Sure, your hip friends who live in that converted loft downtown have a record player — but odds are they don’t own an artisanal turntable crafted by a father-and-son team from the wood of an American black walnut tree. This is the type of turntable …
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Ahead of launch, a lot of excitement could be found around the Chromebook Pixel. The device was meant to give Chrome OS a flagship it could hang its hat on, providing a hardware benchmark for the platform. It accomplished much of that, though the limited spec sheet had most wondering where that $1,300 or so got you. Limited battery life also … Continue reading
When something goes well in Washington these days, it’s worth noting. Republicans and Democrats now agree that the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) – the current name of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) – has failed to achieve its goals and needs to be fixed. Especially since reauthorization of ESEA is already eight years overdue, it’s good news that new Senate education committee Chairman Lamar Alexander has decided to make reauthorizing ESEA a top priority. Further, it’s promising that Chairman Alexander has decided to work with Ranking Member Patty Murray to try to develop a bi-partisan bill.
But, to reach bi-partisan agreement, among other issues the committee will need to answer two vital questions that Chairman Alexander asked at its February 3rd roundtable hearing:
#1 – How can Congress encourage States and localities to innovate to achieve better outcomes for students?
#2: If we keep tests and disaggregate, who decides what to do about tests, determines school success and failure and decides what to do about failure?
In effect, the Chairman is asking: what can Congress do to help States and localities improve public schools serving disadvantaged students and what should be the respective federal, State and local roles in testing, accountability and school improvement?
The first question goes to the heart of how to achieve ESEA’s central purpose: dramatically improving academic learning for disadvantaged public school children, especially poor and minority students. The second goes to the heart of how to resolve Congress’s central political challenge: finding a satisfactory compromise between Republicans and Democrats on the nature and extent of the federal role in helping to accomplish ESEA’s critical national purpose.
Both questions are fundamental. The issue is: how to answer them?
The Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA), is an alliance of national education, civil rights, disability, and civic organizations emphasizing the need to shift ESEA from test and punish to supporting localities and States in making the systemic changes that improve student learning and holding them accountable for doing so. When FEA prepared its proposed legislative language on assessments, accountability and school improvement for the ESEA reauthorization, it provided educationally sound, principled and concrete answers to both questions. (I participated in writing the proposals.)
As to #1, consistent with what Johns Hopkins University Professor Robert Balfanz said at the roundtable, America should stop “reinventing the wheel” on how to improve low-achieving schools and apply what we’ve learned over the last fourteen years about what works. Specifically, Congress should briefly describe the key common elements identified by research and experience that low-achieving schools implement to turn themselves around. These elements involve “leadership,” “instructional improvement,” “curriculum,” “school climate” and “parent and community involvement and support” and include specific practices successful turnarounds use to implement each element. Congress should then require the lowest-achieving Title I-funded public schools to analyze their needs and develop collaborative plans to implement the elements, with support and assistance from the local educational agencies, States and the federal government.
Concurrently, Congress should encourage all Title I-funded schools to focus on implementing these practices by requiring them to report, to their States and the public, indicators of what steps they’re taking to implement the elements, resources available to the schools, and student outcomes. Outcomes should include not just disaggregated test scores, but student attendance, suspension and expulsion rates, high school graduation rates and rates of college enrollment and post-graduation employment.
As to #2, schools and local school districts would decide how to implement the common elements. The States would decide which specific indicators their districts had to report. Districts and States would provide technical assistance and support to schools, with the U.S. Department of Education offering technical assistance to States and districts at their request. States ultimately would be responsible for intervening, as they determine appropriate, when the lowest-achieving schools are failing to implement the elements. In addition to providing funding, the federal government would monitor to ensure States comply with their responsibilities as Congress would more narrowly define them in the reauthorization.
In the Chairman’s formulation, Congress would be encouraging the States and localities to innovate by guiding and assisting them to have Title I-funded public schools do what works to improve schools and, thereby, enhance student learning. All the school improvement and intervention decisions, including how to respond to low test scores and other indicators of inadequate progress, would be made at the local and State levels. As to school improvement and accountability, the federal role would be focused on: identifying what research and experience shows works; funding; technical assistance; and monitoring reporting of resources, common elements implementation and student outcomes and other statutory requirements to ensure compliance with the reauthorized ESEA.
As to assessments, assuming, as the Chairman does, that ESEA continues to require some testing and disaggregation of data, it will make a significant difference how much testing Congress imposes. FEA’s proposal – to reduce federally mandated testing from all grades to grade span – is not only consistent with the Chairman’s recognition that Congress should now focus on how to encourage States and localities to improve students’ learning, but would significantly facilitate achieving that objective.
There would continue to be a statistically valid, disaggregated picture of how each public school’s students were doing based on a sample of one entire grade’s students every year in grades 3 -5, 6 -9 and 10-12. But, since only one grade in each grade span would have to be tested each year, many millions of students in the remaining grades, their teachers, principals and parents, would be freed from the time and burdens of preparing for and taking those tests.
By simultaneously shifting from test and punish to evaluate, support and improve, the tested grades would not be a locus of intense pressure to teach to the test. Instead, all grades would be able to use this valuable time and funds and shift in accountability to concentrate on implementing the common elements and any other steps needed to help turn their schools into good schools.
In short, Chairman Alexander has raised fundamental questions about how to improve schools and divide responsibility between federal, State and local governments. FEA’s legislative proposals for the ESEA reauthorization provide educationally sound, principled and concrete answers to those questions.
These proposals would put Congress in the role it should be in – helping the States and localities to improve low-achieving schools, not over-testing the students and punishing teachers and principals for the difficulties they face and the lack of support they receive. Chairman Alexander, Ranking Member Murray and the Senate education committee members should adopt FEA’s proposals and report out an ESEA reauthorization bill that finally provides hope for America’s millions of disadvantaged students.
Artist Ryan Alexander-Tanner hopes his new comic will help women wade through the physical and emotional pain of miscarriage.
Alexander-Tanner was inspired to illustrate this subject after his friend Wendy wrote about her miscarriage in a Facebook post. ”She felt like she wasn’t supposed to talk about it and how isolating that was and, really, just how pissed off she felt because of that,” he told The Huffington Post.
As more of the artist’s friends married and started trying to have children, he became more aware of the hardships surrounding miscarriages. “[My friends] all said the same thing afterwards — that they had no idea how common it was until it happened to them and that they didn’t really feel like there was a clear way to process the grief.”
In an effort to help break the silence surrounding miscarriage, Alexander-Tanner interviewed four women who have been through it and illustrated their discussions in a comic. Titled “A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage,” the comic artist shares the women’s powerful words of pain, grief and hope as they recall their experiences with pregnancy loss.
Interviewing the four women — who included Wendy, two other friends, and the mother of friend — broadened Alexander-Tanner’s understanding of the aftermath of miscarriage, particularly the emotional trauma of trying to cope in a culture where pregnancy loss is so rarely discussed. “I learned that many women who miscarry actually want to talk about it and that it’s important to create a space where they’re invited to do so,” he said.
Although the artist understands that as a man, he will never physically experience miscarriage, he feels that it’s problematic to write miscarriage off as a “women’s issue” or “something that men can just ignore or don’t have to deal with.”
Giving a voice to women like Maggie, Theresa, Toni, and Wendy, Alexander-Tanner hopes his comic can serve as a resource for people coping with miscarriage. “I also hope that it opens some people’s eyes about how common miscarriage is and how they should treat people who are coping with it.”
You can read the “A Lost Possibility: Women on Miscarriage” in its entirety on The Nib.
H/T Medium
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Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, 2015. Courtesy of Where is Rocky II? film campaign. It all starts in 2009, when artist Pierre Bismuth attends a press conference for Ed Ruscha‘s retrospective Fifty Years of Painting at the Hayward Gallery in London, and asks Ruscha about the whereabouts of one of his works that had never been exhibited. A little surprised at the question, Ruscha, with a slight smile, simply replies, “So it’s out there in the Mojave Desert somewhere. I’m not going to say where.”
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, 2015. Courtesy of Where is Rocky II? film campaign. Maybe it all starts in 2006, when a friend gives Bismuth a copy of a 1980 documentary on Ed Ruscha filmed by Geoffrey Haydon for the BBC’s Seven Artists Series. The 28-minute film draws parallels between Ruscha’s work and the Los Angeles landscape, documents Ruscha crafting a fake boulder, and films him taking it out into the desert.
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, 2015. Courtesy of Where is Rocky II? film campaign. Or maybe it all starts in 1979, when Sylvester Stallone stars as the eponymous boxer in the sequel Rocky II. The same year, Ruscha, with help from his friend Jim Ganzer, make a large rock of resin and sand, titled Rocky II, which they then take out to an undisclosed location in the desert surrounding Los Angeles, planting it among all the extant boulders in the area. It looks just like all the rocks around it. Nothing is written about the piece, it is never exhibited, and the only record of it is the BBC documentary.
Pierre Bismuth, In prevention of technical malfunction – Unplugged Bruce Nauman video work, 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk. But maybe, it all actually starts in 2005, when Pierre Bismuth wins an Oscar for his original screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. As the Brussels-based artist recently told the Guardian, “With that thing in my hand, I realized it would be totally silly not to try to do something else in film, to capitalize on that success, because it was so unbelievable.” And so began the hunt for Ruscha’s rock.
Pierre Bismuth & Cory Arcangel, Untitled, 2008. Courtesy of the artists and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris. Bismuth ranks among the very few conceptual artists with Academy Awards. His work as a contemporary artist often utilizes other artists’ works to serve as proxies by which he can destabilize our reading of cultural objects, drawing attention to constructs that we take for granted. This destabilization is effected by sometimes extremely simple gestures: for instance, his 2003 work To Prevent Technical Malfunctions (unplugged Bruce NAUMAN video) displays two blank, unplugged video monitors purportedly playing a Bruce Nauman video; a collaborative untitled video work with Cory Arcangel subverts Guy Debord’s iconic 1973 film Society of the Spectacle by displaying the message indicating a weak projector lamp, “CHANGE BULB,” over images from the film; in his “Newspaper” series, he doubles an image appearing on a newspaper cover, thereby introducing doubt as to the image’s veracity. Above all, Bismuth is concerned with issues of perception and how we produce and consume culture.
Pierre Bismuth, The Toppling of Saddam (The Guardian – jeudi 10 avril 2003), 2003. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris. Bismuth has had a long-standing interest in popular culture and media, Hollywood movies in particular, and the ways in which we relate to and consume them. A series of paintings and neon works entitled “Coming Soon” plays with the anticipation evoked by the phrase popularly used to conclude movie trailers (and reveals his indebtedness to the work of Ed Ruscha). The Party (1997) is a 100-minute video of a Blake Edwards’ film with subtitles written by a typist, who had never seen the film and could only hear the audio soundtrack, transcribing her real time understanding of the film and dialogue.
Pierre Bismuth, Coming Soon Clouds, 2008. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris. Where is Rocky II? constitutes Bismuth’s directorial debut and his first feature film (the screenplay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was authored by him, but he had no hand in the movie’s production), and as such, the work necessarily moves out of the rarefied realm of contemporary art and into the realm of popular culture. Though it appears as such, this is not a straightforward documentary film, it is rather a prolonged experiment – a construction of layer upon layer of fiction. Bismuth says, “At the core, it is a film about how we project fantasies and how works of art can be the perfect object of fantasy.”
Pierre Bismuth, The Party, 1997. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris. The characters and the setting feel right out of a Hollywood fantasy, with the stark and desperate beauty of the Joshua-tree-studded Southern California desert, the hardened, retired-LA County sheriff-turned-private investigator hired to track down the whereabouts of Ruscha’s mysterious rock, and a gang of informants from the LA art world best suited to provide information about Ed Ruscha’s predilections and activities, including philanthropist Eli Broad, curator of the Hammer Museum Connie Butler, and former and current MOCA directors Jeffrey Deitch and Philippe Vergne. Tagging along with the investigator on his hunt is a pair of screenwriters–Anthony Peckham and DV DeVincentis–employed for the purpose of turning the investigation into a fictional short film. Bismuth told Forth Magazine, “I think it’s really about how the different characters start building up their own understanding of why an object exists. It starts from pure, fictional thoughts eventually to reach the truth…One guy is trying to find the rock and the other guys are trying to find the story. And they join somewhere, but for different reasons.”
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, Photo: Julia Denat. The documentary portion of Where is Rocky II? is completed, but Bismuth is currently raising funds to produce the short film written by his screenwriters, based on their adventure with the private detective and the search for a piece of contemporary art mythos, which will eventually be woven into the documentary. You can donate to the campaign on indiegogo here: Last Thursday, Bismuth’s Paris gallery, Bugada & Cargnel, celebrated a vernissage for Where is Rocky II?. The three-minute trailer for the film, which is being screened as a looped video at the gallery until March 14, is itself designated as an artwork, further blurring the boundaries between art and the film industry. The film trailer/artwork will then travel to Team Gallery in New York, where it will be on display from March 29 to April 26. The completed film is planned for release in December 2015. As to whether or not Rocky II was ever found, Bismuth is keeping quiet. “I want to leave that for the film,” he says, “but I found more than what I was looking for, that’s for sure.”
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, Photo: Julia Denat.
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, Photo: Julia Denat.
Pierre Bismuth, Where is Rocky II?, installation view, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Bugada & Cargnel, Paris, Photo: Julia Denat.
–Natalie Hegert (Note: This text has been edited to note that the trailer for the film is being screened at Bugada & Cargnel, rather than the full documentary, as was previously stated.) |
A prison can’t function without its pecking order. Call it what you will, chain of command, hierarchy, rank, it all comes down to power. Who’s got it, who doesn’t. Who’s on top, who’s on bottom. It’s an all-inclusive, endemic culture: Wardens, top assistant wardens, captains, sergeants and rank and file officers. Frontline COs top inmates, and inmates top whomever they can.
Support staff is notched in there somewhere, just one step above inmates. These “civilians” –medical workers, teachers, social workers, chaplains — are viewed by corrections with almost as much suspicion and contempt as inmates. I know firsthand all about that suspicion and contempt from my years teaching high school offenders locked up in an adult county prison. You get the message pretty quickly when time after time you’re kept standing behind some prison gate or security door, waiting in plain view for an officer to buzz you through while he or she finishes joking with their buddy or finally looks up from their crossword puzzle.
Inmates’ lives are dominated by this same top to bottom hierarchy. For them it’s a food chain that is more blatant, more calculating. The only way to survive is to have your heel, in one way or another, on other inmates’ necks. The young men I worked with had an apt image for making it out alive: “We’re all crabs in a pail scrambling to get out, pulling down the guys in front of you, stepping on them, shoving them down to the bottom so you can make it out.” Extortion, physical strength, ruthlessness, a coldhearted distrust of everyone are the “tools” of survival. Without them an inmate’s well-being and safety are in jeopardy.
You might expect that locked up young kids are on the lowest rung of that ladder both on the block and in the general prison population. Certainly their age, undeveloped thinking and decision-making processes, their inability to physically fend for themselves (despite their bluster and bravado) make them more vulnerable to intimidation, abuse, threats, bullying and physical force.
But it goes lower: incarcerated women, what I call the invisible prison population. Despite the fact that more women are being locked up — an 800 percent increase in the last 10 years — you seldom hear what prison life is really like for them (forget the make-believe you see on “Orange is the New Black”).
The prison I worked in is one small example of how women are unfairly treated in lockup. Aside from the brutal fact of female inmates’ increased vulnerability to sexual assault by staff, the women’s unit in this particular prison was more overcrowded than the men’s, and women had limited or no access to any kind of recreational facilities, while their male counterparts had both gym and yard privileges on a daily basis.
Added to the usual indignities experienced by all women imprisoned in the U.S., the female inmates in the county prison where I taught had to endure the callous authority of a male warden. Among the many arbitrary restrictions he imposed (for example at holiday time teachers on the men’s units were allowed to bring in donuts and hot chocolate while permission was denied for the women’s block) he instigated several “cost saving measures:” rationing of toilet paper; and most egregious and insulting, limiting the feminine hygiene products each woman could receive. This has got to be the bottom of the prison hierarchy for locked up women. How could it not be? To have a man dictate how many tampons you’re allowed to use regardless of your body’s needs.
But it’s not. Some women sink even lower in the prison pecking order. As limited as the public’s awareness of female incarceration is, an even more neglected population are those women in solitary confinement. There has been a lot of attention lately to the U.S.’s overuse of solitary confinement. The United Nations Committee on Torture strongly criticized our use of this form of cruel and unusual punishment, making it clear that it was a form of torture — criticism that the U.S. diplomatic delegation sloughed off with America’s usual disdain whenever confronted with its own human rights violations. But even in the media’s coverage of the hearings and its own investigation of solitary confinement abuses one often heard about the sufferings of male inmates but nothing about those women in isolation.
In 2014 the federal Bureau of Prisons had agreed under some pressure to conduct an “internal audit” on the uses of solitary confinement. Initially no women’s prisons were included on the list of sites to be examined. Under pressure from human rights groups some women’s units were added. However no one was able — or willing — to say exactly which ones. Once again locked up women, this time women held in solitary, didn’t even exist. Solitary Watch, the website which is a fierce advocate for all people held in “special housing units,” called these women “buried.” Another word comes to my mind, one borrowed from repressive Latin American regimes: “disappeared.”
Rihanna celebrated her 27th birthday in style on Friday, with a party courtesy of rumored beau Leonardo DiCaprio.
For months, rumors the actor has been romancing the pop star have been brewing, ushering in the era of RihCaprio (or Rihanardo as commenters over at Jezebel suggested). And now, this party held at a private home in Beverly Hills makes us think these two might actually be dating.
In addition to the birthday girl and DiCaprio, People magazine reports that the guest list included Mick Jagger, Jim Carrey, Bill Murray, Naomi Campbell and Paris Hilton, while Us Weekly notes that Beyonce, Jay Z and Russell Simmons all showed up to the A-list bash.
The party, which raged on until the wee hours of the morning, was apparently the perfect setting for People’s source to analyze Rihanna and DiCaprio’s body language:
“They weren’t couple-y but they would flirt and dance so definitely a little magic there,” the source told the magazine. “They were definitely flirty and dancing, but not over the top.”
The first rumblings of RihCaprio rumors can be traced back to January, when the two partied together at the Playboy Mansion before the Golden Globes, and were allegedly spotted “making out.” Rumors raged on as, shortly after, the stars were both spotted partying at the same hotel. Us Weekly seems to think that RihCaprio is the real deal and claims the alleged couple “took their fling to the next level ” and spent Valentine’s Day together.
On the flip side, sources now tell the New York Daily News that RihCaprio is not a thing, and that Rihanna is getting close with Up & Down club owner Richie Akiva, who posted a photo of himself with the singer on her birthday and wrote, “Happy Birthday! #badass #sweethearted.”
A disconcerting report released last week revealed that New York City could see a 6-foot rise in sea levels by the end of this century. It would make nearly half a million New Yorkers vulnerable to flooding, and waterfront properties would be virtually uninhabitable.
But what if climate change continues unabated for even longer? What will New York City look like if, say, both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melt completely, raising sea levels an estimated 260 feet?
Urban planner and cartographer Jeffrey Linn used computerized mapping to make a GIF demonstrating just that. Watch the city’s five boroughs disappear, with only the lofty heights of New Jersey’s Pallisades left as an island:
Linn, who posted the GIF on his blog Spatialities, told The Huffington Post he wanted to show people what the city would look like after “the terminal point for ice caps melting,” which some scientists estimate could happen in 1,000 to 10,000 years.
“What would the world around me look like, where I live, if in thousands of years, this is supposed to happen?” Linn said he wondered.
Linn also made this mesmerizing map of New York City after only 100 feet of sea level rise. The city’s neighborhoods and parks are cleverly rechristened with more nautical nomenclatures: Central Park is Central Shark, Bushwick is Flushwick, the West Village is Wet Village, and so on:
He’s made similarly alarming maps for his hometown of Seattle, as well as London and Montreal, among other cities.
The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, as manmade greenhouse gas emissions continue to trap the sun’s heat. Here, for example, is a 2012 video showing a lower Manhattan-sized piece of ice breaking off from the Greenland ice sheet:
Apple just pushed the latest OS X update seed to developers and hiding inside is a nice surprise: a brand new roster of racially diverse emoji. Finally!
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