Say you're a Chinese company wishing to appear more global and well-to-do without all the messy hubbub of hiring a foreigner. What do you do? Drop $44 and
rent a white guy.
posted by griphus
on Jun 29, 2010 -
90 comments
Attenborough's Pitcher, an "Udderly Weird Yam," a two-inch phallic mushroom already immortalized on
Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, and the "Bombardier Worm" ("Chaff worm" would seem a more accurate name) are just four of the newly described species making the International Institute for Species Exploration's totally arbitrary
Top 10 New Species list.
[more inside]
posted by dust of the stars
on May 26, 2010 -
6 comments
Vogue Italia relaunched their website last week
(in Italian and English / pictures on the site may be NSFW,) with three new subsites catering to specific fashion industry demographics: Vogue
Curvy (focusing on plus-sized models, actresses and celebrities,) Vogue
Black (men and women of color,) and Vogue
Talents (veteran and up-and-coming designers. "Talents" also encourages hopeful designers to submit their work for review.) "Curvy" and "Black" in particular have received some
positive and
negative attention and some
wonder whether
separating those two fashion categories
is truly inclusive. Vogue
responds.
posted by zarq
on Mar 1, 2010 -
31 comments
Auroville Funded by Governments all over the world, the city of
Auroville is an ongoing experiment 'whose stated purpose is to realize human unity in diversity' through yoga. Unfortunately, it seems the 'rule free' society has attracted some of the least welcome of humanity's outliers, namely
child sex tourists.
[more inside]
posted by asok
on May 27, 2008 -
16 comments
Diversity counterproductive to "social capital?" James Wilson's article in Commentary magazine talks about Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam's essay recently published in Scandinavian Political Studies. In the essay, Putnam publicizes the findings of his research, conducted in rural districts, towns, and cities, whose conclusion establishes that diverse neighborhoods show less "social capital" because ethnically diverse residents seem to distrust each other.
[more inside]
posted by gregb1007
on Nov 2, 2007 -
37 comments
Official transgender blessings -- Kulanu -- the newly-revised manual for LGBT issues and ceremonies put out by the
Union for Reform Judaism (1.5 million US Jews are Reform) now includes 2 blessings (written by a Rabbi now male) for those transitioning and who have completed the change, alongside the already existing same sex marriage liturgy and other documents and procedures. A first? (blessings text inside)
posted by amberglow
on Aug 9, 2007 -
50 comments
Jewcy asks The Big Question-- Why Are Atheists So Angry? with Sam Harris and Dennis Prager. Email exchanges on the topic--and if you can get past the incredibly loaded and one-sided question, really interesting.
posted by amberglow
on Nov 29, 2006 -
246 comments
A Blinding Flash of the Obvious "The city is too beautiful of a city to be known around the world as the capital of exclusion and intolerance."
He was right. Now, a 22-minute film documents the successful fight to repeal an anti-gay ordinance in Cincinnati last year. The campaign was successful because it was honest, and because it included
people of faith.
posted by tizzie
on Feb 16, 2006 -
23 comments
28 U.S.C 1367
was a
controversial and
confusing attempt by
Congress to
codify and address
the issue of
Supplemental Jurisdiction established in cases such as
United Mine Workers v. Gibbs, 383 U.S. 715 (1966),
Zahn v. International Paper, Co., 414 U.S. 291 (1973), and
Finley v. United States, 490 U.S. 545 (1989). The Supreme Court tried to clarify some of the confusing issues regarding 1367 in a 2005 opinion.
Exxon Mobil Corp v. Allapattah Servs., Inc., (2005) (Kennedy, J.,
writing for the Court) (Stevens, J.,
dissenting) (Ginsburg, J.,
dissenting). The
question of whether the Court
clarified the issue or
made it more
complicated remains arguably
unanswered.
posted by dios
on Feb 16, 2006 -
25 comments
The Logic of Diversity "A new book,
The Wisdom of Crowds [
..:] by
The New Yorker columnist James Surowiecki, has recently popularized the idea that groups can, in some ways, be smarter than their members, which is superficially similar to
Page's results. While Surowiecki gives many examples of what one might call collective cognition, where groups out-perform isolated individuals, he really has only one explanation for this phenomenon, based on one of his examples: jelly beans [
...] averaging together many independent, unbiased guesses gives a result that is probably closer to the truth than any one guess. While true — it's the
central limit theorem of statistics — it's far from being the only way in which
diversity can be beneficial in problem solving."
(Three-Toed Sloth)
posted by kliuless
on Jun 20, 2005 -
6 comments
Score one for tolerance and diversity. Three-year-old Sophia Parlock cries while seated on the shoulders of her father, Phil Parlock, after having their Bush-Cheney sign torn up by Kerry-Edwards supporters on Thursday, Sept. 16, 2004, at the Tri-State Airport in Huntington, W.Va. Do the smirking people in this photo really feel proud for terrorizing a three-year-old girl?
posted by DWRoelands
on Sep 16, 2004 -
58 comments
Americans pay lip service to diversity says David Brooks in The Atlantic. Though we talk about the melting pot, we tend to group ourselves with similar people. Do you really care enough about diversity to actively seek it out? Is metafilter a virtual example of this phenomenon?
posted by rainbaby
on Aug 14, 2003 -
61 comments
A split decision from SCOTUS on Affirmative Action -- in cases specifically involving the University of Michigan, the court rules that the law school's AA standard is legal while the undergraduate standard is not. The University president is spinning this as a full out victory because the court has now "given a roadmap" for how Affirmative Action programs can be designed for higher education nationwide. While
polls show that Americans want diversity in education but are unsure about Affirmative Action, it doesn't look like it's going away any time soon. And the fundamental question remains: when it comes to education, is being a racial minority four times more important than having held a position of national leadership? Twenty times more important than writing an outstanding admissions essay?
posted by Dreama
on Jun 23, 2003 -
70 comments
Is this astoundingly bad timing or what? Big Brothers/Big Sisters "will require that all 500 of its local affiliates include active homosexuals as volunteers and mentors to children", according to this article.
On a side note, why hasn't this been widely reported?
posted by kablam
on Jul 18, 2002 -
176 comments
Newspapers fall short of diversity goal : "The people who report for and edit the nation's newspapers look less like the people who make and read the news than a decade ago. If newspapers are a mirror that a community holds up to itself, the reflection is mostly white." Is it unfair to assume that a newspaper writer (or other media outlet) should share some sort of heritage in proportion to the population it covers to get the full feel of their stories? Or should it just be focused solely on merit without a cultural component?
posted by owillis
on Apr 24, 2002 -
9 comments
"In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us -- white folks and people of color -- will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race." So says Henry Jenkins in a Technology Review article on
Cyberspace and Race. On the Internet, nobody knows you're oppressed?
posted by sudama
on Mar 22, 2002 -
4 comments
Criticism Over WTC Statue Race Issues -- I'm sure many of you are familiar with a recent photo featuring three firefighters raising an American flag over the WTC rubble. Now a company has been commissioned to make a statue of the photo at FDNY Brooklyn Headquarters. In the statue though, the three white men who were originally depicted in the photo have been transformed into one white man, one black man, and one Hispanic man. There has been criticism over whether it is going to far to make these changes in order to be politically correct. Others are saying the statue should be more of a symbolic representation of all ethnicities that sacrificed themselves during this tragedy.
What do you think?
posted by yevge
on Jan 12, 2002 -
36 comments
