#and learned a lot about how to structure and sustain a longer narrative

[sevenfists]

hi! i've been an avid reader of your work for a few years now, and i just wanted to say you've had a massive influence not only on my approach to writing but my appreciation for it too! your writing speaks to me on a level i've only encountered maybe once or twice in my life, and i finally got around to purchasing your first novel - i'm so excited! it was a part of my christmas present for myself along with an alphasmart3000. you've really inspired me to seriously pursue what i love the most :) ❤️ i'm so excited to dive into your novels and see what's next! happy holidays xxx

💜💜💜 I hope you'll love it! Writing original fiction is sooo different from fanfiction in sooo many ways, I'm still figuring it out! Every book is a learning experience.

[mcenvs3000w25]

Final Blog Post

A nature interpreter’s job is not just to impart knowledge about the natural world; it’s also to build relationships, encourage stewardship, and generate awe. We have discussed in this course how interpretation can support sustainability, promote environmental stewardship, and facilitate people’s reconnection with the natural world. As an emerging nature interpreter, my personal ethics are based on a strong conviction in the value of hands-on learning, a sense of obligation to the next generation, and a dedication to accessibility and inclusivity in environmental education.

One of the core beliefs I bring to this role is that people protect what they love, and love what they understand. This belief is deeply aligned with the thoughts of Enos and Mills, who emphasized that nature guiding should be more inspirational than informational. In addition to providing information about plants and animals, I want to help people understand how they fit into the greater ecological system. “The chief aim of interpretation is not instruction, but provocation,” as Freeman Tilden put it. It is my responsibility to provoke interest, foster greater appreciation, and leave a lasting emotional impression.

Furthermore, I think that everyone should be able to understand nature. As an interpreter, I have the chance to close the divide that has historically separated many groups from outdoor settings. Through culturally appropriate storytelling, accessible programming, or invoking kids from different backgrounds, I’m dedicated to making sure that everyone has the chance to cultivate a connection with nature.

It is my duty as a nature interpreter to help my audience develop a feeling of environmental stewardship. The analogy of trying to stop a rishing river with a teaspoon by Josh Rodenburg strikes a deep chord because although environmental issues often seem impossible to conquer, little, meaningful actions taken together can have a significant impact. I consider myself to have three responsibilities:

Providing Meaningful Experiences- interpretation should produce unforgettable, life-changing experiences rather than just conveying facts. Whether it’s through immersive treks, interactive exercises, or storytelling, my goal is to bring nature to life in ways that motivate action.

Encouraging Critical Thinking and Reflection- as Richard Louv explains in Last Child in the Woods, nature-deficit disorder affects a lot of individuals, particularly kids. It is my duty to assist people in appreciating nature and challenging the structure that keep them from it.

Advocate for Sustainability and Regeneration- conservation education is no longer sufficient. Ecosystems need to be actively regenerated rather than just maintained. This entails directing people toward actions that lessen waste, restore habitats, and slow down climate change.

Everybody interprets differently, and my method is based on conceptual communication, narrative and active participation. Effective interpretation should be Thematic, Organized, Relevant and Enjoyable, per Sam Ham’s TORE paradigm. My strategy is in line with these ideas. Since individuals can relate to stories more than facts, storytelling is a strong connection technique. I might describe a migrating bird’s journey and the difficulties it encounters rather than listing bird species. Deeper participation is encouraged by the emotional connection this approach helps to establish. Additionally, immersive, hands-on learning enhances understanding. Active participation leads to deeper learning, so rather than just talking about trees, I would encourage people to touch bark, smell leaves, and listen to the sounds of the forest. This is consistent with Mills and Tilden’s emphasis on appealing to the senses and imagination. Finally, it is important to make nature meaningful to the audience. People’s experiences should be connected to interpretation. I might associate nature with backyard biodiversity or city parks if I’m working with urban youth. This method is guided by Tilden’s first principle which states that interpretation must be connected to the visitor’s experience.

Interpreting nature is more than just a profession; it’s sometimes a calling. Since passion is contagious, I will continue to be curious and passionate to make sure that every day has purpose. I will inspire others if I continue to be enthusiastic about the natural world. I shall also keep learning and changing because I understand that just as nature is dynamic, so too is the area of interpretation. I’ll aim to keep improving, whether it’s by reading up-to-date studies, or paying attention to my audience. Lastly, realizing that sometimes the most important moments in nature occur in silence, I will make room for introspection and amazement. Some places, as Harold Ickes pointed out, just need to be experienced; they don’t require narration.

I consider the broader picture of my work as a nature interpreter as this semester draws to a close. It can be intimidating to consider how urgent climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation are. Beck and Cable (2011) remind us, however, that interpretation is a gift of hope. I aspire to create a future where people are inspired to preserve and repair the natural world by cultivating passion for it.

My ultimate objective is to change anything, no matter how small. I’m planting the seeds of awareness and concern, whether I’m taking a family on their first camping vacation, exposing a child to their first woodpecker, or assisting someone in appreciate the beauty of their neighbourhood park. According to Tilden, “You will be an interpreter of the first rank if you love the thing, you interpret and the people who come to enjoy it.” This will serve as my guiding principle going forward in my journey as a nature interpreter.

References

Beck, L., Cable, T. T., & Knudson, D. M. (2018). Interpreting cultural and natural heritage: For A Better World. SAGAMORE Publishing, Sagamore Venture.

[jiessicas]

07.06.23 making maps

in the face of helplessness/panic, noticing the thoughts/feels/actions -> how do my fears sorrows reflect what i want? how do they illuminate some border i didn’t realize was there?

started the day mildly panicked, talked myself through them in morning prompts, almost like i needed a lil narrative to get unstuck

not knowing the paths ahead gives me anxiety; making myself maps feels like a way to anchor / fight the feeling of helplessness

life infra [gonna be me mildly anxiety blogging until i feel properly held by structure that i'm gonna have to make by myself and with others]

today felt like another life infra day (drs appointments, finances)

first time chat with a holistic financial planner who works with underserved groups; it was really nice to talk through short / medium / long term goals

-> to dream about a decade out from now (kids? homes? careers? i can barely fathom life 10 years out from now but appreciated someone nudging me to do that anyway) (i feel i can only think about months at a time)

looking for specialist healthcare and navigating insurance is so confusing & laden with discourage from past failed attempts to, but really thankful for how many online resources there are to navigate this, ready to stay on the phone with bureaucracy for as long as needed

the joys and horrors of inhabiting a corporeal existence

because of some health stuff, my body has been feeling real weird as of late; trying to be gentle with it and not additionally hard on myself for feeling different

resuscitated by chicken porridge i want to learn how to make at home; a friend’s black bean quinoa tacos; two kinds of matcha lattes from two fine establishments (stonemill; maiko)

HAGS! <3

friday field trip and sunday camping incoming :,,,,)

appreciative of converse ways of planning / thinking - starting at the individual vs starting at the group in terms of hopes for this time; starting with the structure of the day vs starting with the discrete things wished to be done!!! dualities of man~

dispatches from s from nyc <3 Against the Tyranny of Shippers (& a Sideeye At Javascript)

all different entry points, but entry points nonetheless!

The Internet(tm)

my main feeling is that everyone has so many things to say all the time and it’s incredible and terrifying and overwhelming but so cool (me, flipping between bluesky, threads, twitter on safari)

k texted me asking about threads v bluesky; it looks like something like 1/3 or 1/4 of people in the us are on meta vs like 1/100 on twitter (ie twitter users are just built different)

nice details to remember

a cruise car named ube; a new candle that crackles with the might of a fireplace; a section of a bookshelf curated after recommendations from a friend; the casual thursday night dates playing out at the social study

l got everyone back onto pokemon go & we're all on tumblr..... it's 2016 and it's time to pokemon go to the polls babyyyy

walk w s through the fillmore talking about the want to be understood and to understand as love languages ~ how that propelled early childhood compulsions to externalize it in writing (like w f and i), or internalize it and alchemize it in other ways!

the opening to "fight" by brockhampton feels urgent and deliberate; it makes me feel like there is some kind of arena to be entered, some hat to be thrown into the ring, some new kids on the block to be stomping around

to linger longer

reveries/dreams

“how am i gonna try today?���

so what are you writing about? you and me both, pal — feel like there's a lot generated, started from the last year, pondering how i can hold onto a thread for a bit longer to work on for a sustained period of time

thinking about dogs & daughters (as it seems like i've been since 2019, according to my notes app search results) ~ thinking about the unfettered sweetness of puppy love

thinking about cleaning tidying decluttering in a song dong / jen craig’s “wall” kinda way

similarly enjoying slowly gathering similar books (currently, book recs from someone whose taste in books i respect/admire, another shelf dedicated to books on art/practice/making)

feeling myself dreaming again, at the end of the day <3 feeling project themes for this summer percolating... feeling like what is ahead is but a wide expanse, with few things in my way (have been reaching for this feeling for so, so long)

when i say i have that dog in me, this is what i mean

[utilitycaster]

How to actually get people to try TTRPGs other than D&D

I've probably said most of this stuff separately, but here it is all together. This was originally even longer, and way more satirical, but honestly, while it was very funny, I think just a straight shot is what's called for.

The long "in defense of D&D" toll you must pay first as it's crucial to understand why so many efforts fail:

The popularity is a feature.

Yes, there is a reason it has the name recognition it does, and yes, that reason is capitalism; this post explains that far better than I ever could. You do need to go about this assuming that you are not going to personally end capitalism tomorrow, and even if you did, more people would be familiar with D&D than any other TTRPG, and 5e would have a number of materials geared specifically towards new players. Pretending this isn't the case will not help you.

Switching TTRPGs, particularly to anything that vaguely resembles D&D in genre, theme, and character creation, requires obtaining materials, finding a group (possibly even a GM, and those are thin on the ground), and learning a new system. This takes significant time, effort, and possibly money. That's often ignored. More importantly, people will have emotional attachments to the games they like. I've found that often, the "hook" in posts encouraging people to leave D&D is when WoTC does something sketchy. However, as a lot of players and creators in the industry pointed out recently, if someone already owns all the D&D content they need, they can sustain a boycott and have no need to switch; and what's more, when someone is considering other games not to better meet their gameplay needs or to expand their horizons, but because they feel cheated, the last person they want to hear from is a gleefully circling vulture.

So if you're reading this and saying "well then, where's my opportunity? when do I pounce?" the answer is "if you are thinking of introducing people to new games as an opportunity to pounce and poach rather than a warm welcome, I feel incredibly sorry for you, and you will probably alienate more people than you attract."

Anyway, onto the actual mechanical merits of D&D. It is a flexible system. It is not infinitely flexible - it has many limitations - but a lot of other systems are even narrower in scope, not broader. D&D can be rules-heavy, but RP is largely open and, barring charm spells, I control my PC, which I vastly prefer to games that will tell me how my character feels. It accommodates a wide range of play styles, from very loose to very crunchy.

D&D hits on a particular balance of strict, though often streamlined mechanical rules for combat and abilities, and wide-open freedom for character personality and agency, which is very appealing to many. In fact, a common complaint I've seen from D&D players about other systems is that they are rigid and overcomplicated in the areas where they want more freedom and ease, and too loose in the places where they want structure. This doesn't mean those systems are wrong or bad! It does however mean that they are not a natural fit for people who genuinely enjoy D&D as a system.

Also, just to get it out of the way: I (and a lot of D&D players I know):

strongly dislike games that regularly just tell you how your character feels, mechanically

Feel that D&D handles mixed successes in a way that feels rewarding for the player and which moves forth the narrative

Feel that D&D has, in the base PHB form, a manageable (ie, non-overwhelming) number of classes/subclasses and races such that you can start people off simple and then those with experience can explore other resources.

In other words: games with mechanics that regularly tell you what your character's emotions are instead of letting you choose through open RP? Games where nearly every success comes with a serious consequence? The 20+ classes of Pathfinder before you even get into archetypes? Not always a selling point! In fact, often a drawback for people coming from D&D! which brings me to the first real point:

Listen to the person you’re trying to convince before you recommend anything.

This doesn't apply if you're making a "hey! this game is cool!" post in general, provided you're actually focusing on said game's own merits, but if you're trying to interact with an individual or a group, you have to personalize it.

First, think theme. This should be obvious, but I have had people recommend survival horror when I've asked for farcical mystery, so it needs to be said. Many TTRPGs - I'd even argue most, and that includes D&D - have pretty significant genre expectations, and so you should be matching those to the interests of the person you're talking to.

This also goes for tools and mechanics! Having a virtual character sheet or dice rollers (for example) isn't terribly important to me, but some people do want the support of these tools and that should be taken under consideration. Don't tell someone who is primarily playing remotely to try to play Dread; don't tell someone looking for a system that supports character advancement over time to play Honey Heist. Again, seemingly intuitive, but you'd be surprised at how often people ignore the entire content of a request simply to hype their favorite game and in doing so harm that game's perception.

The person you're interacting with is a human with preferences, not a faceless proselytizing target. This is about them. It's not about your favorite game. It's about the game you think could be their favorite game.

A crash course will do wonders.

A crash course isn't as immediately attention-grabbing as saying "this is/isn't just like D&D," but it is actually useful. This is why actual play is such a powerful tool for encouraging people to play games - they can see an example. I'm the kind of person who does read a rulebook cover to cover, but this is still useful, because games can come off as far more intimidating or finicky on paper than they are in play. Understanding common player shortcuts and rules as intended vs. written is pure gold in terms of being convincing.

(For what it's worth: I do think it's important to read the rules once you've gotten the gist from actual play. I'm not a fan of "rules by osmosis." However, I think having crash courses or actual play examples are an important part of making people decide it's worth investing the time and often money involved in obtaining the game and reading the rules in the first place.)

If there's a free quickstart guide, an actual play episode or one-shot, or any kind of succinct but reasonably thorough introduction to the game, start there. Disseminate it. Put the rules in someone's hands and say "if this is interesting to you, join us!" and let them make their decision.

Don't sell a fixer-upper

(This also goes for D&D players talking mechanics - it's a community-wide problem to be sure.)

If you don't know of a game that fits someone's needs? Admit it. Point them towards people who know more about the TTRPG landscape, but my god, do not tell them "well, you can learn another system, and then immediately start hacking it with twenty add-ons and house rules before you have any fluency." It's okay to not know! It's even okay to say "I don't know something that achieves all of X, Y, and Z, but you might like this game, which is really good at X and decent at Y out of the box." Again: change is hard. Change that requires even more effort than usual is harder.

Are you trying to convince people to change, or are you trying to convince them to stop?

Shame is useful when you want people to stop doing something, or do something that doesn't require continued interactions with those yelling at them. It's useful to get people to stop making off-color jokes. It's very bad for getting people to join your community. (It's very good for making people leave your community).

This is especially true with TTRPGs, which do not have to be a zero sum game - we all have finite amounts of time, but people can and do play multiple games. And so again: do you genuinely want people to play your favorite game? Or do you just want to get them to stop playing D&D? Would you be welcoming to someone who runs alternating one shots or mini campaigns in both systems, or is it more important to you that they not play D&D, even if that means they never give your favorite indie creator a dime? And if it's the latter...what does that say about you?

In summary:

My general experience in TTRPG spaces as a D&D player has been, honestly, that many indie players are less interested in getting D&D players to join them than in getting D&D players to stop playing D&D. In my admittedly spiteful case, this means that there are a few TTRPGs I truly will not check out because I've found the online community to be far too unpleasant for it to be worth my time.

I'm well aware those people are not representative of all players. I'm sure there are many lovely players. And, for what it's worth, while I would never do something as invasive or obnoxious as going on other people's posts or worse, into their inbox or DMs to berate them for saying they dislike the game I play, I'm sure there are people who have come across my posts and said, for whatever reason, "I don't want to play with her."

I think D&D does have a certain amount of leeway in that it is the predominant game, for better or for worse, and so it's much easier to find the voices you enjoy and drown out those who don't, whereas there are indie games where one single person has been my sole introduction to it, and they have immediately fucked it up by making that introduction to it in the form of being incredibly obnoxious. Again: it's not fair. I'm not pretending it's fair. But it is the reality.

So it's worth checking to see if aggressive evangelizers in your own community are actively making your favorite game seem more unpalatable. You will do more good by getting them to cut it out than by promising the people they're bothering that not all of you are like that.

If you're interested in hyping up a game, then I'd focus on making posts about why it's good - not why others are bad; capitalizing in a positive way on popular shows branching out into other systems (eg, TAZ's BitD and Monster Hunter campaigns and dips into Urban Shadows; D20's Kids on Brooms or Good Society hacks; the CR and RQG one-shots of your choosing); and providing crash courses and fun, easily navigable paths to playing it.

[him-e]

what did you think of shadow and bone? have you read the books? i only read the duology

Thoughts on Shadow and Bone, now that you've probably seen it?

I think the show is alright? It lacks a real wow factor as far as I’m concerned, but it’s enjoyable. It’s especially enjoyable in those parts I didn’t anticipate to like / didn’t even know would be there. 

Whereas the main selling points leave a lot to be desired.

The good stuff: the visuals. The aesthetic. The overall concept. Production, casting and costumes are excellent, the setting is fascinating. The worldbuilding isn’t perfect and is sometimes confusing, which is probably due to the show jumping ahead of the books and introducing elements that happen much later in the book saga, but I’m loving the vague steampunk-y vibe of it mixed with more typical fantasy stuff and slavic-inspired lore, the fact that it’s set in dystopian Russia rather than your usual ye olde England.

I find it interesting that in this ‘verse the Grisha are simultaneously superstars, privileged elite, legendary creatures and despised outcasts, according to the context and the type of magic they wield. It’s A Lot, and so far it’s all a bit underdeveloped and messy, like a patchwork of different narratives and tropes sewn together without an organic worldbuilding structure. (there are hints to a past when they were hunted, but how did they go from that to being, essentially, an institutionalized asset to the government isn’t clear yet. There’s huge narrative potential in this, and I hope future seasons will delve into those aspects)

Many of the supporting characters are surprisingly solid. I appreciated that Genya and Zoya eventually sort of traded places, subverting the audience’s assumptions about them and their own character stereotypes, despite the little screentime they were given.

Breakout characters/ships for me were Nina/Matthias, and even more so the Crows, i.e. the stuff I didn’t see coming and knew nothing about (having only read the first book). (I thought the entire Crows subplot was handled in a somewhat convoluted way, at least in the first episodes; it was hard to keep track of who wanted Alina and why, but the Crows’ chemistry is so strong it carried the whole Plot B on its shoulders).

HELNIK. As an enemies to lovers dynamic, Helnik was SUPER on the nose, I’d say bordering on clichéd with the unapologetic, straight outta fanfiction use of classic tropes like “we need to team up to survive” and “there’s only one bed and we’ll freeze to death if we don’t take our conveniently damp clothes off and keep each other warm with the heat of our naked bodies” (not that I’m complaining, but i like to pine for my ships a bit before getting to the juicy tropetown part, tyvm). And then they’re suddenly on opposite sides again because of a tragic misunderstanding - does Bardugo hate high-conflict dynamics? It certainly seems so, because between Helnik and Darklina I’m starting to see a pattern where the slow burn and blossoming mutual trust is rushed and painted in broad, stereotypical strokes to get as fast as possible to the part where they *hate each other again* and that’s... huh. Something.

^That’s probably why I’m almost more interested in Kaz x Inej, because their relationship feels a bit more nuanced, a bit more mysterious, and a bit more unpredictable. (I didn’t bother spoiling myself about them, so I really don’t know where they’re going, but it’s refreshing to see a dynamic that the narrative isn’t scrambling to define in one direction or the other as quickly as possible)

-

Now, as for Darklina VS Malina... I found exactly what I expected. 

Both are ship dynamics I’m, on principle, very much into (light heroine/dark villain, pining friends to lovers) but both are also much less interesting than they claim to be, or could have been with different narrative choices. I’ll concede that the show characters are all more fleshed out and likable than their book counterparts, and the cringe parts I vaguely remembered from the books played out differently. And, well, Ben Barnes dominates the scene, he’s hot as HELL, literally every single second he’s on screen is a fuck you to Bardugo’s attempts to make his character lame and uninteresting and I’m LOVING it, lol.

But yeah, B Barnes aside, Darklina is intrinsically, deliberately made to be unshippable. 

It makes me mad, because it’s - archetypally speaking - made of shipping dynamite: yin/yang-sun and moon, opposites attract, COMPLEMENTARY POWERS AND SO ON. And what does Bardugo do with these ingredients? A FUCKING DELIBERATE DISASTER:

^ Placing the kiss so early on (season 1, episode five) effectively kills the romantic tension that was (correctly) building up until that point, and leaves the audience very little to still hope for, in terms of emotional evolution of the dynamic. 

Bardugo lays all the good stuff down as early and quickly as possible (the bonding, the conflicted attraction, the recognizing the other as one’s equal, etc) only to turn the tables and pull the rug so y’all sick creepyshippers won’t have anything to look forward to, because THEY’VE ALREADY HOOKED UP AND THAT BELONGS TO THE PAST, IT’S OVER, THEY’RE ENEMIES. This, combined to the fact that she falls for him *without* knowing who he really is, is the opposite of what I want from a heroine/villain ship (it’s basically lovers to enemies, and while that can be valid too, I wanted to see more pining and more prolonged, tormented symbolic attraction to the Shadow/Animus on Alina’s part). 

But here’s the trick: it’s not marketed as lovers to enemies - it has all the aesthetics and trappings of an enemies to lovers (the Darkling is, from the get go, villain-presenting, starting from his name), so it genuinely feels like a trollfic, or at the very least a cautionary tale *against* shipping the heroine with the tall dark brooding young villain, and I don’t think it’s cool at all. It makes the story WAY less interesting, because it humanizes the villain early on (when it’s not yet useful or poignant to the story, because it’s unearned) but it’s a red herring. The real plot twist is that the villain shouldn’t be sympathized with, just defeated: there’s a promise of nuanced storytelling, that is quickly denied and tossed aside. So is the idea of incorporating your Shadow (a notion that Bardugo must be familiar with, otherwise she wouldn’t have structured Alina and the Darkling as polar opposites who complement each other, but that she categorically refutes)

Then we have Malina. The good ship.

Look, I’m not that biased against it. I don’t want to be biased on principle against a friends to lovers dynamic that antagonizes a heroine/villain one, because every narrative is different, and for personal reasons I can deeply relate to the idea of being (unspeakably) in love with your best friend. So there are aspects of Malina that I can definitely be into, but it troubles me that in this specific context it’s framed as a regression. It’s Alina’s comfort zone, a fading dream of happiness from an idealized childhood, to sustain which the heroine systematically stunts her growth and literally repressed her own powers, something that in the books made her sickly and weak. But the narrative weirdly romanticizes this codependency, often making her tunnel vision re: going back to Mal her primary goal and centering on him her entire backstory/motivation, to the point that when she starts acting more serious re: her powers and alleged mission to destroy the Fold, it feels inorganic and unearned. 

Mal is intrinsically extraneous to Alina’s powers, he doesn’t share them, he doesn’t understand them, he has little to offer to help her with them, and so the feeling is that he’s also extraneous to her heroine’s journey, aside from being a sort of sidekick or safe harbor to eventually come back to. People have compared him to Raoul from Phantom of the Opera, and yeah, he has the same ~magic neutralizer~ vibe, tbh.

The narrative also polarizes Mal’s normalcy and relative “safety” against Aleksander’s sexy evil, framing Alina’s quasi-platonic fixation on the former as a better and purer form of love than her (much more visible and palpable) attraction to the latter. This is exacerbated by the show almost entirely relying on scenes of them as kids to convey their bond. I’m sure there are ways to depict innocent pining for your best friend that don’t involve obsessively focusing on flashbacks of two CHILDREN running in a meadow and looking exactly like brother and sister. LIKE. I get it, they’re like soulmates in every possible way, BUT DO THEY WANT TO KISS EACH OTHER?

Which brings me to a general complain: for a young adult saga centering on a young heroine and full of so many hot people, this story is weirdly unsexy? There are a lot of shippable dynamics, but they’re done in such a careless, ineffective way that makes ZERO EFFORT to work on stuff like slow burn, pining and romantic tension, and when it does it’s so heavy handed that the viewer doesn’t feel encouraged at all to fill the blanks with their imagination and start anticipating things (which is, imo, the ESSENCE of shipping). The one dynamic that got vaguely close to this is, again, Kaz and Inej, and coincidentally it’s also the one we didn’t get confirmed as romantic YET. Other than that, where’s the slow burn? What ship am I supposed to agonize over during the hiatus to season two? Has shipping become something to feel ashamed of, like an embarrassing relative you no longer want to invite in your home?

Anyway, back to Alina/Darkling/Mal, this is how the story reads to me:

girl suspects to be special, carefully pretends to be normal so she can stay with Good Boy

the girl’s powers eventually manifest; she’s forcibly separated from Good Boy

the girl’s powers attract Bad Boy who is her equal and opposite but is also a major asshole

girl initially falls for Bad Boy; has to learn a hard lesson that nobody that sexy will ever want her for who she is, he’s just trying to exploit her

also, no, there is no such thing as a Power Couple

girl is literally given a slave collar by Bad Boy through which he harnesses her power (a parody of the Twin Scars trope)

you know how the story initially suggested that the joint powers of Darkness and Light would defeat evil? LOL NO, Darkness is actually evil itself and the way you destroy evil is using Light to destroy Darkness, forget that whole Jungian bullshit of integrating your shadow, silly!

conclusion: girl realizes being special sucks. She was right all along! Hiding and suppressing her powers was the best choice! She goes back to the start, to the same Good Boy she was meekly pining for prior to the start of the story.

... there’s an uncomfortable overall subtext that reads a lot like a cautionary tale against - look, not just against darkships and villain/heroine pairings, but also *overpowered* heroines and, well... change? Growth?

Like, it’s certainly a Choice that Alina starts the story *already* in love with Mal. That she always knew it was him. The realization could have happened later (making the dynamic much more shippable, too), but no. 

[logfanjams]

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Published in 2019

Overall Rating: 4 stars

Dark Academia + ghosts + a pretty decent murder mystery that managed to sustain itself for 400+ pages

Some parts were very good but some parts dragged and I didn’t like the last few chapters

TW: sexual assault, rape, gore (if you’re wanting to pick this book up please take a minute to search potential triggers as this book is dark)

General Thoughts:

On the whole I really enjoyed this book, not only because I tend to really like Leigh Bardugo’s writing style (I am a sucker for descriptive prose and she does not disappoint) but I also enjoyed how Bardugo was able to tackle such a detailed plot in a way that didn’t feel overly draggy and clunky. I liked that the murder mystery aspect of the narrative was able to sustain itself over the course of the entire novel (seriously, it’s brought up in the first full chapter and doesn’t resolve itself until the last few pages). That’s not an easy thing, and the way that she was able to keep the focus on both the murder mystery without sacrificing character and introducing the audience to the overall world of the novel was really well done, since she used both to support each other. I also really liked the characters (most of them anyway but I’ll get to that later on), with Dawes being my number one fave, but I also adored Alex and loved when Bardugo really delved into her backstory and how her position with having little power due to her poverty and previous drug addiction affected how she interacted with the people with clear power and influence. I also liked how Alex was aware of these power structures and how they were clearly set against people like herself and Tara and how this, again, affected how the societies and the antagonists saw them

Full Review and Final Thoughts (with spoilers!) under the cut.

Review (Here There Be Spoilers!):

All that being said, I did have some issues with parts of the novel, since it absolutely dragged on for way too long, with the bigger plot twists happening in the last fifty pages and really negating some of the previous story set ups. For example, I hated, HATED, that it was Dean Sandow who was the actual culprit of Tara’s murder instead of someone more inundated within the societies, since it really felt like that was who the primary culprits were, the rich, powerful Ancient Eight who were primarily responsible for the issues Alex was dealing with as Dante as well as Daisy and North’s murders/deaths. I also really hated that, in the end, the Ancient Eight had ZERO to do with the creation of the nexuses and it was all Daisy. It really didn’t connect back to what had been previously established with the societies having no actual oversight through Lethe and them being allowed to get away with whatever they wanted. I also guess I just really wanted Dean Sandow, Dawes, and Alex to be a team since having an actual adult look out for her was something that Alex desperately wanted and I was sad that Sandow, who up until the very end of the book had been a pretty nice dude, wasn’t that. I was also mad that Belbalm/Daisy also wasn’t that, especially since Daisy was a Wheelwalker like Alex and could have helped her out (instead of like TRYING TO EAT HER???). 

In terms of character, they’re all very well done, even the side characters like Trip, Mercy, and Mira (Alex’s mom). Everyone felt distinct and specific and I liked that Bardugo was able to juggle this large cast of characters while not reverting to vague descriptions. Each character was clearly defined and given time to be fleshed out. Dawes really was my favorite character in the whole novel and I am so glad that she and Alex became such good friends by the end of the book, especially when it would have been really easy for Bardugo to make them antagonistic to one another. I also really related to Dawes because, while I don’t remember ever learning what her major is, she feels very English-y and I absolutely was her in grad school. I also liked how Turner became a friend too and I hope that this is carried through to the next book, since I liked that he and Alex came to a good understanding and respect for each other and how they get results and deal with solving Tara’s murder in different ways. Seriously, the scene where they frame the crime on the whiteboard was the funniest scene ever to me and I was howling the whole time. 

 However, it’s really interesting that we learn so much about everyone as a character in the novel, but I felt like Darlington was really the least developed Seriously, the dude had entire chapters devoted to him and his backstory but I really felt that we got more characterization by the characters just talking about him, instead of the actual parts of the book that were dedicated just to him. Also, why was it necessary to have Darlington chapters, and then just drop this halfway through the book? I understand that it was meant to be giving us background for the Houses of the Veil and their specific rituals through the eyes of someone who was familiar with them and show how they contrasted with Alex’s general non-knowledge, but Bardugo dropped that and then just focused on Alex...Why couldn’t we have just done that from the beginning? I get that, apparently, they’re going to get Darlington (or some version of him) back in the sequel, but I still feel like it was a little clunky and didn’t really work out. Heck, I knew more about Hellie as a character, who we got almost no actual backstory about, through Alex’s flashbacks and her just talking about Hellie than I ever got with Darlington, who had multiple chapters devoted to him and a specific narrator in the audiobook. 

Final Thoughts:

Overall, I really did like this book and enjoyed the narrative that Bardugo gave throughout the book. I also liked the themes of power and class that she discussed and how that affected the way that the characters interacted with one another and perceived themselves and others. While I do wish that Bardugo had touched on some of the racial aspects (Alex being a brown girl + Daisy targeting and harming women of color to fuel her immortality) a bit more, I understand her not drawing attention to it because of the nature of adult novels themselves. I also wish that she hadn’t sequel baited quite so hard with the whole “Let’s go to hell to save Darlington!” but again, it didn’t entirely ruin the book for me. There were also a few issues with just general denseness, as there was a lot of front matter to get through before the plot started up properly, which I felt was done well, but was a little rough to get through.

I do recommend this book if you’re looking for a good adult mystery novel with some strong characterization and description, but be prepared for some parts to drag on a little longer than needed (looking at you last 100 pages). Also, if you are going to read this book, I highly recommend that you look up a list of potential trigger warnings in this book, since there are A LOT, the most recurring being themes of sexual assault, rape, gore, alchohol, and drug use, but there is a very good chance that I have missed others. Leigh Bardugo really wanted to get away from her YA work and it’s clearly represented here, so just make sure that you’re comfortable going into this very wild ride. 

[antoine-roquentin]

Before, McIntosh’s system came close to making virtue and power mutually exclusive. The powerless tended to be virtuous, while the powerful were typically not.

In her new system, McIntosh and those who follow her end up with a strikingly textured identity. The juxtaposition just described means that they contain within themselves a contradictory innocent oppressor, but also the potential for a more heroic role:

[…] there are pressing questions for me and I imagine for some others like me. […] What will we do with [the knowledge of our privilege]? As we know from watching men, it is an open question whether we will choose to use unearned advantage to weaken hidden systems […]

Is acknowledging one’s privilege therefore the precondition for having power and virtue together?

Compare Andrea Smith’s account of her experiences in anti-racism workshops:

[…] despite the cultural capital that was, at least temporarily, bestowed on those who seemed to be the most oppressed, these rituals [wherein people acknowledged their privilege] ultimately reinstantiated the white majority subject as the subject capable of self-reflexivity and the colonized/racialized subject as the occasion for self-reflexivity.

Other people play less dynamic roles within the system. Men originally entered McIntosh’s system as targets, while black people entered it as raw material (for the gender/race analogy). Throughout the Invisible Knapsack, men do one thing – fail to acknowledge their privilege. Meanwhile, black people also do one thing – suffer from their lack of privilege.

According to Fraud, women and various minority communities do a disproportionate share of the activities that make life livable; they therefore constitute resources from which everyone could, if they choose to, draw insights about how to live life in a more sustainable way.

In Privilege, as the lateral ideal faded away, the spotlight shifted from what could be learned from the wisdom of minorities; the role of minorities was now what could be learned from their pain.

As mentioned above, it is plausible to suggest that McIntosh’s new image of oppressed black people was partially based on her earlier feminine self-image. In fact, an alternative analogy to Smith’s colonialization for the role of black and other oppressed people in privilege culture is chivalry – they are set upon a pedestal according to the type of ideal white femininity. Some features of chivalry that are relevant here is that women are presented as supremely sensitive to being wronged, and insults to their honor are the stereotypical justification for conflict and violence.

A model in which black and other oppressed people are treated with perpetual chivalry certainly leads to better behavior than some models, and being on the receiving end can at times feel like a shot of emotional oxygen. But whatever one thinks about desirable and undesirable gender roles, it seems like there are problems with a structure that promises its leaders that they can transcend gender, and meanwhile honors the oppressed with a normatively feminine role, complete with encouragements to value this role and protect it from those who might threaten it.

McIntosh was very conscious of unwritten “maps, passports, codebooks, visas” that could make people of one group “confident” and “comfortable” while making others “inconfident, uncomfortable, and alienated.” Privilege discourse makes some people feel comfortable and others less comfortable – but whom?

When cracking down on problematic statements, common expedients at least superficially eschew conflict, from the menacing “I find it telling” to acknowledging one’s privilege in a way meant for someone else.

When having to backtrack, the culture favors people who can apologize without ultimately losing too much face.

When advancing one’s own views, it can be helpful to talk openly about one’s emotions and vulnerabilities in a way that others will respect.

We have just seen that people in the role of the oppressed will often become the object of a sort of chivalry.

These cultural practices are all compatible with very mainstream ideas about femininity. We could say that setting them up as norms “benefits women.” Which women, though? Women who are ideally placed to leverage a culturally privileged ideal of femininity – in a word, white upper-middle class femininity.

For some people, stringing together “white upper-middle class femininity” is meant as an immediate takedown. That is not the sense in which I am using the phrase. White upper-middle class female culture is a culture like other cultures, running a very wide gamut all the way from the charmingly idealized portrayal of Gilmore Girls to dystopian nightmares like Heathers or Courtney Summers’ novel Some Girls Are.

The issue, however, is that it isn’t the only culture besides white upper-middle class male culture. Do all white women find its norms easy to observe? Do black women? How about black men?

According to white privilege facilitator Paul Gorski,

[…] “white privilege,” was popularized by the feverish, largely grassroots, pre-World-Wide-Web circulation of a now famous essay by my now-equally-famous friend and colleague, Peggy McIntosh. […] The white privilege concept wasn’t new, of course, nor was it uniquely Peggy’s, a fact that she has explained over and over with great humility through the years. Scores of People of Color […] had spoken about the concept of white privilege for generations before Peggy wrote […] Each, despite never using the term, wrote or spoke about white privilege before doing so was hip; when nobody grew wealthy writing and lecturing about white privilege […] Still – and this, in and of itself, is a marker of privilege – it took Peggy’s essay to plant the concept firmly into the mainstream “diversity” lexicon […]

Unease oozes from this paragraph – many white people are now writing and speaking about white privilege, it has become the “hip” thing to do, some of them are becoming “wealthy” doing so. The term itself was invented by the white McIntosh and her essay almost singlehandedly popularized the idea. Gorski attempts to quell the dissonance by claiming, with McIntosh, that the concept (if not the term) was invented by authentic People of Color, that McIntosh merely publicized it, and even there she didn’t do anything particularly special – consistent with the privilege narrative, her success should be attributed to privileges afforded by her whiteness.

Is any of this convincing, though? Let us quote James Baldwin (from The Fire Next Time), one of the writers whom Gorski claims spoke about white privilege before McIntosh:

There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this – which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never – the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.

There are no invisible hidden systems here, just not being beaten over the head. There is no wish for whites to acknowledge their privilege; Baldwin thinks that whites might be better off if they would just work at loving themselves. The only sense in which Baldwin and McIntosh are talking about the same universe is that they both refer to black people as being in some way disadvantaged.

And even without discussing the other supposed intellectual progenitors of McIntosh, we have hopefully made a plausible case that the specific concept of white privilege that has become “hip” is so thoroughly interwoven with specific aspects of McIntosh’s spirit and will, as to raise serious doubts about whether it could have been “discovered” by anyone else.

this is the third in a three part series and goes into a lot more detailed criticism than what’s here, but i particularly like the way it points out how much the privilege system draws from the experience of upper-middle class white women. this is exactly the sort of person over represented in mcintosh’ field, and exactly who she would have drawn much of her ideas from as well as who she would have needed to impress to move upwards. it also tends to be the primary demographic to carry on the use of the privilege metaphor, typically to benefit their own academic work. it’s similar to how so many aspects of feminism reflect upper-middle class desires, like the way radical feminism tries to liquidate trans women and sex workers through direct state violence against those women, because both are seen as lower class practices and as threats.

[nyfacurrent]

Business of Art | Five Ways to Stake Your Claim in the Arts Ecosystem

Takeaways from the inaugural Art World Conference that can help you focus your creative energies to develop a more purposeful practice.

Art World Conference is a new business and financial literacy conference that includes panel discussions, conversations, and in-depth workshops addressing many of the opportunities and challenges faced by artists and arts professionals. The inaugural conference was held on April 25-27 in Manhattan, and brought 300 people together in dialogue around such topics as storytelling, marketing, investing, and growing and sustaining community. Fiscally Sponsored by The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the conference featured an esteemed line-up of speakers, moderators, and panelists including NYFA Board Member Tiana Webb Evans, Caroline Woolard (ABI ‘17), and Doctor’s Hours Consultants Larry Ossei-Mensah and Steven Sergiovanni. Here are five takeaways from the conference that you can apply to your practice today.

Tell Your Story

You know your work inside and out, and how you talk and write about it matters. Don’t rely on art world jargon to tell your story for you, it often distracts and can unintentionally distance people from your work. Says Writer and Critic Antwaun Sargent: “Sometimes language hides what you’re really after, and what you’re trying to say. Jargon can hinder the fullest expression of your work." He recommends that even artists who are uncomfortable writing write about their work. “It’s a good exercise, and it doesn’t need to be structured in a traditional way. Some of the best artists that I’ve come across have some sort of documentation of their work that is written [by them]. It allows for another expression” of their ideas. Curator Sara Raza frames it as a way of articulating the experience of the studio visit through writing: “Think about a set of words that aren’t overly theoretical but show key concerns of practice that articulate where you’re going and what you’re doing."

Learn by Failing

As an artist, you’re constantly experimenting and problem-solving to achieve new heights in your career. The same mindset can be applied to other critical components of your career. “Insanity is defined as doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results,” said Mark Rosen, Associate Director of Marketing, Artsy. “It may be a blow to the ego, but you need to recognize what you’re doing and let it evolve,” he added. Rosen spoke specifically to how artists can find success on Instagram, a question that is on the mind of many creatives. One way to determine whether your posts and stories are resonating? First, use a free app like Planoly to plan out your posts in advance. This is an especially great benefit to artists with limited resources, as they can dedicate a block of time each week to schedule content in bulk. Timing is one of several factors that can help make your posts more or less successful, so test out times in two week increments and see what works best for your feed.

With social media and other components of your practice, re-evaluate regularly, as what may have worked for you in the past is no longer working in the present. “Social is changing every 15 seconds, it will change now and it will change again,” advises Rosen. In another panel discussion, Deborah Obaili, President and Executive Director, Association of Independent Colleges of Art & Design, cited the words of a colleague who encouraged artists to recognize that “what you need from a personal/creative practice standpoint is very different from the kinds of needs you’ll have in 20, 30, 40 years from now. There’s a continual learning curve.”

Resources: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (AK Press, 2017) and Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones (Avery, 2018)

Embrace Community

Community matters and can often open the door to new opportunities. Take the example of Prerana Reddy, Director of Programs, A Blade of Grass. She and a group of her peers formed the South Asian Women’s Artist Collective in 1997 to create a space for support and community and means of facilitating and presenting work. One of the members joined the staff of Queens Museum, brought Reddy into the fold, and helped to usher in a new era at the museum where it was more inclusive of its diverse local community. “Being accountable to the local community is not often something that a contemporary art museum does, but over time it became something that the Queens Museum did” and does through today.

Community also extends far beyond the walls of your studio, home, or office. “You’re part of a much larger ecosystem. Part of being in a creative practice is that you have a solid foundation from which to leap from,” said Esther Robinson, Co Executive Director, ArtBuilt, while moderating a discussion on real estate for visual artists. The panel stressed the importance of artists getting involved in their communities and holding state and local government accountable in the fight for affordable live and work space. Said Robinson: Developers “want us to give up. Make sure you know what your own values are and how to move forward.”

Wherever you make connections and foster community, do so authentically. Online, “Genuinely engage with content to help develop relationships. The more love you show, the more love you’ll get,” says Mark Rosen.

Resources: NYC Loft Tenants; Spaceworks; ArtBuilt; Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Penguin Random House, 2014)

Practice Self-Care

Those in the arts community have a lot to juggle, from keeping up with the day-to-day to the larger pressures of defining success in a challenging industry. Lisa Kim, Director, The Ford Foundation Gallery, got to the heart of it by asking the question, “How can you manage your time and emotional resources wisely?” Alex Paik, Artist and Director, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, takes a refreshing approach: “Once you give up the idea that you can balance everything—just do what you are doing as well as you can while you’re doing it...Being present in the tasks that you’re doing makes them feel a bit more manageable.” Another piece of advice that can be applied widely comes from Prerana Reddy: “Find your time to be alone and whatever it is that’s meditative. You need to be bored to be creative. You need to pass boredom to get to creativity. It’s harder to get there because we don’t give ourselves time to be alone. Find that thing that allows you to be bored enough to rest yourself.”

Protect Your Work

“There’s no art market without the artists,” said Artist Mickalene Thomas in an afternoon panel discussion on Protecting Artists’ Rights that reviewed topics including contracts, copyright, and Fair Use. As artists, you have the power to control your narrative and legacy and you don’t have to do it alone. Artists’ Rights Society (ARS) represents the intellectual property rights of more than 80,000 artists and estates worldwide, including Thomas; it’s free and any artist can join. Pro-tip from Thomas: “When you have one blanket contract, it becomes easier to negotiate the others. Just have a clear understanding of what you want from the project, and write those down. If you do have a lawyer, try to go through it yourself first. When it comes time for the lawyer, it’s more for approval.” Said Attorney Anibal A. Luque: “A template is a great way to start protecting and enforcing your rights. Docracy.com is a great resource for usually artist-friendly templates. Another resource is UpConsel. Most contracts are governed state by state, so if you are getting a template make sure it is state specific.”

Additional Resources: Copyright Alliance, copyright.gov, Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, A Fair(y) Use Tale, Legal Guide for the Visual Artist (Allworth Press, 2010), and nyfa.org.

Telling your story, learning by failing, embracing community, practicing self-care, and protecting your work are just a few of the ways that you can take a more active role in your arts career to initiate positive change and momentum. “There is no prescribed path, and even if there was it wouldn’t hold everyone in this room” said Deana Haggag, President/CEO, United States Artists during her keynote address at the Art World Conference. “Learning together and showing up for one another as needed is the only way to empower our field,” she added.

- Amy Aronoff, Senior Communications Officer

You can find more articles on arts career topics by visiting the Business of Art section of NYFA’s website. Sign up for NYFA News and receive artist resources and upcoming events straight to your inbox.

Have an arts career question? You can contact NYFA staff directly via the NYFA Source Hotline at (800) 232-2789, from Monday - Friday, 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM EST or email source@nyfa.org.

Are you an artist or a new organization interested in expanding your fundraising capacity through NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship? We accept out-of-cycle reviews year-round. No-fee applications are accepted on a quarterly basis, and our next deadline is June 30. Click here to learn more about the program and to apply.

Images: Antwaun Sargent, JiaJia Fei, Sara Raza, and Tiana Webb Evans during the “Defining Your Business: Storytelling” panel discussion and Prerana Reddy, Paddy Johnson, Caroline Woolard, and Alex Paik during the “You As Gatekeeper: Defining Goals and Initiating Opportunities” panel discussion, both at Art World Conference, Image Credit: Art World Conference and Alexa Hoyer.

[mittensmorgul]

wait, what is this thing of dean having flashbacks, is the michael!dean gonna be like purgatory, where the brothers will be separated by just a couple of episodes and the michael!dean sl will be played in flashbacks? it would be very disappointed if they did that

I’m gonna start this reply by reminding everyone that PR is not showrunning. Looking at the sum total of information that came out of sdcc and the roundtable interviews, it becomes really clear that we weren’t given any objective facts or 100% reliable spoilers on what’s to come in s14. We got tons of double-talk, a heck of a lot of flim-flam, and some extremely vague generalizations. So taking any of that as fact and attempting to analyze it too deeply is just gonna lead to impotent frustration, you know? Try not to be upset preemptively over what might or might not actually happen (stops to check the countdown clock) more than 77 days in the future. :)

That said, we’ve mostly been expecting since we first saw Michael!Dean that the possession would last somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 episodes or so. I mean, that’s the way these things always work on this show.

Yes, Sam’s possession by Gadreel lasted 9 episodes, but that was because 98% of the time, Gadreel was “dormant” and Sam was “still Sam.” Gadreel didn’t take over until the end of 9.09, and only lasted one episode before Sam chucked him out. It wasn’t like Sam was just... gone that whole time.

Same with “soulless Sam.” He was still, for all intents and purposes, still Sam.

Demon Dean could’ve lasted longer, except they needed him “cured” by the 200th episode, so he was cured in 10.03. But the MoC storyline lasted a year and a half before we learned it was technically a form of possession via the Darkness.

Cas possessed by Lucifer went on... far too long... >.>

Dean as Michael would just... be gone... that whole time. Even if we get glimpses of what Dean’s going through inside his mind while Michael runs his World Domination Plan with Dean’s body, Dean is still effectively absent from the narrative in a way that Soulless Sam, Demon Dean, Casifer, and even Gadreel!Sam were not. It’s just... not sustainable as a plot device for more than a few episodes.

The show has repeatedly made it clear that TFW are the main characters, they’re the ones we care about and have “sided with” in the narrative. There’s just... no point to long-term having Dean possessed and effectively removed from the narrative, you know?

On the other hand, I know that they will want to use the issues raised by Dean’s time possessed by Michael to their fullest narrative effect, and showing his trauma from that time via flashbacks and dreams and memories is probably the most effective way to do that. Because we don’t CARE what Michael does while occupying Dean as much as we absolutely DO CARE about how this all has affected Dean, you know? And we can’t really see that effectively while Dean’s still not Dean.

So yeah, this is pretty much what we were all expecting to happen, and I’d be rather surprised if they structured this any other way. Especially with s14 being three episodes shorter than usual. They’ve got to keep the story moving to fit it all in with 130 fewer minutes to tell it this season.

[eugenialapteva]

Young Love

The scene:

A young woman, I shall call her Eliza, is sitting next to a young man, whom I shall refer to as Ethan. They seem to be of a similar age, perhaps 16 or 17 years old, and it is clear from the way in which they are seated, close to each other and holding hands, that they are a romantic couple. They are travelling by coach to the airport furthest away from central Stockholm. Eliza is wearing blue jeans and a cream coloured woollen jumper, her boots are sturdy but smart looking and her brown hair is neatly tied up in a bun. She looks confident and self-assured. Ethan is wearing a generic dark coloured jumper and black jeans. The observed interaction begins just after Eliza has come off the phone with her mother.

Ethan: I still can’t understand anything [he chuckles]. No, actually, I think I understood a little – “dobzhe”, that means “good” right?

Eliza: Yeah, “dobry”, it can mean a lot of things. Like “ladny”, which also means nice. But it’s pronounced differently depending on if it’s a person or a thing. For example, if I say “it tastes good”, or “she’s nice”… [She continues to explain the various uses of the word in detail]

Ethan: Oh so it’s like for an item or object?

Eliza: Exactly.

There is a short silence.

Ethan: Good chat with your mum?

Eliza: Yeah, always good chat with her. We always have good talks.

Ethan: Ah good. That’s what I like to hear [He is stroking her hand gently, silently]

Do you think it’s good business this – going back and forth to the airport?

Eliza: Yeah I think it’s good, not only for the shuttle bus to this airport – all capitals have the same system. But this company benefits from it being the only mode of transport to the airport. No trains go there. So they have a monopoly […]

Eliza takes out her phone and is looking at a ‘story’ on Instagram. Ethan leans over to have a look, still caressing her hand.

Ethan: Where is that?

Eliza: Canada.

Ethan: Where in Canada?

Eliza: I don’t know.

Ethan: Cos there’s the English speaking part and the French speaking part.

Eliza: Eh, yeah.. of course, I know that. I went to school you know, I know about the world. We go to school in Poland too!

Ethan: Oh really? I didn’t think so. So you know how the world works then?

Eliza: Yeah.

He smiles and humours her cheerfully, still caressing her hand, his body snuggled up beside her. They start planning their week and Eliza checks the calendar on her phone.

Ethan: Sure, you can see your friends on Friday, that’s absolutely fine with me. I can see you on the weekend. I’m around.

Eliza: I’m working Monday and Tuesday 9-5, Thursday 2-8. You’re off Sunday right?

Ethan: Monday.

Eliza: Oh right.

Ethan: So Saturday? When do you find out your schedule? […] Yeah, yeah that’s cool.

Eliza: Do you have plans Monday?

Ethan: No, just going to be off. If you’re free…and if the trains are running…

Eliza: You do what you need to.

Ethan: Yeah, I'll wait to see what you say.

Both on their phones, but Eliza looks more engrossed in the activity. Ethan is staring at his phone rather purposelessly. As they are approaching the airport, Eliza gathers her things and puts on her coat in preparation.

Ethan: You checked in?

Eliza: Yeah [her voice sounds impatient]

Ethan: So we just go straight in. Easy.

As if noticing her sharp tone of voice, retrospectively, she gives him a little cuddle. They speak inaudibly and suddenly Eliza exclaims:

Yes! 2-1. Winner, that’s me [pointing at herself triumphantly].

Ethan smiles, but does not say anything.

Outside the bus Eliza heads straight for the luggage compartment. She locates their bags within seconds and points to them.

Eliza: They’re there. One over there and the other one is behind.

She takes a step back, to allow him to go ahead and collect them.

Analysis:

As I conjure up the scene of these two adolescents in love and in conversation, I am struck afresh by the same sense of nostalgia which I felt at the time of the observation. The image of this outwardly self-possessed and poised Eastern European princess on a journey with her doting and starry-eyed young prince, taps into my personal narrative of adolescent love, evoking within me a sense of poignancy and pain; a curious fantasy of familiarity and kindred minds.

Within a minute or two of observing the contact between Eliza and Ethan and listening to their dialogue, I was overcome by a powerful feeling that I already knew the power dynamics of their relationship; I could foresee the inevitable calamity and heartbreak that is built into the choreography of their complementary dance. Of course, I soon became aware of how intensely coloured these presumptions were by my own psychical templates and interpersonal experiences from infancy onward. That said, by the same token, this spontaneous reaction of mine – bearing in mind with vigilance its subjective and affective quality – seemed to provide a useful instrument for the observation; a way in, as it were, to the internal worlds of Eliza and Ethan and their romantic relationship.  

The journey of human development is by no means simple. The path toward psychosexual maturity, as Freud astutely proposed, is a long and precarious undertaking for all human beings. Twisting through the plethora of infantile desires, wishes, impulses, obstacles, deprivations, identifications, satisfactions and loss, its course depends on the negotiation of a highly complicated set of developmental stages and processes in early childhood, adolescence and adulthood. The successful transition from one phase to the next is determined by a unique combination of fortuitous and constitutional factors – a mixture, if you like, of our innate genetic makeup and the dynamics of our lived experiences and relations with others and within the self.

According to Freud, then, even the most seemingly unobtrusive symptoms and pointless actions (much like parapraxes, jokes, gestures and dreams) have an intention and bear a connection to the person’s past experiences. In other words, the secret of neurosis in general is that the symptoms, however vicariously, are closely connected to the person’s innermost phantasies and early experiences of sexual life.[1] ‘Sucking at the mother’s breast’, Freud explained, ‘is the starting-point of the whole sexual life […] This sucking involves making the mother’s breast the first object of the sexual instinct.’[2] By discovering what he believed to be the sexual causation of neuroses Freud radically extended the concept of sexuality.

Central to this Freudian thesis was the fact that we must relinquish our first and primary love-object (typically this is the mother) in order to be able to advance to a sexually fulfilling and affectionate non-incestuous love relationship as an adult. In effect of this renunciation, however, ‘the final object of the sexual instinct is never any longer the original object but only a surrogate for it’[3] [emphasis mine]. Following up Freud’s formulations, perhaps a closer glance at the body language of Ethan and Eliza might offer a good point of entry to start understanding their ways of relating to each other psychoanalytically.

From the outset, Ethan’s body is somewhat bent and twisted toward Eliza – he strokes her hand fondly and remains seated in the same position of proximity throughout the journey. Meanwhile Eliza, adopting a more assertive stance, has a straight back and is faced at an angle away from Ethan in the direction of the bus. It is interesting to notice how the nature of their respective body languages mimic the different levels of engagement in their spoken conversation too. From what we observe, a structural imbalance of kind seems to permeate the relationship in multiple ways. While Ethan displays a keen interest in Eliza’s family and culture – he inquires about the Polish language and wants to know more about her conversation with mum – Eliza, on the other hand, seems to make minimal effort to reciprocate these gestures. Furthermore, it is Ethan who initiates conversation when they fall silent, he who suggests they meet up the following week, and he who listens attentively and responds to Eliza’s remarks and deliberations about the Polish word for nice and airport shuttle bus service.

On the surface, then, Ethan appears to be active and outspoken. His gratuitous engagement could be seen as a demonstration of the positive excitement and enthusiasm of being in love with someone whom he greatly admires – a harmless feature of the loving experience. Having said that, I wonder if Ethan’s propensity for ‘activity’ also signals a protective measure of the ego aimed at the avoidance of painful affects of passivation. His eagerness to adapt to Eliza’s schedule and to comply with her needs and demands (accepting her triumph, collecting their bags), parallels his accommodating body language and is suggestive of a denial of self – an unconscious subservient mode of defence against fear and anxiety about abandonment, the origins of which would date back to his childhood.

One could propose, in Freudian terms, that Ethan’s readiness to submit to Eliza’s mental organisation, through idealisation and his compliant attitude, provides him with a familiar way of sustaining psychic equilibrium, which must have taken precedence over the satisfaction of his individual desires and needs at some point in infancy. For one reason or another, something in early childhood might have prohibited Ethan from being able to freely express his wants and wishes to his primary carer – without fear of persecution – causing these incestuous wishful impulses to be forced into repression prematurely. This means that some psychical processes were denied satisfaction through discharge and cast out of consciousness; however, as we learn from reading Freud, in the dark and delirious unconscious they continue to grow and flourish, acting as a constant impediment to the adult’s libido and freedom.[4]

The patterns of behaviour we notice in Ethan might well be manifestations of benign defenses that help us to adapt to reality. My own experience of love – and retrospective exploration of my own role in that dynamic: as the idealised object – has made me deeply conscious of the subtle line between healthy admiration and violent idealisation, while also being cautious about how easily exploited that position of idealised object can be, albeit unconsciously. What is more, as I witnessed the interaction between these two lovers, the irritation and impatience in Eliza’s voice seemed agonizingly tangible. Clearly – or at least that was my impression – she is an educated, intelligent and competent young woman, but equally evident was that she seemed unaware of the impact of her words and actions on her loved one (with the exception of that one significant moment in the interaction, after her abrupt sounding ‘yeah’, when she gave Ethan a little hug).

Speculatively, one might draw from this relative lack of sensibility and tendency toward omnipotence – revealed in the way she asserts, and indeed prioritizes, her needs and wishes over Ethan’s – that circumstances were ‘good enough’ (to borrow Winnicott’s term) during her childhood. Perhaps, unlike Ethan, as a child she was freer to act and exist without taking into careful consideration the other’s separate existence and personal interests. Her phone call to her mum (the close attachment they seem to have) suggests possibly that family members for Eliza can be taken for granted, approached more or less as things that exist in service of her own needs – as blank screens onto which we are allowed to project and express all our anger, wants and needs without undue punishment.

In a different but related vein, psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin writes that: ‘The ability to enter into exchange with the outside object implies a successful shift from the pleasure principle, self-containment in phantasy, toward the reality principle. That is, the individual’s entrance into a shared reality of creative inter-relationships built on mutual recognition and exchange.[5]

Having recognised this curious conjunction between the mother’s care and her baby’s sexual activity, we are arguably in a better position to appreciate how Freud’s remark on incest helps us understand how in various ways both Eliza and Ethan remain under the sway of the pleasure principle, lodged within the incestuous family matrix: a milieu, which as Luce Irigaray so pertinently puts it, ultimately favours cohesion and unity over difference and desire.[6] Together, Eliza’s competitive and perhaps somewhat inflated self-perception, and Ethan’s compliant approach and underlying sense of inadequacy, seem to complement each other in a dyadic structure which is both fragile and romantic.

[1] Sigmund Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XVII, p. 257

[2] Freud, (1917) Introductory Lecture on Psychoanalysis: XX, p. 314

[3] Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, S.E. 11, p. 189

[4] Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’, pp. 169-171

[5] Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love, pp. 37-38  

[6] Luce Irigaray, (2017) To be Born, p. 47

[yasbxxgie]

After generations of displacement and evictions, a Philly woman reclaims a place in the city

The growl of a power sander echoed off the walls of lonely, left-behind rowhouses, amid a landscape that has been reverting to prairie in this corner of West Philadelphia that maps officially label as Paschall, if they bother to label it at all.

Then Dominique London, 35, cut the power, stepped out of a disemboweled school bus in Tyvek coveralls and offered the brief tour of what remains of her family’s estate: a parcel of land she saved from sheriff’s sale, in the shadow of the house that was her grandmother’s.

London — who majored in planning at Temple University and co-founded the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative — arrived here after she found herself living the realities she studied, then organized around. Those include the decades-long decline of Black homeownership, the divestment and displacement seen in Black communities, the ripple effects of evictions. So, here on this property, she’s taking a stand. She’s making it a home, turning a used school bus she had purchased and driven onto the lot into a tiny house on wheels, planning a hoop house and a meditation space, a fruit forest and a community vegetable garden.

It’s a tribute to her grandmother, Pauline London. “This was her land and I couldn’t see the city just taking something else from her, Black voices disappearing.” It’s also a quiet protest — a hopeful, urgent attempt to create a different, more sustainable way of living in a changing city.

“I feel like the city pushes people to do things like this," London said. “From liberating PHA houses to house homeless people, to making encampments, to creating tiny houses, it’s all just finding creative ways to live here because the city makes it so damn hard.”

London grew up visiting her grandmother in Paschall. But only after Pauline had succumbed to Alzheimer’s did she learn her legacy.

Pauline London, who grew up a sharecropper in Georgia making 16 cents an hour, made a life in Philadelphia as a mother of eight and head of household after her husband became disabled. She fiercely advocated for welfare rights — and eventually turned that passion into work that paid enough to get off welfare, buy the house and continue lobbying for reform at the city, state and national levels.

But over the years, the neighborhood around her fell into decay.

Akira Drake Rodriguez, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, said it’s a familiar narrative, driven by intersecting forces such as redlining, the depressed wages paid to Black workers, and discrimination by appraisers who to this day undervalue Black-owned homes.

“Black homes just don’t hold equity over time, and it’s not the fault of the homeowner,” Rodriguez said. "It’s an ongoing history in nonwhite communities of property devaluation and dispossession.”

Pauline London died in 2011. By then, her house had already been lost to sheriff’s sale. Many of her descendants had left for the more stable Wynnefield neighborhood, where they settled in the Penn Wynn House apartments — an aging mid-rise building that became a community within a community. London grew up there. Her family members lived at Penn Wynn for decades, worked in maintenance there, died there. After college, she returned, moving into her own studio apartment.

Then, in late 2016, the building was sold. Residents of 239 apartments were forced out.

"I feel it was because of the uncertainty and stress,” London said. “Some people are homeless right now because of that, and because they have eviction on their record,” she said.

That trauma is multidimensional, Rodriguez said. “Displacement takes you out of your social network: People vote less, they’re less likely to engage in politics. It impacts the ability to attain good school outcomes. It affects mental health, but also physical health, the wear and tear on your body. Evictions, in particular, can leave a permanent mark on your record, which can mean much higher costs, higher security deposit, and much longer searches for housing.”

As for London, it activated her, just as her grandmother was energized to fight half a century earlier.

London led protests, climbing 17 floors of the Dane — as the remodeled Penn Wynn is now called— to drop a “Gentrifiers” banner. She advocated for a resolution, adopted by City Council on Oct. 15, urging the First Judicial District to seal evictions. And, she said, she helped draft many of the demands that echoed through the protest encampments this summer.

Meanwhile, London found an apartment in Kingsessing. But it isn’t like home: “There are bikes, fireworks, gunshots, police sirens, fire engines. There’s no peace." That’s when she started thinking about how to make a life on the land she’d saved from sheriff’s sale, through a last-minute scramble of fund-raising to pay off back taxes.

“I guess this project is just me trying to get back a little bit of peace,” she said.

The property was overgrown when London returned to it. The yellow school bus, still filled with seats, did not look like a home. But she hired a four-legged work crew from Philly Goat Project that tended to the lot, chewing on poison ivy. And, after emptying the bus of seats, she’s working toward heated flooring, solar panels, wool insulation, a wood-burning stove, a water tank, and a compost toilet, everything she needs to live off the grid. But it’s slow work, with YouTube for a tutor and frequent trips to the West Philly Tool Library for gear.

One thing London isn’t bothering with: zoning approvals. (The bus will be registered as an RV, instead.) She recently lobbied City Council to support bringing tiny houses to the city’s thousands of vacant lots. Instead, they passed an ordinance allowing such developments only as accessories to existing structures.

London represents a segment of millennials who no longer believe in homeownership as the American dream. “A mortgage is just fancy rent,” she said. After all, if she can’t pay, the property still goes to sheriff’s sale. “If we just eliminate the things we think we should be paying for, then maybe we can actually do what we love to do.”

That impulse is driving a nationwide movement for smaller, more affordable and more flexible housing, said Diana Lind, a Philadelphia author who documents that shift in her new book, Brave New Home. But, Lind said, efforts at tiny-home development have often been stymied by traditional financing models and zoning designed to exclude.

“There are a lot of different restrictions on what you’re able to build, and a lot of it was specifically to avoid having properties that could potentially lower property values for people who were already there,” Lind said.

But in Paschall, people are enthusiastic: They tell London they’ve seen tiny-house shows on TV, but never expected one in their neighborhood. They’re eager to pitch in, and to accept her offer to use the space as a shared community park.

Brooke Belle, 41, said it’s a welcome sight for her four children, instead of the familiar landscape of abandonment and illegal dumping.

“It’s good for them to see there are other types of places you can call home," she said, "other than what you’re used to.”

Photographs:

(L-R) Dominique London, her school bus and her grandmothers former house in Phila., on Oct. 22, 2020. London is repurposing a school bus into her home on wheels. The bus sits now on her plot of land she saved from sheriff's sale, next door to her grandmother's house which was lost to sheriff's sale

Dominique London applies a coating to seal the floor of her school bus, in Philadelphia on Oct. 22, 2020. London is repurposing a school bus into her home on wheels. The bus sits now on her plot of land she saved from sheriff's sale, next door to her grandmother's house, which was lost to sheriff's sale

Dominique London watches as four-legged landscapers from Philly Goat Project chomp on poison ivy

Dominique London adjusts the tarp on her soon to be house/school bus in Phila., on Oct. 22, 2020. London is repurposing a school bus into her home on wheels. The bus sits now on her plot of land she saved from sheriff's sale, next door to her grandmother's house, which was lost to sheriff's sale

Dominique London, her grandmothers former house and Dominique’s school bus/future home, in Phila., on Oct. 22, 2020. London is repurposing a school bus into her home on wheels. The bus sits now on her plot of land she saved from sheriff's sale, next door to her grandmother's house which was lost to sheriff's sale

[lauramalchowblog]

The False Choice Between Science And Economics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ, MD, PhD

As the nation wrestles with how best to return to normalcy, there’s a tension, largely but not entirely contrived, emerging between health experts—who are generally focused on maintaining social distancing and avoiding “preventable deaths”—and some economists, who point to the deep structural harm being caused by these policies.

Some, including many on the Trumpist-right, are consumed by the impact of the economic pain, and tend to cast themselves as sensible pragmatists trying to recapture the country from catastrophizing, pointy-headed academic scientists who never much liked the president anyway.

This concern isn’t intrinsically unreasonable. Most academics neither like nor trust the president. There is also a natural tendency for physicians to prioritize conditions they encounter frequently—or which hold particular saliency because of their devastating impact—and pay less attention to conditions or recommendations that may be more relevant to a population as a whole.

Even so, there are very, very few people on what we will call, for lack of a better term, “Team Health,” who do not appreciate, at least at some level, the ongoing economic devastation. There may be literally no one—I have yet to see or hear anyone who does not have a deep appreciation for how serious our economic problems are, and I know of a number of previously-successful medical practices which are suddenly struggling to stay afloat amidst this epidemic.

In contrast, at least some on—again, for lack of a better term—“Team Economy” seem to believe that the threat posed by the coronavirus is wildly overblown, and perhaps even part of an elaborate, ongoing effort to destroy Trump.

Yet even if some partisans are intrinsically unpersuadable, I suspect that if Team Economy had a more nuanced understanding of Team Health, this could facilitate a more productive dialog and catalyze the rapid development and effective implementation of a sustainable solution to our current national crisis.

For starters, it might help Team Economy to know that even pointy-headed academics appreciate that science is (or at least should be) a process we use, not an ideology we worship. Most researchers recognize every day how difficult it is to figure out biological relationships, and to make even the most basic predictions in the highly reductionist systems of a petri dish or a test tube.

Under typical conditions, scientists tend to do an exceptional amount of study before they cautiously suggest a new insight. It’s really hard to figure out how nature works, and each time we think we’ve understood even some tiny aspect of it, nature tends to surprise us again with an unexpected twist. While often maddening, this complexity is also what makes science so captivating, engaging, and intellectually seductive.

In the context of COVID-19, it is incredibly, absurdly challenging for anyone—including scientists—to get their heads around the rapidly evolving knowledge that is, in any case, preliminary and is being collected under difficult conditions.

This is not an environment conducive to understanding exactly what’s going on at a system-wide level, let alone a molecular one.

And yet, that’s what Team Health is trying to manage. They’re working to understand the very basic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), while simultaneously extrapolating from the data in order to make recommendations that are going to impact the lives of billions of people.

There is a saving grace: researchers aren’t starting from scratch. They are informed by studies of related pandemics—the influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for starters. Investigators are also leveraging all they’ve learned about the biology of related viruses to make educated guesses about how to approach the current threat, and using recently-acquired knowledge of how to harness the immune system in cancer to think about how we might help the immune system respond more effectively to a virus.

Most scientists recognize the limitations of their knowledge, and realize just how hard it is to extrapolate—which is why they tend to avoid doing so. But they also appreciate that even if understanding is difficult and prediction even harder, the process of science—the meticulous collection and analysis of data, the constructing, testing, and reformation of hypotheses—has proven phenomenally effective over the long haul. It has enabled us to better understand illness and disease, and to provide humanity with the opportunity for longer and less miserable lives than ever in the history of our species.

And even if this potential is not realized either universally, nor as frequently as we might wish, it’s still the best construct we have.

It beats, for instance, hoping that a disease will simply disappear, like a miracle. Hope is not a method.

The Trump administration ought to listen to scientists, but it need not accept their advice uncritically. And that’s because behind closed doors, scientists never (well, hardly ever) accept the advice—or data—from other researchers at face value. They invariably question techniques, approaches, and conclusions.

The foundational training course my classmates and I took in grad school in biology at MIT essentially ripped apart classic papers week after week, exposing the flaws, and highlighting the implicit assumptions—and these were generally top-tier pieces of work by legendary scientists. I came away from the course with a powerful sense of the fragility of knowledge, the difficulty of proof, and a deep respect for the researchers who are driven to pursue, persist, and publish—despite these intrinsic challenges.

No individual or organization should be so revered that their findings are beyond scrutiny or evaluation, whether he or she works for a drug company, an academic institution, or an NGO.

But what rankles people on Team Health isn’t thoughtful skepticism from Trump about a particular piece of data (if only!), but rather Trump’s apparent indifference to science as a whole, and the ease with which he casts it aside if it fails to comport with his narrative-of-the-moment.

Trump seems to treat science like just another point of view, embracing it when convenient, ignoring it when not. This sort of casual indifference rattles the people on Team Health because, for all their disagreements, researchers tend to believe that there is an objective reality they are attempting to describe and understand, however imperfectly.

The notion that a scientist’s inevitably hazy view of a real phenomenon—drawn from well-described, ideally reproducible techniques—is indistinguishable from a “perspective” that some presidential advisor, or morning cable host, or guy on Twitter pulls out of . . . well, let’s say thin air . . . seems irresponsible.

And that’s because it is.

The good news is that Trump has a real opportunity in the coming days to leverage the advice of both scientists and policy makers, should he choose to listen.

In the last week, two important reports were published, each by a cross-functional team of experts. One was organized by the Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke, and includes Trump’s former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and one of Obama’s national health technology leaders, Dr. Farzad Mostashari. The other is from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Both groups suggest that transition to normalcy will require an exquisite ability to rapidly identify new outbreaks and track down and quarantine individuals who are likely afflicted—the ability to test-and-trace.

The idea is that our country needs the ability to conduct something close to a precision quarantine, where we constrain the activity only of those likely exposed — which requires, of course, accurately determining who those people are.

To their credit, both groups focus not on high-tech solutions that might be challenging to implement and potentially threatening to individual privacy (most Americans are not looking to emulate the policies of South Korea or China), but rather on extensive contact tracing involving a lot of individual effort. In other words: good old-fashioned disease hunter shoe-leather.

This approach requires not just a lot of dedicated people, but also a testing capability that we are hopefully developing, but clearly don’t yet possess. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article quoted New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu complaining that his state received 15 of the much-anticipated Abbot testing machines Trump recently demonstrated at the White House—but only enough cartridges for about 100 tests. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” Sununu vented. “I’m banging my head against the wall.”

The reason all this matters (at least if, like me, you believe the health experts) is that the rate at which the population is developing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is remarkably low, according to UCSF epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford. He estimates the rate of population immunity in the United States is around 1 percent, and notes that it’s apparently only 2 percent to 3 percent in Wuhan—the center of the original outbreak.

Herd immunity—the ability of a population’s background level of immunity to protect the occasional vulnerable individual—requires levels more than 10 fold above this (the actual figure depends on the infectivity of the virus; for ultra-infectious conditions like measles, more than 90% of a population must be immune; for the flu, which is less infectious, the figure is closer to 60%; SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be around this range). This means that, in Rutherford’s words, “herd immunity for this disease is mythic”—until there’s an effective vaccine.

Translation: For the foreseeable future, almost all of us are vulnerable. And we will remain vulnerable until therapies emerge.

Health experts worry that without a transition that includes provisions for meticulous contact tracing, rushing headlong back to a vision of normalcy would likely result in a rapid reemergence of the pandemic, and potentially, a need for more wide-spread quarantines—which would drive a stake into the heart of any economic recovery.

The truth here is that Team Economy doesn’t need to push against Team Health, because they’re after the same thing. If Trump embraces a transition that recognizes both the economic needs of the country and the wisdom of leading health experts and policy makers, he may succeed in leading a weary but irrepressibly resilient nation out of our current crisis, and into a durably healthy, economically promising future.

David Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Bulwark here.

The post The False Choice Between Science And Economics appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

The False Choice Between Science And Economics published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

The False Choice Between Science And Economics

By DAVID SHAYWITZ

As the nation wrestles with how best to return to normalcy, there’s a tension, largely but not entirely contrived, emerging between health experts—who are generally focused on maintaining social distancing and avoiding “preventable deaths”—and some economists, who point to the deep structural harm being caused by these policies.

Some, including many on the Trumpist-right, are consumed by the impact of the economic pain, and tend to cast themselves as sensible pragmatists trying to recapture the country from catastrophizing, pointy-headed academic scientists who never much liked the president anyway.

This concern isn’t intrinsically unreasonable. Most academics neither like nor trust the president. There is also a natural tendency for physicians to prioritize conditions they encounter frequently—or which hold particular saliency because of their devastating impact—and pay less attention to conditions or recommendations that may be more relevant to a population as a whole.

Even so, there are very, very few people on what we will call, for lack of a better term, “Team Health,” who do not appreciate, at least at some level, the ongoing economic devastation. There may be literally no one—I have yet to see or hear anyone who does not have a deep appreciation for how serious our economic problems are, and I know of a number of previously-successful medical practices which are suddenly struggling to stay afloat amidst this epidemic.

In contrast, at least some on—again, for lack of a better term—“Team Economy” seem to believe that the threat posed by the coronavirus is wildly overblown, and perhaps even part of an elaborate, ongoing effort to destroy Trump.

Yet even if some partisans are intrinsically unpersuadable, I suspect that if Team Economy had a more nuanced understanding of Team Health, this could facilitate a more productive dialog and catalyze the rapid development and effective implementation of a sustainable solution to our current national crisis.

For starters, it might help Team Economy to know that even pointy-headed academics appreciate that science is (or at least should be) a process we use, not an ideology we worship. Most researchers recognize every day how difficult it is to figure out biological relationships, and to make even the most basic predictions in the highly reductionist systems of a petri dish or a test tube.

Under typical conditions, scientists tend to do an exceptional amount of study before they cautiously suggest a new insight. It’s really hard to figure out how nature works, and each time we think we’ve understood even some tiny aspect of it, nature tends to surprise us again with an unexpected twist. While often maddening, this complexity is also what makes science so captivating, engaging, and intellectually seductive.

In the context of COVID-19, it is incredibly, absurdly challenging for anyone—including scientists—to get their heads around the rapidly evolving knowledge that is, in any case, preliminary and is being collected under difficult conditions.

This is not an environment conducive to understanding exactly what’s going on at a system-wide level, let alone a molecular one.

And yet, that’s what Team Health is trying to manage. They’re working to understand the very basic characteristics of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), while simultaneously extrapolating from the data in order to make recommendations that are going to impact the lives of billions of people.

There is a saving grace: researchers aren’t starting from scratch. They are informed by studies of related pandemics—the influenza pandemic of 1917-1918, the SARS outbreak of 2002-2004, and the 2009 swine flu pandemic, for starters. Investigators are also leveraging all they’ve learned about the biology of related viruses to make educated guesses about how to approach the current threat, and using recently-acquired knowledge of how to harness the immune system in cancer to think about how we might help the immune system respond more effectively to a virus.

Most scientists recognize the limitations of their knowledge, and realize just how hard it is to extrapolate—which is why they tend to avoid doing so. But they also appreciate that even if understanding is difficult and prediction even harder, the process of science—the meticulous collection and analysis of data, the constructing, testing, and reformation of hypotheses—has proven phenomenally effective over the long haul. It has enabled us to better understand illness and disease, and to provide humanity with the opportunity for longer and less miserable lives than ever in the history of our species.

And even if this potential is not realized either universally, nor as frequently as we might wish, it’s still the best construct we have.

It beats, for instance, hoping that a disease will simply disappear, like a miracle. Hope is not a method.

The Trump administration ought to listen to scientists, but it need not accept their advice uncritically. And that’s because behind closed doors, scientists never (well, hardly ever) accept the advice—or data—from other researchers at face value. They invariably question techniques, approaches, and conclusions.

The foundational training course my classmates and I took in grad school in biology at MIT essentially ripped apart classic papers week after week, exposing the flaws, and highlighting the implicit assumptions—and these were generally top-tier pieces of work by legendary scientists. I came away from the course with a powerful sense of the fragility of knowledge, the difficulty of proof, and a deep respect for the researchers who are driven to pursue, persist, and publish—despite these intrinsic challenges.

No individual or organization should be so revered that their findings are beyond scrutiny or evaluation, whether he or she works for a drug company, an academic institution, or an NGO.

But what rankles people on Team Health isn’t thoughtful skepticism from Trump about a particular piece of data (if only!), but rather Trump’s apparent indifference to science as a whole, and the ease with which he casts it aside if it fails to comport with his narrative-of-the-moment.

Trump seems to treat science like just another point of view, embracing it when convenient, ignoring it when not. This sort of casual indifference rattles the people on Team Health because, for all their disagreements, researchers tend to believe that there is an objective reality they are attempting to describe and understand, however imperfectly.

The notion that a scientist’s inevitably hazy view of a real phenomenon—drawn from well-described, ideally reproducible techniques—is indistinguishable from a “perspective” that some presidential advisor, or morning cable host, or guy on Twitter pulls out of . . . well, let’s say thin air . . . seems irresponsible.

And that’s because it is.

The good news is that Trump has a real opportunity in the coming days to leverage the advice of both scientists and policy makers, should he choose to listen.

In the last week, two important reports were published, each by a cross-functional team of experts. One was organized by the Margolis Center for Health Policy at Duke, and includes Trump’s former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, and one of Obama’s national health technology leaders, Dr. Farzad Mostashari. The other is from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Both groups suggest that transition to normalcy will require an exquisite ability to rapidly identify new outbreaks and track down and quarantine individuals who are likely afflicted—the ability to test-and-trace.

The idea is that our country needs the ability to conduct something close to a precision quarantine, where we constrain the activity only of those likely exposed — which requires, of course, accurately determining who those people are.

To their credit, both groups focus not on high-tech solutions that might be challenging to implement and potentially threatening to individual privacy (most Americans are not looking to emulate the policies of South Korea or China), but rather on extensive contact tracing involving a lot of individual effort. In other words: good old-fashioned disease hunter shoe-leather.

This approach requires not just a lot of dedicated people, but also a testing capability that we are hopefully developing, but clearly don’t yet possess. For example, a recent Wall Street Journal article quoted New Hampshire’s Republican governor Chris Sununu complaining that his state received 15 of the much-anticipated Abbot testing machines Trump recently demonstrated at the White House—but only enough cartridges for about 100 tests. “It’s incredibly frustrating,” Sununu vented. “I’m banging my head against the wall.”

The reason all this matters (at least if, like me, you believe the health experts) is that the rate at which the population is developing immunity to SARS-CoV-2 is remarkably low, according to UCSF epidemiologist Dr. George Rutherford. He estimates the rate of population immunity in the United States is around 1 percent, and notes that it’s apparently only 2 percent to 3 percent in Wuhan—the center of the original outbreak.

Herd immunity—the ability of a population’s background level of immunity to protect the occasional vulnerable individual—requires levels more than 10 fold above this (the actual figure depends on the infectivity of the virus; for ultra-infectious conditions like measles, more than 90% of a population must be immune; for the flu, which is less infectious, the figure is closer to 60%; SARS-CoV-2 is likely to be around this range). This means that, in Rutherford’s words, “herd immunity for this disease is mythic”—until there’s an effective vaccine.

Translation: For the foreseeable future, almost all of us are vulnerable. And we will remain vulnerable until therapies emerge.

Health experts worry that without a transition that includes provisions for meticulous contact tracing, rushing headlong back to a vision of normalcy would likely result in a rapid reemergence of the pandemic, and potentially, a need for more wide-spread quarantines—which would drive a stake into the heart of any economic recovery.

The truth here is that Team Economy doesn’t need to push against Team Health, because they’re after the same thing. If Trump embraces a transition that recognizes both the economic needs of the country and the wisdom of leading health experts and policy makers, he may succeed in leading a weary but irrepressibly resilient nation out of our current crisis, and into a durably healthy, economically promising future.

David Shaywitz, a physician-scientist, is the founder of Astounding HealthTech, a Silicon Valley advisory service, and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article originally appeared on The Bulwark here.

The post The False Choice Between Science And Economics appeared first on The Health Care Blog.

The False Choice Between Science And Economics published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[alyssabct]

Concepts and Critical Analysing

1. Tag with cards: The concept is pretty simple, the challenge can be very small, like having to spin around if you’re caught, or no rules on how you defend yourself. 

Critically, I find it too simple, and that it doesn’t meet our aesthetics, specifically Fellowship I don’t think this would work as well as expected for our age range 7 - 11-year-olds, and although does require strategy it lacks communication and in-depth team-building skills.

2. Scribble prompts: On each card are 10 drawing prompts, the player calls out the 10 and the other player has 30 seconds to draw each prompt. Once the time is up the first player can call out any number correlating to the drawing and if the drawing player cannot remember the original object based on their scribble they lose. 

Personally, I think that the idea is quite interesting and would work for our age demographic and target audience but I don’t believe it meets the core intent and purpose of the group. There is no fellowship, however, I think this idea can be built upon to improve it.

3. Words, words, words, words, words: The card prompts you with the main word plus a list of keywords that the players can not say to the chosen person who has to guess the word. Both teams are using the same word and competing for the guessing player to get the word right before the other team. 

This concept is simple but I believe that the competitive challenge of wanting to beat the other team can be a great incentive to work together and a great sense of satisfaction can be achieved from winning this game, which is a huge part of our intent. However, if I were to examine my concept critically, I don’t think that it offers a lot of communication or team building. I can imagine that it would be a lot of confusion and yelling words but this could restrict the players to work harder at different ways to communicate or at least we could each round show them ways of approaching a problem, modes of communication.

4. Debate: One person plays as a moderator whilst the rest are split into two groups. The moderator picks a card with a debate topic and chooses which team is either against or for the topic. 

I quite like this idea as it sparks intrigue and conversation between the groups/teams themselves, furthermore, if we were to add that the moderator picks a winner there may be more of an incentive to work towards winning. The challenge mainly would be coming up with good debate point but also having to argue for something that you don’t particularly believe yourself.

5. Clue: Prompt cards with an object, person, idea, etc and cards with methods of giving a clue, for instance, dance, hum, use three words, draw, etc. Both teams are competing to answer it before one another. 

This idea would be really enjoyable to play and watch, I believe it strengthens communication, team building and is challenging. However, I just find it too simple, but there is, of course, ways to build and make it more interactive.

6. Blindfold manipulation: A player is blindfolded while the players are split into teams one side who tells the truth about the story whilst the other doesn't. 

Critically, this concept would work well in small groups with more narrative based aesthetics than others, however, it ties into challenge, fellowship and sensation. I think that if we were to pursue it would need more attributes or improvements to it.

7. Adjective Cards: Each card has an adjective that is broad for any subject. One player from each team uses these adjectives that pertain to the word that the other players are trying to guess. 

My concept is quite like the other guessing concepts I had thought of before, I know how ambitious or ideas are and I think the concept is simple but simple can be good, if we were to test how well some of our concepts were it would be best to meet our target audience and get feedback or at least try the cards for ourselves. I think that this concept offers challenge and fellowship but I know that it could be so much more than it is so far.

8. Card breaker: Rearranging 5 broken cards or at least more than the other team within 5 minutes. 

This concept is interactive but I am not sure as to how interested our target audience would be for it. Additionally, a critical thought would be to do with the fellowship side, ideally, the team would work together rearranging the cards but with the younger side of our target audience (7-9) are still developing empathy and skills to work together, I wonder how well it would work. I think that the making of the concept could be difficult. It also seems to have only one use and is not a sustainable source of achievement, but more of a puzzle.

9. Alphabet cards: Each player is given 7 cards each with a letter from the alphabet (shuffled). The players take turns going around placing another letter onto the previous word until it can no longer be made longer and the winner can collect the cards for later use. 

I like this concept as it could be played team against a team or amongst a whole crowd, I think that it offers a challenge and sense of achievement. I just think overall, it may not have enough team building in it unless the teams have time to brainstorm words and talk amongst each otherwise it seems to be a figurehead against another with a team behind them giving advice.

10. Towers: Using the cards as stackers, trying to create the highest building before the other team. The challenges are that they have a limited amount of cards and if it falls or is not structurally sound, they lose. 

This concept offers a bunch of challenge to it, and I think that together the teams could learn that designing or thinking before using the materials they've never used before could be useful. I think teaching them how to create something together can help them reach some form of achievement afterwards even it failed. Knowing that you were able to create something and work with teammates can be rewarding. If I were to perceive the concept, critically I would say that it can be improved further and is similar to the projector concept we had thought of before.

[deniscollins]

How Outdoor Voices, a Start-Up Darling, Imploded

What would you do if you were on the Board of Outdoor Voices, and it’s young founder, Tyler Haney, and the Chairman of the Board, Mickey Drexler, a seasoned veteran leader at Gap and J. Crew, obviously did not get along with each other and no longer wanted to work together: (1) have Haney step aside or (2) have Drexler step aside? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision? 

Last summer, Tyler Haney, the founder and chief executive of Outdoor Voices, appeared to be golden.

In just five years, the Instagram-friendly athletic apparel company that she created in her 20s had become a sensation. There was more than $50 million in funding, nine stores and appearances on the business conference circuit. A glowing profile in The New Yorker had anointed Outdoor Voices the next Lululemon. In July, Ms. Haney shared the news that she was pregnant on “Good Morning America” with an enthusiastic message about work, family and having it all.

But behind the scenes, Outdoor Voices was cracking.

Store openings were delayed after leases were signed. A string of experienced executives, hired to professionalize the start-up, had abruptly left. An anonymous letter sent to the board of directors blamed Ms. Haney, now 31, for the exits and accused her of being “spoiled” and mercurial. The clothes were selling at discounts. The office in New York, where Outdoor Voices was based before it moved to Austin, Texas, would soon be shut down.

And a schism had opened between Ms. Haney and Mickey Drexler, the retail legend heralded for his leadership of Gap and J.Crew, who gave Outdoor Voices a halo of can’t-fail credibility when he became an investor and its chairman in 2017.

Mr. Drexler’s decades of experience and deep knowledge of the retail industry were expected to help Outdoor Voices make the transition from scrappy start-up to mature business. But his input was not always welcomed at a company built on the vision of its charismatic founder.

Heading into the new year, Outdoor Voices needed money. In January, the company pieced together a dismal financing that valued it at just $40 million — down from $110 million in 2018.

Part of the deal: Ms. Haney would be replaced as chief executive on an interim basis by Cliff Moskowitz, the former president of InterLuxe, a New York investment firm. She would stay on as “founder.” The Business of Fashion, a trade publication, reported the news in February. Days later, Ms. Haney surprised employees by announcing that she was leaving. She retained her seat on the company’s board.

In a cryptic Instagram Story post, Ms. Haney wrote that her exit was tied to the “heartbreaking narrative of an individual trying to cause harm,” which four current and former employees said was taken as a reference to Mr. Drexler. Mr. Drexler, 75, who also remains on the board, declined to comment for this article.

Ms. Haney’s exit, just months after the difficult birth of her first child, has left Outdoor Voices’ work force of primarily young, female employees shellshocked. Fifteen employees were laid off afterward. All were women, according to one of the dismissed employees and two current employees. The interim chief executive and all members of the newly structured board, other than Ms. Haney, are men.

The company declined to comment on the laid-off employees.

The shake-up has highlighted the generational friction that can arise between idealistic start-up founders, the employees they hire and the seasoned executives their companies often need for success. And it has added to questions about the viability of money-losing e-commerce start-ups, which have amassed piles of venture capital in recent years as they try to disrupt the markets for everything from toothbrushes to watches. In recent months, as investors have become more skeptical, the valuations of a number of these cash-burning “direct to consumer” businesses, like the online mattress company Casper Sleep, have plummeted.

This account of Outdoor Voices’ struggles is based on documents and interviews with 15 current and former employees, investors and people close to the board, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.

“As a young founder, I know my strengths, and I was excited to bring in experienced retail leaders to scale,” Ms. Haney said in a statement. “But in doing so, I was no longer able to lead this company in line with the values and vision that guided me early on.”

“I’m heartbroken, but have learned a lot,” she added. A spokeswoman, Michelle Wellington, said Ms. Haney could not comment further because she had signed agreements that prevented her from speaking about the company’s financial situation or its operations.

Peter Boyce II, a partner at General Catalyst who sits on Outdoor Voices’ board, said the company, like other direct-to-consumer companies, has been grappling with heightened consumer expectations around discounting during the holidays and rising marketing costs on Facebook and Instagram.

“It’s part of the evolution of these businesses,” he said. “There becomes a more sustainable, thoughtful growth rate that makes sense as companies get bigger and bigger, and that’s part of a recalibration taking place in the broader environment.”

Mr. Boyce, who said he also spoke on behalf of major investors, said Ms. Haney had been involved with the board’s search for an “operational partner” for her for about a year and a half, as well as its last fund-raising effort.

Ms. Haney began Outdoor Voices in 2014 after completing a business program at the Parsons School of Design in New York, quickly finding success with “rec kits,” which could pair colorful compression tops and matching leggings. The brand’s profile grew when it was picked up and sold in J.Crew.

The company’s striking, colorful designs and marketing, which portrayed young, diverse women wearing yoga pants while moving and hiking, was a hit on Instagram. Its hashtag — #DoingThings — spoke to a lifestyle. Ms. Haney was a compelling spokeswoman for the brand, which resonated among millennials and college-age customers with money to spend. The company attracted millions in venture funding from high-profile firms like GV, the investment arm of the Google parent Alphabet, and Forerunner Ventures, an e-commerce specialist.

Mr. Drexler viewed Outdoor Voices as something of a swan song as he stepped back from J.Crew and focused on smaller projects, a former employee familiar with his thinking said. And his experience transcended the traditional brick-and-mortar retail business. He had served on the board of Apple and advised the direct-to-consumer eyeglass company Warby Parker. His presence raised the company’s profile among investors and attracted money.

But soon after he joined Outdoor Voices, there was tension. In meetings, Mr. Drexler would quiz employees, expressing frustration when they couldn’t calculate things like profit margins on the fly, according to four people who witnessed the interactions. The exchanges prompted dismissive “OK boomer”-style text messages among the workers, two of the people said.

By 2019, Ms. Haney was telling colleagues that Mr. Drexler was old and out of touch, according to two former employees. Mr. Drexler, in turn, was saying unpleasant things about Ms. Haney to professional acquaintances, according to two people who have worked with him.

Ms. Haney could be dismissive of the traditional ways of retailing, even as the freewheeling start-up grew. This attitude could make it difficult for the company and a revolving door of hires to take basic steps for budgeting, inventory planning, merchandising and store expansion.

“Too often when ‘experience’ walks in the door, that ‘totally possible’ mind-set is gone,” Ms. Haney said to Chip Wilson, the founder of Lululemon, in a conversation published in July by an Outdoor Voices publication.

Outdoor Voices struggled to recruit experienced executives, and when it did, they did not last long. Pam Catlett, a former Nike executive hired as president last year, was gone after five months. Executives from Under Armour, American Apparel, Amazon and J.Crew left as well. The company’s challenges were compounded when it moved its headquarters in 2017 from New York to Austin, with a smaller pool of experienced retail executives.

Some employees bristled at Ms. Haney’s management style. She put pressure on the social media team, which was told to “like” replies to the brand’s Instagram photos within an hour, according to two former employees. When employees left the company, she blocked them on her Instagram account, the former employees said.

In June, an anonymous email that claimed to be written by 14 employees criticized Ms. Haney and was distributed to the board and a group of executives. It mentioned the numerous exits of senior executives as “a huge red flag” and said employees worried that if they disagreed with Ms. Haney’s decisions — even if citing data — they could be fired.

There were also questions about the company’s financial strategy. Outdoor Voices nearly doubled net sales in 2018 to $38 million, according to a prospectus obtained by The New York Times. But it also spent heavily, losing $19 million that year on an adjusted basis. The company predicted annual losses would continue until 2021, when it forecast a $6 million adjusted profit, according to the prospectus.

In 2018, the company’s handful of stores were spending roughly $22,000 on Maison Louis Marie No. 04 candles, $45,000 on fresh flowers and $36,000 on Topo Chico bottled water, according to an internal memo from February 2019.

The retail strategy seemed haphazard. Leases were signed for several stores, including at least one that Mr. Drexler pushed for, that failed to open in a timely manner, running up costs in areas like Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood, according to three people familiar with the plan.

Outdoor Voices’ brand cachet began to erode last year as it unloaded excess products, including at the off-price chain Nordstrom Rack. Competitors mimicked its wares, and social media ad costs rose. It expected $54 million in net sales last year, according to the prospectus, but came up short, two sources said.

Mr. Drexler quietly stepped down as chairman in July but remained on the board.

Internally, employees who felt a deep sense of pride working for a female-founded company that projected a message of positivity are now trying to adjust to the reality of Ms. Haney’s absence and the company’s largely being run by men. (Mr. Boyce, the board member, said, “We have open seats on the board right now where we’re making diversity a priority.”)

Anna Katsios, a design and development project manager who was recently let go, for instance, said she believed she suffered professionally after she told the company that she was pregnant this year.

“While Ty was out on her own maternity leave and slightly prior to that, the management shifted to more males,” she said. “I think that had an effect on how my pregnancy and imminent leave were going to be viewed.” Outdoor Voices declined to comment about Ms. Katsios.

Investors that had once lined up to pour money into the promising company seemed to evaporate. In January, the company secured a new round of financing from some of its existing investors at a slashed valuation.

Terry Sullivan, the founder of Paragon Advisors in Shaker Heights, Ohio, invested in Outdoor Voices in 2014 based in part on his belief in Ms. Haney, and participated in an interim funding round last June. At the time, the company said it expected to be worth at least $240 million in its subsequent round. On Jan. 31, he received a term sheet that valued Outdoor Voices at $40 million and shared plans to find a new chief executive.

Mr. Sullivan was gobsmacked. He said the board had not responded to his inquiries about what happened. “Obviously these things don’t self-implode in a minute,” he said.

[foodoliplife]

Scholastic writing is really a specific design utilized in formal essays as well as other assessments for the program.

Scholastic writing is really a specific design utilized in formal essays as well as other assessments for the program.

it takes formal language, a rational framework and really should be sustained by evidence. It really is a ability which you shall should find out and develop across your time and effort at University. Be sure you make use of the given information in your module guides and feedback from your own lecturers to boost, you may even have workshops included in your program.

Utilize the resources below to build up your writing abilities if you may need more help take a look at our tutorials that are online

To get more information usage one of the publications with this reading list.

Making plans for your projects

There are many different actions to take into account to be sure you hit those deadlines. Our checklist will ideally allow you to get started:

In addition our web page on time administration will provide you with plenty of tips and hints about making the best usage of your energy eg starting out, working with distractions, handling time effortlessly.

Simple, clear framework

A good framework to your assignment is vital to ensuring your audience can follow your argument. If you should be composing an essay, your current framework are going to be an introduction, primary human anatomy and summary. Our Essay framework guide provides overview that is good. Each one of these parts comes with a essential part.

Your audience should be aware of from your own introduction the manner in which you are likely to answer comprehensively the question. This is actually the signpost that is major of essay and really should introduce the subject shortly and recognize one of the keys points you will deal with. It ought to be around 5% of one’s term count. Get more info information in our guide: how exactly to compose introductions.

The primary human body of one’s essay could be the almost all your projects, about 80percent of the terms. Here we ought to view a progression that is logical of argument and references to literature which you have actually read. Utilize paragraphs to separate your lives your key ideas and team associated paragraphs together. This may avoid your essay jumping around and also make it flow.

Finally, an excellent summary will reiterate the key points or revisit the main element themes which you have actually discussed in the primary element of your essay. Most of the points you mention in your summary needs to have recently been talked about within the body that is main of essay. This would be around 15percent of the word count. We now have increased detail in oure handout: Structuring a summary

Paragraphs

You may have heard that the absolute most feature that is important of paragraph is it really is one ‘big idea’. Which means that you need to check always each paragraph and also make certain that all content pertains to one subject.

Paragraphs will be the blocks of one’s essay. Even though they might differ in accordance with your area that is subject and of essay. Each one of these must have the exact same core elements. Have a look at our Paragraph framework handout to learn more. It’s also advisable to consider organising your subjects in an order that is logical making certain each of them connect with your concern and learning objectives. You will need to make connections betwixt your paragraphs by utilizing linking terms and expressions.

Syntax

It really is a myth that scholastic writing has got to include lengthy, complicated sentences. In the event that you write in this manner, your audience will forget that which you stated at the start of your phrase and can soon be lost. Your task as a writer would be to provide your details and argument to your audience plainly so they really aren’t kept wondering just what you suggest. All of your sentences will be able to standalone as a sub point out the ‘big idea’ of your paragraph. a good technique to search for quality of phrasing, sentence size and punctuation positioning would be to read your projects aloud.

Creating a coherent argument or movement

This does not fundamentally imply that you may be composing an “argumentative” essay, more utilizing a rational progression or thread to steer your reader throughout your work. This can be determined by your project and may even change from a “narrative” leading your reader through your conversation, to having a more powerful stance having line of reasoning that develops an instance. Usually that stance gets more powerful while you move up the scholastic amounts and you develop “your vocals”.

Clarity – there’s absolutely no brief cut for this, you’ll want to read and consume the knowledge so that you are unmistakeable exactly what you need to state. This sets the agenda for anything else; the dwelling, ev >

Arrange – organise your details into tips and points that are subsidary. Essays generally begin with a topic that is broad then slim down.

Utilize paragraphing to make sure a clear structure. You can make use of a reverse outline approach to check on this. You need to be in a position to sum each paragraph up in a few terms. This offer you a plan of that which you have actually discussed. Could it be into the most useful purchase?

Look at your paragraph coherence. Is everything in there highly relevant to the heavily weighed of the paragraph or have actually you gone off topic?

Signpost your reader – utilize signposts that are major direct your reader and linking words to build up movement and then make your thinking better.

Assess your proof but indicate which side you fall on.

It is sound and not based on fallacy if you are making an argument make sure. Avoid cherry selecting just the evidence that is supporting ensure you consider both edges. Do not assume causation predicated on correlation e.g simply given that it rains each and every time we set up my tent does not mean i will be making it rain.

Utilizing your reading

Help evidence ( references to your writing) which are presented accurately

Scholastic writing is about utilising the literary works you have got read to guide the argument which you show your audience. Prevent making any statements without supporting all of them with a guide; as an example, you need to show your reader evidence of that claim being true, you will not persuade them simply by saying it if you make the claim girls are better than boys. So, don’t forget to add evidence that is supporting frequently references to posted literary works. Additionally, make an effort to think of all edges of a disagreement – there are that the writers you read don’t constantly agree and also you need certainly to provide your personal audience with an entire account associated with subject. Consequently, you ought to show you’ve got considered the views that are different exist.

Ensure you reference your proof properly. Take a look at Referencing web web page.

Could I consist of long quotations during my essay?

You could add long quotations in your writing, even though this just isn’t a practice that is encouraged many projects. Direct quotations more than three lines have to be presented differently from faster quotations. Longer quotations have to be presented in a paragraph that is separate quote markings and in addition indented from the remaining margin; for instance:

Writing can’t be separated off their procedures such as for example expression, goal-setting, research and organisation. As your writing abilities develop and also you be much more mindful of what exactly is needed, you will be more creative and flexible in your approach to writing (Cottrell, 2003, p. 143).

In the place of including quotes that are direct you should think about re-writing the quote totally is likely to terms (paraphrasing). By paraphrasing you’re showing your examiner which you have actually comprehended the literary works you have got read; this ability is certainly not shown whenever you quote straight. Please keep in mind that once you paraphrase, you nevertheless still need to reference the concept you have got presented due to the fact concept may be the author’s work and perhaps maybe not your own personal.

Go through the website link for many types essay help of paraphrasing.

Structure and style

Utilizing more formal and considered language

Scholastic writing is focused on precision as well as your selection of terms should be produced very carefully. Always stay away from casual terms and colloquial expressions since these don’t appearance really expert. As an example, do not add contractions (can’t, is not) in your writing, merely write these down in full (cannot, just isn’t).

Then on you can just use the abbreviation if you use any abbreviations, for example: OT, NC, make sure you have explained them in full first as well as showing your reader the abbreviation you will use: Occupational Therapy (OT), National Curriculum (NC) from.

Steering clear of the utilization of the very first individual (we)

In educational writing, you really need to often avoid 1st individual; for instance, never make statements such as for instance: in relation to the literary works i’ve read, We think that… alternatively, you will need to inform you in your writing you are being objective; usage statements such as for instance: based on the literature, it may be argued that…This programs your audience that you’re perhaps not presenting your own personal ideas and views but supplying these with a disagreement that is based on the investigation and proof within the literature you’ve got read. For lots more samples of scholastic phrases, check out: www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk.