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urfavmurtad · 6 years ago

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Hi ! Do you have any books recommendations for someone who want to have a better understanding of Islam (on the historical aspect for exemple)? Beside the quran/hadiths. I want to learn more but I don't want Islamic propaganda or something overtly negative. Thanks!!! I love your blog and you're a great writter

No problem anon, I’d love to give some book recs! There are so many shitty books on Islamic history out there, and they’re shitty in many ways. It’s not just the ones written by Muslims that have problems. Some books are written by pop “historians” who have no business writing about this subject, others are from Orientalists who think Arabs invented civilization, others are from revisionists who don’t seem to have met a single Arab person in their lives. I have had to read through buckets of shit to find some gems. This is the true jihad.

I’m gonna dig through my bookshelf and mostly focus on the books that can be found for free online or in most libraries, just for the sake of accessibility.

I think a very good and very basic place to start is this… semi-series by Robert Hoyland, who is a professor at NYU. Hoyland was a student of a writer I’m not fond of (Patricia Crone, who did make some valuable contributions about the status of Mecca but was an extreme revisionist). But he’s not really like that at all, and his sources are basically impeccable. He has three books that I’d happily recommend for beginners, starting in the pre-Islamic era and going into the conquests:

Arabia and the Arabs* (pdf here). This is one of the very few works about pre-Islamic Arabia that brings in information from non-Islamic sources. It’s mostly about northern and southern Arabia (as in… not Mecca or anything near it) because those are the places mentioned by outside sources, but still. This is one of, like, three respectful books on pre-Islamic Arabia that I’ve ever read. I was so happy when I found it.

Seeing Islam as Others Saw It* (pdf here). I’ve linked this before in this post, so you can glance through that to see if the subject interests you. This is just a collection of early non-Islamic sources about the Islamic conquests. It’s a huge reference book, so feel free to skip around and just read the parts you’re interested in. It’s good stuff and may make you stan Muawiya a little purely based on his competency idk

In God’s Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire* (pdf here). I like this a lot, but I don’t agree with all of its conclusions. This is where you can see some of Crone’s influence, but it’s not super revisionist and there are some interesting ideas within it. Hoyland does significantly downplay the role of Islam as a faith here, seeing it as essentially a glue pulling Arabs together and uniting them into one political entity. The last three pages of Fred Donner’s frankly bitchy review… points were made. I still recommend it tho!His ideas on one of the driving forces of the conquests being the Arab “muhajirun” (applied to the conquering army as a whole instead of just the group that left Mecca) and their desire to settle in other lands is at least food for thought.

I’d also v strongly suggest reading up at least a little on the poor long-forgotten empires that dominated the Middle East before Islam’s glorious birth, the Byzantines and the Sassanids. In my experience, most ppl know very little about the former and nothing about the latter. But they were kind of, uh, important? So it might be worth reading a bit on them.

For the Byzantines, take your pick: do you want a dense scholarly book or a lighter but quicker read? The scholarly one I’d suggest is The Making of Byzantium by Mark Whittow (pdf here). The lighter one, Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization* by Lars Brownworth (borrow), has a very ott title that reminds me of those “ISLAMIC CIVILIZATION SAVED EUROPE!!” books that I hate. But the content focuses far more on internal Byzantine stuff than its “legacy” or w/e. It’s definitely less academic than Whittow’s book, but on the plus side it’s way easier to read tbh.

If you really get into it and want to read more single-topic Byzantine books, I’d also suggest most of Judith Herrin’s books, including Unrivalled Influence: Women and Empire in Byzantium and Margins and Metropolis: Authority Across the Byzantine Empire. She also has a general overview of Byzantium (borrow).

There’s also a Byzantine history podcast, I stan it.

The Two Eyes Of The Earth* by Matthew Canepa (pdf here). This is half regular-history and half art history, but don’t let that scare you!! I know very little about art history and I found it easy to read. It’s REALLY GOOD and for a book you can find for free it lays out the relationship between the Byzantines and Persians really well.

For the Sassanids: Sasanian Persia* by Touraj Daryaee (pdf here) is a very brief, easy read and only around 150 pages long. It’s worth it just to familiarize yourself with the topic. A more in-depth rec is Arsacids and Sasanians by Rahim Shayegan (pdf here), which is a longer-term view of Persian history.

Arabs and Empires Before Islam* (pdf here) is a collection from multiple authors that touches on Arabs in relation to both empires, and extends its reach into South Arabia as well.

The Palestinian historian Irfan Shahid’s long series on Byzantium and the Arabs* has been made available online via the Dumbarton Oaks library. His work is a tad outdated nowadays, but it’s still a great resource. This guy has literally spent decades on this single topic and he provides us with his work for free…… a legend tbh. (The download links are on the top right of each page, if you can’t find them.) Honestly every book has worthwhile information in it, but on the topic of Islam/Islamic history you probably want the ones on the sixth century, since that’s when Mo was born. The full thing is like… 800 pages, so. Take it slow! Other scholars on Byzantine-Arab interactions include Walter Emil Kaegi and Greg Fisher, with Fisher being more skeptical of later Islamic texts than the other two. But I’ve read useful stuff from all three.

Rome and the Arabs (pdf here)

Byzantium and the Arabs in the 4th Century (pdf here)

…Fifth Century (pdf here)

…Sixth Century: Volume 1, Part 1 (pdf here)

…Volume 1, Part 2 (pdf here)

…Volume 2, Part 1 (pdf here)

…Volume 2, Part 2 (pdf here)

Now… if you are looking for some actual history about Mohammed and his earliest followers, just be aware that 100% of the information on The Life And Times Of Crazy Mo comes from Islamic sources written over a century after he died. All that anyone can do is dig through them and try to determine, based on whatever criteria, what is plausible and what isn’t plausible. I’d actually suggest you read the primary sources (as in the stuff written by Muslims over a thousand years ago) yourself, since that’s what all these books are based upon. If you don’t wanna slog through the big ahadith collections, you might wanna read one of these:

The Expeditions* by Mamar ibn Rashid (pdf here). I might suggest starting here, because 1) it’s short! (the page count is a lie bc it’s dual Arabic-English) and 2) once you understand the stuff in this, it’ll make reading the larger works way easier. This is a selection of ahadith narrated by a student of al-Zuhri, who was a student of one of the sahaba (Anas ibn Malik). So there is a short and very direct chain of transmission all the way back to the rise of Islam here. You can see how much of the “official story” of Islam was already decided-upon in the 8th century (a lot!), what spots were vague and still being filled in (90% of the pre-hijra days), and what was open to debate (tidbits like: when was the “year of the elephant”?). Note that this covers like… fragments of the story, it is not a full sira.

It’s interesting to compare the above to Ibn Ishaq’s long-ass sira (pdf here), which is from the same century. I might do a post on the differences between them at some point. Ibn Ishaq’s is referenced by virtually all later authors so it’s kinda… important to read it, even though it’s long.

There is another early biography by al-Waqidi (who was considered less credible by his contemporaries and deemed an outright liar by many of them), I don’t really care for it but you can read about the differences between his and Ibn Ishaq’s sira here. It’s still worth a read even tho al-Waqidi himself is questionable, but I can’t find a free English translation.

Muhammad and the Origins of Islam* by F.E. Peters (borrow) is a decent summary of the story, if you don’t feel like reading a sira. The book mostly just quotes from Islamic texts. But at only 300 pages, around a third of which is more about Middle Eastern history around the 7th century, it’s a pretty easy read.

There’s also al-Tabari’s 40-book-long history series (pdfs here), which covers like… everything up to the 9th century. You obviously aren’t gonna read this whole-ass thing but it’s useful as a reference if you wanna check up on a particular topic. I’ve read multiple volumes of this and I didn’t find them hard to read at all, they’re surprisingly short.

If you’re looking for a recent English-language biography of Mohammed and his followers, well. The truth is that there are very few decent English-language books on this topic, and by Allah, some are absolutely cancerous. I’d strongly suggest staying away from: 1) anything written by someone who is not a scholar of Islam, Arabic, or Middle Eastern history in general, 2) older ones written by Orientalists, especially the white guys who were in the habit of dressing in thobes, and 3) works written by Saudi or Qatari-funded scholars (who tend to work at places helpfully named after their benefactors). Also, pls do not read anything that begins a discussion of goddamn 7th century Arabia with “ever since 9/11…”.

Look for something fairly recent (like… since the 90s, maybe) written by a credible scholar of Islam whose work is favorably reviewed by his or her peers. And be aware that no book is going to get it 100% right because of the limitations I mentioned. I think this short article (pdf) summarizes what you should expect going into any of these works.

Since I don’t really like any of them, I can’t recommend any, but I can at least point you in the right direction, hopefully...

In my experience, single-topic articles (that you can read using scihub 👀) are way better and more informative than any books on the topic. I dunno why, but I think it’s just because each individual topic requires so much specialized knowledge that no one can write about the entire era convincingly. I’d be happy to suggest some articles on any particular subject you’re curious about.

If you want some scholarly “analysis” of early Islamic history:

Analysing Muslim Traditions by Harald Motzki (pdf here) presents a convincing argument against people who reject the ahadith because they see them as completely unreliable. The book is basically a defense of “the science of ahadith” created by scholars in the 9th/10th centuries. Not all ahadith are “real” in the sense that they can be plausibly traced back to Mo & Crew–but it’s pretty clear that many of them can be.

Islamic Historiography* by Chase F. Robinson (pdf here) isn’t about whether some parts of Islamic history are true or not–it’s more of a look at the development of Islamic historians and how they built upon the very early ahadith. Short and an easy read.

Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period by Tarif Khalidi is somewhat similar, but touches more on specific authors in a specific period. Khalidi is a big name in Arab Islamic studies, and a lot of his work is pretty decent, though I’ve noticed it’s kinda hard to find some of his books in libraries.

Sectarianism!!!

The Caliph and the Heretic, Ibn Sabaʾ and the Origins of Shīʿism by Sean W. Anthony (pdf here). This is a subject that I’ve been weirdly fascinated by for whatever reason. The guy it’s named after has long been accused of being one of the “ghulat”, meaning people who took Ali to be a divine figure in blatant violation of Islamic doctrine. (A book that goes into more depth on “ghulat” sects is Ghulat Sects by Matti Moosa, pdf here. The “extremist” subtitle means their religious beliefs, not terrorism.) A lot of legends and myths have popped up with respect to this guy and his place in Islamic history, and the author tries to disentangle all the stories and find the root of it all to find an actual basis for early Shiism, without the hateful propaganda that’s clouded it. Really good.

A more general overview of Shia history is Shi’ism by Heinz Halm.

The Heirs of Muhammad* by Barnaby Rogerson (borrow) is a very, very basic overview of the political clusterfuck of the Rashidun era. It’s not super scholarly and leaves out a lot of details, but if you don’t know anything about the topic, give it a try.

The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate by Wilferd Madelung (pdf here) is essentially a book about the title’s topic from a Shia perspective, or at least from an Abbasid perspective. It’s very… credulous, in the sense that it doesn’t question the sources, but it’s good if you want to know one side of the story. The Umayyads, and to a lesser extent Abu Bakr & Crew, are the bad guys here. Full disclosure: the author works at a place funded by the Aga Khan (Ismaili Shia leader).

The Ismailis by Farhad Daftary (pdf here) is an absolutely gigantic book that I would not recommend for beginners, but if you happen to be curious about the Ismailis–this is a historically important Shia group distinct from Iranians et al, who are from another sect called Imamiyya or “Twelvers”–here you go.

The Birth of the Prophet Muhammad by Marion Holmes Katz (pdf here). This is a single-topic book about Sunni (including Sufi) mythology surrounding Mohammed and his life. I’m not talking history here, but outright mythological elements, like Mo’s dad being glowy. This is semi-topical re: the crazies who blow people up for celebrating Mohammed’s birthday, but is also useful in understanding the process by which Islamic theology built Mohammed into a hell of a lot more than “just a man”. Slightly more specialized than the other books here, but I included it because I don’t think it’s so academic that you’ll be lost and confused while reading it.

Here are some basic overviews of the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras, which is when 90% of what we think of as “Islam” was crystallized:

Again, al-Tabari’s history series is really useful for these eras. The Expeditions and Ibn Ishaq’s sira also touch on some of this stuff. Don’t discount the classics! The only thing to remember is that all of these were written after the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads, so obviously they have a certain angle to them. But they’re still useful.

The New Cambridge History of Islam (pdf here). A great, six-volume-long series of articles on a huge variety of topics of early Islamic history. Look through the tables of contents and pick an article that seems interesting, and give it a shot.

The Encyclopedia of Islam* (a tad outdated in places, but still great overall) covers this era and…. like, basically everything. It’s huge. I got all my pdfs of it from Tehran University’s site here, idk why that’s the only place where I can find it. The glorious Islamic Republic doesn’t gaf about copyright laws I guess. There’s also an Encyclopedia of the Quran (pdfs here), but that’s more for religious matters than historical stuff.

The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate* by G.R. Hawting (pdf here) is, imo, a very dry and scholarly book. But if you need an overview, it’s useful. It’s also only like 150 pages so it shouldn’t be too hard to get through.

Black Banners from the East: The Establishment of the Abbasid State by Moshe Sharon is an account of the Abbasid revolution and everything that led up to that moment.

Inquisition in Early Islam: The Competition for Political and Religious Authority in the Abbasid Empire by John Turner. I really wish I had a pdf for this one, but I don’t. This is probably more suited for someone raised Muslim or at least someone who already knows a bit about Islamic history–if you’ve heard of Imam Ahmad’s trial before the caliph al-Mamun, you’re good–but it’s a good look at how religious authority was handled by the early Abbasid leaders.

The Canonization of Islamic Law by Ahmed El Shamsy (pdf here). Oh boy, if you don’t really enjoy the legal side of Islam, this one will bore you to tears. Regrettably this topic is extremely important for understanding Islamic history, so try to power through it.

For some other Islamic empires, here are three books about al-Andalus, two of which I’ve already recced:

Kingdoms of Faith: A New History of Islamic Spain* by Brian Catlos. This one focuses more on the religious communities themselves, the relationships between them, and the conflicts within them.

Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of Al-Andalus* by Hugh Kennedy. Kennedy has written a lot of books, and for me they’re very hit-or-miss. His style can sometimes be dry, and at other times he glosses over important details. But this one’s good. It’s…. well, it’s what it says it is, a political history. If you want intrigue and drama, here you go.

Philosophers Sufis & Caliphs by Ali Humayun Akhtar (pdf here). This is more about Islamic scholars in Andalus and focuses on their interaction with and responses to Fatimid (Ismaili Shia) ideology. A lot of texts on Andalus frame it as part of a European context (as in, devoting a lot of space to Christians), but this one puts it more in the context of the wider Arab world, which is helpful.

Ottomans!!!!

Osman’s Dream* by Caroline Finkel (pdf here) is a great and really in-depth summary of centuries of Ottoman history. It covers over 600 years, so forgive the length and take it one chapter at a time.

The late Halil Inalcik was a master of producing really good, in-depth books about Ottoman history with the driest titles you could possibly imagine. I’m pretty sure he is (or… was) one of the top Turkish experts on the subject, so any of his stuff is worth a look. The one I read was The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600*. But if you can find any of his stuff at your library, you might wanna check it out.

Three books from Roger Crowley touching on the Crusades era, in order: City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire*, 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople* (borrow here), and Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean* (yes the first one is mostly about the Italian city-states but there is plenty of Turkish nonsense too). I’ve recced these before but they’re great. There’s also an interlude about Acre called The Accursed Tower, which is likewise excellent.

Before Homosexuality in the Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800 by Khaled El-Rouayheb. Well… not all of it is about the Ottomans, but a large portion of it is. Don’t be put off by the title–it doesn’t mean that gay sex didn’t exist before the year 1801. I don’t agree with all the author’s conclusions, but the sources he’s collected are still useful. Everything you could possibly want to know about pederasty is contained within, enjoy.

“Roxolana: The Greatest Empress of the East”*. This is an article, not a book, but it’s a brief summary of the Eastern European slave girl who used her body and mind to worm her way into the highest echelons Ottoman politics. I’ll write about this whole weird era someday.

The Ottoman Age of Exploration (pdf here) by Giancarlo Casale is the story of how the Ottomans tried and almost succeeded in getting in on the whole Asia imperialism thing. (Despite this occurring during the Ottoman heyday, you hardly ever hear them mentioned in discussions about it.) It begins with a man named Selim the Grim. If that doesn’t sell you on it, what will?

There is ALSO an Ottoman history podcast (+articles) although tbh the earlier seasons were better and more, uh, Ottoman-focused. It’s kinda more a Muslim history podcast now. It descends into academic jargon and glorification at times but there are still some gems to be found there.

Some of the important Shia dynasties:

Converting Persia: Religion and Power in the Safavid Empire by Rula Jurdi Abisaab (pdf here). Iran became Shia under the Safavids, which is… kind of important, for modern-day issues! So you might wanna read about it! Because this happened in the 16th century, there’s also a lot about geopolitics between them and the Ottomans, interactions with Asian and European nations, etc.

The Fatimids were a hugely important Ismaili dynasty that ruled large swaths of land, including Egypt, during ye olde “golden age” that they’ve been largely erased from. There are, unfortunately, very few decent overviews of the caliphate, but there are some nice “character studies” (for lack of a better word) so I’d suggest reading articles about them instead. There are some collections of essays, including a long series called Egypt and Syria in the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras.

Maghrebi topics:

Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam* by Chouki El Hamel is a recent book about a tragically underexplored topic, namely Black slaves in Arab countries (which is usually dismissed with “slavery wasn’t about race!!!”). This covers mostly the early modern era (~1600s-1800s) of Morocco.

A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period by Jamil M. Abun-Nasr. This is a 20th century book that’s kinda written in the style of an old Arab history book, but it’s still good. There’s a lot goin on in the Maghreb and keeping track of all the tribes and their loyalties is very difficult, so a basic primer like this is very useful.

Some miscellaneous dynasties:

The Empire of the Steppes* by René Grousset (borrow) is only, like, half about any sort of Islamic dynasty (Timurlane and the Timurids), but the early Mongols are part of Islamic history by virtue of killing lots of people, so! Might be worth a read. It’s an old-fashioned book, but it’s an intro to the subject.

The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (pdf here) by Azfar Moin. I’m sure this is noticeable, but I know about 1) Arabs, 2) Turks, 3) Persians, and 4) Amazigh people, in that order. India is kinda beyond my wheelhouse, but I’m trying to learn more. This one was a good start and covers topics that you’ve probably heard of before (the Mughal Empire and the emperor Akbar) in great depth. It covers Iran and the Timurids too, but most of it is about India.

The Seljuks are another one where I’ve just been really unimpressed with the books I’ve leafed through tbh. The only one I’ve enjoyed and actually read through to the end was The Great Seljuqs: A History by Osman Aziz Basan, so if you can find that, go for it.

Books specifically focusing on women:

Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate* by Leila Ahmed (borrow). This is a Hot Topique as many of you know, and if you search for Islam+women you are likely to receive a bunch of bullshit in return. But Leila Ahmed has been covering this subject for decades and her book is about as in-depth and “fair” as you can get.

Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History*. Hey, wanna hear something fucked up? Many if not most of the notable Muslim women throughout history were sex slaves. Some were used purely for sex, others for entertainment, others as the mothers of their masters’ heirs. A few slaves managed to manipulate or charm their way to political power, and they’re some of the most powerful “Muslim” women in history. This messy topic is explored in a series of essays in this book.

Marriage and Slavery in Early Islam* by Kecia Ali (pdf here). This approaches the same topic as the above from more of a religious perspective rather than a historical survey. It traces the development of religious opinions and justifications for slavery, the “proper” treatment of women, the differences or lack thereof in the ultimate status of a freed woman vs a slave woman, etc.

That is…………. a lot!!! But I do think that all of them taken together are a pretty solid basis for understanding the first…. I dunno, 1000 years or so? of Islamic history. I think most of them are accessible for someone with zero or very little knowledge about any of these subjects, though some are denser than others. I put asterisks on the one that I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to get through, no matter how little you know about the topic.

Also, I know you said no Quran or ahadith but… ur gonna be real-ass confused about many things if you don’t at least know a little about them tbh. If you’re ever in the mood for it, there are a bunch of tafsirs online (Ibn Kathir’s famous one is here) and I have @quranreadalong for this exact purpose so pls enjoy!

If anyone wants more recs about any specific topic, hit me up! I got literally hundreds of books on my bookshelf.

#ask #anon #recs #history #reference

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sethisrael · 5 years ago

Text

right/wrong/neither

I recommend listening to this song while reading; it helps me focus and it might help you too. :)

When I began our class in public art in sound and listening, my way of thinking was very much rooted in discernible outcomes and notions of success. This was largely a product of the environments I had existed in growing up: intense, competitive academic spaces, playing sports, going to a well-regarded college. Even in my first year at Brown, the notion of comparative success was pushed forth; I was denied entry to classes due to a comparatively worse portfolio, writing sample, or application. Not only were opportunities to learn limited, once in class, creative assignments I submitted were deemed poor in quality because they were not up to par with the level of the rest of the class or did not meet expectations of a rigid rubric imposed by the professor. I questioned why the system existed in the way that promoted uniformity and rewarded following rigid instructions over organic growth and learning.

Even at a place like Brown University where a liberal education is championed, I felt limited in my ability to make choices for myself, questioning my every decision and my place on campus. Why did every decision I made feel “wrong”? Why did I constantly feel like I was in the “wrong” place, doing the “wrong” things? It was around this time of self-doubt that we read Miwon Kwon’s “The Wrong Place” and Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure. For a long time, it had been explained to me that the greatest growth and discovery was made when I failed, when things didn’t work out, but I was still resistant. Halberstam’s writing expressed a similar sentiment in a way that spoke to me greatly. As Halberstam explains in the introduction, “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers,” and later points out that “[failure] provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (Halberstam 3). Halberstam’s argument recognizes the importance of positivity but also the ability for negativity to shift our perspective and view things through a different or critical scope.

In a similar vane, Kwon’s writing recognizes that objective rights/wrongs are nonexistent, but our relationship to objects, beings, and places is what defines our sense of right and wrong: “The determination of right and wrong is never derived from an innate quality of the object in question, even if some moral absolutes might seem to preside over the object. Rather, right and wrong are qualities that an object has in relation to something outside itself… The more important point here is that it is we who are wrong for this kind of ‘new’ space” (Kwon 38-39). Kwon explains that ending up in the “wrong” place can often lead us to new discoveries about ourselves that we would miss if we follow rigid, “correct” paths. I really love one of her closing statements in the piece:

“Often we are comforted by the thought that a place is ours, that we belong to it, perhaps even come from it, and therefore are tied to it in some fundamental way. Such places (‘right’ places) are thought to reaffirms our sense of self, reflecting back to us an unthreatening picture of a grounded identity. This kind of continuous relationship between a place and a person is what is deemed lost, and needed in contemporary society. In contrast, the wrong place is generally thought of as a place where one fells one does not belong—unfamiliar, disorienting, destabilizing, even threatening. This kind of stressful relationship to a place is, in turn, though to be detrimental to a subject’s capacity to constitute a coherent sense of self and the world” (Kwon 42).

Kwon and Halberstam’s discussion of failure and place bring me to one of the first posts I made on our class soundblog, a podcast profiling the artist Emily A. Sprague, a founding member of the band Florist and an independent artists as well, working primarily in ambient music and creating with Eurorack modular synthesizers. Hailing from a rural community in the Catskill Mountains, Sprague explains how space has shaped her processes of creation: “Every studio I’ve ever had has been in the place that I’ve been living in… You learn from that, being in spaces that aren’t ‘Studio Bs’… You just learn to work with what you have” (Sound + Process). On her origins, Sprague later explains, “Community has always been something that I’ve known to be incredibly hard to find and also the best and most rewarding and inspiring thing that you can experience. I’m from a small town in a pretty rural area; I didn’t really find people until I was older than I really felt a part of a community with, with making music” (Sound + Process). Like Halberstam’s argument, Sprague has repeatedly tried and experimented with space and technique, creating new ways to approach modular synth and pushing the boundaries of genre. Like Kwon explains, Sprague has made new discoveries in her process of making through the space she’s in—not that place is right or wrong, but just that they are different, and produce a different result.

With her process of making rooted in modular synthesis, it is hard to deny Sprague’s precedents. On June 7th, 2017, Sprague made an Instagram post of a single book on a hardwood table: Daphne Oram’s An Individual Note of Music Sound, and Electronics. Daphne Oram, born in 1925 and passed away in 2003, was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music (Anomie Publishing). Oram declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music balancer at the BBC, and she went on to become the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Anomie). Leaving the BBC in 1959 to pursue commercial work in television, advertising, film and theater, Oram also made her own music for recording and performance, continuing her personal research into sound technology. Sound technology was a passion Oram cultivated since her childhood in rural Wiltshire (Anomie). Eventually her home in Kent became an unorthodox studio and workshop, which she crafted on a minimal budget (Anomie). Additionally, Oram developed her pioneering equipment, sounds, and ideas at her home studio. A significant part of her personal research was the invention of a machine that offered a new form of sound synthesis – the Oramics machine (Anomie). Her biography further cements her as influential to contemporary electronic artists, with Oram’s contribution to electronic music receiving considerable attention from new generations of composers, sound engineers, musicians, musicologists and music lovers around the world (Anomie).

Like Wendy Carlos, Oram was a pioneer of synthesizer music and technology, definitively changing the ways her contemporaries approached synthesis, as well as generations for years to come. It seems as though Carlos, Oram, and Sprague are inextricably linked. As Carlos focuses intently on her studio in her website/primary form of external communication, it is evident that the artist considers her studio as a point of pride and importance (Wendy Carlos website). If Wendy Carlos’s studio is Persian rugs, felines, and the crackle of a fireplace on a frigid winter day and Oram’s is a quiet converted oasthouse, then Sprague’s studio is a surfboard leaned against a corner next to a human-sized floor plant as sun pours in through a skylight on a warm California morning (Kheshti). Like Kheshti’s relationship with Carlos, I feel connected to Sprague in a similar way. I do not mean to equate our relationships or interpolate myself in the discussion of electronic musicians, but I do find great joy in listening to electronic music and feel that it is an important part of my life, similar to the way Kheshti describes.

There is something extremely childlike, imaginative, and fantastical about home studios. They are places for experimentation and imagination, mostly unbounded by judgement or criticism, creating a place to take risks and make new discoveries. In many ways a home studio allows for a democratic education of sorts, a place where a creator can speak their own language and have internal dialogue, unrestricted by rigid constraints that may be imposed externally otherwise, and even explore the inherent fun in learning (hooks 43-44).

The ability for these artists to create in unexpected places and to push the boundaries of their genre and craft remind me of Fluxus artists like Yoko Ono or Alison Knowles. There is an ambiguity in place and correctness of a Fluxus score. They are not defined by doing things in a certain way or a certain place or for a certain outcome, but doing for the sake of doing, trying, experimenting, learning, and moving forward. I recently watched a film that referenced Yoko Ono’s “Ceiling Painting, Yes Painting” (1966), where the person interacting climbs a ladder to a magnifying glass in order to discern a tiny speck on the ceiling that reads “YES” (Guggenheim Bilbao). I think this piece is beautifully poetic in a number of ways, but specifically for its affirmation in discovery, and doing so in a playful, almost childlike and imaginative manner. On this note, I want to include some scores I wrote throughout the course of the semester for consideration, reflection, and response (dots indicate separate scores):

sit on a bench and be the last to break eye contact with a stranger • collect fallen leaves from the ground into a paper bag and deliver to someone • learn the language of a Tree and have a conversation • ask a loved one (or a complete stranger) to name a favorite song and listen to it in full • listen to your breath as you run up a steep hill and walk down slowly; listen to your breath as you walk up a steep hill and run down slowly • cut holes in an umbrella during a rainstorm and listen to the irony pour through • get a bicycle and ride across America • hold your palms and fingers gently over the tips of grass at dawn and wipe the dew across your cheeks • do nothing • sitting cross-legged on the floor, recount in detail to an audience (of any or no size) the most recent dream that you can remember • make a friend • look at the Atlantic Ocean; turn 180 degrees; walk; look at the Pacific Ocean • grab a cactus / smash a guitar • move fast so that wind becomes music

Through all these artists, authors, activists, and beyond, like Ono, Knowles, Carlos, Oram, Halberstam, Kwon, hooks, Kheshti, it is clear that approaching things not with notions of right or wrong, but with the intention of discovery, experimentation, and playful imagination is a valuable way of living. In the inscription to hook’s Teaching Community, the author quotes Paulo Freire: “It is imperative that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite.” In many ways, these figures stand for just that: a rejection of the harshness of reality through creativity, experimentation, discovery, and a love for learning.

Bibliography

“Ceiling Painting, Yes Painting (1966).” Guggenheim Bilbao, http://yokoono.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/artworks/ceiling-painting-yes-painting.html.

“Daphne Oram – An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics.” Anomie Publishing, Anomie Publishing and The Daphne Oram Trust.

“Emily Sprague: SOUND PROCESS #8.” SoundCloud, 2017, https://soundcloud.com/sound-and-process/es_ep8.

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Duke University Press, 2011.

Hooks, Bell. Teaching Community. Routledge, 2003.

Kheshti, Roshanak. Swithced-on Bach. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

Kwon, Miwon. “The Wrong Place.” Art Journal, vol. 59, no. 1, 2000, pp. 33–43. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/778080.

“Wendy Carlos.” Wendy Carlos, http://www.wendycarlos.com/.

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brentrogers · 5 years ago

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Podcast: Studying “Resting B**ch Face”

What is resting b**ch face? In today’s Not Crazy podcast, Gabe and Lisa discuss the resting b**ch face concept and why it’s even a thing. Lisa shares how she’s been accused of it and how she’s even been prodded by men to smile more.

What do you think? Is resting b**ch face an unconscious bias against women to always look pretty for men? Or is how you are perceived by others just a regular part of life? Join us for a nuanced discussion on the psychology of resting b**ch face.

(Transcript Available Below)

Please Subscribe to Our Show: And We Love Written Reviews!

About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an Asshole and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.

Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond” award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace suicide prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.

Computer Generated Transcript for “Resting Face” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a psych central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.

Gabe: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy Podcast. I’m your host, Gabe Howard. And with me, as always, is my put-upon co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, hello, everyone. And today’s quote is You should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled. And that has been said by every condescending man I’ve ever met.

Gabe: Is that really the quote that we’re opening the show with?

Lisa: Well, my second choice was don’t judge a book by its cover as popularized by Edwin Rolfe.

Gabe: Wait, there’s an attribution to that? I just thought it was one of those things like why did the chicken cross the road? It’s just?

Lisa: I know,

Gabe: It just appeared.

Lisa: I know. I was surprised, too. The phrase is actually attributed to a 1944 edition of American Speech, which since 1970 has been the quarterly academic journal of the American Dialect Society. And it was originally you can’t judge a book by its bindings. But then in 1946, it was used in a murder mystery novel by Lester Fuller and Edwin Rolfe. And they said, you can never tell a book by its cover.

Gabe: Wow, that was very thorough.

Lisa: Thank you. And you think I just randomly Google these quotes right before? No, no. I research this stuff.

Gabe: I mean, I’m going to have to take your word for it, because I actually prepared for the show topic, not for like the random quote that Lisa says at the beginning. But it’s a . . .

Lisa: The American Dialect Society. That’s a thing.

Gabe: Yeah, I didn’t even know that was a thing. What we want to discuss is resting bitch face. And it’s funny to say that. It’s like, well, Gabe, what does resting bitch face have to do with mental health? And the answer is, people are really starting to study it as if it was psychology and as if it mattered to the world. There’s headlines out there. One of them is, and this is what got us onto this to begin with. In The Washington Post, scientists have discovered what causes resting bitch face. Like what causes? It sounds so medical.

Lisa: Well, it sounds like there’s real science behind it and also “causes” implied to me that they were going to tell us what the people who have resting bitch face are thinking or doing that causes this appearance on their face. But that’s not what they meant.

Gabe: Fascinatingly enough, I have heard the term resting bitch face for a few years. I have no idea where it came from. I have.

Lisa: It first started in a viral video that first appeared in 2013 about resting bitchy face, but then caught on in part because Anna Kendrick talked about it.

Gabe: Now, who’s Anna Kendrick?

Lisa: She’s an actress.

Gabe: That’s all you got? She’s that actress? Has she been in anything?

Lisa: She’s always does those really funny things on The Daily Show.

Gabe: So she was on The Daily Show and, you know, Twilight, that huge blockbuster

Lisa: I forgot about that.

Gabe: Filled with glittery vampires. And that actually gives me kind of another segue. Our generation, we’re over 40. We have decided that those are not real vampires. Why? Because they look different than the vampires from our generation?

Lisa: Well, because they have too much angst. Probably,

Gabe: They are emo vampires,

Lisa: Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, emo.

Gabe: But.

Lisa: They are very emo. They’re no Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires. Now, those are some vampires.

Gabe: Well, yeah, but they’re running around getting killed. These vampires are at least nice.

Lisa: Are they? I’ve actually only seen Twilight once.

Gabe: I’ve never seen Twilight at all. But

Lisa: Okay.

Gabe: But I have nieces who are the right age. But coming back to our point with resting bitch face, what is the slang definition of resting bitch face? When somebody says it, what do they mean?

Lisa: Interesting you should ask that, Gabe. Urban Dictionary does define it as a condition that causes a person to appear angry or annoyed when they’re actually at ease or feeling neutral. And the study you were discussing referenced in The Washington Post was actually about these people. They gave everybody a whole bunch of photographs that everyone agreed had resting bitch face and tried to figure out, OK, what is it about these that they all have in common? What is it that people are responding to? What is it that we’re all identifying as resting bitch face? And their answer was it was a look of contempt.

Gabe: So they tried to scientifically define resting bitch face.

Lisa: Soft science.

Gabe: Just hang on a second here. Isn’t resting bitch face kind of misogynistic? Can?

Lisa: You think?

Gabe: No, I’m asking you, I feel that it’s only ever attributed to women.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Gabe: I know that you feel that way because of your original quote. Which, as everybody recalls, it was you should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled.

Lisa: I get that a lot.

Gabe: You have told me numerous times that women are just constantly under the gun to have a certain facial expression, even when doing the most mundane of tasks like.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Like checking email, reading a book, walking their dog.

Lisa: Because women have to constantly be on display for the male gaze. They’re expected to have this pleasant, likable persona at all times, no matter what they’re doing. Even if you’re doing chores, working out, whatever. You should be pleasing to look at. And people should want to look at you, specifically men.

Gabe: I agree with you. I think this entire thing is rooted in misogyny because every single person with resting bitch face is a woman. Like that in and of itself tells it. Also for what it’s worth, nobody has ever told me that I would be prettier if I smiled. And that’s so sad because I am totally adorbs when I smile.

Lisa: Every woman has been told at least once in her life that she needs to smile more.

Gabe: Only once? Like that would be like a record number based on the people that I talked to, they would love it if it was only once.

Lisa: Well, yeah, exactly, that’s my point.

Gabe: Everybody that I talked to said that they get told this once a week.

Lisa: All the time, I’m assuming no one has ever told you that.

Gabe: But obviously, this is not a show. No, nobody’s ever told me that. I guess outside of the confines of literal acting, like practicing for a speech or. Never just in my day to day life, I think that’s really the rub, right? Nobody has said you’d look prettier if you would smile when they’re taking your headshot. You’re just minding your own business.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: And I know, I know, that this is rooted in misogyny. But the reason this appealed to me so much is because of the direct correlation with how they’re using psychology to address this, to discuss it, to table it as if it were real. And I feel that waters down the treatment for people with severe and persistent mental illness and mental health problems. I mean, after all, if severe anxiety and resting bitch face are both psychological dilemmas, it kind of makes severe anxiety not seem important. Right?

Lisa: First is very clearly a misogynistic thing. Bitch is always about women. There is no equivalent for men. There is no resting asshole face. When a man appears to not be smiling or not really, really pleased, that’s just some guy and his face and how he looks. Men can just exist.

Gabe: One of the things that you said is that there’s no equivalent for men and I want to be an ally and I want to tell you that I completely agree. But I’m a guy living with mental illness and people have looked at me and decided that I’m a step away from violence or that I need care against my will. There’s all these laws that determine how I get treatment. People are constantly discussing my care and my life as if I’m not even in the room. So I recognize that there is no such thing as resting asshole face. But there is absolutely, in the mental health community, people observing people who are known to live with mental illness, including men, and judging them based on. You know, why can’t I just be sad without it being suicidal? Why can’t I just be happy without it being mania? How do we open it up for that? And that’s the thing that, frankly, both excited me when I first heard there was a study about resting bitch face and disturbed me when I heard that basically it’s a software program designed to help marketers.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Because people are just randomly looking at me and deciding how I must feel. And the reality is, 95% of the time they get it wrong. But 100% of the time people have the right to incarcerate me against my will because I could be a danger to myself or others. And me saying, no, I’m not, is irrelevant because they’ve read the non-verbal cues and I look suspicious.

Lisa: What you’re basically talking about doesn’t really having anything to do with resting bitch face, right? What you’re basically talking about is that people have unconscious bias or maybe even conscious.

Gabe: Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.

Lisa: They’re looking at you. They know you have mental illness and now they’ve made all these assumptions about you, your life, how you will behave, what’s going to happen in the future. And obviously, the best example of unconscious bias is going to be related to race. The idea that by looking at a black man, you can know that he’s going to be violent or something like that. But, yeah, that is a problem with mental illness because, again, everyone assumes that they know what you’re going to do next. And it’s almost always, especially for you as a man, couched in terms of violence.

Gabe: I’m really glad that you brought up unconscious bias. Now, I think that it is important to point out that you’re right. Being a woman with mental illness means that you’ve got two ways for people to have an unconscious bias. You know, being an African-American with mental illness, two ways. So even in terms of people judging me based on my mental illness, that’s still only one thing that they’re judging me for. I’ve still somehow managed to gain some privilege even in this whole entanglement. And I agree with you. I don’t want to lose sight of that. But talking specifically about mental illness, the reason this whole resting bitch face concept appealed to me and it really appealed to us, Lisa, as a topic for the show, is because people seem to understand it. Now, some people agree with it and they’re like, oh, it’s real. And some people are like, all right, this is just bullshit and a way to shame and control women. But people have heard of it. People understand it. And people have opinions on it. I thought that would help move the needle forward on what is the resting bitch face equivalent of trying to control people with mental illness? And how can we use this study or research or knowledge to help people with mental illness have better outcomes or get the help that they need?

Lisa: The question you said is people are debating if it’s real. It is real. If someone looks at me and says, wow, you look like a bitch, that happened. That is a real thing. People are falsely perceiving other people, and yeah. We don’t need to study that. That clearly exists.

Gabe: Lisa, let’s go all the way back to Gabe’s childhood. I was terrified of men. I just was. I was raised predominantly by women for a long time. And when I was younger, any woman could abduct me, no problem. And every man I would run from. Now, I was three. I just I was surrounded by women. We can completely understand how this developed and how this was. But clearly, the answer to this was that Gabe needed to change. Right? My parents needed to socialize me around more men. They needed to teach me that women weren’t inherently safe and men were inherently unsafe. One of the things that I’m noticing in this whole resting bitch face debate is people keep saying, here’s what you can do to get rid of resting bitch face.

Lisa: Right. Yes, very frustrating.

Gabe: Looking back to that analogy. Nobody ever said here’s what men can do to win Gabe’s love and affection. I had to learn. Why do we not have this in mental health? Why do we not have this with mental illness? Why do we not have this with resting bitch face? Why are we not teaching all of society that when you look at somebody and you make an assumption based on the expression on their face that is wholly dangerous and stupid on your part?

Lisa: The whole debate has become, does this person have resting bitch face? Why is that the debate? The debate should be, why does it matter? What does it matter what she looks like when she’s just sitting there? We don’t need to go back and forth debating, hey, is this true or not? Because it is irrelevant. And the obvious example on that one is going to be sex. People are always saying things like, oh, my God, she’s so promiscuous. She had sex with four people. And then this becomes an argument of no, that doesn’t make you promiscuous. No, you have to have sex with X number of people before you’re promiscuous. No, you have to have sex with someone who isn’t your husband. That’s it. Why are you debating that? Why? When someone says, oh, my God, she sleeps around. Why isn’t the answer who cares? Why are we talking about this? This is so incredibly irrelevant. Why are we discussing this?

Gabe: Or more specifically, why isn’t it this is none of your business? Why is this a debate? Why? Why can’t your sexual morals differ from somebody else’s sexual morals? And because it’s your body, your sexuality. Well, frankly, your time, therefore, your choice. I like that you brought up slut shaming because there’s another hotly debated topic. And I hear all the time of people trying to determine what the correct, I don’t know, like what are the correct sexual morals? And I tend to side with the articles that say whatever is best for you in a consenting, healthy relationship are the best sexual morals. But I would venture to guess that a lot of people listening to me would not agree with this.

Lisa: So what you’re saying is that rather than having all these articles about how you can appear more pleasant so people won’t think you’re bitchy when you’re resting, we should instead have articles about stop judging people based on their facial expressions. The world isn’t about you.

Gabe: Yes.

Lisa: It’s not this person’s job to make you happy and comfy.

Gabe: Yes. Yes. But now, Lisa, just to keep you on your toes. I am going to argue the other side of the coin. Dun dun duuunnnn.

Lisa: Oh, good.

Gabe: The way people perceive you does matter in our society. I think about this in my advocacy work. I have every right, literally every right to show up in front of the General Assembly, the Senate. Congress, governors and say, what the hell? You’re letting people with mental illness die so that you can fund a sports stadium? You’re giving tax cuts to billionaires so that people with severe and persistent mental illness can? I have every right to yell that. I am angry about it. Lisa, you know how angry I am. But you and I practiced professionalism. You know, Mr. Chairperson, I would like to address the fact that people with homelessness often have untreated mental illnesses and they do not have access to care because of lack of resources and beds. Thank you, Mr. Chairperson. Like we literally practice this and you have told me that it doesn’t matter what’s right. It matters.

Lisa: What works?

Gabe: Right. So when you say there shouldn’t be articles about how to cure resting bitch face, well, is it reasonable to wait for society to change?

Lisa: It really doesn’t matter how you actually feel. What matters is how people perceive you. What you’re really saying is that people are reading your facial expression in a certain way and that does not actually indicate how you feel. But so what? And I take this very personally because this happens to me all the time. I definitely have resting bitch face. I get this comment constantly, that I always look condescending or angry or annoyed. And I’ve gotten this my whole life, and it has not gotten better as I’ve gotten older. It makes me extremely angry because I think, you know, I’m just sitting here. Leave me alone. Or people will say, oh, my God, you were so mad. No, I wasn’t. You think that’s mad? You’ve never actually seen me mad then, because that’s not mad.

Gabe: I can tell you that when Lisa is mad, there is no, yeah. You know, you are 100% positive. You do not think to yourself, I think Lisa is mad. You are running for cover. I hide under desks. It’s terrifying.

Lisa: Anyway, the point is that.

Gabe: That’s it? You’re just going with anyway? You’re not even.

Lisa: I’m assuming people will understand that you’re just making that up. Exaggerating,

Gabe: No, I’m not. I was terrified. Terrified.

Lisa: Really? Desks? You’re hiding under desks? Yeah. You know what I want to say? Like you would fit under a desk.

Gabe: Oh,

Lisa: What desk is that?

Gabe: That’s so mean.

Lisa: See, it’s a fat joke.

Gabe: You’re so mean. I’m glad you’re my bestie.

Lisa: See, that’s what you get for calling me mad.

Gabe: Really? You just went? Isn’t this interesting? I just said you want the nuclear option and called me fat. Well, but people are literally judging your personality sight unseen.

Lisa: Right. How come that’s not the nuclear option?

Gabe: It is interesting. It reminds me of one of our favorite shows was The Big Bang Theory. And remember, Leonard, the genius with a PhD and tenure at?

Lisa: I think they were supposed to be at Caltech.

Gabe: Yeah, a tenured professor making six figures. I just. He was the lucky one because

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Penny was pretty.

Lisa: That always annoyed me. She’s a waitress and an out of work actress. But she can afford to live in the same building as these two tenure track physics professors? Do you know how much money those two were making? And then the thought was always, oh, my God, she’s out of his league. Why? Because she’s pretty? He’s apparently a genius who has an excellent job, but she’s pretty. So that’s what counts.

Gabe: And this is an example of how looks really play a huge role in the public consciousness. And this is a huge problem, I recognize that resting bitch face must be hard for you, but nobody has ever arrested you for having resting bitch face. Nobody has ever pink slipped you or put you in a psychiatric hospital based on your looks. And as annoying as it is, you know, Lisa, I think the world of you and you know that I do. But you are my best friend and I’ve known you for 20 years. And the number of times that you have dismissed what I have to say, because you have decided that I’m having an anxiety attack or a panic attack or hypomania, and you are just flat out wrong. I’m not saying that you’re always wrong. I want to be very clear. Thank you. I want you to look out for me. I do. But that’s like a really easy brush for you to paint, right? Just like you pointed out that resting bitch face is a really easy brush for other people to paint about you. Well, I’ll just assume she’s angry. Well, people with mental illness often get hit with I’ll just assume he’s symptomatic.

Lisa: That is certainly one of the reasons that we got divorced. You actually said, no, it is. I don’t know if you remember this, but one time you actually said to me, you never take me seriously. And I thought, yeah, yeah, that yes, 100 percent. And I actually thought to myself, why would I take you seriously? Yeah. Yeah. If you ever find yourself thinking to yourself, huh, I really don’t need to listen to anything my husband says or care about how he feels because I don’t need to take him or his feelings seriously. Yeah, that’s probably not a relationship that’s going to survive. You could just probably cut that right there and save yourself some time. But yeah, because you spent so many years being all over the place. Yeah. I stopped paying attention. I stopped listening. I stopped taking you seriously. And I don’t feel like that was all that unreasonable. I mean, you had this amazing plan and you’re gonna do this, this and this one day and then the next day you’re on to something else. Well, how much time and effort was I really supposed to invest in any given thing that you said, knowing that you were probably gonna go back on it in a few hours or a few days?

Gabe: This is obviously a little more nuanced, right? Because I didn’t just have a resting symptomatic face, I was actually symptomatic. There was more clues to look into. But I think that there is a large number of the population, people living with mental illness that were symptomatic for a long time before they reached recovery, before they got the right care, before they got the right coping skills, medication, before they got things under control. And they’re having trouble shaking that because everything looks like that. Much in the case of resting bitch face, where it just looks like that. The thing that interested me the most about The Washington Post article is the fact that it actually used the words have discovered what causes it. And I thought, oh, my God, if I can figure out what causes people to think that I have resting bitch face, maybe I can somehow, like, reverse engineer that and figure out why people think I’m symptomatic. And I can hide those things.

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I have tried to do that. Listen, the article is largely bunk.

Lisa: The software is largely bunk, too, but it was interesting.

Gabe: It was interesting. And the software was created to help marketers.

Lisa: And it apparently works great for that.

Gabe: Yeah, I want to see happy people selling me my Big Macs. So if they can run through the facial expressions of the commercial and be like, yes, this portrays happiness. And it gets it right with apparently like 97% accuracy. That’s great for marketing.

Lisa: That’s actually not what they’re doing.

Gabe: Well, what were they doing?

Lisa: Oh, so it’s actually the person watching the commercial, to see how they feel in response to it. So it’s designed for like focus groups and marketing and stuff like that. So you do something and then you can look at your customers and rather than having to say to them, hey, are you happy? Are you sad? Are you angry? Do you like this ad? Do you not like this ad? You can just use their software and the software will tell you so that you don’t have to rely on what they’re saying, which I’m sure is an extremely valuable tool and apparently works great for its intended purpose. Or if it doesn’t, at least people think it does because they’ve sold a lot of it.

Gabe: Then how on earth does this do anything? It doesn’t even diagnose resting bitch face. It just measures the bias

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Of the people on the software.

Lisa: Who programmed the software, yeah.

Gabe: Who have already decided what it is.

Lisa: Right. Yes. Yeah, it’s like a deepity, where it’s like self-referential, it’s like a snake eating its own tail. Well, what is resting bitch face? This is. How do you know? Because I’ve compared it to this. Yeah. It just goes in a circle. Incidentally, do you want to know what it is they’ve decided was the thing that showed you? We already said about that it turned out that what people were defining as resting bitch face was a look of contempt. And how, you ask, do you show contempt? With lips and brow not quite angry or sad. The lip tightened and raised or pulled slightly back on one side and your eyes squinted or tightened.

Gabe: I can hear all of the bias in there. One of the things that came to mind when you said the eyes squinted or tightened,

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: There’s cultures where that is how their faces are structured. That’s not an indication of their emotions or feelings or anything. That’s just that’s a facial structure. Just you.

Lisa: Well, we as Americans should recognize that software has bias because it’s made by people.

Gabe: But that’s like they actually said squinty eyes will just. That’s.

Lisa: Well, not necessarily because you could always assume that it’s not about having squinty eyes. It’s about your eyes being squinted.

Gabe: Eh, I

Lisa: I know, I know.

Gabe: I’m not trying to fall down a rabbit hole here, I’m just saying that, you know, the data that you get out is only as good as the data you put in.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: I’m reminded of an advocate, a pretty popular advocate, who said that everybody with mental illness is violent. And his study to prove it said that one of the indicators of mental illness was violence. So therefore, if you had mental illness and you were not violent, you

Lisa: You did not have mental illness.

Gabe: Didn’t have mental illness.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Well, isn’t that perfect? Just one hundred percent of blonds are violent. If the blond is not violent, then she is not a real blond. Well,

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: What if she is a real blond?

Lisa: Well, she’s not because she’s not violent.

Gabe: She not, yeah, must be a secret, just.

Lisa: Right. He’s not really mentally ill because he’s not violent. Only people who are violent are really mentally ill. Yeah, that’s a problem.

Gabe: It also reminds me of the biases in standardized testing, for example. You know, Lisa, what is two plus two?

Lisa: Four

Gabe: OK, now, Lisa, what is the number of Rocky movies plus the number of Back to the Future movies?

Lisa: I actually don’t know that I’m gonna know that. Are we counting the Apollo Creed movies?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Oh, OK. So in that case, we’re gonna go with, umm

Gabe: You see what I mean?

Lisa: Nine. The answer is nine.

Gabe: I did that on purpose because there’s all of this stuff that you have to debate and you wouldn’t be able to ask questions. So therefore, let’s say that that you wrote on that thing nine. Now you got to ask a follow up question. Nine would arguably be the correct answer because there’s the

Lisa: The six Rocky’s.

Gabe: Five Rocky’s and the Rocky Balboa so that gets you to six. There’s the three Back to the Futures

Lisa: Well, but do you count that as a Creed movie?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Because then the next one after that is about his son.

Gabe: Well, right but it is. But you see what I’m saying?

Lisa: I do, I do. Philosophers should debate this great question.

Gabe: I am now going to ding you and be like you’re stupid and can’t do basic math. Can you believe this woman? She can’t even do six plus three.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: The actual thing is you don’t watch the movies. You don’t understand. You don’t t know what I’m talking about.

Lisa: That’s the objection to standardized testing, that it assumes a set base of cultural knowledge that not everyone has.

Gabe: Yes, that is a much faster way of saying it. We also have that in our software.

Lisa: Well, and in our medical diagnoses.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Announcer: Interested in learning about psychology and mental health from experts in the field? Give a listen to the Psych Central Podcast, hosted by Gabe Howard. Visit PsychCentral.com/Show or subscribe to The Psych Central Podcast on your favorite podcast player.

Announcer: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.com. Secure, convenient, and affordable online counseling. Our counselors are licensed, accredited professionals. Anything you share is confidential. Schedule secure video or phone sessions, plus chat and text with your therapist whenever you feel it’s needed. A month of online therapy often costs less than a single traditional face to face session. Go to BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral and experience seven days of free therapy to see if online counseling is right for you. BetterHelp.com/PsychCentral.

Lisa: And we’re back. Relating resting bitch face to mental illness. So this is all about other people’s perceptions. But again, does it matter if it doesn’t reflect your actual feelings? You have said this to me all the time for years. I’ll do or say something and you’ll say, oh, that sounded really angry or yeah, mostly angry. And I’m like, well, but I’m not angry. And you’re like, but people think that you are. But I’m not. But people think that you are. And you’re like, it doesn’t matter what’s actually going on. How people perceive you matters. And the thing that you always say to me when I write something that isn’t very clear and I’m like, well, that’s not what it means. And you say but the purpose of communication is to explain it to the other person. This is written for the reader, not for you. So if it is not accurately explaining something, that’s your problem. Communication is a two way thing.

Gabe: This is the issue, right? This is the million dollar discussion. I took a leadership course once and the example that it gave is let’s say that you are the head mechanic and you have a car that comes in with a tire that is flat. So you say to your

Lisa: Underling.

Gabe: Lower level mechanic, the right side tire needs replaced and the mechanic then changes the wrong tire because they were standing in the front. You were standing in the back. Now you can try to figure out who to blame, you know, or you can decide to standardize. Well, we’re always going to say right side, left side based on the back of the car. So when I say right, always assume that you’re standing in the back facing the front.

Lisa: Or you could just do passenger and driver.

Gabe: Right. You can do passenger and driver, passenger front, passenger back, driver front driver back and a good leader will figure out the best way to communicate to their employees. Now that’s easy because, one, there’s a clear leader, a person who is in charge. And two, you are in control of your own employees, so you can set this stuff up. I don’t know how to turn this into the rest of the world, but I do know that when the entire country is fascinated by something called resting bitch face that they think is true and real. And for some reason now has scientific merit, that I think it’s going to be very, very difficult to convince people that people with mental illness aren’t faking. And that’s what’s so interesting. Right? Because people with mental illness are often faking, just in the opposite direction. We’re faking that we’re happy when we’re actually, like, really depressed.

Lisa: Yeah, you can never really tell what someone is feeling. You can never really tell what someone is thinking, no matter how much you think you know. I’ve made a list of all the things that we could say instead of resting bitch face. They have the same meaning. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Beauty is only skin deep. Looks can be deceiving. All that glitters is not gold. We have lots and lots of ways to say that what you see is not necessarily reality. And especially when it comes to mental illness, what someone is looking like or projecting is not necessarily what’s actually going on. People look like they’re happy, but they’re really not. Well, then the reverse also exists. People look like they’re sad, but they’re fine.

Gabe: I’m going to do that thing where I flip it on you again, Lisa, just to keep you on your toes. I’m thinking about myself and I’m thinking about my fellow peers, you know, other people living with serious and persistent mental illness. And I think about all the times that I just sit in my own darkness, in my own wallow, in my own depression and unhappiness and just the horror show that is sometimes my life. And I’m constantly looking out at the world. And I’m like, well, they all get to be happy. Why can’t I be happy? Look at that family that’s happy. Look at that couple that’s happy. Look at that child that’s happy. Look at that adult that’s happy. Why do they get a nicer car than me? Why are they laughing? Why are they smiling? Why is their life better? They’re in my sight line for fifteen seconds. And I have determined that they are better than me, they are happy, and it’s not fair.

Lisa: Well, it’s also because you spend too much time on social media. No one is presenting themselves as real life. Have you ever posted unflattering picture of yourself on your social media? No, of course not. So therefore, in the same way that that’s not how you really look, that’s also not how your life really is. No one is projecting to the world, at least no one is trying to project to the world anything negative or anything unsuccessful. They’re always putting their best foot forward. Well, that’s not necessarily their real feet.

Gabe: I have posted unflattering pictures of myself on social media, but it was in response to this idea that so you’re right. I do want to say that I was forced into it. There’s just been a lot of conversations about how everybody puts their best foot forward. One of the things that I heard a lot is well, Gabe, you never are symptomatic. We listen to your podcasts, we read your writing, and we see your social media. And you never have symptoms. Yeah, I don’t record when I’m symptomatic. I really don’t. There have been times that I have recorded myself sick. There is a podcast out there where I’m having a panic attack. And my co-host of the time, aimed a microphone in front of me. And it is a nightmare. I had my wife record me once when I was having a panic attack. There’s a video out there of me literally pulling my hair out to explain trichotillomania.

Lisa: That one’s a good one.

Gabe: I got enough e-mails and comments of people saying, well, clearly, Gabe, you never have symptoms, how do you do it? And I realized that I was doing a disservice. But it was accidental. I wasn’t trying to only put my best foot forward. It just happened organically. And I think that we need to realize that’s what everybody does.

Lisa: Yeah, in general, most people wish to present themselves in a positive light at all times. But like you said, it’s one of those things where it’s not fair, right? It’s not fair that other people are perceiving you this way when you’re not this way. And trust me, I understand. I am so with you on the lack of fairness, because, again, this happens to me constantly, but it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to be able to change the entire world. You can’t control them. You can’t do anything about their thoughts, their feelings. You can only control yourself. And if you are consistently being perceived in a way that you do not want to be perceived. Your only solution is to change. It sucks, but true.

Gabe: Have you tried to change your resting bitch face, Lisa?

Lisa: Occasionally I have tried. It actually gives me a lot of sadness to even think about because this is an intrinsic part of me. This is my face. This is how I look. So the idea that I need to change it is depressing because when someone says you have to change, that means you’re currently bad. So I actually have a lot of emotion surrounding attempting to change the resting bitch face. But this perception that people have of me, it is almost always to my detriment. It almost never helps me professionally. It certainly doesn’t help me socially. So that makes me extremely angry. But again, so what?

Gabe: Along those same lines, and I know it’s not the same thing. I really genuinely and honestly do, but I feel like I have resting happy face.

Lisa: You do, actually. Yes.

Gabe: Because the number of people who think that I’m happy go lucky and I’m the life of the party and I’m just filled with joy and light. The number of people who don’t know me well who are just like Gabe is the happiest person I know. We’d love to have Gabe’s life. And as you know, my life is very, very difficult because of bipolar disorder. And I don’t know what to do with that. Oftentimes I do educate them. I say, look, you are absolutely judging me by a public persona. I am not this person in any way. I strive to be this person. I try to be happy and positive. But I’m actually filled with a lot of

Lisa: Sadness.

Gabe: I’m filled with a lot of mental illness

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: That I have to fight on a daily basis. And it’s always fascinating to me the number of people that tell me that I’m happy go lucky. Lisa, would you describe me as happy go lucky.

Lisa: No, not even a little, but I do see why people say it. I do see where it comes from.

Gabe: I can kind of see it, too.

Lisa: If you remember, I had that one job where someone actually said to me, oh, you have such a sunny disposition. And I thought, oh, my God, I am kicking ass at this job because, yeah, no one who knows me in real life is ever going to actually think that. And to be fair, I don’t know that I necessarily want them to. Even just sitting here thinking about this, when you asked me if I’d ever tried to change, I have a lot of emotions surrounding this. It feels like everybody around me is speaking a language that I understand, but I can’t say back. So I can understand what they’re saying and doing, but they can’t understand me. And this has been a source of frustration and shame for definitely my entire adult life and probably most of my adolescence. It’s always been a very difficult thing. I’ve spent many an hour in therapy talking about this that I do not like the way other people perceive me.

Gabe: Lisa, one of the things that you and I have done, and again, we’ve had 20 years to work on this is we just flat out ask each other, you know, I say, are you mad at me?

Lisa: That was a therapy suggestion.

Gabe: Yeah, and it’s worked out great. This is a sincere question, if a stranger walked up to you and said, are you angry? How would you respond?

Lisa: Am I actually angry when it happens?

Gabe: No, because you have resting bitch face, so you’re at that, you’re at the neutral. You’re in a restaurant. You’re sitting there on your phone, your meals in front of you. And you have a female server. And she walks over and says, what’s wrong? Is everything okay?

Lisa: That’s happened to me a lot.

Gabe: How do you respond to that?

Lisa: Most of the time, I immediately start to put on this super happy persona. Oh, no, everything’s wonderful. I’m fine. Thank you so much for asking. I go way over the top and then I find myself often reassuring people and saying stupid things like, I know I look like I’m mad, but I’m not. Or I know you think I’m mocking you, but I’m not. And incidentally, that doesn’t work. If you actually say to someone I know I sound sarcastic, but I’m being sincere. Yeah. No one believes that. It actually makes it worse. So I should really learn to not do that, but I keep doing it. But it does not help.

Gabe: Oh, yeah, I understand. It’s the same way with bipolar disorder. Gabe, are you symptomatic? No, I’m not symptomatic. Here’s all the reasons why I’m not symptomatic. I don’t see why you think I’m symptomatic. Oh, that’s how we know he’s symptomatic. He’s so symptomatic, he’s unaware of his own symptoms.

Lisa: Saying you’re not sick shows how sick you are.

Gabe: Yes, yes.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Lisa, I understand that you’ve battled what people are calling resting bitch face your entire life, and I completely agree with you that this whole thing is rooted in, frankly, misogyny and this idea that women need to look a certain way or projecting a certain thing. I understand that it’s frustrating for you to be the elected spokesperson, but the person thinks that you’re angry. But rather than assuming they ask, isn’t that the right thing to do? Isn’t that good?

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: I know, and I understand for what it’s worth, that you find it annoying having to be the ambassador for explaining.

Lisa: Well, it’s about having to justify yourself every time you turn around.

Gabe: Exactly, and I know that bothers you and I understand why it bothers you. You get mad when people assume that there is a problem.

Lisa: Sometimes, yeah, a lot.

Gabe: Isn’t this the best thing for them to do to actually engage you in conversation and ask?

Lisa: Maybe,

Gabe: Isn’t this the way that we want the world to work?

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: I am picking on you a bit, but here’s why I’m picking on you. They can either assume that you’re angry and act accordingly. Or they can look you in the eyes and have an adult conversation with you. Both things seem to piss you off.

Lisa: What I want is to not even go down this road. I just want to not have this problem, but I do understand that’s not a choice. I get that. But I suppose for the good of all and for my own long term benefit, I should probably try to engage more with the conversation. But that gets old. It’s a lot easier said than done.

Gabe: The best example that I have is as a man with bipolar disorder, I would much rather not have to explain. I would rather not have to wonder. I would rather so many things. Just just.

Lisa: And you can’t keep it up every day,

Gabe: It is very, very difficult.

Lisa: Maybe you can be the perfect advocate. You can be the bipolar ambassador for X amount of time or so many days or in specific situations. But after a while, you’re just tired of it. It’s exhausting. It’s just exhausting. Yet another perfect analogy for mental illness. And it probably is circling back around to make that mental illness just a little bit worse, because all that stress. It is bad enough that you have bipolar disorder or whatever illness. But now you also have to deal with all of society’s crap surrounding it? That’s just piling on.

Gabe: It really is, and as I’ve said many times, I did not ask to be sick and the elected spokesperson

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: And I recognize I’m not the elected spokesperson. It’s just I have to educate my friends and family and those around me about this. And they get it wrong a lot. They get it right sometimes. And that’s all very, very difficult. Right.

Lisa: And often you feel positively about it and often you do it. And it usually turns out well, etc. But sometimes, yeah, it’s just it’s too much.

Gabe: I get the idea of getting overwhelmed, but I just don’t see another choice. And I also think, not for nothing, if all of the people 50 years ago, if all of the Gabe Howards’ 50 years ago would have been open, discussed this, answered questions, let people use their words, challenged the misconceptions, fought against stigma. Maybe I wouldn’t have to deal with it. Maybe the reason that I’m dealing with it is because everybody else kept quiet.

Lisa: Really?

Gabe: So I guess I just don’t want this problem for the next generation of people or the generation after that. I just it is one of the reasons I speak up. I do want life to be better for Gabe. But I also want life to be better for the next set of Gabes.

Lisa: I think it’s a little unfair to say that the last generation didn’t do that. You don’t know that. Maybe they did, maybe they did it a lot. And just it’s such a slow process. You’ve made such incremental progress that it’s not done yet. Maybe they actually did quite a lot of, they did so much work you can’t even tell how much work they did. All of their work is what’s allowed you to even know there’s work to be done.

Gabe: That’s a very fair statement. The reality is, is probably the work that they did is why I am not in an institution my entire life. It’s why I’m allowed to speak freely. That’s very fair. And I apologize.

Lisa: You should consider doing the work for the next in line. But it’s not going to be something that you can complete for the next in line. It’s an ongoing thing.

Gabe: It just shouldn’t be a slow process. Remember back when I started off in mental health advocacy and I was like, oh, this is just an education problem?

Lisa: Yes. Yes, I do.

Gabe: I’ll have this solved in a year.

Lisa: All I need to do is educate people. Actual words the man said.

Gabe: Yeah. Fifteen years later, still at it.

Lisa: He started debating ways to educate people faster or to get to more people quicker because that’s the problem. Not that it isn’t a problem, but it’s not the whole story.

Gabe: It really isn’t, and I genuinely and honestly thought that it was a matter of people misunderstanding. And if I just explained it to them then they would understand and then they’d be fine.

Lisa: Right. That you were under the impression that everyone was coming at you with good faith,

Gabe: I was.

Lisa: That everyone was actually legitimately interested in learning, were legitimately interested in hearing your point of view, going forward, making progress, and that’s just not always the case. Not everyone is approaching you with love in their heart.

Gabe: That said, I’m still glad that I do this work. I still believe that the progress and the gains are worth it. I recognize that mental illness, advocacy, and resting bitch face are worlds apart. It’s a weird analogy. And the fact that resting bitch face made headlines at all kind of shows you that, I don’t know, maybe something is amiss. Obviously, as a mental health show, the minute resting bitch face made the news we were gonna do it, especially since you, Lisa, have been accused of having resting bitch face ad nauseum.

Lisa: I’ve heard it for years.

Gabe: Yeah. So even though it’s pretty much well-established, this is just not really a thing. People understand that your facial expression does not line up with your actual feelings. You just look mean. You aren’t mean. You look angry. You’re not angry. Well understood. Yet, for some reason, we sit around and we look at the world and we’re like, everybody’s happy but me. Well, why do you think that? They have resting happy face. They look happy, so they must be happy. They look content, so they must be content. They look successful, so they must be successful. But in actuality, they’re anything but. Right? But I know in my darkest moments, Lisa, I’m looking at people and I’m like, why do they get to be happy and not me? And you know why I have decided they’re happy? From some, like, ten seconds snippet while they’re in my sightline, I’m not even talking to these people.

Lisa: Do you remember that antidepressant commercial they had a few years ago where the person had a happy face mask? And whenever they had to go out, they wore the happy face mask in front of their face?

Gabe: Yes.

Lisa: The point of the commercial was that if you took this product over time, you wouldn’t have to hold up the happy face mask as much anymore because it would no longer be a mask. It would be real. I really liked that commercial because, yeah, I feel like that all the time. I feel like I am all the time putting forward that happy face. Yeah. That happy face. I’m all the time trying to put this happy positivity feeling forward that I don’t necessarily feel.

Gabe: But that means, to drive this home, just to pound the nail in as hard as we can pound it in. That means when people see you in public, Lisa, holding up your happy face mask, they think, why does that woman get to be happy? Look at her. Look how happy she is because they can’t see you holding the mask.

Lisa: Right. So it works both ways. People can look at me, or anyone, and think she’s happy when she’s really not, or she’s angry when she’s really not, or she’s a bitch when she’s really not. So, again, can’t judge a book by its cover.

Gabe: Hey, isn’t that a quote that you used?

Lisa: See, I brought it around.

Gabe: Oh, look at you. I’m proud of my choices and I’m proud of my fellow advocates. And when I say my fellow advocates, I don’t mean other people with blogs or podcasts or books. I mean the person who when they’re sitting at dinner and somebody says something incorrect about mental illness, living with mental illness, the diagnoses, etc., they speak up and they say, you know, that’s not completely true. Let me let me enlighten you. Let me teach you. My other advocates who keep fighting to make their lives better. I think this is amazing work. And the number of unsung heroes is so vast. And I see you. I hear you. I want to know more about you and your stories. And that’s why we always leave the email address [email protected] open for you to tell us the things that bother you and the things that you’re seeing. And listen, judging from our e-mail box, you don’t always agree with us and we’re cool with that. As you can tell, Gabe and Lisa have not fallen apart crying. We do fight a lot, but, you know, we were going to anyway.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really not your fault.

Gabe: Lisa, did you have fun?

Lisa: I’m never sure how to answer that, but yes, great episode.

Gabe: You know, most people would just say, yeah, Gabe, I had a great time.

Lisa: Well, that is not necessarily a happy topic. No one says, hey, let’s talk about war. Is that fun? No, no. Let’s talk about puppies. That’ll be fun.

Gabe: You do not watch the History Channel, do you? These people look like they’re thrilled discussing war. I don’t.

Lisa: Good point. Something I had not considered.

Gabe: Lisa, thank you for hanging out with me and, listeners, we are thrilled that you are here. If you like the show, please subscribe. Please use your words and rank us. Write us a nice review. If you have any criticisms, compliments, show topics, anything, please e-mail, [email protected]. And many of you don’t know this, but after the credits, there’s always an outtake of where well, frankly, Gabe and Lisa screwed up. Thanks, everyone.

Lisa: We’ll see you next week.

Gabe: Bye.

Announcer: You’ve been listening to the Not Crazy Podcast from Psych Central. For free mental health resources and online support groups, visit PsychCentral.com. Not Crazy’s official website is PsychCentral.com/NotCrazy. To work with Gabe, go to gabehoward.com. Want to see Gabe and me in person? Not Crazy travels well. Have us record an episode live at your next event. E-mail [email protected] for details.

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Podcast: Studying “Resting B**ch Face”

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Computer Generated Transcript for “Resting Face” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy Podcast. I’m your host, Gabe Howard. And with me, as always, is my put-upon co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, hello, everyone. And today’s quote is You should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled. And that has been said by every condescending man I’ve ever met.

Gabe: Is that really the quote that we’re opening the show with?

Lisa: Well, my second choice was don’t judge a book by its cover as popularized by Edwin Rolfe.

Gabe: Wait, there’s an attribution to that? I just thought it was one of those things like why did the chicken cross the road? It’s just?

Lisa: I know,

Gabe: It just appeared.

Gabe: Wow, that was very thorough.

Lisa: Thank you. And you think I just randomly Google these quotes right before? No, no. I research this stuff.

Gabe: I mean, I’m going to have to take your word for it, because I actually prepared for the show topic, not for like the random quote that Lisa says at the beginning. But it’s a . . .

Lisa: The American Dialect Society. That’s a thing.

Gabe: Fascinatingly enough, I have heard the term resting bitch face for a few years. I have no idea where it came from. I have.

Lisa: It first started in a viral video that first appeared in 2013 about resting bitchy face, but then caught on in part because Anna Kendrick talked about it.

Gabe: Now, who’s Anna Kendrick?

Lisa: She’s an actress.

Gabe: That’s all you got? She’s that actress? Has she been in anything?

Lisa: She’s always does those really funny things on The Daily Show.

Gabe: So she was on The Daily Show and, you know, Twilight, that huge blockbuster

Lisa: I forgot about that.

Lisa: Well, because they have too much angst. Probably,

Gabe: They are emo vampires,

Lisa: Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, emo.

Gabe: But.

Lisa: They are very emo. They’re no Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires. Now, those are some vampires.

Gabe: Well, yeah, but they’re running around getting killed. These vampires are at least nice.

Lisa: Are they? I’ve actually only seen Twilight once.

Gabe: I’ve never seen Twilight at all. But

Lisa: Okay.

Gabe: But I have nieces who are the right age. But coming back to our point with resting bitch face, what is the slang definition of resting bitch face? When somebody says it, what do they mean?

Gabe: So they tried to scientifically define resting bitch face.

Lisa: Soft science.

Gabe: Just hang on a second here. Isn’t resting bitch face kind of misogynistic? Can?

Lisa: You think?

Gabe: No, I’m asking you, I feel that it’s only ever attributed to women.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Gabe: I know that you feel that way because of your original quote. Which, as everybody recalls, it was you should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled.

Lisa: I get that a lot.

Gabe: You have told me numerous times that women are just constantly under the gun to have a certain facial expression, even when doing the most mundane of tasks like.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Like checking email, reading a book, walking their dog.

Lisa: Every woman has been told at least once in her life that she needs to smile more.

Gabe: Only once? Like that would be like a record number based on the people that I talked to, they would love it if it was only once.

Lisa: Well, yeah, exactly, that’s my point.

Gabe: Everybody that I talked to said that they get told this once a week.

Lisa: All the time, I’m assuming no one has ever told you that.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.

Lisa: Right. Yes, very frustrating.

Gabe: Yes.

Lisa: It’s not this person’s job to make you happy and comfy.

Gabe: Yes. Yes. But now, Lisa, just to keep you on your toes. I am going to argue the other side of the coin. Dun dun duuunnnn.

Lisa: Oh, good.

Lisa: What works?

Gabe: Right. So when you say there shouldn’t be articles about how to cure resting bitch face, well, is it reasonable to wait for society to change?

Lisa: Anyway, the point is that.

Gabe: That’s it? You’re just going with anyway? You’re not even.

Lisa: I’m assuming people will understand that you’re just making that up. Exaggerating,

Gabe: No, I’m not. I was terrified. Terrified.

Lisa: Really? Desks? You’re hiding under desks? Yeah. You know what I want to say? Like you would fit under a desk.

Gabe: Oh,

Lisa: What desk is that?

Gabe: That’s so mean.

Lisa: See, it’s a fat joke.

Gabe: You’re so mean. I’m glad you’re my bestie.

Lisa: See, that’s what you get for calling me mad.

Gabe: Really? You just went? Isn’t this interesting? I just said you want the nuclear option and called me fat. Well, but people are literally judging your personality sight unseen.

Lisa: Right. How come that’s not the nuclear option?

Gabe: It is interesting. It reminds me of one of our favorite shows was The Big Bang Theory. And remember, Leonard, the genius with a PhD and tenure at?

Lisa: I think they were supposed to be at Caltech.

Gabe: Yeah, a tenured professor making six figures. I just. He was the lucky one because

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Penny was pretty.

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I have tried to do that. Listen, the article is largely bunk.

Lisa: The software is largely bunk, too, but it was interesting.

Gabe: It was interesting. And the software was created to help marketers.

Lisa: And it apparently works great for that.

Lisa: That’s actually not what they’re doing.

Gabe: Well, what were they doing?

Gabe: Then how on earth does this do anything? It doesn’t even diagnose resting bitch face. It just measures the bias

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Of the people on the software.

Lisa: Who programmed the software, yeah.

Gabe: Who have already decided what it is.

Gabe: I can hear all of the bias in there. One of the things that came to mind when you said the eyes squinted or tightened,

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: There’s cultures where that is how their faces are structured. That’s not an indication of their emotions or feelings or anything. That’s just that’s a facial structure. Just you.

Lisa: Well, we as Americans should recognize that software has bias because it’s made by people.

Gabe: But that’s like they actually said squinty eyes will just. That’s.

Lisa: Well, not necessarily because you could always assume that it’s not about having squinty eyes. It’s about your eyes being squinted.

Gabe: Eh, I

Lisa: I know, I know.

Gabe: I’m not trying to fall down a rabbit hole here, I’m just saying that, you know, the data that you get out is only as good as the data you put in.

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: You did not have mental illness.

Gabe: Didn’t have mental illness.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Well, isn’t that perfect? Just one hundred percent of blonds are violent. If the blond is not violent, then she is not a real blond. Well,

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: What if she is a real blond?

Lisa: Well, she’s not because she’s not violent.

Gabe: She not, yeah, must be a secret, just.

Lisa: Right. He’s not really mentally ill because he’s not violent. Only people who are violent are really mentally ill. Yeah, that’s a problem.

Gabe: It also reminds me of the biases in standardized testing, for example. You know, Lisa, what is two plus two?

Lisa: Four

Gabe: OK, now, Lisa, what is the number of Rocky movies plus the number of Back to the Future movies?

Lisa: I actually don’t know that I’m gonna know that. Are we counting the Apollo Creed movies?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Oh, OK. So in that case, we’re gonna go with, umm

Gabe: You see what I mean?

Lisa: Nine. The answer is nine.

Lisa: The six Rocky’s.

Gabe: Five Rocky’s and the Rocky Balboa so that gets you to six. There’s the three Back to the Futures

Lisa: Well, but do you count that as a Creed movie?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Because then the next one after that is about his son.

Gabe: Well, right but it is. But you see what I’m saying?

Lisa: I do, I do. Philosophers should debate this great question.

Gabe: I am now going to ding you and be like you’re stupid and can’t do basic math. Can you believe this woman? She can’t even do six plus three.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: The actual thing is you don’t watch the movies. You don’t understand. You don’t t know what I’m talking about.

Lisa: That’s the objection to standardized testing, that it assumes a set base of cultural knowledge that not everyone has.

Gabe: Yes, that is a much faster way of saying it. We also have that in our software.

Lisa: Well, and in our medical diagnoses.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Lisa: Underling.

Lisa: Or you could just do passenger and driver.

Lisa: That one’s a good one.

Gabe: Have you tried to change your resting bitch face, Lisa?

Gabe: Along those same lines, and I know it’s not the same thing. I really genuinely and honestly do, but I feel like I have resting happy face.

Lisa: You do, actually. Yes.

Lisa: Sadness.

Gabe: I’m filled with a lot of mental illness

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: That I have to fight on a daily basis. And it’s always fascinating to me the number of people that tell me that I’m happy go lucky. Lisa, would you describe me as happy go lucky.

Lisa: No, not even a little, but I do see why people say it. I do see where it comes from.

Gabe: I can kind of see it, too.

Gabe: Lisa, one of the things that you and I have done, and again, we’ve had 20 years to work on this is we just flat out ask each other, you know, I say, are you mad at me?

Lisa: That was a therapy suggestion.

Gabe: Yeah, and it’s worked out great. This is a sincere question, if a stranger walked up to you and said, are you angry? How would you respond?

Lisa: Am I actually angry when it happens?

Lisa: That’s happened to me a lot.

Gabe: How do you respond to that?

Lisa: Saying you’re not sick shows how sick you are.

Gabe: Yes, yes.

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: I know, and I understand for what it’s worth, that you find it annoying having to be the ambassador for explaining.

Lisa: Well, it’s about having to justify yourself every time you turn around.

Gabe: Exactly, and I know that bothers you and I understand why it bothers you. You get mad when people assume that there is a problem.

Lisa: Sometimes, yeah, a lot.

Gabe: Isn’t this the best thing for them to do to actually engage you in conversation and ask?

Lisa: Maybe,

Gabe: Isn’t this the way that we want the world to work?

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: The best example that I have is as a man with bipolar disorder, I would much rather not have to explain. I would rather not have to wonder. I would rather so many things. Just just.

Lisa: And you can’t keep it up every day,

Gabe: It is very, very difficult.

Gabe: It really is, and as I’ve said many times, I did not ask to be sick and the elected spokesperson

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: And often you feel positively about it and often you do it. And it usually turns out well, etc. But sometimes, yeah, it’s just it’s too much.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: You should consider doing the work for the next in line. But it’s not going to be something that you can complete for the next in line. It’s an ongoing thing.

Gabe: It just shouldn’t be a slow process. Remember back when I started off in mental health advocacy and I was like, oh, this is just an education problem?

Lisa: Yes. Yes, I do.

Gabe: I’ll have this solved in a year.

Lisa: All I need to do is educate people. Actual words the man said.

Gabe: Yeah. Fifteen years later, still at it.

Lisa: He started debating ways to educate people faster or to get to more people quicker because that’s the problem. Not that it isn’t a problem, but it’s not the whole story.

Gabe: It really isn’t, and I genuinely and honestly thought that it was a matter of people misunderstanding. And if I just explained it to them then they would understand and then they’d be fine.

Lisa: Right. That you were under the impression that everyone was coming at you with good faith,

Gabe: I was.

Lisa: I’ve heard it for years.

Gabe: Yes.

Gabe: Hey, isn’t that a quote that you used?

Lisa: See, I brought it around.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really not your fault.

Gabe: Lisa, did you have fun?

Lisa: I’m never sure how to answer that, but yes, great episode.

Gabe: You know, most people would just say, yeah, Gabe, I had a great time.

Lisa: Well, that is not necessarily a happy topic. No one says, hey, let’s talk about war. Is that fun? No, no. Let’s talk about puppies. That’ll be fun.

Gabe: You do not watch the History Channel, do you? These people look like they’re thrilled discussing war. I don’t.

Lisa: Good point. Something I had not considered.

Lisa: We’ll see you next week.

Gabe: Bye.

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ashley-unicorn · 5 years ago

Text

Podcast: Studying “Resting B**ch Face”

(Transcript Available Below)

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About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts

Computer Generated Transcript for “Resting Face” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy Podcast. I’m your host, Gabe Howard. And with me, as always, is my put-upon co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, hello, everyone. And today’s quote is You should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled. And that has been said by every condescending man I’ve ever met.

Gabe: Is that really the quote that we’re opening the show with?

Lisa: Well, my second choice was don’t judge a book by its cover as popularized by Edwin Rolfe.

Gabe: Wait, there’s an attribution to that? I just thought it was one of those things like why did the chicken cross the road? It’s just?

Lisa: I know,

Gabe: It just appeared.

Gabe: Wow, that was very thorough.

Lisa: Thank you. And you think I just randomly Google these quotes right before? No, no. I research this stuff.

Gabe: I mean, I’m going to have to take your word for it, because I actually prepared for the show topic, not for like the random quote that Lisa says at the beginning. But it’s a . . .

Lisa: The American Dialect Society. That’s a thing.

Gabe: Fascinatingly enough, I have heard the term resting bitch face for a few years. I have no idea where it came from. I have.

Lisa: It first started in a viral video that first appeared in 2013 about resting bitchy face, but then caught on in part because Anna Kendrick talked about it.

Gabe: Now, who’s Anna Kendrick?

Lisa: She’s an actress.

Gabe: That’s all you got? She’s that actress? Has she been in anything?

Lisa: She’s always does those really funny things on The Daily Show.

Gabe: So she was on The Daily Show and, you know, Twilight, that huge blockbuster

Lisa: I forgot about that.

Lisa: Well, because they have too much angst. Probably,

Gabe: They are emo vampires,

Lisa: Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, emo.

Gabe: But.

Lisa: They are very emo. They’re no Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires. Now, those are some vampires.

Gabe: Well, yeah, but they’re running around getting killed. These vampires are at least nice.

Lisa: Are they? I’ve actually only seen Twilight once.

Gabe: I’ve never seen Twilight at all. But

Lisa: Okay.

Gabe: But I have nieces who are the right age. But coming back to our point with resting bitch face, what is the slang definition of resting bitch face? When somebody says it, what do they mean?

Gabe: So they tried to scientifically define resting bitch face.

Lisa: Soft science.

Gabe: Just hang on a second here. Isn’t resting bitch face kind of misogynistic? Can?

Lisa: You think?

Gabe: No, I’m asking you, I feel that it’s only ever attributed to women.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Gabe: I know that you feel that way because of your original quote. Which, as everybody recalls, it was you should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled.

Lisa: I get that a lot.

Gabe: You have told me numerous times that women are just constantly under the gun to have a certain facial expression, even when doing the most mundane of tasks like.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Like checking email, reading a book, walking their dog.

Lisa: Every woman has been told at least once in her life that she needs to smile more.

Gabe: Only once? Like that would be like a record number based on the people that I talked to, they would love it if it was only once.

Lisa: Well, yeah, exactly, that’s my point.

Gabe: Everybody that I talked to said that they get told this once a week.

Lisa: All the time, I’m assuming no one has ever told you that.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.

Lisa: Right. Yes, very frustrating.

Gabe: Yes.

Lisa: It’s not this person’s job to make you happy and comfy.

Gabe: Yes. Yes. But now, Lisa, just to keep you on your toes. I am going to argue the other side of the coin. Dun dun duuunnnn.

Lisa: Oh, good.

Lisa: What works?

Gabe: Right. So when you say there shouldn’t be articles about how to cure resting bitch face, well, is it reasonable to wait for society to change?

Lisa: Anyway, the point is that.

Gabe: That’s it? You’re just going with anyway? You’re not even.

Lisa: I’m assuming people will understand that you’re just making that up. Exaggerating,

Gabe: No, I’m not. I was terrified. Terrified.

Lisa: Really? Desks? You’re hiding under desks? Yeah. You know what I want to say? Like you would fit under a desk.

Gabe: Oh,

Lisa: What desk is that?

Gabe: That’s so mean.

Lisa: See, it’s a fat joke.

Gabe: You’re so mean. I’m glad you’re my bestie.

Lisa: See, that’s what you get for calling me mad.

Gabe: Really? You just went? Isn’t this interesting? I just said you want the nuclear option and called me fat. Well, but people are literally judging your personality sight unseen.

Lisa: Right. How come that’s not the nuclear option?

Gabe: It is interesting. It reminds me of one of our favorite shows was The Big Bang Theory. And remember, Leonard, the genius with a PhD and tenure at?

Lisa: I think they were supposed to be at Caltech.

Gabe: Yeah, a tenured professor making six figures. I just. He was the lucky one because

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Penny was pretty.

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I have tried to do that. Listen, the article is largely bunk.

Lisa: The software is largely bunk, too, but it was interesting.

Gabe: It was interesting. And the software was created to help marketers.

Lisa: And it apparently works great for that.

Lisa: That’s actually not what they’re doing.

Gabe: Well, what were they doing?

Gabe: Then how on earth does this do anything? It doesn’t even diagnose resting bitch face. It just measures the bias

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Of the people on the software.

Lisa: Who programmed the software, yeah.

Gabe: Who have already decided what it is.

Gabe: I can hear all of the bias in there. One of the things that came to mind when you said the eyes squinted or tightened,

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: There’s cultures where that is how their faces are structured. That’s not an indication of their emotions or feelings or anything. That’s just that’s a facial structure. Just you.

Lisa: Well, we as Americans should recognize that software has bias because it’s made by people.

Gabe: But that’s like they actually said squinty eyes will just. That’s.

Lisa: Well, not necessarily because you could always assume that it’s not about having squinty eyes. It’s about your eyes being squinted.

Gabe: Eh, I

Lisa: I know, I know.

Gabe: I’m not trying to fall down a rabbit hole here, I’m just saying that, you know, the data that you get out is only as good as the data you put in.

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: You did not have mental illness.

Gabe: Didn’t have mental illness.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Well, isn’t that perfect? Just one hundred percent of blonds are violent. If the blond is not violent, then she is not a real blond. Well,

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: What if she is a real blond?

Lisa: Well, she’s not because she’s not violent.

Gabe: She not, yeah, must be a secret, just.

Lisa: Right. He’s not really mentally ill because he’s not violent. Only people who are violent are really mentally ill. Yeah, that’s a problem.

Gabe: It also reminds me of the biases in standardized testing, for example. You know, Lisa, what is two plus two?

Lisa: Four

Gabe: OK, now, Lisa, what is the number of Rocky movies plus the number of Back to the Future movies?

Lisa: I actually don’t know that I’m gonna know that. Are we counting the Apollo Creed movies?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Oh, OK. So in that case, we’re gonna go with, umm

Gabe: You see what I mean?

Lisa: Nine. The answer is nine.

Lisa: The six Rocky’s.

Gabe: Five Rocky’s and the Rocky Balboa so that gets you to six. There’s the three Back to the Futures

Lisa: Well, but do you count that as a Creed movie?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Because then the next one after that is about his son.

Gabe: Well, right but it is. But you see what I’m saying?

Lisa: I do, I do. Philosophers should debate this great question.

Gabe: I am now going to ding you and be like you’re stupid and can’t do basic math. Can you believe this woman? She can’t even do six plus three.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: The actual thing is you don’t watch the movies. You don’t understand. You don’t t know what I’m talking about.

Lisa: That’s the objection to standardized testing, that it assumes a set base of cultural knowledge that not everyone has.

Gabe: Yes, that is a much faster way of saying it. We also have that in our software.

Lisa: Well, and in our medical diagnoses.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Lisa: Underling.

Lisa: Or you could just do passenger and driver.

Lisa: That one’s a good one.

Gabe: Have you tried to change your resting bitch face, Lisa?

Gabe: Along those same lines, and I know it’s not the same thing. I really genuinely and honestly do, but I feel like I have resting happy face.

Lisa: You do, actually. Yes.

Lisa: Sadness.

Gabe: I’m filled with a lot of mental illness

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: That I have to fight on a daily basis. And it’s always fascinating to me the number of people that tell me that I’m happy go lucky. Lisa, would you describe me as happy go lucky.

Lisa: No, not even a little, but I do see why people say it. I do see where it comes from.

Gabe: I can kind of see it, too.

Gabe: Lisa, one of the things that you and I have done, and again, we’ve had 20 years to work on this is we just flat out ask each other, you know, I say, are you mad at me?

Lisa: That was a therapy suggestion.

Gabe: Yeah, and it’s worked out great. This is a sincere question, if a stranger walked up to you and said, are you angry? How would you respond?

Lisa: Am I actually angry when it happens?

Lisa: That’s happened to me a lot.

Gabe: How do you respond to that?

Lisa: Saying you’re not sick shows how sick you are.

Gabe: Yes, yes.

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: I know, and I understand for what it’s worth, that you find it annoying having to be the ambassador for explaining.

Lisa: Well, it’s about having to justify yourself every time you turn around.

Gabe: Exactly, and I know that bothers you and I understand why it bothers you. You get mad when people assume that there is a problem.

Lisa: Sometimes, yeah, a lot.

Gabe: Isn’t this the best thing for them to do to actually engage you in conversation and ask?

Lisa: Maybe,

Gabe: Isn’t this the way that we want the world to work?

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: The best example that I have is as a man with bipolar disorder, I would much rather not have to explain. I would rather not have to wonder. I would rather so many things. Just just.

Lisa: And you can’t keep it up every day,

Gabe: It is very, very difficult.

Gabe: It really is, and as I’ve said many times, I did not ask to be sick and the elected spokesperson

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: And often you feel positively about it and often you do it. And it usually turns out well, etc. But sometimes, yeah, it’s just it’s too much.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: You should consider doing the work for the next in line. But it’s not going to be something that you can complete for the next in line. It’s an ongoing thing.

Gabe: It just shouldn’t be a slow process. Remember back when I started off in mental health advocacy and I was like, oh, this is just an education problem?

Lisa: Yes. Yes, I do.

Gabe: I’ll have this solved in a year.

Lisa: All I need to do is educate people. Actual words the man said.

Gabe: Yeah. Fifteen years later, still at it.

Lisa: He started debating ways to educate people faster or to get to more people quicker because that’s the problem. Not that it isn’t a problem, but it’s not the whole story.

Gabe: It really isn’t, and I genuinely and honestly thought that it was a matter of people misunderstanding. And if I just explained it to them then they would understand and then they’d be fine.

Lisa: Right. That you were under the impression that everyone was coming at you with good faith,

Gabe: I was.

Lisa: I’ve heard it for years.

Gabe: Yes.

Gabe: Hey, isn’t that a quote that you used?

Lisa: See, I brought it around.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really not your fault.

Gabe: Lisa, did you have fun?

Lisa: I’m never sure how to answer that, but yes, great episode.

Gabe: You know, most people would just say, yeah, Gabe, I had a great time.

Lisa: Well, that is not necessarily a happy topic. No one says, hey, let’s talk about war. Is that fun? No, no. Let’s talk about puppies. That’ll be fun.

Gabe: You do not watch the History Channel, do you? These people look like they’re thrilled discussing war. I don’t.

Lisa: Good point. Something I had not considered.

Lisa: We’ll see you next week.

Gabe: Bye.

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ntrending · 7 years ago

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Can artificial intelligence solve the internet's fake news problem?

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/can-artificial-intelligence-solve-the-internets-fake-news-problem/

Can artificial intelligence solve the internet's fake news problem?

You may have noticed: It’s a weird time for facts. On one hand, despite the hand-wringing over our post-truth world, facts do still exist. On the other, it’s getting really hard to dredge them from the sewers of misinformation, propaganda, and fake news.1 Whether it’s virus-laden painkillers, 3 million illegal votes cast in the 2016 presidential election, or a new children’s toy called My First Vape, phony dispatches are clogging the internet.

Fact-checkers and journalists try their best to surface facts, but there are just too many lies and too few of us. How often the average citizen falls for fake news is unclear. But there are plenty of opportunities for exposure. The Pew Research Center reported last year that more than two-thirds of American adults get news on social media, where misinformation abounds. We also seek it out. In December, political scientists from Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Exeter reported that 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news site—mostly by clicking to them through Facebook—around the 2016 election.

As partisans, pundits, and even governments weaponize information to exploit our regional, gender, and ethnic differences, big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Twitter are under pressure to push back. Startups and large firms have launched attempts to deploy algorithms and artificial intelligence to fact-check digital news. Build smart software, the thinking goes, and truth has a shot. “In the old days, there was a news media that filtered out the inaccurate and crazy stuff,” says Bill Adair, a journalism professor at Duke University who directs one such effort, the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative. “But now there is no filter. Consumers need new tools to be able to figure out what’s accurate and what’s not.”

With $1.2 million in funding, including $200,000 from the Facebook Journalism Project, the co-op is supporting the development of virtual fact-checking tools. So far, these include ClaimBuster, which scans digital news stories or speech transcripts and checks them against a database of known facts; a talking-point tracker, which flags politicians’ and pundits’ claims; and Truth Goggles, which makes credible information more palatable to biased readers. Many other groups are trying to build similar tools.

As a journalist and fact-checker, I wish the algorithms the best. We sure could use the help. But I’m skeptical. Not because I’m afraid the robots are after my job, but because I know what they’re up against. I wrote the book on fact-checking (no, really, it’s called The Chicago Guide to Fact-Checking2 ). I also host the podcast Methods, which explores how journalists, scientists, and other professional truth-finders know what they know. From these experiences, I can tell you that truth is complex and squishy. Human brains can recognize context and nuance, which are both key in verifying information. We can spot sarcasm. We know irony. We understand that syntax can shift even while the basic message remains. And sometimes we still get it wrong.3 Can machines even come close?

The media has churned out hopeful coverage about how AI efforts may save us from bogus headlines. But what’s inside those digital brains? How will algorithms do their work? Artificial intelligence, after all, performs best when following strict rules. So yeah, we can teach computers to play chess or Go. But because facts are slippery, Cathy O’Neil, a data scientist and author of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy, is not an AI optimist. “The concept of a fact-checking algorithm, at least at first blush, is to compare a statement to what is known truth,” she says. “Since there’s no artificial algorithmic model for truth, it’s just not going to work.”

That means computer scientists have to build one. So just how are they constructing their army of virtual fact-checkers? What are their models of truth? And how close are we to entrusting their algorithms to cull fake news? To find out, the editors at Popular Science asked me to try out an automated fact-checker, using a piece of fake news, and compare its process to my own. The results were mixed, but maybe not for the reasons you (or at least I) would have thought.

Chengkai Li is a computer scientist at the University of Texas at Arlington. He is the lead researcher for ClaimBuster, which, as of this writing, was the only publicly available AI fact-checking tool (though it was still a work in progress). Starting in late 2014, Li and his team built ClaimBuster more or less along the lines of other automated fact-checkers in development. First, they created an algorithm, a computer code that can solve a problem by following a set of rules. They then taught their code to identify a claim—a statement or phrase asserted as truth in a news story or a political speech—by feeding it lots of sentences, and telling it which make claims and which don’t. Because Li’s team originally designed their tool to capture political statements, the words they fed it came from 30 or so of the past U.S. presidential debates, totaling roughly 20,000 claims. “We were aiming at the 2016 election,” Li says. “We were thinking we should use ClaimBuster when the presidential candidates debated.”

Next, the team taught code to a computer to compare claims to a set of known facts. Algorithms don’t have an intrinsic feature to identify facts; humans must provide them. We do this by building what I’ll call truth databases. To work, these databases must contain information that is both high-quality and wide-ranging. Li’s team used several thousand fact-checks—articles and blog posts written by professional fact-checkers and journalists, meant to correct the record on dubious claims—pulled from reputable news sites like PolitiFact, Snopes, factcheck.org, and The Washington Post.

I wanted to see if ClaimBuster could detect fake science news from a known peddler of fact-challenged posts: infowars.com. 4 I asked Li what he thought. He said while the system would be most successful on political stories, it might work. “I think a page from Infowars sounds interesting,” he said. “Why not give it a shot and let us know what you find out?”

To create a fair fight, my editor and I agreed on two rules: I couldn’t pick the fake news on my own, and I couldn’t test the AI until after I had completed my own fact-check. A longtime fact-checker at Popular Science pulled seven spurious science stories from Infowars, from which my editor and I agreed on one with a politicized topic: climate change.

Because Li hadn’t had the budget to update ClaimBuster’s truth database since late 2016, we chose a piece published before then: “Climate Blockbuster: New NASA Data Shows Polar Ice Has Not Receded Since 1979,” from May 2015.

Climate-change deniers and fake-news writers often misrepresent real research to bolster their claims. In checking the report, I relied on facts available only in that period.

To keep it short, we used the first 300 words of the Infowars account. 5 For the human portion of the experiment, I checked the selection as I would any article: line by line. I identified fact-based statements—essentially every sentence—and searched for supporting or contradictory evidence from primary sources, such as climate scientists and academic journals. I also followed links in the Infowars story to assess their quality and to see whether they supported the arguments. (A sample of my fact-check is here.)

Take, for example, the story’s first sentence: “NASA has updated its data from satellite readings, revealing that the planet’s polar ice caps have not retreated significantly since 1979, when measurements began.” Online, the words “data from satellite readings” had a hyperlink. To take a look at the data the story referenced, I clicked the link, which led to a defunct University of Illinois website, Cryosphere Today. Dead end. I emailed the school. The head of the university’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences gave me the email address for a researcher who had worked on the site: John Walsh, now chief scientist for the International Arctic Research Center in Alaska, whom I later interviewed by phone.

Walsh told me that the “data from satellite readings” wasn’t directly from NASA. Rather, the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, had cleaned up raw NASA satellite data for Arctic sea ice. From there, the University of Illinois analyzed and published it. When I asked Walsh whether that data had revealed that the polar ice caps hadn’t retreated much since 1979, as Infowars claimed, he said: “I can’t reconcile that statement with what the website used to show.”

In addition to talking to Walsh, I used Google Scholar to find relevant scientific literature and landed on a comprehensive paper on global sea-ice trends in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate, published by the American Meteorological Society and authored by Claire Parkinson, a senior climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I interviewed her too. She walked me through how her research compared with the claims in the Infowars story, showing where the latter distorted the data. While it’s true that global sea-ice data collection started in 1979, around when the relevant satellites launched, over time the measurements show a general global trend toward retreat, Parkinson said. The Infowars story also conflated data for Arctic and Antarctic sea ice; although the size of polar sea ice varies from year to year, Arctic sea ice has shown a consistent trend toward shrinking that outpaces the Antarctic’s trend toward growth, bringing the global totals down significantly. The Infowars author, Steve Watson, conflates Arctic, Antarctic, global, yearly, and average data throughout the article, and may have cherry-picked data from an Antarctic boom year to swell his claim.

We’re in our fake news predicament partly because of algorithms. Can they also get us out of it?

In other cases, the Infowars piece linked to poor sources—and misquoted them. Take, for example, a sentence that claims Al Gore warned that the Arctic ice cap might disappear by 2014. The sentence linked to a Daily Mail article—not a primary source—that included a quote allegedly from Gore’s 2007 Nobel Prize lecture. But when I read the speech transcript and watched the video on the Nobel Prize website, I found that the newspaper had heavily edited the quote, cutting out caveats and context. As for the rest of the Infowars story, I followed the same process. All but two sentences were wrong or misleading. (An Infowars spokesman said the author declined to comment.)

With my own work done, I was curious to see how ClaimBuster would perform. The site requires two steps to do a fact-check. In the first, I copied and pasted the 300-word excerpt into a box labeled “Enter Your Own Text,” to identify factual claims made in the copy. Within one second, the AI scored each line on a scale of zero to one; the higher the number, the more likely it contains a claim. The scores ranged from 0.16 to 0.78. Li suggested 0.4 as threshold for a claim worth further inspection. The AI scored 12 out of 16 sentences at or above that mark.

In total, there were 11 check-worthy claims among 12 sentences, all of which I had also identified. But ClaimBuster missed four. For instance, it gave a low score of 0.16 to a sentence that said climate change “is thought to be due to a combination of natural and, to a much lesser extent, human influence.” This sentence is indeed a claim—a false one. Scientific consensus holds that humans are primarily to blame for recent climate change. False negatives like this, which rate a sentence as not worth checking even when it is, could lead a reader to be duped by a lie.

How could ClaimBuster miss this statement when so much has been written about it in the media and academic journals? Li said his AI likely didn’t catch it because the language is vague. “It doesn’t mention any specific people or groups,” he says. Because the sentence had no hard numbers and cited no identifiable people or institutions, there was “nothing to quantify.” Only a human brain can spot the claim without obvious footholds.

Next up, I fed each of the 11 identified claims into a second window, which checks against the system’s truth database. In an ideal case, the machine would match the claim to an existing fact-check and flag it as true or false. In reality, it spit out information that was, for the most part, irrelevant.

Take the article’s first sentence, about the retreat of the polar ice caps. ClaimBuster compared the string of words to all sentences in its database. It searched for matches and synonyms or semantic similarities. Then it ranked hits. The best match came from a PolitiFact story—but the topic concerned nuclear negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, not sea ice or climate change. Li said the system was probably latching onto similar words that don’t have much to do with the topic. Both sentences, for example, contain the words “since,” “has,” “not,” as well as similar words such as “updated” and “advanced.” This gets at a basic problem: The program doesn’t yet weigh more-important words over nonspecific words. For example, it couldn’t tell that the Iran story was irrelevant.

When I tried the sentence about Al Gore, the top hit was more promising: Another link from PolitiFact matched to a sentence in a story that read: “Scientists project that the Arctic will be ice-free in the summer of 2013.” Here, the match was more obvious; the sentences shared words, including “Arctic,” and synonyms such as “disappear” and “ice-free.” But when I dug further, it turned out the PolitiFact story was about a 2009 Huffington Post op-ed by then-senator John Kerry, rather than Al Gore in a 2007 Nobel lecture. When I tested the remaining claims in the story, I faced similar problems.

When I reported these results to Li, he wasn’t surprised. The problem was that ClaimBuster’s truth database didn’t contain a report on this specific piece of fake news, or anything similar. Remember, it’s made up of work from human fact-checkers at places including PolitiFact and The Washington Post. Because the system relies so heavily on information supplied by people, he said, the results were “just another point of evidence that human fact-checkers aren’t enough.”

That doesn’t mean AI fact-checking is all bad. On the plus side, ClaimBuster is way faster than I can ever be. I spent six hours on my fact-check. By comparison, the AI took about 11 minutes. Also consider that I knock off at the end of the day. An AI doesn’t sleep. “It’s like a tireless intern who will sit watching TV for 24 hours and have a good eye for what a factual claim is,” Adair says. As Li’s team tests new AI to improve claim scoring and fact-checking, ClaimBuster is bound to improve, as should others. Adair’s cooperative is also using ClaimBuster to scan the claims of pundits and politicians on cable TV, highlighting the most check-worthy utterings and emailing them to human fact-checkers to confirm.

The trick will be getting the accuracy to match that efficiency. After all, we’re in our current predicament, at least in part, because of algorithms. As of late 2017, Google and Facebook had 1.17 billion and 2.07 billion users, respectively.

That enormous audience gives fake-news makers and propagandists incentive to game the algorithms to spread their material—it might be possible to similarly manipulate an automated fact-checker. And Big Tech’s recent attempts to fix their AI haven’t gone very well. For example, in October 2017, after a mass shooting in Las Vegas left 851 injured and 58 dead, users from the message board 4chan were able to promote a fake story misidentifying the shooter on Facebook. And last fall, Google AdWords placed fake-news headlines on both PolitiFact and Snopes.

Even if there were an AI fact-checker that’s immune to errors and gaming, there would be a larger issue with ClaimBuster and projects like it—and with fake news in general. Political operatives and partisan readers often don’t care if an article is intentionally wrong. As long as it supports their agenda—or just makes them snicker—they’ll share it. According to the 2017 Princeton, Dartmouth, and Exeter study, people who consumed fake news also consumed so-called hard news—and politically knowledgeable consumers were actually more likely to look at the fake stuff. In other words, it’s not like readers don’t know the difference. The media should not underestimate their desire to click on such catnip.

One last wrinkle. As companies roll out an army of AI fact-checkers, partisan readers on both sides might view them as just another mode of spin. President Donald Trump has called trusted legacy news outfits such as The New York Times and CNN “fake news.” Infowars, a site he admires, maintains its own list of fake-news sources, which includes The Washington Post. Infowars has also likened the work of fact-checking sites like Snopes and PolitiFact to censorship.

Still, AI fact-checkers might be our best ally in thwarting fake news. There’s a lot of digital foolery to track. One startup, Veracity.ai—backed by the Knight Prototype Fund and aimed at helping the ad industry identify fake news that might live next to online ads—recently identified 1,200 phony-news websites and some 400,000 individual fake posts, a number the company expects to grow. It’s so fast and cheap to tell a lie, and it’s so expensive and time-sucking for humans correct it. And we could never rely on readers for click-through fact-checking. We’ll still need journalists to employ the AI fact-checkers to scour the internet for deception, and to provide fodder for the truth databases.

I asked Li whether my one fact-checked story might have an impact, if it would even make its way into the ClaimBuster truth database. “A perfect automatic tool would capture your data and make it part of the repository,” he said.

He added, “Of course, right now, there is no such tool.”

Footnotes:

1Fake news is an embattled term. It is used to describe news that is intentionally meant to mislead—for political or economic gain— based on false, misinterpreted, or manipulated facts. But partisans also use it to smear reputable legacy media outlets. Here, we’re using the former definition.

2The book is part of a family of writing guides from the University of Chicago Press. And yes, the facts in it are valid beyond Chicago.

3 A Popular Science fact-checker spent 15 hours verifying the pages of the Intelligence Issue and caught 34 errors before we went to press.

4 Infowars is a media empire and clearinghouse for conspiracies—from the federal government controlling weather to the idea that Glenn Beck is a CIA operative.

5 We made sure that the rest of the story did not provide evidence or context that would affect our fact-check.

This article was originally published in the Spring 2018 Intelligence issue of Popular Science.

Written By Brooke Borel

#Technology

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brentrogers · 5 years ago

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Podcast: Studying “Resting B**ch Face”

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Computer Generated Transcript for “Resting Face” Episode

Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.

Gabe: Hi, everybody, and welcome to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy Podcast. I’m your host, Gabe Howard. And with me, as always, is my put-upon co-host, Lisa.

Lisa: Well, hello, everyone. And today’s quote is You should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled. And that has been said by every condescending man I’ve ever met.

Gabe: Is that really the quote that we’re opening the show with?

Lisa: Well, my second choice was don’t judge a book by its cover as popularized by Edwin Rolfe.

Gabe: Wait, there’s an attribution to that? I just thought it was one of those things like why did the chicken cross the road? It’s just?

Lisa: I know,

Gabe: It just appeared.

Gabe: Wow, that was very thorough.

Lisa: Thank you. And you think I just randomly Google these quotes right before? No, no. I research this stuff.

Gabe: I mean, I’m going to have to take your word for it, because I actually prepared for the show topic, not for like the random quote that Lisa says at the beginning. But it’s a . . .

Lisa: The American Dialect Society. That’s a thing.

Gabe: Fascinatingly enough, I have heard the term resting bitch face for a few years. I have no idea where it came from. I have.

Lisa: It first started in a viral video that first appeared in 2013 about resting bitchy face, but then caught on in part because Anna Kendrick talked about it.

Gabe: Now, who’s Anna Kendrick?

Lisa: She’s an actress.

Gabe: That’s all you got? She’s that actress? Has she been in anything?

Lisa: She’s always does those really funny things on The Daily Show.

Gabe: So she was on The Daily Show and, you know, Twilight, that huge blockbuster

Lisa: I forgot about that.

Lisa: Well, because they have too much angst. Probably,

Gabe: They are emo vampires,

Lisa: Yes, that’s the word I’m looking for, emo.

Gabe: But.

Lisa: They are very emo. They’re no Buffy the Vampire Slayer vampires. Now, those are some vampires.

Gabe: Well, yeah, but they’re running around getting killed. These vampires are at least nice.

Lisa: Are they? I’ve actually only seen Twilight once.

Gabe: I’ve never seen Twilight at all. But

Lisa: Okay.

Gabe: But I have nieces who are the right age. But coming back to our point with resting bitch face, what is the slang definition of resting bitch face? When somebody says it, what do they mean?

Gabe: So they tried to scientifically define resting bitch face.

Lisa: Soft science.

Gabe: Just hang on a second here. Isn’t resting bitch face kind of misogynistic? Can?

Lisa: You think?

Gabe: No, I’m asking you, I feel that it’s only ever attributed to women.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Gabe: I know that you feel that way because of your original quote. Which, as everybody recalls, it was you should smile more. You’d be so much prettier if you smiled.

Lisa: I get that a lot.

Gabe: You have told me numerous times that women are just constantly under the gun to have a certain facial expression, even when doing the most mundane of tasks like.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Like checking email, reading a book, walking their dog.

Lisa: Every woman has been told at least once in her life that she needs to smile more.

Gabe: Only once? Like that would be like a record number based on the people that I talked to, they would love it if it was only once.

Lisa: Well, yeah, exactly, that’s my point.

Gabe: Everybody that I talked to said that they get told this once a week.

Lisa: All the time, I’m assuming no one has ever told you that.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.

Lisa: Right. Yes, very frustrating.

Gabe: Yes.

Lisa: It’s not this person’s job to make you happy and comfy.

Gabe: Yes. Yes. But now, Lisa, just to keep you on your toes. I am going to argue the other side of the coin. Dun dun duuunnnn.

Lisa: Oh, good.

Lisa: What works?

Gabe: Right. So when you say there shouldn’t be articles about how to cure resting bitch face, well, is it reasonable to wait for society to change?

Lisa: Anyway, the point is that.

Gabe: That’s it? You’re just going with anyway? You’re not even.

Lisa: I’m assuming people will understand that you’re just making that up. Exaggerating,

Gabe: No, I’m not. I was terrified. Terrified.

Lisa: Really? Desks? You’re hiding under desks? Yeah. You know what I want to say? Like you would fit under a desk.

Gabe: Oh,

Lisa: What desk is that?

Gabe: That’s so mean.

Lisa: See, it’s a fat joke.

Gabe: You’re so mean. I’m glad you’re my bestie.

Lisa: See, that’s what you get for calling me mad.

Gabe: Really? You just went? Isn’t this interesting? I just said you want the nuclear option and called me fat. Well, but people are literally judging your personality sight unseen.

Lisa: Right. How come that’s not the nuclear option?

Gabe: It is interesting. It reminds me of one of our favorite shows was The Big Bang Theory. And remember, Leonard, the genius with a PhD and tenure at?

Lisa: I think they were supposed to be at Caltech.

Gabe: Yeah, a tenured professor making six figures. I just. He was the lucky one because

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Penny was pretty.

Lisa: Well.

Gabe: I have tried to do that. Listen, the article is largely bunk.

Lisa: The software is largely bunk, too, but it was interesting.

Gabe: It was interesting. And the software was created to help marketers.

Lisa: And it apparently works great for that.

Lisa: That’s actually not what they’re doing.

Gabe: Well, what were they doing?

Gabe: Then how on earth does this do anything? It doesn’t even diagnose resting bitch face. It just measures the bias

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: Of the people on the software.

Lisa: Who programmed the software, yeah.

Gabe: Who have already decided what it is.

Gabe: I can hear all of the bias in there. One of the things that came to mind when you said the eyes squinted or tightened,

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: There’s cultures where that is how their faces are structured. That’s not an indication of their emotions or feelings or anything. That’s just that’s a facial structure. Just you.

Lisa: Well, we as Americans should recognize that software has bias because it’s made by people.

Gabe: But that’s like they actually said squinty eyes will just. That’s.

Lisa: Well, not necessarily because you could always assume that it’s not about having squinty eyes. It’s about your eyes being squinted.

Gabe: Eh, I

Lisa: I know, I know.

Gabe: I’m not trying to fall down a rabbit hole here, I’m just saying that, you know, the data that you get out is only as good as the data you put in.

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: You did not have mental illness.

Gabe: Didn’t have mental illness.

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: Well, isn’t that perfect? Just one hundred percent of blonds are violent. If the blond is not violent, then she is not a real blond. Well,

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: What if she is a real blond?

Lisa: Well, she’s not because she’s not violent.

Gabe: She not, yeah, must be a secret, just.

Lisa: Right. He’s not really mentally ill because he’s not violent. Only people who are violent are really mentally ill. Yeah, that’s a problem.

Gabe: It also reminds me of the biases in standardized testing, for example. You know, Lisa, what is two plus two?

Lisa: Four

Gabe: OK, now, Lisa, what is the number of Rocky movies plus the number of Back to the Future movies?

Lisa: I actually don’t know that I’m gonna know that. Are we counting the Apollo Creed movies?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Oh, OK. So in that case, we’re gonna go with, umm

Gabe: You see what I mean?

Lisa: Nine. The answer is nine.

Lisa: The six Rocky’s.

Gabe: Five Rocky’s and the Rocky Balboa so that gets you to six. There’s the three Back to the Futures

Lisa: Well, but do you count that as a Creed movie?

Gabe: No.

Lisa: Because then the next one after that is about his son.

Gabe: Well, right but it is. But you see what I’m saying?

Lisa: I do, I do. Philosophers should debate this great question.

Gabe: I am now going to ding you and be like you’re stupid and can’t do basic math. Can you believe this woman? She can’t even do six plus three.

Lisa: Right.

Gabe: The actual thing is you don’t watch the movies. You don’t understand. You don’t t know what I’m talking about.

Lisa: That’s the objection to standardized testing, that it assumes a set base of cultural knowledge that not everyone has.

Gabe: Yes, that is a much faster way of saying it. We also have that in our software.

Lisa: Well, and in our medical diagnoses.

Gabe: Yeah.

Lisa: We’ll be right back after these messages.

Lisa: Underling.

Lisa: Or you could just do passenger and driver.

Lisa: That one’s a good one.

Gabe: Have you tried to change your resting bitch face, Lisa?

Gabe: Along those same lines, and I know it’s not the same thing. I really genuinely and honestly do, but I feel like I have resting happy face.

Lisa: You do, actually. Yes.

Lisa: Sadness.

Gabe: I’m filled with a lot of mental illness

Lisa: Yeah.

Gabe: That I have to fight on a daily basis. And it’s always fascinating to me the number of people that tell me that I’m happy go lucky. Lisa, would you describe me as happy go lucky.

Lisa: No, not even a little, but I do see why people say it. I do see where it comes from.

Gabe: I can kind of see it, too.

Gabe: Lisa, one of the things that you and I have done, and again, we’ve had 20 years to work on this is we just flat out ask each other, you know, I say, are you mad at me?

Lisa: That was a therapy suggestion.

Gabe: Yeah, and it’s worked out great. This is a sincere question, if a stranger walked up to you and said, are you angry? How would you respond?

Lisa: Am I actually angry when it happens?

Lisa: That’s happened to me a lot.

Gabe: How do you respond to that?

Lisa: Saying you’re not sick shows how sick you are.

Gabe: Yes, yes.

Lisa: Yeah.

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: I know, and I understand for what it’s worth, that you find it annoying having to be the ambassador for explaining.

Lisa: Well, it’s about having to justify yourself every time you turn around.

Gabe: Exactly, and I know that bothers you and I understand why it bothers you. You get mad when people assume that there is a problem.

Lisa: Sometimes, yeah, a lot.

Gabe: Isn’t this the best thing for them to do to actually engage you in conversation and ask?

Lisa: Maybe,

Gabe: Isn’t this the way that we want the world to work?

Lisa: Probably.

Gabe: The best example that I have is as a man with bipolar disorder, I would much rather not have to explain. I would rather not have to wonder. I would rather so many things. Just just.

Lisa: And you can’t keep it up every day,

Gabe: It is very, very difficult.

Gabe: It really is, and as I’ve said many times, I did not ask to be sick and the elected spokesperson

Lisa: Right.

Lisa: And often you feel positively about it and often you do it. And it usually turns out well, etc. But sometimes, yeah, it’s just it’s too much.

Lisa: Really?

Lisa: You should consider doing the work for the next in line. But it’s not going to be something that you can complete for the next in line. It’s an ongoing thing.

Gabe: It just shouldn’t be a slow process. Remember back when I started off in mental health advocacy and I was like, oh, this is just an education problem?

Lisa: Yes. Yes, I do.

Gabe: I’ll have this solved in a year.

Lisa: All I need to do is educate people. Actual words the man said.

Gabe: Yeah. Fifteen years later, still at it.

Lisa: He started debating ways to educate people faster or to get to more people quicker because that’s the problem. Not that it isn’t a problem, but it’s not the whole story.

Gabe: It really isn’t, and I genuinely and honestly thought that it was a matter of people misunderstanding. And if I just explained it to them then they would understand and then they’d be fine.

Lisa: Right. That you were under the impression that everyone was coming at you with good faith,

Gabe: I was.

Lisa: I’ve heard it for years.

Gabe: Yes.

Gabe: Hey, isn’t that a quote that you used?

Lisa: See, I brought it around.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah, that’s really not your fault.

Gabe: Lisa, did you have fun?

Lisa: I’m never sure how to answer that, but yes, great episode.

Gabe: You know, most people would just say, yeah, Gabe, I had a great time.

Lisa: Well, that is not necessarily a happy topic. No one says, hey, let’s talk about war. Is that fun? No, no. Let’s talk about puppies. That’ll be fun.

Gabe: You do not watch the History Channel, do you? These people look like they’re thrilled discussing war. I don’t.

Lisa: Good point. Something I had not considered.

Lisa: We’ll see you next week.

Gabe: Bye.

Podcast: Studying “Resting B**ch Face” syndicated from

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