Tag Archives: interview

What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

by RafaelaYFPY Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Bill Nye, the bow-tied erstwhile kids’ TV host, onetime dancer with the stars, and tireless champion of evolution and climate science, was never a virulent or wild-eyed critic of genetically modified crops. Back in 2005, he did a pretty nuanced episode of his TV show on it, the takeaway of which was hardly fire-breathing denunciation: “Let’s farm responsibly, let’s require labels on our foods, and let’s carefully test these foods case by case.”

In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, published just last November, Nye reiterated these points. His concern about GMOs centered mainly on unintended consequences of growing them over large expanses—he cited the example of crops engineered to resist herbicides, which have been linked pretty decisively to the decline of monarch butterflies, which rely on abundant milkweeds, which in turn have been largely wiped out in the Midwest by GMO-enabled herbicide use. Nye praised certain GMOs, such as corn engineered to repel certain insects, but concluded that “if you’re asking me, we should stop introducing genes from one species into another,” because “we just can’t know what will happen to other species in that modified species’ ecosystem.”

Now, Nye’s doubts have evidently fallen away like milkweeds under a fine mist of herbicide. In a February interview filmed backstage on Bill Maher’s HBO show (starting about 3:40 in the below video), Nye volunteered that he was working on a revision of the GMO section of Undeniable. He gave no details, just that he “went to Monsanto and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there.” As a result, he added with a grin, “I have revised my outlook, and am very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world!”

Monsanto’s longtime chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, responded to the interview with an approving tweet featuring a photo of Nye at company HQ:

It will be interesting to hear what wonders within Monsanto’s R&D labs turned Nye from a nuanced GMO skeptic to a proud champion.

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What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

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This Is What a Troll-Free Internet Feels Like

by Veola28Njffo Posted on February 19, 2015

Mother Jones

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Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Femsplain is what the site doesn’t yet have: haters.

“We haven’t received a single negative comment so far,” founder Amber Gordon told me. In fact, even the comments men have left on the website, which aims to be a safe and creative forum for anyone who identifies as female, have been positive and encouraging of Femsplain’s mission.

One man reached out to Gordon, for instance, about a personal essay titled “Voluntary Interruptions,” which had encouraged readers to move away from labeling abortions as taboo. “He couldn’t understand why his sister had an abortion—him being pro-life,” Gordon recalls. “After reading this story and all the pain another woman went through, he told me he reached out to his sister, whom he hadn’t spoken to in a while, to talk about what she went through. He thanked us for making him feel welcome.”

“We are trying to create a community off Twitter,” Gordon explained. “Come to us when the world is garbage, and you can connect with similar people and do things better.” Given the unrelentingly hostile internet climate, the absence of hateful comments on a female-centric website qualifies as a temporary victory, at least, for women fed up with online harassment.

Mandi Harris wrote an essay for Femsplain about her health issues.

While last week’s frank admission from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo that he and the company “suck at abuse” may indicate that a solution to trolls is at the very least being considered, Femsplain’s fast rise in popularity—just a few months old, the site is getting more than 10,000 views weekly—suggests that women are craving more than a technological fix: They want an open community in which conversations about women can be reshaped.

Gordon’s quest to fill that void began this past October. She and three friends who met through Twitter had hoped to turn their own group text conversations into a blog called “Sad Drunk Girls.” They never followed through on it, but the idea persisted for Gordon. She coded a website with the notion that it would be a platform for themed content written largely by women. She and another friend came up with the name Femsplain.

“It’s a play on mansplain,” Gordon says. “Our goal was to reshape the way in which women are discussed, and take a word with a negative meaning into our own by redefining it and the conversation.”

Each month, Gordon and a small roster of editors put out a call for content pertaining to a broad theme such as, say, “firsts” or “desires,” and then act as curators of submissions that include everything from personal essays on sexuality and domestic violence to audio recordings about one’s first real makeout session. For December’s “Secrets & Secrecy” theme, Gordon penned her own article in which she came out as a lesbian to her friends and family. The overwhelmingly supportive comments her post received, she says, underscored “exactly why we’re doing this.”

The fledgling website already boasts a steady stable of writers and a growing audience—not to mention praise from some prominent feminists and celebs:

But Gordon has bigger ambitions. She recently left her job at Tumblr to work on Femsplain full-time. Earlier this month, she launched a Kickstarter to expand the site, finance a redesign, and pay her contributors. “We believe the content is so good, and it’s important work,” she says. “People are taking the time out of their lives to write for us and we want to compensate them.”

For the moment, Femsplain is a refreshing glimpse of what a hate-free internet could look like. But as it becomes better known, it’s pretty much inevitable that the trolls will come calling.

Gordon says the redesign will address this through a user registration system in which non-contributors will have to be a member for a certain number of days, and agree to the site’s terms of conduct, before they are allowed to post comment. “Ideally, in the future, I want to hire someone whose job is to keep our community safe,” Gordon says. “For now, we’ll block the trolls by hand.”

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This Is What a Troll-Free Internet Feels Like

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The Singer of "Love Shack" Is Back With an Upbeat Solo Album

by AudreaOsvsifkns Posted on February 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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The B-52s have kept their glittery, campy party vibe going for nearly four decades, from early jams like “Rock Lobster,” through later hits like “Love Shack,” right up to 2008 with the release of their well-received album Funplex. With retro outfits, beehive hairdos, and funky dance moves, they made the thrift-store esthetic cool before Macklemore was even born. But while the band continues to perform live, founding member Keith Strickland announced in 2012 he would stop touring and no new music appears to be on the horizon.

Kate Pierson

Yet Kate Pierson, the band’s bassist, keyboard player, and singer, shows no signs of slowing down. This month, at age 66, she’ll release her first solo album, Guitars and Microphones. It pulses with energy and spunk powered by Pierson’s towering vocals and melodies from the enigmatic pop artist Sia, who produced the album.

“Sia and I were laughing all the time,” said Pierson about making the album. “It was a real fun process, light-hearted, it was magical.”

Pierson spoke with me about her new project from her snowed-in house in Woodstock, New York, where, when not on the road, she leads a quiet life with her partner Monica Coleman and their dogs. We covered the excitement and exhaustion of touring, ageism in rock and roll, Glee‘s rendition of “Rock Lobster,” and the trans community’s reaction to her new song “Mister Sister.”

Continue Reading »

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The Singer of "Love Shack" Is Back With an Upbeat Solo Album

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Chris Christie: Parents Should Have "Choice" on Vaccines

by EdwinFortin Posted on February 2, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update, February 2, 2015, 12:20 p.m.: In 2009, Christie wrote a letter in which he appeared to support the theory that autism may be linked to vaccinations. An excerpt from the letter, provided to MSNBC, below:

“I have met with families affected by autism from across the state and have been struck by their incredible grace and courage. Many of these families have expressed their concern over New Jersey’s highest-in-the nation vaccine mandates. I stand with them now, and will stand with them as their governor in their fight for greater parental involvement in vaccination decisions that affect their children.”

Update, February 2, 2015, 10:30 a.m.: Gov. Christie’s office released a statement amending his previous comments to reporters, saying there is “no question kids should be vaccinated.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called for a “balanced” approach to childhood vaccinations, telling reporters on Monday that it’s important to provide parents a “measure of choice” in their decisions.

“Mary Pat and I have had our children vaccinated and we think that it’s an important part of being sure we protect their health and the public health,” Christie said during a press conference in Cambridge, England, where he is traveling on a trade mission. “I also understand that parents need to have some measure of choice in things as well, so that’s the balance that the government has to decide.”

“Not every vaccine is created equal and not every type of disease is as great a public health threat as others,” he added.

Christie’s comments come a day after President Obama urged parents to vaccinate their children in the midst of a widening measles outbreak that started in Disneyland. The highly contagious disease has since spread to 14 states with at least 102 cases reported, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“I understand that there are families that, in some cases, are concerned about the effect of vaccinations,” Obama said in an interview with NBC Sunday. “The science is, you know, pretty indisputable. We’ve looked at this again and again. There is every reason to get vaccinated, but there aren’t reasons to not.”

The rise in parents who choose not to have their children fully immunized has been cited as one reason for a growing number of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks in recent years.

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Chris Christie: Parents Should Have "Choice" on Vaccines

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Is There Any Relief in Sight for Our Overtested Kids?

by ChanelChavarria Posted on January 13, 2015

Mother Jones

On the second day of school, instead of playing get-to-know you icebreakers, the students in Room 202 were hunched over worn test booklets filling in bubbles in Scantron sheets. At the time, Michigan, where I taught fifth grade Language Arts and Social Studies from 2010 through 2013, administered its annual tests in October. In a desperate attempt to raise its scores, the underperforming school where I worked announced that September would be dedicated solely to test preparation. What made this mandate unusual was the way it was enforced: Fearing dissent, the superintendent decreed that students would return to their homerooms from the prior year, pretty much stepping back a grade, for the first month.

If you’re contemplating ways to suck the spirit out of a school, this is an effective one. Studies have shown the importance of the first few weeks of school for fostering relationships and building motivation in children. Instead, we were forced to take a route that was sterile and demoralizing—a school-wide lobotomy, if you will. Each morning my former students would trundle into my classroom to submit to an onslaught of questions whose responses were restrained to an A,B,C,D paradigm that rewarded compliance and rote memorization at the expense of creativity and critical thinking.

“This is wack!” Ashton, a chubby sixth grader with a habit of speaking out of turn declared amid one of our many drills. “Ms. Gross, this question doesn’t even make sense!” After hushing his giggling classmates and reminding everyone that they only had two more minutes before “pencils down,” I looked over the contentious question. Ashton was right. Depending on how you interpreted it, there were at least two potential right answers, but only one that would work-work. Smiling, I told Ashton to try and pick the one that made the most sense to him. Instead of complimenting this 11-year old on his ability to think analytically, I gave him ambiguous, impersonal feedback—which at the time felt like the only appropriate response to a question about an ambiguous, impersonal test.

So who’s to blame for this scenario—or any of the countless frustrating testing scenarios a teacher could tell you about? Select the best answer and fill in the appropriate bubble with a No. 2 pencil. (Even though many state tests are now administered by computer.)

A. Administrators and staff who neglect children’s learning needs in favor of a “teach to the test” approach?

B. Testing companies that create confusing multiple-choice questions and have a financial stake in maintaining the testing status quo?

C. The states, which spend an average of $27 per student on testing—which encourages a fast-food approach to learning: a cheap and not necessarily satisfying or informative experience?

D. George W. Bush’s 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, which ushered in an era of high-stakes testing by holding schools to the awesome but unrealistic expectation that all students would be 100 percent proficient in math and English by 2014, and then holding schools accountable by tying Title I federal funding to test scores?

E. President Obama waivers that release states from the strict restrictions of NCLB’s Adequate Yearly Progress goals but which do ask states to tie teacher evaluations to test scores?

F. The recently introduced Common Core State Standards, which attempt to create more rigorous academic benchmarks but also come with new, harder and longer mandatory exams.

G. All the above.

While the answer is technically G, it also cannot be boiled down to seven multiple choice options—let alone four. America’s testing zeitgeist is complicated and nuanced and, like any thoughtful assessment, requires a complete unpacking with space for overlaps and contradictions.

That’s where The Test, the latest book by NPR education blogger Anya Kamenetz, comes in. Kamenetz does the heavy lifting for us, deftly deconstructing America’s education landscape and the perverse incentives that amplify our obsession with assessments. In the first half of the book, she gets readers up to speed, breaking down the history and policies that led to our current predicament. In the second, she offers solutions for parents and teachers who want to stay above the fray. “I think it’s important for parents to realize that their kids don’t have to take all the tests, and there are a lot of tests that you can sit out without many consequences,” she told me.

Anya Kamenetz

Kamenetz is quick to point out that she’s not against accountability or metrics. Rather, she’s interested in improving the ways we hold schools and teachers accountable—specifically by being more critical, humble, and curious when it comes to evaluating how we test, the data we collect, and how we use it. “Big data is very popular,” she says. “People like the idea of making objective decisions that are data-driven, but if you’re going to put so much emphasis on data, you have to be sure that the data you’re choosing is good. And you have to be very clear about admitting its limitations…The psychometricians, the people that build these tests, are really great scientists, some of them, and they didn’t mean for the tests to be attached to all these consequences.”

By digging in with the individuals who create the tests and the testing policies, Kamentez manages to humanize a subject that’s dry and wonky by nature. We’re reminded, for example, that the architects of No Child Left Behind had good intentions. Indeed, it’s easy to forget the bipartisan support the policy garnered early on because of its goal of decreasing the achievement gap between black and white students. Asking states to break down test data by subgroups such as race was intended to make it harder for struggling kids to fall through the cracks.

“This was a way of saying we care about their performance and we’re not going to hide it behind the average for a school,” Kamenetz says. “This country has high levels of inequality, persistent levels of poverty, and a really painful racial past that is at the forefront of lot of people’s minds right now. The promise that we could address those problems by improving educational services, that somehow whatever happens between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on a school day is going to erase the legacy of poverty, the legacy of racism in this country—that is something that is very seductive to a really wide range of people.”

Alas, as I witnessed with Ashton and his peers in Room 202, good intentions can be distorted. Because test scores can result in grown-up consequences like school closures, layoffs and budget cuts, my students were forced to sit through ‘teach-to-the-test’ styled lectures and forgo the excitement of a new school year. And it’s not just schedules that are getting reshuffled in the name of the tests, budgets are being reworked as well. At my school, students had to take additional district assessments three times a year, and since there weren’t enough computers, the middle-school kids were bused to a nearby computer center at a cost of $17,900—money that could have been put toward an arts program or a part-time social worker. It’s just a small illustration of how a test-centric model can skew priorities and lead to kids missing out or even still slipping through the cracks.

The Test couldn’t be coming out at a more critical time for public education. The book’s release was originally pegged to the fact that 44 states will be taking Common Core-aligned “accountability tests” this spring. (These more-rigorous new exams are expected to result in proficiency drops that have been dubbed the “Common Core Cliff.”) But the bigger news is that Congress is looking to reauthorize No Child Left Behind and loosen some of its restrictions—it could, for example, eliminate the mandatory state testing requirement at the crux of the 2001 policy. How this will fit in with Common Core is anyone’s guess, but mere talk of such a bill is already reviving debate around testing and accountability.

While it’s difficult at this point to imagine a world without standardized tests—even people who decry overtesting tend to use poor test scores as evidence of why teaching to the test is ineffective (talk about meta)—Kamenetz points to her 2010 book, DIY U, which looks at the rapid transformation of higher education. “One of the reasons I feel hopeful is the enormous amount of attention that’s starting to be given to what are called social and emotional skills or mindsets, what I call ‘Team Monkey’ in the book,” she told me. “It sometimes seems in education, especially K-12, that nothing ever really changes because we are still having the same debates that were having 150 years ago about poor kids, about opportunity and all these types of things, but things can change pretty quickly.”

How, in a mere 30 years, we became a nation obsessed with standardized tests could be a good example of that.

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Is There Any Relief in Sight for Our Overtested Kids?

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40 Great Quotes From 40 Great Interviews

by 0c4g78x Posted on December 29, 2014

Mother Jones

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Wow, looking back, we’ve had the privilege of talking to some really talented and interesting people this past year. This is just a fraction, actually. I didn’t want to overwhelm you. But no matter your interests, you’re bound to find something below that’s up your alley.

On Feminism

“It’s really cool that Miley Cyrus said she’s the biggest feminist ever. I was like, ‘That’s the sound of 200,000 eight-year-olds Googling the word “feminist!'” —Riot Grrrl icon Kathleen Hannah, now back on stage with her latest band, The Julie Ruin

On Preparedness

“If you want to read anything nasty about me, just go to the backpacker websites. I mean, lots of outdoor people love Wild, but there’s this kind of elitist branch where they really believe that I had no business going backpacking. I get blamed: “Oh, Cheryl Strayed, it’s her fault if somebody needs to be rescued.” First of all, things have gone awry in the wilderness well before Wild was ever published. But I actually don’t have any fear of people reading Wild and going out unprepared. Because one of the best things that ever happened to me was that I went out unprepared.” —Author Cheryl Strayed, whose memoir is now a film starring Reese Witherspoon

On Rock and Roll

“Before I leave this world, if I can create something that’s timeless and museum quality, then it will have all been worth it. And if I don’t? It would have still all been worth it.” —Country music luminary Rodney Crowell

“It’s a lesson that I learned in Toronto when I was a kid and played guitar on sessions. The studio people were forever rummaging through closets, fishing out equipment. Hours would go by, people would be in the game room playing pinball while some other guy hit the snare for hours on end. I said to myself, “Is this what rock ‘n’ roll is about? The Ramones walk in the door and they’re going to play pinball? No way! I want the Ramones walking in and rocking out!” —Daniel Lanois, producer of iconic albums by U2, Bob Dylan, and Peter Gabriel

“Whereas my friends might listen to the songs, I would spend hours looking at the liner notes and figuring out who did what and listen to the productions. I don’t think other kids would listen and think, ‘Oh, that’s an interesting bass sound.’ Whenever I was sick at home my dad would bring me a vinyl record. I remember getting David Bowie’s Station to Station when I had the flu.” —Singer/songwriter Jill Sobule

“I really see the rock movement as the revolution that happens in the aftermath of destruction. It’s the thing that people don’t talk about. Media always talks about war, but nobody really talks about the day after, and the year after, and the five years after—what it means to rebuild. It’s that hidden story that’s less sensationalist, and less sexy. It’s much more complex, and much more human. You are confronted with your own inadequacies when you start thinking about the difficult things, the work of what it is to be human.” —Jeremy Xido, director of the documentary Death Metal Angola

On Being Young and Gay

“I knew when I was signed, at the age of 23, in Hollywood, at a huge studio, that the fact that I was openly writing about my homosexual lifestyle and that I presented myself as an out gay man was very, very unusual…People tried to persuade me to hide it and be a little more mysterious. But I didn’t want to hear any of that.” —Songwriter Rufus Wainwright

“My first crush, as early as age 5, was Gadget the Mouse from Chip ‘n Dale Rescue Rangers. It didn’t bother me that she was animated, or a mouse. It bothered me that she was female. I had these inclinations, and was really terrified by them.” —Sara Farizan, whose gay-themed YA novels have been an unexpected hit

On Sexism in Art, Science, and Technology

“I don’t read the comments anymore, unless they are moderated. Which is not to say censored, but I don’t need to read someone saying, “You’re ugly.” Nasty emails I delete. I read them, and of course it hurts. I’m human, and I allow myself to feel that hurt. But I also try to keep it in its proper place. This is not someone who deserves my time. They don’t deserve my pain. I try to remember that.” —Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist, on dealing with the inevitable trolls

“Shit’s tough for girls…I wish I understood it better. Because I see it, and I have friends that suffer from it. And I worked with Kari Byron for 11 years, and I’ve watched the evolution of the terrible shit Kari’s had to deal with as a public figure and a woman and a science communicator.” —Mythbusters star Adam Savage on sexism in science and tech

“What I also found really odd, when I was criticizing Eminem for being misogynistic, is how few people came to my defense. I’m not trying to look for pity or sympathy. I was just surprised that so many people in the world of entertainment seemed to be okay with misogyny and homophobia as long as they were profiting from it.” —Musician Moby, on his public feuding with Eminem

“There’s no rap against comics that isn’t true. They were sexist, they were racist, you name it—and they kind of gloried in that. If someone attacked them, back in the time I was growing up reading comics in the ’40s and the ’50s, the purveyors would look at you not knowing what the hell you were talking about. This is just what they did: ‘What’s wrong with this?'” —Jules Feiffer, who released his first graphic novel this year at age 85

On #Gamergate

“You hear a lot of this. ‘Why are you dragging real-life politics into cyberspace? I go to gaming to get away from real-life issues.’ For a lot of geeks, gaming is all about stripping who you are completely and entering this imaginary space, this world that’s made for you, where winning and losing have nothing to do with real life. They try to argue that representation in games has not been an issue because nobody is really themselves in a game; it’s all just avatars. They’re not seeing the many ways in which that’s not true.” —Jeopardy champ Arthur Chu

On Race

“I’m not walking around feeling black all the time. That would stress me out. It would make me crack. Some days I do feel that pressure of, “What do I mean as a black woman? What am I representing?” It honestly just gives me anxiety.” —Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams

“It’s so easy to hate something you don’t know. What’s harder is to actually scratch the surface.” —Journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is making a documentary about the experience of young whites in America

On Fame

My husband “doesn’t give a shit about all the VIP. We’re going to the Glastonbury Festival this weekend, and I was like, ‘Someone’s given us a hotel if we want it,’ and he’s like, ‘Why the fuck would we have a hotel? It’s Glastonbury! We’ve camped since we were 20.’ And there’s the Jewish princess in me being like, “Please say yes to the hotel. Please say yes to the hotel.” —British popstar Jessie Ware

On Environmental Mayhem

“The BP spill happened, and then nothing happened. I hope the film can address why nothing happened, and I think a lot of that is Congress. But also that, the minute it got off the news, people stopped thinking about. It seemed like, ‘Okay, they capped it. It’s gone.’ But actually, there are no new safety regulations. It’s not gone. —Filmmaker Margaret Brown, whose documentary The Great Invisible tells the inside story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster

“I’m not an activist, but as a comedian, some of how it is talked about is incredibly funny to me. The stridency, and the intense comfort with a lack of scientific information, is ludicrous—it’s objectively ludicrous…This world will be a complete ball of fire before it stops being funny.” —Comedian John Oliver, on climate change

“If you’re asking in the abstract, ‘What could you do to really mess up a lot of species?’ it would be hard to design a better system than the one we’ve got. Practically everything is on the move now, in some way, because of climate change. And they’re going to run up against all these man-made barriers. We’ve completely changed the rules of the game.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, author of The Sixth Extinction

On Technological Change

“One of the things I loved about the series Deadwood was that sense of just how deadly clever people in the 19th century probably really were. If those guys got out of the time machine now in downtown Los Angeles, they wouldn’t be hopeless hicks. They’d be very dangerous characters, simply because they were. And the people in my 22nd century initially assume that anyone they’re dealing with back in 2025 or whenever is just kind of a hick.” —Author William Gibson on his latest novel, The Peripheral

“The problem with social media is that people respond therapeutically. It is therapeutic to hit back against your enemies, but it is not necessarily strategically wise. McDonalds and JPMorgan opened up Twitter conversations that were taken over instantly by their detractors. People in my industry would like people to believe we have ways to control it. But that’s one of the great swindles.” —Corporate crisis-management guru Eric Dezenhall

On Politics and Politicians

“It became obvious that there were really funny characteristics about this guy, chief of which would be that he seemed to devote about 85 percent of his waking energy to suppressing any sign of his emotional response to anything that was going on around him, and the other 15 percent blurting out those authentic responses in the silliest and most inopportune ways. And he had these smiles that would come at the most inappropriate times—just flashes that there was an inner life screaming to get out. —Actor Harry Shearer on portraying Richard Nixon

I can’t say I follow the ins and outs of electoral politics closely, but I tend to think having an impact on the world is a lot more complicated than government. If I were to point to the person who’s having the greatest impact, I wouldn’t be naming that many government officials. I’d point to, for example, Elon Musk. —Actor Joseph-Levitt

On Scrabble

“The last time I attempted Scrabble with an interviewer, I accidentally stole 12 tiles from the Bryant Park public Scrabble set.” —The Magnetic Fields’ Stephin Merritt on his recent book, 101 Two-Letter Words, illustrated by Roz Chast (see below)

On Professional Sports

“Short shorts are not for everybody. I’m not trying to wear capris, but I got a lot of leg. I need to cover it up a little bit. They want more male attendance, and for us to change our uniforms to “sleek and sexy” takes away from what we’re trying to do on the court. I want you to come watch my game, not the uniforms. If you wanna come just because we look sexy, then I really don’t want you there.” —WNBA star Britney Griner

“The NFL is a culture that values secrecy. When you’re with an NFL team, the message to you is clear: Don’t fuck anything up for your partner, and don’t fuck anything up for the team. Don’t be controversial. Don’t talk to the media. Stay out of the way. Support the player and be quiet.” —Tracy Treu, a former NFL wife, on the league’s domestic violence problems

On Crime and Punishment

“When you hear about a case—even if you’ve attended a trial—there’s a story presented which is a kind of agreed-upon narrative that each side brings…The thing that hooked me is realizing that the story they’re telling at trial is just one layer that’s just sitting on top of this whole super-interesting ocean that we don’t ever get to hear about.” —This American Life producer Sarah Koenig, speaking shortly before the premiere of Serial, her wildly popular podcast

“What really interested me was the moral divide in all of us: In trying to do the right thing, where’s the line you cross? At what point have you gone irrevocably into moral hazard? Every character in our show, practically, crosses that line.” —Scandal star Tony Goldwyn on creating The Divide, a new drama about the death penalty

On Shooting a Film Over 12 Years

“It’s such a crazy, wildly impractical idea. The logistics were tough enough that we didn’t even talk about doomsday scenarios. We’re all just a phone call away from our lives changing pretty enormously, so you kind of play the odds. I remember saying to Patricia Arquette, ‘Where are you going to be 12 years from now, just theoretically?’ It wasn’t hard to convince an adult to jump in. A kid, they’re not even aware what they’re getting into.” —Richard Linklater, director of Boyhood

“Rick made a conscious decision to not have Mason do anything I hadn’t already done. Looking back, I now see that he would feel it out and see, like, ‘Is he still a virgin? Has he gotten drunk yet? Has he done drugs?’ And then he would throw those things in.” —Actor Ellar Coltrane, who was six years old when Linklater cast him as his lead

On Gun Rights

“When you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the Second amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias…Every adult man, and eventually every adult white man, was required to be in the militias and was required to own a gun, and to bring it from home. So it was an individual right to fulfill the duty to serve in the militias.” —Michael Waldman, author of The Second Amendment: A Biography

On Being a Zombie

“I get email after email, and I get stopped on the street—which is sort of astounding, considering I’m not an on-camera guy. People will come up and go, ‘How do I get to be a zombie on The Walking Dead?’ They don’t think about the fact that it’s 120 degrees outside, and you’re going to be sitting in a makeup chair for an hour and a half, and you’re going to be sticky and hot, and you’re going to work all day, and then at the end of the day we’ve got to use all the remover. It sounds more glamorous than it is.” —Makeup effects guru Greg Nicotero

On Improvisational Performance

“I think about the audience. I just want to make sure they’re having a good time. I don’t want them to think that I’m just going off and not giving a fuck about them. Laughs. So there’s that.” —Weirdo comedian and musician Reggie Watts

On Dealing With Aging Parents

“You didn’t throw away jar lids or Band-Aid boxes. There was a drawer of those amber plastic vials, what pills come in—you might need them for, I don’t know, three cotton balls or something. It was borderline hoarding.” —Cartoonist Roz Chast, author of the memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?

On Pulitzer Prizes

“I was teaching in Uvalde, Texas, the day I won. I gave six speeches that day. My friend Susan Freudenheim told me I had won the prize. I was too busy to have much of a reaction to it. I once owned a collection of 77 novels that won the Pulitzer. The only good novel of the bunch was The Grapes of Wrath.” —Lonesome Dove author Larry McMurtry, whose latest novel is titled The Last Kind Words Saloon

On War

“I saw Donald Rumsfeld selling a book of leadership tips on Meet the Press and the Today Show, and I was like, ‘How is this possible?’ I understand why anti-war folk don’t like Rumsfeld, but if you were pro-war you really shouldn’t like him, because he messed it up and invalidated your whole worldview.” —Phil Klay, Iraq War veteran and recent author of Redeployment

On Art

“What I’ve seen recently is the creative class finding a way, like the rest of the culture, to peddle in capitalist ventures of one kind or another so they can afford to be where they want to be, and it gets harder and harder and harder. The process of gentrification now takes about eight minutes.” —Artist Art Spiegelman, who published a major retrospective in 2014

On Personal Struggles

“Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer. And she had another boyfriend! Can you imagine the depths of self-rejection one would have to reach in order to have a relationship like that?” —Author Gary Shteyngart, whose recent memoir is titled Little Failure

“When I won my way to the international science fair, I didn’t want to embarrass myself. It was the first time I was going to be away from home, the first time taking an airplane. I went to the local library, checked out every single etiquette book, and I read those books like I was uncovering some sort of treasure. I committed every one of the rules to memory. When somebody puts down four forks on one side and four spoons on the other side, what does that mean? All of a sudden I knew what to do when the food dropped from the table and how to signal that you were finished and how to signal that you wanted coffee—all these little intricacies that just did not come into our lives because we were poor.” —New York Times columnist Charles Blow, whose recent memoir is titled Fire Shut Up In My Bones

On Teaching Science

“A TV show has to be entertainment first, education second. I spend a lot of time with Nobel laureates and a lot of rocket scientists. Being a good teacher is a completely different skill from being a good scientist.” —Bill Nye (the Science Guy)

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40 Great Quotes From 40 Great Interviews

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

by AthenaRucker Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all heard yesterday that Sony Pictures made a last-minute decision to release The Interview on Christmas after all, thanks to pleas from a couple hundred independent theaters that agreed at the last minute to defy Kim Jong-un and show it. So the honor of Western civilization is saved and everyone is happy. Right?

The film’s limited release drives a further wedge between Sony and the nation’s largest theater owners, who blame the studio for yanking away a potential hit. It was supposed to open on 3,000 screens before Sony and theater chains shelved the movie.

Theater owners are also upset that Sony is negotiating to release the movie simultaneously on a video-on-demand platform….“They could have a full theatrical release. Instead they have a token,” said one theater executive who asked not to be identified because it could harm his relationship with the studio.

Wait. What? I thought this whole fiasco had been driven in the first place by the refusal of big theater chains to show the movie amid fears of terrorist retaliation. So what are they all griping about?

The disagreement over a digital release played into larger tensions between Sony and theater owners after hackers last week threatened physical harm on moviegoers who saw “The Interview.”….Worried about a potential threat, Sony said it canceled the movie after large chains backed away from the film.

But theater owners have been pointing the finger at the studio for originally giving them the OK to not run the film amid the threats. Then Sony blamed the nation’s four big theater chains for forcing the studio to cancel the original release….Representatives of Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike declined to comment on the matter.

OK, I guess I’m officially confused. Did Sony cancel the Christmas release date of The Interview because malls and theater chains were desperate to back out of showing it? Or did malls and theater chains back out because Sony had implicitly urged them to do so when it gave the chains permission to break their contractual commitments to show the movie? Or are both sides now just furiously trying to shift blame after being called out for cowardice by everyone from George Clooney to President Obama?

The latter, I suppose. In any case, now I know what I want for Christmas: A country that doesn’t spin into a damn tizzy over every little thing. From Ebola to ISIS to the Sony hack, you’d think we were all at risk of losing our lives to outside forces every time we step off our front porches. In the immortal words of Aaron Rodgers, can we all please R-E-L-A-X?

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

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Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

by RolandoRoland Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Actor and activist Sean Penn, no surprise, has some thoughts about the Sony hacking and the movie studio’s decision to pull The Interview after cyber-saboteurs linked (by the FBI) to North Korea threatened moviegoers and theaters. Here’s a statement Penn sent me:

It’s not the first time culture has been threatened by foreign interests and corporate caution. See then Disney CEO Michael Eisner’s interview with Charlie Rose in 1997, when Disney was dealing with pressure from China about Martin Scorcese’s Tibet film, Kundun. Eisner said, “we do not take, as a company, a position either in human rights or not in human rights. We are a movie company. We’re an entertainment company.” That was a pretty shocking statement. (Disney, which was looking to expand its ventures in China, did end up distributing the film, but distribution was limited and the advertising budget was low—and despite these concessions, Disney was largely frozen out of the Chinese markets for years.) This week, the distributors who wouldn’t show The Interview and Sony have sent ISIS a commanding invitation. I believe ISIS will accept the invitation. Pandora’s box is officially open.

The damage we do to ourselves typically outweighs the harm caused by outside threats or actions. Then by caving to the outside threat, we make our nightmares real. The decision to pull The Interview is historic. It’s a case of putting short term interests ahead of the long term. If we don’t get the world on board to see that this is a game changer, if this hacking doesn’t frighten the Chinese and the Russians, we’re in for a very different world, a very different country, community, and a very different culture.

I’m not sure the world has come to terms with all the implications of the hacking. I was in Liberia and Sierra Leone right at the beginning of the Ebola outbreak in April. It did seem to those of us there that the response was neither coming swiftly or with a true sense of urgency. This feels the same. This matter should be before the UN Security Council today.

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Sean Penn on Sony Pulling "The Interview": This Sends ISIS an "Invitation"

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How Science Can Tell If Your Great-Grandparents Were Strikebreakers

by QuyenLabonte Posted on December 5, 2014

Mother Jones

An 1832 engraving of Newcastle William Miller/Wikimedia Commons

Geneticist Stephen Leslie kept coming back to a handful of data points that seemed out of place on his genetic map of Britain. “It was driving me absolutely insane,” he’s quoted as saying in Christine Kenneally’s new book, The Invisible History of the Human Race. No matter how many times he re-ran the analysis, double-checking the data and his code, the anomaly wouldn’t budge. So he figured that if his finding was true, there must be some logical explanation.

Some of the most important discoveries in science and technology have grown out of persistent and puzzling observations. Like when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered the first evidence of the Big Bang while mapping radio signals from the Milky Way. At first they thought it was interference from urban Manhattan, or maybe from pigeon poop. But eventually they realized that the annoying noise was in fact the signal that the beginning of the universe left behind: cosmic background radiation. And so they won the Nobel Prize. Or when Pfizer developed a little blue pill to treat chest pain, whose surprising side effect is responsible for much of the spam in your inbox.

In Leslie’s case, the anomaly was the finding that an individual living near the English city of Newcastle had eight great-grandparents who were all from the faraway county of Devon. On a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, Kenneally explained why this was so strange—and what it might tell us about the history of England.

When scientists are trying to figure out the genetic basis of a disease, they need to know what else differentiates people who have the illness from those who don’t. That way, they can tell which DNA variations might be related to the disease and which ones are entirely irrelevant to that disease. So if a particular genetic signature is associated with a specific population, that information can be help researchers rule out aspects of genetic variation that have nothing to do with the illness in question. Characterizing this regional genetic map is one of the main goals of Leslie’s work.

Kenneally’s book tracks the ways in which this sort of data can also be used to illuminate history, and she describes the methods that Leslie and his colleagues used to map out genetic variation in large populations. Specifically, the scientists collected and analyzed blood samples from a population of about 4,500 people living in rural Britain. To be a part of the study, participants had to have four grandparents who who were all born near each other. These blood samples were then entered into a genome-wide association analysis. That means that instead of looking for a handful of “candidate genes”—the way many genetic studies had done in the past, with little success—the scientists employed a new method that allowed them to simultaneously compare tens of thousands of sites on the genomes of thousands of people. Using this analysis, they were then able to identify parts of the genome that characterize people from specific places.

To learn more about this “People of the British Isles” study, you can watch this short video:

The research produced some remarkable results, revealing that groups of people from specific parts of Britain had unique genetic markers. “They isolated at least 20 different groups,” explains Kenneally. “And one of the first things that this tells us is that people lived in those areas for a very, very long time—way back to 1,000 or 2,000 years ago. The local villagers were marrying each other; their children grew up, they married the girl next door, the boy next door.” This fact was borne out by the rest of Leslie’s dataset: Most people in the study shared similar DNA with their closest neighbors.

It’s important to understand that the regional differences identified in the study were minor. “All these people the entire sample, that is are almost entirely, exactly genetically the same, and these differences are extremely subtle, and they probably have no impact whatsoever on people’s health or traits or anything like that,” says Kenneally. “But they’re these tastes or flavors in the genome that tell us a little bit about the past.”

So what was it that drove Leslie nuts as he stared at his data?

“Once they had sorted Great Britain out into all these neat little groups, there was someone in Newcastle who looked like they shouldn’t be there,” says Kenneally. This person was born near Newcastle and had four grandparents who were also born in the area. But the individual in question had DNA that looked a lot like the the patterns found in people who were from Devon, 400 miles to the south. Indeed, the genetic data seemed to suggest that back in the 1800s, all eight of this person’s great-grandparents had migrated to the region from the same part of Devon. For some reason, these people had all intermarried, and their descendants had too—instead of marrying the locals, as would be expected.

“This just seemed really implausible,” explains Kenneally. There wasn’t an obvious cultural reason why the ancestors of the migrants from Devon would remain so isolated, with even the next generation intermarrying rather than mixing with the locals. After all, they weren’t ethnically or religiously distinct from most other residents of Newcastle. “If they were a religious group—if they were Catholics, or if they were Jewish people—it might perhaps make sense that…they would have continued to marry within their group.” But there was nothing special about those Devonians. “No offense to Devonians; it’s just that there was nothing binding them together,” adds Kenneally. “So, Leslie ran and re-ran his analysis over and over again. It was absolutely driving him mad.”

When science failed to provide the solution to the puzzle, Leslie turned to the ultimate source of information: the internet. Searching genealogical websites, he found an important historic connection between Devon and Newcastle: In the 1800s, both places relied heavily on the mining industry. In 1830, Newcastle’s miners formed a union, and the following year, they went on strike. The Great Strike of 1831 was a massive victory for the miners. But a year later, the owners of the mine brought in workers from other parts of Britain, including Devon, and starved the locals into submission. The union soon collapsed, and the mine owners began to systematically lower wages. Other strikes would follow in the years to come. The situation left the locals angry and bitter—and much of that anger was no doubt directed at the out-of-town miners and their families.

“These people were strikebreakers,” says Kenneally. “So they would’ve been really isolated from their new communities. People would not have wanted to talk with them, let alone to marry them and have children with them.” And that’s one likely solution to Leslie’s genetic mystery: The eight transplants from Devon—along with their descendants—may have been ostracized by the locals.

Leslie’s analysis demonstrates just how powerful genetic data can be. “In these tiny gaps where we’re different, where you have a few markers here and there, or maybe a few hundred or thousand markers here and there,” says Kenneally, “those markers can tell us something about not just our health, not just our individual traits, but the history of the human race as well.”

Update: Our interview with Kenneally was the second in a three-part series focusing on DNA and what makes us human. You can click below to listen to this week’s show, in which Cynthia Graber interviews Donald Johanson about our evolutionary origins. Johanson was part of the team that discovered the fossil Lucy 40 years ago; at that time, Lucy was humans’ oldest ancestral remnant who walked upright.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. We are also available on Stitcher. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook. Inquiring Minds was also singled out as one of the “Best of 2013” on iTunes—you can learn more here.

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How Science Can Tell If Your Great-Grandparents Were Strikebreakers

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Chris Rock: "My Children Are Encountering the Nicest White People That America Has Ever Produced"

by yq7izr Posted on December 1, 2014

Mother Jones

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New York Magazine’s Frank Rich has an incredible interview with Chris Rock, in which the comedian discusses everything from what’s happened in Ferguson, his new film Top Five, to Bill Cosby’s tarnished legacy. It’s an eye-opening conversation wholly worth reading for every detail.

But Rock’s most compelling meditations might be found in his deeply personal descriptions of what it’s like to raise two daughters under the country’s first black president, while wrestling with complex notions of what real racial progress in America means to different people.

On his two daughters, Lola and Zahra:

I mean, I almost cry every day. I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: Did anything happen today? Did anybody say anything? They look at me like I am crazy.

How Lola and Zahra view the current First Family:

…You’ve got to remember, they’re so young. Zahra was 4 when Obama was nominated. So as far as they’re concerned, there have always been little black girls in the White House.

On kids and racial progress:

It’s partly generational, but it’s also my kids grew up not only with a black president but with a black secretary of State, a black joint chief of staff, a black attorney general. My children are going to be the first black children in the history of America to actually have the benefit of the doubt of just being moral, intelligent people.

How his daughters are growing up with the “nicest white people that America has ever produced:”

So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years…The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Read the interview in its entirety over at Vulture.

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Chris Rock: "My Children Are Encountering the Nicest White People That America Has Ever Produced"

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