Month: March 2013

Kelly Stout profiles Don Ward, who “runs a successful business shining shoes at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street in Manhattan”:

Don uses various tools of benign manipulation to attract customers. Flattery (“Nice boots! And your hair looks nice. Can I love your boots?”). Shame (“Look at your boots!”). And appeals to reason (“How do you not clean your dirty shoes, sir? Sir! It’s 2013; we have the technology.”). Don estimates that only one quarter of his customers are women—this is up from when he started shining shoes in the nineties, when a mere one in nine was female—but his tenderhearted heckling is equal-opportunity, and he does a lot of it.

Ryan Healey reflects on the end of Canada’s experiment with pole-dancing immigrants:

Since the 1970s, a specific visa process for foreign strippers has been in place, although it has vacillated between expedient carte blanche and Victorian prejudice. So many people want this visa window closed for so many noble reasons. For humanitarians, you can protect women from this way of life; or, if you’re nativist, you can appeal to “keeping it Canadian.” And haven’t you heard of human trafficking? A 2010 RCMP report said that criminal groups exploited the visa policy to induct foreigners into the underground sex trade, the stats slippery but terrifying.

Healey concludes:

The stripper visa was radical, even if it existed for all the wrong reasons, and now it is lost: a federal policy that required Canada to meet its infinite demand for libidinal energy. The country had opened its arms to the legitimacy of the sex trade and the beginnings of considerable social mobility. A Romanian could raise herself up with only her body, and Windsor’s streets could be paved with worn US dollar bills.

Alice Jones is weary of popular but unpredictable interactive shows like Sleep No More, where audience members are immersed in multi-faceted performances and can explore a five-floor set designed to look like the inside of an abandoned hotel:

There is still the very real risk of watching an usher for ages in case he turns out to be a Main Character (he didn’t). Pace is another potential pitfall. “The average journey time takes approximately 70 minutes, but you may go at your own pace,” states the laminated sheet. And if you get round in 55 minutes? Does that make you a bad audience member?

It’s difficult to give yourself over to theatre when your over-riding emotion is anxiety. Anxiety that you’re not seeing the crucial key that will unlock the piece; that you’re looking too hard at something that means nothing; that you might have to get involved at any moment; or that you’re missing out on something more exciting happening in another room. Too many times I have left shows only to discover that the best bit was a secret room I never found or a whispered encounter in a hidden phone box to which I was never privy. The feeling is disappointment mingled, it has to be said, with relief.

Google can help us study drug interactions:

Much like Google Flu Trends reveals influenza outbreaks by tracking flu-related search terms, search queries about drug combinations and possible side effects—say, “paroxetine,” “pravastatin,” and “hyperglycemia”—might enable researchers to identify unanticipated downsides to medications, says bioinformatics researcher Nigam Shah of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “If a lot of people are concerned about a symptom, that in itself is valuable information.” [And although] many bad reactions to drugs never get reported to doctors, people talk about what’s bothering them all the time on a casual basis to their friends or online, notes computational biologist Nicholas Tatonetti of Columbia University, who was also involved with the study. “They don’t really know,” he says. “They’re just reporting on their symptoms, which is just a normal thing that humans love to do.”

A “Harlem Shake” video, filmed in “front of the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood”:

Amar Toor notes the proliferation of Harlem Shake protests in the Middle East:

The transformation from meme to message began late last month, when Egyptian police arrested four pharmaceutical students for publicly recording a “Harlem Shake” video in their underwear — an act that officials from Egypt’s conservative ruling party described as “scandalous.” A similar controversy erupted in Tunisia just days later, when education minister Abdeltif Abid promised to launch a vigorous investigation into a “Harlem Shake” video filmed at a high school in Tunis. Threatening swift punishment for those responsible, Abid condemned the act as an “insult to the educational message.”

As is so often the case, though, these crackdowns have only fanned the flames of discontent, emboldening progressive-minded youths to produce even more “Shake” videos, while underscoring the profound social divides that threaten to derail two of the region’s most fragile democracies.

In Egypt, some members of the Muslim Brotherhood released their own “Harlem Shake” video to insult opposition leaders, though they then subsequently tried to scrub it from the Internet.

You might have thought that a church that bars women from any institutional equality might be a little leery of actively opposing the VAWA. You would be wrong. Why on earth would Catholics oppose measures to protect women from domestic and other forms of violence? Because some of them might be gay:

For the first time since the original act became law in 1994, it spells out that no person may be excluded from the law’s protections because of “sexual orientation” or “gender identity” — specifically covering lesbian, transgender and bisexual women. That language disturbs several bishops who head key committees within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops that deal with, among other issues, marriage, the laity, youth and religious liberty.

“These two classifications are unnecessary to establish the just protections due to all persons. They undermine the meaning and importance of sexual difference,” the bishops said in a statement released by the USCCB on Wednesday. “They are unjustly exploited for purposes of marriage redefinition, and marriage is the only institution that unites a man and a woman with each other and with any children born from their union,” the statement continued.

So protecting lesbians and transgender and bisexual women from violence is now something Christians should oppose? The most vulnerable are somehow the least defensible? Do these bishops have even basic comprehension of the Gospels they read out loud every Sunday?

Instead of preventing the stoning of an adulteress, as Jesus did, they would have gone looking for bigger rocks.

A rare moment in actual journalistic accountability on the far right.