Collecting ephemera, curios, and raw material from across the digital universe. (Theme: Maple & Oak by the layoutshop).
A new crop of romantic comedies is subverting the idea that a ‘perfect’ marriage is the ultimate fulfilment of female purpose
The movie resonated not just because it is screamingly funny, but also because it dares to address the thought that the traditional female life narrative, in which marriage to “the right man” takes the place of every other kind of quest and call for self-discovery and self-development, may really not be enough…
…Instead, these movies suggest that she should find adventure in herself and look for real emotional sustenance in those who surround her – and not idealize the groom as a deliverer from, or a panacea for, everything else in her life. Above all, these stories seem to propose that only then can a wedding day be a real cause for celebration.
HBO’s Game of Thrones has a lot of nudity in it, sometimes that nudity seems completely gratuitous and unnecessary. Last night, Saturday Night Live proposed a theory as to why that is.
By AMY ALLEN
This is why the predominant approach in so-called third wave feminist theory (which is not necessarily the same thing as feminist philosophy) is deconstructive in the sense that it tries to call into question binary distinctions such as reason vs. emotion, mind vs. body, and male vs. female. Among other things, this means challenging the very assumptions by means of which people are split up into two and only two sexes and two and only two genders.
This short detour through the history of second wave feminism suggests that the choice that has emerged in the debate over Badinter’s book — that we either view attachment parenting as a backlash against feminism and or embrace attachment parenting as feminism — is a false one. Neither vision of feminism challenges the fundamental conceptual oppositions that serve to rationalize and legitimate women’s subordination.
In 1979, he was an 18-year-old freshman who liked Earth, Wind & Fire and wore silly hats. David Maraniss’ new biography reveals how Barry from Honolulu became Barack, president of the United States
…When it was time for McNear to return to Occidental, they began a long-distance relationship, conducted mostly through a series of passionate letters. Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told McNear that it seemed all his Pakistani friends were headed towards the business world, and his old high school buddies from Honolulu were “moving toward the mainstream”. Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me… The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and all the] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”
Here, at 22, was an idea that would become a key to understanding Obama the politician and public figure. “Without a class” meant he was entering his adult life without financial security. Without a “structure” meant he had grown up lacking a solid family foundation, his father gone from the start, his mother often elsewhere, his grandparents doing the best they could, but all leading to his sense of being a rootless outsider. Without a “tradition” was a reference to his lack of religious grounding and his status as both white and black, feeling completely at home in neither race. Eventually he could make a few essential choices in terms of how he would live out his personal life, moving inexorably towards the black world. But in a larger sense, in terms of his ambitions beyond family, he did not want to be constricted by narrow choices. The different path he saw for himself was to rise above the divisions of culture and society, politics and economics, and embrace something larger. To make a particular choice would be to limit him, he wrote in the letter to McNear, because “taken separately, they are unacceptable and untenable”…
…Class inequality and ‘the gospel of wealth’ – in tackling such issues F Scott Fitzgerald’s masterpiece has never been more relevant. The ‘American dream’ has always been an idea of failure
And as of 1917, at least some Americans were evidently beginning to recognise that consumerism and mass marketing were teaching them what to want, and that rises of fortune would be measured by the acquisition of status symbols. The phrase next appeared in print in a 1923 Vanity Fair article by Walter Lippmann, “Education and the White-Collar Class” (which Fitzgerald probably read); it warned that widening access to education was creating untenable economic pressure, as young people graduated with degrees only to find that insufficient white-collar jobs awaited. Instead of limiting access to education in order to keep such jobs the exclusive domain of the upper classes (a practice America had recently begun to justify by means of a controversial new idea called “intelligence tests”), Lippmann argued that Americans must decide that skilled labour was a proper vocation for educated people. There simply weren’t enough white-collar jobs to go around, but “if education could be regarded not as a step ladder to a few special vocations, but as the key to the treasure house of life, we should not even have to consider the fatal proposal that higher education be confined to a small and selected class,” a decision that would mark the “failure of the American dream” of universal education…
…The American dream comes true for just 1%: for the other 99%, only discontent and bitterness await, ressentiment on a mass scale. More than 15 years later, the Marxist critics Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer used a similar image of the typist who believed she would be a movie star to reveal the American dream as a rigged lottery that no one wins but everyone plays. Today, almost 100 years after “The Swimmers” appeared, the Occupy movement has clenched its fist around the same angry realisation that we are all the 99%, not the 1%. More remarkable than the fact that Fitzgerald beat Adorno and Horkheimer and the Occupy movement to the punch, however, is that he saw all this before Wall Street came smashing down…
There are surely lessons here from John Maynard Keynes, who understood that the state and the market are interdependent. But Keynes had little to say about social justice, including the political commitments with which Europe emerged after World War II. These led to the birth of the modern welfare state and national health services — not to support a market economy but to protect human well-being.
Though these social issues did not engage Keynes deeply, there is an old tradition in economics of combining efficient markets with the provision of public services that the market may not be able to deliver. As Adam Smith (often seen simplistically as the first guru of free-market economics) wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” there are “two distinct objects” of an economy: “first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or, more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.”
9:01PM BST 21 May 2012
In the 17th century civil marriage appears for the first time. And some women simply didn’t get married at all, in such numbers that the terms “spinster” (to mean “unmarried woman” rather than someone who spins for a living) and “old maid” begin to appear. These women formed a significant new group in society. Yet people found them disturbing, and it was the singletons who tended to be accused of witchcraft. On the positive side, even housework, a married woman’s destiny, could be a significant way to spend a life. A wife was the head of a business, managing servants, health care and the production of clothes and food. She could learn about enterprise and technological innovation from a growing genre of specialist literature, and authors such as Hannah Woolley became the housewife’s adviser and cheerleader. Of course, some felt threatened by all this female empowerment.
…My heroines of the Restoration period were those women who refused to be imprisoned by expectations. There were travellers, like Celia Fiennes, the first person known to have visited every county in the kingdom. Aphra Behn, female spy and playwright, wrote that she valued fame “as much as if she had been born a hero”. Christian Davis went off to war disguised as a male soldier.
n higher education, the United States may be on its way to becoming more like the rest of the world, with a small group of schools controlling access to life membership in the élite. And higher education is becoming more like other areas of American life, with the fortunate few institutions distancing themselves ever further from the many. All those things which commencement speakers talk about—personal growth, critical-thinking skills, intellectual exploration, breadth of learning—will survive at the top institutions, but other colleges will come under increased pressure to adopt the model of trade schools. Student loans open access to students, and give colleges more freedom. Obama and Romney will have plenty to disagree about, and it’s good that the interest rate on student loans isn’t on the list. For the federal government to pump extra tuition money into the system, in the form of low-cost loans, in order to spread opportunity more widely, and to allow more schools to provide more than skills instruction, seems like a small price to pay for the kind of society it buys. ♦
Published: May 20, 2012
Even more striking is the type of men who are making the shift. From 1970 to 1990, according to a study by Mary Gatta, the senior scholar at Wider Opportunities for Women, and Patricia A. Roos, a sociologist at Rutgers, men who took so-called pink-collar jobs tended to be foreign-born non-English speakers with low education levels — men who, in other words, had few choices.
Now, though, the trend has spread among men of nearly all races and ages, more than a third of whom have a college degree. In fact, the shift is most pronounced among young, white, college-educated men like Charles Reed, a sixth-grade math teacher at Patrick Henry Middle School in Houston.
Saturday, May 26 - Sunday, May 27, 2012
Seattle University
Seattle, WA
This symposium focuses on the patterns and networks of cultural interaction, exchange, and mutual curiosity between Europe and Southeast Asia as well as Sri Lanka (Ceylon). While some of the papers use frameworks of empire, others highlight themes that are often overlooked or obscured when focusing on the frameworks of empires and nation-states. Issues of heritage are also highlighted.
“Collecting Malay Heritage: Amateur Scholarly Societies, Ethnology, and Colonial Education in British Malaya 1900-1910”
Matthew Schauer, University of Pennsylvania
“Illegible Histories: Cultural Heritage and Vietnam’s Yao Communities”
Bradley Davis, Gonzaga University
“The Politics of Mobility and Constructions of Masculinities in Colonial Vietnam.”
Judith Henchy, University of Washington
“Rituals and Power: Anxieties over and Challenges to the Material and Immaterial Forms of Deference in Colonial Java, 1900-1942”
Arnout van der Meer, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
“Opium Policy and International Opinion: Colonial Burma, c.1930-1939”
Ashley Wright, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada
“Material Culture in Colonial Indonesia”
Dawn Odell, Lewis and Clark College
“Circulation of Tiles and Other Forms of Material Culture”
H. Hazel Hahn, Seattle University
“The Diaries of Philiphe Binh: A Vietnamese Travel Account of Early Nineteenth-Century Portugal”
George Dutton, UCLA
“Images of Empire: Late Nineteenth Century British Photography in Ceylon”
Benita Stambler, John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art
“Technical Exchanges in Colonial Vietnam: a Missed Rendez-Vous?”
Caroline Herbelin, Université de Toulouse 2 Le Mirail, France
“Modernizing Cambodia Under Norodom Sihanouk”
Linda Saphan, Manhattan College
“Rejecting and Reproducing Colonial Urbanism in Contemporary Malaysian City Design”
Sarah Moser, University of Massachusetts Lowell
“Rethinking the ‘Divine Arabesque’: A Critical Approach to Claude Debussy and the Javanese Kampong from the 1889 Universal Exposition”
Rachel Thompson, MCAD Minneapolis College of Art and Design
“Jazz and the British Empire in Colonial Asia”
Fritz Schenker, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This symposium is open to the public.
The symposium is sponsored by the Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair Fund in the College of Arts and Sciences. Those wishing to attend the symposium should contact Hazel Hahn, Pigott-McCone Endowed Chair in Humanities 2010-12, at hahnh@seattleu.edu.
Other speakers consider the influence of Plato in the books, the “racial politics of goblins” and the educational path taken by Harry and “orchestrated by the Socratic figure of Dumbledore”.
Other lecture titles include:
• What about the Dursleys? : A re-reading of fantastical intrusions in Harry Potter
• “The Role of Snape: A Sketch of a Pattern of Paternal Atonement”
• “The Canonization of Neville Longbottom”
With the economic troubles of the past few years, it’s no surprise that the number of people using food stamps is soaring. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reports that an average of 44 million people were on food assistance last year; that’s up from 17 million in 2000.
What might be surprising, though, is one subgroup that’s taken a particularly hard hit.
The number of people with graduate degrees — master’s degrees and doctorates — who have had to apply for food stamps, unemployment or other assistance more than tripled between 2007 and 2010, according to a report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
In 2010, the report says, 360,000 of the 22 million Americans with graduate degrees received some kind of public assistance.
From The Nation
Mothers’ financial struggles during unpaid leave can leave an indelible mark on their finances. While there are no studies looking specifically at the connection, the debt taken on during leave could be at least one reason that women have a higher bankruptcy rate. In a study of bankruptcy filers published by Elizabeth Warren and Melissa Jacoby in 2006, 7 percent cited the birth of a child as the cause for bankruptcy. The Center for American Progress reports that a “not-insignificant” number of bankruptcies happen after a worker misses two or more weeks of work due to illness. Other work by Warren may complete the picture. A 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap, which Warren co-authored with Amelia Tyagi, noted, “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse” (emphasis theirs). While it’s unclear how exactly maternity leave fits into these trends, “it is part of multiple factors that make child-bearing very expensive to women specifically,” said Emily Martin, vice president at the National Women’s Law Center.
Universities can behave this way because they think they have a captive audience. Because college grads still earn considerably more than high school grads, colleges assume that students will keep enrolling. But what will happen when cash-strapped students are presented with a viable alternative? It may take 10 to 20 years, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a new breed of school emerges, schools that throw away the four year model (and the humanities too) and offer students a very targeted online education in “practical” fields — from accounting to coding to nursing to law and business — at a dramatically lower cost. Here, the education cycle gets shortened to perhaps two years, and then students get credentialed (maybe by a trusted third-party provider) and go to work, only to return later in their careers to take more courses in specialized areas. This model will require the right technology platform (something that will get worked out fairly soon) and a change in the expectations of employers and society more broadly (something that will take time to develop, but less time than complacent colleges think).
