We all owe Rebecca Solnit one:
JESSICA VALENTI: How do you feel about being considered the creator of the concept of “mansplaining”? Your now-famous essay– which really gave women language to talk about the condescending interactions they’ve had with men – certainly gave birth to the term, but you write in the book that you didn’t actually make up the word.
REBECCA SOLNIT: A really smart young woman changed my mind about it. I used to be ambivalent, worrying primarily about typecasting men with the term. (I have spent most of my life tiptoeing around the delicate sensibilities of men, though of course the book Men Explain Things to Me is what happens when I set that exhausting, doomed project aside.) Then in March a PhD candidate said to me, No, you need to look at how much we needed this word, how this word let us describe an experience every woman has but we didn’t have language for.
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The black market for dinosaurs (it makes more sense this way, but at first I thought the dinosaurs were swapping ration books for nylons and stuff):
Prokopi’s cooperation with authorities has led to the recovery and repatriation of not only the T. bataar but also other Mongolian fossils—enough to populate a new dinosaur museum in Ulaanbaatar. In court on Tuesday, Bell reported that “over eighteen largely complete, if not fully prepped, dinosaur fossils will be returned as a result, indirectly or directly, of Mr. Prokopi’s information, to Mongolia, a country which is not only enthusiastic about the possibility of dinosaur tourism based solely on the haul from this case but which badly seems to need it.” The returned specimens included “a second Tyrannosaurus skeleton; a dinosaur called an oviraptor, which is an egg-eating thing,” Bell said. “I think a number of them stampeded in the 1996 movie ‘Jurassic Park.’ It might have been 1992. I was young and awestruck in any event, Your Honor.”
“I missed the movie,” the judge said. “Maybe I should go back to see it.”
“Every now and then it airs on TNT.”
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How the US is getting the science of sun exposure wrong, and what they could learn from Australia.
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A really long article on sea monsters! FIST-PUMP!
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I can honestly say I understand more about (non-menstrual) cramping now:
So why have the scientific myths about dehydration and cramping proved so durable? Partly, it’s because so much of the science surrounding exercise and hydration has been underwritten by Gatorade, which obviously has an interest in pushing the notion of dehydration as a performance killer and hydration as the silver bullet. (In their book The Runner’s Body, Tucker and co-author Jonathan Douglas mention one fear-mongering study that suggests that “dehydration of 2 percent causes performance to decline by up to 20 percent.”)
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This piece about the local journalists and photographers covering the Sandy Hook tragedy is beautiful and difficult:
At the firehouse, which is three hundred and fifty yards from the school, Hicks’s colleagues moved seven fire trucks from the garage, so that the school’s survivors could be counted in the empty bays. On her way there, Hicks spotted the seven-year-old son of another firefighter walking along the side of the road with his class. He asked her if there had been a wild animal in the building. “Yes, honey,” she said. As the boy’s class continued to the firehouse, she heard the children whispering to one another down the line: a wild animal, a wild animal, a wild animal.
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I hesitated to link to the Nick Denton Vows column, bc it’s such inside-baseball-NYC-new-media-circle-jerkery, but it is really going for a “what are these things called ee-moash-ons?” vibe which is usually found in, like, Sherlock-hugging-Watson scenes, so. Worth a look:
In his vow, Mr. Denton said, “I was always expected to be successful, but I never really believed I would be happy.” Recalling an earlier era when it was thought that gay men led lonely, childless lives, he pronounced, “I want to make my own family with you.”
Mr. Washington told Mr. Denton, “You saved my life and then you changed my life,” and brought the house down after professing, in wildly unprintable language, that there was no one quite like him.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
I firmly believe that there are ALL KINDS of beasties in the sea that we know nothing about, since the ocean is chronically, tragically understudied and unexamined. I don’t care if it’s insane, I am confident there are things down there that we have NO IDEA about, and every time I read a story about sea monsters or gigantic sea serpents it makes me wish I had done better in high school chemistry so I could have studied oceanography in university.
Oh for sure, there’s all sorts of stuff we don’t know about down there, since it’s so very hard to explore. In many ways, getting to the moon is easier than getting down into the oceans.
I think the ocean is understudied because deep-sea creatures are invariably horrifying nightmare-spawn. You think you’re going to find the sea serpent of song and story, or maybe a mermaid colony, and then you dive in and SURPRISE! Humpback anglerfish all up in your face. You pull your net up and there’s just a blobfish in there, looking like a reject from a fast-food restaurant pink slime grinder.
I can’t blame scientists for choosing to go to Mars rather than the beach.
YES. Take to the sea… and find sea serpents! But I agree. The oceans are vast and hostile to human life and we have barely scratched the surface, literally. I mean, we already know there are blue whales (the largest animal that has ever lived… and it’s alive right now!), and goblin sharks, and angler fish, and colossal squids. The idea that we’ve discovered everything except a few different species of shrimps is absurd.
The squids! I mean, how ridiculous is it that for a long time all we knew about giant and colossal squids was that “sperm whales eat them?” I mean, have you SEEN a sperm whale? THEY MUST EAT A LOT, THEY’RE ENORMOUS. So there’s a huge population of gigantic creatures down there….what OTHER kinds of gigantic freaky creatures are there???
I’m fully aware I sound like a crazy person on this subject and I do not care.
I am right there with you! I mean, we had the Internet and space shuttles long before any human being ever even glimpsed a living giant squid. We’ve had a few videos now, but other than that, they’re still pretty mysterious.
I think the problem is that we’ve plumbed the deepest depths (the Mariana Trench) and sort of concluded, “well, we didn’t find any dino-sharks down *there*, so that must be that”, but 99.99% of the abyssal plain, which is much more life-friendly than trenches, and that constitutes the vast majority of space on our planet is completely unexplored.
For some reason calling it “the abyssal plain” hasn’t done wonders for tourism. I guess it would kinda suck if you’re taking your bathyscaphe down to what you think is a sea vent and find yourself in Pandaemonium.
I was at a cheap seafood restaurant last year that, of course, used laminated nautical maps as placemats. Now, being a giant nerd, I naturally scanned it intently and discovered that there is a vast swath of ocean in the North Atlantic that had been named by a Tolkien nerd. I forget the specifics, but there’s stuff like a Rohan Mountain range, a Gondor trench, etc. So, the rebranding effort has already begun, there in the ruins of Numenor.
Only on the Toast do my interests intersect with such ferocity and such regularity.
That’s like dropping straight down into the Grand Canyon at night with no moon and a feeble flashlight, not seeing much of anything new, and going “well I guess there’s not much living on the surface of this planet” and calling it a day. ie, ABSURD.
I feel that way, and then I spend a little time talking to my dad’s oceanographer buddy who studies reefs, and after enough OH GOD EVERYTHING IS DYING I don’t feel that way anymore!
I think it’s going to be ok, we’ll be launching the Seaquest in 4 years.
Ha, the sunburn article is incredibly appropriate for me to read today! I spent 3 hours outside in shorts and a halter top in full (overcast) sun at a baseball game yesterday, and the top of my thighs and shoulders got pretty burned. I’m probably a 4 on the Fitzpatrick scale , and yeah, because of my recent move, I didn’t have any sunscreen to put on.
That being said, growing up I played outside all the time in the summer and never got burned at all! As I’ve gotten older I’ve spent less time outside (and less time wearing shorts, which is a whole other story) and I’ve noticed that the incidence and severity of burn has gone up. But it’s usually only once a year, which is why I never seem to learn.
WOOHOO ANECDATA POTENTIALLY SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE
tl;dr: gonna buy some more shorts, also my legs are a bright pink-orange which is very confusing to this SE Asian woman.
Bright pink-orange? Trendy with this summer’a fashions!!!!
Trust me, the color popped really nicely against my cute white/blue print cutoffs I got from the Gap last year… which I only wore to the baseball game because I was sure that wearing jeans would cause me to melt into a puddle.
Whereas I was always very sensitive to sun, even as a child. I have the irish ‘white with a hint of pink’ skin and all you need to do is show it the sun and it starts to burn.
From my vantage point, at least it’s been consistent? I’ve just been confused and have been very laissez-faire about it for the past ten years.
AH FUCK IT LETS JUST BE MOLES
[j/k sun, pls don’t kill me]
I once burned so badly on my thigh that I had a dark spot there for three months. If I’m gonna get skin cancer, it’ll start there.
I spend from may through to about september either inside, or under big hats and factor 50.
However, I still only apply sunscreen if I’m going to be out for more than half an hour, because I figure half and hour to an hour of unblocked sun now and again is good for my skin and energy levels. Reduces my depression symptoms.
What I tend to do is just go sit out on my balcony for ten minutes at a time, avoiding 12-2, the sunniest time of day.
Yes! It’s pretty much free Vitamin D.
I need to actively incorporate regular sunning in my life again.
I’m a 2 on the Fitzpatrick scale so I’ve spent years and years covering up from head to toe. But a few years ago my D levels were so low my doctor prescribed hard-core supplements for me to take. Since then I’ve been trying to actually get some sun naturally- nothing too crazy, of course, but I’ve noticed a marked improvement on my mood and energy levels. This winter up here in Boston was real tough, though. Gonna have to bank some serious rays this summer.
I am a type 1, so I do have to be very careful. The sort of tan build-up they talk about in the article, where you slowly develop melanin over a period of time spent inside? Just doesn’t happen to me. More than ten minutes exposure, and I freckle. More than half an hour, I start to go pink. More than about 45 minutes, and I burn.
Sometimes very, very deeply.
Yeah, the article explained so many things for me! I have light olive skin (type 3/4 I guess), and as a kid, I absolutely never burned and usually had a deep tan by early May. As an adult, I get pretty tan in the summer, but I often get sunburned if I spend the day outside, especially in early summer. I’ve always wondered if my skin changed or if I’d just built up more of a resistance by being outside so much more as a kid. Time to go sunbathe!
Ha, the sunburn article is incredibly appropriate for me to read today! I spent 3 hours outside in shorts and a halter top in full (overcast) sun at a baseball game yesterday, and the top of my thighs and shoulders got pretty burned. I'm probably a 4 on the Fitzpatrick scale , and yeah, because of my recent move, I didn't have any sunscreen to put on.
That being said, growing up I played outside all the time in the summer and never got burned at all! As I've gotten older I've spent less time outside (and less time wearing shorts, which is a whole other story) and I've noticed that the incidence and severity of burn has gone up. But it's usually only once a year, which is why I never seem to learn.
WOOHOO ANECDATA POTENTIALLY SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE
tl;dr: gonna buy some more shorts, also my legs are a bright pink-orange which is very confusing to this SE Asian woman.
Am I being silly, or is there actually not a link to that last article?
I loved the skin article. I’m always trying to find a way to coexist with it safely here in Texas.
You hesitated so much to link to the Denton vows that you didn’t actually link it!
I saw it yesterday and they actually gave the wedding points based on the Gawker wedding system!
Hilarious. Why doesn’t “Phylis Nefler” do that anymore? It was awesome.
She does! Her real name is Katie Baker, and she writes “Wedded Blitz” columns for Grantland.
Sea-serpents! I WANT TO BELIEVE
I know that article is about non menstrual cramping BUT I’ve noticed that when I’m not well hydrated my period cramps are terrible and when I drink a lot of water they are barely there or gone all together. I have no idea what the science of it is, but I first noticed it when I moved to a very hot tropical country and then started getting cramps regularly with my period (I’d never had them before), and they didn’t go away until I started drinking a lot of water. Now I live in the US, but drinking water all through my period makes a huge difference still. ~bodies are weird~
I am deeply disappointed that not a single person was quoted in the dinosaur article as saying “It belongs in a museum!”
Agreed.
The Mongolian Natural History Museum is mostly dusty exhibits of slightly deranged taxidermy and items displayed according to the “labeled pile of stuff” school of curating (you can handle the skis that a Mongolian climber used on some expedition, for instance, because they’re just propped up in a corner with his parka), but then you get to the dinosaur hall and it’s a whole different story. The Deinocheirus claws are particularly memorable; scientists can say that critter wasn’t a carnivore all they want, but good luck convincing anyone who sees those talons.
Mongolia’s museum needs the tourism money – I tried to visit in August of last year, but it was closed “indefinitely” for lack of funding. 🙁
NOT OKAY. Damn it, Mongolia is such a cool place, but the past 150 years have done it no favors at all.
Hold up, Australia, let’s not congratulate ourselves too much. As a brown-skinned person living in Melbourne, no one told me that the guidelines designed for white Australians didn’t apply to me until I finally started seeing a GP who was Indian-Australian like me.
And the article’s suggestion that (white) Australia has avoided problems relating to discussing race because of the no-nonsense pragmatism passed down by their settler forebears or whatever is rubbish. If anything, Australia has a worse track record than America of having mainstream conversations about racism out in the open. (That consultation I had with that GP happened to be during the Indian student bashings in Melbourne, and white Australia’s tremendous ability to spout racist bile while denying all accusations of racism was on full display.)
Yes, I suspected as much. That self-congratulatory vibe didn’t ring true & there is still such a tendency of all media to portray “Aussies” as white folk that I didn’t believe any of that marketing actually explained anything to brown Aussies.
However, I have noticed that we as expat Aussies cover up the Bergy Bits against sun much more than anyone else at the beach here in GA.
The first time I went to the beach in the US, everyone laughed at me for slathering myself in SPF 50 and not wanting to sit out in the sun all day. This was before I realised how weak Massachusetts sunshine is.
I also don’t believe that it’s the Slip-Slop-Slap campaign that made us so Vitamin D deficient, I think it’s that compared to twenty or thirty years ago, we spend way more time inside than we used to.
Off topic but I neeeeeeed a place to talk to y’all about Orange is the New Black.
Yes. With separate caucuses/threads for people at different points.
YEP. I’m midway through episode 4, have friends who finished it less than 48 hours after it was released (lolwhat) and need to talk to someone who is also in the middle.
I’m in the same place as you (maybe ep 5?) so yes, highly advocate different threads!
I’ve watched 8 or 9 episodes so far. I spent a good portion of brunch with my roommates yesterday talking to our server about it. I dreamed about it last night. So, yes, let’s do that.
I’ve only watched the first 2. I’m yeeeeaaaarrrning to watch the rest but I can with the boyf and/or his netflix password. I’m sure he would give me his password but that feels weird. And our schedules don’t line up until 3 weeks from now. 3 WEEKS! Not okay.
I need a translation for a few episodes! We end up with extended scenes in Spanish and then German. Is there a way to do subtitles on Netflix?
Somehow I have subtitles, but they are in Spanish. So when they spoke German, I got subtitles, but in Spanish. Does anyone know how to fix that?
best/worst part of the sunscreen article:
The American Academy of Dermatology’s article about skin cancer and photoprotection acknowledges that for “blacks and Asians, UV radiation does not appear to be a major risk factor” in malignant melanoma. It also states the effectiveness and impact of sunscreen for black people is unknown since SPF sunscreens are tested only on light-skinned people. But the report goes on to recommend sunscreen for all people of color regardless of skin shade. For Henry W. Lim, M.D., a leader of the Skin Cancer Foundation’s photobiology committee and chair of the Henry Ford Hospital dermatology department in Detroit, the missing information is irrelevant. “We don’t need data on that,” he said, because supplements would treat any D-shortfall, whatever that might be. “We want to make it simple as a public health message—as to what the public should reasonably be able to absorb and understand,” says Lim. “To fine tune it is just too complicated we feel.”
God forbid we give medical advice that is helpful to POC and risk slightly confusing white people! Instead, anyone who has darker skin can just buy these supplements we don’t really know work in addition to the sunscreen that may not do them any good.
Ugggggggggggggggggggh.
The worst thing is that if I’m reading his name correctly, Dr. Lim is a POC and you know, should be thinking about this a little more.
BAH
Also he works in Detroit! Detroit, home of Motown!
..except not really because I need to stop burning in the sun! Also, I would really like to know if I can make up for Vitamin D deficiencies by standing out in the sun for a set period of time, but I don’t know how long that might be because the recommended times are for white people! BAH
Blah blah blah, social science research has demonstrated that successful behavior change campaigns work best if you fine-tune messages for specific audience but who has time for that?
[okay I am really done now]
If you can find some of Adele Davis’ books she has recommendations for people of color, or at least for kids.
Maybe there’s a chance that he could be a light/medium-skinned Asian person? Occasionally I find that some light-skinned Asians flat-out don’t get that other Asians/POC in general are darker than them and have different skincare needs. They really don’t find issues around dark skin (and accompanying colourism) to be a big deal because they’ve never been personally affected by either. This is just from my super-personal observation, though! Intra-racial politics are tricky, like anything else.
I’m SEAsian too; the absolute palest I get, in the dead of a British winter, is the shade of palm sugar. In the grand scheme of possible skin tones I know I’m pretty light–but that makes me think about people who have very deep skintones, as burns and marks are still immediately discernible on my skin. I once read an article where people with dark brown-black skin tones are actually more likely to die from aggressive skin cancer, partly because neither they nor their doctors know how to spot the melanomas before it’s way too late. :
SPF sunscreens are tested only on light-skinned people
We don’t need data on that
too complicated
SCIENCE
“We don’t need data on that” is like a big honking alarm going BAD SCIENCE BWOOP BWOOP REPEAT WE HAVE BAD SCIENCE ON THE LOOSE HERE.
Daaamn it’s like someone asked him to please demonstrate the worst paternalism of the medical field in the most quick and efficient way he could muster.
Right, because the public can’t look at a color swatch chart, match their skin to it, and then buy the sunscreen with the appropriate SPF. Has Dr. Lim ever walked past a makeup counter?
Rik Mayall, one of the men behind the ground-breaking comedies ‘The Young Ones,’ ‘Bottom’ and various others, has died aged 56.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-2777…
NOO! NO no no!! NOO!
Oh no! So sad. He was so young!
It’s very sad. I loved much of his work, and while he wasn’t actively working so much any more (his physical timing was off since his accident a few years ago, and as so much of the humour was physical it mattered) it is a shame to lose him so early.
OH NOOOOOOOOOOOO
NO NO NO
Not Lord Flasheart!
Yep, this is a real tragedy 🙁 So sad.
Love, love, love Rebecca Solnit; I’m always excited to see her talked about.
I need to hear more about this Sid the Seagull character! Smokey the Bear is kind of only about forest fires, is Sid just a general Australian public service ad animal?? Paging @icebergmama !
He’s just for sun protection, but the Slip Slop Slap song is pretty great. I’m going to have it in my head all day.
I had no idea that we owe manspalaining to one single person. I thought the internet had willed it spontaneously into being through sheer need. Applause to Rebecca Solnit.
I was very interested in the vitamin D article. I’m pretty light skinned – of Irish and German heritage – but I also live in Minnesota which is basically a sunless existence for half of the year. Twice when I’ve been blood tested at the doctor they responded with “OMG you are super-duper deficient in Vitamin D” and prescribed me huge supplement doses. I take them, and regularly take the daily supplement pills (not actually daily) but then they told me the same thing the next time I went in.
I complained to my boyfriend about it, because he is PHD student in medicinal chemistry, and his reaction was “stop taking supplements. they are untested and unregulated; you can’t even know for sure what is in them, and they often aren’t even metabolized correctly – they just make your pee really expensive.”
It just surprises me that in the article they acknowledge that we aren’t even sure supplements work and there is no scientific evidence that this is an adequate replacement for sunshine, and yet the medical industry seems to be promoting their use HARD CORE. Science – how does it work?
This is one of those areas where I trust tradition more than modern science. If cod liver oil was consumed religiously for centuries by my ancestors despite tasting completely disgusting, then it must have been doing something for them.
Let’s talk about a machine passing the Turing Test! I don’t know how to embed links!
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/20…
Beautiful–and yes, difficult–article on Sandy Hook. Thanks for including it.
I also don't believe that it's the Slip-Slop-Slap campaign that made us so Vitamin D deficient, I think it's that compared to twenty or thirty years ago, we spend way more time inside than we used to.
Yep, this is a real tragedy 🙁 So sad.