Howard Gardner: ‘A Blessing of Influences’ We all owe our lives to someone, starting with mother and father and then outward along a spreading tree of life going back in time.
No Ultimate Political Solutions. By Timothy Sherratt October 18, 2013.
How the GOP Slowly Went Insane - Jon Lovett. The current moment in politics came about slowly, not suddenly, but it doesn't make it any less of a national emergency.
When I was a kid, all I knew about Michael Jackson was that he was crazy. He had a monkey named Bubbles and some kind of oxygen chamber and he used to be black but he made himself white and he was nuts. That was Michael Jackson in full. Gender and the Body Language of Power. We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in.
Enjoy! Philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky once observed that being feminine often means using one’s body to portray powerlessness. Consider: A feminine person keeps her body small and contained; she makes sure that it doesn’t take up to much space or impose itself. She walks and sits in tightly packaged ways. Behind the camera: How selfies bring authenticity into focus. There’s a moment in Eddie Murphy’s legendary 1983 standup special, “Delirious,” when Murphy scans the front row of the crowd and asks if anybody has a camera.
A hand reaches up to the stage to offer a quintessential 1980s point-and-shoot, one of those flattened rectangles that masks the photographer’s eyes like a censorship bar. Murphy proceeds to snap two photos of the audience. He then points the camera at himself, drops his arms to his sides, and takes a close-up of his fire-engine red-leather-clad crotch. Article. The Christian religion,” wrote Robert Louis Wilken, “is inescapably ritualistic (one is received into the Church by a solemn washing with water), uncompromisingly moral (‘be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,’ said Jesus), and unapologetically intellectual (be ready to give a ‘reason for the hope that is in you,’ in the words of 1 Peter).
Like all the major religions of the world, Christianity is more than a set of devotional practices and a moral code: it is also a way of thinking about God, about human beings, about the world and history.” Ritualistic, moral, and intellectual: May these words, ones that Wilken uses to begin his beautiful book, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, be written on your soul as you begin college and mark your life—characterize and distinguish your life—for the next four years. Feminist_Pedagogy_Project091109.pdf. When Schools Become Dead Zones of the Imagination: A Critical Pedagogy Manifesto.
(Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout) Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak.
We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. Martin Luther King, Jr. If the right-wing billionaires and apostles of corporate power have their way, public schools will become “dead zones of the imagination,” reduced to anti-public spaces that wage an assault on critical thinking, civic literacy and historical memory.1 Since the 1980s, schools have increasingly become testing hubs that de-skill teachers and disempower students.
Why Women Still Can’t Have It All - Anne-Marie Slaughter. The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today.
Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.
Revaluing Family Values. When Judges Assume That Men Cannot Control Their Own Sexual Urges - Mieke Eerkens. Women and men alike should be concerned by the Iowa Supreme Court's recent ruling that it's legal for a man to fire an employee he finds too attractive.
The face of America's homeless youth. Hundreds of homeless teens and young adults live in Denver, Colorado Many fled abusive families or foster parents Doyle "Sox" Robinson has opened a drop-in center for homeless youths "They are just like any other kids out there," Robinson says Denver, Colorado (CNN) -- When the sun dips below the Rocky Mountains and the streets of Denver go dark, Lokki, his girlfriend Magic and their friend Tripp head home.
They climb in between the rafters of a highway overpass, crouching as they sit under the concrete structure that rumbles with every car that crosses overhead. It is where they will sleep tonight. It is where they say they can live safely after escaping from abusive homes. "It's pretty hard," says Magic, 18, when asked about living on the streets. Anything But Human. 5 tips for creating civil discourse in an era of polarization. Congress is now more polarized than at any time since Civil War Reconstruction.
As we barrel toward a nasty presidential election, things will get even worse. Whether it is the news channels we watch, the blogs we read, the people we follow on Twitter, our physical neighbors, our Facebook friends, our churches, or the people with whom we socialize, most of us consume information in communities which do not invite us to critically examine our positions. Prosumer-Centric Capitalism. Irving Wladawsky-Berger has posted an illuminating piece titled Customer-centric Capitalism in which he convincingly argues the now dominant profit-driven businesses M.O. is in fact detrimental to society: For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies.
But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers. It is clear that our system of profit-driven capitalism must be modernized with a greater emphasis placed on the customer.
This is already happening. A handful of companies, like Google, have adopted positive-sum or triple-bottom-line business models. Now consider the spread of modern day analytics.Thanks to the web information explosion and the social sharing boom it's become possible to track more complex behavior. Living With Less. A Lot Less. Make Anything Better in an Hour: How to Run a Public Brainstorm. When was the last time you really looked at a bus stop? It's the sort of mundane, everyday object that usually gets overlooked—and that's exactly why it's interesting to think about. There are unexplored opportunities for change, and making even a small change to a bus stop can be really impactful when multiplied all over the country.
Along with GOOD Chicago, Greater Good Studio recently helped facilitate a workshop that generated hundreds of new ideas to redesign the lowly bus stop into a commuter tool, not just a piece of urban furniture. The workshop followed a panel discussion with current experts in the field. WHAT IS WRONG WITH MULTICULTURALISM? [PART 1]
I gave the Milton K Wong lecture in Vancouver on Sunday. I very much enjoyed the event- it was a stunning venue, a superb audience and a good discussion of the issues. My thanks to the Laurier Institution, University of British Columbia and CBC for inviting me. Entitled ‘What is Wrong with Multiculturalism? A European Perpective’, the lecture pulled together many of the themes about immigration, identity, diversity and multiculturalism of which I have been talking and writing recently. The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science — Editor's Picks. Leap Year Project: A Prototype for Radically Experiential Learning.
Can young people create their own education? Why Borders Disfigure Landscapes as Well as Thoughts. In 1989, as a first-year university student, I photographed the fall of the Berlin Wall in my hometown. The Last Mystery of the Financial Crisis. 5 Logical Fallacies That Make You Wrong More Than You Think.