Tuesday, December 12, 2017

Dialogic Cinephilia - December 12, 2017

Charaborty, Ranjani. "The U.S. Medical System is Still Haunted by Slavery." Vox (December 7, 2017)

Cook, John, Ullrich Ecker and Stephan Lewandosky. "Misinformation and How to Correct It." Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. ed. Robert Scott and Stephan Kosslyn. John Wiley and Sons, 2015: 1-17. ["The increasing prevalence of misinformation in society may adversely affect democratic decision making, which depends on a well-informed public. False information can originate from a number of sources including rumors, literary fiction, mainstream media, corporate-vested interests, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. The rise of the Internet and user-driven content has provided a venue for quick and broad dissemination of information, not all of which is accurate. Consequently, a large body of research spanning a number of disciplines has sought to understand misinformation and determine which interventions are most effective in reducing its influence. This essay summarizes research into misinformation, bringing together studies from psychology, political science, education, and computer science. Cognitive psychology investigates why individuals struggle with correcting misinformation and inaccurate beliefs, and why myths are so difficult to dislodge. Two important findings involve (i) various “backfire effects,” which arise when refutations ironically reinforce misconceptions, and (ii) the role of worldviews in accentuating the persistence of misinformation. Computer scientists simulate the spread of misinformation through social networks and develop algorithms to automatically detect or neutralize myths. We draw together various research threads to provide guidelines on how to effectively refute misconceptions without risking backfire effects"]

Diaz, Junot. "Radical Hope is Our Best Weapon." On Being (September 14, 2017) ["'From the bottom will the genius come that makes our ability to live with each other possible. I believe that with all my heart.' These are the words of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Dominican-American writer Junot Díaz. His hope is fiercely reality-based, a product of centuries lodged in his body of African-Caribbean suffering, survival, and genius."]

Egan, Jennifer."On Cops and Mobsters." New Yorker Radio Hour (October 6, 2017) ["A lot of people first heard the name Jennifer Egan when her innovative book “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” which contained a chapter written as a teen-ager’s PowerPoint presentation, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2011. But Egan was no overnight success: Goon Squad was her fourth novel—if it was a novel—and she published her first story in The New Yorkernearly thirty years ago. But she’s kept experimenting since then, and a few years ago she wrote a short story entirely in tweets, called “Black Box.” Compared to that, Egan’s new novel, “Manhattan Beach,” is “more of an escapist book,” she tells David Remnick. It starts during the Depression, and it’s about a girl who goes to work in a shipbuilding yard in Brooklyn during the Second World War. It involves false identities, a possible murder, and the mob—an old-fashioned page turner. It also reflects her ethnic identity as an Irish-American, and her grandfather’s life in the Chicago police. But that didn’t make it any easier to write. Putting out a novel, Egan finds, is murder no matter how you slice it."]

"Merriam-Webster's 2017 Words of the Year: Feminism, dotard, gaffe, syzygy, and 6 more of the top lookups in 2017." Merriam-Webster (December 12, 2017)

Richards, Cecile. "Meet the Miss USA Contestant Accusing Trump of Sexual Misconduct as Senators Call for Him to Resign." Democracy Now (December 12, 2017) ["Five senators are now calling on President Trump to resign over allegations that he sexually harassed or assaulted women, and 56 House lawmakers with the Democratic Women’s Working Group are calling for a congressional investigation into the allegations. This comes as three of the 16 women who have publicly accused Trump of sexual harassment held a press conference Monday in New York, demanding that Congress take action. We speak with one of them: Samantha Holvey, a former Miss USA contestant for North Carolina when Trump owned the pageant. We are also joined by Cecile Richards, president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and we play an excerpt from the Brave New Films documentary 16 Women and Donald Trump."]





Simon, David. "The Deuce Charts the Rise of Pornography." The New Yorker Radio Hour (September 29, 2017) ["David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry in New York, in the seventies. Critics have compared Simon not so much to other television showrunners as to novelists like Dickens; Simon’s work is similarly wide in scope, with large casts, and aims to create a picture of a whole world. At bottom, he wants to follow the money from the street to the bosses to the politicians. But though Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” and even to some of the pimps and mobsters who exploit them, he is unambiguously critical of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms—has warped a whole culture toward misogyny."]

Strether, Lambert. "Class and Beyond: Case-Deaton’s 'Deaths of Despair,' Embodiment, and Neoliberal Epidemics." Naked Capitalism (December 11, 2017)

"Word of the Year 2017: Feminism."  Merriam-Webster (December 12, 2017)


"things are not what they seem," A Video Essay by Susana Aho from MGFX UConnDMD on Vimeo.


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