How I Broke, and Botched, the Brandon Teena Story


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The story that inspired “Boys don’t cry”.

For years, I have wanted to apologize for what I now understand, with some shame, was the article’s implicit anti-trans framing. Without spelling it out, the article cast Brandon as a lesbian who hated “her” body because of prior experiences of childhood sexual abuse and rape. (One of Brandon’s acquaintances had told me he’d said he was “disgusted by lesbians,” and several friends said Brandon had said, “I can’t be with a woman as a woman. That’s gross.”) I saw this youngster’s decision to lead a life as a straight man as incredibly bold — but also assumed it was a choice made in fear, motivated by internalized homophobia.

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Donna Minkowitz — The Village Voice

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SHIA LABEOUF IS READY TO TALK ABOUT IT


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The unpredictable Shia LaBeouf.

Yes, LaBeouf is the guy who was handed a golden ticket and promptly lit it on fire. But too often we forget that everyone screws up on their path toward becoming an adult; and that few do so under the gaze of the public eye; and that by embracing the kind of capital-A Acting LaBeouf aims to do, we nourish the same spark from which his bad behavior stems. Tom Hardy, who worked with LaBeouf on 2012’s Lawless, points to the paradox central to their work. “A performer is asked to do two things,” he tells me. “To be disciplined and accountable, communicative and a pleasure to work with. And then, within a split second, they’re asked to be a psychopath. Authentically. It takes a very strong human being to sustain a genuine sense of well-being through that baptism of fire.” Then: “Drama is not known to attract stable types.”

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Eric Sullivan — Esquire

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Asian-Americans on being “likable” in the modern workplace


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On navigating racial stereotypes:

The stereotype that I run into the most with my own race is looking young. I was 27 and had just started a new job, and I was introduced to the team as a new person. One older woman said to me, “I don’t mean to sound ageist, but you don’t look like you’ve graduated from college.” It was like, what was the purpose of making that statement? I’m telling you that I have.The implication that I might be in school signals that I might be less than professional.

For Asian-American men, the leading stereotypes are being good at math and being good with computers. But when you narrow that down to East Asian men, you are also pegged as quiet, shy, and for many, socially awkward. I had a conversation with a friend who was categorized as being “stoic and unexpressive” even though I know him to be a very funny, likable person. If your communication skills are not that strong, it’s easy for people not to talk very much.

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PAVITHRA MOHAN AND ANISA PURBASARI HORTON — Fast Company

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Bryan Caplan and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on What’s Missing in Education


It’s very hard now to argue against education when we know all the empirical data — if you want to have a few minutes to explain it, or let’s say, to convince — or have all the empirical data that at the individual level, education — and that’s how I’ve called them antifragile — education, it appears that it’s good for you because it’s a great way to transmit wealth to a generation, because your children are certain to stay in middle class if you educate them.

It’s a great way, but at the level of a country, it doesn’t seem to work. In fact, it’s the reverse kind of thing. Alison Wolf’s data.

Even more interesting that people think that by educating people they’re actually transmitting knowledge instead of technique because of places like Germany and Switzerland. These places had a very low level of formal education and a huge amount of apprenticeship, and a huge amount of built-in.

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Conversations with Tyler

SELF-OPTIMIZATION


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We humans have a tendency to measure everything. For example, what matters for Business is profits and humans are worth only how productive they are, whatever that means.

The ad’s gimmick plays not only to the fantasy that our life force can be captured in some simple unidimensional measure and actively managed but also to the broader, more insidious notion that people should function like phones. The expectations we have for our devices saturate our expectations of others (whether they are friends, family, service workers, or robots) and ultimately ourselves. We should be capable of handling any task we’re hired for, moving seamlessly from one interface to the next, from one application to another, for as long as required. If we can’t, we need to “recharge” ourselves: to find the right drug combination or exercise regimen, or else to sit ourselves out for precisely as long as we need to get back to 100 percent. The idea that we are anything other than self-sufficient and energy independent is suspended for a fantasy of instrumental control.

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Real Life

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New FBI Study Shows Mass Shooters Aren’t Loners Who Suddenly Just Snap


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We need to figure this out urgently.

The study reaffirms that there is no useful demographic profile for active shooters. The vast majority were male (all but 4 of the 63), but that only narrows the pool down to approximately half of the US population. About two thirds were white. Others were black, Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and Native American. The shooters ranged in age from 12 to 88. The largest age group, nearly a third of all the attackers, was 40- to 49-year-olds.

The report also further validates several key findings from our long-running investigations into mass shootings at Mother Jones. The overwhelming majority of active shooters obtained their firearms legally, according to the new FBI study. (Six percent stole firearms, and just 2 percent purchased guns illegally.) A particularly striking data point here is that shooters in 40 percent of the cases purchased at least one weapon “legally and specifically for the purpose of perpetrating the attack.”

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Mark Follman – Mother Jones

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Is the international art world too elitist?


Surveying the biennial circuit, the obvious conclusion is yes, the international art world is too elitist. For all the rhetorical emphasis on engaging local communities, histories, and cultures, it is populated by globetrotting curators, artists, critics, and patrons who temporarily parachute into various settings – the more obscure the better – and pat themselves on the back for their (our) worldliness and commitment to diverse publics while mostly talking to people they (we) already know. Occasionally this can tip over into outright black comedy: think, for instance, of the reports in the art press about Documenta 14 curators and staff carrying stacks of euros from Germany to Athens in their hand luggage to circumvent the cash-strapped Greek banks’ €120 cap on withdrawals (all under the auspices of ‘learning from Athens’).

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Apollo

Rebuilding the Working Class


Trump isn’t an aberration but a consequence. He is a harrowing mix of monster and buffoon and rallying those who are outraged will be an important part of winning in 2018. But two generations of a falling standard of living and quality of life for most working people have led them to believe that politicians just aren’t that into them. These voters are dropping out of the political process or swinging erratically between the parties in elections as they try to find someone who will “shake things up.” Democrats who are giddy at the prospect of a wave election will be disappointed if they fail to understand what happened in 2016 and the need to do things differently this year.

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Karen Nussbaum — Dissent

How Original Was Shakespeare?


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If Franssen is concerned with the variegated history of Shakespeare after his death, Shakespeare’s Originality attempts to untangle the knotty roots of the playwright’s contemporary sources, inspirations and even plagiarisms. ‘Most people interested in Shakespeare’, John Kerrigan observes, ‘have wondered about his originality. Is it true that his plays were adapted from other authors’ plays, poems, and romances? Are his best-known speeches really lifted out of Montaigne and Plutarch?’ More consequentially for our understanding of Shakespeare, Kerrigan asks: ‘Does it matter, any more than it does when a classic movie is based on a novel?’

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Patrick J. Murray — History Today

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Student Loans Are Too Expensive To Forgive


The cost of the loan forgiveness programs exploded, in part, because policymakers did not correctly estimate the number of students who would take advantage of such programs, according to higher education scholar Jason Delisle. Now there’s an emerging consensus that some programs should be reined in, but ideas on how much and in what ways vary by party affiliation. Senate Democrats just introduced a college affordability bill that focuses on creating “debt-free” college plans by giving federal matching funds to states that, in turn, would figure out ways to help students pay for school. In the past, President Barack Obama acknowledged the need to require borrowers to repay more of their debts and made some proposals for modifying the programs’ rules. The GOP goes much further in its suggestions: A new proposal from House Republicans would eliminate some loan-forgiveness programs entirely.

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Amanda Palleschi — FiveThirtyEight