sinister

neurology-based literary studies of “cognitive literary criticism” and other evolutionary psych–based attempts to argue that humanity is hardwired to enjoy marriage plots

The most effective governments will be able to think about the pandemic in terms of protecting the whole population. The rest will leave individuals to fend for themselves.

By their very nature, they require the cascading effects of interventions reaching across an entire population. But as soon as you have a disease that's afflicting millions—or billions—of people, the stakes are too high to start experimenting. With lives on the line, who would choose an immunization plan that has never been tested outside of computer models and college campuses?

Take a random sample of a population, ask each individual to name a single acquaintance, and vaccinate the acquaintance. “In this way,” Havlin says, “you can reach the hubs, the super-spreaders, very easily.”

Let's say you've got one course of the vaccine and two people to choose between: Candidate 1 is a college student who doesn't social distance, wears his mask slung beneath his chin, and plays beer pong all weekend at underground frat parties. Candidate 2 is his 87-year-old widowed grandmother, who lives on her own and has barely been out of the house since March. If your goal is to protect the more vulnerable person, you should vaccinate grandma. If your goal is to reduce transmission, you should vaccinate the frat bro. From society's perspective, he's a jerk; from the network's, he's a hub.

If the friend group had been vaccinated at the beginning, the campus might have been spared an outbreak entirely.

on average, your friends have more friends than you do. The very act of asking someone to choose a friend, any friend, played out over hundreds or thousands of iterations, leads inevitably to the most connected people. Consider, for example, a very simple network of three people from Casablanca, Morocco: Rick, Ilsa, and Louis. Ilsa and Louis both know Rick, but they don't know each other. If you ask each of them to name a friend, two out three times you wind up with the most-connected person: Rick.

Havlin likens the effect to a phase transition: A solid network of ice crystals melts suddenly into water.

inoculate the nodes

They found that in most settings, from Hollywood to academia to the World Wide Web, networks tended to be “extremely heterogeneous, in the sense that their connectivity is dominated by a few very, very highly connected hubs.”

they thought their work might eventually have some practical application—say, in understanding the evolution of railways or the power grid

Alessandro Vespignani

A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women.

Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism

sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above

Democracy

Russia extended full suffrage to women in 1917

or have sex, for money.

including state-sponsored research on the mysteries of female sexuality

This generational divide between daughters and mothers who reached adulthood on either side of 1989 supports the idea that women had more fulfilling lives during the Communist era.

which are largely insulated from international competition

Also, when will he release his tax returns?

The proposal is meant to provide an antidote to short-term thinking in the biggest businesses

Perhaps a Grand Ole Opry-style performance hall for rap would serve as a major tourist attraction

"The lack of affordable housing, gentrification, piss-poor public schools, those are key cogs in the wheel," he says. "That's like the secret sauce to how the culture is made."

But the well-heeled corporate community it represents maintains an arm's-length distance from many of the culture's most marketable artists.

ChooseATL, the branding campaign launched by the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, uses the city's hip-hop swag to market Atlanta as a premier destination for tech-savvy millennials and entrepreneurs.

that inequity has helped to cultivate a trap-rap innovation economy from which Atlanta perpetually feeds

Hip-hop in 2017 is certainly no stranger to academia.

We have this incredible brand, so how can we capitalize on this?

there's

there's

There's

the promethazine-syrup laced "Dirty Sprite" that Future references in his signature codeine flows

The Atlanta bubblegum trap act starred alongside pop star Carly Rae Jepsen in an epic Target commercial, the longest of the night at three minutes. Atlanta superproducer Mike Will Made-It was also featured

The missed opportunity is even clearer in rap, where artists derive their clout from bragging about lifestyle and luxury brands in songs and videos that often double as major commercial endorsements. It's a simple equation, according to Hudson: "Rappers make things cool. What's cool becomes pop culture. What becomes pop culture sells."

brands

Black music's worldwide marketing power was being slept on by some of Atlanta's biggest global brands

you have to embrace the weird; you have to embrace the different — because that's our best product. That's our best potential for future growth

The decades-late push for a music tax credit is coming at the same time that MARTA, the city's rapid transit system, is on the cusp of a partial expansion denied it for more than 40 years. Atlanta's legacy of racialized transportation policies is symptomatic of a larger disease.

Hall believes the solution lies in fostering ties that reach beyond the typical distinctions of race and class. "There's an opportunity for a cultural connection," he says, "but right now we have some[thing] of a disconnect."

forerunner

Like the rose that grew from concrete, it's the shameful little secret buried in Georgia's red clay.

Lil Yachty added a major Target endorsement — and the longest commercial aired during the Grammy Awards' February broadcast — to his portfolio.

Yet the twice-as-old, homegrown music industry, on which the show's plot is centered, still runs off an ecosystem largely unsupported by state funding or investment from the city's civic and corporate communities

I wore mine whenever I stepped away from my desk, afraid people would see me without it and assume I wasn’t a lawyer.

The 'black music' that isn't either.

Rap forfeited whatever claim it may have had to particularity by acquiring a mainstream white audience whose tastes increasingly determined the nature of the form.

a dynamic in which anti-Semitic slurs and black criminality correspond to "authenticity," and "authenticity" sells records

formulaic assaults on white America

BDP's roots remained firmly planted in the guns-and-posturing of the mainstream rap ghetto

After the release of "Fight the Power," Professor Griff made a series of anti-Semitic remarks in an interview with The Washington Times. Griff was subsequently asked to leave the group, for what Chuck D termed errors in judgment. Although these errors were lambasted in editorials across the country, they do not seem to have affected Public Enemy's credibility with its young white fans.

Like disco music and jumpsuits, the social commentaries of early rappers like Grandmaster Flash and Mellie Mel were for the most part transparent attempts to sell records to whites by any means necessary.

It was not until 1984 that rap broke through to a mass white audience.

the Sugar Hill Gang, an ad hoc all-star team

middle-class

A lot of what you see in rap is the guilt of the black middle class about its economic success, its inability to put forth a culture of its own.

Whatever its continuing significance in the realm of racial politics, rap's hour as innovative popular music has come and gone.

In part because of young whites like Shecter and van Meter, rap's influence on the street continues to decline.

With rap, however, this process took an unexpected turn: white demand indeed began to determine the direction of the genre, but what it wanted was music more defiantly black.

RunDMC

"People hated that record," recalls Russell Simmons

drawing fulsome praise from white rock critics, raised on the protest ballads of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs

"The Message"

I said, hip-hop, de-hibby, de-hibby-dibby, Hip-hip-hop you don't stop. Rock it out, Baby Bubba to the boogie de-bang-bang, Boogie to the boogie to be. Now what you hear is not a test, I'm rapping to the beat… I said, "By the way, baby, what's your name?" She said, "I go by the name Lois Lane And you can be my boyfriend, you surely can Just let me quit my boyfriend, he's called Superman." I said, "he's a fairy, I do suppose Flying through the air in pantyhose … You need a man who's got finesse And his whole name across his chest" …

Performers were unsophisticated about image and presentation, tending toward gold lamé jumpsuits and Jericurls, a second-rate appropriation of the stylings of funk musicians like George Clinton and Bootsy Collins

It was the rapper's role to match this intensity rhythmically. No one knew what he was saying. He was just rocking the mike.

Although much is made of rap as a kind of urban streetgeist, early rap had a more basic function: dance music.

Cool DJ Herc

Rap's appeal to whites rested in its evocation of an age-old image of blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of white society are defined, and, by extension, through which they may be defied.

despite an effective boycott of the music by both black and white radio that continues to this day

Since the early 1980s a tightly knit group of mostly young, middle-class, black New Yorkers, in close concert with white record producers, executives, and publicists, has been making rap music for an audience that industry executives concede is primarily composed of white suburban males.

the more rappers were packaged as violent black criminals, the bigger their white audiences became

although rap is still proportionally more popular among blacks, its primary audience is white and lives in the suburbs

Bill O’Reilly consistently slammed hip-hop, even blaming it for a decline in Christianity back in 2015. “The rap industry, for example, often glorifies depraved behavior, and that sinks into the minds of some young people—the group that is most likely to reject religion,”

“This rape culture is purported by none other than the entertainment industry, none other than hip-hop music, which you can hear on local radio.”  

Public Enemy and N.W.A

Michael Jackson was taking over the charts with music that demanded little of its white audience

despotism

“Pull your pants up and the cops won’t shoot you.”

Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby.

o wonder everybody is always stealing it

But by that point it had already captured the nation’s imagination and tapped into the confused thrill of integrated culture. A black kid hadn’t really merged white music with black, he’d just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis.

Black men in Armani.

The modern conundrum of the black performer’s seeming respectable, among black people, began, in part, as a problem of white blackface minstrels’ disrespectful blackness.

Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument

We’re also talking about what the borrowers and collaborators don’t want to or can’t lift — centuries of weight, of atrocity we’ve never sufficiently worked through, the blackness you know is beyond theft because it’s too real, too rich, too heavy to steal.

“blue-eyed soul,” a term I’ve never known what to do with, because its most convincing practitioners — the Bee-Gees, Michael McDonald, Hall & Oates, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Adele — never winked at black people, so black people rarely batted an eyelash.

What we’ve been dealing with ever since is more than a catchall word like “appropriation” can approximate. The truth is more bounteous and more spiritual than that, more confused. That confusion is the DNA of the American sound.

called by blackness

Particular to black American music is the architecture to create a means by which singers and musicians can be completely free, free in the only way that would have been possible on a plantation: through art, through music — music no one “composed” (because enslaved people were denied literacy), music born of feeling, of play, of exhaustion, of hope.

what we think of as black music

“White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. Black music is a completely different story. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument — Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. Patti LaBelle’s emotional police siren. DMX’s scorched-earth bark. The visceral stank of Etta James, Aretha Franklin, live-in-concert Whitney Houston and Prince on electric guitar.

Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both.

If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem; if it can make Teena Marie sing everything — “Square Biz,” “Revolution,” “Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” — like she knows her way around a pack of Newports; if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn; if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse; if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt; if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America.

2 onions, peeled and quartered

12

By birth, then, a baby has five layers of sex.

unusual combinations of sex markers (ovaries and a penis, testes and a vagina, two X chromosomes and a scrotum, and more)

This was why the fastest cotton pickers were often whipped the most. It was why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations.

The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation

Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England

Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage.

This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made “all nonslavery appear as freedom,” as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage. It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for; a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter. It was a freedom far too easily pleased.

The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design.

The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. “Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,” a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, “the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.” Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate.

relocated to the United States and started over

The people who are tipped in the US comprise an ever-expanding number of employed professions. Employers recognize the tipped individual as a great boon to the business: someone who needn’t be given benefits, a living wage, or employment security. They are essentially a guest at the company who must comport themselves appropriately for monetary reward, courtesy of the customer.

As a fact-checker, your job is not to resolve debates based on new evidence, but to accurately summarize the state of research and the consensus of experts in a given area, taking into account majority and significant minority views.

one of its authors has made a career of data analysis (and actually won a Pulitzer prize as part of a team that analyzed data and discovered election fraud in a Florida mayoral race)

According to the Pew Research Center, 94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service

The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site

For instance, there are two ways to frame the cure to an epidemic that willkill 600 people (Tversky and Kahneman1981). First, one could say that if program A isadopted 200 people will saved, and if program B is adopted there is a 1/3rd chance that600 people will be saved and 2/3rd chance that no one will be saved. Second, one couldsay that if program A is adopted 400 people will die, and if program B isadopted there is a 1/3rd chance that no one will die, and a 2/3rd chance that all600 will die. Both of these framings describe the same information, but the firstframe elicits support for program A while the second frame elicits support forprogram B. The first scenario associatesprogram A with a definite gain, whilethe second associated program A with a definite loss.

byforgoing any caveats, McIntosh implies that Whites have it better oneverysociological dimensio

a politicalmovement that was as deadly as Nazism.

fascism is an ideology vigilant to disruptions ofBproper^political andeconomic hierarchy