The YMFY logo is a Barbara Kruger bite. I hope I don’t get sued.
white privilege radically changes the appearance of Tsarnaev bros
This is how brofiling actually works in real life. The Week Magazine ran with this image as their cover sketch.
Just so it is said, clearly and unambiguously: the Tsarnaev brothers are white guys. They are white. The FBI’s own wanted poster for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev lists his race as “white”, but you would never know it from the cover image on The Week.
Hold up the cover to someone else, and ask them how many white people they can see on the cover. Chances are they will identify Gabby Giffords on the top left and the image of the Boston policemen (all white men) on the top right, but how about those two guys in the center? Nope, not a chance that anyone would say these caricatures look white.
Why? Because in addition to being white they are also “Muslim”, which is the current dehumanizing “Other” label that whiteness has constructed as a sanctioned target for violence in US popular culture.
This is how white privilege works in media representations and everyday life: when the criminal suspects are demonstrably white men, seize upon any aspect of difference and magnify it such that they become Othered, non-white, and menacing. If it is too hard to do so, simply dismiss them as aberrations and isolated cases of insanity. This is also how white culture, specifically the process of whiteness in conjunction with white privilege, portrays several non-white identities, including those that are now considered white but at one time were decidedly not so. For example, see here for how the Irish were depicted as violent apes or lazy drunks in the late 1800s to early 1900s.
Addendum, posted 4.29.13:
As Tim Wise said on April 18, there are consequences for these kinds of things. Here are a few reasons why this is important:
- Making white criminals who are Muslim appear to be more ‘brown’ than ‘white’ has serious consequences for brown people. Indeed, as we saw right after the Boston bombings, people that simply “looked” brown and Muslim were profiled and assaulted. Two men were escorted off a plane in Boston simply for speaking Arabic and thereby somehow making passengers “uncomfortable”. A Bangladeshi man in NYC was beaten up because he looked ‘Arab’. And this affects women too: a Muslim woman doctor in Boston who wears a headscarf was attacked by a man while she was out walking with her baby. And the white Muslim wife of the older brother has been demonized for simply being a Muslim American woman, especially after Ann Coulter called for women who wear hijabs to be arrested.
- People have pointed out to me that The Week Magazine’s cover images are regularly caricatures/sketches of the main events of that week’s news. I know this—I read their print edition every week, and all their previous cover images are available online. But there are two main problems with this argument: (a) why caricature them in a way that makes them so explicitly ‘darker’ and ‘Arabized’ in their appearance? Contrast the way they look on that page with the other white faces on that same page—would anyone say that these men look ‘white’? So why is the caricature done in such a ‘racializing’ way? How is this any different from the more overt media racism that was used by Time Magazine (h/t @sarahkendzior), for example, to make OJ Simpson appear way more menacing? And (b) if The Week is simply trying to put a caricature of criminals who committed mass violence on their cover, then here are the covers for the weeks when Newtown happened, when Aurora happened, and when Tucson happened — where were their ‘racialized’ caricatures of Adam Lanza, James Holmes, and Jared Loughner? How come the ideologies and ethnicities and religions of those particular mass criminals were not profiled?
- And so here is the more subtle consequence: when white criminals are treated as if they are just aberrations, and when white criminals who are Muslim are portrayed as more brown than white not just by The Week but by mainstream propaganda outlets like Fox News, then the problems of white supremacist violence and extremism become hidden, unaddressed. When analyzed carefully, research has shown that right-wing extremism causes more deaths in America than “jihadist” groups. Also, of the terror attacks/plots since 1995 in America, 56% of them were by right-wing extremists and only 12% by Islamist/jihadist groups — and yet the DHS was told to back off reporting on that or on analyzing right-wing violence for fears of backlash from conservative political groups.
So, my main point is that such a willful blindness hurts ALL people.
Discrimination Is Obvious 
By: S.B. Woo
NY Times, Dec. 19, 2012
Top colleges are clearly limiting the number of Asians they admit, and what’s at stake for America is of more importance than just the number of Asians going to Harvard.
The Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade wrote in his 2009 book, “No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life,” that “to receive equal consideration by elite colleges, Asian Americans must outperform Whites by 140 points, Hispanics by 280 points, Blacks by 450 points in SAT (Total 1600).” As Ron Unz demonstrates, the percentage of Asians among the student bodies of Ivy League schools has been a steady 17 percent, give or take a couple of points, for about 20 years.
This clearly shows that these colleges set a quota for Asian students.
The percentage of Asian students at the California Institute of Technology, which uses a “race-neutral” admission policy, has roughly followed the proportion of college-age Asians in the general population.
And it’s not just a matter of Asian-Americans doing well on tests. In 2006, they were 27 percent of Presidential Scholars, who were chosen based on scholarship, service, leadership and creativity.
This all demonstrates that top colleges have a “merits-be-damned” approach to limit the number of Asian students. They did that once before — against Jewish students about a century ago.
America’s core value of equal opportunity is being trampled. The 14th Amendment on equal protection is trampled upon. America and Asian American students suffer.
The creditability of elite colleges suffers. The administrators of these colleges may be steadfast in their righteous posturing. But as the truth emerges, fewer people are with them; more are shaking their heads and chuckling at their facade. The meritocracy of the American culture is compromised. America’s future is too important to allow race-conscious admission to continue hurting all of us. It’s time for the game to stop.
On this date 23 years ago, two individuals entered the Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts disguised as police officers. After tying up the museum’s real security guards, they spent 83 minutes raiding the facility and emerged with 13 pieces of art including original paintings by Rembrandt, Degas, and Vermeer. In all, the stolen goods were valued at $300 million by the FBI, though other experts say that figure should be closer to $500 million. The Gardner heist remains the single largest property crime in US history, and now more than ever the bureau and museum officials are eager for answers. Today the FBI renewed a campaign to find the missing art relics, offering a $5 million reward for information leading to a successful recovery.
The criminals themselves are essentially cleared of wrongdoing at this point; the statute of limitations on the original theft has already lapsed. Rather than criminal prosecution, the goal now is returning the lifted pieces to the halls of Gardner Museum where they belong. To better the odds of that happening, the FBI wants your help. It’s uploaded high-resolution photos of every painting known to be missing in hopes someone on the internet will come to a stunning revelation. “If you didn’t see these paintings, you’d walk right by them and maybe not take note of them,” says agent Geoff Kelley. “But by trying to get the images out there of these paints and these pieces, hopefully this might resonate with someone.” Aside from the website launched today, federal officials will also appeal to the public via billboards in Connecticut and Philadelphia, two states it believes the pieces were trafficked through. (via)
Jeremy Scott ripped off legendary artist Jimbo Phillips.
The Google Glass feature no one is talking about
The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally - here’s where the problems really start - you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.
Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public - any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway - you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you - and all 49 other passengers - could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.
Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out - I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.
First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.
Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.
Now our stage is set: not for what will happen, necessarily, but what I just want to point out couldtechnically happen, by combining tools already available within Google.
Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.
I’m still not done.
The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.
Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.
Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device - every single day, everywhere they go - on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.
And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience - it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.
Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud - whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between - will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.
This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.
Oh, and as for that physical design problem. If Google Glass does well enough in its initial launch to survive to subsequent versions, forget Warby Parker. The next company Google will call is Bausch & Lomb. Why wear bulky glasses when the entire device fits into a contact lens? And that, of course, would be the ultimate expression of the Google Glass idea: a digital world that is even more difficult to turn off, once it’s implanted directly into the user’s body. At that point you’ll not even know who might be recording you. There will be no opting out.
MLive – Earlie Johnson had a bad day Tuesday when he came home from work to find his considerable porn collection and three televisions had been stolen.Earlie Johnson, the owner of the stolen vintage porn collection, relaxes at his home in Muskegon. According to Johnson, he and his fiancée arrived home from work around 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 19, and discovered the back door of their house in the 1700 block of McIlwraith Street had been kicked in. After making a sweep of the house, the couple discovered that three flat screen television sets and Johnson’s valuable vintage pornography collection had been stolen. “Basically, I had a porn collection that was priceless,” Johnson said. “It was worth — to be straight up — $7,500 dollars.” Johnson was confident of the monetary value of his stash of pornographic movies, which includes 1970s classics to more current titles starring some of the biggest names in adult movies, because he had the collection appraised by the CD Exchange in Holland. “They buy your CDs and they also appraise what you got,” he explained. “They appraised my collection. It was done a couple years ago so they may not remember.” Johnson told Muskegon police officers investigating the burglary that his trove was “one of the largest porn collections” in Michigan. “I’m the Hugh Hefner of Muskegon,” Johnson said proudly. “I appreciate all beautiful women. Ain’t no doubt.”
(Editor’s note: I love this guy. Usually a lot of individuals associated with being “sex-positive” are annoying/ironically ugly. This guy just tells it like it is.)
Guy Fieri forgot to register the actual name of his restaurant. someone swoops in and registers it and makes a fake menu.
Maria Popova - have you made $1M on affiliate ads while soliciting $500k in donations for your “ad-free” site? Then maybe go easier on your fellow writers for how they make a living.
Maria Popova is a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, regular author for The Atlantic, and was named to the Fast Company 100 Most Creative in Business list. I let her know I was a regular reader of her site when I sent her an email a few months ago after she wrote an article about the dangers of advertising in journalism. She detailed a scenario in which a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist was offered money from Xerox to write an article. I sent her a message to ask for clarity in what she meant, given that I was aware of her practice of putting affiliate advertising links in her articles while at the same time asking users at the end of each article to donate to her site by telling them that she runs an ad-free site that is subsidized by user contributions (screenshot). It is often controversial for a site to make money off of affiliate ads without notifying users in any terms of use (i.e. Pinterest), or to write reviews on products without notifying users they are making money when the reader clicks and purchases those products (the FTC enforces laws for certain types of blogs), but Popova has been going a bit further - while keeping the ads undisclosed, she also writes at the end of each article and in each email newsletter that the site is ad-free and needs user donations to support it.
The Brain Pickings “Support” page reads: “Keeping it all ad-free…means it’s subsidized by the generous support of readers like you.” In a revealing email exchange outlined below, Popova told me that 25% of her book recommendations come from the data that she receives from Amazon after her readers click the ads in her articles and go on to make purchases (she sees, and makes commissions off of, the other items they place in their shopping cart, including books that she didn’t link to). I found this to be interesting given that she made waves in the journalism and blogging community by publishing the “Curator’s Code” last year which urged website owners to be more upfront in attributing where they found the content they post. It was also ironic given that she regularly writes diatribes in publications such as The Atlantic and NY Times railing against the “filter bubble” which is the common practice of websites using algorithms to recommend to users things that similar users have also read or purchased.
An interview in The Guardian last month drew me to revisit our weeklong email exchange from last Spring. I had inquired about whether she would notify users of her ad practices, and I was surprised to receive a defensive response coupled with a condescending sign off that read, “I wish you the very best as you continue to explore and navigate the world of media and morality.” Not being the open letter type, I wrote back with a few reasons why she may be misleading users, and after we had exchanged 7 or 8 more emails, she agreed to change her pitch to “banner-free” instead of “ad-free.” When she changed it back to “ad-free” within 6 weeks, I was disappointed, but still not the open letter type. When she ignored my next three attempts over the summer to ask her why she still claimed to be ad-free, I figured she must have just really need the donations to keep the site going.
But then I read The Guardian article last month which quoted Brain Pickings user numbers (millions per month) that point to potentially millions of dollars in deception on the table, then I did a google search and found out that a for-profit LLC was formed in New York called “Brain Pickings LLC” just one month after my email inquiry to her (odd timing for a site in its 7th year at the time), and then I saw more articles by Popova condemning media, journalism, writers, and the filter bubble….and then I realized it was time for an open-letter and thought this was a worthwhile place to start a much needed discussion about affiliate advertising, Pulitzer Prize winners, the journalism and blogging industries, how E.B. White started all of this and how Richard Feynman can end it.
Describing how affiliate ads affect writers is necessary given that the reason Popova told me she uses the “ad-free” pitch is that she claims her affiliate advertising links are not ads. Popova uses Amazon’s Affiliate links program - which means if I click a book or product link from her site and buy that book, and another book, and a movie, diapers, a shirt, and anything else - she receives up to 10% of my entire shopping cart’s value from that trip to Amazon…and she also gets to see what I purchased. Given the non-Silicon Valley nature of her site, I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that maybe she didn’t realize that these are a form of advertising (even though the first feature in bold on the Amazon Affiliates page is “Advertising,” and in every description of the service, Amazon calls the revenue made by partner websites “advertising fees.”).
Maria informed me she doesn’t define the links in her articles as ads because they are all “books that I would feature anyhow” and that her “different intention” means that she is not seeking to sell the books. I pointed out that in Google’s quest to organize the world’s information, there are tens of millions of times per day where the top Google result is also the top Ad that they display, but in these cases they don’t say “this is the one we were going to show you anyway” and hide the fact that it is an ad. Advertising is a business process defined by the way money changes hands - intent does not play a part in the definition. Roger Federer probably already likes Rolexes, but as soon as they pay him millions of dollars, he is considered to be advertising their product. Aside from the fact that businesses don’t get to create their own definition of advertising, Maria’s claim that they were all books she would feature anyhow was contradictory to the statement she wrote in the same email thread, which proves that her advertisements do in fact change what books she offers to users:
“a major reason I use Amazon is…data they give me - it tells me what other books Brain Pickings readers are buying on Amazon…I’d say I’ve found at least a quarter of the books I myself have purchased and read over the past few years through Brain Pickings readers that way.”
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Harrison Salisbury was the subject of an E.B. White letter featured by Maria last Spring that spawned our correspondence. In 1975, Xerox offered Salisbury $55,000 to write an article in Esquire magazine. White expresses his concern about the erosion of press if writers start accepting money from advertisers this way. In her commentary, Popova noted that she “has been publishing an ad-free curiosity catalog supported by reader donations for the past seven years.” Reading the article I could only think what reader response would be if the article concluded with “Disclaimer: I make money each time you click a link in my articles and buy a book.”
There are important differences that make affiliate ads more subversive than the Xerox-Esquire scenario. The Affiliate form of advertising invites more detriment to quality writing because it actually requires an author to interrupt the reader with a link and it incentivizes authors to change their tone such that they convince the reader to go all the way through with the purchase (which is necessary for them to receive their kickback). At least in the golden days of tainted journalism the author was paid upfront, and the ad was on the opposite page, not in the article itself, so they were still incentivized to write a quality article about anything they wanted - health, art, sports - that people thought was interesting enough to read, while hoping that wandering eyes would bring eyeballs to the Xerox Ad on the facing page. I’m not saying this offer was a good thing, simply noting that if Brain Pickings is building a brand based on anti-ad sentiments, it might be fair to explain how the revenue generating practices of the site work. The Guardian article described the site as an “antidote to Google” - ironic given the identical business models of Brain Pickings and Google, both of which make money as users click links in the normal course of using each site…the difference being that Google makes it known which links are ads.
What kind of user and ad numbers are we talking about? Where do the numbers in the title come from? The Guardian author asked Popova why she didn’t let advertisers onto her site even though it draws 1.2M readers and 3M page views per month. Not acknowledging the affiliate ads, Maria referenced a 1923 letter to a newspaper editor about integrity in writing, and responded by saying “It doesn’t put the reader’s best interests first…I don’t believe in this model.” Working out the math, and knowing how display advertisements work (those are the ones on the sides and at the top of many websites - including the websites of The Atlantic and NY Times, where Popova is a regular contributor) it turns out Popova would most likely lose money if she switched from her current affiliate ad model to the display ad model that The Guardian writer refers to. Assume that Popova used an ad network like Google Adwords which is the typical way websites make money on display ads. The average click value of display ads in the book industry is typically worth less than affiliate ads - and if Popova added display ads to her site, it would take readers off of the page prematurely, preventing them from clicking the in-article affiliate ads. Reducing the number of conversions through the more lucrative affiliate funnel is why Brain Pickings would likely lose money if they switched to a display ad model from the current affiliate ad model, and why the response to The Guardian’s question could have been “there are no display ads because the site makes more money off of affiliate ads.”
Let’s work with The Guardian’s quote of 3M page views, and the knowledge Brain Pickings has been around for 8 years. An index of Brain Pickings showed approximately 5-6 Amazon ads per article, and there are typically 3 articles published per day. Most pages have more than one article, but for the most conservative number of ad impressions let’s assume one article per page, yielding 6 ads per page. At 3M page views per month, this is about 18M affiliate ads served per month, or 216M impressions per year. Placing the average book that Brain Pickings links to at $17-$20 and accounting for a few extra bucks for the other items that users are clearly placing in their cart, the assumption is that the average Amazon purchase is $20-$25, of which Popova likely gets between 7-10%. Let’s use this to make the assumption that $2 is the amount Brain Pickings makes on each Amazon customer originating from her site. With 216M impressions, a 0.1% conversion rate on those ads at $2 per conversion would bring in $432,000 per year. Looking from another direction - with 1.2M monthly followers, if 10% buy something from Amazon each year, we’re at 120k users bringing in $2 of revenue each, or $240,000. Over 8 years, ad revenue of $200k-$400k would total $1.6M-$3.2M, but assuming it took 4 or 5 years to get the user base ramped up to significant numbers, maybe the total is half that amount, on the order of $1M. As for donation numbers, Maria has said her biggest donors are her email followers - a newsletter with over 180,000 users. Only looking at this group, ignoring the site visitors, if 5% of the newsletter readers donate $10 per year, it’s $90k in donations. If 10% are donating, it’s $180k, or if they’re donating more on average, the guesses change in different ways - in a recent NY Times article a reader was quoted who gives $25 per month ($300 per year), saying that it was like “donating to a public radio station” to her. If donations have been around $50k-$100k for 8 years, are total donation revenues upwards of $500k? Retrospective numbers are difficult given unknown growth to the current reader following of over 1.2M, but looking out 5 or 10 years, if donation and ad revenues are in the $200k-$500k range, then the total dollars changing hands will certainly reach seven figures if it hasn’t already.
Certainly, there are too many variations in website user bases and site numbers to be accurate about projections of this sort, so the main point of the mathematical exercise isn’t really how much, it’s why is something being hidden? Before spending any more time tweaking which numbers are right or wrong, the timely incorporation last Spring may be more telling than any calculations. Within a month after being asked whether she was being honest to users about the financials of her site, a company called Brain Pickings, LLC was established in New York. In a 2010 article, Popova said Brain Pickings was not-for-profit…not that this would be much better - a one person not-for-profit (different in some states than a non-profit), doing no charitable work that makes money from ads and donations can pay all revenue out in salaries to its single employee, maybe even landing better tax considerations. After our email exchange, Maria changed the wording on her site to “banner-free” for 6 weeks - almost exactly covering the span of time from the last email to me until the end of the LLC formation. If only because I never heard back from her again, it appears a very real possibility that “banner-free” was a great way to quell her one inquisitive user for long enough to hide the financials of the site. Were you ever a non-profit? Would you be willing to include an About section or Terms of Service on your site that shows what kind of organization it is? If there was a change in business formation last year, none of your users were notified - would you tell them if their donations were now to a for-profit LLC if that is the case? For the record, this could be a different company - I would simply be very surprised if there is another Brain Pickings in New York City, and without any legal terms of service or information posted about the entity behind the site, this is an open question.
In the mass of money changing hands around the world each day, as long as I’m not being duped by the donation plea, why do I feel like it’s worth bringing up? Besides potentially being able to save a few thousand people hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next few years, my mind was altered significantly after reading the quote from Princeton professor and State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter who, in the aforementioned NY Times article, was the one who said she gives $300 per year because it was like donating to a public radio station. This made me wonder which non-profit, which struggling writer, or which innovative startup would have received that $300 of consumer spending money if Brain Pickings readers knew that the site was not funded solely of off their donations? Is there a real public radio station or library that is out $500,000 over the last few years from book lovers? Would charity: water receive $500k more in donations over the next 5 years? There is a disturbing apathy in our culture, especially among the young and tech-savvy, to ignore the economic interconnectedness of things that actually affect them negatively. Hearing about a fraudulent spammer halfway around the world who conned a neighbor into giving up bank account information, a young person trying to build the next big thing in his garage would probably scoff at the non-tech-savvy for getting what they deserve, and laugh at the simple method of the spam-attack used by the scammer. Rarely is there a realization that every time one million dollars is sucked out of the consumer spending pot fraudulently, that’s one million dollars that is now not available in the market for their fledgling startup, their non-profit, or their venture. How many of Brain Pickings’ readers are writers, designers, or freelancers deserving of those dollars?
The average reader of Brain Pickings appears to be in the design/history/bookworm demographic (not exclusively, this is a very superficial stab at the median user), likely in the mid to upper income range, including types who donate to public radio stations (she touts Josh Groban and Drew Carey as users), but also just not quite as tech savvy as your regular Reddit reader who would sniff out an affiliate ad right away and laugh at the Donation plea. Maria knows that her readers are unaware of the affiliate ads - in her emails with me she was impressed that I was “aware enough to bring up these issues.” And in the 6 week stint where she did take down “ad-free,” she told me it was because “it seems to matter to you and it doesn’t matter to me in the least.” Then why did ad-free go back up 2 months later? It would be really disappointing if your donation numbers dropped during those two months, proving that ad-free did make a difference and driving you to change it back, because then you would have proof that the deception was affecting your bottom-line, yet you would still be doing it anyway. Since re-posting “ad-free,” Popova has also added the ability to sign up for a subscription of recurring donations - an interesting feature for an incorporated LLC.
I imagine some readers of Brain Pickings are loyal enough that they’d give money even if they knew there were ads, but it sure seems like they should have all the information at hand to make their own choice. An index of Brain Pickings shows that Richard Feynman is one of the most cited topics. Recently, Popova wrote how much she admired a graduation address he gave in 1974, where he was talking to scientists about the duty they have to make sure to portray things correctly to the layperson so as not to misrepresent something that the layperson may not understand. Feynman said:
“…details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong…you should explain to the layman what you’re doing — and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision…I have just one wish for you — the good luck to be somewhere where you are free to maintain the kind of integrity I have described, and where you do not feel forced by a need to maintain your position in the organization, or financial support, or so on, to lose your integrity. May you have that freedom.”
Maria, there are many questions your readers could ask and requests they could make at this point - many of which may even be avoidable with legal or semantic loopholes, so the simplest summary question I can think to ask is: What do you think Richard Feynman would do in your situation?
-T.B.
Contact: onads.blog@gmail.com
Loose Thoughts on Youth and Age
By: George Packer
New Yorker, February 8, 2013
Something unusual stopped me in these sentences from a Times article about a state-by-state study of flaws in the American electoral system: “A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor Gerken’s 2009 book, ‘The Democracy Index,’ was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said. ‘Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings,’ Professor Gerken said. ‘But it also produces professional peer pressure.’”
It almost took my breath away: Professor Heather Gerken, who is in her early forties, felt free to tell a reporter that Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, not to mention tongue rings, are horrible. Gerken broke one of the unwritten rules of being middle-aged: don’t go after the young and what they love. Not in print, anyway. Don’t open yourself up to the charge of curmudgeonliness, because the inevitable retort—“You just don’t get it, Professor! You sound like your parents!”—is probably accurate, certainly unanswerable, and absolutely devastating. Few things in America are less forgivable than getting older.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. American culture belongs to the young, and, for that reason, it isn’t really mine any more. My favorite album of 2012 was Neil Young’s “Psychedelic Pill,” featuring a twenty-seven-minute meditation, “Driftin’ Back,” about the deterioration of musical sound due to digital technology. Yet, I still live in the culture, experience it, react to it. For example, during the Super Bowl halftime show a friend and I exchanged e-mails (not texts, though they’ve been making serious inroads on my phone) about Beyoncé’s performance. We agreed that it left us a bit cold—a highly polished combination of corporate marketing and pole dancing. But I instinctively sensed the danger in going public with this view, on, say, my Twitter feed (if I had one). And sure enough, as the Twitterverse started weighing in, the response to Bey was overwhelmingly positive (as it was on this Web site). And now that I’ve said it here, I await my comeuppance.
When I was sixteen, a poet friend of my parents’ mockingly quoted a few lines from “Rainy Day Women” to establish the absurdity of my claim that Dylan was one of the greatest poets of our time. Temporarily stuck on the merits, I came back with the harshest answer I could think of—some version of “You’re too old to understand.” But what I remember now is my anger, and, even more, my hurt: here was someone I respected, someone who knew so much more than I did (he was also a former Jesuit priest, at least doubling his air of authority and erudition), and he was flicking away something that I loved to the point of fevered obsession. Beneath the contempt of the young for the contempt of the not-young is a deeper outrage at being chronically misunderstood and dismissed, as well as an even deeper worry that the not-young might be right.
Back then, that poet-priest seemed to hold all the cards. Now it’s the other way around: not liking certain new things sometimes feels like a testament to nothing but not being new. And, after all, the too-old retort can be richly justified. Years ago, a cover article in the Times Magazine, “The Triumph of the Prime-Time Novel,” hailed shows like “E.R.” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” as the most interesting literature of the age. The article struck me as a middle-aged book reviewer’s surrender to the cult of the young, the journalistic equivalent of a fifty-year-old man growing a ponytail. A widespread side effect of the dominant youth culture is older people insisting on loving it and then turning their scorn on their skeptical peers.
In 1995, I wasn’t prepared to let network TV displace the novel without a fight. But that article turned out to be prescient. Within a few years, “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” and other series had definitively staked television’s claim to narrative greatness. I sometimes think of that when I catch myself disliking the music at the gym. But then I have another thought: This music is really bad.
There are reasons why older is not necessarily wiser. You’re never more open to new experience than when you’re twenty. After that, the need to make money, the fear of having no work, the demands of children, the sense that the world is moving in strange new directions, the appearance of unfamiliar forms of expression that inevitably seem less wonderful than the ones that changed your life when you were twenty cause the aperture to slowly narrow.
I can feel it happening in the way I absorb the news. In my twenties, I devoured the newspaper with the fearless zest of moral outrage. No atrocity story was too horrible for me to revel in every last detail—in some way, none of it was quite real. But, over time, indignation gave way to fear. Nothing makes the news more real than having children—it’s as if you lose a layer of skin, and even minor abrasions with the world get infected. On some days, reading the paper is almost unbearable. The Newtown killings hit me in a deeper place than all the wars and genocides of the past few decades. There were certain articles I couldn’t finish, even though I was unable to think of anything else.
This is selfishness—parents are at once the least and most selfish people on earth—and it feels like another way of pulling back from the world. I have less time and attention than I used to for faraway stories that don’t touch me and my family. (I once despised people who admitted that.) I am a less curious, less capable consumer of news than I was ten or twenty years ago, when the stakes were lower.
One of the biggest problems with getting older, other than the place where it’s headed, is a massive projection about the state of the world: by fifty, the obvious fact of your own decline is easily mistaken for an intimation of the world’s. And, since there’s never a shortage of evidence that things are, indeed, worse than they used to be, it’s incredibly satisfying to indulge the idea, and easy to confuse it with a veteran’s seasoned judgment. That’s the impulse you have to resist if you want to retain your credibility while you lose other features.
Some things are worse than they used to be—a lot of them, in fact, but I’ll spare my readers the list, for now. Pointing this out shouldn’t make you a crank. Some judgments need time and a basis for comparison. Age can make things clearer. On the other hand, I’m well aware that Beyoncé might not have been any worse, and may even have been better, than Ella Fitzgerald, Carol Channing, and Al Hirt, in 1972; or Chubby Checker, the Rockettes, and eighty-eight grand pianos, in 1988; or Diana Ross, in 1996. I’d have to see the footage.
