culmination of a right-wing movement before and during the Trump administration and a stunning symbol of a possible future. Like so many other political events in the past decade, it again revealed how social media has made once unthinkable political events possible. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among other sites, amplified marginal conspiracy theories and far-right militia organizations, allowed a sitting president to delegitimize the election he lost, and permitted open planning for a violent attack on the seat of government.

Social media companies have faced sustained criticism for years about the negative impacts of speech on their platforms. These have ranged from national political conflicts such as the organization of genocide in Myanmar, to worldwide endemic personal harassment like the Gamergate scandal or revenge porn. But the attack on the Capitol appears to have crossed a line. Social media sites have responded accordingly by widely banning Donald Trump and many other right-wing activists and organizations.

Until this point, promoting right-wing propaganda and accompanying advertising with little metadata has been wildly profitable.

"Deplatforming" on this scale would have been unimaginable just weeks earlier. It has provoked predictable complaints from the right. But the American Civil Liberties Union and other free speech organizations have also expressed concerns about a new standard for censorship without transparency or accountability for private companies. Others have noted that left-wing social media accounts have been getting banned for some time, and are also current targets of arbitrary shutdowns. There is already a national security-oriented response underway to investigate and surveil right wing movements as "domestic terrorism." But this alone will not solve the social conditions that encourage fascist thought and activity, or prevent right wing activists from finding new ways to organize online.

Protecting democracy from the power of free speech seems like a paradox. However, free speech on the internet has never truly been free. The regulation of speech online is in fact framed by laws that allow private sites to censor content at will. Moreover, many factors affect the impact of online speech besides its mere existence or deletion. User algorithms and advertising demand can promote speech to different audiences, while metadata can inform users about the sources or reliability of that speech. Until this point, promoting right-wing propaganda and accompanying advertising with little metadata has been wildly profitable.

But with the Capitol attack, it seems as if the wild west era of monetized political speech online is reaching its end. There are two plausible futures for the industry. Either the tech monopolies will keep the power to arbitrarily restrict speech to prevent controversy and protect their bottom lines, or the government will better regulate the internet to mitigate the power of tech companies to profit from negative speech and political extremism. This is already provoking deeper questions about the meaning of the First Amendment and the public's rights and interests in the internet itself.

Free Speech Is Not Social Media's Priority

Establishment opinion about the role of online speech in society and politics has evolved rapidly over the past decade. Prior to 2000, the internet represented a forum that was alternative and even countercultural to mainstream political parties, business and media. In the following decade, the spread of social media seemed to affirm the era's neoliberal values of "promoting Democracy" in the world, culminating most obviously in the Arab Spring protests 10 years ago this month. When internet companies were smaller and fragmented, protecting them and their users against the censorship of governments worldwide seemed not just to defend free speech, but to transform the world for the better.

This is certainly the tone of Columbia University President and First Amendment scholar Lee Bollinger's piece in Foriegn Policy's 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2012, "Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age." The issues of the day motivating Bollinger's argument were China blocking access to The New York Times and the suppression of the right-wing anti-Islamic film Innocence of Muslims. Despite the gratuitous insult of the latter to more than a billion people and the political and social backlash Middle Eastern governments faced, Bollinger blithely expresses that the overall arc of freedom of speech on the internet was toward progress. "When the number of people around the world who are engaged in the marketplace of ideas increases, we can expect a corresponding rise in the flow of innovation in both the academy and the economy," Bollinger writes. He argues that globalization thus directly fuels conflict between governments and internet publishers and social media sites.

The objects of Bollinger's concern in 2012 were appropriate, but the economic and political dynamics around it have turned out to be rather the inverse of how he and many others saw them a decade ago. Rather than the United States First Amendment becoming a guiding principal for speech around the world, internet companies are in fact accepting a huge array of sovereign controls on speech, different in each country. This is leading more toward collaboration between the tech giants and governments to protect their profits rather than outright conflict. And of course, the "marketplace of ideas" has turned out to become as useful for the innovation of illiberal ideas and organizations, from ISIS to QAnon, as for science or education.

The Private Government of Social Media

The social media business model is founded upon a legal collaboration between the industry and the US federal government. In the early days of the internet, corporations sued chat boards for the libel of individuals who had posted complaints about them, arguing they were "publishers" of the posts. With inconsistent judicial interpretations over whether internet hosts were moderating their content and thus counted as such, Congress stepped in with Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The law states "no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." Moreover, it expressly allowed internet providers, as private companies, the discretion to ban content that they did not wish to carry. This extends to internet service providers or server farms banning entire platforms from using their services, as a judge has just ruled Amazon Web Services could do to Parler, a social media network heavily used by right wing activists.

"Governance by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has many aspects of a nineteenth-century autocratic state."

Benjamin Cramer argues this creates "a 'moral hazard' in which the absence of future liability encourages ethical lapses and unaccountable behavior in the present." Rather than more frequently intervening in user content, social media sites until the present have chosen to leave all but the most egregious fraud or harassment alone in order to avoid accusations of infringing users' free speech "rights." As partisan politics has become more heated in recent years, the sites are often attacked for their perceived biases from both sides, further encouraging them not to intervene.

This would not be quite so bad, writes Jack Balkin, if the social media industry were not monopolized by Twitter, Facebook, and Google. At present, those companies have so much political and economic power, they effectively represent practically a new, "private state" that has subsumed the U.S. Constitution's protection of free speech to make a profit for themselves while providing their users no accountability. "Governance by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has many aspects of a nineteenth-century autocratic state," Balkin writes, "one that protects basic civil freedoms but responds to public opinion only in limited ways."

Indeed, pressure for better governance have made social media companies establish independent tribunals to adjudicate management's decisions to ban content or block users. These include Facebook's "Oversight Board," composed of famous politicians and journalists, which began meeting last month. In its first decision on January 27, it actually overturned Facebook executives' decisions to block content based on "hate speech, nudity and COVID misinformation." It will soon meet to review the decision to ban Donald Trump.

How Can The Internet Serve the Public Interest?

With public scrutiny now so heavily focused on the politicization of speech online, social media companies will not be able to plead inaction in the name of free speech any longer. Yet potential government regulators are still reluctant to intervene, both fearful of the power of the industry and of actually infringing the First Amendment. Who in the future will both determine the "red lines" on speech, or otherwise try to protect users from the long term negative externalities of unregulated content algorithms?

Past research available on JSTOR reflects less urgency than the present crisis demands. Cramer believes that a more rigorous application of "Corporate Social Responsibility," in part to maintain public goodwill, would gradually move social media companies toward more ethical treatment of their users and the targets of their speech. Balkin believes the current Section 230 framework could be reformed by better enforcing companies' user agreements and by treating a company's relationship to its users as an "information fiduciary." In short, this means borrowing legal ideas from the financial, medical, and legal industries to force social media companies to be more transparent with their users and allow users to (genuinely) opt out of data surveillance and targeting.

Since January 6, however, there are increased calls to abolish Section 230 altogether, which would transform the internet as we know it. As anti-monopoly activist Matt Stoller points out, C ongress is now reluctant to attack powerful corporations like Amazon because it has stood as a monolith, willing to keep right-wing and violent content off their platforms since the attack. Taking away the protections of Section 230 and demonopolization thus go hand-in-hand. If platforms shared at least some of the liability for the content they spread-or the way they exponentially amplify and profit from it-it would be possible to dismantle the vertical integration that now exists between internet service providers, server farms, and social media platforms. Facing true competition, the majority of new entities would seek responsible ways of selecting out or diminishing the impact of negative content as it passes between these stages of the internet infrastructure.

This is the turning point between continuing to allow the tech titans to treat the world's communication networks as their private fiefdoms, or restoring democracy and transparency to what we have long considered the "public sphere."
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After the Capitol Riot, Who Will Govern Speech Online? | JSTOR Daily

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The January 6 attack on the Capitol has transformed politics in the United States in ways that journalists, lawyers and politicians are still struggling to understand. It was at once the chaotic culmination of a right-wing movement before and during the Trump administration and a stunning symbol of a possible future.

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Is there inherent prejudice in some geographical names?

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Is there inherent prejudice in some geographical names?

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Or, what about a postcolonial world where the lasting impact of colonialism is felt in the names of cities, towns, roads etc.?

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In 1962, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names banned the n-word, beginning a process of changing thousands of place names labeled with the racist epithet. In many cases, "Negro" was simply substituted for the offensive term. Four decades later, this 2003 survey found 573 place names like Negro Creek, Negro Gulch, and Negro Hill.

Maps, as formalized representations of space, may be changed by government fiat. Local usage, however, may not necessarily follow suit. During the midwestern floods of 1993, a wetlands near Havana, Illinois, was still known locally as N- Lake. Some locals blamed these wetlands for the flooding, or even insisted that the floodwaters originated in...New York. Scholars Lauren E. Brown and Richard Stivers explore this scapegoating of a physical place and the racist history of its name.

N- Lake seems to have been named by the overwhelmingly white community because a Black man once ran a grocery store nearby.

The lake stands for "the outsider poised to destroy the community only because, it is believed, African Americans have always been ready to pollute the social community," write Brown and Stivers. "The citizens attempted to restore unity to their community by finding a common scapegoat. [...] It was a convenient scapegoat in large part due to its symbolic meaning."

N- Lake seems to have been named by the overwhelmingly white community because a Black man once ran a grocery store nearby. "We suspect he avoided living in Havana (a river town) to escape racial prejudice and harassment," note the authors. They date the man and his store to the mid-nineteenth century, pointing to "evidence that he both served whiskey and permitted card playing in the back of the grocery," likely adding to whites' perception that he was dangerous.

To "avoid public embarrassment," local authorities used the name "Sand Lake" when they applied for funding to combat flooding in 1993. One of the authors' local interviewees said the road by the wetlands was informally known as "N- Lake Road." Another informant insisted that the town wasn't "racist because it has an ordinance prohibiting African Americans from living there." The authors write, "Whether Havana ever had such an ordinance, it likely had an informal norm to the same effect." (Havana is listed in this database of "sundown" towns.)

Brown and Stivers point to indirect, symbolic racism, "a consequence of a fear of the other race's standing as a degraded, inferior group," as the motivation for the animus toward N- Lake. In the social crisis of the flooding, somebody or something needed to be blamed. The wetlands became the symbolic focus of that blame, since they were associated with African Americans.
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The Meaning of Racist Place Names | JSTOR Daily

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In 1962, the U.S. Board on Geographic Names banned the n-word, beginning a process of changing thousands of place names labeled with the racist epithet. In many cases, "Negro" was simply substituted for the offensive term. Four decades later, this 2003 survey found 573 place names like Negro Creek, Negro Gulch, and Negro Hill.

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How was science used to support antifeminism in Victorian England?

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How was science used to support antifeminism in Victorian England?

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This is an interesting article to read in the context of "The Picture of Dorian Gray".

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It was a common belief of the Victorian era that women and men were fundamentally different and that a woman's natural place was in the home. Many male scientists clung to this popular belief, even in the face of a growing movement pushing for female emancipation and woman suffrage. "Scientists could have felt no more threatened than other men by feminism," writes historian Susan Sleeth Mosedale, "but they were in an especially effective position to attack it."

These attacks were often riddled with contradictory evidence and conflicting analysis, Mosedale argues. The scientists "operated in blissful ignorance of their prejudices," allowing their own "socially conditioned feelings" to guide their application of scientific theories. Biologists grasped for vaguely scientific reasons why women shouldn't be allowed to vote, get an education, or aspire to anything more than having babies.

"The human female's role of homemaker and child nurturer was the necessary continuation of an evolutionary trend."

Naturally, many of these scientists defaulted to an "evolutionary" perspective. Among them was Charles Darwin, who used his observations of animal mating and behavior to support his sketch of the human "mental dispositions." Darwin observed the difference in temperament between bulls and cows, stallions and mares. Based on this, he said, men were more courageous and competitive, while women were more tender and generous, with a natural tendency for submission (developed in order to survive their male partner's "animalistic tempers").

Darwin, along with many other biologists, concluded that "the human female's role of homemaker and child nurturer was the necessary continuation of an evolutionary trend," writes Mosedale. "Motherhood [allowed] women to reinforce their instincts along this line and pass them on to their daughters at conception."

Of course, many argued, women evolved to operate with a singular goal: maternity. Mosedale describes another scientist who wrote that "the education of adolescent girls held potential for permanent physical and psychological damage, because it occurred at just the period when their ovaries were maturing." Basically: A woman who puts too much effort into her education risks becoming completely sterile.

Sexual selection aside, most of these scientists couldn't help but observe the obvious: Women are, on average, smaller than men. This small size was often taken to be "an index of inferiority." One biologist argued, for example, that women "exhale less carbonic acid," proving them to be mentally and physically "more sluggish" than males. This supported the antifeminist argument that "the sum total of food converted into thought by women can never equal the sum total of food converted into thought by men. It follows, therefore, that men will always think more than women." Another apparent "mark of female inferiority," writes Mosedale, was "the relatively low proportion of carbonate of lime in feminine bones: 4.52 parts, compared with 9.98 parts for the male."

Of course, Mosedale concedes, some philosophers and scientists of the time recognized the rampant hypocrisy in these theories. In 1890, British philosopher David G. Richie delivered an astute takedown of this "scientific" discrimination, noting that it was "always the favourite sort of argument with the jealous champions of privilege: first to prevent a race or class or sex from acquiring a capacity, and then to justify the refusal of rights on the grounds of this absence-to shut up a bird in a narrow cage and then pretend to argue with it that it is incapable of flying."
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The "Scientific" Antifeminists of Victorian England | JSTOR Daily

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It was a common belief of the Victorian era that women and men were fundamentally different and that a woman's natural place was in the home. Many male scientists clung to this popular belief, even in the face of a growing movement pushing for female emancipation and woman suffrage.

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What are the consequences of Twitter's Trump ban?

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What are the consequences of Twitter's Trump ban?

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SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter Inc chief ecxecutive Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that banning President Donald Trump from its social media platform after last week's violence at the US Capitol was the "right decision," but said it sets a dangerous precedent.
San Francisco-based Twitter last week removed Trump's account, which had 88 million followers, citing the risk of further violence following the storming of the Capitol by supporters of the president.
"Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation," Dorsey said on Twitter. "They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation."
The ban drew criticism from some Republicans who said it quelled the president's right to free speech. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also warned through a spokesman that legislators, not private companies, should decide on potential curbs to free expression.
In his Twitter thread, Dorsey said that while he took no pride in the ban, "Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all."
Even so, he added, "While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation."
Twitter has introduced a series of measures over the last year like labels, warnings and distribution restrictions to reduce the need for decisions about removing content entirely from the service.
Dorsey has said he believes those measures can promote more fruitful, or "healthy," conversations online and lessen the impact of bad behavior.
The Twitter CEO added that bans by social media companies on Trump after last week's violence were emboldened by each other's actions even though they were not coordinated. But in the long term, the precedent set "will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet," he said.
Supporters of Trump who has repeatedly made baseless claims challenging Democrat Joe Biden's victory in the November election, stormed the USCapitol on Wednesday, trying to halt the certification by Congress of Biden's Electoral College win.
On Wednesday, Trump became the first president in US history to be impeached twice.

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Twitter CEO: Banning Trump was right decision but sets dangerous precedent - Times of India

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SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter Inc chief ecxecutive Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday that banning President Donald Trump from its social media platform after last week's violence at the US Capitol was the "right decision," but said it sets a dangerous precedent.

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What is the connection between the American Far Right and Medieval history?

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What is the connection between the American Far Right and Medieval history?

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These days, Trump's most ardent supporters have framed him as the messianic savior of America. Matt Gabriele, professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, tells Teen Vogue that there's a clear reason why the far right finds it so easy to identify with the Crusaders. "You have scholarly works that are built from an assumption that Europe was 'under siege' and needed to defend itself, and that blends with pop-culture fantasy-medieval, like Game of Thrones or Kingdom of Heaven, that portrays these Christian knights as hypermasculine warriors," he said. Gabriele observes that this patriarchal warrior fantasy is attractive to people who feel that they are "under siege" - and thus easily radicalized. As Gabriele says, these ideals make "it very easy to put a bunch of disconnected historical events - Battle of Tours, [the] Crusades, 9/11, et cetera - next to one another and say they're all connected." This perpetuated myth of an ongoing war between civilizations is what Gabriele describes as "bullsh-t history, like a terrible self-published novel, only intended to give a veneer of historical legitimacy to their hate."

Sierra Lomuto is an assistant professor at Rowan University, whose work "explores the relation between global contact histories and the discursive production of racial ideologies in medieval literature." Speaking to Teen Vogue, Lomuto said that white supremacists find it so easy to identify with Crusaders because "in modern times, the Crusades have come to represent a narrative of brave martyrdom in the face of dangerous enemies who threaten white, Western exceptionalism." Lomuto added that this appropriation by the far right also reflects a patriarchal, toxic masculinity: "Think chivalrous knights saving damsels in distress. They imagine themselves as white women's saviors against hostile outsiders - [i.e.,] anyone who threatens their myth of white supremacy."

But is this modern misappropriation of Crusader ideology close to the truth? No, Gabriele said flatly. According to Lomuto, "It's likely that most white supremacists today who wield Crusader imagery don't know much about the history they are appropriating. They are appropriating the Crusades because of how the Crusades have been represented in Western history books and Western pop culture."

Nonetheless, the Crusaders, in their "real" context, did in fact enact atrocities upon Muslim and Jewish people, as Lomuto noted. The far right's "interest in the Crusades as historical events that reflected Islamophobia and hatred against Jewish people is certainly true," she said. "Crusade ideology was both of these things, just as white supremacist ideology is today."

For medieval historians, the responsibility is vast. With the rise of the far right a well-documented threat to democracy, they say the need for scholars to continue to provide historical context and accountability is more pressing. Lomuto told Teen Vogue that literature and the humanities "should be valued and funded in our modern society because these are the fields that teach critical reading and thinking skills. We need scholars of the distant medieval past to care about how their work intersects with contemporary politics, even when they think it doesn't - because it does, whether they like it or not."

Gabriele agrees, concluding, "We can't be blind anymore - and never should have been in the past - to how the Middle Ages are being used in the contemporary world."

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Teen Called Mom Out for Participating in Capitol Building Insurrection

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Why Is the Far Right So Obsessed With the Crusades?

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These days, Trump's most ardent supporters have framed him as the messianic savior of America. Matt Gabriele, professor of medieval studies at Virginia Tech, tells Teen Vogue that there's a clear reason why the far right finds it so easy to identify with the Crusaders.

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How does the media's use of stereotypes impact our thinking in relation to what is a legitimate religion and what is not?

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How does the media's use of stereotypes impact our thinking in relation to what is a legitimate religion and what is not?

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Thinking of submitting to a leader, cutting off all your hair, and moving to a commune in the desert, or is that just the type of thing Netflix seems to be recommending? TV stereotypes of "cults," or new religious movements (NRMs), may have primed that algorithm over the past fifty years. As religion scholar Lynn S. Neal argues, TV has influenced what generations of viewers expect cults to be. Which is to say, really, really bad.

Analyzing episodes of The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond, Law and Order: SVU, and other shows, Neal finds that they all show people dressing unusually, living communally as a substitute for family life, having "delusional and infantile" beliefs, and being visibly abnormal. This can be humorous, as with the "Movementarians" on The Simpsons, or grimly dramatic, as with a girl driven to shoot her leader on SVU in order to break free of the cult once and for all.

NRMs "often appear as a joke or as some type of threat-ideas that can wield tremendous power in American culture."

These elements, Neal argues, add up to a negative stereotype that reinforces ideas about true and false religions. Neal points out that in these TV portrayals, there's usually no discussion of any theology. "[B]y defining and showing what is strange or deviant, these programs help delineate what religious behaviors and norms are deemed acceptable and legitimate," she writes. Those, naturally, are "vaguely Christian." NRMs "often appear as a joke or as some type of threat-ideas that can wield tremendous power in American culture."

The stereotype has roots that probably go deeper than TV itself, to portrayals of non-Western religions as exotic. Representation of "cults" on TV at first focused mainly on practices like these. But in the 1970s a "cult scare and intense media scrutiny of NRMs" launched the stereotype full blown on the small screen. In 1975 a show called S.W.A.T. featured an episode called "A Coven of Killers," and dangerous NRMs appeared on teen-oriented sitcoms like What's Happening and Welcome Back, Kotter. Even as news media coverage of NRMs went down in the '80s-and gawking coverage of televangelism increased-the cult stereotype reliably plumped ratings on dramas and comedies.

That boom peaked around the year 2000, Neal posits, because the U.S. was grappling with fallout from a spate of violence surrounding real NRMs like the Branch Davidians and Heaven's Gate. They made bankable nonfiction headlines for fictional TV to rip from. But as reality TV took over the industry, and as Y2K came and went, living communally and holding infantile beliefs didn't come as often from fictional TV...but they were all over The Real World and its copious copycats.
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Thinking of submitting to a leader, cutting off all your hair, and moving to a commune in the desert, or is that just the type of thing Netflix seems to be recommending? TV stereotypes of "cults," or new religious movements (NRMs), may have primed that algorithm over the past fifty years.

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Can reality TV change society towards a culture of inclusivity?

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Can reality TV change society towards a culture of inclusivity?

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When army veteran, author and CEO Phillip Sheppard appeared on US reality TV show Survivor, he struggled with how he was presented. The 62-year-old African-American, who first emerged in 2011's Redemption Island season and later in 2013's Caramoan, says his portrayal on screen was very different from how he had perceived his actions. "I realised that what I thought I did in the game and what my memories were... the way it was edited, it was like... everything I did was delusional or crazy or didn't have a purpose," he says.

Sheppard says that in the past, many former black "Survivors" had unofficial discussions about how they were portrayed, and how to tackle the issue. Like Sheppard, many black contestants say they were stereotyped as aggressive. But some were also portrayed as lazy, as Ramona Gray Amaro - the first black woman who appeared on the show's first season - told US broadcaster NPR last year.

According to Sheppard, the events of 2020 made them develop a sense of urgency. He's now part of a group formed by black alums of the Survivor franchise, Black Survivor Alliance, who went public last summer about their collective concerns regarding their treatment over the years. "It wasn't until George Floyd that everybody could no longer deny what they saw," he says, referring to the high-profile police brutality incident that resulted in the death of the black Minnesota resident.

Though the reckoning was a long time coming, it's unsurprising that this push for change is taking place now; a resurgence of Black Lives Matter amid racially motivated violence against black people has led to a surge in individuals and organisations addressing racism and representation in the workplace.

This includes the reality television industry, where some noteworthy attempts to rectify institutional racism are emerging. This genre, however, thrives on drama and conflict as an entertainment form, which sometimes involves taking advantage of bias and stereotypes. So, any attempt to prioritise equity is not just a matter of diversifying its representation; change is needed behind the scenes, and even to the entire model itself.

Phillip Sheppard competed on Survivor in 2011 and 2013, and is part of a black alumni group that's pushed for better representation on the US programme (Credit: Getty)

'Not just who is represented, but how'
In November, a few months after Survivor's black alums raised their concerns, programme-maker US network CBS announced a goal to ensure 50% of all casts in its unscripted shows are Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC). Back in August, Arisa Cox, host and executive producer of Big Brother Canada, also shared on Twitter that she would be aiming for " 50% BIPOC on our next cast ".

NBCUniversal Television network's Bravo TV, home to many popular US reality series, also put itself in the spotlight. Critics often cite many Bravo shows, including the famed The Real Housewives franchise, for perpetuating racism, featuring typecasts and caricatures. In Housewives, for example, casts are generally homogenised along racial lines, with only periodic introductions of cast members of a different ethnicity. There have also been explicit incidents of overt racism and racialised name-calling by white cast-mates toward castmates of colour, with seemingly few repercussions. Real Housewives of Atlanta, which features a majority black cast and is one of Bravo TV's most popular series, has long faced accusations of racialised stereotyping in its production and presentation.

Rather than radically alter its model, Bravo TV baked a national conversation on race into parts of its programming. In August, the network offered a 90-minute TV special, Race in America: A Movement Not A Moment, in which stars from some of its shows held a roundtable to discuss race and racism. Two cast members on restaurant-based reality show Vanderpump Rules were also fired when incidents of racism and stereotyping of a former black co-star emerged. And, on its current Housewives shows, some cast members are now featured addressing Black Lives Matter on screen (though some fellow castmates and the fandom believe the discourse is disingenuous).

Of course, the problems of the reality TV industry, from underrepresentation to reinforcing stereotypes, are not divorced from television as a whole. From the very inception of American entertainment and pop culture, racist caricatures including blackface and portraying Asian-Americans and Latino-Americans as 'foreign' has been part of the medium. Yet unscripted television differs from its scripted counterpart because of how viewers experience it. To many viewers, reality TV feels real, and therefore the characters are relatable to our values and how we see ourselves. And, because the genre is broad, covering everything from dating to cooking to surviving in the wilderness, viewers can imagine themselves in many of the scenarios.

"Reality TV is a social construction and like all social constructions, we say as sociologists, it's kind of slippery. The boundaries are kind of difficult to discern," says Danielle Lindemann, a Lehigh University professor of sociology. In other words, these seemingly authentic scenes are still manufactured, and for underrepresented groups, the challenge of how individuals and groups are presented is an old media problem. More than underrepresentation, Lindemann is concerned with the types of representation people of colour receive, notably their depictions on screen and the kinds of shows they are featured in.

Kandi Burruss of The Real Housewives of Atlanta, a programme criticised as being problematic in the past, has spoken out on issues like Black Lives Matter in 2020 (Credit: Getty)

"There's this kind of certain obsession within reality TV about nouveau riche women, and then particularly nouveau riche black women... There's something the public enjoys about looking at black women who are successful... and making fun of them ... and that's something that has been historically true in our country," she says. Lindemann specifically references Bravo TV shows and the Housewives franchise, but also points to American network VH1's Love & Hip Hop franchise, focusing on the lives of a majority black cast in the music industry.

"I think it's important to think of not just who is represented but also how they are represented," Lindemann says. "It's important to attend to that as well and not just say, 'Okay, well, we've met our quota'."
Diversifying production - and introducing ethics
One way to alleviate some of the more intricate issues regarding representation is to have more people of colour in production. In addition to CBS' BIPOC cast goals, the network also said they would allocate "a quarter of its annual unscripted development budget" to BIPOC-led projects. George Cheeks, president and CEO for the CBS Entertainment Group, acknowledged the genre as "an area that's especially underrepresented, and needs to be more inclusive across development, casting, production and all phases of storytelling". But without statistics on its teams' current demographics, linked to improvements at every level, the statement lacks specificity. (CBS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

ViacomCBS, however, which owns both CBS and VH1 alongside other entertainment networks, launched a diversity and inclusion website that features the company's coalesced workforce demographics. As of July 2020, 63.8% of the company's domestic employees were white, while Asian-Americans, black or African-Americans and Hispanic or Latino-Americans made up 10.6%, 11.3% and 11.6% of the company, respectively. Of the company's senior leadership, it's notable that less than 25% identify as BIPOC.

Networks might consider borrowing from HBO's Power of Visibility initiative, a campaign featuring the perspectives of craftspeople behind the camera, all of whom are from historically underrepresented groups. People of colour who are part of the production process can intimately inform the industry and the public at large on how they navigate their experiences and what they believe is needed during this push for more inclusion.
'Is it worth it?'
Still, despite these potential changes on screen and off, there are experts who think the major problem of reality TV is in its very design.

Helen Wood, a professor of media and cultural studies at Lancaster University, UK, says the overt racism or microaggressions people face in interactions are ultimately still embedded in the shows' blueprints. Wood emphasises that reality TV doesn't merely portray people, especially those in vulnerable groups, inaccurately; the designs of many shows inevitably include having microaggressions as part of the drama, which contributes to individual harm. "It's not just representing diversity in problematic ways. It's also intervening in people's experiences," she says.

In Wood's view, increasing diversity behind the scenes in the long run isn't good enough; the industry needs to reconceive the entire model, beginning with how formats are designed. Yet such an approach would likely alter what makes reality TV unique or enjoyable: the drama, and the subsequent righteousness or outrage we feel from onscreen interactions. Though she believes applying ethics and stress-testing throughout the process will better prepare participants for harmful situations, Wood says we have to confront an ethical question: "Is the drama worth the expense? What is it worth?"

Arisa Cox, host and executive producer of Big Brother Canada, says that the programme is aiming for a cast next season that's at least 50% BIPOC (Credit: Getty)

'Changed how people view me'
These are questions without easy answers. After all, reality TV is brain candy for most of the audiences that watch it, and individual moral interrogations might be more than most are willing to do. Given its comparatively low cost and high return, it's also unlikely that the industry is going away any time soon.

Kristen Marston, a Culture Director at Color of Change, an online racial-justice organisation, spends a huge portion of her time consulting in writer's rooms. According to her, post-George Floyd, networks are more open to rethinking their processes. "We're seeing studios and networks and execs really paying more attention and addressing the diversity on their sets... and we need to be providing [harm-reducing] tools on set and to our cast members," she says. After 25 seasons, ABC's dating show The Bachelor has finally cast its first black lead, for example.

Yet while networks and programmes are rightly enthusiastic about initiatives, there remains an equally healthy suspicion among critics and experts as to whether the changes will be effective. Still, if the industry is truly invested in long-lasting alterations to its practices, and potentially to its model, there is an opportunity for a cultural shift. And if reality TV can prove the sceptics wrong, then given the symbiotic relationship it holds onscreen with culture offscreen, perhaps a wider culture shift is possible across many more industries.

When Phillip Sheppard looks back on his time on Survivor, he says he wasn't reflected in a positive light at all in either season. "The editing I received fundamentally changed how people viewed me." Sheppard says that his portrayal led to episodes of depression, for which he sought treatment.

Sheppard does believe CBS is on the right track, and echoes the network CEO's statement on pursuing inclusiveness at all stages of production and storytelling. "Had what he articulated been the case the last 20 years and 40 seasons, there would have been no need to have former black contestants in different groups and individuals to speak to the issues of systemic, systematic, implicit bias and micro-aggressive racisms."

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Can reality TV shows help lead the way for inclusivity?

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When army veteran, author and CEO Phillip Sheppard appeared on US reality TV show Survivor, he struggled with how he was presented. The 62-year-old African-American, who first emerged in 2011's Redemption Island season and later in 2013's Caramoan, says his portrayal on screen was very different from how he had perceived his actions.

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How does street art communicate protest?

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How does street art communicate protest?

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Over the summer of 2020, a portrait recurred on city walls across the world: an image of the black American George Floyd, who was brutally suffocated to death by police officer David Chauvin on 25 May, 2020. Most of these portraits were based on Floyd's 2016 selfie, taken from his own Facebook account; many referred to the torment of his killing, and his final words. Thousands of miles from the US, protests numerous graffiti tributes to Floyd appeared in European cities and in Asia, Africa and Australia.
More like this: - The music movement that took on racism - Striking images of black struggle - The images inspired by protest
In Karachi, truck artist Haider Ali painted a portrait inscribed with English tags ('#blacklivesmatter') and Urdu song lyrics ("This world doesn't belong to white or black people, it belongs to the ones with heart"); in Idlib, northwestern Syria, Floyd appeared among the war-ravaged ruins; in Nairobi, he was depicted alongside the Swahili word " haki", meaning 'justice' (in a work by Kenyan artist Allan Mwangi, aka Mr Detail Seven); Palestinian artist Taqi Sbatin painted Floyd on the West Bank barrier; in Berlin's Mauerpark, Floyd was portrayed on the wall by Dominican-born artist Eme Freethinker, alongside an array of iconic black US figures: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the musician Prince.

These portraits are a testimony to human empathy, and the reach of the vast, multi-stranded Black Lives Matter movement. Graffiti is both an ancient form (traced back to writing on the wall in Ancient Greece and Rome) and a vital contemporary statement about society; independent graffiti and commissioned public art have also brought vivid focus to BLM. In a year when history is being emphatically questioned, and where a global pandemic has shut conventional galleries and museums, street art also highlights a diversity of vewpoints. The very public horror of Floyd's killing (captured on videocam) lingers, but he is rarely an isolated figure; mural memorials also say the names of generations of innocent black US victims: among them, Breonna Taylor (killed by the police in her own home, 13 March, 2020); 12-year-old Tamir Rice (fatally shot by the police, 22 November, 2014); 14-year-old Emmett Till (lynched by racists, 28 August, 1955).

International artists bring their own resonance; the Nairobi mural of Floyd also draws attention to accusations of police brutality in Kenya; Freethinker was adamant that his Berlin mural should honour Floyd's life, rather than visualise his death, although he added in an interview with NPR: "I saw many, many other guys die by the police in my country, like almost for nothing. So I know how it is." Syrian artist Aziz Asmar, who created the Idlib mural with Anis Hamdoun, told The National: "Art is a universal language. Our humanity requires us to unite with other people who are facing injustice. When we draw on the walls of destroyed buildings, we are telling the world that underneath these buildings there are people who have died or who have left their homes. It shows you that there was injustice here, just like there's injustice in America."

Graffiti has both an ephemeral quality, and an enduring power. Writing in the LA Times, academic and author Susan A Philips (whose books include The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti) recently argued: "Political graffiti is a critical intervention in urban space, especially as municipalities and police attempt to shut down the streets. Even after protests have dispersed, graffiti stands as a testament to the protestors' collective voice... The graffiti may soon be washed away, but not before it is documented, becoming part of history."

In South Minneapolis, US, the Cup Foods convenience store, where a 911 call led to George Floyd's police killing, is now emblazoned with memorial art. One particularly moving piece was created by local illustrator, muralist and teacher Melodee Strong; entitled Mama after Floyd's dying plea, it depicts grieving black mothers, against a backdrop of the US flag.

"I am a mother, and when George cried out for his 'mama' as he was taking his last breaths, I also cried," Strong tells BBC Culture. "That's what we do when we are in trouble or scared, we cry out for God or our mothers. My son has been harassed and mistreated by the police. I have witnessed numerous times how the people I love have been abused by police. The anguish we feel from the fear and the experiences of those too many incidences is what I feel in the faces I painted... Even though this piece is about George Floyd, it's more a dedication to all the mothers that have lost their child to police violence."

Social media brings these streets and statements much closer, wherever we are. Strong champions the positive force of graffiti and street murals, on local and global levels ("It's empowering and it gives pride. The people and culture represented in these images validates a community... When it comes to activism, it's allowing a space to have a voice, when for so long that voice has been suppressed and oppressed"). At the same time, she has made cogent points about how media-savvy artists sometimes overshadow community voices:

"I still believe this is so," she says. "Everyone has an opinion and everyone is dealing with this in their own way. I am cool with white artists making their mark in history but I also believe we need to allow BIPOC artists a place first. So often we are cast aside, and now we are seeing a trend where companies and patrons are seeking our work; not sure if it's 'white guilt' or it's just the 'popular thing to do' right now, but we need to recognise that BIPOC artists have always been here, and will continue to be."

There is a need for lasting change, in Strong's view: "Don't just use us now, but rather continue to provide the platforms and the resources to empower our voices. It shouldn't just be about satisfying a trend but actually making an effort towards real change. Including us more. And when you do, really listen. And listen to several of us. Don't token one artist and make them the spokesperson for the whole group. We are diverse within our communities and we have a lot to say and in different ways."
Righteous fury
There is righteous fury in BLM-inspired graffiti, and also beauty in its details: the names of great thinkers, creators and activists; the image of unity, strength and potential. Black experience cannot be encapsulated as trauma alone; its celebratory, inspirational range must be wholly acknowledged. There are also significant contemporary artists who are not specifically linked to BLM, but whose works embody its energy. Take the empowering, grand-scale, yet immediately relatable portraits painted by the London-based artist and educator Dreph (aka Neequaye Dsane), which have appeared around the world, including residencies in Brazil and Cape Verde, and artwork in the Accra neighbourhood where his father grew up.

"My thing is to inspire; once you've acknowledged the trauma, what do you do with it?" Dreph tells BBC Culture. "We are bombarded with negative imagery all day long; what do we do with that energy? It's got to be moulded into something positive... I want to constantly make authentic, inspiring, meaningful, thought-provoking work, regardless of the context."

Dreph's formative influences include New York's hip-hop graffiti scene ("Our thing was to get our work in the most inaccessible and hard-to-reach places; that mindset is what I do with my work") but also British comics such as 2000AD and Jamie Hewlett's Tank Girl, as well as centuries of fine art, spanning Caravaggio to Jenny Saville. His painting style feels timely, and distinctly his own. In Britain, his street-portrait series includes Migrations, a celebration of multi-cultural local heroes - especially resonant around the Windrush scandal, where hundreds of Britons of Caribbean descent were wrongly threatened with deportation and refused vital services through the UK Government's "hostile environment" policy.

Another is You Are Enough, which depicts an array of inspirational modern women. When we speak, Dreph has just completed a mural in Belfast, of the 18th-Century West African-born writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano, whose travels included a key period in Ireland; Equiano should surely be a fixture of school curriculums - but here, graffiti provides public education.

At its best, graffiti also evokes a sense of community - whether it's the collaborative BLM pieces that have appeared internationally, or mass responses to individual works. "I realised early on that graffiti is a key, and I can go to pretty much any country in the world and meet a local within minutes because of the graffiti movement; it's a network," says Dreph. "With each place I visit, I'm learning and refining what I do. One aspect of my work, I've realised, is the community listening that happens," he adds. "Say, for instance, I go to Brixton [a South London neighbourhood], and it takes me three days minimum to do my portraits. I'm there painting, and essentially giving something to a particular community that I don't live in. After a day or two, I'm getting cups of tea, I'm getting told about local politics, about the gentrification of the area - all these different things by the locals that live there. The actual artwork that people see is only one aspect of it."

Most of Dreph's artworks now remain in place for a significant time; in summer 2020, one of them became a permanent feature of the outdoor set of the major British TV drama EastEnders: a radiant portrait (measuring 5m by 2m) of a young black woman.

"When I was asked to do the EastEnders job, they wanted to acknowledge an undeniable time," says Dreph. "They wanted to do something meaningful, they wanted legacy. All of these words are the foundation of what I do; I was able to do that and nod to the time. They were adamant that they wanted something authentic, right down to making sure that my tag is very clear on the work."

It's fitting that such a pop culture phenomenon should display solidarity with BLM; it's also an overdue reality check, given EastEnders' London setting (as a life-long viewer, I couldn't imagine this statement happening when the show started, 30 years ago). Graffiti communicates that spirit, across media, communities and continents; it brings vital remembrance, boundless diversity and indelible visibility.

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The street art that expressed the world's pain

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In 2020, murals in cities all over the globe gave voice to black protest and resistance. Arwa Haider explores the powerful graffiti art that memorialises George Floyd and others.

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Are “Huck Finn”, “Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” racist? 

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Are “Huck Finn”, “Mockingbird” and “Of Mice and Men” racist? 

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California's Burbank Unified School District has removed five classics from its curriculum over racism charges, but a conservative youth organization is stepping up to offer the books to students.

On Sept. 9, Burbank announced "To Kill a Mockingbird," "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," "The Cay" and "Of Mice and Men" will no longer be used in classrooms, at least temporarily, after four parents, three of them Black, challenged their use as racist.

On Nov. 27, Superintendent Matt Hill announced that the district was removing the novels from its core reading list and banning the use and reading of the N-word in classrooms.
CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION SEEKS INJUNCTION AGAINST REOPENING SCHOOLS
Young America's Foundation (YAF) announced it will now offer the books to students free of charge.

"In addition to putting the books Burbank schools are attempting to hide directly into students' hands, YAF is calling on those with the power to do the right thing-the board members of the Burbank Unified School District-to immediately rescind their ban on these books," YAF wrote on Twitter.

The organization urged parents to contact the school district to share their thoughts.

The Burbank School District has pushed back on the notion that the books have been banned.
CDC DIRECTOR: SCHOOLS ARE NOT A MAJOR COROANVIRUS TRANSMISSION SOURCE
"Recent news articles in the Los Angeles Times and television interviews have spouted false information," said Instruction subcommittee member and BUSD Library Coordinator Lisa Dyson. "WE ARE NOT BANNING BOOKS!"

"These books are on pause while we listen and learn from our BIPOC students, parents, and teachers who have experienced these classroom books for over 30 years now and have come to our District sharing their experiences and their concerns," Dyson continued.
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"So these books are on pause while we listen and learn and read what is currently out there also written by award-winning BIPOC without the trope of the white savior stories or books that are considered 'classics' because white gatekeepers at one time decided what would be considered classic."

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Conservative youth organization offers students books banned by their school district

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California's Burbank Unified School District has removed five classics from its curriculum over racism charges, but a conservative youth organization is stepping up to offer the books to students. On Sept.

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How are Gen-Z and Covid impacting the lexicon of "business speak"?

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How are Gen-Z and Covid impacting the lexicon of "business speak"?

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This feature uses a computer-generated synthetic voice. There may be some errors, for example in pronunciation, sentiment and tone.

If you've ever tried to explain a meme to your grandparent - or if you're the puzzled grandparent - you know how big the cultural divide among generations can be. And while all-caps 'yelling', misunderstood emojis and other crossed wires are harmless in a family group text, business communication is much more fraught. Send your boss the goat emoji, and instead of realising it's a compliment (she's the greatest of all time!) she might think you're calling her, well, a goat.

Workplace harmony, culture and productivity all depend on successful communication. And while language gaps between senior leadership and newer hires aren't unusual, they're usually bridged by a shared lexicon of ' business speak'. But now, the first generation of true digital natives is entering the workforce, and a pandemic has forced us into virtual offices. Workplace communication is undergoing a major shift, with some huge potential pitfalls.

"With the ways we communicate now, there are so many more chances for miscommunication," says Giselle Kovary, generational researcher and president of Toronto-based consulting firm n-gen People Performance, Inc. "There's lots of noise in a digital environment, and unless we're chatting live, things can be misinterpreted. To younger workers, the formal business communication of older generations can come off as very cold and a little harsh, while the criticism is that younger people are too casual."

With the transition to remote work that depends on digital fluency, younger workers now have a larger influence on workplace communication (Credit: Alamy)

Gen Z, born in the year 2000 and later, is the largest generation in human history. Over the next 10 years, 1.3 billion of its members will enter the global workforce. Traditionally, the onus has been on younger workers to assimilate into office culture. But with the culture itself changing as the office moves online, the eldest and youngest employees of organisations may find themselves having to meet in the middle.

Australia-based social researcher Mark McCrindle, co-author of Work Wellbeing: Leading Thriving Teams in Rapidly Changing Times, says every generation "has their own youth slang and pop-culture code" that they use in social situations. But although older generations, and even millennials, are likely to 'code switch', sticking to a more codified type of professional communication, Gen Z is keeping things much more casual. McCrindle says, "We're starting to really pull down those barriers between our work and personal or social life. We're working from home, or in a mobile work environment, and that's naturally creating a more relaxed workplace."

The digital workplace is where Gen Z is already comfortable, explains Jonah Stillman, the 21-year-old co-author of Gen Z @ Work: How the Next Generation is Transforming the Workplace. "Since we were born, nearly every physical element has a digital counterpart. So, whether I put something in my cart at the supermarket, or click 'add to cart' is one and the same. This is a generation that defines being together as either FaceTiming or being in the same room."

Stillman's consulting firm, GenGuru, found in a recent survey that 84% of Gen Z still prefers in-person communication over email or text. But, crucially, "Gen Z defines things like Zoom, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams as being face-to-face".

The move to remote work in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic means younger generations, who are digitally fluent, suddenly have far more influence over communication and culture. It goes beyond slang and internet-speak abbreviations. Gen Z, used to informal, near-constant contact, spurns the prim email in favour of a quick Slack message. But that can be a tough pill to swallow for older generations, who are accustomed to dictating the professional rules of communication.

Kovary points to a former client: a company who came to her for advice after a run-in with a young intern. "On the first day, she emailed the CEO because she couldn't find access to information she wanted. At the end of week one, she sent a company-wide email, to 8,000 people, with all her ideas. They called me and said, 'obviously, we let her go'."

New workplace platforms that encourage real-time communication and collaboration - and, yes, emojis - are helping break down some of the traditional formality (Credit: Alamy)

Kovary explains that while the company's leadership felt the intern "totally violated the unspoken rules of the communication chain", what really happened was a generation-gap issue. "Most companies don't want a new hire to email the CEO directly, even if that CEO has said, 'I'm always available!' They don't really mean it, but the new hires don't understand. I tell executives all the time, don't tell young people 'message me with your ideas', and then be surprised when you get them."

Stillman says Gen Z values authenticity above all else. It's why younger employees are less willing to do the same 'code-switching' that past generations have. Forced assimilation to a shared lexicon isn't sustainable anymore, says Nicky Thompson, a London-based business psychologist with a background in linguistics. Code-switching can be especially harmful for people of colour; research shows it can hinder performance and increase burnout. And Gen Z won't put up with it.

Thompson says, "Younger generations are coming into a world where diversity and inclusion is at the forefront. It's not an exercise of ticking a box anymore. It's taken seriously. Creating a more diverse and inclusive workspace is about language, tone, who I am as a person, and being able to actually express that in the workplace."

Often, especially for younger people, authentic expression involves more than words. "Slang's not a new thing, and that changes with the generations, of course," says Stillman. "But part of the Gen Z 'slang' is a totally non-verbal kind of communication: emojis. They're not a fun add-on to a sentence. It's a new language."

But the nuance and subtlety of a cartoon-symbol language isn't all that easy to translate to non-native speakers, and that can create friction between young emoji-users and their superiors. Whether that friction is resolved by keeping emojis out of corporate communication, or by making sure leadership understands remains to be seen, says Stillman. "Are we three years away from there being emoji policies in communication? Are we going to be having meetings explaining to our bosses what emojis mean?"

Although older leadership can encourage newer employees to maintain decorum (and maybe go easy on the emojis in client emails), mentorship is no longer a one-way street.

Workplace superiors may find Gen Z's casual approach to office communication frustrating - if not bewildering, too (Credit: Alamy)

"We have a generation entering the workforce that innately knows more about operating in the modern world than any other generation," says Stillman. "That ability is something boomers are starting to tap into, with communication and beyond. Gen Z will give you a plug-in that will save you 12 hours, tell you what you need to know about navigating our culture, what things to say and not say. This idea of two-way mentorship is about aligning older and younger generations on the same goal in different ways."

McCrindle adds another major way to bridge the generational gap at work is to establish common ground. "A workplace is a community. It's important for its members to have a shared culture. That means communicating what the brand's voice is, maybe distributing a written style guide. It's important for businesses to double down on their brand story, invest in a workplace culture, and create shared experiences that give people commonality even among differences."

After all, McCrindle says whether you're 22 or 82, on Zoom or in a cubicle, everyone wants to relate. "We're humans. It's a human value to communicate across the generations. People want that connection."

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How young workers are changing the rules of 'business speak'

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This feature uses a computer-generated synthetic voice. There may be some errors, for example in pronunciation, sentiment and tone. If you've ever tried to explain a meme to your grandparent - or if you're the puzzled grandparent - you know how big the cultural divide among generations can be.

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Is "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" racist?

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Is "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" racist?

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Recently, the family of author Roald Dahl family apologized for anti-Semitic remarks he made. But Dahl, most famous for the children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, also brought young readers anti-Black racism in his original depiction of the Oompa-Loompas.

Dahl drew on his own life for his writing in many ways. As journalist Layla Eplett writes in Gastronomica, Dahl's initial inspiration for the book came when he was a boy at a prestigious British boarding school in the 1930s. The candy company Cadbury had the school's pupils test its new chocolates, a job Dahl took very seriously. He left comments such as "Too subtle for the common palate" and dreamed of someday working for the candy maker.

The book's plot line, involving spies sent to the Wonka factory by a rival chocolatier, is also rooted in real life. British chocolate makers were known to use industrial espionage. Having served as a spy during World War II, Dahl could draw on personal knowledge here, too.

Wonka explains that he found the Oompa-Loompas "in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before."

Eplett writes that one real-life parallel Dahl apparently did not intend involved labor practices. Cocoa plantations that supplied Cadbury and other chocolate makers used enslaved labor. The chocolate makers at least worked to distance themselves from slavery. Dahl, on the other hand, apparently saw nothing wrong with Oompa-Loompas-depicted as African pygmy people-being locked up forever in the factory where they supplied all the labor for Willy Wonka's chocolate empire.

In the 1964 book, Wonka explains that he found the Oompa-Loompas "in the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had ever been before." They were near starvation, living on vile caterpillars, so Wonka smuggled them to England for their own good. The wildly colonialist stereotyping apparently received little pushback until 1971, when plans were announced for a U.S. movie version of the book. The NAACP launched a protest.

"In response, Dahl was shocked and sullen," Eplett writes. "He found the NAACP to be unreasonable, telling Knopf editor Bob Bernstein he was unable to understand why the perceived his story as a 'terrible dastardly anti-negro book,' and described their attitude as 'real Nazi stuff.'"

In the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the Oompa-Loompas are reimagined with orange skin. But it was only after a series of exchanges with Eleanor Cameron, a white children's book author who objected to the racist content, that Dahl agreed to revise the book. In the 1974 edition, Oopma-Loompas became long-haired, rosy-cheeked, and white, hailing from the island of Loompaland. (Dahl's widow revealed in 2017 that the original Charlie was intended to be a Black child.)

Like his loving depiction of fantastical candies, Dahl's colonial outlook was rooted in his life. He spent time several years in Africa as a young man, later acknowledging that he had been too willing to accept British imperialism. Eplett quotes novelist Deji Olukotun, who marvels that despite the incredible creativity of Dahl-and fellow children's writer Hergé, author of Tintin in the Congo -"the stereotypes and racism were so imbued in their outlook that even they did not realize that blowing up a rhinoceros or importing a group of pygmies was a failure of the imagination."
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Roald Dahl's Anti-Black Racism - JSTOR Daily

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The first edition of the beloved novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory featured "pygmy" characters taken from Africa.

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What is the real symbolism behind the Eye of Providence?

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What is the real symbolism behind the Eye of Providence?

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Conspiracy theories thrive on cryptic symbols and covert visual signs. The 'Eye of Providence' - an eye set within a triangle - is one such symbol, associated with Freemasonry but also linked with the apocryphal Illuminati, a secret group of elite individuals allegedly seeking to control global affairs.

More like this:
- The strange power of the 'evil eye'
- One of our earliest human symbols
- The ancient symbol that spanned millennia

The Eye of Providence is a lightning rod for conspiracy theorists because it is very much hidden in plain sight: not only does it appear on countless churches and Masonic buildings worldwide, it also features on the reverse of the American one-dollar bill as well as the Great Seal of the United States.

The divine eye in Pontormo's Supper at Emmaus (1525) was a later repainting, hiding a three-sided face prohibited by the Counter-Reformation (Credit: The Uffizi Galleries)

Another key source of the icon was in a book of emblems called the Iconologia, published first in 1593. In later editions, the Eye of Providence was included as an attribute of the personification of 'Divine Providence', ie God's benevolence. As the name of the symbol and its early usage suggest, it was invented as a sign of God's compassionate watchfulness over humanity.
Building on the past
Nobody is certain who originally invented it, but whoever did crafted it out of a set of previously existing religious motifs. The triangle was a long-standing symbol of the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit; sometimes in previous centuries God was even depicted with a triangular halo. The rays of light that are often shown emanating from the symbol are also a pre-existing sign of God's radiance in Christian iconography. But what are the origins of that eerie disembodied eye? God had been depicted in numerous cryptic ways before, such as by a single hand emerging from a cloud, but not as an eye.

It's fair to say that an eye represented in isolation has its own inherent psychological impact, showing authority and for the viewer implying a sentient watchfulness. You can even see this effect in nature, with some animals having evolved 'eyespots' on their skin to scare off predators. The Surrealist photographer Man Ray summarised the uncanniness of the disembodied eye best when he said that René Magritte's The False Mirror of 1929 "sees as much as it itself is seen."

The Sumerians used abnormally large eyes to convey the holiness of divine figures (Credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

But it was the ancient Egyptians who were the originators of the detached eye as a motif: for example, a pair of eyes painted on a coffin that allowed the dead to see in the afterlife. And one of the most famous of all Egyptian symbols is the Eye of Horus.

This motif is actually a hybrid of a human and falcon eye, and it includes the bird's dark eyebrow and cheek markings. According to ancient Egyptian mythology, the god-King Horus (often depicted as a falcon, or with a falcon's head) had his eyes cut out in battle with his uncle Set. With the help of Thoth, he later healed his eyes. The Eye of Horus was therefore a protective symbol, often used as an amulet, a sculpture small enough for a person to carry in their pocket as a form of protection.

This and other Egyptian hieroglyphs of isolated human eyes went on to affect European iconography during the Renaissance. At that time, scholars and artists had a fascination with Egyptian writing; the only problem was that they didn't fully understand it, and attempted translations were normally riddled with inaccuracies. One of the most famous appeared in a romance of 1499 titled The Dream of Poliphilo where the translation of an Egyptian single eye symbol was 'God'.
Lost in translation
This stemmed from a fundamental misunderstanding of hieroglyphics' original use. Nowadays we know that they are a written language of mainly phonetic signs, but in the 1400s and 1500s they were believed to have a much more mystical significance. The symbols in hieroglyphic writing - animals, birds and abstract shapes - were thought to be deliberately mysterious, each one creating meaning through the inspiration of the viewer rather than being part of a linguistic system. They were, so it was believed, open puzzles that contained multiple meanings.

This belief had a huge effect on European art. When dictionaries of symbols, such as Andrea Alciati's 1531 Emblemata and later Cesare Ripa's Iconologia came out, the emphasis was on cryptic, often highly complex visual symbols where the viewer is enrolled as a participant in deciphering as well as constructing meanings from them.

As a result, a motif like the Eye of Providence was deliberately esoteric in its appearance. It's a symbol almost purpose-built to be reinterpreted, and maybe even misinterpreted. And this really came to fruition in the late 18th Century. Three key examples from this period demonstrate an increasing diversity in the symbolism of the Eye of Providence.

In post-revolutionary France, Jean-Jacques-François Le Barbier's 1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen featured the text of the radical new declaration with the Eye of Providence at the top. In this case, it has become an instrument of paternalistic reason watching over the newly egalitarian nation.

In Britain in 1794 Jeremy Bentham commissioned the architect Willey Reveley to design him a logo for his 'Panopticon'- a revolutionary new prison aiming to allow for continual surveillance of each cell. The resulting design prominently included the Eye of Providence - a symbol now of the unblinking stare of judiciary righteousness - surrounded by the words 'Mercy', 'Justice' and 'Vigilance'.

And into our modern age, Madonna, Jay-Z and Kanye West have all been accused of using Illuminati iconography, including the Eye of Providence. But rather than any link to the Illuminati, what each music artist has in common is a discerning eye for the iconic (and perhaps for provocation) - in visuals as much as in melody. The repeated use of the Eye of Providence - and we can apply this as much to Madonna and Jay-Z as to Bentham, Le Barbier, Thomson, Barton, the Freemasons, Renaissance artists or pretty much any other individual or group - is proof not of a concerted conspiracy, but of its enduring brilliance as a piece of logo design.

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The Eye of Providence: The symbol with a secret meaning?

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Conspiracy theories thrive on cryptic symbols and covert visual signs. The 'Eye of Providence' - an eye set within a triangle - is one such symbol, associated with Freemasonry but also linked with the apocryphal Illuminati, a secret group of elite individuals allegedly seeking to control global affairs.

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Talk with enough people about gender, politics, and power, and you'll probably encounter this question: Why are there vanishingly few matriarchal societies? Looking at the Khasi of northeastern India, political scientist Roopleena Banerjee argues that we may be misunderstanding what it means for women to hold power.

Banerjee writes that the concept of matriarchy emerged among European thinkers in the nineteenth century. In 1861, Swiss anthropologist Johann Jakob Bachofen published a study of ancient societies in which he argued that female rule was one early stage in social development. Bachofen claimed that matriarchy emerges from an earlier social order called hetaerism, characterized by unregulated sexuality and female powerlessness. In his view, women fought back against this state of affairs, taking a dominant role, controlling property, ruling within their families, and gaining political power. In a still later stage, Bachofen and other scholars believed, men took power from the matriarchs, instituting patriarchy.

The youngest daughter in a family, the Khadduh, inherits the largest share of family property and the ancestral home.

"The downfall of maternal law was the historic defeat of the female sex," Frederick Engels wrote. "The men seized the reins also in the house, the women were stripped of their dignity, enslaved, tools of men's lust and mere machines for the generation of children."

In some respects, Banerjee writes, the Khasi look like that European vision of a matriarchy. They live in clans that trace their origins to a female ancestor. Marriage within clans is forbidden, and men marry into their wives' clans and extended families. The youngest daughter in a family, the Khadduh, inherits the largest share of family property and the ancestral home, which she uses to support her parents, her sisters, and their families.

"If any member of the family faces any trouble or distress, he finds solace and all kinds of help in the house of the Khadduh," Banerjee writes. "A man who marries a Khadduh is supposed to be open hearted and accommodating too and to help all members of the family."

However, when European anthropologists began looking at the Khasi in the nineteenth century-as part of the British colonial domination of India-they recognized their systems as matrilineal and matrilocal but did not classify them as matriarchal. That's because, at the level of states and villages, men lead Khasi political institutions such as the court system, and only men are allowed in local councils.

"This, however, is a very patriarchal understanding of power," Banerjee writes. "Those who subscribe to this view consider power only to be a means and an agent of domination.... Wherever power was not used to dominate, it was considered to be no power at all."

She argues that in Khasi society power is understood instead as freedom-particularly the freedom that comes with the control of land and property.

"Politics always occupied a backstage in the Khasi way of life," she writes.

If we avoid thinking of matriarchy simply as the flip side of a patriarchy based in coercive political power, Banerjee argues, it's possible that the Khasi, with their female-controlled systems of property ownership and responsibility for families' well-being, could qualify.
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What Does It Mean to Be a Matriarchy? | JSTOR Daily

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Talk with enough people about gender, politics, and power, and you'll probably encounter this question: Why are there vanishingly few matriarchal societies? Looking at the Khasi of northeastern India, political scientist Roopleena Banerjee argues that we may be misunderstanding what it means for women to hold power.

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In the 21st century, girls and women were asked to heal capitalism, to clean it up, to save it from itself. Around 2010, the economic system was still in crisis. We were recovering from a recession, and the recovery was weak - the miserable gig economy was creeping in, and many were in debt. As a result, faith in corporate America, which had caused the crisis, had eroded. Wall Street was particularly hated, but Silicon Valley also had an image problem. While Wall Street had scapegoated its few female leaders by pushing them off the "glass cliff," Silicon Valley rarely had female leaders at all. In the next decade, dozens of brands would start calling for more "girl bosses" to climb the corporate ladder, build businesses, and show that this time around, capitalism could work for all of us. Capitalism would empower women, and women would prove that capitalism could still be good.

These "feminist" brands seemed ridiculous. Thinx was (and is) a brand of period-proof underwear led by a woman whose version of empowerment included asking a female employee to take her shirt off in the office to see her nipple piercings. #GirlBoss was a book, a TV show, and a self-help brand built by the founder of retail company Nasty Gal. Nasty Gal was later accused in a lawsuit of "being a horrible place to work" for pregnant employees, a claim the company called "defamatory" and "frivolous"; the lawsuit was settled in arbitration. Lean In seemed best suited to white-collar executives - it encouraged its readers to overcome sexism by working harder before taking time off, being assertive yet non-threatening, ambitious but not grabby, and other things that are hard to do at the same time. Many pointed out that the book seemed designed for women who were able to pay other women to take care of their children. A company called the Wing promised that its all-female coworking space would advance feminism and sold shirts reading "Caution Women at Work" and "League of Unusual Women" (Wing support staff interviewed by the New York Times said they grew cynical about the company's version of feminism, which they said didn't include them; the company told the Times it "maintained employment best practices"). All of these worldviews applied to a small number of women and depended on their employment of other women, for whom leaning in meant more drudgery, not promotion. There's no capitalism, after all, without bosses and workers. Feminism seemed to have become like a box of those briefly trendy pastel macarons - decorative, for sale, and tending to leave you feeling slightly sick.

All these brands tried to project the same underlying messageS: Capitalism can become more equitable; it's totally possible to work your way to wealth and success; things are working better and better - just look at all these women doing capitalism. As inequality mounted in America and around the globe, the pitches seemed more and more out of step, designed to persuade women of capitalism's promise just as real upward mobility all but disappeared. It felt like a last-ditch attempt to make American capitalism look like it was worth saving.

For Millennials and Gen Z'ers, those versions of feminism are dead women walking. Corporate feminism doesn't mean much when your generation is more likely to have freelance work and haphazard gigs than an office. Many young workers are actually downwardly mobile (read this perfect account), doing delivery work for apps and gig-ified versions of white-collar work. Many are still in debt. And being your own girl boss is no answer - plenty of startups fail. Most young women face college debt, bad health care, and a worse job market.

In response, socialist feminism is on the rise, mirroring the popularity of socialism in general. A socialist won huge support from young women in the last two presidential primaries. Democratic Socialists of America suddenly has flourishing feminist working groups all over the country. Feminist heroes increasingly include labor leaders like Sara Nelson, president of the flight attendants' union. And one of the most popular politicians of our era, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is a proud democratic socialist feminist. This generation of feminists is less interested in helping to paint a veneer of equality on capitalism than scrapping that system for good.

In a sense, it's no surprise that socialist feminism is on the rise. Socialist ideas owe their modern relevance to feminists who have revised and reinvented them over the last two centuries. Without socialist feminism, we wouldn't have concepts like identity politics (a term invented by socialists), or the tools to understand emotional labor or to explain why the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis are manned by women. Despite the many tedious Bernie bro accusations used to characterize socialists today, the fact remains: Socialism belongs to feminists.

It might be useful to start with a really good definition of socialist feminism. bell hooks, who writes on race, socialism, and feminism, argues in her brilliant book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (a book I'd recommend to any new socialist feminist) that "feminism is the struggle against sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women." In other words, it's not a lifestyle, an identity, or a particular group, but an ongoing struggle to end the oppression of all women (and I would add nonbinary and queer folks too). This rules out a system, like capitalism, that will always oppress the majority of people in order to benefit the few. Socialist feminists reject the exploitation of anyone, demand equal representation within institutions (we have this in common with all liberal feminists), and are able to perceive the specific ways people are exploited through unpaid labor, through their bodies, and by society's contempt for values stereotyped as feminine, like nurturing and vulnerability. Socialist feminists reject the idea of "sisterhood" in favor of solidarity, believing that strong relationships among socialist feminists are not somehow natural, but built in pursuit of a better society.

While it's of course impossible to give a complete history of socialist feminism here, I wanted to offer a few important concepts in recent socialist feminist history that should be useful today. If you want to go further, some folks in the Democratic Socialists of America have written syllabi and compiled a reading list. I also benefited massively from reading Karl Marx's Capital in a reading group with no men (except this one), thus avoiding a situation ripe for unrelenting mansplaining. One of the reasons the book is both brilliant and lively is that it was written in a moment of great worker organizing and struggle - it was a piece of analysis designed to serve as a powerful tool of the socialist movement of the 1860s. That tool is constantly in need of updating for new situations. And socialism would not be the relevant, vital force it is today without its feminist evolution.

The push for wages for housework
"They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism. Every miscarriage is a work accident." -Silvia Federici, "Wages Against Housework," 1975

If you've heard terms like care work and emotional labor, you've heard echoes of the Wages for Housework movement, which began in Italy in 1972. Women involved in the labor movement began to tackle their own oppression, noting that society would fall apart without the domestic work done by women, which was widely perceived not as real work, but as a natural "labor of love." They called for wages so that they could make domestic work visible as work and consequently refuse it. The analysis they produced remains relevant and useful today, and thinkers like Arlie Hochschild have developed precise ways of thinking about what it means to be paid to smile. In essence, the Wages for Housework organizers helped push socialism toward an analysis that did not end at the factory gates, and has proved especially useful in an era dominated by the service economy, which demands not just work, but charm, flexibility, and cheerfulness.

The roots of identity politics
"If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression." -Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977
Most people don't know that the term identity politics was developed by a socialist group, the Combahee River Collective (CRC), comprising black lesbian organizers and thinkers. The collective's founding statement remains one of the most important pieces of socialist feminist analysis we have. Historian and organizer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, in her fantastic book about the statement, explains it best: "The women of the CRC did not define 'identity politics' as exclusionary, whereby only those experiencing a particular oppression could fight against it. Nor did they envision identity politics as a tool to claim the mantle of 'most oppressed.' They saw it as an analysis that would validate Black women's experiences while simultaneously creating an opportunity for them to become politically active to fight for the issues most important to them. To that end, the CRC Statement was clear in its calls for solidarity as the only way for Black women to win their struggles. Solidarity did not mean subsuming your struggles to help someone else; it was intended to strengthen the political commitments from other groups by getting them to recognize how the different struggles were related to each other and connected under capitalism." This vision of socialism, in which our specific sites of oppression become sites of strength through our alliances, transforms our understanding of what solidarity can and should look like. In a moment when the right is more explicit than ever about trying to divide us through racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia, the CRC's vision of identity politics provides the vision of creative unity we need.

The devaluation of women's labor
"There was a time when teachers were revered in the community, and now they're often demonized.... There's still this paternalistic attitude of "I'd like to protect women" combined with, on the other hand, 'Let's cut them off at the knees.'" -Karen Lewis, former head of the Chicago Teachers Union, Dissent magazine
As feminist labor reporters like Sarah Jaffe have noted, jobs like teaching and nursing are underpaid and constantly under attack from politicians who want to cut budgets. These professions were originally feminized in order to make them cheaper - you could pay female teachers less than male ones. This strategy was also reflected in factory work in the early 1900s factories, when young women were brought in as cheap labor. And today, women working in the public sector are attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike and accused of, for example, neglecting their children. Today, we're seeing the consequences of devaluing nurses for decades. They have said over and over that the health care system is underfunded, they are overworked, and the disrespect for their work puts patients at risk. Women are now the vastly under-resourced frontline workers in the COVID-19 struggle.

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Socialism Is the Answer to Corporate 'Girl Boss' Feminism

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In the 21st century, girls and women were asked to heal capitalism, to clean it up, to save it from itself. Around 2010, the economic system was still in crisis. We were recovering from a recession, and the recovery was weak - the miserable gig economy was creeping in, and many were in debt.

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In recent weeks, controversial statues and symbols across the United States that seem to glorify the white supremacist ideals of a Confederate past have been taken down by frustrated protesters and concerned institutions, ready for a change in the public conversation. In many ways, this has been a long time in coming, but some have looked on in disapproval, fretting that these quick actions point to a politically correct erasure or denial of the country's Civil War history, good or bad. This is despite the fact that in many cases, these statues do not have a long history at all and celebrate an outdated-or, in some cases, an overtly racist-viewpoint that obscures the stain of slavery from America's story.

As historian Robert R. Weyeneth observes, when it comes to longstanding historical injustices committed against an innocent people, perhaps taking down these symbols of oppression is not a suppression of history, but just one form of historical apology that a nation can make, one way the present can apologize for the past, on the road to reconciliation. "Societies now find themselves compelled to confront their past in its entirety," writes Weyeneth, "to ask new questions about it, and to rewrite the story 'all of us have learned since childhood.'"

Countries can take many steps that could act as apologies for historical wrongs-so is an official apology ever needed? Old statues can be taken down, new statues can be put up. Memorials, plaques, and holiday observances such as Juneteenth can dedicate space and attention for a nation to tell a more complete story of its past. Renaming the places and important geographical points we know can better reflect what really happened. For example, the Custer Battlefield National Monument in Montana acknowledged only the general who was defeated by the Sioux and Cheyenne in 1876, until its name was changed in 1991 to Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Much-debated reparations and legal settlements can also help the healing process, writes political scientist Angelique M. Davis.

But when a nation is grappling with a painful history, what is necessary, and what is enough?

An apology may be mere words to many, but it is often the case that for those affected, egregious historical wrongs can't be made right without them.

What many don't realize is that a nation's leader just saying the words "I'm sorry" or "I apologize" can be even more powerful than toppling statues. According to Weyeneth, "When the Australian government offered a $41 million assistance package to make amends to the 'stolen generation' [Aboriginal children who had been forcibly removed from their families by government programs from 1905 into the 1970s], some Aborigines deemed the offer 'fundamentally flawed' because the government had refused to apologize as well." An apology may be mere words to many, but it is often the case that for those affected, egregious historical wrongs can't be made right without them.

There is a strange power in the words "I'm sorry." They seem simple, but they can carry far more complex, uncomfortably loaded meanings than we're often aware of.

For some, on a practical level, the very election of Barack Obama as president of the United States might have seemed symbolically more potent as a kind of apologetic act, better than any formally spoken apology could be-yet the effects of slavery and racial discrimination haven't gone away. In fact, as a presidential candidate, writes Davis, Obama publicly opposed both an official apology and reparations, saying, "I have said in the past-and I'll repeat again-that the best reparations we can provide are good schools in the inner city and jobs for people who are unemployed." Obama marked the 150th anniversary of Juneteenth in 2015 with powerful words, but none of them contained an official apology for slavery on behalf of the country.

Before Obama, Bill Clinton reportedly did not offer an official apology due to the objections of the white majority. Some may believe that official apologies for historical injustices are unnecessary or meaningless rhetoric, because, essentially, in the opinion of one citizen quoted by Weyeneth, "You're asking people who didn't do wrong to apologize to people who weren't the actual victims."

People often assume the apologizer has a sense of guilt and shame-an apology can be an act of humiliation, making it very hard for many people, not just political leaders, to say sorry and accept blame on behalf of past generations.

So what could saying sorry really do?

Linguist Robin Lakoff explains that apologies are basic to our social interaction, but they can take on different meanings. In our daily lives, they actually cover a range of functions, "from abject abasement for wrongdoing, to conventional greasing of the social wheels, to expressions of sympathy, advance mollification for intended bad behaviour, and formal public displays of currently 'appropriate feeling.'"

Linguists have found that for apologies to be recognized as valid by listeners, they must contain the right words associated with this "speech act," namely the simple expression "I'm sorry," which is used in the majority of cases, along with "I apologize."

The receivers may ultimately refuse to accept an insincere apology, which plays an important role in validating the many forms that apologies can take.

Speech acts are utterances that actually change something about the world, such as a leader declaring war or the police arresting someone "in the name of the law." True apologies are no different: They are intended to right a wrong, to heal something that is broken, to convey a sense of remorse. But unlike other speech acts, apologies aren't simply enacted with a word; they're also a social process of trust. The receivers may ultimately refuse to accept an insincere apology, which plays an important role in validating the many forms that apologies can take. This can be even more involved when it comes to official apologies, which can have a ceremonial aspect of performance to convey the gravity of the matter.

Perhaps the spectrum over which apologies range, from inconsequential politeness to deep remorse expressed formally, drives some members of the public to distrust official apologies as insincere or unnecessary, while others demand them to redress wrongs. When political leaders are attentive to public sentiment, and empathetic to public grief, the careful language of an official apology can be symbolically very powerful as a first step to dealing with a country's deep-seated wounds.

Australia established its first National Sorry Day in 1998, which helped sway public opinion to support an official apology from the Australian government for its policy of forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families. Then Prime Minister John Howard stubbornly refused to join millions of Australians in apologizing to the victims on behalf of the nation, believing that " present generations should not be held responsible for the actions of past generations." Two years later, the Howard government did pass a resolution expressing "its deep and sincere regret," yet a motion to use the simple word "sorry" was defeated. This shows how much meaningful, performative weight the mere words "sorry" or "apologize" can carry, compared to milder expressions like "regret."

It was not until a decade later, in 2008, that the next government, led by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, officially apologized to the stolen generations and their families. In a close study of this historic speech, linguists Martha Augoustinos, Brianne Hastie, and Monique Wright show how a leader with a simple, unequivocal apology, using the right inclusive language, and accepting responsibility, can change how an entire country sees a once-disenfranchised group.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

[...]

For the pain, suffering, and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

By accepting institutional and collective guilt and blame, rather than stubbornly avoiding it, such a symbolic apology can actually reframe and reset a nation's history, allowing people to feel the collective emotions and empathy and respect for those who were once left out of the story. An honest, heartfelt apology on a national scale, seeking forgiveness from the victims of injustice, rather than dividing a population into "us" and "them," can actually be inclusive as the wronged are recast as fellow human beings, belonging to the same community, with the same national identity.

How is it that a mere apology can turn long-held assumptions upside down in a way that practical solutions, such as more social support or even financial assistance, simply can't do alone? Those one-dimensional symbols, such as statues and flags, can give way to richer, more complete stories that embrace empathy and respect. A sincere apology on a national scale can turn once-revered heroes, such as Confederate leaders, into villains, and once-despised outsiders, such as an enslaved people and their descendants, into human beings who have endured unimaginable injustices. It may be one small first step, but without a political leader addressing it head on as an official act, it is harder for a nation to be made whole and move onward.

Apologies that look and sound and speak clearly like true apologies do matter, when it matters to those who desperately need to hear them. For those people whose very humanity has been repeatedly denied in the telling of a nation's history, somehow those simple words "we are sorry" might help restore and heal, just as much as physically correcting problematic symbols and statues.
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The Sorry State of Apologies | JSTOR Daily

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In recent weeks, controversial statues and symbols across the United States that seem to glorify the white supremacist ideals of a Confederate past have been taken down by frustrated protesters and concerned institutions, ready for a change in the public conversation.

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Are memes a new form of social cohesion?

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Are memes a new form of social cohesion?

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Good news! Recently, many curve-flattening countries began opening up their borders to certain international travelers- but not, alas, to citizens of the United States.
... *cries in American*
In a socially distant world, online life for many people has become normal life. How we express ourselves on the internet has become more important as we lose the social signals of body language and facial expressions. Without handshakes, hugs, and in-person social rituals, such as public gatherings and assemblies, how do we socialize and bond with each other? How can we convey emotionally what our lives have become in this pandemic era without having to explain it all through painstakingly literal language?

The remarkable thing about internet memes is that without constant mutation through wordplay, they become, ahem, meme-ingless.

For many internet users, one way to actively engage in a wider community is to play with words-through seizing the memes of production, as it were. If bonding through figurative language sounds similar to the work of idioms, it's because good old idioms and memes are somewhat related, in the way we cognitively process their words to get from their literal meaning to their figurative one. Idioms are purportedly well-worn clichés that usually can't be altered without losing their meaning, but the remarkable thing about internet memes is that without constant mutation through wordplay, they become, ahem, meme-ingless-less successful linguistic fads. Stagnant, unfashionable memes eventually go extinct.

There are, of course, other ways of conveying simple emotions and accompanying gestures online. As Humphrey Bogart never said, we'll always have emojis. True, emojis and emoticons let us express less complicated feelings, but they are just one type of affective communication-perhaps a more limited kind. ( Even if people can get pretty creative, strings of emojis can be hard to process and decode.)

But how can we better express deeper or more complex states of emotions online?

Like emojis, the classic reaction gifs of split-second slices of life taken from popular culture have long been used as virtual gestures to signal other kinds of expressions-a kind of knowing, meta-emotional state that users can pass on just as they are or attach other, similar reactions to them. The more common reaction gifs can then later take on verbal forms that reference them without the need for the gif itself, such as "facepalm" and "side-eye."

While we've always had conventions for describing our actions and reactions online linguistically, such as *eats popcorn*, psychologist Sam Glucksberg suggests that we can process literal meanings in the words that are present while simultaneously conveying figurative meanings by alluding to words that are absent. From their literal meaning, the words "eats popcorn" can come to refer to observing drama or gossip. Since many already associate "eating popcorn" with entertainment, using the words in context can stand in for what might have been depicted wordlessly with images.

The chaotic creativity of remixed internet memes and the new linguistic structures that rapidly evolve from them allow us to express certain states of mind and have others immediately get it and respond in kind. This has been called an " asynchronous, massively multi-person conversation." Meme makers and sharers participate in this conversation to bond and maintain social cohesion through humor and wordplay -even shared with countless millions of complete strangers.

Memes aren't shared because people are forced to, or because humans are just by their nature passive "copying machines." They're shared, as James Willmore and Darryl Hocking argue, following the linguist Ronald Carter, because people actively engage and delight in " the creative, nonliteral, playful language of everyday conversation," which "is not merely ornamental but socially determined." We don't play with language for pure pleasure alone, but to convey identity, to show belonging, to show we're on the same page as others. This creativity in producing memes, playing off language as in ordinary conversation, is democratic, "the common property of all human beings." While images are important to the origins of internet memes, they often enter the mainstream in linguistic form, from such wordplay as punning, morphological inventiveness, reformulating, or repeating patterns and figures of speech.

For instance, take the emerging linguistic meme with the phrasal template "X in Y," such as "cries in American," "laughs in Canadian," or, in its original form, "cries in Spanish." This meme, which you can't take literally in the same way as "eating popcorn," has evolved as one kind of wry reaction to certain situations (such as the state of international travel during a pandemic). Somehow, through allusion, the meme can convey far more complex emotional information than its simple linguistic structure might suggest. In fact, " a central characteristic of much memetic humor is sociocritical commentary " that is not often literally spelled out.

Internet memes are popularly image macros-often originating from weird or amusing snippets of pop culture, with accompanying humorous text or catchphrases riffing on the theme of the meme. Those textual elements can take on various forms, depending on the in-joke, such as initialisms or set catchphrases. But many of these memes set up phrasal templates that can be reformulated, such as the one that's probably Sean Bean's albatross, "One does not simply X into Y":

Linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term "snowclones" to refer to phrasal structures with slots that can be filled in, such as:

If snowclones have been more like mass-produced linguistic clichés, such as " If Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, Germans have as many for bureaucracy," it's the absurd context of ever-mutating memes, where almost anything goes as long as a familiar enough structure is maintained, that can really turn a cliché on its head. The original source meme has to have had something notable about it for it to have become popular in the first place.

The "cries in Spanish" meme, for instance, began as a humorous observation on the nonsense of subtitles unnecessarily explaining a universally human act of emotion-crying-in terms of a particular language, nationality, or personal identity.

Successful memes are virally shared and copied, but unlike your classic reaction gifs, they can often go on to take a life of their own. Most importantly, memes aren't static; they can mutate as they're copied, as meme sharers remix their elements, particularly riffing on the text to create new layers of referential humor while keeping the soul of the original intact. Earlier parodies of the meme, like "Dies in Spanish," were straightforward, descriptive plays on subtitles, since dying is also a universal human condition that needs no linguistic qualification.

As variations on the meme become more popular, the relevant phrasal structure is used and reused, without the images. For "Cries in Spanish" memes, the reference to a language or nationality is humorous and can't really be taken literally, which means that the phrase evolved figuratively: not merely referring to parodies of subtitles, but becoming affective commentary on a person's state or identity. In context, meme readers can understand and respond. One Reddit thread about extreme healthcare costs, for example, riffs on the same phrasal structure "cries in American" to refer to the abject state of medical insurance in the U.S. ("Cries in British in the future" responds with anxiety about expected cuts to universal healthcare the U.K.)

Expressing yourself through the medium of the absurdist humor of internet memes can seem silly to many people-but it's a silliness and playfulness that's often surprisingly bundled together with astute observations about the human condition, or our assumptions about the world-perhaps as we laugh or cry ruefully in ongoing events of 2020.

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Good news! Recently, many curve-flattening countries began opening up their borders to certain international travelers- but not, alas, to citizens of the United States. ... *cries in American* In a socially distant world, online life for many people has become normal life.

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Captain America and Wonder Woman both premiered in comic books in 1941 as anti-fascist superheroes. On the cover of the first issue of Captain America, the hero in red, white, and blue clocked Adolf Hitler in the mustache. In Wonder Woman's debut ( All Star Comics #8), she rescues an American spy and captures a Japanese one. Both of these comics appeared before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, so the comics were at war before the country. During the war years, these superheroes didn't let up their fight.

"To fight 'the good fight' Captain America and Wonder Woman appealed to Americans' sense of patriotism and service through patriotic appeals to the audience to fight on behalf of the American nation-state," writes scholar Mia Sostaric.

The myth of World War II as the "Good War" elides the country's prior ambivalence.

Before Pearl Harbor, Americans were deeply divided about participating in yet another European conflict. As Sostaric notes, the myth of World War II as the "Good War" elides the country's prior ambivalence. There were pacifists and non-interventionists, isolationist "America Firsters," and even outright pro-Nazis in the antiwar camp. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who clearly favored the Allies (Britain, France, Russia), had to be cautious about angering this politically significant bloc.

But Roosevelt and his administration did try to move public opinion both before and after Pearl Harbor. In addition to official propaganda, the state also found allies in the private sector. Popular culture was a fruitful way to get the patriotic message across.

Plenty of artists and producers didn't have to be asked. For Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, the originators of Captain America, Hitler was "a natural foe for a superhero," writes Sostaric. Beyond the Nazi punching, Captain America Comics "primarily used political obligations, such as the defense of democracy, to encourage citizens to contribute to the war effort."

Psychologist William Moulton Marston created Wonder Woman under the pen name Charles Moulton for DC Comics. Influenced by the feminism of the 1910s and 1920s, he specifically created Wonder Woman to "help inspire and promote women's political, economic, and social advancement." The war did a lot of that, too, as women filled roles traditionally occupied by men in offices and factories during the "manpower" shortage. Wonder Woman's alter ego, Diana Prince, was a secretary in the U.S. Army. Wonder Woman was costumed in an American flag-inspired outfit and was "a patriotic role model to American readers." Captain America also literally wore the flag.

Both of these superhero books fundraised for the war effort, supported wartime recycling campaigns, and carried advertisements for volunteers. Wonder Woman, whose fan club was called the Junior Justice Society of America, "encouraged women to build their physical strength" by joining the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (better known as WAACs) or the Women's Naval Reserve, also known as WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). Wonder Woman doubled down on inspiring girls and young women through the stories they told, activities like "victory puzzles," and even the advertisements. A 1945 plea for Army nurses urged readers to "show this to your mother, your big sisters, and your aunts!"

"Never before in our history has Uncle Sam needed the wholehearted support of every man, woman, and child," went the appeal of the Junior Justice Society of America. Uncle Sam wanted you, and so did Captain America and Wonder Woman.
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Captain America and Wonder Woman, Anti-Fascist Heroes | JSTOR Daily

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Captain America and Wonder Woman both premiered in comic books in 1941 as anti-fascist superheroes. On the cover of the first issue of Captain America, the hero in red, white, and blue clocked Adolf Hitler in the mustache. In Wonder Woman's debut ( All Star Comics #8), she rescues an American spy and captures a Japanese one.

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The more we learn about the impact of fake news and disinformation on democratic politics, the scarier it seems. In political contexts ranging from Russia's seizure of the Crimea to Britain's referendum on exiting the E.U. (and including, of course, the 2016 U.S. election), fake news has swayed public opinion and affected voter turnout. Or has it? One of the scariest things about fake news is that because it spreads via closed, proprietary networks like Facebook and Twitter, neither governments, media, nor citizens can get access to the kind of data that would actually allow us to quantify its effects.

Nonetheless, we know enough to worry-and to plan. Smart researchers, journalists, technologists, and policymakers have been hard at work trying to figure out ways of fighting back against the deliberate dissemination of false and misleading information.

Strengthening Digital Literacy

For the most part, pessimism about the likely effectiveness of regulation or counteroffensives-not to mention their feasibility-leads to one consistent, repeated recommendation: Let's make voters more resistant to disinformation by strengthening digital literacy. In the report " Russian Hybrid Warfare: A Study of Disinformation," Flemming Splidsboel Hansen calls for a "cognitive firewall," which

should be installed at both the collective and at the individual level. At the society-wide level the ability to recognise and subsequently reject disinformation and not give it the attention which it demands should be improved...And at the individual level a new media literacy should be developed...which gives members of the target audience the tools with which to distinguish facts from fiction and the information from the disinformation.

Sounds great! I'm all for investing in education and media literacy programs that teach college, high school, and even elementary students how to differentiate between credible and questionable data sources. Yes, let's support libraries and community programs that foster critical thinking and strong media skills among adults. And by all means, if we can pressure or persuade the big social platforms into creating their own feel-good digital literacy programs and tools, let's do it.

Fake news is a problem we can't wait a generation to fix.

But building strong critical thinking skills and smarter citizens is a long-term project-one that is hardly likely to enjoy continued support from governments who are elected on the basis of public ignorance. Democracy is on fire now. Fake news is a problem we can't wait a generation to fix.

Fighting Fake News Where it Spreads

That's why we need to stop thinking about improving the disinfo-resistance of individual citizens, and instead focus on improving the disinfo-resistance of entire communities. We actually have something going for us: fake news largely spreads through communities. What's more, it spreads through the communities we have built for ourselves, in the form of social networks.

Research into fake news suggests that how we build our online communities has a big impact on our individual and collective vulnerability to fake news. It turns out that people who belong to relatively homogenous communities, made up of people who share their values and world view, are a lot more vulnerable to manipulation via fake news. The best thing you can do to combat fake news is to broaden your own online social circle, and build online communities that bring different kinds of people into contract and conversation.

Broadening your online social circles helps combat fake news in three ways. First, it serves as a kind of personal inoculation: The narrower and more like-minded your online circle, the more easy it is to be taken in by fake news. In " Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election," Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow found that "those with segregated social networks are significantly more likely to believe ideologically aligned articles, perhaps because they are less likely to receive disconfirmatory information from their friends." Based on a 1,200-person online survey they conducted after the 2016 election, Allcott and Gentzkow show that the more someone's Facebook friends shared their presidential preference, the more likely that person was to believe headlines that matched their ideology over headlines that challenged their ideology. In other words, spend too much time in an echo chamber, and you learn to prefer the sound of an echo.

Second, expanding your social circle shifts your relationship to social media in a way that undercuts the core logic of modern information warfare. As Michael Jensen writes in " Russian Trolls and Fake News: Information or Identity Logics?," Russia uses identity as the psychological access point for building trust in fake news sources.

In a world where trust in institutions and the media is declining, people tend to trust those who they identify as being like themselves more than professional and governmental sources. In a social-media space, Russia conducts influence operations using traditional spy craft methods adapted for a digital space: assets-in this case citizens-are targeted online at first through innocent conversation to build a report before trying to move their beliefs about political entities and events.

It's worth digging into what Jensen is uncovering here, because it speaks to the relevance and importance of our social networks in facilitating Russian-style disinformation. "While the term fake news suggests informational or epistemic deficits,"Jensen writes, "To the extent that these communications are not just factually deficient but also seek to manipulate political identities, the consequences for democratic politics may be far more damaging."

Social psychology tells us that much of our individual identity derives from the herd.

Clumping online with like-minded souls sets the stage for just this sort of manipulation. Social psychology tells us that much of our individual identity derives from the herd: the kinds of Facebook groups you join, the kinds of Twitter users you follow, and the kinds of Instagram hashtags you use all become ways not just to connect with other people, but to claim a certain kind of valued identity.

While it's natural to be drawn to the groups and conversations that reinforce your identity, the more we rely on our social networks as a source of identity reinforcement, the more vulnerable we become to the kind of manipulation Jensen describes. Russia can tap into identity as a way of connecting with targets precisely because so many of us have grown accustomed to experiencing social media as a never-ending series of identity affirmations. Wean yourself off that experience of identity affirmation (and offer less of it to others), and you're removing Russia's favorite psychological access point.

Third, expanding your social circle helps to undo one of the most pernicious injuries caused by fake news and information warfare-what Gregory Asmolov (in an article of the same title) calls " The Disconnective Power of Disinformation Campaigns." Digging into social networking behaviors in a variety of polarized contexts, Asmolov notes that:

A research project on unfriending practices in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict concluded that "unfriending was more prevalent among more ideologically extreme and more politically active Facebook users." In addition, "weak ties were most likely to be broken." In the case of the Russia-Ukraine conflict...evidence suggests that the conflict has had a robust impact on previously strong apolitical ties among people, including ties between relatives, classmates, and friends.

Asmolov makes a compelling case that this undoing of loose social ties represents one of the biggest dangers of fake news: "The constant flow of state-sponsored disinformation triggers and sustains the phenomenon of 'unfriending' as an outcome of conflict-dominated social categorization." He suggests a variety of measures to combat this, of which my favorite is the idea of a "yellow card" system "issued by one user to another to alert them when an online discussion is entering a phase where it may threaten the social connection between participants and to raise the question of whether continuing the debate is worth paying the price of 'disconnection.'"

Why to Friend Your Conservative Aunties

By all means, bring on the yellow cards-if it allows us to sustain a wider range of social connections rather than unfollowing and unfriending in the face of disinformation-fuelled polarization. But even without yellow cards, we can make the same kind of choice by broadening our social circles, and deliberately staying engaged with a wide range of people. When you stay connected to even those Facebook friends whose political posts or social commentary tend to appall you, you're fighting back against disinformation's disconnective impact.

I don't mean to suggest that we can conquer trolls, bots, and information warfare by friending random people on Facebook. Fake news, disinformation, and weaponized information are here to stay. In his vivid and compelling contribution to a report on " The MADCOM Future " (as in MAchine Driven COMmunication), Matt Chesen maps out three different scenarios for how we'll come to terms with this reality, and none of them are good:

Scenario 1: A World Gone MADCOM: Global Information Warfare Nations weaponize narratives, using MADCOMs to exacerbate social discord, undermine faith in government, and eliminate the reliability of traditional journalism.

Scenario 2: Muddling Through: Measures and Countermeasures Western democracies manage to bring some tools of national power to bear on adversaries...Nations struggle to agree on peacetime norms for information security, but adoption is uneven and impossible to enforce, due to weak attribution tools and methodologies. MADCOMs undermine democracy, but they are a bonanza for capitalism. Corporations continue to harvest customer data, and utilize that data for subtly manipulative marketing.

Scenario 3: Lockdown: The Cognitive Security State In response to threats posed by MADCOMs, computational propaganda, weaponized narratives, and other rampant disinformation, over the next decade many nations impose stringent regulations on online communications and information...Political change slows as incumbents use their cognitive security powers to solidify their political positions...Reality becomes more resilient, but is also determined by unelected bureaucrats in capitals who subtly use these tools to maintain domestic and global order.

It's precisely because we face such bleak possible futures that we must make whatever effort we can, now, to inoculate both ourselves and our communities. In the face of disinformation and polarization, it's very tempting to pull up the drawbridge and retreat into cozy conversations with the friends and colleagues who share our values. Indeed, that's a practice I advocate as a form of occasional respite in a world of ever-growing conflict.

But once you've retreated and replenished, it's time to get out there again. It's time to un-hide your vitriolic uncle on Facebook, re-follow your annoying colleague on Twitter, and maybe even tune into hashtags that extoll the merits of your least-favorite politicians, commentators, and sports teams. If you're serious about fighting fake news, it's time to brave the kind of chaotic and eclectic community that you experience only when you actually engage with people unlike yourself; the kind of community that is truly our best hope for transcending the disinformation threat.

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To Fight Fake News, Broaden Your Social Circle | JSTOR Daily

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The more we learn about the impact of fake news and disinformation on democratic politics, the scarier it seems. In political contexts ranging from Russia's seizure of the Crimea to Britain's referendum on exiting the E.U. (and including, of course, the 2016 U.S. election), fake news has swayed public opinion and affected voter turnout.

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MSNBC recently signaled that it was moving away from the liberal-leaning shows it's become known for and toward more straight news reporting. Writing in The Atlantic, Megan Garber suggests that claiming to provide unbiased reporting could be a good move: "Consumers, in general, don't like to think of themselves as partisan; it's almost always good PR for a news organization to frame itself as the sane alternative to wingnuttery, whatever the wing may be."

But actually offering reporting that tries to play things straight down the middle isn't necessarily a winning move, as a 2005 paper about bias in newspapers by economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer explains.

It's in a newspapers' interests to offer reporting that's more biased than their readers' positions; that helps create two separate, defined markets.

Traditionally, the authors write, economists explain the consumer demand for news as a need for information. Under this model, a competitive market would push the media to deliver more and more accurate information.

But psychologists have found that people prefer to consume news that confirms their existing biases. If that's the case, and if the potential audience in a news market is split ideologically, Mullainathan and Shleifer find that it makes sense for two newspapers to position themselves on different sides, choosing which facts to include and which to ignore to suit their readership bases. In fact it's in the papers' interests to offer reporting that's actually more biased than their readers' positions because that helps create two separate, defined markets, reducing their need to compete against each other. This strong bias, in turn, may affect the readers' ideological positions, further polarizing the audience.

"When competitors can create or reinforce differences of opinion, they will do so in order to divide the market and reap higher profits," the authors write. "There will be no convergence in reporting to the median reader."

On a more positive note, Mullainathan and Shleifer write that, in this polarized media world, a conscientious news consumer can read both papers to pull together a less biased understanding of the news. In contrast, if almost everyone in an audience is biased in one direction, both papers will tend to offer the same slant. That means they'll compete more, driving prices down, but it also means that even the most earnest truth-seeker won't be able to find all the relevant facts on an issue.

This paper doesn't delve into the tricky question of what it means for news to be objective, or if that's even possible. But if we assume that all the cable news channels have their own kinds of bias, it does suggest that being able to flip between ideologically distinct stations might create better-informed viewers.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

American Economic Association

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Why Bias Helps News Channels-and Maybe Viewers Too | JSTOR Daily

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MSNBC recently signaled that it was moving away from the liberal-leaning shows it's become known for and toward more straight news reporting. Writing in The Atlantic , Megan Garber suggests that claiming to provide unbiased reporting could be a good move: "Consumers, in general, don't like to think of themselves as partisan; it's almost always good PR for a news organization to frame itself as the sane alternative to wingnuttery, whatever the wing may be."

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Douglas M. McLeod and James Hertog define the protest paradigm as the "routinized" coverage of social protest by mass media. They argue that the images and stories told about protests in mass media emphasize protests as events-especially spectacular acts of violence-while masking the issues at the root of the protests. As a result, protestors are portrayed as "deviant." Ultimately, McLeod and Hertog argue, mass media depictions of protests impact the "growth of radical movements" by delegitimizing the protest groups and their views, thus marginalizing them from dominant political discourse.

Moreover, McLeod suggests elsewhere, mainstream media deploys "news frames" that draw on specific aspects of a given protest to construct meaning and to provide a means for the general public to understand the protest. For example, referring to protests as "riots" or framing the coverage as a "crime story," negatively influences public opinion.

Social movement research offers perspectives on news coverage that shed light on this framing process. In their ethnographic content analysis of over 750 television news reports, Malaena Taylor and Kate Gunby note that the academic literature on news coverage of protests tends to promote the idea that journalists "personalize the stories and emphasize individuals' actions, hardships, and successes" as opposed to offering more in-depth coverage of the deeper political positions of social movements. However, Taylor and Gunby argue, "news coverage paints a complex and contested picture of the movements' realities." Looking at the relationship between TV news framing and in-depth reporting on activism with the Global Justice Movement (GJM) and the Tea Party Movement (TPM), they found that even in-depth reporting doesn't always result in positive coverage for activists. In fact, news installments that were "less critical of activists" were also "less likely to provide in-depth coverage of their movements." Interestingly, Taylor and Gunby found "very few" examples where the GJM was framed positively, yet nearly half of the TPM frames were positive. Their research suggests that news framing is informed by underlying partisan and market-driven motivations, since the anti-neoliberal platform of the GJM is linked to a more radical left politic, while the TPM is firmly rooted in right-wing, U.S. patriotism, and free-market nationalism. Mass media coverage of U.S. social movements that are racialized as non-White is even more complex, with underlying partisan motivations that reflect sociohistorical investments in White supremacy and patriarchy that negatively frame these protests in myriad ways.

Black Protest Frames Amidst the Reality of Black Violability

Mass media depictions of Black protest movements often rely on racialized and gendered stereotypes of Black bodies. Power is depicted as the physical and sometimes violent dominance at the hands of (presumably) cisgender, hypermasculine presenting men. This includes images of physical altercations between protestors and police officers.

Consider the following video posted on Twitter by Sherrilyn Ifill, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. It shows a crowd of protesters in New York City using the "hands up don't shoot" gesture popularized after the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. The video depicts police officers demanding protestors to "step back" and one removes the mask of a young Black male and proceeds to pepper-spray him in the face.

This boy had his hands up when an NYPD ofcr pulled his mask down and pepper sprayed him. ⁦@NYPDShea⁩? Mayor ⁦@BilldeBlasio⁩? pic.twitter.com/YtXDOoVckA

- Sherrilyn Ifill (@Sifill_LDF) May 31, 2020

Here the unequal power dynamic between protestors and law enforcement is illustrated by the strength in numbers of the former which is then outmatched by the strength in militaristic force of the latter, as representatives of authoritarian state power. Hypermasculine gender performance is privileged as a de facto form of masculinity that aligns acceptable behavior and physical presentations with gendered social norms of male dominance (both physical and structural vis-a-vis social institutions). This hierarchy of masculinity rests at the intersection of gender, race, and heteronormativity, whereby any threat to the existing social structure is met with extreme resistance. In the case of Black protest, the immediate threat-organized resistance to structural racism and race-based inequalities-is met with police force enacted upon Black bodies. There are many examples of this dynamic throughout the history of the United States.

An October 1906 cover of French daily newspaper Le Petit Journal, for instance, depicts a White mob choking, holding down, and violently overtaking Black male protesters during the Atlanta race riots of September 22-24, 1906. Newspapers of the time reported anywhere from 25 to 40 Blacks were killed, while only two Whites were killed.

Sixty years later, the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" attacks in Selma, Alabama became a watershed moment for the Civil Rights movement in America, in part because of how the protest was depicted in news media. State troopers advanced on over 600 protestors, led by John Lewis and Hosea Williams, with tear gas and billy clubs amidst the backdrop of a crowd of white spectators with Confederate flags, on a bridge named after former grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus.

These images were displayed on television screens and newspaper covers across America, which spurred public opinion to support the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on August 6, 1965.

Over the course of the twentieth century, White vigilante justice has transformed from violent protest mobs to state-sanctioned law enforcement agencies. We see this clearly in the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which marked yet another turning point in the use of militarized police tactics to curtail protests, as those documented in the image below.

Mayor Tom Bradley declared a state of emergency and Governor Pete Wilson, a Marine Corps veteran, authorized thousands of National Guard troops, Marines, and Army soldiers to enter the city. Yet, the riots also saw, for some say the first time, the use of bystander video to capture and publicly display, to an international audience, acts of police violence. These bystander videos, like the one seen in the Tweet below by @POLITICO, complicate mainstream reporting.

Watch when Democratic Rep. Joyce Beatty was pepper sprayed by Columbus, Ohio, police during protests Saturday afternoon over the death of George Floyd https://t.co/Q6C4wFAb7g pic.twitter.com/2i5fEGjxuh

- POLITICO (@politico) May 30, 2020

A "Herstorical" Look State-Sanctioned Anti-Black Violence

From early twentieth century race riots to the 1965 "Bloody Sunday" attacks in Selma, the L.A. Riots of 1992 to the recent Black Lives Matter protests, protest images, as they appear in mainstream media, reflect a racialized power dynamic often signified by vigilante policing and militarized enforcement. But there's more to the story. In her essay on #BlackLivesMatter post-Ferguson and Black women's historical leadership in racial justice movements, Treva B. Lindsey defines "black violability" as a term that captures "both the lived and historical experiences of Black people with state-initiated and state-sanctioned violence." She reminds us that what she calls the "white domestic terror lineage" extends beyond police violence, both representational (in the case of media images) and real. Black racial terror is grounded in a "Black masculine-centered narrative" that frames anti-Black violence as "pervasive injustice primarily experienced by Black men and boys." While many know the names of Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, the names of women and girls - cis and trans-such as Tarika Wilson, Pearlie Golden, Rekia Boyd, Tanisha Anderson, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Renisha McBride, Yvette Smith, Riah Milton and Dominique "Rem'mie" Fells-remain unknown to most people. Their stories and, more specifically, their fatal experiences with White police and security officers and vigilantes disrupt a masculinist framing of anti-Black state violence. The idea of "black violability" presents a way of making visible how anti-Black terror manifests for "Black women and girls and trans, genderqueer, gender non-conforming, and queer people."

Mateo De La Torre, director of policy and advocacy of LGBTQ prisoners' rights organization Black and Pink, notes that the hypervisibility of being Black and transgender or gender non-conforming increases the level of engagement with police and the threat of negative profiling. "What people need to understand is that when you're talking about Black and brown communities, immigrant communities, communities experiencing poverty, and then you layer that with folks who are LGBTQ, specifically trans and gender nonconforming, [systemic policing] issues aren't necessarily very different, they're just amplified," says De La Torre in an interview with Vox.

Campaigns like #SayHerName and the important research and policy work of the African American Policy Forum and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies disrupt male-centric frames of anti-Black police violence. Lindsey advances an intersectional approach that reveals the names and experiences of Black cis and trans women to uncover the "multiple dimensions of state and state-sanctioned anti-Black violence" in ways that situate sexual violence and police murders as "interconnected forms of racial terror."

#BlackLivesMatter Protest & the Pandemic of Racism

Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, reminds us that radical social movements of the twenty-first century engage intersectional political organizing platforms and leadership models that center queer folks, Black cis women, transgender, and gender non-conforming individuals. They call for an end to anti-Black state violence and for cultural, political, and economic shifts that uplift the dignity of Black lives. Collective public actions produce protest images that reflect the multidimensional aspects of #BlackLivesMatter and other allied movements for structural change.

The civil unrest of 2020, sparked by the public outcry over the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, has been fueled by the U.S. federal government's ghastly response to the novel coronavirus pandemic which disproportionately impacted urban Black communities. The wave of municipal and state lockdowns rendered Black communities under a new kind of siege as police officers administered mandatory mask requirements and sunset curfews. Amnesty International released a report in June 2020 documenting the human rights violations in the enforcement of COVID-19 measures across Europe, which included the disproportionate targeting of "ethnic minority and marginalized groups with violence, discriminatory identity checks, forced quarantines and fines."

Intersectional Movements Challenge the Protest Paradigm

Despite evidence of heightened racial and ethnic terror among marginalized racial and ethnic communities across Europe and the U.S., protest images of late offer juxtapositions to the hypermasculine representations of civil unrest that mass media have historically advanced.

In May, 2020, choreographer Kemar Jewel experienced police violence first hand at a Black Lives Matter protest in New York City. This incident prompted Jewel to produce the dance video "Vogue 4 #BlackLivesMatter," which highlights "how Black and Brown queer and trans people can use voguing as a form of protest, and as a source of joy in this political climate." The video features Black dancers voguing on location at the iconic Stonewall Inn and includes clips of protestors using vogue as a form of social protest.

Social media also offers visual interventions into mass media's heteronormative presentation of protest actions. Instagram hashtags like #blmpride, #blacklgbtlivesmatter and #blacktranslivesmatter capture the hidden narratives of Black queer and trans activism within the Black Lives Matter movement. On platforms like Facebook and Twitter, activists and organizers generate their own news content through livestream videos and narrative and visual posts that offer in-depth analysis and reporting to articulate an effective message. In an age of hashtag activism and partisan news engagement, social media offers the possibilities for intersectional movements to take charge of their message and reimagine images of Black protest inclusive of the plurality of individual experiences and of Black communal life.
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The Power of the Intersectional Protest Image | JSTOR Daily

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Douglas M. McLeod and James Hertog define the protest paradigm as the "routinized" coverage of social protest by mass media. They argue that the images and stories told about protests in mass media emphasize protests as events-especially spectacular acts of violence-while masking the issues at the root of the protests.

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Don't think of an elephant. The elephant isn't there. The elephant isn't real so don't think about it. Don't listen to the people who tell you about what the elephant is doing. The elephant isn't doing that, or anything else for that matter, because there is no elephant. Don't think of an elephant.

We're obviously thinking about elephants now. That's because the word elephant was just used seven times. Even when denying the existence of an elephant, the word, that is, the written descriptor of the idea of an elephant, is still being employed. The elephant wins.

The elephant continues to win. Whoever controls the words controls the ways in which ideas are framed. Anyone can disagree with your beliefs, but so long as they use the same framework of words you use to describe your beliefs, even in adamant opposition to them, you win.

America is not in the throes of a culture war. It is locked into a language game, and the Republican Party knows it better than anyone. Conservative strategists have purposefully worked to control the dialogue through terminology, and it has proven exceptionally effective. Increasingly, facts don't matter. Their description does.
The Power of the Frame
is a Richard and Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California. His research on language framing centers on the understanding that the ways people say things are often more important than what is actually being said. The words used to explain an idea do more to influence people's perceptions than the idea itself.

These differing metaphors strongly affected the views of the participants. Those who were shown the "beast" frame were more likely to support harsher, punitive measures against crime, whereas those who read the "virus" frame tended to support reformative action.

Most notable is the participants' lack of awareness of the framing's effect on them. When asked to explain their reasoning, no one mentioned the metaphor, pointing instead to statistics that remained unchanged between the two passages.

Once you understand just how covertly powerful a frame is, it becomes clear that the effects of their purposeful usage cannot be underestimated or ignored. The Republican Party has already recognized the power of language framing, and has been using it to great effect.
The Conservative Frame Game
In 1970, soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr. came out with a memo outlining a strategy for promoting conservative thought. It called for the creation of professorships in major universities to teach right-wing modes of thinking. Such positions were to be sponsored by wealthy conservatives, who would also be encouraged to set up research institutes to sponsor conservative scholarship. The memo suggested conservative media be consolidated to better broadcast right-wing ideas.

The memo led to a 30-year investment of $2-3 billion and the creation of 43 conservative think tanks. The result has been a unification of conservative ideology and a strengthened understanding of the ways in which language can be used to convince people of ideas.

Taxes are then implicitly framed as negative, a source of discomfort without benefit, something one should want to be relieved from. The conservative promise of "tax relief" then becomes appealing. Taxes are a form of suffering, who wouldn't want relief? Who wouldn't promise that?

These loaded terms are everywhere. Ask yourself: why are social support programs referred to as "entitlements" and not "rights"? One implies an undeserved and inconvenient demand, the other a fundamental and reasonable necessity.

Why are laws designed to curb pollution and the degradation of natural resources known as environmental "restrictions"? Why not "protections"? The word "restrictions" tells us that environmental laws limit our growth in some way. The word "protections" tells us that we benefit from the environment's continued health.

In all of these frames, the elephant wins. If you say you're against tax relief, you're implicitly accepting the idea that taxes are a form of suffering. If you support entitlement programs, you're also admitting that they're unnecessary demands. Even though the environment is vital to our health as a population, how can you possibly get people excited about restrictions ?

Even when denying the elephant, you acknowledge and speak about the elephant.

Using the frames laid out by conservative media and scholarship gives them immediate control of the terms of the debate.

Lakoff was concerned that the media-frenzy surrounding Trump was causing us to think of elephants all the time. News outlets repeated trump's false claims and tweets, and his frames were thus spread further, taking deeper root in mass consciousness.

In his article, Lakoff advised the Clinton campaign repeatedly reiterate its own position, and to stop repeating Trump's statements.

Progressives are losing the language game because they're not playing it. The left has forfeited control of the dialogue's framework by allowing conservatives to set the terms. That must change.
Understanding the American Family
One of the most effective ways of convincing someone to support an idea is by framing it in terms of their value system. Conservatives and progressives have differing moral frameworks to serve the same metaphor: the country as a larger American family.

The model of a progressive family is such that there are two parents who share responsibility for raising their children. They are expected to communicate clearly and directly with their children to foster a shared sense of understanding. Their children's fulfillment is valued, and parents work to provide their kids with opportunities to help them decide what kind of life they want to live.

The model of a conservative family is significantly different. The conservative model values strict parenting, where the parent is the moral authority of the family. The parent is assumed to be right and is not to be questioned. The task of parents is not to encourage children to do what feels good, but what the parents say is right. When a child disobeys a parent, the parent is responsible for punishing the child painfully enough to discourage them from disobeying again. The child develops discipline to resist doing what feels good and instead doing what the parent says is right, a discipline that's viewed as vital for living a prosperous and meaningful life.

When viewed through this metaphor, the policy positions and governing philosophies of the left and right begin to make a great deal of sense. For example, in matters of law enforcement the right favors the harsh punishment of criminals to teach discipline and discourage disobedience, whereas the left pushes for communicative measures to develop a shared understanding that prevents further breaches.

The metaphor extends to most all modes of conservative and liberal thought. The right tends to value loyalty to an in-group, respect for authority, and purity. The left prefers fairness, reciprocity, and a reduction of harm.

Understanding these conceptual frameworks helps you communicate more pragmatically and strategically to those you wish to convince. You could get a conservative to support environmental protections by framing the protection of natural resources and landscapes in terms of preserving the nation's purity. Similarly, you could get a liberal to support increased military spending by emphasizing its employment benefits for poor and disadvantaged citizens.
Get in the Game
Negating a frame does nothing but reinforce its existence. What liberals need to do is develop a practical language that appeals to a wide and varied audience, one that simply frames the basic values of empathy, sustainability, a reduction of collective harm.

These notions, when framed strategically, appeal to almost everyone. The specific beliefs existent along the political spectrum of the left don't matter, so long as everyone can agree on and conceptualize the basic ideological tenets. Developing a shared language unifies a group, no matter how varied, towards the same aims. Possessing your own frames to articulate your ideas gives you leverage in the language game.

The Democratic Party must invest and strategize to develop such frames, to properly broadcast and communicate its message, on its own terms, and to combat and undermine conservative frames, not by negating them, but by undercutting their foothold in American consciousness.

You either play the language game or you lose the language game. Considering what's at stake, the left can't afford to sit it out.

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Language framing: The left is losing the language game

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Don't think of an elephant. The elephant isn't there. The elephant isn't real so don't think about it. Don't listen to the people who tell you about what the elephant is doing. The elephant isn't doing that, or anything else for that matter, because there is no elephant.

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In March of this year, just as the pandemic was upending the way we live, a crime was committed. A young woman, whose name was Breonna Taylor, was killed, as an early local news report described, "inside a home [...] in the middle of an officer-involved shooting. [...] Police discovered Taylor inside the secured home, who was found dead from the gunfire."

Through the linguistic fog, we can just about make out what happened, and who might have been the perpetrators of this crime. The public has grown increasingly aware of the power of language to uphold the powers that be, from politicians to police. Many have pointed out how unbalanced and troubling this kind of manipulative indirect language can be. Even when the facts are as clear as day, media reporting of crimes where the police might be the instigators uses language that obscures those known facts. Why?

In the phrase "officer-involved shooting," language itself aggressively suppresses law enforcement's own aggressive actions.

Though it's a fact that Taylor was in her own home, media reports can render it more impersonally as "a home" or "a residence," subduing the horrific image of being attacked in the very place we tend to feel the safest.

And likewise, in the phrase "officer-involved shooting," language itself aggressively suppresses the police force's own aggressive actions. Since its first appearance in the 1970s, this has been a problematic euphemism, stemming from technical police jargon that many journalists have persistently repeated in their reporting, in strange headlines like " Death of man in officer-involved shooting ruled a suicide" and " Pensacola police involved in officer-involved shooting in downtown Pensacola."

We've heard of the so-called victimless crime, but can there be such a thing as a perpetrator-less crime? Who can we blame for these acts when our own language is used so often, so fearfully, to avoid naming names?

All human cultures have their secrets, taboo subjects that must not be mentioned, at least in polite society: the grubby experiences of being human, from bodily functions to how we function with each other in society. But what happens when we need to mention the unmentionable, as we so often do?

There's a certain safety in indirect language and other linguistic methods of preventing the mud of the unmentionable from sticking to clean-living folk, or what Judith T. Irvine, in her essay "Leaky Registers and Eight-Hundred-Pound Gorillas," calls a kind of " linguistic cordon sanitaire."

For myriad reasons, we can use forms of indirect and coded language such as euphemisms ( "officer-involved shooting," "collateral damage," "going to the restroom"). Euphemisms are supposed to be nice ways of saying not-so-nice things. According to one researcher, through euphemism " distasteful activities can lose their repugnancy, harmful conduct can be made respectable, and that which is socially unacceptable can be transformed into something socially approved."

Passives can be used (by whom?) (such as "she was found dead from the gunfire," "mistakes were made"), truncated to suppress the human agent until actions appear to simply happen, with no one responsible for them at all. There are other linguistic hedges, such as existential constructions ( "there was a shooting"), or turning an active verb into an impersonal and important-sounding nominalization (such as "incarceration"). These are found in quite a lot of technical jargon, downplaying the impact of the very act itself.

We might also separate ourselves from unmentionable events by shifting the footing and the framing when reporting information, by putting those noxious words we're too timid to voice into other people's mouths. Or so they say. Or, says Irvine, we could shift the register, by talking about you know what and you know who in more formal, technical, or Latinate terminology (a well-known learnèd way of archly beating around the bush about the "naughty bits").

The euphemism, one of the oldest forms of language, covers up the human condition. "Thus gentlemen dine, perspire, and expectorate while peasants eat, sweat, and spit," as Irvine puts it. But euphemisms are not just for keeping up appearances as we Tom Ripley ourselves up the class ladder.

We use this kind of language often in an effort to be tactful, polite, and to avoid confrontation and minimize negativity, which are cooperative ways to communicate with each other-usually a good thing. By not taking a more direct linguistic stance, language can appear to be more neutral and objective, disconnected from the personal.

So what harm can there really be in the humble euphemism or its linguistically indirect colleagues?

Rather than reporting that, say, a politician told a lie, publications may prefer to use more roundabout phrases.

What some studies have found is that people are actually more likely to use euphemisms to save face socially than in consideration of the feelings of others. This, coupled with the desire to sound neutral, objective, and authoritative, can lead journalists to use euphemistic language to reframe a story obliquely, even when the facts themselves are indisputable. This can obscure or omit important information. Rather than reporting that, say, a politician told a lie, publications may prefer to use more roundabout phrases like the rather archaic "falsehood" or the technical-sounding "misrepresentation," if they don't avoid addressing it at all. By reframing events to sound more socially acceptable, to avoid the disagreeable, such tentative reporting not only reveals hidden biases and value judgments, it also can fall into ethical traps that have real-world and legal repercussions.

Researchers Caitlin M. Fausey and Lera Boroditsky ask the simple question " When bad things happen, how do we decide who is to blame and how much they should be punished? " The language of police reports, legal statements, and public discussions can include active phrasing with an agent, but also passive or indirect constructions with no agent. Can the differences between these constructions influence our ideas of who is to blame, how much we blame them, and how financially liable we think they are as a result? Even if it's a well-known event we can observe with our own eyes, the answer is: probably.

"For example," Fausey and Boroditsky write, "in the 197,745 trials held between 1674 and 1913 at London's central criminal court [...], cases with the agentive phrase 'broke it' in the court records resulted in a guilty verdict more often than did cases with the nonagentive phrase 'it broke' [...]. In the most serious of cases (when the charge was 'killing'), the transitive/intransitive contrast as marked by different verbs also predicted verdicts. Saying 'killed' resulted in more guilty verdicts than did saying 'died'."

Because it's impossible to tell whether these historical cases were just due to reports tending to use more active, agentive language when the perpetrator was clearly more guilty, the researchers set out to test the impact of this kind of language framing. Hundreds of informants were asked to view certain reporting about the infamous Super Bowl "wardrobe malfunction" incident, in which Justin Timberlake ripped Janet Jackson's costume a little too shockingly. The outcome was that Jackson was publicly blamed and shamed, CBS was fined half a million dollars for public indecency, and Justin Timberlake, whose actual fault it was for doing the ripping, went on to have a long and storied career. The linguistic experiment found that just changing the language had a strong impact not only on how people viewed Timberlake's culpability but also on how much they believed he should be fined. When reports of the incident used more direct language, people believed Timberlake should pay an extra $30,000 in fines. This was 53 percent higher than what people thought he should be fined when the reports used more indirect language. So, yes, language matters.

The research supports the fact that euphemisms and other indirect language can not only affect people's perceptions of blame, it can also encourage unethical acts, because people tend to view actions as legal or appropriate when described euphemistically-presenting "bribes" as a "soft commission," for example. Repetition of euphemisms can lead people to forget what ethical problems they once arose from, such as in phrases like "creative accounting" or "right-sizing," which are wholly disconnected from any corporate illegality or ruthlessness.

The morality of the euphemism can certainly be complex, particularly when it comes to violent crime. On the one hand, traumatic experiences can be difficult for survivors and even eyewitnesses to articulate directly. But on the other, the very use of indirect, euphemistic, or coded language to ensure safety can also cause observers to downplay the seriousness of the crime and obscure the perpetrator's responsibility for that crime.

In one serious case, researchers Kristen Lucas and Jeremy P. Fyke investigate how the indirect, euphemistic language used in the discourse around the Jerry Sandusky sexual abuse case at Penn State University enabled a "decade-long organizational cover-up that ran concurrently with Sandusky's pattern of abuse." In order to save face and avoid embarrassment and bad publicity for the football team, Penn State leaders used the ambiguous interpretation of euphemisms, such as "horsing around," to conceal the facts of the case and downplay the severity of what was reported to them.

Though it was true that, shockingly, no one directly reported the crimes to the authorities, Lucas and Fyke point out that that doesn't mean employees weren't talking and trying to report the crimes to the university's chain of command. This is not completely surprising, as research shows that organizations may often suppress dissent, and "subordinates often are fearful of engaging in critical upward communication, with some of the most cited reasons for remaining silent being fear of being labeled as a troublemaker, concern for ruining relationships, fear of being punished, or concern about the organizational hierarchy."

When graduate assistant Michael McQueary first reported the sexual assault he witnessed involving then-assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, possibly due to the upsetting nature of the event, his language was euphemistic, but he believed the meaning was clear. This meaning was semantically diluted and bleached as it moved up the chain of command, from euphemistic language such as "in the shower with a little boy," "something was going wrong," and "It was way over the lines" to, astonishingly, "horsing around," "playful," and "kind of wrestling."

In the current debate about police brutality and racial bias, it is all the more important to be aware of what influence language can have on ordinary people's lives. As Orwell once said, "[...] if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." Though euphemisms and other linguistic hedges have their place in how we communicate, the repeated use of troubling euphemistic messaging, such as "officer-involved shooting," does have an impact on whether perpetrators are ultimately held responsible for their crimes. Framing reports about crimes euphemistically, or omitting disagreeable information out of fear of offending, can certainly have an effect on how people understand the serious moral implications of a situation. It can also allow leaders to mindlessly act or to deliberately ignore ethical crimes while morally justifying their decisions based on more favorable semantics of a form of language that exists to hide the unpleasantly dark truths in human nature.
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The Ethical Life of Euphemisms | JSTOR Daily

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In March of this year, just as the pandemic was upending the way we live, a crime was committed. A young woman, whose name was Breonna Taylor, was killed, as an early local news report described, "inside a home [...] in the middle of an officer-involved shooting. [...]

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"It's the filthiest, dirtiest, nastiest word in the English language."

That was the view of prosecutor Christopher Darden when the issue of saying the N-word came up in the 1995 murder trial of US football star OJ Simpson.

And it's a view that many people still share today.

It now says there must be "exceptional editorial reasons to use the strongest racist terms" - and this must be personally approved by the corporation's divisional directors.

When I hear the word I shudder. I think of my dad hearing the words, "Get the [N-word]!" while being chased through the streets of Liverpool by racist football fans as he went to watch Man City.

The word can be traced back in history to slavery.

It was in the summer of 1619 when a ship arrived in a port in Virginia carrying around 20 Africans who were chained up to be sold as slaves.

"It's really tied into the idea that African people aren't really human beings," says Kehinde Andrews, professor of black studies at Birmingham City University.

"They were more like an animal than a human being, a beast of burden, could be bought and sold, could be thrown overboard ships and literally had no rights.

"So when the N-word is used that's essentially what it's used for. So I would hope most people would understand why that is deeply offensive and problematic because it still is used in that context now."

You only have to watch films like 12 Years a Slave to see how the word was used to make black people feel inferior and unworthy.

The full word was a nickname British scientist Charles Darwin and his wife Emma used in their letters to each other in the 1840s.

"Part of the thing about the N-word and why it was used for the dog and why it's used in that kind of affectionate way is because we were seen to be like animals," Prof Andrews tells me.

"There's different versions of it where, on the one hand, the good [N-word] is a slave, they're subservient, they do what they're told, they're good to their master.

"And then the other side of that is that a bad [N-word] is somebody who's really violent, masculine and dangerous. But it's all rooted in the same basic premise that we're not really humans."

After World War Two, the racism directed at black and Asian people who had emigrated to the UK from Commonwealth countries saw the word come to be used as a racial slur in everyday life - and politics.

This is something I didn't know about until now, and I did GCSE history at school. It does makes me wonder if teaching these difficult moments in our past in school would help more people to understand the horrible legacy of the word and why it's so offensive.

That election was more than 50 years ago - but the word is still used in that derogatory way today.

But not everyone sees the word as being problematic.

In July this year, the name of the Dambusters' dog was removed from its gravestone as RAF Scampton "did not want to give prominence to an offensive term".

Caller Mark said discussions around the use of it had become "over-sensitised.".

Caller Shaun said the word has been "demonised", adding: "If you walked up and slapped me in the face I'd be offended, if you call me any name under the sun I'd just rise above it and walk on. It's just a word, it doesn't hurt."

Questions that always get asked when the word comes up are "Why do some black people still use it?" and "Why can't white people sing it if it's in a rap song?"

It makes me think back to one of my favourite comedy films, Rush Hour, and Chris Tucker's character - who is black - uses it to greet his black friend saying, "What's up my [N-word]?"

Then a few minutes later, Jackie Chan's character copies him and says it to a black person and it starts a huge fight.

You'll also hear the word in songs by black US rappers and in UK grime music.

She said historically black enslaved people created a language for themselves, "often using the framework and actual words of their enslavers".

"Black people have successfully divested the N-word of its original offence and in our struggle to survive the devastation it occasions, gave it new meaning, made it approachable, survivable," she wrote.

I spoke to Dr Stanford about this further and she said the word was a "complex term" and she "doesn't necessarily reject it". During our chat she used the full word and every time I heard it I could just feel my body tensing up.

"The word is being policed because black folks did not have a choice in the matter at a certain time when it was used to their disadvantage, to abuse and to inscribe and reinforce the sense of black people as inferior by white people," she said.

"That the word survives is an act of redemption by black folk. The word survives on the conditions that black folks have inscribed for it and nobody else can take that. And it becomes violent when other people try to take it and use it."

"So if I say this is my word, let me have this one word, please let me have that word."

Dr Stanford says white people cannot use the word because its origin in slavery hasn't been lost.

"These are people who have created the word in the first place, but who have now lost power in relation to it, they have lost the power to use it with impunity, they have lost the power to reclaim it."

Prof Andrews adds: "If you understand the history of the word and how it's been used, it's not for white people to use, it's not for anybody else to use.

"If you look at the way that we use the word, which would be more acceptable - and I'm not saying I'm pro using it - it's about endearment, it's about family, it's about connections, it's about recognising the situation that we're in.

"So if you're not black you can't do that. You actually can't use the word in the way that we use it. It's not possible, because you're not in that space. So any other usage of it is completely wrong."

But there are some people who feel the word shouldn't be used by anyone - whatever their race.

He said he understands the history of reclaiming and owning the term of abuse, but added: "I say the time has come to do away with it. If black lives matter, don't own it, reject it."

Illustration by Gerard Groves

Cherry Wilson is a proud northerner who recently moved back to Stockport, Greater Manchester, where she grew up.

She studied journalism in Sheffield and was the first in her family to go to university. Her passion is telling the stories of the people and communities behind the headlines, exploring issues that matter to them.

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N-word: The troubled history of the racial slur

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The term can be traced back to slavery and to many it's one of the most offensive words out there.

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How can well-meaning statements reinforce gender stereotypes?

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How can well-meaning statements reinforce gender stereotypes?

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While saying "girls are as good as boys at math" is meant as encouragement, it can unfortunately backfire.

Although well-meaning, the statement commonly expressed by parents and teachers can subtly perpetuate the stereotypes they are trying to debunk, said Stanford scholars Eleanor Chestnut and Ellen Markman in a new paper published in Cognitive Science.

On the surface, the sentence tries to convey that both sexes are equal in their abilities. But because of its grammatical structure, it implies that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said.

Markman and Chestnut tested the effects of the sentence, as well as variations like swapping "girls" with "boys," on a group of English-speaking adults. They found that most people associate a natural math ability with the gender written in the second part of the sentence - what grammatically is known as the complement.

"Considering that several fields with large gender gaps like computer science and physics value raw talent, statements that imply that boys are naturally more talented could be contributing to women's underrepresentation," said Chestnut, the lead author on the paper that formed part of her Stanford doctoral dissertation work.

"Adults, especially parents and teachers, should thus try to avoid consistently framing one gender as the standard for the other," she said.

The power of language

The difference between "girls are as good as boys at math" and "girls and boys are equally good at math" may not be obvious, but each carries a slightly different meaning.

The first statement contains a so-called subject-complement structure, which compares girls to boys. "Boys" is the complement or a standard against which "girls," the subject, is examined. In other contexts, English speakers use this structure to compare one object to another that's considered more typical or common. That's why it sounds better to say "tents are like houses" instead of "houses are like tents," or "zebras are like horses," not "horses are like zebras."

The second sentence has a subject-subject structure and puts both girls and boys in the same position in the sentence, without comparing the two.

Markman and Chestnut surveyed 650 English-speaking adults from the United States to better understand how people perceive the subtle difference between such statements even if they do not realize it.

"Language can play a huge role in how we perceive the world," said Chestnut, who is now a postdoctoral scholar at New York University. "It's important to identify parts of language that taken all together can influence us in one way or another, unknowingly."

The researchers divided study participants into five conditions, each with 128 people.

Participants read variations of a paragraph that summarized research that showed a lack of gender differences in math skills. The text for each condition was almost identical except for a subtle difference in how the main finding was framed. Participants read text with one of four statements: "girls do just as well as boys at math," "boys do just as well as girls at math," "girls and boys are equally good at math," and "boys and girls are equally good at math."

After reading the text, participants in all conditions were asked which gender they considered to be more naturally skilled at math.

Of those participants who read a text that included "girls are as good as boys at math," 71 percent said boys have more natural math ability. But only 32 percent of participants said the same after reading a text that contained "boys are as good as girls at math," according to the research.

"We thought that swapping 'boys' and 'girls' in the sentence would have an effect, but we didn't expect a full reversal of the stereotype," said Markman, the Lewis M. Terman Professor and Senior Associate Dean for the Social Sciences in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

When the researchers explicitly asked participants if they thought the sentence "girls are as good as boys at math" was biased in any way, people rated the statement as unbiased. This shows that the power of such statements to imply inequality occurs without listeners realizing it, the researchers said.

Measuring effects of framing

Chestnut and Markman encourage people to pay attention to how they talk when they describe genders. They suggest choosing subject-subject structures and avoiding subject-complement sentences that frame one gender as the standard.

Chestnut hopes to research further how much text in the media and other public discussions, online and offline, uses subject-complement sentences that frame men as the standard that women are compared against. Chestnut and Markman are also currently working on studying how such differences in framing affect children and whether subject-complement statements of equality teach children stereotypes about gender.

"We are not saying, 'Never say this or that,'" Chestnut said. "But if this type of language is everywhere and if we're habitually using it, it all could matter. To achieve gender equality, we should critically analyze our language so that we can identify and then correct the ways we implicitly reinforce the belief that men are the dominant, higher-status gender."

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How well-meaning statements can spread stereotypes unintentionally | Stanford News

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While saying "girls are as good as boys at math" is meant as encouragement, it can unfortunately backfire. Although well-meaning, the statement commonly expressed by parents and teachers can subtly perpetuate the stereotypes they are trying to debunk, said Stanford scholars Eleanor Chestnut and Ellen Markman in a new paper published in Cognitive Science .

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Brands such as Nike and Adidas to PG Tips and Space NK have been expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by issuing statements and adverts of support - from Nike playing with their memorable tagline of "Just Do It" by asking consumers " for once, Don't Do It" to the #Solidaritea hashtag taken up by many tea brands. Many of these messages have been accompanied by promises to take a hard look at each company's history and current working practises to see what changes can be made to address structural racism.

The idea that we need to decolonise various areas of society is finally growing. But the idea itself is, of course, nothing new. Calls and attempts to decolonise curriculums, public transport systems, museum collections, healthcare systems and so on have been around for a while, but finally many appear to be taking it a bit more seriously.

Decolonising involves removing or rewriting rules and concepts left by colonial-era thinking that still control or influence society. And, of course, this means basically every sector of society. It is an idea that is becoming more widespread. But even though brands are stepping up and making statements, the broader industries behind these messages also need interrogating. Decolonisation, for example, is rarely discussed in my field, advertising - and it needs to be.

American city dwellers, for example, usually see 5,000 adverts a day and many contain messages that reinforce colonial thinking. Adverts reflect what a society thinks about itself. One study found that white advert characters are more likely than characters of colour to be depicted as having an occupation. Such subtle racist and gendered stereotypes are common in adverts around the world.

A poster campaign from earlier this year by the Mexican department store chain Sears, for example, shows an indigenous woman selling bracelets next to a tall white woman. Another shows a white man looking down at another indigenous person, the headline reading "Vacations".

White superiority is implied in these adverts. The differences between "primitive" clothing and contemporary fashion are highlighted, something that the man's downward gaze and woman's nonchalance further emphasise. These adverts also objectify indigenous peoples as something to be looked at on holiday. Someone to take a selfie with, like an animal at the zoo. Sears didn't remove the ads. The store responded to complaints by tweeting that it celebrates Mexican culture.

One advert that drew particular attention in the UK and US was the 2017 Dove ad that showed a black woman removing her brown top, revealing a white woman underneath. Although this was not the intended message, it could certainly be read to imply that by using Dove the consumer can become "white". This upset some consumers who felt that Dove was referring to old colonial-era soap ads that portrayed black people as unclean. Dove removed the ad and started reviewing online content.

And a recent Dolce and Gabbana social media campaign, created in Italy for the Asian market, featured a Chinese model attempting to use chopsticks to eat Italian food, looking fabulous in her D&G clothing. This deeply offended Chinese luxury consumers. The ads were taken down and D&G sales drastically dropped, as celebrities withdrew their support for the brand.

These cases show that advertising needs to be decolonised: it can and does support discriminatory thinking - thinking that often has its roots in the colonial era.

Ways to decolonise advertising

I am considering how we can remove such thinking from advertising, and there are a number of steps I think the industry should take.

The most obvious place to start this is within universities, which are already taking steps to decolonise other subjects, from history (more of a focus on colonial histories) to literature (moving beyond the set "canon" of what are often white male writers) and design (creating a space for designers working outside the confines of the Anglo-European sphere).

But most marketing courses have not yet taken such steps. It should become standard practice for marketing courses to emphasise how advertising not only persuades consumers but also influences society. Just as today we laugh at ads from the 1950s and their reflection of negative gender stereotypes, such as women stuck at home doing the washing, or not being able to drive correctly, the same exercise will certainly be done in 2050, analysing our current advertising. Advertisers had better be prepared - and bear this in mind.

A change is also needed within actual advertising agencies, which are dominated by white men in top positions. Even though more women are obtaining these roles, there needs to be more of a gender balance, and far more racial diversity is needed. This will help encourage inclusive messages. In the UK, the Advertising Association has just released a report on diversity and inclusion concluding that the challenge is to ensure the industry is one in which Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) recruits can prosper.

In addition, the companies paying for advertising need to change by practising what they preach. This means that they need to follow through and act on their recent messages of solidarity.

Take Nike's "Don't Do It" ad. This is a good example of a brand calling attention to racism in society. But this, too, has been controversial because even though Nike has supported black athletes over the years, the company has been questioned over its lack of black representation on its leadership team. Brands associating themselves with racial equality need to back words with actions.

Finally, regulatory bodies that govern advertising should be more proactive, creating specific rules that guide the ad industry before adverts become offensive. This might involve introducing regulations around reinforcing the concept of white superiority. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has attempted to be proactive in this way, with the negative stereotypes rules that banned two ads in 2019, including Volkswagen. So this is a step in the right direction.

Of course, all of these steps will also feed into the efforts to decolonise elsewhere. The process of decolonising institutions will create a more egalitarian society - so this is something to strive towards.

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Brands may support Black Lives Matter, but advertising still needs to decolonise

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Brands such as Nike and Adidas to PG Tips and Space NK have been expressing solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement by issuing statements and adverts of support - from Nike playing with their memorable tagline of "Just Do It" by asking consumers " for once, Don't Do It" to the #Solidaritea hashtag taken up by many tea brands.

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Can you spot the problem with these headlines?

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Can you spot the problem with these headlines?

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Sometimes a health headline will focus on a study done in mice, or done with only 2 people, or done by forcing people to run hundreds of miles a day. The farther the study is from who you are and how you act in your real life, the less likely the results will translate directly to you. For example, the Physicians Health Study is a well-known study that was conducted in the 1980s that demonstrated that aspirin reduced the risk of having a heart attack. The observed effect was very strong and lead to headlines such as: "Health; Doctors Confirm Benefits of Aspirin", however this study was only conducted among men, and since it has been demonstrated that the effect may not be the same for women. Does this mean the original study was wrong? Of course not! The researchers were explicit in saying their conclusions could only be drawn among men. This leads to an important question to ask when evaluating whether a study's result will be interesting for me: Who was included in the study? Could I fit in that population?

In our videos, we briefly discuss the design of a study, for example paying attention to whether there is a control group. There are many types of studies but two big types are randomized, controlled trials (RCTs) and observational studies. RCTs are the gold standard, because they let us prove that an exposure, like taking a drug or changing a diet, causes a change in your health. Observational studies can support the hypothesis that the drug or diet causes the change, but you usually need a lot more information. Hill's criteria are a set of extra bits of information that might lend more credibility to an observational study (see Lucy's fun blog post on this for more).

In addition to the design of the study, it is important to notice the sample size.Bigger studies usually let us measure results more accurately, especially when the result is likely to be noisy or hard to get a good handle on. To demonstrate this, a science journalist, John Bohannon, conducted a study that found that eating chocolate lead to weight loss. The problem? This study was only conducted on only 16 participants and John purposefully looked at many different outcomes before he found a significant one. (Check out John's write up of this study).

If the impact of the exposure, like a drug or diet, is pretty small we call that a small effect size. The smaller the impact, the harder it is to reliably find it with a study. When small effect sizes are combined with small sample sizes it makes it really, really hard to figure out if we found something real or not in the data. Similarly, in a very large study, we may be able to detect a very small effect that is statistically significant, but not actually scientifically meaningful. For example, remember the study we discussed that examined whether a new drug prolonged the life of patients with pancreatic cancer - while the result was statistically significant,
the actual effect was only a difference of 10 days.

Finally, it is important to pay attention to the outcome being analyzed. Many times, surrogate outcomes are used. Our example is based on a real case from the medical literature. In the mid-twentieth century, researchers started publishing studies suggesting that a B-vitamin called niacin might help prevent heart disease by raising levels of beneficial cholesterol. By 2009, more than 700,000 prescriptions for niacin were being written in the U.S. every month. There was just one problem. It turns out that niacin doesn't help prevent heart disease - but it does increase the risk of serious side effects. The original niacin studies concluded that the vitamin would reduce the risk of heart disease because it raised the levels of the healthy form of cholesterol, and people with higher levels tend to have fewer heart attacks. But they didn't measure heart attack risk directly. When other scientists eventually did, it turned out that niacin's effect on cholesterol didn't actually lead to fewer heart attacks.

A great way to dig deeper is to read the research article behind the headlines. Read Jeff's blog post for tips on tracking down the original research.

We have only scratched the surface of things to think about when evaluating scientific studies. If you are interested in pursuing this area further, we have a short massive online open course (MOOC) that dives a bit deeper into these issues. The course is designed to be completed by busy students and professionals, with short lessons and quizzes that can be completed on the go. We take real examples from the medical literature and dive into the text to understand the study design, statistical methods, and results. The whole course can be completed in about four hours. We leave out the mathematical detail and focus on the conceptual ideas. Anyone can pick this course up and gain a better understanding of how data and statistics are used in the medical literature. You can find the course on Leanpub: Understanding Data and Statistics in Medical Literature.

Enjoy!

Lucy D'Agostino McGowan and Jeff Leek

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Can you spot the problem with these headlines? (Level 1) - Jeff Leek and Lucy McGowan

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In medicine, there's often a disconnect between news headlines and the scientific research they cover. While headlines are designed to catch attention, many studies produce meaningful results when they focus on a narrow, specific question. So how can you figure out what's a genuine health concern and what's less conclusive?

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How do the adjectives we use to describe different genders differ?

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How do the adjectives we use to describe different genders differ?

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Machine learning analyzed 3.5 million books to find that adjectives ascribed to women tend to describe physical appearance, whereas words that refer to behavior go to men.

"Beautiful" and "sexy" are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women. Commonly used descriptors for men include righteous, rational, and courageous.

Researchers trawled through an enormous quantity of books in an effort to find out whether there is a difference between the types of words that describe men and women in literature. Using a new computer model, the researchers analyzed a dataset of 3.5 million books, all published in English between 1900 to 2008. The books include a mix of fiction and non-fiction literature.

"We are clearly able to see that the words used for women refer much more to their appearances than the words used to describe men. Thus, we have been able to confirm a widespread perception, only now at a statistical level," says computer scientist and assistant professor Isabelle Augenstein of the University of Copenhagen's computer science department.

The researchers extracted adjectives and verbs associated with gender-specific nouns (e.g. "daughter" and "stewardess"). For example, in combinations such as "sexy stewardess" or "girls gossiping." They then analyzed whether the words had a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment, and then categorized the words into semantic categories such as "behavior," "body," "feeling," and "mind."

The dataset is based on the Google Ngram Corpus.

11 billion words

Their analysis demonstrates that negative verbs associated with body and appearance appear five times as often for female figures as male ones. The analysis also demonstrates that positive and neutral adjectives relating to the body and appearance occur approximately twice as often in descriptions of female figures, while male ones are most frequently described using adjectives that refer to their behavior and personal qualities.

In the past, linguists typically looked at the prevalence of gendered language and bias, but using smaller data sets. Now, computer scientists can deploy machine learning algorithms to analyze vast troves of data-in this case, 11 billion words.

Although many of the books were published several decades ago, they still play an active role, Augenstein points out. The algorithms used to create machines and applications that can understand human language are fed with data in the form of text material that is available online. This is the technology that allows smartphones to recognize our voices and enables Google to provide keyword suggestions.

Why do adjectives matter so much?

"The algorithms work to identify patterns, and whenever one is observed, it is perceived that something is 'true.' If any of these patterns refer to biased language, the result will also be biased. The systems adopt, so to speak, the language that we people use, and thus, our gender stereotypes and prejudices," says Augenstein. She gives an example of where it may be important: "If the language we use to describe men and women differs in employee recommendations, for example, it will influence who is offered a job when companies use IT systems to sort through job applications."

As artificial intelligence and language technology become more prominent across society, it is important to be aware of gendered language.

Augenstein continues: "We can try to take this into account when developing machine-learning models by either using less biased text or by forcing models to ignore or counteract bias. All three things are possible."

The researchers point out that the analysis has its limitations, in that it does not take into account who wrote the individual passages and the differences in the degrees of bias depending on whether the books were published during an earlier or later period within the data set timeline. Furthermore, it does not distinguish between genres-e.g. between romance novels and non-fiction. The researchers are currently following up on several of these items.

Additional coauthors of the study are from the University of Maryland, Google Research Johns Hopkins University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Microsoft Research.

They presented a paper on the at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
Source: University of Copenhagen

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Algorithms find top 11 adjectives for men v. women in 3.5M books - Futurity

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Machine learning analyzed 3.5 million books to find that adjectives ascribed to women tend to describe physical appearance, whereas words that refer to behavior go to men. "Beautiful" and "sexy" are two of the adjectives most frequently used to describe women. Commonly used descriptors for men include righteous, rational, and courageous.

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Same car, different ads, different ethnicities

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Same car, different ads, different ethnicities

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A father and a daughter driving after baseball practice. A momentary glimpse of a peacock. An ignored phone call from Mom. The Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now."

All of these are part of Toyota's marketing campaign for its new Camry. But which commercial you get to see may depend, in part, on what ethnicity you are.

African-American

Hispanic

Asian-American

'Transcultural Mainstream'

The company recently unveiled the numerous ads it had made for the car, several designed to resonate specifically with African-American, Hispanic or Asian-American audiences.

People may see different commercials based on whether they are watching "Scandal" on ABC, which tends to have a high number of African-American viewers, or a show on the Spanish-language network NBC Universo, according to the company's ad agencies. Some of the ads that are meant to appeal specifically to minorities will also run on programming that appeals to a general audience, like "Sunday Night Football."

Viewed together, the ads - and their different story lines, music and actors - offer a glimpse into how race and culture figure into American advertising today, showing how an ad for one product can evolve depending on who is making it and whom it is marketed to.

"People like to see people of all ethnicities in what they're seeing because that's the life they're living in most of the U.S. today," said Jack Hollis, group vice president and general manager of the Toyota brand.

At the same time, added Mr. Hollis, who is white, "if a person of any group is looking for communication that is like them, that looks like them specifically, the good news is because of the breadth of something like a Camry campaign, they can find it."

Companies have developed commercial campaigns aimed at minority groups for years, often in conjunction with specialized ad agencies. But Toyota's efforts show how major companies are adjusting their marketing tactics as the nation's demographics shift.

Some wonder, though, if these kind of specialized ads are even needed when the country's population is getting more diverse.

"You see a real blending and a more progressive acknowledgment that there is significant diversity" in mainstream advertising, said Shalini Shankar, a professor at Northwestern University and the author of the book "Advertising Diversity." Still, she said, "it doesn't hurt to have more stuff that acknowledges that race is real."

The advertising industry does not have a great track record when it comes to race, whether it's the ads themselves or the lack of women and minorities at many agencies that make them. Just days ago, Dove was pilloried for a Facebook ad in which a black woman removed her brown shirt to reveal a white woman in a light-colored shirt.

The Camry campaign was developed jointly by a group of four ad agencies - one general agency and three that specialize in each ethnic group. The agencies - Saatchi & Saatchi, Burrell Communications, Conill and interTrend - each aimed their ads at Americans 25 to 49 years old and built them around the theme "Sensations."

Four of the eight commercials are below, along with explanations from each agency about what it was trying to accomplish in its marketing.

We want to hear from you. Does a targeted approach reinforce stereotypes, or help represent a wider range of communities? Are there any past ads, bad or good, that have stood out to you?

African-American consumers

The ad from Burrell, an agency that has specialized in African-American consumers since the 1970s and has worked with the likes of McDonald's and Comcast, is titled "Strut."

It features an African-American man who orders a pizza from a restaurant that offers free delivery. "No, no, pickup," he says, enjoying his drive as the hip-hop song, "The Time Is Now," by the professional wrestler John Cena, plays in the background.

The image of a peacock flashes after he opens the garage to reveal a red Camry, emphasizing the idea of showing off.

He then drives past a movie theater whose marquee reads "Now Showing Out," and he earns an admiring look from an African-American woman.

"What we found with African-Americans is style really comes to the forefront in how we look at vehicles," said Lewis Williams, Burrell's chief creative officer. "We see automobiles as extensions of ourselves, so style is really important."

Vicki Bolton, a group account director, added that the agency's research had led it to the idea of strutting, because "we wanted people to take notice of us."

The actor was cast to portray "someone who felt athletic, who had this space that he could feel like a guy's guy but could be a great father, someone who maybe moved to the suburbs and hadn't lost his edge totally because now he has a car," Mr. Williams said. "It gave him his strut back."

The music was also chosen to signal confidence and athleticism, and to give the ad a contemporary feel.

Mr. Williams and Ms. Bolton, who are both African-American, said the agency relied on research, personal knowledge and a philosophy called "positive realism" to avoid stereotyping.

"We always make sure we portray African-Americans in a positive light when we do any kind of media, as well as be very authentic to the stories we tell," Mr. Williams said.

"People want to see themselves in messaging," Ms. Bolton said. She added that millennials may have broader social circles, but that "when they come home at the end of the day, they still want to see messaging with people that are reflective of them."

Asian-American consumers

In the commercial titled "Captivating," a Chinese-American father picks his daughter up from baseball practice in a red Camry. She is focused on her tablet in the backseat until he turns Pandora on. As the music kicks up and the engine revs, both of their faces light up.

The ad is from interTrend, a Long Beach, Calif., agency that specializes in marketing to Asian-Americans. It is the only Camry broadcast spot to focus on a father and daughter. The father was specifically cast to "highlight a not-often-seen behavior," said Julia Huang, interTrend's chief executive, who is Taiwanese-American.

"Traditionally, Asian fathers show less emotion and affection toward their kids," Ms. Huang said. "We wanted to show that driving the Camry brought out a different side of an Asian dad and how he wanted to share the experience with his daughter."

When asked about the potential pitfalls of perpetuating stereotypes through race-targeted ads, Ms. Huang said the word "has a stigma" attached to it. From a research perspective, she said, it is not stereotyping to say Asian-Americans view family and education as particularly important.

"I'd like to say there is some value for value attributes that we pick up, and we highlight that," she said, "so it's not really a stereotype - it really is a core value that is embraced."

Baseball was chosen, Ms. Huang said, because it "is a universally popular sport among all Asian segments." Others, like cricket, were dismissed as being "too obvious."

Hispanic consumers

The ad, called "Rebellious," shows a young man in a red Camry zooming down a highway when he sees his mother is calling his phone. He hesitates before deciding to decline the call, breaking into a smile and focusing on the joy of the drive.

This commercial, which is in Spanish, is one of two from Conill, which markets to a Hispanic audience.

Conill, which creates ads in both English and Spanish, approaches its work by considering how "acculturated" its target consumers are, said Jennifer Dellapina, group strategic planning director at Conill. It uses a model that "takes into account how long a person was in the United States, if they were born here, which language they speak, which culture they tend to feel more connected to," she said.

When Toyota's agencies gathered, they concluded that potential Camry buyers were broadly ready for change, though the Hispanic consumer sought "some guardrails" with that effort, Ms. Dellapina, who is white, said. That came from a sense of responsibility, particularly to family, she said, adding that "internally, we called it 'soaring with sense.'"

That insight is reflected in the ad when the man declines the call, which Ms. Dellapina called an "edgy move."

"It's a Hispanic thing - you're going to talk to your mom once a week," she said. Still, ignoring the call isn't too radical of a move.

"He's not jumping off a cliff or burning down his house - he's just not answering the call from his mom, and it's sort of implied in my mind that he's going to call her back later," Ms. Dellapina said.

In the agency's other ad, titled "Striking," a woman with a perfect manicure is driving a red Camry in what appear to be red heels, carefully applied makeup and jewelry.

She applies red lipstick before strolling out of her red Camry to her final destination: a supermarket. The idea is to bring style wherever you go, Ms. Dellapina said.

All of the characters in Conill's commercials "are everyday people who portray different situations based on strong Hispanic insights, like the Latino woman who always wants to look and feel attractive - even when she is just doing the everyday tasks," the firm said in an email.

The 'Transcultural Mainstream'

This commercial, titled "Thrill," is one of four spots from Saatchi & Saatchi, and features a version of "Don't Stop Me Now," by Queen.

It shows a schoolboy, a young woman with bangs and a bearded man with glasses each waiting impatiently for someone to arrive. Their counterparts - a father, a significant other and a female colleague - appear to have forgotten about their duties as they enjoy separate, unworried joyrides in a Camry, until their phones ring and a reunion takes place. The six actors appear to be a mix of white and nonwhite.

The agency recoils at the notion that, by default, its ads may be designed to appeal first and foremost to white people.

"There is no Caucasian market," said Mark Turner, chief strategy officer of Saatchi & Saatchi, who is white. "The mainstream market as defined by any mass marketer like Toyota actually comprises many different cultures, so we're not the Caucasian agency. We're the agency that caters to the transcultural mainstream."

Outside of Queen, the commercials use songs like "The Look" by Roxette and "What a Wonderful World," and show a variety of ethnicities among actors.

"We wanted every person in our campaign to be relatable, but we didn't want people to get to know them too much," said Jason Schragger, chief creative officer of Saatchi & Saatchi, who is white.

The ads sought to use familiar places, like the office and road trips, to highlight excitement around the car and its features.

"I have people of other cultures and heritages in my department, but I do think the three other agencies bring a depth and history of experience with their markets that would be very hard to replicate overnight by going out and hiring a handful of people or half the agency," Mr. Turner said.

Culture, he added, "is a very complicated and hard thing to understand and get right."

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Different Ads, Different Ethnicities, Same Car

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A father and a daughter driving after baseball practice. A momentary glimpse of a peacock. An ignored phone call from Mom. The Queen song "Don't Stop Me Now." All of these are part of Toyota's marketing campaign for its new Camry. But which commercial you get to see may depend, in part, on what ethnicity you are.

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Which languages are most at risk of becoming extinct?

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Which languages are most at risk of becoming extinct?

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When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new one, combining bits of each into something everyone can use to communicate easily. Linguists call such impromptu tongues "contact languages" - and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of.

The origin stories of these linguistic mash-ups vary. Some are peaceful, such as when groups meet for trade and need a lingua franca: Nigerian Pidgin English, for example, allows speakers of over 500 tongues to communicate. But others were born of tragedy and violence - like Haitian Creole, Gullah Geechee, Jamaican Creole and many others that arose from the Atlantic slave trade, when West African peoples combined several tongues with English, creating everyday languages often used among slaves.

Today, many of these contact languages are lost. Only 200 or so remain - scores of which are at risk of extinction. Linguists and anthropologists who traditionally have focused on the fate of more formal languages are paying increased attention: studying them with greater intensity and working with indigenous groups, international agencies, independent non-profits, academics and others to preserve them.
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From pidgins - forms of simplified speech - used for commerce to the more mature creoles that have developed from them, contact languages exist all over the world. Some are transitory; others have persisted for hundreds of years. Through time, some that began as contact languages evolved into more formalised ones, explains linguist Shelome Gooden of the University of Pittsburgh, who as a child spoke English at school but Jamaican Creole - a mix of English and West African languages - at home.

A market in Lagos, Nigeria, where Pidgin English helps people communicate with a common language (Credit: Reuters)

Turkish, for example, is a fully formed language that evolved about 1,000 years ago from an amalgamation of existing Turkic languages, Arabic and Persian languages as well as Greek and Armenian. But Gooden says it shows signs of reduplication, a feature common in creole and pidgin languages wherein existing words in a language are used to create new words.In Jamaican Creole, for example, "laaf" means simply "laugh," but "laaf-laaf" becomes "to laugh a lot." In Turkish, not typically grouped with contact languages, the word "derin" means "deep," while "derin derin" means "deeply." Traces like this offer hints about the origins of languages when other historical clues may be missing, Gooden says.

There is a reason contact languages have traditionally commanded less respect, says Nala H Lee, a linguist at the National University of Singapore who wrote an overview of the status of contact languages in the 2020 Annual Review of Linguistics."They've been thought to be bastardised versions of component languages from which they have been derived," she says. "People think of them as being less good or not real languages." Sometimes derisively referred to as "kitchen languages," they are spoken in informal settings and are unlikely to be written down or used in official matters such as in court documents.

But they are well worth saving, Lee says. The tongues are part of a people's cultural or ethnic identity and history: when they disappear, which they do at a disproportionate rate to mature languages, an entire tradition can die with them. The Gullah Geechee language, for example, has a unique culture that comes, along with the tongue, from descendants of the slave trade still living on the southern Atlantic Coast of the United States. Contact languages also are a trove for linguists studying how languages evolve and how our brains learn to speak them.

In research published in 2018 in the journal Language Documentation & Conservation, Lee surveyed 96 contact languages for endangerment. She scored them by the number of fluent speakers, the extent to which they are being passed to the next generation and how widely they're used by those who still speak them. Some might still be used in day-to-day trade, while others may be used only at home or small group settings, for example.

Many contact languages are now threatened, including a few on the precipice of extinction, a state termed "dormancy" in linguistics (Credit: Mapswire.com/Knowable Magazine)

Lee says that there are probably a little more than 200 contact languages in the world, 154 of them pidgins or creoles. For her survey, she chose 96 prominent and well-understood examples. Of the 96, 10 had lost their last speaker within the last 50 years - becoming dormant, as linguists put it - and 11 were critically endangered, with less than 10 speakers and a low chance of transmission to the next generation. Five more were severely endangered, with between 10 and 99 speakers left.

In all, Lee's work suggests that up to 96% of contact languages are either endangered or recently dormant, having lost the last known speakers - compared with less than 50% of the roughly 7,100 total languages worldwide. That means the risk of a contact language disappearing is nearly double that for all languages.

This is sometimes due to ephemeral needs - the contact that gives rise to a language may not last very long. Lee points to Northern Territory Pidgin English, which came about through trades between British settlers in northern Australia and some Asian countries. "It quickly became obsolete when trading was halted after 11 years," Lee says. In other cases, evidence points to deliberate efforts to suppress informal languages. Once the United States took over Hawaii, for example, it banned Hawaiian Pidgin (a combination of English and Hawaiian), as well as the indigenous Hawaiian language, from being used in schools starting in 1896.

The fact that contact languages are not written, but passed down orally, means they can fade as younger generations move away to seek economic opportunity elsewhere, leaving traditions to elders. On the US Virgin Islands, English gradually became the language of choice and Negerhollands - a creole that originated around 1700 and combined Dutch, English, French, Spanish and African languages - became extinct in 1987.

A native Canadian girl dances at a festival to celebrate Canada's indigenous culture and history (Credit: Alamy)

Attempts to preserve the endangered tongues can be a challenge: just as contact languages command less respect on the outside, the speakers themselves may be reluctant to view them as worth saving, Lee says.

But efforts are afoot around the world. Among these, the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission in South Carolina works to preserve the language of the Gullah people. The Sri Lanka Malay Association aims to maintain the language and traditions of this small ethnic group in Sri Lanka. The Creole Heritage Center and the Louisiana Folklife Center, both affiliated with the North State University of Louisiana, promote Louisiana Creole, which is based on French, some Spanish and native African languages used by enslaved people from the period when Louisiana was French-held territory.

And in Canada, some who identify as Métis - the descendants of First Nations people (primarily Cree) and French fur traders - are working to preserve Michif, a contact language used by Métis which combines Cree and French. It's listed as critical by the Endangered Languages Project, which tracks at-risk languages including contact languages. There are an estimated 200 Michif speakers left in the world, though Lee estimates that the number of speakers fluent enough to pass on the language to subsequent generations is far lower.

In the British Columbia area, the Michif Language Revitalization Circle was formed about two years ago and focuses on preserving Heritage Michif - one of four Michif dialects spoken in Canada and small pockets in the US. "Luckily, in our group, three of us grew up exposed to our language," says programme coordinator Anita Barker, whose maternal grandfather was Cree and maternal grandmother was Métis. "We're by no means speakers, but we at least heard it and could speak some when we were growing up." The group is trying to create a written, phonetically read form of the language, working with Métis elders who still speak the language and members of the circle who had exposure to Michif growing up.

Though many contact languages face endangerment, others go on to thrive. Gooden points to Nigerian Pidgin English. There are more than 500 languages spoken in Nigeria, and to facilitate cross-communication Nigerian Pidgin has become the universal, everyday tongue of the country.

There have also been moves to legitimise contact languages. In 1987, the government of Haiti made Haitian Creole an official language alongside French. Similar efforts are currently underway in Jamaica.

But then there are tongues like Baba Malay - a combination of Malay and Hokkien spoken by the Peranakan ethnic group in the Malaysian state of Malacca - that only older generations have held onto. That includes Lee's own grandparents. As these languages diminish, so do the cultures that created them.

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This article Join one million Future fans by liking us on If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called "The Essential List". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Worklife, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram. originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, and is republished under a Creative Commons licence.

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The fragile state of 'contact languages'

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When groups of people who speak different languages come together, they sometimes inadvertently create a new one, combining bits of each into something everyone can use to communicate easily. Linguists call such impromptu tongues "contact languages" - and they can extend well beyond the pidgin and creole that many of us have heard of.

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How could you use the contents of this article in developing a comprehensive character analysis?

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How could you use the contents of this article in developing a comprehensive character analysis?

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Self, selfhood and understanding. This page explores the nature of the self. We look at four different models of selfhood - which is a far from easy task. It is difficult to take a step outside what we take for granted.

Contents: introduction · starting with the parts · looking to the whole · the dialogical self · the post-modern self · in conclusion · further reading · how to cite this piece

Our appreciation of selfhood is so very immediate - it is part of all that we do. Thus, to say that the way we as humans come to know ourselves, to experience our bodies, and to place ourselves in relation to others changes - over time, and between cultures - can be to challenge something essential.

I want to set out four ways of approaching the self - individuals as containers; as part of a whole, as dialogical; and as multiple voices.

Starting with the parts - individuals as bounded containers

One of the most significant problems we face is the way that the individual is set against society. Many of the images we draw upon in the North place the individual on one side and society on the other - they are seen as quite separate. If we turn to the popular press, films and soaps, or the nature of political rhetoric this can be seen quite clearly. As Burkitt (1991: 1) put it, 'the view of human beings as self-contained unitary individuals who carry their uniqueness deep inside themselves, like pearls hidden in their shells' is deeply engrained. It is easy to see how this view of the individual takes root. Consciousness, as Damasio (2000) has argued is 'an entirely private, first-person phenomenon'.

In this way of coming to understand ourselves the body plays a crucial role. The skin becomes a boundary - everything that happens outside the wall it forms becomes the other - the world outside; what is inside is me - the world inside. In this three relatively simple and apparently 'natural' ideas rule (Sampson (1993: 34):

the boundary of the individual is coincident with the boundary of the body;

the body is a container that houses the individual;

the individual is best understood as a self-contained entity.

Here I just want to highlight three important aspects of these assumptions.

First, the building block for all sorts of analysis then becomes the self as container. A central point of reference in political or moral debates is the rights and experiences of the individual. We look to the parts to approach the whole. Each self as container is added to a pile to form the whole - like tins of baked beans stacked in a supermarket.

Second, if we approach the body as container then it is clear that what is vital about an individual - physiologically and psychologically is held within. 'We believe that an individual has an inside that contains all the important features that comprise the person - everything that the person owns - and that this is distinct, separate and cut-off from all that is not part of the person, located outside the container' (Sampson 1993: 36). A dominant notion is that we need to look inside ourselves if we are to gain enlightenment. The surgeon looks to our organs, the psychoanalyst to our inner feelings.

Third, what then emerges is a picture of the individual and society as separate realms. There is a division between individual and society, between individual and social worlds. Such a view then allows politicians such as Margaret Thatcher to talk of there being no such thing as society - only individuals and families.

All this is not to say that individuals do not feel divided themselves. As Burkitt eloquently put it -

not only do people in the Western world feel separated from others with whom they live and who make up their society, they also feel divided within themselves, riven between the selves they present in relations with others and the individuals they feel themselves to be deep down inside. The armour that protects and separates us from others appears also to drive a deep wedge between our feelings and our ability to express them in public.

In this way people may well talk of presenting a 'face' to others and to hide their true feelings inside. This is very much the world that Erving Goffman explores using the metaphor of the stage - and of our anxious attempts not to present our selves in such ways that allow us to negotiate the dangerous world o f social encounters.

This understanding of individuals flows into the idea of alienation. This we can approach via Marx. In capitalist society the separation between the individual and society becomes fully manifest. We have the separation of ownership of the means of production, the development of private property relationships, the movement of significant power into the hands of an impersonal state apparatus and a growing division of labour. In this web of relationships exchanges are less personal and more dependent on the use of objects. The classic example here would a shift from barter arrangements to the use of money for exchange. Also within the division of labour the worker plays a smaller and smaller role in the production of the final item.

A direct consequence of this alienation of man from the product of his labour, from his life activity and from his species-life, is that man is alienated from other men. When man confronts himself he also confronts other men. What is true of man's relationship to his work , to the product of his work and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labour and to the objects of their labour. (Marx, Political and Economic Manuscripts :125).

Talk of individualism in the social sciences usually broadly refers to any set of ideas that emphasize the importance of the individual and the individual's interests. Commonly these are contrasted with collective interests or holistic constructs. As Williams (1976: 133) comments, there is something of a paradox here, for 'individual' originally meant indivisible. Three ideas are central to this form of individualism. A belief in:

the supreme value and dignity of the individual;

the individual as independent and autonomous - with thoughts and actions not determined by outside agencies; and

self-development - with the onus on individuals to develop their talents to the fullest. (Lukes 1973)

Such an idea of individuality can be related to the break-up of the medieval social, economic and religious order.

In the general movement against feudalism there was a new stress on a man's personal existence over and above his place or function in a rigid hierarchical society. There was a related stress in Protestantism, on a man's direct and individual relation to God, as opposed to this relation mediated by the church. (Williams 1976: 135)

In this way the individual became seen as an entity and as the cornerstone for political, legal and economic rights. It is here that the notion of possessive individualism is of great importance. 'Every man is naturally the sole proprietor of his own person and capacities (the absolute proprietor in that he owes nothing to society for them)' (Macpherson 1962: 270). The idea we are each owners of our own capacities and self fits in well with the changes in production and political power that were taking place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Looking to the whole - people in community

If the self as container begins with the parts another route is to begin with the whole. This is the line that pragmatists take such as John Dewey. They start with the inclusive and the connected. Wholes are not built out of isolated elements. Rather, we look to a progressive differentiation within organic wholes (Tiles 1988: 22). In such a view society and the individual are not two separate entities.

Humans are always in social relationships from the moment they are born and they remain part of a network of other people throughout their lives (Burkitt 1991: 2).

This does not necessarily involve throwing out the idea that people are individuals. Rather we can approach individuality as socially based.

To think about these two ways of approaching the self I want to look at how teaching about family relationships and obligations in different cultures. For example, many North Americans might argue that children should learn to be both obedient, 'to submit to rules which protect the rights of others, and to develop a progressive independence' (Johnson 1985: 123). Independence, in this sense, involves us being able gradually to take responsibility for, and to control (internally), our actions. 'Becoming independent' is seen as desirable.

This can be contrasted with Japanese thought where there may be strong support for some for ms of life-long dependency upon selected others. The acknowledgement of interdependence in work, friendship and family relations is explicit, conscious and central to social life. In a similar fashion, the Hindu concept of self leads to a rather different understanding of the significance of being 'individual'. It begins with the concept of the 'real-self' or âtman which may be contrasted with the lower empirical or material self. The 'material self' is the experiential form of self involving thought, desires and sensations.

What would be seen as self-inconsistency in a westerner is perfectly understandable given the idea that Hindus do not see their situational behaviour as a reflection of their true self, but as a reflection of a lesser entity... When the Hindu traditions speak about an individual, it is not to analyse but to denigrate (Marsella et al 1985: 14).

Thus, when a Hindu man is asked for his identity, 'he will give you hi s name, the name of his village, and his caste' (Bharati 1985: 211). There is a Sanskrit formula which begins with lineage, family, house and ends with personal name. In this presentation, the empirical self comes last.

The western striving is toward the development of a solid well-functioning ego. The inner experience of self should be clearly delineated from the outside. The Hindu striving goes in the opposite direction - to achieve union with the immutable self, which is ultimately indistinguishable from deity and the totality of the universe (Marsella et al 1985: 18)

This underlines the fundamental importance of addressing how patterns of socialization and family interaction, and the operation of symbols within different cultures affect people's self conception and their way of placing themselves in the world. It is simply not possible to approach say, Hindu experience, through the application of western models of thought. What results doe s not make sense, worse still the culture may then be stigmatized as irrational or silly. Understanding can only be attained by attempting to enter different cultural systems of thought - and paying particular attention to the way things are symbolized. This requires special attention to language.

Interaction - the dialogical self

This perspective flows from the idea that people's lives:

...are characterized by the ongoing conversations and dialogues they carry out in the course of their everyday activities, and therefore that the most important thing about people is not what is contained within them, but what transpires between them. (Sampson 1993: 20)

'The most important thing about people is not what is contained within them, but what transpires between them' - this is a difficult idea to grasp if we have brought up in an individualist culture. This was a problem that faced George Herbert Mead in the early part of the century when he began to argue that our selves are formed in interaction with others.

Mead suggested that the 'mind' and the 'self' are formed within the social and communicative activities of the group. He argued that humans have constantly to adapt to the activities of others. There is a continual process of adjustment. We 'read' others' gestures (behaviour), and so become conscious of ourselves. In communicating we learn to assume the roles of others and monitor our actions accordingly. Self consciousness and individuality are, thus, understood as developing in tandem with social organization and co-operation.

There is something more here. Mead conceives of the mind as a form of conversation - it is a conversation held internally with a person's own self.

Me, I and 'the generalized other'. Mead can be seen as drawing a distinction between two phases of the process known as the self - the 'I' and the 'Me'. Neither of these can exist without the other. He argues that we develop in response to the attitudes of others - we take in or incorporate certain aspects of others attitudes towards us. In this sense:

The 'Me' is the identity that the self develops through seeing its form in the attitudes others take towards it. It consists of those attitudes of others that have been incorporated into the self (Miller 1973: 56).

The 'I' is a phase that is never directly knowable. It is the agent, the active component of the self as it organizes the attitudes of others, selects objects on which the individual will act, and chooses or commits itself to respond in a certain way (Miller 1973: 60).

This is not an easy idea to grasp at first - but Sampson puts it quite well: 'When we are doing something, we are unaware of what is going on until we see our doings reflected back to us; that reflection back gives us ourselves as an object, a 'me''. (1993: 105). This is how Mead (1934: 243) put it:

If you ask, then, where directly in your own experience the 'I' comes in, the answer is that it comes in as a historical figure. It is what you were a second ago that is the 'I' of the historical figure.

In other words, the 'I' is the process of thinking. 'In the inner conversation, the 'I' articulates thoughts and the 'me' hears them expressed, recognizing the voice as its own' (Burkitt 1991: 39). One could describe this as consciousness.

Damasio (2000) approaches this via the notion of 'the feeling of what happens'. The 'I' is close in some ways to what he talks about as the 'proto-self' - this is a constantly updated representation in the brain of the state of the body (that we are not conscious of as such). The 'me' is, in part, the 'core self' - a non-verbal, implicit awareness that is ceaselessly re-created for every object the brain encounters. Such a sense of self is present all the time. He argues that when we are looking at an object or event, reading a book, or whatever, besides the sensory images 'there is also this other presence that signifies you in a particular relationship with some object'. He continues:

The presence is quiet and subtle, and sometimes it is little more than a 'hint half guessed', to borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot. In its simplest form , the presence of you is the feeling of what happens when your being is modified by apprehending something.

This awareness when extended over time, (looking backwards and forwards) then becomes known as the 'autobiographical self' that we tend to experience as central. AT any one time, then, we are aware of the here and now (core content) and of its place in relation to our history (extended content).

We need to add one further element here - the generalized other. This notion was introduced by Mead to represent the organized set of attitudes, and their corresponding responses which are common to the group. This allows people to incorporate a sense of the overarching group or community values into their appreciation of self.

The significance of language. As researchers such as Vygotsky have made clear, personality develops through encounters with the physical world and through relations with other human beings which are mediated by language. It is activity structured by social relations that is fundamental to the formation of the self (Burkitt 1991: 138). Combining the mind and the hand in consciously productive activity gives human action its special quality. 'And while the tools with which people produce are the medium, through which they gain mastery over nature, so language is the tool and the medium through which people gain influence over the behaviour of others and over their own actions' (Burkitt 1991: 139).

The sign is a psychological tool. Speech is thus seen as a key to the development of thought - rather than being an expression of thought. Children begin by touching, pushing, and playing with things. In activity they become curious about the names of things and develop their vocabulary. They may well talk as they act - revealing their thinking. Gradually speaking the word is no longer necessary to guide our actions - the vocalization of inner speech ebbs away and we operate not with the word itself but with its image - we work with the sense of the word.

In this way, psychologically, the symbolic tools we use to reflect upon and steer our actions, form an inner conversation which is an internalization of the communicative processes taking place in society. This inner conversation can be labelled as thinking - its dialogical structure creating something we can call 'mind'.

Power and social relations. Language is also a deeply political. The labels we give to things, the ideas evoked by a particular word or phrase, are a double-edged sword. They allow the possibility of knowing more, and of being controlled or misled. As Habermas (e.g. 1984: 332) has consistently pointed out, our communication can be systematically distorted. Such words as we have may not fully describe or capture an experience, situation or idea. The context in which they are heard or read may be flavoured by a wish for submissive silence (Coutinho 1972: 16-7)

The language we use is inevitably flawed. People have widely different opportunities to develop their vocabulary. They learn to talk and write in contrasting ways. The meanings, metaphors, images and stories to which they have access is different for different groups. The material and social conditions in which they live foster contrasting ideas of what is important and what is not; and what is possible.

The post-modern self

Our final port of call is what might be described as the post-modern self. A currently fashionable way of approaching these matters is through the idea of discourse - the way a set of meanings, representations, stories and images come together to produce a particular version of events (Burr 1995: 48). In this way our identity is formed out of the discourses available to us, 'and which we draw upon in our communications with other people' (ibid: 51). We might consider that our subjectivity lies in the internal logic or grammar of language. Rom Harré is a key exponent of this view. 'To be a self', he writes, 'is not to be a certain kind of being, but to be in possession of a certain kind of theory' (1985: 262 quoted in Burr). In other words, a human being consists of physiology and linguistic practices; our sense of identity (and personal history) arises out of culturally available narrative forms. In this sense the story-telling capacity of human beings is central to their selfhood. For example, Sarbin argues that human beings develop structures to make sense of their experiences - and that these are present in 'both our accounts of ourselves and our experience that we give to others, and in how we represent those things to ourselves' (Burr 1995: 134). This structure takes the form of narrative - we organize experiences in terms of stories.

In the post-modern world, it is argued, the modernist search for a true and authentic self and the fulfilment of a pre-given individual autonomy gives wa y to a playfulness where identity is formed and re-formed by constantly unfolding desire realised, although never fully and finally, through lifestyle practices in a multiplicity of forms' (Edwards 1997: 17).

This inevitable leads us to Foucault. The particular common sense view of the world that is around in a culture is intimately bound up with power (ibid: 64). Power is an effect of discourse rather than a possession. 'To define the world or a person in a way that allows you to do the things you want is to exercise power' (op cit.). Once a discourse becomes available it is then possible for it to be appropriated in the interests of the relatively powerful (ibid: 69).

In conclusion

Our understanding of self is of profound significance for practice. It affects our aims and our appreciation of process (do we seek to look inside individuals or to the realm of the 'between', for example, see Martin Buber on education). In the table below I set out some key elements of the different ways of approaching selfhood - and some of the ways in which they affect educators.

The educational focus
Educators seek to develop the individual as independent and autonomous. They have a concern for self-development

Educators look to develop the capacity of the community as a whole. Individual development is significant only in so far as it contributes to communal advancement

Educators look to people in relation. They seek to open up and deepen conversation and the conditions that underpin it.

Educators seek to encourage playfulness and engagement with different ways of telling stories about lives.

As we can see from the above how we come to understand selfhood has an impact on the way we are able to work with others. Fundamentally it has a profound effect on how we appreciate and understand ourselves.

Further reading

Burkitt, I. (1990) Social Selves. Theories of the social formation of personality, London: Sage. 225 pages. Interdisciplinary overview of theories of the social formation of personality.

Burr, V. (1995) An Introduction to Social Constructionism, London: Routledge. 194 + ix pages. Clear introduction to debates around socially constructed notions of the person.

Damasio, A. (2000) The Feeling of What Happens. Body and emotion in the making of consciousness, London: Vintage. This books looks first at the how processes in the brain engender, or constitute, or be, conscious experiences (or images - what Damasio calls the 'movie in the brain'). The second half turns to the nature of selfhood - 'how the appearance of an owner and observer for the movie is generated within the movie'.

Harré, R. (1998) The Singular Self. An introduction to the psychology of personhood, London: Sage. 192 + x pages. Good introduction to Harré's thinking. Argues that despite the centrality of our social and cultural identities 'the self must ultimately be seen as autonomous, distinct and continuous - as a shifting but unified pattern of multiplicities and singularities'.

Sampson, E. E. (1993) Celebrating the Other. A dialogic account of human nature, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf. 207 + x pages. Very clear introduction to some of the debates around notions of the self.

Sorabji, R. (2006) Self. Ancient and modern insights about individuality, life and death, Oxford: Clarendon Press. 380 pages. An accomplished exploration of understandings of self over time.

Taylor, C. (1989) Sources of the Self. The making of the modern identity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 601 + xii pages. Important inquiry into the source s of modern selfhood. Sections deal with identity and the good; inwardness; the affirmation of ordinary life; the voice of nature; and subtler languages.

Also referenced

Bharati, A. (1985) 'The Self in Hindu Thought and Action' in A. J. Marsella, G. Devos and F. L. K. Hsu, (eds.) Culture and Self. Asian and western perspectives, London: Tavistock.

Coutinho, J. da Veiga (1972) 'Preface' to P. Freire Cultural Action for Freedom, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Edwards, R. (1997) Changing Places? Flexibility, lifelong learning and a learning society, London: Routledge.

Habermas, J. (1984) The Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society (trans. T. McCarthy), Cambridge: Polity.

Johnson, F. (1985) 'The Western Concept of Self' in A. J. Marsella, G. Devos and F. L. K. Hsu (eds.) Culture and Self. Asian and western perspectives, London: Tavistock.

Lukes, S. (1973) Individualism, Oxford: Blackwell.

Mapherson, C. B. (1962) The Political Theory of Possesive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marsella et al (1985) Culture and Self. Asian and western perspectives, London: Tavistock.

Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. (ed. C. W. Morris), Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Miller, D. (1973) George Herbert Mead. Self, language and the world, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Usher, R ., Bryant, I. and Johnston, R. (1997) Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge, London: Routledge.

Williams, R. (1976) Keywords. A vocabulary of culture and society, London: Fontana.

Acknowledgement: This is me thinking by Alberto Cerriteño. Reporduced from Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) licence. http://www.flickr.com/photos/acerriteno/408599609/

How to reference this piece: Smith, M. K. (1996, 2001). 'Self, selfhood and understanding', The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education. [ https://infed.org/mobi/self-selfhood-and-understanding/. Retrieved: insert date].

© Mark K. Smith 1996, 2001

Last Updated on

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Contents: introduction · starting with the parts · looking to the whole · the dialogical self · the post-modern self · in conclusion · further reading · how to cite this piece Our appreciation of selfhood is so very immediate - it is part of all that we do.

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Does the internet reinforce gender norms?

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Does the internet reinforce gender norms?

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For the past month my web browsing has been colored by having read Rachel Giese's new book, Boys: What It Means to Become a Man. In Boys, Giese builds on the concept of the "Man Box," which she describes as "common attitudes and understandings about what it means to be a man, as well as the consequences of those beliefs." Once you clue into the idea of the Man Box, it's easier to understand where conventional Western notions of masculinity come from-and how those notions affect boys, men, and the rest of us.

How the Internet Reinforces Gender Norms

We see those effects every day when we go online. From shopping sites with separate sections for boys' toys and girls' toys, to the gender divisions in many Facebook groups and discussion threads, we're constantly confronted by the way longstanding gender norms get reproduced, solidified, and sometimes tweaked once they move onto the internet. And then there are moments, like the #MeToo movement, #GamerGate, and the Brett Kavanagh hearings, when the internet holds up a particularly cruel mirror to our gender pathologies, or even gets recruited to the job of enforcing offline norms of masculinity.

"For many boys and men, parts of the internet-especially gaming spheres-have also reinforced the worst aspects of masculinity."

At least, that's what I started to see once I read Giese's book. I have known Giese for many years, so when I recently reconnected with her, I was curious to see how her research on boyhood and masculinity might intersect with the issues I've looked at around boys and video games, or around the gendered conflict over kids' screen time.

I didn't have to dig far, because Giese directly addresses the role of technology in twenty-first century boyhood. "[F]or many boys and men, parts of the internet-especially gaming spheres-have also reinforced the worst aspects of masculinity," she writes. That in turn shapes the ways boys are perceived by both parents and educators:

When conversations turn to boys and schooling, an overly generalized idea of a boy emerges. He's restless and rambunctious and hooked on video games; he'd rather shoot hoops than read a book; he's more likely to be found in the principal's office than on the honour roll.

Giese is hardly alone in perceiving video games as a pivotal influence on contemporary boys. In " Video Game Culture, Contentious Masculinities, and Reproducing Racialized Social Class Divisions in Middle School," Christo Sims cites Henry Jenkins's influential argument that:

many popular video games provide a context for Western boys to accommodate traditional ideas about masculinity within contemporary conditions of spatial confinement...For Jenkins, the main disjuncture between traditional boy culture and contemporary video game culture has to do with changes in the spatial organization of gendered play spaces. Many contemporary boys no longer have access to the backyards and woods that provided boys of the past with spaces for unsupervised play. Video games, Jenkins argues, offer contemporary city and suburban boys with a way to accommodate their ideas about masculinity within conditions of domestic confinement.

But video games aren't the only way today's technologies get harnessed to the job of defining or reinforcing masculinity. In her article " Adolescents, the Internet, and the Politics of Gender," Meenakshi Gigi Durham looked at adolescent engagement with the then-new world of the World Wide Web. Writing in 2001, she observed:

The boys' initial selection of Web sites pertained directly to issues of heterosexual desire and its role in the construction of masculine communities. By proclaiming their common sexual interest in celebrity women who functioned as markers of agreement among them, they established their membership in the male society within the classroom.

Male Identity in a Technologized World

The role of online culture in producing masculinity does not always parallel offline masculinity quite so neatly. In " The Fetishization of Masculinity in Science Fiction," Amanda Fernbach offers a Freudian analysis of the way iconic works of "technofetishist" science fiction reveal contemporary male anxieties in a technologized world. "Despite the threats to a stable masculinity represented by cyberspace, it is also the only place where masculinity seems to be complete," she argues. In the case of iconic works like The Matrix or Neuromancer, both of which belong to the sci-fi genre known as "cyberpunk," technology helps to solve the crisis of masculinity by allowing man to merge with machine. As Fernbach puts it,

the discourse of cyberpunk starts with the inept figure of the nerd and transforms and empowers him. It fantasizes a technomasculinity associated with hackers and cyberpunks that disavows the male lack so flagrantly displayed by the nerd's deficient body and goofy sense of style, through the magical fetish of technoprosthetics.

If cyberpunk offers a fictional tech fix for contemporary masculinity, some online communities threaten to bring that fix to life. In " The New Man of 4chan," Andrea Nagle delves into the way the infamous 4chan community has birthed a specific male identity known as "betas." As she explains:

The term "beta," is an ironic inversion of the fabled swagger of the alpha male. Whereas alphas tend to be macho, sporty, and mainstream in their tastes, betas see themselves as less dominant males, withdrawn, obsessional, and curatorial in their cultural habits....On men's rights sites and in some geeky subcultures, "beta male" is a common term of identification, one of both belonging and self-mockery.

Nagle's thoughtful and troubling exposition of 4chan's beta scene reveals the way online culture doesn't simply replicate conventional masculinity, but iterates it for a new technological age. As she writes,

It's easy to mistake the beta rebellion for a youthful, but otherwise undifferentiated, variation on the bad old tradition of patriarchy. Yet the phenomenon bears the unmistakable signs of a new, net-bred brand of misogyny...As the same frontier sensibility that characterized early Internet culture also runs through American gun culture, it's no great surprise that the rites of gun worship and principled geek isolation should overlap-or that they should find expression the targeting of women whom beta men believe are dedicated to a matriarchal thwarting of male freedom and desire.

Of course, the internet is hardly the first technology to reinforce the project of constructing masculinity. In " Boys and Their Toys," Roger Horowitz cites a paper by Steven Meyer that:

showed how changes in work under Fordist production methods prompted a merger between "rough" and "respectable" forms of masculinity among automobile workers. Basing his paper on a close reading of shop-floor grievances, Meyer showed how affirmations of masculine autonomy and prerogatives informed conflicts between workers and supervisors and shaped local unions' efforts to control the workplace environment.

Breaking Out of the Man Box

Recognizing the internet's role in shaping contemporary masculinity opens the possibility for online interventions that not only change the gendered character of online culture, but the larger evolution of masculinity itself. Alongside games and websites that reinforce conventional notions of masculinity, the internet has created new opportunities to break out of the Man Box. Giese writes, "the ability to create their own media has allowed for the visibility of boys who either don't see themselves represented in mainstream media or who don't fit norms of traditional masculinity."

These are the opportunities we need to seize if we are to counter the internet's frequent outbreaks of misogyny, and instead seize its potential for reinventing our ideas about boys and men. We can seek out games and online media that deliberately break with the constraints of traditional masculinity. We can engage in thoughtful critique expressions of "geek" identity that superficially challenge conventional understandings of masculinity while serving to codify gendered ideas about technology (like the stereotypical identification of tech skill with young white men). We can invent new and more open possibilities for masculinity online, and leave the Man Box to die a slow death in the analog world.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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For the past month my web browsing has been colored by having read Rachel Giese's new book, Boys: What It Means to Become a Man . In Boys, Giese builds on the concept of the "Man Box," which she describes as "common attitudes and understandings about what it means to be a man, as well as the consequences of those beliefs."

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If you think last week's episode of "Real Time" was the first time Bill Maher said "n***a" on TV, it isn't.

An August 2001 clip from Maher's old show "Politically Incorrect" has resurfaced online, and it shows the comedian insisting that white people have the right to use the slur.

In the clip, posted in a tweet below, Maher is in debate with comedian David Spade, activist Guy Aoki, comedian Sarah Silverman and African-American actress Anne-Marie Johnson. According to Salon, the panel was gathered to discuss a then-recent controversy in which Silverman had used an Asian slur during a comedy routine.

Maher used the debate as an opportunity to suggest that the word "n***a" should no longer be considered offensive. When questioned by Johnson, Maher argued that because black people use the word, white people should be able to use it, too.

"Every African-American person uses that word night and day. It's in every song; it's all through culture," Maher explained.

"The word has changed," he added. "It has been co-opted as a term of endearment."

So Maher:

1. Says white folks should say nigga bcz racism is over.

2. Questions a black woman's blackness

3. Says nigga repeatly.

🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/ovpscRxNGx
- Black Aziz Ansari 👏 (@Freeyourmindkid) June 6, 2017

Johnson told Maher that as a black woman she was the only one allowed to use the word. Maher replied:

"I wouldn't even know that you were black if you didn't tell me."

"I love it when white people try to define what is 'African American,'" Johnson responded.

"I'm African American regardless of my skin color or my hair. I think I'm only one on this stage who's qualified to talk about the meaning of the word, how it hurts, how it doesn't hurt, where it's used, the history of it. Because I live it everyday," she continued.

In a video interview with TMZ on Thursday, Johnson said that she was not shocked by Maher's recent controversy.

"I wasn't surprised that he used the word, since I'm accustomed to his comfort," Johnson explained.

"The fact that he doesn't understand the history of the word, and his comfort with saying it once again, just brought me back to when I was on the show many, many years ago."

Watch the entire "Politically Incorrect" segment here.

BEFORE YOU GO

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Watch Bill Maher Defend Using The N-Word To A Black Woman In 2001

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If you think last week's episode of "Real Time" was the first time Bill Maher said "n***a" on TV, it isn't. An August 2001 clip from Maher's old show "Politically Incorrect" has resurfaced online, and it shows the comedian insisting that white people have the right to use the slur.

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How do certain terms come to be linked to specific races?

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How do certain terms come to be linked to specific races?

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The term "superpredators" recently took centerstage nearly thirty years after its late-1990s invention. Ava DuVernay's acclaimed documentary played on the exaggerated and invented crisis of "super predators." In more recent times, white officer Darren Wilson used this same kind of 13th -referring to the 13th amendment which abolished slavery and forced servitude except as a punishment to a crime-shed light on the racist American prison industrial complex and focused on the invention of racialized terminology which justified harsh crime bills disproportionately targeting black communities. President Bill Clinton's 1996 Crime Bill, for instance, language and imagery of a " demon" with "aggressive," animal-like behavior in his 2014 grand jury testimony for the killing of Michael Brown.

In a 2004 study, Michael Welch, Eric Price, and Nana Yankey argue that the media has played an important role in "the social construction" of terms such as "mugging," "wilding," and "wolfpacks," used to dehumanize and demonize alleged criminals.

In the '90s, the term "superpredators" conjured dangerous, threatening imagery and caused moral panic, resulting in the 1994 Crime Bill.

They assert that the media not only shapes popular notions of and about crime, but it also perpetuates criminal stereotypes. On top of this, the media often attempts to imbue the story with something exciting for viewers. "While drawing on racial stereotypes in reporting incidents of crime, the media also resorts to sensationalism whereby so-called new forms of menace are invented and commodified for public consumption."

Welch, Price, and Yankey's study specifically analyzed the history of the term "wilding," from its invention in 1989 (as the media used it to describe the five accused perpetrators of the now infamous "Central Park jogger" case ), traced through its usage until 1998. They describe how the press invented the term to sensationalize the story of the brutal rape of a white Central Park jogger. "Taken further, many 'new' types of lawlessness are invented, or , along lines of race, conjuring threatening images of young black men as villains."

They argue that racialized terms and metaphors have been used as criminal signifiers to connote menace, danger, and moral threats to white society. In addition to "wilding," they trace the ways in which the media used terms like "wild," "wolfpack," and "animals" to label the accused as non-human, predatory entities. "Indeed, animal metaphors are a powerful mechanism in social stratification whereby non-whites, particularly those who are also lawbreakers, are dehumanized and forced to occupy a lower stratum of society."

In the '90s, the term "superpredators" conjured similarly dangerous, threatening imagery and the widely used term caused moral panic, resulting in the Crime Bill, along with other "Get tough on crime" initiatives in California and other states. This past November, however, many state propositions overturned some of the original bills influenced by such racialized and discriminatory propositions that were shaped from racist hysteria.

In addition, the Central Park case, from which Welch et al. analyzed surrounding press and media, is now widely known as a faulty and racist case , fueled by a media frenzy. In 2002, another man came forward to admit to the rape and assault. DNA evidence connected him to the crime, so the "Central Park Five," who had been jailed since they were teenagers, were eventually released and exonerated . They also won a $41 million settlement from city of New York.

Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

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Unpacking the Racially-Charged Term "Superpredators" | JSTOR Daily

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The term "superpredators" recently took centerstage nearly thirty years after its late-1990s invention. Ava DuVernay's acclaimed documentary played on the exaggerated and invented crisis of "super predators."

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A student asked me how organizations should go about recognizing institutional racism. What does it looks like? Great question. Sometimes, I stated, it is easy to recognize, but let's be clear here, structural and institutionalized racism occurs everywhere - even in nice places like education.

For instance, folks tend to move to spaces where one might find great schools, great teachers, great neighborhoods and more without ever thinking about what "great" might mean. Ask a realtor what they mean by great schools. Ask different folks what "great" might mean or convey. Good test scores. Good grades. Blue ribbon schools. Where are the "great spaces" located, and who tends to teach, administrate and attend those "great or good" schools? Located in those good schools, one can assume would be good teachers. In fact, one of the leading criteria for assessing those "great schools" is whether a teacher has significant instructional experience. However, if one has had years of experience teaching in "good schools" and those schools tend not to be diverse, I would argue that an institutional racism problem may also reside in those "great schools." In fact, institutionalized racism is the underbelly of the rhetoric of "greatness". I mean, who tends to use that vernacular?

Since racism is a part of the very cultural fabric in which we live in the United States, it often goes unnoticed, ignored or denied. Racism becomes much like the air in which we breathe ... normal. Most folks have no reason to dare or even think about questioning that which is normal - that which is business as usual. Because this peculiar institution [emphasis added], racism, becomes a part of the very structure in which one resides, operates and works; institutions and organizations also yield to structurally racialized spaces. Pay attention to this definition! Institutional racism is a powerful system of privilege and power based on race. Those powerful structures begin and are perpetuated by seemingly innocent, normal events and daily occurrences and interactions.

I ask folks to think about events that you have attended and who is in attendance. Think about neighborhoods in which one lives, schools attended, parks visited, visiting the homes of friends, parties, weddings, everyday functions. What do the demographics of those events look like? Those events seem so innocent, seem so normal. However, if most folks spend time with folks who look exactly like themselves, how are relationships formed with anyone who might be different - in terms of race? Heck, in terms of anything? When those same folks who have never been exposed to difference enter institutions and organizations that purportedly "embrace and celebrate diversity" - how does one embrace or celebrate those ideals?

Interestingly, there is a large body of research that clearly suggests that folks tend to hire and rehire folks who tend to act and look exactly themselves. So, exactly what do those organizations mean when they report embracing, celebrating and hiring a racially diverse pool of applicants? Given the statistics about who is typically hired at most organizations - let's say Fortune 500 companies - I would say that it does not mean much, other than those organizations might just have a structural racism problem, given their hiring practices.

How are the roots of structural and institutionalized racism formed? It's subtle. It seems normal. It seems innocent. That is the way that institutionalized racism works; it is rooted in the core of one's everyday existence yet it is easy to detect if we just look and assess.

1. If you live in the United States and you have never been around anyone or very few people of color, you may just be a part of a structurally racist system. [You might also claim that some of your best friends are, but if you have to count, then there is still a problem]

2. University administration, please pay close attention. When buildings are erected in the name of someone and the someone is never a person of color, then you might be sending messages to everyone about folks who are powerful, smart and valued. That is how institutionalized racism works.

3. When pictures of presidents, board members, award-winning whomevers are hung, and they do not depict a demography that matches that of the state, city or the country, then your organization might have an institutional racism problem. Again, universities, administrations, trustees, check yourselves.

4. Look at the organizational structure to which you belong. If the organization is disproportionately White in all upper levels positions, and all of the folks in lower level positions are people of color, then your organization may have an institutionalized racism problem. Also read D. Bell's work, Faces at the bottom of the well. Then call me.

5. Take a look at the hires in your own department. If it is all White, then you may just have an institutional racism problem. In addition, if the department has hired one person of color, and claims or believes that diversity goals have been met, you still have a problem.

6. When you and the administration can name the one or two folks of color who are routinely asked to reside on every committee in your organization, then you might have an institutionalized racism problem. [BTW, folks of color can name the one or two "usual suspects" in their organization.]

7. If those same who serve are always the same ones - the "usual suspects" - you might ask why? Often times, the "usual suspects" are chosen to serve because there are few folks of color in the organization. However, sometimes, the "usual suspects" are chosen because administrators are most comfortable with some people of color. Everyone has a unique biography, consciousness and reaction to oppression. In fact, those "biographies," one's consciousness, and or dispositionality, can resonate with those in power. In other words, the "usual suspects" will often receive nominal gratuitous rewards - appointments to menial positions, important hiring committees and some even receive "awards" for keeping their mouths shut. So yes, you may have still have an institutional racism problem. Read Christie, colored friend of Tiffany.

8. Take a look at who receives highly honored awards in your organizations ... and ask why they receive them? [For instance, regarding institutions of higher education, look at Endowed chairs, Chancellor's professors, even teaching awards]. You may have an institutionalized racism problem if there are few or no people of color in the pool. Also note that if the award is granted for something diversity related, people of color tend to receive them. Again, see number 4 and ask whether the institution is rewarding the often accommodating "usual suspects." Again, this may be an indication of a problem with institutionalized racism. Also, this is a serious pay equity issue. Who tends to get raises based on so-called "good teaching". Uh-oh.

9. When you are constantly looking for the "right fit," and the "right fit" tends to always look like the rest of the folks that you have hired already, then you just might have an institutional racism problem.

10. When given a chance to hire someone of color, but instead someone from your hiring committee or upper-level administration chooses to make a phone call to someone that they have known, and again, they tend to "fit" and look exactly like the majority of the institution, then your organization might have an institutionalized racism problem.

Institutionalized racism occurs in a number of spaces and organizations. While I have made reference to employees, please know that students throughout the P-20 pipeline are the victims of institutionalized racism. Take a look at who is considered to be gifted and talented. Who is typically awarded advanced placement status? Who is most often referred to special education? Who is disproportionately expelled and suspended for minor infractions (if we must refer to an eye roll as an infraction. Sometimes I don't know how I made it through high school given the number of eye rolls delivered on a daily basis.)

Again, since racism is so deeply embedded in our culture, we cannot assume that those who benefit from a powerful system of privilege built on race will somehow learn to see or even want to see inequity and institutionalized systems of racism overnight. Yet, what messages do we send to younger human beings when everyone who resides in the neighborhood, attends school and other events, goes to the grocery store, or even attends worship service (which is by the way, the most segregated day of the week) is the same. Harrowing as it might seem (at least I think so), never exposing young folks to difference - any kind of difference - perpetuates the madness of institutionalized racism. However, if we think about it, and we truly want to end racism, then the first step is to recognize that we have a problem.

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10 Signs Of Institutionalized Racism And The Rhetoric Of 'Greatness'

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A student asked me how organizations should go about recognizing institutional racism. What does it looks like? Great question. Sometimes, I stated, it is easy to recognize, but let's be clear here, structural and institutionalized racism occurs everywhere - even in nice places like education.

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Why are we judged because of our accents?

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Why are we judged because of our accents?

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Yes, we are judged on our accents | Hannah Jane Parkinson

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Hannah Jane Parkinson: I have altered how I speak to suit situations in the past, but I would never go full Eliza Doolittle and get rid of my Liverpool accent

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Julie Washington’s Quest to Get Schools to Respect African-American English

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The speech pathologist believes that helping kids switch seamlessly between dialects is a key to their success.

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Political correctness or measured speech?

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Political correctness or measured speech?

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As the implications of the success of Donald Trump's particularly toxic brand of divisive rhetoric reverberate around the world, it is a reminder that the language used by elected politicians has a big impact on the standard and fairness of political discourse throughout society at a time when many communities are anxious about what will constitute the new social norm.

In Australia, recent accusations in parliament of "political correctness" raise the question: do we want our political representatives using measured language when discussing matters of policy? The push to bring inflammatory language into the mainstream represents a shift in the balance of power that has the potential to impact on the prevailing "givens" that we have become used to.
My everyday life is not 'legendary', any more than yours is | Tim Rushby-Smith
Here is an example. As a convert to paraplegia, I feel myself fortunate to have suffered a life-changing injury when the principle that disabled people should be included in all aspects of life was widely accepted. This represents a shift in attitudes away from the old "medical model of disability", in which disability was seen as something "wrong" with the individual. By contrast, the "social model of disability" views a lack of inclusion as a problem with the way society is organised.

Things are far from perfect, as even the most cursory glance at statistics on poverty and unemployment among disabled people will reveal, but the launch of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is a clear signal that there is a general acceptance of the principals of social inclusion and empowerment.

With a political lurch to the right however, it is not impossible to imagine a scenario where a costly scheme like NDIS gets dragged into a bruising political fight over the "nanny state", tough fiscal decisions, and individual responsibilities (I read a post on an NDIS discussion complaining that people's comments were too negative and that we should all be grateful that we don't live in India).

One of the important changes that the NDIS represents is a move away from a model of support for disabled people that is significantly dependent on the charity sector.

Don't misunderstand me; I have no problem with charity fundraising, supporting people in need or increasing awareness about different diseases and/or the hardships that people face every day.

But when people are dependent on provision by charity for basic resources and support, it can create a culture whereby organisations or individuals have to present themselves as needy or worthy of pity in order to raise enough money. This risks making progress towards increased independence and autonomy into things that can undermine funding streams in the future. NDIS offers the opportunity to move away from this potential pitfall. If you believe that such support is the responsibility of good, inclusive government, then gratitude shouldn't come into it.
Happy first anniversary, NDIS - here's to many more | Jenny Macklin
It's easy to forget that disability rights and support were won in a hard fought battle that continues today, in the same way as anti-discrimination laws designed to protect other minorities. Yes, playground banter is still punctuated with occasional cries of "spastic" and "retard", but for the most part this stems from an ignorance as to the origins and meanings of these words, and they would no longer be considered socially acceptable in the public arena.

Incidentally, if you see no problem with these expressions, ask yourself this: would you be happy to see a child with cerebral palsy or Down's syndrome vilified in this way? No? OK, so how do you go about explaining to children that they can use these terms so long as the target of their teasing doesn't have an obvious disability?

The same principles apply to racism, sexism and homophobia. Most people would agree that school is the right place to challenge children to think about the kind of language they use. It's a public arena where kids learn about mutual respect, a principal we hope they will take into the wider world. Teaching that lesson is made harder when the language of politics is indistinguishable from the cruelty of the playground. It's time our elected officials raised their game.
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Political correctness or measured language: for many anxious communities, words count | Tim Rushby-Smith

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As the implications of the success of Donald Trump's particularly toxic brand of divisive rhetoric reverberate around the world, it is a reminder that the language used by elected politicians has a big impact on the standard and fairness of political discourse throughout society at a time when many communities are anxious about what will constitute the new social norm.

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Are idioms the fossilized poetry of language?

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Are idioms the fossilized poetry of language?

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From the shock of a devastating pandemic, to a grim economic future for many millions, to the widespread protests reaching the boiling point over police brutality and systemic racism, it certainly appears that, in the words of that popular idiomatic expression, "shit has hit the fan." This is especially true for those who keep getting the short (or in some circles, shitty) end of the stick. When we think of the extraordinary mess we're all in together, it seems to be a particularly evocative way for many to wryly express and understand how we got here, as Hemingway would put it, "gradually and then suddenly."

Why use an idiom, and such a colorful one at that, where a more direct, more serious statement describing what's happening might suffice? Not to be taken literally ( unless you absolutely must, for science), there's still something about this expression, and others like it which, far more than everyday language, seems to metaphorically hit home the intensity of the messy consequences for the future.

Idioms, though seemingly mundane, are the fossilized poetry of language.

So how does a phrase that doesn't actually mean what it says still manage to be so usefully informative?

Arbiters of linguistic style often assume that idioms are a kind of " exhausted speech " that once meant something but has become a set of lazy linguistic shortcuts to predigested ideas. We may "chew the fat" with someone or "chew them out," "pull someone's leg" or "pull strings" to get a job. With language full of idioms, should well-worn expressions like "kick the bucket" kick the bucket in favor of more direct ways of speaking?

To paraphrase Emerson, idioms, though seemingly mundane, are the fossilized poetry of language. Their origins are often frozen in time, lost in the mists of metaphor and meaning. As excitable paleoscatologists find value in fossilized excrement of an ancient age, so might we delve into the whys and wherefores of the most disreputable scatologically adjacent idioms.

The true origins of the expression "shit hits the fan" are largely undetermined, though some sources suggest that Canada is to blame-it might have come from particularly picturesque Canadian military language of the early twentieth century. Another suggestion is that the idiom is descended from "an old joke":

A man in a crowded bar needed to defecate but couldn't find a bathroom, so he went upstairs and used a hole in the floor. Returning, he found everyone had gone except the bartender, who was cowering behind the bar. When the man asked what had happened, the bartender replied, "Where were you when the shit hit the fan?"

Variants such as "egg," "soup," and "stuff" hitting the fan suggest that the idiom was familiar enough to inspire bowdlerized versions. Even with the scatological reference toned down, the image splattered across your mind is enough to convey the chaos that could result. It's an idiom that tells an evocative microstory in a handful of common words.

On the other hand, older idioms, such as getting "the short end of the stick," are even more frozen in place. We might wonder what all the fuss is about a stick, much less the short (or shitty) end of it. One explanation is that, apparently, in medieval England, there were "instruments shaped like hockey sticks, which were kept in privies in lieu of paper, where one might have regretted seizing the wrong end of the stick in the dark." If this is true, it might be that those who were caught out by the surprising pandemic run on the humble roll of toilet paper really did get the short end of the stick.

Since idioms often begin life as metaphors or other expressions of figurative speech, their individual words can't generally predict their meanings, even if they may be graphically memorable. Because of this, an interesting aspect of idioms is that they usually can only be used in limited ways syntactically, especially the older the idiom is. Changing an idiom into a passive version of itself-for example, "the fan was hit by shit"-wouldn't mean the same thing, much less have the same effect. While modern slang memes can playfully "not give a fuck" by switching up the phrasing syntactically-"not a single fuck was given"-usually this kind of transformation would result in the idiom becoming no idiom at all.

So most idiomatic expressions, fused into a petrified form of speech, are limited in how they can be used linguistically. This makes their powerful social impact even more surprising, especially considering their mundane familiarity to most people. As poet Tony Hoagland puts it, "Idiom's great alchemical trick is the quickness with which it fabricates intimacy between speaker and audience." Idioms, however shopworn, can do this naturally in a way that's much harder for plain and ordinary literal language.

For one, a shared understanding of the unpredictable meaning of an idiom is a shortcut for two strangers to connect and understand each other. For another, idioms typically are used in informal, conversational contexts and often describe the social things that affect our lives, such as chatting ("shoot the breeze," "chew the fat") or revealing gossip ("spill the beans," "let the cat out of the bag").

In fact, linguists Paul Drew and Elizabeth Holt found that the use of idioms in conversation doesn't just happen randomly. They noticed a marked use of idioms where people describe personal difficulties in their lives. Idioms also seem to be used even more frequently when speakers need to bring an unsympathetic or neutral audience over to their side-to convince others that their beliefs, their feelings, their grievances are valid, to persuade them to be allies, to legitimize their ideas.

Linguist Anita Pomeranz's study of how people legitimize their own claims, such as through justifying, defending, accusing, or complaining, shows that there is a tendency to grasp at hyperbolic language in making a case. Using language like "every time," "everyone," "brand new," or "completely innocent" is a strategy to convince skeptical audiences that the claims are valid, but it also requires making conditions seem more extreme than they might be.

As Drew and Holt discuss, this approach can backfire because extreme language might not be literally factual. If you complain that no one ever does the dishes but you, for example, someone in your household might invalidate your claim by saying that they did the dishes at least once. But since everyone who speaks the same language understands that idioms are figurative, they can't be challenged in the same way: They can really take the cake in being wildly hyperbolic and extreme in themselves.

Idioms can help sum up a persuasive, casually told story, crafted to convince, with all the right details and extreme intensity of feeling, without the expectation that it has to be literally true. If, for example, you say that breaking a bone "hurt more than the devil in hell," a skeptical listener can't dispute this on a factual basis, but they might feel drawn to understand if not sympathize with you, thanks to a mutual understanding of the same figurative language.

Idiomatic expressions may well be old and shabby language, but they are our own speech, from the Greek idios, "one's own." Fossilized idiomatic language, like the newest of new slang in an exclusive subculture, has a special power to draw two people together in a kind of linguistic intimacy, to express intensities of thought and feeling about their uncertain and sometimes unjust worlds, when the literal meaning of things just doesn't cut it.

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The Linguistic Case for Sh*t Hitting the Fan | JSTOR Daily

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From the shock of a devastating pandemic, to a grim economic future for many millions, to the widespread protests reaching the boiling point over police brutality and systemic racism, it certainly appears that, in the words of that popular idiomatic expression, "shit has hit the fan."

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What can we learn from conspiracy theories and their persuasive impact?

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What can we learn from conspiracy theories and their persuasive impact?

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From political upheavals to anxieties about sex, technology and women, it turns out conspiracy theories can tell us a lot about what's going on in our societies - and how to fix them.

In 331 BC, something was wrong with Rome. Across the city, swathes of eminent men were succumbing to sickness, and practically all of them were dying. The losses were as baffling as they were alarming.

Then one day, a slave approached a curule aedile - a kind of magistrate - and hinted that she might know why. The girl led a team of investigators to various houses, where she claimed they would find an alliance of upper-class women secretly preparing poisons. They did.

The accused were dragged to the central square, and asked to prove their innocence. Since they claimed their concoctions were medicinal, would they drink them?

Alas, two of the suspects obliged - and promptly dropped dead. Mass arrests followed, and a further 170 women were found to be involved. The incident was a huge scandal. In the aftermath, the people of Rome elected a dedicated official to perform a ritual banishment of evil, a tactic which had previously only been used as a last resort after extreme civil unrest.

Or, at least, this is the version of events that was dutifully recorded by the respected historian Livy, who was born a few hundred years later. But he wasn't convinced that the women were really responsible, and neither are modern-day experts. Instead, Livy pointed to a far more rational explanation: an epidemic.

At the time, the city was in the grip of an unknown plague - a common cause of death in the classical world. Mass poisonings, on the other hand, were unheard of. The case discussed by Livy was the first of its kind, and the whole affair had struck Roman citizens as distinctly odd.

In fact, the women probably really were preparing medicines - and the rest of the story was heavily embellished or entirely made up. The infamous poisonings of 331 BC are thought to be a conspiracy theory, to explain deaths that had an obvious cause all along.

Amid the current pandemic, this scenario is oddly familiar. Since the beginning of April, at least 77 phone masts and 40 engineers have been attacked in the UK, after some people bought into the erroneous idea that Covid-19 is somehow being spread by powerful forces in the global telecommunications industry. Now the rumour has spread to the US, where there are fears it may lead to further violence. Yet again, reason is being cast aside, in favour of a niche explanation that involves a convoluted secret plot. ( Find out why 5G is not responsible for transmitting Covid-19.)

The question is, why did these alternative stories catch on?

The Romans viewed slaves and upper-class women with suspicion (Credit: Alamy)

From alien lizard rulers to shark attacks instigated by spies and elaborate multi-billion-dollar hoaxes, the menagerie of conspiracy theories in existence is so bizarre, the reasons some take off - and others vanish without a trace - may seem almost random. There's even a conspiracy theory about how conspiracy theories were invented (in keeping with the standard conspiracy formula, the CIA were allegedly involved).

But there are patterns hidden in their strangeness. The latest thinking suggests that conspiracy theories are filtered by a kind of natural selection, which allows those that fit certain requirements to spread rapidly through our societies - while others are confined to the darkest corners of the internet.

What makes a conspiracy appealing to the masses? And is there anything they can teach us about the problems we face - and how to fix them?

First up - successful conspiracies always have the right villain. Throughout history, many widely accepted conspiracy theories have conveniently placed the blame for distressing incidents or trends on the population's favourite baddies.

According to an analysis by Victoria Pagan, a classical historian at the University of Chicago, the success of the Roman poisonings conspiracy is likely to be partly down to the way it portrayed upper-class women and slaves, who powerful male elites found threatening.

Though the civilisation relied heavily on the exploitation of both these groups, men were constantly worried that their subordinates would turn on them. High-status women were generally viewed with suspicion, and often portrayed as secretive and dangerous. Slaves, on the other hand, had been known to murder their masters from time to time - and there was a long-standing paranoia that they sometimes acted as spies, and so couldn't be trusted.

In short, a conspiracy involving a gang of murderous women being betrayed by their slaves was ideal - it was always going to be more appealing than the truth.

Meanwhile, in the modern world, it's no accident that popular conspiracies tend to concern themes such as alien life, religious minorities, powerful elites, rival nations, mysterious technologies and the destruction of the environment. "Across the world, people generally believe in theories that are related to the cultural and historical events that have happened in particular places," says Karen Douglas, a social psychologist at the University of Kent.

Each society has its own anxieties and obsessions - and successful conspiracy theories generally tap into them. Take Romania, where many women decline to have their daughters vaccinated against HPV, the virus responsible for 99% of cervical cancers.

Successful conspiracy theories generally tap into a society's anxieties and obsessions (Credit: Getty Images)

In 2008 - the first year the vaccine was offered - just 2.5% of eligible Romanian women had it. The rates were so low, the school-based vaccination programme was eventually abandoned altogether. This is particularly surprising, when you consider that elsewhere in Europe, the HPV jab is extremely popular, with uptake at around 80% or higher, and that the nation has a long track record of having the highest fatality rates from cervical cancer on the continent.

There are several reasons for Romanian mothers' suspicion of the vaccine, but research has shown that one is the abundance of conspiracy theories about the true motivations for providing it, including the idea that it's an attempt to control the world's population by making women infertile and that it's a medical experiment by the pharmaceutical industry - though there is no evidence for either.

These, in turn, may have been fed by the country's history of meddling with women's fertility, along with a general lack of trust in the healthcare system; it's still common for patients to bribe medical staff for even basic care, and many of the women in the study reported suspicion about why the vaccination programme was free of charge.

In some cases, it's thought that concerns like these remain dormant in our minds, until certain events - such as political change - activate them. This can lead them to fuel our collective belief in conspiracy theories.

Anti-Semitic theories - such as the idea that Jews are powerful and engaged in secret evil plots - have historically emerged during times of societal stress, such as periods of unemployment - possibly because they allow people to consolidate blame for what can be the result of a complex set of societal and economic circumstances instead on a single scape-goat. Research has shown that people who have a social identity centred around victimhood are more susceptible to conspiracy theories that villainise Jews, and this might also be true at a societal level.

This fits with another common ingredient in popular conspiracies - they make us feel good about our own social group, often while putting down those we see as our rivals. "That can be your national group, or your gender group or whatever," says Douglas. "There's some evidence that people are attracted to conspiracy theories that satisfy these prejudiced attitudes."

By emphasising the distinctions between "ingroups" and "outgroups", conspiracy theories may also lead to stronger social bonds - and provide a sense of protection against those people find threatening. Accordingly, conspiracy theories are often widespread in groups that are involved in mutual conflict.

In Romania, there is a general lack of trust in the healthcare system, which might explain the abundance of conspiracy theories about the HPV vaccine (Credit: Alamy)

"There is some research to suggest people turn to conspiracy theories more when they're confronted with crisis situations," says Douglas.

The idea that 5G and other earlier mobile phone networks are somehow bad for our health has been around for years - ever since the technology entered widespread use around 30 years ago. To begin with, it was falsely accused of being responsible for causing autism, infertility and cancer, among other things - but generally confined to the most hardcore conspiracy theorists.

The emergence of a mysterious new coronavirus in December 2019 set the stage for a new slant on this enduring idea. On the 22 January - when the virus still had infected just 314 people, leading to six fatalities, an article was published that changed everything. It was an interview with obscure family doctor in a Belgian newspaper, and titled "5G is life-threatening, and no one knows it". Crucially, it linked the dangers of 5G to the new coronavirus even though there is no evidence to support the claim. And that was it.

"Conspiracy theories tend to emerge quite quickly when something important happens," says Douglas. "They come out of the blue when there's some kind of crisis or conflict that people really want to explain and want to have answers for." She points out that the recent bushfires in Australia also led to a number of trendy conspiracies.

There's this effort by politicians to erase facts and evidence and remake the world into something more conducive to their goals - Russell Muirhead

The 5G theory has been called a " conspiracy cocktail ", since it involves several of humanity's greatest fears, shaken together in one deliciously appetising mixture. As well as the perennial fear of new or invisible technology, which seems to pervade many popular conspiracy theories, it also taps into an undercurrent of anxiety about the emergence of China as a global superpower.

Another reason the 5G conspiracy might be more appealing than the truth is that it's a story. Fairy tales, legends, anecdotes and gossip are how our brains make sense of the world - they go back tens of thousands of years, and they're arguably what makes us human. In times of crisis, it's possible that we turn to conspiracies because we find them reassuring.

Conspiracy theories have all the elements of a good story - terrifying villains, creative plots, and moral lessons. Because of this, a well-constructed conspiracy can have a powerful hold on the public imagination, in a way that a narrative about a "virus emerged entirely unpredictably and killed thousands for no reason" is unlikely to be able to rival.

Some psychologists have compared conspiracy theories to religious beliefs, in the way that they help us to feel more in control, by taking unpredictable or random events and making them seem somehow predestined or shaped by human hands.

Others have gone so far as to suggest that this is why they stick: in their content, storylines and purposes, they come uncannily close to the beliefs perpetuated by many organised religions. Some people believe in conspiracy theories to such an extent that they will even put their lives on the line, in their attempts to prove themselves right.

It's thought that people are more susceptable to conspiracy theories during a crisis (Credit: EPA)

Similarly, leading conspiracy theories often address some kind of ambiguity or mystery, from unexplained plane crashes to sudden celebrity deaths.

Where the authorities either can't or won't provide more information, these knowledge gaps combine with a general mistrust - driving the public straight into the arms of those who claim they have the answers. This is compounded by the fact that science, government inquiries and other legitimate forms of information-gathering can be painfully slow, in the meantime leaving a temporary void in which other sources can become established.

After the disgraced scientist Andrew Wakefield falsely claimed that the MMR vaccine can lead to autism in the 1990s, it took decades of research to establish beyond reasonable doubt that this had absolutely no scientific basis - in which time, the conspiracy had time to do serious damage.

Eventually, conspiracy theories can become so popular that they enter a positive feedback loop, in which the more they're discussed, the more legitimate they seem.

For example, a recent analysis of Tweets that mention 5G and Covid-19 found that just 34.8% included a suggestion that the two are linked, while the majority either denounced the theory or didn't express an opinion. Unfortunately, whether the users were making fun of the idea or explaining why it's false, they were still raising the profile of the idea.

Indeed, the advent of social media and the rise of new technologies have been big moments in the history of conspiracy theories. "Of course you will find more geographically localised conspiracies in certain countries that other people don't even know about," says Douglas. "But it is true that the way that we communicate with people now and the way we consume information is much more global than it was before, so some conspiracy theories are just very, very well-known across the world."

Some conspiracy theories, such as those that involve exclusive groups of people secretly running the world, are now ubiquitous, she observes.

As politics becomes more polarised, some experts think that it's becoming easier for conspiracy theories to take hold (Credit: Reuters)

As our societies are changing, so are conspiracies - and Russell Muirhead, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, is concerned about the direction they're taking.

"Classically, conspiracy theories are propagated by people on the margins - they're almost a weapon of the powerless, for holding the powerful to account," he says. "But right now the new stuff is coming directly from the powerful, which is really quite extraordinary."

Since the Covid-19 pandemic began, numerous world leaders have announced their public support for related conspiracy theories, which often align remarkably well with their own agendas. For example, US President Donald Trump recently suggested he has seen evidence the coronavirus originated in a Chinese lab while his own intelligence agencies have said there is no evidence for this. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has also claimed it's the other way around - the pandemic was caused by a bioweapon that was unleashed on China (but again there is no evidence for this).

We are, Muirhead suggests, being manipulated by our own weapons. "There's this effort by politicians to erase facts and evidence and remake the world into something more conducive to their goals."

It's thought that a new type of conspiracy is emerging, which doesn't require any evidence or justification (Credit: Alamy)

The whole scenario is also being exacerbated by the fact that many countries, such as the United States, are experiencing record levels of political polarisation at the moment. "That's kind of motivated this new conspiratorial talk," says Muirhead.

He gives the example of "Pizzagate", the entirely discredited and widely condemned conspiracy that linked former US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's campaign manager to an alleged child abuse ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Despite being entirely made-up, it gained widespread support in 2016, culminating in a man firing an assault rifle inside the business.

"This conspiracy doesn't try to explain anything about the world," says Muirhead. "What it does do is paint Hillary Clinton, not just as somebody who [in some people's opinions] is, on balance, less desirable than her opponent, but as the sort of human being who is worse than a Nazi."

In the book " A Lot of People Are Saying ", which Muirhead co-authored with the political scientist Nancy Rosenblum from Harvard University, he introduces a second new trend in the conspiracy world: conspiracy without the theory.

"Not only were there no children being held captive at the pizza restaurant, there wasn't even a basement," says Muirhead. "What surprised us was the way this narrative was a complete fabrication, from beginning to end."

He explains that normally conspiracy theories would start with a kernel of truth - an event in the real world that's easy to see and hard to understand, like an assassination or an attack - and build on it. But the latest generation of conspiracies skip this first step and seem to be successful regardless of how blindingly obvious it is that they're false.

"I'm worried that ordinary people trying to understand the world are going to become very disoriented as they try to navigate this kind of whiteout blizzard of conspiratorial fictions and lies," says Muirhead.

The "Pizzagate" conspiracy gained widespread support in 2016, despite being entirely made-up (Credit: Reuters)

So what should we do about it?

"We can't just take on the conspiracy charges one by one by one," says Muirhead. In his view, part of the problem is that people have gradually lost trust in experts, governments and powerful institutions. To fix the system, he suggests that we need to re-legitimise democracy - reform our governments and retrain our institutions. "In the United States that was done in the early decades of the 20th Century. It rehabilitated the government for new generations, and led to all sorts of progressive reforms, culminating in female suffrage."

Douglas, on the other hand, thinks more research is needed. "I think it is really, really important to understand where conspiracy theories come from and how they spread, because there's strong evidence that believing them has significant consequences."

In particular, she explains that there have been very few studies into why some have extraordinary longevity, such as the Flat Earth, Illuminati and Moon Landing conspiracies, while others die out relatively quickly - though this is something she is starting to look into.

In fact, despite decades of research and an endlessly captivated public audience, there are still many unanswered questions in the field. "I think there's a general consensus amongst researchers that we are in an age of conspiracy, but again, there's no real evidence for that," says Douglas.

Who knows, perhaps that could be the next conspiracy...

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From political upheavals to anxieties about sex, technology and women, it turns out conspiracy theories can tell us a lot about what's going on in our societies - and how to fix them.

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What role do linguistic games have on children's language and social development?

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What role do linguistic games have on children's language and social development?

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In these strange pandemic times, small children all over the world are on lockdown. To many frazzled parents, juggling home schooling, child care, work, and economic worries, in often small spaces, it may feel like living in some dark fairy tale.

With schools shuttered and education moves imperfectly online, many responsible adults are worried and anxious. Catching COVID-19 at school is a major concern. But if some children just stay home and play all day, how are they going to learn what they need to grow into happy, healthy, and functioning adult members of society? Will their educational development be stunted by this extraordinary break in normal life? Should schools open up earlier than other community institutions and businesses on the premise that children are not like other, older humans?

These are all valid questions. In this unprecedented topsy-turvy time in which nothing seems to make sense, the fragilities of modern society are revealed, from stark economic inequality to the stigmatization of some of the more vulnerable among us. Without formal instruction and supervision, how will kids make sense of a world where nothing is normal, where people wear masks and keep far away from each other, lest they catch something fearsome?

The truth is that the world of children is a lot darker and weirder and perhaps more creatively resilient than adults often assume. It's there that kids are exposed to such things as contagion, plague, mysterious accidents, social inequality, and political intrigue and executions-and pass them on to others, from generation to generation. Through the medium of playground games and the seemingly harmless nursery rhymes and nonsensical wordplay that children delight in, a grim and unsettling depiction of the world endures. Like Alice's Wonderland, almost nothing seems to make sense.

Why are these children's rhymes so much dark nonsense, and what could it all mean?

Many children over time have fallen asleep to an innocent lullaby about a baby who, strangely enough, has been left on a treetop, in precarious danger of falling with every breath of wind. Elsewhere, a poor black sheep has been taxed out of existence, with all three bags of its wool sent off to the one percent. In another place, two people fall down a hill under mysterious circumstances, one of them breaking his crown. But that's not nearly as disconcerting as when several church bells toll ominously, a candle comes to light you to bed, "And here comes a chopper to chop off your head!"

Why are these children's rhymes so much dark nonsense, and what could it all mean?

More pertinent to the psychological moment, what exactly is the mysterious message contained in:

Many have pondered whether this children's game could be (somewhat callously) an allusion to the great plague, the infamous Black Death of the fourteenth century. The assumption goes that "rosy rings are the red sores that covered the victim's body. Bunches of flowers, the posies, were used, ineffectually, to sweeten the air that carried its own special odor of corruption. And when the Black Death had run its course, its victims all fell down."

It must mean something, because otherwise what would be the point?

Perhaps we could understand better if we didn't always view children through the concerns of adulthood. Children's culture (and yes, there is such a thing) could be considered for itself, not as a watered-down version of what it is to be an adult. As pychologist Judith Rich Harris noted, "[a] child's goal is not to become a successful adult, any more than a prisoner's goal is to become a successful guard. A child's goal is to be a successful child.... Children are not incompetent members of adults' society; they are competent members of their own society, which has its own standards and its own culture."

There's a lot to learn from the lore of children, from what they say to how they play.

Particularly when it comes to the game of cooties, says anthropologist Lawrence A. Hirshfield, in "Why Don't Anthropologists Like Children?". "There has been little scholarly work on cooties," he writes. But his own review of literature on cooties and similar games shows how children can build a resilient culture that allows them to make sense of a chaotic world and how to act within it.

In a kid's world, cooties and other similar contagions may not be real-but they're deadly serious. The North American children's lore of cooties is "a social contaminant that pass[es] from one child to another, a form of interpersonal pollution." The term "cootie" might have been taken from a British colonial word for lice popularized by returning World War I soldiers, possibly derived from a Malay word, kutu, meaning "a parasitic biting insect." It might be lice, it might be germs, but it's invisible, and you may be in danger of catching it.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie describe a similar game from Britain called "The Dreaded Lurgi," while in Japan children have developed their own prophylactic treatments for such a social contagion, called engacho. Similar medical methods, recorded terms such as cootie vaccination and cootie immunization, can also be found for cooties, involving special hand gestures or perhaps pretend injections. Children who play this game learn and absorb concepts familiar to a public health emergency, but on their own strange terms. Because cooties can be a serious problem.

As Hirshfield relates,

One of the lead researchers on the project, Ivelisse Martinez, witnessed the force of cootie fear first hand. Martinez was chatting with a group of nine-year-old children in a classroom (not about cooties) when a girl approached the group and sat in an available chair. Almost immediately and quite suddenly she became demonstrably upset. Martinez asked her what was wrong. The girl breathlessly replied that she just realized that the last child to use the chair had cooties.

Though it may have a real impact on children's social distancing, it's hard to pin down what cooties is exactly, because conceptually, it needs to be many things. Children have vaguely described cooties as "They give you bad germs that can kill you" or "if you don't like a person and you touch them, you can get cooties." It's not unlike an invisible virus, in that no one is safe. No kid knows whether they'll get it, or whether they'll be accused of giving someone cooties.

The reality is that cooties also reflects deeper social problems and anxieties, not unlike what happens in the real world. Like a virus, cooties often attack the more vulnerable in children's society-those at risk of being stigmatized in some way. Cooties make it okay to socially distance yourself from those you don't like. The material point Hirshfield makes is this: "Cooties are about power and authority within children's culture. Cooties are used to establish and maintain unequal social relations between children."

Playing games can often be meaningful in themselves in this way, even if outsiders don't understand them. We may see fragments of these reflections of the adult world in the playful nonsense of children's culture and understand that by playing, children are also learning and rehearsing and exploring these darker concepts. But that link to adulthood and reality that many try to draw on to explain the unexplainable is not the most important thing to understand. The fact is, even without formal schooling and instruction, children are constantly learning, absorbing, and testing out crucial concepts through play.

Nonsense makes a lot of sense in a kid's world.

The same folklorists who described the dreaded Lurgi, the Opies, also debunked the idea that the nursery rhyme "Ring-a-Ring a Rosy" was about the great plague. From its history and timing, such a theory didn't make sense, and we can't really be sure what it means, if anything. But it's true that many nursery rhymes are often so dark, so strange, so...nonsensical.

As adults, astonished at the verses we may have playfully repeated as children, we may want to attribute meaning to them to make some kind of sense out of them. Other nursery rhymes have also been posited to be about other, much darker themes, with each line simply bursting with adult meaning. Some scholars may try to find meaning in the origins of nursery rhymes that were perhaps derived from adult ballads, stripped down to be more palatable for children, and therefore assumed to be more meaningful than just mere nonsense.

Whatever the real origins, this search for a satisfactory meaning might not mean much when it comes to children. Because nonsense makes a lot of sense in a kid's world.

Some nursery rhymes were certainly from the same source as ballads. But if we think of nursery rhymes as only being created for children, rather than children creating or playing with rhymes themselves and passing them down to other children, we discount the remarkable capacity that kid culture has for weird and wonderful language play and invention, of spontaneous rhymes and puns and verbal sparring-and why it is so enjoyed by children around the world.

It's this childish tolerance of nonsense, the idea that maybe nursery rhymes and other games don't have to mean anything intrinsically linked to an adult world, that allows children to learn and organize the world around them into something that makes sense to themselves. To understand what the world may be, it's also useful to understand what it is not, where logic and language go hand in hand with the illogical and language that bends and stretches.

Jan Wojcik describes a child who, upon seeing the surf and the sea for the first time, said, "The waves hit the rocks. The rocks cry." On another occasion, Max comes up with a spontaneous black comedy of a nursery rhyme: "Now is the time,/ Now is the time/ To take all the Easter girls/ And all the Easter boys/ And all the Easter bunny children to the bridges,/ To lock them up in the bridges."

It's seemingly nonsensical moments like these that children and their parents delight in-as children acquire new metaphors in their speech, linking two disparate things by their unexpected similarities, we see the world with different eyes.

"Off my case, potato face."
"Up your lip, potato chip."
"Up your nose with a rubber hose."
"That don't rhyme, Frankenstein."
"I'm the boss, applesauce."

By playing these linguistic games with words, rhymes, metaphors, and figures of speech, children not only become more aware of language and linguistic structure as something that can be used to create new ideas and concepts, improving their linguistic competence, but can also experiment with how they see the world...and then make fun of its darker forces.

It's hard to believe the cooties and nursery rhymes of your childhood can reveal so much about the world. Even under lockdown, with schools closed, it's children's linguistic nonsense and playfulness that may not be fully understood, that allow children to keep learning and exploring the deepest corners of the world.

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The Linguistics of Cooties (and Other Weird Things Kids Say) | JSTOR Daily

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In these strange pandemic times, small children all over the world are on lockdown. To many frazzled parents, juggling home schooling, child care, work, and economic worries, in often small spaces, it may feel like living in some dark fairy tale. With schools shuttered and education moves imperfectly online, many responsible adults are worried and anxious.

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The power of suffixes and the women who transformed the use of words.

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The power of suffixes and the women who transformed the use of words.

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We need new words. The strange and unsettling world in which we're suddenly living no longer fits the fatigued syllables and worn-out language we had been using to describe our lives. Some of our old terms feel too clumsy and forced; they fail to capture the essence of our fear and grief - our eerie alienation from one another.

More like this:
- The history of the word 'dude'
- Fourteen words that define the present
- A glossary of the 21st Century

In times past, when frustrating circumstances demanded new ways of expressing what it means to be alive, it was often female writers who sculpted the fresh coinages that kept language rippling with poignancy and power. The word 'frustrating' itself, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, makes its first appearance in print in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, where she presciently describes "the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity".

Perhaps it's not so surprising that it should have been women, who historically have all-too-well understood the paralysing parameters of enforced distancing (and not just social, but economic and political as well), who were compelled to fashion new words to cope with the feeling of being cut off from the pulse of life.

Taking as our inspiration such gifted wordsmiths as George Eliot and Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and Dorothy Wordsworth, perhaps we can distil some helpful principles - some New Rules, to do a Dua Lipa - for sculpting a vocabulary to describe the surreal realities that will surely come to define these tense and trying times.
Rule no 1: Get your '-ness' on
The suffix '-ness' can transform an otherwise unremarkable word into something stranger and more affectingly abstract. The adjective 'dark', for example, on its face is frank and factual, whereas 'darkness' is more movingly evocative and poetic. Dorothy Wordsworth understood that linguistic trick profoundly and exploited it to memorable effect when describing an uncanny walk she took with her brother, William, in Scotland in 1803, and in particular the misty sight of a little Gaelic boy hooting as dusk was "shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains".

The soulful scene, Wordsworth said, magically contained "that visionariness which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature". It was the first time, according to the OED, that the words 'visionariness' and 'unworldliness' are known to have been used. Today, unnerving-nesses stack up around us: the unvisitedness of our parents and grandparents. The unembracedness of our friends. The egglessness of our pantries.
Rule no 2: You are what you '-r'
To demonstrate the profound depths of one's connection with a place or feeling, simply fastening an '-r' or an '-er' to the end of a noun can confer a new existential title. No one remembers now who claimed for himself the broad domain of a 'forest' to become the original 'forester', or who it was that first bestowed the modest grandeur of 'dweller' onto an inhabitant of a simple 'dwelling'. But as far as we are aware, it was Jane Austen who, in a letter she wrote in 1800, seized upon the alienness of a group of random gamblers who had gathered around a casino table, none belonging to the place itself and all having come from an undefined 'outside', to christen all such future strangers as 'outsiders'.

Such sympathy with social misfits was characteristic of Austen's generous spirit. Sixteen years later, while writing her novel Emma, she turned the word 'sympathy' into 'sympathiser' - the first recorded use of that word. Who knows how the irrepressible Austen (as it happens, she introduced the word 'irrepressible' too, in 1811, when writing her novel Sense and Sensibility) would have described the congregants of our bizarre new world: Zoomers and Couchers? Thresholders and Rainbowers? We do know what she would likely have made of conspiratorial theories for the virus's origins peddled by charlatans - 'pseudophilosophy', a word she is credited with coining in her unfinished novel Sanditon, on which she was working when she died, aged 41, in 1817.
Rule no. 3: Join the Hyphen Nation
Another way to reinvigorate a lacklustre lexicon is to pull together words that have never been tethered before - a little like constructing an impromptu meal from random reached-for tins dragged to light from the fumbled darkness of a kitchen cupboard. (Chutney pasta anyone? Anyone?) Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To her it is likely we owe the origin of 'self-doubt' and 'Wild-West' as well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly engaging with obsessive vigour: 'spring-clean', which Brontë niftily neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848.
Rule no. 4: The Wisdoms of '-isms'
There is no quicker way to elevate a word into grandiloquence than to stick on to the end of it the suffix '-ism', three small letters that can canonise seemingly throwaway syllables and transport them into the realm of respectable doctrine, system, or movement. The novelist George Eliot (she who fashioned 'frustrating' for us) is also credited with formulating, in a letter she wrote in 1885, something rather less negative in its outlook and attitude: the term 'meliorism', or the belief that the world's suffering is healable if we all work together for that end. To get us out of our infectiously fatiguing covidism, or the dread that viral isolation will go on endlessly, perhaps we need to do another Dua Lipa of faith and practise her cleverly coined 'Future Nostalgism' instead? We can meet together in a great disco of the mind, fuelled by the conviction that one day, in the not-too-distant future, that beautiful, fragile, craved-for togetherism we all so desperately miss, will resume again for real.

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We need new words. The strange and unsettling world in which we're suddenly living no longer fits the fatigued syllables and worn-out language we had been using to describe our lives. Some of our old terms feel too clumsy and forced; they fail to capture the essence of our fear and grief - our eerie alienation from one another.

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Hypocognition is a censorship tool that mutes what we can feel - Kaidi Wu | Aeon Ideas

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You know that feeling when you don't have a word for a feeling? That's hypocognition, and it can be used to censor and suppress

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The times we live in are starting to seem disturbingly biblical. Worldwide, there have been fires raging across continents, unbearable heatwaves, and unseasonably warm winters. There's been major social upheaval, too, from strikes, protests, and elections. And now, the world suddenly finds itself in the midst of a possible pandemic that dare not speak its name.

In a very short span of time, cases of a new coronavirus originating in Wuhan, a city in the Chinese province of Hubei, have spread exponentially around the globe. The virus has caused sickness and death in such unmanageably large numbers that public health systems in some countries, lacking resources, have been strained to the breaking point. In the early confusion and growing public panic, as researchers raced to investigate the makeup of this strange new virus, amid infection and fatality rates much higher than the seasonal flu, there was scarcely time to worry about the seemingly tangential linguistic implications of when to call a pandemic a pandemic and what we should consider when naming a new disease.

As with many other recent global crises, there has been a flood of dangerous misinformation, and with it, the insidious "viral" spread of toxic speech through social media. With people beginning to grapple with fearsome unknowns over which they have little control, the public conversation has nourished a sense of permissiveness around acts of outright racism and physical violence. The wrong kind of name might give listeners the wrong idea.

The path between the so-called linguistic dog whistles and the violent action they can inspire is a murky one. How do words that should be innocuous, like "poor," "welfare," or "inner city," or perhaps more topical words, like "socialist," "illegals," and "establishment," go negative?

While these names may have been used neutrally at first, it became clear that they had the potential to reinforce harmful stereotypes.

By February 11, when the World Health Organization gave the name COVID-19 to the mystery disease, it was perhaps too late. A range of colloquial labels had already taken root. Since there's more than one kind of coronavirus, people came up with intuitive names that referenced the disease's origins, such as the "China flu" or "Wuhan virus." While these names may have been used neutrally at first, it became clear that they had the potential to reinforce harmful stereotypes. As a disease name, COVID-19 is easy to pronounce and also follows the WHO convention of not referencing animals, people, or places, to avoid stigmatizing them. (The WHO's now-official name for the virus is severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2; the disease that the virus causes is coronavirus disease, or COVID-19.)

Still, the association of COVID-19 with China and Asian people in general has lingered. Chinese-owned businesses far from any outbreak felt the pinch, with their customers staying away, and many Asian people are reporting a rise in racism. It's clear that in the right context, there's a hidden power associated with a name, despite what Shakespeare might say. Taiwan, in a tussle over nationhood with China, was controversially labeled by the WHO at times as "Taiwan, China," or "Taipei" in its outbreak updates. Taiwan decided to continue using the earlier term "Wuhan virus" widely, ostensibly to avoid confusing the public with too many names. But perhaps there was another reason for not using a naming convention that most other countries quickly adopted.

How does a name that perhaps arose out of expediency develop negative connotations for a wider English-speaking audience?

Being associated with illness, much less a pandemic-causing virus, is not the most positive of things. As Lawrence Besserman notes, being ill in the English language is no fun. Metaphorically, illness is often conceptualized as a personal failing, as we blame the sick for actively catching illnesses rather than having illness happen to them. Although "ill" is not etymologically related to "evil", Besserman shows how the two became synonymous, as "ill" attracted more negative metaphorical connotations of moral depravity, just as "sick" similarly took on the pejorative senses of being mentally ill or even "perverted." These senses remain in terms like ill-advised, ill-bred, ill-tempered, ill-will.

But more than that, as the recent incidents of coronavirus-related racism show, many countries, in particular the U.S., have a long and unhealthy history of associating germs with the idea of being foreign. The long-held stereotype of unclean immigrants importing germs from strange places resulted in invasive public health practices before immigrants were allowed to enter the country, with many being deported for spurious health reasons. Disease was seen as related to criminality, poverty, addiction, immoral behavior, even communism. Those same germs, of course, don't particularly care for borders; they could have just as easily hopped on an unsuspecting American coming back from a vacation abroad.

It's unsurprising, then, that the name of a disease, if it incorporates the name of a people, will likely eventually result in stigmatization, especially given the gravity of the current outbreaks. So much so that Chinese officials are reportedly trying to push the false story that COVID-19 may have been found in China, but didn't originate there.

In today's heavily charged political environments, more and more people are aware that language can be weaponized and used to frame narratives that aim to persuade people one way or another. But when we think of weaponized language, often it's a pretty blunt instrument. We tend to focus on the obvious slurs that a speaker and a wider audience can understand are clear-cut negative terms that convey bigoted intentions and aim to wound.

Perhaps a more harmful kind of speech lives in a gray area, merging and intertwining with norms and nudging them in certain directions.

We live in a world where it's much harder to use outright slurs as linguistic weapons in a public or professional sphere, because racism is widely seen as unacceptable, and calling someone a racist is still considered a serious accusation for which there'd better be evidence. When slurs are used, it's easier for observers to call out racism with certainty, and harder for those who use slurs to plausibly deny it.

Perhaps a more harmful kind of speech lives in a gray area, merging and intertwining with norms and nudging them in certain directions, but having plausible deniability when confronted. Right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders once staged a scene where he asked a crowd "Do you want more or fewer Moroccans?" which resulted in anti-Moroccan chants from the audience. After being convicted of hate speech, he denied it, plausibly, saying, "I cannot believe it, but I have been convicted because I asked a question about Moroccans.... The Netherlands have become a sick country."

It can be hard to tell when speech is intentionally coded to get listeners to infer something that's never directly said-and when it's really what it says on the surface. Last year, when Joe Biden, a presidential candidate known for his support of African-American communities, said " poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids," what did he mean? Perhaps it was a gaffe, or perhaps it was an unwitting code that drew on assumptions that some of his listeners shared. Unlike a slur, it's hard to tell what his intentions were. Crucially, though, intent matters less than whether an audience can still understand and receive the message as coded, and in some cases, act on it.

When Barack Obama suggested during the 2008 presidential campaign that his opponent, John McCain, and the Republican Party would push the fact that he " doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills," McCain's campaign responded furiously: "We are not going to let anybody paint John McCain, who has fought his entire life for equal rights for everyone, [ sic] to be able to be painted as racist." How did McCain's campaign read fighting words into Obama's statement? For those who are looking and are of a similar mindset, the answer is obvious, but for others, it might not be. This is why these political code words are often called dog whistles: those who are sensitive to it can hear it, but those who aren't, can't.

This gray language can spread across a community and infect the semantics of words with a new toxicity, if listeners can make the metaphorical connections and choose to endorse them by not challenging them. The more they're repeated in those fuzzy-but-negative contexts, the more these coded meanings become normalized and accepted. But for philosopher Lynne Tirrell, words don't go negative just through frequency of use in a negative context. Conversation is a joint, cooperative activity, like a dance, with actions and reactions. It needs listeners to react, by accepting or resisting what's said. For toxic speech to evolve new inferences and meanings, rather than challenging or resisting the semantic change, an audience has to endorse it by taking it up and using it themselves, spreading it among the community like a virus that leaps from host to host. It's in this way that media can unwittingly spread biased political talking points, by dutifully reporting toxic speech without commentary or challenging false information in a distorted sense of neutrality.

Tirrell considers the idea of an epidemiology of toxic language, conceptualizing language as something that can have the power to cause harm, by degrees, just like a poison or a disease. When we think of speech acts in terms of toxins or viruses, it's a useful medical metaphor that helps us makes sense of how speech, even when it doesn't contain any slurs, name calling, hate speech, or other derogatory language, can nevertheless be harmful, even to the point of violence, especially the further and more frequently it's spread around.

"Words have killed my country," says Dr. Naasson Munyandamutsa, a Rwandan psychiatrist who survived genocide. Tirrell describes how Munyandamutsa was referring to the derogatory words that were once used to refer to Tutsi guerrilla soldiers, words like inzoka (snake) and inyenzi (cockroach). It was the same kind of language that once was used jokingly, perhaps as a playful threat to kill Tutsi friends, even as they all socialized or worked together. In a mere four years, their toxic effect changed drastically and spread across the country like a virus, to refer to the entire Tutsi community. Not just nasty names, these words primed some Rwandan citizens to take action and kill those who were once their neighbors.

As Tirrell points out, when Donald Trump says "Syrian refugees are snakes," he is likewise drawing on suggestive qualities about snakes that allow his listeners to infer certain negative ideas about an entire people, and by extension, other immigrants and refugees. Tirrell quotes Republican consultant Frank Luntz as saying that Trump initially left people "horrified by his offensive statements. But as time went on, they came to enjoy and absorb it." As Tirrell elaborates, "Each repetition of an outrageous speech act makes the next one less of a surprise, until such speech becomes common enough to seem 'normal,' lowering the standard of acceptability."

Toxic speech, under the insidious guise of ordinary language, can act as a virus if spread to the right crowd. It can be just as harmful as outright slurs, no longer the words we once knew.

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The times we live in are starting to seem disturbingly biblical. Worldwide, there have been fires raging across continents, unbearable heatwaves, and unseasonably warm winters. There's been major social upheaval, too, from strikes, protests, and elections. And now, the world suddenly finds itself in the midst of a possible pandemic that dare not speak its name.