I wrote recently about Sweden recognizing Palestine and the UK parliament voting to urge the government to do so. This was noteworthy in that they were the first western European countries to take this action. But as this map shows how, year by year, other countries around the world have recognized it long before Europe got around to doing this. The isolation of the west on this issue becomes pretty glaring.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Stephen Colbert discusses the difficulty that the GOP has in dealing with rapidly shifting opinion, both public and legal, on gay rights and predicts the shape of the coming gay civil war in the US.
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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.
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Yesterday was a debate between Florida governor Rick Scott and his challenger Charlie Crist. It got off to the weirdest start as you can see from the video, where Scott initially refused to come out, leaving his challenger alone on the stage for about 10 minutes.
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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.
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Now that the media have a done a bang-up job of scaring the bejeesus out of everyone about the possibility of contracting Ebola, one can expect some foolish people to realize how easy it is to cause panic and take advantage of it to cause mischief.
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To complement my series of posts on facing death, here is surgeon Atul Gawande talking with Jon Stewart about his new book Being Mortal about how to talk and deal with end-of-life issues.
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