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fightmeyeats · 6 years ago

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Marvel’s Netflix Originals & the Reification of the Prison Industrial Complex: A Prison Abolitionist Intervention on Jessica Jones

I just finished the final season of Jessica Jones on Netflix and overall I feel fairly ambivalent about it. I think the first season was by far the show’s strongest and I felt like the show lost some of its heart (namely through the way we see the corruption of Trish and especially Malcolm), but overall I felt like it held to some of its core themes, and I certainly didn’t hate it. However, what this season got me thinking about, and what I think becomes a clear problematic which repeats throughout many of Netflix’s Marvel originals shows is the way the vigilante role of the superpowered heroes is represented and played out: heroes demonstrate repetitively the failing of America’s criminal justice system, and yet ultimately reify the validity of these structures in very frustrating ways. Definitely spoilers below.

Before continuing, I do want to emphasize two things: first, this is intended to be an intervention on an incredibly prevalent problem, not a complete dismissal of the shows themselves. Considering how much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe centers on the stories of white men (frequently rich or middle-class, and exclusively canonized as heterosexual despite fan counter-readings), it is important to acknowledge the significance of Netflix shows centering their stories on women, people of color, and people with disabilities, as well as the way they, to some extent, address the social inequalities that marginalized communities and individuals experience. Secondly, I also do not want to suggest that all of the Marvel Netflix-originals have the same kinds of potentials; The Punisher, for example, does not, to me, hold the same possibilities as Luke Cage, and I’m not even looking at Iron Fist because I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to.

Let me first start by briefly discussing the concept of the prison industrial complex and prison abolition. If you are unfamiliar with the concept or the activism I highly suggest reading The Nation’s article “What Is Prison Abolition?” and looking at Critical Resistance, which was co-founded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. Taken from the website’s about, “the prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” What prison abolition is about “is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” There are a number of excellent scholars/theorists/activists who discuss prison abolition, but here I’m going to be citing and discussing “Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?” (the introduction to Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?) and Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade’s “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got.”

Let me start tracing this argument through Jessica Jones by drawing out a few of the examples which initially brought this criticism to the forefront of my mind while watching this final season:

Corrupt Cops & the Need for Jury Evidence: while the show demonstrates the limitations of policing and the criminal justice system, it simultaneously acknowledges corrupt cops who are abusing their power and the inability of police to lock up a villain because they don’t have enough evidence or the ability to get said evidence. By showing these together, there is a suggestion that the two issues at once separate from each other and equally problematic. We do not see police officers acting without warrants, assaulting/shooting suspects (although in one scene, an officer threatens to shoot Jessica when she is smashing a gazebo and digging beneath the foundation to recover a body neither the officer nor the homeowners realize is hidden there up until Trish begins filming her), or acting outside of the law to collect evidence; instead, the show’s hero does many of these things in contexts which suggest she is correct to do so (again, the antagonist she is facing up against is a psycopathic serial killer who tries to kill her multiple times). The corrupt cop in this season is removed from the central action; his corruption allows Jessica to do what she “needs” to do (destroy evidence which will allow the villain to be incarcerated, to keep her sister out of prison), and is represented as being separate from the police force as an institution. There is even a way in which his actions are presented as being potentially justifiable: he kills drug dealers to steal from them. We are told this is wrong because they are kids and still have “time to change,” implying that if they were adults, their murders would be perhaps justified (and one officer even comments that “one of those kids” hit her in the head with a bike lock, suggesting that their age doesn’t matter); we are also told it is wrong because his motive is the theft, not “justice.” This again implies that things might be different if he was murdering drug dealers for dealing drugs, and again obscures the systemic inequalities which produce crime, as well as the way the PIC contributes to and benefits from these inequalities.

“Supers” and Prisons: acknowledged but never fully addressed is the significance of “supers” as an unprotected category. When Trish is arrested, Detective Costa informs her that the NYPD doesn’t have jurisdiction and that powered peoples are, apparently, not afforded due process of law. When Jessica is initially reluctant to tell the police that the masked vigilante is Trish and hopes to stop Trish herself, Jessica comments that no one really knows what happens on the Raft because no one from the Raft is able to contact the outside world. Given the context that Luke Cage’s powers came from illegal experimentation conducted on him while he was incarcerated, it seems possible if not probable that experimentation/medical torture is being conducted on those incarcerated on the Raft, and it becomes all the more insidious that Luke shows up to explain to Jessica that he himself had to send his brother to the Raft, and convince her to do the same. Essentially by addressing some of the extreme human rights abuses involved in incarceration in the real world through the metaphor of fictitious superpowered people being denied the (facade of) protections that are extended to suspected criminals, the argument being made is that even incarceration at its worst is a necessary and viable solution to crime.

The problematic of “diverse” cops: this is less centered in the narrative and subsequently has lower stakes than the other two examples I discuss above, but by representing a “diverse” police force, we are given the illusion that police forces “are” “diverse”, and that this means something. Costa, who is shown having “personal problems” in the form of going through the adoption process with his husband, who is worried about how much Costa is working and whether or not he will be more present as a parent, obscures the reality of homophobia in the PIC.

Davis argues that “the prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (10) and the consequence of this is that “the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States” (11). She goes on to raise the question “why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure?” (14). Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Punisher, and Daredevil, address, to varying degrees and varying success, some of the problems of the PIC: they acknowledge police corruption, wrongful incarceration, the effects of financial inequalities on criminal justice outcomes (namely in the power of the rich to avoid punishment), illegal treatment of prisoners (through experimentation/medical torture), the effects of trauma and poverty on the creation of the “criminal”, and the lasting effects of incarceration. However, the solutions suggested through these shows, at best emphasize alternative models of policing/surveillance (in the case of Jessica Jones, private investigator and serial trespasser, an increased kind of policing/surveillance) and reforming systems rather than abolishing them. The problem with this, as Davis points out, is that “frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison” (20). Furthermore, the shows, for the most part, do not even call of for reforms or imagine reform as a real possibility anyways; they suggest empathy but maintain that prison or death are the only ways to stop “real” criminals. The prison is almost always the natural solution in these shows; the only question is who belongs in them and how they should get there. Worse, the only show which consistently deviates from the naturalness of incarceration is The Punisher, which suggests the better alternative to prisons might be revenge killings.

In discussing “the hero mindset,” Bassichis, Lee, and Spade discuss, essentially, the pitfalls of neoliberalism and argue that “stories of mass struggle become stories of individuals overcoming great odds,” and give the example of narratives which center Rosa Parks as “sparking” the Montgomery Bus Boycott through a solitary (“lonely”) act while obscuring the reality that she was an experienced civil rights activist acting in part of a series of civil disobediences (26). This is a general problematic of the superhero (and especially “vigilante” hero) genre, and it becomes particularly relevant in shows such as Luke Cage and Jessica Jones which are addressing systemic issues like racism, the prison industrial complex, and sexual assault/abuse in important (if imperfect ways). Superheroes, especially vigilante heroes, predominantly work alone; when they do team up it’s typically only with one or two others (Jessica working with Trish), short-lived (The Defenders), or both (Jessica sometimes working with Luke, Malcolm, and/or Erik). What’s important, is that they are vigilantes, working outside of structures or movements; while operating outside structures can have the potential to suggest alternatives solutions to the structures (ie the way that prison abolition looks to find solutions outside of policing/prisons), it also centers the solution (and problem) on individuals in ways which obscure the realities of broader structures. Even in these limited “team-ups” there is little to no potential for meaningful coalition between individual heroes and organizations/activist communities to address the broader inequalities which are being addressed/acknowledged.

This plays out in the third season of Jessica Jones in the way that it centers on a binary logic which runs: prisons or vigilante-justice through murder. The audience is told that the police don’t cut it, they can’t always know who's a “good” person or a “bad” person, and because of that “good” people are vulnerable and “bad” people walk free. The initial antagonist is a psychopathic serial killer making it easy to subscribe to this model. While it is perhaps better that the solution isn’t for Jones to kill him (again, this is the solution suggested in The Punisher), the problem is not only a reification of the prison, but that in order for this solution to be realized, Jones must take on a heightened policing role, following him, illegally searching his house, and chasing down leads the police overlooked. As Bassichis, Lee, and Spade point out, “the violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, can’t be adequately explained by finding one nasty racist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institutions, policies, and practices that make it “normal” and “necessary” to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color” (23). The binary is further traced through Trish Walker, who herself becomes a (vigilante) murderer; she is partially excused (morally/as a character) of the murders, because her first two kills are assaults that go to far because she flashes to her mother’s murderer, and the third is her mother’s murderer. Furthermore, her role as a vigilante is contextualized through her own experiences of powerlessness as the victim of abuse. However, even as Trish represents a more morally ambiguous case for the need for prisons, the solution (prison) never addresses the issues we are told shaped her actions, nor any potential for other outcomes.

#jessica jones #spoilers #marvel #prison abolition #netflix #the defenders #the punisher #luke cage #prison industrial complex #essay #film review #as always please let me know your thoughts on this topic #and while i didn't end up going into the other marvel-netflix originals if anyones interested in that im more than happy to expand on this #((also as always i wrote this as a quick rant/ramble so ill fix any typos as i notice them lmao))#jessica jones spoilers

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seashellsoldier · 4 years ago

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Well, as if we thought “next week can’t be any worse”, the sedition and treason of this past week has pushed the GOP from the crazed wilds of Fantasyland into the dark recesses of Insanityland. This country is in deep trouble. I don’t know what makes sense anymore. It seems as though the evil geniuses of GOP greed have mutated into a party of evil imbeciles supported by the most deplorable in the realm, with a demented ass-clown at the helm spewing seditious words and creating the greatest stress-test on this republic since the Civil War. What happens to the GOP now will remain to be seen. A schism seems likely though. What is indisputable though is that the filthy-rich have used Trump for their own advantage, completely unconcerned about anyone else. Anyway, about the book . . .

Kurt gave a glimpse into his personal struggles with complicity to vampiric capitalism in The Atlantic back in AUG 2020 as a lead-in to this book (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/arc...), and how so many “blue-collar” joes saddled onto the GOP horse of “trickle-down economics” only to see their occupations, facilities, unions, benefits, and industries flushed down the toilet, or sent off to other countries with cheaper labor to abuse and laxer environmental protections:

“I really hadn’t known all the crucial advance work done by big business and the economic right during the 1970s—the decade of strategizing, funding, propagandizing, mobilizing, lobbying, and institution-building. My initial underemphasis was due to a different kind of ignorance. Because I’d lived through the 1980s and definitely noticed in real time, plain as day, the rapid and widespread uptick in deference to business and the rich and profits and the market, I’d neglected afterward to take a close, careful look at the various pieces of that shift.”

Andersen, like so many other Dems, capitulated to Friedman-esque Neoliberal policies because of the beautiful delusions manufactured by its puppeteers. Of course articles in the Wall Street Journal and other defenders of Mammon just fortify their ivory defenses and yell “whiny libtard” over the battlements, because that’s all they can do to defend the almighty gods of Greed and Profit anymore. We have decades of facts on our side now. The GOP has been waging a class-based war on the middle-class and the struggling poor for the sake of their own insatiable greed, using women’s wombs and assault weapons and disinformation campaigns as distractions from their consolidation of wealth. Period. The fact that the top wealthy 10% of the US population owns 84% of all stock should illustrate everything well enough. The bottom 80% of Americans owns 6.7% of all stocks (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks...). The United States is a huge plutocracy that infects both political parties deeply, but the GOP and its donor base are by far the most egregiously rapacious. The events of 2020 demonstrate the 50-year-old playbook woefully: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. All hail big business. Protect the economy at all costs. Short-term profits are everything. Inequality’s not so bad. Systemic racism doesn’t exist. Universal healthcare is tyranny. Entitled to your own facts. Anderson connects the dots in Evil Geniuses to show the “not-quite-an-organized” conspiracy that has evolved over the past 50 years, where “[k]ey intellectual foundations of our legal system were changed. Our long-standing consensus about acceptable and unacceptable conduct by big business was changed. Ideas about selfishness and fairness were changed. The financial industry simultaneously became reckless and more powerful than ever. The liberal establishment began habitually apologizing for and distancing itself from much of what had defined liberal progress” (p. 156). Robert Reich reinforces this book talking about the latest study from the London School of Economics (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/20/joe-biden-trickle-down-economics-build-up).

“In a new study, David Hope of the London School of Economics and Julian Limberg of King’s College London lay waste to the theory. They reviewed data over the last half-century in advanced economies and found that tax cuts for the rich widened inequality without having any significant effect on jobs or growth. Nothing trickled down. (The emphasis is mine.)

Meanwhile, the rich have become far richer. Since the start of the pandemic, just 651 American billionaires have gained $1 tn of wealth. With this windfall they could send a $3,000 check to every person in America and still be as rich as they were before the pandemic. Don’t hold your breath.”

Obviously McConnel’s GOP-led Senate wouldn’t even gift a $2,000 check to every citizen making under $75K during a crippling pandemic, idiotically calling it “socialism”, but he’s a multi-millionaire so why would he care about you. It’s all about the “economy”, meaning their stock portfolios. The London study is here (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/107919/1/Hop...) and the results are stated thusly: “Overall, our analysis finds strong evidence that cutting taxes on the rich increases income inequality but has no effect on growth or unemployment” (p. 6), and that “[o]ur results have important implications for current debates around the economic consequences of taxing the rich, as they provide causal evidence that supports the growing pool of evidence from correlational studies that cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance” (p. 21). Never mind the Panama Papers from 2016 (https://www.icij.org/investigations/p...), and the FinCEN Files of 2020 (https://www.icij.org/investigations/f...), or the Gini Index, which measures income inequality by nation and has the US at 41.19—in-between Togo and Iran (https://www.statista.com/forecasts/11...).

Of course there was no blueprint scrawled in a secret bunker by a cabal of robed priests for how to do what was done . . . and yet there is a convincing, damning forensic trail of thoughts and theories, memos and actions, articles and legislation which Andersen takes us down, starting with Milton Friedman and the libertarian acolytes of Ayn Rand, propelled by Lewis Powell, Charles Koch, Dick Cheney, and many other familiar names (Welch, DeVos, Kavanaugh, Mercer, Stone, Ailes, etc.), Grover Norquist’s “Taxpayer Protection Plan”, the huge seeding of lobbying groups spending billions each year, partisan “think tanks” which have grown exponentially thanks to billionaire supporters, to the manipulated elected officials and the agencies they oversee, to the planting of Neoliberal judges in the federal courts—including the Supreme Court (Citizens United), to the bribing of scholars to publish propaganda (just like Big Tobacco and Big Oil and Big Coal and Big Pharma and Big Ag) such as Charles Murray and George Gilder, to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show and Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling media empire (this was all done before the internet). The “freedom” of the Internet has now allowed every tinfoil-hat-wearing redneck to find one another.

“So what if millionaires would start paying a little less too? So what if big business was relieved of some government red tape everybody hates? And as for cutting government programs, people understood that Reagan was only going to get rid of the things that didn’t benefit them—all the waste and fraud, all the foreign aid, all the giveaways for all the lazy bums and welfare queens” (p. 140). These ideas echo Trump and his cronies and their sweeping nostalgification—some of them actors of this grand scheme since the 1970s—and despite the overwhelming evidence against such foul logic. “Drain the swamp!” was a rallying cry of Trumpers, like it was for Reagan, and they added $7 trillion to the national debt while padding their own coffers even more in a lucrative “tax relief” bill that just made the filthy-rich even wealthier while the rest of us got a cash prize of a few hundred bucks (I gave mine to the local food bank, on behalf of Trump.) Osita Nwanevu complied an incomplete list of all the corporations supporting the GOP (https://newrepublic.com/article/16080...), and found:

The discourse surrounding money in politics can at times obscure as much or more than it reveals—the nearly exclusive focus on campaign finance and direct lobbying oversimplifies the myriad and diffuse ways that the wealthy influence and manage our politics, and it is an inescapable fact that the right wins in large part because millions of geographically well-distributed Americans simply support right-wing rhetoric and policy. That said, turning those preferences into actual political power does take money. And the Republican Party gets its money not only from the individual villains who’ve soaked up the most progressive outrage and attention—the Kochs, the Mercers, Sheldon Adelson, and all the rest—but from a number of companies familiar to the American public. Don’t worry, she lists them.

The point is that the GOP is soulless, feeding their plebeian followers with abject propaganda, baseless lies, and easily deconstructed smoke & mirrors, wrapping themselves up in flags while screwing over the lower classes at every opportunity so they can capitalize on everything possible, including a pandemic. Automation is increasing and it's all those low-wage jobs that will vanish first. NPR’s Hidden Brain show recently talked about the subject of “double standards” in people (https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/the-d...), wonderfully discussing naive realism, cognitive dissonance, magical thinking, and all the other defense mechanisms a brain can manufacture to protect one from reality. Of course we’re all biased, but we also truly live in a PSYOPed world now, and I’m uncertain if we can get out of it. The terrorist insurgency on the Capital this week, and the utter lack of police enforcement (https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/c...), never mind the seditious and treasonous acts of those involved, are a perfect highlight to the hypocrisy of it all. This is the new norm, and it won’t be getting any better unless severe accountability is enforced.

“Most Americans, even those to the left, have been reluctant to subscribe fully to Marx’s basic big idea, that modern society is shaped by an endless struggle between capital and labor, owners and workers, the rich and powerful versus everyone else” (p. 135). Too many have been drinking the toxic kool-aid for far too long. Bernie Sanders has been railing against this sadistic behavior only to be mocked and jeered by disinformation and dusty Cold War propaganda while the new Robber Barons make off with the loot, in DC, on Wall Street, and in Silicon Valley. All the brainwashed “white national” groups are their moronic thugs taking selfies while they plant pipe bombs in the Capitol wearing viking cosplay garb and waving Confederate flags.

Jeremy Adam Smith penned a nice piece for the Greater Good Science Center (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/arti...) analyzing the science and psychology of lying, citing a 2017 study published in the journal Advances in Political Psychology. The results are dour. Not only have we become terribly tribalistic, where “[s]cientists call this kind of reasoning ‘directionally motivated,’ meaning that conclusions are driven by feelings, not facts—and studies find that this is our default mode”, but that anger further fuels such mindless adherence to misinformed idiocy, and nothing short of a manufactured messiah could alter the untruths already sown within the minds of millions by Trump and his treasonous sycophants and the media networks, social media podiums, and entrenched echo chambers they all feed from. NPR was kind enough to compile a list of all the elected GOP officials who fomented sedition and supported treason upon the Rule of Law (https://www.npr.org/sections/congress...). How much evidence do we need to prosecute the bulk of the entire GOP? People should be in prison for this egregious violation of the law. Otherwise this nation is doomed to fall into sectarian factionalism and dysfunctional chaos where the lower classes will take the brunt of it (like they always do), if not outright terrorism. The Intercept's Mike Giglio was embedded with the wingnuts (https://theintercept.com/2021/01/10/c...) and surmised this:

I witnessed successful coups in two countries, and the conspirators came heavily armed with well-laid plans so that by the time people realized what was happening, it was done. I’ve also seen a country tipped into civil conflict by people who just kept taking that next blind step until they were trapped in their own momentum. But it’s naive to see America’s worst failings through the lens of foreign nations. What I saw in all the pained and screaming faces in the Capitol — in the half-naked QAnon disciple dressed in furs and also in the state lawmaker and sheriff’s deputy and schoolteacher and disenchanted veteran — was uniquely American. It wasn’t the start of something or the end of something, just the next step.

America is definitely Great Again. Thank you DJT, and every person that supported him.

For everyone else—be safe out there.

#The United States is a Sinking Ship #Divided We Fall #Plutocracy

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vishers · 4 years ago

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Friday-ish links [2020-11-06 Fri]

DUNE, Part Two: The Missionaries - YouTube

The idea of seeded mythology as a lever just came up. This is really cool and exactly the reason I think everyone should subscribe to Matt Colville's channel whether they like D&D or not.

A sea angel under ice in the White Sea | The Kid Should See This

Whoa.

Volcano Filter Betta Aquarium | The Kid Should See This

This is very cool to watch. Even cooler since my wife is doing the same kind of thing with our tank.

xkcd: Voting Software

I don't quite know how to put this, but our entire field is bad at what we do, and if you rely on us, everyone will die.

Me whenever I talk to anyone about using software for anything of importance.

What If Trump Refuses to Concede? - The Atlantic

That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.

This article, like every time I watch How Unequal Can America Get Before We Snap?, is deeply unsettling.

via Redmond

How to Be at Home

how to stay connected with ourselves and feel a connection with others while spending time physically apart from other people

FDR’s Second Bill of Rights

After WWII, many countries in Europe came to similar conclusions and enacted reforms to offer these rights to their citizens. In America, aside from the significant efforts of the Johnson administration in the 60s, we went in different direction, doubling down on inequality in the pursuit of happiness.

Choosing the Management Track | blog.danielna.com

This is a really good take on what I think we should expect of ourselves as engineering managers or managers to be. It's organized into two sections: 1. The primary differences between being an individual contributor and a manager and 2. Why being a manager is exciting.

The differences:

You won't code anymore because…

You'll have 1000 other things thate are more important for your teams success for you to do and have a fundamentally less stable daily schedule (not working more hours but being less capable of predicting at the start of the day what you'll end up actually doing that day).

Management creates an unavoidable power hierarchy and your behavior has to morph in response to that.

You need to be technical enough to intervene if something technical has truly gone off the rails while being politically savvy enough to rarely pull that trigger.

Why it's awesome:

If you're good at public speaking and writing you'll have much more opportunity to exercise those skills with great impact than as an IC.

You'll be preparing to run your own engineering organization some day.

You'll be able to directly contribute to changing industry wide problems by example.

If you're favorite thing to do is actually to see people and teams self-actualize, managing is the job of doing that. *I find this point to especially pertinent. We have to take our highest joy from watching others grow and succeed rather than directly succeeding ourselves.*

You'll have the highest leverage in the company for affecting the overall success of the business because companies ultimately succeed or fail by their coordinated execution, culture and leadership, and that's your job.

via SoftwareLeadWeekly: A free weekly email for curious humans who want to build better teams and companies.

Product Thinking vs. Project Thinking | by Kyle Evans | Product Coalition

Another entry in the output vs outcome literature.

So what are the benefits of letting go of project timelines in favor of focusing on outcomes?

First of all, it is ultimately the outcome that we are driving toward, regardless of how we try and get there. The main benefit of a product mindset is that we ensure that we get to the outcome more efficiently.

With a project mindset, we assume at the beginning that we already know how to achieve the desired outcome… But what if we were wrong initially? What if the solution we identified isn’t going to achieve the outcome we had hoped?

That is where project thinking gets us into all sorts of trouble. Once we set a plan in motion, it can be very difficult, especially in larger organizations, to pivot and change…

But with a product mindset, we are able to learn and adapt as we go. We aren’t set on dates and milestones, but rather are focused on learning and achieving the outcome. If something doesn’t work out or customers don’t respond well to one thing, we can take that into account, adapt, and still work toward the outcome we had intended without blowing up a beautiful plan that is everyone’s focus.

Crucially, when problems arise (and don’t kid yourself, they always will arise), product thinking allows us to learn and adapt, and stay focused on the outcome we’re trying to achieve.

…

All products and product management involve some level of project management. We have to keep things moving along and it is (unfortunately) unrealistic to assume that we can work in environment where our stakeholders and partners won’t expect some dates or commitments.

The key is to make commitments and project plans only at a point when we can do it with a high degree of confidence. So rather than committing to a specific path beforehand, we commit once we’ve validated what we’re doing and have had a chance to really understand what it will take. Often that is a sprint or two into the work. That may feel really late in the process, but it is at the point when estimates and plans can actually mean something. Marty Cagan, in his book Inspired: How to Create Tech Products People Love, calls this type of commitment a “high-integrity commitment.” We allow teams time to do proper discovery and research before asking for commitments.

via SoftwareLeadWeekly: A free weekly email for curious humans who want to build better teams and companies.

Andy Raskin on Twitter: "I'm often complimented by CEOs on how I run meetings, and some (notably @tycloud) have asked for tips. So here's my # 1 rule: Before participants share their opinions, ask them to write them down." / Twitter

Shift to 80% writing/sharing/cataloging and 20% discussion. Free-form sharing is poison.

via SoftwareLeadWeekly: A free weekly email for curious humans who want to build better teams and companies.

Why Silicon Valley has so many Bad Managers (and what to do about it)

No matter how beautiful and well-intentioned the values are on your walls, or what you say you care about, it’s what you do that matters.

…

These are some of the biggest mistakes that happen especially in the Valley to contribute to the problem of bad managers.

Lionizing successful leaders holistically rather than recognizing their selective good qualities and calling out their bad ones.

Especially in startups there's a vicious cycle of bad managers as new managers develop bad habits at one company which folds and then outputs to another set of companies all while only paying attention to the fiscal success over and against the cultural success of the company. Remember: people leave managers, not companies.

Ignoring cultural problems because of successful growth.

Adding perks rather than fixing real problems. What’s hard is fixing culture issues. Taking a hard look on whether your work environment is friendly and inviting for everyone, or outright hostile requires serious commitment.

Hiring HR too late Unfortunately, when HR is hired too late, many cultural habits are already ingrained deeply and hard to change. When you compound that with a backlog of core HR tasks, it’s little wonder so many startups have bad managers that are unsupported.

Turnover problems are overlooked until it's too late. It takes time to recognize turnover problems that occur. You can easily explain away a few people quitting, especially if you’re also hiring a lot of people at the same time. However, if you notice in Susan Fowler’s widely-read post on harassment at Uber, things can quickly snowball:

…

CEOs punt to someone else. It all goes back to the power of leadership by example. Without C-Level support, at best it’s “Do as I say not as I do” and at worst it’s the active undermining and contradiction of what whomever was hired knows needs done to fix things.

…

What do do?

Measure more.

Recognize that leadership is intrinsically valuable.

Train your managers.

Reward the right behaviors.

Play an active role in shaping your culture.

via SoftwareLeadWeekly: A free weekly email for curious humans who want to build better teams and companies.

Organizing software teams | The Startup

A Team Topologies Book Summary

The team topology approach treats humans and technology as a single sociotechnical ecosystem, and thus it takes a team-sized architecture approach (people first) rather than a technology-first approach, e.g., the monolith vs microservices debate.

…

If you know you need to deploy different parts of the system independently, you need to decouple services. In this environment, you should make your teams small and decoupled with clear boundaries. These boundaries should represent the business context and always be designed with the user in mind. These small decoupled team models also help to minimize intrinsic cognitive load and eliminate extraneous cognitive load.

…

The roots of success are not in creating organizational structures but in developing capabilities and habits in teams, in people.

…

And, when it comes to measuring performance, teams matter more than individuals when building and evolving modern software. An organization should assign objectives to teams, not individuals and consider team-scoped flow and design architecture to fit it.

…

High-level Takeaways:

No shared code ownership to minimize cognitive load on the team managing that stream of the product.

Use software boundaries defined by business-domain bounded contexts.

DevOps is about making teams autonomous, providing a platform and techniques from which the team can pull rather than directly providing those services to the teams.

*Tooling teams should be reorganized into enabling teams, and you should convert architects into enabling teams to focus on APIs between teams and those interactions.*

I like the verbiage developed here around the different kinds of teams. Never forget that you if you can name something you have power over it.

via SoftwareLeadWeekly: A free weekly email for curious humans who want to build better teams and companies.

The Tacit Knowledge Series - Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog

I am also fascinated by how to extract Tacit Knowledge from experts.

Knowing The Dip Exists is a Heck of an Advantage - Commonplace - The Commoncog Blog

This feels especially relevant to Chris C and I at Stitch right now.

You know you’re on a Cliff or at a Cul-de-Sac when … You know you’re in a Cliff when — well, Godin says this should be obvious to you. But your friends probably know better than you do; they’ll tell you when you’re on the path to disaster. On the other hand, only you will know if you’re in a Cul-de-Sac. Cul-de-Sacs happen when you’re not making forward progress. What counts as forward progress should be most clear to you — Godin points out that there are really only three states you can be in when you’re trying to succeed in a job or a relationship or at a task: making progress, standing still, or sliding backwards. Forward steps, however tiny — or imperceptible shifts, internal to you — count as progress. Everything else doesn’t.

Why, yes, you can register an XSS attack as a UK company name. How do we know that? Someone actually did it • The Register

OMG 😂

via Little Bobby Tables, LTD | MetaFilter

Dogmatic Partisanship's Dead End | Mere Orthodoxy

Without an honest, open, bipartisan dialogue about the fundamentals—what kind of society we want, and what it requires of each of us—all the activism in the world isn’t going to move the needle very much. The result? A world in which the only aspect of cultural life we hold in common is a penchant for cancellation, with minimal effort devoted to offering alternative visions of a shared civic life marked by the common good.

Am I wrong for having so much hope in dialogue?

It's Not the Economy: Big Tech, Anti-Trust, & the Future of Political Liberalism

So if the turn against Big Tech isn’t primarily about economic liberalism, then what is the reason? I believe that we have Big Tech in our congressional rifle scope because we as citizens are rightly concerned about the immense (and often disruptive) political power that these outsized companies wield. We increasingly feel and fear the fragility of our own democracy, and our turn against Big Tech is rooted in our fears.

I want an era of monopoly busting worthy of the history books.

Ethics is hard. We can't even agree on things ourselves. How can we teach our AIs anything remotely useful?

But I also think Stoller’s greatest insight is the one that will perhaps be most overlooked:

This report re-asserts Congress’s role as the central policymaking body in America, seizing control from judges who have re-written case law in ridiculous ways, as well as slothful enforcers.

Ultimately, it is Congress who is most responsible for structuring our political economy. And ultimately it is we the people to whom Congress is accountable, and from whom Congress receives its marching orders. Technocrats in the field of economics cannot save us from Big Tech. If we are to be saved, we will have to save ourselves.

The Metronome – Rands in Repose

After hiring and building a diverse set of humans, your primary job as a leader is to give them as much time as possible to do their creative work. My small act of meeting timeliness demonstrates that I value everyone’s time equally.

The primary responsibility of a manager is keeping their reports unblocked.

Your Mid-Year Leadership Check-in – Rands in Repose

I like the idea of habitually working through these questions. I think they'd generate a lot of insight.

Kitchen Soap – Invited article in IEEE Software – Technical Debt: Challenges and Perspectives

My main argument isn’t that technical debt’s definition has morphed over time; many people have already made that observation. Instead, I believe that engineers have used the term to represent a different (and perhaps even more unsettling) phenomenon: a type of debt that can’t be recognized at the time of the code’s creation. They’ve used the term “technical debt” simply because it’s the closest descriptive label they’ve had, not because it’s the same as what Cunningham meant. This phenomenon has no countermeasure like refactoring that can be applied in anticipation, because it’s invisible until an anomaly reveals its presence.

Next up: STELLA Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity Brooklyn NY, March 14-16, 2017

Dark debt is found in complex systems and the anomalies it generates are complex system failures. Dark debt is not recognizable at the time of creation. Its impact is not to foil development but to generate anomalies. It arises from the unforeseen interactions of hardware or software with other parts of the framework. There is no specific countermeasure that can be used against dark debt because it is invisible until an anomaly reveals its presence.

How have I never heard of this one?

KeystoneInterface

Software development teams find life can be much easier if they integrate their work as often as they can. They also find it valuable to release frequently into production. But teams don't want to expose half-developed features to their users. A useful technique to deal with this tension is to build all the back-end code, integrate, but don't build the user-interface. The feature can be integrated and tested, but the UI is held back until the end until, like a keystone, it's added to complete the feature, revealing it to the users.

OutcomeOverOutput

A consequential concern about using outcome observations is that it's harder to apportion them to a software development team. Consider a customer team that uses software to help them track the quality of goods in their supply chain. If we assess them by how many rejects there are by the final consumer, how much of that is due to the software, how much due the quality control procedures developed by quality analysts, and how much due to a separate initiative to improve the quality of raw materials? This difficulty of apportionment is a huge hurdle if we want to compare different software teams, perhaps in order to judge whether using Clojure has helped teams be more effective. Similarly there is the case that the developers work well and deliver excellent and valuable software to track quality, but the quality control procedures are no good. Consequently rejects don't go down and the initiative is seen as a failure, despite the developers doing a great job on their part.

CannotMeasureProductivity

I can see why measuring productivity is so seductive. If we could do it we could assess software much more easily and objectively than we can now. But false measures only make things worse. This is somewhere I think we have to admit to our ignorance.

Ego Driven Development · deliberate software

Type in the exact number of machines to proceed

This is a great idea. I'll definitely be incorporating it in more of my scripts.

40 milliseconds of latency that just would not go away

LULZ easy job…

Against an Unequivocally Bad Idea – Quillette

But the bipartisan appeal is a façade. Liberals and conservatives support radically different versions of UBI, and both are fatally flawed. The liberal version of UBI is unworkable, and the conservative version would throw millions into poverty. Regardless of how one tinkers or modifies the details, UBI is an Unequivocally Bad Idea.

Race, Trump, and BLM | City Journal

I want to put choices in the hands of parents to seek whatever provision of educational services best suits their needs and let the chips fall where they may.

I want more integration, intermarriage, mixing. I want a ratcheting down of the intensity of the investment that we make in our racial identities, because that’s not the most important feature of our human profile.

I think the war on drugs has been a very bad mistake for the country. It’s not the only thing going on with the rise in imprisonment in the United States, but it’s a major factor. The overrepresentation of blacks in drug trafficking explains part of the conflict with blacks and the police, and I incline toward a somewhat libertarian outlook on some things.

I think we desperately need better black leadership—people prepared to step away from the crowd and stand up for what they know to be right. Many black police officers are beginning to speak out now. Kentucky attorney general Daniel Cameron, who happens to be African-American, has been trying to walk a very difficult line in the Breonna Taylor case, and he’s met with much vilification. We need 100 more public officials like him to offer a different account of what’s going on and to represent African-Americans in a different way.

Condemn this Violence without Equivocation – Quillette

But not all protests have been peaceful and not every protestor has behaved righteously. In cities across our country we have witnessed, often in real time, violent attacks on the police, looting of commercial outlets, and torching of the property of innocent bystanders. That is, some of the protests have descended into riots. This rioting is also contemptible, and it, too, demands our unreserved condemnation.

Not only are theft, arson, and violence immoral, but they are also politically counterproductive. It should be obvious that the outrageous injustice apparently perpetrated against George Floyd can in no way justify or excuse the criminal behaviors of those few who are using the chaos of mass protests as a cover for their sprees of looting, arson, and mayhem. No civilized society can allow righteous anger to become a license for indulging one’s basest instincts. The violence, arson, and theft must stop. And so long as they continue, they must be forcefully condemned.

The Electoral College Will Remain: Smaller states wouldn’t have approved the Constitution without it, and they won’t support an amendment to abolish it. | City Journal

“A successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1788, would need to achieve the “esteem and confidence of the whole Union.” A direct popular vote would narrow the number of citizens whose votes the presidential candidates campaigned for. Candidates would focus their time, energy, and money on the most populated areas. By contrast, under our current system, presidential candidates seek the support of dairy farmers in Iowa, coal miners in Pennsylvania, seniors in Florida, and students in Colorado.

larval stage

larval stage: n.

Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the perpetration of more than one 36-hour hacking run in a given week; neglect of all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2 years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never resume a more ‘normal’ life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also wannabee. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new OS or programming language.

I feel like I grew up on the tail end of this being the accepted norm for software people. Now I feel like there's a growing divide between those who want a good work life balance but are also clearly awesome at their job (@b0rk comes to mind) and those who still yearn for the days when Real Programmers wrote in machine code… I, for one, am sick and tired of the heroic sociopathic wizard.

(If you've never seen The Jargon File you're in for a treat.)

via Learning new things

File Descriptor Transfer over Unix Domain Sockets | by Cindy Sridharan | Medium

I got a number of reponses on Twitter from folks expressing astonishment that this is even possible. Indeed, if you’re not very familiar with some of the features of Unix domain sockets, the aforementioned paragraph from the paper might be pretty inscrutable.

Transferring TCP sockets over a Unix domain socket is, actually, a tried and tested method to implement “hot restarts” or “zero downtime restarts”. Popular proxies like HAProxy and Envoy use very similar mechanisms to drain connections from one instance of the proxy to another without dropping any connections. However, many of these features are not very widely known.

There is nothing new under the sun…

via SRE Weekly Issue #242 – SRE WEEKLY

Who else remembers the heady days of the standardization wars?

The Web Standards Project

CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty of CSS Design

4 Questions Before Election Day

Do you feel more fundamentally aligned with a non-Christian who aligns with your political party than with a church member who votes differently from you? Christians share the most vital, deep-seated, identity-forming reality in common with other Christ followers. We’ve been redeemed by the blood of Christ, brought into one new body, and indwelled by the same Spirit. This brotherhood and sisterhood stands, regardless of our politics. Indeed, it exists even across vastly different forms of government. I have a tighter bond of fellowship with my friend Feng, who is a Christian in Communist China, than I do with a member of my own family who doesn’t know Jesus.

The essential problem I have with this line of thinking is that it doesn't properly engage with James 2.18-22 or 1 Corinthians 5.9-13. This is the fundamental lie that I think has crept in to the church for who knows how long: that somehow politics and faith are separate. How can politics (the art or science of controlling and directing the making and administration of policy in a nation state) possibly be divorced from faith? How can you look at me and tell me that certain immoral actions are supposed to cut off my brothers and sisters in Christ from me but their actions related to the franchise do not? It's certainly right to say that politics are harder to judge than some sins but that doesn't mean we shouldn't.

Why Evangelicals Are (Still) Divided over Trump

That is the main strength of the witness side. The drawback is by being rigidly focused on our gospel witness, evangelicals may suffer losses, such as religious liberty, that might affect our ability to proclaim the gospel in the future. By not fully supporting Trump as the “lesser evil” the witness side may be helping to tip the election toward a Biden presidency. That could result, as many on the transformation side have noted, in the promotion of socially progressive policies that will shape the future of our nation.

By painting ourselves into this corner we could effectively be making it 'legal' to proclaim The Gospel while also making it so incredibly repugnant that no one will listen short of an astonishing miracle (which it already is).

Also, RE 4 Questions Before Election Day, the 'Justice' side of this seems to really fall afoul of 'putting our hope in judges', doesn't it?

Christians, Conscience, and the Looming 2020 Election - AlbertMohler.com

I am convinced that abortion and the sexual revolution are a largely a (perhaps unwitting) front for the real issue of religious liberty.

Why Many Americans Will Be Shocked on Election Day

If Trump wins

What really worries me isn't Trump himself. It's the interaction of another Trump victory with the potential reaction of the left…

That is a recipe for a precipitous collapse in the perceived legitimacy of those institutions. If we hadn't just lived through several months of urban unrest, with widespread protests frequently crossing over into rioting and looting, and rates of violent crime surging in cities across the country, I might be convinced that the result would be little more than intensified online flame wars while the overwhelming majority of Americans tune out and ignore the political circus. It would be the kind of virtual civil war Ross Douthat describes in the most cogent chapter of his recent book on our decadent society — a scenario in which committed partisans indulge in vicarious digital violence while the rest of the country withdraws further into indolence and apathy, leaving the real world perfectly peaceful.

But the past five months have showed us a different and much darker path — one where another Trump upset is followed by public demonstrations much larger, angrier, and more violent than the ones that briefly flourished in the early days of 2017. Imagine the George Floyd protests from late May and early June at their most volatile but amplified and augmented by the scalding realization that at this moment the country's electoral system is deaf to plurality or majority public opinion.

Yep…

Next up: Common Sense 316 – The Day of the Dove

Making Sense Podcast #42 — Racism and Violence in America | Sam Harris

While I don't think that this is a particularly great conversation in terms of being actual debate (unlike, for instance, Has Anti-Racism Become as Harmful as Racism? John McWhorter vs. Nikhil Singh - YouTube) I do think the issues discussed are hyper important to our culture at this moment.

Emily Joy on Twitter: "Earlier this year I found out someone I used to be really close with was voting for Tr*mp. I reached out to her to attempt to call her in because we were CLOSE at one point, and we always used to talk about deep things." / Twitter

I don’t really know what I’m trying to say. I’ve been awake for hours and I’ve been in the bathtub for 45 minutes and I guess I’ll just never get over how Christians use theoretical babies to justify not loving the the already-born people standing right in front of them.

#friday-ish links

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anaymalpani · 5 years ago

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Coronavirus Will Change the World Permanently. Here’s How.

A crisis on this scale can reorder society in dramatic ways, for better or worse. Here are 34 big thinkers’ predictions for what’s to come.

For many Americans right now, the scale of the coronavirus crisis calls to mind 9/11 or the 2008 financial crisis—events that reshaped society in lasting ways, from how we travel and buy homes, to the level of security and surveillance we’re accustomed to, and even to the language we use.

Politico Magazine surveyed more than 30 smart, macro thinkers this week, and they have some news for you: Buckle in. This could be bigger.

A global, novel virus that keeps us contained in our homes—maybe for months—is already reorienting our relationship to government, to the outside world, even to each other. Some changes these experts expect to see in the coming months or years might feel unfamiliar or unsettling: Will nations stay closed? Will touch become taboo? What will become of restaurants?

But crisis moments also present opportunity: more sophisticated and flexible use of technology, less polarization, a revived appreciation for the outdoors and life’s other simple pleasures. No one knows exactly what will come, but here is our best stab at a guide to the unknown ways that society—government, healthcare, the economy, our lifestyles and more—will change.

Community

The personal becomes dangerous. Deborah Tannen is a professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author, most recently, of You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships.

On 9/11, Americans discovered we are vulnerable to calamities we thought only happened in distant lands. The 2008 financial crisis told us we also can suffer the calamities of past eras, like the economic meltdown of the Great Depression. Now, the 1918 flu pandemic is a sudden spectre in our lives.

This loss of innocence, or complacency, is a new way of being-in-the-world that we can expect to change our doing-in-the-world. We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky. How quickly that awareness recedes will be different for different people, but it can never vanish completely for anyone who lived through this year. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we might all find we can’t stop washing our hands.

The comfort of being in the presence of others might be replaced by a greater comfort with absence, especially with those we don’t know intimately. Instead of asking, “Is there a reason to do this online?” we’ll be asking, “Is there any good reason to do this in person?”—and might need to be reminded and convinced that there is. Unfortunately, if unintendedly, those without easy access to broadband will be further disadvantaged. The paradox of online communication will be ratcheted up: It creates more distance, yes, but also more connection, as we communicate more often with people who are physically farther and farther away—and who feel safer to us because of that distance.

A new kind of patriotism. Mark Lawrence Schrad is an associate professor of political science and author of the forthcoming Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition.

America has long equated patriotism with the armed forces. But you can’t shoot a virus. Those on the frontlines against coronavirus aren’t conscripts, mercenaries or enlisted men; they are our doctors, nurses, pharmacists, teachers, caregivers, store clerks, utility workers, small-business owners and employees. Like Li Wenliang and the doctors of Wuhan, many are suddenly saddled with unfathomable tasks, compounded by an increased risk of contamination and death they never signed up for.

When all is said and done, perhaps we will recognize their sacrifice as true patriotism, saluting our doctors and nurses, genuflecting and saying, “Thank you for your service,” as we now do for military veterans. We will give them guaranteed health benefits and corporate discounts, and build statues and have holidays for this new class of people who sacrifice their health and their lives for ours. Perhaps, too, we will finally start to understand patriotism more as cultivating the health and life of your community, rather than blowing up someone else’s community. Maybe the de-militarization of American patriotism and love of community will be one of the benefits to come out of this whole awful mess.

A decline in polarization. Peter T. Coleman is a professor of psychology at Columbia University who studies intractable conflict. His next book, The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization, will be released in 2021.

The extraordinary shock(s) to our system that the coronavirus pandemic is bringing has the potential to break America out of the 50-plus year pattern of escalating political and cultural polarization we have been trapped in, and help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality. It might sound idealistic, but there are two reasons to think it can happen.

The first is the “common enemy” scenario, in which people begin to look past their differences when faced with a shared external threat. COVID-19 is presenting us with a formidable enemy that will not distinguish between reds and blues, and might provide us with fusion-like energy and a singularity of purpose to help us reset and regroup. During the Blitz, the 56-day Nazi bombing campaign against the Britain, Winston Churchill’s cabinet was amazed and heartened to witness the ascendance of human goodness—altruism, compassion and generosity of spirit and action.

The second reason is the “political shock wave” scenario. Studies have shown that strong, enduring relational patterns often become more susceptible to change after some type of major shock destabilizes them. This doesn’t necessarily happen right away, but a study of 850 enduring inter-state conflicts that occurred between 1816 to 1992 found that more than 75 percent of them ended within 10 years of a major destabilizing shock. Societal shocks can break different ways, making things better or worse. But given our current levels of tension, this scenario suggests that now is the time to begin to promote more constructive patterns in our cultural and political discourse. The time for change is clearly ripening.

A return to faith in serious experts. Tom Nichols is a professor at the U.S. Naval War College and author of The Death of Expertise.

America for several years has become a fundamentally unserious country. This is the luxury afforded us by peace, affluence and high levels of consumer technology. We didn’t have to think about the things that once focused our minds—nuclear war, oil shortages, high unemployment, skyrocketing interest rates. Terrorism has receded back to being a kind of notional threat for which we dispatch volunteers in our military to the far corners of the desert as the advance guard of the homeland. We even elevated a reality TV star to the presidency as a populist attack on the bureaucracy and expertise that makes most of the government function on a day to day basis.

The COVID-19 crisis could change this in two ways. First, it has already forced people back to accepting that expertise matters. It was easy to sneer at experts until a pandemic arrived, and then people wanted to hear from medical professionals like Anthony Fauci. Second, it may—one might hope—return Americans to a new seriousness, or at least move them back toward the idea that government is a matter for serious people. The colossal failure of the Trump administration both to keep Americans healthy and to slow the pandemic-driven implosion of the economy might shock the public enough back to insisting on something from government other than emotional satisfaction.

Less individualism. Eric Klinenberg is professor of sociology and director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author, most recently, of Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.

The coronavirus pandemic marks the end of our romance with market society and hyper-individualism. We could turn toward authoritarianism. Imagine President Donald Trump trying to suspend the November election. Consider the prospect of a military crackdown. The dystopian scenario is real. But I believe we will go in the other direction. We’re now seeing the market-based models for social organization fail, catastrophically, as self-seeking behavior (from Trump down) makes this crisis so much more dangerous than it needed to be.

When this ends, we will reorient our politics and make substantial new investments in public goods—for health, especially—and public services. I don’t think we will become less communal. Instead, we will be better able to see how our fates are linked. The cheap burger I eat from a restaurant that denies paid sick leave to its cashiers and kitchen staff makes me more vulnerable to illness, as does the neighbor who refuses to stay home in a pandemic because our public school failed to teach him science or critical thinking skills. The economy—and the social order it helps support—will collapse if the government doesn’t guarantee income for the millions of workers who will lose their jobs in a major recession or depression. Young adults will fail to launch if government doesn’t help reduce or cancel their student debt. The coronavirus pandemic is going to cause immense pain and suffering. But it will force us to reconsider who we are and what we value, and, in the long run, it could help us rediscover the better version of ourselves.

Religious worship will look different. Amy Sullivan is director of strategy for Vote Common Good.

We are an Easter people, many Christians are fond of saying, emphasizing the triumph of hope and life over fear. But how do an Easter people observe their holiest day if they cannot rejoice together on Easter morning? How do Jews celebrate their deliverance from bondage when Passover Seders must take place on Zoom, with in-laws left to wonder whether Cousin Joey forgot the Four Questions or the internet connection merely froze? Can Muslim families celebrate Ramadan if they cannot visit local mosques for Tarawih prayers or gather with loved ones to break the fast?

All faiths have dealt with the challenge of keeping faith alive under the adverse conditions of war or diaspora or persecution—but never all faiths at the same time. Religion in the time of quarantine will challenge conceptions of what it means to minister and to fellowship. But it will also expand the opportunities for those who have no local congregation to sample sermons from afar. Contemplative practices may gain popularity. And maybe—just maybe—the culture war that has branded those who preach about the common good with the epithet “Social Justice Warriors” may ease amid the very present reminder of our interconnected humanity.

New forms of reform. Jonathan Rauch is a contributing writer at the Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

One group of Americans has lived through a transformational epidemic in recent memory: gay men. Of course, HIV/AIDS was (and is) different in all kinds of ways from coronavirus, but one lesson is likely to apply: Plagues drive change. Partly because our government failed us, gay Americans mobilized to build organizations, networks and know-how that changed our place in society and have enduring legacies today. The epidemic also revealed deadly flaws in the health care system, and it awakened us to the need for the protection of marriage—revelations which led to landmark reforms. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some analogous changes in the wake of coronavirus. People are finding new ways to connect and support each other in adversity; they are sure to demand major changes in the health-care system and maybe also the government; and they’ll become newly conscious of interdependency and community. I can’t predict the precise effects, but I’m sure we’ll be seeing them for years.

Tech

Regulatory barriers to online tools will fall. Katherine Mangu-Ward is editor-in-chief of Reason magazine.

COVID-19 will sweep away many of the artificial barriers to moving more of our lives online. Not everything can become virtual, of course. But in many areas of our lives, uptake on genuinely useful online tools has been slowed by powerful legacy players, often working in collaboration with overcautious bureaucrats. Medicare allowing billing for telemedicine was a long-overdue change, for instance, as was revisiting HIPAA to permit more medical providers to use the same tools the rest of us use every day to communicate, such as Skype, Facetime and email. The regulatory bureaucracy might well have dragged its feet on this for many more years if not for this crisis. The resistance—led by teachers’ unions and the politicians beholden to them—to allowing partial home-schooling or online learning for K-12 kids has been swept away by necessity. It will be near-impossible to put that genie back in the bottle in the fall, with many families finding that they prefer full or partial home-schooling or online homework. For many college students, returning to an expensive dorm room on a depopulated campus will not be appealing, forcing massive changes in a sector that has been ripe for innovation for a long time. And while not every job can be done remotely, many people are learning that the difference between having to put on a tie and commute for an hour or working efficiently at home was always just the ability to download one or two apps plus permission from their boss. Once companies sort out their remote work dance steps, it will be harder—and more expensive—to deny employees those options. In other words, it turns out, an awful lot of meetings (and doctors’ appointments and classes) really could have been an email. And now they will be.

A healthier digital lifestyle. Sherry Turkle is professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT, founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, and author, most recently, of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.

Perhaps we can use our time with our devices to rethink the kinds of community we can create through them. In the earliest days of our coronavirus social distancing, we have seen inspirational first examples. Cello master Yo-Yo Ma posts a daily live concert of a song that sustains him. Broadway diva Laura Benanti invites performers from high school musicals who are not going to put on those shows to send their performances to her. She’ll be watching; Lin-Manuel Miranda joins the campaign and promises to watch as well. Entrepreneurs offer time to listen to pitches. Master yoga instructors teach free classes. This is a different life on the screen from disappearing into a video game or polishing one’s avatar. This is breaking open a medium with human generosity and empathy. This is looking within and asking: “What can I authentically offer? I have a life, a history. What do people need?” If, moving forward, we apply our most human instincts to our devices, that will have been a powerful COVID-19 legacy. Not only alone together, but together alone.

A boon to virtual reality. Elizabeth Bradley is president of Vassar College and a scholar of global health.

VR allows us to have the experiences we want even if we have to be isolated, quarantined or alone. Maybe that will be how we adapt and stay safe in the next outbreak. I would like to see a VR program that helped with the socialization and mental health of people who had to self-isolate. Imagine putting on glasses, and suddenly you are in a classroom or another communal setting, or even a positive psychology intervention.

Health/Science

The rise of telemedicine. Ezekiel J. Emanuel is chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania.

The pandemic will shift the paradigm of where our healthcare delivery takes place. For years, telemedicine has lingered on the sidelines as a cost-controlling, high convenience system. Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic. There would also be containment-related benefits to this shift; staying home for a video call keeps you out of the transit system, out of the waiting room and, most importantly, away from patients who need critical care.

An opening for stronger family care. Ai-Jen Poo is director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Caring Across Generations.

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed gaping holes in our care infrastructure, as millions of American families have been forced to navigate this crisis without a safety net. With loved ones sick and children suddenly home from school indefinitely, they’ve been forced to make impossible choices among their families, their health and financial ruin. After all, meaningful child care assistance is extremely limited, access to long-term care is piecemeal at best, and too few workers have access to paid family and medical leave, which means that missed work means missed pay.

This crisis should unleash widespread political support for Universal Family Care—a single public federal fund that we all contribute to, that we all benefit from, that helps us take care of our families while we work, from child care and elder care to support for people with disabilities and paid family leave. Coronavirus has put a particular national spotlight on unmet needs of the growing older population in our country, and the tens of millions of overstretched family and professional caregivers they rely on. Care is and always has been a shared responsibility. Yet, our policy has never fully supported it. This moment, challenging as it is, should jolt us into changing that.

Government becomes Big Pharma. Steph Sterling is vice president of advocacy and policy at the Roosevelt Institute, and co-author of the forthcoming paper “In the Public Interest: Democratizing Medicines through Public Ownership.”

The coronavirus has laid bare the failures of our costly, inefficient, market-based system for developing, researching and manufacturing medicines and vaccines. COVID-19 is one of several coronavirus outbreaks we have seen over the past 20 years, yet the logic of our current system—a range of costly government incentives intended to stimulate private-sector development—has resulted in the 18-month window we now anticipate before widespread vaccine availability. Private pharmaceutical firms simply will not prioritize a vaccine or other countermeasure for a future public health emergency until its profitability is assured, and that is far too late to prevent mass disruption. The reality of fragile supply chains for active pharmaceutical ingredients coupled with public outrage over patent abuses that limit the availability of new treatments has led to an emerging, bipartisan consensus that the public sector must take far more active and direct responsibility for the development and manufacture of medicines. That more efficient, far more resilient government approach will replace our failed, 40-year experiment with market-based incentives to meet essential health needs.

Science reigns again. Sonja Trauss is executive director of YIMBY Law.

Truth and its most popular emissary, science, have been declining in credibility for more than a generation. As Obi-Wan Kenobi told us in Return of the Jedi, “You’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.” In 2005, long before Donald Trump, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” to describe the increasingly fact-lite political discourse. The oil and gas industry has been waging a decades-long war against truth and science, following up on the same effort waged by the tobacco industry. Altogether, this led to the situation in which the Republicans could claim that the reports about the coronavirus weren’t science at all, but mere politics, and this sounded reasonable to millions of people. Quickly, however, Americans are being reacquainted with scientific concepts like germ theory and exponential growth. Unlike with tobacco use or climate change, science doubters will be able to see the impacts of the coronavirus immediately. At least for the next 35 years, I think we can expect that public respect for expertise in public health and epidemics to be at least partially restored.

Government

Congress can finally go virtual. Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of the practice in media arts and sciences at MIT, director of the Center for Civic Media and author of Digital Cosmopolitans: Why We Think the Internet Connects Us, Why It Doesn’t, and How to Rewire It.

Coronavirus is going to force many institutions to go virtual. One that would greatly benefit from the change is the Congress. We need Congress to continue working through this crisis, but given advice to limit gatherings to 10 people or fewer, meeting on the floor of the House of Representatives is not an especially wise option right now; at least two members of Congress already have tested positive for the virus.

Instead, this is a great time for congresspeople to return to their districts and start the process of virtual legislating—permanently. Not only is this move medically necessary at the moment, but it has ancillary benefits. Lawmakers will be closer to the voters they represent and more likely to be sensitive to local perspectives and issues. A virtual Congress is harder to lobby, as the endless parties and receptions that lobbyists throw in Washington will be harder to replicate across the whole nation. Party conformity also might loosen with representatives remembering local loyalties over party ties.

In the long run, a virtualized Congress might help us tackle one of the great problems of the contemporary House of Representatives: reapportionment and expansion. The House has not grown meaningfully in size since the 1920s, which means that a representative, on average, speaks for 770,000 constituents, rather than the 30,000 the Founding Fathers mandated. If we demonstrate that a virtual Congress can do its job as well or better using 21st-century technologies, rather than 18th-century ones, perhaps we could return the house to the 30,000:1 ratio George Washington prescribed.

Big government makes a comeback. Margaret O’Mara is a professor of history at University of Washington and author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America.

The battle against the coronavirus already has made government—federal, state and local—far more visible to Americans than it normally has been. As we tune in to daily briefings from public health officials, listen for guidance from our governors, and seek help and hope from our national leaders, we are seeing the critical role that “big government” plays in our lives and our health. We also see the deadly consequences of four decades of disinvestment in public infrastructure and dismissal of public expertise. Not only will America need a massive dose of big government to get out of this crisis—as Washington’s swift passage of a giant economic bailout package reflects—but we will need big, and wise, government more than ever in its aftermath.

Government service regains its cachet. Lilliana Mason is an associate professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity.

The Reagan era is over. The widely accepted idea that government is inherently bad won’t persist after coronavirus. This event is global evidence that a functioning government is crucial for a healthy society. It is no longer “terrifying” to hear the words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” In fact, that is what most people are desperately hoping to hear right now. We will see a rebirth of the patriotic honor of working for the government.

A new civic federalism. Archon Fung is professor of citizenship and self-government at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Just as the trauma of fighting World War II laid the foundations for a stronger American government and national solidarity, the coronavirus crisis might sow the seeds of a new civic federalism, in which states and localities become centers of justice, solidarity and far-sighted democratic problem-solving. Many Americans now bemoan the failure of national leadership in the face of this unprecedented challenge. When we look back, we will see that some communities handled the crisis much better than others. We might well find that success came in states where government, civic and private-sector leaders joined their strengths together in a spirit of self-sacrifice for the common good.

Consider that the virology lab at the University of Washington far surpassed the CDC and others in bringing substantial COVID-19 testing early, when it was most needed. Some governors, mayors, education authorities and employers have led the way by enforcing social distancing, closing campuses and other places, and channelling resources to support the most vulnerable. And the civic fabric of some communities has fostered the responsibility and altruism of millions of ordinary citizens who have stayed home, lost income, kept their kids inside, self-quarantined, refrained from hoarding, supported each other, and even pooled medical supplies and other resources to bolster health workers. The coronavirus is this century’s most urgent challenge to humanity. Harnessing a new sense of solidarity, citizens of states and cities will rise to face the enormous challenges ahead such as climate change and transforming our era of historic inequality into one of economic inclusion.

The rules we’ve lived by won’t all apply. Astra Taylor is a filmmaker and author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone.

America’s response to coronavirus pandemic has revealed a simple truth: So many policies that our elected officials have long told us were impossible and impractical were eminently possible and practical all along. In 2011, when Occupy Wall Street activists demanded debt cancellation for student loans and medical debt, they were laughed at by many in the mainstream media. In the intervening years, we have continued to push the issue and have consistently been told our demands were unrealistic. Now, we know that the “rules” we have lived under were unnecessary, and simply made society more brittle and unequal.

All along, evictions were avoidable; the homeless could’ve been housed and sheltered in government buildings; water and electricity didn’t need to be turned off for people behind on their bills; paid sick leave could‘ve been a right for all workers; paying your mortgage late didn’t need to lead to foreclosure; and debtors could’ve been granted relief. President Donald Trump has already put a freeze on interest for federal student loans, while New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has paused all medical and student debt owed to New York State. Democrats and Republicans are discussing suspending collection on—or outright cancelling—student loans as part of a larger economic stimulus package.

It’s clear that in a crisis, the rules don’t apply—which makes you wonder why they are rules in the first place. This is an unprecedented opportunity to not just hit the pause button and temporarily ease the pain, but to permanently change the rules so that untold millions of people aren’t so vulnerable to begin with.

Revived trust in institutions. Michiko Kakutani is author of the 2018 bestseller The Death of Truth and former chief book critic of the New York Times.

The coronavirus pandemic, one hopes, will jolt Americans into a realization that the institutions and values Donald Trump has spent his presidency assailing are essential to the functioning of a democracy—and to its ability to grapple effectively with a national crisis. A recognition that government institutions—including those entrusted with protecting our health, preserving our liberties and overseeing our national security—need to be staffed with experts (not political loyalists), that decisions need to be made through a reasoned policy process and predicated on evidence-based science and historical and geopolitical knowledge (not on Trump-ian “alternative facts,” political expediency or what Thomas Pynchon called, in Gravity’s Rainbow, “a chaos of peeves, whims, hallucinations and all-round assholery”). Instead of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, we need to return to multilateral diplomacy, and to the understanding that co-operation with allies—and adversaries, too—is especially necessary when it comes to dealing with global problems like climate change and viral pandemics.

Most of all, we need to remember that public trust is crucial to governance—and that trust depends on telling the truth. As the historian John M. Barry wrote in his 2004 book The Great Influenza—a harrowing chronicle of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide—the main lesson from that catastrophe is that “those in authority must retain the public’s trust” and “the way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one.”

Expect a political uprising. Cathy O’Neil is founder and CEO of the algorithmic auditing company ORCAA and author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

The aftermath of the coronavirus is likely to include a new political uprising—an Occupy Wall Street 2.0, but this time much more massive and angrier. Once the health emergency is over, we will see the extent to which rich, well-connected and well-resourced communities will have been taken care of, while contingent, poor and stigmatized communities will have been thoroughly destroyed. Moreover, we will have seen how political action is possible—multitrillion dollar bailouts and projects can be mobilized quickly—but only if the cause is considered urgent. This mismatch of long-disregarded populations finally getting the message that their needs are not only chronically unattended, but also chronically dismissed as politically required, will likely have drastic, pitchfork consequences.

Elections

Electronic voting goes mainstream. Joe Brotherton is chairman of Democracy Live, a startup that provides electronic ballots.

One victim of COVID-19 will be the old model of limiting voting to polling places where people must gather in close proximity for an extended period of time. We have been gradually moving away from this model since 2010, when Congress passed a law requiring electronic balloting for military and overseas voters, and some states now require accessible at-home voting for blind and disabled voters. Over the long term, as election officials grapple with how to allow for safe voting in the midst of a pandemic, the adoption of more advanced technology—including secure, transparent, cost-effective voting from our mobile devices—is more likely. In the near-term, a hybrid model—mobile-phone voting with paper ballots for tabulation—is emerging in the 2020 election cycle in certain jurisdictions. We should expect that option to become more widespread. To be clear, proven technologies now exist that offer mobile, at-home voting while still generating paper ballots. This system is not an idea; it is a reality that has been used in more than 1,000 elections for nearly a decade by our overseas military and disabled voters. This should be the new normal.

Election Day will become Election Month. Lee Drutman is a senior fellow at New America and author of Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

How do we hold an election in the time of coronavirus? By making it easier to vote when citizens want and where they want, so that Election Day doesn’t become a health risk of big crowds and long lines. The change will come through expanded early voting and no-excuse mail-in balloting, effectively turning Election Day into Election Month (or maybe months, depending on the closeness of the election and the leniency for late-arriving ballots postmarked on Election Day). This transition requires considerable thought and planning to ensure that all communities are treated equally, and to prevent fraud. But facing the prospect of crowded polling places staffed by at-risk poll workers (who tend to be older), states will come under tremendous pressure to develop plans so that the election can go on regardless. This will mark a permanent change. Once citizens experience the convenience of early voting and/or voting by mail, they won’t want to give it up. More convenience will generate higher voter turnout, potentially transforming partisan competition in America.

Voting by mail will become the norm. Kevin R. Kosar is vice president of research partnerships at the R Street Institute.

To date, five states—Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland and Ohio—have postponed their presidential primaries. More states may well follow. But these elections cannot be put off indefinitely. Parties need to hold their conventions and select a presidential nominee before the autumn general election. The coronavirus might, according to some reports, continue to menace Americans through June or even the end of summer. In most states, this means elections policy is inviting an electoral train wreck. The clock is ticking.

Fortunately, there is a time-tested means for the country to escape the choice between protecting public health and allowing voters to exercise their right to vote: voting by mail. Military members overseas have voted by mail for decades. Some states, such as Washington, Oregon and Utah, already let everyone vote at home. They send every voter a ballot and then let them choose to cast it either via mail or at a polling place. Unfortunately, most states have set the toggle to voting in-person and requiring individuals to request to vote by mail. Voters already receive registration cards and elections guides by mail. Why not ballots? Given the risks that in-person voting poses, states now have urgent cause to move immediately to modernize their hidebound systems—and we should soon expect them to.

Dale Ho is director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an unprecedented threat to the way that most people vote: in person on Election Day. But there are several obvious steps we can take to ensure that no one has to choose between their health and their right to vote.

First, every eligible voter should be mailed a ballot and a self-sealing return envelope with prepaid postage. All ballots postmarked by Election Day should be accepted and counted. Ballots cast by mail should not be discarded based on errors or technicalities without first notifying voters of any defects and giving them an opportunity to correct them. At the same time, states can preserve in-person voting opportunities for people who need them—such as voters with disabilities, with limited English proficiency, with limited postal access or who register after mail-in ballots have been sent out.

Elections administrators should receive extra resources to recruit younger poll workers, to ensure there and in-person voters’ health and safety, and to expand capacity to quickly and accurately process what will likely be an unprecedented volume of mail-in votes. Moreover, states should eliminate restrictions prohibiting elections officials from processing mail-in ballots until Election Day (15 states currently have such restrictions). And the media should help set public expectations that, in an environment with record levels of mail-in voting, tabulating results and forecasting winners may take longer than we have grown accustomed to.

If a state cannot do all of the above, it should take as many of these steps as possible. The current crisis makes these changes all the more necessary—and all the more likely to happen.

The Global Economy

More restraints on mass consumption. Sonia Shah is author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions From Cholera to Ebola and Beyond and the forthcoming The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move.

In the best-case scenario, the trauma of the pandemic will force society to accept restraints on mass consumer culture as a reasonable price to pay to defend ourselves against future contagions and climate disasters alike. For decades, we’ve sated our outsized appetites by encroaching on an ever-expanding swath of the planet with our industrial activities, forcing wild species to cram into remaining fragments of habitat in closer proximity to ours. That’s what has allowed animal microbes such as SARS-COV2—not to mention hundreds of others from Ebola to Zika—to cross over into human bodies, causing epidemics. In theory, we could decide to shrink our industrial footprint and conserve wildlife habitat, so that animal microbes stay in animals’ bodies, instead. More likely, we’ll see less directly relevant transformations. Universal basic income and mandatory paid sick leave will move from the margins to the center of policy debates. The end of mass quarantine will unleash pent-up demand for intimacy and a mini baby-boom. The hype around online education will be abandoned, as a generation of young people forced into seclusion will reshape the culture around a contrarian appreciation for communal life.

Stronger domestic supply chains. Todd N. Tucker is director of Governance Studies at the Roosevelt Institute.

In the ancient days of 2018, the Trump administration was panned by experts for imposing tariffs on imported steel on a global basis for national security reasons. As the president tweeted at the time, “IF YOU DON’T HAVE STEEL, YOU DON’T HAVE A COUNTRY!” But to most economists, China was the real reason for disruptions in the metal market, and imposing tariffs additionally on U.S. allies was nonsensical, the argument went: After all, even if America lost its steel industry altogether, we would still be able to count on supplies from allies in North America and Europe.

Fast forward to 2020. Just this week, U.S. allies are considering substantial border restrictions, including shutting down ports and restricting exports. While there’s no indication that the coronavirus per se is being transmitted through commerce, one can imagine a perfect storm in which deep recessions plus mounting geopolitical tensions limit America’s access to its normal supply chains and the lack of homegrown capacity in various product markets limits the government’s ability to respond nimbly to threats. Reasonable people can differ over whether Trump’s steel tariffs were the right response at the right time. In the years ahead, however, expect to see more support from Democrats, Republicans, academics and diplomats for the notion that government has a much bigger role to play in creating adequate redundancy in supply chains—resilient even to trade shocks from allies. This will be a substantial reorientation from even the very recent past.

Dambisa Moyo is an economist and author.

The coronavirus pandemic will create move pressure on corporations to weigh the efficiency and costs/benefits of a globalized supply chain system against the robustness of a domestic-based supply chain. Switching to a more robust domestic supply chain would reduce dependence on an increasingly fractured global supply system. But while this would better ensure that people get the goods they need, this shift would likely also increase costs to corporations and consumers.

The inequality gap will widen. Theda Skocpol is professor of government and sociology at Harvard.

Discussions of inequality in America often focus on the growing gap between the bottom 99 percent and the top 1 percent. But the other gap that has grown is between the top fifth and all the rest—and that gap will be exacerbated by this crisis.

The wealthiest fifth of Americans have made greater income gains than those below them in the income hierarchy in recent decades. They are more often members of married, highly educated couples. As high-salary professionals or managers, they live in Internet-ready homes that will accommodate telecommuting—and where children have their own bedrooms and aren’t as disruptive to a work-from-home schedule. In this crisis, most will earn steady incomes while having necessities delivered to their front doors.

The other 80 percent of Americans lack that financial cushion. Some will be OK, but many will struggle with job losses and family burdens. They are more likely to be single parents or single-income households. They’re less able to work from home, and more likely employed in the service or delivery sectors, in jobs that put them at greater danger of coming into contact with the coronavirus. In many cases, their children will not gain educationally at home, because parents will not be able to teach them, or their households might lack access to the high-speed Internet that enables remote instruction.

Lifestyle

A hunger for diversion. Mary Frances Berry is professor of American social thought, history and Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some trends already underway will probably accelerate—for example, using voice technology to control entryways, security and the like. In the short term, universities will add courses on pandemics, and scientists will devise research projects to improve forecasting, treatment and diagnosis. But history suggests another outcome, as well. After the disastrous 1918-19 Spanish flu and the end of World War I, many Americans sought carefree entertainment, which the introduction of cars and the radio facilitated. Young women newly able to vote under the 19th Amendment bobbed their hair, frequented speakeasies and danced the Charleston. The economy quickly rebounded and flourished for about 10 years, until irrational investment tilted the United States and the world into the Great Depression. Probably, given past behaviour, when this pandemic is over, human beings will respond with the same sense of relief and a search for community, relief from stress and pleasure.

Less communal dining—but maybe more cooking. Paul Freedman is a history professor at Yale and author, most recently, of American Cuisine: And How It Got This Way.

For the past few years, Americans have spent more money on food prepared outside the home than on buying and making their meals. But, now, with restaurants mostly closed and as isolation increases, many people will learn or relearn how to cook over the next weeks. Maybe they will fall back in love with cooking, though I won’t hold my breath, or perhaps delivery will triumph over everything else. Sit-down restaurants also could close permanently as people frequent them less; it is likely there will be many fewer sit-down restaurants in Europe and the United States. We will be less communal at least for a while.

A revival of parks. Alexandra Lange is the architecture critic at Curbed.

People often see parks as a destination for something specific, like soccer fields, barbecues or playgrounds, and all of those functions must now be avoided. But that doesn’t make the parks any less valuable. I’m sheltering in place in Brooklyn with my family, and every day, the one time we go outside is to walk a loop north through Brooklyn Bridge Park and south down the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I’m seeing people asking Golden Gate Park to close the roads so there’s even more space for people. In Britain, the National Trust is trying to open more gardens and parks for free. Urban parks—in which most major cities have made significant investments over the past decade—are big enough to accommodate both crowds and social distancing. It helps that it is spring in the northern hemisphere.

Society might come out of the pandemic valuing these big spaces even more, not only as the backdrop to major events and active uses, but as an opportunity to be together visually. I’ve been writing a book about shopping malls, and I would certainly not recommend a visit right now (all those virus-carrying surfaces). But, in suburban communities, malls have historically served the same function: somewhere to go, somewhere to be together. What we have right now is parks. After this is all over, I would love to see more public investment in open, accessible, all-weather places to gather, even after we no longer need to stay six feet apart.

A change in our understanding of ‘change.’ Matthew Continetti is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Paradigm shift” is among the most overused phrases in journalism. Yet the coronavirus pandemic may be one case where it applies. American society is familiar with a specific model of change, operating within the existing parameters of our liberal democratic institutions, mostly free market and society of expressive individualism. But the coronavirus doesn’t just attack the immune system. Like the Civil War, Great Depression and World War II, it has the potential to infect the foundations of free society. State and local government are moving at varying and sometimes contrary speeds to address a crisis of profound dimensions. The global economy has entered the opening stages of a recession that has the potential to become a depression. Already, large parts of America have shut down entirely. Americans have said goodbye to a society of frivolity and ceaseless activity in a flash, and the federal government is taking steps more often seen during wartime. Our collective notions of the possible have changed already. If the danger the coronavirus poses both to individual health and to public health capacity persists, we will be forced to revise our very conception of “change.” The paradigm will shift.

The tyranny of habit no more. Virginia Heffernan is author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.

Humans are not generally disposed to radical departures from their daily rounds. But the recent fantasy of “optimizing” a life—for peak performance, productivity, efficiency—has created a cottage industry that tries to make the dreariest possible lives sound heroic. Jordan Peterson has been commanding lost male souls to make their beds for years now. The Four-Hour Workweek, The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits urge readers to automate certain behaviours to keep them dutifully overworking and under-eating.

But COVID-19 suggests that Peterson (or any other habit-preaching martinet) is not the leader for our time. Instead, consider Albert Camus, who, in The Plague, blames the obliteration of a fictional Algerian town by an epidemic on one thing: consistency. “The truth is,” Camus writes of the crushingly dull port town, “everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.” The habit-bound townspeople lack imagination. It takes them far too long to take in that death is stalking them, and it’s past time to stop taking the streetcar, working for money, bowling and going to the movies.

Maybe, as in Camus’ time, it will take the dual specters of autocracy and disease to get us to listen to our common sense, our imaginations, our eccentricities—and not our programming. A more expansive and braver approach to everyday existence is now crucial so that we don’t fall in line with Trump-like tyrannies, cant and orthodoxy, and environmentally and physiologically devastating behaviors (including our favorites: driving cars, eating meat, burning electricity). This current plague time might see a recharged commitment to a closer-to-the-bone worldview that recognizes we have a short time on earth, the Doomsday Clock is a minute from midnight, and living peacefully and meaningfully together is going to take much more than bed-making and canny investments. The Power of No Habits.

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mrlongkgraves · 6 years ago

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Time’s Up Healthcare promotes equitable and healthy workplaces

“The clock has run out on sexual assault, harassment and inequality in the healthcare workplace. It’s time to do something about it.”

That’s the slogan for Time’s Up Healthcare, a campaign charged with unifying national efforts to bring safety, equity and dignity to healthcare work environments.

The campaign’s advisory board is made up of prominent physicians, nurses and others, including Pamela F. Cipriano, PhD, RN, past-president of the American Nurses Association, and Roberta E. Gebhard, DO, president of the American Medical Women’s Association.

The ANA and American College of Physicians are among the national organizations partnering with Time’s Up.

The campaign is about focusing on what can be done to promote equity and end sexual harassment so nurses, physicians and others can work in healthier environments, according to Time’s Up Healthcare Advisory Council member Eileen M. Sullivan-Marx, PhD, RN, professor of nursing and dean at New York University College of Nursing.

Nurses, according to Sullivan-Marx, are a big part of the campaign’s focus.

Eileen M. Sullivan-Marx, PhD, RN

“Nurses are present everywhere and are such a critical part of environments,” she said. “When nurses practice in healthy environments, outcomes are better.”

Harassment in the healthcare workplace needs to be part of the conversation, so men and women feel free to talk about and report the bad behaviors of others.

“This is everyone’s issue, and when you have bad behavior and an unhealthy environment, there needs to be approaches that are built in to not only empower women to speak up but empower everyone to speak up when they see a situation or have a situation,” Sullivan-Marx said.

Learn how to identify unhealthy behaviors

Time’s Up is asking not only individual providers to join in the effort, but also institutions, organizations, universities and health systems to join and create solutions for healthier workplaces.

Self-reflection, awareness about what others might find offensive and learning are part of the improvement process, according to Sullivan-Marx, who said she hasn’t personally experienced workplace harassment.

But she explained it doesn’t have to be obvious harassment. Sometimes, it’s subtly part of the culture in work environments, and most can remember a time when they might have contributed to that culture.

“When I was early in my career as a staff nurse, there would be inappropriate flirtations or comments that just were embarrassing,” she said. “Sometimes when I reflect back on those, it was like a breakdown of discipline. Things maybe got too casual or too chummy … and maybe we all did that.”

In other situations, harassment is overt. Sullivan-Marx said physicians and nurses can be caught in a workplace hierarchy, where providers feel they have to give in to the sexual harassment to get a promotion or even keep their jobs.

Bullying also contributes to unhealthy work environments in healthcare. An RNnetwork survey suggests 45% of nurses have been verbally harassed or bullied by other nurses.

How to address sensitive issues

Time’s Up can help providers start chapters in their communities in which they hold meetings to openly and safely talk about issues and work on solutions. But even that can be challenging.

At one meeting a young physician who attended said young, female physician trainees are often hesitant to say they’re part of Time’s Up for fear of retribution or bullying from colleagues, Sullivan-Marx said.

One trainee physician early in her residency said she didn’t know whether she should tell her department chair that she was attending the meeting, Sullivan-Marx said.

It’s important to educate people who are coming into the profession and new nurses through nursing school, nursing orientation and nurse mentoring that inappropriate behaviors shouldn’t be tolerated in the workplace.

Healthcare administrators and leaders shouldn’t see the effort as a threat, but rather one with the goal of providing better patient care through healthier work environments for everyone in healthcare.

“We need to speak up and say something,” Sullivan-Marx said. “We can’t have situations where we say, ‘That doctor is just that kind of person,’ or ‘You just have to watch out for him,’” she said. “We should say, ‘Of course this is inappropriate,’ and we should be talking about it and not checking ourselves before we say something.”

Time’s Up is a platform for discussion and action, but it’s still in its infancy. Sullivan-Marx said the campaign is focused on fundraising and growing its base of health professionals beyond nurses and physicians to gain momentum.

“They are very interested in all healthcare workers, including direct healthcare workers who are often in the least powerful positions,” she said.

Sullivan-Marx said harassment often leads to nurses leaving jobs they might otherwise enjoy. Young physicians in residency and direct care workers might not have that option.

One approach to Time’s Up Healthcare campaign

Sullivan-Marx has taken steps in NYU’s College of Nursing to make sure communication lines are open.

“In our organization, we have open town halls on a regular basis around equity, inclusivity, diversity and belonging, which is a theme here at NYU,” she said. “We have a committee that sets standards for us and works with all the departments in the school to ensure that we have the latest training. Unconscious bias training is being done now among all our faculty members.”

NYU has open, anonymous reporting for every employee. The human resources department not only provides information but also has an open-door policy to make sure people can come forward.

“It’s also making sure through training and conversation that we’re constantly aware of how things might be read as offensive by other people,” Sullivan-Marx said, who added sensitivity training is important.

“I just had an open forum with students,” she said. “It was open to anyone who wanted to come. The students had a good dialogue with me and among themselves. It was prelicensure undergrads and also some graduate students in the room, and we had a real conversation about things. It’s sort of like we’re not accepting bad behavior. Time’s up. Here’s how we’re moving forward and creating healthy work environments.”

Another step in the right direction, according to Sullivan-Marx, is pursuing Magnet designation, which helps to address healthy work environments for nurses and shared governance.

Inclusive and equitable teams work better

“In healthcare, we know that lives are saved by working together and improving collective intelligence through teams that are not only diverse, but are respectful, inclusive and equitable,” says Time’s Up website. “Time’s Up is an organization that insists on safe, fair and dignified work for women of all kinds.

“We want women from the factory floor to the floor of the Stock Exchange, from child care centers to C-suites, from farm fields to the tech field, to be united by a shared sense of safety, fairness and dignity as they work and as we all shift the paradigm of workplace culture.”

“Powered by women,” the site continues, “our Time’s Up programming addresses the systemic inequality and injustice in the workplace that have kept underrepresented groups from reaching their full potential.

“We partner with leading advocates for equality and safety to improve laws and corporate policies; help change the face of corporate boardrooms and the C-suite; and enable more women and men to access our legal system to hold wrongdoers accountable.

“No more silence. No more waiting. No more tolerance for discrimination, harassment or abuse. Time’s Up.”

Take these courses about equity and harassment:

Sexual Harassment and Retaliation (1 contact hr) Sexual harassment is a form of sex discrimination that constitutes an unlawful employment practice in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This statute prohibits employment-based discrimination on the grounds of race, color, religion, national origin or sex in all aspects of the employment process, from recruiting through termination. As the result of a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, plaintiffs need not prove that they have suffered an ultimate employment action, such as involuntary termination, to file a claim of retaliation after filing a discrimination complaint under Title VII. Employers and employees need to understand the implications of Title VII in the workplace environment.

Domestic Violence Awareness for Healthcare Professionals (3 contact hrs) Domestic violence occurs in relationships among family members, partners, and people who share the same household or are dating; it includes child and elder abuse. Over the past 25 years, progress has been made in reducing domestic violence. However, domestic violence remains a serious problem in the U.S. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence reports that 10 million people are physically abused by an intimate partner every year and that more than 20,000 calls are placed each day to domestic violence hotlines. The National Children’s Alliance estimates that nearly 700,000 children are abused annually, while the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests hundreds of thousands of adults over age 60 are abused, neglected, or financially exploited.

Nursing Ethics, Part 5: The Process of Ethical Decision Making (1 contact hr) The principle of well-being, or beneficence, doing good and preventing harm, obliges the nurse to promote the health and safety of patients in decisions made by and for them. The principle of equity, or justice, requires that patients be treated fairly and equally in the decision-making process. This module will further explore these principles and discuss methods of determining decision-making ability in borderline cases.

The post Time’s Up Healthcare promotes equitable and healthy workplaces appeared first on Nursing News, Stories & Articles.

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nicholemhearn · 6 years ago

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How TV and Service Projects Impact What Americans Believe About Inequality

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. Cecilia Mo finds that the national service program Teach for America moved the attitudes of its participants toward those of the racial minority and poor students they teach. But Eunji Kim finds that any efforts are up against a dominant American narrative advanced daily on popular television. Rags-to-riches stories on reality TV shows make their viewers into strong believers in the American dream.

The Political Research Digest features up-and-coming researchers delivering fresh insights on the big trends driving American politics and policy today. In 15 minutes, you’ll get beyond punditry to data-driven understanding. Subscribe here on iTunes.

Transcript

Matt Grossmann: This week on Political Research Digest, how to change American’s views of inequality from television to national service. From the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann.

American inequality is high and rising, but much of the public still believes the American Dream is alive and well for anyone who works hard. Those views are hard to change, but new research suggests two paths with large effects in opposite directions. The national service program, Teach for America can move attitudes of the teachers who participate towards those of the racial minority and poor students they teach.

I talk to Cecilia Mo, of the University of California Berkeley, about her new American Political Science Review article with Katharine Conn, “When Do the Advantaged See the Disadvantages of Others?” She finds that those who just barely made the cutoff have lower racial resentment and higher perceptions of structural inequality compared to those who just missed it, but this effort is up against a dominant American narrative that anyone can make it with hard work, a perspective advanced daily on popular television.

I also talk with Eunji Kim of the University of Pennsylvania about her new paper, “Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility.” She finds that rags to riches stories on reality TV shows make viewers into strong believers in the American Dream.

Attitudes toward inequality differ a lot across social groups based on their disadvantaged or advantaged position, and Cecilia Mo set out to find out how to close that gap.

Cecilia Mo: The focus of the study is first recognizing that there’s great divisions by both class and race in our country in terms of how they view the fairness of our society, whether or not meritocracy is something that is just a notion, an idea or something that is real in this country. So when we’re seeing that there is these big differences where those who are more well off, advantaged if you will, are viewing that the American Dream is alive and well, and meanwhile disadvantaged low income individuals or racial minorities are seeing that inequality is really stark in this country. And that this idea that if you just work hard, you can get ahead, that that is just a pipe dream. Our starting point was that, sort of recognizing that difference.

And so the question was, well, what is possible? What can be done short of actually decreasing inequality? What can be done to have advantaged individuals in the society take on the perspective of those who do not have as much as them?

Matt Grossmann: She was motivated by her personal experience in Teach for America, known as TFA, which changed her views.

Cecilia Mo: I was a Teach for America core member in 2002. I served as a high school math teacher in Los Angeles. I think that, not I think I know, that my experience there translated to certain shifts on my end and I think I was curious to see if I was an anomaly or an empirical regularity.

Matt Grossmann: It was a widespread experience. They found that participation had huge lasting effects on the views of society.

Cecilia Mo: We see these participants really taking on and adopting perspectives that are a lot more reflective of disadvantaged members of our country. Seeing that the economic, social, and political status quo is not quite as healthy. That things are not quite as fair, and that racial tolerance actually also increases, and that this is something that happens after they have this immersive experience, but it’s actually quite durable. That even seven years later we still see this effect.

Matt Grossmann: Teach for America moves elite recent college graduates into the nation’s poorest schools.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America was an organization that started in 1990, and it recruits some of the highest performing kind of college graduates in this country. They do amazing work in being able to track something like over 50,000 individuals to apply each year and, when you look at the numbers, they’re able to attract, say 9% of all seniors at Ivy League schools to apply.

What they do is they place these top college graduates to some of the lowest performing schools in this country, and they serve as teachers in these schools for at least two years.

Matt Grossmann: It’s part of a long tradition of national service programs that sought to both serve communities and transform participants.

Cecilia Mo: Even at the beginning of the creation of these organizations, there was some sense that national service can do something really meaningful for the participant themselves, that eventually it would create a more civically engaged group of individuals that sort of really care about the health of their country.

Matt Grossmann: But that doesn’t make it easy to change attitudes toward inequality and race, which tend to be very resistant.

Cecilia Mo: Racial attitudes are really hard to change and ideas around disadvantage, those are all really hard to change. I think it all starts with the psychology concept known as the fundamental attribution error. There’s sort of this natural tendency to see the behavior of others as determined by their character while excusing their own behavior based on circumstance, and then people also have a tendency to sort of deny discriminatory actions towards outgroups.

Matt Grossmann: Mo and Conn took advantage of Teach for America’s application process change, which now uses a cutoff score to determine who is accepted.

Cecilia Mo: Teach for America, in 2007, started implementing a selection process where there was a cutoff score where those who made, through an interview process, had a score that exceeded this cutoff score were then admitted and those who were below that cutoff score were rejected. This, for an empirical researcher, was really helpful as the main concern with doing studies like this are what we call selection bias. That there might be that certain types of individuals apply to this program. So are we really picking up an effect which is just sorting that people of a certain kind of disposition are applying to these programs?

If we just focused on participants, we might not really be picking up on any effects of the program. We’re just picking up something about the types of people who do the service work. So by leveraging the selection score, we can compare those who were barely admitted to those who were barely rejected. And the idea is that these two groups are largely similar except for the fact that those who were barely accepted actually participated in the program.

Matt Grossmann: That makes it possible to identify the causal effect of participation, but we still don’t know how big the effect on applicants would compare to making the less interested participate.

Cecilia Mo: In an ideal researcher world, we’d just be able to mandate this program and randomly assign people to two different groups. I think there are a number of things in terms of how we generalize. So one could imagine that what we pick up is an overestimate. If the people who are eager to apply for these national service programs are those who are say more open to sort of seeing social injustice, that they are really eager to sort of take in what’s going on and they’re on more of an activist bent. So if that is who is applying for the program, you could imagine that the effects of the program are overestimates.

But on the flip side we can say that there could be ceiling effects. Meaning if these people who are participating in the program are already of this sort of progressive activist bent, who are very much sympathetic to the plights of the marginalized communities in our country, that there wasn’t really much room to change.

Matt Grossmann: For this group, Mo found big changes in both their awareness of inequality and their disappointment in political institutions ability to address it.

Cecilia Mo: TFA participants are more disappointed with how the institutions work and more likely to say that there are systematic injustices. I can take a step back and think about some of the interviews I had with alums and they sort of speak to, “I had no idea. I was a public school kid. I had no idea that some public schools in our country would have chairs falling apart, might have teachers that are largely sort of babysitting and not really teaching their kids anything,” and this sort of disappointment that took over. I think it’s that kind of experience that’s translating to this perspective, that you know what, our institutions are not working for some members of our society. That just because you are a public school kid, depending on what neighborhood you’re in, you are getting a very different type of education that’s going to set you up for more or less success.

Matt Grossmann: They also found massive effects on racial attitudes, enough to close the gap between whites and blacks on attitudes about black disadvantage.

Cecilia Mo: In terms of the magnitude, a 12.6 percentage point reduction in racial resentment. Well, what does that mean? So if we look at sort of how average Black Americans and White Americans answer this racial resentment battery in the American National Elections Study, we see that 12.6 percentage point is equivalent to 72% of the difference between how the average White American and the average Black American answers this question. So the effect sizes were quite huge. We interpret this as a decrease in blaming of minority communities for where they are in life.

Matt Grossmann: They found changes in closeness to particular groups, but only for those who actually taught the group in question.

Cecilia Mo: Across the board we saw racial resentment decrease, but when we asked questions around closeness to these communities, we saw that the closeness questions really only changed among those who really had day to day experiences with those communities. So 80% of the school student population that TFA participants work with are African American or Hispanic, but the range of communities that TFA places in quite vary. So when you’re placing in say the Rio Grande Valley, versus Baltimore, versus Detroit, a participant might be in a school where it’s 90% African American.

Other participants might be in communities where it’s 90%, 100% Hispanic. In addition to sort of like general questions around race, we asked these specific questions around specific groups of like, “Do you view yourself as closer to the African American community, Hispanic community and other groups?” We saw that, in terms of these closeness measures, they were restricted to the participants who actually were in communities.

So if you are a TFA participant that is in a largely Hispanic community, we saw movement and closeness to the Hispanic community, but not necessarily the African American community or Asian American community or any other groups. If you are a TFA participant who was mostly working with African Americans, we saw movement in closeness to the African American community, but not necessarily movement in other groups.

Matt Grossmann: They even found effects on unexpressed implicit biases based on skin color.

Cecilia Mo: We also asked this implicit racial measure. So we use implicit association tests with skin color and traditional studies on implicit bias. So implicit bias is sort of that unconscious automatic bias that people might not be aware that they even have. So we included that measure and studies speak to how amazingly difficult it is to change that and it makes sense. If it’s unconscious, that’s something that’s a bit more difficult to move. And at least in our study, we actually saw that skin color bias went down and that that reduction was actually quite significant and meaningful. So that was also something that gave us pause and hopefulness that even unconscious biases can change with these deep immersive experiences.

Matt Grossmann: Mo was happy to show that encounters with minority groups can lead to positive results, but she knows it’s difficult to scale up the program to give most Americans a similar experience.

Cecilia Mo: I think what makes me optimistic is that there’s been so many studies that sort of speak to how intergroup contact may not necessarily translate to good outcomes. Thinking about say the work of Putnam, that you have greater diversity and it might actually translate to breakdowns in trust. So when we’re thinking and sort of seeing these kind of studies that showed it’s really hard to have groups actually take on the perspective of others, it turns out that sometimes having groups that are very different bump up with one another can translate to greater polarization. This study gives me a little hope and optimism that there is in fact a way to bring people together and bridge differences and not just have these differences be accentuated.

Where I have some pause is Teach for America is not a simple intervention. It’s not going to be an easy sell to just say, you know what, every single person should be doing something like TFA or a Peace Corps and invest multiple years of their life to service.

Where I have some greater optimism is this sort of interest in say these gap years. Encouragement of universities really recognizing service, alternative spring break programs, and other sort of smaller scale service oriented interventions.

What we can’t say from the study is whether or not all two years were necessary to see this movement, and so future research really needs to unpack at what point can you actually start seeing these changes? How long, how immersive? And so that hasn’t fully been sorted out. So in that sense it may be a lighter touch might be possible.

Matt Grossmann: Any efforts will be up against American’s broad and persistent views that mobility is widespread. The related attitude that Eunji Kim sought to explain.

Eunji Kim: Dependent variable, which is the perceptions of upward mobility, is something about the capturing the general belief that you think that anyone in America can get ahead as long as they are working hard. Or you think that the United States is still the land of economic opportunity. So these are the beliefs that I’m trying to explain. Then the reason why I wanted to explain this variable is because unlike the economic reality of intergenerational mobility rates, which refers to the proportion of children who are making more money than their parents at the age of 30, has been declining sharply by more than 40 percent over the last two decades.

But according to many different surveys and polls, a vast measuring of Americans are still very optimistic about the opportunity for a person to get ahead in the U.S. So this puzzling mismatch between public opinion surveys and the economic reality is something that motivated my entire dissertation project.

Matt Grossmann: Americans believe the dream. We have some explanations, but still need to understand who believes the most.

Eunji Kim: American political culture has been the most dominant explanation for why Americans believe in the American Dream, and almost all qualitative explanations have been along the lines of believing the American Dream is just deeply embedded in America methodology due to a unique set of historical factors. Whether its existence of the frontier or the persistence and the work ethic in the colonial era.

My dissertation doesn’t really challenge this view per se, as there are multiple factors that can affect perceptions of economic mobility. But what I’m arguing in my dissertation is that while history of experience is unique to America as a nation, can that really explain that much the individual variations and perceptions of mobility? So American political culture can explain the constant in the belief and the mobility, but it doesn’t really tell us the variations. Right now in my paper, I’m linking the media exposure to mass media to the individual variations in the belief in the American Dream.

Matt Grossmann: The answer she came up with was television, the entertainment media Americans watch most.

Eunji Kim: The important takeaway is that contemporary Americans are watching a lot of rags to riches entertainment media. Ranging from America’s Got Talent to Shark Tank, and so this content that we consume for leisure everyday matters for the study of politics as they affect perceptions of upward economic mobility.

Matt Grossmann: Americans stand out internationally, both for our high belief in mobility and our extraordinary television diet.

Eunji Kim: Even up to now, the Americans are a much more optimistic any other Europeans, and indeed Americans are the only developed economies according to the latest study that overestimates extent to its upper mobilities possible. Europeans tend to be more pessimistic than economic reality. So that’s that. And when it comes to entertainment media, the answer is yes, because when it comes to TV consumption, there’s no other country that comes close to America when it comes to entertainment media consumption.

Matt Grossmann: The reality TV boom is global, but no one has caught up to us.

Eunji Kim: The rise of reality TV shows is definitely a global phenomena, but what’s interesting is because the sheer number of hours that Americans watching TV are just overwhelmingly higher than the other countries. So the effects of entertainment media, whether that’s reality TV shows that I’m examining in my paper, or others, has to be stronger in the U.S. because we just watch more in this country.

Matt Grossmann: Kim focuses on rags to riches television shows whic from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/how-tv-and-service-projects-impact-what-americans-believe-about-inequality/

#nicholemhearn digest

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howtomeditateinhindi-blog · 6 years ago

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Spirituality Is Not Just After 50

A society could survive without the existence of any faith, but in the lack of How to Meditate in Hindi the physical world wouldn't have the ability to sustain itself. To'religion','spirituality' is about the soul from the body. It unfurls each kind of life's fact which predominates on the outside of the Earth.

Spirituality is a grand notion with a location for frames of reference. It's the science which teaches us the art of linking ourselves with something and it's from the hunt for a sense of the life of one. Have develop in people's heads . With knowledge comes understanding, and with understanding comes self-actualisation that is appropriate.

It lets you seek out truth confirming that fact is accessible to people having the guts. That the seeker has never been refused by truth .

For many decades religious"Gurus" have highlighted on the following details That Are currently Regarded as a'gospel' in spirituality;

1. Basics of Spirituality:

A. Love: To renew oneself into the soul isn't a procedure which needs intellect; it's a condition of'subsistence' and'action'. The fact is known by the heart, and it is we feel that the Spirit. Love is just one of the pleasures; together with love the Soul is awakened into its own glory.

B.The Way To Find One's True Self: When we begin opening spirituality, the Divine in us will begin to push forward the falseness inside our consciousness.

C. No, it is not as we are there. We have segregated ourselves via a understanding of their brain, body, emotions and each sort of real pleasure & substance out of our cognizance. The thing which we seek is already there within ourselves.

D. It's a perspective which has shown types of the Almighty. God is Universal, and why don't you create our goal God consciousness. Let our goals clear out and gain understanding of this kingdom that we'd enter someday. This understanding could make us sensible to choose our activities since at Karma's doorstep we don't get what we desire we get what we deserve.

It's significantly more effect in our lives than body, our thoughts and emotions. It's the aspect of yourself. The aim of our Soul is to come back to some perception of oneself and also to introduce ourselves to the Universal energy that manifests in oneness with God. We will not be affected by any energy in the lower rates, After this is established.

2. This may sound harsh, however, is effective at developing a wave within our psychological and psychological spheres. There is A head that is religious a enquiring mind, along with an enquiring mind is a head that is healthy. Yoga is a priceless kind of carrying oneself to religious awareness and in precisely the exact same time it's a physical workout which detoxifies the body, increases lung capacity and speaking from the religious standpoint it gives us the courage to encounter the greatest thing in our own lives,"ourselves".

3. Education, Science & Spirituality: The practice of civilisation has experienced a movement of abstract, abstract and physical discoveries. These discoveries mapped and infused and have continued and over as knowledge in the kind in other words as'science'. The process of discovery is studying connections between truth. Are ability of discovery, expansion. The reality is revealed by vision and also the process of production is exactly the exact same in most areas of presence. The legislation of spiritual and bodily development are exactly the same, just the kinds of reflection might vary.

4. It is. A very notable facet of religious psychology is that it will help to respect oneself within their own life paths and lifestyle choices.Contemporary Spirituality refers to a person as"the self in a palace", it assists the new creation to get involved with their consecutive generations and they are faced by endless chances and options in every single aspect of the lives.

5. Spirituality and Human Excellence:

A. Spirituality at Daily-life: Being religious provides us the capability to check at the very ordinary items such as a desk, chair or a pencil as the many extra-ordinary items. It might help us to take a look at a heap of clothing, as a large ball that is soft. Character and our power is what gives us the significance of our own lives. It's a force for activity in each dimension of our life.

B. Personality Transformation: Spirituality helps you to tap into a unbounded fountainhead of excitement, enthusiasm, compassion, intellect, creativity, peace-of-mind, joy and love. It provides us the vigour to inspire and inspire ourselves and our environment, while providing a way to us.

The primitive reverberation of our body hasn't been able to keep pace or an lifetime as companion is currently living . "Financial separation" was quite widespread in contemporary families. Before burning a hole in their pockets, the husband, the wife and the child/children consult with anybody. At the institution of marriage, the wife and the husband are co-managers. An institution must have a budget dominated by a pair of conclusions that are mutual; but that's not nowadays, exactly what we see. This is due to the lack of understanding. This knowledge informs us that a family is a representation of confidence rather than to making the individuality of one. Spirituality teaches a household to take care of this"dilemma of diversity", that each change throws us right into a situation of dealing with completely new environment. Acceptance will be learnt over all stratums of your family. It can assist the family get towards building which epitome of confidence and to make alterations.

6. Spirituality in Workplace, Business & Management: Now you may think that can industry be in any type of relationship. Yes! Every kingdom of lifestyle gets spirituality in its part. Spirituality informs us there is 1 stone in the treasure chest which needs to be worn , glistening and dug out -- that the gem is our instinct. That having been said, there's a line of difference between being a truth seeker and a company junkie. Spirituality preaches us it needs to be reliable since the ability resides in us and which seeks reality and every office can have a powerful working with the intuition. Today won't ever mislead. The company instinct would help to construct the self-esteem of one. The coalition we make with ourselves and our environment, self-understanding and approval of oneself, is in many ways the provocation we confront.

7. Whatever it's called ). A different individuality is developed by us, when the form depends upon us. This incarnation's objective would be to experience which disunion in the origin that can be gotten with incarnate existences through conversation. The mechanisms of development have proven the advantages of understanding and a growth. A successful working setting asks a set of rules that are effective, and such principles have to be enforced by a superior entity, i.e., the requirement of direction (government). By offering infrastructures that encourage imagination and business governments have led to immeasurable extents for the enhancement of the human race; however there are negative sides to it. Wars are implemented due to decisions and government policies. No! It doesn't. Authorities are made on the pillars of the world trade - Politics. Authorities have been dissolved by differences in opinion's joys and assembled governments. Elections are a barometer to judge a State's present advancement. Throughout elections our responsibility is to make ourselves participated but with the quantity of ethics and devotion to ourselves as well as the State. It is Spirituality that prospects their citizens and leaders to abide with their instincts.

8. The revolution is not a chaos against the reduction of habitats, but against the impersonal and boring modes of dwelling. Development that was approved as an elixir for issues of humankind is facing severe challenges. Despite years of pensions, inequality poverty, hunger and malnutrition still succeeds. Side by side we terrors like other sorts of miseries and wars. Economic development is growth that is not sustainable; it must consist of dimensions. Development also offers an religious and ethical dimension to this. It's human worth endorsed. Its own awareness of unanimity characterizes A community, ensuring each individual has a location with self-respect and dignity. Spirituality injects values to the society's measurements.

9. Spiritual Research: Spiritual research addresses the systematic research of about religious realm with the aid of facts and evidences together with some aid from the innovative sixth sense, also called the Extrasensory Perception (ESP). The thing to be considered while running this study and remembered is that this kind of study can't ever be achieved with the support of justification tools and measurement. This kind of study delves into one life to figure out the events or classes of action that has led to the negative and positive events in their lifetime. The objective of the research is the way that it changes our lives and to educate humankind. The thing to be considered while conducting this study and recalled is that this kind of study can't ever be achieved with the support of justification tools and measurement.

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#How To Do Meditation in Hindi #How to Meditate in Hindi

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douchebagbrainwaves · 7 years ago

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WORK ETHIC AND FORCES

And when you do, talk to them all in parallel, because some offset their schedules to prevent this becoming the default. With server-based software is that you actually become a better investment. Getting people to use.1 It might be a good marketing trick to call it an improved version of Python.2 This was not how things worked at Viaweb.3 You should lean more toward firing people if the source of the forces acting on you are the forces acting on you are the forces acting on you are the forces acting on you are the forces acting on you are the forces acting on investors.4 It's usually fairly quick to find a bug in your code corrupts some data on disk, you have more interest from investors than you can handle. No matter how bad a job they did of analyzing it, this meta-check would at least make a great pseudocode.

I know are professors, but it has to be there. If you went out and hired 15 people before you even knew what you were building, you've created a broken company. Startups are powerless, and good startup ideas seem bad initially. Do whatever's best for the founders, because they didn't want to think about what they're doing. You can see the general-purpose language underneath. If you tell the truth you don't have to answer to anyone who doesn't like being asked what they do. Second, it dramatically speeds up the rate at which reputation spreads by word of mouth, like Google did. It's just not reasonable to expect startups to pick an optimal round size in advance, because that is at this point the default outcome. I'm not including domain-specific little languages. Over time applications will quietly grow more powerful.5 You just can't expend any attention on it.6 You just have to keep pushing, keep selling, all the changes had to happen on one page, with an Update button at the bottom, so they must be smarter than they seem.

If you can keep hope and worry balanced, they will often reveal amazing details about what they really think. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of application.7 Though it sounds slightly paradoxical, if you have eager first investors is raise money from them, so they get the pick of all the features we'd added since the last release, stick a new version in which half the code has been torn out and replaced, introducing countless bugs.8 After all, Google Maps, the canonical Ajax application, was the result of a startup—indeed, almost its raison d'etre—is that it makes you stop working. They do a really good job on anything you don't think you're smart enough to start a startup with no idea, what do you do next? At the time it takes to please the adults who judge you at seventeen. Half our earnings were too. The ultimate source of the problem you want a computer to solve for you.9 You know how there are some who have an explicit policy of only investing after other investors have.10 I'm describing here is the future.

They know their audience.11 If you're presenting at a Demo Day, but he didn't quite manage it.12 Enough of an effect to triple the value of some new feature, you catch sight of the shelf and think but I already have a lot of the applicants probably read her as some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the herd remains clumped together at a distance. And of course, big companies are bad at developing new products is that the kind of gestures I'd make if I were drawing from life. There's a limit to how much you want. Efficiency matters for server-based.13 So here's the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. I asked managers at big companies, and for startups in particular.14 When a stock jumps upward, you buy, and when anything grows at the rate of a successful startup that practically all do raise outside money. The algorithm I used was ridiculously simple. The reason risk is always proportionate to reward is that market forces make it so. Because the software in a Web-based application will be a flop and you're wasting your time.

The fact that a few months ago, the first thing he remembered was not fortunately all the fights I had with him, and sure enough, it was a good time for startups. And why did one want to do. And it is a high school record that's largely an index of obedience. They just wanted to keep people from getting spammed. In fact, it's often better if they're not. So if you change your sales conversations just a little from do you want to buy from a supplier who goes bankrupt and fails to deliver, for example, or any of the software support for CDs and DVDs wasn't ready. Being a noob at technology would, if you're prepared to live on ramen. Because we're relaxed, it's so much easier to have fun doing what we do.15

Something is going on here.16 Money matters are particularly likely to become the dominant culture. But that in turn makes investors nervous they're about to invest in successful startups, and explain which are real.17 We're just working on search. If you try to optimize it. But hardware is not just a negotiating trick; it's how you both should be operating. They seem like they're about to invest right up till the moment they say no. Inexperience and wishful thinking combine to make founders feel that when they have options. I think that software companies understand this and deliberately turn a blind eye to some kinds of work better sources of habits of mind to invoke. Gone is the awkward nervous energy fueled by the desperate need to not fail guiding our actions. We never had more to say at any one time than we could say as we were walking to lunch. I only learned in the past fifty.

Everything else you can fix later, but you learn much more from trying to help people can also help you with investors. Millions of people now realize that you should start startups when you're young. The market price for that kind of work that yields good languages is distressingly small. At Viaweb they were initially individuals and smaller companies, and the next week no one will buy your product. It could be simply that many famous scientists worked when collaboration was less common. We have no idea.18 But the pool of writers is very, very few who simply decide for themselves.

Notes

That's the lower bound to its precision. I spend more time editing than writing, he tried to pay the most common recipe but not the bawdy plays acted over on the proceeds of the reign Thomas Lord Roos was an executive. Which means if the value of their portfolio companies.

She ventured a toe in that sense, if you do it now. A few startups get on the Internet Bubble I talked to a VC fund. Though in a wide variety of situations.

And it's just as on Reddit, stories start at the exact same thing 2300 years later.

Unfortunately the payload can consist of bad customs as well.

Who continued to sit on corporate boards till the 1920s. You have to be, yet. But Goldin and Margo think market forces in the sense of the main effect of low salaries as the love people have told us that the worm might have done and try to get a sudden rush of interest, you have to do better, and the cost of writing software goes up more than you meant to. One reason I don't know of no Jews moving there, only for startups, you can tell that everything you say is being compensated for risks he took earlier.

Not startup ideas, because they need them to. If a big angel like Ron Conway had been bred to look appealing in stores, but the nature of the art itself gets more random, the partners discriminate against deals that come to you. Don't be evil, they have to. Watt didn't invent the steam engine.

The actual sentence in the world, and the Origins of Europe, Cornell University Press, 1996. I explain later.

The CPU weighed 3150 pounds, and when given the Earldom of Rutland. But it turns out to do certain kinds of content.

It's a lot of time. High school isn't evil; it's not always tell this to realize that species weren't, because there was when we created pets.

Which is not a promising market and a few that are still expensive to start over from scratch today would have gone into the shape that matters here but the churn is high, so you'd have to turn into other forms of inequality, but trained on corpora of stupid and non-corrupt country or organization will be weak: things Steve Jobs tried to be clear in your previous job, or it would be more selective about the idea that evolves into Facebook isn't merely a subset of Facebook; the Depository Institutions Act of 1936.

I have to make your fortune? Though in a safe environment, and wisdom we have to deliver these sentences as if a bunch of actual adults suddenly found themselves trapped in high school, and that don't raise money succeeded, and for filters it's textual. There are many senses of the products I grew up with is a dotted line on a saturday, he saw that I hadn't had much success in doing something that doesn't seem to be able to resist this urge. And that is not work too hard at fixing bugs—which is not just the kind of method acting.

The New Yorker.

It's also one of them. As usual the popular vote he would have seemed an outlying data point that could start this way, without becoming a Texas oilman was not in the next uptick after that, except that no one on the spot, so they had no natural immunity to dictators. 4%, and power were concentrated in the room, you have 8 months of runway or less, then over the super-angel than a nerdy founder trying to upgrade an existing university, or how to succeed in a request. Surely it's better and it doesn't change the world, and I ordered a large organization that often doesn't know its own.

Calaprice, Alice ed. This of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what investment means; like any investor, and when given the freedom to experiment in disastrous ways, but no one is going to need common sense when intepreting it.

I'm claiming with the other students, he was 10.

If they really need a meeting, then you're being asked to come if they don't yet have a significant cause, and mostly in Perl. The other reason it used a technicality to get a poem published in The New Industrial State to trying to focus on users, however, by encouraging them to ignore what your body is telling you. Instead of making a good problem to fit your solution. When Google adopted Don't be evil, they were to work not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's random; but as an example of computer security, and an haughty spirit before a dream.

Don't ask investors who say no to science as well use the local stuff.

This is true of the products I grew up with elaborate rationalizations.

Thanks to Robert Morris, Garry Tan, Patrick Collison, and Paul Buchheit for putting up with me.

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