Women are having a moment. At President Trump’s State of the Union address, Democratic women wore white as a nod to suffragists and female leadership, and Nancy Pelosi’s backclap went viral. At the 2019 Oscars, women of color made history, receiving an unprecedented number of awards, and Period. End of Sentence. (2018),a film about menstruation in rural India,won best …
Category Archives: Web Roundups
Web Roundup: Who Counts? Who’s Counting?
In March 2018, the Pew Research Center reported that the Justice department intended to include a new citizenship question on the 2020 US Census. This past November, a New York court took on the legality of the citizenship question following a suit by a number of plaintiffs, including 18 states. Plaintiffs argued that asking “are you a citizen?” would …
Web Roundup: Marketing, Masculinity, and Commodity Activism
On January 13th, Gillette, a razor blade brand, released a new ad campaign called, “We Believe.” The video ad opens with a collage of news clips that—unlike the voiceover narrator—explicitly use the words, “toxic masculinity” and “#MeToo movement.” The narrator then asks, “Is this the best a man can get?” In the short film, Gillette plays on their decades-old slogan…
Web Roundup: CRISPR Babies and Bioethics
In late November, He Jiankui, a scientist in China, announced that he had created the first “CRISPR babies,” meaning that he performed germ-line genome edits on human embryos, which were implanted through in vitro fertilization (IVF), and has now resulted the birth of twin girls. He used CRISPR-Cas9, a genome editing technology that can target DNA at precise …
Web Roundup: Trapped in the Tar Pit
Earlier this month, Atul Gawande, physician-author and new CEO of the yet-to-be defined health venture formed by JP Morgan, Berkshire Hathaway, and Amazon, published the long-form New Yorker article, “Why Doctors Hate their Computers.” The article describes rising rates of physician burnout attributed to poor work-life balance, long hours, and exorbitant amounts of time spent on chart review and data …
Web Roundup: Annals of Politics and Psychopathology
For those of us in the U.S. who read the Liberal News Media, September began with a bang that reverberated loudly, if anonymously, around the Internet. Well, the bang had a source, but the source of that source requested not to be identified. A few weeks ago, The New York Times published an Op-Ed essay written by a senior official …