Hasta La Gadget!

It’s been a long four years without our favorite pretty-boy swimmer-bro Ryan Lochte, who (aside from his depressingly short-lived reality TV series on E! in 2013) has kept relatively quiet since coming away with five medals at the 2012 summer Olympics in London. 

But thanks to a recent Cosmopolitan.com interview about his online dating habits, we can safely say that in 2016, he’s back and better than ever. 

Back in 2012, Lochte shared some deep thoughts on the topics of love and women ― the latter of which he called “evil” (unless they wear white pants, in which case, call him). But Lochte has kept up with the times, and with the rise of online dating apps since the last summer Olympics has come the expansion of Lochte’s dating pool. (See what we did there?)

The athlete shared some more deep thoughts with Cosmo about how he feels about certain dating apps. First and foremost, he is decidedly anti-Bumble, telling Cosmo, “The girl always has to make the first [move], and I don’t really like that. I don’t think that’s a woman job. So I got off that.”

Noted. 

But Tinder, on the other hand, is “perfect.” He told Cosmo:

I heard it took off in Sochi [at the 2014 Winter Olympics] and then people were talking about it and I was like, “Let me try this.” So I got on it and I’ve been matching up with a bunch of gorgeous women who are smart, they have professional jobs and everything. I’m like, “Wow, this is perfect.” So I’ve been on Tinder lately.

That’s right, Ryan. Women do have professional jobs! And everything!  

Never stop being you. 

 Check out Lochte’s full interview with Cosmopolitan.com here. 

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It makes sense that Cara Delevingne plays Enchantress in “Suicide Squad,” because her raps are straight up magic.

On Wednesday, the actress took out both Dave Franco and James Corden during a rap battle on “The Late Late Show.” It all pretty much came down to one line from Delevingne that was hot fire:

You’re both shorter than me, and I think that you’ll find, I’ve hooked up with hotter girls than both of you combined. 

“All true statements,” Franco said.

The crowd was loving it. Franco and Corden did their best, but there was no recovery.

Someone please get these guys some aloe. They just got burned.

“The Late Late Show” airs weeknights at 12:37 a.m. on CBS.

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“I’m just rockin’ and rollin’ and making a living out of what I love. Age is just a number. You can see that in my photography and you can see that in life.”

Colorado based photographer, Pinque Clark, lives by the notion that age is merely a numerical device we are handed at birth. Clark’s exciting lifestyle, the buoyant tone of her voice, and the subjects of her new series are patterns in practicing this healthy perspective. And she is creating work that aptly explores this notion in others.

Her newest project, the “Boudoir Series,” works with friends, strangers, men and women, and brings light to their inherent sensuality. What started as two women inquiring about an anniversary gift for their husbands, the Boudoir Series has since expanded and morphed into a sultry exploration of maturity, charm and photographic style. Many of the subjects of Clark’s series are between the ages of 30 and 60. Clark, being 61 herself, has developed a Renaissance-esque style that enigmatically highlights the features of each subject with limited props and post-shoot enhancements.

“I learned photography in college by spending many nights in the darkroom and studio. Throughout my childhood, I had been exposed to fine art from every angle, so I had quality knowledge and influences. I was surrounded by art that had ‘witnessed the light.’ After my divorce, with the help of a ‘point and shoot’ from a local shop, I began to develop my passion into my career. One of the greatest gifts and challenges of this career is dedicating yourself to making an imprint on what I see today, through the use of my art. My Boudoir Series was a challenge that I was eager and willing to take on. At first I was going to work with professional dancers, but then I reached out to the people I know, the people I surround myself with, and began shooting the series with them. It’s remarkable how much personality can be brought out in just one shoot. My subjects ooze with sensuality and I’m so grateful to work with them.”

Clark drove 3600 miles solo, in an empty car that was once filled with her photographs, after a sold out show at a high-end gallery in Arkansas. She has shown in galleries all over Europe and the United States in both solo and group exhibitions. As what she calls her “spiritual home”, her life is split between time in Colorado and Italy; a fact adding to the sincerity behind Clark’s adventurous spirit. Clark plans on expanding the Boudoir Series as well as documenting local fights and their contenders. One of her latest projects captures Boulder’s ‘Founder Fights’, where she was allowed one corner of the ring to shoot. “The red corner for one fighter, the blue corner for the other, one for the doctor and the other for me.”

Pinque Clark’s work can be seen at Mary Williams Fine Art gallery in Boulder. In 2017, Clark will be having a solo exhibit with a “complete” Boudoir Series. You can check out more of her work here.

Photos courtesy of Pinque Clark

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This is not a test.

In fact, Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice is a critique of test-taking, and the reductive practice of choosing a single answer to an interpretable or multi-faceted question.

The book, appropriately, is tough to categorize. It’s formatted in the style of the Chilean national exam, a test all students take to determine college placement, and which Zambra took himself in 1993. Publishers and critics have called it a novel, a poetry collection, a work of criticism. But Zambra clearly aims to avoid classification. He abandoned another, more traditionally told story he’d been working on in favor of beginning Multiple Choice.

The book begins with a prompt: The reader is to determine which word, in a series of 24 questions, doesn’t fit with the others that it’s grouped with. From the first question, it’s apparent that none of the answers will be clear-cut; “bear” is matched with “endure,” “tolerate,” “abide,” “panda” and “kangaroo,” highlighting the tenuous connection that exists between so many words, and the absurdity of drawing distinct lines between them, rather than embracing their playful fluidity.

Distinct lines are just what Zambra is waging against. In one question, the narrator writes that he is Manuel Contreras, and he is also Manuel Contreras’ son. He finds a page in the phonebook with 22 listings for Manuel Contreras, looking for solidarity, but he sticks the page in a paper shredder, claiming that sharing a first and last name ― mere words ― with another individual has never done him any good. What’s ostensibly similar can be deeply and complicatedly different, in ways that can’t be whittled down into lettered options.

You can’t talk about Zambra without talking about Chile, the country he is from, and the country he’s disillusioned with. He lived through the aftermath of Augusto Pinochet’s corrupt, overbearing rule, which began in the early 1970s and lasted through the late ‘80s. It makes sense, then, that Zambra’s past books ― My Documents, The Private Lives of Trees, Ways of Going Home and Bonsai ― are short and intentionally disjointed, leaving room for the power of what’s left unsaid. The same mood reigns over Multiple Choice, which unites a series of personal stories under one theme: attempting to limit human experience to the confines of tasks and rules can stifle and distort.

The second portion of the book, “Sentence Order,” prompts the reader to place a series of events in chronological order ― but events as ethereal as quarrels and loving memories aren’t usually recalled so straightforwardly, with an accurate calendar in mind.

The fourth section, “Sentence Elimination,” asks the reader to select the sentences that should be removed because they “do not add information” to the text. The idea is that each sentence should follow after the other in a cohesive, declarative fashion ― dates and facts take precedent over emotional observations. In one question, the narrator defines what a curfew is and states that there was a curfew in place in Santiago, Chile, from 1973 to 1987. But these historical tidbits are interrupted by a less palatable detail: The narrator was born as a result of that curfew because his father stayed over at a friend’s house when it was too late for him to walk home. Of the five multiple-choice options, two imply that this anecdote should be removed from the story. Zambra-as-literary-critic shows himself here, commenting on which elements of a story ― namely, the mysterious and the interpretable ― are vital to its liveliness and emotional import.

The final section, “Reading Comprehension,” asks the reader a series of questions about a preceding text. Here, the book’s clever structure falls away and poignant vignettes emerge. Zambra crafts three touching works of flash fiction, one about a student who learns of twins who traded places to succeed on their exams, another about a marriage that later gets annulled before divorce is legal in Chile. Both are subtle and ripe with meaning. Both are stripped of nuance in the multiple-choice questions that follow.

In a question about a bitter former high school teacher who later runs into his students, the reader is asked which of his sentiments about education is true. If you were to write a book report on Zambra, the options that follow would be highlighted as its thesis statement:

A) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

B) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

C) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

D) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

E) You weren’t educated, you were trained.

What we think:

Alejandro Zambra’s Multiple Choice is small book packed with meaning and space for interpretation. By structuring it as a test, the author comments on the rigidity of Chile’s former fascist leader. By allowing the reader to meditate on how to make sense of each puzzling question, he offers an alternative to enforced structure.

What other reviewers think:

Kirkus: “Though the overall effect is fragmentary, Zambra’s fragments are consistently witty and provocative.”

NPR: “Throughout Multiple Choice, Zambra traffics in a depth of imagination and playfulness that is akin to a guessing game. As with many of his earlier works, he is content to play with, prod, and shake up the reader, confirming once again that the questions we ask about the world and about ourselves are oftentimes far more telling than the answers.”

Who wrote it:

Zambra is a Chilean novelist who’s been described as “Latin America’s new literary star.” This is his fifth book.

Who will read it:

Fans of Borges and other playful, experimental writers. Those interested in a book about that explores the limits of formal education.

Opening lines:

“In exercises 1 through 24, mark the answer that corresponds to the word whose meaning has no relation to either the heading or the other words listed.”

Notable passage:

“The bride ― of course I remember her name, though I think eventually I’ll forget it, someday I will even forget her name ― looked lovely, but my parents just couldn’t understand why she would wear a black dress.”

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This piece comes to us courtesy of EdSource, where it was originally published.

A new California law requiring 7th- through 12th-grade students to be educated about sexual harassment and assault will enter its first full year of implementation this fall, and experts and advocates say schools have the opportunity to address troubling attitudes about gender and power that they say can contribute to sexual harassment and even assaults on college campuses.

Many school cultures trivialize harassment, tolerate language that degrades girls and women, and leave unchallenged the misconception that masculinity means being superior and aggressive and femininity means being inferior and submissive, said Erin Prangley, associate director of government relations for the American Association of University Women, a Washington, D.C.-based research and policy organization. These unchecked attitudes emerge at an early age and help create a mindset that, at the college level, has the potential to contribute to sexual assaults, such as the case of Brock Turner at Stanford University, she said.

“The problems that have been very high-profile in the campus sexual assault arena aren’t problems in a vacuum,” Prangley said, without referring to the specific circumstances of the Turner assault.

“A lot of these assaults are symptoms of how children were socialized to be in relationships with other children and, ultimately, with intimate partners,” said Emily Austin, director of advocacy services at the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault, a Sacramento-based nonprofit organization.

In a 2011 study, the American Association of University Women found that nearly half – 48 percent – of about 2,000 7th- through 12th-graders in a nationally representative survey said they experienced some form of harassment based on their gender during the school year. The harassment included unwelcome sexual comments and gestures, being shown sexual pictures they did not want to see, being touched in an unwelcome sexual way and being forced to do something sexual. Girls were more likely to experience sexual harassment than boys.

While there is no single profile of a student who sexually assaults others, sexual harassment by definition is about gender and power, and students who engage in that behavior are likely to have issues with both, said Dorothy Espelage, a University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researcher on bullying and sexual violence. Those issues, she said, may include a personal or cultural belief that men should hold a dominant position over women in society, a conviction that gender roles must be strictly defined and a concern about being perceived as not masculine enough.

“In our work, the idea that girls should succumb to boys and that boys should call the shots – and be stoic and traditionally masculine – is associated with higher rates of sexual harassment,” Espelage said.

Power and gender identity come to the fore in middle school when girls and boys take stock of their relative status as social and sexual beings. In a study of nearly 1,000 5th, 6th and 7th grade students, Espelage and her colleagues found that the combination of high rates of bullying and high rates of homophobic name-calling – using words such as “homo, gay, lesbo or fag”– was a predictive indicator of which middle school boys were most likely to sexually harass other students over a two-year period, according to results published in 2015 in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

The findings do not imply that bullying leads to rape, according to a research brief on Espelage’s work published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, the findings suggest the need for schools to explicitly address and forbid homophobic teasing and sexual harassment, the authors said.

“Unlike flirting or good-natured joking, which are mutual interactions between two people, sexual harassment is unwelcomed and unwanted behavior which may cause the target to feel threatened, afraid, humiliated, angry, or trapped,” according to the National Women’s Law Center’s primer on sexual harassment for students. In the school environment, sexual harassment includes unwanted sexual behavior – such as sending sexual notes, grabbing body parts, spreading sexual rumors or making sexual gestures, jokes, or verbal comments  – that interferes with a student’s opportunity to obtain an education, according to the law center. Sexual harassment may occur electronically or in person.

It is also against the law in federally funded schools under Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, as reiterated in a 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. “Sadly, I think most people don’t know that Title IX applies to sexual harassment and sexual assault, and not just to sports,” said Rebecca Peterson-Fisher, senior staff attorney at Equal Rights Advocates, a San Francisco-based nonprofit legal organization.

Unaddressed sexual harassment and assault incidents in K-12 schools are the “training ground” for college sexual assaults, said Esther Warkov, executive director of Stop Sexual Assault in Schools, a nonprofit organization that is creating an anti-sexual harassment educational curriculum. Warkov said she co-founded Stop Sexual Assault in Schools after her high school daughter in the Seattle Public Schools system was raped by a student during an overnight field trip.

To illustrate the types of student-to-student sexual harassment that parents and students report to schools, Warkov shared with EdSource copies of  Title IX complaints filed between 2012 and 2015 at various schools in California. Warkov obtained the complaints by filing public records requests; to protect the privacy of all parties, EdSource is providing only a summary.

One parent of a 5th-grade girl stated that a boy repeatedly followed her daughter and another girl around the playground while shouting comments about their bodies and what sexual acts he would do to them. A high school girl described a male student putting his hand down the front of her shirt. A parent of an elementary school boy stated that a group of boys trapped her son while one boy rubbed his body against him. A middle school parent said that when her daughter told the principal that she had been touched in a sexual way, the principal asked her what she was wearing at the time.

Enforcement of the 44-year-old Title IX law in K-12 schools is poor, said Brett Sokolow, executive director of the Association of Title IX Administrators, a national organization based in Pennsylvania, who estimated that about 85 percent of school districts nationwide are out of compliance. He described a landscape in which school districts fail to fulfill some or all of the basic mandates – they fail to name a Title IX coordinator, fail to train a coordinator and fail to inform students that they have the legal right to go to school without being subjected to sexual harassment, which includes listening to crude sexual jokes and hearing about Facebook pages created to rank girls’ appearance.

In 2013, the California Department of Education sent a letter instructing all school districts to complete a Title IX Coordinator survey, but response was so low that results were never published, said Peter Tira, department spokesman, who said the department is considering conducting a new Title IX Coordinator survey in the fall. In the Legislature,Senate Bill 1375, by state Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, D-Santa Barbara, would instruct school districts to post the name of their Title IX coordinators and their complaint procedures – requirements already mandated by federal law, as was stated in a 2015 federal “Dear Colleague” letter to school districts.

And yet, schools are obligated to act. “If a school knows or reasonably should know about sexual harassment or sexual violence that creates a hostile environment, the school must take immediate action to eliminate the sexual harassment or sexual violence, prevent its recurrence, and address its effects,” according to guidance from the Office for Civil Rights.

Sokolow called on schools to become places where administrators, staff, teachers and students talk in age-appropriate ways about gender equality, sexual harassment and the need to ask for permission before touching someone, he said. “You can’t just teach somebody rape is wrong. You have to teach them to respect women,” he said. “We need to role model masculinity that is respectful and begin a conversation around norms and objectification.”

California’s new sexual health education law for grades 7-12, which went into effect Jan. 1, would seem to provide an opportunity for such conversations. Schools must provide information about sexual harassment and assault, healthy relationships and body image and the curriculum must positively affirm gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. In addition, another new law requires curriculum on affirmative consent before sexual activity, known as “yes means yes,” to be taught in school districts where high school students must take a health class before graduating.

Meanwhile, 90 Title IX sexual violence investigations are underway nationwide in 82 elementary and secondary school districts, according to the Office for Civil Rights, including seven in California: Berkeley Unified, Carlsbad Unified, Palo Alto Unified, Pasadena Unified, San Diego Unified, Santa Cruz City High and Val Verde Unified. The federal Office for Civil Rights Data Collection publishes data from all school districts on reported sexual harassment incidents. “Zero” incidents reported is a bad sign, said Prangley at the American Association of University Women. “We know based on our research that can’t be true,” she said.

“The  failure of schools to address sexual harassment and sexual assault in K-12 mirrors the failure to address it in society as a whole,” said Peterson-Fisher at Equal Rights Advocates. “The prevalence of sexual harassment in society is extraordinary and we’ve done extraordinarily little to combat it.”

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