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šŸ—ŗļø Emoji Day: A šŸ“– List

Image by Dimitri Otis / Getty Images

šŸ‘‹ July 17 is šŸ—ŗļø Emoji Day! To šŸŽ‰ this ever-changing visual language that we use on our šŸ“± and šŸ’» and across social media, here are five šŸ“– recommendations — including a delightful post series on a blog about punctuation — on the history and evolution of the emoji. 😘

1. A Series on Emoji (Keith Houston, August 2018-January 2020, Shady Characters)

Don’t have time to read 10 posts? šŸ˜› Adam Sternbergh’s 2014 New York magazine piece, “😊, You’re Speaking Emoji,” covers the emoji’s evolution.

On his blog Shady Characters, Houston tells the histories of our favorite punctuation marks, from the ā‰ļø to the #ļøāƒ£. In a 10-part series on the emoji, he chronicles the beginning; its ancestor, the emoticon; its adoption outside of šŸ—¾; the gatekeepers; its presence in the šŸ“°; the challenges in making the character set more inclusive and representative; its future; its nature (“What are emoji?”); and, in the series conclusion, its current state. Don’t overlook the reference šŸ“œ at the bottom of each post, which include even more recommended stories and articles.

It was into this text-only world that emoji’s first true anĀ­cestor was born. ComĀ­prisĀ­ing only a colon, a hyĀ­phen and a closĀ­ing parĀ­enĀ­thesis, the emoticon, or :-), was perĀ­fectly deĀ­signed to pierce the disĀ­inĀ­terĀ­ested blankĀ­ness of a crt monĀ­itor. GranĀ­ted, so-called emoticons have been disĀ­covered in many pre-diĀ­gital sources, such as sevĀ­enĀ­teenth cenĀ­tury poems:

Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruĀ­ins, (smilĀ­ing yet:)
Tear me to tatĀ­ters, yet I’ll be
PaĀ­tient in my neĀ­cesĀ­sity.

and tranĀ­scripĀ­tions of AbĀ­raĀ­ham LinĀ­colĀ­n’s speeches:

…there is no preĀ­cedĀ­ent for your beĀ­ing here yourselves, (apĀ­plause and laughter;) and I ofĀ­fer, in jusĀ­tiĀ­ficĀ­aĀ­tion of myĀ­self and you, that I have found nothĀ­ing in the ConĀ­stiĀ­tuĀ­tion against.

“Emoticon, Emoji, Text: Pt. 1, I Second That Emoticon” by Tom McCormack in Rhizome covers this joke gone wrong in more detail.

but these are alĀ­most cerĀ­tainly tyĀ­poĀ­graphic misĀ­steps rather than inĀ­tenĀ­tional smiĀ­leys. The conĀ­sensus is that emoticons proper arĀ­rived in 1982 in reĀ­sponse to a joke gone wrong on an elecĀ­tronic bulĀ­letin board at CarneĀ­gie MelĀ­lon UniĀ­versity.

2. How Emoji Conquered the šŸŒŽ (Jeff Blagdon, March 2013, The Verge)

Blagdon tracks the beginnings of this digital communication through the šŸ‘€ of Shigetaka Kurita, the šŸ’”šŸ‘ØšŸ» of emoji.

Windows 95 had just launched, and email was taking off in Japan alongside the pager boom. But Kurita says people had a hard time getting used to the new methods of communication. In Japanese, personal letters are long and verbose, full of seasonal greetings and honorific expressions that convey the sender’s goodwill to the recipient. The shorter, more casual nature of email lead to a breakdown in communication. ā€œIf someone says Wakarimashita you don’t know whether it’s a kind of warm, soft ā€˜I understand’ or a ā€˜yeah, I get it’ kind of cool, negative feeling,ā€ says Kurita. ā€œYou don’t know what’s in the writer’s head.ā€

Face to face conversation, and even the telephone, let you gauge the other person’s mood from vocal cues, and more familiar, longer letters gave people important contextual information. Their absence from these new mediums meant that the promise of digital communication — being able to stay in closer touch with people — was being offset by this accompanying increase in miscommunication.

ā€œSo that’s when we thought, if we had something like emoji, we can probably do faces. We already had the experience with the heart symbol, so we thought it was possible.ā€ ASCII art kaomoji were already around at the time, but they were a pain to enter on a cellphone since they were composed with multiple characters. Kurita was looking for a simpler solution.

3. Everybody šŸ˜ŠšŸ’© (Mary Mann, August 2014, Matter)

Mann discusses her conflicted feelings around her use of emojis: she’s fascinated by their ability to encapsulate our emotions so succinctly, and that they are understood across šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡øšŸ‡ÆšŸ‡µšŸ‡«šŸ‡·šŸ‡ØšŸ‡³šŸ‡§šŸ‡· and šŸ‘¶šŸ»šŸ§’šŸ»šŸ‘©šŸ»šŸ‘µšŸ», but also šŸ¤¦šŸ»ā€ā™€ļø to rely so heavily on them.

And of course emojis are inherently silly, but that’s not in and of itself a bad thing. Silliness is not necessarily an indication of shallowness. In fact, I’d argue the opposite: A capacity for real silliness is usually born out of pain. We’re attracted to silliness because we need it. We need it because life isn’t easy.

Your mom is sick.

Your grandfather died.

You got laid off.

Your company folded.

Your rent went up.

Your husband left.

He didn’t call.

She didn’t call.

They never call.

All these things happen every day, to billions of people all over the world. And if a stupid cartoon of smiling poop makes you feel better, well, that’s:

😜 + šŸ’”

4. The šŸ‘„ History Of The šŸ’© Emoji (Or, How Google Brought šŸ’© To šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø) (Lauren Schwartzberg, November 2014, Fast Company)

Schwartzberg compiles an šŸ‘„ history on the origin and evolution of the beloved šŸ’© emoji, created in šŸ‡ÆšŸ‡µ and brought to the šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø by a team at Google.

Darick [Tong, Google šŸ‘ØšŸ»ā€šŸ’» and šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ølead of its emoji project]: It struck me as a particularly flexible and effective emoji. It provides a way to say shit or crap in an email without explicitly typing the words, and it catches the reader’s attention in a way that smiley faces don’t. Most importantly, it always elicits a smile from the reader and the writer, which is ultimately the purest purpose of emoji: to add emotional expressiveness to written communication.

5. Emoji Don’t Mean What They Used To (Ian Bogost, February 2019, The Atlantic)

While it makes sense for emoji to cover the range of the human experience, Bogost āœšŸ» that “more specificity means less flexibility,” and that this visual language has shifted away from the abstract. More choices at our šŸ“±fingertips changes the way we select and use emoji, viewing them more as šŸ–¼ļø rather than šŸ’”. “Counterintuitively, all these emoji are less applicable because they contain more information.”

A skull (šŸ’€) almost never means that the speaker has a braincase in hand, Hamlet-like, but rather offers an ashen reaction or a lol, I’m dead sentiment. An emoji originally designed to signify an Eastern bow of greeting or politesse (šŸ™‡ā€ā™‚ļø) takes on the more abstract meaning of mild subjugation or psychic deflation in the West. Fire (šŸ”„) could mean a campfire or house fire, but more often it suggests enthusiasm, ferocity, or even spice. Eggplant (šŸ†) could denote a nightshade, but more likely it suggests, well, something else. These and other meanings are possible because the emoji function primarily as ideograms.

But as emoji have become more specific in both their appearance and their meaning, their ideographic flexibility has eroded.

The Big Sick

Illustration by Homestead

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | July 2019 |Ā  7 minutes ( 1,978 words)

 

ā€œThe sickness rolled through me in great waves.ā€ Whenever I’m sick, I read The Bell Jar. I know, ironic, but there’s a chapter where Sylvia Plath describes her central character having food poisoning and it always makes me feel better — her ability to capture how urgent it feels, how relentless, how it reduces you to a vehicle for vomit and diarrhea. How cleansed you are afterwards just for you to do it all over again, eventually. It’s comforting that someone writing two decades before I was even born not only experienced this exact feeling, but could reproduce it so clearly. ā€œThere is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.ā€

Nostalgia is a kind of vomiting. It’s not like you re-watch your favorite parts of Heathers because bile compels you to. But there’s the same idea of deconstructed repetition, although in nostalgia’s case, it’s so you can climb back into your memories, where you can lock yourself into a space untroubled by reality. It’s a thing that keeps coming up (sorry) because of how we manufacture culture now — not just online but in a world owned by big media. There has always been significant reworking of past cultures, but I don’t think popular culture was ever the commodity it is now, where Mickey Mouse isn’t just a drawing but an intellectual property (IP). At no other time has mainstream culture felt like such an opiate, so tied to appealing to mass comfort. Out of this comes the new season of the bingeable Netflix series Stranger Things, which is less its own story than a collection of its creators’ pop culture memories; Disney churns out live-action remakes of every one of its films until the elephants come home; and then there are the countless stories in the press celebrating the anniversaries of every movie/show/album ever made.

I guess you can’t really blame anyone for wanting to keep puking up the past when the present is so insufferable. Except anyone is not everyone, and the relief is a ruse. Read more…

Putin’s Rasputin

St. Basil's Cathedral in Red Square; Moscow, Russia. (Rickson Liebano/Getty)

Amos Barshad | An excerpt adapted from No One Man Should Have All That Power: How Rasputins Manipulate the WorldĀ | Harry N. Abrams | 17 minutes (4,490 words)

 

In the lobby of a heavy-stone building in central Moscow, I’m greeted by a friendly young woman in a pantsuit who, she explains, is working ā€œin the field of geopolitics.ā€ She takes me to the security desk, where my passport is carefully, minutely inspected before I’m granted access. As we head upstairs the woman slowly whispers a joke: ā€œThis is what will save us from the terrorists.ā€

We walk down a long, high hallway that looks or bare or unfinished or forgotten, like maybe someone was planning on shutting down this wing of the office but never got around to it. There are linoleum floors, cracking and peeling, and bits of mismatched tile in the style of sixties Americana. Rank-and-file office clerks shuffle through, and no one pays attention to a faint buzzing emanating from somewhere near.

We stop in front of a heavy wooden door. Inside is Aleksandr Dugin.

The man is an ideologue with a convoluted, bizarre, unsettling worldview. He believes the world is divided into two spheres of influence — sea powers, which he calls Eternal Carthage, and land powers, which he calls Eternal Rome. He believes it has always been so. Today, those spheres are represented by America, the Carthage, and Russia, the Rome. He believes that Carthage and Rome are locked in a forever war that will only end with the destruction of one or the other. Read more…

Tom Petty’s Problematic Album Southern Accents

Michael Montfort/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Michael Washburn | Southern Accents | Bloomsbury Academic | April 2019 | 20 minutes (3,222 words)

 

Around 10 p.m. on September 25, 2017, Tom Petty told the audience at the Hollywood Bowl, ā€œWe’re almost out of time,ā€ and struck three D chords in quick succession. ā€œWe’ve got time for this one here.ā€

In six minutes Petty’s public career will be over. Petty and the Heartbreakers will finish the song, thunderously and to thunderous applause. Petty will wish a good night on his audience, and then he’ll linger on stage after the band retreats. Seven days later his life will be over.

But before that we have four minutes of music.

Read more…

The No. 1 Ladies’ Defrauding Agency

Illustration by Matt Chinworth

Rose Eveleth | Longreads | July 2019 | 12 minutes (2,883 words)

Sarah Howe’s early life is mostly a mystery. There are no surviving photographs or sketches of her, so it’s impossible to know what she looked like. She may, at one point, have been married, but by 1877 she was single and working as a fortune-teller in Boston. It was a time of boom and invention in the United States. The country was rebuilding after the Civil War, industrial development was starting to take off, and immigration and urbanization were both increasing steadily. Money was flowing freely (to white people anyway), and men and women alike were putting that money into the nation’s burgeoning banks. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and in 1879 Thomas Edison created the lightbulb. In between those innovations, Sarah Howe opened the Ladies’ Deposit Company, a bank run by women, for women.Ā 

The company’s mission was simple: help white women gain access to the booming world of banking. The bank only accepted deposits from so-called ā€œunprotected females,ā€ women who did not have a husband or guardian handling their money. These women were largely overlooked by banks who saw them — and their smaller pots of money — as a waste of time. In return for their investment, Howe promised incredible results: an 8 percent interest rate. Deposit $100 now, and she promised an additional $96 back by the end of the year. And to sweeten the deal, new depositors got their first three months interest in advance. When skeptics expressed doubts that Howe could really guarantee such high returns, she offered an explanation: The Ladies’ Deposit Company was no ordinary bank, but instead was a charity for women, bankrolled by Quaker philanthropists.Ā 

Word of the bank spread quickly among single women — housekeepers, schoolteachers, widows. Howe, often dressed in the finest clothes, enticed ladies to join, and encouraged them to spread the news among their friends and family. This word-of-mouth marketing strategy worked, Howe’s bank gathered investments from across the country in a time before easy long-distance communication. Money came in from Buffalo, Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Washington, all without Howe taking out a single newspaper advertisement. She opened a branch of the bank in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and had plans to add offices in Philadelphia and New York to keep up with the demand. Many of the women who deposited with the Ladies’ Deposit Company reinvested their profits back in the bank, putting their faith, and entire life savings, in Howe’s enterprise. All told, the Ladies Deposit would gather at least $250,000 from 800 women — although historians think far more women were involved. Some estimate that Howe collected more like $500,000, the equivalent of about $13 million today.Ā 

It didn’t take long for the press to notice a woman encroaching on a man’s space. And not just any woman, a single woman who had once been a fortune-teller! ā€œWho can believe for a moment that this woman, who a few years ago was picking up a living by clairvoyance and fortune-telling, is now the almoner of one of the greatest charities in the country?ā€ asked the Boston Daily Advertiser. Reporters were particularly put off by their inability to access even the lobby of Howe’s bank, turned away at the door for being men. One particularly intrepid reporter, determined to find out what Howe’s secret was, returned dressed as a woman to gain entry and more information.Ā 


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Then, in 1880, it all came crashing down. On September 25, 1880, the Boston Daily Advertiser began a series of stories that exposed Howe’s bank as a fraud. Her 8 percent returns were too good to be true. Howe was operating what we now know as a Ponzi scheme — 40 years before Ponzi would try his hand at it.Ā 

Here’s how it worked: When a new depositor arrived, Howe would use their money to pay out older clients, so the whole scheme required a constant influx of new depositors to pay out the old ones. Like every other Ponzi fraudster, Howe’s bank would have eventually run out of new money. The run of stories in the Boston Daily Advertiser instilled enough fear in the bank’s investors that they began to withdraw their money, and eventually there was a run on Howe’s bank.Ā 

Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain.

It took two weeks and five days from the first story published in the Advertiser uncovering Howe’s fraud before she was arrested. The press extended her victims a modicum of sympathy, describing their plights while also reminding the reader that they deserved their pain for trusting a woman with their money. ā€œI put every dollar I had into the bank, and if I lose it I am a beggar,ā€ one depositor told the Boston Globe at the time. ā€œI wanted the interest so badly, that I placed a mortgage on my furniture to secure the principal to deposit. Oh! I wish I hadn’t now, for I shall have my goods sold from under my head,ā€ said another.Ā 

Howe, on the other hand, was spared no remorse. The Boston Herald claimed that Howe was ā€œnearly as deaf as a postā€ and cross-eyed. Banker’s Magazine described Howe as ā€œshort, fat, very ugly, and so illiterate as to be unable to write an English sentence, or to speak without making shameful blunders.ā€ This is all untrue, as Howe’s own statements to the press before her downfall suggest that, in fact, she had a sharp wit. In response to one newspaper’s critique of the Ladies’ Deposit Bank, Howe wrote: ā€œThe fact is, my dear man, you really know nothing of the basis, means or methods on which our affairs are conducted, and when shut up in the meshes of your savings-bank notions, you attempt an exposition of the impossibility of our existence, you boggle and flounder about like a bat in a fly trap.ā€Ā 

Ā Nevertheless, as soon as she was caught, a backstory for Howe emerged in the papers. The Boston Herald published a story with the headline ā€œMrs. Howe’s Unsavory Record,ā€ claiming she was born out of wedlock and ran away at 15 to marry an ā€œIndian physician,ā€ who they also referred to as ā€œher dark-skinned Othello.ā€ The paper claimed the marriage caused her mother such distress that she wound up dying in an asylum ā€œraving over the heartlessness of her daughter.ā€ The story also alleged that she then left her first husband, married two house painters in quick succession, had been in and out of prison, and even tried to lure a young girl into prostitution. Basically none of this can be confirmed by historians, but it didn’t matter. Sarah Howe was the most unfathomable and outrageous character: a woman villain. As historian George Robb writes in his paper about Sarah Howe, ā€œShe had to be ugly, vulgar and immoral.ā€ The only way her story could make sense to readers was if Howe was some kind of abomination — a complete outlier both physically and mentally.Ā Ā 

Ā ā€œI’m sure she was just a normal-looking person,ā€ Robb told me. ā€œUntil the whole thing unraveled, when people talked about her, no one described her as anything other than an ordinary person.ā€ But in Victorian-era Boston, the idea that a woman criminal could be an ā€œordinary personā€ was impossible. ā€œPeople were comfortable with the idea of women as victims,ā€ Robb told me. ā€œThe men were the crooks, the men were doing the manipulation. The women were the victims. They needed to be protected by other men.ā€Ā 

Howe wound up standing trial in Boston, and was ultimately convicted (although not of fraud, but soliciting money under false pretenses — for claiming that a Quaker charity was backing the venture). She spent three years in prison, and when she got out, in classic scammer fashion, she tried the whole thing again.

ā€œI think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the futureā€

Next, Howe opened up a new Woman’s Bank on West Concord Street in Boston. She kept the scheme going from 1884 to 1886, offering depositors 7 percent interest and gathering at least $50,000, although historians think the number might be far higher. This time, however, Howe was never prosecuted. After being caught and closing down her bank, she gave up the game and returned to fortune-telling and doing astrology readings for 25 cents each. She died in 1892, at the age of 65, no longer wealthy, but still notorious enough to warrant an obituary in the New York Times that read: ā€œFor three months she had been living in a boarding and lodging house, carefully keeping from those whom she met the knowledge that she was the notorious Mrs. Howe of Woman’s Bank memory.ā€Ā 

***

Sarah Howe was, in some ways, a product of her time. In the late 1800s, the United States was moving out of a period marked by ā€œfree banks,ā€ in which there were very limited rules governing banks, and into a system of national banking more familiar to us today. Money was flowing into the economy, and financial advisers were telling their clients to put their cash in banks that were now more stable than they had been in the past. This advice was often targeted at women, who couldn’t use their money to, say, start their own endeavors. But they could put their money in stocks and banks, and many of them did. In fact, during that time, women were often the majority of depositors and shareholders.

But there were very few regulations on banks. The stock market was relatively new. For women like Howe, it presented an unregulated place where money was changing hands purely on the basis of confidence. And as a fortune-teller, Howe had plenty. ā€œI think there’s a similarity between being a fortune-teller and making money on the stock market, making predictions about the future, and getting people to believe that you know something about how the trends are going to play,ā€ Robb said.Ā 

At the time there was little fear when it came to watchdogs or regulators. Howe could start her own bank with no real procedure or oversight. ā€œAnybody could form a bank!ā€ Robb said, ā€œIf you could get people to give you money you could call it a bank. You advertise, you rent a fancy office space, people come and give you money. It was amazing how much money you could make before anybody caught you.ā€ As much as people love to point fingers at Howe, very rarely do people consider the complete lack of oversight that allowed her to prey upon these women. ā€œIt’s so much easier to pick individual villains and say, ā€˜Oh it’s these nasty scheming people who are the problem, the capitalist system can do no wrong, it’s perfect and self-regulating and we don’t want to mess with that. It’s these individual crooks that are the problem.ā€™ā€Ā 

***

In spite of her crimes, Sarah Howe is not a household name. It’s not called a Howe scheme after all, it’s a Ponzi scheme. When Howe is mentioned at all, it’s as a punchline.Ā She’s forever stuck as a historical fun fact. ā€œShe’s become an anecdote in history, but she should be as famous or more famous than Ponzi,ā€ historian Robyn Hulsart told me. ā€œThere’s nothing about what she did that doesn’t fit the definition of a Ponzi scheme.ā€ (In fact, Howe wasn’t even the first to execute this type of scam. At least two other women pulled off Ponzi schemes before her — one in Berlin, the other in Madrid.)Ā 

It’s become popular now to say that we’re living through the golden era of the scammer. “We’re living in a scammer’s paradise,” Sarah Jeong told Willamette Week recently about our current era, “not just economic scams, but intellectual scams, too.” Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, Fyre Fest, Ailey O’Toole, Jennifer Lee, Anna March — the list is long enough that everybody from WIRED to The Cut called 2018 ā€œthe year of the scam.ā€ As the United States recovers from the fraud that was that housing market bubble, we’re in another era of deregulation. President Donald Trump and the Republican run Senate, have gone on what has been called a ā€œderegulation spree,ā€Ā increasing the cap at which banks become subject to more stringent rules from $50 billion in assets to $250 billion. Robb pointed out that we never seem to actually learn. ā€œWhenever there’s a big boom cycle in the economy everybody screams to deregulate,ā€ he told me, and with deregulation comes increased risk for frauds like Howe’s.Ā 

Howe’s case also demonstrates a struggle in feminist circles that persists today: How do you balance the desire to celebrate women with the need to hold bad behavior accountable?

Howe’s legacy could and should be one that we can learn from today in the so-called era of the scam. Howe’s success was one that tells us something not just about fraud, but about economics and the conditions under which fraud can blossom into a $17 million scam. Howe was aided and abetted by the economic conditions, but she was also a wizard at her craft. What Howe mastered, beyond the Ponzi scheme, is what experts call an ā€œaffinity fraudā€ — going after a group of people who have something in common, and most often who the scammer has something in common with too. As an ā€œunprotectedā€ woman herself, Howe understood what might appeal to her clientele. She decorated the bank to create a mood and aesthetic that would appeal to her ideal mark. The Advertiser described the Ladies’ Deposit Bank this way: ā€œThe furniture, of which there are many pieces, is upholstered in raw silk of old gold figured patterns, and corresponds in tone and design with the walls. … The carpets are of a deep warm tone, and all the ornaments are rich and in good taste.ā€ She used language that drew women in, talking about her commitment to the ā€œoverworked, ill-paid sisterhood.ā€ Hulsart points out that it’s not unlike the language used by multilevel marketing companies like Mary Kay and Amway, which generally advertise to women throughĀ  word of mouth. ā€œThey really like to say things like ā€˜we’re in this together,ā€ Hulsart says.Ā  Read more…

Manic Street Preachers’ Album The Holy Bible

The Manic Street Preachers at Castle roundabout, London, 1990. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty Images

David EvansĀ | The Holy Bible | Bloomsbury Academic | May 2019 | 17Ā minutes (2.781 words)

 

Manic Street Preachers never exactly fit in. When they emerged from South Wales with their debut album Generation Terrorists in 1992, their leopard-print outfits, political sloganeering and widdly-woo guitar riffs already seemed out of date amid the musical movements du jour: Madchester, Shoegaze, Grunge. Critics tended to dismiss them as a quirk of pop history, about as relevant to the zeitgeist as that other Welsh throwback, Shakin’ Stevens.

But when The Holy Bible came out, in August 1994, it felt more than just anachronistic. Rarely has a major record been so spectacularly out of step with its cultural moment. This, after all, was the year Britpop took off; the year of girls-who-do-boys and boys-who-do-girls; the year of the New Lad and his lairy pursuit of sex and drink; the year a former barrister named Anthony Blair began remaking the Labor Party in his own primped, twinkle-toothed image. The dominant mood was a sort of willed optimism. “Things Can Only Get Better,” as D:Ream helpfully put it.

Read more…

Yentl Syndrome: A Deadly Data Bias Against Women

Illustration by Homestead

Caroline Criado PerezĀ |Ā An excerpt adapted fromĀ Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men | Harry N. Abrams | 22 minutes (5,929 words)

In the 1983 film Yentl, Barbra Streisand plays a young Jewish woman in Poland who pretends to be a man in order to receive an education. The film’s premise has made its way into medical lore as ā€œYentl syndrome,ā€ which describes the phenomenon whereby women are misdiagnosed and poorly treated unless their symptoms or diseases conform to that of men. Sometimes, Yentl syndrome can prove fatal.

If I were to ask you to picture someone in the throes of a heart attack, you most likely would think of a man in his late middle age, possibly overweight, clutching at his heart in agony. That’s certainly what a Google image search offers up. You’re unlikely to think of a woman: heart disease is a male thing. But this stereotype is misleading. A recent analysis of data from 22 million people from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia found that women from lower socio-economic backgrounds are 25% more likely to suffer a heart attack than men in the same income bracket.

Since 1989, cardiovascular disease has been the leading cause of death in US women and, following a heart attack, women are more likely to die than men. This disparity in deaths has been the case since 1984, and young women appear to be particularly at risk: in 2016 the British Medical Journal reported that young women were almost twice as likely as men to die in hospital. This may be in part because doctors aren’t spotting at-risk women: in 2016, the American Heart Association also raised concerns about a number of risk-prediction models ā€œcommonly usedā€ in patients with acute coronary syndrome, because they were developed in patient populations that were at least two-thirds male. The performance of these risk-prediction models in women ā€œis not well established.ā€

Common preventative methods may also not work as well in women. Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) has been found to be effective in preventing a first heart attack in men, but a 2005 paper found that it had a ā€œnonsignificantā€ effect in women aged between forty-five and sixty-five. Prior to this study, the authors noted, there had been ā€œfew similar data in women.ā€ A more recent study from 2011 found that not only was aspirin ineffective for women, it was potentially harmful ā€œin the majority of patients.ā€ Similarly, a 2015 study found that taking a low dose of aspirin every other day ā€œis ineffective or harmful in the majority of women in primary preventionā€ of cancer or heart disease. Read more…

‘Women Created Our Worlds:’ Native Art Reclaims Its Power

Parka, Artic and Subarctic, ca. 1890-1910. Image: John Bigelow Taylor. Collection of Minneapolis Institute of Art

Soraya Roberts | Longreads | June 2019 |Ā  7 minutes ( 2,039 words)

The final report of the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls is 1,071 pages of 2,380 people — from survivors to their family members to community Knowledge Keepers — outlining how colonialism’s resolve to split First Nations communities from their culture has led to gendered violence that continues to this day. ā€œTo put an end to this tragedy, the rightful power and place of women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people must be reinstated, which requires dismantling the structures of colonialism within Canadian society,ā€ one commissioner said. ā€œThis is not just a job for governments and politicians. It is incumbent on all Canadians to hold our leaders to account.ā€ That involves voting for those (preferably Indigenous, preferably female) politicians who support this dismantling, not to mention hiring Indigenous women, especially for positions of power. Instead, Canadians quibbled over whether or not the whole thing could be categorized as a genocide. The response was a chef’s kiss, a perfect example for why the inquiry had to be conducted in the first place: Indigenous women, women who originally had as much power as men, who imbued their community’s art with this power, are universally overlooked. Except this time it’s in the public record.

A third of the people cited in the report were allowed to testify in the form of art, which ended up in the National Inquiry’s Legacy Archive, a collection of more than 340 pieces by more than 800 people that serves as a historical record of myriad Indigenous identities. ā€œWe characterize these expressions, through art, as the act of ā€˜calling forth,ā€™ā€ the report explained. ā€œThis includes calling forth the legacies of those who no longer walk among us; calling forth awareness that leads to concrete action.ā€ Calling forth also confronts the embarrassing (and persistent) colonial tradition of ignoring Indigenous voices. Of, for instance, starting public events by acknowledging the First Nations land on which they are being held, but without actually providing the First Nations people much of a space for their work. But Indigenous artists, women in particular, are refusing to be shut out; see the recently announced Netflix partnership with three Indigenous Canadian organizations or the first major North American retrospective of Native women’s work, Hearts of Our People, at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. ā€œIt has to be said that none of our communities need an exhibition at a fancy art museum to tell them that their women are important and what their women do is important,ā€ cocurator Teri Greeves tells me. ā€œThis exhibition needs to happen in an art museum for the broader audience so, hopefully — my prayer — that they understand what we’ve always known, [which] is that these women created our worlds.ā€

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A quick Canadian history lesson for those of us who only remember Louis Riel and that book by Tomson Highway: The white settlers, armed with Christian patriarchy and blunderbusses, entered Indigenous communities hundreds of years ago and saw matrilineal societies in which power and money were passed down through women, and they were like, wha? They saw men and women with complementary roles that were equally respected and were like, wait … ? Then they saw women as advisors and policymakers and that was it. Civilization said women were designed to pump out babies and keep house and these Natives were fucking it all up with progress. So in order to convince everyone these people were better off with him, the white man came up with some bullshit about there being two kinds of Native women, the pure Pocahontas types who had the good sense to want to be civilized (read: subservient), and the Squaw, whose off-the-chain libido had to be contained in order to protect the settlers’ fragile morality (guess the ball-busting bitch wasn’t sexy enough to get her own stereotype). As laughably reductive as all of this was, it had staying power. ā€œThe myth of the deviant Aboriginal women continues to plague us, reinforced by dominant cases that coalesce prostitution and Aboriginal women into a single entity,ā€ Lubicon Cree scholar Robyn Bourgeois said in 2011. ā€œContemporary Canadian society dismisses violence against Aboriginal women and girls today on the basis of these perceived deviances.ā€

The Indian Act officially cut down women by shifting all of their power — political, financial, familial — to men. Until 1985, First Nations women could only really define themselves through a man. Even when women were the breadwinners, their rights and recognition remained limited. Instead they became the target of their men’s resentment, and their wider invisibility made them highly vulnerable to serial killers like Robert Pickton. Convicted of murdering six women in 2007, he admitted to killing 49 in total, having preyed predominantly on sex workers on the east side of Vancouver, a group in which Indigenous women were overrepresented — another reflection of the obstacles faced by the community. For more than a decade, activist groups like the Native Women’s Association of Canada have been unofficially tracking missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. According to the National Inquiry, they are 12 times more likely than other Canadian women to be killed or disappeared. But it wasn’t until 2016, a year after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada report advised it, that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau launched the national inquiry. (In the U.S., meanwhile, since 2017 lawmakers have been attempting to pass Savanna’s Act, which would establish a law enforcement database to track disappearances.)

ā€œThe borders between the U.S. and Canada weren’t created by indigenous people, but by outside influences,ā€ Jill Ahlberg Yohe, cocurator of Hearts of Our People, told The Guardian earlier this month. ā€œAll this work is connected to our history, whether it was made in 1500 or 2019.ā€ Several years ago she asked Kiowa bead artist Teri Greeves to advise on a different exhibit, and out of their conversations came the realization that Native women’s art, as a whole, had never been surveyed. ā€œShe was shocked by this,ā€ Greeves tells me. ā€œI was not.ā€ Greeves’s mother had a trading post for more than 25 years where her daughter noticed that the women on their reservation made everything. It turned out the iconic Native American art — beadwork, baskets, ceramics, textiles — was a way for these women to communicate. Greeves’s mother, who her daughter refers to as a ā€œNative fashionista,ā€ looked for literature on these textiles but found nothing. So she conducted her own research and put on educational fashion shows everywhere from museums to the YMCA. But it was more than fashion, just like the ceramics and the baskets were more than housewares. ā€œThere are layers of meaning in all this stuff,ā€ says Greeves, ā€œand if that’s what you mean by art with a capital A then, yes, that’s what our ladies are doing, they’re making art.ā€ Ā 

Not that any gentlemen cared. At the turn of the century, concerned that the destruction of Native culture would mean the destruction of Native art, a bunch of institutions sent students to save it. (Apparently the people who made the art were less important — artists were rarely, if ever, identified.) These young men all went to the same places and gathered the same objects, which is why so many of us can only call to mind a few types of Native art — Sioux warrior shirts, for instance — while the real scope is more vast and variable. (Alongside Canada’s 600+ First Nations, there are 577 federally recognized Native American tribes in the United States.) The collectors also dealt primarily with men, even though the women were making most of the work being sold to the white man. ā€œIf they weren’t even seeing their own white women,ā€ says Greeves, ā€œhow were they seeing the Native women?ā€ Today, when you walk through Native collections in museums and galleries the (limited range of) objects are often only identified by tribes, but were largely made by women. ā€œIt’s just that no one’s said it,ā€ says Greeves.

But over the past few years, Canada’s art institutions have started to. In 2014, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights exhibited Winnipeg-based MĆ©tis artist Jaime Black’s REDress Project, an installation made up of donated red dresses that symbolize missing and murdered Indigenous women. First created in 2010, it has since traveled to the Smithsonian and red dresses have become a recognized symbol in Canada of this exploited population. In 2017, the National Gallery of Canada established the Canadian and Indigenous Galleries, which house almost 800 works, while Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario launched a department for Canadian and Indigenous art. Retrospectives of the works of Annie Pootoogook, Rebecca Belmore, and Christi Belcourt followed, and last year a nationwide project, ā€œResilience,ā€ included 167 billboards exhibiting the work of 50 female artists. Film and television have been slower to adapt — Netflix just announced the cancellation of Chambers, their only original series (and one of my favorites) starring a Native American lead, San Carlos Apache actress Sivan Alyra Rose.Ā In Canada, however, Indigenous Screen Office (ISO) associate director Kerry Swanson says that the Truth and Reconciliation report was ā€œa watershed that shifted the dialogue.ā€ The ISO was formed two years after that and this month — seven days before ChambersĀ got the axe — Netflix unveiled a partnership with the ISO, ImagineNATIVE and Wapikoni Mobile. The deal involves six initiatives for First Nations producers, directors, and screenwriters, which wasn’t necessarily out of the goodness of Netflix’s heart — it was part of their five-year $375 million agreement with the federal government, which includes $19 million to develop Canadian talent.

Twelve Canadians will also be included among the 115 artists making up the millennium-spanning Hearts of Our People retrospective. Asked around five years ago to help curate the collection, Greeves, despite being an artist (not a curator), said yes in order to continue her mother’s legacy. But because she could not speak for other Indigenous groups, and because, not being an elder, she couldn’t even speak for her own, Greeves and Yohe gathered 21 artists and academics, mostly Native, to circumvent the trap of curatorial tokenism: ā€œMuseums are colonial institutions, so we’re working within a format that is set up to not listen, and we’re all aware of it because we’ve all been silenced.ā€ With no men present, recreating the gendered spaces they form on their own reservations, the women felt comfortable enough to freely exchange ideas. The result was a show organized into three loose themes: Legacy, Relationships, and Power. The first refers to the knowledge passed down through generations, the second to the relationships that include but also extend beyond the natural world, and the third to the power of Indigenous women, in all areas of life.

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When you think about what art’s supposed to be — how much it should mean — and then you think about Native art and how its meaning transcends not only us, but also space and time, it starts to look like it belongs in galleries and museums more than anything else. Not only was each work of the past sacred, but each existed to be disseminated; Indigenous work was not generally considered the property of any one individual. What it does need, however, are women, because women are the keepers of its history. If they disappear, the art disappears and vice versa. Each work not only serves to preserve Native history, but the voice of the woman who makes it and all the women who came before her. ā€œWhen I go to make something, I am praying on it,ā€ Greeves tells me. She prays for the animals that gave up their lives for the materials she uses, for the person she is making the work for, for where it goes after that, the same way the women did before her: ā€œWhen I look at the historic stuff, what I know is that all that stuff was made in prayer.ā€ And when you look at all of that work together, when you acknowledge that you don’t know about the culture that is all around you, that the pieces the women have poured themselves into are teaching you what you thought you knew, the voices of Indigenous women become so loud they’re no longer possible to ignore. Ā 

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Soraya Roberts is a culture columnist at Longreads.

On Truth and Lying in the Extra German Sense

Illustration by Homestead

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | June 2019 | 15 minutes (3,962 words)

Would you like to know if you’ve gained weight? If you’re annoying, or too talkative, or not as smart as you think? If you’re doing something, literally anything, the wrong way? Just ask a German and they will tell you immediately. Germans do not do this to hurt your feelings. There isn’t even a single long word in German for ā€œhurt feelings,ā€ they just translate the English directly (verletzte Gefühle), and everyone knows that direct translation from the English is how Germans demonstrate their disdain. There is, however, a common and beloved expression for an individual who makes a big show of having hurt feelings, and that is beleidigte Leberwurst, or a perennially ā€œinsulted liver sausage,ā€ because hurt fee-fees are for weak non-German babies.

After all, Germans are just being direct: unmittelbar, or literally translated, ā€œunmediated.ā€ Their assertions are simply unverblümt, or ā€œnot putting a flower on it.ā€ They’re not mean, they’re freimütig, or ā€œfree-hearted.ā€ They’re just being forthright: offen, ā€œopen,ā€ which is a good thing, ja? Germans couldn’t even begin to imagine why being brutally honest would hurt someone in the first place! If the truth hurts you, isn’t that more your fault than the truth’s?

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We Still Don’t Know How to Navigate the Cultural Legacy of Eugenics

Illustration by Tom Peake

Audrey Farley | Longreads | June 2019 | 13 minutes (3,381 words)

 

On May 28, Justice Clarence Thomas issued an eyebrow-raising opinion. It concurred with the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold an Indiana law that requires abortion providers to follow a certain protocol to dispose of fetal remains and prohibits abortions on the sole basis of a fetus’s sex, race, or disability. It wasn’t the justice’s position that caught attention, but rather his method. In speaking to the law’s second provision on selective abortions, Thomas launched into a history of eugenics, the debunked science of racial improvement that gained popularity in the early decades of the 20th century.

Arguing that abortion is ā€œan act rife with the potential for eugenic manipulation,ā€ the justice offered a lengthy discussion of the origins of the birth-control movement in the United States. In this discussion, written for the benefit of other courts considering abortion laws, Thomas explains how Planned Parenthood grew in tandem with state-sterilization campaigns, providing the foundation for the legalized abortion movement. (As historians corrected, legal abortion preceded birth control, as it was not regulated until the 19th century.) The justice cites the disturbing rhetoric of Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who wrote in The Pivot of Civilization that birth control was a means of reducing the ā€œever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.ā€ While conceding that Sanger did not support abortion, Thomas nonetheless argues that ā€œSanger’s arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing ā€˜the elimination of the unfit’ apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics.ā€

Thomas does not offer concrete evidence that American women actually abort fetuses solely because of sex, race, or disability. Nor does he explore the possible reasons for abortions related to these criteria, such as financial hardship or the lack of societal support for individuals with chronic conditions. His grievance with abortion boils down to this point: the practice is ill-borne. This claim is inaccurate, for reasons that historians swiftly noted; it also obscures the fact that eugenics did in fact initiate many traditions in this country, not all of which are perceived to be heinous today. Thomas’s incautious opinion, which echoes other voices in the abortion debate, unwittingly invites a more nuanced discussion of eugenics’ legacies.

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