Reading stuff regularly

Brumberg finds disturbing signs of this shift in American girls’ diaries. In the nineteenth century, girls vowing to improve themselves generally wrote about their resolve to focus less on themselves and more on doing “good works” at home, school, church, and so forth. In contrast, twentieth-century girls pen passages such as this one from a 1982 diary, quoted by Brumberg: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can … I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” For American girls, the body has become an all-consuming project, “something to be managed and maintained, usually through expenditures on clothes and personal grooming items, with special attention to exterior surfaces—skin, hair, and contours.”

A new app allows you to scan a product in the supermarket aisle and learn who exactly is behind that box of cereal. More impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott groups of companies who may have lobbied against a cause you believe in.

But no work of ancient literature is as obsessed with unburied bodies as Sophocles’ “Antigone,” a tragedy first produced in Athens around 442 B.C.: the entire plot centers on the controversy over how a community that has survived a deadly attack will dispose of the body of the perpetrator of that attack—the body, as it happens, of a young man who had planned to bring destruction on the city that had been his home, who “sought to consume the city with fire…sought to taste blood.”

What does it feel like to face the death of a child, or to live with hopelessness, or to suffer from the bitterness of extreme loneliness? Fiction and art have grappled with these issues for centuries. Now games are showing us what it is to exist at the extreme margins.

A new generation of games, like That Dragon, Cancer, Depression Quest and Actual Sunlight, is connecting players with real human issues, including terminal illness, depression and suicide. Mostly generated by small teams or by individuals, these games are described by Lucas Pope, creator of Papers, Please, as “other people simulators” that allow us to interact with the world from a challenging point of view.

With “Scandal” still new, and both it and “Grey’s” returning next year, Rhimes knows she should not start another series. Still, she is having some trouble convincing herself of that. She has a couple of projects she is eager to do, one of which is a show about “a woman carrying a gun and kicking people’s butts.” She is fond of “Alias,” the J . J. Abrams TV show about a female secret agent, and says: “I would have loved to have been the person who came up with it. I don’t think it’s been done by a woman. And that’s where my mind is.”

Part of what appeals to her about such a show is that, like “Scandal,” it is not what people expect from her. It irks her to be pigeonholed. “I was writing a hospital show for a very long time, and that became all that anybody thought that I could write,” she says. “It’s not that I want to do [a female-spy show] because people don’t think of me as doing it, but when I do say that’s what I want to do next, and some network exec says: “Really? Can’t you do one of your romance triangle-y things?” I want to strangle them. A romance triangle-y thing is not a show.”

Swedes are shaking up their language with a new gender-neutral pronoun. The pronoun, “hen,” allows speakers and writers to refer to a person without including reference to a person’s gender. This month, the pronoun made a big leap toward mainstream usage when it was added to the country’s National Encyclopedia.

Librarians at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library have a problem unique to the modern age - attaching numbers to the myriad services the library provides across varied platforms.
[…]
While traditional methods of counting the number of people who check out tangible items, such as books or films, provides a circulation count, the library doesn’t receive statistics about how many cardholders use their cards to access data from vendors.

“I could be an exclusive ebook user, and it’s like I don’t use the library at all,” Millsap said.

(Source: librarystuff.net)

She described a fan’s family, undocumented immigrants from Honduras, sleeping in their front room so she and her band could crash on their beds, and she described herself wondering: “Is this fair?” In the morning, she was told in broken English how much her music meant to the daughter who invited her, and thanked for coming, and she decided: Yes, this is fair.

I have sympathy for this argument, because the exchange she’s talking about really does get lost when we talk about the economics of art; we focus on material questions of who should pay for what, and often act as though the attention and approval artists get from us is a bigger gift than the world full of art we get from them. However: Palmer’s logic here is itself generally identical to cold, hard free-market capitalism. Yes, the exchange she’s describing is “fair” — everyone involved is willing and happy to engage in it. It’s also “fair” to pay someone minimum wage for work that makes you millions, and fair for a male musician to spend every night having sex with starstruck, consenting young fans, but fairness is not the same thing as nobility, and neither of those arrangements is something you’d present as a revolutionary new relationship.

But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. They warn that nonexperts doing online research will have trouble distinguishing credible research from junk. “Most people don’t know the journal universe,” Dr. Goodman said. “They will not know from a journal’s title if it is for real or not.”
[…]
The phenomenon has caught the attention of Nature, one of the most competitive and well-regarded scientific journals. In a news report published recently, the journal noted “the rise of questionable operators” and explored whether it was better to blacklist them or to create a “white list” of those open-access journals that meet certain standards. Nature included a checklist on “how to perform due diligence before submitting to a journal or a publisher.”

New examples of the sexualization of girlhood crop up all the time. Of course there are the dolls that look like Sesame Streetwalkers—Monster High, Winx Club, Bratz; the makeup lines for third-graders; the padded bikini tops for seven-year-olds. But a Facebook reader recently pointed out evidence of this phenomenon in the last place I’d expect: Candy Land.