Archive for Improving Society
Here are the organizations I’m donating to in 2019. (I used to post my list every year, but haven’t managed to post it since 2013.) Much of this is repeated from 2013 (and earlier years), but since that last post I’ve removed nine organizations and added thirty-five others. The list is categorized for ease of […]
I have some thoughts that I feel like are connected to each other, but they’re not quite cohering into an essay. So here are some not-quite-cohering thoughts. (Content warning for descriptions of various forms of exoticizing/Othering.) Mary Anne wrote an interesting post recently about (among other things) whether non–Sri Lankans are reading the Sri Lankan […]
Two years ago, the first time I attended an all-group meeting for the Cloud Documentation group at my day job, I noticed that people in the audience were asking questions that were largely inaudible to much of the rest of the audience, including me. (And completely inaudible to people who were attending the meeting remotely, […]
I understand why people who are giving talks or writing articles use phrases like these that assume a shared experience: We’ve all had the experience of … Everyone here knows … You’d be surprised at … But I’d like to recommend not doing that. Such phrases are very often inaccurate (twice yesterday, presenters said things […]
When I criticize someone in the past for having done something that I consider bad by my own modern standards, I often get pushback from friends who say things like: “He was just a man of his time. [Alternative phrasing: a product of his time.] You can’t/shouldn’t judge him by modern standards!” (I’m using he […]
Short version of this post: At my alma mater, Swarthmore College, documents have recently been revealed that describe a lot of awful behavior by members of the two fraternities on campus. Eventually, both fraternities decided to disband. Much longer version follows. Background Swarthmore is a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania. For decades, it’s been home […]
A friend just posted a comic about the difficulty of getting kids to look for things that they’re missing (like their shoes). It suddenly occurred to me that my experience with asking kids to look for things is that the kids go off to look but seem kind of at a loss as to how […]
Good tweet from KTO: ...we can either find reasons to improve inclusion, or we can make excuses for continuing past exclusion.— Kat Tanaka Okopnik (@KTOkopnik) August 23, 2018 Which reminds me of a recent thing I was thinking about. During the discussion about this year’s Worldcon programming, I had the following series of reactions (in […]
From Le Guin’s “Introduction to Planet of Exile” (intro written in 1977 or 1978; can now be found in The Language of the Night). Worth reading the whole piece, but here’s a bit of it: […] Planet of Exile was written in 1963–1964[…]. The book exhibits my early, “natural” (i.e., happily acculturated), unawakened, un-consciousness-raised way […]
Some assorted notes about today’s March for Our Lives rally in San José: Followup on my previous post: I was glad that the march started at 11:00 a.m. That gave me time to have a leisurely start to my day and still arrive before the march started. When I first arrived, the crowd nearby was […]
What I want to do today: Laze around the house, reading and watching TV and labeling photos and maybe doing laundry. What I’m going to do today: Go to the March for Our Lives in San José. I’m generally oddly reluctant to attend marches and rallies and such. They involve a lot of people, and […]
I have complicated feelings about this mashup of “Story of Tonight” (from Hamilton) with “You Will Be Found” (from the musical Dear Evan Hansen). On the one hand, it’s a lovely song, and it’s a benefit for March For Our Lives. On the other hand, I had never heard of Dear Evan Hansen before (content […]