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By SIU Press
An endangered right whale attempting to nurse her new calf in the December ocean, foxgloves blooming in different places from year to year, or the rescue of imperiled Kemp’s ridley sea turtles – the bounty and cruelty of nature infuses this latest collection of poems from Brendan Galvin, which takes as its maxim finding the extraordinary in the ordinary all around us.
Posted on September 12, 2017
By Kath Kenny/The Conversation
Once a week, during electives at primary school in 1980, I walked with a group of girls to the local hairdressing salon where we were taught how to apply eyeshadow, lipstick and smooth foundation onto our perfect skins. We also played AFL with the boys during sports period, but the news from women’s liberation about makeup and women’s oppression hadn’t yet arrived at my little school in the sleepy seaside town of Sorrento.
Second-wave feminism, to a large extent, defined itself against the beauty industry. As Susan Magarey writes, one of the Australian Women’s Liberation movement’s first actions was a 1970 protest against Adelaide University’s “Miss Fresher” beauty contest. It was inspired, in part, by a protest in the U.S. against the 1968 Miss America pageant.
Women’s liberationists did have their disagreements about individual choices and tactics. Anne Summers, writing in the newsletter MeJane in 1973, said she was abused for wearing makeup at a Women’s Liberation conference. Carol Hanisch, a member of the New York Radical Women group behind the 1968 protest, argued later that protesters should target not the women who enter beauty contests but “the men and bosses who imposed false beauty standards on women.”
In 1963, Betty Friedan had argued women’s magazines were central to creating the feminine mystique, an infantilizing image of womanhood built around a myth of beautiful women in beautiful homes tending to handsome husbands and beautiful children.
Posted on September 11, 2017
By SIU Press
Southern Illinois Salukis Football, the first book to focus solely on the program and its history at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, details the organization’s greatest moments, from its origins around the beginning of the 20th century through the extraordinary leadership of head coaches William McAndrew, Rey Dempsey and Jerry Kill, to the present-day team and its coach, local hero Nick Hill.
Dan Verdun draws on more than 100 interviews with coaches, players, sports historians and sports reporters, as well as newspaper and magazine archives and other sources, to give readers an in-depth look at Saluki players, coaches and teams from all eras.
Posted on August 30, 2017
By Natasha Tusikov/The Conversation
The torch-lit march by armed white supremacists in Charlottesville continues to generate debate about how hate groups should be regulated. Amid growing public pressure following the march, internet companies rushed to remove from their platforms websites espousing violent hate speech.
GoDaddy terminated its domain services to the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer website, as did Google. Cloudflare, a company that protects websites from online attacks, also banned the hate website from its platform. Russia ordered the site barred from being hosted in the country.
My research and my book, Chokepoints: Global Private Regulation on the Internet demonstrate that many internet companies already remove content and ban users “voluntarily” – that is, in the absence of legislation or any judicial processes. Major intermediaries including Google, PayPal, GoDaddy, Twitter and Facebook voluntarily police their platforms for child sexual abuse content, extremism and the illicit trade in counterfeit goods.
Many people understandably applaud these efforts to stamp out hate speech and other objectionable content. However, internet companies’ efforts as de facto regulators of speech raises serious questions: How should online content be regulated? By whom?
Posted on August 23, 2017
By Jennifer La Zotte/The Conversation
National Thrift Shop Day exists alongside other quirky holidays like National Play Your Ukulele Day and National Rice Krispies Treat Day. Though intended as a lighthearted celebration of an acceptable commercial habit, the process of making thrift stores hip involved unusual advocates.
As I describe in my recent book From Goodwill to Grunge, thrift stores emerged in the late 19th-century when Christian-run organizations adopted new models of philanthropy (and helped rehab the image of secondhand stores by dubbing their junk shops “thrift stores”).
Today, there are more than 25,000 resale stores in America. Celebrities often boast of their secondhand scores, while musicians have praised used goods in songs like Fanny Brice’s 1923 hit “Second-Hand Rose” and Macklemore and Ryan’s 2013 chart-topper “Thrift Shop.”
Yet over the past 100 years, visual artists probably deserve the most credit for thrift shopping’s place in the cultural milieu.
Posted on August 18, 2017
By The Spertus Institute For Jewish Learning And Leadership
For the 7th year in a row, Chicago will mark Jewish Book Month with One Book | One Community, in which a single title is selected for discussions and activities across greater Chicago.
This year’s selection is Windy City Blues by Chicago author Renée Rosen (White Collar Girl and What the Lady Wants). Set in 1950s Chicago, it follows the musical and social revolution through the eyes of a young Jewish woman working at the legendary Chess Records.
Posted on August 14, 2017
By Kristin Seefeldt/The Conversation
After “Rose” lost her low-wage job in a Southeast Michigan nursing home, the single mother of four sought Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) benefits.
People who are eligible for this federal, time-limited welfare program for very low-income families must be working or looking for work, a feature the Trump administration and other politicians want to spread to Medicaid and other similar programs that support low-income Americans.
Rose obtained the benefits but lost them after finding that the program was doing little to help her get a job and interfering with her parenting. This fairly common experience suggests that these restrictions can prolong and worsen spells of poverty. Like many experts on American poverty relief, I don’t see why that punitive strategy makes sense.
Posted on August 3, 2017
By Andrea Adomako/Aeon
In September 1965, an article titled “The All-White World of Children’s Books” appeared in the influential American magazine The Saturday Review of Literature.
Its author, the editor and educator Nancy Larrick, noted that African-American children were learning about the world “in books which either omit them entirely or scarcely mention them.”
In one award-winning volume from 1945, black children were portrayed with bunion-covered feet and popping eyes, living in dilapidated shacks with gun-wielding adults.
Meanwhile, white children were “nothing less than cherubic, with dainty little bare feet or well-made shoes,” Larrick wrote.
After years of complaints, she said, the publisher finally solved the problem by simply removing all black faces from the book.
More than 50 years later, the problem persists. Imaginary black children remain almost as marginalized as real ones, at least in mainstream publishing.
Posted on July 27, 2017
By David Schlosberg/The Conversation
This article is part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies, bullshit and propaganda that threatens rational discourse and policy.
The project brings together scholars of media and communications, government and international relations, physics, philosophy, linguistics, and medicine, and is affiliated with the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre, the Sydney Environment Institute and the Sydney Democracy Network.
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I grew up in the Long Island suburbs of New York and have vivid memories of running behind the “fog trucks.” These trucks went through the neighborhoods spraying DDT for mosquito control until it was banned in 1972.
I didn’t know it until much later, but that experience, and exposure, was extended due to the pesticide industry’s lies and tactics – what is now labelled “post-truth.”
Posted on July 25, 2017
By Ronald W. Pies/The Conversation
When Donald Trump gave the commencement address at Liberty University this spring, he told the graduates that “America has always been the land of dreams because America is a nation of true believers.” Trump argued that, in America, “we don’t worship government; we worship God.”
I suspect the president was unaware that the term “true believer” was made famous more than 65 years ago in Eric Hoffer’s 1951 book, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.
Hoffer had no academic training, having worked mainly as a longshoreman. He wrote The True Believer in reaction to the rise of fascism, Nazism and communism. Against all odds, the book became a best-seller.
Posted on July 17, 2017
