"I know this might come as a shock, because my whole page used to be about loving my flat chest and being confident with it."

"I literally built my entire career around that. Was everything a lie? Was I secretly insecure this whole time, and just using body positivity to make money so I could finally afford a boob job? No."

Said Clara Dao, on TikTok, quoted in "When Beauty Standards and Body Positivity Collide/A new cultural ideal for women is ultrathin and cloaked in the language of inclusivity and self-acceptance" (NYT).

Dao got the implants for “fun,” she explained. After six years and more than 900 videos of “flat-chest content,” she “got bored.”... Dao’s followers are flooding her comments with anger and disappointment, but all the analytics show is that the engagement is through the roof....

I don't understand the choice of the word "but." The "flooding" of comments is engagement. It's a bad use of the human capacity for emotion to get angry at someone like this and to reward her with the attention she sought by doing the thing that made you angry. When will we ever learn?

"Our ethical judgments, he suggests, are governed not by a complex of modules but by one overriding emotion."

"Untold generations of cowering have written fear into our genes, rendering us hypersensitive to threats of harm. 'If you want to know what someone sees as wrong, your best bet is to figure out what they see as harmful,' [writes Kurt Gray, the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab]. At another point: 'All people share a harm-based moral mind.' At still another: 'Harm is the master key of morality.'..."

Writes Elizabeth Kolbert, in "Does One Emotion Rule All Our Ethical Judgments? When prehistoric predators abounded, the ability to perceive harm helped our ancestors survive. Some researchers wonder whether it fuels our greatest fights today" (The New Yorker).

"Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much...."

"If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort.... Mindfulness is another way of managing one’s reactivity. Broadly speaking, mindful minds seek to replace the question “Am I overreacting?” with the neutral observation that, yes, a reaction is happening. In the pre-baby mindfulness workshop I attended, our instructor told us to imagine our emotions as locomotives. 'You can watch the train leave the station without getting on board,' she said. She encouraged us to react to our reactions with nonjudgmental attention...."

Writes Joshua Rothman, in "Are You Overreacting? How to survive when provocations are a natural—and inescapable—part of life" (The New Yorker).

"Even the most apparently conservative and decorous women writers obsessively create fiercely independent characters who seek to destroy all the patriarchal structures..."

"... which both their authors and their authors’ submissive heroines seem to accept as inevitable. The madwoman in literature by women is not merely, as she might be in male literature, an antagonist or foil to the heroine. Rather she is usually in some sense the author’s double, an image of her own anxiety and rage."

From "The Madwoman in the Attic," quoted in "Sandra M. Gilbert, Co-Author of ‘The Madwoman in the Attic,’ Dies at 87/A poet, scholar and literary critic, she turned a feminist lens on 19th-century writers like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, creating a feminist classic" (NYT).

“People forget that, when they were writing, even to talk about women writers as having anything in common, as having a story of their own, as being connected in any way to each other, was incredibly controversial,” Katha Pollitt, the feminist author, told The Washington Post in 2013. “Now it seems completely obvious.”

By its own account, "Cubik is 'a deeply human organization' that 'seeks personalities before skills" — "you don’t just work at Cubik, you 'Be Cubik.'"

"An online quiz prompts you to discover your Cubik profile: Reflection, Action, or Relation. 'Cubik’s V.I.P. drinks have hardly begun and you’ve already talked to all the guests,' the description for the last category reads. 'You now know at which sport Jean-Yves is unbeatable, where Joëlle will spend her vacations, and that Antoine has planned to cross Slovenia on a tandem bicycle.' Whew. Jean-Yves, Joëlle, and Antoine might be having the time of their lives. Or they might be frantically texting the babysitter or wishing they were at yoga class. Cubik boasts, 'Because we are proud of our culture, we have many rituals for getting together.' These include an annual corporate retreat just before the summer holidays, 'to celebrate the past season and take a step back from working.'"

From "The Right Not to Be Fun at Work/In a win for workplace dignity, a French high court recently decreed that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in supposedly enjoyable activities" (The New Yorker).

Can the capacity to have fun be made one of your professional responsibilities? It's one thing to be allowed to have fun or even encouraged to have fun or rewarded for bringing your delightful spirit of fun to the workplace. But it's quite another to fire you because you're no fun. But what is this "fun"? An employer's idea of fun can be distorted and burdensome. Isn't that what the TV show "The Office" is about? I don't know, I don't watch it, because I can't stand that sort of thing even vicariously.

"Grief reigns in the kingdom of loss. I refer to not only the loss of a loved one but also the loss of a hope, a dream, or love itself."

"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."

That's item #13 on "MONICA LEWINSKY: 25 'RANDOMS' ON THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL CLINTON CALAMITY/My name became public 25 years ago this week. What have I observed and learned in the quarter century since? Oh, plenty" (Vanity Fair).

Okay, let me try to write 25 "Randoms" on the text printed above:

When AI does Thanksgiving: "It's doing it without emotion. There's no context. I don't feel anything... It feels very machine-generated. There's no backstory."

A NYT food editor, Priya Krishna, asks AI to generate Thanksgiving recipes, then follows the recipes to the letter: 

 

This was an interesting project, well presented, so just a few comments: 

"When Jen receives an accidental transfusion from her cousin Bruce Banner (Marvel’s original Hulk, played by Mark Ruffalo) she suddenly becomes She-Hulk."

"While Bruce’s Hulk is a cinder block of a man — or as Maslany put it, 'a roided-out gym maniac, to such a cartoonish degree' — Jen’s transformation, triggered by anger, looks different. Only some muscles bulge. Her breasts — not muscles! — bulge, too. Her waist whittles. Her hair straightens.... Maslany described She-Hulk’s bearing as heavier, less fidgety, more centered in the pelvis. 'The weight of She-Hulk brings her down into her loins in a different way,' she said. This might be the way a woman moved if she felt safe in the world, if she knew that no one could hurt her.... This new show suggests that a woman could be angry, and that the world would really like it.... 'She transforms into a hyper beautiful, hyper feminine version that might be more palatable in that anger,' Maslany marveled...."

From "As She-Hulk, Tatiana Maslany Is Beautiful When She’s Angry/The 'Orphan Black' actor described the giant, green protagonist of 'She-Hulk: Attorney at Law' as 'weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever'" (NYT).

Attorney at Law! So... a lawyer gets very very angry and sprouts extra-large breasts. It's just so embarrassingly dumb. The fantasy is that anger makes a woman especially attractive. I've never watched any Hulk shows or movies, so I'm just going to guess what Hulks — He-Hulks and She-Hulks get angry about: crime? Superhero stories are all about fighting crime, right? Anyway, I love this idea that when women become angrily powerful we become more centered in our "loins." 

I tried watching the trailer, but it was too hard to get a look at the transformation, so I'm not going to embed it. For some weird reason, the audio was "Happy Together" by The Turtles. That's the polar opposite of anger. The skies'll be blue.

"The... teacher... said, 'O.K., everyone, now we’re going to check in with how we feel we are doing in the "Best Self" exercise.'"

"A self-assessment of the self-assessment.... Afterward, a group left with one of the teachers to visit the 'sensory hallway,' an obstacle course of self-examination. On the way, they passed relics of previous emotional inquiries. A large poster board with the word 'Anxious' hung outside a classroom. One student had written, 'What if nobody likes me. What if that happens.' The first activity was emotional hopscotch—students jumped on a square that represented how they were feeling. The first few jumped on 'Happy!' A boy named JJ jumped on the square that said 'Sad.'... Next activity: a 'disposition board,' where the kids had to hop to positive-attitude words on the floor and say them out loud: 'Generosity!' 'Forgiveness!' 'Presence!' The last hallway station was an oversized Scrabble board attached to the wall, where students would decide on a collective mood.... After a brief but earnest deliberation, the kids decided on 'upbeat.' There was one dissenter. 'I am not upbeat,' JJ declared. He carried some giant letters to a faraway spot on the board and spelled out 'd-i-s-a-p-o-n-t-e-d.'"

From "Readin’, Writin’, and Regulatin’ Emotions/As Eric Adams, who has advocated for daily meditation in public schools, pushes mindfulness classes, the third graders at P.S. 60 in Staten Island assembled for a lesson on identifying and coping with their feelings" (The New Yorker).

"Friends enjoying music on speaker during rooftop party at terrace against sky."

Ludicrous caption for "The pleasure principle: How the left wins the abortion wars/The right wants to punish sex — so the only way to win the abortion wars is make sex fun again." 

That's a Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. It's a stock photograph, and they just used the stock photo description. I guess they needed a photo of people having fun sex. 

 How idiotic does this look?

 

I'm certain Salon is fine with offending those who morally oppose abortion. In fact, this article aims to insult them. It says so in text: They're not really about saving babies. They "want[] to punish sex." I'm saying the photo (and caption) are ludicrous because they represent Salon's idea of inviting its readers into the world of sex as fun.

Look at those models. They're so beautiful yet slightly drunk. They're sitting on the edge of the roof. They're ecstatic about a miniature speaker. They have a black friend, tucked away as far back as possible, with his head slightly bowed. The man in this foreground — Is he stretching in joy over whatever music emanated from the elongated rectangle wielded by the central figure? Is he the drunkest of the lot? Or is he lying there, arms outstretched, as our flight path into sex? Girl in Hat gazes back at us: Yes, we can join them. We can experience pleasure.

"In New York City, the slightest runny nose has people canceling holiday gatherings and lining up for hours outside coronavirus testing centers."

The NYT reports. 

In New York City, the slightest sniffle has people canceling holiday plans and packing coronavirus testing centers, where in recent days lines have stretched for blocks....

Despite receiving negative tests, some people keep burning through at-home coronavirus swabs just to stay calm....

There is a distinction between reasonable fear and anxiety that becomes disproportionate and all-consuming, said Dr. Itai Danovitch, the chair of the department of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. A meta-analysis of dozens of community-based studies on mental health and the coronavirus showed that anxiety among the general population has increased threefold during the pandemic.

But in such tumultuous times, a certain level of anxiety is understandable, he said. “It is important to normalize how people are feeling: Anxiety and fear are common, it’s OK to feel anxiety, it’s OK to feel low, it’s OK to feel some distress,” Dr. Danovitch said....

There's a great photograph at the link of a woman wearing a T-shirt that says:  

My body is a temple

Ancient & crumbled

Probably cursed.

Harboring an 

Unspeakable horror

The caption quotes her saying: "I have thought so much about this disease for the past two years, that any potential brush with it feels a bit monumental."

Is it "important to normalize" that? How much fear and anxiety should a person simply accept as just the way it feels to be human? The psychiatrist tells us our bad feels are "OK." Fine. But how should we live? How can we flourish?

I've heard from my NYC informants that the lining up for testing is quite extreme. Why aren't people afraid they'll catch the disease from standing around in line? I know that people maintain distance between other people in the line, but they are still hanging around, not isolated, crowding the streets for hours. And what good is another test? It could be a false negative. At some point all the checking and rechecking is a mental disorder. But if the whole city is doing it, it's the new normal.

"Nobody familiar with office life will have managed to avoid the absurd pantomime of excitement which now attends almost all corporate activities..."

"... from the greying and weary middle managers who must pretend to be thrilled about PowerPoint presentations to the prospective interns who have to write begging letters proclaiming themselves to be 'passionate' about the prospect of making those same greying and weary middle managers coffee for a couple of weeks...  And as work (thanks to longer hours and ubiquitous email) encroaches on our time and becomes more defining of who we are, the boosterish values of the workplace have become more prominent in society generally. Employees find themselves colluding in this. For, if work is the defining activity of your life, how depressing not to be passionate about it. In a meritocracy passion is also a sign of worth. The top jobs — at least in theory — go to the eagerest beavers and are no longer insouciantly inherited by the upper classes. If you were insouciantly to inherit a job, a public display of enthusiasm might help convince sceptical colleagues you were there on merit.... We must not be afraid of indifference, which nowadays looks positively like a virtue."

Writes James Marriott in "The cult of enthusiasm leaves me indifferent All this talk of passion and excitement is crowding out the virtues of boredom and apathy" (London Times).

ADDED: It's important to keep in touch with your natural aversion to fakery, but what if your livelihood depends on existing with it all around you and generating plenty of it yourself? Ah, it's not the hardest job in the world, but it's horrible.

"The neighborhood’s camera opponents argued that the systems were a pointless, Orwellian annoyance they didn’t want greeting them every time they drove home."

"To them, the cameras felt like another step toward mass suburban paranoia, where every once-forgettable slight is now recorded by Ring doorbell cameras, shared on Facebook and discussed endlessly on Nextdoor. But the cameras’ supporters said... [g]oing soft on crime could put their families at risk... and no one on public roads should expect privacy, anyway.... 'You would think we were living in a war zone,' said [Michele] Lawrence, 55. 'We have neighbors who have fortressed their houses in Ring cameras, and it’s gotten them nowhere — and nothing, except this false sense of panic. It creeps me out.'... Tensions boiled over at community meetings, said [David Paul] Appell, who recalled the head of the pro-camera faction screaming that an opponent was 'chusma' — Cuban Spanish for 'low class.' ... Camera supporters griped that opponents were naive, penny-pinching Luddites.... And the critics griped that they were being transformed into a surveillance state thanks largely to one board member notorious for repeatedly — and, to them, unnecessarily — calling the police."

From "License plate scanners were supposed to bring peace of mind. Instead they tore the neighborhood apart/A battle among homeowners in the Colorado mountains shows how a new generation of surveillance technology is reshaping American neighborhoods" (WaPo).

It's hard to know which side is right. Once lots of people — making their own individual decision — have put in Ring doorbells, you're arguing for privacy that's already gone, and it's mostly about money. The article says the license-plate-scanning cameras cost $2,500 a year. What's each person's share of that and how does that loss compare to what you're losing through crime? You're losing peace of mind through crime, even if no one steals anything from your car. But if we're talking about the value of your emotional state, we need to put a dollar amount on the feeling that you've got less privacy, even if your privacy was already shot to hell.

I learned a new word, "chusma." From the Urban Dictionary:

Have you ever heard of insect emotion? Neither had I.

"Big, exciting changes are afoot."

Enthuses David Brooks, sketching out some neuroscience that he seems to think will really intrigue and surprise us. 

It all sounds like stuff I read a quarter century ago in a completely popular, mainstream book — "Descartes' Error." So reason and emotion are not separate and distinct... oh, really?!

Enough sarcasm. Let me look at the comments to see how hard it was for readers to drag Trump into it. Because, you know, that always has to happen. Ah, the top-rated comment has Trump in it. And then there's Trump in this one:

This is the science that explains why we’re so polarized as a country, why it feels as if people are living in side-by-side realities. Fear is the emotional basis for many of our “rational” stances and decisions—for white Trump supporters, the fear of losing power and being “replaced.” This science is a mechanism by which we could admit when we’re wrong and start to come out of delusions—and that reconciliation is what has to happen for democracy to continue here....

Well, that would be a big, exciting change — if science would work as a mechanism to lead us out of our delusions. That itself is a delusion. The science seems to say delusion is who we are. And I love the way the commenter sees so clearly that the "white Trump supporters" are the deluded ones. But at least she thinks somehow those deplorables can find a way into the light of reason. I remember when they were in a basket and declared "irredeemable." 

"UFO skepticism can sometimes be mistaken for anthropocentrism, a kind of biological arrogance...."

"The believer says to the skeptic, 'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?' An adjunct to this is the assertion that, among intelligent beings in the universe, humans are likely relatively primitive, since we’ve only been around for, what, 100,000 years or so, and the Old Ones out there may be billions of years ahead of us. It would actually be reassuring, at a deep existential level, to know that interstellar space travel is possible. That it’s something we might do someday. Alien visitors by their mere existence would imply that we can overcome our worst instincts (war, hatred, pollution, Twitter) and survive. It would be nice to know that the kind of intelligence humans possess, and which gives rise to technological civilizations like ours, won’t always backfire, that it’s not only a nifty evolutionary adaptation in the short run but something that’s durable. The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. They’re a little bit like angels. What’s more anthropocentric is to assume that human beings are so fascinating that aliens want to visit us and study us. The aliens seem a bit obsessed with us.... Some UFO narratives imagine that we have something the aliens are missing. Like: feelings....."

 
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).

Just take one more minute for rational reflection and you will be all set.

That's what I have to say to metalmom, who writes this comment to "Do We Really Need to Take 10,000 Steps a Day for Our Health? The advice that we take 10,000 steps a day is more a marketing accident than based on science. Taking far fewer may have notable benefits" (NYT):

What really burns me up about the endless reports of how we need to do at least 30 minutes of vigorous exercise five days a week: who has time for that? Let me get this straight. You have young children. You get them off to school and then commute an hour to your job. Do your job all day and then rush home to your kids. Help them with their homework, make dinner, attend school-related or community-related events. And all the housework including laundry and grocery shopping, and yardwork. Fit in a few minutes of conversation with your partner. Handle phone calls about the family or friends. Then fall into bed too stressed out to sleep. Repeat every day. Don’t forget to get your vigorous exercise in! And feel guilty if you don’t!

Such unnecessary burning up! 

ADDED: It occurs to me that if one were really burning with anger, it would consume calories. I'm thinking I could get rich writing a new diet book. Has anyone ever used this idea before? You lose weight by getting angry, so angry you feel the burn. That heat could not exist if not for calories. So don't worry about going running or off on your long runs. Stay on the internet and keep reading those websites that fire you up.

FROM THE EMAIL: Washington Blogger writes:

I lost 7 pounds reading the Althouse comments section. Now all that weight is back under the new format. However, blood pressure is down. I think my doctor prefers it that way, so you get a thumbs up from her. :)

"Strangers rank their intelligence."

I'm seeing that this morning because something made me want to read the subreddit "Asian Masculinity: Culture, masculinity & racial identity for Asian men," and I happened across a discussion of that video — "Ray is a good example of Asian Masculinity." Quite a bit of the discussion there is about whether a soft-spoken man can be attractive.

The video itself is quite something — inviting these 6 individuals to judge each other's intellligence and then — as they're sitting in order of supposed IQ — surprising them with an IQ test. Then they're reseated — or not — according to the test results. It was a very funny (and disturbing) situation because they were openly expressing some prejudice while decorously resisting mentioning other prejudice. 

There was some vocal assertion that "emotional intelligence" is part of IQ, but the IQ test wasn't about emotional intelligence, and the strongest booster of the idea of "emotional intelligence" lacked emotional intelligence (I think). 

And the test was taken under ridiculously nonneutral conditions, as they'd all just heard judgments about themselves and were seated right next to the people who'd judged them. Plus they were taking the test on a laptop that was balanced on their knees (or a handheld iPhone) — in front of a camera. That made it partly a test of aptitude for concentrating and keeping calm. I think the laptop-on-knees position would have shaved 10 points off my IQ.

The puzzling intensity of bile.

It was a beautiful piece. Honest and non-judgmental toward any other choice. Why the intensity of this bile? https://t.co/mB22zDYLoH

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) May 9, 2021

Let's take a closer look at that bile. Is there bile at all?

I would like to thank this headline/byline combo for helping me set a record for the quickest "gross, pass" I've ever uttered in my life.

Bile is anger. "Gross, pass" is disgust.  One might perhaps base an entire career on examining the anger/disgust distinction, but I think the key distinction is the direction of the negative emotion. Anger urges you to take aggression at the source of your outrage. Disgust sends you away. You shun. It's the difference between wanting to attack what you hate and wanting to make sure you don't get any of that on you. Marcotte experiences disgust — "gross" — and immediately shuns — "pass." Her measure of the intensity of disgust is the shortness of the space between the emotion and the reaction. She's open and proud of the absence of rational thought. It's a feeling and a decision all at once — "gross, pass."

Having decided not to expose herself to the text of the article, Marcotte is free to enjoy herself: "The funniest part" — funniest part of the headline — "is framing 25 like it's some daringly young age. The average age of first childbirth is 26." Is that really funny? I haven't read the op-ed yet myself. I saw it, did a quick skim, and decided it wasn't bloggable, but I didn't think — like Marcotte — that my rejection of it was bloggable (i.e., tweetable). I'm going to read it in a minute, but I want to say that Marcotte comes off as privileged. I'm guessing that if the average age is 26, that includes a lot of very young women who are not spending their late teens and early 20s acquiring higher education and beginning career, that is, are not the sort of women who are reading NYT op-eds about timing their reproductive life. 

"He will obsessively listen to one song while working."

"He wrote one of his first plays to Leadbelly’s 'Ol’ Riley.' He listened to Bob Dylan’s 'Like a Rolling Stone' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' while writing 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,' and John Lennon’s 'Mother' while writing the play 'Jumpers.'... [Tom Stoppard thinks] that art arises from difficulty and talent. 'Skill without imagination,' one of his characters says, 'is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.'... His idea of a good death, he’s said, would be to have a bookshelf fall on him, killing him instantly, while reading."

From "'Tom Stoppard' Tells of an Enormous Life Spent in Constant Motion," a book review in the NYT.

We've all had the experience of listening to one song obsessively over and over, but under what circumstance? Probably not while trying to get some serious mental work done! We're talking about songs — with words — over and over. Imagine writing a play while Bob sings "Subterranean Homesick Blues" over and over. So annoying! Maybe it helps to set up a big obstacle, to cram out 90% of what would otherwise crowd into your head. 

When have you played one song over and over and why? When I was a teenager, I'd play one song over and over because it was a new song — a missive from the outside world — that I felt I needed to completely internalize. For example, "All You Need Is Love." As an adult, it was an old song that expressed an emotion I was experiencing and benefited from having the company and support. You could say that was an externalizing of what I was feeling. For example, "Fool to Cry."

But I really never want to hear someone else's words when I am trying to write. 

As for the "idea of a good death," would you like a song to be playing? Unless you're in one of those death-bed positions where you can manage the audio, it's likely to be an inappropriate song, perhaps something ironic about how full of life you are, like "I Will Survive."