With Such Words

He’s suggesting that something about the relationships between pitches is culturally universal. All people seem to experience them the same way, regardless of where they're from or whether they have musical training. The question of universals in music perception is important because it can help us determine how much of our perception is shaped by culture and how much by biology. A paper in this week’s Nature reports on the surprising finding that a form of musical perception long thought to be common across all humans might not be so universal after all.

The more we can quantify what actually is happening in tech, versus what corporate mouthpieces say is happening in tech, the easier it is to see that the problems that need solving are within a company’s ethos. Silicon Valley seems really concerned with its employees being a ‘culture fit,’ when what they should be worrying about is themselves being a ‘culture fit’ with the rest of the United States. You don’t innovate in a bubble, Tech Industry. Why do you hire in one?

far more discussion, but to be honest–other than my disgust at what appears to be Kate’s entire arc in a trailer for an upcoming and supposedly inspirational TV drama, This Is Us–I actually have little personal experience encountering it, as the kinds of stories I’m regularly drawn to–superheroes saving the world, starships exploring the great unknown, detectives solving the mystery, and final girls surviving to live another day–don’t generally engage in that particular narrative, mostly because they rarely include overweight characters at all. It was difficult in some cases (especially with adult literature) to think of good examples for this column, not because fat representation is overwhelmingly positive, but because it is so often entirely absent. Because, as we’ve seen, when fat characters are included, they’re likely gluttonous, unattractive, dumb, slothful, or cruel; many times, however, they’re simply invisible, absent from the fantastical worlds that can imagine mythic pasts full of dragons and magic, or far futures with technological marvels and alien wonders… but can’t imagine fat people inhabiting those worlds, questing there, commanding there, saving the day.

Law enforcement has shifted away from being an integral part of the communities they serve and opted instead to view themselves as an occupying force in a war zone. The weapons and vehicles are repurposed military gear. Officers' training goes heavy on force deployment. Very rarely are tactics like de-escalation or actual community-oriented policing given any priority. While there's no condoning the actions of people who kill cops, the reality is that law enforcement itself has shown over the years that its preferred method of communication is violence. It's the only thing it truly understands.

And to white people out there in a position to make decisions about hiring—the mere mention of differences is not insulting. What’s insulting is “being color blind.” What’s insulting is pretending that difference doesn’t exist so that you have an excuse for not seeing or considering people who don’t look like you. “Color blindness” is still blindness … and not to get biblical about it, but Matthew 15:14 says, “If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.” (Colbert is a practicing Catholic, so I’m hoping he appreciates that.)

Have you noticed, when a product is marketed in an unnecessarily gendered way, that the blame shifts depending on the gender? That a pink pen made “for women” is (and this is, of course, true) the work of idiotic cynical marketing people trying insultingly to pander to what they imagine women want? But when they make yogurt “for men” it is suddenly about how hilarious and fragile masculinity is — how men can’t eat yogurt unless their poor widdle bwains can be sure it doesn’t make them gay? #MasculinitySoFragile is aimed, with smug malice, at men—not marketers.

Ideally, a game like Pokémon Go would bring the whole world together in some sort of rainbows-and-sunshine version of reality where everyone is a Pokémon trainer and everyone gets along and blah blah. But it’s been three days and I’ve already had multiple interactions with strange men that I didn’t want to have, and at least one situation in which my friends got scared that the cops were going to arrest them (or worse). Also, this app requires you to provide a heck of a lot of location data, and let’s not forget that location data can be used in very unsavory ways (and it’s all legal).

The current versions of the gendered captivity tale place a decidedly contemporary spin on the retrograde story lines. They are almost uniformly concerned with the woman actively rescuing herself. And yet they don’t necessarily represent a reversal of the Grimm story; rather, they complicate it for a time of upheaval and anxiety when it comes to women’s roles. They certainly don’t glorify victimhood, but they do suggest that victimhood, for these women, has been a source of a kind of reluctant power: Nancy is a bit of a ditz before being forced to battle the shark. Sansa is a typical teenager before she faces Ramsay. Ditto Kimmy and the Reverend.

Spend less than you earn, save your money, and—poof!—your financial problems are solved. If only it were this easy. Being broke sucks enough on its own, and then there are obstacles that make it extra hard for poor people to fight their way to financial security. For example, here are a few expenses that actually cost more for low-income individuals.

Because although gender isn’t even a consideration in this world, the question of “Significance” is. It would be easy to misread one of the novel’s big themes as “what it means to be human,” but as the language issue suggests, the AI here aren’t arguing that they are human. In fact, Breq is insulted by people who say “you don’t seem like an ancillary,” because it implies that her reality is lesser and that she’s somehow transcended it. It’s not “should the idea of humans be expanded to include AIs?” but “human or not, they are individuals, and they deserve autonomy.”

We’re meant to admire the experience-lovers for their indifference to stuff, which implies they’ve got their priorities straight: to live life to the fullest. It’s no coincidence, though, that these experience-lovers are so often male, as it’s a stereotypically male aspiration not to be “tied down”—that is, not to have domestic responsibilities. But these men do have roofs over their heads. The bourgeois life they’re rejecting is simply one they’ve outsourced. After all, Tony hasn’t rejected the material life. He’s just got a woman—his mother—tidying up after him.

One way to decrease the risk of terrorism is clear: Keep military-grade weaponry out of the hands of mentally unstable people, those with a history of violence, and those on F.B.I. watch lists. But, despite sit-ins and filibusters, our lawmakers are failing us on this front and choose instead to side with the National Rifle Association. Suspected terrorists can buy assault rifles, but we’re still carrying tiny bottles of shampoo to the airport. If we’re going to use the “they’ll just find another way” argument, let’s use that to let us keep our shoes on.

What Simpson may not have recognized, though, is that the United States’ history is a story of theft, and theft doesn’t require cooperation. Talents you don’t trade can be stolen through your silence, through your absence or after your death. And once you’ve been marked as having “transcended race,” the success you’ve earned in spite of white racism can be twisted into an example of white magnanimity. Muhammad Ali was a menace, a black fighter who engaged in psychological warfare with his opponents, changed his name after joining a black-supremacist sect and gave up the best years of his career in exile rather than killing for a country he decried as racist — yet after his death, the sportscaster Chris Myers could tweet that “When you saw #Ali, you didn’t see color, you didn’t see religion.” Martin Luther King Jr., harassed by the F.B.I. and ultimately assassinated, is now deployed as a symbol of a nation that has achieved colorblindness. Whitney Houston, a black woman who made black music after finding her voice in a black church, was congratulated on transcending race after her death. You can imagine the Barack Obama obituaries to come.

Meiners pointed out that the preventative intent of registries, is based on a common misconception about sexual violence: the myth of stranger danger. “Registries really operate on this idea that these are the bad people, and if we have a scarlet letter on the bad people we’re going to be able to prevent or reduce child sexual violence,” she says. But the truth is that less than a third of sexual violence is committed by strangers. Most victims know their assailant.

In order to explore nuance, we need a clear moral baseline first, a black and white view that feels familiar to everybody. It’s difficult to explore the idea of Pennsatucky forgiving her rapist without a baseline where everyone believes that rape is terrible and that “oh I didn’t mean to” isn’t an excuse. It’s pretty much impossible to explore the idea of a cop accidentally killing Poussey when cops murdering African Americans still isn’t considered a serious crime. We need to fix our automatic assumptions before we can dig into the nitty gritty of situation-specific hypotheticals.

This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural. Najya’s first two years in public school helped me understand this better than I ever had before. Even Kenneth Clark, the psychologist whose research showed the debilitating effects of segregation on black children, chose not to enroll his children in the segregated schools he was fighting against. “My children,” he said, “only have one life.” But so do the children relegated to this city’s segregated schools. They have only one life, too.