Hasta La Gadget!

The first big public – Insiders Only, but still – release of Windows 10 has been ushered in. What we’re looking at in short order is the bits and pieces Microsoft has brought to this first Windows 10 download that change from our most recent update to Windows 8.1. This includes the new Xbox app, a new Photos app, a … Continue reading

I recently interviewed Gayle Kirschenbaum, Emmy Award-winning film producer, to talk about her up-coming film “Look At US Now, Mother!” because I wanted to understand what motivated her to create this deeply personal movie about her relationship with her mother. I wanted to know why Gayle went public about her abusive relationship with her mother, and Gayle and her mother’s journey from having an abusive relationship to one where love flows more freely.

Gayle told me that after her movie “My Nose” came out to great acclaim, she was surprised by how many women could relate to her story. “My Nose” is Gayle’s first mother-daughter relationship movie. It tells the story of her mother’s obsession with Gayle’s nose, and her mother’s deep-seated belief that if Gayle had plastic surgery to change the shape of her nose, her life would be okay, which to her mother, meant finding a husband. After this movie came out Gayle discovered that women are hungry to talk about their relationships with their mothers. At speaking events women would seek Gayle out, and they would tell Gayle their stories about having a hurtful, critical, emotionally disconnected relationship with their mother. Through these stories Gayle realized that the story of how mothers and daughters hurt each other needs to be told. She wanted to document her mother’s and her journey from hatred to love, and how she, as a daughter coped with her mother’s criticism.

Sadly, many mothers and daughters suffer from some kind of relationship conflict. With women’s lives having changed dramatically since grandmother’s day, mothers and daughters are struggling to understand the differences in their respective realities. As a mother-daughter relationship therapist it concerns me that mothers are being blamed for causing mother-daughter relationship conflict. All too often I hear mothers being treated as mentally ill, or misrepresented as bad or inadequate mothers by the media, and the therapy community as well. Critical and abusive behavior is not okay, whether it is perpetrated by a husband or mother, but I find that society is all too quick to blame mothers for being critical of their daughters, without understanding what has happened in their lives that has made them so critical of their daughters.

As Gayle and I talked about her journey to understanding and forgiving her mother, I was delighted to learn that she hadn’t gone down the road of blaming her mother. She described that as a girl she craved her mother’s attention and affection, but she also knew that her mother’s criticism wasn’t entirely about her. She knew that her mother’s hurtful behavior was coming from her mother’s own life experiences and not because she was a bad daughter. This motivated her to discover her mother’s life story. Through mother-daughter couple therapy, Gayle and her mother learned to connect the dots between how her mother was treated as a girl and young woman, and how her mother treats herself and her daughter Gayle.

In my practice I hear many daughters from around the world share similar stories about having an instinctual knowing that their mother’s hurtful behavior stems from their mother’s life experiences, rather than from them being bad daughters. This doesn’t mean that being criticized by your mother isn’t emotionally hurtful or harmful. It is! Like Gayle, these daughters find that their instinctual knowing helps them in their journey to find out why their mother is so critical of them. I have found that the underlying cause of mothers being overly critical of their daughters is mothers being emotionally neglected; their needs, feelings, thoughts, and desires not being understood or inquired after. I see countless mothers and daughters hurting each other because in their family, women’s emotional needs do not matter. This lack of emotional caring causes mothers and daughters to fight. It causes daughters to be overly responsible for their mother’s needs, and mothers to be unable to hear what their daughter needs from them. And this theme is generational. It is passed down from mother to daughter.

The answer to healing this generational pattern is not, as Gayle said in her interview, to criticize mothers. Being a mother is an extremely difficult job, especially if you have little support, or if you haven’t had enough emotional care yourself. Abusive behavior should never be accepted or tolerated, and neither should the silencing of women’s needs, because that in itself is abusive.

Historians are at it again. This time they are arguing about the legitimacy of Black Confederate soldiers. John Stauffer argues that about 3,000-6,000 served as Confederate soldiers; whereas, Kevin Levin argues that none served in the Confederate Army. Levin takes apart Stauffer’s argument by claiming that Stauffer does not offer one piece of evidence from the military records that prove that Confederates did, in fact, contribute to the war effort as soldiers.

The problem of Levin’s criticism lies in its formulation. He is asking Stauffer to retrieve archival evidence from the 19th century that fits a 21st century definition of soldiers. He is asking Stauffer to practice historical research that privileges white, Confederate record-keeping over the ways that black people observed, wrote, and remembered the war. He is asking Stauffer to play according to the rules in which traditional historiography, often the purveyors of epistemic violence, define evidence and engage in archival collecting.

In short, Levin’s criticism fails to even acknowledge that the very construction of the archive, the collection of sources, and the writing of history reflect the same racist dynamics and oppression of black people that caused the war in the first place. The archive is not like the Wizard of OZ; historians are not Dorothy who get to ask an omnipotent force a question and get the answer. The archive is a political construction, the result of a power dynamic, which has historically failed to capture the experience of black people.

The archive cannot spit out a case number of a Confederate soldier that adheres to some intellectually acceptable way of doing history. In other words, historians’ investment in archival evidence as a proof for their arguments is a relatively new invention that developed in the late 19th century. The historical profession’s invention of a set of commandments that dictates historical practice is also a relatively new development that gained momentum in the early 20th century. In short, we have invented the standards to determine the legitimacy of Black Confederates, and we have created the rules by which they became visible in the archives. Our definitions have little to do with whether a Black Confederate brandished a rifle in the face of a Union soldier.

Writing the history of black people during the Civil War (or any other oppressed group) demands a reckoning with how sources enter the archive in the first place and even the various political, economic, social and, most of all, ideological forces that led to the mere construction of the archive. To simply find black people in documents and to claim that we know something about them because they fit into a constructed definition of historical practices overlooks the process by which they became legible. Better questions to ask would be: who compiled wartime military records? Did black people contribute to the construction of this vast archive? What was left out? What was emphasized?

Scholarly analysis from W.E.B. Du Bois’ formulation of “double consciousness” to Darlene Clark Hines’ concept of “dissemblance” to Sadiya Hartman’s “Story of Venus” powerfully indicates the ways in which black people said one thing but meant another; how they evaded historical documentation; and how they subverted the power structures that attempted to say their name. Doing black history means more than just finding black people in the archives and stating whether they did or did not do something, it means engaging a whole host of questions that range from the Confederates’ use of the bureaucracy to track black experience in the same way as they charted white people’s experience; it means understanding that enslaved people’s decisions to join the Confederacy as soldiers might not fit either the past or the present’s definition of soldiering and that it may not fit into the frameworks of how we understand enlistment in general. Stauffer rightly gestures toward this mode of analysis by placing enlistment in the context of the Atlantic world where enslaved populations joined military campaigns for all kinds of idiosyncratic reasons that challenge our definitions of war, slavery, and emancipation.

Writing black history further means that the sources used to write white people’s experience will not be the same sources used in writing the history of black people. Levin wants Stauffer wants to generate a record from the Confederacy, but as a scholar trained in interdisciplinary methods, Stauffer smartly reaches for a range of other sources to support his claim: cultural memory, printed images, and other cultural ephemera.

The debate about Black Confederates tells us more about us than it does about them. It uncovers more insight about how we write about the past than the actual events that transpired. It exposes more about the political imperatives that shape how we want to see the past rather than the ways that the past may have wanted to be seen.

Jim Downs is the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford U.P., 2012).

The McDonald’s menu could be getting even smaller.

Mike Andres, McDonald’s U.S. CEO, hinted on a conference call with analysts Friday that the chain may cut more menu items.

“This menu rationalization process is clearly ongoing,” Andres said. “As we look forward, we’ve added quite a number of products over the last 18 months or so, so we’re rationalizing that.”

Andres was responding to a question from an analyst about whether the chain would be willing to keep cutting the menu if the recent decision to slash eight items proved successful. As part of the test, McDonald’s went from four quarter pounders with cheese to one, three premium chicken sandwiches to one and three snack wraps to one.

So far, the changes have led to improved sales and better throughput — a measure of how many orders are processed in a given period of time — in test markets, Andres said on the call.

McDonald’s could use the help. The chain’s profits plunged 21 percent from the same quarter a year ago, according to the fourth-quarter earnings report released Friday. The past few months also marked the fifth quarter in a row that McDonald’s reported a drop in sales at U.S. stores open at least a year, an important metric of a restaurant’s health.

Analysts, the media, franchisees and even McDonald’s executives have blamed the chain’s bloated menu for its poor performance in recent months. The menu — which had just nine items in the 1950s — ballooned to more than 100 items over the past several years, ranging from things like Egg McMuffins to a few McWrap varieties to smoothies.

The complicated menu has made it harder for McDonald’s to deliver what it’s known for: cheap and quick food. It also comes at a time when Americans are turning increasingly to chains like Chipotle and Five Guys, which have a handful of menu items but offer diners the ability to customize their orders.

McDonald’s is rolling out its own customizable options for burgers, called Create Your Taste, at 2,000 locations nationwide. Diners can pick from fancy toppings like creamy garlic sauce, guacamole and pepper jack cheese. Andres hinted on the call that the program could make it easier for the fast food giant to cut even more from its menu.

“That offers unlimited variety to our guests, they can now choose whatever they want, so it takes some of the pressure off a lot of the other menu items,” he said.

For this toddler, ignorance is bliss — and we aren’t lion.

This is “Zari,” a 7-year-old lioness at the El Paso Zoo, who was caught on camera late last month trying to get a more hands-on look at a toddler who’d wandered up to the other side of the safety glass:

“My, Grandma, what big claws you have!”

Zoo spokesperson Karla Martinez assured Today the toddler is “safe behind a really thick window,” and said the lioness was only exhibiting play behavior.

Probably not the type of “play” from which your child would emerge unscathed in the wild, but at least Zari wasn’t actively trying to fit the the tyke in her mouth, as this lioness in Oregon attempted in 2012.