As mentioned earlier this week, one of our own is embarking on a lifetime of marital bliss this weekend–and because we believe in doin’ it up big here at PB, when it comes to celebrating our own, we’re devoting this Friday’s Random Ten to wedding songs in blackink12’s honor.
Below, you’ll find an amalgam of tunes folks either sing during ceremonies, request at receptions, and/or can’t believe were recorded with nuptials of any kind in mind.
Raise high your glass (or your pimp chalice) in our comrade’s honor as you listen to our marital mixtape.
And, as always, be sure to add any reception requests of your own to the comments section.
1. “International Player’s Anthem (I Choose You)” by UGK f/Outkast (slb)
2. “Spend My Life” by Eric Benét featuring Tamia (Alisa)
3. “Bonnie and Shyne” by Shyne featuring Barrington Levy (R. A. B.)
4. “I Do” by Boyz II Men (brokeymcpoverty)
5. “White Wedding” by Billy Idol (quadmoniker)
6. “Let’s Get Married (Remix)” by Jagged Edge featuring Run DMC (Alisa)
7. “Wifey” by Next (brokeymcpoverty)
8. “You” by Jesse Powell (Alisa)
9. “No One Else in the Room” by Nas featuring Maxwell (R.A.B.)
10. “Love U 4 Life” by Jodeci (slb)
Once y’all finish playin’ these (and the Cupid Shuffle), it’ll almost be like you were there!
Finally, an honorable mention for Shalamar’s “A Night to Remember,” a staple at many a hip and happenin’ wedding reception:
Finally, Sawyer! Sawyer is the one parallel life I want to see, but not because I think the story will have more integrity or be more interesting. I just like seeing Sawyer as much as possible.
In the beginning, we see Sawyer running the same con he ran in the beginning of the first season: a pile of money spills out and he’s ready to swindle some unsuspecting damsel. But, in keeping with this season’s on-island=bad/off-island=good dichotomy, this Sawyer is a detective who’s trying to get the target to turn over her conman husband. While, in another life, Sawyer took his childhood pain, assumed the identify of the man responsible for his parents death and turned into a bad guy, who used the drive in this world to root out injustice. He even says as much to new-Charlotte, “I got to a point in my life where I was either going to be a criminal or a cop. So I chose cop.” That might be taking it a little far, though. Not that the rest of the season has been subtle.
On-island, Sawyer is busy performing busy-work for not-Locke. Locke wants him to go to the other island — Is it the same one where he and Kate shacked up as captives? I thin that was the dress she wore. — and find the people we know are at the temple. Of course, Sawyer finds Widmore instead (finally) and makes him a promise that looks as though he’s screwing not-Locke and crew over. Then, he goes back to not-Locke and tells him the whole plan, and it looks like he’s screwing over Widmore. We know, of course, that Sawyer’s trying to screw over them both so they can screw each other. Also, cause Sawyer ain’t with anybody, Freckles! So now, we see the final island battles shaping up. I just hope we get to see Desmond again.
Off-island, we see that Sawyer still has a plan to murder the real Sawyer, and that he screws over new-Charlotte because he has issues. In the end, he’s also surprised to run into Kate. I can’t tell if the look on his face when he pulled off her hood was expressing shock because she was a woman, or because he recognized her from the airport. Time will tell. Also, Miles is his partner. I suspect that who we see the Losties running into in their parallel lives is going to mean something, but I’m not sure what. Sawyer knows the researchers now, Jack runs into Dogen and Locke, Sayid runs into Jin, etc. Also, has anyone else noticed that there hasn’t been a Michael or a Walt? We haven’t seen them in so long it’s easy to forget, but they were really important characters in the first two seasons. I suspect Walt’s entirely grown now, so working him in just might be impossible. But it would be nice if Michael could have been on the flight or something.
There’s not much else to say except, 1) What’s wrong with Sayid? and 2) Is Claire really crazy, or just island crazy? I’ll let you guys have the rest of it below.
You’ll notice that the roundup is waaaaay later than normal.That’s because blackink12, our usual roundup guy, is kinda swamped with uber-important life stuff (something about “getting married this weekend…”). So into the breach I step, as your substitute aggregator. But don’t be forgetting yourself and writing all sorts of funny names on the attendance sheet. I am not above drop-kicking motherfuckers.
Wait, where was I? Ah, yes. The roundup. Let’s go.
The votes needed in the House to pass health care reform (which a plurality of voters now support) are trickling in.Ann Kirkpatrick and Mike Doyle, who had previously been undecided, have now said they will vote for the bill, putting the Democrats at 207 — nine short of the magic number for passage. Tim Kaine, the head of the DNC, is trying to use the power of the purse to win over undecideds and nail down over the skittish by offering financial support in this fall’s races.
Michelle Goldbergsays HCR is a less-than-ideal piece of legislation for feminists, but they/we should support it nonetheless. “The simple fact is that health-care reform, even with its awful provisions on abortion, will hugely improve the health of American women. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, more than 17 million women are uninsured, and millions more are underinsured…Women are more likely to rely on their spouse’s insurance coverage, leaving them vulnerable if they’re divorced or widowed, if their husband becomes old enough to qualify for Medicare, or if their partner’s employer decides to drop dependent coverage, which is happening with increasing frequency.” (From a RaceWire piece that illustrates Goldberg’s point: “African-American women are nearly four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related complications than white women. These rates and disparities have not improved in more than 20 years.”) (G.D.)
If you’re interested in that kind of thing, John Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter spills the beans to GQ. The nearly 10,000-word Q&A is accompanied by a photo spread fit for movie star shoot. In one of the photos, Hunter is holding her and Edwards’s daughter. (blackink12)
The New Yorkerprofiles John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court’s 90-year-old liberal stalwart, who many think will retire soon, putting Obama in position to select another justice (but not changing the Court’s ideological makeup). (G.D.)
NYU has a list of nominees for best journalism of the 2000s. Some pieces are long overdue their praise and others, are, well, let’s just say they’re not favorites. (Monica)
Sady at Feministe reviewed the “The Most Important Film of the Year or Perhaps of All Time,” otherwise known as the massively-hyped Lady Gaga music video for “Telephone.” Sample line: “Anyway, Lady Gaga’s vagina. There it is.” (blackink12)
Got links? Share ‘em. And, of course, be sure wish blackink12 (but we just know him as Joel) the most ridiculous nuptials in human history and connubial bliss with The First Lady. Joel is funny as hell and equally smart, and I’m sure I speak for all of the PB crew when I say that we’re lucky to know you.
“I just don’t think it makes much sense,” he shrugged. “His college is paid for; he can go anywhere he wants to go, anywhere in the state. I’m not dishing out forty-two thousand dollars so that–”
“It’s not going to cost him forty-two thousand dollars! It’s not going to cost you anything. He’s paying for it! He is!”
Yes, that was the plan, until one particular acceptance letter invited the present furor into his home. The shouting downstairs had torn into his dreams; now the boy couldn’t sleep.
“…and what if he can’t? I’m cosigning, right? What if he can’t pay? Then what?”
I have yet to see Green Zone, Matt Damon’s Bourne-esque latest, but I’ve been enjoying the commentary surrounding it. For instance, here’s Freddie DeBoer with his take on conservative criticism of the film:
What’s really behind these charges of “slander,” I suspect, is that this movie tells the bald truth about America’s involvement in Iraq: that the chief rationale for invading Iraq, that Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction, has been proven entirely false. It is true and uncomfortable that we invaded a country and brutalized its people under false pretenses. If telling the unhappy truth about American actions is enough to get a movie labeled anti-American, then I suppose Amistad is an anti-American film. The movie also makes a big deal about de-Baathification and the dissolving of the Iraqi military. The movie points out that this was insanity, and this again is true and uncomfortable.
And here’s Daniel Larison responding to Ross Douthat’s complaint that the film isn’t nuanced enough:
Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not?
I remain mystified by this conservative refusal to honestly take account of the damage wrought by their war boosterism and militarism. Among mainstream conservatives, support for President Bush’s ill-thought, reckless invasion of Iraq was near-unanimous. And given that the war has claimed tens of thousands of lives and broken many million’s more, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a little bit of contrition from conservatives. Instead, we get nonsense like Douthat’s plea for nuance. “These were decent men! They deserve some sympathy!” At the risk of sounding shrill, where exactly is the nuance in aggressive war? And why should I feel sorry for the ideologues and militarists who destroyed a country and a culture in their insane push to remake the world in America’s image?
It’s uncomfortable to think of the war in these terms — especially given our collective refusal to understand American power as anything but an unqualified good — but if we’re not going to hold accountable those responsible, then the very least we could do is acknowledge the destruction we caused. And if that requires a somewhat simplistic view of things, so be it.
PostBourgie: The Podcast, Episode 4: “Black Women Should Just Quit Life.”
Monica, Jamelle and I are back with a discussion about That Study on women of color and wealth; marriage equality in D.C., and Marc Thiessen on the Daily Show.
Listen to the podcast here on the blog (and subscribe). Click once to play, click again to download.
Apparently, hundreds of thousands of obnoxious and horny college students are about to converge on unsuspecting beach towns around the country to enjoy something regularly referred to as Spring Break.
I say it that way because it seems none of us here at PostBourgie ever enjoyed the kind of bacchanalia that lured our classmates to South Padre Island and Panama City Beach. Most of us went back home, others worked through the week and at least one of us celebrated, um, “Reading Week.”
Right. For better or worse, we’re nerds and recluses.
So to honor those of us who opted out of sun-drenched beaches and drunken fun with coeds for family time in Arkansas we’ve got a soundtrack for the weekend. Eric Nies would totally hate us:
1. “What About Your Friends” by TLC (R.A.B.)
2. “Take On Me” by Zo & Tigallo (slb)
3. “Hanging By a Moment” by Lifehouse (Quadmoniker)
4. “Don’t You Forget About Me” by Simple Minds (slb)
After I wrote a column supporting New York’s latest effort to tax sugary drinks, I read RaceWire’s column on how it’s just another tax to hurt poor people. While, yes, sales taxes are regressive, decrying this tax as a social justice issue misses the point.
For starters, as I wrote in my piece, this sales tax hits producers who use concentrated syrups to add a lot of calories to their drinks. That might sound like a moot point, since the tax will be passed on to consumers as a higher-priced drink, but it’s important to note that it also includes fruit juices with added sugar. In those instances, consumers can very easily shift their purchases to juices with more natural fruit that are slightly less sweet and have higher nutritional value per calorie. (The science on how bad sugary drinks are for us is pretty clear, but for some reason the RaceWire author, Michelle Chen, calls it uncertain. To support that, she links to a newspaper article that notes scientific consensus but quotes the beverage industry calling that into question.)
Second, assuming that the tax will disproportionately hit poor families assumes they won’t shift their purchases elsewhere in response. The average price of milk is $3.50 a gallon, while the average price of a 2-liter bottle of Coke is $1.70. Two bottles of Coke, which would provide about the same amount of liquid as a gallon of milk, would still be 10 cents cheaper. Part of the reason it’s so cheap is because sweeteners like corn syrup are cheap, and they’re so cheap because of government subsidies. (The dairy industry is also, obviously, heavily subsidized, but making it even cheaper to compete with soda isn’t the answer). It’s fine to talk about personal choice, but you have to note that the government is already interfering in such a way that it encourages families to buy more soda than is healthy. It’s possible, then, that families now are actually forgoing drinks like milk because soda’s so much cheaper. We’re subsidizing junk food, which to me is a more important social justice issue. The food we make most available to people who are watching their wallets is the food that will cost them most in the long run.
Don’t have a ton to say about the “black women have a net worth of $5″ meme (which comes from this study), but allow me to quote Ta-Nehisi Coates on that somewhat inaccuratePittsburgh Post Gazette story about the study that’s been making the rounds:
The headline announces, presumably, that all single black women are worth $5. The article then qualifies the claim:
Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.
This is alarming. But it’s also inaccurate. From the study:
Young women ages 18-35, whether white or non-white, are beginning their adult years with a median wealth of zero, meaning that at least half of women in this age group had no wealth or had debts greater than the value of their assets (see Table 3). However, while white women in the prime working years of ages 36-49 have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61% of their white male counterparts), the median wealth for women of color is only $5.
This is still really alarming. But obviously, conclusions about women of color–all nonwhite women and Latinas of all races, according to the study– of a certain age, are very different than conclusions about black women in particular. Professor Chang was kind enough to talk to me this evening and verified that $5 dollar stat applied to women of color as a whole, and not just black women.
This study is really alarming. The lack of wealth among black women and Latinas is a serious issue, and needs to be addressed. But instead of taking the study seriously, the author of the Post Gazette story immediately jumped on the “black women, it sucks to be you” bandwagon, to the detriment of the facts presented in the story itself.
Frankly, as TNC writes: “We deserve to have the wealth gap–arguably the preeminent racial issue of our time–discussed seriously. In that endeavor we should reject articles that turn stats into porn.”
On the good side, the homie Latoya Peterson at Racialicious is doing an in-depth series on women of color and wealth, which is definitely worth a read.
Conversations pertaining to the persistent problem of how to increase teacher effectiveness tend to yield more questions than answers. The intuitive strategy of choosing exceptional students and overachievers in the hopes that they will in turn be exceptional teachers sounds right, but doesn’t work. Attributes that are fuzzy and difficult to quantify such as “grit” and “life satisfaction” seem to say more about a person’s potential to be a good teacher than whether they went to an ivy league school or have experience teaching difficult students at under-resourced schools. For those of us seeking some concrete way of finding, training and keeping good teachers this conclusion is less than satisfying. In addition, the need for teachers is so great is is unlikely that the ranks can be filled by only recruiting candidates who are naturally gifted in teaching.
I believe teaching is a mixture of skill sets. Having an easy rapport with students and and a certain “touch” with students can be an asset, as are many other intangibles that we think about when we reminisce about our favourite teachers. However, these ineffable qualities must coexist with studied and reflective praxis, which is not mysterious at all. Its the product of finding out what works, throwing out was doesn’t and refining it, so that it can be employed by anyone who can learn it. For a far better discussion on this than I could produce I recommend Elizabeth Green’s great piece in the NYT Magazine on the quest to train better teachers and the contributions of Doug Lemov’s work on a taxonomy of teaching techniques. The premise of Lemov’s taxonomy, which is to be published in April entitled “Teach Like A Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students On The Path To College”, is that although a lot of teaching seems like magic it is actually a defined skill set. A skill set that can be taught.
When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise. “Stand still when you’re giving directions,” a teacher at a Boston school told him. In other words, don’t do two things at once. Lemov tried it, and suddenly, he had to ask students to take out their homework only once.
It was the tiniest decision, but what was teaching if not a series of bite-size moves just like that?
I first encountered the taxonomy this winter in Boston at a training workshop, one of the dozens Lemov gives each year to teachers. Central to Lemov’s argument is a belief that students can’t learn unless the teacher succeeds in capturing their attention and getting them to follow instructions. Educators refer to this art, sometimes derisively, as “classroom management.” The romantic objection to emphasizing it is that a class too focused on rules and order will only replicate the power structure; a more common view is that classroom management is essential but somewhat boring and certainly less interesting than creating lesson plans. While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.
There are some who might rail against this, seeing it as a “reduction” of teaching to “mere skills” but I don’t think that at all. There has to be some form of structure that can be relied on and knowledge of what works so that so-so teachers can be helped to become good teachers and good teachers can become great teachers. Even talent needs a nudge from time to time. Given the massive gaps in the amount of good teachers we have and what we need projects like the taxonomy and mechanical changes to the way we teach teachers may be the most realistic means of meeting the challenge of improving education.
Winner of a Bellwether Prize for Literature of Social Change, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky is the story of Rachel, a biracial adolescent being raised by her African American grandmother, in the wake of a horrific tragedy that left Rachel critically injured and her Danish mother and two siblings dead.
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver, who awarded Durrow the Bellwether, calls this “a breathless telling of a tale we’ve never heard before. Haunting and lovely… this book could not be more timely.”
After finishing the novel, I took issue with this idea that Durrow’s story is one “we’ve never heard before.” But I’ll get back to that in a minute.
It’s difficult to categorize the book: it’s part bildungsroman and part mystery. It succeeds at the former and fails, at least for me, at the latter. The “mystery” of the novel is alluded to in the title. Rachel does, quite literally, fall from the sky (or rather, through the sky: from a rooftop, to the ground). So do her mother, brother, and sister. The question Durrow wants us to ponder, as we read each short chapter, written from a revolving door of characters’ perspectives, is: did they fall or were they pushed?
In last night’s Ben-centric episode, we got a chance to see the character at his lowest, as he literally dug his own grave at gunpoint, and at his best, in ParalleLA, where he passed on an opportunity to follow through on a “Machiavellian plan” in order to secure a bright and winning future for Alex Rousseau, of all people.
Here’s how it went: early in the episode, Ben, having been separated from Ilana & company, in a failed attempt to “save” Sayid, meets back up with them in the jungle. Ilana wastes no time in asking Ben whether or not Fake Locke killed Jacob. Ben says of course, but Ilana is skeptical. So she shoves the ashen remains of Jacob into Miles’ hands and demands that he confirm Ben’s account. Miles, being the top-notch communicator with the dead that he is, immediately discerns Ben’s lie.
This is when Ilana decides to march Ben into the brush, shackle his ankle and force him to dig a grave which, once complete, she fully intends to fill with his cold dead body.
I just finished listening to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks on audiobook (though I really wish I’d read it) and I can’t overstate how fabulous it was. Ta-Nehisi Coateshas already noted that the author, Rebecca Skloot,* seemed to equivocate on the question of race, but her reporting doesn’t. In 1951, Lacks’s cervical cancer cells were taken by doctors without her permission. She would later die of the disease, but her uncommonly hardy cells became the first ever to grow in a Petri dish. The HeLa cells (named after their progenitor) led to so many scientific advances it’s hard to recount quickly, and the family never knew about the cell sample until 25 years later, when researchers came to ask for their blood.
The book shows clearly how racism, sexism and poverty played a role in patients’ access to medicine and in how doctors regarded patients. And Skloot makes clear that it’s not just a tale of the past: Lacks’s children have their own medical problems, and many of them don’t have health insurance. But the book is really about the life of Deborah Lacks-Pullum. Lacks’s daughter was born just a year before her mother died, and sees in the story of the HeLa cells a chance to connect with the mother she never knew.
One thing about the book unsettled me, and it was problem that was probably amplified on audio. Skloot doesn’t correct for grammar, and both Henrietta Lacks and her family members speak in a heavy Southern dialect. It’s not just them. An Asian doctor and an Austrian researcher are presented with imperfect English. And the readers for the book do voice impressions.
As the Fake AP Stylebook said on Twitter recently, “When considering whether to write in dialect, please don’t.” For newspapers, that’s generally true. It’s seen both as condescending — since people in general rarely use proper grammar when speaking but improper grammar is different from rendering dialect — and confusing for the reader. It’s also kind of a cheap way to convey a tone. But in this instance, it’s not so clear that it’s bad. One of the problems the Lacks’s had with the fact that their mothers cells had be taken was that she, and them, had been so left out of the story. Few people knew Lacks had contributed the HeLa cells at all. And even fewer knew about the woman behind them. Skloot’s mission was to correct that historical omission, and doing it in a way that lets the Lackses tell their own story in their own way seems like a good way to do it. In fact, Deborah’s voice in the book is really unique, and the language she used conveys a real sense of her personality.
But dialect: is it ok to use it? Does this make anyone else uncomfortable?
*Side note, Skloot came to one of my grad school classes, and I’ve been waiting to read the book since she talked about it then.
There are a few things in personal finance as aggravating as overdraft fees: you make a $55-dollar purchase with your debit card, and you only have $53 in your account. Your bank honors your charge anyway — for a $35 fee. In theory, customers willingly sign up for the service in order to avoid embarrassment at the register. In practice, though, many banks enroll their customers in the programs without telling them and assess charges to customers’ accounts out of sequence in order to force them into overdrafting their account. Banks have been leaning more on fees to shore up their bottom lines after the banking crisis forced them to find new revenue streams. So it’s hard not to be happy about Bank of America’s announcement that it would eliminate overdraft fees, which might force other big banks to do the same.
But one of the less-discussed consequences of bank fees is how they help promote instability for people on the lower-end of the socioeconomic scale. Many of the traditional barriers to banking access have eroded over the last decade, with branches sprouting up everywhere and putting people in traditionally underserved communites in position to open accounts. But the proliferation of banks in poor neighborhoods has done little to keep the unbanked from opting for “fringe banking services” — check cashing services, payday lenders, and the like. Those institutions charge onerous fees of their own, but unlike the big banks, their fees are explicitly outlined. Customers may cough up $12 for the privilege of cashing a $300 check, but it makes more economic sense than being stuck with miscellaneous surcharges over the course of several weeks for not maintaining a minimum balance, withdrawing money from an ATM, writing a check, or overdrafting your account — penalties that can accrue much more easily and be much more disastrous when your life is inherently unstable.
If banks moved away from the dizzying constellation of fees they currently dish out — unlikely, to be sure — it would result in more money remaining in the hands of the people who need it most. As it is, this is another example of the many added costs that come with being poor.
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