White Fight, White Flight: The Atlanta Hawks and the Race Card (incidentally, I read this fine piece, and then said something to Shrill about how proud I was that I read an article about football for him, and he was all “Nicole, the Hawks are a basketball team“):
“I am deeply saddened and embarrassed that this has put a blemish on our team and our city, which has always been a diverse community with a history of coming together as one. We should build bridges through basketball, not divide our community or serve as a source of pain.”
There have been many odd and hilarious racist remarks uttered during this scandal—Ferry’s expression “he has a little African in him, but not in a bad way,” has a distinctly antiquated feeling, evoking images of an old colonial adventurer, enlightened for his time, describing a black native who had earned his favor—but the assertion that Atlanta is a city of racial harmony might be the most ridiculous and revelatory. That the Hawks would write and publicly issue this sentence betrays not only their deep ignorance of the city of Atlanta, but a professional incuriosity about the marketplace they wish to serve. One need only glance at the history of the city to understand this.
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Hate bees, love poems about bees:
And Mandelstam’s bees
Wore the thin wings of time,
Every one silent and enormously still,
Staring at him from the stone of the page.
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What do you mean, Marriott might be telling people to tip their housekeeping staff NOT AS A PURELY NICE GESTURE ON THEIR PART?
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They are still not having sex on Outlander.
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When animals infect:
At this point, you’re entitled to ask: Damn, what is it about bats?
I asked that myself, in conversation with Charles Rupprecht, a virologist and veterinarian who leads the rabies section at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta. Rupprecht recited a list of factors that make this order of mammals, the Chiroptera, ideal candidates to host a variety of dangerous viruses. Some bats roost in huge colonies, snuggled intimately together; they give birth to only a few young, and therefore nurture those young dotingly; they have long life spans, especially for small mammals; they are old, too, in evolutionary terms; they encompass a great diversity of species, roughly 20 percent of all mammals; they fly, and therefore they get around the world nicely, finding places and ways to sustain themselves on nearly every landmass except Antarctica. Add to those traits the fact that, being nocturnal and airborne, they’re hard to study. “Bats really are the undiscovered country,” Rupprecht said. His point—the point of a rabies biologist who happens to like bats—is that they aren’t sinister and, if they seem to harbor an undue variety of nightmare diseases, it’s probably because they are so various and so poorly known.
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“My Feminism Needed to Start 300 Years Ago”:
The typical woman I talk to is doing shift work. In places like Atlanta that usually means at a bank so it has a slightly higher status but it’s still shift work. She’s working from 2pm-11pm Tuesday through Saturday, usually customer service. Then she’s going over to [for profit university] Strayer twice a week trying to get a degree. She’s hoping it’ll lead to her becoming a manager, which comes with a more stable schedule. The women I work for, they’re hustlin’—that’s how they describe it. So if I go and tell them something like, “You should Lean In” or, “I think Sheryl Sandberg reinvigorates the policy conversation around the work-life balance,” these women would laugh me out the room. What do you mean work-life balance?! It ain’t no work-life balance. It’s work. All of it is work! Their man is work. Their kids are work. Work is work. They’re not having it. But! Those are also the women whom I think are living feminism in ways that we don’t talk about.
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How evolutionary psychology went viral:
In each case, we are presumed to believe in the phenomenon under analysis already. All we require is an explanation, a story that tells us why we are the way we are. Ultimately, the explanation is always the same: evolution—i.e, reproductive advantage. Click on one of these stories and you will find two things: first, the results of a recent psychological study that verifies an observation about a common human behavior; and second, an evolutionary explanation for why that behavior was advantageous for our ancestors. Because their standard operating procedure is to begin from behaviors that they perceive as universal (despite the fact that blond hair, for example, could hardly be considered universally valorized), evolutionary psychologists tend to confirm received wisdom. Many EP studies tautologically assert that widely held social values are… well, widely held. Study finds that most men are attracted to women who are deemed conventionally attractive by society!
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The lost libraries of the Sahara
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MOCKINGJAY TIME, MOTHERFUCKERS:
Gentle Lady Seeks Ornamental Hermit
But surely a hermit who [browses Craiglist] is not a hermit in whom one can have complete confidence.
I think the Gentle Lady has salacious designs on the hermit – she requires him to be “unafflicted by any social disease” and willing to “[provide] the lady of the house such entertainments as she requires” if you know what I mean.
Oh, I’m sure of it. (I’m fairly sure this is a reference to Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard, and if one hermit, why not another?)
I think the Gentle Lady might actually be a vile sorceress; why else the 7-year term in which he cannot remove any part of his hair, beard, or nails?
Also, does this hermit have a narrative to provide?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU HATE BEES
Bees are lovely little things, happy to kill all males as winter comes.
My father-in-law keeps bees. The worst thing they do is fly into the back of your head if you are accidentally standing in their approach route while watching their hive.
Yes, please no hate for bees!
I understand hate for yellowjackets or hornets (haha #notallwasps) but bees are amazing. My dad and I have four hives and they are just fascinating to observe. Plus honey!
In fact, today’s agenda includes treating the hives for mites for the last time before winter. I’ll let y’all know how it goes if you want.
I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT BEEKEEPING.
ME TOO. Bees are fantastic and we do not collectively appreciate them nearly enough.
I once backread like YEARS of this woman’s bee keeping blog and my roommate still makes fun of me for it. BUT IT WAS FASCINATING. I think the name was Bee Keeper Linda?
It’s SO COOL. I don’t have any hives right now but I have had them in the past and I hope to again soon. So cool.
One time I caught a swarm! They swarm when they get too crowded. The workers decide to make another queen (they can TURN A REGULAR EGG into a queen by FEEDING THE LARVA DIFFERENT STUFF. What.) and then when they have their new queen hatched, they take her and a bunch of the workers and some drones and they go off on their own in a big lump. But they are totally chill during that time because they have no honey and eggs to protect, so you can handle them pretty easily. Usually when you see bee beards that is swarms. They don’t sting hardly at all when they are swarming.
Anyway if you can reach your swarm, you can cut the branch or whatever and put it in a beehive box and they’ll move in! And now you have a new colony!
My swarm went to the neighbor’s house and landed on a young tree and they were so heavy they broke the branch and then they were in a puddle on the ground.
This was the only swarm of mine that I’ve been able to capture. I put them in one box with frames (for them to make comb on) and then I had another box to put on top but no frames for it, so I put that on top, and before I could get there with frames (just a few days later) they had built some crazy cool architecture in the empty box, so I couldn’t put frames in.
In conclusion, BEES.
ALSO, worker bees can only lay infertile eggs. But infertile eggs hatch into drones which are male. What????
Like, seriously, Gal Science time. What? They lay an egg that has not been fertilized but which hatches into something that is NOT a clone of the egg-layer? And *is* a fertile male? HOW
TOO COOL.
It is my goal in life to have a swarm of bees show up on my car so I can call into work one morning and say “Yeah, I’m gonna be a little late, the beekeeper’s on his way but there’s a colony of bees attached to my fender, so.”
WAIT HOLD ON you attracted and now house WILD BEES?! I (foolishly?) thought that most bees in kept hives were descended from other kept hives, not you taking wild bees and giving them a nice safe home! I am tickled pink that I was wrong 😀
That second picture looks like a fancypants art building. Bees are so cool.
No these were bees from my own hive that swarmed. Beekeepers try hard to capture swarms, esp if it’s your own, because, hey, free colony! Some inevitably don’t get captured, so there are wild domesticated bee colonies out there. But this was my existing hive.
Feral honeybees?
I shouldn’t’ve said “wild domesticated bee colonies.” They aren’t really domesticated, ever. Not like any other domesticated critter. Honeybees (Apis mellifera, literally “bee, honeybearing”) aren’t native to the Americas, so what I meant and should’ve specified is that 100% of honeybee colonies living in trees or whatever in the Americas are escaped from managed hives, via swarming. Swarming is how the colony reproduces.
Earlier this year, at a party in a town that is not mine, I met a fellow with a beautiful red beard. Upon initial conversation, it was discovered that he had moved from my town to this town 1500 miles away, to become a beekeeper. I considered sexing him just so he would keep talking about bees (but I didn’t because monogamy).
These pictures. You are even cooler than that handsome redhead. Definitely wittier (your screen name kills me every time). Certainly superior.
I’m not hitting on you.
Probably.
*blushes*
He prob would have kept talking about them if you had asked.
Bee architecture! Bee-chitecture!
Beekeeping is very soothing. My parents have had bees forever, and I took over a few years ago after my mom turned allergic to bee stings (bummer). You realize that the whole hive is a creature, rather than a mass of individual bees. Kind of hard to describe–but there’s definitely a collective consciousness there.
Today’s mite treatment went smoothly. One hive, which was from a very late swarm, will not survive the winter, so we are going to have to combine it with another hive. Sadly, this will require us to find and kill the queen. But at least the colony will make it.
There are many great beekeeping blogs out there, so I know info is pretty easy to find, but if you have bee questions, I can try and answer them!
Yes! The shift in thinking of the bee as the organism to the hive as the organism is weird but (IMO) part of the awesomeness.
COVERED IN BEEEEEEEEES!!!
This is all I know of beekeeping.
p.s. Sorry about the 5 million edits; I was trying to embed a video, but I failed.
I like my women like I like my coffee …. uh …. covered in bees!
It took approx two years of me beekeeping for my Man I Live With to 1) get a bee suit so he could help me from closer than 50 feet away, and 2) stop yelling “aaaaa, covered in bees!!!!” like, at me, when neither of us were covered in bees.
Also, I want a shiny red suit. This will not help with bees.
Bees are amazing. Wasps, hornets and yellow jackets are the worst.
The other day I was walking home when I happened to glance up, and I noticed a wasps’ nest stretching over the top of a window in a small apartment building. My skin is crawling again just thinking of it.
THERE IS A WASP NEST IN MY SHED
I WENT TO PUT MY OLD BIKE IN THERE AND BACKED AWAY SLOWLY
NOW I AM REMINDED TO SEND A CAPSY TEXT TO MY LANDLORD
Team Bees! (Wasps are bastards though)
BEADS?!!!!!
They had worked so hard. They’re just little things.
(Official response to all bee/wasp comments.)
When I was a small person, my father took me to a bird supply store. The owner was a 50 something lady who had a recuse bat that spent the day sleeping inside of her (baggy) shirt, hooked to a bra strap. Everytime I think of bats, I think of that little bat getting skritched on the head. And where the bat droppings must have gone.
😀
D:
😀
D:
guano-h no D:
Maybe it had a little makeshift diaper. Yup, that’s it.
Don’t know much about bats, but if they’re like the other small mammals I do know about, they don’t poop while sleeping. And bats do sleep during the day, right? Yes, that must be right, so I can relax and stop worrying about guano near that woman’s bosom.
Will always click on any poem about bees, or indeed even a poem about poems about bees.
How about a news article about bees? I read this back in May and I’ve thought about it at least once a week since then http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/dr-gridlock/w…
I’m sorry to be the one to do this to you today, but the first letter in today’s Dear Prudence HAS to be fake. Right? RIGHT? Worms?!
“Is it truly evil to blackmail a person if I’m only going to do it once?”
God, I love the people who submit questions to Dear Prudie. I hope I never come within 60 feet of them, but I love them.
Ha ha, I just read it and I can’t believe that was a direct quote.
I don’t even want to start thinking about what it might be, but I am not sure I can resist.
I’m just sitting at my desk making the saddest face. Why? How? What? No.
OHMYGOD.
I feel like it’s got to be fake, but I Want To Believe.
Let’s speculate on who it is though!
Whenever I hear celebrity rumors I just assume them to be about Jude Law, and I think I’m right about 55% of the time.
This is my strategy too. I’d up the percentage to at least 65 though.
OK, now I am going to have the image of Jude Law dumping worms down his pants all day.
Russell Crowe comes immediately to mind.
For some reason I’m getting a strong Nic Cage vibe with this one.
My brain immediately went to Kanye West, though even I don’t believe that.
It’s obviously Troy McClure.
Something to do with fishing, I expect.
Follow Me to Springfield Aquarium!
Okay, so let us close-read this. The letter-writer says he/she was in a relationship with this person “years go” and this person is “now a well-known celebrity,” and that he emailed her “a while ago (while he was engaged to his now wife).”
To me this reads like the celeb has been married for less than 2 years (because of the choice of “a while” vs. “a few years”). I also feel like he might be a new-ish celebrity (<10 years), because LW says he is “<i>now well-known”?
Ergo, Channing Tatum
Channing Tatum
I feel like it has to be someone who recently became famous or this would have come up before.
Oh my god, that last letter. If I had started my period at my boyfriend’s house and stained his couch and his mom cleaned it up for me? I WOULD HAVE DIED.
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEES!
This is one of my favourite gifs ever. The person who created it is clearly a Genius of Our Times.
Beads?
That Marriott thing drives me crazy. PAY YOUR FUCKING EMPLOYEES. Jesus Christ.
(I am not one of those I-don’t-tip psychopaths. But someone’s daily wage shouldn’t depend on some random person who is not their employer remembering to put a couple bucks on the table while rushing around getting ready, possibly hungover, certainly cranky, definitely out of my element in an unfamiliar place.)
Related to this, what’s the universal location that indicates “this is a tip for you, housekeeper, please take it” — anyone who’s worked as a housekeeper want to weigh in?
On top of the pillow. (I haven’t worked as a housekeeper, but a previous job where we had a lot of travel included a helpful lecture on how to be a good guest. The other note: For a multi-day stay, tip daily; the same person may not be working in your room every day.)
Oh yikes, in the past I’ve left money on the last day of my stay. Going to start tipping every day now! I don’t stay in hotels very often but now I feel guilty for maybe having stiffed people in the past. 🙁
oh, that’s very smart, and had literally never occurred to me. Thanks!
Usually what I’ve done is taken a notepaper or envelopes (if it’s a “business hotel”) and written “Housekeeping” on the note, put the money on it, folded it or just left it there. No possibility of mistaking that anywhere.
The tipping system in the US seems very strange to someone from a rather different country and uncomfortably close to begging.
I recently had to explain the tipping thing to a European colleague who was born, educated, and currently lives in Europe, but travels to the US frequently for business. As I was explaining all the various situations in which you do or do not tip, I started hearing myself and it was like, wait, am I the crazy one here? This is clearly insane. It was like when you see the same word a bunch of times and it stops looking like a word and starts looking like a random jumble of letters. (The large amounts of wine we consumed certainly didn’t help things, either.)
Then I got to the part about how servers don’t even make minimum wage and colleague’s jaw actually dropped, like we were in a cartoon.
A few years ago I was a cashier at a clothing store and a French guy tried to tip me $2. He seemed really confused when I explained that you’re not expected/supposed to tip retail employees.
Here in Canada, servers do make (at least) minimum wage – except in Quebec where minimum wage for workers receiving gratuities is $1.45 less than regular minimum wage, and in some provinces the minimum wage for liquor servers is also a bit lower. I tip because it’s such a deeply ingrained a cultural expectation/standard, but it is so frustratingly arbitrary. Is the server making minimum wage really more deserving of a tip than the sales clerk making minimum wage, who’s running between the sales floor and the stockroom all day or bringing new clothes for me to try on in the dressing room?
AH and THEN – at some food places I am encouraged to tip when I myself do all the usual “service” type things – i.e. where it is counter service, I bus my own table or even there are no tables, etc. Nobody brings me my food, and nobody cleans up after me. Food carts are a prime example. I always do tip, because I don’t want to be a monster. But then at my favourite local deli the lovely people make my sandwiches while I wait and there is no tip jar or tip option. So I don’t tip.
And the whole thing seems so… crazy to me. Like, I don’t tip the person who MADE my pre-made sandwich I bought at a coffee shop. But I am encouraged to tip the person who hands it to me and takes my money. But I don’t tip at a grocery store. And on and on.
I’m in BC, where there is no lower minimum wage for tipped workers. I used to work for tips, and let me tell you, it’s the most money I ever could have made without an expensive education. I was a young blonde white lady with boobs, and I made piles of money quite often. But I tell you, my contribution to society as a server/bartender was way lower than a teacher or a pre-school teacher or a bureaucrat at the welfare office.
The whole thing is so completely fucked up.
I have friends who are not quitting their food service jobs because, at the trendy restaurants they work at, they make $35 – $40 an hour.
On the flip side, when I worked at Tim Hortons in a very low income area, all of my customers were really good about tipping (even without prompts). They knew that the majority of the workers there were supporting families on minimum wage and the extra quarters made a difference added up.
My friends who worked at Tim’s in more affluent areas received practically no tips.
It’s just so ARBITRARY. Like, of course those Tim Horton’s workers need all the quarters they can get. But so do people working at other kinds of outlets. But they don’t get them.
What cracks me up is when Americans go abroad and start fuming about how “they” expect tips for “every little thing.” BECAUSE OUR SYSTEM MAKES SO MUCH SENSE???
(Also it infuriates me, but that’s a different diatribe.)
Sometimes it feels that way more than other times. I worked at a “resort” (read: older, falling apart lodge in the middle of a national forest) where they ran family camp programs in the summer. At the end of every week, the manage would stand up during the evening entertainment and essentially beg the guests to tip. It was definitely more uncomfortable, but it worked, and when tips amount to about a third of your wages you do whatever it takes.
YES.
The tipping system in the US seems very strange to some people born and raised in the US. As chickpeas said, it is super-weird and bizarro and makes no real sense in its current iteration.
And I kinda hate it. I would much, much prefer a system where service employees are all just paid a real living wage, regardless of whether I’m an asshole to them or remembered to hit an atm on the way to my haircut or can calculate 18% correctly after *mumbled number* drinks.
I actually have a math trick that I use to compensate for drunkenness — I end up overtipping by design, which I feel is fair given that drunk people are annoying and also, is just a good investment if you go to the same bar a lot:
Take the total amount of your bill + tax — let’s say, $25.30. Move the decimal place to the left one digit and drop the last digit: $2.53. Multiply this by two: $5.06. Round up to nearest full dollar: $6. Now, you’ve just tipped 23.7%, but the confidence that you’re not a drunk undertipper/terrible person? Priceless.
I always write “20%” or “30%” on the tip line, because I assume they have calculators.
People who handle receipts: Am I a jerk?
When I waited tables, we could only legally enter a tip equaling the exact amount listed on the “Total” line. This meant that if someone added their tip in wrong, even if they meant well, we were held accountable for the number written as the total.
I don’t believe a restaurant can or should charge you for a tip unspecified. Some people tip before tax, some people after tax, so your server would have to make a judgement call as to which number they should multiply by your given percentage. It leaves them open for a crazy amount of liability.
Ack! I’m sorry, people I’ve stiffed or inconvenienced. 🙁
I’ll use exact dollar amounts from now on. Thank you!
You vastly overestimate my ability to accurately do math drunk.
(But this, more crudely, is also my trick. Move the decimal, double it, round up.)
I moved abroad and am basically only an Adult staying in hotels by myself in Europe, but I was in a hotel in Orlando a few months ago and didn’t tip the housekeeper because I didn’t realize this was a thing I need to do?? Christ I don’t know how to deal with the US any more.
I just found out I am a jerk too! I feel like if you grew up in a family that was, let’s say, not quite middle-class, and your family never stayed in hotels, you basically have no clue.
I haven’t worked as a housekeeper, but I work at a hotel, and want to second the tipping every day for a multi-day stay.
I don’t think there’s any place in particular that is universal; I’d just leave a note with the tip that you’d like to leave.
I’ve stayed a few places where there are little notecardy things by the TV or bedside table that say something to the effect of ‘Your room was prepared by ______!’ I tend to leave tips under those (though not usually every day, I’m a dirtbag oh noooo), but will use an envelope or something if the room doesn’t have one.
I hate that it requires me to have the proper change. I wish I could add it onto my bill so I could pay it with my card, which, you know, is the same thing as if they just paid their employee more.
I also hate that I can’t get a receipt – it makes business travel personally expensive, which ARGH.
A reputable office should let you have a small per diem for miscellaneous expenses, which should specifically cover tips to room staff and bellboys without the need for a receipt. If yours doesn’t, point out that it’s standard to provide $5 per day of travel (even under the sequester rules, the government’s per diem rate still includes it, and private companies should be able to stretch at least as far).
Holy crap we’re supposed to tip housekeeping and I never knew this. How do I right the wrongs?!
Uh, I was browsing the Globe & Mail’s website just now and saw the following headline in the Life section: “What if anorexia wasn’t a disorder, but a passion?”
I’m over my limit of free G&M articles for the month so I couldn’t read it – which is just as well because the title alone gave me a rage-headache. What the hell??
The headline sucks, but the article itself was interesting. The researcher was talking about the area of the brain and the brain chemistry at work in anorexia and how traditional treatments don’t work for many patients. The researcher used passion in its traditional religious sense of suffering. And how a new way of framing how people with anorexia feel about their illness may inform treatment and have better outcomes. I can’t remember the exact stats, but a higher percentage of people with anorexia die than those with depression.
Okay, that definitely sounds a lot better than I thought it would be! I should make a note to read it 2 weeks from now when my 10 free articles roll over.
Contact me at pocket.rockette50(at)Gmail.com. I’ll send you a PDF.
Ahhhh I am always so PUMPED whenever one of THG films come out. I love those books and films blindly, with my whole heart. I never cease to be thrilled and a little gleeful at the extent to which this female sci-fi/action hero just dominates the film season. Like I remember standing in line for the first one and just wanting to shriek, “Keep your Dark Knight and your Spiderman and whatever. THIS ONE’S MINE! Mine, motherfuckerrrrrrs!”
Related: I just read that Roxanne Gay is Team Peeta too, and so I will brook no further argument on the subject.
KATNISSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!! (Sorry, Katniss is second only to Buffy in my heart, and actually at this point they might be right about equal in my boundless love for them.)
I was going back and forth on whether book!Katniss’s (realistic) limitations in Mockingjay were enough to keep her from reaching Buffy-level sainthood. But then I realized Mockingjay Katniss is basically identical to Season 7 Buffy, so the comparison is actually more apt. (Although I stand by my assessment that Season 7 Buffy is definitely not my favorite Buffy. That season was about one-quarter absolutely amazing and three-quarters filler fluff.)
I was also debating how to rank Katniss, Buffy, Veronica Mars and the rest of the Strong Female Protagonist canon (or at least the ones worth discussing, since I’ll also happily explain the harms of the trope). But then, of course, came the realization that in Matriarchy, we shall have much less need of hierarchy! All our warriors can be worthy of songs of praise without need for something as base as rankings.
WAIT SO WHO IS YOUR FAVORITE BUFFY. Mine is proooobably season six. And three. And two! (Can we talk about Buffy all day?)
And UGH. I totally agree on the 1/4 amazing and 3/4 fluff assessment. I just did a season 7 rewatch and I just…GOD. It could have been so much better and it’s really frustrating to me that my favorite show ever ever ever ended with such a mediocre season. (Although “Chosen” makes me cry every single damn time.) Like, less Spike, please, and more Watcher Junior Dawn, and for gods sake Tara never should have died, Willow was so far gone with the magics that *anything* could have tipped her over the edge rather than the whole big-pain-so-you-get-a-freebie-for-this-killing spree. And WHY DID ANDREW GET SO MUCH SCREENTIME.
Mostly I just want a Tara/Anya/Dawn triumvirate of Lady Watcher goodness, and for there to be LESS SPIKE.
I’m doing a season 4 rewatch now, and even though it’s not the most exciting season, each episode is SO much more on-point, as far as writing goes, than season 7. Almost every single episode is so solid in season four (except maybe for “Where the Wild Things Are” but I’m pretty lukewarm on Riley so I might be biased)
Oh, oh my. Season 4 is undisputed King of Terrible in my circle’s ratings. Season 6’s quality varies dramatically from viewer to viewer (I loved it, but there are a couple of haters), and likewise assessments of Season 7 run hot and cold; seasons 5 and 3 vye for the top spot (Glory! The mayor! Faith!); no one should bother even discussing season 1. It is a different show, to be enjoyed (or not) depending on your personal love of camp.
What season 4 and 7 share is a few stand-out stand-alone episodes in seasons that otherwise can’t decide what to do with the bulk of the episodes in the middle. Hush is amazing and deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Once More, With Feeling and The Body. (And like OMWF, it is made more amazing by understanding where it fits within the season’s arcs.) Similarly, Selfless and Conversations With Dead People show a season 7 that really, really wants to push the limits and do something new (and a bit scary) with what Evil can truly be. But the Initiative & Adam are just so cheesy (and thematically dull), and I honestly find so many of the early season 4 episodes unwatchable. The meeting and courtship of Tara is very sweet, but none of the other characters do much that’s interesting.
And that’s before we get to the big ol’ eyeroll that is Riley. My official position is that Riley makes an incredible interesting ex-boyfriend (that moment he reappears in season 6, my heart always flip-flops with Buffy’s, it’s so perfectly executed), but oh such a uselessly dull boyfriend.
But you were asking about my favorite iteration of Buffy, the character. Thinking it through, it seems like there’s not a lot of time she isn’t in some fairly advanced emotional pain, although I think even the acute depression of early s06 is sixteen times more interesting than the endless “I’m giving another ‘suck it up’ tough talk speech to the proto-slayers now, it’s been a whole 20 minutes since my last one” that runs through s07.
So, for my favorite angsty Buffy, I’ll go with late season 2. Her journey to learning to run her boyfriend through with a big sword was well-nuanced without being interminable, I think. Plus, when she gets there, it meets no more terrible Boreanaz “accent” time.
For non-angsty, the options seem to mostly be season 3 or… season 3.
Really, s07 boiled down to “everything is terrible, you’re all going to suffer, but you’ll probably save the world before you die horribly, also I feel nothing” whenever she talked to the proto-slayers.
I am quite fond of both Season 4 and Season 1 (although I admit that some of Season 4 is terrible). Seasons 5-7 are my least favourite, although possibly in part because I’ve rewatched them less than the others – the tone is pretty bleak throughout, and I find that they drag a bit. Season 3 is my favourite, but my favourite episode (episodes?) is “Becoming” Parts 1 and 2.
I first watched the show a few years after it came off the air, and then did all seven seasons in a row from beginning to end. I’ve also run through the whole series a few more times like that. I definitely found my season-to-season rankings switched around a bit on the rewatches.
I think the second half of season 2 through the end of season 3 are definitely when the original formula shines. Buffy + Angel + High School + a very dim awareness of the rest of the town outside of high school + Faith/Spike/Drucilla. Season 3, in particular, does a great job of having the “monster of the week” be some variation on “ohemgee being a teenager is terrible.”
My thoughts on s04 are below, but seasons 5-7 are basically all attempts at “the scoobies try to figure out how to be grown-ups”. And since we’re all on that phase of life now, I think it makes sense that which parts (if any) of those attempts resonate with us will change as we do.
Hahahaha Undisputed King of Terrible. I don’t know, maybe I’m just really nostalgic for college right now? But I’m enjoying my season 4 rewatch! (I mean, this is coming from the girl who love love love LOVES Beer Bad, so, you know, grain of salt). But my brother and I are watching it now, and more than once I just had to pause it and be like, “You know what? This kinda rocks.”
Like…Whatsit. Something Blue? Love Something Blue. And Hush, as you mentioned above, OF COURSE. And This Year’s Girl and Who Are You (I mean, I will take Faith ANYTHING, but I looooooove watching Eliza Dushku impersonate SMG and vice versa).
And TARA oh my god. We get shy, sweet, awkward Tara and MISS KITTY FANTASTICO and okaaaay sure maybe I just drank my pumpkin beer too fast right now but I am currently all about season four haha.
PS. I totally agree that Adam is super cheesy, though. I feel like they dropped the ball in a big way by killing Maggie off and making Adam the Big Bad. Because clearly Maggie shoulda been the Big Bad.
Heh. I think, in the end, we will still disagree about season 4 (which is great! I just mean that I put Beer Bad baaaarely above Where the Wild Things Are. And the latter gets a mandatory “skip” on any rewatch these days.)
I first watched the series barely a year or two out of college. But I found their attempt to replace “high school” as a character in seasons 2-3 with “college” to be mostly a bunch of paper-thin tropes. Oh, look, Buffy doesn’t like her roommate! It’s hard to keep up your high school relationship! Some guys are manipulators who just want to hook up! Beer can be fun but not in excess! I have a friend whose distaste for s06 mostly comes from his view that the addiction plot is too After School Special in its heavy-handed familiarity. I kinda feel that way about how s04 portrays college, especially in the first half. Of course, almost none of those tropes applied to my college life; I suppose I might feel differently if they were more familiar from reality instead of from generic teen movies.
Re: PS. If they could have done Prof. Walsh as Big Bad with the same sophistication they did the Trio, it would definitely have raised the caliber of season 4 significantly. I could definitely see them doing it as a poorly-executed, boring version of a “sudden betrayal!” in that season, though.
KATNISS!!!
I need to find this about Roxanne Gay and Team Peeta, because that’s a collision of two wonderful things I wish to see together.
It is in Bad Feminist!
It’s in Bad Feminist. She says something along the lines of “Gale? I cannot speak of him.” AND I AGREE. She is the best.
Correct ranking of Katniss’ romantic options:
1: Johanna
2: Peeta
3: No one
….
Eleventy-billion: Gale (I wish him happiness, and I wouldn’t hesitate to help teach Liam Hemsworth to find peace of spirit through, say, tantric sex, but the closest Gale comes to earning Katniss’ awesomeness is just recognizing that it’s worth earning.)
“Sorry
You’ve already voted on that comment.”
LIKE HELL I HAVE. LET ME VOTE IT AGAIN!
Team Gale. Come at me 😀
I WILL.not. speak of him.
Are the book characters like the movie ones? Because Gale seems like someone she actually has things in common with and Peeta is kind of a sad puppydog she might feel sorry for and/or appreciate help from but not really be attracted to.
I find book Gale to be insufferable when he’s paying attention to Katniss but a competent, reasonble person when he’s doing things for the revolution (mostly in Mockingjay). Movie Gale, at least so far, is more moderate but also a bit forgettable. I agree that Katniss has more in common with him as far as how they were raised – that’s canon – but Peeta has the games in common with her, so…
(Haven’t finished the last book yet, fyi.)
They changed the worst thing he did in the first one, because in the movie he doesn’t want to run away because he wants to help in the revolution, while from what I remember in the books he refuses to leave unless she says she loves him and she’s too caught up in trying to keep her family and friends alive to deal with that so he stays.
Yes! I don’t watch many movies – I prefer tv and books. But I went to see Catching Fire in the theatre with my sister (who also doesn’t really watch movies) and 4 female friends and it was just an amazing experience.
WHY WOULD ANYONE BE TEAM GALE THOUGH
WHY
HE EXISTS ONLY AS A LITERARY DEVICE TO REPRESENT WHO KATNISS THOUGHT SHE WAS/MIGHT HAVE BEEN AND THE HOLD THAT HAS ON HER I MEAN FOR GOD’S SAKE TEAM GALE IS LITERALLY RETROGRADE
I didn’t think it was possible to hate evopsych more. I was wrong.
Evolutionary psychology, atheism (of the youtube video making, fedora-wearing kind), and mens rights activism are all just sort of lumped together for me in a pile of NOPE
Me too, except pale is in there too.
I get a lot of joy from studies that actually test the assumptions at the base of evolutionary psychology. Because so often they just NOPE all over the theory. A recent example – women are supposed to be attracted to handsome, testosterone-faced dudes because they’re supposed to be all fertile and healthy and whatnot. One problem… it looks like men with more masculine faces might actually have lower semen quality. Wah-waaah.
It is the absolute worst thing and I hate that it even exists.
Gotta love the first example given in the article. Professor Clark the Third couldn’t think of ANY reason a woman wouldn’t want to follow a strange man back to his house, other than evolution? He couldn’t come up with any other theory for why men would be less cautious about this?
If you pointed this out to him I’m 98% sure he would recover with “Ah, so you’re suggesting that men evolved to rape and women evolved to fear rape!”
I just had flashbacks to LiveJournal evopsych debates.
This is the study that made me abandon the thought of studying psychology in college because it was so astoundingly dumb and off base that I lost interest in the entire discipline. (sorry! I know there are many other kinds of psych!) I started taking feminist studies classes instead and got a minor. I have 0 regrets [except not getting a double but that’s a different story].
I have started to get tired of explaining yet again why evo psych is not science and is not useful in any way. I am glad I can just send them a link now.
Reading evolutionary biology theory nonsense (calling them Just So stories is PERFECT, yes) always reminds me of this SMBC comic: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2853
Giggling forever.
While I always tip housekeepers, servers and others, (since I know all too well how underpaid they are,) the REAL issue here is that corporations are asking their customers to supplement their employees’ wages so the corporations don’t have to. The restaurant and hospitality Industry isn’t paying their people enough so they can make higher profits. Their employees are often on food stamps. Basically our labor and tax rules are subsidizing profitable corporations to underpay their employees.
I mean I know the economy still sucks and consumers are price conscious but really? An extra 5 a room a night would that kill them? Its not the ultra-budget-inn-and-lice-farm.
I think I’m in a minority, but I’ve always preferred working for tips. I feel like, yeah, you have bad days, but overall it sifts out to where I make more than I’d have any expectation of making as a flat wage. I mean, sure, ideally, we’d all have a living wage, but as compared to people working in retail or other non-tipped service professions? I always took home significantly more, and it’s fun to know there’s theoretically no ceiling on your day’s income. For me, the shitty days always kinda came out in the wash. I side-eye the “let’s get rid of tipping!” because when I was working in restaurants and coffeeshops, and even now doing tipped spa work, I feel 99% sure that a flat wage would be an income hit for me.
I realize other people in tipping professions disagree with me, and I’m sure it varies by where exactly you work.
But if you work as a maid you are INVISIBLE. I worked as a hotel maid back in my youth at a resort thingy, and the waiters all got tips, and made the same hourly wage as we did. Our team of 5 people or so, who cleaned between 30 and 100 rooms per day, plus common areas, I think we got tipped maybe 10 times total in that many weeks. And we scrubbed hairs out of tubs and changed sheets. not carried food to and from a table. It’s pretty wierd who we tip and who we don’t.
KATNISSSSSSS
Actor and explorer Michael Palin, visiting in 2001, described one elderly bookkeeper showing off his priceless wares. “In some cases the pages have come loose from their bindings, but in all of them the quality of the work is exquisite. They have been in his family for centuries and he treats the texts like old friends, moving his finger from right to left, as the Chinese and Japanese do, across the delicate, spidery calligraphy.”
the only bit of Zizek I can really be doing with is the bit where he calls Michael Palin a racist. I don’t need Z to point that out for me, but it does make if ‘funnier’.
omg yes.
Also the article was very sparse. Would like to know more, but with fewer incorrect and even-if-correct-would-still-be-totally-random references to other languages.
I’m extremely wary of the part where the article says the books are decaying due to age and “mishandling.” Mishandling, from the people who have been caring for them for generations. Right. Maybe the changed climate and decline in resources has more to do with it, bub.
UH HUNH. Funny how they managed to preserve them for hundreds of years, while the cities flourished and the Sahara wasn’t gobbling up the continent.
Wellllllll if I might be allowed to put on my art historian glasses for a minute, there isn’t enough information to tell for sure, so wary is a good approach. Some ancient scrolls, especially papyrus (which I doubt these are), hold up very well when sealed and left alone, but then crumble when touched. There are some that miiiiiight be from the same time and place as Christ held at Yale, I think, that can’t be opened and read because they’re too delicate (I assume they hold all the answers to every Biblical contradiction and mystery, naturally). And while the ancestral caretakers of these documents may have been geniuses at care and preservation, it’s possible some of that skill might have been lost from generation to generation–or maybe not. That’s not unique to desert tribes; even different libraries and archives from town to town in America have competing views on book preservation and handling (the one where I researched the most during grad school was anti-white gloves). But the line that gave me pause was that bit at the end where the caretakers said they refused to give up the scrolls to the national archives for professional-grade preservation. Maybe the scientific standards in Mauritania aren’t so great (looking at you, National Archives in Cairo). Maybe they’re first-class! Either way, as a historian I despair for someone who cares more about their personal connection to an object than its proper preservation (i.e., I rail against natural human emotions).
You guyyyyyssss! The Mindy Project is back TONIGHT! I am so, so, so very happy!
I AM SO EXCITED
like, all caps excited.
Here’s a link, in case anyone needed a reminder that the ocean is a terrifying, unknowable deep! Make sure to watch the video ’cause it’s loads better than the gifs.
ohmigod it’s like the insides of my vacuum bag with a saw on the end of it ohmigod
THAT IS AMAZING
This is why “unlimited rides in ALVIN” tops the list of “things I would do with unlimited piles of money.”
WHOA.
We live on a magical planet.
Fun link for fans of bullshit police violence/ police provocation. . http://www.abc2news.com/news/crime-checker/baltim…
Imagine how that would’ve gone if she hadn’t put her body on the line to stop the attack?
My Mum was having a conversation with my Nana about the next visa we have to apply for, so that my partner can live in my country.
My Nana: “But why does he need a visa? He’s not an immigrant.”
Which is pretty darn close to what my partner’s Grandfather has said about me.
Contrary to what you, dear Toastie, might think, people from other western countries, who have learnt to speak the language, have had tertiary education, are white and are nice are NOT immigrants. Those other people, though…
The things you learn *sigh*
Oooh, I forgot the best bit! (Just remember that I’m from NZ)
Nana: “And he isn’t bringing any diseases” (subtext, like THEY do)
Mum: “You mean like when the Europeans arrived here with measles?”
BOOM
10 points to your mum!
I married a not-an-immigrant, by those standards. Guess he can just go vote in our upcoming election, then!
Edit ’cause of reading fail. (Oooops!)
Yeah, if only it’d be that easy, aye…
Yeah, it’s something I think about from time to time myself. I live in Europe, I am still technically in grad school but I’m working and have a cat, but Geert Wilders wouldn’t find anything wrong with me (even though my Dutch is rudimentary at best). I’m an “expat” and not an “immigrant.” Or some nonsense.
Yeah, I know someone who is Asian-American (actually an immigrant herself, but as a child, so she’s a citizen, no accent, etc.) married to a white European immigrant, and you know she still gets way more shit out in the world than he does.
People are the worst.
yeah… I married a non-American white European person, and everyone in my family was convinced he acquired citizenship immediately by marrying me. Had to say, um, nooope, INS makes us apply and do interviews too. And be fingerprinted and investigated and whatnot, just like anyone else.
The next exciting moment is when I explain to them that he actually doesn’t want American citizenship anyway, being a permanent resident alien is just fine, and he has no desire to cut ties with his country of origin, why should he. It’s a great place. It has the rest of his family in it. They look very confused but they stop asking questions.
People are depressing sometimes.
The Atlanta Hawks thing is where the asshole said the stadium should play more of “the kind of music that 40-year-old white guys like,” right? Does he not know that that is actually hip-hop??? Possibly several-years-out-of-date hip-hop, but still.
Seriously, can we QUIT with this notion that hip-hop is some kind of crazy, newfangled thing the kids do? You know who 40-year-old white guys were rocking out to in high school? LL Cool J and Run DMC.
Exactly. I don’t think I know a 40-year-old white guy who does’t like at least some rap music. And I know a lot of 40yo white guys.
I think it’s just a trick to subject the rest of us to more U2.
roughly 20 percent of all mammals
What?! Crazy! I love bats. AND bees.
I get sad allover again whenever I see Philip Seymour Hoffman.
OUTLANDER. Surely they know we are not just here for the 18th-century repartee. Give the people what they want, for chrissake.
Also, Graham McTavish, what a fox.
I just found out they’ve SPLIT THE SEASON, and I am devastated. You know they’re just gonna start going to bonetown and then we have to wait until fucking JANUARY.
Bats and bees: two of my least favorite bugs.
On Outlander: “You’re telling me Claire will have a blank slate and that amazing body to work with? There is a god and her name is Beyoncé.” Thank you, Roxane Gay, you are a national treasure.
I am unreasonably excited about the prospect of the next episode. Like, I am breathing weird and have heart palpitations just thinking about it.
Mosquito Control. That’s what we say when the neighbors ask about the bat boxes we install. It soothes the bat-phobic and it’s the truth.
OH YEAH BAT HOUSES 4EVA
I installed a bat house at the only privately-owned house I ever lived in as an adult, and it really did seem to help with mosquito control. I wouldn’t have thought one single bat house would make a difference, even in the geographically weird little ecosphere created by our location, so maybe I’m just very suggestible.
At the same time, I gave a bat house to my parents, who were… less enthusiastic… despite their property swarming with mosquitos. Having predicted that, I also gave them a butterfly house, which they loved, especially Mom. I should get her one for the new house! [jots down gift idea]
[This has been Early Christmas-List Planning with Emily]
I’m currently reading Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Bees”. A WHOLE BOOK of poems about bees (well, sort of), by the first woman AND first openly queer person AND first Scot to be Britain’s poet laureate. I commend her excellent work to all Toastrons.
Seconding Carol Ann Duffy. I studied her collection “The World’s Wife” – poems in the voices of women elided or passed over in history and myth – for A-Level and hated it at first; gradually it grew on me. One of her later collections, “Rapture”, is also excellent. I am shamefully ill-acquainted with her early work.
… I should go read “Rapture” again.
Reputable evolutionary psychologists (whose work is not always all that sensational and Daily Mail/Jezebel screed-worthy) are very concerned with taking culture into account, using data from as wide a range of humanity as possible, taking a nuanced view of what “hardwired” means and how environment and instinct interact, and not making moral or social prescriptions simply because something is “natural”. The liberal aversion to EP is a just another kind of creationism and I’m sick of it. The idea that we’re so smart and special that we can outrun the millions of years of evolution that has shaped our brains, just as it’s shaped the rest of our bodies, is ridiculous. That Nation article is embarrassingly (deliberately?) obtuse. It’s a cartoon version of what EP actually is.
I had a comment about enjoying research that ends up undermining EP theories above, but you are very right about this. There are also some interesting researchers doing work on integrating feminist theory (essentially the culture side) and EP theory – Charlotte Chuck Tate at SFSU, Christine Harris at UC San Diego. Lisa Diamond at the University of Utah, kind of.
I think a major dividing line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ evo-psych research is how much the researchers attempt to actually integrate biology – measuring hormones or ovulation rather than just counting days to estimate the menstrual cycle, for example, or actually taking blood testosterone levels in men or whatever. Having interviewed a lot of evolutionary psychologists, there are an unfortunate number who really do buy into the theories before the evidence is really on hand, and pretty much any results are seen as a way to bolster the worldview. But that is not everyone, by far, and the more nuanced people don’t talk to the media or write pop-sci books, so much.
Um, apparently I have lots of opinions about evolutionary psychology!
Cool: can you suggest specific papers?
Sure! This is sort of a random smattering of things I’ve run across and seen – I’m a science journalist and evo psych is only one thing on my occasional radar, so don’t mistake me for an expert!
A look at facial masculinity and semen quality that brings biological rigor to the picture
A theory piece on why can’t evo psych and feminism just get along?
Warning, PDF: Shifts in masculinity preference across the menstrual cycle: still not there
Another PDF disagreeing with the first PDF
Why is facial symmetry so hot? Obviously that is not really what they titled the paper.
The semen link has replaced the theory link!
Hm. It is good to read that people are replicating earlier studies in a rigorous manner, and of course publishing negative results is a good thing; but do you have any material that is both more rigorous and does something other than provide evidence against the poorly supported papers of the past?
Hm, probably nothing much that jumps to mind offhand, which doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, just that it isn’t in my memory stores for the last few months! I’m reporting on this one right now. They find a small effect and you may or may not be impressed by the rigor, but I was impressed by the authors when I interviewed them. They were in line with what YoungLeafedJune discussed above, interpreting cautiously, pointing out that culture and society can override instinct even if their findings are true, emphasizing the need for replication.
If you can’t get to that link the paper title is “Assortative Mating on Ideology Could Operate Through Olfactory Cues.”
All right, my paper reading brain is my jerkbrain, so I’m going to be mean while assessing papers.
They don’t report on the p-value of their findings or any other test that determines how likely this was to arise by chance, they recruited the conservatives and the liberals by wildly different methods, they treat sex as a binary, and THEY DECIDE THAT THIS IS CAUSATION, NOT CORRELATION, WITHOUT PROVIDING EVIDENCE THAT THEY’VE CONTROLLED FOR ANY POSSIBLE FACTORS LEADING TO CORRELATION.
Also the only data matrix is very badly labeled.
OK; it is possible to calculate the p-value from the data they have, and it’s like .046 for Model 1, so hey, it’s signifcantish,
Are they cheering a p-value of less than 0.1 for Model 2 and Model 3? What even. That’s like the odds that you’ll roll more than 10 on two six side die. Why would you even publish that without the equivalent of a big-ole shrug?
Wait, isn’t the female population more generally liberal? Why don’t they talk about the political affiliations of each gender in the study? The p-value for thinking the other gender is sexy is like 0.00055, which is FANTASTIC, why don’t they reassure us that the political affiliation data is not an artifact of having a bit of a gender binary?
Wait, I was a bit heterosexist AND I didn’t make any sense. If people tended to be liberal ladies and conservative dudes, you’d see an across-party tendency. That is not what they saw. Still, since they recruited liberals by existing on a college campus and conservatives by calling every single conservative campus club and encouraging them to ask their friends and then also mailing lists and media advertisements.
You know, probably a lot of the conservative test subjects knew one another, since they were recruited via social networks. I wonder if there’s good cause to say they knew the smell of their friends and preferred that?
Haha! The attached links have data, and the women are like 75% liberal, hilarious!
Well, not enough data for me to understand that stupid chart; probably I am talking to myself now, but anyone wanna tap in?
Huh, the standard deviations on preference for ideology are ENORMOUS. That’s not great for evidence.
“I was impressed by the authors when I interviewed them”
Charisma /= Rigor
And some of their basic assertions are bananas.
“the olfactory bulb has direct connections with the seat of emotion in the amygdala and the center of memory in the hippocampus. This indicates the importance that natural selection placed on odorants, in some ways privileging speed of learning by smell over that offered by vision or hearing.”
No. No it does not. It only indicates is that chemo-sensory processes are extremely ancient traits, which, anyone familiar with the evolution of animals can tell you predates both hearing and sight. Evo psych does this all the time. It presumes that the way something is organized is based solely on fairly recent evolutionary pressures when in fact a great many adaptive traits are just awkwardly re-purposed from more ancient traits. If smell were an important trait for human evolution (more so than sight or hearing) we’d be good at it. Compared to other mammals, primates have abysmal senses of smell, just tragically bad, but we have comparably fantastic eyesight.
I’m not certain, but I’d be willing to bet that crocodiles have their sense of smell wired to pretty much the same brain structures we do, maybe even sharks. That doesn’t mean sharks use their sense of smell to determine political affiliation of their mates or that crocodiles use scent as a mate selection criteria, it just means that rewiring highly conserved and ancient portions of the brain is really hard to do.
Totally agree! Hating evo psych is such a meme at this point. So what, just because a few idiots use it to support antiquated views of gender roles, we’re not allowed to consider the evolutionary basis of behavior ever?
There are lots of other fields that consider the evolutionary basis of behaviors, most of them in evolutionary biology. Before you can reliably decide whether something is causal you have to have a good understanding of how common it is, where it came from, and what it might have been used for in our ancestors and extant relatives. That’s a pretty tall order for a psychologist, it’s just not their area.
Mostly, I think it’s important to keep in mind that human culture and behavior varies wildly over time and location, with very few over-arching constants, so the evolutionary basis of any specific human behavior, in general, is that we’ve evolved as a social species with highly plastic behaviors which may largely the result of environmental pressures and that any behavior can be modified by a society very quickly if there is enough internal or external pressure.
I don’t think we’ve outrun millions of years of evolution. I just think that humans, both now and then, have evolved to be highly adaptive to social situations, and that this flexibility can cancel out or completely overwhelm whatever our “default” or “evolved” sexual mores are. I also dislike the idea that evolution leads to homogenous attitudes and adaptations across humanity, when every other social species has niches and specialities within its communities. The article is addressing a cartoon evo psych because that is what is popular right now, and it is wrong enough to be worth addressing.
“The liberal aversion to EP is a just another kind of creationism and I’m sick of it.”
What? No. I have yet to see an EP paper that shows the kind of rigor expected from a standard scientific paper. There’s probably a couple hiding out somewhere, but they’re less “sexy” and overwhelmed by the crap coming out of that discipline. When evopsych cleans up its act and polices itself the way other disciplines do, I will take it seriously, but it can’t expect non-practitioners to mine for the couple of nuggets in the mountain of dogshit.
“When evopsych cleans up its act and polices itself the way other disciplines do, I will take it seriously”
Basically.
My issue is that people are dismissing the idea, not just the discipline (which I don’t think is as shitty as you believe). A few idiots write the equivalent of “women were born to be barefoot and pregnant!” articles, and that makes it ok to completely write off the idea of evolution influencing our behavior at all (or in any but a very primitive way). We have to pretend that our minds popped into being magically, or that culture creates everything anew constantly, because otherwise this boogeyman of an evolutionary psychologist might come and force all women to like take-charge men and all men to want to fuck as many women as possible.
Fair enough. I agree that our evolution has shaped our brains, and as a baby scientist I was interested in it, but I got pretty disillusioned by the quality of the work I was seeing and comparing that to the animal behaviour stuff I was more involved in. I don’t really have time or the access to journals anymore to regularly read the pure journals, so I do tend to see the more high visibility stuff. The poor logic in the published papers I do end up reading has not convinced me that there is any rigorous peer-reviewing there and I am leery, as someone outside that field, from assuming I can sort which of the papers are decent and which are not if the reviewers and editors are going to let any old thing through.
Yeah, that stuck out to me. I think “creationist of the mind” is a pretty popular phrase among evolutionary psychologists, but it seems pretty smug when your best-known proponent is Satoshi Kanazawa.
Got any reputable ep’s for a curious ‘interested in human evolution, don’t believe I needed a passed-down mutation to tell me not to follow strange men home, wtf’ layperson to check out?
Would you like to suggest researchers and papers you have found to be interesting and well-designed?
Seconding the request for specific papers! I have no problem at all with the idea that evolution has shaped human behavior, but it was my impression that evolutionary psychology is a very new field that’s still figuring out its methods. Happy to be proven wrong!
there’s no other place to say this so can I treat this as an open thread for a sec? I had sex for the first time in ages on Sunday (self-five!) and now my hip flexors are super sore! Nicole, what stretches do I do???
Dude, that deserves a double high-five at least!!! But also, I have stupid hip flexors! I’ve started doing yoga videos targeted for the hips and hamstrings which may help.
http://www.doyogawithme.com/content/yoga-therapy-…
http://www.doyogawithme.com/content/happy-hamstri…
There’s definitely a pose or two I couldn’t do at first, because my hips were yelling STOPPP, but I’m still working dem hips into submission.
Also, hip pain makes me feel soooo much older than I actually am.
thanks for the links! I’ll try those when I get home.
I’m kind of waddling around like an old lady and it’s very sad but also VERY GREAT BECAUSE YAY so I feel conflicted.
it’s been 7 years but this is still my go-to hip opening sequence
http://www.yogajournal.com/article/practice-secti…
All hail the pigeon! The pigeon will do beautiful things for your hip flexibility and core strength. It’s weird to get into, but once you find your balance, gravity works to pull you deeper into it and it actually feels fantastic.
Congratulations on the sex!
oooh I just tried that on my office floor and it felt great. thanks!
also thanks everyone for all the sex thumbs-up, you guys are great 🙂
From a lady in a hell of a dry spell, I say to you, mazel tov, and may your hip flexors feel better.
Also there should absolutely be some sort of Stretching For Sexy Times series somewhere.
OMG thank you, this is the best. 🙂 I would read the hell out of Stretching For Sexy Times series, especially since I am pretty sure this was only occasion #1 of many (oh god I hope so)
The only useful advice I can offer is to not work an 8-hour coffeehouse shift the day after the sex, but as that window has now closed, there’s nothing helpful I can say.
<3 <3 <3 BATS <3 <3 <3
So cute.
Evolutionary psychology always makes me think of this:
(in that it’s just a bunch of just-so folk stories)
There sure are a lot of people in the comments section of every Roxane Gay recap for Outlander falling over themselves to assure us that it is a serious tv show based on serious books and therefore Roxane’s focus on Jamie’s chest and wondering when they’ll have sex is disrespectful.
Surprise! You like a romance novel. Surprise! Genre fiction can be wonderful. Get over yourselves.
There was a “Don’t Touch a Bat” (campaign? no idea what to call this…other than Andrea being hilarious) thing on twitter a couple weeks ago that amused me.
So sorry but the new pop up ad boxes are nearly impossible to close on iPhones. I wouldn’t mind them if I could actually hit the close x mark accurately 50% of the time but these are super hard to manage. I have tiny fingers so I can’t be the only one.
I emailed nick about it today and he said he’s working on it. I forgot to mention how hard it is to close — I was just complaining about it covering up content.
This article is very long and very worth it, although it is also very anger-inducing: http://www.buzzfeed.com/timstelloh/behold-the-hea…
I feel like there needs to be an evopsych corollary to Godwin's law. Whenever some dude (and isn't it always a dude?) starts in with the evopsych (typically to explain why something wrong is natural), I'm like, "Nope, this isn't a serious conversation, this isn't a serious person, this is a troll" and I nope the hell out of there.