From The Atlantic: The White-Savior Industrial Complex Teju Cole Mar 21 2012, 7:15 AM ET

http://m.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/

I want to tread carefully here: I do not accuse Kristof of racism nor do I believe he is in any way racist. I have no doubt that he has a good heart. Listening to him on the radio, I began to think we could iron the whole thing out over a couple of beers. But that, precisely, is what worries me. That is what made me compare American sentimentality to a “wounded hippo.” His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

But I disagree with the approach taken by Invisible Children in particular, and by the White Savior Industrial Complex in general, because there is much more to doing good work than “making a difference.” There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.

“One virtue of those hated things called bureaucracies is that they oblige everyone to follow a common set of rules, regardless of station or background; they are inherently equalizing.”

Op-Ed Contributor

Celebrating Inequality

Published: May 19, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/opinion/inequality-and-the-modern-culture-of-celebrity.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130520

As mindless diversions from a sluggish economy and chronic malaise, the new aristocrats play a useful role. But their advent suggests that, after decades of widening income gaps, unequal distributions of opportunity and reward, and corroding public institutions, we have gone back to Gatsby’s time — or something far more perverse. The celebrity monuments of our age have grown so huge that they dwarf the aspirations of ordinary people, who are asked to yield their dreams to the gods: to flash their favorite singer’s corporate logo at concerts, to pour open their lives (and data) on Facebook, to adopt Apple as a lifestyle. We know our stars aren’t inviting us to think we can be just like them. Their success is based on leaving the rest of us behind.

“As the women’s movement grew, women activists did, however, begin to “name” their grievances. “

Feminism Has Come a Long Way—or Has It?

As an activist and historian, I’m still shocked that women activists (myself included) didn’t add violence against women to those three demands back in 1970. Fear of male violence was such a normal part of our lives that it didn’t occur to us to highlight it—not until feminists began, during the 1970s, to publicize the wife-beating that took place behind closed doors and to reveal how many women were raped by strangers, the men they dated or even their husbands.  

Read more: http://www.thenation.com/article/173036/womens-movement-has-come-long-way-or-has-it#ixzz2TUD65jyp

“This book is about worries. It’s not about money troubles. There’s a crucial difference.”

How to Worry Less About Money

by Maria Popova

What Goethe can teach us about cultivating a healthy relationship with our finances.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/13/how-to-worry-less-about-money/

Armstrong argues, are four main questions that have far less to do with our financial standing than with psychoemotional and social factors — questions about why money important to us, how much money we need to achieve what’s important to us, what the best way to acquire that money is, and what our economic responsibilities to others are in the course of acquiring and using that money. We’ll never overcome our money worries, he argues, unless we first recognize those underlying questions:

Our worries — when it comes to money — are about psychology as much as economics, the soul as much as the bank balance.

NY Times: “Gray Matter Brain, Interrupted” by Bob Sullivan

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/opinion/sunday/a-focus-on-distraction.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130504

There have been a few efforts to do so: Gloria Mark of the University of California, Irvine, found that a typical office worker gets only 11 minutes between each interruption, while it takes an average of 25 minutes to return to the original task after an interruption. But there has been scant research on the quality of work done during these periods of rapid toggling.

We decided to investigate further, and asked Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology, and the psychologist Eyal Peer at Carnegie Mellon to design an experiment to measure the brain power lost when someone is interrupted.

“I can only hope that “The Undivided Past” will have all the impact of Huntington’s work, serving as an important reminder that human beings around the world not only have much in common but also have improved the conditions of their lives over time”

A Common Struggle

‘The Undivided Past,’ by David Cannadine

By ALAN WOLFE

Published: April 19, 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/the-undivided-past-by-david-cannadine.html?nl=books&emc=edit_bk_20130419

So it goes for race and gender. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whose ideas influenced the Nazis, insisted that racial differences could never be overcome and so, in his own way, did the left-wing radical W. E. B. Du Bois. Similarly, it is not just male chauvinists who insist on the biological superiority of one sex over another but also “essentialist” feminists like Germaine Greer. All these arguments represent examples of “totalizing,” which Cannadine defines as “describing and defining individuals by their membership in one single group, deemed to be more important and more all-encompassing than any other solidarity.” Not only is totalizing empirically wrong, he insists, but it is also politically obnoxious in its claim that human solidarity is illusory.

…What’s more, the very term “civilization” was anything but merely descriptive; to German thinkers it was a step down from Kultur, while for British imperialists it was a step up from tribalism. When we get to Huntington, therefore, it comes as no surprise to learn that for Cannadine the civilizations presumed to be clashing “seem on closer inspection to be little more than arbitrary groupings and idiosyncratic personal constructs.” Cannadine rarely puts his emotions on display, but on this question he does: “Future world leaders who invoke ‘civilization,’ ” he writes, “ought to be more circumspect about doing so than many who have recently and irresponsibly been bandying it around to such baleful effect.”

” the sensation of ‘pleasant surprise’”

Why your brain loves music

New neuroscience study sets out to explain why in some respects music offers the same sort of pleasure as a really good thriller.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/9989446/Why-your-brain-loves-music.html#mm_hash

It might seem surprising that people should enjoy having their expectations contradicted. But these results only reveal the physical basis for something we’ve known about for centuries. In the ancient world, teachers of rhetoric knew that one way to hold people’s attention was to set up expectations and then deny them.

As the great 17th-century philosopher Francis Bacon put it in an essay on rhetoric, “there is pleasure even in being deceived”.

But the implication is this only works provided the ‘deceiving’ doesn’t go on too long. Thwarting expectations is good, as long as it’s temporary. Anyone who’s studied music theory will have come across the “interrupted cadence”, which does actually what its name suggests. It seems to be leading to a close, but at the last minute swerves to an unexpected destination. We enjoy this, partly because it’s a pleasurable shock, but also because we know it will all come out right in the end.

More closely relevant to this new research is a book published more than 50 years ago by the music theorist Leonard Meyer. Entitled Emotion and Meaning in Music, it offers an entire theory of musical meaning based on a close examination of things like the interrupted cadence. Meyer showed how this mechanism of “thwarted expectation” only works when we know the style. Faced with a piece of Korean pansori music, most of us can’t predict how it will unfold, so our pleasure in the music is drastically reduced.

” tomorrow’s adults will need an online home that they control”

• 
• • Dan Gillmor
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 March 2013 08.00 EDT

My students get extra credit if they can show they’ve registered an internet domain name for themselves. In any future course I teach, this will no longer be optional; it will be a requirement.

My students – and the rest of us – are partly who others say we are. That’s a key reason why each of us needs to be one of the voices (preferably the most prominent) defining us. To the extent that they live public lives in any way – and like it or not, it’s getting harder not to be public in some way – tomorrow’s adults will need an online home that they control. They need an online home, a place where they tell the world who they are and what they’ve done, where they post their own work, or at least some of it.

The Guardian on Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2013/mar/11/mont-blanc-pb-shelley?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+theguardian%2Fbooks%2Frss+%28Books%29&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

The concept of mind as a helpless natural force comparable to glaciers, rivers, winds, etc is a difficult one for an idealistic and reforming imagination such as Shelley’s. While travelling, he would sign guesthouse registers as “Shelley – Democrat, Philanthropist and Atheist”, and under “destination” write “L’Enfer” (Woodcock, p.viii). At the end of “Mont Blanc”, framing that final rhetorical question about meaning, he evokes a chilling kind of hell. God’s absence is no problem. But a “vacancy” that denied imaginative resonance to our perceptions would be the ultimate bleakness. It’s almost as if the young poet had foreseen the hollow materialism of a secular age not unlike our own: “The secret Strength of things/ Which governs thought, and to the infinite dome/ Of Heaven is as a law, inhabits thee!/ And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea,/ If to the human mind’s imaginings/ Silence and solitude were vacancy?”

Great Classroom Resource on Class in U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/national/class/

Shadowy Lines That Still Divide
By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT
This series does not purport to be the last word on class. It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans encounter it.