Leah Libresco's Blog, page 24

A Good Marriage Isn’t A Mutual Admiration Society

In the middle of a column on married couples ineptly supporting single friends, Sara Eckel had a weird model of what happy and healthy relationships look like: Couples are weird. Relationships — happy ones, anyway — put you a strange bubble, a closed loop of positive reinforcement. “I love you!” “I love you, too!” “You’re [Read More...]

Workplaces Make Terrible Monasteries

I’m a little late to the discussion of Amazon’s treatment of its white collar workers (I’ve been on vacation in CA), but I really liked Matthew Schmitz’s take on the company at First Things. It sounds like Amazon works really hard to filter its employees for people who are willing to give most of their life [Read More...]

Donating to Women Prisoners Denied Medical Supplies

Prisons price tampons and pads out of the range of what some women prisoners can afford.  Forcing indigent prisoners to bleed into their clothes can pose health/sanitary problems, but, even if it were no problem, medically, it would still be a terrible situation to force prisoners into simply because it is humiliating. And, as far [Read More...]

Eve Tushnet’s Great New Novel On Forgiveness And Addiction

Eve Tushnet, the author of Gay and Catholic, just released her second book!  Amends is a novel about addiction and forgiveness (and how both aren’t things you can finish dealing with).  I just finished it myself, and I can’t wait to be back in D.C. to convene my friends to talk about it (and read aloud [Read More...]

7QT: Innovation in Gross Robots and Stock Photos

— 1 — If folks don’t want to wait til next year to play in another Ideological Turing Test, one of the posters on LessWrong is running one on vegitarianism. Format is a little different — you’re asked to rate your confidence using numbers, rather than the categorical variables I usually use. Let me know [Read More...]

7QT: The Odder Errors of Computers and Humans

— 1 — My family tends to share thoughts on the New Yorker caption contest every week, over email, when the magazine arrives (no wins yet!). But I didn’t know that our entries might be being winnowed out by a computer.  BloombergBusiness has a nice feature on the Microsoft team working with the New Yorker cartoon editor to [Read More...]

Is “Kindness-Adjacent” A Useful Category?

Catherine Addington wrote a great piece on police brutality for AmCon (that happened to riff on one of my posts about unadvisable, rape-adjacent sex): Bland’s death remains under investigation, but the dashboard camera footage of her interaction with Encinia shows the escalation of a warning for the failure to signal into the forceful detention of an epileptic woman. Surprisingly, much of what [Read More...]

Positive Parenting and Pick Up Artistry

Libby Anne of the Patheos Atheist channel is one of my favorite people to read on parenting, and I really enjoyed her recent post “When Positive Parenting Doesn’t ‘Work’”  I’m pulling a longer quote and I still feel bad about chopping up her story, so just pop over and read the whole thing. Simply put, here is [Read More...]

The Exuberance of Quotidian Goodness

In Sunday’s Book Review, the NYT asked authors whether virtuous characters can ever be interesting. The first author came down firmly on the side of the villains, saying, “No one has ever preferred Amelia to Becky in “Vanity Fair,” or Melanie to Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind.”  But Alice Gregory, the second writer, said you can’t do [Read More...]

Seeing the World Through Tammet’s Joy

Sometimes, when I have a book out from the library, I wind up buying it, and Daniel Tammet’s Thinking in Numbers: On Life, Learning, Love, and Math is one that I ordered before I had finished reading it.  Tammet is on the autism spectrum, and his book’s title pays homage to Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures, and its [Read More...]