Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 867
February 11, 2016
Yes, and … that joke is sexist: Improv troupes, unchecked creepiness and the toll that being “cool with it” takes
So where are the funny women? That’s an easy question to answer today--they’re everywhere, they’re headlining shows like "Inside Amy Schumer" and starring in sitcoms like "Broad City" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and running publications like The Toast. They’re even, finally, hosting late-night talk shows after years of paying their dues for male hosts (even if, somehow, the Muppet universe broke that barrier before the real world did). But not that long ago--by which I mean when I was in college, an eternity in Internet time but in reality about a decade ago--this was still a controversial question. Luminaries like Christopher Hitchens were giving pompous “scientific” explanations for why women just aren’t funny. Hell, in the long ago days of 2013 you had Norm MacDonald and Colin Quinn casually riffing on Sarah Silverman as the singular ur-female comic and all other women in comedy as imitations of her. Even though women have been behind some of the biggest comedy hits in history--going as far back, at least, as Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball in the Golden Age of TV--this question of “why aren’t women funny” is a persistent, undying meme. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s the fault of people like Jerry Seinfeld who talk about comedy and “safe spaces” to be opposed concepts--the obnoxious are misguided. Comedy is about safe spaces, it depends on safe spaces, which is exactly why comics have an unwritten code about treating workshopping material in small venues as a “safe space” and see taking that material out of context for a YouTube audience as a betrayal. There’s the saying that “comedy is tragedy plus time,” but that’s oversimplifying it--I’ve laughed about tragedies that happened to me just yesterday and gotten deeply pissed off at insensitive, shitty remarks about stuff that happened decades ago. What it really is is “comedy is tragedy plus safety.” That safety can be time, or distance, or being in the right venue with the right people--but a big part of the release of laughter comes from the feeling of relief at a shared perspective, at being able to reveal something about yourself or your world that’s deeply fucked up to people who will agree with you that it’s fucked up rather than use it against you. It has to do with who feels safe. I remember “RapeJokeGate” a few years ago with Daniel Tosh becoming the cause célèbre for the right to joke about sexual assault and whether rape jokes are ever funny, the endlessly repeated talking point about why jokes about violent and gruesome murder are OK but jokes about a different kind of violence aren’t. To me, it boils down to something simple--the perception (not the reality, but the perception) of rape in our society is asymmetrical. It’s something we think of as something men do to women. For a guy, rape jokes are about the fear of being accused of rape or thought of as a rapist, not about being raped. This is what I had buzzing through my mind when reading social media comments about the #MadFunnyWomen hashtag last week. Chicago, the nation’s improv comedy capital, has been rocked by women in the comedy scene coming out and saying that a ton of what’s been happening in said scene is, in fact, not very funny. That “joking” sexual harassment shades into real sexual harassment, that women are treated as props and accessories, that a lot of women get emotionally ground down by the experience and burn out before they ever make it professionally. I am not (despite still having “comedian” in my Twitter bio) a comic by trade. I haven’t performed stand-up or improv for a long time. I’ve never done it at the level of the #MadFunnyWomen at UCB or Second City, two institutions that feed the high-profile sketch comedies we watch on TV, from "Saturday Night Live" to "Broad City." But for a couple years when I lived in D.C. improv was a huge part of my life. It was the anchor of my social network and it was what I spent most of my spare time doing. It played a huge role in shaping my personality and my willingness to put myself out there publicly. I’ve had former troupe mates write about me back when I was on TV. And, well, the #MadFunnyWomen are right. Even at the best of times, in the best of situations, shit is fucked up. Improv is supposed to be, after all, the ultimate safe space, a judgment-free zone. It is, after all, incredibly difficult to ask people to go up in front of an audience without a script, reveal the unrehearsed thoughts that are passing through their minds at that moment, and do it in a way that people will find amusing. The “rules” of improvisation that have been set down over time involve constant affirmation--improvisation can only work if everyone says “Yes, and” to each other’s ideas rather than shutting them down. It’s fun. It’s therapeutic. And among performers who really trust and understand each other it’s transcendent. But it’s also a path that leads into some predictable ruts. One of which is that men who are in scenes with women--and I should own up to being a serious repeat offender when I was onstage--will default to playing “creepy pervert hitting on unwilling target” with depressing regularity. Why not? It’s an easy way to grab an audience’s attention and it’s an easy laugh. It’s an easy boundary to transgress, and--most important--it’s the kind of self-deprecating humor male comics love because it’s confronting a negative experience in a safe space. It’s taking something guys are afraid of being--repulsive, unwanted, gross--and taking power over it, embodying the negative image in order to show it has no power over you. The downside, of course, is that to do that you have to make women into a prop for your own empowerment. Which, in turn, is a trope that’s so well worn it’s spawned an entire genre of genres (from Apatow-style touching dramedies to Andrew Dice Clay-style nihilistic wallowing). Which, at best, gives the women you work with in scenes a boring, crappy role to play and, at worst, smashes their safe space to smithereens for the sake of yours. Because, after all, women’s issue with dark sexual shit isn’t being thought of as creepy or perverted--it’s being afraid of actually being assaulted. The “joke”--the catharsis, the feeling of relief--when dudes joke about rape is, or at least is supposed to be, from that feeling of safety: ”I wouldn’t actually do this, I think this is as horrible as you do, I’m satirizing how awful people like this are by embodying one of them.” The reality is that you may know or believe that about yourself, but women in your life have no reason to take your word for it. The reality is that creepy shit happens to women in the comedy scene all the time--that not only are survivors of sexual assault guaranteed to be in the audience of your shows, as people pointed out during the Daniel Tosh controversy, but they probably exist among your colleagues as well. When Beth Stelling came out and said she’d been in a physically and sexually abusive relationship it was a big damn deal because she was breaking an old, unwritten rule in comedy, that women who work in comedy have to be “cool with it,” that they have to make the guys they work with feel comfortable by not dragging in that scary, heavy shit about sexism and abuse into their world, that they have to preserve the unspoken consensus that we’re all good people here and we can all joke about rape and abuse because we’re all too decent to ever actually do anything like that, because things like that only happen to other people. In other words, she breached what has, historically, been a safe space for male comedians. It’s been gratifying to see how well the comedy world of 2016 has handled Stelling opening up about her experience. It doesn’t always turn out so well. One of the hardest things I ever had to hear was a Cleveland-area actress talking about leaving stand-up because she spoke up about being assaulted by a fellow comic and, as a result, got frozen out by her community--not as an act of open retaliation or a show of allegiance to her assailant but just because people weren’t “comfortable” booking her anymore. I never directly dealt with that situation in my time doing comedy. I did hear the behind-the-scenes whispers about which girls were “cool” and which ones less “cool” and therefore less fun to work with--and heard women I knew echo those assessments, sometimes bitterly dissecting whether their mishandling of a specific incident was what got them on the “uncool” list and made them less of a hot commodity than some other woman. I got to observe women actually being a majority among entry-level students in improv classes and the ratio slowly-but-surely shift as people worked their way up until the “advanced” troupes that were performing regularly were mostly guys--and, among the minority of women who remained, a few women getting the lion’s share of the guest spots. And, in an incident I remember vividly, a friend of mine burst into tears and stormed out in the middle of an improv class. Nothing about the scene was overtly sexual or sexist--but it did involve an escalating series of put-downs and insults about our characters blaming each other for being comically useless at their jobs. She came back after just a few seconds. She apologized repeatedly and fervently for being disruptive. She went on to a successful career doing improv onstage--longer than mine was. But I still remember her terse explanation for why she suddenly couldn’t handle that scene anymore: “It just reminded me too strongly of how people had treated me at work that day.” Yes, guys get put down in the workplace too. No, being patronized and underestimated and systematically having credit stolen isn’t something that only happens to women--and yes, when it does, laughing about it is a way to cope with it. But the ability to laugh about it, to make it funny, the difference between genuinely making humor out of it and just bullying someone over it--that requires a certain degree of awareness and empathy, of getting why some jokes might strike a rawer nerve for one person than another. Awareness that I remember I didn’t have at that time--I remember, in fact, wondering when my friend had suddenly become so “fragile”--and that I wouldn’t really have until many long talks over many years about casual sexism in the workplace. I don’t want to leave a purely negative impression. Most of the women I met doing improv loved it--in fact the class instructor who convinced me to stick with it by telling me how it changed her life was a woman. Nor is it just an issue of gender. I can speak to the deflation of tension in a room--the palpable sense of relief--when I’m the first one to tell a joke about being Asian to a group of mostly white people. Just like Key and Peele clearly know the feeling of putting everyone in the improv troupe at ease that they’re cool with “black” jokes. I know the complicated double-consciousness feeling of putting on an accent and obsessing over how authentic I’m really being, if my sense of “how Chinese people talk” is influenced more by childhood or Hollywood, and if I’m subverting racism or just buying acceptance by giving people permission to be racist. It’s hard. It’s not impossibly hard. It is, indeed, possible to negotiate all of that and still be a damn funny comedian. People are doing it on TV right now. But it takes up extra brain cycles to deal with all that--to have to deal with a more complex idea of responsibility and safety than your colleagues seem to worry about. It’s an extra burden to have to deal with the ugly reality of gender, or race, or class in a much more personal way than people who, from their safe vantage point, can treat those issues as abstract. It’s work--emotional labor--that, until recently, has been invisibly done by everyone else for the sake of the “default” “normal” people in the community, the ones you can’t piss off or make uncomfortable lest you stop getting called back for auditions. It’s the active effort required to maintain a safe space--for straight white men. All “p.c. culture” really asks is acknowledgment that this work is hard. Comedy is hard. Creating the feeling of safety that allows barriers to come down enough to look at ugly truths without flinching and accept them, laugh at them, rather than be repulsed by them--that’s hard work. And “political correctness”--asking guys to be the ones uncomfortable sometimes about “bringing up gender issues,” asking white people to be the ones uncomfortable about “bringing up race”--is just about spreading that burden a little more evenly.
Is John Kasich a closet vegan? Or just a drug fiend? Troubling questions emerge about the GOP’s New Age alterna-Trump
Have you heard that John Kasich may be a vegan? Now, I don’t know whether it’s true that the Republican Party’s newest and strangest alterna-Trump, the budget-slashing, hug-dispensing Ohio governor who has called himself “the prince of light and hope,” refuses to consume any animal products. The search term “John Kasich vegan” returns no solid hits, except this moving but inconclusive poem called “Presidential Candidate John Kasich,” written by someone called Spock the Vegan. (“John Kasich served 9 terms in the U.S. House of representatives. / When it comes to fixing problems, he thinks he’s God’s preventative.”) We’re gonna get that term trending upward starting now, am I right? Anyway, I’m just reporting on a rumor someone was spreading around in New Hampshire. OK, the person spreading the rumor was me, and the only reason I can’t be sure it’s false is that I haven’t asked. Kasich campaign refuses to address vegan rumor! Anyway, politicians lie about everything. Obama denies he’s a Muslim and Hillary Clinton denies that she intentionally let those people die in Benghazi because … well, I’m not sure why she did that. Something something something Muslims. So when you see Kasich — whose tenure as the current leader in the GOP’s “establishment lane” is likely to be exceedingly brief — claim to love pork products of all kinds and choke down a massive slab of South Carolina BBQ ribs, ask yourself this question: How can you be sure it’s not tempeh? Cleverly molded tempeh, artfully smeared with delicious Carolina mustard sauce? (Tempeh, by the way, is a meat impostor made from fermented soybeans and traditional to Indonesia, which is — you guessed it — a Muslim country.) Of course, if it’s conceivable that Kasich is a closet “meat is murder” activist who has been consuming a cakelike soy product also eaten by radical Islamic terrorists (and if Kasich is known to be the subject of poetry by vegans from the planet Vulcan), it’s also possible that he has been ingesting massive doses of the obscure hallucinogenic drug known as ibogaine. Either hypothesis could explain Kasich’s insinuation that other Republican contenders worship the devil: “We have a lot of candidates who like the Prince of Darkness,” he told radio host Hugh Hewitt in January. Or the fact that during his recent New Hampshire appearances Kasich sometimes wandered off script into Fritjof Capra and/or Dr. Phil territory. From a town hall in Concord: “Sometimes there’s nobody around to sit and cry with us. Don’t we want that back in our country again? … Everybody on this earth is connected. We’re just a part of a mosaic in a moment of time.” Whoa. Next time steer away from the orange acid, John. But keep on truckin’! There’s absolutely no basis for any of this malicious rumor-mongering, you say? Well, you’re right. But let’s turn the question around so I’m right instead, shall we? No one in the current Republican field is more deserving than Kasich of the Ibogaine Effect, the notorious prank inflicted on Sen. Edmund Muskie by Hunter S. Thompson in 1972. Thompson “reported” that rumors had surfaced during the Wisconsin primary campaign suggesting that Muskie, then viewed as the Democratic front-runner, was being treated with “something very heavy” by a “mysterious Brazilian doctor.” (Along the way, Thompson also implied that former Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a speed freak, which almost no one noticed.) Thompson himself, of course, was the sole source of these rumors. Muskie’s consumption of ibogaine, a powerful psychoactive drug used in some African religious ceremonies, could explain the Maine senator’s lugubrious campaign demeanor, Thompson wrote: “It is entirely conceivable — given the known effects of Ibogaine — that Muskie’s brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at the crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely as he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs.” I’m supposed to pull a long face here and tell you that Muskie was a decent guy who didn’t deserve this treatment, and that’s true enough. It is not true, however, that Thompson’s ibogaine fiction destroyed the Muskie campaign. The fact that such a ludicrous story could take hold was a symptom of Muskie’s '72 implosion, not a cause. None of Thompson’s later explanations of what he thought he was doing entirely hold water, except that he never suspected anyone would believe it for more than five minutes. More than likely he was high on ibogaine and any number of other things himself, and just writing for his own amusement. To the extent that Thompson’s real target was the groupthink and collective idiocy of the political and media classes, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Ibogaine became a trending topic, in the social-media terms of 1972. Mainstream reporters began repeating and embellishing the rumors, while making no effort to source or verify them. (Yes, journalists were lazy even before Wikipedia!) George McGovern’s campaign staffers started dropping the reference in off-the-record conversations: “Hey, we hear Big Ed is doing some great drugs! Can you get us any, ha ha?” By the time Muskie gloomily withdrew from the race, his poor performance was widely understood to reflect an unspecified “personal problem.” If Thompson wanted to spread false rumors about Muskie’s drug habit because he thought Muskie was a terrible candidate, I want to spread false rumors about John Kasich’s hemp suits, seaweed-fiber shoes and slow-food diet because he’s a giant phony. He talks the tofu talk, but he does not walk the tofu walk. Kasich’s brief moment in the post-New Hampshire media spotlight is based on his self-presentation as the first New Age Republican, an “experiment in political positivity” amid a rising tide of GOP hate, as Laura Reston of the New Republic has put it. I don’t want to bash reporters like Reston (or Russ Choma and David Corn of Mother Jones) who have been seduced by Kasich’s folksy, reflective rhetoric or his admonition to Republican audiences that it’s time to talk “seriously about stuff.” I spent a week in New Hampshire myself, and felt profoundly grateful for the relative sanity of Jeb Bush, the scion of an evil dynasty who supports a long list of bad ideas. As those writers all get around to observing, once you get to questions of actual policy Kasich is a hardcore government-hating conservative. He wants us to slow down and cry together and hug our neighbors. He doesn’t want women to have access to abortion services or poor people to get help feeding their families or state workers to have collective-bargaining rights. He’s a cuddly version of Grover Norquist: Instead of drowning government in the bathtub, he wants to smother it with a fuzzy Night-Night Bear. Salon’s Amanda Marcotte wrote a comprehensive dissection of Kasich’s extensive record on Wednesday. As governor of Ohio and before that a nine-term congressman, he has spent many years fighting to cut taxes on the rich, slash social spending or devolve it to the states (which in many contexts is code for “fewer benefits for black people”), break the power of unions and restrict abortion rights. Yes, he’s also the only Republican candidate who has halfway made peace with Obamacare (by expanding Medicaid in Ohio), and he has said he views marriage equality as a settled issue. Those pragmatic decisions are probably more than enough to scuttle his chances in the GOP race. But I would urge South Carolinians and other patriotic Americans to look past those superficial issues, which are only the outermost signals of John Kasich’s deeper and more troubling struggle with meatless ham loaf (aka "Cheerful Log") and fishless tuna.
Capitalism is making us miserable: New global survey challenges the most sacred of free-market dogma
What is happiness? This might sound like a question you’d hear come out of Derek Zoolander’s mouth. But seriously, think about it. Is it a matter of perspective, your relationships, a neurological chemical imbalance, or career fulfillment? The more you try to pin down this elusive state of mind, the more achieving a measure for it seems out of reach. Take the movie Hector and the Search for Happiness (2014), in which Hector (Simon Pegg) travels the entire world trying to solve this philosophical quandary. By the time Hector sort of works it out, all we're really left with is 120 minutes of our lives we’ll never get back. Luckily, for the past 39 years, WIN/Gallup International (Worldwide Independent Network of Market Research) has been conducting a survey that claims to offer a quantitative measure of levels of happiness around the world. Last month it published its survey’s most recent findings taking into account “the outlook, expectations, views and beliefs of 66,040 people from 68 countries across the globe.” While the survey’s indices may be far from a definitive accounting, they certainly offer some interesting insights into capitalism’s relative effects on a population’s perception and enjoyment of their lives. Participating countries in the survey were divided into three tiers: Prosperous (the G7); Emerging (G20, excluding the original G7) and Aspiring (all other nations). One thing immediately apparent even to the most entry-level statistician is that net happiness is unrelated, or possibly inversely proportional, to a country’s wealth. While Prosperous nations experienced a 42% net happiness, Emerging and Aspiring nations soared past with 59% and 54% respectively. In capitalism's own bosom, the United States scored a meager net happiness rate of 43% in stark contrast to Mexico’s 76%. This difference is particularly noteworthy given the U.S. enjoys five times the per capita income of its southern neighbor. In fact, not one of the G7 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Great Britian, Italy, Japan and the United States) cracked the top 10 list for happiest countries, but did score two spots (Italy and France) for top 10 most unhappy nations. Although the Economic Optimism and Hope indices seem just as vague as the happiness metric, they were equally revealing. Maybe thanks to the fact mortgage bonds are yet to be invented in these countries, the top two spots for optimism were taken by Nigeria (61%) and Bangladesh (60%). No less noteworthy, although not surprising given recent history, was Greece topping the list of most economically pessimistic societies, followed closely by EU cohorts Austria (-49%), Italy (-47%) and Sweden (-47%). In general, Prosperous nations displayed the least amount of hope (6%) and economic optimism (-16%), while on the flipside, Emerging nations are both more hopeful (50%) and optimistic (36%). Demographics-wise, millennial pessimism might be exaggerated; young people are generally more optimistic (31%) than their calloused older brethren (13%). It’s unclear what all this information concretely tells us about the nature of a nation’s happiness in relation to its prosperity and international economic standing. One could hypothesize that those societies less immersed in capital consumption generally seem to be more content. In other words, the less you have, the less you need to worry about. Another explanation could perhaps be that relative to Prosperous nations, the myriad of infrastructural and societal ills facing Emerging nations simply makes it a lot easier not to sweat the small stuff. (They call them first-world problems for a reason.) Poor decimated Iraq was ranked the unhappiest country in the world (-12%). By contrast, Colombia took the number-one spot with a whopping 85%. What accounts for Colombia's happiness is hard to say. Perhaps it’s the favorable climate and beautiful landscapes. It could also be the fact that after half a century of civil war, Colombia is finally about to enjoy a bit of peace. Taken all together, what does this survey tell us about the world? That the promise of prosperity under consumerist capitalism is one big fallacy? That living in a jungle-filled tropical climate is almost guaranteed to bring you bliss? An equitable economy means a more optimistic general populace? If anything, happiness is a relative combination of several of these factors. In any case, the significance of these findings should likely be taken with a healthy handful of salt. 
Too many Flints to count: America’s infrastructure is rotting — and poisoning our children
“I know if I was a parent up there, I would be beside myself if my kids’ health could be at risk,” said President Obama on a recent trip to Michigan. “Up there” was Flint, a rusting industrial city in the grip of a “water crisis” brought on by a government austerity scheme. To save a couple of million dollars, that city switched its source of water from Lake Huron to the Flint River, a long-time industrial dumping ground for the toxic industries that had once made their home along its banks. Now, the city is enveloped in a public health emergency, with elevated levels of lead in its water supply and in the blood of its children. The price tag for replacing the lead pipes that contaminated its drinking water, thanks to the corrosive toxins found in the Flint River, is now estimated at up to $1.5 billion. No one knows where that money will come from or when it will arrive. In the meantime, the cost to the children of Flint has been and will be incalculable. As little as a few specks of lead in the water children drink or in flakes of paint that come off the walls of old houses and are ingested can change the course of a life. The amount of lead dust that covers a thumbnail is enough to send a child into a coma or into convulsions leading to death. It takes less than a tenth of that amount to cause IQ loss, hearing loss, or behavioral problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the government agency responsible for tracking and protecting the nation’s health, says simply, “No safe blood lead level in children has been identified.” President Obama would have good reason to worry if his kids lived in Flint. But the city’s children are hardly the only ones threatened by this public health crisis. There’s a lead crisis for children in Baltimore, Maryland, Herculaneum, Missouri, Sebring, Ohio, and even the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., and that’s just to begin a list. State reports suggest, for instance, that "18 cities in Pennsylvania and 11 in New Jersey may have an even higher share of children with dangerously elevated levels of lead than does Flint." Today, scientists agree that there is no safe level of lead for children and at least half of American children have some of this neurotoxin in their blood. The CDC is especially concerned about the more than 500,000 American children who have substantial amounts of lead in their bodies. Over the past century, an untold number have had their IQs reduced, their school performances limited, their behaviors altered, and their neurological development undermined. From coast to coast, from the Sun Belt to the Rust Belt, children have been and continue to be imperiled by a century of industrial production, commercial gluttony, and abandonment by the local, state, and federal governments that should have protected them. Unlike in Flint, the “crisis” seldom comes to public attention. Two, Three... Many Flints In Flint, the origins of the current crisis lay in the history of auto giant General Motors (GM) and its rise in the middle decades of the twentieth century to the status of the world’s largest corporation. GM’s Buick plant alone once occupied “an area almost a mile and a half long and half a mile wide,” according to the Chicago Tribune, and several Chevrolet and otherGM plants literally covered the waterfront of “this automotive city.” Into the Flint River went the toxic wastes of factories large and small, which once supplied batteries, paints, solders, glass, fabrics, oils, lubricating fluids, and a multitude of other materials that made up the modern car. In these plants strung out along the banks of the Flint and Saginaw rivers and their detritus lay the origins of the present public health emergency. The crisis that attracted President Obama’s attention is certainly horrifying, but the children of Flint have been poisoned in one way or another for at least 80 years. Three generations of those children living around Chevrolet Avenue in the old industrial heart of the city experienced an environment filled with heavy metal toxins that cause neurological conditions in them and cardiovascular problems in adults. As Michael Moore documented in his film
Roger and Me
, GM abandoned Flint in a vain attempt to stave off financial disaster. Having sucked its people dry, the company ditched the city, leaving it to deal with a polluted hell without the means to do so. Like other industrial cities that have suffered this kind of abandonment, Flint’s population is majority African American and Latino, and has a disproportionate number of families living below the poverty line. Of its 100,000 residents, 65% are African American and Latino and 42% are mired in poverty. The president should be worried about Flint’s children and local, state, and federal authorities need to fix the pipes, sewers, and water supply of the city. Technically, this is a feasible, if expensive, proposition. It’s already clear, however, that the political will is just not there even for this one community. Gina McCarthy, the Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator, has refused to provide Flint’s residents with even a prospective timetable for replacing their pipes and making their water safe. There is, however, a far graver problem that is even less easy to fix: the mix of racism and corporate greed that have put lead and other pollutants into millions of homes in the United States. The scores of endangered kids in Flint are just the tip of a vast, toxic iceberg. Even Baltimore, which first identified its lead poisoning epidemic in the 1930s, still faces a crisis, especially in largely African American communities, when it comes to the lead paint in its older housing stock. Just this month, Maryland’s secretary of housing, community, and development, Kenneth C. Holt, dismissed the never-ending lead crisis in Baltimore by callously suggesting that it might all be a shuck. A mother, he said, might fake such poisoning by putting “a lead fishing weight in her child's mouth [and] then take the child in for testing.” Such a tactic, he indicated, without any kind of proof, was aimed at making landlords “liable for providing the child with [better] housing.” Unfortunately, the attitudes of Holt and Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan have proven all too typical of the ways in which America’s civic and state leaders have tended to ignore, dismiss, or simply deny the real suffering of children, especially those who are black and Latino, when it comes to lead and other toxic chemicals. There is, in fact, a grim broader history of lead poisoning in America. It was probably the most widely dispersed environmental toxin that affected children in this country. In part, this was because, for decades during the middle of the twentieth century, it was marketed as an essential ingredient in industrial society, something without which none of us could get along comfortably. Those toxic pipes in Flint are hardly the only, or even the primary, source of danger to children left over from that era. In the 1920s, tetraethyl lead was introduced as an additive for gasoline. It was lauded at the time as a "gift of God" by a representative of the Ethyl Corporation, a creation of GM, Standard Oil, and Dupont, the companies that invented, produced, and marketed the stuff. Despite warnings that this industrial toxin might pollute the planet, which it did, almost three-quarters of a century would pass before it was removed from gasoline in the United States. During that time, spewed out of the tailpipes of hundreds of millions of cars and trucks, it tainted the soil that children played in and was tracked onto floors that toddlers touched. Banned from use in the 1980s, it still lurks in the environment today. Meanwhile, homes across the country were tainted by lead in quite a different way. Lead carbonate, a white powder, was mixed with linseed oil to create the paint that was used in the nation’s homes, hospitals, schools, and other buildings until 1978. Though its power to harm and even kill children who sucked on lead-painted windowsills, toys, cribs, and woodwork had long been known, it was only in that year that the federal government banned its use in household paints. Hundreds of tons of the lead in paint that covered the walls of houses, apartment buildings, and workplaces across the United States remains in place almost four decades later, especially in poorer neighborhoods where millions of African American and Latino children currently live. Right now, most middle class white families feel relatively immune from the dangers of lead, although the gentrification of old neighborhoods and the renovation of old homes can still expose their children to dangerous levels of lead dust from the old paint on those walls. However, economically and politically vulnerable black and Hispanic children, many of whom inhabit dilapidated older housing, still suffer disproportionately from the devastating effects of the toxin. This is the meaning of institutional racism in action today. As with the water flowing into homes from the pipes of Flint’s water system, so the walls of its apartment complexes, not to mention those in poor neighborhoods of Detroit, Baltimore, Washington, and virtually every other older urban center in the country, continue to poison children exposed to lead-polluted dust, chips, soil, and air. Over the course of the past century, tens of millions of children have been poisoned by lead and millions more remain in danger of it today. Add to this the risks these same children face from industrial toxins like mercury, asbestos, and polychlorinated biphenyls (better known as PCBs) and you have an ongoing recipe for a Flint-like disaster but on a national scale. In truth, the United States has scores of “Flints” awaiting their moments. Think of them as ticking toxic time bombs -- just an austerity scheme or some official’s poor decision away from a public health disaster. Given this, it’s remarkable, even in the wake of Flint, how little attention or publicity such threats receive. Not surprisingly, then, there seems to be virtually no political will to ensure that future generations of children will not suffer the same fate as those in Flint. The Future of America’s Toxic Past A series of decisions by state and local officials turned Flint’s chronic post-industrial crisis into a total public health disaster. If clueless, corrupt, or heartless government officials get all the blame for this (and blame they do deserve), the larger point will unfortunately be missed -- that there are many post-industrial Flints, many other hidden tragedies affecting America’s children that await their moments in the news. Treat Flint as an anomaly and you condemn families nationwide to bear the damage to their children alone, abandoned by a society unwilling to invest in cleaning up a century of industrial pollution, or even to acknowledge the injustice involved. Flint may be years away from a solution to its current crisis, but in a few cities elsewhere in the country there is at least a modicum of hope when it comes to developing ways to begin to address this country’s poisonous past. In California, for example, 10 cities and counties, including San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Oakland, have successfully sued and won an initial judgment against three lead pigment manufacturers for $1.15 billion. That money will be invested in removing lead paint from the walls of homes in these cities. If this judgment is upheld on appeal, it would be an unprecedented and pathbreaking victory, since it would force a polluting industry to clean up the mess it created and from which it profited. There have been other partial victories, too. In Herculaneum, Missouri, for instance, where half the children within a mile of the nation’s largest lead smelter suffered lead poisoning, jurors returned a $320 million verdict against Fluor Corporation, one of the world’s largest construction and engineering firms. That verdict is also on appeal, while the company has moved its smelter to Peru where whole new populations are undoubtedly being poisoned. President Obama hit the nail on the head with his recent comments on Flint, but he also missed the larger point. There he was just a few dozen miles from that city’s damaged water system when he spoke in Detroit, another symbol of corporate abandonment with its own grim toxic legacy. Thousands of homes in the Motor City, the former capital of the auto industry, are still lead paint disaster areas. Perhaps it’s time to widen the canvas when it comes to the poisoning of America’s children and face the terrible human toll caused by “the American century.”
The Kochs’ plot against America: How the billionaire industrialists are systematically dismantling American democratic ideals
Gather round for the word of the day: metanarrative. Definitions vary but let’s say it’s one big narrative that connects the meaning of events to a belief thought to be an essential truth, the storytelling equivalent of the unified field theory in physics. Now use it to define what’s being done to America today — our Big Story. Journalist and activist Naomi Klein did just that a couple of weeks ago when she and I talked at Finger Lakes Community College in upstate New York about the Koch brothers’ resistance to the reality of climate change.
“…The Charles Koch metanarrative — and he’s said it explicitly — is that he is challenging collectivism, he is challenging the idea that when people get together they can do good,” she said. “And he is putting forward the worldview that we’re all very familiar with that if you free the individual to pursue their self-interest that will actually benefit the majority. So you need to attack everything that is collective, whether it’s labor rights or whether it’s public health care or whether it’s regulatory action. All of this falls under the metanarrative of an attack on collectivism.”In other words, Koch and his brother David and the extraordinary machine they have built in cahoots with fellow billionaires and others, have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions to get their way — “the great wealth grab” in the words of Richard Eskow — all part of one long story told in pursuit of a specific end: to make the needs of the very, very few our nation’s top priority and to thwart or destroy any group effort among the poor and middle class to do or say otherwise. The Kochs have spun their tale with a singular, laser-like focus, carefully taking their time to make sure they get it right. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, recently wrote in Politico Magazine that
“Charles Koch might claim that his entry into politics is new, but from its secrecy to its methods of courting donors and recruiting students, the blueprint for the vast and powerful Koch donor network that we see today was drafted four decades ago.”Mayer reviewed papers — including one written by Charles Koch himself — presented at a Koch-sponsored Center for Libertarian Studies conference in 1976 and concludes, “…It’s not hard to recognize the Koch political movement we see today—a vast and complex network of donors, think tanks and academic programs largely cloaked in secrecy and presented as philanthropy, leaving almost no money trail that the public can trace. And it’s these techniques Charles first championed decades ago that helped build his political faction—one so powerful that it turned fringe ideas William F. Buckley once dismissed as ‘Anarcho-Totalitarianism’ into a private political machine that grew to rival the Republican Party itself.” And so we see their creation of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council posing as a non-profit while entertaining state legislators and plying them with templates for laws that favor restrictions on voter eligibility, public sector unions and the minimum wage while supporting freedom for the gun lobby and deregulation. The Kochs shower cash on candidates and elected officials who do the bidding of the right, fund programs at historically black colleges and universities that preach free-market economics and deregulation, bankroll the Libre Initiative that hands out holiday turkeys and Easter baskets to Latino families while, in its own words, “informing the U.S. Hispanic community about the benefits of a constitutionally limited government, property rights, rule of law, sound money supply and free enterprise through a variety of community events, research and policy initiatives that protect our economic freedom.” As Naomi Klein said during our conversation, “The Koch brothers set out to change the values, to change the core ideas that people believed in. And there is no progressive equivalent of taking ideas seriously.” She then asked, “So what is the progressive metanarrative? Who funds it? Who is working on changing ideas that can say, ‘Actually, when we pool our resources, when we work together, we can do more and better than when we only act as individuals.’ I don’t think we value that.” In fact, there is a progressive metanarrative, one that needs to be valued and not obscured by arguments over who is or is not sufficiently progressive or who did what to whom and when. The metanarrative’s lead has been buried in divisiveness, by trolling from every side and by despicable, old-fashioned redbaiting. What’s more, goals and purposes have been diffused with a scattershot approach when we should be vectoring in on what really counts. The progressive metanarrative is the opposite of the fight against collectivism: it’s the struggle against inequality. The Harvard Gazette reports, “Though the wealthiest 20 percent earned nearly half of all wages in 2014, they have more than 80 percent of the wealth. The wealth of the poorest 20 percent, as measured by net worth, is actually negative. If they sell all they own, they’ll still be in debt.” Labor organizer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz tells the Gazette, “I think the galloping inequality in this country results from poor political choices. There was nothing inevitable, nothing global. We made a series of political choices… that set us on this path.” He continues, “Inequality, it’s not just about wealth, it’s about power. It isn’t just that somebody has some yachts, it’s the effect on democracy… I think we’re in a really scary place.” But it’s not a place from which escape is impossible. To make our metanarrative come true, we must embrace both community and government that effectively can protect and provide for all. In a 2014 article at the Ideas.TED website, philosopher T.M. Scanlon wrote,
“No one has reason to accept a scheme of cooperation that places their lives under the control of others, that deprives them of meaningful political participation, that deprives their children of the opportunity to qualify for better jobs, and that deprives them of a share of the wealth they help to produce… The holdings of the rich are not legitimate if they are acquired through competition from which others are excluded, and made possible by laws that are shaped by the rich for the benefit of the rich. In these ways, economic inequality can undermine the conditions of its own legitimacy.”And so it can, if progressives work together, mobilize, dare to take risks and keep the faith in the face of cynicism and weary resignation. Such a metanarrative could have a different — and happy — ending.Gather round for the word of the day: metanarrative. Definitions vary but let’s say it’s one big narrative that connects the meaning of events to a belief thought to be an essential truth, the storytelling equivalent of the unified field theory in physics. Now use it to define what’s being done to America today — our Big Story. Journalist and activist Naomi Klein did just that a couple of weeks ago when she and I talked at Finger Lakes Community College in upstate New York about the Koch brothers’ resistance to the reality of climate change.
“…The Charles Koch metanarrative — and he’s said it explicitly — is that he is challenging collectivism, he is challenging the idea that when people get together they can do good,” she said. “And he is putting forward the worldview that we’re all very familiar with that if you free the individual to pursue their self-interest that will actually benefit the majority. So you need to attack everything that is collective, whether it’s labor rights or whether it’s public health care or whether it’s regulatory action. All of this falls under the metanarrative of an attack on collectivism.”In other words, Koch and his brother David and the extraordinary machine they have built in cahoots with fellow billionaires and others, have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions to get their way — “the great wealth grab” in the words of Richard Eskow — all part of one long story told in pursuit of a specific end: to make the needs of the very, very few our nation’s top priority and to thwart or destroy any group effort among the poor and middle class to do or say otherwise. The Kochs have spun their tale with a singular, laser-like focus, carefully taking their time to make sure they get it right. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, recently wrote in Politico Magazine that
“Charles Koch might claim that his entry into politics is new, but from its secrecy to its methods of courting donors and recruiting students, the blueprint for the vast and powerful Koch donor network that we see today was drafted four decades ago.”Mayer reviewed papers — including one written by Charles Koch himself — presented at a Koch-sponsored Center for Libertarian Studies conference in 1976 and concludes, “…It’s not hard to recognize the Koch political movement we see today—a vast and complex network of donors, think tanks and academic programs largely cloaked in secrecy and presented as philanthropy, leaving almost no money trail that the public can trace. And it’s these techniques Charles first championed decades ago that helped build his political faction—one so powerful that it turned fringe ideas William F. Buckley once dismissed as ‘Anarcho-Totalitarianism’ into a private political machine that grew to rival the Republican Party itself.” And so we see their creation of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council posing as a non-profit while entertaining state legislators and plying them with templates for laws that favor restrictions on voter eligibility, public sector unions and the minimum wage while supporting freedom for the gun lobby and deregulation. The Kochs shower cash on candidates and elected officials who do the bidding of the right, fund programs at historically black colleges and universities that preach free-market economics and deregulation, bankroll the Libre Initiative that hands out holiday turkeys and Easter baskets to Latino families while, in its own words, “informing the U.S. Hispanic community about the benefits of a constitutionally limited government, property rights, rule of law, sound money supply and free enterprise through a variety of community events, research and policy initiatives that protect our economic freedom.” As Naomi Klein said during our conversation, “The Koch brothers set out to change the values, to change the core ideas that people believed in. And there is no progressive equivalent of taking ideas seriously.” She then asked, “So what is the progressive metanarrative? Who funds it? Who is working on changing ideas that can say, ‘Actually, when we pool our resources, when we work together, we can do more and better than when we only act as individuals.’ I don’t think we value that.” In fact, there is a progressive metanarrative, one that needs to be valued and not obscured by arguments over who is or is not sufficiently progressive or who did what to whom and when. The metanarrative’s lead has been buried in divisiveness, by trolling from every side and by despicable, old-fashioned redbaiting. What’s more, goals and purposes have been diffused with a scattershot approach when we should be vectoring in on what really counts. The progressive metanarrative is the opposite of the fight against collectivism: it’s the struggle against inequality. The Harvard Gazette reports, “Though the wealthiest 20 percent earned nearly half of all wages in 2014, they have more than 80 percent of the wealth. The wealth of the poorest 20 percent, as measured by net worth, is actually negative. If they sell all they own, they’ll still be in debt.” Labor organizer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz tells the Gazette, “I think the galloping inequality in this country results from poor political choices. There was nothing inevitable, nothing global. We made a series of political choices… that set us on this path.” He continues, “Inequality, it’s not just about wealth, it’s about power. It isn’t just that somebody has some yachts, it’s the effect on democracy… I think we’re in a really scary place.” But it’s not a place from which escape is impossible. To make our metanarrative come true, we must embrace both community and government that effectively can protect and provide for all. In a 2014 article at the Ideas.TED website, philosopher T.M. Scanlon wrote,
“No one has reason to accept a scheme of cooperation that places their lives under the control of others, that deprives them of meaningful political participation, that deprives their children of the opportunity to qualify for better jobs, and that deprives them of a share of the wealth they help to produce… The holdings of the rich are not legitimate if they are acquired through competition from which others are excluded, and made possible by laws that are shaped by the rich for the benefit of the rich. In these ways, economic inequality can undermine the conditions of its own legitimacy.”And so it can, if progressives work together, mobilize, dare to take risks and keep the faith in the face of cynicism and weary resignation. Such a metanarrative could have a different — and happy — ending.Gather round for the word of the day: metanarrative. Definitions vary but let’s say it’s one big narrative that connects the meaning of events to a belief thought to be an essential truth, the storytelling equivalent of the unified field theory in physics. Now use it to define what’s being done to America today — our Big Story. Journalist and activist Naomi Klein did just that a couple of weeks ago when she and I talked at Finger Lakes Community College in upstate New York about the Koch brothers’ resistance to the reality of climate change.
“…The Charles Koch metanarrative — and he’s said it explicitly — is that he is challenging collectivism, he is challenging the idea that when people get together they can do good,” she said. “And he is putting forward the worldview that we’re all very familiar with that if you free the individual to pursue their self-interest that will actually benefit the majority. So you need to attack everything that is collective, whether it’s labor rights or whether it’s public health care or whether it’s regulatory action. All of this falls under the metanarrative of an attack on collectivism.”In other words, Koch and his brother David and the extraordinary machine they have built in cahoots with fellow billionaires and others, have spent hundreds and hundreds of millions to get their way — “the great wealth grab” in the words of Richard Eskow — all part of one long story told in pursuit of a specific end: to make the needs of the very, very few our nation’s top priority and to thwart or destroy any group effort among the poor and middle class to do or say otherwise. The Kochs have spun their tale with a singular, laser-like focus, carefully taking their time to make sure they get it right. Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, recently wrote in Politico Magazine that
“Charles Koch might claim that his entry into politics is new, but from its secrecy to its methods of courting donors and recruiting students, the blueprint for the vast and powerful Koch donor network that we see today was drafted four decades ago.”Mayer reviewed papers — including one written by Charles Koch himself — presented at a Koch-sponsored Center for Libertarian Studies conference in 1976 and concludes, “…It’s not hard to recognize the Koch political movement we see today—a vast and complex network of donors, think tanks and academic programs largely cloaked in secrecy and presented as philanthropy, leaving almost no money trail that the public can trace. And it’s these techniques Charles first championed decades ago that helped build his political faction—one so powerful that it turned fringe ideas William F. Buckley once dismissed as ‘Anarcho-Totalitarianism’ into a private political machine that grew to rival the Republican Party itself.” And so we see their creation of ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council posing as a non-profit while entertaining state legislators and plying them with templates for laws that favor restrictions on voter eligibility, public sector unions and the minimum wage while supporting freedom for the gun lobby and deregulation. The Kochs shower cash on candidates and elected officials who do the bidding of the right, fund programs at historically black colleges and universities that preach free-market economics and deregulation, bankroll the Libre Initiative that hands out holiday turkeys and Easter baskets to Latino families while, in its own words, “informing the U.S. Hispanic community about the benefits of a constitutionally limited government, property rights, rule of law, sound money supply and free enterprise through a variety of community events, research and policy initiatives that protect our economic freedom.” As Naomi Klein said during our conversation, “The Koch brothers set out to change the values, to change the core ideas that people believed in. And there is no progressive equivalent of taking ideas seriously.” She then asked, “So what is the progressive metanarrative? Who funds it? Who is working on changing ideas that can say, ‘Actually, when we pool our resources, when we work together, we can do more and better than when we only act as individuals.’ I don’t think we value that.” In fact, there is a progressive metanarrative, one that needs to be valued and not obscured by arguments over who is or is not sufficiently progressive or who did what to whom and when. The metanarrative’s lead has been buried in divisiveness, by trolling from every side and by despicable, old-fashioned redbaiting. What’s more, goals and purposes have been diffused with a scattershot approach when we should be vectoring in on what really counts. The progressive metanarrative is the opposite of the fight against collectivism: it’s the struggle against inequality. The Harvard Gazette reports, “Though the wealthiest 20 percent earned nearly half of all wages in 2014, they have more than 80 percent of the wealth. The wealth of the poorest 20 percent, as measured by net worth, is actually negative. If they sell all they own, they’ll still be in debt.” Labor organizer and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Marshall Ganz tells the Gazette, “I think the galloping inequality in this country results from poor political choices. There was nothing inevitable, nothing global. We made a series of political choices… that set us on this path.” He continues, “Inequality, it’s not just about wealth, it’s about power. It isn’t just that somebody has some yachts, it’s the effect on democracy… I think we’re in a really scary place.” But it’s not a place from which escape is impossible. To make our metanarrative come true, we must embrace both community and government that effectively can protect and provide for all. In a 2014 article at the Ideas.TED website, philosopher T.M. Scanlon wrote,
“No one has reason to accept a scheme of cooperation that places their lives under the control of others, that deprives them of meaningful political participation, that deprives their children of the opportunity to qualify for better jobs, and that deprives them of a share of the wealth they help to produce… The holdings of the rich are not legitimate if they are acquired through competition from which others are excluded, and made possible by laws that are shaped by the rich for the benefit of the rich. In these ways, economic inequality can undermine the conditions of its own legitimacy.”And so it can, if progressives work together, mobilize, dare to take risks and keep the faith in the face of cynicism and weary resignation. Such a metanarrative could have a different — and happy — ending.
Noam Chomsky: “The U.S. is one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world”
Like beauty, fundamentalism is in the eye of the beholder. That's according to noted public intellectual and philosophical pot-stirrer Noam Chomsky, who recently remarked that the United States is “one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world” in an interview with The Wire. Chomsky’s comment was made in relation to his views on the 2016 U.S election cycle, which reflect in his view a combination of widespread anger and distrust of the current system. In particular, Chomsky was referring to Trump’s seemingly anomalous popularity. By seizing on the religious right and adopting his tone of Old Testament proportions, Trump is simply the flouncy-haired litmus for the country’s current state.
“It is a reflection of depression, hopelessness, concern that everything is lost—nothing is in our lives, nothing is in our futures, then at least show your anger,” said Chomsky, who added that Trump’s propagandist strategy was in line with a history of focusing anger on a straw man such as “immigrants, ‘welfare cheats,’ trade unions and all kinds of people who somehow you think are getting what you are not getting.”
Conversely, Bernie Sanders has also managed to find his footing in what Chomsky views as the economy’s current democratic miasma. “The impact of the neoliberal programs of the past generation almost everywhere has been to undermine democratic participation, to impose stagnation or sometimes decline on the majority of the population and to concentrate wealth very narrowly, which of course then in turn affects the political system and how it works.”
Given these conditions, Chomsky believes people's need to feel the Bern reflects a natural response to a global political shift to the right. “Today’s Democrats, Clinton-style Democrats, are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans just went way off the spectrum. They are so dedicated to service to wealth and the corporate sector that they simply cannot get votes on their own programs.
Like beauty, fundamentalism is in the eye of the beholder. That's according to noted public intellectual and philosophical pot-stirrer Noam Chomsky, who recently remarked that the United States is “one of the most fundamentalist countries in the world” in an interview with The Wire. Chomsky’s comment was made in relation to his views on the 2016 U.S election cycle, which reflect in his view a combination of widespread anger and distrust of the current system. In particular, Chomsky was referring to Trump’s seemingly anomalous popularity. By seizing on the religious right and adopting his tone of Old Testament proportions, Trump is simply the flouncy-haired litmus for the country’s current state.
“It is a reflection of depression, hopelessness, concern that everything is lost—nothing is in our lives, nothing is in our futures, then at least show your anger,” said Chomsky, who added that Trump’s propagandist strategy was in line with a history of focusing anger on a straw man such as “immigrants, ‘welfare cheats,’ trade unions and all kinds of people who somehow you think are getting what you are not getting.”
Conversely, Bernie Sanders has also managed to find his footing in what Chomsky views as the economy’s current democratic miasma. “The impact of the neoliberal programs of the past generation almost everywhere has been to undermine democratic participation, to impose stagnation or sometimes decline on the majority of the population and to concentrate wealth very narrowly, which of course then in turn affects the political system and how it works.”
Given these conditions, Chomsky believes people's need to feel the Bern reflects a natural response to a global political shift to the right. “Today’s Democrats, Clinton-style Democrats, are pretty much what used to be called moderate Republicans. And the Republicans just went way off the spectrum. They are so dedicated to service to wealth and the corporate sector that they simply cannot get votes on their own programs.
February 10, 2016
White Beyoncé haters don’t get it: “Formation” isn’t “race-baiting” — but it is unapologetically about race
This might be the blackest version of Beyoncé we’ve twerked to yet. However, there are those who aren’t down with Beyoncé’s party — they’re ready to get in anti-Beyoncé protest formation. Coming off the heels of her Super Bowl performance, where she received harsh criticism from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Peter King, R-Long Island, for being “anti-police,” a #BoycottBeyoncé is brewing. NWA went there in 1988 with “Fuck Tha Police” and received backlash for it, but it’s 2016 — and this critique is just further proof that African-Americans can’t have anything or express ourselves fully without first considering if we’re “race-baiting” white America. The anti-Beyhive is reportedly planning to storm the NFL headquarters in Manhattan on Feb. 16, the same day tickets for her world tour are slated to go on sale, calling her performance at the Super Bowl halftime show "a slap in the face to law enforcement" that "glorifies" the Black Panthers, whom they call a "hate group." But protesters are missing the real point of “Formation.” Beyoncé's song/video/halftime show is pro-black, and has nothing to do with catering to the comforts of white America — their feelings or their politics. Rather, “Formation,” as shown in her now-iconic video, is Beyoncé’s coming-of-age race story, a celebration of black unity and individuality in words and images. Clearly, our home girl is both woke and unashamed of reveling in the glory of black life in “Formation.” In just under 5 minutes she breaks down some of the complexities of her brand of black womanhood—she twirls on respectability politics, while standing on top of a police car in the middle of post-Katrina New Orleans floodwaters. She rebels against any bit of anti-blackness or patriarchy you have mistaken her for subscribing to. “Formation” exposes a different side of a woman who isn’t afraid of showing us her historical self while figuring out with the rest of black America how to unpack a bunch of confusing questions about our black identities. The song dropped within days of Trayvon Martin’s birthday, Sandra Bland’s birthday, during Mardi Gras and Black History Month. Proverbial Beyoncé. The song’s lyrics and music video don’t necessarily go hand in hand. She could have given us choreography similar to her hits “7/11” or “Girls Run the World,” but she didn’t. It’s defiant. The visuals hold their own—as she breaks down the power of black self-love, family unity, colorism and the misconception that you can’t be both “woke” and desire a lavish life, as Beyoncé has obtained for herself. For such a long time we were presented with a “whiter version” of Beyoncé — who slayed nonetheless. However, it was very clear that she was put on a pedestal by white America, further validating black Americans’ praise of her. Not this time around, though. “Formation” is a lyrical memoir of coming to terms with her blackness—something much of young black America is trying to figure out how to do ourselves, as we’ve become increasingly more aware of the challenges that being black can present. Beyoncé begins breaking down an abbreviated version of her individual story by first giving us some background of where it all started, “My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana. You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” She’s clearly over respectability politics as she uses the somewhat derogatory word “bama” to describe the working-class family she grew up in. She quickly fast-forwards to motherhood and marriage, where she destroys colorism, good hair and praise of Eurocentric features all within one verse: “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros / I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” When she brings up daughter Blue Ivy’s hair, which has been the focal point of much bantering on Twitter over the last couple years, she’s repudiating social hatred of girls with popping Afros. Oh, and let’s not forget all of the dope hairstyles Beyoncé rocked throughout the video, to further bring home her point of loving your individual beauty, from her lush curly hair to the fleeky braided hairstyles she slayed. She makes it a point not just to praise the beauty of black women, but also defend the looks of her husband, Jay Z, whose nose has been the center of jokes for quite some time. “Formation” resonates because many of us are trying to collect ourselves, figure it all out and craft our own “blacken” coming-of-age narratives. We’ve experienced our Rodney King moment and we’ve witnessed what appear to be blatant disregard for the crises of black and brown people at the hands of government and institutions, from Katrina to Flint, Michigan. In the struggle to understand what our mamas gave to us, there’s something comforting about knowing that it’s OK to wear our histories on our sleeves. There’s also nothing wrong with subscribing to Beyoncé’s dream while still remaining aware of everything that is going on in the world. She reminds us that, despite her and her husband’s combined reported worth of close to a billion dollars, she will always be the same country girl in this line: “earned all this money but they never take the country out me / I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag.” After giving us this piece reminder of who she is at heart, she then goes into addressing unity regardless of sexuality, incorporating the voices of Big Freedia, a New Orleans Bounce Star, to introduce the emergence of gay black rap in the city. She also features Messy Mya, a provocative social media-famous comedian who was gunned down in 2010. To further bring home the point of unity there are several scenes for “ladies get in formation.” She first references formation when referring to the family and then shifts her focus to women, who have historically been on the front lines of any movement. However, there’s one choreographed piece of “ladies get in formation,” that particularly hits home — a scene that happens at the bottom of an empty pool. She’s addressing the fact that we need each other during tough times, whether that be in literal floodwaters, or wading through haters and their "Illuminati mess” charges. We’ll get through it together. Beyoncé declares she’s here on the front lines with, "I twirl all my haters...Albino alligators.” She’s willing to sacrifice some of her mass appeal for what she believes — #BlackLivesMatter. And she presents her own brand of activism, without subscribing to respectability politics — she can still enjoy wearing a Givenchy dress. Her black experience can’t be summed up into one horrific event. As Beyoncé takes us through this abbreviated version of her life, the video's wardrobe palette changes. The scene in which the women are wearing all white refers to the time after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed — a time when slaves were technically "free" but still being oppressed. The shift to all-black outfits depicts a more empowered and free people — the men dressed up in nice suits, Beyoncé adorned in jewelry and flicking off the camera in front of a plantation. Near the end, a powerful scene of a little boy wearing a black hoodie and dancing in front of a line of police armed in riot gear once more underscores the power of unity. He stops and puts his arms into the air — and all of the policemen follow his position. Then the camera shifts to a clip of graffiti on a wall that says, “Stop shooting us.” Beyoncé joins a league of artists from Kendrick to J. Cole who have made smelling ourselves and wearing black culture on our sleeves the dopest thing to do. We want something that we can own, and music more than ever is one of the few spaces in which we can. The knee-jerk reaction from white viewers to her song and her black beret-clad dancers' performance at the Super Bowl is absurd. The backlash to “Formation” is proof that even in 2016, black artists have to make anything, especially something as wildly popular as a new Beyoncé song performed at the most mainstream of all TV events, the Super Bowl, about white America’s feelings and politics — even when the song is about anything but that.This might be the blackest version of Beyoncé we’ve twerked to yet. However, there are those who aren’t down with Beyoncé’s party — they’re ready to get in anti-Beyoncé protest formation. Coming off the heels of her Super Bowl performance, where she received harsh criticism from former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Rep. Peter King, R-Long Island, for being “anti-police,” a #BoycottBeyoncé is brewing. NWA went there in 1988 with “Fuck Tha Police” and received backlash for it, but it’s 2016 — and this critique is just further proof that African-Americans can’t have anything or express ourselves fully without first considering if we’re “race-baiting” white America. The anti-Beyhive is reportedly planning to storm the NFL headquarters in Manhattan on Feb. 16, the same day tickets for her world tour are slated to go on sale, calling her performance at the Super Bowl halftime show "a slap in the face to law enforcement" that "glorifies" the Black Panthers, whom they call a "hate group." But protesters are missing the real point of “Formation.” Beyoncé's song/video/halftime show is pro-black, and has nothing to do with catering to the comforts of white America — their feelings or their politics. Rather, “Formation,” as shown in her now-iconic video, is Beyoncé’s coming-of-age race story, a celebration of black unity and individuality in words and images. Clearly, our home girl is both woke and unashamed of reveling in the glory of black life in “Formation.” In just under 5 minutes she breaks down some of the complexities of her brand of black womanhood—she twirls on respectability politics, while standing on top of a police car in the middle of post-Katrina New Orleans floodwaters. She rebels against any bit of anti-blackness or patriarchy you have mistaken her for subscribing to. “Formation” exposes a different side of a woman who isn’t afraid of showing us her historical self while figuring out with the rest of black America how to unpack a bunch of confusing questions about our black identities. The song dropped within days of Trayvon Martin’s birthday, Sandra Bland’s birthday, during Mardi Gras and Black History Month. Proverbial Beyoncé. The song’s lyrics and music video don’t necessarily go hand in hand. She could have given us choreography similar to her hits “7/11” or “Girls Run the World,” but she didn’t. It’s defiant. The visuals hold their own—as she breaks down the power of black self-love, family unity, colorism and the misconception that you can’t be both “woke” and desire a lavish life, as Beyoncé has obtained for herself. For such a long time we were presented with a “whiter version” of Beyoncé — who slayed nonetheless. However, it was very clear that she was put on a pedestal by white America, further validating black Americans’ praise of her. Not this time around, though. “Formation” is a lyrical memoir of coming to terms with her blackness—something much of young black America is trying to figure out how to do ourselves, as we’ve become increasingly more aware of the challenges that being black can present. Beyoncé begins breaking down an abbreviated version of her individual story by first giving us some background of where it all started, “My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana. You mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bama.” She’s clearly over respectability politics as she uses the somewhat derogatory word “bama” to describe the working-class family she grew up in. She quickly fast-forwards to motherhood and marriage, where she destroys colorism, good hair and praise of Eurocentric features all within one verse: “I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros / I like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” When she brings up daughter Blue Ivy’s hair, which has been the focal point of much bantering on Twitter over the last couple years, she’s repudiating social hatred of girls with popping Afros. Oh, and let’s not forget all of the dope hairstyles Beyoncé rocked throughout the video, to further bring home her point of loving your individual beauty, from her lush curly hair to the fleeky braided hairstyles she slayed. She makes it a point not just to praise the beauty of black women, but also defend the looks of her husband, Jay Z, whose nose has been the center of jokes for quite some time. “Formation” resonates because many of us are trying to collect ourselves, figure it all out and craft our own “blacken” coming-of-age narratives. We’ve experienced our Rodney King moment and we’ve witnessed what appear to be blatant disregard for the crises of black and brown people at the hands of government and institutions, from Katrina to Flint, Michigan. In the struggle to understand what our mamas gave to us, there’s something comforting about knowing that it’s OK to wear our histories on our sleeves. There’s also nothing wrong with subscribing to Beyoncé’s dream while still remaining aware of everything that is going on in the world. She reminds us that, despite her and her husband’s combined reported worth of close to a billion dollars, she will always be the same country girl in this line: “earned all this money but they never take the country out me / I got a hot sauce in my bag, swag.” After giving us this piece reminder of who she is at heart, she then goes into addressing unity regardless of sexuality, incorporating the voices of Big Freedia, a New Orleans Bounce Star, to introduce the emergence of gay black rap in the city. She also features Messy Mya, a provocative social media-famous comedian who was gunned down in 2010. To further bring home the point of unity there are several scenes for “ladies get in formation.” She first references formation when referring to the family and then shifts her focus to women, who have historically been on the front lines of any movement. However, there’s one choreographed piece of “ladies get in formation,” that particularly hits home — a scene that happens at the bottom of an empty pool. She’s addressing the fact that we need each other during tough times, whether that be in literal floodwaters, or wading through haters and their "Illuminati mess” charges. We’ll get through it together. Beyoncé declares she’s here on the front lines with, "I twirl all my haters...Albino alligators.” She’s willing to sacrifice some of her mass appeal for what she believes — #BlackLivesMatter. And she presents her own brand of activism, without subscribing to respectability politics — she can still enjoy wearing a Givenchy dress. Her black experience can’t be summed up into one horrific event. As Beyoncé takes us through this abbreviated version of her life, the video's wardrobe palette changes. The scene in which the women are wearing all white refers to the time after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed — a time when slaves were technically "free" but still being oppressed. The shift to all-black outfits depicts a more empowered and free people — the men dressed up in nice suits, Beyoncé adorned in jewelry and flicking off the camera in front of a plantation. Near the end, a powerful scene of a little boy wearing a black hoodie and dancing in front of a line of police armed in riot gear once more underscores the power of unity. He stops and puts his arms into the air — and all of the policemen follow his position. Then the camera shifts to a clip of graffiti on a wall that says, “Stop shooting us.” Beyoncé joins a league of artists from Kendrick to J. Cole who have made smelling ourselves and wearing black culture on our sleeves the dopest thing to do. We want something that we can own, and music more than ever is one of the few spaces in which we can. The knee-jerk reaction from white viewers to her song and her black beret-clad dancers' performance at the Super Bowl is absurd. The backlash to “Formation” is proof that even in 2016, black artists have to make anything, especially something as wildly popular as a new Beyoncé song performed at the most mainstream of all TV events, the Super Bowl, about white America’s feelings and politics — even when the song is about anything but that.
“Zoolander” hasn’t aged well: This weirdly conservative, un-funny sequel betrays the original comedy’s roots
When I watch some bad movies, I cannot figure out why they were made. The recent “Dirty Grandpa” seems to exist so that Robert De Niro can say the “N-word” on-screen and stick his flaccid penis in Zac Efron’s face. Its director, Dan Mazer, is an Oscar nominee. Was this the kind of movie he dreamed of making when he got into film? But in the case of “Zoolander 2,” it’s hard to fathom why anyone wanted to make this particular version of it. There’s no reason the movie had to be this terrible. “Zoolander 2” was written by four people who have done much better things. Nicholas Stoller made “Neighbors” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” John Hamburg wrote and directed the underrated “I Love You, Man,” a touching and observant bromance. Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux were two-thirds of the team behind “Tropic Thunder,” one of the more audacious Hollywood satires of the past decade. Your opinions on seeing Robert Downey Jr. in blackface may vary, but you cannot say the film lacks gumption. Many of these comic talents were behind the original “Zoolander,” a charming dumb-smart comedy marred by its unfortunate release date. The film, about an assassination plot foiled by male models, debuted in theaters just two weeks after Sept. 11. Since no one wanted to see a terrorist comedy, “Zoolander” performed very modestly in theaters—en route to becoming a cult classic on DVD. For Stiller and co., getting a do-over must have felt like a shot at redemption, like Rocky climbing the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum before the title match. It’s just too bad the end result is the exact opposite: falling down and hitting every single step along the way. “Zoolander 2” never, ever finds its rhythm, like a badly dubbed foreign film that always feels a beat behind. Some scenes sag under the weight of bad material, while others feel as if the writers forgot to add the actual jokes. It’s not a good sign when a movie scores its biggest laughs in the first five minutes. “Zoolander 2” begins promisingly enough. The world’s pop stars are being systematically killed off, with Justin Bieber (playing himself) marking the most recent casualty in the celebrity serial murders. Before he dies, Bieber snaps one last selfie in his final moments, taking painstaking care to select the proper Instagram filter to document his untimely death. The premiere of TV’s “Scream Queens” featured a similar gag spoofing millennial narcissism in the face of tragedy, and the joke is still funny. The rest of “Zoolander 2” lacks any real comic bite—or much of a reason to exist. “Zoolander 2” details Derek Zoolander’s (Stiller) quest to climb back to the top of the modeling industry, more than a decade after he left the fashion world in disgrace. His ex-wife, Matilda (Christine Taylor), was killed when the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too collapsed immediately after it was built. His son, Derek Jr., was subsequently taken away by Child Protective Services. By teaming up with a sexy Interpol agent (a wasted Penelope Cruz) to find the culprit behind the killings, Zoolander can not only get Derek Jr. back but also prove he’s still got it. He doesn’t. If “Zoolander” was a sometimes sharp satire of the insular fashion world and our celebrity-obsessed culture, its sequel is everything that film was designed to mock. “Zoolander 2” is a string of embarrassing and unnecessary famous person cameos—featuring everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Katy Perry to Susan Sarandon, who pops up just long enough to make “Rocky Horror” fans weep with agony. Even noted Instagram plagiarist Josh Ostrovsky (better known as “The Fat Jew”) appears on-screen for the briefest of moments—because, hey, why not? That very question is the ethos behind the entire film: If “Zoolander 2” can do it, the filmmakers believe the movie should. That lack of comic discipline is why we get endless takes of fashion icons riffing off each other (because you totally wanted to hear the comic stylings of Anna Wintour). It’s also why the film includes a transphobic interlude featuring “All,” a gender ambiguous model played by Benedict Cumberbatch. After a line asking whether All had a “hotdog or a bun” sparked outrage when the film’s trailer hit the Internet, I expected the scene might hit the cutting room floor. It remains intact because to an extent, that’s the entire movie. Otherwise you’d have to rip the whole thing to shreds. That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. “Zoolander 2” is the kind of movie you want to throw paint all over, as strangely conservative and mean-spirited as its predecessor was disarmingly sweet. This is a movie that’s deeply uncomfortable with America 15 years after we last left the series. Aside from lazy references to Uber and Ariana Grande, it features a running gag in which Hansel (Owen Wilson) is now in a committed relationship with a group of people he refers to as his “orgy.” The cast of characters includes both Kiefer Sutherland and a goat. When Hansel cheats on his many lovers during a later sex scene, a pig scampers out of the closet. Even when the movie is trying to be progressive, it’s less an embrace of poly queerness than a joke about how crazy and weird it would be if Jack Bauer and that guy from “Wedding Crashers” hooked up. After all, same-sex intimacy is repeatedly equated to bestiality. There’s a much better movie dying to get out from underneath this rotting pile of garbage. Assisted by CGI, Fred Armisen has a delightfully absurd cameo as a tween social media manager, but the movie quickly forgets he’s even in it. Will Ferrell, reprising his role as the poodle-haired Mugatu, appears to be ad-libbing most of his best lines. Meanwhile, Kristen Wiig certainly looks the part as Alexanya Atoz, a fashion designer with an indecipherable accent and an over-the-top array of Lady Gaga-esque ensembles. Like the movie she’s in, Wiig is all dressed up with nowhere to go. If you enjoyed “Zoolander,” listen to your friend Billy Zane: Toss this one back in the bargain bin where it belongs. This hideous knockoff isn’t just a crime against fashion, it’s an affront to everyone who liked the original.When I watch some bad movies, I cannot figure out why they were made. The recent “Dirty Grandpa” seems to exist so that Robert De Niro can say the “N-word” on-screen and stick his flaccid penis in Zac Efron’s face. Its director, Dan Mazer, is an Oscar nominee. Was this the kind of movie he dreamed of making when he got into film? But in the case of “Zoolander 2,” it’s hard to fathom why anyone wanted to make this particular version of it. There’s no reason the movie had to be this terrible. “Zoolander 2” was written by four people who have done much better things. Nicholas Stoller made “Neighbors” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” John Hamburg wrote and directed the underrated “I Love You, Man,” a touching and observant bromance. Ben Stiller and Justin Theroux were two-thirds of the team behind “Tropic Thunder,” one of the more audacious Hollywood satires of the past decade. Your opinions on seeing Robert Downey Jr. in blackface may vary, but you cannot say the film lacks gumption. Many of these comic talents were behind the original “Zoolander,” a charming dumb-smart comedy marred by its unfortunate release date. The film, about an assassination plot foiled by male models, debuted in theaters just two weeks after Sept. 11. Since no one wanted to see a terrorist comedy, “Zoolander” performed very modestly in theaters—en route to becoming a cult classic on DVD. For Stiller and co., getting a do-over must have felt like a shot at redemption, like Rocky climbing the stairs of the Philadelphia Art Museum before the title match. It’s just too bad the end result is the exact opposite: falling down and hitting every single step along the way. “Zoolander 2” never, ever finds its rhythm, like a badly dubbed foreign film that always feels a beat behind. Some scenes sag under the weight of bad material, while others feel as if the writers forgot to add the actual jokes. It’s not a good sign when a movie scores its biggest laughs in the first five minutes. “Zoolander 2” begins promisingly enough. The world’s pop stars are being systematically killed off, with Justin Bieber (playing himself) marking the most recent casualty in the celebrity serial murders. Before he dies, Bieber snaps one last selfie in his final moments, taking painstaking care to select the proper Instagram filter to document his untimely death. The premiere of TV’s “Scream Queens” featured a similar gag spoofing millennial narcissism in the face of tragedy, and the joke is still funny. The rest of “Zoolander 2” lacks any real comic bite—or much of a reason to exist. “Zoolander 2” details Derek Zoolander’s (Stiller) quest to climb back to the top of the modeling industry, more than a decade after he left the fashion world in disgrace. His ex-wife, Matilda (Christine Taylor), was killed when the Derek Zoolander Center for Kids Who Can’t Read Good and Who Wanna Learn to Do Other Stuff Good Too collapsed immediately after it was built. His son, Derek Jr., was subsequently taken away by Child Protective Services. By teaming up with a sexy Interpol agent (a wasted Penelope Cruz) to find the culprit behind the killings, Zoolander can not only get Derek Jr. back but also prove he’s still got it. He doesn’t. If “Zoolander” was a sometimes sharp satire of the insular fashion world and our celebrity-obsessed culture, its sequel is everything that film was designed to mock. “Zoolander 2” is a string of embarrassing and unnecessary famous person cameos—featuring everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Katy Perry to Susan Sarandon, who pops up just long enough to make “Rocky Horror” fans weep with agony. Even noted Instagram plagiarist Josh Ostrovsky (better known as “The Fat Jew”) appears on-screen for the briefest of moments—because, hey, why not? That very question is the ethos behind the entire film: If “Zoolander 2” can do it, the filmmakers believe the movie should. That lack of comic discipline is why we get endless takes of fashion icons riffing off each other (because you totally wanted to hear the comic stylings of Anna Wintour). It’s also why the film includes a transphobic interlude featuring “All,” a gender ambiguous model played by Benedict Cumberbatch. After a line asking whether All had a “hotdog or a bun” sparked outrage when the film’s trailer hit the Internet, I expected the scene might hit the cutting room floor. It remains intact because to an extent, that’s the entire movie. Otherwise you’d have to rip the whole thing to shreds. That wouldn’t be such a bad idea. “Zoolander 2” is the kind of movie you want to throw paint all over, as strangely conservative and mean-spirited as its predecessor was disarmingly sweet. This is a movie that’s deeply uncomfortable with America 15 years after we last left the series. Aside from lazy references to Uber and Ariana Grande, it features a running gag in which Hansel (Owen Wilson) is now in a committed relationship with a group of people he refers to as his “orgy.” The cast of characters includes both Kiefer Sutherland and a goat. When Hansel cheats on his many lovers during a later sex scene, a pig scampers out of the closet. Even when the movie is trying to be progressive, it’s less an embrace of poly queerness than a joke about how crazy and weird it would be if Jack Bauer and that guy from “Wedding Crashers” hooked up. After all, same-sex intimacy is repeatedly equated to bestiality. There’s a much better movie dying to get out from underneath this rotting pile of garbage. Assisted by CGI, Fred Armisen has a delightfully absurd cameo as a tween social media manager, but the movie quickly forgets he’s even in it. Will Ferrell, reprising his role as the poodle-haired Mugatu, appears to be ad-libbing most of his best lines. Meanwhile, Kristen Wiig certainly looks the part as Alexanya Atoz, a fashion designer with an indecipherable accent and an over-the-top array of Lady Gaga-esque ensembles. Like the movie she’s in, Wiig is all dressed up with nowhere to go. If you enjoyed “Zoolander,” listen to your friend Billy Zane: Toss this one back in the bargain bin where it belongs. This hideous knockoff isn’t just a crime against fashion, it’s an affront to everyone who liked the original.
The science of air guitar and car karaoke: How music teaches our brains to imagine what’s coming next
What part of the brain responds to music? Neuroscientists have been looking for this zealously for years, and their efforts have taken at least one step forward. Brain scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gotten close to what the New York Times has called, in a new story on the research, “The Music Channel in the Brain” and the brain’s “music room.” One of the things the research showed was the connection between music and speech. “Importantly,” Natalie Angier wrote, “the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.” Music, then, is not just a dressed-up version of language. And music, the research demonstrates, is not just what scientists call “auditory cheesecake” -- a sort of extra element that engages various other parts of the brain -- but is central to some of it. The article continues: “When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked away inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.” To understand the research, Salon spoke to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, who directs the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. Margulis is also the author of the award-winning book “On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. What does this research tell us about the brain’s relationship to music? If you look back over the history of research on music and the brain, when people began to use magnets and peer into the brain they were expecting to find a music center: this region that lights up when you listen to music. A specific collection of neurons, right? Right. So if you think of the way neuroimaging studies work, where you’ll have people do something, and this area lights up, and then they do that, and this area lights up … But it turned out that the areas that light up [with music] were so widely cast across all of these brain regions. This is something people ran with and did all kinds of interesting research about: Maybe part of what makes music training so helpful for other kinds of training – why does it help people read earlier, why does it help people do math better – maybe it brings all of these different areas together, helps them talk to each other and work together. And does this change that picture at all? No, that’s still certainly the case -- that all these things are working together. But what’s new is they’re finding that if they use the same fMRI, but use a new type of analysis to the data – to try to get underneath, to get a finer resolution than an fMRI can afford… When they use this technique, they can say, “There do seem to be these special kind of circuits that are responding [to music] preferentially, selectively, over these other sounds.” So there is a specific “music room” in the brain, where music is heard? I don’t know if the room metaphor is the ideal metaphor. What they’re uncovering is not the kind of thing you can see in the same way [as an fMRI] – they’re fine areas. But what it is suggesting is that there is circuitry in there whose job is to respond to music – and it does the over and above ordinary daily sounds, and over and above speech. Particularly the one contrasting it to speech is important, because there’s this whole debate about how these capacities developed over the course of evolution. Right, so they’re interested in music’s relationship to language. And we think that music came first, is that what research has shown? No one knows that – people have various intuitions or research that supports one case or the other. What people are really curious about is whether some kind of musical capacity is innate… Are our brains “musicing” brains? Or does the phenomenon of music simply piggyback on all these other phenomena that evolved for all these other purposes? Perhaps music-making is not this fundamental element of what it is to be human. That’s where the debate is – an unresolved debate. And this new research pushes us further into seeing music as central to human history and prehistory? Yes – and I think what they’ll try to do next is say, OK, it could be that you develop this circuitry because you are exposed to music so much. The same way if you play chess a lot, or drink a lot of craft beer, you might develop some circuitry that’s really awesome at distinguishing between types of craft beer. But it doesn’t mean you’re born a craft beer connoisseur. So the next step is to see how far they can go back – can you find it in infants? Get closer to seeing if it’s apparatus that we’re born with or apparatus that we develop. What does your own research show you about how far the capacity and interest in music goes back? It’s really hard to speak to that big question. Ethnomusicologists have observed that music is a human cultural universal. You go around the world, and everyone you find seems to be making music. Just because it’s universal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innate, but it’s certainly intriguing. And it’s consistent with a case for innateness. And then in my own research I’ve been interested in looking at a characteristic that seems to be universal in all of these cultures as well: You can go back and hear a song again, and hear it again. Or within the song, you get a theme that comes back, or some underlying beats that continues through the course of the song. It’s something that seems really special in music, and really widespread in music. So I’ve been trying to understand what that’s doing, what kind of experience that makes possible. You’d get that in rock and pop music – a repeated chorus – and in folk music too. In hip-hop, repeated beats. In minimalism, repeated cells or motifs. Classical too will repeat themes. And not only – but regardless what's going on inside the music, the fact that we can go back and listen to the same pieces and with recording technology listening to the exact same sequences of sound – that’s all intriguing. Part of what that’s doing is pushing us into a special relationship with musical sound, where we’re really imagining what’s coming next, in a way that feels like we’re participating. So you see people doing air guitar, or singing along in their car … All of that is really influenced by the degree of repetition. And the research shows that lyrics that are sung and words that are spoken are received by different parts of the brain? Are there two different places where the brain takes in words? That’s the thing – there’s an incredible amount of overlap in the way they’re being processed. But there are also different areas that come online when things are being perceived as music. Not necessarily things specific to music – but areas that become active when you’re listening to music rather than when you listen to speech. It sounds like neuroscience took us forward in understanding how music connects to the brain, and there’s still a long way to go. That’s exactly right. And the methodology they used allows you to look at imaging data with a finer lens. It’s going to have wider implications than music research.What part of the brain responds to music? Neuroscientists have been looking for this zealously for years, and their efforts have taken at least one step forward. Brain scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gotten close to what the New York Times has called, in a new story on the research, “The Music Channel in the Brain” and the brain’s “music room.” One of the things the research showed was the connection between music and speech. “Importantly,” Natalie Angier wrote, “the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.” Music, then, is not just a dressed-up version of language. And music, the research demonstrates, is not just what scientists call “auditory cheesecake” -- a sort of extra element that engages various other parts of the brain -- but is central to some of it. The article continues: “When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked away inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.” To understand the research, Salon spoke to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, who directs the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. Margulis is also the author of the award-winning book “On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. What does this research tell us about the brain’s relationship to music? If you look back over the history of research on music and the brain, when people began to use magnets and peer into the brain they were expecting to find a music center: this region that lights up when you listen to music. A specific collection of neurons, right? Right. So if you think of the way neuroimaging studies work, where you’ll have people do something, and this area lights up, and then they do that, and this area lights up … But it turned out that the areas that light up [with music] were so widely cast across all of these brain regions. This is something people ran with and did all kinds of interesting research about: Maybe part of what makes music training so helpful for other kinds of training – why does it help people read earlier, why does it help people do math better – maybe it brings all of these different areas together, helps them talk to each other and work together. And does this change that picture at all? No, that’s still certainly the case -- that all these things are working together. But what’s new is they’re finding that if they use the same fMRI, but use a new type of analysis to the data – to try to get underneath, to get a finer resolution than an fMRI can afford… When they use this technique, they can say, “There do seem to be these special kind of circuits that are responding [to music] preferentially, selectively, over these other sounds.” So there is a specific “music room” in the brain, where music is heard? I don’t know if the room metaphor is the ideal metaphor. What they’re uncovering is not the kind of thing you can see in the same way [as an fMRI] – they’re fine areas. But what it is suggesting is that there is circuitry in there whose job is to respond to music – and it does the over and above ordinary daily sounds, and over and above speech. Particularly the one contrasting it to speech is important, because there’s this whole debate about how these capacities developed over the course of evolution. Right, so they’re interested in music’s relationship to language. And we think that music came first, is that what research has shown? No one knows that – people have various intuitions or research that supports one case or the other. What people are really curious about is whether some kind of musical capacity is innate… Are our brains “musicing” brains? Or does the phenomenon of music simply piggyback on all these other phenomena that evolved for all these other purposes? Perhaps music-making is not this fundamental element of what it is to be human. That’s where the debate is – an unresolved debate. And this new research pushes us further into seeing music as central to human history and prehistory? Yes – and I think what they’ll try to do next is say, OK, it could be that you develop this circuitry because you are exposed to music so much. The same way if you play chess a lot, or drink a lot of craft beer, you might develop some circuitry that’s really awesome at distinguishing between types of craft beer. But it doesn’t mean you’re born a craft beer connoisseur. So the next step is to see how far they can go back – can you find it in infants? Get closer to seeing if it’s apparatus that we’re born with or apparatus that we develop. What does your own research show you about how far the capacity and interest in music goes back? It’s really hard to speak to that big question. Ethnomusicologists have observed that music is a human cultural universal. You go around the world, and everyone you find seems to be making music. Just because it’s universal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innate, but it’s certainly intriguing. And it’s consistent with a case for innateness. And then in my own research I’ve been interested in looking at a characteristic that seems to be universal in all of these cultures as well: You can go back and hear a song again, and hear it again. Or within the song, you get a theme that comes back, or some underlying beats that continues through the course of the song. It’s something that seems really special in music, and really widespread in music. So I’ve been trying to understand what that’s doing, what kind of experience that makes possible. You’d get that in rock and pop music – a repeated chorus – and in folk music too. In hip-hop, repeated beats. In minimalism, repeated cells or motifs. Classical too will repeat themes. And not only – but regardless what's going on inside the music, the fact that we can go back and listen to the same pieces and with recording technology listening to the exact same sequences of sound – that’s all intriguing. Part of what that’s doing is pushing us into a special relationship with musical sound, where we’re really imagining what’s coming next, in a way that feels like we’re participating. So you see people doing air guitar, or singing along in their car … All of that is really influenced by the degree of repetition. And the research shows that lyrics that are sung and words that are spoken are received by different parts of the brain? Are there two different places where the brain takes in words? That’s the thing – there’s an incredible amount of overlap in the way they’re being processed. But there are also different areas that come online when things are being perceived as music. Not necessarily things specific to music – but areas that become active when you’re listening to music rather than when you listen to speech. It sounds like neuroscience took us forward in understanding how music connects to the brain, and there’s still a long way to go. That’s exactly right. And the methodology they used allows you to look at imaging data with a finer lens. It’s going to have wider implications than music research.What part of the brain responds to music? Neuroscientists have been looking for this zealously for years, and their efforts have taken at least one step forward. Brain scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have gotten close to what the New York Times has called, in a new story on the research, “The Music Channel in the Brain” and the brain’s “music room.” One of the things the research showed was the connection between music and speech. “Importantly,” Natalie Angier wrote, “the M.I.T. team demonstrated that the speech and music circuits are in different parts of the brain’s sprawling auditory cortex, where all sound signals are interpreted, and that each is largely deaf to the other’s sonic cues, although there is some overlap when it comes to responding to songs with lyrics.” Music, then, is not just a dressed-up version of language. And music, the research demonstrates, is not just what scientists call “auditory cheesecake” -- a sort of extra element that engages various other parts of the brain -- but is central to some of it. The article continues: “When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked away inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.” To understand the research, Salon spoke to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, who directs the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. Margulis is also the author of the award-winning book “On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind.” The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. What does this research tell us about the brain’s relationship to music? If you look back over the history of research on music and the brain, when people began to use magnets and peer into the brain they were expecting to find a music center: this region that lights up when you listen to music. A specific collection of neurons, right? Right. So if you think of the way neuroimaging studies work, where you’ll have people do something, and this area lights up, and then they do that, and this area lights up … But it turned out that the areas that light up [with music] were so widely cast across all of these brain regions. This is something people ran with and did all kinds of interesting research about: Maybe part of what makes music training so helpful for other kinds of training – why does it help people read earlier, why does it help people do math better – maybe it brings all of these different areas together, helps them talk to each other and work together. And does this change that picture at all? No, that’s still certainly the case -- that all these things are working together. But what’s new is they’re finding that if they use the same fMRI, but use a new type of analysis to the data – to try to get underneath, to get a finer resolution than an fMRI can afford… When they use this technique, they can say, “There do seem to be these special kind of circuits that are responding [to music] preferentially, selectively, over these other sounds.” So there is a specific “music room” in the brain, where music is heard? I don’t know if the room metaphor is the ideal metaphor. What they’re uncovering is not the kind of thing you can see in the same way [as an fMRI] – they’re fine areas. But what it is suggesting is that there is circuitry in there whose job is to respond to music – and it does the over and above ordinary daily sounds, and over and above speech. Particularly the one contrasting it to speech is important, because there’s this whole debate about how these capacities developed over the course of evolution. Right, so they’re interested in music’s relationship to language. And we think that music came first, is that what research has shown? No one knows that – people have various intuitions or research that supports one case or the other. What people are really curious about is whether some kind of musical capacity is innate… Are our brains “musicing” brains? Or does the phenomenon of music simply piggyback on all these other phenomena that evolved for all these other purposes? Perhaps music-making is not this fundamental element of what it is to be human. That’s where the debate is – an unresolved debate. And this new research pushes us further into seeing music as central to human history and prehistory? Yes – and I think what they’ll try to do next is say, OK, it could be that you develop this circuitry because you are exposed to music so much. The same way if you play chess a lot, or drink a lot of craft beer, you might develop some circuitry that’s really awesome at distinguishing between types of craft beer. But it doesn’t mean you’re born a craft beer connoisseur. So the next step is to see how far they can go back – can you find it in infants? Get closer to seeing if it’s apparatus that we’re born with or apparatus that we develop. What does your own research show you about how far the capacity and interest in music goes back? It’s really hard to speak to that big question. Ethnomusicologists have observed that music is a human cultural universal. You go around the world, and everyone you find seems to be making music. Just because it’s universal doesn’t necessarily mean it’s innate, but it’s certainly intriguing. And it’s consistent with a case for innateness. And then in my own research I’ve been interested in looking at a characteristic that seems to be universal in all of these cultures as well: You can go back and hear a song again, and hear it again. Or within the song, you get a theme that comes back, or some underlying beats that continues through the course of the song. It’s something that seems really special in music, and really widespread in music. So I’ve been trying to understand what that’s doing, what kind of experience that makes possible. You’d get that in rock and pop music – a repeated chorus – and in folk music too. In hip-hop, repeated beats. In minimalism, repeated cells or motifs. Classical too will repeat themes. And not only – but regardless what's going on inside the music, the fact that we can go back and listen to the same pieces and with recording technology listening to the exact same sequences of sound – that’s all intriguing. Part of what that’s doing is pushing us into a special relationship with musical sound, where we’re really imagining what’s coming next, in a way that feels like we’re participating. So you see people doing air guitar, or singing along in their car … All of that is really influenced by the degree of repetition. And the research shows that lyrics that are sung and words that are spoken are received by different parts of the brain? Are there two different places where the brain takes in words? That’s the thing – there’s an incredible amount of overlap in the way they’re being processed. But there are also different areas that come online when things are being perceived as music. Not necessarily things specific to music – but areas that become active when you’re listening to music rather than when you listen to speech. It sounds like neuroscience took us forward in understanding how music connects to the brain, and there’s still a long way to go. That’s exactly right. And the methodology they used allows you to look at imaging data with a finer lens. It’s going to have wider implications than music research.
“He” or “she” doesn’t work for everyone: Why “misgendering” matters
Perhaps the best lesson I’ve ever gotten on the importance of gender identity came from a trans woman who explained, in perhaps the most understandable terms I’ve ever heard, why "misgendering" (that is, among other things, using the incorrect pronoun to identify a person) matters to all of us. “Think about how upset people in, say, a store or over the phone, when someone incorrectly refers to them as ‘Miss’ or “Mister’ when they don’t identify that way,” she said to me. “That’s how it feels when someone labels you in a way that doesn’t match your gender identity.” I’ve been reminded of that conversation a lot as the discussion around gender identity has moved to the national forefront. Most of us are "cisgender," meaning our gender identity matches our sex, or more simply put, we feel the way we are seen. I was born with lady parts (not to put too fine a point on it) and I have always felt female. An increasingly visible number of people experience a conflict between inside and outside. Transgender, or “trans” people, have physical anatomies that don’t correlate with their internal gender identity. For others—those who identify as neither male nor female, but somewhere along the vast continuum between masculine and feminine—gender identity may be a less fixed idea. These people might refer to themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, gender variant, gender nonconforming, or gender diverse, among other terms. They also may not want to be referred to in traditional gender binary terms. If one's gender identity or gender expression doesn’t fit neatly in a box marked boy or girl, one may not want to be spoken of or referred to as “she” or “he,” “him” or “her.” Gender-neutral pronouns can help to avoid misgendering and suggest where the person you’re talking to (or about) sits on the gender spectrum. In English, there are a few ways to remove gender from the equation. Among the most common is the use of “they” as a singular. For example, in answer to the question, “What’s Chris up to today?” one might respond, “They went to a movie with one of their friends. They’ll be back later on.” If you have concerns about grammar violations, don’t worry! Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, explained to the Washington Post that the use of the singular “they” is yet another example of how language has changed over time. “Purists object that a plural pronoun like ‘they’ can’t be used as a singular. But they are wrong,” Baron told the paper. “‘You’ began its life as plural (the singular second person was ‘thou’). Then ‘you’ began serving as singular as well...Today we use ‘you’ to refer to one person—‘Are you talkin’ to me?’—without worrying about number. And for most people, ‘they’ works the same way.” Other words can also be used, some of which might look or sound unfamiliar, but which only take a little getting used to. These might include ze, xe or ey. The best way to figure out someone’s preferred gender pronoun is to ask them. 
With greater public consciousness about trans and non-binary gender identities, there’s been a concurrent rise in the use of gender-neutral pronouns. In 2015, the Associated Press ran a story about gender-neutral pronouns on college campuses, noting that schools around the country are “widening their policies and pronouns” to embrace trans and gender fluid students:
That list also includes the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which in 2015 offered students information about gender-neutral pronouns, including how they might be used and pronounced, on its website. The school made clear that it was not forcing students to use the terms, but was providing a guide to those who might want to be respectful with their words. "There is no mandate or official policy to use the language,” the school posted. “We recognize that most people prefer to use the pronouns he and she; we do not dictate speech. We do strive to be a diverse and inclusive campus and to ensure that everyone feels welcome, accepted, and respected." Republican Tennessee Sen. Bo Watson took issue with the school’s actions, stating, “I find it difficult to believe that such a ridiculous suggestion as gender-neutral pronouns would be published on a university website without leadership's approval.” He suggested the state “Senate Education and Government Operations committees should investigate and review" and said “Tennessee taxpayers should not expect to be paying for this kind of stuff,” as if website updates drain the endowment. After meeting with state legislators, the school president announced that the post would be removed from the website. But Watson was wrong, and so was everyone else decrying the school’s move toward creating an inclusive, safe environment for all of its students, regardless of their gender identities. Acknowledging someone’s gender identity by using their preferred gender pronoun isn’t “politically correct” or whatever other dumb phrase the aggrieved right has come up with to protest being asked to treat people politely. It’s a matter of respect and it’s incredibly easy to do. There may be a learning curve involved, but it’s not particularly steep, and we likely all do far more inconvenient and maddening things every single day, from commuting to doing laundry to changing your oil. What does it cost any of us to refer to people as they want to be recognized? It’s just the right thing to do. Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.American University posted a guide on its website explaining how to use pronouns like "ey," and how to ask someone which pronouns they use. Cornell University and MIT offer similar primers on their websites. Ohio University started letting students register their gender pronouns this year, and officials at Boston University said they're discussing the topic. Last week, the State University of New York, one of the nation's largest public college systems, announced that it's working on a data-collection tool to let students choose among seven gender identities, including "trans man," ''questioning" and "genderqueer."
Perhaps the best lesson I’ve ever gotten on the importance of gender identity came from a trans woman who explained, in perhaps the most understandable terms I’ve ever heard, why "misgendering" (that is, among other things, using the incorrect pronoun to identify a person) matters to all of us. “Think about how upset people in, say, a store or over the phone, when someone incorrectly refers to them as ‘Miss’ or “Mister’ when they don’t identify that way,” she said to me. “That’s how it feels when someone labels you in a way that doesn’t match your gender identity.” I’ve been reminded of that conversation a lot as the discussion around gender identity has moved to the national forefront. Most of us are "cisgender," meaning our gender identity matches our sex, or more simply put, we feel the way we are seen. I was born with lady parts (not to put too fine a point on it) and I have always felt female. An increasingly visible number of people experience a conflict between inside and outside. Transgender, or “trans” people, have physical anatomies that don’t correlate with their internal gender identity. For others—those who identify as neither male nor female, but somewhere along the vast continuum between masculine and feminine—gender identity may be a less fixed idea. These people might refer to themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, gender variant, gender nonconforming, or gender diverse, among other terms. They also may not want to be referred to in traditional gender binary terms. If one's gender identity or gender expression doesn’t fit neatly in a box marked boy or girl, one may not want to be spoken of or referred to as “she” or “he,” “him” or “her.” Gender-neutral pronouns can help to avoid misgendering and suggest where the person you’re talking to (or about) sits on the gender spectrum. In English, there are a few ways to remove gender from the equation. Among the most common is the use of “they” as a singular. For example, in answer to the question, “What’s Chris up to today?” one might respond, “They went to a movie with one of their friends. They’ll be back later on.” If you have concerns about grammar violations, don’t worry! Dennis Baron, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, explained to the Washington Post that the use of the singular “they” is yet another example of how language has changed over time. “Purists object that a plural pronoun like ‘they’ can’t be used as a singular. But they are wrong,” Baron told the paper. “‘You’ began its life as plural (the singular second person was ‘thou’). Then ‘you’ began serving as singular as well...Today we use ‘you’ to refer to one person—‘Are you talkin’ to me?’—without worrying about number. And for most people, ‘they’ works the same way.” Other words can also be used, some of which might look or sound unfamiliar, but which only take a little getting used to. These might include ze, xe or ey. The best way to figure out someone’s preferred gender pronoun is to ask them. With greater public consciousness about trans and non-binary gender identities, there’s been a concurrent rise in the use of gender-neutral pronouns. In 2015, the Associated Press ran a story about gender-neutral pronouns on college campuses, noting that schools around the country are “widening their policies and pronouns” to embrace trans and gender fluid students:
That list also includes the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, which in 2015 offered students information about gender-neutral pronouns, including how they might be used and pronounced, on its website. The school made clear that it was not forcing students to use the terms, but was providing a guide to those who might want to be respectful with their words. "There is no mandate or official policy to use the language,” the school posted. “We recognize that most people prefer to use the pronouns he and she; we do not dictate speech. We do strive to be a diverse and inclusive campus and to ensure that everyone feels welcome, accepted, and respected." Republican Tennessee Sen. Bo Watson took issue with the school’s actions, stating, “I find it difficult to believe that such a ridiculous suggestion as gender-neutral pronouns would be published on a university website without leadership's approval.” He suggested the state “Senate Education and Government Operations committees should investigate and review" and said “Tennessee taxpayers should not expect to be paying for this kind of stuff,” as if website updates drain the endowment. After meeting with state legislators, the school president announced that the post would be removed from the website. But Watson was wrong, and so was everyone else decrying the school’s move toward creating an inclusive, safe environment for all of its students, regardless of their gender identities. Acknowledging someone’s gender identity by using their preferred gender pronoun isn’t “politically correct” or whatever other dumb phrase the aggrieved right has come up with to protest being asked to treat people politely. It’s a matter of respect and it’s incredibly easy to do. There may be a learning curve involved, but it’s not particularly steep, and we likely all do far more inconvenient and maddening things every single day, from commuting to doing laundry to changing your oil. What does it cost any of us to refer to people as they want to be recognized? It’s just the right thing to do. Kali Holloway is a senior writer and the associate editor of media and culture at AlterNet.American University posted a guide on its website explaining how to use pronouns like "ey," and how to ask someone which pronouns they use. Cornell University and MIT offer similar primers on their websites. Ohio University started letting students register their gender pronouns this year, and officials at Boston University said they're discussing the topic. Last week, the State University of New York, one of the nation's largest public college systems, announced that it's working on a data-collection tool to let students choose among seven gender identities, including "trans man," ''questioning" and "genderqueer."
