Links, Thursday 24th July

A summary of "The Invention of the White Race", for anyone who is interested. Link

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Now here's a great idea: vegan cheese made from actual milk protein Slate

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This is applicable to the issue of sharing domestic labour more generally (even if you don't have kids), and gets at some of the issues around gendered division of labour.

"When I ask my happily married parents, who both worked while raising three children in the 1970s and 1980s, about division of labor, my father says, “I was always willing to do whatever your mother told me to do.” That’s exactly the problem: I don’t want to be the Captain. My mom was the Captain for our family, and now she organizes compulsively, unable to get rid of the habit. I’m the Captain in my house already when it comes to boring inventory-related things like remembering whether or not we have paper towels, and I don’t much like the feeling. When I hear somebody referring to a “honey do” list—a common cultural artifact of women’s captaincy—I want to puke." Slate

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A good little comic about how the "narratives" around sexual assault get in the way of calling it what it is [TW] Medium

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"Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use." Guardian

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"To a sociologist, the reason people drink alcohol is that they have been socially taught to. That is, we like alcohol because we’ve been taught to overlook the negative side effects or we have redefined them as positive." Sociological Images

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"if we are measuring by the risk of premature death, then 79% of the people we currently shame for being overweight or obese would be recategorized as perfectly fine. Ideal, even. Pleased to be plump, let’s say, knowing that a body that is a happy balance of soft and strong is the kind of body that will carry them through a lifetime." Sociological Images

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School choice is not a panacea - by all objective measures, the Free School experiment in Sweden has led to worse student outcomes. Slate

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"Going to the bathroom in space is awesome" Cracked

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"By 2000, airline travel [in the United States] (3,892 BTU per passenger mile) officially became greener than driving (3,926 BTU per person, per mile.) The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 57 percent better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon (4,218 BTU per passenger mile). It was better than buses as well." Slate

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"At the time, ideas of race in America were quite literally black and white. In some places, if you could pass yourself off as something other than black, you could circumvent some amount of discrimination. People of color — both foreigners and African-Americans — employed this to their advantage. Some did it just to get by in a racist society, some to make a political statement, and others — performers and businessmen — to gain access to fame and money they wouldn't have otherwise had." NPR

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"Over 2,000 Palestinians were killed in all three military operations in Gaza, not including the Second Intifada. Most of them were civilians. I’ve exchanged emails with people in Gaza in the past few days. These are people who don’t care much for Hamas in their everyday lives, whether due to its fundamental ideology, political oppression or other aspects of its rule. But they do support Hamas in its war against Israel; for them, fighting the siege is their war of independence. Or at least one part of it." 972

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"There was one fatal flaw in the Stanford prison experiment: The guy in charge was stage directing the whole thing. Zimbardo didn't step back and watch the events unfold as an observer; he played the part of head guard, even going so far as using these totally scientifically unbiased instructions to his student guards: "In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none."

And remember, Zimbardo wasn't just the researcher/fake guard/sadistic mastermind of the experiment; he was a teacher, therefore an authority figure. There was pressure on students to please the researcher -- they were getting paid $15 a day for the experiment, and the department had clearly spent a lot of money building the fake prison. They were acting like sadistic guards because they wanted to please, not because their mock professional role emboldened them to do so. They knew what they were there to do. Oh, and a former San Quentin prisoner who served as a consultant on the experiment later admitted to feeding Zimbardo and his students suggestions on how to abuse their prisoners. So much for assuming decent, upstanding people spontaneously invented ways to be abusive." Cracked

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