Kellen Fujimoto

[kellenblogs]

First impressions of iOS 7

This is a bullet-points-with-minor-exposition post of my initial thoughts of iOS 7, after my first day or so with it.

Aesthetics: I like the overall appearance overhaul in this version of iOS. I would've preferred the ultralight flavor of Helvetica Neue, but I can see the greater appeal of light. Everything looks crisp and uses space efficiently; I suppose cranking down the text size all the way helped in that regard.

I like the opacity and blur effect with Notification Center and Control Center. The ubiquity of these effects can be a bit much at times, but I'll take it over linen any day. Given my choice of wallpaper, it gives a happy orange glow to my lock screen, even when I have music playing. I'm not a fan of the parallax effect, but it isn't distracting.

Lock Screen: The lock screen hasn't changed too much, but I do have several problems with the changes that were made. I'm not a fan of “swipe anywhere to unlock” as I can see many people without passcodes accidentally activating things via pocket. I also dislike having media controls immediately available when the screen wakes, as I can see it happening when my device is still in my pocket; to be fair, I haven't checked to see of the controls are visible when the screen wakes via notification. The code entry view is very pleasant, and I love how big the buttons have become.

Springboard: Springboard hasn't changed too much, but the implementation of nesting is abysmal now. Blowing-away all surrounding context while in the folder is so unnecessary, not to mention the jarring effect of losing a row when the contents balloon forth in a superfluous animation. They're so bad, I have gone to great lengths to eliminate nesting from my screens. I'd rather swipe—even multiple times—than deal with being zoomed around my apps.

It may seem a particularly niggling detail, but the dock is so ugly now: bland, staid, and disengaging.

Power consumption: I've noticed a marked increase in power consumption after upgrading to iOS 7, when connected to wifi. When I'm not connected to a network, I get the same performance that I did in iOS 6. I can only assume that the new backgrounding APIs are sucking extra power, which makes sense. Hopefully this is a Region of Pain problem, not inherent in the new features.

Performance: iOS 7 is laggier than iOS 6. I'm running a 5th generation iPod Touch, and the operating system is definitely choppier than the previous version was. The animations themselves are smooth as glass, but it seems that memory management isn't tuned well yet. I hope that's the problem, at least.

Background App Refresh: Could be really neat. Haven't had much of an opportunity to play around with this. I've turned off this feature for most apps, but I'm looking forward to having fresh content on Instapaper and Downcast without relying on geofencing trickery.

Control Center: Control Center is a handy tool that was added in iOS 7. I have to remap my muscle memory away from tap-tap-swipe, but that should only take a matter of days. Having access to screen brightness—surprisingly enough—really came in handy this morning, when my 4:30am eyes didn't like the full brightness I usually keep my device at. If I changing that necessitated a trip to settings.app, I would've grinned and bore it instead of fixing the issue.

Notification Center: I'm using Notification Center the same as I always have. The Today view might be useful for some, but for me it's just extraneous stuff, as I typically know the basic layout of my day from memory, and I have alerts for important events. The little bounce when you apply some English to the swipe down is cute.

[kellenblogs]

App review: Clear

Super-simple lists, done well

I have a terrible memory. Especially for remembering specific tasks, I have failed to find a mental strategy that works for me. My mom uses Post-its—literally dozens of neon pads scattered throughout the house—to keep track of everything. This definitely plays into the human strength of spatial awareness, but what if the specific note you’re looking for isn’t around? The overhead of remembering to bring the requisite piece of paper every time cancels-out the benefits for me; you soon have to make notes to remember notes, etc. The obvious solution is to have these lists around wherever you go—I prefer an app on my phone to Sharpie on my hand, but to each their own. The App Store is rife with simple list apps, as they’re probably the easiest practical application to slap together. Some developers go above and beyond, however: enter Clear.

On a fundamental level, Clear is the same as any other list organizing app: there’s a table view of things to check off and organize. What sets clear apart, however—and why it’s worth your cash vs. some cheap free one—is that they spent the time to really think of how this app was going to be used.

I use Clear primarily to keep shopping lists. Not that I go on exorbitant grocery expeditions or anything, but when I forget the milk, I’m going to have a bad time. I’m usually holding a basket or otherwise single-handed, and this is a hinderance to using my phone. Clear solves this by having a gesture for everything: swiping creates, completes, deletes, and clears items, with pinching and swiping for navigation. Typing is the only action that really requires two hands. Shaking the phone vigorously gives you undo.

Clear is an app which may only slightly enhance your life, but does so every single day. The companion app for Mac is a bit pricey: $10 for displaying a list is starting to become silly. Being able to paste lists into the app and have them magically synced—in the background through iCloud, no less—is super useful. Even as a standalone app it is incredibly useful.

Clear for iOS is worth every penny. $1 is a trivial price for this level of convenience.

[kellenblogs]

App Review Warmup: Weather Apps

I use many apps every day, and share them often enough that it seemed like a good idea to have a collection of thoughts to point people to. These posts are going to be editorial pieces, not technical reviews; I enjoy evangelizing what I like, and this will be no different. I’ll usually write about a single app I recommend—there are far too many crappy apps out there to waste time on—but I’m going to start out with a more general topic: weather apps.

Like tip calculators and to-do lists, weather forecasters are a type of app that suffers from a mess of terrible choices. Luckily, there are a few contenders in these spaces that stand out from the pack: Clear, Soulver, Omni Focus, and several others I plan on covering later. I have yet to find a weather app that completely suits my needs, though.

A good weather app should be able to solve several problems: provide an accurate forecast for the morning, afternoon, and evening; inform me of the immediate weather (“Will I need an umbrella, Siri?”,) ideally with push notifications; give me a rough forecast for the upcoming week, with temperature and precipitation; and provide a clean, easy to use interface. Any regular Joe can fetch weather data from the net and puke it onto the screen, but taking advantage of the medium requires a good amount of forethought and creativity.

While there are several apps that have interesting takes on this category, none of them perfectly suit my needs. Dark Sky is the One Bus Away of weather, but like it’s cousin is lacking in some basic information expected from an app in this space. Yahoo! Weather is gorgeous, but stuck in the old paradigm of “derp here’s the forecast derp” instead of doing anything more ambitious. Solar is elegant but short on useful information.

Dark Sky

In Seattle, we are accustomed to reading the weather forecast of “70’s with some clouds” as the downpour of disappointment pitter-patters overhead. Predictions are accurate just often enough to hold out hope for the promised sunshine, but being regularly caught in the rain is too common.

Enter Dark Sky, an app which holds the promise of giving up-to-the-minute weather predictions. It’ll give uncanny forecasts like “rain in 7 minutes, stopping again in 34.” Once I got past my pessimism about how this voodoo could possibly be trusted, Dark Sky became a regular part of my day: I generally check it when there’s a possible chance of rain, and it’s been freakishly accurate for me. They recently added crowdsourcing to their already accurate forecasts, providing even more detail.

Dark Sky’s killer feature, however, is the push notification functionality. The app keeps track of your rough location in the background (don’t worry, battery usage is unaffected and your privacy is not at stake from this) and will send you an alert when rain is about to hit the area. This has saved my ass multiple times, giving me just enough time to duck into a café before the rain came.

For the visually-inclined, they can also present this info as a graph of rain severity over time. The graph even squiggles to reflect the variance in Dark Sky’s prediction.

The app’s radar view leaves a bit to be desired, honestly. Its dark-on-dark color palette may be in line with their brand colors, but makes it difficult to distinguish clear skies from sprinkles. I understand that the staid, old-school green-on-white radar color scheme is butt-ugly, but you’re taking form over function a bridge too far, guys.

I wish the biggest drawback of this app is their choice of colors. While Dark Sky does an excellent job of providing basic short-term information, it doesn’t paint a complete picture of the weather forecast. Basic aspects of how a day feels—humidity and dew point, wind, “feels like…”, UV index, etc.—are completely left out. It seems that the developers went a little too far in their pursuit of simplicity. As the name implies, this app’s real strength is in telling you when it’s going to rain.

In spite of it’s rather limited capabilities, Dark Sky is head and shoulders above the rest in being useful to the user: you’ll never be caught out in the rain again. Dark Sky leverages its incredible information to provide something unimaginable before the smartphone revolution, and that’s why it’s a worthwhile investment.

Yahoo! Weather

Yahoo! takes a much more conservative approach to their app. Given how much this app was touted on its release, you’d expect more than Yahoo! simply fetching information from their various properties and slapping a Helvetica Neue font on it. This app provides nothing more than Googling for “Seattle weather” would.

While this app may be rather pedestrian, it’s still the prettiest pick of the bunch. Yahoo! got a head start on the iOS 7 aesthetic, with an elegant font and straightforward interface.

The personalization of fetching Flickr photos of the current city was a brilliant move. Not only does Yahoo! already have access to the best pool of photos on the internet, but that level of polish and personal touch makes for a delighting experience every time I open the app.

It’s sad that Yahoo! couldn’t turn some of that imagination into creating a more forward-thinking product. This app functions more like a mobile web app than a full-blown native application, albeit with a strong sense of style.

Sadly, there’s one terrible wart on this app’s user interface. I am almost inclined to think that this was simply an accident, and that some interface element got dragged into the wrong spot, revealing this tacky blemish upon what is mostly a highly refined countenance. Before I say what it is, see if you can spot it:

See that? That single, 1pt Yahoo! Purple border along the top of the screen? That one little line of pixels is one of the most distracting, ugly, and offensive design decisions I’ve seen in a very long time. Perhaps it’s because the rest of the app is so beautiful, or maybe it’s such a useless element, but I just can’t stand it. At least when Yahoo! snuck a dick bar into their otherwise gorgeous redesign of Flickr, it could be hidden with some rudimentary browser tools so I don’t have to be bothered by it. If Yahoo! is seriously trying to make some kind of brand around ugly purple streaks atop their properties, their design team needs to go cold-turkey on the Kool-aid.

If you’re a bit of an information junkie, this app may be for you. While Dark Sky always leaves me with questions, Yahoo! Weather gives a great overview of the current climate, and the user-submitted backgrounds are absolutely gorgeous.

Solar

There is an ethos among iOS developers: “make your app do one thing really well.” This design philosophy has served them well, and contributes to many excellent apps. Unfortunately, the designers over at Hollr, Inc. didn’t succeed in making a worthwhile app using this philosophy.

The overall design aesthetic behind Solar is one of complete simplicity. The app displays the current temperature along the top, with a shifting sea of vague colors and rain-like droplets in the background, indicating how the weather makes Solar feel. While the visual designers—if they exist at all—went for the gold with the hyper-minimalist appearance, it’s a swing-and-a-miss for me. I find the app bland; I want to escape the soup of oranges and blues as quickly as possible.

From a usability perspective, Solar is both clunky and unintuitive. Like many a pretentious app being released before it, control is entirely relegated to gestures. While some interfaces aren’t immediately intuitive, they’re easy to map to your muscle memory, making the experience better with time. In Solar, a down swipe drops a three day forecast from the top—a modal action which must be held—and swiping up gradually gives a corresponding hourly forecast. These gestures aren’t mapped to any real-world metaphor, and I’m often accidentally pulling down when trying to figure out if it’ll be raining in an hour, and vice-versa.

Though Solar has been featured as App of the Week in the past, and seems to be fairly popular, I can’t see how it’s worth the time and space when there are so many other fantastic options out there. In the end, it’s a toy product for people who want to dick around with gestures—and unfulfilling ones at that. I can’t recommend purchasing this product when there are so many others on the market that do what Solar does, and much more.

Recommendations

Get Dark Sky. Yes, it’s about the cost of cheap coffee. Yes, it’s worth every penny. Great apps are worth your hard-earned cash. Unlike that stick of gum, apps are useful every day, and you’ll certainly be grateful for having this gem on your phone. Especially when living in a rainy city like I do, eliminating the worry of being rained on is a huge convenience.

Yahoo! Weather is free, so if you’re interested in a more recreational weather experience, give it a whirl. Though unimaginative, the pictures are pretty, at least.

Don’t waste your money on Solar. If you have some change burning a hole in your pocket, get a fun little game instead.

[kellenblogs]

Unreasonable Expectation of Privacy

Most people deeply believe in a right to some level of privacy on the internet. The knee-jerk reaction to various IT companies opening up their doors to the NSA shows our visceral intuition about the internet—our screens are a barrier between our actions and their consequences. Unfortunately, this expectation isn’t founded in reality. In spite of this illusion of anonymity on the tubes, the salad days of the web are long gone and the internet's infrastructure contradicts any hope of privacy.

Many people gripe about the lack of true privacy on sites such as Google, etc. I simply don’t understand where this indignation comes from. These services are all free. You don't pay anything to have constant contact with your loved ones on Facebook. Tweeting your latest meal to everyone on the planet is free. You don't pay anything for instant access to the entirety of human knowledge. As the saying goes, “if you don’t pay money for it, you’re the product and not the customer.” You are functionally storing your stuff, free of charge, at Tweet-store-your-stuff-book+, where they make money by telling advertisers about the kind of stuff you like. The price you are paying for these services is not cash, but your privacy. When you know this price up front, that selling you is in their nature, how can you be surprised by these leaks?

The obvious question is, why aren't there big services based on the premise that a user owns their data? Advertisers simply are grossly outbidding users. Would you pay $5 (Facebook's revenue divided by its users) for your Facebook account, for instance? Would most people? Highly doubtful, given that $1 for an app is too expensive for most. While some are able to carve out a business for themselves by charging their users, the market just isn’t there. Running a social network the size of Facebook or Twitter is very difficult and very expensive, so the only businesses who can do it must be very lucrative. The only way of doing that so far is through advertising.

While the winning move is to not play, it's difficult to live completely outside of these digital kingdoms. Exercising discretion is a pragmatic solution; whatever you put on these services is no longer yours, but giving it willingly puts you back in control. While some people may think that they have nothing to hide, privacy and individuality are important to happiness, and there’s a damn easy way to reclaim these necessities: only store the stuff you aren't attached to in somebody else's garage.

Reddit’s veritable electromagnetic repulsion towards “doxxing”—the revelation of a Redditor’s real life identity—makes no sense to me. It smacks of an internet long gone where pseudonymity was almost feasible. That was 20 years ago, though; in the present internet where personal information is the local currency, their denial of that reality is pretty childish. Additionally, tying real identities to users in online communities produces helpful content and prevents the really sad and loathesome from taking hold in your community—jumping behind “because free speech bro LOL” is a cop out, and Redditors know it. You’d think a community of tech-savvy nerds would be more accepting of the terrain, embracing their identities as a fact of life, and learning to stand by what they write on the internet. Hell, maybe that’ll solve Reddit’s troll problem, or at least restore it as a sad fact of life on the web instead of the norm on the internet's front page.

While I do make extensive use of the “privacy” options afforded in the UIs of Facebook and Twitter, I’m not deluding myself for a second that I have any real privacy there. If anything I posted on the internet were made public or connected to my name, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest. These little features are nice bonuses, but reliance on them would be foolhardy.

You aren’t the customer, you are the product.

[kellenblogs]

Get Your Skinny Off My Strong

I believe that "strong" shouldn’t succeed “skinny,” but obsolete it altogether.

Strength is a personal endeavor. It is functional and there is no end and when it's undertaken for its own sake you realize that the only measure of success is how you were yesterday. Did you only get five reps of those pullups? Did your backpack feel heavier the other day? Can you run up those flights of stairs for the first time?

The quest for strength is an everyday war. Strength can be measured in pounds lifted or miles run, but its true yard stick is personal achievement.

To be strong is to own your successes: holding yourself responsible for your shortcomings and having the accountability to pull yourself back up. Your own goals, discipline, and self respect are all that matter.

And yes, I find that strong people are generally far sexier than “skinny” ones. However, I believe that strength should be encouraged in spite of its boost in attractiveness. The confidence, physical fitness, and overall competency at life that strength training brings are all incredible attractive qualities, but shouldn't they stand on their own merits?

Being a part of Seattle’s parkour community for many years, I see obsession with skinniness as lunacy: being unable to open a can of pickles is pretty silly. I don’t work out to have an eight pack, I work out to jump farther and climb up walls faster. The joy I get from mastering my own body is enough of a reward.

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power. —Tao Te Ching, chapter 33

[kellenblogs]

Thoughts on Privacy

Only a few decades ago, our social lives were an intimate tapestry woven amongst our friends. Our friends knew everything about us, and we were the same for them. News was actively shared with the people we cared about most; we could keep track of who knew what with a fair amount of accuracy, and the art of conversation was alive and well. We told stories, we mailed newsletters to relatives, we laughed together over a beer.

The internet permanently disrupted this status quo. Where we used to favor direct communication, we now relegate to indirect communication blasts. Now most of our lives are announced into a void, where significance is lost in a sea of status updates. Many lament this loss of intimacy, but there is a more significant change with the coming of the social web.

Privacy has become more of a concern as the older generations begin to adopt social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Older users value a sense of security about their personal information. The concept of being "Googled" is frightening in the context of tangible privacy, but is commonly accepted as a fact of life on the internet. It has become nearly impossible to avoid the internet's grasp in the age of Facebook and Google. The currency on the net is information: anything and everything that a company can get their hands on.

The definition of "personal information" has undergone a massive change in the internet revolution's wake. It is practically impossible to avoid divulging your personal activities to massive net corporations, especially as their techniques are becoming more sophisticated. As an example, anytime you visit a page with Facebook's ubiquitous "like" button, they now have your activity recorded and are able to track you throughout the net.

Personal information is the new currency of the internet. Advertisers want it, and are willing to pay for our services for us if we provide them with a little bit of data. Facebook is making billions of dollars off of advertising, I doubt its users would like to foot the bill. Even as America's economy switches from manufacturing where tangible goods are bought and sold to one where services are exchanged, consumers are unable to wrap their heads around paying for these fantastic services. This is a subject for an entirely separate blog post, but the feeling of free that we get when we pay with our habits instead of our wallets is feeding this delusion.

Perhaps due to growing up with the internet, I don't really care as much about traditional privacy anyway. Yes, I do take my online identity seriously. Yes, I realize that publicly tweeting about being away from home isn't a great idea. Do I guard my real name as if my life depended on it? No!

I could spend a lot of time fretting over who knows what online, but let's be honest; if it has been put on the internet, it is now essentially a part of the public domain. The net was designed to be an information sharing network, and because of that information is duplicated all over the place. I have always had a policy of radical candor and honesty on the internet, and I see no need to hide every detail about my life from public view.

I believe that living with Integrity in all aspects of life is important, and the internet is no exception. We all walk the line of what to show on our sleeve, but I think I fall further on the side of candor than most. I do avoid placing my family and acquaintances in the line of fire of my personal life, but I'm not going to hide it from them either. If they go on a fishing expedition they can take responsibility for what they catch.

Even as people become more aware of how little privacy there is on the net, companies are getting more clever about hiding their data mining. In the end, our information is a commodity no different from cash or labor, and if you aren't paying in one, you're certainly paying in another.

[kellenblogs]

Totalitarianism Set Up To Fail

To desire control is a human survival mechanism adapted over millennia to breed a powerful and dominant species. The autobiographical work Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi brings into focus a regime that not only covets their power over their people, but uses this authority to oppress vulnerable minorities to further the oppressor’s own biases. This Islamic regime is merely one example of a pattern that has been repeated throughout history, it is evident throughout the works of many other authors throughout history that the desire to control is an innate human trait. However, much like Newtonian mechanics, these oppressive efforts inspired some to a resist even stronger in response, thus destabilizing the status quo and bringing revolutionary shifts to the existing paradigm. While these systems of control may be effective for a short term, this oppression also sows the seeds of its own undoing in focusing so much on conformity and less on the needs of the controlled. It is self evident through Nafisi, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Frederick Douglass’ The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and Jonathon Kozol’s Amazing Grace, that no matter what the hardship may be, there will always be those who stand up and disrupt the existing regime. It is also evident that while these institutions attempt to maintain control by restricting information to preserve the party line work in theory, in practice there are always those who will slip through the cracks and discover the knowledge to set themselves free. Though some institutions—such as slavery or radical Islam—may seem too big to fall, there is always a vulnerability that is seen and exploited by at least one of the oppressed. Totalitarian governments and others in positions of power attempt to force conformity through the suppression of knowledge and deprivation of education—and though attempts to control seem to work from the oppressor’s perspective—these controlling acts serve to motivate the oppressed’s desire to usurp their ruler’s power.

Throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi references the blatant use of propaganda to control the people. Though concerts are allowed in Tehran, they are heavily politicized and great care is given to avoid any “un-Islamic” actions on the part of the audience and performers. Nafisi describes how a government agent was present to give a speech detailing that “management did not wish to entertain audiences of ‘rich imperialists’ contaminated by decadent Western culture…The gentleman also admonished that if anyone acted in an un-Islamic manner, he or she would be kicked out” (Nafisi 272). The regime keeping such a tight noose upon every aspect of the people’s lives is both absurd from the perspective of foreigners and also amused those present, with Nafisi’s account of these declarations “[bringing] smiles to many of those who had come [to] hear the music of the Gipsy Kings” instead of instilling the fear that was intended (272). This event effectively illustrates the futility of such persistent control and authoritarianism—with this great authority also comes a responsibility to justify such actions, and when the authority is on unstable moral or logical ground the excuses are correspondingly poor too.

However, at the same time these constant attacks on people’s liberties do take their toll on the oppressed’s minds. Nafisi describes how Mrs. Rezvan is so indoctrinated by Tehran’s regime that she is shy to even put on a swimsuit, needing to move to a deserted section of beach before feeling comfortable in doing so (266). Being in a society that abhors even the slightest patch of skin or smallest strand of hair being visible in public, it is shocking that Mrs. Rezvan is able to overcome her indoctrination to be able to enjoy the beach as anybody in a Western culture would. In Reading Lolita in Tehran, one of Nafisi’s students, Azin, says “Women who cover themselves are aiding and abetting the regime” because they are only reinforcing the pattern of obedience to the regime in their own small way (70). At the same time, the regime uses all means at their disposal to force conformity, because they realize that any slip in their perceived authority will cause a great rift to form in their power. Unfortunately for those in the regime, not only was this vulnerability is impossible to obfuscate from all, but when Nafisi exploited this weakness she spread the knowledge she gained with her students, enabling their education as well.

In discussing the formation of her reading group, Nafisi explains “[the class] entailed an active withdrawal from a reality that had turned hostile” describing a regime that was tightening control over sensitive topics that might undermine their moral authority (15). Nafisi covered many works, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita, works which always were relatable to the situation she and her students faced every day when they walked out of the front door. Nafisi ran into significant challenges in obtaining these works for class discussion, as the regime restricts access to works it deems threatening by closing down foreign book stores and banning certain books in an attempt to keep such dangerous knowledge out of the hands of its citizens. Despite the regime’s best efforts Nafisi succeeded in finding the resources she needed, proving the difficulty in cutting off all avenues of subverting the law. Under most circumstances occasional minor infractions of the law are not a problem, but when a regime’s power is directly tied to maintaining an iron grip on the people even the slightest breach can bring the levees down to overwhelm the regime’s authority.

For the American slave in the 19th century, the odds are stacked even higher against obtaining any real education or empowerment. While the efforts to keep Frederick Douglass blind to the educated world around him worked in the beginning, Douglass soon realized that if his enslavers wanted him to stay illiterate then education must be a truly wonderful thing. After hearing his master animatedly forbidding his education, Douglass recounts “These words sank deep into my heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering, and called into existence an entirely new train of thought” (Douglass 31). More specifically, Douglass only saw value in education because his master had expressly forbade him from it. Douglass uses his literacy to gain further prestige as a slave and is presented several opportunities to escape because of this drive to learn kindled by the forbidding of it by his enslaver. After being given this lens, Douglass views the interests of the slaveholders as inherently opposed to his own, and this skepticism served him well throughout the “holiday” imposed upon the slaves as a straw man of what a free life entailed (62). Having already seen through the illusions of the slaveholders, Douglass was able to have a skeptical perspective which helped him resist the propaganda fed to slaves to keep them in line.

This machination of miseducation and neglect is not just the product of a distant past or place, however. In Amazing Grace, Jonathon Kozol goes into great detail about the systematic suppression of education that takes place in New York’s public school system. While $150 million was spent on the elite Stuyvesant High, schools affecting children in the South Bronx are forced to absorb a billion dollars in budget cuts, often leaving the disadvantaged students without a proper school at all (Kozol 152–153). The environment spawned from this shortfall in funding perpetuates a cycle of economic depression in Mott Haven, where Amazing Grace is set, leading to a poverty rate that is unacceptable for a city as thriving as New York. The highly divided racial demographics between Stuyvesant and the South Bronx—nine percent black or Hispanic instead of almost entirely black and Hispanic, respectively—are another point of shame about this broken education system, perpetuated by the decisions of the government in a blatant attempt to curry favor amongst affluent constituents.

The greatest weakness for unjust systems of governance lies in fallacious reasoning and general incompetence on behalf of the oppressors. In Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky describes the Spanish Inquisition, where the Grand Inquisitor exerts the church’s rule over a terrorized population whose free will is restricted because of the his reasoning that “we will decide all things, and they will joyfully believe our decision, because it will deliver them from their great care and their present terrible torments of personal and free decision” (Dostoevsky 259). The Grand Inquisitor’s argument that the people prefer a certain freedom from the tyranny of choice that a more traditional form of freedom would afford them. By outlawing seemingly trivial behavior and banning controversial books, the regime in Tehran is taking it upon themselves to determine what ideas and choices are “acceptable” for the people living in their society. This situation is analogous to the Tehran Nafisi describes—where even the slightest, innocent expression in the part of women is outlawed as “un Islamic” —as an absurd government that is not held accountable by the people. This totalitarian rule, whose arbitrary limits on the actions of their people turn towards the absurd; in the case of Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor rejects Jesus Christ himself in the name of preserving the church’s ways, and in Tehran even the slightest hint of skin or smallest strand of hair is too alluring for any “reasonable” man to resist. These justifications when viewed from an outside perspective are completely contradictory to both reason and common sense from a Western background, but to those within the system these fallacies are a part of everyday life and not worth a second thought. Naturally, there are exceptional people who do not have these cultural blind spots, and therefore are in a position where they can see this circular logic for what it is.

Accounting for the tenuous grounds upon which totalitarian and other oppressive regimes stand upon, it is a small wonder how they can become so pervasive in some parts of the world. Due to the numerous ways in which the entire house of cards can come toppling down with just a single subject slipping through the cracks, these systems of control and oppression are not sustainable. While exerting control over the education system and information available to the oppressed, oppressive governments cannot ensure the compliance from all, and therefore cannot maintain any control they gain after a single point of failure. Though superficially there is absolute conformity in Douglass’ South and Nafisi’s Tehran, both are motivated to subvert their rulers even more by the severity of the oppression they face. Metaphorically, totalitarian regimes and oppressed peoples obey Newton’s third law of motion, where both parties act and react to each other in accordance to each other’s level of severity; the stronger one side fights to beat down the opposition, resistance to the change increases as well. Due to this interaction, totalitarian systems of governance are inherently volatile and not a strong foundation to build a society on, and are also dangerous for the parties involved due to the upheavals of oppression and revolution in the unwinnable struggle for power.

Works Cited

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. "The Grand Inquisitor." 2002. Brothers Karamazov. N.p.: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, n.d. 247-64. Print.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. [s.l.]: Simon & Brown, 2011. Print.

Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Perennial, 2000. Print.

Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. Print.

[kellenblogs]

Connections Between Religion and Poverty

Jonathan Kozol’s Amazing Grace is a compelling story exposing the true hardships of the disadvantaged residents of New York City’s South Bronx. Kozol’s report is saturated with the faith of the impoverished people interviewed for Amazing Grace, showing how their faith in Christianity helps them through extremely difficult times. As illustrated by Kim Se-Kang, et al, in “The Relationship Of Religious Coping And Spirituality To Adjust And Psychological Distress In Urban Early Adolescents,” (RRCS) there is an enduring connection between the disadvantaged and religious devotion, which is used as a coping mechanism to help process the unimaginable difficulties facing the residents of Mott Haven and other neighborhoods within the South Bronx. At the same time, tensions between Mott Haven’s residents and an apathetic government have bred mistrust and animosity towards law enforcement who are reluctant to respond to the troubles of the South Bronx. However, the similarities between the worldly people charged with protecting and serving Mott Haven, and their heavenly protector, seem to put the separation of faith in God and the faith in New York’s finest in contradiction. The dissonance between Mott Haven’s distrust of the government and their overwhelming faith in Christianity as a protective force is found in the similarities between the functions of the government and God as protectors of the people of Mott Haven. This disparity in faith can be explained by a natural human response to difficult situations, and while slightly contradictory, is resolved through close examination of the nuanced differences between the two trusts.

Kozol’s treatment of religious conviction throughout Amazing Grace is one of incredulity. Though many of Kozol’s interviewees articulately explain why they find comfort in their faith and through prayer, he continues to probe into the deeper motivations behind these beliefs. Kozol describes a boy named Cliffie as having “an absolutely literal religious faith” who explicitly believes in a literal man with long hair who “can walk on the deep water” (8). Kozol continues to describe the literal nature of Cliffie’s faith throughout his interaction, as if his entire impression of the boy was informed by his belief in God. This literal interpretation of Christianity can be ascribed to a belief being passed on from a mother to her son combined with a child’s tendency to conflate story into reality, but is there something greater going on here?

While religious adoption can be a very intricate process, a plausible explanation for this is the human need for comfort from the extremely stressful situation facing the residents of Mott Haven. In RRCS, Se-Kang, et al, explore “the relation of religious coping and spirituality” to “psychological distress in urban early adolescents” (Se-Kang, et al 369). The authors use existing research in adults as a backbone to inform their own hypothesis that “positive religious coping and daily spiritual experiences would correlate positively with indicators of adjustment and negatively with indicators of psychological distress,” meaning that Se-Kang, et al, expected their subjects would find solace in religion during times of “psychological distress” (371). While there was a relationship between “positive religious coping” and religion, actual stress — in the form of depression, nausea, nervousness — was not correlated with religious coping. In other words, though religious devotion is brought about by stress, that same devotion was not proven in this study to be effective in reducing the stress of adolescents. Se-Kang, et al, conclude in their paper that “it seems important for psychologists…and others who interact with youth to be able to recognize the role of religious coping strategies” and stress that these insights must be used to help youth in need.

It comes as no surprise that law enforcement is treated with a level of distaste reserved for nobody else in Mott Haven. Law enforcement officers took three hours to respond to Mrs. Washington when she called about a robbery, saying to her “Mrs. Washington…a number of us heard [the call] but we all knew the address and no one wanted to respond because nobody wants to come here to this building. Everyone is scared” (Kozol 53). Throughout the book, there is an attitude of mistrust for authority among the residents that Kozol converses with; there is often a “they” who are resented by the people for denying SSI, health care, and other essential needs provided for the needy by the government. While the government lets the schools in the South Bronx become increasingly destitute, it spends taxpayer dollars to paint a façade facing the highway to hide Mott Haven from suburban commuters, which is vehemently offensive to Gizelle Luke of the Covenant House (31). With all of this mistreatment by the government, and its abject failure in taking care of and supporting the community of Mott Haven, it only follows logically that there is a great deal of animosity towards the authorities. When Kozol asks Mrs. Washington’s son, David, if he believes in evil, he unflinchingly says that “what the rich have done to the poor people in this city is something that a preacher could call evil. Somebody has power. Pretending that they don’t so they don’t need to use it to help people — that is my idea of evil” (23).

However, this logic could also apply to the trust in God as a powerful protector of the people of Mott Haven. Immediately before labeling the complacency of the rich and powerful as “evil,” David ponders “I wonder how powerful God is. He must be wise and powerful to…give man organs and a brain to build complex machineries, but He is not powerful enough to stop the evil on the earth, to change the hearts of people” (23). While it might be argued that his thoughts are that of resignation, his enumeration of all the things God is capable of implies that he harbors doubt in a limit to this power being set at the influence of humanity’s suffering. To see all of the despair and suffering is to characterize Mott Haven as a hellish place, Mrs. Washington tells Kozol that “We have our hell right here on earth.” (44) An extremely faithful resident of Mott Haven, Bernardo, suffered a tragic accident that took his own life and landed his mother in prison for endangering the welfare of her child (105). Though their faith in God comforts the residents of Mott Haven, the persistence of underlying stress and danger in spite of consistent prayer and devotion presents the same betrayal of trust perpetrated by the government’s own inaction. Holding mistrust for government programs and keeping faith in God at the same time is contradictory in this sense, due to the promise of help broken by both sides, but is also explained by Se-Kang, et al’s findings.

Religion and poverty are both complex issues that are ripe for human inquiry. Kozol’s treatment of poverty in Amazing Grace is a complete investigation into the causes, motivations, and intricacies of how such injustice can happen in the heart of America; his inquiry into the faith of Mott Haven’s residents is superficial at best, leaving the reader to reach their own conclusions with little to no information about the rich inner workings of living in such an impoverished environment. Though the scope of RRCS was very narrow, Se-Kang, et al’s findings were both illuminating and directly relevant to Kozol’s work. Instead of superficially probing at the faith of his interviewees, Kozol would have served both his readers and subjects better by digging deeper into the rationale behind religious belief and possible connections to the people he was writing about.

Works Cited

Kozol, Jonathan. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. New York: Crown, 1995. Print.

Kim Se-Kang, et al. "The Relationship Of Religious Coping And Spirituality To Adjustment And Psychological Distress In Urban Early Adolescents." Mental Health, Religion & Culture 12.4 (2009): 369-383. Academic Search Complete. Web. 23 May 2012.

[kellenblogs]

Frederick Douglass: Not So Noble After All

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is a 1845 narrative written by Frederick Douglass about his struggles under, and eventual freedom from slavery in the South. Writing at a time when slavery was still alive in many parts of the United States, Douglass chose to hide various details about his life; at the time showing any compassion towards slaves such as Douglass was viewed with much distain and could prove dangerous. Douglass masks the identities of several characters in the name of protecting them and on a grander scale, the effort to free black slaves in the United States. Though Douglass points to preventing retaliation towards those still in slavery through his omissions, the details he chooses to leave out suggest that he is only protecting those who he personally cares about, and these redactions are not due to a “higher purpose” of aiding all slaves.

Douglass owes a lot to the neighborhood boys in Baltimore; they taught him how to read and write, which he used to great advantage throughout is time as a slave. After mistress Hugh became averse to him learning, Douglass befriended all of the boys he ran into on the street and learned from them instead. Referring to the boys as “kindly,” Douglass cares enough to hide their identity from the reader, he explains “I am strongly tempted to give the names of…those little boys, as a testimonial of the gratitude and affection I bear them; but prudence forbids…it might embarrass them” (Douglass, 35). While Douglass is grateful for all of the help he received from the boys in his neighborhood, even the poor white boys will grow up to be a part of the system that Douglass claims to be fighting against in his narrative.

While Douglass avoids libeling the boys’s reputations by hiding their identities, he does not extend the same courtesy to those who are enslaved with him. During Douglass’s first escape attempt he reveals information that can be used by their slave holders to identify them, stating “Our company then consisted of Henry Harris, John Harris, Henry Bailey, Charles Roberts, and myself. Henry Bailey was my uncle, and belonged to my master, Charles married my aunt: he belonged to my master’s father-in-law, Mr. William Hamilton” (70). Naming the brethren who assisted him does nothing to advance Douglass’s stated goal of speaking in the interests of slaves who were still being brutalized in the South. If nothing else, this is a symptom of Douglass’s fundamental lack of compassion for his brethren, even though they risked their lives with him attempting to escape.

Though Douglass’s first plot to escape was unsuccessful, he gives goes into great detail about exactly how they planned to escape. Without a member of the plot informing Mr. Freeland, there is a good chance that the escape would have been successful. Douglass explains “The plan we finally concluded upon was, to get a large canoe belonging to Mr. Hamilton, and…paddle directly up the Chesapeake Bay. Our reason for taking the water route was , that we were less liable to be suspected as runaways; we hoped to be regarded as fishermen” (70). Given the viability of Douglass’s plan to escape Mr. Freeland, his disclosure of the details can only hurt future slave’s chances of escape by similar avenues. Douglass is incriminating Henry and John Harris, Henry Bailey, and Charles Roberts by associating them with attempted escape in the minds of his white audience.

Douglass reveals several key details about his successful escape from Master Hugh, though he leaves out more than the plot in St. Michael’s. While Master Hugh thought Douglass’s pristine behavior a sign of his renewed devotion to his master, Douglass reveals that this good behavior is really a signal that he is readying his escape. Douglass writes “My object in working steadily was to remove any suspicion he might entertain of my intent to run away…I suppose he thought I was never better satisfied with my condition than at the very time during which I was planning my escape” (85). While Douglass makes a point to omit any detail that might reveal his method of escape, or who helped him to freedom, he blatantly reveals a crucial insight into the psyche of slaves. This gives slave holders of the South motive to suspect the more obedient slaves of attempting escape, giving them no recourse to prevent the abuse by demonizing diligent service to their captors.

While The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave is an accurate narrative of Douglass’s time as a slave, he omits many incriminating details in the name of protecting existing slaves and the abolitionist movement. While these exclusions could be attributed to furthering the cause of freeing his brothers still enslaved in the South, Douglass does not consistently protect those who stood for freedom and equality. In fact, the only pattern in Douglass’s protection is the personal relationship he has with them. Though Douglass is voicing the concerns of slaves throughout the South, his claim to be speaking on their behalf is not followed by his literary choices. The role The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave played in bringing about better lives for slaves was in spite of Douglass’s choices in whom to protect, not due to his concern for the future of blacks in America.

[kellenblogs]

Assimilation's Effect on Zitkala-Sa

Zitkala-Sa’s American Indian Stories describes her journeys through western settler’s efforts to civilize Native Americans. This assimilation effort was not limited to bombarding the students with unfamiliar academic work, but also stripping their Native American identities by cutting their hair and forcing them to wear western clothing. Catherine Kunce’s article “Fire of Eden” sheds further light on the nature of Zitkala-Sa’s later endeavors, including excelling in debate and teaching at the Carlisle Indian School, and how her appeal to western civilization was more symbiotic than American Indian Stories implies. With the attitude taken by Western missionaries, and others intimately involved within the Native American assimilation effort, any contribution to Western society was taken as evidence of the effective conversion of natives from savages to civilized people. Due to this viewpoint on her actions, the change in Zitkala-Sa caused by Native American assimilation, and her participation by teaching in the boarding schools, shows her school experience in a positive light in the eyes of her captors due to the efficacy of the assimilation programs in producing western members of society from Native Americans.

Perhaps the most stunning transformation in Zitkala-Sa throughout American Indian Stories is the rejection of her native spirituality. During the more oppressive times for her tribe, Zitkala-Sa’s mother tells her daughter that she is trying to save them by praying to the Great Spirit, to which Zitkala-Sa replies: "'Mother, don't pray again! The Great Spirit does not care if we live or die!'" (97). Zitkala-Sa’s experience with Western culture has turned her beliefs from family traditions to religious mandates set forth by her captors in boarding school. By including this detail in her writing, Zitkala-Sa demonstrates how malleable young minds are to religious indoctrination, and she is only encouraging the missionaries to continue their work because of its dramatic effect on her beliefs. Though her feelings may be different, the missionaries and others invested in the Native American assimilation programs can only see the successful "civilization" of Zitkala-Sa in American Indian Stories, and will not look past this feeling of victory.

In the introduction of "Fire of Eden," Kunce provides insight into a profound truth about Zitkala-Sa. Kunce writes about the irony of Zitkala-Sa teaching at the Carlisle Indian School, perhaps the most notorious boarding school of her time; children were "brutalized" to force conformity with Western principles (Kunce 73). As Zitkala-Sa becomes more involved with the machination of "civilizing" Native Americans with boarding schools and assimilation, the dissonance with these actions and the focus on her native stories and legends. Zitkala-Sa’s life choices suggest that, while she was far from being in lock step with westerners of her day, she was also much more a part of the system than most of her native Dakota tribe liked. The very fact that Zitkala-Sa taught at the Carlisle Indian School—whether because of successful assimilation efforts or due to some enigmatic plan beneath her actions—ended up harming her people and was seen by the missionaries as proof of the death of her native roots.

This endorsement of western culture’s imposition upon Native Americans shines through in Zitkala-Sa’s own personal account of her life after boarding school. Though she grew up in a wigwam, Zitkala-Sa criticizes her mother’s attempt at building a western home: "'Mother, why is not your house cemented? Do you have no interest in a more comfortable shelter?' I asked, when the apparent inconveniences of her home seemed to suggest indifference on her part" (Zitkala-Sa 96). Though she may not like to admit it, Zitkala-Sa clearly identifies with the "palefaces," as she calls them, more than her own mother (94). Zitkala-Sa’s critique of her mother’s dwelling points to Zitkala-Sa’s attitude of western superiority that is in direct contradiction with her fear of the school buildings when she first began her education (77). In the eyes of her audience, this dramatic change in Zitkala-Sa’s writing points to the profound psychological effects of Native American assimilation. While brutal and dehumanizing towards the students of boarding schools, Zitkala-Sa’s portrayal of the effectiveness of these assimilation efforts could only affirm the paleface’s feelings of righteousness in "civilizing" the "savages."

This critique suggests that Zitkala-Sa had, whether consciously or subconsciously, bought into the paleface’s notion of Native Americans being "less civilized." Even though Zitkala-Sa spent many formative years in her native Dakota culture, her assimilation was so complete, the sight of her mother’s house brought distinctly Western feelings of inadequacy to her. Not only does Zitkala-Sa discard the notion of a wigwam being an acceptable dwelling, she takes it a step further in asserting that the particular Western house her mother had was not up to her standards of craftsmanship. Not only did the stability of her mother’s house fail her own expectations, it failed them because of the Western point of view that Zitkala-Sa was now conforming to.

Though Zitkala-Sa is a very talented and articulate writer and her choices regarding content were doubtlessly deliberate and well planned, mistakes can clearly be made regarding voice and message in a written text, especially when the subject matter is as critical as civil rights. The missionaries and teachers at boarding schools, as people with very specific and ingrained in the rationale of indoctrinating Native Americans, will see any message about assimilation and warp it to fit within their personal beliefs. As their belief of Native American "savagery" stemmed from a deeply rooted bias against different ways of life, seeing Zitkala-Sa undergo such a thorough transformation from Dakota child to assimilated adult only confirmed their notion that if Native Americans would "just" change their entire lifestyle to conform with the West their civilization would "advance" to the paleface’s level. Zitkala-Sa’s transmutation, as presented in American Indian Stories, not only serves the purpose of speaking for Native Americans but also brings a second edge to the sword of her text that clouds the morality of the Native American assimilation efforts.

Works Cited

Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. Nook Study ed. Barnes and Noble, 2012. Print.

Kunce, Catherine. "Fire of Eden." Studies in American Indian Literatures 18.1 (2006): 73-82. Print.

[kellenblogs]

The Lonely Work

It's an everyday war. -Stephane Vigroux, Parkour Generations

As traceurs, we strive to overcome obstacles as efficiently as possible. For a time, in the beginning, the going is easy. Sure we'll end up sore every night after we train, but it is easy in the moment to push ourselves to do better. All of the basic movements in parkour can be learned in a matter of months, and most of us are self-selected to be kinesthetically intelligent. This is the honeymoon stage in our relationship with the discipline – where we build new skills every day – still feeling out how it's gonna be between us.

Once we have gained proficiency with those skills, however, a new leg of the journey begins. Kevin Carroll calls this "the lonely work," the work that nobody knows about, but also the work that really makes the difference. To do anything well, you need to have that dedication and passion to train, by your own motivation.

In order to shine in all moments you must prepare. You must do your homework. Preparation means doing what I call the lonely work: the unglamorous tasks that no one tells you to do and the hard work that no one will notice. -Kevin Carroll, Rules of the Red Rubber Ball

As practitioners of our art we must devote untold hours honing our craft. Doing the lonely work requires a certain mental fortitude to challenge yourself, every day. You train parkour, progressing forward and avoiding stagnation at all costs. To be successful requires commitment, persistence, and patience. Nobody accomplished anything that was easy, and all of the experienced traceurs that we look up to truly dedicated themselves to parkour.

When coaching parkour, we emphasize that this isn't meant to be practiced once a week and called good. With this discipline you need to take pride in your work, going that extra mile between mediocre and excellent. I truly believe that an extra 30 minutes a day of training is what makes the difference, over time, between Daniel Ilabaca and the half-assers.

Train hard, train safe, and most importantly train well.