“None of the news stories are commenting on the fact that Manti Te’o is Samoan. The reporters are wondering whether he was truly hoaxed, or whether he was complicit. Why didn’t he ever insist on visiting his girlfriend in person? They had been in touch for four years after all – chatting by Facebook message, texting, calling each other on the phone. How could he not be a bit suspicious? But in wondering all these questions, they never ask what his cultural background might be – what ideas about truth and verification did he learn growing up in a Samoan migrant community, especially one that was so religious (in his case, Mormon)? So as an ethnographer of Samoan migrants, I want to say that I heard a number of stories that sound almost exactly like Manti Te’o’s story — naïve Christian golden boys who had been fooled by other Samoans pretending to be dewy-eyed innocents. Leukemia was even a theme, I guess Samoan pranksters keep turning to the same diseases over and over again. But I did this fieldwork before Facebook or cell phones, and even before email became all that widespread outside of college circles. All the stories I heard involved husky voices on telephones, and maybe a letter or two.”
How to Get High-Speed Internet to All Americans - NYTimes.com
Susan Crawford hits it out of the park
I wear your granddad’s clothes
I look incredible
I’m in this big ass coat
From that thrift shop down the road
Tech LadyMafia: Aaron Swartz on misogyny in technology
Phillip Lenssen: Can you give some examples of misogyny or racism?
Aaron Swartz: If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result, the only women you see in tech are those who are willing to put up with all the abuse. I really noticed this when I was at foo camp once, Tim O’Reilly’s exclusive gathering for the elite of the tech community. The executive guys there, when they thought nobody else was around, talked about how they always held important business meetings at strip clubs and the deficiencies of programmers from various countries. Meanwhile, foo camp itself had a session on discrimination in which it was explained to us that the real problem was not racism or sexism, but simply the fact that people like to hang out with others who are like themselves. The denial about this in the tech community is so great that sometimes I despair of it ever getting fixed. And I should be clear, it’s not that there are just some bad people out there who are being prejudiced and offensive. Many of these people that I’m thinking of are some of my best friends in the community. It’s an institutional problem, not a personal one.
(Source: blogoscoped.com)
“We’ve long known that the credulous viewer of romantic comedy is headed for a fall, for comedy encourages a misunderstanding about endings. In life, the “ending” that is marriage actually comes at the beginning of adulthood. The novel took as one of its great subjects the calamitous realization that you have to live with your marriage. Now that we don’t really have to live with our marriages, or enter them in the first place, the choice of whom, if anyone, to settle down with is not a great subject but a middling one—about sitcom-sized, it turns out. And the grown-up questions we ask ourselves when deciding whether to stay or go, to marry or not, don’t hinge quite as much on the idea of a right or wrong choice as on a rough sense of timing: when, if ever, is the right time to write the marriage into our lives? How much felicity can we plausibly expect from a partnership entered in our youth? Would we lose too many potentially interesting plot twists if we committed to one person right now? And if we end up disappointed by marriage, will it have been because we chose the wrong man, or simply that we chose him when we were only about a third of the way through our own personal comedies?”
— Single Women and the Sitcom by Elaine Blair | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books
