#but he taught at a public university and at some point in the 2010s the funding got really shitty :

[monstrosity-positive]

If you could relive any memory of your past, what would it be?

HRM interesting question, I'm not really sure. My family used to travel when I was younger (and when the university my dad taught at was better funded 😅) so I'd probably say one of those memories! It also depends on how long of the memory I'd get to relive, and if I could only relive the specific bit that I remember. Because I went to Australia as basically a baby and have about half a memory of that, so if I could relive that but MORE of it, I'd like to. But if it was limited to stuff I have a clear memory of, it would be visiting a castle in Italy and then having gelato afterwards. Or having cioccolata calda on a rainy day with my dad's colleague! Or visiting that same colleague's house and having a homemade dinner with her family! When I think back on it that was one of the coolest "vacations" I went on in my life but I was only 9-10ish, so I didn't fully appreciate all of it.

Ty for the question 🫡 sorry if I rambled a bit, it was interesting to think about!

[ronnie-azumane]

Haikyuu guys as stuff my dad did

This idea has been in my brain for a while, so I'm writing it out. Hope y'all enjoy :)

CW: idn, its pretty wholesome

Daichi answers your frantic phone call home expressing that you forgot your backpack and laptop for college when you went home over the weekend. Expressing that all of your notes are in the backpack, he decides to wake-up extra early Monday morning and make the 2 1/2 hour drive to your university, then drive all the way back to your hometown to go to work.

Sugawara came up with the best hiding spot for you while playing hide and seek at your 7th birthday party. He squeezed you in-between the back of the couch and the back couch cushions. Then, he sat in front of it to conceal the awkward lump it made in the couch. It took the others 30 minutes before giving up and telling you to come out.

Asahi asks you to style his hair for a zoom meeting he has later that day. After some deliberation, you both decide to do a mohawk style. He braces himself as you run off to get the brush, hairspray, hair gel, and hairdryer.

Nishinoya still wears the Annoying Orange shirt you got him when you were in 3rd grade. It's faded and has a giant picture of Annoying Orange on it, which faded from popularity in 2010, but he still wears it. In public.

Tanaka makes the dumbest jokes while in the audience of your colorguard/dance competitions. For example, he asked your mom if he should shout "Go get 'em George" to the group of girls performing to confuse everyone. Another favorite joke o his is to chant "the worm, the worm,, we worship the worm" while the previous team is carrying out their floor.

Ennoshida talks with you as you make one of the biggest changes in your life. Midway through your second semester at university, you determine that business is not for you, however, you do not have a backup plan. Talking with him, you end up changing your major to Geography, and now you love every second of it.

Kageyama drinks the milk out of you cereal. You hate the taste of milk by itself, but you don't want to eat dry cereal. To not waste milk, he drinks it after you finish eating your cereal.

Hinata fails miserably when your mom tells him to reapply the medical glue on your forehead. The day before, your sister threw a wooden block at you, causing a major tear in your head. Your mom took you to the emergency room, but they were busy and it was a school night, so they told her to just take some liquid band aid (which we called glue) and close the wound. Your mom told him to replace the glue, and he took ELMERS GLUE and placed it on the open wound. It hurt like a bitch.

Tsukishima takes you to go see the museum of natural history once a month. He knows you're the odd girl out of your class that would rather play with dinosaurs than dolls, so he takes you to see the dinosaur fossils. He also gets a discount because his place of work donated a significant amount of money and resources to one of the exhibits.

Yamaguchi helped set up your setup once you moved to zoom university. He attached your laptop to a monitor his job had extra, so now you feel like a badass whenever you use the two screens.

Oikawa out of nowhere invites all his high school friends over to stay the week at your house. A trip that probably should have been planned in weeks, even months, is planned in just a weekend. Everyone ends up sleeping on air mattresses and blankets on the floor due to your mom just finishing up replacing the floors in the house (she was not too happy with the sudden trip, but was welcoming anyway)

Iwaizumi makes you watch Godzilla with him whenever it's on TV. Some of his fondest memories include receiving Godzilla themed ornaments from his mom ever Christmas. He also unironically watches those cheesy fan-made Godzilla fights on YouTube for hours on end. Man just likes Godzilla.

Hanamaki and you wear funny hats to a volunteer cookout. The organizers told every one to wear a hat so that their hair didn't get in the food, but you two take it a step further. You wear a banana hat while he wears a hotdog hat.

Matsukawa taught you how to make all kinds of breakfast food at a young age. Whether it was a simple as a fried egg or as complex as French toast, he worked with you until the recipe came out perfect.

Kyotani scares the other parents off when it comes to the silent auction selling the class are projects. Now the shelf you and your kindergarten classmates fingerprinted flowers and bugs on sits proudly in your closet holding crafting supplies.

Ushijima scolds you for leaving the lights on. Most parents do that already, but he takes it to a new extreme. Your mom explains that he would never turn the lights on in his apartment when he was in college and would simply get his homework done before dark. Sometimes, if he had something to do, he would light a candle to finish something up.

Tendou recalls a story in which he stole a bus battery with his buddies to power an air conditioned tent at boy scout camp. He also recalls the year he and his friends tried to build a pool in the wilderness at the same count, only to get caught and reprimanded for it before filling it with water which totally had nothing to do with a camp counselor finding it and having a Vietnam flashback

Goshiki watches anime with you. He always acts like he is uninterested in whatever show is on, but he soon gets super into it and it will be the only thing he talks about for a week.

Kuroo sits at the table with you until 2am working on that math assignment you have been struggling with. You've definitely run out of tears to cry, and had to redo the assignment twice, but he is guiding you through the answers

Yaku isn't a fan of all the pets you and your mom have collected over the years. I mean, in his defense, at one point we had 8 cats an 3 dogs. However, he is also super cuddly with them, always giving them nose boops and belly rubs.

Kenma plays Xbox, Wii, and the ds with you. He doesn't find the bulk of the games you play with him entertaining, but he is willing to run through LEGO Star Wars with you. His personal favorite to play is Mario Kart and he doesn't let you win >:(

Lev is trying to convince the family to let him take the position in Alaska with higher pay. When mom raised the concern that the long winters wouldn't do well for your mental health, his counter argument was, "Yeah, and that sucks, but hear me out. We could have a pet Polar Bear." We didn't move to Alaska

Bokuto was definitely the most enthusiastic dad at the girl scout father daughter dance. He twirled you around in your pretty little JC Penney dress and made sure you two were the center of the dance floor. At one point, he lifted you above his head with each foot in a hand like a cheerleader. Truly terrifying.

Akaashi drives out to the 24-hour pharmacy to pick up some cold medicine when you couldn't sleep due to a stuffy nose. He also checks up on you every hour when you are coughing with some mysterious disease (due to the lack of tests and priority of the high-risk, I will never know if I had Covid when I got sick in late March)

Aone gives you the biggest hug after you get released from the graduation ceremony. He isn't the best with words, so this hug speaks so much to you.

Terushima has been taking you to Mardi Gras in New Orleans since you were a baby. He doesn't care that it's mostly an adult party, he believes that everyone in the family should enjoy a good ol' Mardi Gras

Atsumu carries you on his shoulders all the time when you're small. He just thinks it's the cutest thing.

Osamu makes sure to host a crawfish boil every year. Whether its the neighbors, family, both, or just the household, you can expect some good, spicy crawfish with corn and potatoes whenever he cooks.

Kita teaches you how to drive a stick shift. He's frustrated that you cant move three feet before stalling, but then realizes that the issue was that you were in third gear, not first. He is now impressed that you were even able to start moving at third gear.

Sakusa takes you along with him to work. His job is full of tough men, so when they see him with you in a little blue dress-up tutu and a plastic tiara on your head, their hearts just melt.

[holdharmonysacred]

Been seeing one of those posts about anti-intellectualism going around and while I agree that the other examples cited are bananas (who looks at Picasso’s stuff and thinks he’s a renaissance artist????), I’m gonna have to call foul on the one complaining about people studying YA and fanfiction in English class, because that specific point sounds like it’s mocking some genuine arguments that got unfortunately mangled in the game of social media telephone. Because usually when someone’s seriously arguing something like that, it’s either

A. people genuinely wanting to study YA lit, fanfiction, and other forms of popular literature like comics or video games as genuine artforms worthy of analysis, critique, and respect (with this version usually happening at a higher academic level like university or “trained academics going ham”)

or B. people wanting to use YA lit as a teaching tool and springboard for kids to use to start learning how to read and analyze texts, usually because most of the stuff we consider classics today genuinely suck as material for Baby’s First Literary Analysis.

And the thing is both of those are legitimate points to be had! For point A, these forms of popular media are still genuinely worth studying and analyzing, and while there’s genuine issues with the subcultures around these forms of media, the media itself is still worth taking seriously and talking about. A text being made for kids or teens doesn’t mean it’s therefore worthless, university classes that talk about literature for kids and teens aren’t stupid, what the hell are you guys on about? How are you guys gonna work in the kids and teens departments of your local libraries if you look down on those types of literature with a sneering disdain?

And for point B, this is a genuine problem with English classes in public schools! A lot of classic texts suck as reading material for kids and high schoolers these days because either schools aren’t equipped to really teach them (you can’t teach Huck Finn to your class of kids if you’re unable to step in and stop said kids from using the book as an excuse to be horrifically racist), or because the texts themselves just haven’t aged well and don’t match the target reading level anymore. Alice in Wonderland is kid’s literature for example, but it’s not the best text to teach to kids nowadays because most of its jokes just aren’t relevant or obvious to modern kid audiences anymore (whereas an adult might find the books hilarious because they have an advantage in Comprehending Ye Olde Texts that kids don’t have). No one’s saying Huck Finn is irredeemably bad and should never be taught ever again, what people are saying is that it’s a terrible text to use as Baby’s First Introduction To Antiracism, and there’s far better texts written by actual POC who would be better suited to that particular purpose. Huck Finn can and should still be taught, but its failure to age with grace means that it’s better suited for college-level courses that can actually grapple with its material.

and also....... We already teach YA texts in schools???? We literally already teach YA texts to kids in schools. That’s literally what books like The Giver and The Outsiders are - they’re YA novels. Teaching YA texts to kids in schools isn’t remotely a new concept, it’s something we’ve been doing for decades. Really this whole argument is just about updating the reading lists to include more recent novels from the 2000s and 2010s, in which case something like The Hunger Games would be a perfect choice because it matches the relevant reading levels while also being thematically dense enough to use to teach literary analysis. This literally isn’t as bizarre a situation as you guys think it is, I beg you all to take English classes for once in your life.

[tamorapierce]

Tammy's Spring 2020 Reading Recommendations For the Bored

Sooner or later the bookhounds among us are going to start joining my relentless song, from age five on up, of “I don’t have anything to read!!!!”

 I am here to help.  In this space, as I get to it (knowing, as my readers do, that I have no sense of deadline), I will be posting a constant set of collections of book titles by authors my team and I have read and will recommend in a wild variety of genres and for a wild variety of ages.  (And I’ll give a short hint as to the subject of the first book/series—if I did them all I’d never finish this.)  This last is for the many of you who are reading teen and adult books in grade and middle school, and those adult readers who are reading teen and kidlit. These people are for those who love books and don’t care who is supposed to be reading them.  

 Also, you may have to look far and wee, since we will be drawing upon not only recently published books but older ones that we have either read recently or that we read long ago and have re-read or have never forgotten.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you when the writing is archaic.  If you’re a true nutsy reader like the rest of us, you won’t care.

 -Tammy Pierce

                                                        *     *     *

Assume the book came out within the last 2 years unless I put LO next to the title, which means you have to check libraries and bookstores online and paper for copies.

 *     *     *

 Diana Wynne Jones  LO

A generation or two of fantasy writers, particularly those who love humor, bow to this woman as our goddess.  Not only was she out of her mind in a very British and manic way, but with her TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASYLAND she taught a number of us to ditch some ill-considered tropes of our genre.  If you write historic fantasy in particular, move heaven and earth to track this book down.  There’s a bonus: some of the entries will make you laugh till you cry.

           She is best known for her books for middle grade and teens, but they are enjoyable for all readers.  I cannot list them all here because my fingers will break (curse you, arthritis!), but these titles will give you a jumping-off point.  And remember, authors change with each book, so you won’t encounter the same author with each title as the author you read in the previous one!

           The Chrestomanci books, all in the same universe, in order of story,

                       not publication

Charmed Life  (1977) An innocent lad follows his plotting egotistical sister to live with England’s chief wizard

The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988)

Conrad’s Fate (2005)

Witch Week (1982)

The Magicians of Caprona (1980)

Short stories

 The Dalemark Quartet begins with

The Spellcoats (1979)

3 sequels

 The Derkholm books are

Dark Lord of  (1998)

Year of the Griffin (2000)

  The Tough Guide to Fantasyland is standalone, but is a kind of offshoot of the Derkholm books.  You don’t have to have read the Derkholm books to get Tough Guide!

 There are other books and stories by Jones—I’ll let you find them on your own.

  Philip Pullman

To this day I am unable to call him anything but Mr. Pullman—that’s how much in awe of the man I am.  We’ve had dinner together, talked on the phone, talked at an event or two, done a conversation on audio with Christopher Paolini—it’s still Mr. Pullman to me.  (I was an assistant in a literary agency when I discovered his work, and I never recovered.) He is, in a word, brilliant, and his interests range through all kinds of areas, particularly history and religion.  I could have talked with him forever that night we had dinner, but the poor man had jet lag and I let him go to collapse.  It was one of the best exchanges of ideals, values, and books I’ve ever had.  

Read his work carefully, because what he discusses is never just the story on top.  No matter what he writes, he is making strong points about social justice, human nature, religion, and history without preaching.  He is one of the few male writers out there who can write female characters as people, not Something Different.  And you never know, with his work, where he will go next.

 The Ruby in the Smoke,

book 1,  the Sally Lockheart mysteries

Victorian mysteries with a female hero and male assistants,

           The Book of Dust and sequel,

first 2 books of The Secret Commonwealth

           His Dark Materials trilogy

                       The Golden Compass

                       2 other titles                

           THE COLLECTORS

           LYRA’S OXFORD

           THE WHITE MERCEDES

           FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM

           I WAS A RAT!

           TWO CRAFTY CRIMINALS

           COUNT KARLSTEIN

           (I will stop here and let you find the rest. Most are available as Nook books.)

  Sharon Shinn

I discovered Sharon Shinn with JOVAH’S ANGEL, but a shortage of funds left me unable to pursue my interest (I am an economic disaster with libraries, so I buy rather than borrow) until, with a job and money to spend, I spotted THE SAFE-KEEPER’S SECRET.  It is the story of a medieval-ish world and a small village where a baby was left with a childless couple.  She is raised as their daughter and discovers, as she grows, that her mother is an important, a Safekeeper, the person to whom a secret can be told, relieving the person who told it of the weight of guilt from it, to be carried by the Safekeeper until the owner either decides to tell or dies.  (And if they die without giving permission, the Safekeeper never reveal the secret.)  The baby who is adopted by this town’s safekeeper becomes the safekeeper in her turn.

           The next book is THE TRUTHTELLER’S TALE, about a girl who acquires the gift (??) of telling the truth, whether the person she tells it to wants to hear it or not. The third book is The Dream-maker’s Magic.  The three main characters now learn why they have been brought together over the course of the two earlier books, in what I thought was a satisfying, if unusual, conclusion.

           And there’s more!  I just did the two I love best!

             THE SAFEKEEPER’S SECRET (book 1, two sequels)

           ARCHANGEL (4 books)

           TWELVE HOUSES (5 books)

           ELEMENTAL BLESSINGS (4 books)        

SHIFTING CIRCLE (2 books)

           UNCOMMON ECHOES

           GENERAL WINSTON’S DAUGHTER

           GATEWAY

 Daniel Jose Older

 I was a Daniel Jose Older fan before I was sent DACTYL HILL SQUAD for a blurb (preodactyls in flight!  Of all sizes!  Confederate spies!  Thuggish bigot northerners!  The backlash of Gettysburg and the forced recruitment of blacks for the war effort! And strong, smart, fierce kids of various ages, sizes, colors, national heritage, and skills doing their best to help the war against the slaves, keep escaped slaves safe, duck the cruel managers of the homes and jails where they are being kept, find a half-decent meal, free other kids in trouble, learn who’s killing their friends, and help the dactyls!  That’s part of it, anyway!

Yeah, I loved it.  And there’s at least one new book, and once I’ve mowed though that, there are his older teen books, and his grownup mysteries, with their half-dead taxi driver who doubles as a part-time troubleshooter for the undead powers in his Bone Street Rhumba series.  {happy sigh}

  Edgar Allen Poe

Yes, some of these are reminders of why we ended up to be the readers we are and to nudge us to corrupt—I mean, “introduce”—­new readers to the glories that are our legacies.

­

THE COMPLETE TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR ALLEN POE

           Here are the greats:

poems like “The Raven,” and “Annabelle Lee”

stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Telltale Heart,” and  ::shudder:: “The Pit and the Pendulum” (yes, a deep pit and a swinging pendulum topped with a razor-edged blade will be featured in this story).  

My dad would read these to us on dark and stormy nights when we lived near the Pacific ocean, when the fog came rolling in, softening every sound, when there were no cars driving by and no other sounds in our house but his deep voice and the crackle of the fire in the fireplace.  We would listen, soundless, as he wove the stories and poems around us and the foghorn sounded offshore.

           That’s the power of Poe.

  N. K. Jemisin

I think I began with Jemisin’s THE HUNDRED THOUSAND KINGDOMS, soon followed by its sequel THE BROKEN KINGDOMS.  The series ended with a third book, THE KINGDOM OF THE GODS.  She presented a rich and varied world from the aspects of people of different classes, showing the growth of societies and their formation.  I have a secret passion for society-building and social interaction, and whether or not a book is difficult to read (as Jemisin’s books are in spots because she refuses to insult a reader by talking down to them) is immaterial.  I want the world and I want the characters, and with her far-reaching mind and her respect for her characters she delivers each and every time.  I have read almost everything she’s written since that first trilogy: if I’ve missed something, it’s because I was in the middle of a deadline and on the road and somehow didn’t see it.  I’ll catch up!  This is just a sample:

           For readers of all sexes and adult reading skills

 The City They Became (pub’d April 2020)

 The Inheritance Trilogy:

           The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2010

           2 book sequels

Novella: The Awakened Kingdom, 2014

                       Triptych: Shades in Shadow, 2015 (3 short stories) 

             The Dreamblood Duology:

           For readers of all sexes and adult reading skills

           The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, 2010

                       Two sequels

 The Broken Earth series:

         The Fifth Season (August 2015)

                       Two book sequels

And there are plenty of short stories out there.  I may even have missed a book or twelve!

For those who prefer to hear my ramble in person, a video!

[joeyclaire]

Who is he.

Ben Bernanke

14th Chair of Federal Reserve

Ben Shalom Bernanke (/bərˈnæŋki/ bər-NANG-kee; born December 13, 1953) is an American economist at the Brookings Institution who served two terms as the 14th Chair of the Federal Reserve, from 2006 to 2014. During his tenure as chair, Bernanke oversaw the Federal Reserve's response to the late-2000s financial crisis, for which he was named the 2009 Time Person of the Year. Before becoming Federal Reserve chair, Bernanke was a tenured professor at Princeton University and chaired the department of economics there from 1996 to September 2002, when he went on public service leave.

Quick Facts 14th Chair of the Federal Reserve, President ...

From August 5, 2002, until June 21, 2005, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, proposed the Bernanke Doctrine, and first discussed "the Great Moderation" — the theory that traditional business cycles have declined in volatility in recent decades through structural changes that have occurred in the international economy, particularly increases in the economic stability of developing nations, diminishing the influence of macroeconomic (monetary and fiscal) policy.

Bernanke then served as chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers before President Bush nominated him to succeed Alan Greenspan as chairman of the United States Federal Reserve. His first term began February 1, 2006. Bernanke was confirmed for a second term as chairman on January 28, 2010, after being renominated by President Barack Obama, who later referred to him as "the epitome of calm." His second term ended January 31, 2014, when he was succeeded by Janet Yellen on February 3, 2014.

Bernanke wrote about his time as chairman of the Federal Reserve in his 2015 book, The Courage to Act, in which he revealed that the world's economy came close to collapse in 2007 and 2008. Bernanke asserts that it was only the novel efforts of the Fed (cooperating with other agencies and agencies of foreign governments) that prevented an economic catastrophe greater than the Great Depression.

Family and childhood

Bernanke was born in Augusta, Georgia, and was raised on East Jefferson Street in Dillon, South Carolina. His father Philip was a pharmacist and part-time theater manager. His mother Edna was an elementary school teacher. Bernanke has two younger siblings. His brother, Seth, is a lawyer in Charlotte, North Carolina. His sister, Sharon, is a longtime administrator at Berklee College of Music in Boston.

The Bernankes were one of the few Jewish families in Dillon and attended Ohav Shalom, a local synagogue; Bernanke learned Hebrew as a child from his maternal grandfather, Harold Friedman, a professional hazzan (service leader), shochet, and Hebrew teacher. Bernanke's father and uncle owned and managed a drugstore they purchased from Bernanke's paternal grandfather, Jonas Bernanke.

Jonas Bernanke was born in Boryslav, Austria-Hungary (today part of Ukraine), on January 23, 1891. He immigrated to the United States from Przemyśl, Poland, and arrived at Ellis Island, aged 30, on June 30, 1921, with his wife Pauline, aged 25. On the ship's manifest, Jonas's occupation is listed as "clerk" and Pauline's as "doctor med".

The family moved to Dillon from New York in the 1940s. Bernanke's mother gave up her job as a schoolteacher when her son was born and worked at the family drugstore. Ben Bernanke also worked there sometimes.

Young adult

As a teenager, Bernanke worked construction on a hospital and waited tables at a restaurant at nearby South of the Border, a roadside attraction, amusement park and fireworks retailer, in his hometown of Dillon, before leaving for college. To support himself throughout college, he continued to work during the summers at South of the Border.

Religion

As a teenager in the 1960s, Bernanke would help roll the Torah scrolls in his local synagogue. Although he keeps his beliefs private, his friend Mark Gertler, chairman of New York University's economics department, says they are "embedded in who he (Bernanke) is." Once Bernanke was at Harvard for his freshman year, Fellow Dillon native Kenneth Manning took him to Brookline for Rosh Hashanah services.

Education

Bernanke was educated at East Elementary, J.V. Martin Junior High, and Dillon High School, where he was class valedictorian and played saxophone in the marching band. Since Dillon High School did not offer calculus at the time, Bernanke taught it to himself. Bernanke scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT and was a National Merit Scholar. He also was a contestant in the 1965 National Spelling Bee.

Bernanke attended Harvard College in 1971, where he lived in Winthrop House, as did the future CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, and graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an A.B. degree, and later with an A.M. in economics summa cum laude in 1975. He received a Ph.D. degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1979 after completing and defending his dissertation, Long-Term Commitments, Dynamic Optimization, and the Business Cycle. Bernanke's thesis adviser was the future governor of the Bank of Israel, Stanley Fischer, and his readers included Irwin S. Bernstein, Rüdiger Dornbusch, Robert Solow, and Peter Diamond of MIT and Dale Jorgenson of Harvard.

Personal life

Ben and Anna Bernanke

Bernanke met his wife, Anna, a schoolteacher, on a blind date. She was a student at Wellesley College, and he was in graduate school at MIT.[citation needed] The Bernankes have two children, Joel and Alyssa. He is an ardent fan of the Washington Nationals baseball team, and frequently attends games at Nationals Park.

When Bernanke left Stanford to accept a position at Princeton, he and his family moved to Montgomery Township, New Jersey, in 1985, where Bernanke's children attended the local public schools. Bernanke served for six years as a member of the board of education of the Montgomery Township School District.

In 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bernanke was a victim of identity theft, a spreading crime the Federal Reserve has for years issued warnings about.

Academic and government career (1979–2006)

Bernanke meeting with United States President Barack Obama.

Bernanke taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1979 until 1985, was a visiting professor at New York University and went on to become a tenured professor at Princeton University in the Department of Economics. He chaired that department from 1996 until September 2002, when he went on public service leave. He resigned his position at Princeton July 1, 2005.

Bernanke served as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System from 2002 to 2005. In one of his first speeches as a Governor, entitled "Deflation: Making Sure It Doesn't Happen Here", he outlined what has been referred to as the Bernanke Doctrine.

As a member of the board of governors of the Federal Reserve System on February 20, 2004, Bernanke gave a speech in which he postulated that we are in a new era called the Great Moderation, where modern macroeconomic policy has decreased the volatility of the business cycle to the point that it should no longer be a central issue in economics.

In June 2005, Bernanke was named chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers, and resigned as Fed Governor. The appointment was largely viewed as a test run to ascertain if Bernanke could be Bush's pick to succeed Greenspan as Fed chairman the next year. He held the post until January 2006.

Chairman of the United States Federal Reserve

Bernanke testifying before the House Financial Services Committee responding to a question on February 10, 2009.

On February 1, 2006, Bernanke began a fourteen-year term as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and a four-year term as chairman (after having been nominated by President Bush in late 2005). By virtue of the chairmanship, he sat on the Financial Stability Oversight Board that oversees the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He also served as chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee, the System's principal monetary policy making body.

His first months as chairman of the Federal Reserve System were marked by difficulties communicating with the media. An advocate of more transparent Fed policy and clearer statements than Greenspan had made, he had to back away from his initial idea of stating clearer inflation goals as such statements tended to affect the stock market. Maria Bartiromo disclosed on CNBC comments from their private conversation at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. She reported that Bernanke said investors had misinterpreted his comments as indicating that he was "dovish" on inflation. He was sharply criticized for making public statements about Fed direction, which he said was a "lapse in judgment."

Financial crisis of 2007–2008

Bernanke (left) in September 2008 as President Bush speaks about the economy

Further information: Financial crisis of 2007–08

As the Great Recession deepened, Bernanke oversaw some unorthodox measures. Under his guidance, the Fed lowered its funds interest rate from 5.25% to 0.0% within less than a year. When this was considered insufficient to abate the liquidity crisis, the Fed initiated quantitative easing, creating $1.3 trillion from November 2008 to June 2010 and using the created money to buy financial assets from banks and from the government.

Second term

Bernanke answers questions in 2013 at FOMC press conference

On August 25, 2009, President Obama announced he would nominate Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve. In a short statement on Martha's Vineyard, with Bernanke standing at his side, Obama said Bernanke's background, temperament, courage and creativity helped to prevent another Great Depression in 2008.

[eponymous-rose]

Hello! I know you're busy, and I hope this isn't too intrusive, but I wanted to ask about your experience with undergrad research! I'm a sophmoore physics student wanting to get into research, but not sure where to start. My professors say it can be as easy as asking, but everyone's research is so advanced I barely understand the abstract. I know we're not in the same field, but do you have any advice? What would you say if an undergrad asked if they could help you research?

Oh gosh, I had a lot of really good experiences with undergrad research! As a professor now, I’d try to make it happen for any student who expressed an interest---there’s always some money in our department to pay students for a summer research internship, and for something longer-term we have a 3-credit “Independent Research”-style setup.

For me, during my undergrad I took on two summer research positions and a sixteen-month full-time internship at a forecasting office that included some research during the winters. The internship was through a special program with the university, but the research summers were funded through a government agency (NSERC in Canada)---if by chance you’re in Canada, they’d be a phenomenal choice! In the U.S., science-wise there’s the REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates), which will fund your work on any project funded by the National Science Foundation, and if you can spin things toward oceanography or atmospheric science I know NOAA does the Hollings Scholarship, which funds research at a NOAA facility (decent pay plus room & board). NASA also has a TON of internships (I did mine as a master’s student, but they’re also open to undergrads).

But these are just sources of additional funding---often, professors and departments have money set aside to fund undergrad researchers, so you don’t have to worry about all this(and professors can tell you all about these and help you apply if they’re relevant to your field anyway). 

Basically, I went to professors whose stuff seemed interesting---like you, I definitely couldn’t parse most of what they were doing, but I had ideas like “hey, this person works on tornado stuff” or even more vaguely “I like this way this guy taught his class, I bet he does really cool research”. I just shot them an e-mail, said I was interested in doing research as an undergraduate, and asked if I could come chat with them about their research and the possibility of getting to work on it during the summer.

The first project was with a hail researcher after my second year of college, and he told me about NSERC---we put together an application, which was approved, and I spent the summer getting paid well to digitize this really old dataset that nobody had looked at, attend group meetings where this professor and his postdocs and grad students chatted about the results, and finally present some of my own results at the end. Really, really good starting point! I wound up working with the guy on an honors thesis at the end of my degree, and he wrote me a great reference letter for grad school.

After my long internship at the forecasting office, I was finishing up my final year of undergrad, and I had a real “fuck it, why not?” moment. I had this oceanography professor who was just very easy to understand, very cheerful, and had infectious energy. He was technically in the physics department, so not at all my area of study, but I figured I’d gotten an A in his class, so why not? I e-mailed him mentioning the NSERC research I’d done, told him what I’d enjoyed about his class, and asked if he had the funding for and time to supervise an undergrad research assistant over the summer, even though I wasn’t in his department and this wasn’t at all my specialty.

And he was delighted! He brought me on board (again with NSERC funding) for the summer between undergrad and grad school, and I learned all about experimental fluid dynamics: I helped build this complicated tank setup, ran laboratory equipment more valuable than a Ferrari that inexplicably still ran on Windows 95 in 2010, attended his really entertaining group meetings (I remember him working with a grad student to prep her for her Master’s defense: he put on different hats to impersonate each of her committee members and expertly predicted which questions each would ask), met a retired spy at a dinner party (??? this prof knew some cool people), and finally put together some figures for his postdoc’s paper that wound up getting published. As a result, my first-ever scientific publication is a second-author credit in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics, and ten years later I still get the occasional question about it, which is terrifying every time because hey, still not my area of expertise.

But that one gave me the amazing experience of understanding how much knowledge was transferable between disciplines: I didn’t have to be an expert on the subject matter to be helpful in a research lab. My NASA internship was working on an ecological satellite, for crying out loud. And a few weeks ago a senior colleague was telling me that the main reason they hired me was the versatility and flexibility they saw in my CV.

Undergrad research was HUGE for me, and I can guarantee that it’s something that elevates any grad school application! Even if the research feels simple or routine, having senior scientists who can write you letters of reference with more details than just “so-and-so got a grade of such-and-such in this class” is a MASSIVE advantage, wherever you decide to go after college.

All of this longwinded storytelling boils down to the advice: talk to the professors who inspire you, tell them they inspire you, and ask if you can help them do the things they love. Best of luck, and please let me know if you have more specific questions---I’ll be happy to answer!

[royisms]

annekane asked: false god by taylor swift

so here’s a long ass thing i did that deiniftely doesn’t answer the question and nobody asked for but did that stop me? no.

Harvard University: Government Major

     -- Dated for five months in freshman year. Jason was in her Economy class and they didn’t talk until after the term was over. They met met at a bar near campus and it took her exactly those five months to realize that they wanted opposite things. He was looking for a long term girlfriend, and Amanda was already not about that life. She took the end of the year as an excuse and ended things before moving back home for the summer.

     -- Hookup in freshman year. Some guy on the debate team that beat her on the last round. It didn’t last long (in more than one way), but there was something about competition that was so exciting already. 

     -- Dated? in sophomore year: it’s been over twenty years and Amanda’s still utterly confused about this guy. She was certain they were only sleeping together, he apparently was sure that they were an item. It didn’t end well. Someone saw her flirting with some other guy and Bruno god stupid angry and it kind of looked like a scene out of a comedy series. They were having totally different conversations, but bottom line was she broke his heart.

     -- Hookup during the summer between sophomore and junior years: Amanda was as  vanilla as it got because she never ever had sex ed in school (shocking) and she hadn’t had enough partners and enough confidence to try things out. Xavier was her first experience with an older guy (she was 20, he was 28) and he taught her things about herself. They didn’t talk too much, he picked her up and dropped her off just around the corner of her house so her parents wouldn’t ask whose car it was. He was an incredible kisser and the fact that he paid her any attention at all made her feel all the more mature. He even paid for the morning after pill that one time. So sweet.

     -- Hookup in junior year: at that one party, her roommate and her were dared to kiss and Amanda was That Girl and was also way past tipsy and it kinda seemed like a good idea. Callie and her were in the same classes, too, and they both pretended it had never happened. To be fair, Amanda couldn’t even recall if the kiss had been good the next morning.

     -- Dated for four months: Phil. Kinda lame, but had an okay sense of humour and he sat through extremely lengthy conversations with her and Oliver about the undoubtable and unavoidable demise of humanity. Evidently, he did it because he thought she owed her after, and she wasn’t informed enough to know she didn’t, so she lay down for two and a half minutes, cleaned up after and said she was tired and she’d see him the next day because he was really weird to share a bed with. After using all the clichés she knew to say she didn’t want to see him anymore, he decided to ignore her not very subtle hints and kept calling and showing up with take out. Phil really is a boring name for a boring man who needed a smack on the head and a book on women’s rights. Also: https://royisms.tumblr.com/post/621230604961333248/i-wish-i-missed-my-ex-mahalia

      -- Fell for Marcus in junior year: this time, it was the other way around. She was completely enamoured by him (looking back, it was the fact that he had a full academic scholarship he didn’t need and him being a guy her age who wasn’t a complete waste of space). There were rumours but she decided to ignore them and they came back to bite her in the ass. If she remembers correctly, that was the first time Oliver held back an “I told you”, but maybe she just didn’t hear him because she was sobbing into her pillow and screaming about how men were all the same and how could she have been so stupid. Not only a borken heart, but Marcus also gave her an STD! Thanks babe!

Georgetown University: Masters in Public Policy 

     -- Hooked up with her first Grad professor: because she’s a dumb bitch who doesn’t learn. He was only five years older but being in a position where he was way more powerful gave her such a rush. They wouldn’t talk in class, but she’d look at him from across the room and give him a look because it earned her some rough loving when they were finally behind closed doors. He eventually stopped calling her when she passed his class and he found another student to sleep with. Anyway... That’s systemic misogyny for you.

     -- Dated for eight months in 2003 - 2004: Joshua. Maybe the first relationship she’d consider serious. She had her own room for the first time in years and so did he, and they spent most nights together. With working on top of studying and her lack of time-management skills, she didn’t spend too much time with friends and, instead, they became each other’s support system. In the end, they liked each other because they didn’t have others who’d stand by them while they got consumed in their textbooks and not because they had too much in common. He’s now probably a Republican mayor in some town and he’s balding so she calls this one a win for sure.

Started to work for her father’s consultancy to dip her toe into electoral strategy.

     -- Hooked up with: Frank. A lawyer who’d just joined the consultancy business. She met him at an event she was assisting in. He was also struggling to pay rent but he was much better at hiding it and his neat hair and grey tux (and her lack of human touch in months) earned him a willing young blonde eager to get out of her heels and into his bed. They were done by 12:13am and he kicked her out, didn’t even call her a cab. Definitely not what she’d pictured for her first month as an official adult.

Didn’t date anyone, finally decided to officially put her career first and not focus on men. Also, started going to a therapist for the first time! This was great. We love mental health. Started to think about leaving her dad’s business and work on something else. Consultancy was okay but she really wanted to make an impact on the world, have a legacy... Yada yada.  

     -- Hooked up with: Luke. Her friend stood her up at the bar because she met some dude and Amanda was forcefully introduced to the beauty of drinking alone. This guy used the classic ‘pretending to be your boyfriend when a stranger is hitting on you to get them off but then I ask for your number so you’re uncomfortable again but I win so who cares’ move. She was tipsy enough that she didn’t care he didn’t have a condom. Unfortunately, her bank account disagreed when she withdrew the cash necessary for Planned Parenthood. You know what, fuck you Luke.

She took on more responsibilities at the office and eventually gathered enough to have her own clients. Granted, she still worked for an office, but her dad was close to retiring and she was proud of her own accomplishments. People actually called in and requested her by this point! Amazing progress. She was never working on campaigns alone because Youth and also men were still in charge lmao let’s not forget!! But hey. It’s something.

     -- Hooked up with: Samuel. He wasn’t a client anymore and he was a little younger than her, actually. He was also a Republican. Something about him winning the election with her help and her getting praise over the work she’d done by her peers made her reach out in 2010. One glass of wine became two and three. She kicked him out in the morning, and as far as she’s concerned his wife never found out.

     --  Dated (on and off) for one year and a half 2011 - 2012: Doh. He was a rising journalist, he’d written a big piece on something sketchy that had happened in Congress and he’d scored an important job, and he still wasn’t as busy as Amanda made herself. It was one year full of half-fights because, as if on cue, her phone would always start ringing and she’d pick it up without hesitation. In the end, he was too tired to explain, and she didn’t really want to hear it. By this point, she’d already started shooting people an annoyed look when they asked when she’d finally have children.

Her dad retired and his partner bought his half of the business. Amanda decided to leave the company; with the connections she’d secured during her many years as an assistant, she was finally able to consult on her own. 

     -- Hooked up with: Paarush. What was supposed to be a night of unwinding and letting herself go ended in too tight of a grip and some deep bruises on her neck. She had to wear a scarf for days to avoid any inappropriate questions.

     -- Dated for two years: Peter. Professionally, she was getting places she’d never even dreamed of and, as it had happened before, she was putting her career before anything else. She started seeing Peter after a friend of a friend introduced them and he was sweet. He was an economist and he wasn’t as busy as her, but he seemed to understand. The first few months, he’d call her at night and listen to her rant about her day, he’d check in on the weekends and wouldn’t get mad when she forgot to return his call. A few months in, he asked for the spare key to her place and it made sense, because he’d get there so much earlier than her. She’d arrive and he would have made dinner because he knew she’d forget to eat otherwise. It started small: something about the clients she was working for, how she should just stay home, comments about how good of a mother she’d be even though she’d made it very clear she had no intention in having children. By the end, it was about her beliefs and her impossibility to be empathetic with him. Most of all, he repeated over and over how she was so innocent to believe she could make a change in the world. It was hard to part ways because it was so comfortable -- they’d fallen into a routine that had taken a lot of weight off her shoulders for a while, but when she changed the lock of her apartment and refused to talk to him, she really believed she was better off without him.

     -- Hooked up with: Hans. As far as she’s concerned, he definitely wasn’t the worst man she’d slept with. Need I say more?

Started working for Oliver as his Chief of Staff. A new job, new staff, new line of work altogether, it was… Big. Not too much time for dating but she deprived herself of sleep. 

     -- Hooked up with: Javier. Not a Republican, but a conservative Democrat. He was on his way to become Mayor of Louisville (thanks to her, mostly). Again, winning is exciting, and she’s a simple woman with needs.

     -- Dated for nine months: Charlie. They matched on Tinder and Amanda messaged them with a line she thought was funny and cheeky, it probably wasn’t but for whatever reason, Charlie messaged her back. They met at a bar and hit it off almost immediately, and - wow, sleeping with someone she didn’t hate was a welcomed change. They were the first (and, so far, only) person she dated who wasn’t a man. It was a little scary at first, to be honest -- she’s a feminist, she’s liberal, she’s progressive, and she’s nice, but it was a new experience and she didn’t want to say the wrong thing. In the end, they were both too busy to keep up with a relationship. Fun fact: they both decided to break up on the same night so they were dumper and dumpee all the same. Amanda was not amused at the time, she hadn’t been dumped in so long, but hey… They didn’t talk for a while, but then ran into each other at some event or the other, one thing led to another… They definitely hooked up a few times after breaking up, but both made sure there weren’t any romantic feelings left there. That would’ve been Awkward.

Election season started and, with that, her new position as Campaign Manager for Zafar 2020. Later, she’d become Deputy Campaign Manager for Berkeley-Zafar 2020. She’s working way more hours and definitely doesn’t have time for men. Or does she! You know what I’m talking about.

     -- Did not date for nine months: Silas. There are many things she could say about him, but she won’t because it never happened. Outside of her bedroom, and his (and… His office, and the restroom at that one bar), this never happened. She never sent him flowers, he never put on his cat to meow through the phone to her, they never shared a lazy Sunday morning with coffee in bed and books unrelated to work. And he’s definitely not the man who “I can't talk to you when you're like this, staring out the window like I'm not your favorite town” was written about.

[write-crawler]

Why culture matters, especially in times of economical crisis

A defense of Brazilian SAT (ENEM)'s essay theme: “Democratization of access to movies”

B A C K G R O U N D - What is ENEM?

The ENEM - Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (National High School Exam) - is one of the most important tests for high school kids. It's a chance to get into an university, it's a chance to get into a public university - which, in Brazil, are free of tuition and are usually the highest ranking universities of the country. It's the Brazilian SAT.

The test is divided into Humanities, Languages, and an essay - which are tested on the first day - and Mathematics, Sciences, and Biology - tested on the second day. The ENEM happens all across the country in the first 2 Sundays of November, starting at 1:30 pm and lasts a maximum of 5 hours and 30 minutes. That means the first half happened already this past Sunday (November 3rd, 2019).

This is the first ENEM applied under the Presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, far-right politician who got elected in 2018. Last year, he criticized the test and a specific question about language that used as example a dialect used by the Brazilian transgender community. This is also the first ENEM that had an ideological screening. Also the first ENEM that had no questions about the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964 - 1985)  - which Bolsonaro supported and still openly supports - or about the dictatorship of Getúlio Vargas (1937 - 1946), who was a nazi and fascism sympathizer. 

T H E   E S S A Y - The “controversy”, its history, and my opinion

The essay is a dissertative-argumentative one that requires students to present na introduction, thesis, argumentation, conclusion, and a solution proposal. Every year it has a different theme, which the candidates only find out what it is when they recieve the test. It is released to the press and public later on the day, while candidates are still taking the test. This year the theme was "Democratization of the access to movies". And, like always, many many people complained about it. 

Part of the complaints were about how there are many other important topics to discuss, such as the fires in the Amazon rainforest or other political matters more closely connected to Jair Bolsonaro and his government. Other complaints were that most Brazilians don’t have access to the movies – only 10% of the country’s cities have movie theaters -, so it was very hard for most of the candidates to talk about that theme, making the theme unfair. A tweet that became viral after the test reports a candidate saying “Dude, some days, my house doesn’t even have water, and they want me to write about the democratization of movies”. So, basically, the complaints are that the movies are a reality that is too far away for many Brazilians and there are other social problems that affect everyone, which makes them more important than the movies. 

What these people aren’t getting about the theme is that it is not about movies. Or rather, it’s not just about movies. It’s about democracy and accessibility. But, because these two topics are too broad and the essay has a limit of 30 lines, with a focus on movies. The essay didn’t require you to explain why “The Shape of Water” wasn’t just a monsterfucker fantasy of Guillermo del Toro. It didn’t require you to point out all the symbolism in “Donnie Darko”. Or to talk about how “Fight Club” is an amazing criticism of current society. It didn’t require any knowledge of cinema or movies because it wasn’t about it. It wasn’t necessary to have ever stepped foot in a movie theater to be able to talk about this theme. Because the actual keywords of the theme are “democratization” and “access”. The “movies” part was there simply to help candidates narrow down the topics, to make it easier to talk about these topics.

This year’s theme has suffered the same criticism so many past themes have suffered, because people want the simple and obvious themes. And, to accomplish that, they reduce the theme to just one word. They take the word in the theme that is meant to help you think about the others and make it the theme of the essay.

For example, in 2018 the theme was “Manipulation of user behavior by internet data control”. Everyone said the theme was hard and that it was “the internet”. It was NOT about the internet. It was about how the internet is used to MANIPULATE people, how it is used to CONTROL and TRACK people’s behaviors. We all saw the election of Donald Trump in 2016 happen with a lot of fake news in the internet. We saw in 2018 Bolsonaro get elected by bombarding conservative’s WhatsApp groups with fake news. We KNOW Facebook tracks us and our behavior so they’ll know what ads to show us. Hell, Facebook watches us so closely, they can make shadow profiles of people who don’t have a Facebooks account.  So, if in the ENEM of 2018, you talked about the internet, and not about the manipulation of internet data, you failed the essay.

And 2017’s theme wasn’t deaf people. It was “Dificulties in the education of deaf people”. I did the ENEM that year. And, like most, I thought “fuck” when I read the theme. I, like so many others, complained on the internet about the theme, about how hard it was. And yet, I scored a 840 out of 1000 on my essay. It’s a really good score that would’ve gotten me into several good colleges. How did I manage to get a 840 even though I knew very little about the life of someone with a hearing disability? It’s not because I’m fucking incredible, or because I’m gifted, supersmart or because I suddenly developed an empathical bond with every deaf person in Brazil that allowed me to write the essay. But because I focused first on the first words of the theme, because I thought about the Brazilian educational system, it’s flaws, what affected me and those close to me. Then, after I identified the problems, I figured out how deaf people are affected by them. The theme didn’t require you to be na expert on deafness or to personally be deaf or know a deaf person. You had to think about Brazil’s educational system, the flaws it has and how could they be worse for deaf people. It required you to think about inclusion, disabilities, diversity, and, most of all, education, schools. So, if in 2017 you talked about deaf people instead of their inclusion in schools, you fucked up.

And here is the thing, and maybe you’ve noticed it already, the ENEM’s essay is always about social issues. More specifically, social issues regarding citizenship, democracy, and inclusion. No matter the theme, these three topics, somehow, are always involved in the discussion – because that’s the estructure of the essay. So the theme will never be about just one word or one concept. It’ll always be more complex than that. For more proof, let’s look at all the other previous themes since ENEM’s beggining:  

2016: Ways to fight religious intolerance in Brazil

2015: The persistency of violence against women in Brazilian society

2014: The question of child advertising in Brazil

2013: Effects of the prohibition in Brazil

2012: Immigration movement to Brazil in the 21st century

2011: Linving online in the 21st century: the limits between public and private

2010: The work (as in job) in building human dignity

2009: The individual facing national ethics

2008: How to preserve the Amazon rainforest: immediatly suspend deforestation; give financial incentives to landowners that stop deforesting; or increase law enforcement and impose fines on those who deforest

2007: The challenge of living with differences

2006: The transformative power of reading

2005: Child labor in Brazilian society

2004: How to garantee freedom of information and avoid abuses in the means of communication

2003: The violence in Brazilian society: how to change the rule of this game

2002: The right to vote: how to make of this conquest a way to promote the social changes that Brazil needs?

2001: Development and environmental preservation: how to conciliate these conflicting interests?

2000: Children and teenagers’ rights: how to face this national challenge

1999: Citizenship and social participation

1998: Living and learning

Apart from 1998’s theme, which really is simplistic, all others contain at least one of the topics I mentioned above: citizenship, democracy, and inclusion – perhaps not explicit in the title, but if you think about them, it’s not hard to get to these topics. And all the themes are about social issues. So this is why 2019’s theme is not, in any way, shape or form, a divergence from ENEM’s usual estructure. It’s true that it’s been a long while since ENEM’s essay tackled culture, but it still follows the usual formula, it still expects the same things from 2019’s candidates that it expected from the candidates of previous years.

Another part of the criticism that I haven’t addressed yet: that there are more important themes to discuss.

Honestly, Brazil has always been a country that didn’t give a shit about culture in general so this shouldn’t surprise me. Like most Third World countries, we serve only to supply Europe and the USA with raw materials and give them our natural resources. This isn’t by choice, by the way, that’s the result of living under colonization and USAmerican imperialism. The USA has kept a very tight leash on Brazil, us being it’s most loyal follower in South America – and, when we aren’t that loyal, the USA is quick to orchestrate a coup. And because of all of this, Brazilian society has na ironic culture of dismissing culture. Or rather, dismissing critical thinking and the arts and anything that isn’t pragmatical or practical. What matters here are real jobs, jobs that make money. You go to college so you can work, not to get culture. Because culture is for the elites and, unfortunately, that’s how Brazil wants to keep it.

 The lower social classes are taught to only care about majors that will get them a job. Here, we have a thing called Technical Education, and it’s purpose is solely to prepare kids to work. Like the name suggests, it’s just technical information, it doesn’t encourage or teaches critical thinking – again, because in Brazilian mentality, that’s all you need to do, work and shut up. You can opt for Technical Education rather than go to High School – the subjects that are required in High School are integrated with others – or you can do it after High School. Technical Education is NOT college, it doesn’t count as college or superior education. So, again, it really is meant to keep poor people away from college and culture and just get them to work. In 2016, after leftist President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment – or coup, depends on your political position and how you see the process – and her right-wing VP, Michel Temer, took over, Technical Education started being encouraged a lot on TV with government advertisement. After Temer took over, it was passed a reform of our Educational System that no longer required schools to teach philosophy.

Currently, Bolsonaro’s government has constantly attacked education, especially public universities. Like I said before, public universities in Brazil are free of tuition, which means that it’s the only chance for many to go to college. And public colleges here also have social and racial quotas, some universities even have transgender quotas, to help the less privileged students get into colleges as part of historic reparations. One of the biggest projects of Bolsonaro’s government is to end all these quotas, making diversity in universities drop even lower. And his government also wants to impose monthly fees on public universities, claiming that those who attend public universities can afford it (we can’t, asshole). (Also, here’s the thing about a right given to you by the Constitution: if you have to pay for it, then it’s no longer right, it’s a privilege. So, charging anything at a public university is unconstitutional. Charging for education is against the Constitution.)

What is also concerning, is the project Future-se (comes from the word “futuro” meaning “future”), nicknamed Fature-se (a play on the name, comes from “fatura” meaning “bill”), that would make public universities depend on financial aid from private companies. Meaning that only the colleges, only the areas, that can be capitalized and/or that appeal to the capitalist market, would get fundings. That means, arts and human sciences are doomed. Those two areas already don’t have enough funding and already suffer with attacks from conservatives, constantly, for not being “productive” and not producing “anything” for society, now imagine when they have data from private companies refusing to invest in those areas. We’ll be cut for sure. Especially because the project states that it is meant to supply the entrepreneurial sector, the privates sector of economy. It’s not about giving back to the community, it’s about fueling capitalism. The project also allows private companies to buy and name buildings of the college. So, literally, you could have na auditorium at a public university called Wall-Mart or Jeff Bezos. Totally not capitalist propaganda, right?

This capitalism-covenient project comes at a time where Universities are struggling to pay their bills – because the State has made a cut on fundings (BOLSONARO’s government cut the fundings, it’s directly his fault a need for financial aid coming from outside the government is even needed). Another area that has suffered a lot of financial cuts is – guess it – culture!

I know I went on and on and on about Brazilian education, but I needed you to understand just a little bit of the extent that the higher classes will go to to keep the lower classes away from anything that may teach them critical thinking. Culture, movies, literature, and paintings are all things that make us look critically at our society. Art has always existed as a form of protest, as a form of expressing your political beliefs, be it left or right wing beliefs. To keep it away from the population, to restrict it, is to put restrictions on our souls, minds, and, obviously, freedom. We need the fictional to function in reality.

Fiction is not reality, obviously. But it doesn’t exist on a vaccum. It feeds on reality and it feeds reality, they’re both stuck in an endless cycle. Fiction isn’t reality, but it does have the most potential, out of anything, to change reality. If it didn’t, fascists wouldn’t need to burn books. If fiction didn’t matter, there would be no censorship of song lyrics under dictatorial regimes. If it didn’t matter, Bolsonaro wouldn’t have felt the need to extinguish the Ministry of Culture, turn it into the Secretary of Culture and put the son of a pastor in charge of it. If it didn’t matter, Bolsonaro wouldn’t have cut 43% of the National Cinema Agency (Ancine)’s budget for 2020 – making it the lowest since 2012. If it didn’t matter, Bolsonaro wouldn’t have threatened to end Ancine because of the movie “Bruna Surfistinha”, which told the story of a teenager who ended up being a prostitute. If it didn’t matter, Bolsonaro wouldn’t have censored LGBTQ+ themed movies that were being made by Ancine. And if it didn’t matter, Bolsonaro wouldn’t have asked Ancine to make a movie about himself, and the rise of the Brazilian reactionary movement. If it didn’t matter, Crivella, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, wouldn’t have tried to enter a book event with the police to aprehend a Marvel Avengers comic book because it had two gay characters kissing in it. If it didn’t matter, they wouldn’t care.

But they do, a lot. Because, like I said, fiction doesn’t exist in a vaccum, it exists with reality. And so, what we see in fictional work has come from reality, in one way or the other. Because if you see gay people in a comic book, it’s because gay people exist. If there’s transgender people in movies or in a book, it’s because transgender people exist in real life. If minorities exist in fiction, it’s because they exist in reality. And what bothers them is not that we are present in books, but that we are present in real life. And, since genocide would take more effort, they take the easy way out and try to kill us in fiction hoping that it will lead to our dissapearence from real life. That’s why censorship happens. That’s why representation matters.

Protecting culture means protecting the rights of people to exist and be seen. And that is a political act. Shouldn’t be, but it is. Because the right is very firm and clear about the fact that they don’t want groups of people to exist because of who they are.

And, no, that’s not the same as antifa. Antifa hates fascists because their ideology inhenrently wants to persue the genocide of minorities. Antifa hates fascists because of what they believe in, not because of who they are. If antifa confronts a fascist, the fascist can say they regret defending that ideology and leave it behind. Antifa maybe won’t buy their motives, but will leave them alone. However, when it comes to fascists, either they lose or we die. It’s not the same.

But back to culture, literature and movies are a important part of people’s political position formation. Like I said before, education is not accessible to all and critical thinking isn’t being taught to many lower classes kids. So, for these kids that don’t have access to theorical texts – and, even if they did get their hands on these books, the vocabulary would probably be too hard for them (not because they’re stupid, but simply because no one has taught them these words and meanings before) and the quantity of information is not one they’re used to, making the text hard to digest and understand – movies are a great way to show them the ugly truths of our society in a way that they can understand.

Movies like “Freedom Writers” are very, very important to show exactly everything I’ve been saying so far. The movie is based on a real story about a teacher, Erin Gruwell, who starts teaching at a High School in 1995 where a lot of students are poc and involved with gangs, living in poverty and in violent neighborhoods. Gruwell understands the reality of these students and introduce them to books they can relate to, but that also teach them about history, the history of oppresed minorities – like the Diary of Anne Frank and the Diary of Zlata Filipovic. She knows these students won’t respond to textbooks, or hundreds of grammar lessons that seem meaningless to them. So she buys them books. Books written by teenagers like them who they can relate to. Now, I know these books aren’t fiction, but, still, they’re literature and they changed the lives of those teenagers – some of them were the first to graduate High School on their families. But as for the movie telling these stories, it’s essential that kids on the same situation as these teenagers see it. They have to see kids like them on TV going through the same things and making it out alive, well, and going to college. It’s important for them to see a teacher buy the Diary of Anne Frank to a group of teenagers deemed stupid by the educational system. It’s important that they see that the reason they might not understand Diary of Anne Frank isn’t because they’re stupid, but because they didn’t have a Erin Gruwell to help them, to explain it to them.

But “Freedom Writers” isn’t the only movie that does that. “Que Horas Ela Volta”, a Brazilian movie titled “Second Mother” in English, tells the story of Val, a woman who left her young daughter in the Northeast of Brazil to be a nanny, then domestic maid, in the Southeast, working for na affluent family – and living with them. She leaves her daughter in a poor state, with her grandmother, while she takes care of someone else’s son. Years later, Val’s daughter, Jessica, asks to stay with her for a while so she can take na entrance exam for a public university, the same one the family’s son, Fabinho, is trying to get into. As Jessica lives with them, she questions the unspoken and tight rules that dictate the places each social class gets to ocupate, creating tension within the household.

Brazilian TV series, “Assédio” (“Harrassment”), talks about a doctor at a fertilization clinic who is exposed for sexually abusing and even raping his patients. “Saneamento básico” (“Basic sanitation”) is a comedy about how the lack of basic sanitation changes a small town – the residents decide to make a movie, that has to be of a fictional story, to shed light on the sanitary problem they face. “Cidade de Deus” (“City of God”) talks about the favelas, the “slums”, police brutality, and racism. “Central do Brasil” (“Central of Brazil”) is about a retired teacher who writes letters that are dictated for her by poor people who are illiterate, and want to send letters to realtives. “Larte-se” is about a transgender cartoonist who started transitioning at 59 years old. “Hoje Eu Quero Voltar Sozinho” (“Today I Want To Go Back Alone”) is about a blind gay boy. “O Filho Eterno” (“The Eternal Son”) is about a couple who happily waits for their first son, and then find out the child has Down Syndrome.

See, all these movies are extremely relevant themes. All of them could be cited in an ENEM essay. All these movies are very political. All these movies talk about problems of our society and inequality. They show what life is like for those less privileged. To see those fictional stories, is to develop a better understanding of how society works and it’s problems. To see those fictional stories is to develop a bigger empathy for those suffering.

And to keep them away from people, to censor movies, to keep the price of movie tickets high, to restrict what stories can be told, is to limit the population’s right to think for ourselves. Think and criticize. It’s a violation of free speech, it’s a violation of democracy.

In times of economical crisis, the right rises with “magical” solutions for the economy that almost always means cuting the fundings of arts and encouranging the lower classes to work. Work, not think. It is in those times of crisis that music, movies, and literature suffer bigger and bigger attempts of being crushed. Because art is political, because to do art you have to think. And it is in those times that we must protect the most the arts. It is in those times that we have to do what we can to make the arts accessible.

And this is why the democratization of access to the movies is a very very important theme. And this is why culture matters, especially in times of economical crisis.

So we can think. So we can fight. So we can survive. So we can thrive. 

[theuniversitychallengereview]

UC 49 - Grand Final: Imperial vs Corpus Christi, Cam

For the first year since 2013 there is no Oxford college in the Grand Final of University Challenge. In that time they only won a single trophy, when Balliol beat Wolfson in 2017, with various other colleges losing five more, mostly to sides from Cambridge. Manchester’s win over UCL seven years ago also marked the last time a London University had made the final, with Birkbeck’s triumph in 2003 the last time a series winner had come from the capital 

(If you read my Preview then you may have noticed that I’m reusing it as the introdction to the review, so you can just go ahead and skip to the start of play if you’re bored already. Otherwise, get stuck into some stats)

Imperial arrived in the studio looking to add to two previous Grand Final wins, the most recent of which came in 2001 against St John’s, Oxford, and they narrowly missed out on retaining their title against Somerville, Oxford the following year. 

Corpus Christi’s sister college at Oxford was involved in the most controversial moment of UC history in 2009 when their winning side, featuring the first UC celebrity Gail Trimble, was disqualified after the fact for fielding an ineligible player. This is a first final for the Cambridge Corpus though, who had never previously made it beyond the second round in the Paxman-Era.

The past ten years of University Challenge has seen only four women lift the trophy (out of a total of forty winners). Tonight’s match won’t add to that total, as for the third time in four years the final is an all-male affair. The reasons for this are numerous, and have been written about by many people (including Corpus captain Wang). Female contestants apply in fewer numbers and (this being a reason behind the former) receive a different level of commentary to the male contestants, with comments more often unsavoury and focussed on looks, as this thread by Jesus contestant Lucy Clarke details. 

However, one promising aspect of the line-up in terms of breaking the white-male hegemony is that three of the contestants are not white. Only three winning contestants in the last 12 years (thanks again to Ian Wang’s article) have been people of colour, but that number will be added to tonight, either by Corpus stars Wang and Gunasekera or Imperial’s Brandon.

Both Wang and Brandon are players who are well on their way to becoming quizzy celebs in the vein of Trimble (and 2017s Monkman and Seagull, who have fully-fledged (pun intended) media careers now), both in terms of how many questions they’ve answered and in terms of how they have captured the public imagination. 

Corpus Captain (Grandmaster) Wang (who narrowly edges his teammates Stewart and Gunasekera out with 19 starters to their 17 and 18) has gained a following for his childlike glee whenever he gets a head scratcher right. His conferences with teammates over bonus questions can also be a delight to watch, with no stone left unturned in any discussion. 

My favourite moment like this was in Corpus’ semi final music round. The question asked for two composers, one of whom taught the other. He agreed with left-hand man Gunasekera that the first tune was by Ravel, and Gunasekera quickly identified that the second one was by Vaughn-Williams. ‘Do we know if Vaughn-Williams was taught by Ravel?’, asked Wang, wanting to make absolutely sure. ‘Well, I know its by Vaughn-Williams’, replied Gunasekera.

Imperial are also very good at conferring, with a clear hierarchy of who knows best on the various different topics (McMeel on maths, and Brooks for the classical music for example), but they have a less balanced approach when it comes to the starter questions. Brandon (outta Jamaica, Queens) has been their outstanding player on the buzzer, with 32. Captain Rich is next with 13. (The Times list his total score for the series as 482, which is interesting because its exactly 100 points less than @ jack_jmmcb gets using his scoring method. And he scored exactly 100 points in his first match, which may indicate that they missed that out of the calculation)

This is no surprise though, because Brandon has strong quiz experience, winning more than £375,000 over appearances on three gameshows in the States, starting when he was just 14. Well, like his semi-final badge and Twitter bio say, he’s not here to make friends. 

Many “commentators” on Twitter have lambasted him as arrogant, and Paxman himself hit him with a sneering ‘Oh, is this too easy for you?’ in one of the early rounds, the general belief being that he’s acting like the competition is beneath him. But then again, when he seemed to be having a grand old time in the semi final, pointing at his teammates when he knew they had the answer, he got slagged off for that too. You can never win. And I don’t think he’s acting like he’s above the competition either. Like all people who are good at things he’s practised. And practised. And then done some more practising. 

Using the techniques of Roger Craig, the famed Jeopardy contestant who personally taught him as a youngster, he trained himself to be good at quizzing. And then, by watching loads of old episodes of University Challenge, to become really good at University Challenge. 

So he’s clearly very good. But University Challenge isn’t won by one person. There are four players on each team, and when you take the total number of starters answered by Imperial (63) and Corpus (59), there is barely any gap between them. In total Imperial have scored 1170 points to Corpus’ 1075. Pretty close too.

Brandon himself was keen to stress that Imperial were not a one-man team, and said on Twitter after the semi final iwin that ‘if you’re expecting me vs Wang in the final, don’t tune in. This is his team vs our team’. 

Interestingly, there are two teams that both finalists played and beat, so that might provide an insight into who is better placed to win. However...

Imperial 235 - 80 Trinity, Cam ... Imperial 185 - 115 Durham

Corpus 245 - 80 Trinity, Cam ... Corpus 185 - 130 Durham

...they have almost identical records against those two sides.

Anyway, you all know the rules by now. Here’s your first starter for ten...

Its Brooks, not Brandon, who gets Imperial off the mark, with tea, an answer most befitting of his soft teddy beat aesthetic. Bonuses on Italian cities gave them two more in quick succession. Stewart came in early for Corpus on the next starter, but Gothic Architecture is unfortunately part of the question that hadn’t been asked yet, so he loses five points. Brooks tries his luck again, but he misses too, and then its McMeels turn to come in with a rapid buzz of asteroids on the next ten pointer. 

A correct guess of Vivienne Westwood follows, but Brandon laments that ‘This is a weird period for me’, of 1930s Italian fashion designers and they miss the next bonus. He gets his buzzer fingers involved on the next starter though, a typically quickfire attack followed by a fist-pump-y gesture at McMeel, who looked like he knew what it meant.

He picks up the picture starter from Stewart, who guessed quickly but wrongly that it was the First Crusade (it was the Third). McMeel takes his second of the night, thereby matching his best performance of the series before the halfway point. They only manage one bonus, but they are already a hundred points clear.

Wang finally gets Corpus back into positive figures with an excellent buzz on an Art Starter (an arter? No, ignore that). They answer three bonuses on songs in 7/4 time in record time, interrupting Paxman after only a few words on the second two. Indeed he wasn’t ready to hear Wang’s Dave Brubeck so early on in the question that the Corpus captain had to repeat himself.

Brandon got his third of the night to put a stop to any plans Wang might have been formulating. He wouldn’t get another starter for the rest of the match though, and looked hopefully at Brooks on the music question, hoping to pull off another buzz-by-proxy as in the semi final, but Gunasekera beat him to the punch and then spectacularly rattled off the bonuses without so much as a pause. Impeccable.

Rich, who had suffered unfair questions as to his captaincy on Twitter, then took control of the match, silencing any doubters. In his previous three matches he had only taken four starters (though his skill on the bonuses couldn’t be questioned), but he took four of the next seven, with Brooks and McMeel taking one each too, as Imperial glided serenely upwards like a swan who’s forgotten its keys at the top of a waterfall but can’t be bothered to fly. 

The one starter which went to Corpus over that stretch was the second picture round, on movies, which Wang utterly annihilated, taking 4/4 in a matter of seconds. This was unsurprising, his film knowledge has been astounding all series, but it had been clear for some time that it wouldn’t be enough, but it went some way to establishing a respectable score. A couple more starters for Stewart took them above one hundred points, which was no mean feat with Imperial in such devastating form, but at the gong it was the London side who took the applause, and Professor Andrew Wiles presented them with the trophy in Oxford, later on.

Final Score: Imperial 275 - 105 Corpus Christi, Cambridge

With a total score of 380 between them, this was the highest scoring final since 2010, when Alex Guttenplan’s Emmanuel beat St John’s, Oxford 315-100. In recent years the finals have been nervy affairs, with several matches being among the lowest scoring of their respective series. 

Congratulations to both teams for putting on a show. Imperial deserve huge credit and probably to be acknowledged as one of the strongest winning teams of the past decade. And though they were blown away by Imperial’s buzzing power, Corpus still proved an excellent team, taking 13/15 bonuses that they got.

Brandon ends the campaign with 35 starters to his name, narrowly edging out Trinity’s Hughes (34) to be the best buzzer of the series. But, as he was at pains to tell us for months, he was outshone by his teammates in the final, which gives this tweet ‘Everybody who thinks I'm carrying the team is either gonna look real smart or real dumb next wk-soz in advance xx’ a bit of context.

And contrary to what his badge says, he certainly seemed to be having a grand old time with his teammates. He may not have been there to make friends, but it looks like he did.

FIN

Thanks for reading my blog this series, or just this post! I’m very grateful and somewhat surprised that I have any audience at all, and look forward to starting next series.

If you’d like to support what I do here then I have a woefully under-promoted Patreon, here. If I get enough supporters then I might do retrospective series reviews for the ones pre-2017...

Alternatively I have a ko-fi, here, if thats not your bag.

And here is a list of the e-book compilations I’ve made for previous series, that you can get on Kindle.

Cheers, and I’ll see you in July. Stay curious.

[mikenewmantumblrcom]

Don’t Just ”Follow Your Dream” Dr. Harrison Solow

https://medium.com/@harrisonsolow/don-t-just-follow-your-dream-2c5f73a4a77f

Jun 13, 2015

Note: This piece was published originally by AOL: OP ED in 2010

Everywhere you turn today, our children are urged to “follow your dream.” It seems like a harmless, even inspiring bromide to motivate children to achievement.

It isn’t.

A lot of damage has been done to young minds by this particularly nauseating, rampant philosophy. There seems to be an air of entitlement in it, which encourages people to expect rewards for simply having a dream and not working toward it with blood, sweat and tears. Somewhere along the line, responsibility has been discarded in favor of infantilism. Scream loud enough from the cradle or the American Idol stage and mama/nanny/Simon Cowell will come running. And when in the latter case, this does not happen, many people are bewildered and angry.

Wanting something, they have been told, is the only requirement needed to get it. This is, of course, absolute nonsense.

The simple fact is that people who achieve excellence in their fields didn’t just have a dream. They got up at 4:00 am to practice on parallel bars or had to forego other desirable activities and paths in order to get in six hours of violin practice a day, or stayed off the several million absurd writing advice blogs with their overheated little cliques that dispense useless regurgitated maxims and empty praise and decide to actually confront their thoughts on a page. Or they read Beowulf and Dante carefully and deeply when they didn’t see any point, since all they were interested in was Sylvia Plath, because someone of more experience and wisdom told them to do so. I don’t know whether we’re overly lazy, stupid, or childish these days. But the idea of preparing oneself for excellence has somehow disappeared.

Case in point: I was Writer in Residence and an English professor at a British university for some years. In my second year there, when one of my students actually lifted, word for word, two pages off a website and handed it in as his own work, I ended up being the one reprimanded!

I had given him a zero for the paper, of course. But university policy was that I wasn’t allowed to give him a zero. Instead, the entire English Faculty met to go over his paper and give him credit for all the things he didn’t plagiarize. This, to me, is akin to a criminal breaking into your house and stealing your jewelry, silver and art, and when appearing in court for indictment after pleading guilty, being given credit by the judge for not stealing your television or computer.

I was both disillusioned and livid at this so, contrary to university policy at that time, I called “Trevor” into my office and asked him why he had done this despicable thing. He responded that he had always had a dream to have a degree. (“Have” not “earn”!)

I said to him, “Trevor, you will never have a degree if you keep doing on this. Oh — someone may hand one to you one day, but you will always know that it isn’t yours. It will never be yours. It will always belong to all those from whom you stole it. Never you.” And he started to cry. I was glad to see those tears, which were, in the end, the only entity in the university acknowledging responsibility for such an unworthy act.

My friend James Strauss, a talented novelist and writer for the television show, House among other things, found a similar situation in his recent (and brief) foray into teaching.

“Our public almost never understands what it takes to put a production on, or the vital necessity of good writing,” he wrote to me. “Everybody thinks they can ‘at least’ write. I taught a screenwriting class last year and was amazed that almost all my students thought they had a screenplay in them. I assigned them a one hour, fifty page, screenplay by next week’s class. I said I’d do the same. The following week we met (only eleven of the sixteen showed) and there was one screenplay written. Mine. Not one page of any other work was available, although the excuses were endless and complex.”

This is worrying. Even our universities are filled with people who have dreams but no plans; desires but no talent; talent but no work ethic, and because the few people who could make a difference in their lives will not step up to the plate and say “You can’t have this until you earn it,” I am concerned that there is no end in sight.

So — my advice to dreamers: Don’t just follow your dream. Do what it takes to earn it. To achieve it. To be worthy of it. Because if you don’t, it will never, ever, really be yours.

[chiseler]

The Greatest Bad Writer in America? Weird, Forgotten Harry Stephen Keeler

Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) enjoys a peculiar kind of fame as a writer. Or "paper-blackener," to quote him. The prose of his mystery novels and pulp stories, written from the 1920s into the 1960s, can be simultaneously balled up, discombobulated, lyrical, cryptic -- even going "utterly blooey" at times. This is from The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, published in 1934:

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!

Viewed through the appropriate lens, Keeler's manifest flaws become avant-garde virtues, as he seems to stretch the novel towards some new form, possibly the radio play or podcast. Neil Gaiman is a fan: "My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him."

Among the various devotees keeping this "forgotten author" alive, no one has proven more steadfast than Richard Polt, who chairs the philosophy department at Xavier University in Cincinnati and founded the Harry Stephen Keeler Society. http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/

Richard, give us an introduction to Keeler and his work -- and tell us what led you to dedicate so much time and energy to keeping his name alive.

I ran across Keeler by pure accident in 1996, and from the start I was thrilled by the feeling that I was onto something truly weird and forgotten. I’ve always enjoyed digging into some corner of culture, going deep enough that I discover things that just aren’t in sight of today’s conventional wisdom, and finding connections that I would never have found otherwise. That’s exactly what the world of Harry Stephen Keeler has done for me.

Keeler (1890-1967) was a lifelong Chicagoan. His father died when Harry was an infant, and his mother married a series of other ne’er-do-wells who also kept dying on her. Meanwhile, she ran a boarding house for vaudevillians—so Harry was exposed to a wide variety of theatrical types in a city that was teeming with immigrants. He studied to be an electrical engineer and worked for a while at a steel plant, but his real passion was writing. His mom feared that he was going insane, and had him committed to the asylum at Kankakee, Illinois in 1911-1912. But he was released, and managed to make a living publishing quirky little stories with twists. In 1919 he became the editor of the pulp magazine 10 Story Book, which published short fiction and pictures of half-clothed girls. He also edited magazines such as the Chicago Ledger and America’s Humor.

Keeler’s stories began to get more convoluted, and by the late ’20s he was publishing mystery novels with Dutton in the US and Ward Lock in England, including The Spectacles of Mr. Cagliostro, which drew on his experience in the asylum. Things were looking up, but the Depression cut into book sales at the same time as HSK’s novels took a turn for the bizarre. He typically built his novels on the skeleton of an old short story from his youth, or several of them woven together. Sometimes his wife, Hazel Goodwin Keeler, would also contribute a chapter. This all became the occasion for gloriously implausible tales, chock-full of long-winded speeches in dialect; caricatures of every ethnic group from “Swodocks” to “Celestials”; near-future technology such as intercontinental 3D television; and, inevitably, a surprise ending that sends your synapses on a rollercoaster ride. This stuff appealed to an ever narrower audience. Finally, Dutton dropped Keeler in 1942. He was published by the bargain basement Phoenix Press from 1943 to 1948. Ward Lock cut him in 1953. Then he wrote for Spanish and Portuguese publication at $50 a title—or just for himself.

There were definitely some bitterness and frustration in Keeler’s old age, and when Hazel died in 1960, he went into a tailspin. But then he married Thelma Rinaldo, his one-time secretary from America’s Humor, and as he put it, he caught hold of “the greased pig known as the will to live.” Harry collaborated with Thelma on some late novels that have been published only in recent years.

There are two perennial questions about Keeler: Was he mentally ill? And was he a bad writer? Most people’s initial reaction is that he was a terrible writer who had mental problems. But you can also make the case that he knew what he was doing and was very good at it; it’s just that he had an eccentric sense of humor that requires a special sensibility to appreciate. I’m inclined to this latter view, although he does keep me guessing. I suspect that he had some traits that we would classify as belonging to the autistic spectrum, such as a prodigious memory for facts combined with a superficial grasp of human emotion. A Keeler story is not about interiority; it’s about a complex plot that plays games with the reader’s mind.

Describe Keeler's trademark concoction, the "webwork plot." “Web-work” or “webwork” was Keeler’s term for a highly complex plot, which weaves together a number of strands. He introduced the term in 1917 in a series of articles for The Student-Writer, which he then expanded into a fairly long treatise, "The Mechanics (And Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction" (The Author and Journalist, April-November, 1928). Keeler never claimed to have invented the term or the concept; he gave credit to now-forgotten pulp writers such as Bertram Lebhar. But he did consider himself to be a skilled practitioner, and his fans would surely agree.

What’s most delightful in HSK’s theoretical writings on webwork is the diagrams, which show graphically how various characters and objects intersect at key moments in the story. "Mechanics" distinguishes 15 types of “elemental plot combinations” and presents a mind-blowing diagram of Keeler’s 1924 The Voice of the Seven Sparrows. It’s a very tortured plate of spaghetti.

Some of Keeler’s novels (including Sing Sing Nights, Thieves’ Nights, and the series Hangman’s Nights) get their complexity from a 1001 Nights structure: a framework story embraces several stories told by characters. Other Keeler novels get their complexity from endless digressions and red herrings, or tons of factoids that may or may not turn out to be relevant to the main story. Often, the action is told or retold by an unreliable character, instead of being shown to us directly. Inevitably, there’s a big surprise at the end that makes you see the whole plot differently in retrospect.

If you take away the surprise ending, webwork looks a lot like the contemporary literary genre sometimes called “hysterical realism”—the massive, weird, convoluted stories of writers like Pynchon. Keeler pioneered the formal analysis of this kind of tale. If you have a mathematical mind, you’ll appreciate his advice for getting a webwork started:

In conceiving a story or inaugurating a plot which involves threads weaving with threads, if the thread A, or viewpoint character, should figure with the thread B in an opening incident of numerical order "n" (with respect to the incidents in the conditions precedent) there must be invented a following incident "n + 1" involving threads A and C; an incident "n + 2" involving threads A and D; an incident "n + 3" involving threads A and E; and so on up to perhaps at least "n + 4” or "n + 5"; and furthermore "n" must cause "n +1"; "n + 1" must cause "n + 2"; "n + 2” must cause "n + 3" etc.

I’ve tried it—it works!

What's it like living in and among Keelerian natterings over the long haul?

Like one of Pynchon’s paranoid plots, or like Borges’ fantasy encyclopedia that ends up colonizing reality, the Keelerian world has many unsuspected strands that create a webwork in which I am now enmeshed. I’ve read more obscure authors because they imitated Keeler (John Russell Fearn) or were friends of his (T. S. Stribling). I found out that my own great-grandfather, Wells Hastings, wrote a mystery novel that can fairly be described as webwork. And I taught myself some Dutch in order to read the 2010 novel De Sciencefictionschrijver, by Harold S. Karstens—a story about a man who becomes unhealthily obsessed with Harry Stephen Keeler and starts a correspondence with Richard Polt. Yes, Keeler’s world is absorbing—to the point where I have now been absorbed within the covers of a fictional exploration of that world, to be discovered, like Harry himself, by future eccentrics.

by Daniel Riccuito

[howwelldoyouknowyourmoon]

Divine Principle – “any character would have sufficed to fill the role of ‘messiah’”

Many ‘messiahs’ have taught variations of the Divine Principle in Korea.

Kim Baek-moon 金百文 taught it from the early 1940s, and was the source of many of Moon’s ideas. Kim developed the ‘parallels of history’ which culminated in the year of his birth, 1917. 

Kim Baek-moon talked about “sexual union with God”

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Chong Deuk-eun 丁得恩 taught 17 ideas in the mid 1940s that were integrated into Moon’s Divine Principle. She called herself Holy Mother, and had developed a theology to demonstrate that she was a new female messiah. She was over 20 years older than Moon, and had developed her ideas well before meeting him. She taught the four position foundation, the failure of Abraham, etc., many years before Moon.  She practised pikareum and described it as “Transmission of the holy blood”. At the end of her book, The Principles of Life, she emphasized the restoration of Eden. LINK

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Here are examples of four men and one woman who were Unification Church members, or studied the Divine Principle, and have then promoted themselves as messiahs or gurus:

Jung Myong-suk (or Jeong Myeong-seok) 鄭明析 – the South Korean cult known as Setsuri, JMS, Jesus Morning Star, or Providence. LINK

Jeong Myeong-seok, above. Following accusations against him by South Korean police of rape, fraud and embezzlement, Jeong fled the country in 1999 and lived as a fugitive in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China before being arrested by Chinese police in May 2007. In April 2009, the Supreme court of South Korea sentenced Jeong Myeong-seok to 10 years in jail. LINK

Sex and the bizarre world of former Moonie, Providence cult leader Jeong Myeong-seok

VIDEO

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Lee Il-chi 李一指 (born Lee Seung-heun 李承憲 ) – Dahn Yoga LINK

Dahn is the Korean for “energy”

“During the day time, Lee attended college, and … studied with Unification Church’s Divine Principle study group looking for answers in the bible.” (“Dahn Hak” written by Lee Il-chi, page 199)

From www.freedomofmind.com: “While I was seeking Tao at Moak mountain, I attended Unification Church. … I opened up a Unification Church Il-Wha spring water franchise, but it failed so I had to sell my house.

…Lee first opened his eyes to the enlightenment in 1980. According to Dahn World, President Lee achieved his “Great Connection with the Heaven” on July 15th 1980 at Moak Mountain behind his wife Sim JourngSook’s birth home.”

[similar to Moon’s 1936 ‘revelation from Jesus’ myth]

“Lee reportedly had help from Hwa-young Moon, a Korean woman who joined Dahn in the late 1980s and whipped [the theology] into shape; she knew a good deal about the enlightenment trade, having grown up in the “Moonies,” the Unification Church.” (Rolling Stone magazine, 2010 LINK)

In 1980 Lee changed his name from 李承憲, Lee Seung-heun to Lee Ilchi 李一指. Ilchi means “finger pointing to the truth.” [Moon changed his name from Moon Yong Myung to Moon Sun Myung. Yong means dragon.]

Lee left two sons and his wife. [Moon left his first wife, Choi Seon-gil, and infant son in 1946. (ref. Michael Breen, Sun Myung Moon, the early years) Hee-jin Moon was born on August 17, 1955 in Tokyo. He was the son of Kim Myung-hee and Moon Sun Myung who married on June 30, 1955. Moon has acknowledged he is Hee-jin’s father. However, Moon never gave any financial support for his wife or for his son during their four year exile in Japan.]

In 2008, Dahn settled a lawsuit for an undisclosed sum when a college professor named Julia Siverls died of dehydration while hiking a Sedona mountain, allegedly lugging 25 pounds of rocks in her backpack. LINK

The Scary Yoga Obsession – A Glamour exclusive LINK

Thousands of young women have turned to the popular Dahn Yoga practice, and many say they love it. But now some former members are making shocking charges of greed, psychological manipulation and sexual assault. Who’s right?

… A few months later Jade attended a Shimsung workshop led by a high-level Dahn trainer and staffed by Dahn masters. These workshops, according to Jade and some of the other plaintiffs in the suit, take on the air of group therapy, with participants sharing their deepest, darkest insecurities with a roomful of strangers. Masters are quick to offer a box of tissues or a supportive embrace during emotional moments. At the end of the workshop, the lights dim, loud drumming music is turned on and the participants chant, weep and shout, “Who am I? What do I want?” Lucie remembers that some people walked out midworkshop, unnerved, but she and others felt as if their hearts had opened.

Recalls Lucie, “It felt like you were falling in love, only much bigger, because you weren’t just falling in love with a person, but with a community, a practice and a lifestyle, all in one. It was everything. I felt like the luckiest person in the world.”Cult experts call that lavish attention “love bombing,” a common recruitment technique. “As social beings, we respond well to people who make us feel welcome and secure,” notes Janja Lalich, Ph.D., a professor of sociology at California State University, Chico, and a cult expert. “Love bombing also tends to make the person feel more obligated to comply with requests from the group—requests to come back again, to give more, to bring friends and so forth.” The technique doesn’t work on everyone, which may explain why many people can practice Dahn Yoga without being consumed by it. “Dahn is especially appealing to anyone who is anxious, vulnerable or struggling with personal issues like a breakup or questions about career direction,” says cult expert Szimhart.

Six months into her Dahn experience, Lucie dropped out of college to dedicate herself completely to Ilchi Lee’s “vision” of spreading the word about Dahn Yoga. When her MIT tuition refund check came, she cashed it to pay for a course at Dahn’s National Retreat Center in Sedona, Arizona. “You feel good when you write the check or swipe your card,” says Lucie. “Like you just bought a present for your soul.”…

… Lucie now directs a ski school in New Hampshire and has paid off the debt she accrued while at Dahn. One good thing she says has come from her ordeal is a “beautiful friendship” with Jade, Liza and Nina. “We’re healing together,” says Lucie. While they say they may never see a penny—or an apology—from Dahn, they hope their complaint will save others. “The women who become sabumnims are incredible people; they are so smart and passionate and have so much to contribute to the world,” Lucie says. “Ilchi Lee’s bank account is not a cause worthy of all they have to offer.”

Catherine Elton is a journalist in Boston.

It is worth reading some of the comments under this Glamour article.

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Woo Myung-shik – Woo Group LINK (Not to be confused with Woo Myung and Maum Meditation)

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David Jang – LINK Christianity Today September 2012, Vol. 56, No. 8, Pg 36, “The Second Coming Christ Controversy”

… The details of Jang’s early life are in question, and multiple efforts to contact him for this story’s publication were unsuccessful. Critics in Korea, Japan, and China say he was involved in Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church. They point to his appearance in a 1989 student handbook for Moon’s Sung Hwa Theological Seminary as an assistant professor of theology, teaching systematic theology and Unification theology. They also cite a 2002 history of Sun Moon University praising him for helping to fund the school.

… But according to several sources with experience in Jang-associated organizations and communities, many members of the movement believed that the key event in Jang’s early missionary endeavors is not in his résumé—nor, indeed, in any written source. It was believed, these sources said, that in or around 1992, early follower Borah Lin told Jang that she believed he was the “Second Coming Christ”—not Jesus Christ himself, but rather a new messianic figure that would complete Jesus’ earthly mission. According to several former members, Lin became an important spiritual figure in Jang’s closest circles. Documents from teaching sessions indicate that Jang and his followers look to October 30, 1992—Jang’s 43rd birthday—as the precise date of the start of their own movement. Beyond that, affiliated groups including Apostolos Campus Ministries and Olivet University look to 1992 as the year of their founding.

… The basic content of these messages, both as contained in the notes and as described by former members, bears similarities to the teachings of Sun Myung Moon—that Jesus’ work was left unfinished and in need of another "Christ” to complete it. Daniel 12 records a notoriously ambiguous prophecy that refers to 1,260 days (“a time, times and half a time”), “1,290 days,” and then finally to “1,335 days.” The 1,260 days, the notes say, finished when Jesus was born, and the 1,290 days were completed when Jesus began to preach and teach publicly at 30 years of age (1,260 + 30 = 1,290). His three-year public ministry, they say, advanced the prophecy of 1,290 days to 1,293 days, but because the Cross cut his mission short, Jesus did not fulfill the prophecy of the 1,335 days. There is thus a remaining gap of some 42 “days,” which were said to symbolize 42 years. Multiple sources said that this 42-year gap was believed to have been fulfilled by Jang.

The lessons also taught a doctrine of “three Israels.” The first was a national Israel, the second was composed of Christians, and the third was constituted by the movement Jang had founded. The 144,000 of Revelation 7 was said to refer to this “third Israel,” and the Lamb who redeemed them was said to be “not Jesus, but the Christ of the Second Coming.”

Closely associated with this idea of Jang’s followers as the “third Israel” is a distinction between the “gospel of parables” that Jesus taught and the “eternal gospel” delivered to Jang. One of the lessons said, “Jesus speaks in parables to preach to us, but to the new era, the gospel will be explained more clearly, that is, the everlasting Gospel.” This “everlasting Gospel” will be proclaimed by the Second Coming Christ.

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And a new True Mother, ‪Senyu Ryuka Sama‬  LINK

‪A service with Senyu Ryuka Sama‬ LINK

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Disciples of the messiah, Lee Man-hee

Rival Korean messiah, Lee Man-hee, builds workshop next to UC / FFWPU Cheongpyeong Center

How “God’s Day” was established by Sun Myung Moon on Jan 1, 1968

Newsweek on the many Korean messiahs of the 1970s

Hwang Gook-joo and his orgies

Chong Deuk-eun – Great Holy Mother

Park Tae-seon – another Korean Pikareum Messiah

Kim Baek-moon talked about “sexual union with God”

Kim Seong-do and the roots of the Divine Principle

The six ‘wives’ of Sun Myung Moon

Sun Myung Moon: “church and the state must become one”

[journodale]

Why I’m mad about the Rise of Skywalker

My first reaction to The Rise of Skywalker – once I got past the litany of eyerolls and “oh, come on!” reactions while I was watching it – was just how mad I was about it. It’s not a deep-abiding rage, mind you, and much of my anger is a form of disappointment, but some of it is just about how petty and spiteful aspects of the film seemed to be in response to things that happened in The Last Jedi. (Spoilers, and occasional salty language, about herein).

My biggest and first complaint is that JJ Abrams and his co-writer, Chris Terrio, turned Rey into Ken the Jedi Prince. Ken. The. Fucking. Jedi. Prince. For those of you who are unaware, these stemmed from a series of largely shite (but occasionally charmingly shite) young adult novels in the early 1990s, as the franchise was experiencing its first major revival with the publication of Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy. Several of those books revolved around the discovery of a Jedi “prince” named Ken, who started to follow Luke Skywalker around until he discovered that he was indeed Palpatine’s grandson (the books had a whole story arc about his father, Palpatine’s son, being a three-eyed mutant), though these storylines and characters conveniently disappeared from the old expanded universe and were never spoken of again. Around the same time, Dark Horse Comics also published Dark Empire, many of the plot points therein were also lifted liberally by Abrams and Terrio – specifically that Palpatine has resurrected himself by use of clone bodies and mysterious dark side powers – the film simply called the planet Exogol rather than Byss, but the broad strokes are the same, including that Palpatine was eventually trying to move his essence into a new body (in this case it was Leia’s unborn third child rather than Rey). These comics touched off a whole litany of spin-offs wherein the nature of the Force and the conflict between the Jedi and Sith descended to increasingly cartoonish depths, and yet here they are, reviving themselves, because of the need to give Rey a bloodline.

In an interview with Terrio in The Hollywood Reporter, Terrio stated that they chose to make Rey a Palpatine because it was the “worst news she could receive,” and then handwaved a bunch of bullshit about “dark side royalty” and how she was choosing her own family over her ancestry. The problem is that this makes no sense, either from a story perspective, or from the broader continuity of the Star Wars universe. Terrio insisted that the original films established that the Force ran along family lines because of Luke Skywalker’s line to Leia in Return of the Jedi about how the Force was strong in their family – discounting that this was Luke’s awkwardly trying to tell a woman who made out with him six months before that she was actually his long-lost twin sister, or the fact that the whole existence of the Jedi Order and their prohibitions against marriage and children precluded there being Force-wielding dynasties out there. Rian Johnson in Last Jedi to make the significant revelation that Rey was the children of junk traders and nobodies was not only “democratizing” the Force – that one didn’t need famous parents to feel the Force – but also to being a hero. Terrio insisted that they weren’t slighting Johnson – and that could be the case. They instead were taking the laziest course to telling the story of the film.

Absolutely nothing in the story demanded that Rey be of Palpatine’s bloodline – if they insisted on bringing back Palpatine (another lazy choice, but more on that later), he could simply have demanded that Kylo Ren find her because she was simply a powerful Force user, whom the Force seemed to manifest in her as a response to the rising darkness (which would seem to have been the whole promise of The Force Awakens’ title). They wouldn’t have needed to invent a son for Palpatine (and then handwave away the fact that he apparently didn’t have Force powers despite their insistence on strong Force lineages, or if he did, how he managed to avoid being groomed as his father’s new apprentice and heir, and how he wasn’t the subject of a war of succession to the throne upon Palpatine’s death), and they would have maintained the notion that the Force belongs to everyone – not the Jedi, not the Sith, and certainly not to famous bloodlines (as Johnson made explicitly clear in Last Jedi). But no – giving Rey a bloodline was about fan service, and the constant need by certain fans that she be related to somebody important (never mind that all of the theories they put forward would not have worked out in terms of ages and timelines).

Another example of Abrams and Terrio totally not thumbing their noses at Johnson was the complete abandonment of the core theme of Last Jedi – that it’s people and relationships that matter, not things. What Abrams and Terrio replaced it with was about turning objects into fetish items – lightsabers in particular. The fact that they insisted on Rey having rebuilt Anakin/Luke’s lightsaber – recreating it exactly rather than turning it into something new – or having Rey build her own lightsaber before the film opened, coupled with the fact that they also introduced Leia’s lightsaber to imbue it with special meaning, as though it was the fact that it was these two lightsabers in particular that imbued Rey with particular symbolic meaning for the final fight was a complete abrogation of Johnson’s message. Lightsabers are not Excalibur – they are not magic swords bestowed upon Jedi by women in lakes. That said, Abrams is pathologically incapable of writing screenplays that don’t have MacGuffins (though the Sith Wayfinders were themselves also MacGuffins, and the dagger another one – even though its appearance and history made absolutely no sense), so this is more of his particularly lazy writing. As an aside, the whole Wayfinder MacGuffin is itself partially lifted from the Jedi Prince series, where the Imperial warlords were looking for the Glove of Darth Vader and found it in pieces of the second Death Star…on a water planet. I’m not even kidding.

The redemption of Kylo Ren didn’t make any sense. Terrio tried to handwave some Joseph Campbell bullshit about how great myths required atonement with the father figure and the great sin of patricide, but Ren’s actual rejection of the dark side was completely nonsensical – particularly because of how they used the device of Leia going into some kind of meditative state that eventually led to her death, as though it was her mystical intervention and self-sacrifice that somehow drove it out of him, as though the dark side was some kind of demonic possession. It also didn’t make sense how Rey decided to heal Ren immediately after she struck him with a lethal blow with her lightsaber – which they played as an act of mercy – and it was Terrio’s contention that it was what allowed Ren to let the light in and see his father again (which was a memory and not a ghost, because how else were they going to get Harrison Ford wedged into the film for fan service). There’s no logic to any of that. Both Force Awakens and Revenge of the Sith showed that going to the dark side was a choice – Ren chose to kill his father because he thought that was what would allow him to bury his past. After a career of mass murder and raping the minds of his interrogation victims, he’s going to suddenly turn it all back because he got stuck by a lightsaber and healed? Really? I’m not buying it. (Incidentally, the fact that Ren’s body dissolved in the end also makes no sense either – Kenobi, Yoda, and Skywalker’s corporeal dissolution had to do with the powers that Qui-Gon Jinn learned to unlock to maintain his presence in the Force after death, which he later showed Yoda how to do in The Clone Wars series and in Revenge of the Sith. I can see Luke having taught Leia the powers, but Ben/Kylo Ren before his training had been completed? I have a hard time with that).

Yet another of Abrams and Terrio’s lazy choices was the need to bring in a Big Bad™ in the form of Palpatine rather than engaging with another of the significant aspects of the Last Jedi’s themes, which was about the banality of evil. The whole point of the casino sequence that fanboys like to deride is that it showed Finn the evil of indifference of those who profit from war, while the underlying theme of the rise of the First Order in the films had to do with people being nostalgic for fascism – sure, a lot of people got trampled underfoot but at least the trains ran on time and we were “safe” with stormtroopers on every corner. It made the film as relevant to the 2010s as George Lucas did with commenting about Nixon and Vietnam in the original trilogy, or his construction of a trilogy of films about political violence and the rise of authoritarian populism with the prequels. Killing Palpatine does nothing about these bigger, underlying societal problems that the Resistance has to confront. Remember in Last Jedi where Poe talks about being the spark that will light the flame that will burn the First Order to the ground? Well, that’s all evaporated with the revelation that hey, it was Palpatine pulling the strings all along. Nothing to confront here, people, let’s just kill the Big Bad™ and go home. Again, it’s cheap, it’s lazy, and it’s fan service.

I have a big problem with the way Abrams and Terrio treated the Finn/Poe relationship, which all of the actors were pushing for. Abrams, in several interviews, dismissed this as the fact that they have a bond that’s “stronger” because they’ve been through the fire together, or some bullshit like that, then assured fans that they would get their LGBT representation because it’s important to show queer fans that they too belong in the Star Wars universe. That “representation” – the fact that a tertiary character from Last Jedi shares a same-sex kiss with another woman (whom the materials accompanying the film identify as her wife) – is brief, in the background, and was easily sliced out of the film for foreign distribution. And yet, Abrams expects plaudits for his “representation,” while also trying to reinforce Finn and Poe’s hetero credentials with the ambiguity of what Finn planned to declare to Rey as they were sinking in the quicksand, and with Poe’s awkward flirting with Zorii Bliss (and we did learn in the subsequent materials that the pair’s previous “emotionally complicated” relationship was when they were teenagers). Abrams later said that a kiss between Finn and Poe would be “heavy handed” – erm, you know, like the fact that he had Rey kiss Ren, the man who chased her, tortured her, tried to rape her mind, killed her friends, and was a mass-murderer. Yeah, he’s a dark, broody soul who just needs the love of a good woman to complete his redemption story (and I’m sure that the Internet is replete with all kinds of fanfic about how her magic vagina cures Ren’s manpain). That’s totally not heavy-handed, heteronormative fan-service in the slightest. There was actual ground that could be made where Finn and Poe were gay male leads in one of the biggest blockbuster franchises on the planet – something that has never been done before. It would have been ground breaking, keeping entirely with the story that had been established, and would have actually been worthy of applause.

The diminution of Rose Tico’s role is also bullshit, and Terrio’s assurances that they filmed more good stuff with her that just wound up on the cutting room floor also doesn’t pass the smell test. Terrio asserted that it was great how she rose from being a lowly mechanic to being one of Leia’s right-hand advisors – which conveniently had very little screen time. There was an opportunity to have her included with the group aboard the Millennium Falcon on its spy mission right at the very beginning of the film, rather than the insertion of the puppet creature Klaud, so as to show that Rose was an integral part of “Leia’s best agents” entrusted with getting the valuable intelligence from their spy in the First Order, but no, that would be a little too obvious. What is left is essential proof that they have caved to the loud and obnoxious fanboys who objected to her presence in “their” films.

There’s a lot of other nitpicking I could do – whether it’s Abram’s inability to grasp how hyperspace works, the fact that the celebration scenes at the end don’t make any sense with the exception of going down the fan service checklist, or the fact that the closing scene contained so much cheese that I’m surprised the Supply Management marketing boards didn’t file a trade complaint and impose 300 percent tariffs on it. The pace of the film was so frenetic that any scene that could have been poignant or moving was lost in the bang-bang-bang editing. Overall, however, I’m just incredibly disappointed in the lazy writing and fan service that pretends it’s being clever.

This was not the film we deserved. This was a film that rewarded the legions of fanboys who complained that films with strong female characters who don’t wind up in bed with a man at the end were a “feminist agenda;” that films that didn’t pander to the very straight white male entitlement to a particular fandom were the works of “social justice warriors” that hate their own fans; that films that don’t recreate the wonder they felt when they were twelve years old – which is an impossibility – are somehow raping their childhoods. The CBC’s Eli Glasner called it “cinematic comfort food,” but it’s more insidious than that – it’s a repudiation of attempts to grow the franchise beyond just a nostalgia cult, as it increasingly morphs itself into (and by cult, there is now a legion of online “truthers” who trade conspiracy theories about how the films have been hijacked by executives with agendas). And because it will rake in billions of dollars, it will assure the people with the purse strings that this is what the market needs more of. My hope for the franchise is moving toward vehicles like The Mandalorian, and the other forthcoming live-action series on Disney+, because the lessons for blockbusters are apparently to be hollow facsimiles of what came before.

[noramoya]

Starting going through the Revised Version of Vogel’s brilliant book “MAN IN THE MUSIC : The Creative Life And Work of Michael Jackson”. Let’s see what’s the difference from the 1st version... #HonorMJ🤩 #MJ4EverInOurHearts♥️

“PREFACE OF THE 2019 VINTAGE EDITION.”

... “The first edition (2011) had a great run, but for years after its publication I was anxious to tweak, revise, and improve it. So I went back to work. Over the years, I had accumulated an enormous library of Jackson-related materials. My Google docs were packed with interviews, notes from the artist, obscure articles, track sheets, session calendars, and other pieces of the puzzle.

In addition to my own work, a wave of new books, documentaries, think pieces, academic articles, and monographs on Jackson were released. Filmmaker Spike Lee directed two critically acclaimed documentaries,”BAD 25” (2012) and “Michael Jackson’s Journey from Motown to Off The Wall” (2016). Scholar Susan Fast published an outstanding book-length treatment of the Dangerous Album, as part of Bloomsbury Academic’s popular 33 1/3 series. Forbes journalist Zack O’Malley Greenburg published an insightful book (“Michael Jackson, Inc.”, 2014) on Jackson’s business acumen. Rolling Stone writer Steve Knopper published a compelling new biography (“MJ : The Genius Of Michael Jackson, 2015).

In addition to this new content, musician and journalist Questlove taught a “classic albums” class on Jackson, at New York University. Scholar and author Mark Anthony Neal began offering a regular course on the Artist, at Duke University, titled “Michael Jackson & the Black Perfomance Tradition”. Mean-while, an array of new platforms arose dedicated to exploring his life and work, including “Michael Jackson’s Academic Studies”, “The MJCast”, And “Dancing With The Elephant”. I am grateful to so many fellow Michael Jackson authors, biographers, researchers, and fans for their contributions and insights (their names , too many to list here, are cited on in the Acknowledgments).

“... Not only did many of these individuals talked to me for hours about their time working with Jackson, for the first edition; many also helped with my follow-up questions as I prepared this second edition. This book would not be what it is, without their invaluable stories, insights, notes, session calendars, demos, track sheets, and other important documents. So what’s the difference about this new edition?

First, it contains many more behind-the-scenes details from the studio. From further research and conversations with those who worked closely with Jackson, I was able to fill in a lot of gaps and present a much more accurate timeline in terms of how, when, and where his albums were made. This is perhaps the most important addition. I felt it was critical to make the history as vivid and accurate as possible.

Second, I’ve tried to set the record straight where possible. There is a lot of mythology surrounding the work of Michael Jackson; it can be difficult to separate fact from fiction. I got some things wrong in the first edition, which have been corrected and fleshed out here, based on my most credible sources. Sometimes collaborators tell conflicting stories or remember things differently. In those cases I have either told both sides or gone with what makes the most sense, given the evidence available.

Third, it truly focuses on the music. The first edition was mostly about the music but also included information on Jackson’s short-films and performances. Ultimately, I felt that coverage was too thin, so I decided, for this book, that it would be better to use that space to go more deeply into the music. This book, then, is entirely about the songs and albums – not the short-movies, tours, performances, business dealings, or other activities. If any of these other things are mentioned in the book, it is simply to provide context.

And, fourth, it omits any assessment of posthumously released work. Posthumously albums are notoriously difficult – by nature they can never be what the artist would have created. The 2010 album “Michael” – reviewed in the appendix of the first edition of “Man In The Music” – was particularly challenging because of the controversy surrounding the so-called Cascio tracks – songs submitted by Eddie Cascio and James Porte, shortly after Jackson’s death (three of which appeared on the album). Given the serious questions surrounding the origin and authenticity of the vocals on those tracks, I do not acknowledge or assess them in this book.

More broadly, this book does not review any of Jackson’s work after “Invincible” – the last studio album he saw to completion. The epilogue does mention music he was engaged in, during his final years, but those songs are not explored or assessed; their mention is merely intended to give a sense of what the artist was working on. But the overarching concept of the book remains much the same of the first edition: an album-by-album exploration of Michael Jackson, the Artist.

The goal was to make it all come to life: the historical context, the creative process, the work in the studio, the vitality of the songs.?That last point is important . Sometimes in fixating on the minutiae, the power and meanings of the music are lost. I didn’t want this to be a trivia book, nor did I want to impose my own interpretations too strongly onto his music. That is why I draw from an array of other critics. Ultimately, as with the first edition, I try to present Jackson’s music to the reader with as much curiosity and openness as possible. As historian Carl Van Doren put it : “The measure of the creator is the amount of life he puts into his work. The measure of the critic is the amount of life he finds there.”

The year 2019 marks ten years since Jackson’s death. It was expected to be a celebratory moment , yet that has been complicated, to say the least, with the release of the controversial 2019 HBO “documentary” Leaving Neverland, in which “new” allegations of sexual abuse have been leveled against the artist. Important information, conversations, and context surrounding those allegations are currently being examined and will no doubt continue. I have researched and grappled with them personally. The people I interviewed for this book talked to me for hours, on and off the record, about Jackson. They spoke candidly about his flaws, his virtues, his habits, his struggles. But none gave any indication of the Michael Jackson portrayed in Leaving Neverland. I say that, not as conclusive proof of his innocence but simply to represent the perspectives of my sources.

Given my area of focus – Jackson’s creative work – this book will not attempt to render a verdict on the accusations, for the reader. However, chapter 5 offers an account of the 1993 allegations, since they are contextually important for the HIStory album. The 2005 Trial, in which Jackson was acquitted, is likewise covered in the epilogue.

Whatever one concludes about his personal life, Jackson’s Art will live on, like the work of countless other controversial icons, from... to ... How he is viewed , at least for the foreseeable future, will vary widely from person to person, culture to culture, and, perhaps generation to generation. As James Baldwin observed in 1985, very few figures in modern history have attracted as much polarizing attention. For more than half a century, Jackson has been a lightning rod for questions about: race, gender, sexuality, innocence, guilt, truth, deception, media, fame, childhood, identity, capitalism, Art, and genius . It is a complicated legacy that will, no doubt, take many more books to begin to unpack.

Man In The Music is a historical account of his music and how people have responded to it . It is the story of how a young black boy from Gary, Indiana, honed his craft in a cramped living room, in the wings of stages, in the studios of Motown, and went on to become one of the most influential artists of all times. “

— Joseph Vogel, 2019.

PS. From my point of view, up to the point I’ve read, it’s even better than the first version ! I copied part of the PREFACE TO THE 2019 VINTAGE EDITION. No inappropriate intentions at all on this, but the promotion as a clarifying point for the fans who are in doubt of its value . — Nora Moya .

[shirlleycoyle]

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex

“It’s quite possible someone’s having sex with me right now and I don’t even know it,” adult performer and director Stoya told me.

Her vulva is for sale on the internet and in stores. Or rather, a rubbery, lifelike mold of her vulva is, in the form of a Fleshlight. The outside of it looks almost exactly like her actual body. The inside is a labyrinth of corkscrew shapes, nodules, and ridges. It’s dubbed “The Destroya,” a name that, nine years after the product launched, still makes her laugh.

Fleshlight manufacturer Interactive Lifeforms LLC has sold more than 75,000 Destroyas and more than 15 million Fleshlights total since the company started 20 years ago. It averages around 20,000 retail orders every month, according to a spokesperson for the company.

At around 1.63 pounds each, that’s nearly 24.5 million pounds of fucktoy floating around, taking up space in closets, nightstands, and under beds around the world.

The Fleshlight is an artifact of the sexually adventurous, technologically innovative 90s, but it’s become the face—and lips, and anus, and lips—of the male sex toy industry. The fact that a disembodied vulva and vaginal canal to jerk off into exists in 2019, the era of #MeToo and grabbed pussies and tabloid uproar over sex robots, shows the often contradictory intersection of sex and technology.

On one hand, the Fleshlight is a portal to new forms of sexual openness, allowing people, even those who think of themselves as heterosexual men, to engage in sex that moves away from old notions of gender and the biological body in general. On the other, the Fleshlight is also the reduction of a person to a replica of their reproductive organs. But 21 years since its inception, Fleshlight, the people who use them, and sex toy experts are realizing that maybe people don’t need an exact replica of a vulva or anus to get off. Sex toys are increasingly taking on more abstract, functional forms, and the future of the Fleshlight and toys like it may rely less on using replicas of disembodied genitals.

Today, the Fleshlight is polarizing even for the people who use it. No matter your opinion of the ubiquitous brand, it’s made an undeniable mark on human sexuality and the world.

Hundreds of years from now, if sentient life still exists on Earth, when archeologists dig up the still-intact bits and pieces of plastic casings containing rubberized genitalia, what will they think of the Fleshlight? Will it be considered an antiquated representation of how society literally objectified and commodifed sexual pleasure, or a turning point in the normalization of sex toys for all people, and our first step into a world where technology is an inseparable part of sex?

The answer, according to people who make them, use them, and are them, is both.

WHAT MAKES A FLESHLIGHT

The original Fleshlight model consists of a 10-inch plastic tube casing with a soft sleeve inside. You stick an erect dick (plus some water-based lube) into one end, grip ridges on the outside of the casing, and stroke the penis inside of the sleeve. You fuck the tube, come in the tube, then (ideally promptly) unscrew the whole apparatus and rinse it out with water (soap could degrade the material) and dry it.

Earliest archived version of Fleshlight.com, captured May 1998

Why the Fleshlight exists is a complicated story that’s become seminal sex toy lore. If the many interviews given by the company’s founder Steve Shubin are to be believed, the Fleshlight was born from his desire to get off while his spouse was pregnant.

In the late 90s Shubin, a former member of the Los Angeles Police Department’s SWAT team, and his wife Kathy were expecting twins. Both in their 40s, the couple was advised by doctors that because of their age and the fact Kathy was having two babies, the pregnancy was high-risk. He claims they were told not to have sex again until after the baby was born.

“I asked my wife ‘would you think I was a pervert if I told you there was something that I could use, sexually?'” Shubin told Wired in 2008. “But the adult store had only junk. Just crap. I thought, I can make something better, and took $50,000 of our savings to start working on it.”

Image from the 1997 patent filing for a “discrete sperm collection” device.

Shubin’s first patent filing, in 1995, was for a “female functional mannequin,” a hard sex doll torso. He called his next invention, which boiled the whole doll down to just the genitals, a “device for discreet sperm collection.” The proto-Fleshlight.

This version of the Fleshlight was pretty similar to what we see on the market today. But the description Shubin laid out in the 1997 patent filing was much more clinical. The product was framed as useful for sperm banks or doctors’ offices.

It also predicted some of the embarrassment many men feel from tucking a sex toy away in their own homes:

While my [sex doll] patent succeeds admirably in fulfilling the objects of that invention, it has several characteristics that prevent it from universal acceptance. When the torso mannequin is used in sperm banks, doctor’s offices, and other public facilities, it is sometimes intimidating to the patient being treated or may have an adverse effect upon the patient’s sexual desire and ability to deposit sperm. […] When the device of my patent is used in the home, or by those who find such a mannequin to be positive in nature, there is the concern that others will still find the object during a casual visit to the home.

The earliest version of Fleshlight.com that’s archived online, captured in 1998, shows a company attempting to carve a path as the first widely-accepted male sex toy by characterizing it as a requirement of virility, manliness, and insatiable sex drive. From an archive of Fleshlight’s “Our Philosophy” page circa May 1998:

The need for sexual gratification is as present and as powerful in a man as it is in the stallion. But where the stallion has no ability to wait, relentlessly pursuing his desire until he is satisfied or restrained, man has the ability to control his desires through fantasy… That release has to be done in a responsible way or we risk our relationships, expose ourselves to disease, take a chance with unwanted pregnancy, or even, in extreme cases, break the law.

The market, and we as a species, were primed for this thing to succeed. Hallie Lieberman, sex historian and author of Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, told me that artificial vaginas and sleeves date as far back as the 1600s—the first being Japanese masturbators made from tortoiseshell and velvet, she said. Artificial vaginas were sold in the U.S. as early as the late 1800s, she said, and Doc Johnson debuted the “pocket pal” in the late 1970s. Pocket pals look a lot like Fleshlights without the hard case around them (therefore, like long fleshy sandworms), and the labias themselves are a lot more realistic-looking compared to Fleshlights’ more smooth, almost cartoonish aesthetic.

Doc Johnson’s “Pocket Pal,” as seen for sale on Amazon.

When Fleshlight hit the market in the late 1990s, sex toys marketed to male customers still mostly consisted of “pocket pussies,” “those disembodied, often clunky looking artificial vaginas—sometimes with fake pubic hair,” Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and author of Vibrator Nation, told me. “They were really kind of gross looking and for years, many women-friendly retailers, such as Good Vibrations, refused to carry them because they felt that displaying disembodied female body parts didn’t fit with their women-friendly vibe.” (San Francisco-based Good Vibrations became the first sex-positive, women-friendly sex shop in the U.S. in 1997.)

“Some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

Since time immemorial, men have been fucking whatever they can get their hands on, whether it be rubber gloves, toiler paper rolls, couch cushions, fruit, teddy bears, etc. A story about a Redditor who jerked off into a coconut, then later had his penis covered by maggots (he did it multiple times with the same coconut), has become treasured Reddit lore. There are also communities committed to exploring upscale DIY masturbators by refashioning Pringles cans, sponges, and building a better Fleshlight.

The Fleshlight arrived in a perfect pro-masturbation societal storm, Lieberman said: On the heels of the safe sex messaging of the 1980s AIDS crisis, in the midst of cultural landmarks like Seinfeld’s 1992 episode “The Contest” which grappled with masturbation both male and female, and as the White House forced Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders to resign in 1994 for suggesting masturbation should be taught in school. In the 90s, masturbation, for better or worse, was discussed more openly than ever.

Shubin couldn’t have happened into a better time to unveil a tasteful sex toy for penis-having people. But the Fleshlight founder’s reputation is controversial: he’s waxed nostalgic in interviews about his time as an aggressive LAPD cop, and the company’s Glassdoor reviews are generally abysmal.

In 2010, Stoya stopped by the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin, Texas before her mold was made, and described Shubin as a “mountain of a man” who normalized the absurdity that surrounded him.

“He was like, ‘We’re having a meetin’ about selling your vulva, in a can, in a box,'” she said. “It suddenly seems so reasonable and everyday when you’re talking, but you get back to regular life and it’s like, Ha, there are like 100,000 replicas of my pussy floating around.”

USER EXPERIENCES

When I went looking for Fleshlight users, nearly 200 people messaged me to voluntarily talk about their Fleshlight experiences.

“It felt a lot better than I thought it would, which kind of depressed me tbh,” one Fleshlight user told me. “Made me miss actual physical intimacy. Hence why I only used it like 5 times.”

I offered all of them anonymity in order to speak freely about their private, sexual experiences, and asked the ones who requested anonymity to explain why they didn’t want to be named. Almost all of them cited some element of social stigma or shame.

The overwhelming majority of these people were male-identifying. Many said they were lapsed Fleshlight or non-Fleshlight pocket pussy enthusiasts—guys who told me they’d been gifted a masturbation sleeve of some kind, years ago, or bought one on a whim, and used it once or twice before casting it aside again. Several cited the difficulty of cleaning the Fleshlight for why they don’t use it more.

At least three cited some hazing ritual in college, or sharing one pocket pussy with an entire group of male friends.

Several described feeling a sense of disgust with themselves after using it.

“Used it like 4 times, post nut clarity hit extra hard, & now it’s somewhere in my closet soaked in semen & dust,” said one person.

Almost everyone who spoke to me said the feeling of masturbating into a fake vagina is nothing like the real thing.

“They’re billed as lifelike, and they simply are not,” one said. “Of course! It’s a chunk of rubber at the end of the day. It’s not a bad thing, they feel good.”

A few men told me that they use Fleshlights due to physical disability, to increase stamina, or conditions that make it difficult for them to have sex otherwise. One said he bought his online when he was 22. Because he has cerebral palsy, finding sexual partners is difficult. A Fleshlight, he thought, would make imagining the experience more vivid.

“It was what I expected, but it was also more difficult to enjoy for me as my hand would cramp from using the plastic container thing it came with for extra suction,” he said. “As a disabled user, it allowed me the freedom and knowledge that sex toys were definitely for me! It helped me deal with some of the loneliness that I was experiencing.”

I also spoke with Dan Cooper, senior editor at Engadget, about his experience reviewing a Fleshlight Launch—the company’s digital product made with teledildonics company Kiiroo, that moves up and down on its own, in tandem with porn scenes. Cooper’s childhood phimosis (a condition that causes over-tightening of the foreskin) led to him needing a medical circumcision, which he said gave him limited sensitivity during sex or masturbation.

“Even as someone who thinks of themselves as sex-positive, I’ve always held the view that Fleshlights were a bit sad,” Cooper told me. “I’d assumed that they wouldn’t have worked with my broken genitals, but it was revelatory how effective (and fun) they are to use.”

A few wives and girlfriends told me why they bought their male partners Fleshlights as gifts. Their stories usually involved buying masturbators as a couple, to use while traveling or in long-distance relationships. Some said they were gifts to use during military deployments.

Karabella, a trans woman and porn performer, told me that she first encountered a Fleshlight in 2012, on her first big production shoot. “I’d never even heard of a ‘pocket pussy’ before, but [the director] pulled out a brand new one and handed it to me,” she said. “It wasn’t exactly inviting when I first slid into the butthole-shaped slit of cold silicone, so I initially started to lose my erection. However, as it began to warm up around me it was increasingly difficult to differentiate between it and real flesh.” Seven years later, using a Fleshlight has become a staple of her cam shows and performances.

HOW IT’S MADE

Beyond what’s publicly available on the Fleshlight website, specific details about the production of Fleshlights are a closely-guarded company secret. No one outside the company seems to know what the soft, skin-like material—trademarked as “Real Feel SuperSkin”—is made out of.

Kristen Kaye, Fleshlight’s Head of Business Development until late last month when she left the company, said that the material “is indeed proprietary.” She told me she believes it is biodegradable, and “made of natural materials, mostly.”

The closest I came to finding the secret recipe for SuperSkin was through the founder of FleshAssist.com, a website devoted to all things Fleshlight and masturbators. A 24-year old web developer who goes by the pseudonym John started FleshAssist in 2014 after years spent frequenting Fleshlight forums. He told me in an email that ever since buying his first name-brand Fleshlight at 20 years old, he was ���hooked.”

John told me that SuperSkin, as far as he’s aware, is made from “amorphous polymers,” a mixture of PVC and silicone. It’s similar to CyberSkin, another type of thermoplastic faux-skin material used in lots of non-Fleshlight brand sex toys and dolls (but not patented, like SuperSkin).

“The trick with softer materials is that they will inevitably not feel as velvety or suede-y as harder silicone,” Emily Sauer, founder of sex wearable company Ohnut, told me. “So there is in the development of the product, there is a constant battle between, you know, does it feel too sticky? Does it feel gross in any way? There’s a very fine line.”

“The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

Micropores in the Fleshlight’s PVC make their “skin” more realistic to the touch, but also can never be fully, truly sterilized once it’s used. The top complaint I heard from all of the Fleshlight users I spoke to was that it’s too hard to clean to use regularly.

“That’s really gross to me that guys don’t even rinse them out right after, now I’m thinking about it,” Kaye said. “How hard it would be to clean…. If you were to let things dry in there, how disgusting that would be?”

After our call, I borrowed a friend’s (unused) Fleshlight to find out for myself. It’s relatively easy to unscrew the pieces and take apart, and there’s a hole in both ends of the removable soft sleeve to run water through it. As In Bed Magazine’s YouTube review notes, the most inconvenient part of cleaning is leaving it out to dry in the open long enough that you can safely store it without worrying about mold growing in a wet, airtight can—but not so long that your roommates or family stumble across a silicone worm with a vulva on the end of it.

“I think it just comes down to laziness, to be honest,” Kaye said about why people don’t regularly clean their Fleshlights.

According to my very informal online polling, she’s right.

“The biggest annoyance for me was the clean up,” Twitter user and self-proclaimed “vaginal aficionado” @BurlClooney said. Burl first heard about Fleshlight on an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast, which had a partnership with the company from 2010 to around 2012, according to Rogan’s tweets at the time.

“Your semen goes down into a base at the bottom and you should really clean that shit immediately,” he said. “But, I usually just wanted to sleep right away and would leave it until the next day or I would forget until I next used it. It was absolutely fucking disgusting. The cum would turn a weird color and it was so gross to clean out then. However, I mainly stopped due to all the prep work. The hand is just way easier. Boner. Hand. Done. It’s that simple.”

BECOMING A ‘FLESHLIGHT GIRL’

Stoya told me she once fucked a man with a mold of her own silicone vagina.

“It was so like, bizarrely narcissistic, but kind of beautiful,” she said.

She’s featured in one of Fleshlight’s most popular product lines, the Fleshlight Girls. There are also Fleshlight Boys (anal molds), and Guys (dildos), all modeled after real porn performers’ anatomy. Fleshlight currently offers around 45 models of Fleshlight Girls, including Stoya, Riley Reid, Jessica Drake, and Kissa Sins.

“I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Becoming a Fleshlight Girl is a career goal for many in the industry. Kaye, who led the selection of Fleshlight models, told me that three or four years ago the performer’s popularity rank on Pornhub, for example, would have been a deciding factor. Now, she looks at a variety of metrics—social media following, engagement online, how entrepreneurial and invested they are in their own success.

As secretive as the SuperSkin material recipe is, the process of molding a real vulva into SuperSkin is kept even more tight-lipped.

Fleshlight Girl Elsa Jean told me that the process of getting her custom mold done involved going to the Fleshlight headquarters in Austin and having someone cast a mold of her vulva and anus. Fleshlight models’ genitalia are also photographed using a 3D camera, and the final mold is hand-sculpted by a professional artist to get the details as accurate as possible.

“For my butthole, I had to go into a doggy[-style position],” Jean said. “I was laughing and talking a lot, and they told me to be careful, because your asshole actually moves a little bit when you laugh.”

Once they’re finished making the silicone mold, the models are given the product to check out. When Stoya saw a Fleshlight modeled after her own anatomy for the first time, the first thing she did was text a handful of her former lovers a photo of the silicone vulva. They’d know, she reasoned, if it was realistically accurate. (They said it was.)

“It was a very like, holy shit moment,” Stoya said. “You feel a bit like an action figure.”

Models are paid in royalties instead of a flat fee. The more that sell, the more money they personally make. For Stoya, being recruited for a Fleshlight of her own was a springboard into independence in the adult industry. “It’s what’s enabled me to start independent porn companies like Zero Spaces,” she said. “It’s sold well enough that it gives me the extra resources to do creative things.”

“Having my vagina and butthole on sale for people is actually pretty amazing,” Jean said. “Believe it or not, it was one of my goals when I first started in the industry. It’s as close as they can get to having the real thing.”

The actual objectification—turning a woman’s body into an object—involved in making a custom Fleshlight has brought the company, and anatomically-correct masturbation sleeves generally, some criticism.

“I don’t think it’s objectifying,” Lieberman said. “In fact, I’d even say that some Fleshlight designs actually depict women’s genitals beautifully, like a more commercialized version of a Georgia O’Keefe painting.”

I asked Stoya how she feels about the objectification criticism, as someone who’s worked in the adult industry as an actor, director, writer and business owner. Is the idea that hundreds of men could be fucking “her” right now weird at all?

After all, hundreds of people could be jerking off to her porn right now, too—and isn’t that kind of the same? Not at all, she said.

“People like don’t give a fuck largely about who’s doing the fucking [in mainstream porn], who’s coming up with the fucking, but with a Fleshlight—someone has looked [for me],” she said. “And even if they don’t know who I am, or my work, or care who I am as a person? They’ve still chosen my vulva. And that’s qualitatively different.”

People choose the Stoya Fleshlight because they’ve seen her work, or read something she’s written, or even just read the description on the product page of her persona, she said—and liked what they saw enough to pay $79.95 to fantasize about fucking her.

“That feels really humanizing,” Stoya said. “Whereas seeing one of my videos pirated on Pornhub with a sentence in the description that says, ‘Don’t mention the performers name so she can’t find this and get this removed’? That’s really dehumanizing, and really separates you from your work. With the Fleshlight, it’s the opposite.”

THE STIGMA

As the woman charged with marketing a plastic pussy to the masses, Kaye had a big job. And a huge part of that job, she told me, is overcoming the stigma attached to masturbation sleeves, and the men who buy them. Kaye’s worked in the adult industry—in advertising, consulting, and marketing—for 13 years, but for the last three with Fleshlight, she’s made it her mission to drag that shame out from under men’s beds and bring masturbation tools into the light.

“Unfortunately, for men, there are stigmas attached to using a masturbation device… because for whatever reason, if a guy’s masturbating or talks about masturbating, it’s like they’re not getting laid,” she said.

“For cis-gendered males, revealing you have a fleshlight gives implications that you can’t ‘get a girl’ on your own, which inhibits the positive ramifications of using sex toys,” one anonymous user told me. “In reality, they can help people explore what satisfies them, and healthily masturbating can relieve stress or just clear one’s mind, at least in my experience.”

“I feel like a lot of men feel ashamed or embarrassed for using one, but when you’re having a dry spell or not getting laid often, it’s very beneficial,” Twitter user @g0dsparadise said. “I have given Fleshlights as gifts in the past, I have told my closest friends about it, and I am hoping that one day it becomes very common to own one just because this whole stigma is ridiculous to me.”

Some pointed out a percieved double standard between male and female-gendered sex toys. “There’s an interesting dichotomy,” Cooper said. He attributed it to women’s sex toys being seen as “luxurious” and respected, while men’s typically aren’t. “But it all drills back to the idea that we should somehow be ashamed of sex.”

FleshAssist founder John told me that while the stigma itself isn’t as bad as it used to be, it still exists.

“I saw a comment before that said something along the lines of ‘a dildo looks potent, it shows that a woman doesn’t need a man,’ making it a symbol of female independence and empowerment,” John said. “I think if we flip that around, and say ‘a man with a masturbator shows that he doesn’t need a woman’ it doesn’t have the same resonance at all.”

Liberman said that she has noticed this stigma, too—and that despite toys like Fleshlight in the mainstream, it hasn’t changed much. “I think that’s because men are supposed to be self-sufficient and not need additional tools to get off,” she said. “Their hands are supposed to be all they need.”

THE FUTURE OF FUCKTOYS

It’s possible that the Fleshlight and other toys like it are a decent oracle for the future of sex.

If the analog Fleshlight was a step toward destigmatizing male sex toys, its interactive, internet-connected iteration could help bring virtual reality sex to the mainstream.

Fleshlight’s Launch device syncs automatic, motorized movement with interactive porn content. It’s a Fleshlight sleeve inside a casing shaped and sized like a wine chiller that moves the sleeve up and down in rhythm with the porn it’s synced with.

Fleshlight isn’t the first sex toy to combine porn, virtual reality, and a connected device that syncs the two. Around the time the earliest adult-themed virtual reality films were revealed, in 2015, people started wondering if porn would be the thing to finally push VR into the mainstream.

Sex toys that interact with film and VR open new worlds of transcending what your physical, corporeally-limited body could experience. Companies like Camasutra exist today that scan real humans into avatars for fuckability in virtual worlds. There’s no limit to what you can embody, sexually, in these virtual environments.

“The porn and sex-toy industries have always led the way in technological innovation: from the electrification of the vibrator in the late 19th century to the early adoption of VHS by porn directors,” Lieberman said. “VR and the Fleshlight are just extensions of this trend that stretches back all the way to the printing press and erotic literature.”

She attributes this innovation to a need for something novel. Putting your dick inside a mechanized stroker-bot certainly is that, and Fleshlight, as it chases the interactive trend, knows it.

As our identities become more openly fluid and less binary, so do our toys. Ohnut, another wearable, doesn’t look like anything anatomical at all. Even the color, a pale jade, is meant to evoke a neutrality without being skin-like. Like Kaye, Ohnut’s founder Sauer also mentioned the concept of enhancement. “It’s not trying to replace skin. It’s not trying to replace a person or anything. It enhances,” she said.

Sauer points to Tenga, a Japanese company that’s been making disposable soft strokers and sleeves since 2005, as an example of where the industry could continue heading: Toward a less gendered, more pleasure-centered future of sex. One of their products, the Tenga Egg, is a handheld stroker shaped like a gummy, hollow egg, and they’re sold inside Easter egg-hunt-shaped packaging.

“They’re de-misogynizing the male masturbator,” Sauer said. “[Tenga products] are so delightful, but they’re just as dirty. They’re meant to be thrown away, but they come in really fun patterns. And what’s less masculine than a white egg?”

“I think that sex toys now are moving away from realism: the idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away,” Lieberman said. “People are more focused on both the utility of a device (does it give me an orgasm) and the design: they want something that looks beautiful.” She noted that the Eva II vibrator by Dame, and Unbound’s Bean and Squish are geometric—not dick or vulva-shaped.

Fleshlight is no exception to this trend. According to Kaye, the Fleshlight Turbo, a newer, non-anatomical sleeve, is creeping up in reviews. It looks nothing like human anatomy. It doesn’t even come in “skin” colors—only “Blue Ice” and “Copper.” (However, a helpful cross-section of the Turbo labels where you’re meant to imagine the lips, throat and tongue would be.)

Screenshot via Fleshlight.com

“I think marketing the other stuff—the stuff that’s not like, pardon my French, fucking a rubber pussy—that’s how we’ve transitioned our marketing approach,” Kaye said. “The exact replica of the genitalia? I think that’s kind of getting tired. I see that the younger people are more inclined to get the stuff that’s non-anatomical, that’s a little more discreet.”

“The idea that a person would only want to masturbate with a replica of genitals is kind of going away.”

“There’s more of an acknowledgement that many people don’t fit into the gender binary and our toys should reflect that,” Lieberman said. “I think that gender neutral sex toys are popular now because sex toys always reflect the culture of the time they’re created in; they reflect the current gender norms…. I think this shift in sex toy design to gender neutral reflects both a profit motive and a desire for inclusivity.”

For some companies, this might be an inclusivity effort, but for others, “it’s a response to the fact that inclusivity can be profitable,” Comella said. “A business that de-genders vibrators or ‘queers’ sex toys also expands its potential market reach by eliminating labels that don’t have to be there in the first place.”

But for those who still want the visual illusion of another person, Fleshlight isn’t going anywhere.

“That’s the thing to always keep in mind with the adult industry: It’s the business of fantasy,” Stoya said. “It’s like magic or professional wrestling. The audience who enjoys it comes in, ready to suspend their disbelief.”

Lieberman believes that lifelike sex toys impact our sexuality mostly for the good. If you want the feeling of fucking a penis or vagina or butthole without another person attached to it, that option is available to us, here in the future.

“I’m not sure that our society is that much different for having the Fleshlight in the world,” Lieberman said. “But our society is better when more people are having orgasms, and since Fleshlights provide orgasms, then our society is a bit happier thanks to the device.”

The Fleshlight Is a Portal to the Future of Sex syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[historicalemily]

history resource pack: historical theory and method (or history books about history)

so what is historical theory and historical method?

historical theory refers to the exploration of the nature of history and evidence. specifically it concerns issues around objectivity, accuracy, and questions of bias.

historical method is the practice of history including techniques and guidelines by which historians use evidence to research and write about the past. historiography is the study of how historians have studied a specific topic using particular sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches.

list of books about historical theory and method:

Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. W.W. Norton, 2000.

This book is about how history is read, written, and researched in the postmodern age. Evans covers a wide range of topics from questioning whether there is such thing as objective fact to causation, sources, and morality. I definitely recommend this book!

Turabian, K. L. A manual for writers of research papers, theses and dissertations, 7th edn. Chicago, 2007.

This book is an absolute essential! This book not only covers the technical aspects of citations, but also includes an additional section from other editions that provides step-by-step help for people who might be new to doing historical research. It is a little lacking on writing style, but is great for providing technical information about structure, citations, and the process of writing.

The Chicago manual of style, 16th edn (Chicago, 2010).

Chicago is the citation style used by historians and understanding it is very very important! You’ll likely get to the point where you’ve memorized the basic structure of books and articles, but for the more complicated sources (cartoons? advertisements?) it is really helpful to flip through the guide and figure out what to do and it is definitely more reliable than just googling it.

Green, A. and K. Troup (eds), The houses of history: a critical reader in twentieth-century history and theory. Manchester, 1999.

I haven’t personally read this book (yet… I’ll be reading it for a class next semester), but it is the required book for my college’s Historical Methods course which is a required research course of history majors. It focuses on different schools of thought which have had the greatest influence on the study of history.

Tosh, J. The pursuit of history: aims, methods and new directions in the study of modern history, 5th edn. Harlow, 2010.

This book is a great introduction to the historical discipline! It is especially good on addressing biases in history and how best to approach historical sources. I really recommend it for college history students.

Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Touchstone, 2007.

This book is slightly different from the rest, but I included it because I’m super interested in the way history is taught in school and why it’s taught the way it is. This book compares multiple American history textbooks assigned in public schools in the US (including the book I used for American history in high school) and analyzes the way history is taught. Definitely less focused on academia, but still an interesting read and he does go into some depth on the historiography of the periods he covers.

Wineburg, Sam. Why Learn History (When It’s Already on Your Phone). University of Chicago Press, 2018. 

This brand-spankin’ new book is next on my to read list! Again, it’s more focused on the teaching of history in the modern era and the issues in the way history is taught in public schools. It seems to be less of a historiographic approach than Loewen’s book, but personally I think that how history is taught is a huge issue right now (especially in the United States) and I’m super excited for what this book has to offer.

If you all know any more essential books about historical theory, method, or about how history is taught, let me know! These are just books I’ve read (or will be reading soon) in my college career so far and are good starting points for studying historical theories and methods 😊