#justice and integrity are two different things and do not always coincide

[1-800-roflmao]

Gi-Hun's arc this season reminded me of Handsome Jack from Borderlands. Namely, how he lived long enough to become the villain essentially, and his hero complex.

I love Gi-Hun. This is not hate lol. I just find it fascinating the direction his character took.

[fourletterworld]

Chapter 1 - Is this Real? Was a Big Brother

I had a dream where I was laying on my back in a monorail, watching telephone poles pass by through the windows as I stared at distant clouds. I can't remember what lead to this scenario, but I soon heard Cody's voice speaking to me from no particular location. It was as gentle and near as ordinary conversation, yet I never saw his face.

"Dust?" he called out, questioning, as though this connection was as strange to him as it was to me.  

I remember calling back excitedly; the incredible apathy I had been feeling during this point in time evaporated. I felt pure like I was a kid, as I immediately entered into a long conversation with him, asking him things he couldn't explain.

"What do things look like where you are?" I'd asked, and I could tell he had a semblance of an answer, but I imagined he didn't want to invalidate anything with words. Cody often wouldn't explain something for fear of not doing it justice. I fear putting our conversation into true dialogue for the same reason.

I remember asking if he was okay, which he said he was with certainty and positivity. The majority of our conversation faded in the mist where most of my dreams fall behind, but I recall clearly that his voice was light like it had never been in life. It had an intoxicated enthusiasm, but with absolute clarity of emotion and speech. It felt, to me, like he'd become the man he was supposed to be. The man he would have been had the pangs of chemical torture never got such a grip on his brain.

Cody had mental problems throughout his whole life. When he was young his ears would burn red hot and he would go into hysterical fits of laughter that would bleed into crying. He had a lot of allergic reactions that affected him emotionally, and he always had a hard time focusing and sitting still. When we were kids, I recall many times sitting next to him in restaurants, where he would get agitated toward the end of the meal. He'd lay back on a booth and start bicycle kicking me. The age gap made it unfair for me to fight back, and so I resorted to needling him: like asking him if other kids in his school looked like old women or if it was only him. He'd try to mask a grin with an evil expression, and then sit upright to throw body punches. I'd laugh and try to grab his wrists, while my Mom tried to yell at us from across the table. If my Dad was ever there, he'd make the ordeal into a scene which would embarrass my mom, scare the shit out of Cody and I, and promptly put a stop to the nonsense.

The psychological abuse I retaliated with was just as unfair as hitting back, but in 2019 before Cody passed we talked about this over phone. Cody told me I was always such a bastard growing up, but he always thought the shit I said was funny, and he attributed this to our unified sense of humor.

I didn't usually make fun of him though. I was really sympathetic most of the time, and he knew he could come to me when he was having problems. I think about one time in particular. Cody was eleven years old and he knocked on my bedroom door. When I let him in he was shaken like he wanted to cry and I was immediately alarmed.  

“What’s wrong Codes? Are you okay?” I thought maybe he’d gotten hurt, but what he told me dazed me momentarily and took me a second to grasp.

He said he was laying on his back and started thinking about what life is. He was stricken with rudimentary existential questions, like why are we here, and what is life, and is life even real? When I say these are rudimentary questions, I don't mean at all that the experience of these questions are uncomplicated... They are vast and overwhelming to deal with if you are emotionally invested and living them, and Jesus Christ, especially if you are eleven years old and afraid of things as simple as being kidnapped.  

Though, I didn’t understand that at the time. I was having trouble understanding how something theoretical could bring you to tears. I could wrap my head around what he was telling me easy enough, but it was the difference between someone explaining free falling from an airplane or actually being the person that jumps from the hatch. I think a lot of people who discuss things philosophically forget that understanding the premise of something existential isn't the same as living through it, and when Cody was explaining this to me, I was still years from experiencing anything similar myself, and still, to a lesser degree than I believe he had.

I listened to what he told me, and amidst my concern, I kept thinking about what a special brain he had. This was before he started experimenting with drugs, so all of his thoughts were uninfluenced in that way. I mean, I can't stress it enough, the kid was eleven. I don’t think I had an unprovoked thought until I was in my twenties. I still can't decide if whatever unlocks these intense ideas about the human condition comes from the imagination or some kind of fucked up rationale... The same kind of rationale that comes to the conclusion to put a gun to your head to erase all the anguish.

It is sick to say, but I imagined him dying prematurely many times before he did. He was tremendously encumbered by life, but rather than to become sluggish and uninspired, Cody was restless, which I correctly considered to be a terrifying combination.

After high school, I had moved away to Oregon for less than two years, in an effort to continue a relationship that hadn't been working. During this time Cody began to drink and smoke pot regularly. We talked on the phone often, and he subtly told me what he was getting up to, and I felt worried about him. I was selfishly torn between being his friend and being a good older brother. I was also selfishly torn between being a hypocrite and being a good older brother.

One day, my friend went to his then girlfriend's mom's house, who had a younger sister Cody was friends with. Fourteen-year-old Cody was passed out on the front lawn in the middle of the day next to patch of his vomit. My friend called me and warned me about this situation, and it was at this point I told my Mom. Neither she nor I controlled the situation at all.  

Oddly enough, this friend that discovered him on the lawn was also the same friend that discovered his body on the dirt road after he had overdosed. He was called to the scene as an EMT, on a day which he was randomly working in the area when he shouldn't have been. This coincidence is maddening to me, as though God or the Universe or whatever is saying that it meant to happen... But usually when you think of things meaning to happen, the unifying idea is supposed to bring you peace, but to me, it was a slap in my face that I deserve. To me, it was only meant to be because I didn't stop this from going off the tracks when I was warned first. It's a strange and fucked up parallel I can't get out of my head. Then sometimes I think, is any of this even real or am I drawing spiteful lines between a meaningless constellation?

When my Mom and I were in the hospital, we discussed his addiction problems at length to a doctor as we sat by Cody's bed. The Doctor then asked, knowing the answer, "You never put him into a rehabilitation program?" He looked at me. His eyes and tone brimmed with sympathy, but his question was built without any emotional integrity. Though, being a guilty human being, I did get casted with shame, but additionally swelled with momentary rage at the doctor’s useless blame. I was very close to cruelly criticizing the doctor, and had I been a person that indulged in self-gratifying drama, I would have.  I instead didn't answer the question, but my Mom did, and it hurt her, because the answer was, of course, no.

I then apologetically kissed his forehead. I remembered smelling his oily hair, and I then cried onto his rough hand, holding it and hoping it would miraculously squeeze mine back, but of course it never did. I'm still there each day in disbelief. I've personally experienced this and it still feels like someone had to explain it to me.

So, I'm lying on my back in the monorail in my dream, and I look up and say into the nothing, "Cody I want to hug you", and all he could do was say "I love you Dust".

So I said, "Cody, how do I know and of this is real?" and he replied with something meaningless, and I woke up.

[oneofthosecrazycatladies]

Arrowverse Re-Watch: Arrow season 1, episode 3 “Lone Gunmen”

***Disclaimer: I recommend you read the tags before digging in to this review.

So I’m doing my annual Arrowverse re-watch (where I go back and watch all the Arrowverse shows in chronological order) and this year, I decided I would make these reviews/commentaries about each episode as I re-watch them.

So here goes… WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Request for season 7: Can we see Oliver doing this thing that he’s doing right now again? Standing shirtless and bathed in a single spotlight while he pulls a chain that lifts some pretty heavy-looking weights. God just look st those muscles ripple as he moves. (I don’t have a gif for it, just watch the episode and see for yourself.)

God and that ass!

Stephen, I’m so sorry for objectifying you. You’re a wonderful actor and you seem like an amazing person.

(Okay, hopefully that will ease some of my guilt.)

Okay but what the fuck even is this pool?

Look at how tiny it is!! Who has a pool that small?!

Okay and here’s the pool from a different angle.

I just cannot get over the pool guys. A pool that small is just impractical.

Okay I feel like I should talk about these voiceovers because there’s something really interesting about them.

So if you go back and watch the first three episodes, you’ll notice that Oliver does a lot of voiceover all throughout the episode. But after this episode, there are no more voiceovers except the “My name is Oliver Queen” thing at the beginning.

Now I could be (and probably am) way overthinking this and reading too much into it but...at the end of this episode is when John finds out Oliver’s secret and then he becomes Oliver’s partner in the next episode.

So it’s like the voiceovers are because Oliver is working all alone, but then once he has a partner he doesn’t need the voiceovers because he’s not alone anymore.

Does that make sense? Probably not...but it makes sense to me and that’s all that matters I guess.

Anyway, from a storytelling/character development point of view I find it really interesting.

How can he look so good in just a plain white t-shirt?

(Also, I miss seeing Willa Holland’s name in the credits.)

LL: I hate Oliver and I wish that he had died on the island!

Also LL: *trolls the internet for articles about him*

Me:

Also, does anyone else notice that she’s chewing on a blue pen while she’s trolling?

Now I know this couldn’t have been done on purpose since this episode was supposed to be Felicity’s one and only appearance but because the red pen has become such a big thing in the Olicity fandom...

...it’s just interesting that LL would be chewing on a blue pen.

Oh my god look at Oliver ninja his way up that wall. This man is remarkable.

I love Quentin in this episode so much! And the reason for that is because, even though he hates the Hood, he’s not so blinded by his hatred that he would just ignore contradictory evidence in order to catch the Hood. It shows how much he truly cares about justice and not just letting personal feelings get in the way. Of course, this will totally change in the next episode (as the Lances turn), but I’m just gonna ignore that for the time being and enjoy this version of Quentin.

This. Mother. Fucking. Pool.

Walter: So if I was taking out the competition, I’d have a lot of killing to do in a very short amount of time.

Walter Steele is honestly a legend. It sucks that we’ll probably never get to see him again. Ugh I miss him so much!

So Tommy and Olivear show up at Poison (the nightclub) and what are the odds that LL (and Joanna) and Thea are also at the same club at the same time? Only in TV land I guess.

Oliver: *finds out that LL (the supposed “love of his life”) is sleeping with his best friend*

Oliver: *literally no reaction whatsoever*

Later...

Oliver: *sees Felicity kissing Ray*

Oliver:

(I’m sorry I used this gif twice in one post [and so close together] but it was necessary.)

I’m just saying. If we are really supposed to believe that LL is Oliver’s once and future love, then maybe he should actually act like she is.

(On that note, though, I actually blame the writers for that because honestly I felt like Stephen was working his ass off to make the audience believe that Oliver was in love with LL while KC just gave him nothing in return. She played every scene between them so angry and bitchy even when it was totally unnecessary and didn’t fit with the tone of the scene [but more on that later].)

So LL is able to kick the crap out of Max Fuller in this episode and she did it just because his guys were beating up two people she doesn’t even really like? But literally one episode before this, when people broke into her home she just stood there not doing anything and then ran into the arms of her big, strong man.

Is LL a kickass, independent woman who can take care of herself or is she a helpless damsel in distress that needs Ollie to come and save her? I’m starting to get whiplash from all this character inconsistency.

Oliver Jonas Queen what the fuck do you think you’re doing? I know Yao Fei shot you but that was only to see if you were a threat or not. He saved your life and gave you food and water and shelter. How dare you run away from him.

Okay so I know a lot of people apparently do, but I have to admit, I actually don’t completely hate that frat boy hair Oliver has in these early flashbacks. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely prefer his present-day hair. But I don’t think the frat boy hair looks that bad.

(Then again, Stephen could probably make a mullet and a porn stache look good.)

When was the last time we saw the characters just hanging out at Big Belly Burger? That’s another request for season 7.

Argh! Oliver gets into a shootout with Lawton and Lawton destroys a perfectly good piece of technology!

Oliver Queen there is no Kevlar in that suit, you could’ve gotten seriously hurt or even killed or—

Oh hey, bb, what’s going on?

How’s your day?

I wonder how many times a day she has to ask “have you tried turning it off and then back on again”?

I wonder if she still owns this pink blouse and if it makes her smile whenever she wears it. Although, if you notice, in all 6 years of the show, she’s never worn the same outfit twice. It drives me crazy. I know that she has a lot of money from her days at Palmer Tech but it’s not unlimited. (Although apparently she and Ir*s clothes-swap now? For the record, I thought that sweater looked better on Felicity.)

And Felicity’s chewing on a red pen. Interestingly, it looks like it’s the same kind of pen as the one LL is chewing on, just a different color.

Also, I didn’t talk about this earlier when the scene actually happened, but I find it kinda great that this episode where Oliver finds out that Tommy and LL are sleeping together (and he has no reaction) is also the episode where Oliver meets Felicity. Honestly, if I didn’t know it was just a coincidence, I’d probably think the writers actually planned it all along because it’s just so damn perfect.

Okay so I know that Felicity mentions to William that she’s loved Oliver since this moment. However, since I don’t believe love at first sight is a real thing, I think that she wasn’t head over heels in love with him at this moment, but she could clearly see through all his bullshit and his Ollie Queen persona and she could see his heart. Which is why she helps him even though he’s lying out of his ass.

Because just think of where Felicity is in her life in this moment. Her father had abandoned her and never looked back and, at this point, she probably still believes that she’ll never see him again. She still has a pretty strained relationship with her mother. She still believes that Cooper is dead (I like to think that Cooper was the first guy Felicity was really in love with and that, after he died, she took a job in IT [despite being grossly overqualified] because she wanted something mundane and safe and she probably closed herself off to everyone; I can’t imagine she’s gone on many dates in the last 3 years). So I think Felicity’s pretty used to being lied to and yet, despite all that, she still decides to help Oliver anyway. Everyone always talks about this moment from Oliver’s perspective and how it’s the first time he genuinely smiles and all that, but I like to think about Felicity’s perspective. I mean, she hasn’t had the easiest life either and here comes yet another person with more lies and yet, deep down, she just has this gut feeling that he’s actually a good guy, so for the first time in probably a very long time, she takes a chance. She decides to open up her heart to this guy, whose practically a stranger, but she just knows. Because they’re kindred spirits really, and even though Oliver doesn’t know anything about her past yet, I think he can tell that too. Kindred spirits can always recognize each other.

Also, one more little note. Can we just talk about this for a second: So far, this show has been so dark—literally and metaphorically—and grim. And then...this beautiful bespeckled blonde bathed in bright daylight. Once again, if I didn’t know this was a coinincidence because this was supposed to be her only appearance, I would think the writers planned this all along. She’s the one that harnesses the light inside of him...and when they first meet its bathed in bright sunlight.

I just love this scene so much! In a way, it almost makes it better that all these things were basically accidents. Because it fits so well with the story. Oliver came back from the island with a very specific purpose and plan in mind. He never planned on meeting Felicity but now he can’t imagine his life without her. Emily was only supposed to be in one episode, but now she’s become such an integral part of the show.

This story Moira tells Thea about when she brought home a cat and Robert convinced her to let it go is so wonderful. But it also makes it that much more painful when Thea rejects Robert as her father and starts calling Malcolm “dad”. The whole time I kinda just wanted to scream at Thea and be like “BUT ROBERT LOVED YOU! He knew you weren’t his but he loved you and raised you as his own anyway!!!!!”

I was just so happy when that Malcolm/Thea storyline more or less came to an end and Thea started calling Robert “dad” again. I mean, I think Malcolm is a great character but I couldn’t stand it how he just got away with manipulating her. I don’t blame the characters, of course. I blame Guggenheim for his misogynistic writing. (And I’m pretty sure that MG is the reason Willa left which really sucks because not only did we lose a beloved character, but now MG is gone but we’ll never get to see Thea treated the way she deserves. It kinda makes me wonder if Willa decided to leave before she knew that MG was leaving too and if she would’ve stayed if she knew).

Okay I just gotta ask...with Felicity’s low ponytail and the way the hair totally covers her ears...did they do that on purpose to cover up Emily’s industrial piercing?

And if that’s so, why didn’t they just have her not wear the piercing for this scene? I may not have my ears pierced at all but I’m sure it wouldn’t be a big deal if she took the piercing out for, what, it maybe took an hour or so to film her scenes?

Ugh whatever. I’m just a very detail-oriented person so I always hyper-focus on these things.

Okay I’m sorry, but how did Quentin not recognize Oliver’s voice in this scene? It just doesn’t make any sense!

Tommy: By being better. By being someone that you deserve and that you wanna be with.

Oh Tommy, bb, you’re alreasy too good for LL, okay? She is the one that doesn’t deserve to be with you.

Yay John knows!!!

Okay that’s it for episode 3. To be continued with episode 4.

[your-dietician]

What college football coaches learned from the pandemic last year

New Post has been published on https://tattlepress.com/ncaa-football/what-college-football-coaches-learned-from-the-pandemic-last-year/

What college football coaches learned from the pandemic last year

WEST VIRGINIA COACH Neal Brown is hesitant when he says there are positive things to be gained from what he and his fellow coaches went through last season.

“Maybe ‘positives’ isn’t the right word,” he corrected himself.

Brown doesn’t want to paint a rosy picture of what was a frustrating situation for everyone involved. Talk to enough coaches and they’ll tell you how exhausting it was going through a pandemic, juggling safety and practice and those endless pages of protocols and, oh yeah, the games themselves.

They’re creatures of habit who thrive on structure and routine. But as North Carolina coach Mack Brown told his staff one day last year, “The only thing consistent is inconsistency.”

So, no, it wasn’t much fun, and there was very little in the moment that felt positive.

But the further away they get from what Neal Brown says was the most challenging experience for anyone in leadership, whether they were a coach, a CEO or a principal, the more there’s something to be gained from the experience.

2 Related

“I think there are opportunities that have come out of the adversity that we’ve been through,” he said.

Opportunities to rethink the way they practice and recruit. Opportunities to rethink the way they teach and communicate. Opportunities to not look away from social justice issues that for so long were ignored.

Like millions of Americans, Neal Brown has learned to embrace Zoom, which is why he was able to participate in this interview from his home one day last month.

That may not sound like much — it is the offseason, after all — but it runs contrary to an entire career of waking up early, going into the office for daily staff meetings, and since he was already there, staying a while even though there wasn’t much work to be done.

But on this day, he held the staff meeting virtually and drove his kids to school. Then, he returned home and spoke to a reporter from his own couch about coaching post-COVID-19 and how there’s a need for a better work-life balance in his profession, which for too long has embraced the lifestyle of the workaholic who sleeps in his office at nights.

After the call was over, his plan was to take the rest of the day off.

“There was no more, ‘This is the way we’ve always done it,'” Neal Brown said. “That’s probably the most growth that I made not only as being a head football coach but personally as well — adapting and embracing change.”

THERE WAS ONE curveball coaches were thrown that they all almost universally enjoyed and want to integrate moving forward.

The NCAA dubbed it “enhanced summer practice,” but what it boiled down to was a sort of pre-preseason practice to help players ease into more traditional training after so much time away because of COVID restrictions.

Similar to the NFL’s organized team activities, colleges were granted two extra weeks dedicated to weight training, conditioning, film review, walk-throughs and meetings. Players couldn’t wear helmets or pads during walk-throughs, but they could handle a football.

Alabama coach Nick Saban was a proponent of the plan, stressing how the practices would be non-contact and how they would provide more education, focusing on things like technique and fundamentals.

“It was awesome,” Georgia Tech coach Geoff Collins said.

Because of the limited contact and slow build-up, Collins said, “I thought we were fresher the early part of the season than we had been in the previous four years.”

Neal Brown has learned to embrace the benefits of Zoom meetings and working from home. Frank Jansky/Icon Sportswire

Iowa State coach Matt Campbell felt the same way about the health benefits of the extended preseason, except he noticed a difference on the back end of the season. In an interview with The Athletic, Campbell said he saw better practices from his team late in the year and quicker recovery times.

The Cyclones finished the regular season as winners of five straight, reaching the Big 12 championship game for the first time in school history.

“I thought the week of preparation, going into our bowl game, was maybe the best practices we had all year,” he told the website. “We were able to continue to add fuel to the tank instead of extracting some of that fuel. When we needed it most, we were able to find it and use it.”

Stanford coach David Shaw, who is chair of the NCAA rules committee, said coaches are hoping to adopt the extra lead-in time on an annual basis.

While there wasn’t enough time to change the calendar this year, next year is a possibility.

First, Shaw said, they need to talk to medical professionals to see whether their hunch that it’s healthier for players is backed up by actual science. Second, there’s the coaches’ quality of life to consider, because it’d be taking away two weeks of vacation.

Time will tell whether everyone gets on board, but in the meantime, Neal Brown has a more radical approach he’s considering.

Last season, out of necessity in order to limit a teamwide outbreak and to make the most out of the limited time they had to prepare, he essentially split West Virginia’s roster down the middle. Instead of holding one practice and one set of meetings for players each day, the Mountaineers held two.

What it did was confront the fact that if there are 85 scholarship players on a team, not all 85 are at the same level of maturity or understanding. So teaching them all the same is going to inevitably leave some players bored and leave others behind.

It’s simple, Neal Brown said: “You don’t want to slow them down where you lose the fourth-year player just so the first-year player has a chance.”

By dividing the roster along the lines of experience and readiness to play, he provided more targeted coaching and, perhaps most importantly, more reps for everyone.

He hasn’t made a final decision on split practices in the future, but said, “There’s a thought that maybe that’s the best way moving forward.”

IT’S SURPRISING THAT the pairing of Zoom and recruiting didn’t happen sooner.

After all, the growth of recruiting departments in college football and video communication technology like Zoom and FaceTime have coincided over the past decade. But before the pandemic, there was very little integration on those two fronts.

Well, not anymore.

Virtual visits allow for recruits to experience places like Fayetteville, Arkansas, they might not have ever been able to go to. Nelson Chenault-USA TODAY Sports

What happened out of necessity during a year of no in-person recruiting — namely FaceTime calls and virtual campus visits over Zoom — is here to stay.

Instead of hoping for an unofficial visit to show off their programs, coaches are now able to make a more tangible first impression online, which could be a huge win for difficult-to-reach places like Arkansas and Stanford.

During the pandemic, Shaw said his staff got creative and learned how to “bottle” the Stanford experience. That meant virtually introducing prospects to their professors and students, and showing off the beauty of campus, along with its terrific weather.

“We can’t wait to get people on campus,” Shaw said, “but we have a good program now to show them as much of campus as possible — the people as well as the scenery — to entice them to come.”

While Arkansas coach Sam Pittman says there’s no substitute for in-person contact, the value of virtual visits makes too much sense to ignore.

It’s a matter of logistics. Because Fayetteville’s nearest major recruiting hubs — Atlanta, New Orleans and Dallas — are all at least a five-hour drive away, it’s difficult to get recruits to campus.

“Instead of saying, ‘This kid can’t make it to Junior Day,’ why don’t we take the Junior Day to him?” Pittman said. “I learned that and we may use that in the future.

“We may have a weekend totally committed only to Georgia or Florida or someplace where the kids can’t get here.”

Neal Brown, whose West Virginia campus is a hike for many of the country’s top prospects, said it’s a win three times over to go virtual in recruiting.

“Players save money getting to and from campus, and universities save money, and it’s a better life for an assistant coach,” he said.

Plus, it’s fewer nights on the road for everyone.

MACK BROWN FOUND himself pouting last year.

During the first wave of the coronavirus, when everyone was forced to leave campus and it looked like the football season might not happen, he wondered why he bothered to come out of retirement.

“Why am I doing this?” he thought. “I came back to be around players and try to help them and help younger coaches, and I can’t talk to anybody, I can’t see them, they can’t even come around. What are we doing?”

That’s when his wife, Sally, spoke up.

“[She] jumped on me and said, ‘You know what? There’s never been a more important time for leadership. You need to help people understand this. You need to help solve the problems. You’ve been around a long time, so you need to figure it out,'” he recalled.

“And at that point I kind of woke up and said, ‘All right, I got it.'”

He had to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.

That meant acknowledging what he didn’t know, whether it was about the pandemic or the social justice issues playing out in Raleigh and cities across the U.S.

At 69 years old, Mack Brown confronted some harsh realities.

Mack Brown told his staff one day last year, “The only thing consistent is inconsistency.” Grant Halverson/Getty Images

For so long, he saw the locker room as a place free from racism. But then he heard the pain in his players’ voices as they discussed the murder of George Floyd. And then he found out that two of his coaches — one white and one black — hadn’t spoken in days.

“That really bothered me,” he said. “I could tell there was pressure, there was tension.”

Rather than sidestepping it, they confronted it head-on as a team.

“We talked hard,” Mack Brown said.

And he also listened. A lot of what was said surprised him.

He kept hearing about white privilege, which he took to mean that he had money and a good life. So he asked his players questions about it and began to understand.

“I’m white privilege,” he realized. “I don’t feel race. I don’t see it. I don’t get stopped going home. I don’t get shot in the back.”

Talking it through brought them closer together, and it led to conversations about mental health, drugs and homelessness.

“I’m not sure it wasn’t the closest team I’ve ever been around,” he said.

Kentucky’s Mark Stoops was one of many coaches across college football who walked arm-in-arm with his players last summer to protest police violence against people of color.

But just because the protests have subsided doesn’t mean the issues have.

“I’ve learned that we need to continue to not let this matter go away,” Stoops said. “We have to continue to address it. We have to continue to work at it. We have to continue to do our part to be part of the solution to grow closer together, and keep that at the forefront of our program through communication and education.”

BAYLOR’S DAVE ARANDA says he saw the worst in a lot of people and the best in others.

He doesn’t name names, nor does he cite specific issues. He doesn’t want to be polarizing. But the last year revealed a lot to him.

He referenced the TV show “Ted Lasso” and a scene in which the lead character, a soccer coach, is playing darts in a pub and quotes Walt Whitman: “Be curious, not judgmental.”

“Keeping that approach all the way through COVID when there’s really good and really bad things happening and you’re seeing bad parts of people, I think is the key,” Aranda said. “When you come out on the other side of it, there’s an opportunity to blossom.”

But to blossom into what?

Whether it’s a global pandemic or a life event, Eli Drinkwitz sees a need for coaches to be more amenable. AP Photo/L.G. Patterson

Aranda sees a shift taking place in college football in which the old-school ways of coaching are fading.

“I’m not saying we’re it,” Aranda said, “but I do sense that along with the NIL and all of it, the birth of a modern coach — of someone that [deals with] social justice issues, race and inequality, the transfer portal, social media, mental health. It’s self-talk, positive talk, negative talk. It’s perfectionism. It’s bullying. It’s parents and expectations. It’s all of it.”

Missouri coach Eliah Drinkwitz talked about that trend toward a more holistic approach as well.

This generation of athletes is so flexible and adaptable, he said, and coaches are generally more rigid and routine-oriented.

There’s a fine line, of course, but whether it’s a pandemic or a life event, Drinkwitz sees a need for coaches to be more amenable.

He brought up Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address and the idea of striving to become a more perfect union. That notion of striving — admitting you’re not there, but you’re working toward it — is where he finds meaning.

It’s about listening and learning and working together.

“I’ve learned there’s a lot more capacity to do things than I ever thought possible if you take it one step at a time,” he said. “Then, before you know it, you get somewhere. You don’t look at the totality of the task, you take it one step at a time and put one foot in front of the other.

“And that’s really what we were trying to do the whole time — keep moving forward and try to make a positive impact, whether it was the pandemic or social justice, whether it was our football team trying to improve and establish our identity, every day let’s take a little step forward.”

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[darkwinterchild]

Arrow: how season 1 set up the world

Originally posted on Reddit

Warning: a lot of words, as usual.

Worldbuilding is an important part of storytelling, so I wanted to talk a little about one of the most important pieces of worldbuilding in Arrow: Starling City itself. Because I think it has been neglected after the first seasons. The city used to be so full of life back in the days. It felt whole, it felt real and it felt grounded, and there are two major ways the writers managed to accomplish that: first, they introduced characters from all walks of life, both mains and minors; second, they set up a social background, the issue of class, and used that background to frame, color, compare and contrast their characters from the get-go - give them more depth and complexity.

So first, let’s look at season 1’s array of characters

The main character belonged to Starling City’s elite: that was our point of entry, our main point of view. On the one hand, we had Oliver, Thea, Thea’s friends, Tommy, Max Fuller and Carter Bowen to represent the privileged youths of the city. On the other, we had Walter, Moira, Malcolm, Frank Chen and the people on the List (Adam Hunt, Martin Somers, etc.) to introduce us to the older generation and their shenanigans.

Middle class? The Lance family used to be at the center: Laurel, Quentin, Dinah and Sara (dead but certainly not forgotten). From there, we had Laurel’s friends and colleagues at CNRI (Joanna in particular), and we had Quentin’s friends and colleagues at SCPD (Pike, Hilton, McKenna). We also had Diggle and Carly, poor Rob, and Felicity Smoak.

The people of the Glades were given a voice via Laurel’s storyline as a lawyer: Emily Nocenti, Peter Declan, and Eric and Nancy Moore with their son Taylor. Roy, our main boy, was introduced in episode 15. Raisa, the Queens’ Russian maid, left an impression in spite of only being featured in episode 1. Others were antagonists, but they were still given depth and motivations: the Restons and the Savior in particular.

Organized crime in Starling City used to operate at every level. At the very top, we had Malcolm Merlyn and his organisation. Then, among the lesser rich, we had the Bertinelli family (Frank and Helena). Ted Gaynor and his disgruntled veterans belonged more or less to the middle class. Finally, down at the bottom, we had the Triad, the Bratva, and Count Vertigo’s drug ring.

Throughout the first season, the main characters also mostly all had their own distinct narrative space. Just to cite some of the most important ones: Laurel shared separate storylines with Oliver, Lance and Tommy; Felicity shared separate storylines with Walter and Oliver; Tommy shared separate storylines with Laurel, Oliver and his father; Thea shared separate storylines with her mother, Oliver and Roy. There were so many different factions with different opinions and different agendas, doing completely different things - which made it all the more exciting whenever these storylines intersected (and they all came together in the big finale). This was a way to breath life into their world: Starling City used to be more than just a bunch of vigilante saving nameless faces. It used to be Laurel and the lawyers at CNRI fighting the city’s corrupt elite; it used to be Tommy trying to find his place; it used to be Quentin Lance and SCPD fighting crime and chasing after the Hood; it used to be Walter, a good man trying to solve a mystery; it used to be Moira, trying hard not to drown in her conspiracies; it used to be Roy and Thea figuring out who they wanted to be; etc.

So, this diversity of POV wasn’t a coincidence, but a consequence of the choice the writers made when they incorporated class as one of the thematic pillars of their show. Once they made that decision, it was obviously very important to have both main and minor characters at every social level through which we could explore life in the city. Note also the variety of professions/life styles within the same social class: in terms of worldbuilding, it is doubly important, because of course that leads to a variety of locations. The city didn’t just feel different in season 1 because of all the characters, it also looked different because of all the different sets associated with these characters.

How class was used to ground Starling City and bring it to life

The class issue was an integral part of the story. For a show based on a liberal superhero (from what I’ve heard), it is the one social justice issue they chose to tackle (racism, homophobia, sexism, etc. basically weren’t addressed at all), and they obviously put some effort into it.

Most characters and relationships during the first season explored class dynamics to some extend. When you look at romance, for example, class was the most essential element of Thea/Roy, a core element of both Oliver/Laurel and Tommy/Laurel (Quentin resenting these rich bad boys for what Oliver did to his daughters, Moira telling Laurel that her son loved being at her place because he didn’t feel like Robert’s son there, just himself; Tommy being cut off being an important part of the development of his story with Laurel; etc.), and definitely colored the way Moira/Walter as a high-end couple was written. Concerning characters, the fact that they were billionaires was a defining characteristic of both the Queens and the Merlyns, just like the fact that he was poor was a defining characteristic of Roy. Actually, we can’t just talk about a defining characteristic: their social standing was basically one of the driving character traits in their storylines, for all these characters.

Class used to be at the very core of show. Oliver’s story started when he realized his family’s fortune was built upon the suffering of others - when his father shot himself in the head and left him with the mission of righting the wrongs he committed toward the lower class. On the outside, the Hood was designed to be a champion of the people, an avenger going after the corrupt elite: he was the monster they created, karma in a way, consequences for all those who thought they could abuse their power and get away with it just because they had money. On the inside, the Hood is a deeply personal story about redemption and legacy, it is about an ex- billionaire playboy making amends for not only his father’s cruelty and indifference, but also his own mistakes - the entitlement that made him hurt his girlfriend horribly and irreparably, and left her sister dead at sea.

The Hood going after the List grounded the show in so many ways. First, it made his story different than all the other superheroes out there. Second (and particularly relevant to this post), it allowed the writers to explore the city in so many different angles: these people were not only businessmen but also accountants, investors, financial advisors, etc. By telling us their stories, the writers were also telling us how the city worked in all its complexities, who were the many different players. It made it more whole. Third, it meant the Hood had a justification for being a vigilante: he wasn’t there to replace the police back then, he was there to do what they couldn’t because they weren’t allowed to. Go after the guilty that eluded the law, that fancied themselves above it. His targets and his M.O. meant Oliver couldn’t do what he wanted to do by legal means. Each operation was carefully planned in advance, complete with detective work. This added a layer of believability to his story and the world they lived in that completely fell off in latter seasons.

The class issue wasn’t used to ground just the hero’s story into something real: it’s the same deal for the big bad’s plot. Everything about the Undertaking is a commentary on class, from Malcolm’s motivation (the crime-infested Glades that killed his wife), its execution (using his power as the most successful businessman in Starling to persuade or bully the other powerful players into joining his cause, take control of the corrupt first class via blackmail, infiltrate the law-enforcement, etc.: all of that to have a hand of command over every important chess piece in the city), to his end-goal (the annihilation of the poorest part of town). Actually, I’ve always found the diversity of Malcolm’s main group, the team that orchestrated the Undertaking, striking: he was the only white man, the others were two women, an Asian man, and a black man (Robert was killed right after they switched objectives so I’m not counting him). The only thing they had in common was their social standing, so you feel like it was deliberately constructed not to be a gender or race issue, but specifically a class one.

Even if you exclude the hero and villain’s plots, most storylines during season 1 had a relation to class in one way or another. The Savior? Fed up with the gangbangers in the Glades and the executives who let them run around free. The Huntress? Couldn’t stand her father oppressing the poor anymore. Ted Gaynor? Resentful over having to babysit rich kids. Firefly? He was created during the Nodell Tower fire, a tragedy that only occurred because the construction company that built it used substandard material to save a few bucks. Etc. Every single one of these storylines served to flesh out Starling City and its citizens a bit more.

Season 1’s most iconic quote is probably “You have failed this city” - the vigilante’s tagline. These words are directly related to the class issue, and what made them powerful was how thoroughly the writers set up the city’s social background, how full of life they made Starling feel.

The current situation

Since season 1 was, well, the first season, it was its responsibility to set up solid foundations for the show, notably a believable world. A city in which the show could grow into something more. I think it did a good job, but the seasons that followed didn’t really respect that work with the exception of season 2.

The class issue was dropped somewhere after the first third of season 2, which was busy trying to introduce more comic-booky elements. Season 3 and on didn’t pick it up again. I feel like season 3 was trying to do something worldbuilding-wise w/ the League of Assassins, but failed miserably (they succeeded in destroying one of DC’s most legendary mythos that’s all, and I’m very bitter about it).

So what does Star City look like today? IMHO: boring. You’d think Oliver being Mayor would mean it gets more development, but it’s more bland and empty and dead than ever.

In terms of point of views in season 5 and 6, mostly all we get is Team Arrow in the Arrow Cave and Team Arrow in the Mayor’s Office. They killed, wrote off the show, or forgot about most of the characters that added layers and diversity to the city. Apart from the masks and their allies, mostly all we have now are some villainous POV here and there, most of them not even originally from the city but just coming around to cause mayhem for some reason (I do think the character of Susan Williams was a welcome break for that reason, but she wasn’t particularly well-received). I don’t even know how the city looks like anymore, empty warehouses is all I can see in my head.

It’s actually a joke how the background of the characters, wrt the totally dropped class issue, simply doesn’t matter now. We were left wondering where Oliver, the main character, lived for an entire season. Most of Team Arrow doesn’t have a job, and it’s only recently been addressed. Curtis, well-off genius who used to hold a good job in a giant tech company, can say stuff like “as a black man I’m 80% more likely to get shot than you” (/paraphrased) to Rene, poor latino guy from the Glades who has actually been a victim of random gun violence and used to be a marine - because the history of these characters barely matters anymore, it’s just superficial.

In terms of believability, all the work season 1 put into making it all seem grounded has been thrown out the window. Revolutionary tech is invented on the fly in a matter of minutes. Felicity can hack into anything in a matter of seconds - her and Curtis basically have God-like powers, I swear. I still don’t understand how Oliver manages to be the Mayor and also moonlight as the Green Arrow. Also he’s good at being the Mayor and Thea was an awesome Chief of Staff despite them having zero credentials in politics because our heroes can now be absolutely anything they want if the plot demands it (or just if it pleases the writers). He can pass magical bills on controversial issues that everyone is happy with because Star City is now just a bland simple-minded mass. The Arrow cave is more technology advanced than the NASA and honestly, since they don’t kill and only go after common criminals, I don’t even know why they haven’t simply joined the law enforcement - as a special unit or something, Marvel style. The whole vigilante thing seem pointless at this point, just another hurdle.

(I mean, for real, last episode, Dinah, instead of confronting Vigilante in her capacity as a cop, had to go put on her costume first - that I have no idea where she hid since FBI lady was snooping around. Seems inconvenient and a giant loss of time when people’s lives are at stakes, yk?)

Tobias Church can just show up and take control of Star City’s organized crime (which, btw, I’m surprised to see is even still around) in a matter of… what was it? Two weeks? Which completely undermines these guys, in addition to being unrealistic. It’s another thing that makes the citizens of Star City look stupid or useless, just like the fact people haven’t figured out Oliver and his little gang are the vigilantes makes them look stupid. The writers destroyed any credibility the city had as a whole.

So, yeah, the world of Arrow’s latter seasons is a senseless one, and Star City feels like it has lost its soul.

This is all my humble opinion. Thoughts?

[mxbees]

In discussing the question of neutrality and libraries a careful distinction must be made between the descriptive and prescriptive elements. Descriptive: talking about what libraries are; ‘are libraries neutral?’. Prescriptive: talking about what libraries should be; ‘should libraries be neutral?’. Reading that blog post by some white guy about ‘ugly beliefs’ and library neutrality its pretty clear that, at least from the ALA’s bill of rights, that he is talking about what libraries should be.

In so doing he ellides the question (and problem) of whether libraries are, in fact, neutral. There is a lot of different literature out there discussing the issue and most of it concludes that libraries, despite the stated values, aren’t actually neutral. Additionally (and perhaps most importantly) librarians ourselves are not neutral. This is partly the motivation for my article on “Locating the Library in Institutional Oppression”. Only ‘partly’ because my article goes one step further to examine the ways in which libraries are not neutral1.

The reason why it is important to settle the question whether libraries, as they currently exist, are actually neutral is because their current state constrains what they can be (at least so long as we don’t enact radical change). Can non-neutral libraries be the foundation for neutral ones? If so, how? If we understand libraries as being non-neutral what changes must be made in order to achieve the ideal of neutrality?

One of the ways, as proposed by King is that we support free speech, even in cases of ‘ugly’ speech. If you look in the comments of the blog post he makes it clear that he is drawing a distinction between ‘legal’ free speech and ‘illegal’ hate speech. All speech up to that line should have equal place within libraries. Its interesting to me that he points out that these discussions were sparked by events in Charlottesville. Which, I’m guessing, is his example of ‘ugly speech’. Interesting because the ‘speech’ in Charlottesville did, in reality, incite violence. It would seem, then, that discussing free speech in the context of this particular event is a little misguided (but whatever).

Beyond the problems of using laws as moral compass (e.g., the legal system in the US is famous for how oppressive it is), we can see this as an attempt to dodge the moral culpability he (and others like him) bear for giving space to oppression. By pointing to the ‘bill of rights’ and the first amendment he is simply shrugging his shoulders regarding the larger implications of both this stance and the current state of libraries.

However, this stance itself is one of the ways in which libraries become sites of institutional oppression. And, please, recall that ‘institutional oppression’ isn’t about individuals but the system and institution as a whole (that said, we as individuals are morally culpable for what institutions do and are, since we are an integral part of these institutions).

The example I always love to use is when Janice Raymond was invited to speak at an event taking place in the Vancouver Public Librarie’s public space. Both within that press release and the ensuing discussion the legal code is pointed out as the line for what is (and should be) allowable. Also do note that hate speech laws are more restrictive in Canada than in the US. But the point does remain: what Raymond intended to speak about wasn’t hate speech (legally speaking). At the same time, it is also the perfect example of the kind of speech that both causes and expresses oppression.

Her topic that time was about sex workers. She (and the intellectual tradition she belongs to, radical feminism) supports and advocates for policies that leads to oppression and, yes, violence against sex workers. The key issue here is the criminalization of sex work. Radical feminists usually advocate for a position that they call ‘abolishing sex work’ which, in reality, means that they openly oppose attempts to legalize sex work. Decriminalizing sex work, however, is the goal for many sex workers (as in: this is what they frequently say they want for themselves).

As it happens, regardless of their theoretical background, it turns out that their opposition of decriminalizing sex work coincides with that of many conservatives. This is also true regarding their stance on trans women (as in how we are not women and, thus, should die). Its important because we end up seeing situations like vancouver rape relief (the same org that invited Raymond) arguing against trans rights, as in the recent debates Bill C-16. Their position on this and the issue of sex work gives fuel to conservatives and other politicians because they get to point to a group of feminists and make it look like there is a broader consensus than actually exists (it helps them to point out that it isn’t only the right-wing that wants sex work to remain illegal).

Okay. Why have I spent so much time describing this situation? Because its an easy example for how ‘legal’ speech can feed into the oppression of others. And, for the sake of clarity, by ‘oppression’ I absolutely do include ‘violence’ as one of the ways ppl are oppressed. So, yes, these ‘ugly’ (but legal!) beliefs incite violence… its just that this incitement is covert. When radical feminists talk about ‘aboloshing sex work’ it sounds good. I mean, it is frequently a very ugly and violent business. It ‘sounds’ good right up until you realize that these translates to radfems actively working against decriminalization – which results in sex workers being exposed to the violence of the criminal justice system (not to speak of all the other kinds of violent oppression it results in).

The thing is: extremist groups have long been aware of the value of propaganda. Which means that their hate is sublimated into other ideas that don’t sound nearly as dangerous as they are. And we know this from history. We know that when people talk about racial purity this translates into eugenics and genocide. We know this and yet…. we also argue that such things should be given space within libraries. That since this kind of speech is legal, we should actively work to protect it.

And we circle back to the issue of descriptive vs prescriptive. We have ample evidence to support the idea that libraries and librarians – as we currently exist – are not neutral. Which means we are biased. And the bias leans towards oppression, not liberation. It takes very little effort to find the ways in which the classification systems most english libraries use (the library of congress or dewey) is biased. It expresses a white supremacist perspective in various ways. It is sexist, ableist, homophobic, and so on. It also doesn’t take much effort to find examples and literature about how librarians have (and do) purposefully deploy classification schemes as a way to hide/bury lgbt books (amongst many others).

I don’t think King (and others) realize that some of us frame the issue in this way: given that libraries aren’t neutral and that the bias is oppressive, we shouldn’t push for neutrality where it doesn’t exist (and may not even be possible). And given that we aren’t neutral and the oppressive bias, we have a moral obligation to both correct the current bias (and all ways it is expressed institutionally) as well as actively working against current articulations of oppression to which we are already biased towards.

As in: as non-neutral libraries and librarians we only really have two positions to support. We are either for oppression or we are against it. And given that our non-neutrality is currently biased towards oppression doing nothing or supporting the status quo means we support oppression. And the idea and ideal of ‘neutrality’ is actually part of our status quo. Neutrality is, as King helpfully points out, embedded within the core ideals of our profession and their institutions.

I mentioned on twitter that I’d be super interested in seeing some other concrete plans and ideas supporters of library neutrality have for acheiving it, given our currently non-neutral state. Its weird to me that neutrality appears to come up most often when talking about free speech and the like but I never see one of these people arguing for a complete rehaul of the DDC (or a complete new replacement). If we have non-neutral libraries and neutrality is the goal, we have a shitton more work to do than simply giving more space to oppressive ideas (and people). Libraries and librarians would require radical and fundamental change in order to even begin to approach neutrality. And yet… its pretty much just crickets from these ppl.2

If I were to write this article now, it’d be a very different paper. In part due to the problems surrounding Andrea Smith herself but also because I’d use different examples. ↩

I also have to say… this concluding statment: ‘I’m a strong believer in people, and in the idea that if really wrong ideas are voiced, the community will take notice, will speak up, and will help better the community’ betrays King’s structural placement as a white d00d. I mean. Really? How fucking naive and clueless do you have to be to make this claim. For one reason or another, I pretty much constantly hear about how I should not be allowed to exist and your average person not only is not speaking up but are actively supporting. Jesus fucking christ. ↩

[turklingua]

Turkish Translation and Becoming a Turkish Translator http://bit.ly/2Se1ryT

Translating is the situation of “articulating” the entire emotional and intellectual activities in the chaotic soul structure of human being. In the heart of this complexity or chaos, translator is the person who analyzes all these perception processes with the emotional-intellectual power of the author and his or her language of expression, and fulfills “articulating” in his own language. There are three essential main essential components in the translation action: Our first essential is knowledge accumulation; we mean that the translator is culturally equipped . Our second essential is the ability of emotion-dream transfer; we can call it creative ability. Our the third and last essential is that the source and target language knowledge is at the certain level of translating. It is faced with human nature and human beings who acts different from what they say and do, and who can be defined in thousands of characters. Humans have a curiosity and passion to deal with invisible and unknown areas. When we begin to write this curiosity and passion out, the thing what we call literature arises. The author who has the ability of making invisible ones visible, the unknown ones known, only needs expert translators to spread out his discoveries to the world.

The way to be an expert translator is to built multiple relationships with life and to articulate the other lives far away or the lives right besides us, with the emotional and intellectual accumulation that is gained from the totality of these multiple relationships which is not possible to be known without translating action. Translation action is not a simple, mechanical or ordinary interposition, but requires to constitute a common language with the author and the editor. Creating a common language is one of the hardest act and the translator does one of those hard work. Translator is the person who shows the success of integrating with the heart and brain of the author. In other words, he is the soul mate of the author not someone else based upon the work that he translates. Interpreting, except your native language, is the act of transferring, analyzing and perception of any knowledge at any language what it means in your native language. It is necessary to have an objective and moral stance when carrying out this action. You can not say a word that is not said in the original text; you can not construe a sentence or word you do not know! There is the importance of translating profession: we need to learn what we do not know and communication for the flow of life, that information in foreign languages should be translated into our native language to get the information, assimilate and reproduce.

It is impossible to communicate with other countries and lives without translation, the power and the importance of the translation profession emerges here. There are dozens of occupational areas within the definition of translator. For example, people who will translate literary and commercial areas must have different qualities. When we think that there are different fields within these two fields, I can say that the qualifications of the translator should be determined according to the area selection. However, it is essential to have the ability of writing, analytical thinking, creativity, and language skills both the native and foreign language. The perception of interpreting in Turkey is based on the perception of “a job that anyone who knows a foreign language can do”. This is extremely wrong generalization! We have to break this perception and generalization; because knowing foreign languages is just one of the most important elements of translation. If I express within the context of literary translation, interpreting is not a job that can be done without the intellectual accumulation and authorship ability. The translator has a changing relationship according to each book, but if there are topic concerning sentimentality and justice in it, you will unintentionally take a side but you will have to conceal…

The translation should remain as good as the original text. The translator does not have a mission of making the original text better! There are physical, mental effort and energy of the editor, translator, proofreader and other people in any book that has been translated. The quality of the translation excels in when these energies are in harmony with each other. To be a translator in Turkey means to work under aggravated circumstances with low wages, without having any social security. We have no choice other than to be organized to stop this. If you are not economically dependent on to translate; if you say I can not stand the pressure of the boss or manager; translating for sure seems to be attractive in this sense, but words and sentences that we can not figure out and meet a lot of difficulties when deciphering, takes the place of pressure of the boss or manager… Setting many experienced difficulties aside I would say: you look at yourself with the eye of a creator when your translation gets credit and becomes a book that takes its place in bookcase or shelves.

You are that creator! Could it be a greater happiness than that? You contribute to yourself and others and to life by translating every work you do. There is no training required to become a translator; however I recommend you to place training in somewhere of your life to become a good translator. A translator who does not have translation training can do successful translations; however these translations are usually coincidence. An educated translator can explain what, how and why he translated. Expert knowledge is important. Do not expect the time you will translate to have knowledge about the topic you will be translating. Research, learn, get ready for the translation as you are studying lesson. You should also improve yourself out of school. Make the translation a part of your life. Try to translate what you listen, watch, read in your daily life. Repeat the exercises every day in this way. Pay attention to develop your general culture, accumulation of your popular culture. Follow the news, current events. Be informed of economics, literature, politics, etc. Prepare a CV to yourself, accumulate things to add to your CV until you graduate. Participate to seminars, conferences, volunteer projects, attend courses. Try to build connections with benificial people. Do not underestimate the written translation.

Making a written translation is also a part of providing sufficient accumulation for interpreting. Your character may be suitable to verbal translation; however instead of running away from the translation by pleading, go over your problems. Develop yourself regarding the issues such as enduring and continuous focusing, long working time, meeting the deadlines. We often don’t choose to work as a full-time or freelance translator. Working freelance chooses us. If it chooses you, get your home environment well organized. A large table, a fridge full of tertiary processed meals and a high speed computer can be a good idea for a proper working environment. When we enter the sector, usually the things may not go as planned. You are interested in art; but you can face always with an automotive translation. Suddenly, you can find yourself as a specialized translator in the automotive sector. Interest, curiosity and enthusiasm are good. But do not worry if you can not get jobs in the areas you want, learn to love the fields where you work. Go ahead with preliminary preparation whatever you will interpret; never interpret by yourself, especially when you are new graduate. Do not go alone for more than one or two hours interpretations after you gain a certain experience. There can be anything during interpreting, you may face with unexpected problems. Make confidentiality and impartiality your first principle. Do not share the contents of any meetings with third parties. Never do a biased translation. The conference interpreter is the headliner of the translation cabin.

When you get on the stage, do not let anyone to interfere which song you will sing. Translation is a creation. It is a product that you entirely produce; so all rights are yours. If your voice is recorded, demand copyright for your product. Translator interprets in oral translation jobs. Do not try to solve technical problems. Do not fall back upon the organization. We live in the global world. Speakers from all over the world can speak English at international meetings. Be prepared to hear different accents. Include speakers with different accents among your oral translation exercises. Interpreting is an enjoyable activity; however the market we try to survive, requires you to have nerves of steel. Be gentle, smile and learn to look in the bright side of everything. He who gets up in anger, sits down with a loss. Do not allow to suffer from the competitive feelings and ambition. Your colleagues may be your friends or turn into your competitors according to your attitude. Try to built good relationships with everyone. Interpreting is already difficult; doing this without breaking any heart and having fun, is completely in your hands. You should continue to built up your language training that you get at school with your personal studies. Area selection is difficult, on the way of this selection do not be hurry to decide, it will settle in time. The most important point is to know your own language first, please often read books. Be reminded that it is not expected to make healthy translations from someone, who has no command of his native language. Appearance and attitude are quite important in the field of interpreting. People are ready to judge you, even with your appearance, the way of sitting. When you get in a platform, if you show a profile that is lack of confidence, people try to abuse you and pile extra work to you in every sense. So take a tough stance and try to recover your mistakes instantly, and the most important thing is to trust yourself and be proud of your work.

The post Turkish Translation and Becoming a Turkish Translator appeared first on Turkish Translation Service Company for Businesses & Individuals, Professional, Fast and Easy.

[jessicakehoe]

My Story: Creative Director Josef Adamu on the Power of Telling Untold Narratives

Meet Josef Adamu, a creative director who splits his time between Toronto and New York, and who started his own creative agency, Sunday School, from his Toronto basement back in 2017 which has since grown to a team of four. Here, he shares, in his own words, his company’s mission and what fuels him creatively.

On growing up:

“My parents are Nigerian and they came to Canada in ’89. I was born a few years later in Toronto, and my family bounced around a lot between Toronto and Brampton. I even lived in Calgary, Alberta for one year as well. I’ve always been in a Black space for the most part, meaning I’ve always lived in areas where there was a highly concentrated Black or South Asian community. That was beautiful to me. And I always took note of things. Like, when I went to friends’ houses, I was very inquisitive about where their parents were from. I’ve always been that friend that was questioning everything and I’ve always documented it. When I went to the hair salon, I took note of things. When I went to play basketball with friends, I took note of things. I’ve always made mental notes. And, honestly, those experiences play into what I’m doing now.”

On what he does professionally:

“Creative director, entrepreneur, visual storyteller. I run a creative agency that brings different creatives together to work on campaign projects, and partner with other companies on projects, that bring to life untold narratives. I do dabble in a bit of photography and a bit of consulting, but creative direction is the overarching element. I spent about two to three years prior to 2017 studying the game — learning about the best photographers in the industry, learning about the spaces in which I could fill as a creative — and then eventually started Sunday School.”

On his agency, Sunday School, and the company’s DNA:

“It’s a creative agency that focuses on telling narratives from a Black perspective, and integrating art and education at its core. And we do that through stories that are often untold, overlooked, or not as amplified. And when I say Black perspective, I mean Black at the forefront. The stories we tell are not only Black ones, but they’re Black-centred because there are a lot of companies that don’t include these narratives at all. And I’m not going to lie: Sunday School is everything I’ve ever wanted. Being from the background I come from, my upbringing, the kind of spaces I’m used to taking up — this is a complete reflection of what I stand for. And you know what they say, ‘Be the person that you never had.’ And I never had this. I wanted to make sure that the next generation after me could be super inspired about what I’m doing, but also find and see ways to make it possible for themselves.”

A still from Sunday School’s REPRESENTATION MATTERS series. Photography by Jeremy Rodney-Hall.

On what inspired the idea for Sunday School and how the company has evolved:

“I started it out of frustration. I wanted to see change in the space I was working in; change in an industry that was very linear and that didn’t include much room for my community. There wasn’t ideal space for this type of content, for these type of campaigns, especially here in Canada. So I created one. I had no real goals at first; we were just having fun with the idea of visual storytelling. But then in 2018 I was like, let me put my foot down and set actual, intentional direction with this company: register it, do all that good stuff. See if we could create something long lasting and that will attract corporate-level interest. And we’re at a point now where we don’t just take on any project. Everything is completely centralized and intentional by constantly finding ways to integrate art with knowledge. Like, what can you gain from this? How can you teach a friend? For example, a lot of people don’t know about Africa’s different components and its regions. So, if we can use our platform to show people just how beautiful Africa is, and how all these different parts come together and coincide to make up the continent, then we’re teaching through the work we do. And that’s exactly what we set out to do.”

A shot from Sunday School’s JUMP BALL: THE AFRICAN DIASPORA STORY series. Photography by O’shane Howard and Joshua Kissi.

On the name Sunday School:

“So, I grew up in the church, and if you know anything about church, Sunday school is the youth service that the kids go to. It’s a class where you learn about the word of God, but you also come together and really unite with kids your age: you get to speak like them and you create like them. And I’ve always found that admirable because you really get the opportunity to be more yourself. So I took that as a metaphor for creativity and how, with me, every project I work on is collaborative. You’re always working with a team, and you have all these different ideas, opinions, values and backgrounds that come together to create something beautiful, like a photographer, a videographer, a creative director, and a makeup artist. And then ‘school’ really ties into the educational component of this is not just being art. It’s a lot more than that.”

Shot from Sunday School’s THE HAIR APPOINTMENT series. Photography by Jeremy Rodney-Hall.

On one of his favourite work projects, The Hair Appointment:

“I grew up with an aunt that had a hair salon and her hair salon was attached to the barbershop I went to. I was always in that space, whether I was getting my hair cut or just soaking up the culture. And there’s something about the hair salon where, when you enter, you feel like, “I’m welcomed here,’ from the smell to even the temperature of the room. Everything about it. You just feel like, ‘I can be myself in here.’ That’s something about the hair salon and the barbershop that I’ve never, ever felt anywhere else, and that inspired me. I have a really good friend that lives in New York and that works with her mom at their family hair salon, so we shot it there.

From Sunday School’s THE HAIR APPOINTMENT series. Photography by Jeremy Rodney-Hall.

We wanted to evoke the idea of unconventional beauty and the stories that often go on in hair salons. We also wanted to highlight the different makeup of Black beauty (the light-skinned girl, the brown-skinned girl, the dark-skinned girl) and how braiding techniques have their origins rooted in Africa. We also found ways to tie in Black youth because that perspective is so authentic to the Black hair and salon experience. I think it all came together and made something really beautiful for the community. My proudest career moment has probably been the fact that we were able to take The Hair Appointment on four different activations around the world: New York City, Oakland, London, England and Ghana. And honestly, until this day, I didn’t expect the feedback that we got from it. I didn’t think it would take off the way it did. It just shows you the power of social media, the power of togetherness, and the power of telling stories that are untold.”

From Sunday School’s THE HAIR APPOINTMENT series. Photography by Jeremy Rodney-Hall.

On the Black Lives Matter movement:

“Sunday School has gained over 2,000 followers over the past week just based off people wanting to tap into more Black-oriented storytelling, and that’s what we do. But we’ve been doing it for so long that, for us, it’s just another day. But it’s all been very tough, especially because I have a lot of American friends and now having lived there physically myself, too, I feel like I’m seeing this all first-hand. I’m super upset and disgusted with how the Black community is being treated. I understand the rioting. I understand the looting. But what’s next? I’m always looking for solutions. I’ve been doing what I can: I’ve been encouraging myself and my team to donate where we can, and we’ve been using our Instagram stories and feed to really push the awareness out there to people who are not informed, especially because we take up that space. We live in that space. It’s been overwhelming. I pray for better days. I pray for progress.”

View this post on Instagram

✊🏿✊🏾✊🏽 We stand in complete solidarity with our people. Many of our team members and artists are out there with the community in various cities. Justice must be served and WE are going to be heard. Sunday School has always been dedicated to boldly telling our stories, and this is our story, so please send videos/photos related for us to share. Let’s continue saying their names, speaking out, expressing ourselves, and MAKING our voice heard for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Regis Korchinski-Paquet, Tony McDade, James Scurlock, and the heavy list of other brothers and sisters. For those that don’t quite understand, this is a time to learn, ask questions, and have conversation. This passionate expression of emotions didn’t come out of thin year, but many years of pain, hardship, and frustration. Many people are exclusively focused on debating HOW, but the only thing that matters is the WHY. Gandhi Mahal, a South Minneapolis restaurant was damaged in the fires and the owner responded with, “let my building burn, justice needs to be served.” The fight is to arrest, prosecute, and charge those officers for the murder of George Floyd. The fight is to dismantle white supremacy and police brutality. Don’t forget that. Racists are racists. They didn’t like us when we were marching, they didn’t like us when we were kneeling, they didn’t like us when we were publicly speaking. Stop accepting and protecting evil, because if not, these ideologies will continue to live on and strive in all institutions. #blacklivesmatter We’re in this fight together. Don’t forget the mission and don’t be fooled by the propaganda and infiltration. We must protect ours at all costs. “Don’t fall for the trick bag. Keep fighting the good fight” — @_stak5 . . [PHOTOS BY @MR.KOA and @BRILLANT007] If able, please make donations and send resources to organizations that are doing the work. Below are just a few: – George Floyd Memorial Fund: gofundme.com/f/GeorgeFloyd – Minnesota Freedom Fund: @mnfreedomfund – Black Visions Collective: @blackvisionscollective – Reclaim The Block: @reclaimtheblock – Unicorn Riot: @unicorn.riot – Brooklyn Community Bail Fund: @brooklynbailfund

A post shared by Sunday School (@ssunday.co) on May 31, 2020 at 4:47pm PDT

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The post My Story: Creative Director Josef Adamu on the Power of Telling Untold Narratives appeared first on FASHION Magazine.

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Guest Post: First-Quarter Securities Class Actions Respond To Outbreak

Nessim Mezrahi

In the following guest post, Nessim Mezrahi discusses his analysis of the First Quarter 2020 securities class action lawsuit exposure. Mezrahi is cofounder and CEO of SAR, a securities class action data analytics and software company. SAR’s April 10, 2020 press release discussing its 1Q20 securities class action litigation analysis can be found here. A version of the following article previously was published on Law 360. I would like to thank Nessim for allowing me to publish his article on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Nessim’s article.

  *******************************

  Transparency is paramount in the securities class action arena. Directors and officers, as well as institutional investors, rely on the rule of law and the duty of candor of their lawyers to seek and attain justice through the judiciary process.

  Amid the current pandemic-driven economic correction, U.S. publicly traded corporations — and their insurers — are in pole position to showcase the resiliency of the American economy.[1] On March 26, Thomson Reuters reported that “there are plaintiffs’ lawyers who will try to take advantage of the [COVID-19] crisis, just as there are defense lawyers and companies who will do the same.”[2]

  Opportunistic frivolity by lawyers on both sides of the aisle will lead to business and judicial inefficiencies that may hinder a sound economic recovery. As Joseph Conrad wrote in the 1902 novel “The Heart of Darkness”: “What saves us is efficiency — the devotion to efficiency.”[3]

  The primary issue presented in the strategic plan for the federal judiciary is: “Scarce resources, changes in litigation and litigant expectations, and certain changes in law challenge the federal judiciary’s effective delivery of justice.”[4]

  To address the issue, the plan’s primary strategic focal point is to “[p]ursue improvements in the delivery of justice on a nationwide basis.”[5]

  A disciplined effectuation of data science is necessary to promote transparency in support of the plan. Transparency leads to efficient data-driven decision-making by officers of the court, particularly when working towards the adjudication of claims that arise from alleged violations of federal securities laws under Section 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

  The Exchange Act ensures that the U.S. capital markets — the fuel of corporate America — maintain the gold standard for global investors.

  On Feb. 27, in Arkansas Teacher Retirement System v. State Street Corporation, U.S. District Judge Mark Wolf of Massachusetts wrote a notable and important opinion that reached the core of the class action mechanism:

  Judges trust lawyers. … Every lawyer is an officer of the court [and] has a duty of candor to the tribunal. … If judges are appropriately skeptical and do the work necessary to discharge their duties as fiduciaries for a class, its members will be protected and the integrity of the administration of justice will be promoted. This effort may sometimes be arduous. It will always be important.[6]

  The promotion of transparency, through greater dependence on data science, strengthens the integrity of the settlement process in securities class action litigation. The court’s reliance on empirical analysis is the basic tenet that provides independent support for the judicial approval of billions of dollars in settlement distributions that stem from the adjudication of claims that allege violations of the Exchange Act.

  Data science is essential for a verifiably transparent and efficient delivery of justice in securities class action settlement proceedings. As per In re: Signet Jewelers Limited Securities Litigation:

  [J]udicial approval of a class action settlement is a two-step process. First, the Court performs a preliminary review of the terms of the proposed settlement to determine whether to send notice of the proposed settlement to the class. Second, after notice has been provided and a hearing has been held, the Court determines whether to actually approve the settlement. … This standard for preliminary approval of class action settlements was established by amendments to rule 23(e) that became effective on December 1, 2018.[7]

  Since March 11, when the novel coronavirus was officially characterized as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, the U.S. securities class action litigation exposure to alleged violations of Rule 10b-5 directly related to COVID-19 has amounted to $2.7 billion.[8]

  Data and analysis indicate that investors have not sued publicly traded corporations indiscriminately on COVID-19 related issues, even as the pandemic took hold of the equity markets on March 9, when an automated circuit breaker halted trading in the New York Stock Exchange for the first time since 1997.[9]

  The securities class actions that have been filed in the first quarter of 2020 directly related to COVID-19 amount to 4.32% of $63.5 billion of the total U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure.[10]

  According to reporting by Thomson Reuters, plaintiffs lawyers that the reporter spoke to “said they have no intention of filing reflexive class actions alleging the companies slammed by the pandemic failed to provide adequate risk warnings to shareholders.”[11] This remains to be seen throughout the remainder of 2020 as the legal disclosure ramifications from the COVID-19 pandemic continue to shape the global securities class action landscape.

  Notably, the increase in frequency of Exchange Act securities class actions since 2018 has coincided with the end of the longest running bull market in U.S. history.[12][13]

  As a result, more fervent shareholder recovery efforts can be expected as the fiduciary duties of institutional investment managers are tested and global investors in the U.S. capital markets seek nontraditional equity investment returns. After all, “[t]he empirical evidence on the [Private Securities Litigation Reform Act’s] lead plaintiff provision suggests that courts should continue their preference for institutional over individual plaintiffs in securities class actions,” says St. John’s University Law School law professor Michael Perino.[14]

  According to Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., $5.84 billion in 2018 and $3.17 billion in 2019 was made available for distribution to investors that bought and sold shares in the U.S. capital markets.[15] ISS expects that figure to increase in 2020.[16]

  According to Jessica Erickson of the University of Richmond School of Law:

  To accurately distribute settlement funds in a securities class action, claims administrators need certain information about the damages suffered by individual class members. Damages in a securities class action are based on, among other things, the difference between the price that an investor paid for the corporation’s stock and the value of this stock had the corporation not lied to the market.[17]

  The class action settlement recovery process is an essential component of the greater class action mechanism. Settlement recovery provides fair and appropriate monetary recompense to investors from alleged fraud on the market by directors and officers of U.S.-listed corporations.

  Settlement recovery services have become increasingly dependent on data science to ensure equitable redress for global investors in the U.S. capital markets. According to Epiq’s Stevie Thurin: “A plan of allocation [POA] is a stated methodology by which a class action recovery is allocated among eligible claimants; literally, it is a plan for allocating the settlement fund.”[18]

  Data science is also used and relied upon to attain material limitations to aggregate damages demands made by securities class action plaintiff lawyers that do not evaluate price impact prior to filing a class action complaint.

  Effective data science serves to efficiently implement the tools the U.S. Supreme Court afforded U.S. public corporations in Hallibuton II, such as price impact. Stock price reaction on an alleged misrepresentation is referred to as direct or front-end price impact, and stock price reaction to a corrective disclosure is referred to as indirect or back-end price impact.[19]

  Claimed aggregate damages can be limited by disqualifying alleged corrective disclosures that are allegedly related with stock price declines that do not exhibit price impact. Disqualification will compromise an alleged corrective disclosure from comprising a certified class and restrict the attribution of damages to the related stock price decline.

  In other words, if the corrective disclosure’s related drop in stock price does not exhibit a statistically significant stock price return after controlling for general and industry-specific factors, the court should be reluctant to approve the related stock price decline as a source of potential damages in a certified class.

  Event studies were conducted [by SAR] on each of the 65 Exchange Act claims filed in the first quarter. These event studies were performed by first conducting multivariate regressions to measure statistical relationships between the defendant company stock price returns and market and industry indices for control periods of either one year or 100 trading days prior to either the alleged class periods or the first alleged corrective disclosures, depending on data availability.

  The results of these regressions were used to calculate t-statistics and perform t-tests on the residual one-day stock price returns corresponding to alleged corrective disclosures. According to the results of the t-tests, residual returns with p-values greater than 5% have been classified as having no back-end price impact; residual returns with p-values of less than 5% have been classified as having back-end price impact.

  After excluding all alleged stock price declines that do not exhibit back-end price impact, the market capitalization losses of the surviving stock price declines are accumulated to estimate the aggregate U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure of companies that trade on U.S. exchanges.[20]

  The application of event study analysis indicates that 72 claimed stock price declines alleged in 41 Exchange Act claims filed in the first quarter of 2020 do not exhibit back-end price impact.[21]

  According to David Tabak and Frederick Dunbar at National Economic Research Associates Inc.:

  Event studies are also used to measure the size of a stock price movement as the basis for a damage calculation. For example, in cases of securities fraud, it is common to measure changes in the alleged inflation in a stock price by the movement in that stock price in the wake of a corrective disclosure, after controlling for market, industry, and other company-specific influences. This is because inflation is removed from the stock price with the disclosure, and an event study measures the change in inflation in the stock at the time of the disclosure. Often, it is then assumed that this is the best estimate of the inflation per share if defendant had a duty to disclose the same information that was revealed in the corrective disclosure. As a result, an event study is a common method that serves as the basis for quantifying damages in security fraud cases. …

  The most important reason to consider the use of an event study is that it is likely to provide a highly objective methodology for calculating the magnitude of damages and the materiality of the event that may have caused damages.[22]

  Event study results indicate that $6.8 billion out of $70.3 billion of claimed market capitalization losses are not a verifiable source of potential classwide damages in the corresponding filed claims made in the first quarter.[23] Eleven Exchange Act claims filed in the first quarter contain at least one alleged stock price decline that does not exceed a t- statistic of -1.96 to support sufficient back-end price impact to warrant inclusion in a certified class.[24]

  For example, in the case Linenweber v. Southwest Airlines Co., none of the alleged stock price drops related with the four alleged corrective disclosures exhibit indirect price impact at the 95% confidence standard.[25]

  [A] defendant can rebut the Basic presumption with evidence that the alleged misrepresentation was not associated with “negative price stock-returns,” i.e., there was not statistically negative, “back-end” impact on stock following a corrective disclosure. Virtus Inv. Partners, 2017 WL 20162985, at *4. A corrective disclosure occurs then the truth about an earlier allegedly fraudulent statement or omission is revealed to the market. …

However, for class certification purposes, when Plaintiffs are able to show an alleged misrepresentation had statistically significant front-end price impact, Defendants are not entitled to rely on these additional back-end arguments to rebut the Basic presumption.[26]

    Stock price impact evaluation, through the application of event study analysis, also serves to attain more accurate measures of exposure — and aggregate damages — on Exchange Act claims made against non-U.S. issuers.[27] Non-U.S. issuers use American depositary receipts, or ADRs, to access capital in the U.S. public markets through the New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ or over-the-counter markets.

  On Jan. 28, in Automotive Industries Pension Trust Fund v. Toshiba Corp., U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the second amended complaint in a California federal court.[28] Based on this ruling, “[e]ven companies with unsponsored Level I ADRs trading in the U.S. can be subject to liabilities under the U.S. securities laws if the claimants are able to establish that the ADR transactions are sufficiently domestic,” according to the D&O Diary’s Kevin LaCroix.[29]

  In the first quarter, six non-U.S. issuers were sued for alleged violations of the Exchange Act, amounting to $11.7 billion in ADR U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure.[30] A total of 14 alleged corrective disclosures were claimed by investors in ADRs of non-U.S. issuers. $824 million of claimed shareholder losses in ADRs in the first quarter do not surpass thresholds of indirect price impact.[31]

  In the first quarter, global securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure amounts to $75.2 billion.[32] $63.5 billion are related to U.S. issuers of common stock in U.S. exchanges (U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure) and $11.7 billion to non-U.S. issuers (ADR U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure).[33]

_______________________

Nessim Mezrahi is co-founder and CEO of SAR LLC, a securities class action data analytics software company. 

The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the organization, or Portfolio Media Inc., or any of its or their respective affiliates. This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be taken as legal advice.

  [1] On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization stated that “COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic.” See, “WHO Director-General’s opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19 – 11 March 2020,” World Health Organization, March 11, 2020 https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at- the-media-briefing-on-covid-19——– 11-march-2020.

  [2] “’Corporations don’t get a free pass because of COVID-19’-Robbins Geller’s Randy Baron,” Alison Frankel’s On The Case, Thomson Reuters, March 26, 2020 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-otc-covid19/corporations-dont-get-a-free-pass- because-of-covid-19-robbins-gellers-randy-baron-idUSKBN21D3JC.

  [3] Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (New York, US: Oxford University Press, 1990 – Reissued as Oxford World’s Classics Paperback 1998), Pg.

  [4] US. Strategic Plan for the Federal Judiciary, September 2015, Judicial Conference of the United States, Issue 1: Providing Justice. https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics- reports/strategic-plan-federal-judiciary.

  [5] Id.

  [6] Arkansas Teacher Retirement System v. State Street Corporation et al., Case No. 1:11- cv-12049-MLW, Opinion and Order, Feb. 27, 2020

  [7] In re Signet Jewelers Limited Securities Litigation, Case No. 1:16-cv-06728-CM-SDS, Memorandum of Law in Support of Lead Plaintiff’s Unopposed Motion for Preliminary Approval of Settlement and Authorization to Disseminate Notice of Settlement, March 26, 2020.

  [8] Securities class action exposure in McDermid v. Inovio Pharmaceuticals, Inc. et al, Case No. 2:20-cv-01402, amounts to $431.8 million. Securities class action exposure exposure in Douglas v. Norwegian Cruise Lines et al, Case No. 1:20-cv-21107, amounts to $2.3 billion. A second Exchange Act claim was filed against Norwegian Cruise Lines on March 31, 2020, in Abraham Atachbarian v. Norwegian Cruise Lines et al, Case no.: 1:20-cv-21386. U.S. securities class action Rule 10b-5 exposure related to COVID-19 does not account for Defendants that have been sued multiple times for seemingly related alleged violations of the Exchange Act.

  [9] “Circuit Breaker Halts Stock Trading for First Time Since 1997,” The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2020.

  [10] “SAR Securities Class Action (SCA) Rule 10b-5 Exposure Report – 1Q 2020,” April 10, 2020, SAR. SAR.https://bit.ly/SAR_1Q_2020_Exposure_Report.

  [11] “Shareholders’ class action lawyers: We’re not rushing to bring COVID-19 cases,” Alison Frankel, Alison Frankel’s On The Case, Thomson Reuters, March 17, 2020 https://www.reuters.com/article/legal-us-otc-covid19/shareholders-class-action- lawyers-were-not-rushing-to-bring-covid-19-cases-idUSKBN21445P.

  [12] “U.S. Stocks Poised to Enter Longest-Ever Bull Market,” The Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2019. https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-stocks-poised-to-enter-longest-ever- bull-market-1534843800.

  [13] “Dow Jones Industrial Average’s 11-Year Bull Run Ends,” The Wall Street Journal, March 11, 2020. https://wsj.com/articles/global-markets-calmer-after-two-hectic- days-11583899913.

  [14] Michael Perino, “Have Institutional Fiduciaries Improved Securities Class actions? A Review of the Empirical Literature on the PSLRA’s Lead Plaintiff Provision,” St. John’s School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper Series #12-0021, November 2012 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2175217.

  [15] “The Top 100 U.S. Class Action Settlement of All-Time,” Institutional Shareholder Services, as of Dec. 31, 2018. https://www.issgovernance.com/library/the-top-100-u-s- settlements-of-all-time-as-of-december-2018/.

  [16] “The Top 100 U.S. Class Action Settlement of All-Time,” Institutional Shareholder Services, as of December 31, 2019. https://www.issgovernance.com/library/the-top-100- us-class-action-settlements-of-all-time-as-of-december-2019/.

  [17] Jessica Erickson, “Automating Securities Class Action Settlements,” Vanderbilt Law Review, Vol. 72:6:1817. Introduction to the article available here: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/01/03/automating-securities-class-action- settlements/.

  [18] “A Guide to Settlement Plans of Allocation in Securities Class Actions,” November 15, 2018, Stevie Thurin, American Bar Association: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/securities/articles/ 2018/fall2018-a-guide-to-settlement-plans-of-allocation-securities-class-actions/.

  [19] Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund, Inc., 134 S. Ct. 2398 (2014).

  [20] SAR Securities Class Action (SCA) Rule 10b-5 Exposure Report – 1Q 2020,” April 10, 2020, SAR. SAR.https://bit.ly/SAR_1Q_2020_Exposure_Report.

  [21] Id.

  [22] David Tabak and Fredrick Dunbar, “Materiality and Magnitude: Event Studies in the Courtroom (April 1999).” NERA Working Paper 34 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=166408.

  [23] “SAR Securities Class Action (SCA) Rule 10b-5 Exposure Report – 1Q 2020,” April 10, 2020, SAR.https://bit.ly/SAR_1Q_2020_Exposure_Report.

  [24] Id.

  [25] In Linenweber v. Southwest Airlines Co. et al., plaintiff alleges four corrective disclosures affecting participants in the market on April 17, 2018, April 19, 2018, June 22, 2018, and June 26, 2019. The t-statistic of Southwest’s stock price residual return on each of these dates using a 95% confidence standard does not surpass -1.96 based on a company-specific event study analysis.

  [26] In re Chicago Bridge & Iron Company N.V. Securities Litigation, Case No. 1:17-cv- 01580, Opinion and Order, March 23,

  [27] “Non-U.S. Issuers Targeted in Securities Class Action Lawsuits Filed in the United States,” David H. Kistenbroker, Joni S. Jacobsen and Angela M. Liu, Harvard Law School on Corporate Governance, March 29, 2020. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/03/29/non- u-s-issuers-targeted-in-securities-class-action-lawsuits-filed-in-the-united-states/.

  [28] Automotive Industries Pension Trust Fund, et al. v. Toshiba Corporation, Case 2:15-cv-04194.

  [29] “U.S. Securities Suit of Toshiba’s Unsponsored ADR Investors to Proceed — Including Even Their Japanese Law Claims,” The D&O Diary, Kevin LaCroix, Feb. 3, 2020 https://www.dandodiary.com/2020/02/articles/securities-litigation/u-s-securities- suit-of-toshibas-unsponsored-adr-investors-to-proceed-including-even-their-japanese-law- claims/.

  [30] “SAR Securities Class Action (SCA) Rule 10b-5 Exposure Report – 1Q 2020,” April 10, 2020, SAR. SAR.https://bit.ly/SAR_1Q_2020_Exposure_Report.

  [31] Id.

  [32] Id.

  [33] Id.

Guest Post: First-Quarter Securities Class Actions Respond To Outbreak published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

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This Research-Backed Toolkit Helps Youth Organizations Integrate Digital Learning

The Beam Center in Brooklyn is an out-of-school maker program that teaches teenagers technical skills like welding, woodworking and microcontroller interface design; they collaborate on a range of cool projects from mushroom fruiting environments to giant, hand-cranked flipbooks. But perhaps the most important skills kids learn at Beam are empathy, communication and self-expression. “When we have 23 kids from seven different ethnic backgrounds who speak seven-plus different languages, we experience some tension in our space,” says Beam Director of Teen Programs Calvin Stalvig. “We have the opportunity to establish a community where youth feel safe to be around one another, to talk about things that are challenging them, to talk about being from another country or struggling to learn English or being gay or trans.”

We wanted to understand more about preparing youth for the changing workforce, and for civic participation.

Susan Crown

Beam’s emphasis on youth development in conjunction with technical learning is one reason it was chosen to partner in the collaboration behind the recently published Reclaiming Digital Futures toolkit. The free web-based guide is designed to help educators at out-of-school youth organizations leverage five strategic areas to integrate technology and digital learning into their programming and practices. One resource in the toolkit, for example, explains how to incorporate digital tools that align with an organization's specific goals.

The project’s partners—which include the Susan Crown Exchange, researchers at University of California Irvine and New York University, and eight exemplar youth-serving organizations, including Beam Center—gathered for three “digital learning convenings” as well as several group digital meetings and multiple individual onsite visits over an 18-month period. Their goal was to share best practices and “explore important questions about what it means to be a 21st-century citizen,” says Susan Crown, founder of the Chicago-based social investment organization that funded the project. “We wanted to understand more about preparing youth for the changing workforce, and for civic participation.”

An overview of the Reclaiming Digital Futures project. Full size video on YouTube.

They help them find their passion and help them deal with daily challenges and trauma.

June Ahn

The eight exemplar programs each focus on different subjects, from arts to engineering to journalism, but they have a few things in common: They all integrate digital learning and 21st-century skills into their practices, and they are all deeply rooted in their own communities, many of which are marginalized neighborhoods. “A lot of times when we think about technology or digital learning, we tend to start with the technology, the hard skills,” says June Ahn, an associate professor of education at UCI and the project’s research lead. “With our partners, it's not an either/or question,” he explains. “They all have nicely developed youth development practices that coincide with their technical programs. They focus on building trust with young people. They help them find their passion and help them deal with daily challenges and trauma. Those kinds of things are just as important as infusing digital learning into projects that are really relevant for them.”

Every year the Beam Center tackles a massive maker project based on designs from an international call for entries. This year’s project is a set of giant hand-cranked flip books that will be displayed in Brooklyn’s DUMBO neighborhood. Expert metalworkers on the Beam staff break down the large project into small projects that individuals or groups of students can create together while learning about animation, woodworking, metalworking, kinetics, solar power and storytelling. There are also smaller projects going on at any given time that teach similar skills. This spring Beam students are learning about mycology while creating fruiting environments for mushrooms. Stalvig says he could swap out mushrooms for hip hop music and the kids would be learning a lot of the same things: how to use digital as well as old-school tools, how to collaborate, how to plan a project and see it to completion. “Only the conversation will be different,” says Stalvig. “And the conversations always relate to—how does this connect to your life? How does this connect to your community? How does this connect to social justice?”

Source for all photos: Reclaiming Digital Futures

. . . they quickly care for one another in ways that they're not able to care for one another in their schools because of the divisions of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc.

Calvin Stalvig

To help bridge potential divides among his students, Stalvig created a slideshow he called “Five Minutes of Me”—and shared it with his students. With the help of 27 pictures, from old family photos of his hometown in Wisconsin to pictures of him and his husband on their honeymoon in Iceland, he told his students who he was. Every week thereafter, different students would make five-minute presentations about their lives. “When I—a black, gay man from northern Wisconsin from a white family—do that first, I model that I'm not ashamed of any single part of my identity,” says Stalvig. "Five Minutes of Me” doesn’t just help students with public speaking and other career-readiness skills, “it helps them celebrate who they are and helps them find an audience that will listen to them. Afterwards, they ask each other questions like, ‘What is your favorite anime manga comic book?’ Then it changes the whole tone of our space, and they quickly care for one another in ways that they're not able to care for one another in their schools because of the divisions of class, race, gender, sexuality, etc.”

A commitment to human dignity and expressing oneself are also central to the mission at Free Spirit Media (FSM), a journalism-focused exemplar organization where kids from mostly low-income and minority backgrounds in Chicago produce a thousand pieces of media content a year. At FSM, kids don’t just learn how to identify good local stories and how to operate cameras, microphones, and editing programs. “They make media content that is intended to contribute to the civic discourse by reaching an audience and starting meaningful conversations,” says founder Jeff McCarter.

Along with technical skills, kids learn things that foster, as McCarter puts it, 'interpersonal fluency'—such as media literacy and personal accountability.

Along with technical skills, kids learn things that foster, as McCarter puts it, “interpersonal fluency”—such as media literacy and personal accountability. At the beginning of each new program cycle, students brainstorm a code of conduct and write it on a poster that everyone signs. “If somebody were to show up late and something is on there about tardiness, a peer is likely to say, ‘Hey, you signed on to this. You need to do better,’” says McCarter.

As they gain experience and move through the five program levels of FSM, students get opportunities to earn money with their skills while telling stories that are relevant to them. The short film "A Tale of Two Cities" was created by advanced FSM youth as a commissioned companion piece to "Romeo is Bleeding," a poetic documentary about Richmond, CA. In Tale, young people from Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood, a mostly black, mostly low-income community, talk about how their neighborhood is perceived from the outside—thanks to a steady stream of media reports of violence and police activity—and how they know the neighborhood from their own personal experiences. The FSM students hashed out ideas, set up a series of shoots, worked on their script and voiceovers and captured archival footage from both outside media and Free Spirit’s archive. They then produced a beautiful and moving four-minute piece that was shown as the opener to a Chicago screening of Romeo.

More Project Info

Find the toolkit here: DigitalLearningPractices.org

Video: Learning, Interest, and Voice

Video: Learning How to Distribute and Share Media

That commitment to mining the assets of the local community—whether it’s story material or expert advice—is “a really important flavor to this project,” says Ahn. “We're not just talking to partners in highly-resourced areas; we’re talking with partners who work in low-income communities and build from assets in those communities.” Determining how to spread the rich practices highlighted in the Reclaiming Digital Futures project to the communities that could most benefit from them will be an ongoing process, he adds. “That equity agenda is important, and it’s something that we’ll have to continue to work on.”

Adds Crown, “One thing we know for sure; kids with a sense of purpose, a sense of competence, and a sense of community fare much better in life than kids who lack these three things. Technology offers remarkable new ways to cultivate these qualities in kids.”

This Research-Backed Toolkit Helps Youth Organizations Integrate Digital Learning published first on https://medium.com/@GetNewDLBusiness

[nchyinotes]

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

the spambot left me feeling powerless and sullied. my identity had been redefined all wrong by strangers and i had no recourse. (3)

“a researcher in technology and cyber culture and director of the virtual futures conference”, “creative technologist” (4)

“you’re proposing yourself as the real mccoy, as it were, and you want to maintain that integrity and authenticity.” (5) “we’re not quite persuaded by that. we think there’s already a layer of artifice and it’s your online personality - the brand jon ronson - you’re trying to protect.” … “that’s why i say you’re using it as brand management.” … “and that’s what’s annoying me so much,” i explained. “it’s a misrepresentation of me." (6)

“it’s about the terror isn’t it?” “the terror of what?” “the terror of being found out,” he looked as if he felt he were taking a risk even mentioning to me the existence of the terror. he meant that we all have ticking away within us something we fear will badly harm our reputation if it got out - some “i’m glad i’m not that” at the end of an “i’m glad i’m not me.” i think he was right. maybe our secret is actually nothing horrendous. maybe nobody would even consider it a big deal if it was exposed. but we can’t take that risk. so we keep it bored. maybe it’s a work impropriety. or maybe it’s just a feeling that at any moment we’ll blurt something out during some important meeting that’ll prove to everyone that we aren’t proper professional people, or in fact, functional human beings. i think that even in these days of significant oversharing we kept this particular terror concealed, like people used to with things like masturbating before everyone suddenly got blasé about it online. with masturbation, nobody cares. whereas our reputation - it’s everything. (31)

delaware laws: if jonah had been found guilty of ‘lying or publishing fake news” in the 1800s, he could have been publicly whipped! (53)

i suppose that when shamings are delivered like remotely administered drone strikes nobody needs to think about how ferocious our collective power might be. the snowflake never needs to feel responsible for the avalanche. (56)

“i always felt like a fad. i felt like i was going to be hot for a second and then i would disappear. so i had to act while i could. and there was just some deep seated … some very dangerous and reckless ambition. you combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.” (60)

I suddenly remembered how weirdly tarnished i felt when the spambot men created their fake jon ronson, getting my character traits all wrong, turning me into some horrific, garrulous foodie, and strangers believed it was me, and there was nothing i could do. that’s what was happening to justine, although instead of a foodie she was a racist and instead of fifty people it was 1.22 million (75)

So there it was: at aryan nations, you didn’t need to be an actual Jew to be jew ish. and the same was true on twitter with the privileged racist justine sacco, who was neither especially privileged nor a racist. but it didn’t matter. it was enough that it sort of seemed like she was. (77)

her destruction was justified, sam biddle was saying, because justine was a racist, and because attacking her was punching up. they were cutting down a member of the media elite, continuing the civil rights tradition that started with rosa parks, the hitherto silenced underdogs shaming into submission the powerful racist. but i didn’t think any of those things were true. if punching justine sacco was ever punching up - and it didn’t seem so to me given that she was an unknown PR woman with 170 twitter followers - the punching only intensified as she plummeted to the ground. (78)

a life had been ruined. what was it for: just some social media drama? … with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. (78)

he was just like everyone who participates in mass online destruction. who would want to know? whatever that pleasurable rush that overwhelms us is - group madness or something else - nobody wants to ruin it by facing the fact that it comes with a cost. (79)

in psychology it’s known as cognitive dissonance. it’s the idea that it feels stressful and painful for us to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time (like the idea that we’re kind people and the idea that we’ve just destroyed someone). and so to ease the pain we create illusory ways to justify our contradictory behaviour. (81)

"but aren’t you turning the criminal justice system into entertainment?” i asked (85)

judge ted poe’s critics - like the ACLU - argued to him the dangers of those ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. they said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in mao’s china an whittler’s germany and the KKK’s america - it destroys souls, brutalising everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanising them as much as the person being shamed. (83)

but mike hubaecek thought his shaming was the best thing that had ever happened to him. this was especially true, he told me, because the onlookers had been so nice. he’d feared abuse and ridicule. but no. … their kindness meant everything, he said. it made it all right. it set him on his path to salvation. (87)

“social media shamings are worse than your shamings,” i said suddenly to ted poe. he looked taken aback. “they are worse,” he replied. “they’re anonymous.” “or even if they’re not anonymous, it’s such a pile on they may as well be,” i said. “they’re brutal,” he said. i suddenly became aware that throughout our conversation i’d been using the word they. and each time that i did, i felt like i was being spineless. the fact was, they weren’t brutal. we were brutal. (88)

for the first time in history we sort of had direct access to ivory-tower oligarchs like (donald trump and rupert murdoch). we became keenly watchful for transgressions. after a while, it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. it was misspeaking. fury at the terribleness of other people had started to consume us a lot. and the rage that swirled around seemed increasingly in disproportion to whatever stupid thing some celebrity had said. (88)

“the justice system in the west has a lot of problems,” poe said, “But at least there are rules. you have basic rights as the accused. you have your day in court. you don’t have any rights when you’re accused on the internet. and the consequences are worse. it’s worldwide forever.” it felt good to see the balance of power shift so that someone like ted poe was afraid of people like us. but he wouldn’t sentence people to hold a placard for something they hadn’t been convicted of. he wouldn’t sentence someone for telling a joke that came out badly. the people we were destroying were no longer just people like jonah: public figures who had committed actual transgressions. they were private individuals who really hand’t done anything much wrong. ordinary humans were being forced to learn damage control, like corporations that had committed PR disasters. it was very stressful. “we are more frightening than you,” i said to poe, feeling quite awed. poe sat back in his chair, satisfied. “you are much more frighting,” he said. (90)

her motives were kinder than that. she was also someone whose shaming frenzy was motivated by the desire to do good. (123)

"dragging down justine sacco felt like dragging down every rich white person who’s ever gotten away with making a racist joke because they could. she thought her black AIDS joke was funny because she doesn’t know what it’s like to be a disadvantaged black person or to be diagnosed with AIDS. … Some sorts of crimes can only be handled by public consensus and shaming. it’s a different kind of court. a different kind of jury.” (128)

eventually, general motors was forced to admit the plot and apologise to nader in a congressional hearing. the incident proved to him, and later to max, that the car industry was not above trying to shame its opponents into silence in its battle against safety do gooders, and that people in high places were prepared to ingeniously deploy shaming as a means of moneymaking and social control. maybe we only notice it happening when its done too audaciously or poorly, as it had been with ralph nader. (143)

if our shame worthiness lies in the space between who we are and how we present ourselves to the world, max was narrowing that gap to nothing. whereas jonah’s gap was as wide as the grand canyon. (144)

brad blanton: many of us “live our lives constantly in fear ob being exposed or being judged as immoral or not good enough.” to eradicate those feelings = radical honesty (158)

shame can factor large in the life of a journalist - the personal avoidance of it and the professional bestowing of it onto others. (168)

almost none of the murderous fantasies were dreams dup in response to actual danger - stalker ex boyfriends, etc. they were all about the horror of humiliation. … shame internalised can lead to agony. (170)

max mosley: as soon as the victim steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, the whole thing crumbles. —> jon realises this is wrong (176)

but the shifting sands of shame worthiness had shifted away from sex scandals - if you’re a man - to work improprieties and perceived white privilege, and i suddenly understood the real reason mark had survived his shaming. nobody cared. max survived his shaming because he was a man in a consensual sex shaming - which meant there had been no shaming. … of all the public scandals, being a man in a consensual sex scandal is probably the one to hope for. max was a target of no one - not liberals like me, not the online misogynists who tear apart women who step out of line. (186)

i think we all care deeply about things that seem totally inconsequential to other people. we all carry around with us the flotsam and jetsam of perceived humiliations that actually mean nothing. we are a mass of vulnerabilities, and who knows what will trigger them? (189)

how could almost identical shamings annihilate one man and leave another without a scratch? (193)

“the way we construct consciousness is to tell the story of ourselves to ourselves, the story of who we believe we are. i feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write  a different narrative for the person. one story tries to overwrite the other. and so to survive you have to own your own story. or you write a third story. you react to the narrative that’s been forced upon you. you have to find a way to disrespect the other narrative. if you believe it, it will crush you.” - mike daisey (200)

then she left new york. “in new york your career is your identity. i had that taken away from me” (justine) (201)

i think she still felt ashamed, but maybe not quite so much. instead, she said, she felt humiliated. (after 5 months) (203)

clive’s point was that the criminal justice system is supposed to repair harm, but most prisoners - young, black - have been incarcerated for acts far less emotionally damaging than the injuries we noncriminals perpetrate upon one another all the time - bad husbands, bad wives, ruthless bosses, bullies, bankers. (228)

james gilligan: the world’s best informed chronicler of what a shaming can do to our inner lives, which is why he’s so opposed to its renaissance on social media (245)

“universal among the violent criminals was the fact that they were keeping a secret, a central secret. and that secret was that they felt ashamed - deeply ashamed, chronically ashamed, acutely ashamed." it was shame, every time. "i have yet to see a serious act of violence that was not provoked by the experience of feeling shamed or humiliated, disrespected and ridiculed. as children, these men were shot, axed, scalded, beat, strangled, tortured, drugged, starved, suffocated, set on fire, thrown out of the window, raped, or prostituted by mothers who were their pimps. for others, words alone shamed and rejected, insulted and humiliated, dishonoured and disgraced, tore down their self esteem, and murdered their soul.” for each of them the shaming “occurred on a scale so extreme, so bizarre, and so frequent that one cannot fail to see that the men who occupy the extreme end of the continuum of violent behaviour in adulthood occupied an equally extreme end of the continuum of violent child abuse earlier in life.” so they grew up and -“all violence being a person’s attempt to replace shame with self esteem” - they murdered people. … and when they were jailed, things only got worse - they were further humiliated because officers thought this was how to get them to obey, when it did the exact opposite and stimulated violence instead. (249)

jonah had a house in hollywood hills and a wife who loved him. he had enough self esteem to get him through. but i think that in front of the giant twitter screen he felt for an instant that same deadness that gillian’s prisoners had described. (250)

therapeutic communities in prisons

the word forever had been coming up a lot during my two years among the publicly shamed. jonah and justine and people like them were being told, “no. there is no door. there is no way back in. we don’t offer any forgiveness.” but we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. so why do we pretend that we don’t? (255)

This has been a book about people who really didn’t do very much wrong. justine and lindsey, certainly, were destroyed for nothing more than telling bad jokes. and while we were busy steadfastly refusing them forgiveness, jim was quietly arranging the salvation of someone who had committed a far more serious offence. it struck me that if reshaping would work for a maelstrom like raquel, if it would restore someone like her to health, then we need to think twice about raining down vengeance and anger as our default position. (260)

the sad thing was that lindsey had incurred the internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. and now here she was, working with farukh to reduce herself to safe banalities - to cats and ice cream and top 40 chart music. we were creating a world where the smartest way to survive is to be bland. (266) [not sure if this is true, though i do think there may be a chilling effect/more calculated curating is encouraged]

“it’s the algorithm shifting things around and wondering what, from a mathematical standpoint, is the story that needs ob e told about this person.” (268)

“but there is a chilling of behaviour that goes along with virtual lynching. there is a life modification. … they have signs of PTSD. it’s like the stasi. we’re creating a culture where people feel constantly surveilled, where people are afraid to be themselves.” (268)

our own social media surveillance network (269)

of course, no prurient or censorious bureaucrat had intercepted justine sack’s private thoughts. justine had tweeted them herself, labouring under the misapprehension - the same one i laboured under for a while - that twitter was a safe place to tell the truth about yourself to strangers. that truth telling had really proven to be an idealistic experiment gone wrong. (270)

social media gives a voice to voiceless people - its egalitarianism is its greatest quality. (271)

“but its scary. after all that’s happened, what’s funny to me… i don’t want to go anywhere near the line, let alone cross it. so i’m constantly saying, ‘i don’t know farukh, what do you think?’” (272)

michael fertik: “the biggest lie is the internet is about you. we like to think of ourselves as people who have choice and taste and personalised content. but the internet isn’t about us. it’s about the companies that dominate the data flows of the internet.” (276) … google make many when anything happens online, even the bad stuff.

scott kelley, your speed signs, feedback loops, thomas goetz ‘harnessing the power of feedback loops’

adam curtis: echo chambers, “they got trapped in the system of feedback reinforcement. … feedback is an engineering principle, and all engineering is devoted to trying to keep the thing you are building stable.” (281)

“i suddenly feel with social media like i’m tiptoeing around an unpredictable, angry, unbalanced parent who might strike out at any moment … it’s horrible.” … we see ourselves as nonconformist, but i think all of this is creating a more conformist, conservative age. (282)

how twitter mutated from a place of unselfish conscious honesty into something more anxiety inducing

people he spoke to: luke robert mason, michael moynihan/jonah lehrer, justine sacco (twitter aids girl), judge ted poe, gustave lebon (research referenced), dave eshelman/zimbardo, adria richards, max mosley, mercedes haefer, princess donna dolore, brad blanton, andrew ferreira/alexis wright, mike daisley, lindsey stone, michael fertik, clive stafford smith, jim mcgreevey, james gilligan, scott kelley

[aabany-group]

ACLU-NJ’s New Executive Director is Amol Sinha, Jersey-Raised Civil Rights Advocate

Sinha, an attorney who directed state campaigns at the Innocence Project and led NYCLU’s Suffolk County Chapter, will head NJ’s ACLU affiliate

For Immediate Release Wednesday, August 23, 2017 Contact: Allison Peltzman, Communications Director, 973-854-1711 (office), 201-253-9403 (cell) Keerthi Potluri, Communications Strategist, 973-854-1702 The ACLU-NJ today announced that Amol Sinha has been named as executive director. The Jersey City resident, who most recently led state advocacy campaigns to address wrongful convictions nationwide at the Innocence Project, will start on September 1. He knows exactly what he’ll do in his first 100 days: a lot of listening. “In the first few months, my plan is to travel across the state, listen to the needs of people here, meet with as many organizations, community groups, and people as possible, and make the ACLU completely accessible,” Sinha said. “I want people across the state to know that we’re here as a partner, to collaborate together to make New Jersey better and more welcoming than it already is.” For Sinha, who grew up in Lawrenceville, taking the helm is a homecoming, not just to his home state, but to an organization that has always anchored him. Sinha’s first role as a newly minted lawyer – after interning for the national ACLU while a student at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law – was as director of the Suffolk County Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union. He said the job posting had an unforgettably fluid yet empowering description: “Be the face of the NYCLU.” Approaching the responsibility with great pride, he transformed the Suffolk County Chapter into an advocacy powerhouse, making inroads with unexpected allies like the Suffolk County Police Department and Sheriff’s Office. The chapter, working with partners, convinced Suffolk County to stop honoring Obama-era immigration detainers – although that policy has been rolled back, a reminder that no battle for liberty stays won, no matter the administration. Under Sinha’s leadership, the chapter successfully defeated unconstitutional policing and surveillance schemes and investigated public schools that prohibited immigrant students from enrolling. The ACLU-NJ has done similar investigations of public schools and taken legal action as a result. “The Board of Trustees is thrilled to welcome Amol Sinha to the ACLU-NJ family as our new Executive Director,” said ACLU-NJ Board President Deb Guston. “We expect Amol will bring both his passion for civil liberties, civil rights, and social justice, and his knowledge as a longtime New Jersey resident, to continue to move the ACLU-NJ forward.” Sinha takes the helm at a time of significant growth for the ACLU-NJ, which recently added an immigrants’ rights attorney, staff attorney, and several legal fellows. The ACLU-NJ plans to fill the role of public policy director soon after Sinha starts as executive director, and the organization is currently accepting applications. (Read the policy director job posting, as well as other open positions, at www.aclu-nj.org/careers.) This growth coincides with new challenges in today’s social and political climate that call for greater vigilance. “One quality of the ACLU I most admire is its inexhaustible capacity to remain principled, yet evolve to confront the ever-changing threats to our liberties, as we have seen this year,” Sinha said. “Crucially, the struggles for racial justice and the principles of free speech – both so fundamental to New Jersey communities – can be reconciled, and in this climate, they must. It may be complicated, but the ACLU does not shy away from complexity. We're in it for the long haul.” The ACLU-NJ role merges what Sinha described as his two passions: advocating for constitutional rights and New Jersey. Sinha’s childhood in the Garden State was integral to his passion for civil rights. The son of Indian immigrants who came to America in the early 1970s, Sinha vividly recalls a persistent feeling that he couldn’t quite articulate. He has always been proud of his roots, but as with many first-generation Americans, struggled to find the right balance of identities. While finding comfort in New Jersey’s growing diversity, he witnessed interactions growing up that indicated some people viewed him and his family differently because of their immigrant South Asian roots. Such incidents often rolled off his parents’ backs. But for him, it was an introduction to larger injustices faced by many groups. “The issues South Asian communities face are emblematic of civil rights issues – immigrants’ rights, racial justice, religious freedom, economic injustice, language access, gender-based discrimination, LGBT issues, and biased policing all impact South Asian communities in significant ways,” Sinha said. “New Jersey has the largest proportion of South Asian residents of any state, so it’s meaningful for a member of that community to lead our state’s ACLU,” Sinha added. “But, I truly believe in unity and breaking barriers across communities. I want every community and every person in New Jersey to know they can call on the ACLU as a resource.” Sinha is the first person of color to lead the ACLU-NJ and one of the first South Asian executive directors of an ACLU affiliate. Maya Harris, who led the ACLU of Northern California from 2006 to 2009, was the first person of South Asian descent to lead a state ACLU affiliate. “Working for the ACLU never actually feels like work,” Sinha said. “It is truly a privilege to defend the rights of the people, and it aligns perfectly with my own principles and moral compass. I’m excited to come back home and have people across the state fall in love with the ACLU, just like I did.”

AABANY congratulates Amol Sinha, SABANY President-Elect, on this new position. We look forward to hearing great things from him as executive director of ACLU-NJ and we are pleased to be working with him as a leader of SABANY, one of our sister bar associations.

[ramblings-of-a-young-misfit]

The wide and narrow path.

Before I start blogging away, let me introduce myself. Hi, I'm Jonathan. I am a 20-something Christ-follower from Portland, Oregon. I was born into a Christian family and was raised in the church and lived a pretty sheltered life for a majority of my childhood with my younger brother. We were both homeschooled by our stay-at-home mom up until 2005, after that, I went to a private school and my brother went to a public school. It wasn't until a year later that I joined my brother in being a part of the public school system. I believe these years of my life, my faith in God, my parents' guidance, my quiet personality (INFJ, for those curious), and all the hard lessons I had learned later in life played a huge part in shaping who I am today. Looking back, I had a lot of respect for my parents. Granted, I wasn't always Mr. Goody-two-shoes. I definitely had my fair share of days when I was angry, lazy, lustful, prideful, selfish, and dishonest. But I wanted to make it my goal in life to be someone my parents would be proud of. And I don't mean in the "they're-my-child-so-I'm-automatically-proud-of-them" kind of proud. No, I'm talking about the "they're-seeking-to-live-out-a-life-of-honor-and-integrity-and-that-makes-me-proud" kind of proud. Here's the thing, though. I couldn't do what I thought would make my parents proud until I stopped seeking their approval and instead started seeking God's approval. I love my parents, but they were not perfect, they had their issues like any other person did. If I followed completely in their footsteps, I would not be following God. If I followed completely in my family's footsteps, I would not be following God. If I followed completely in my Christian friends' and peers' footsteps, I would not be following God. Even if I followed completely in my pastors' footsteps, I would not be following God. Am I saying they're all not following God? No. What I'm saying is we weren't made to follow other Christians, we were made to follow Christ. As much as they may love Jesus, your parents can't save you, your family can't save you, your friends can't save you, not even your pastor can save you. Only Jesus can save you. He is the standard. Nobody's perfect but Him, not even me, as much I'd like to be. If I told you I could save you, I'd be lying. Don't follow me. Regardless, I can still point you to the one who can save you. So, what does it look like to follow Jesus? Well, how did Jesus live? He lived a life full of Grace and Truth; a healthy balance of Justice and Mercy. He was completely blameless, yet He did not have a superiority complex. He introduced Grace to the humble and introduced Truth to the proud. He spoke of God's Justice and lived out God's Mercy. He did not conform to the world, but He did not condemn it either. How do we as Christ-followers today compare? It both saddens and angers me to see people who call themselves followers of Jesus live a holy life at church on Sunday, but the rest of the week act like the rest of the world and act as though that because they're forgiven by God, they can just keep on sinning like it's no big deal. Yes, you are forgiven and made clean. And yes, you have the free will to live your life as you please. But if you say you believe in God but act like those who don't believe in God, can you really call yourself a Christ-follower? Your actions speak much louder than your words. Granted, none of us will live completely perfect lives, that's not the point. The point is DO WE SEEK TO PLEASE GOD OR DO WE SEEK TO PLEASE OURSELVES? If you are seeking to serve yourself, you are not serving God. And on the flip side, if you are seeking to serve God, you are not serving yourself. You can't do both. The cost of being a disciple is dying to yourself daily and surrendering your all to Jesus, that He may welcome you in and make you clean. So what does the Bible have to say about what Christianity looks like and what it doesn't look like? Well, in Matthew 16v24-27 Jesus has this to say: Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him DENY HIMSELF and TAKE UP HIS CROSS and FOLLOW ME. For whoever would SAVE HIS LIFE WILL LOSE IT, but whoever LOSES HIS LIFE FOR MY SAKE WILL FIND IT. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay each person according to what he has done.” And in Matthew 7v21-23 Jesus gives an even more unsettling message to anyone claiming to be His didciples: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, BUT ONLY THE ONE WHO DOES THE WILL OF MY FATHER WHO IS IN HEAVEN. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!’” And in 1 Corinthians 6v9-11, the apostle Paul gave a list of what types of people aren't following Christ: Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the SEXUALLY IMMORAL nor IDOLATERS nor ADULTERERS nor MEN WHO HAVE SEX WITH MEN nor THIEVES nor the GREEDY nor DRUNKARDS nor SLANDERERS nor SWINDLERS will inherit the kingdom of God. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. And in James 1v19-27, the author James takes a slightly different approach to this subject: My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be QUICK TO LISTEN, SLOW TO SPEAK and SLOW TO BECOME ANGRY, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires. Therefore, GET RID OF ALL MORAL FILTH AND THE EVIL THAT IS SO PREVALENT and HUMBLY ACCEPT THE WORD PLANTED IN YOU, which can save you. DO NOT MERELY LISTEN TO THE WORD, and so deceive yourselves. DO WHAT IT SAYS. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do. Those who consider themselves religious and yet do not keep a tight rein on their tongues deceive themselves, and their religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: TO LOOK AFTER ORPHANS AND WIDOWS IN THEIR DISTRESS and TO KEEP ONESELF FROM BEING POLLUTED BY THE WORLD. If you haven't picked up on it yet, the act of following Christ is not about giving God your best to earn His favor, it's about giving God your worst so that you may receive His favor. God's free gift of Grace is not meant to simply free you from the PUNISHMENT of sin, but save you from the PENALTY of sin, as well. I've seen many Christians who believe that going to church on Sunday, reading their Bible all the time, talking about Jesus to their peers (in person or on social media), singing songs to Jesus during worship, and following all the Christian trends is what God wants out of them. It's not. Sure, many of these things are good, but you can do all of these things and still not be a Christ-follower. You can do all these things and still be living in sin. You can be doing all these things and still be hating on and pushing away the very people Jesus is trying to love on and invite in. Worship leaders, your worshipping of God is not found in the singing of songs, but in the surrender of self. Pastors, your pastoring the church is not found in your teaching on Sunday, but in your lifestyle every other day of the week. What is holding you back from going all in with Christ? Is it premarital sex? Extramarital sex? Your sexuality/sexual identity? Drug abuse? Alcoholism? Porn addiction? Toxic media? Unhealthy friendships? Greed? Theft? Rage? Mysticism? False beliefs? Poor theology? Other religions? Doubt? Fear? Anger towards religiosity and hypocrisy? Past sins? Let me tell you, JESUS IS FAR GREATER THAN THE SINS OF YOUR PAST AND THE PROBLEMS IN THE CHURCH OF THE PRESENT! You have the opportunity to take that initial step towards positive growth; that step towards an abundant life, both in this temporal life on earth and the eternal life in Heaven, but it'll cost you everything. To be with Him, you must follow Him and He will not occupy the same space as sin. Heaven is essentially the presence of God, sin is the absence of God. God and sin can't coincide. To let God in means to kick sin out. Choose God over sin, friends. He is definitely worth it!

[kyukurator-blog]

WHEN THE MORAL COMPASS IS SPINNING

Storytelling is one of the most powerful ways for society to recalibrate its moral compass.

Throughout his long career, Sidney Lumet was obsessed with stories of moral courage – the lone individual who has the guts to risk everything and stand up against the crowd for what he/she believes is right.

His own courage and commitment as a filmmaker resulted in 46 Academy Award nominations and 6 Academy Awards, including 4 for Network.

Call us crazy, but here at The Thread, we are actually chumps enough to believe in this stuff. To us, it felt like no coincidence that American Masters chose this moment to premiere By Sidney Lumet.  

It was a great profile, and inspired us to put together this list of Lumet favorites.

 BY SIDNEY LUMET (2017)

In By Sidney Lumet, Lumet tells his own story in a never-before-seen interview shot in 2008 by late filmmaker Daniel Anker and producer Thane Rosenbaum—directed by Nancy Buirski.

With honesty and humor, Lumet reveals what matters to him as an artist and as a human being. He talks about his early years growing up in NYC tenement housing where he quotes Brecht: “First feed the face, then tell me right from wrong.”

As a young soldier in Calcutta he witnessed the brutal rape of a young girl by a group of G.I.’s but was powerless to stop it—this criminal act and his inability to stop it shadowed him through his life and his work on the fight for justice.

Lumet often used New York City’s urban spirit to infuse his films with a realism and intensity that kept audiences in suspense while pushing them to consider their own morality.  His consistent dedication to truth and what drives human behavior makes him a unique and philosophical director who is sorely missed.

   12 ANGRY MEN (1957)

In 1956, Reginald Rose and Henry Fonda commissioned Lumet to turn Rose’s Studio One teleplay of 12 Angry Men into a Hollywood movie. Before this, Lumet had only directed TV dramas, but it was this first feature that defined Lumet as one of the industry’s most socially conscious directors. Themes of justice, personal integrity, and radicalism would later appear in the scripts he chose, as well as the people he chose to work with.

In the film Fonda plays Juror 8, who casts the lone ‘not guilty’ vote as he and his fellow jurors deliberate the fate of a young Puerto Rican boy facing the death penalty for his father’s murder. A symbolic counterargument to the witch hunts of McCarthyism, it is also a quest for social justice, this time by way of that iconic American institution – the jury.

Critic Roger Ebert called it “a masterpiece of stylized realism.” Even skeptical New Yorker critic Pauline Kael said that it was, “so sure-fire it has the crackle of a hit.”

Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor has credited it with inspiring her career in law. “It sold me that I was on the right path, “she said. “This movie continued to ring the chords within me.”

          SERPICO (1973)

Serpico was a police thriller starring Al Pacino, this time in the role of an isolated and intense undercover cop whose radical idealism defines his search for justice as he blows the whistle on payoffs and corruption in the police department.

Based on a true story (written by Peter Maas; screenplay co-written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt) the movie showed Lumet at his best, filming on New York City streets with a talented crew of actors playing characters in moral conflict and a story that was in perfect sync with the mood of the country.

Lumet has said of Serpico, “I’m not directing a moral message. I’m directing that piece and those people, and if I do it well, the moral message will come through.” Near the end of the film as Al Pacino is testifies before the Knapp Commission, Lumet mentions that he was often criticized for not having a thematic line in his work and for doing many different kinds of movies. “It’s nonsense,” he said. “There is always a bedrock concern: Is it fair?”

           DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975) 

“Talk about radical,” says Lumet. “What could be more radical than a guy robbing a bank so that he can get the money to pay for his boyfriend’s sex operation?”

“The thing that I think makes Dog Day what it is Pacino’s performance. Because it could have easily degenerated into a sensational piece,” he says. “We have got to reach, on a fundamental level, into anybody watching this movie, to make them aware of the humanity of these two men. And I couldn’t have had a better person unearth that feeling than Pacino because he is like an open wound up there.”

In the end of this film even the hostages are rooting for them. 

           NETWORK (1976)

Lumet said of Network, “For me and [writer] Paddy Chayefsky, the network was a metaphor for America and the corruption of the American spirit.” He noted Chayefsky’s prescience and said, “It’s only gotten worse,” at the time referring indirectly to the war in Iraq.

Faye Dunaway and Peter Finch star in this powerful satire of the news industry. When anchorman Howard Beale is forced to retire his 25-year post because of his age, he announces to his viewers that he’s going to commit suicide on his final program. When his announcement looks like it will improve the ratings, the entire event is turned into a garish entertainment spectacle.

           THE VERDICT (1982)

Based on a script by David Mamet. Paul Newman stars as Frank Galvin, an alcoholic Boston lawyer who tries to redeem his personal and professional reputation by winning a difficult medical malpractice case against a large Catholic hospital.

Helped by his assistant Mickey (Jack Warden) and his new girlfriend, Laura (Charlotte Rampling) The Verdict is an outstanding, if not very legally accurate, courtroom drama; his decision to try the case without telling the family of the settlement offer would probably lead to his real-life disbarment.

The central theme concerns a man who overcomes his own impulses toward self-destruction and summons the courage to challenge the system – even though it will inevitably turn him into a pariah.

              WHEN THE MORAL COMPASS IS SPINNING was originally published on FollowTheThread

[chrismaverickdotcom]

Hidden Figures, Visible Baiting: The game of imitation in Hollywood biopics.

(Some minor spoilers in this review. But not much really. After all, it is a historic biopic… and just so you know… John Glenn did make it into space.)

So Steph and I went and saw Hidden Figures yesterday. I had really been looking forward to it. In fact, I maybe made the mistake that I always try to avoid when going to see a movie. Usually I try to go in with no expectations. I don’t want to be disappointed by something not living up to the hype and I don’t want to be tricked into thinking I liked something just because it wasn’t as awful as initial reviews or trailers led me to believe it was. That was pretty hard with Hidden Figures. When I first saw the trailer my initial thought was “well, that’s Oscarbait” (this isn’t a problem. I actually frequently like Oscarbait movies). Then, over the last week with the critical and popular acclaim that has been impossible to ignore I started thinking “wow… I guess the Oscar baiting is working.” It was impossible to ignore.

But I tried my best.

I’m glad I did. As I was sitting down to watch the movie I thought to myself “this is going to be amazing!!!” And then I caught myself and said “no, wait… don’t do that. Watch this and enjoy it for what it is. And it’s a good thing I did that, because otherwise I probably would have been really disappointed.

Instead, what I saw a pretty good movie.

It was by no means a perfect movie. I’m not even sure that it as a *great* movie per se. But it was pretty good. Above average. Enjoyable all the way through.

One really good way to bait the Oscars is to make a socially relevant biopic. There’s two aspects that go into this. First of all, the Academy loves a biopic. And there’s good reasons for this. There’s something of a challenge to presenting the life of a real person. Real people are complex. And when a writer, and actor, a director and everyone else on set can combine to present the audience with a view into a character that is very tangible and very real, that is an accomplishment and it should be celebrated. I love a good superhero movie, and Robert Downey Jr. should certainly be celebrated for bringing as much complexity and depth to the character of Ironman as he has — far more than needs to be there for those films to make money. However, Ironman will never be as complex and nuanced as Katherine Johnson was in this movie because Katherine Johnson is a real life, complex and interesting human being and Taraji P. Henson did an amazing job of de-Cookyfying herself to make the character of Johnson real, relatable and engaging.

The other half of that equation is the social relevance. And that’s where the movie really shined. Diversity, multiculturalism, people of color, feminism. Basically the entire “social justice warrior” culture. These are big buzz words and that means big business. Hollywood, especially the Academy, likes to feel good about itself when it feels like it’s doing something positive and making a difference, an nothing does that like telling the story of heretofore undiscovered minority women who were the secret backbone of one of America’s proudest and most inspiring moments. Yay us for being progressive. Something like that. And this is an important thing. Being able to spoonfeed history dressed up as entertainment is good.

But beyond the need for simply presenting a lesson on the historical significance of the civil rights movement of the sixties. The film seems to be a direct attempt to address the controversy of Hollywood not offering meaty enough roles for minorities, and particularly women of color in order to warrant recognition at the Academy Awards. Or, as it is often summed up, #OscarsSoWhite! This is a clear attempt to address that. By shining a light on the accomplishments of black women in a time in the past where they were essential to the success of the country but invisible, the film attempts to make a statement about their similar invisibility in the media today. You can almost feel the movie saying “look, black women! Black women right here! You looking for black women? We got your black women!”

And that’s not exactly a complaint. They did a good job with it. Henson is really good and does an amazing job of presenting a the character of a black woman in 1961 who must walk the line between showcasing her own brilliance while not overstepping her bounds as an impoversihed member of the society of which she is a part of. There were even some parts while watching where Steph leaned over to me and mentioned that she was surprised that this or that aspect of racism existed at a place like NASA in that time period. So yay! Learning is good! Octavia Spencer, who plays Dorothy Vaughan, similarly shines. Though in her case, this is maybe less surprising, given that she’s already received an Oscar for playing a similar character in The Help. If anything, I’d worry that she’s going to start getting typecast. And perhaps she already is. I feel like producers are starting to say “we want to make a socially conscious movie about the civil rights movement. We need to feature a sassy but respectable black woman. Someone get Octavia Spencer on the line!” Even better, at least for me, was the third lead, Janelle Monáe as Mary Jackson. She did an amazing job. Despite being the C-storyline and having the least to do o the three principle actresses, she was amazingly believable and worked to earn the audience’s respect for every second she was on the screen. She was phenomenal. The main cast is rounded out by three white actors. Kevin Costner as a gruff boss who really doesn’t understand the inherent racism in the system, but when it is brought to his attention will serve as an ally of sorts because “lets move past this petty shit so that everyone can get to work, goddammit!!!” and Jim Parsons and Kirsten Dunst whose jobs are to be living embodiment of white privilege leading to casual systemic racism, a function that Spencer’s Vaughan has the pleasure of directly pointing out, just in case the audience doesn’t realize it… “Yes, I get that you’re not trying to be racist. But just so you know… by adhering to the racist status quo, you totally are. HTH!” They really don’t have much to do. Dunst plays “generic white lady from the sixties.” Parson’s pretty much plays exactly his Sheldon Cooper character minus the comedy. They’re good at it. But they’re as much stereotypes in this film as the token black characters would be in any other Hollywood biopic.

But the things that make it good are also part of the failings of it. First of all, it’s just very clean and neat. Hollywood loves a happy ending. It’s easier to send an audience home happy than sad. Costner’s character in particular has a moment where he becomes so offended up Henson’s Johnson having to go across campus to use the negro bathroom that he he takes a crowbar to the bathroom sign and singlehandedly ends bathroom segregation at NASA with a few swoops of the mighty white hand of God. So, at the end of the film, it just kind of feels like “yay! NASA solved racism!” and by extension Hollywood is saying “and we made this movie about black women so we’re totally not racist anymore either! Yay!” It’s all very neat and tidy and clean and wrapped up in a pretty little bow. Look, these three great women went on to have great careers and are important and honored and everything is awesome!!! And while that’s nice and all, its obviously not really true on either account, which is kind of why this movie needed to exist in the first place. It feels a tad to celebratory.

Secondly, the film has the failing of many biopics. Namely, real life just isn’t very interesting a lot of the time. Certainly not as interesting as the movies. And since movies are about tension and drama, that needed to be fixed. At the end of the day, for all of her cultural significance, Katherine Johnson’s actual job was “doing math.” She was really good at this job, by all accounts better digital computers of the time (in real life as well as in the film). But her job was still to sit down and do math, and that’s just not visually compelling to watch on screen. In fact, its boring enough that there really wasn’t enough to make a whole film out of just her doing math, which is what necessitates adding Vaughan and Jackson’s stories into the mix. Vaughan’s B-story at least kind of dovetails into the main storyline, as her struggle to gain recognition for the West Area Computing Unit (the segregated group of African American female mathematicians at NASA that the women were members of) does seem to affect the Friendship 7 mission launch and Vaughan’s promotion to supervisorship of the unit does ultimately allow the Project Mercury missions to take place. The problem with this is that it is historically inaccurate. The West Area Computers never existed at NASA. They were actually part of the NACA (NASA’s predecessor) and were disbanded and integrated into the rest of the NASA workforce when the organization restructured in 1958, three years before the film. The struggle and drama that Vaughan goes through in the movie therefore actually predates Johnson’s struggle by several years.

Similarly, Jackson’s struggle to become NASA’s first official black female engineer also occurred years earlier and was completed by the time she was actually working in the wind tunnel for the Friendship 7 module. This leads to one of the most problematic aspects of the film for me. While Jackson’s C-story of trying to gain an education so that she can be an engineer was, for me, the most compelling part of the film, the pacing of the ilm makes it ultimately meaningless. Since she achieves her goals at the end of the movie, coincident with Johnson and Vaughan achieving theirs, it is ultimately meaningless to the overall plot line. Friendship-7 had launched and the film was over. So whereas in real life, Jackson being an engineer probably was essential to the survival of John Glenn and the mission, in the movie universe, it doesn’t actually matter whether she’s an engineer or not since she didn’t become one until after the climax of the film had been resolved. This was something that I noticed while I was watching the film, even though I didn’t yet know the actual timeline of the real life Jackson (I researched it later). It felt like “Wow, this most interesting person in the movie is actually completely inconsequential. Well that sucks.” However, at the very least, it got me to do some research on Mary Jackson, and that’s a good thing.

Merging Jackson and Vaughan with Johnson’s plot line appears to have been a step to both add more diversity to Hollywood (“you wanted roles for black actresses? Well, hey we could have just given you one. But we gave you three! Please love us! Wait, what do you mean you’d rather they be spread out into multiple movies? Stop being greedy!”) and also to distract from the fact that Johnson in and of herself doesn’t actually do anything that gives much tension for the viewer to cling to. As I said before, she’s basically just doing math. Math is boring. It is super important — the film reminds us on several occasions that the math is essential to the survival of the mission — but it is boring to watch. In order to add drama and a sense of stakes as the film reaches the third act, it is necessary to create a situation where we seen Henson as Johnson basically trying to “math faster” and then running the calculations she’s just completed across the NASA campus as John Glenn is entering the rocket because Glenn refuses to launch without them. Of course if you stop to think about it, you realize that this isn’t actual drama because Glenn simply would have said no. That’s exactly what he said he would do. The actual drama of the Friendship-7 mission were the difficulties that it achieve in flight which caused it to abort its mission after the third orbit (it was scheduled for seven) but once that occurred it was too late for new math to be done. They just had to trust what they had. So the climax of the film sort of necessarily involves all the principle characters just kind of watching to see if all of their hard work actually paid off or if it was a complete failure. Having worked in the tech industry… well, that’s pretty much exactly what it’s like. You watch the product launch and you sit there and you say “please don’t blow up! Please don’t blow up!” over and over again. And it either does or it doesn’t. But the camera watches the guy actually demoing the product. Not all of the engineers and designers who worked on it standing around biting their fingernails, because… well, that shit is boring.

The movie does similar tricks to try and flesh it out by delving into Johnson’s personal life and showing the development of her relationship and eventual marriage to her second husband (which in real life also occurred two years before the movie actually begins) and to a lesser extent familial and marital relationships of Vaughan and Jackson. While this does humanize the characters a bit, it does prove inconsequential to the plot. Unlike The Imitation Game, which is in effect the same basic story (mathematician secretly helps to save the world), the personal life of Johnson never really directly plays into the events of the film (not surprising because in real life it happened earlier), so it seems ind of artificially added on. As a viewer, I am left wondering if the film had about white men trying to save the space program would the domestic life of the characters been downplayed altogether? (Hint: The answer is yes, and that movie is called Apollo 13.) As is, even though the domestic life of the characters is somewhat interesting it never really goes anywhere. The lesson appears to be “oh, and just so you know… women who worked at NASA in the 1960s were married.” Much like the five minute scene of characters watching while John Glenn (the single character in the film with the most to actually gain or lose, and therefore the focal point of the tension despite being a minor part of the narrative) this ultimately becomes filler so that there’s enough minutes to fill screen time.

So in the end, it’s a good movie. I enjoyed watching it, and I think other people should see it. But in reality, it is very much an aspect of this time. It is a response to the complaint of the last two years that the opportunities for the roles that Hollywood is currently celebrating (biopics for intellectual historic figures like The Imitation Game) weren’t available to black actresses. And so the response was to give the viewers EXACTLY that. A biopic of historical intellectual figures like The Imitation Game but this time with black actresses. It’s watchable. It’s engaging and it makes for an interesting bit of introspection as to the way the current cultural moment that the film was produced in compares to the context of the era it is portraying. But ultimately it won’t have the rewatchability that it is going for. It won’t go down as a Hollywood classic. It should get a couple nominations, and yay, there might be some black people in the crowd at the Academy Awards this year, but as good as Henson, Spencer and Monáe are, the Oscars will probably remain SoWhite. Hopefully, it’s at least a step in the right direction and not an excuse to just not try to do another film like this for another decade.

★★★½☆ (3.5 out of 5 stars).

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Hidden Figures, Visible Baiting: The game of imitation in Hollywood biopics. was originally published on ChrisMaverick dotcom

[turklingua]

Getting Smart With: Professional Turkish Translation Services http://ift.tt/2DNDTWe Translating is the situation of “articulating” the entire emotional and intellectual activities in the chaotic soul structure of human being. In the heart of this complexity or chaos, translator is the person who analyzes all these perception processes with the emotional-intellectual power of the author and his or her language of expression, and fulfills “articulating” in his own language. There are three essential main essential components in the translation action: Our first essential is knowledge accumulation; we mean that the translator is culturally equipped . Our second essential is the ability of emotion-dream transfer; we can call it creative ability. Our the third and last essential is that the source and target language knowledge is at the certain level of translating. It is faced with human nature and human beings who acts different from what they say and do, and who can be defined in thousands of characters. Humans have a curiosity and passion to deal with invisible and unknown areas. When we begin to write this curiosity and passion out, the thing what we call literature arises. The author who has the ability of making invisible ones visible, the unknown ones known, only needs expert translators to spread out his discoveries to the world. The way to be an expert Turkish translator is to built multiple relationships with life and to articulate the other lives far away or the lives right besides us, with the emotional and intellectual accumulation that is gained from the totality of these multiple relationships which is not possible to be known without translating action. Translation action is not a simple, mechanical or ordinary interposition, but requires to constitute a common language with the author and the editor. Creating a common language is one of the hardest act and the translator does one of those hard work. Translator is the person who shows the success of integrating with the heart and brain of the author. In other words, he is the soul mate of the author not someone else based upon the work that he translates. Interpreting, except your native language, is the act of transferring, analyzing and perception of any knowledge at any language what it means in your native language. It is necessary to have an objective and moral stance when carrying out this action. You can not say a word that is not said in the original text; you can not construe a sentence or word you do not know! There is the importance of translating profession: we need to learn what we do not know and communication for the flow of life, that information in foreign languages should be translated into our native language to get the information, assimilate and reproduce. It is impossible to communicate with other countries and lives without translation, the power and the importance of the translation profession emerges here. There are dozens of occupational areas within the definition of translator. For example, people who will translate literary and commercial areas must have different qualities. When we think that there are different fields within these two fields, I can say that the qualifications of the translator should be determined according to the area selection. However, it is essential to have the ability of writing, analytical thinking, creativity, and language skills both the native and foreign language. The perception of interpreting in Turkey is based on the perception of “a job that anyone who knows a foreign language can do”. This is extremely wrong generalization! We have to break this perception and generalization; because knowing foreign languages is just one of the most important elements of translation. If I express within the context of literary translation, interpreting is not a job that can be done without the intellectual accumulation and authorship ability. The translator has a changing relationship according to each book, but if there are topic concerning sentimentality and justice in it, you will unintentionally take a side but you will have to conceal… The translation should remain as good as the original text. The translator does not have a mission of making the original text better! There are physical, mental effort and energy of the editor, translator, proofreader and other people in any book that has been translated. The quality of the translation excels in when these energies are in harmony with each other. To be a translator in Turkey means to work under aggravated circumstances with low wages, without having any social security. We have no choice other than to be organized to stop this. If you are not economically dependent on to translate; if you say I can not stand the pressure of the boss or manager; translating for sure seems to be attractive in this sense, but words and sentences that we can not figure out and meet a lot of difficulties when deciphering, takes the place of pressure of the boss or manager… Setting many experienced difficulties aside I would say: you look at yourself with the eye of a creator when your translation gets credit and becomes a book that takes its place in bookcase or shelves. You are that creator! Could it be a greater happiness than that? You contribute to yourself and others and to life by translating every work you do. There is no training required to become a translator; however I recommend you to place training in somewhere of your life to become a good translator. A translator who does not have translation training can do successful translations; however these translations are usually coincidence. An educated translator can explain what, how and why he translated. Expert knowledge is important. Do not expect the time you will translate to have knowledge about the topic you will be translating. Research, learn, get ready for the translation as you are studying lesson. You should also improve yourself out of school. Make the translation a part of your life. Try to translate what you listen, watch, read in your daily life. Repeat the exercises every day in this way. Pay attention to develop your general culture, accumulation of your popular culture. Follow the news, current events. Be informed of economics, literature, politics, etc. Prepare a CV to yourself, accumulate things to add to your CV until you graduate. Participate to seminars, conferences, volunteer projects, attend courses. Try to build connections with benificial people. Do not underestimate the written translation. Making a written translation is also a part of providing sufficient accumulation for interpreting. Your character may be suitable to verbal translation; however instead of running away from the translation by pleading, go over your problems. Develop yourself regarding the issues such as enduring and continuous focusing, long working time, meeting the deadlines. We often don’t choose to work as a full-time or freelance translator. Working freelance chooses us. If it chooses you, get your home environment well organized. A large table, a fridge full of tertiary processed meals and a high speed computer can be a good idea for a proper working environment. When we enter the sector, usually the things may not go as planned. You are interested in art; but you can face always with an automotive translation. Suddenly, you can find yourself as a specialized Turkish translator in the automotive sector. Interest, curiosity and enthusiasm are good. But do not worry if you can not get jobs in the areas you want, learn to love the fields where you work. Go ahead with preliminary preparation whatever you will interpret; never interpret by yourself, especially when you are new graduate. Do not go alone for more than one or two hours interpretations after you gain a certain experience. There can be anything during interpreting, you may face with unexpected problems. Make confidentiality and impartiality your first principle. Do not share the contents of any meetings with third parties. Never do a biased translation. The conference interpreter is the headliner of the translation cabin. When you get on the stage, do not let anyone to interfere which song you will sing. Translation is a creation. It is a product that you entirely produce; so all rights are yours. If your voice is recorded, demand copyright for your product. Translator interprets in oral translation jobs. Do not try to solve technical problems. Do not fall back upon the organization. We live in the global world. Speakers from all over the world can speak English at international meetings. Be prepared to hear different accents. Include speakers with different accents among your oral translation exercises. Interpreting is an enjoyable activity; however the market we try to survive, requires you to have nerves of steel. Be gentle, smile and learn to look in the bright side of everything. He who gets up in anger, sits down with a loss. Do not allow to suffer from the competitive feelings and ambition. Your colleagues may be your friends or turn into your competitors according to your attitude. Try to built good relationships with everyone. Interpreting is already difficult; doing this without breaking any heart and having fun, is completely in your hands. You should continue to built up your language training that you get at school with your personal studies. Area selection is difficult, on the way of this selection do not be hurry to decide, it will settle in time. The most important point is to know your own language first, please often read books. Be reminded that it is not expected to make healthy translations from someone, who has no command of his native language. Appearance and attitude are quite important in the field of interpreting. People are ready to judge you, even with your appearance, the way of sitting. When you get in a platform, if you show a profile that is lack of confidence, people try to abuse you and pile extra work to you in every sense. So take a tough stance and try to recover your mistakes instantly, and the most important thing is to trust yourself and be proud of your work.

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