Sentence Collections

Keeping track of what I read. What I write

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Spanx And Other Shapewear Are Literally Squeezing Your Organs, Huffington Post

Shapewear couldn't do its job if it wasn't tight. Unfortunately, this leaves your stomach, intestine and colon compressed, which Dr. Kuemmerle says can worsen acid reflux and heartburn. Restrictive clothing can also provoke erosive esophagitis.

The new corset, no surprises.

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On Gay Male Privilege, Medium

“Queer” is an awesome word; it sets a place at the table for everyone, including the same “gay” identity which itself would shun most who identify as “queer” in the way it’s constructed now. What this means is that to identify as “queer” is to be at ease with your own masculinity and femininity that you’re not constantly having to fear for your own gender expression. Amazingly, when you’re not hating yourself for being a little too femme, you end up respecting women.

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For the Love of Money, New York Times

In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough.

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Trans Woman Commits Suicide Amid Fear of Outing by Sports, Jezebel

Vanderbilt's trans status is treated as a revelation that's part and parcel of her fabricated education and background. It implies that the act of transitioning is itself a dishonesty or on par with lying, when what it actually reveals is the author's (and/or editor's) biases about the act as intrinsically fake or disingenuous, when it is, in fact, a more honest, genuine identity at long last for the person in question.

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Why Gamers Can't Stop Playing First-Person Shooters, The New Yorker

It isn’t just the first-person experience that helps to create flow; it’s also the shooting. “This deviation from our regular life, the visceral situations we don’t normally have,” Nacke says, “make first-person shooters particularly compelling.” It’s not that we necessarily want to be violent in real life; rather, it’s that we have pent-up emotions and impulses that need to be vented. “If you look at it in terms of our evolution, most of us have office jobs. We’re in front of the computer all day. We don’t have to go out and fight a tiger or a bear to find our dinner. But it’s still hardwired in humans. Our brain craves this kind of interaction, our brain wants to be stimulated. We miss this adrenaline-generating decision-making.”

The appeal of first-person shooters as a matter of flow and as a tool for asserting the control that Americans, according to polls, increasingly feel they lack over their lives.

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Where Politics Are Complex, Simple Joys at the Beach, New York Times

“What we are doing here will not change the situation,” said Hanna Rubinstein, who traveled to Tel Aviv from Haifa to take part. “But it is one more activity to oppose the occupation. One day in the future, people will ask, like they did of the Germans: ‘Did you know?’ And I will be able to say, ‘I knew. And I acted.’ ”

Lovely.

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Ghost in the Machine, Psychology Today

I feel and am aware of my own body and the fact that I am not the machine; no part of the machine is analogous to a part of my body. It’s as if the machine and I are connected, and I can feel what it feels through that lens without actually “becoming” it.

The idea of a machine synesthete is a lot more interesting than this article.

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Dream On, New Yorker

“Show me every car dream. Show me every car dream in Moscow. Show me every red-car dream that involved men living in Las Vegas. Compare that to Tokyo or Paris. Do famous people dream differently? Do you have more positive dreams if you have more money in the bank? Can you quantify the dreams of successful people, and can you teach that? Could we run an algorithm against the news and find people who predict events in their dreams?

A free app that, just give it time, will sell your dreams.

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Just spent an hour reading about the stars of Freaks, like Prince Randian, a father of five who was born with no limbs. He liked to roll his own cigarettes. The song above is by Daisy and Violet Hilton, conjoined twins who managed to have a pretty stable life after their turbulent childhood and career. 

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Seeing You Seeing Me, New York Times

In truth, it isn’t sex per se that makes “Blue Is the Warmest Color” problematic; it’s the patriarchal anxieties about sex, female appetite and maternity that leach into its sights and sounds and the way it frames, with scrutinizing closeness, the female body. In the logic of the movie, Adèle’s body is a mystery that needs solving and, for a brief while, it seems as if Emma will help solve it.

That last sentence though. My favorite thing about Jane Campion's Top of the Lake is that there are so few answers, and there's no tidy lesson to take away from it.

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When People Write for Free, Who Pays? Gawker

This is what props up the system of internships, low rates, and writing for "exposure": the middle- to upper-middle-class parent who can drop $900 for rent money here, or $2,000 for a broker's fee there, or who can simply co-sign a lease. Their budding writers get breathing room that millions of other mothers and fathers couldn't imagine being able to provide.

This is wonderful and what I always find myself arguing about to people who think their parents "aren't rich" even when, compared to mine and a lot of other people's parents, they are.

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Marijuana Compounds Can Kill Some Cancer Cells: Study, Huffington Post

The National Cancer Institute has also funded some research into cannabis and cancer, including a 2012 study that looked at the effects cannabis compounds have on slowing the progression of breast cancer, spokesman Michael Miller told U.S. News and World Report. However NCI has not funded research on the effects of cannabinoids on leukemia...."Although there is much promise, I struggle to find enough support to drive this work on," Liu said. "The mention of cannabinoids can polarize the public, who understandably link cannabis smoking with cannabis-derived drugs."

Findings are overhyped here, but we're not likely to hear about anyone really testing them further for a while.

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Aura of Mystery, Nature Medicine

It begins as a slowly expanding spot of light or similar visual disturbance, often accompanied by phantom noises and other sensory distortions. People who experience such 'auras' know all too well that these early warning signs will culminate in a head-splitting migraine, yet scientists have little idea what causes the debilitating deluge of symptoms.

My head hurts from reading this.

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US Military PsyOps video appears online, Mind Hacks

It’s called The Invisible Sword and it’s a bit like watching a cable TV infomercial for psychological warfare complete with cheesy easy listening background music and stilted dialogue.

PsyOps as after school special.

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If You Can Smell This, You May Not Have Alzheimer's, Popular Science

Peanut butter was used because it's a so-called "pure odorant." Generally our sense of smell actually incorporates two distinct sensations: the olfactory sense, or smell, as well as a trigeminal sense, which is like a more physical burning or stinging sort of sense. Peanut butter has no trigeminal element; it's only olfactory, which makes it ideal for testing, as the link to Alzheimer's is specifically dealing with the olfactory sense.

More cheap health testing like this and this pancreatic cancer test, please.

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Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet, MIT Technology Review

“People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination—a form of data redlining.”

It's hard for me to imagine a landlord or employer actively using data observations to discriminate against a potential tenant or employee. But then, if someone develops the technology, I'm sure there are those who would pay to use it.

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Why Do We Sexualize Chicken?, Sociological Images

Moreover, presenting chicken as dressing up for the male gaze suggests that the animal wants to be consumed.  The animal appears to desire to inspire (culinary) lust and, accordingly, it’s okay if you eat her.  This works best alongside feminization, as it is women who are typically presented as objects of a lustful male gaze.

See also, Suicide Food, in which male and female foods prepare themselves to be eaten. A pig bathing in a tub of BBQ sauce.