Micro-aggressions

There is a new film out with the title Dear White People that was triggered by the series of photographs and the video I, Too, Am Harvard that had students of color at that university talk about the ‘micro-aggressions’ that they experience in an environment that is mostly white. Micro-aggression is the term given to often unthinking actions and statements based on ignorance, stereotypes, and prejudices. This has spawned similar efforts at other universities.
[Read more…]

How the watermelon cartoon appeared

Remember the mini-controversy over the watermelon toothpaste editorial page cartoon that appeared in the Boston Herald? Observers, including me, wondered how no one along the editorial chain flagged the problem before the paper went to print. The paper’s editorial page editor Rachelle Cohen explains how the editorial oversight process works and why it failed in this case.
[Read more…]

New documentary on Snowden released

Award-winning documentarian Laura Poitras has just released her new film Citizenfour about Edward Snowden. (The title of the film is taken from one of the aliases he used in his initial communications with her.) Spencer Ackerman provides a review of the film while George Packer provides a lengthy profile of the notoriously publicity-shy Poitras and also discusses the film which he saw in Berlin before its release.
[Read more…]

Gamergate

As one who is not a fan of video games (but have played a few, badly, with my daughters) I initially avoided stories about the so-called ‘Gamergate’, partly because I thought it dealt with some inside-baseball stuff about video games and the community of players that I was not particularly interested in and partly because I have grown weary of issues that have the suffix ‘gate’ added to them, which nowadays almost always signifies some trivial issue that is being artificially inflated in importance.
[Read more…]

Freezing eggs to delay having children

The period in their twenties and thirties is where men and women establish their career paths and this often requires hard work and long hours. But women have to negotiate an especially tricky path because this is also the peak childbearing years and they have to face hard choices about what to do. Should they short-change their careers to better care for their children? Keep on the career path and forego having children or feel guilty about leaving the care of their children in the hands of others? Try to do both and end up exhausted and feeling a failure at both? Even with the most supportive partner, women still bear the brunt of this problem.
[Read more…]

Protons are forever?

The proton has never been observed to decay into other particles. So it is possible that it is an absolutely stable particle and will never decay. However, there are some grand unified theories that argue that the proton does decay and physicists have been carrying out experiments to detect them decaying. The catch is that these theories predict an extremely long lifetime for the proton, greater that 1031 years! How does one do such an experiment?
[Read more…]