Althouse

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• "Weathering is associated with accelerated aging of the body and is thought to be one of the reasons that Black Americans develop certain chronic medical conditions..."
• "Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners."
• "Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin."
• "A senior No 10 source said that male primogeniture was 'a nonsense.' Scrapping it was 'being looked at,' along with 'three or four other things.'"
• "I had to isolate, using Being Famous as an immense excuse for never facing anything. Because I was Famous, therefore I can’t go to the movies."
• At the Snowman's Café...

"Weathering is associated with accelerated aging of the body and is thought to be one of the reasons that Black Americans develop certain chronic medical conditions..." Posted: 20 Feb 2021 06:59 AM PST "... at much younger ages than their White counterparts. Studies have also found that the average Black American, compared with their White peers, has a much higher 'allostatic load,' which is a measurement for lifelong cumulative stress on the body. Using data from a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey collected from 1999 to 2002, Geronimus found that when measuring the allostatic load of Americans, the score 'for Black Americans was roughly comparable to that for Whites who were 10 years older.'...  Removing or lowering age cutoffs for Black Americans could go a long way toward increasing access to one of the most impacted communities and accounting for structural racism's toll on Black lives."  From "Opinion: Black Americans should face lower age cutoffs to qualify for a vaccine" (WaPo).  The authors, Oni Blackstock and Uché Blackstock, are physicians. They define "weathering" as the "physiologic effect of these persistent social and environmental stressors" and relate it to the term "John Henryism." The comments at WaPo are calling the column "racist" and "insane."

"Ollie says one of the 'rules' of the experiment is that he and Zoe, both bisexual, will only hook up with same-sex partners." Posted: 20 Feb 2021 06:14 AM PST "But whoops, Zoe replies, she already broke that rule by sleeping with a man. Later, Ollie is dating and sleeping with a woman. We don't see them discussing their rules, why they exist, why they might change, how they talk about the ones they've broken. Ollie's narration adds no clarity.... While Ollie and Zoe are just kind of irritating—we're treated to long sequences of them frolicking naked in fields; Ollie waxes poetic about how he loves Zoe for being such an 'adult,' because she soaks her oats overnight—what's hardest to watch is how they're hurting each other because they don't communicate with specificity or empathy, or even agree why they're doing this in the first place.... Zoe, Tom, and the other non-Ollie characters are played by actors, and the film is a re-creation of Ollie's experience with the real Zoe.... Ollie and Real Zoe did try an open relationship and were documenting it, and Real Zoe really did end their relationship to be with another man, but what we see on screen here is not a documentary of an experiment in real time so much as Ollie's on-screen memoir, starring himself...." From "What HBO's New Documentary Gets Wrong About Open Relationships/I've been in a nonmonogamous relationship for six years, and I'm tired of movies like There's No 'I' in Threesome" (Slate). I'm almost tempted to watch this just to see how terrible it is. It  might be funny.... oh, no.... I just looked at the trailer, here. I was thinking of embedding it. But watching it, I had to force myself, and by 0:34, I had to turn it off. The visuals are very unappealing.

"Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin." Posted: 20 Feb 2021 05:48 AM PST "I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world. Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College. The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said 'I don't feel comfortable talking about that.' I was the only person in the room to abstain. Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person's discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of 'white fragility.' They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a 'power play.' In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues."  Writes Jodi Shaw, resigning from her staff position at Smith College, quoted at "Whistleblower at Smith College Resigns Over Racism Jodi Shaw made less in a year than the cost of tuition. She was offered a settlement, but turned it down. Here's why" (bariweiss.substack).

"A senior No 10 source said that male primogeniture was 'a nonsense.' Scrapping it was 'being looked at,' along with 'three or four other things.'" Posted: 20 Feb 2021 03:59 AM PST Ha ha. It's nonsense, but they're only up to the point of looking at it and still considering several other options.  The quote is from "Ladies first in Tory plan to abolish male primogeniture/Daughters may take hereditary peerages under new bill" (The London Times).  After seven miscarriages and two rounds of IVF Charlotte Carew Pole was "absolutely thrilled" when she gave birth to her daughter, Jemima.... "'Congratulations, what a shame it wasn't a boy', or 'How quickly can you have another?'" were some of the comments she received. "There was a general expectation that I must keep pumping them out until a boy arrived. And all because I married a man who will inherit a title.... He doesn't care about it, and neither did his parents. But the more I thought about it, the angrier it made me. I was outraged that this was still happening. Why should you look at a scan and be disappointed it's a girl?".... Male primogeniture – inheritance by the eldest son - is a feudal relic, designed to ensure that estates remain undivided on the deaths of their owners, and kept out of the hands of women too weak to fight off predators.... Britain and Lesotho are the only two democracies with reserved seats in parliament for hereditaries.... The reservation of seats in parliament for men almost certainly contravenes Article 14 of the European Convention of Human Rights, prohibiting discrimination on grounds of sex....

"I had to isolate, using Being Famous as an immense excuse for never facing anything. Because I was Famous, therefore I can’t go to the movies." Posted: 20 Feb 2021 04:51 AM PST "I can't go to the theater. But then sitting in this [Hong Kong hotel] room, taking baths, which I noticed Yoko did, every time I got nervous — I must have had about 40 baths — I'm looking out over the Hong Kong Bay, and there's something ringing a bell. It's like, what is it? And then I just got very, very relaxed. And it was like a recognition: this is me! This relaxed person is me!.... I rediscovered [in Hong Kong], the feeling I used to have as a youngster, walking in the mountains of Scotland with an auntie. You know, you're walking and the ground starts going beneath you, and the heather, and the clouds moving above you, and you think, Ah, this is the feeling they're always talking about, the one that makes you paint or put it into poetry because you can't describe it any other way. I recognized that that feeling had been with me all my life. The feeling was with me before the Beatles. So this period was to re-establish me, as me, for myself.... So here I am, right? It's beautiful, you know. It's just like walking those hills." From a December 2020 article in the NYT, "For John Lennon, Isolation Had a Silver Lining/Forty years after the musician's death, a writer revisits conversations with the former Beatle about the long period of seclusion and self-reflection that inspired his breakthrough as a solo artist, and as a human being."  I was reading that after listening to John's song "Isolation," which I embedded in a post yesterday, in a discussion of the use of the noun "isolate" to describe a type of person. Obviously, the NYT publishes things about John Lennon every December, memorializing his murder, but this article connected to the coronavirus lockdown, in that Lennon imposed a lockdown on himself (from 1976 to 1980).  There's a suggestion that we might take something from his experience and turn the negative of the lockdown positive. He was, though, recovering from the distortions of life as a very famous person, so it's hard to adapt that to your own life, especially if you have aspirations to accomplish things out in the world of your fellow humans or if you were already in touch with the real you. But one thing that might be useful is Lennon's assertion that recorded music — which you can so easily experience alone and at home (or walking along the purple heather) — is preferable to going out to concerts: "All the performers I ever saw, from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis, I was always disappointed. I preferred the record."

At the Snowman's Café... Posted: 19 Feb 2021 05:01 PM PST . ... enjoy the conversation.

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