On Google, Parents Ask About Sons’ Intelligence–And Daughters’ Weight

The Article: Parents Ask Google If Their Sons Are Geniuses And If Their Daughters Are Fat by Amanda Marcotte in Slate.

The Text: One of the unintended consequences of the digital era is that it leaves a historically unprecedented pile of evidence of our innermost thoughts and concerns. Google’s simple search bar has turned into a dumping ground for the questions that we may be afraid to ask out loud, which is why it’s a perfect place to look and see if modern parents, who are often careful to claim publicly that they treat male and female children equally, are privately exerting different expectations and pressures based on gender.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz writes for the New York Times on his research looking at the different concerns that parents bring to Google when it comes to sons and daughters. He finds, unsurprisingly, that despite a decade-plus of “girl power” cheerleading, parents still believe that what matters about sons is their intelligence and what matters about girls is their looks.

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Russell Brand On How America Harvests Terrorists

Guess what: when people’s children are lawlessly and carelessly killed without reason, chances are they’re not going to start waving the perpetrator’s flag around in admiration.

A Worrying Oil Spill Timelapse

Hey, but at least that spilled oil is domestic, right?

Joe Rogan On Gay Marriage

Incendiary and incisive. We like.

Is It Wrong To Tell Others To “Do What They Love”?

The Article: In the Name of Love by Miya Tokumitsu in Jacobin.

The Text: “Do what you love. Love what you do.”

The commands are framed and perched in a living room that can only be described as “well-curated.” A picture of this room appeared first on a popular design blog, but has been pinned, tumbl’d, and liked thousands of times by now.

Lovingly lit and photographed, this room is styled to inspire Sehnsucht, roughly translatable from German as a pleasurable yearning for some utopian thing or place. Despite the fact that it introduces exhortations to labor into a space of leisure, the “do what you love” living room?— where artful tchotchkes abound and work is not drudgery but love?— is precisely the place all those pinners and likers long to be. The diptych arrangement suggests a secular version of a medieval house altar.

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate?— and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

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