I hate writing about the terrible things that happen to women, or I suppose it is more accurate to say I hate how I feel obligated to write about the terrible things that happen to women. I feel this obligation because terrible things have happened to me and because for too long I stayed silent. I was scared and ashamed and humiliated. My silence only amplified these feelings, the self-loathing, the isolation. If speaking about violence against women makes other women feel less alone, I am going to use my voice. And still. I hate writing about the terrible things that happen to women. I hate the inescapable feeling that writing about such issues accomplishes so very little. I hate the exhaustion I feel when I see yet another news story about a woman who has suffered at the hands of a man. I hate the guilt I feel because I am exhausted. Exhaustion is such a luxury.
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Here is an extremely long piece of writing on the Mann Gulch fire, always one of the best things to read extremely long pieces of writing about.
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Death comes for us all anyway, do not let the Italians deprive you of small joys. Also, do not let Russians deprive you of the less-obvious joys of sitting on cold park benches.
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Anna North talks to a bunch of people (including our own Mindy Hung) about their stress reads.
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On how Teach for America is evolving in response to its critics.
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On the NFL’s tax-exempt status.
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Well, I guess we all need a horrible hobby that flies in the face of stats on racial bias and cost and the periodic yanking of the innocent off death row:
But that doesn’t mean there’s no one to argue for capital punishment. Blume and Dieter both start their short list of death-penalty champions with the same person: a scholar named Kent Scheidegger, the top lawyer at the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a small think tank in Sacramento, California. For nearly 30 years, Scheidegger has dedicated his professional life to defending the death penalty. And he’s often the go-to wonk for his side of the debate. When California’s death penalty was ruled unconstitutional in July, it was Scheidegger who provided outlets from The New York Times to the Los Angeles Times to NPR with their sole quote decrying the judge’s decision. Page back through years of similar coverage, and his name pops up again and again. “I think even for supporters of the death penalty, if you had them rank what they care about the most, it wouldn’t be high on their list,” Blume argues. In that respect, he says, Scheidegger is “a lone wolf.”
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Lo, the Booker shortlist!
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They found one of Franklin’s ships (no evidence yet of supernatural polar-bear-like monsters.) Now, please listen to Stan Rogers sing “Northwest Passage”:
Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
My morning had not gotten off to the best start, but, thanks to Stan Rogers and Nicole, I’m thinking about Fraser and RayK riding off into the sunset together now, so things have really turned around.
I am deeply irritated by the number of news stories that are all “OMG Stephen Harper found this ship!” like he, personally, was out operating the sonar. But other than that, it is REALLY COOL that it is finally discovered! Also side-eye to the number of people going “It turns out the Inuit stories about how the ship wrecked and sank at a certain spot WAS TRUE! They didn’t make it up!” because….what.
But it is still so, so cool that they found it! (Not getting into the arctic-sovereignty bit and all the other issues making it up here BUT still: so awesome.)
Ugh, yes, apparently, “finally deciding to listening to Inuit oral traditions”=”discovering”
Dan Simmons’ The Terror has a great bit about how the Franklin expedition didn’t really founder in some remote, uninhabited wilderness as we imagine. Hostile as that environment would be to most of us, there were numerous Inuit settlements in the area… who, you know, were surviving just dandy in them parts without resorting to cannibalism.
I know it’s full of issues about colonialism and whatnot, but I can’t help but be fascinated by the disaster and am so excited that they found it. I’m also giving a big, cynical LOL at it taking 100 years and however many man-hours before they got around to looking in the place where the only eyewitness said it went down (although I realize that it hasn’t probably been 100 years since they developed the technology to find it etc. etc.)
Agreed! Especially considering his absolute slashing of Parks Canada’s budget. Ughh it’s his own personal vanity project.
I was tickled to see this headline yesterday:
Damn kids these days, so lazy they can’t even be bothered to use drugs!
in my day we MADE our drugs kids these days
This was a wasted opportunity for a futon or mattress ad. A bridal show doesn’t really fit with the loafing lifestyle.
Also Eastern European people have a holy terror of sitting on cold things. Even now I don’t like to sit on cold concrete and benches because my grandmother told me constantly I would “freeze myself” [for which, read: freeze your ovaries] and now it’s all I can think about. My Russian prof in university–my highly-educated, brilliant, PhD from Moscow State University-holding prof–would get all twitchy if she saw us students sitting on cold concrete.
Also, the horror of The Draft. Sitting outside with a breeze? How lovely! Sitting inside with two windows open so you get a cross-breeze? WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE IMMINENTLY.
It all makes so much sense. I was sitting on a curb and my friend was horrified. “Get up! You’ll get piles!” she cried. I laughed and she said that was something her Ukrainian mother always said. My grandmother was always on the watch for pneumonia. Wet hair = pneumonia. Sweating outside in winter = pneumonia. Moving from hot outside to air conditioned inside = pneumonia. And she had a mustard plaster waiting to cure you.
When I first read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at 11, and Francie chasties Neely for sitting on the stove because he’ll get piles, I was honestly confused. Because if you can’t sit on cold surfaces (you will freeze) and you can’t sit on warm things (because piles), I was like “so where CAN you sit?” Nowhere, you stand, always, contemplating the decline and fall of your nation (Poland).
What are piles (do I even want to know)?
I think they’re hemorrhoids. But I honestly don’t know.
Yeah, it’s an old-fashioned term for hemorrhoids.
OMG I thought that was some weird thing my Mom made up! But maybe she got the sitting on cold concrete = imminent hemorrhoids thing from my (Ukrainian!) grandma?!
I WOULD LIKE TO CO-SIGN ALL OF THIS except I also get it from my parents, not just grandparents. If you sit on a cold surface or walk around barefoot, you will freeze your ovaries or get ovarian cysts. I once complained to my dad that my arm hurt and he said, “It’s because you were studying at your desk yesterday and your desk is near the window. It was the draft.” Not the fact that I had been lifting weights at the gym the previous day. It was the devious currents of air!
See also: if you go outside with wet hair you will get any manner of infectious diseases. (“Mom, that’s not how meningitis works and anyway, I got the meningitis vaccine.” “You young people these days think you know everything, but I know a thing or two myself!” Yes you do but obviously not about meningitis?)
My parents are utterly convinced that every sickness I’ve ever had was the direct result of going around with wet hair or not wearing a coat or whatever. My dad especially believes that eating cold food for breakfast will make you ill. But only certain types of cold food. Not cereal. But cold meat will make you sick.
Every time my mom starts doing her “hint hint I would like a grandchild soon” song-and-dance I have to fight back a devilish urge to say, “Oh mom… I didn’t have the heart to tell you… the doctor said I’ll never be able to have children. She thinks I damaged my ovaries all those years I didn’t wear slippers inside the house. I should have listened to you!”
Devious. Brilliant. Do it.
Seconded!
When I studied in France, my host mom was HORRIFIED that I wanted to go running when it was 45 F outside. It was too cold! I’d get sick! I told her repeatedly that I’ve lived my entire life in a place where winter temps get down to 0 F and it snows for months, but she wasn’t convinced. She looked at me suspiciously, like I might actually be dead and trying to pull the wool over her eyes.
Then again, it bothered me that she’d leave food like cake out overnight without refrigeration. Until I realized that she too had been living this way for her whole life and SHE wasn’t dead either. Probably. And that’s how we settled our differences.
I feel that Europeans don’t get how extreme American temperatures can be. They just think it’s like wherever they are, but really, it’s pretty messed up in a lot of places. (“New York gets *that* hot?? For how long???”)
Do you really refrigerate your cakes? Because my family always just covered them and left them on the counter until it was gone.
Different cakes can handle being room temp for longer, and some need to be in the fridge (see: cream cheese icing). Just kinda depends.
The best plan, of course, is to eat all the cake at once and then there will be no leftovers.
Refrigerating cake? That is a new one to me. Though I was also disturbed when I studied in Germany and my host family would leave BUTTER out of the fridge all the time. It was in a covered butter dish (and very easy to spread), and I eventually reached the same conclusion you did, but it’s still not something I would do.
I need to refrigerate the delicious lemon loaf I get from the bakery down the street because if it were constantly out in the open, I would just inhale the whole thing.
I leave butter out too, except in the summer, because melted butter does not spread, and pouring butter on toast is not as decadent as one might think. it’s mostly just messy.
I refrigerate cake because fridge-cold leftover cake is superior to room temperature cake, in the same way that fridge-cold leftover pizza is superior to hot, fresh pizza.
We leave our butter out all the time! It’s in a covered dish to keep cat/bugs away, but it’s generally cold enough in my kitchen that it doesn’t go bad before we eat it up. (In fact, it’s a not infrequent occurrence for me to wake up in the morning and find the counter butter is hard because it was just that cold in the house overnight.)
Depending on the kind of cake, yes. Squidgy ones keep longer if refrigerated.
The butter thing! My host mom left the butter out too, and it REALLY weirded me out until I realized (again) that she wasn’t dead and the butter tasted fine. I wonder how many foods we refrigerate needlessly in the USA.
The answer is a lot.
We take a natural outer layer off of eggs during processing, and that’s why eggs in the US need to be refrigerated, but not in other places like Europe where they have different food processing regulations.
I don’t refrigerate cakes or butter. Well, I have a large block of butter in the fridge and a smaller one out on the counter. I don’t cover the butter, either. What’s going to happen to it? It takes a long time for butter to go rancid.
I was weirded out by a roommate who didn’t refrigerate ketchup. She’s probably in the right, though, as I have a hard time believing ketchup could rot.
Yikes, uncovered butter seems very brave. Bugs? (Maybe that’s just an NYC apartment problem.)
Hmm good point about ketchup. I think I would also be weirded out, but it does seem impossible for it to go bad.
My husband leaves ketchup out. He learned to do so from his father, who is a food scientist who spent a large portion of his career making ketchup. So I’m pretty sure it won’t kill us.
Damn it, is THAT why I have ovarian cysts? If I start wearing slippers or socks everywhere will they go away & I won’t have to keep having MRIs?
I first heard about this weird aversion to drafts from an episode of the Judge John Hodgman podcast. He was as astonished as I to find Germans (and apparently other Europeans) hate drafts with a startling fierceness.
Yes, it is fierce! I actually agree with them about air-conditioning — it may or may not make a person sick, but it’s just really unpleasant going back and forth from hot to cold, and it makes my body unable to acclimatize me to the heat, so I end up more uncomfortable overall, unless it’s really extreme heat (over 95F).
But the draft thing is nuts! My husband is literally physically uncomfortable if we don’t close the doors of rooms in the apartment. And I have a whole collection of winter AND summer house slippers thanks to the influence of him and my mother-in-law…
European representing, to say that draft is THE ENEMY. I was raised by two parents who were phobic about OMGdraft, and unfortunately I have succumbed to this fear too. Well, not even so much the fear, as the FEEL. Do you even know what draft feels like? It’s awful, like a cold mosquito buzzing around your head. Brrrrr. *goes off to insulate ev.ry.thing.*
My Romanian friends talk about how their parents are against drafts, but my Dutch friends have suggested I try and create a cross-breeze during the two weeks a year it might be warm.
Yes, I once dated a German who was obsessed with regulating body temperature. He would only put on his coat, hat, and gloves once he had exited a warm building, never before, regardless of how cold it was outside. He also thought that sitting on the cold ground would give me a vaginal infection. Mutual friends who were from more urban/cosmopolitan areas of Germany regarded these fears as a bit countrified and superstitious.
Sadly my German partner always wants the window open at night to get some fresh air and a breeze (I hate open windows when I’m trying to sleep).
My German friends are all obsessed with insulation. Which, yeah, is quite good I guess
I was scolded by my neighbors many many times during the five years we lived in Germany because I would run down to the laundry room (in the basement… heated…) barefoot all winter long. And I can’t even express to you the horror on their faces when I once ran out to my car barefoot, in the snow, to grab something and then hot-foot it back into the house. My upstairs neighbor was sorely puzzled that I didn’t die instantly, or even later. I was also yelled at once by a little old lady as I carried my not-yet-able-to-walk baby around in a sling and 75 layers of clothes, including 3 pairs of socks, because he didn’t have shoes on. She was very clear about what she was yelling at me for, despite the fact that my German was also in its infancy and I just kept politely saying “Ich nicht verstehe” and “Entshuldigung” over and over with a pained smile.
Although I had a boss from Poland and she believed vigorous outdoor exercise in winter prevented colds and flus. Because the cold air rushing into your nose and lungs killed all germs.
It will never cease to confuse me that my very Ukranian great-grandmother had a “breeze room” in her house. I don’t know if that’s actually a thing anywhere else, but I feel like she was just giving the old country the finger just by having it.
Please someone with a fear of drafts come over and fix my drafts. I do not fear them, but damn it gets expensive trying to run the air conditioner…
My Turkish relatives would FREAK if I went outside when it was windy with wet hair. Even if it was summer, I would still die of a cold.
Did anyone else’s mother tell them not to sleep with a fan pointed towards them because they might get Bell’s Palsy?
Forget drafts, get worried about FAN DEATH. I.e., if you leave the fan on at night while you are sleeping, YOU WILL DIE.
My mom is Korean, and my dad is a white dude from the South; when I was a kid, my dad would say goodnight to me in the summer and turn the fan on so I wouldn’t get too hot, and then my mom, who claims publicly that fan death is bullshit, would sneak in when my dad wasn’t looking and turn off the fan, just in case.
And now I am an adult who knows fan death is bullshit, and yet I still can’t sleep with the fan on.
My fave story about this: I went trail-building on Lake Baikal when I was living in Russia, and after we returned from the forest several of us (all women) went back to the office of the non-profit we were working with to drop off some equipment. The office was closed for lunch, so the group of us set down our packs and sat down on the hot concrete in the courtyard (summer in southern Siberia doesn’t play around, it was like 90) to wait. At which point a MAN (of course) comes up and starts going on about, “girls, get up! You’ll freeze! YOU STILL HAVE CHILDREN TO BEAR.” We were all just like, we just spent two weeks sitting on logs and dirt in the extremely rainy forest, and also wielding axes and chainsaws and eating meat from cans. Our ability to reproduce has almost certainly been compromised already, sir. Also this concrete is not cold.
Second favorite story, I had to go to the consulate for something and was made to wait outside for a bit. I sat down on a concrete barricade, and one of the guards was giving me crazy side-eye until I gestured to indicate that I was sitting on a plastic bag I had brought for that purpose. Then it was fine.
But does your Nani try to forcibly prevent you from going outdoors at dusk because the djinn will get you?
Yesterday must have been Prime Minister Harper’s best day. A Franklin ship was found and the Queen sent her congratulations. Ice of glory (thanks, Kate Beaton) indeed. I do love that Stan Rogers song though.
Ditto to Stan Rogers love. Is it weird that like 90% of his songs make me cry?
I was about the comment the same thing. I seriously get weepy every time I hear Stan Rogers’s voice.
I can’t even start to sing the chorus of The Mary Ellen Carter without choking up.
Also:
Regain your youthful glow by hunting down hikers in the Gatineau Park woods and using their blood as toner!
Hahaha I always love how very specific the ages are in those ads. “Looks 27! Not 28, noooo, no one wants to look 28! 27!”
Good news/bad news about This Modern World: I can surround myself so fully with the kind of people I like that when I see (on the Texts from Jane Eyre website) that The Toast is a “cult favorite,” I think, “Cult favorite?? EVERYONE loves The Toast! Why, just last week, Glen Weldon said Mallory’s name on the NPR pop culture podcast!”
I think I gave out a little squeak of joy when I heard that. Melis on the Pop Culture Happy Hour!
Still, if that means we’re in a cult, but the cult is this, I’m not gonna complain.
My stress read is LMM, all day, every day. I read 3 Anne books over the weekend and it was so soothing, like curling up under the duvet on a cold winter night. Although it did lead to me doing 4 hours of intense housework on Sunday afternoon because I’d started internalizing the whole “Get up at 5 AM, spend hours cleaning the house even though you spent hours cleaning it yesterday, teach school all day, come back and bake 20 cakes because if company comes and you have just one type of cake to serve them you will be shamed forever” vibe. It was great! My kitchen is spotless now.
I did a lot of repetitive LMM reading, too! Books are a great way of coping–especially books one reads as a kid or teen–because you can just slip into that familiar world.
Yesss, very much so. Jia mentioned The Phantom Tollbooth in her interview and that’s a big one for me. It’s perfect, it’s clever, it makes me happy, and it’s like going home. Harry Potter, especially the early ones, are also like that.
I do that more frequently than I like to admit. LMM is so indescribably comforting and requires no thought because I’ve read it all already–I can relax and be in their world for a while.
(But really I would be perfectly happy teaching school, baking cakes, and keeping my house spotless. I would.)
I think this is why I find reading the LMM books so comforting – life was so much more proscribed and subject to the dictates of tradition and society that in some ways it was easier.
Don’t get me wrong, you guys, I love my life, and my job, and my status as a Kickass Executive-Wife-Mom Who Can Do It All, but sometimes it’s exhausting and overwhelming and all I want to do is stay home, walk the dog and cook nice dinners.
Early settler narratives for me (Susanna Mood ie, Catherine Parr Trail, Anna Jameson). They make me feel like I could be really capable. I also like household advice books of this era. Although my favorite (I can’t remember the title) was a British book published around 1920 that basically ran “So WWI happened and you have no servants. Here’s how you manage.”
I love household advice/home medical books from the first half of the 20th century. One has a recipe for “liver lemonade” to serve to invalids, which sounds like the vilest thing imaginable. It’s brilliant.
It is soo hard to read LMM with a messy house. It just eats at you.
My stress read is LMM, too — it’s the Blue Castle. Much less housework and rewarded rebellion.
Oh man, yes. I’m super careful with my books, and I read that one till its spine fell apart. Then I read it again.
Ditto! I love The Blue Castle. I usually read it straight through in one sitting.
The Anne books give me too many feels to be a stress read…I tend to go for The Witches or a book of fairy tales from the sixties that my mom passed down to me.
I’m with you, except my LMM stress read of choice is usually one of the Emily books. I like Anne, but I LOVE Emily.
I love Emily too, but lately when I reread those books I just get seriously creeped out by creepy Dean and what a pedo slimebag he is.
UGH I KNOW. I never caught on to any of the creepiness when I read those books as a tiny ten-year-old, but grown-up me can’t stand Dean. Not a big fan of Teddy either, to be honest. Perry’s the best of the boys, but mostly I’m just Emily/Ilse all the way.
Oh, Ilse. *dreamy sigh*
Co-sign all of this. Emily/Ilse forever. (Though I did actually notice what a creeper Dean was when I first read the books as a kid.)
It feels so weird when you internalise messages like that from older books and then are confronted with the very different realities of the world you live in. I recently was reading the diaries of Nella Last, a housewife in Barrow-in-Furness during the Second World War, and so much of what she writes is about making do and mending, and how she managed to make cheap and satisfying food. I then went to the supermarket and was completely horrified by how much money I was spending, because it would have been so unimaginable in the 40s.
My stress reads are star wars books (all of them), Wuthering Heights, Among Others, and sometimes The Mabinogion. Thesis defense is tomorrow and it feels pretty meta to come across an article on stress reads today! Also, now I have a renewed sense of urgency to track down the Sioned Davies translation of The Mabinogion that I’ve been half-heartedly looking for for the past couple years.
Also, terrible options for stress reading is LMM journals. I can only read them (especially the later volumes) on good mental health days.
STAN FUCKING ROGERS. AM I RIGHT?
Spoiler: I am right.
I am laughing out loud right now. I needed a good laugh. Thank you!
Yes, yes you are.
CLEARLY.
I just went on a driving vacation in Canada with my boyfriend. I was driving (because misandry) and he was dj-ing, and I said something about how Stan Rogers was a staple of our family (not Canadian) roadtrips. And he looked at me and said, “no.”
I told him he was a bad Canadian.
This piece by Stacia L. Brown gets at some of my conflicted feelings about Ray Rice being cut as the NFL’s main response. I’m not saying he should have kept his job, but I don’t know that it helps Janay Rice or makes it less likely future players will commit DV. Especially given that multiple players are currently under investigation for DV and have faced no penalties yet.
“We have no way of knowing whether any of the steps the Rices have taken since February have had any impact on Rice’s propensity toward physically assaulting women. Skepticism would be wise. But if we hold in one hand the idea of counseling and intervention programs to prevent further violence and in the other, long-term unemployment and social ostracism, we can imagine which option is more likely to result in recidivism. “
It is horrible when something ‘private’ becomes public scrutiny and I do feel a lot of sympathy for Janay Rice, but it is in the public awareness now and what happens to Ray Rice gives out a signal of how our society views abusers and we need more institutions to publically say domestic violence is wrong and known abusers should not get rewards which is why I support Rice being cut from the NFL.
Although, youre right, it is important to look at the issue from all sides to see if it really is the best solution and have a discussion about it.
I agree with all but the very first bit: it is NOT NECESSARILY terrible. I don’t generally think that people who assault other people being caught and prosecuted for assault is terrible. I think it’s the point of having assault laws.
This whole narrative of domestic violence being “a private matter” that the rest of us should quietly and awkwardly avert our eyes from — have we not internalized yet that it’s a bad thing? That believing beating the shit out of a woman is a different matter if she belongs to you vis a vis if she pissed you off in line at the DMV is a pretty toxic way of looking at the world?
I feel sympathy for Janay Rice, but this is *not about Janay Rice.* It’s about having a legal system that assesses actual penalties for violently assaulting women, because it’s a crime, and crime is a public, not private, matter.
Would the correct outcome be that Ray Rice be imprisoned? Are carceral solutions the best way to deal with domestic violence? I am not a prison abolitionist, but I do respect a lot of the work and writings of people like Mariame Kaba (https://twitter.com/prisonculture) who work to end incarceration (though her organization focuses on youth incarceration, an area where prison is more clearly terrible and inappropriate).
YAY for Texts from Jane Eyre at last!!! I cannot wait to see it in my local bookstore (and fall upon it like a starving hyena).
Is the Mann-Gulch fire article both long and wrong? Or is that a wee typo? I had a look, and it is most definitely long…
lol subconscious error, bc some of it IS wrong, I think!
Does anyone know if Mallory gets more money (or some other benefit) from buying the hardcover vs the kindle version? Or from buying at a book store vs amazon? I want to get the most dolla dolla bills/publicity/whatever in Mallory’s hands that I can.
I don’t know for sure, of course, but I’m inclined to say:
*preorder or buy on release day if you want to give it the biggest bump for hitting best seller lists – some list aggregators take preorders into account and some don’t, I’m a little fuzzy on that, but generally everyone buying it at once is better for her visibility & getting everyone else (not in our cult) to see & buy it
*likely the links from the texts-from website include her affiliate links, so the bookstore vendor if you order when you click those links (as opposed to going back later to search for it on your own) will give her an extra 4% or something per sale. So if you’re going to buy it online, go to the book’s website & use the buy links provided there.
(And if she doesn’t have affiliate links, feel free to use mine and I’ll get her 4%)
Texts from Jane Eyre: And Other Conversations with Your Favorite Literary Characters
(Don’t do that. I’m just playing with the code to see if I can tell for sure that she has a link on her buy button.)
AND – I was wrong. The affiliate link on the website is for her publisher. So buying direct from the website doesn’t help her (unless her contract kicks some of that back from the publisher to her, but I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, so I’d doubt it.)
(So buy her book via my link instead. Or wherever you want. Or- Mallory/The Toast, make an affiliate link and post it here so we can use it and kick the money back to y’all, is really the best idea.)
Haha:
Manny Roman, CEO of Man Group, comments: ‘We are very proud to sponsor the Man Booker Prize’”
Oh my god, I thought you were joking. YOU WERE NOT.
I also noticed that! It made me very happy.
So, um, regarding that Franklin expedition news: Any other due South fans in the house who are as conflicted as I am about it?
Should I be conflicted? My immediate response was, QUICK, TO THE DVDS! But I’m probably missing something. (Fair disclosure, that’s my response to a *lot* of things.)
I like to pretend that Ray and Fraser are at any moment still actually looking for the Hand of Franklin and now that someone else has found it? Presumably? It feels sort of…unsettling.
Nah, they settled down happily in a shack out in the middle of nowhere years ago. (RayV lives with them about half of the year, but he needs to go back to Chicago to recharge frequently, being such a city guy.)
Franklin’s body is unlikely to be on the ship, I think, since it went down after it was abandoned. It just gives them additional clues!
Oh, this is a fantastic way to deal with my ridiculous head canon. Perfect! Thank you you!
*steps forward to mic, clears throat*
AH FOR JUUUST ONE TIIME I WOULD TAKE THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
TO FIIIND THE HAND OF FRANKLIN REACHING FOR THE BEAUFORT SEA
TRACING ONE WARM LINE THROUGH A LAND SO WIDE AND SAAAAVAGE
AND MAKE A NORTHWEST PASSAGE TO THE SEAAAA.
(. . . or not because the ship sinks and everyone dies. But it’s very inspiring until then!)
Way to spit in the face of historical accuracy, Mallory. Jane Eyre takes place in, like, 1492 or something. THE CELL PHONES OF THAT TIME DO NOT HAVES THE CAPABILITY TO TEXT. Wake up, SHEEPLE! The EMPEROR has NO CLOTHES!
The TFA article is supposed to be encouraging in that they’re changing their model, but the program has already been destructive in a lot of schools because of the high turnover rates it creates. I also was hit in the gut to read about their pedagogy style for little children in the second half, too. So rigid. Giving a first grader a demerit for saying “yes!” enthusiastically at the wrong moment! Rigid repetition of concepts like “the middle of the story” using what sounds like a crummy piece of disposable children’s lit instead of a good children’s book, and instead of letting children figure out for themselves that stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Nagging them about where their eyes are looking all the time — even though some kids get overstimulated and need to rest by looking away for a little bit. I would pull a child of mine out of school if they were subject to that kind of controlling teacher presence at the age of 5 or 6. Children deserve some privacy and control about where their eyes are looking, and they still need to find pleasure in learning and feel their own initiative at that age. Otherwise what they’re learning won’t make sense to them, won’t get internalized. It was the saddest thing to read. I hope more of the TFA recruits get placed with higher grade levels where they will feel more comfortable and need less training, instead of with the little tots in 1st grade.
Yeah Teach for America is still the worst. They take jobs from career teachers and they are being increasingly funneled into charter schools. Particularly the “no excuses” type with the controlling pedagogy you mention. TFA also has a program for special education because what students with disabilities need is someone from an ivy with 5 weeks of training.
I can’t believe that no parents have brought an IDEA lawsuit against a district staffing special-ed positions with TFA. Although, I think they successfully lobbied Congress to classify their recruits as “highly-effective educators” under Race To The Top, so it might not even be possible.
Yeah, that description of the super-controlling classroom management style and the awful lecturing to kindergarteners… ugh. I mean, even leaving aside the questions of effectiveness and learning, even giving TFA the absolute maximum possible benefit of the doubt on their confidence in this classroom management approach… what a fucking waste of your limited classroom time, to spend half of it policing whether a bunch of 5-year-olds have their legs crossed in the prescribed manner. (And that kindergarten teacher only has five students. When she has 30, is there going to be any time left in the day to read the shitty “book”?)
Oh, it just made me so sad to read. Those ages are so important. If you have to teach “beginning, middle, end,” there are so many better ways to make it clear to them. Even I can think of them, and I teach adults.
1. Tell them a very very simple short fairytale, then give them a quiet thirty seconds to think up their own story, and then ask who is ready to tell the class their own story? The more verbal kids will talk, the less verbal ones can listen even if they’re not up to generating a story, and you can ask them what makes a good story (beginning, middle with some challenge or action, end). Or you can ask them to tell a story to a stuffed animal.
OR
2. Ask them to name something they think is hard or scary, and then tell them a story with them as the protagonist in it! In your story, they are challenged, and take some action to deal with the hard or scary thing — voila, a story. Maybe make the “obstacle” a silly monster, so that the lesson stays light and humorous. Then help them think about what made it a complete story (beginning, middle, end).
It’s not even that hard! I think it just takes some life experience, and also trusting your students more to have worthwhile things to tell you, instead of just the reverse.
I do kind of want to soften the “awful lecturing” and “shitty ‘book'” parts of my comment, because, honestly, that part of How Do I Teach is so often outside of the individual teacher’s control. I know this type of reading instruction, specifically, is something that the early-childhood folks in my teacher prep cohort struggled with — they were spending half their time in class, talking about best practices in reading pedagogy and the importance of authentic texts and whatnot, and the other half in their placements in schools that had adopted a very rigid reading curriculum, with exactly the kind of crappy inauthentic pamphlet-style “storybooks” that article describes, that they had very little room to change. So, yeah, TFA needs to be giving their trainees more and better preparation and exposing them to better concepts of pedagogy… but until we see curriculum changes at the school and district administration levels, they could be the best-trained teachers in the world and they’d still be stuck going “Middle. Middle. Middle.”
For sure, the individual TSA volunteers are probably doing the very best they can. But, if you know about pedagogy… that is truly Not Good Pedagogy, especially for that age group, makes me sad for the 5 and 6 year olds.
For what it’s worth, that level of micromanagement was never part of my training in TFA. I taught high school and my institute experience was somewhat tailored to that, and this was ten years ago, but still. . . that passage describes a level of negative reinforcement that was actively discouraged by my corps.
Yes, unless TFA stops pretending that college grad trainees are teachers, they’re still just union busting dirtbags. It would be fantastic if they’d send their recruits into schools to work as aides and paraprofessionals under real teachers, those who really want to teach would get experience in a classroom and people who want to pad a weak law school application wouldn’t be doing as much damage. But since that program wouldn’t pull in as much money as when school districts use them to replace teachers, it’s not going to happen.
Yeah, the discipline part was pretty upsetting to me. I was an extrodinarily well-behaved child in school and I *still* feel resentful about elementary school teachers I had who relied on overly strict or punitive disciplinary methods to retain “control” in the classroom. And as I recall, the classes where kids behaved the best weren’t the ones with the strictest teachers- they were the ones with good teachers, who kept the students engaged and made them want to behave better. Of course kids are going to act up when the teacher is mindlessly repeating herself, as the one in the article was when talking about parts of a story…
As an Italian-Canadian with immigrant parents and grandparents I would like to say that not only is air conditioning, random gusts of wind and water detrimental to the health, going barefoot in the home at any time is also dangerous. Slippers, always slippers. I have so many nonna-knitted pairs of slippers, guys.
Bare feet can kill you. Everyone knows that. I’m taking a huge risk right now, having bare feet while it is 80 degrees. I feel like an outlaw.
To my Turkish Grandmother, socks weren’t even enough, I had to wear slippers at all time when stepping on tile indoors.
Whereas my parents were always on us to stop sliding around the house in socks YOU’LL BREAK YOUR NECK. You might think the alternative was to wear shoes (STOP CLOMPING AROUND LIKE A HORSE) or to go barefoot (JESUS, YOU’LL CATCH COLD) but no.
Looking back, I’m not sure what my parents did expect us to do about the unspoken problem of, y’know, having feet in the house. Go wafting around inches above the floor like so many spirits? (STOP FLUTTERING ABOUT, YOU’RE MAKING A DRAFT.)
So interesting to read the opposite perspective to what I grew up with, which was basically, “Shoes: Why?” Shoes were for going to school, church, store, etc, but if you were in the house, outdoors and reasonably sure you knew where the fire ant nests were, driving, or at friends’ houses, shoes were unnecessary and possibly not good for you.
My Nana didn’t knit me slippers but she crocheted like a demon. I have one tiny pink-and-white blanket that was on my crib (every grandchild got one of them) and one GIANT blanket that could cover a king-sized bed with a lot of friendly people in it. Nana-warmth! The Best Warmth.
Listen also to Sinéad O’Connors version of “Lord Franklin” (Lady Franklin’s lament). “Ten thousand pounds I would freely give / To know on earth, that my Franklin do live”. *sniffle*
I did not know that Sinead O’Connor did a version of this hauntingly beautiful ballad. Can’t search for it now,must go to work. Damn, work cuts into my Toast reading/commenting time so much!
Oh man, time for me to dig out that paper I wrote about the Franklin Expedition and the other-ness of the Arctic. Robert Randolph Carter captained the Grinnell Expedition, which went to search for the Erebus and Terror in 1850 and returned in 1851.
“So good bye Sir John, the Yankees have failed to aid you and can only pray for you. God Almighty aid you to escape from what by this time must be an awful position, if any of your party are still in the hands of Arctic Deities.
The Little Aauk were going southward in great numbers.”
– Carter, on the crew’s decision to turn back.
Also, This Hark, a Vagrant from Kate Beaton.
Arctic Deities
damn useless yankees
Since when are Americans eligible for the Booker Prize? It has ruined my week, possibly my month, to see Joshua Ferris in the same sentence as “Booker Prize shortlist.” Ug.
I think this is the first year they considered U.S. authors. Is Joshua Ferris terrible? I read the Fowler book – it was very well-written and thought-provoking.
He’s not my favorite writer (though I did really like “And Then We Came to the End”) but his persona is just so boy-wunderkind-writer-genius I want to kick him in the nuts (not exaggerating, I feel like I have restless leg syndrome every time I see his name in writing). But I have the same reaction about every writer in that genre — Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, Gary Shteyngart, Michael Chabon (god my foot is so itchy I’m going to have to go outside and kick a rock or something). I’m probably too biased to weigh in on anything any of them have written.
Also, the Booker shortlist has always been so magical for me. There are almost always books on it I haven’t heard of before the shortlist comes out (and sometimes books you can’t even get in print here in the US and have to order used on Amazon from an international seller). Extending it to all books written in English just takes all the magic out of it.
Reading all those names in one place also made me want to invent a perpetual kicking machine aimed right at ball height. You are not alone.
Kickstarter your kicking machine – we’ll all fund it.
Cosign
They want a prototype! Is anyone handy?
ETA: holy shit procrastination is an effective motivator. I have work to do, so instead I am staring at one of those old wooden artist’s model things on a stand and wondering how to get it to kick. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME
I feel like the Mythbusters have built at least one kicking machine? Maybe they take commissions.
Googling “KICKING MACHINE” turns out to be a good use of my time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAx__g-4d8
I am the same way. I used to love announcement of the Longlist and would do a special amazon.co.uk order. The Commonwealth books were always the best and I discovered so many new authors through the Booker. Now? It is ruined. This Shortlist is the worst I’ve seen in a long time.
(That said, I’ve read The Wake, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Bone Clocks, and the Fowler and liked them all. I’m also planning to read The Dog, How to Be Both, The Blazing World, and History of the Rain even though they didn’t make the Shortlist. I’ll read the Ferris and the Jacobson when hell freezes over.)
I’ve made it my mission to NOT read the Ferris no matter how much it comes up on all my book discussion groups and all that crap.
Go read the Blazing World twice to make up for it.
This is a very recent change… this year or last year. Basically a marketing thing to make the prize “more relevant.”
Antonia Fraser resigned over it. If I could do the same, I would. All I can do is stamp my virtual feet.
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/londoners-diary/an…
The Pulitzer committee is already very happy to give awards to books like “The Goldfinch,” for God’s sake.
Even though I grew up in Southern California (with a climate not unlike Sicily’s) my grandmother would not let us go barefoot (it can kill you) have wet hair (pneumonia), go running or bike riding or just playing after dusk (even though So Cal is warm) because of the “miasmata” or night air, which can kill you. My daughter went to school for a semester in Italy, and the mom she stayed with would not let her run the fan in her room at night (even though it was summer, and hot) because sleeping with air on you can kill you.
Even now I am unable to drink a cappuccino after breakfast, even though I like them.
I also studied in Italy for a semester, and my host mom was truly and deeply horrified that I sometimes left the house with wet hair. It’s a miracle I’m still alive, apparently.
#Ferguson update: Amazing speeches at the Ferguson City Council meeting last night. Several community members identifying themselves as Mike Brown and great evidence of ORGANIZING FOR ACTION. I continue to be overwhelmingly inspired by the community there. Calling out the towns in St Louis County’s profiteering off the backs of marginalized people that we’ve all been reading the stories about. And more great pictures from Robert Cohen:
Yes! This man’s speech is awe-inspiring:
“My name is Mike Brown, and I am from Ground Zero. The problem is like, with that man over there, the previous mayor, and the current mayor, is that they don’t understand us. The people up there do not represent us. The police do not represent us. It is time for us to start getting suited and booted and kick their you-know-whats outta office! We got the power, they don’t!” http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/09/10/young-black…
I keep getting “Discover USA” tourism ads on the Toast and it is kind of delightful.
I got one for Chickasaw county! I clicked it with great alacrity.
I keep being asked what I’d do with 24 hours in Europe. Um, I suppose I’d go to work?
I keep getting those too, and have been thinking much the same. “The same stuff I usually do with every other 24 hours in Europe?”
Oh yes, leaving the house with wet hair is courting certain death. So is not putting on a sweater immediately after exercising, even if it is a million degrees out and you are red and sweating.
Oh, my parents had a horror of going from a hot place to a cold one. CERTAIN DEATH. If you are hot and going from a warm room into cold night air, not wearing a coat = THIS WILL KILL YOU PAINFULLY.
Nooo, if you put on your coat before you leave the warm place then you “won’t feel the benefit of it!”
My first wedding anniversary is November 3rd. I have sent the link to purchase Texts From Jane Eyre to my husband with the following: “The first anniversary is the paper anniversary and I demand a hardcover of this book as a gift. Carry on.” His response: “Ok.” Readers, I think we might be able to keep this one after the burning.
I’m like the person in that interview that said their stress-reading is playing video games–just finished my second run of Mass Effect 3 and started my fourth of Mass Effect 2, because of real-world chaos. But I also really like re-reading familiar but complex books to destress. That’s why I turned to Wolf Hall when ME3 gave me too many feels the first time through; I’ve re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell a half-dozen times for this reason, and multiple readings of Middlemarch and Persuasion and Mr. Fox. There’s a lot of moving pieces in all of those books, so they demand your attention even when you are revisiting.
Speaking of re-reading–I really want to re-read North and South so I can get in on the Billfold book club next month, but my to-read list is very long right now. Anyone else doing this? I loved rereading Middlemarch with Toastfolk so much and would be into reliving that experience.
Yeah, I am that person who plays video games to destress too. I mean, I read too, but like, I don’t reread certain books. I am always reading something anyway? But games I will replay over and over. Oh, and I rewatch shows that make me happy to destress too.
I love reading about polar expeditions, doomed and otherwise, and one of my favorite books is “I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination” by Francis Spufford, a cultural history of British polar quests and their reflection in the culture. It has a lot about the Franklin expedition, Shackleton, etc. Do you Toasties have any other recommendations for good polar exploration books?
The worst journey in the world – Apsley Cherry-Garrard, if you’ve not already read it, which you probably have if you are into the polar stuff. I’ve also got his bio, Cherry, by Sara Wheeler, which is fascinating. If you want to go fictional then Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson is one of my favourites, I read it first and then got into finding out about the older expeditions.
I haven’t, actually! Thanks!
It’s long and dense and take a bit of headbutting your way through, but I found it really compelling. I particularly got interested in him because I went to the same college, and found out more about him that way, and the poor bastard was just so incredibly unsuited to polar expediting, but he was also so immensely badass that he did it anyway. Him and Titus Oates, who I have the most enormous history-crush on, were just incredible. His sight was so bad he was practically blind without his glasses, which he couldn’t usefully wear in the snow. He shattered his teeth because they were chattering so much where he was so cold.
And I just found it on gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363
OH! It is fictional, and YA, but if you are interested in this topic, read The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean. It is excellent and deeply spooky.
Fictional and YA are right up my ice-crusted, frozen corpse strewn alley. Thanks!
I have a crush on that sentence right there.
Oh, I was just going to suggest this! Strange lonely teenage girl with an obsessive crush on a version of Titus Oates that lives in her head and speaks to her. What’s not to love?
In that case I must read it immediately.
Fiction: The Voyage of the Narwhal was pretty good. Nonfiction: Adam Gopnik’s book “Winter” has a long essay all about polar exploration, I think called “Geographical Winter,” that’s awesome. It probably doesn’t have much information that would be new to you, but I love the way he thinks through the question of why people went on these voyages.
Thanks!
Ohh, I picked up “I May Be Some Time” at a book sale at work a few years ago – glad to know it gets someone’s stamp of approval! Maybe I’ll bump it up a few spots on my to-read list…
It’s excellent. Really digs into the explorations, how they were covered by media, and what drove them, along with how the English fascination with the poles appeared in literature like Frankenstein and Jane Eyre. It also talks at length about English attitudes towards the Inuit, and how annoyed the English were that they kept suffering and dying in the same places where the Inuit were going about their daily lives.
I remember reading “The Last Place on Earth” as a kid and really enjoying it — it’s about both Amundsen and Scott’s race to the South Pole.
You’ve seen Drunk History, South Pole Edition, right?
Two about Inuit women who were the lone survivors of their crews:
Ada Blackjack by Jennifer Niven
Midnight to the North by Sheila Nickerson
Farley Mowat wrote three books in the 60s about polar exploration, consisting largely of diary entries/narratives from the explorers themselves with his commentary added in for context. They’re quite interesting, but can be hard to find. The first one is Ordeal by Ice and deals solely with the Northwest Passage from the vikings on up.
There’s also one particularly amazing bit, where literally the only crew to actually be friendly with the First Nation groups of the area and legitimately engage with them stuck around for four years and then returned to Europe – everybody figured they had died and refused to believe them because they didn’t get scurvy/most of the crew survived.
Even if Teach for America is getting more diverse they are (1) still setting those diverse corps members up to fail because their five week ‘institute’ of training is deeply shitty and (2) the two year term creates tons of churn which is bad for communities and undermines the profession as a whole.
I urge you to read this piece on TFA called “I am, I am asking you to quit” http://oyemundo.wordpress.com/2014/02/13/i-am-im-…
“deeply shitty” is an accurate description of institute as preparation for actual teaching. For an organization that I do think means well TFA is fucking HARMFUL.
The verdict for Oscar Pistorius’ murder trial will be handed down tomorrow.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/osca…
Her name was Reeva Steenkamp.
Is “Northwest Passage” the go-to campfire song in anyone else’s family?
Stan Roger’s entire oeuvre was the go-to campfire and sing-in-the-car choice with my long-ago ex. (His singing voice was one of the best things about him.) Once, we got in a minor motorcycle accident, which I think broke a couple of his ribs. Walking home, via the liquor store to buy some Bushmill’s, we sang Barrett’s Privateers to keep our spirits up. I consider it the best drinking song ever written.
No, but Barrett’s Privateers certainly is.
I fully admit to being judgmental re: cappuccino drinking after noon. I’m sorry. I can’t help it.
On a more serious note that Roxane Gay article punched me in the gut this morning and then the awesome Katie Nolan video kicked my ass into rage-mode.
Hey, yo, you wanna hear frikkin Commander Shepard speak out against misogyny in videogames? Of course you do. Second half of segment. Jennifer Hale is the best.
Of course I do! Do you have to log in?
Shouldn’t need to – the audio just started playing for me. Is it asking you to sign in?
It has kind of a weird player, it seems.
The same podcast with a different audio player can be found here. The bit that has Jennifer Hale starts at about 2:43.
Aaah, there’s the original – thankee!
Thanks!
That piece was great. They don’t mess around with trying to show “both sides”–both interviewer and interviewee make it very clear that (a) there is a misogyny problem in gaming and (b) it may be the minority but (c) it is dangerous and needs to stop. I seriously got chills when Jennifer Hale put her Commander voice on. (e.g. she describes diversity in an ideal gaming world and seethes “we can’t do that” while women are being attacked.)
Tough week for Italians on NYMag: http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/09/i-did-laundry-for…
There’s a reason why Italy’s marriage and birth rates are constantly declining. Italian women know full well that their men are totally effed up gender-role-wise. (I’ve known several Italian female academics who, when asked if they ever want to return to their home country, have gone “Haha lol no.”)
But they are at least speaking up in defense of pasta, so there is that. (Even if “that” is still “weird and judgy.”) http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/09/italian-ladys-adv…
So I have been watching Myth Hunters, which is like a documentary show about people lookig for stuff that probably doesn’t exist, like the Ark and the Covenant and stuff. A LOT of amateur archaeologists, who make me so mad. Anyway, lots of explorers on this show, obviously, and every time, I’m like, “This is the worst idea I have ever heard of.” And 90% of the time, I am right.
I go out with wet hair all the time, and haven’t got ill from it. Take that, Italians! (My boyfriend also claims his mother told him that going to bed with wet hair will give you a stiff neck, and is very perturbed whenever I do it.)
I’m so glad that someone else’s first thought on seeing they found the Franklin Expedition ship was “OMG, time for some Stan Rogers!” It was definitely mine. Poor Stan, though — nobody who sings about disastrous journeys should die in a plane crash.
I remember how gutted I was to find out that he had died before I was born. INJUSTICE.
Didn’t he die partly because he was one of the volunteers who stayed behind to get everyone else off the plane?
“Follow the sound of my voice.”
My stress read is definitely romance novels too! I’ve read like 15 in the past month which starting law school which is not a coincidence. I really enjoyed Courtney Milan’s new series
She is totally my stress read. Romance novels can be a bit hit and miss as stress reads with me, because I have a very low tolerance for “alpha male” behaviour, but I never have to worry about that with Courtney.
Have you guys seen Milan’s Ask a Man tumblr? It is MARVELOUS. http://ask-a-man.tumblr.com/
(I can’t stop myself from talking about the damn thing.)
Ooohhh, this is excellent!
I love Courtney Milan. I’ve really been enjoying G.A. Aiken lately- for hetero romance novels where the girl inevitably winds up with the guy, they’ve got a deep misandrist streak. Seas of male blood flow and heads fall in the face of gleeful women wielding swords (or just straight up tearing guys in half, which is also satisfying). They’re very, very silly, but the fight scenes are glorious.
I took a fire ecology class last year and one of the major topics we covered was the Mann Gulch Fire. I actually ended up buying Norman Maclean’s Young Men and Fire at a Bookmans a little while back. Just a note to whoever wants to read it: there’s occasional casual misogyny and racism stuff in there (not enough to make me put the book down, but enough to make me annoyed) plus lots of poetic rambling about the bravery of “men’s souls” and “men’s dreams” and so on. Plus also graphic descriptions of the folks that got caught up in the fire, which is pretty gross.
I would still recommend the book though, because the Mann Gulch Fire is super interesting.
Did you read anything else good for that class? (growing up in the mountains with a firefighter dad has given me a strong [I was going to say weird but I don’t think there’s anything weird about it] interest in how wildfires work)
We didn’t have a textbook for the class, most of what we read besides class notes was scientific articles and journals and things. I think you can find a lot of cool fire-related stuff in wildfire/wildland management journals (and if you’re affiliated with a university, you can usually go through the library’s website and access scholarly articles for free!)
I would also recommend poking around Wikipedia a bit for fire-related information. I just searched ‘wildfire’ there and the first article that came up has a nice overview of fire stuff. The cited sources on that page can also lead to some interesting stuff (that’s actually how I found sources for most of the papers I did in that class). As far as specific wildfires, some articles that I find myself constantly coming back to when I’m bored and on Wikipedia are the Ash Wednesday (II) fires in Australia and the Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin.
Sorry I can’t really find any specific books for the topic, but again I’d recommend Young Men and Fire. Just know that it was written by a privileged white dude in the ’80’s who is far more wordy than he needs to be and also (spoiler alert) people die horribly. 🙂
Deadspin has complied a collection of all the DV incidents involving NFL players that have happened under Rodger Goodell’s tenure. It’s a…difficult read. http://sidespin.kinja.com/roger-goodell-is-a-dome…
Of note: this is just domestic violence and does not include sexual assault or other relationship violence.
“…a general-interest website geared towards women”? That has got to be the most understated understatement in the history of understating.
Holy shit you guys Polly answered my question this week. I’m almost in tears. I’m basically in love.