| Who Is the Planned Parenthood Defector Who Testified Before Congress? |
[09 Oct 2015|12:56am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/10/planned_parenthood_defector_susan_thayer_testifies_before_congress.html In 2002, a dead newborn baby boy was discovered at a recycling plant in Storm Lake, Iowa. Police could neither identify him nor determine the cause of death, so they turned to local doctors and nurses to try to find his mother. When they subpoenaed the records of women who’d had pregnancy tests at the local Planned Parenthood, however, the clinic fought the order to the Iowa Supreme Court, which ultimately stayed it. “For many women, it’s the most personal test they’ve ever had done,” then–clinic manager Susan Thayer was quoted saying in USA Today. “They come in expecting the information will stay here.”
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| The Blind Deserve Tech Support, Too |
[09 Oct 2015|11:07am] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/tech_companies_should_care_more_about_customers_with_disabilities.html It had started as just another call to tech support. Sina Bahram, a Ph.D. student in computer science at North Carolina University, had been trying to convince the Lenovo customer service representative to send out an on-site repair person to fix the broken audio on his laptop, but the representative was arguing that the company was no longer doing on-site repairs. Instead, he asked Bahram to go through a troubleshooting procedure, beginning with a visual inspection of the audio port. That presented a problem.
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| The Shame of Finding Your Younger Self Online |
[09 Oct 2015|01:58pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2015/10/the_shame_of_finding_your_younger_self_online.html My first week of grad school, a few of my new peers already knew me by my publication record. I wasn’t a prodigy: My writing hadn’t appeared in some prestigious scholarly journal. Instead, they’d Googled their way to an essay I’d written almost a decade before, one in which I enthusiastically declared my love for playing Dungeons & Dragons in the young adult section of my local public library. (And no, I’m not linking to it for you.)
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| The Shark |
[09 Oct 2015|02:29pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2015/10/aaron_sorkin_s_steve_jobs_starring_michael_fassbender_reviewed.html When I told a colleague I was on my way to see Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s biopic about the Apple founder and personal-computing guru, he asked, “Haven’t we figured out who Steve Jobs is yet?” In the four years since his death, three feature-length films have devoted themselves to understanding, debunking, and/or lionizing this paradigm-changing figure. But I’m not sure any of them has yet satisfactorily addressed that complex question.
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| The Girl, the Psycho, and the Nice Guy |
[09 Oct 2015|04:09pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/10/mk_reed_and_farel_dalrymple_s_comic_palefire_reviewed.html Are girls only interested in jerks? It’s a time-honored question among high school boys, and one that gets an admirably thorough examination in MK Reed and Farel Dalrymple’s collaborative comic Palefire. But the question, of course, isn’t that simple. Some girls are interested in bad boys, like Alison, who finds something intriguing in firebug Darren that no one else sees. And some “nice guys,” like Paul, use their niceness as a weapon, reminding their friends just how they’re continually falling short of the mark.
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| Do You Need a “Smart” Menstrual Cup? |
[09 Oct 2015|04:44pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2015/10/kickstarter_campaign_for_a_smart_menstrual_cup.html A little over a week ago, a product called Looncup appeared on Kickstarter. Touted as “the world’s first smart menstrual cup,” Looncup is an old-fashioned silicone cup with a twist: It contains a sensor that collects information about the volume and color of your menstrual fluid and an antenna that sends that information to your smartphone, which alerts you when your cup is getting full. The makers of Looncup enticed would-be backers with a video of a beautiful woman running alone, swimming alone, working out at the gym alone, and making copies alone in a dark, empty office while exchanging smug glances with her iPhone about the perfect volume and color of her menstrual fluids. A gorgeous desolation has come to the Internet of Things.
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| The Real Reason for the Chaos in the House |
[09 Oct 2015|10:36pm] |
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/10/house_speaker_fight_the_real_reason_the_republican_caucus_is_in_chaos.html First of all, let’s not shed any tears over the fall of Kevin McCarthy. Though the Republican majority leader is well-liked by his colleagues, he seems to have even less of a vision for where the GOP should go than the famously visionless John Boehner. If McCarthy has ever had a deep thought on how Republicans ought to position themselves in the post-Obama era, or the public policy goals the party should champion, he’s done an impressive job of concealing it from the public. McCarthy’s lack of vision could be forgiven if he were a masterful legislative strategist capable of implementing someone else’s vision, but again, there is no evidence that this in fact the case. Can you imagine McCarthy rallying Republicans around strengthening Congress, an institution that has grown dangerously weak as executive power has grown under Presidents Bush and Obama? Does he know enough about the basics of the federal budget process to get Republicans to try to fix it? Don’t make me laugh.
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