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[jessicapll]

According to one recent poll, more Americans blame drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness for homelessness than poverty or the availability of housing. This focus on individual pathology can lead to dangerous policy prescriptions.

The worlds of the rich and the poor are growing further apart, as those with resources retreat to increasingly fortified sanctuaries to safeguard their status, while those without are left to struggle and ultimately die on their own, with the government intervening mainly to discipline those who fail to render themselves obligingly invisible.

[jessicapll]

The dancers work on one-year contracts. Corps members earn roughly $1,100 to $2,100 a week, depending on seniority, and are typically paid for 37 to 39 weeks a year. Since ballet careers are short, many are in a hurry to make their marks.

[jessicapll]

 We’re used to having our celebrity gossip laundered through a few cycles of rumor mills and publicist-approved statements. Here was primary sourcing—an original text, literally, presented with relatively little comment or apparent mediation—made public to all for analysis and interpretation. In the realm of digital totems, screenshots feel unvarnished and objective, and therefore believable and true.

[jessicapll]

“The government’s outreach leans toward the privileged urban youths -- the kind of millennials who fit the idea they want to promote -- while leaving out the majority who are middle- to lower-income and live in rural areas.”

[jessicapll]

In this country, it’s routine for kids to ask their parents for money but not vice versa. In many places, however, children expect to support their elderly parents and will subordinate their interests to that aim. Indeed, children have historically been regarded as a kind of insurance plan for old age. Filial piety, a Confucian ideal, requires children to maintain indigent parents in old age, and in Singapore, where much of the population takes Confucian values seriously, that ideal has legal teeth: A Tribunal for the Maintenance of Parents allows needy parents to obtain a legally enforceable order for financial assistance from their children. People I grew up with in Ghana would condemn you if you lived comfortably but left your parents hard up. And many, many Americans would no doubt feel the same.

[jessicapll]

When I was 25, I was suffering a ton of ankle pain. The doctor did an MRI and said my posterior tibial tendon — on the outside of the anklebone — looked like string cheese. It was completely unraveling. For female dancers, it's often an area of pain because that tendon is the stabilizer for pointe work, but most get tendinitis or something milder like that. My injury wasn't just from all the pounding over the years; it was also because of poor nutrition.

[jessicapll]

Even though during rehearsals, we try to exercise both legs, while dancing, the load is never distributed evenly. Therefore the bodies of ballet dancers have various "professional deformations." So, what we need is not fitness but balancing gymnastics that helps the dancers prepare their bodies for a professional classic ballet rehearsal. This kind of balance can be found in Pilates, Gyrotonics, the gymnastics I mentioned earlier, or vinyasa yoga.

[jessicapll]

Shcherbakova “is actually a skater that appears to look like a ballerina, but as soon as she starts moving, you can tell that she’s not trained” and that “a lot of her movements are very unaesthetic and unappealing.” Trusova, similarly, is known in the sport as an athletic jumper, and her free skate tends to resemble something more along the lines of a warmup to music than a routine; jump after jump, with not much artistry in between. A former skater who asked that their name not be used described Trusova’s skating as “so unpleasant.”

[jessicapll]

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22902543/covid-omicron-pandemic-tired-burnout

Americans are disengaged from the news and numb to politics, our circuits overloaded from months of crises and coup attempts. Some experts say we’re losing our ability to empathize with one another; others say we’ve been steeped in badness for so long it’s become difficult to imagine a better world. At this point, “I wonder where people are getting their hope from,” said Kali Cyrus, a psychiatrist and professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

[jessicapll]

[jessicapll]

Since I have muscles to protect and grow, scheduling eating and resting is vital. The training is one thing, but if you don’t do that then it goes away.

[jessicapll]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/09/magazine/difficult-mother-in-law-ethics.html

When you provide people with ongoing assistance, you tend to assume ongoing obligations. In ways I’ve discussed before, when a helping hand is dependably there, it’s only reasonable that we come to depend on it. And so your stepmother-in-law now has a legitimate expectation that she can rely on you to manage her finances and her health care arrangements; she probably also expects that you’ll continue to spend time with her. These are responsibilities that have accrued to you because of what you’ve done for her; they no longer have much to do with the fact that she was married to your father-in-law.

[jessicapll]

Once, he refused to eat leftovers because he'd eaten the same thing yesterday. Instead he insisted on fixing something new. ... I think there is some privilege in refusing to eat food due to boredom.

[jessicapll]

Do not answer the door. Do not answer the phone. When the man is looking through the window, make sure you can't be seen. Do not tell anyone who knocks on the door where the parents work