Gagandeep Kaur in Delhi tells us more about those huts where women are isolated because they’re menstruating.

Poornima Javardhan, 25, felt dread and trepidation as she got ready to spend five days in a gaokor – a hut outside her village where girls and women are banished during menstruation.

“During the rainy season, it is all the more difficult to stay in a gaokor because water comes inside and sometimes the roof leaks,” says Javardhan, who lives in Sitatola, a village in central India’s Maharashtra state. Each month, custom dictates that she must stay in the thatched hut on the edge of a forest, sometimes on her own, or, if she’s lucky, with another woman.

There are no kitchens, because bleeding women aren’t allowed to cook. A thick sheet on the ground is the only bed; during the day it’s folded to serve as a chair. The huts are isolated, so forest animals pay visits; there are reports of women dying from snakebites.

The practice of banishing women and girls is most prevalent among the Gond and Madiya ethnic groups. The Gonds are the largest indigenous group in central India and hail from the states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh and Orissa.

Girls miss school while they are in the huts. An estimated 23% of girls in India drop out of school when they start menstruating. “Many times a menstruating girl is unable to take her exams because of this practice. It means that few girls from this region study beyond matriculation [high school],” says Barsagade.

They have to stay there for five days.

There are two gaokors in Sitatola, home to about 20 families. Although there have been incidents of harassment, women are generally left alone because they are considered impure while they have their periods. There have been moves to improve the conditions of the gaokors, but not to end the practice.

It’s very important not to rape a woman when she’s impure. Keep that for when she’s not bleeding.

Asra Nomani and Hala Arafa say thanks but no thanks to the whole “wearing ‘hijab’ in solidarity” thing – not for the familiar and irritating reason that it’s “appropriation” but for the much better reason that it’s sexist shit.

Last week, three female religious leaders – a Jewish rabbi, an Episcopal vicar and a Unitarian reverend – and a male imam, or Muslim prayer leader, walked into the sacred space in front of the ornately-tiled minbar, or pulpit, at the Khadeeja Islamic Center in West Valley City, Utah, the women smiling widely, their hair covered with swaths of bright scarves, to support “Wear a Hijab” day.

The media obligingly reported this interfaith gesture.

For us, as mainstream Muslim women, born in Egypt and India, the spectacle at the mosque was a painful joke and reminder of the well-financed effort by conservatives to dominate modern Muslim societies. This modern-day movement spreads an ideology of political Islam, called “Islamism,” enlisting unsuspecting well-intentioned do-gooders, while promoting the headscarf for women as a virtual “sixth pillar” of Islam, after the traditional “five pillars,” the shahada (or proclamation of faith), prayer, fasting, charity and pilgrimage. We reject this interpretation. We are not too sexy for our hair.

It’s been grating on me for ages, the way the media and would-be progressives beam approval on the headscarf for women, as if it stood purely for mutual love and respect and not at all for the subordination of women.

This modern-day movement, codified by Iran, Saudi Arabia, Taliban Afghanistan and the Islamic State, has erroneously made the Arabic word hijab synonymous with “headscarf,” furthering a sexist interpretation of Islam that women and girls must “protect” their “honor” by covering their hair. Hijab literally means, “curtain” in Arabic. It also means “hiding,” ”obstructing” and “isolating” someone or something. It is never used in the Koran to mean headscarf.

I did not know that. I’ve been calling it hijab all this time. Damn.

Born in the 1960s into conservative but open-minded families (Hala in Egypt and Asra in India), we grew up without an edict that we had to cover our hair. But, starting in the 1980s, following the 1979 Iranian revolution of the minority Shia sect and the rise of well-funded Saudi clerics from the majority Sunni sect, we have experienced bullying to cover our hair from men and boys – and women and girls, who are sometimes called “enforce-hers” and “Muslim mean girls,” for example, telling jokes about “hijabis” in skinny jeans actually being “ho-jabis,” using the indelicate term for “whores.”

…

To us, the headscarf is a symbol of an interpretation of Islam we reject that believes that women are a sexual distraction to men, who are weak, and, thus, we must cover ourselves. We don’t buy it. This ideology promotes a social attitude that absolves men of sexually harassing women and puts the onus on the victim to protect herself by covering up.

And treats her like so much garbage if she doesn’t cover up.

Unfortunately, the idea of “hijab” as a mandatory headscarf for women, duping well-intentioned “interfaith” supporters, is promulgated by efforts such as “World Hijab Day,” started in 2013 by Nazma Khan, the Bangladeshi American owner of a Brooklyn-based headscarf company, and Ahlul Bayt, a Shia proselytizing TV station, that the University of Calgary, in southwest Canada, promotes as a resource for its participation in “World Hijab Day,” the TV station arguing “hijab” is necessary for women to avoid “unwanted attention.” World Hijab Day, Ahlul Bayt and the University of Calgary didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Yikes. Bad move, University of Calgary.

In its “resources,” Ahluly Bayt includes a link to the notion that “the woman is awrah,” or forbidden, an idea that leads to the confinement, subordination, silencing and subjugation of women’s voices and presence in public society. It also includes an article, “The top 10 excuses of Muslim women who don’t wear hijab and their obvious weaknesses,” with the argument, “Get on the train of repentance, my sister, before it passes by your station.”

Also, the notion that “the woman is awrah” presupposes that the only people who count as people are men. The woman is forbidden to men, and therefore she’s just plain forbidden, because only men count. Since only men count, the way to deal with these forbidden women is to imprison them. Problem solved…as long as you assume women don’t count as people.

The rush to cover women’s hair has reached a fever pitch with ultraconservative websites and organizations pushing this interpretation, such as VirtualMosque.com and Al-Islam.org, which even published a feature, “Hijab Jokes,” mocking Muslim women who don’t cover their hair “Islamically.”

Last week, high school girls at Vernon Hills High School, outside Chicago, wore headscarves for an activity, “Walk a Mile in Her Hijab,” sponsored by the school’s conservative Muslim Students Association. It disturbed us to see the image of the girls in scarves.

These things always disturb me. They just send the message that Muslim women and girls are expected to wear the damn curtains.

As Americans, we believe in freedom of religion. But we need to clarify to those in universities, the media and discussion forums that in exploring the “hijab,” they are not exploring Islam, but rather the ideology of political Islam as practiced by the mullahs, or clerics, of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Islamic State.

In the name of “interfaith,” well-intentioned Americans are getting duped by the agenda of Muslims who argue that a woman’s honor lies in her “chastity,” pushing a platform to put a headscarf on every woman.

Please do this instead: Do not wear a headscarf in “solidarity” with the ideology that most silences us, equating our bodies with “honor.” Stand with us instead with moral courage against the ideology of Islamism that demands we cover our hair.

I do!

I tried to find some evidence to rebut (or not) something I claimed.

Ed Cara on Twitter said in response to my link to the first collection of misogynist comments about Germaine Greer:

Those are all certainly vile, but I absolutely do think there’d be vile racist comments over quotes from a famous AA speaker

So I looked around, and found a rapper who obliged. Pink News reported last September:

Waka Flocka Flame made a series of transphobic comments on a New York radio station on Friday.

The rapper told ‘The Breakfast Club’ that Caitlyn Jenner’s transition was an: “Affront to God.”

He went on to accuse “transgenders” of “marketing evil, man.”

Flame continued to wax lyrical about the danger of non-traditional family units, accusing men and women of forgetting their gender roles as “husbands and wives”.

“Women are afraid to be a wife and young males is afraid to be men.” he said.

“It’s like, it’s not cool, they’re not marketing that. They don’t market families and husbands and wives no more.

“They marketing young girls, you know what I’m saying?” he said, as it became increasingly clear that few around him did.

“Transgenders — they’re marketing evil, man,” he said, before accusing the trans community of doing the “devil’s work” and as a test that society needed to “outbeat [sic]”.

“You are who you are when God made you, not who you became after he did.

“That’s how I just feel. You rebuking God, man.

“God didn’t put them feelings in you, man, that’s the Devil playing tricks on your mind,” he added.

“That’s a test from God. If you can’t outbeat [sic] that one task and you believe that, then you’re going to believe everything else.”

However, Mr Flame didn’t reserve his hate fuelled philosophising for trans people alone – he also criticised the African American community, insisting that they need “get over slavery”.

So I found the Pink News Facebook post of the story. Ed was at least partly right – the comments are certainly abusive. On the other hand they’re not explicitly racist the way so many of the comments about Greer were misogynist – and there are only 34, compared to her 223.

But plenty of them are implicitly racist. Like the second one for instance:

Gideon John Kramer Waka flaka wtf all theses idiots with the brain the apsize of an ant who brag about fucking bitches selling drugs and people are so fucking stupid they pay these idiots attention rap takes no talent what so ever these idiots call themself artists and then say stupid things like this moron its sad to see how many people actually even listion to anything these idiots say

And others:

Pete Smith Looks like a trans human.

Scott Sherman I’m not a fan of ignorant, bigoted talentless twats holding themselves out like theyre a role model and spewing their hate in interviews

There’s a rather cryptic one…

Donny Ball WAKA your baby girl is waiting for you.

The misogyny sneaks in even when the sinner isn’t a woman.

But anyway: my claim is at least partly rebutted.

Whooooooo – Phil Plait alerts us to an amazing NASA photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

This incredible photo was taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been mapping the Moon since it achieved orbit in 2009. Its cameras are usually pointed straight down (what’s called nadir viewing), but sometimes the whole spacecraft is rotated to point them toward the horizon, or even up into space, to measure the Moon’s incredibly thin atmosphere (called an exosphere, which, c’mon, is an extremely cool word) or to take calibration measurements.

In this case, on Oct. 12, 2015, when it took the images used to make this image, LRO was over the large crater Compton, which is just over the visible edge on the farside of the Moon. LRO was 134 km above the Moon’s surface, so it could peek over the horizon and see the Earth.

In the Times today – behind a paywall as always, but the free first two paragraphs are of interest all the same.

Britain’s biggest Islamic organisation and its largest Muslim student group have undeclared links to the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist network that has at times incited violence and terror, a government report claimed yesterday.

The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella body of more than 500 Islamic organisations, claims to be non-sectarian, but Brotherhood supporters are said to have “played an important role in establishing and then running” it, according to the review.

Wait, the MCB claims to be non-sectarian? What sense does that make? It’s sectarian right in the name. The issue isn’t sectarian / non-sectarian but theocratic / secular, or tolerant / intolerant, or liberal / illiberal. It’s whether or not you respect human rights. It’s whether or not you think your religion has the right to demand and enforce universal obedience.

It’s also whether or not you exclude women in the name of your organization.

Speaking of Al Jazeera…last January it had some issues with Charlie Hebdo. National Review saw the emails.

As journalists worldwide reacted with universal revulsion at the massacre of some of their own by Islamic jihadists in Paris, Al Jazeera English editor and executive producer Salah-Aldeen Khadr sent out a staff-wide e-mail.

…

Khadr urged his employees to ask if this was “really an attack on ‘free speech,’” discuss whether “I Am Charlie” is an “alienating slogan,” caution viewers against “making this a free speech aka ‘European Values’ under attack binary [sic],” and portray the attack as “a clash of extremist fringes.” “Defending freedom of expression in the face of oppression is one thing; insisting on the right to be obnoxious and offensive just because you can is infantile,” Khadr wrote. “Baiting extremists isn’t bravely defiant when your manner of doing so is more significant in offending millions of moderate people as well. And within a climate where violent response — however illegitimate — is a real risk, taking a goading stand on a principle virtually no one contests is worse than pointless: it’s pointlessly all about you.”

Excuse me? A principle virtually no one contests? If virtually no one contests it, what were all those dead bodies then? If virtually no one contests it, why did the Kouachi brothers murder 12 people at Charlie Hebdo? If virtually no one contests it, why do so many people get in such a rage of opposition to it? What a cowardly, blaming, contemptuous, horrible thing to say. The whole point is that a great many people absolutely do contest it, and a great many of them contest it with violence. They contest it by murdering people. Those guys with machetes in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who draw up lists of people to be killed in Bangladesh? They contest it. Those people who threaten to kill my dear friend Taslima? They contest it. That guy who shot up the conference in Copenhagen, killing a Danish film director, and then later killed a guard outside a synagogue? He contested it. I could go on. People do contest it and they use force, they use murder, to make their contesting stick. So yes, actually, the people at Charlie Hebdo were bravely defiant.

His denunciation of Charlie Hebdo’s publication of cartoons mocking the prophet Mohammed didn’t sit well with some Al Jazeera English employees.

Hours later, U.S.-based correspondent Tom Ackerman sent an email quoting a paragraph from a January 7 blog post by Ross Douthat. The New York Times’ Douthat (film critic for National Review) argued that cartoons like the ones that drove the radical Islamists to murder must be published “because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.”

I hate having to agree with Ross Douthat, but these things happen.

H/t Lady Mondegreen

Lots of people are passing this around, and I think the original spark for the passing around may have been Dawkins, but all the same, I’m going to pass it around too, because it is just that whatever it is.

Carbon Fibre Masculinity: Abstract.

This article examines material economies of carbon fibre as a prosthetic form of masculinity. The paper advances three main arguments. Firstly, carbon fibre can be a site in which disability is overcome, an act of overcoming that is affected through masculinized technology. Secondly, carbon fibre can be a homosocial surface; that is, carbon fibre becomes both a surface extension of the self and a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships, a surface that facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies. Carbon fibre surfaces are material extensions of subjectivity, and carbon fibre surfaces are vectors of the cultural economies of masculine competition. Thirdly, the article gives an account of Oscar Pistorius as an example of the masculinization of carbon fibre, and the associated binding of a psychic attitude of misogyny and power to a form of violent and competitive masculine subjectivity. The paper unpacks the affects, economies and surfaces of “carbon fibre masculinity” and discusses Pistorius’ use of carbon fibre, homosociality and misogyny as forms of protest masculinity through which he unconsciously attempted to recuperate his gendered identity from emasculating discourses of disability.

Let’s see…

One, what does it mean to say “carbon fibre can be a site”? Why call it a “site”? I know it’s theory jargon, but why use it? Carbon fiber is a material. What is added by calling it a “site”? Other than obfuscation?

Two, why call it “masculinized technology”? No doubt this is explained in the paper, but it’s taken to be self-evident enough to work in the abstract, and I wonder why.

Third, how can carbon fiber be “a third-party mediator in homosocial relationships”? That obviously will be a big part of the article, but on its face it looks desperately arbitrary. Women can make use of carbon fiber prostheses too, surely?

Then of course I wonder how carbon fiber can be a surface that “facilitates intimacy between men in ways that devalue femininity in both male and female bodies.”

The rest – well I can see the drift. Oscar Pistorius may have felt less of a man because of his missing leg. I would guess that most people feel less of a human if they lack a major limb, but whatever – maybe Pistorius felt it especially acutely. But the special carbon fiber aspect…?

Oh well. I prefer clarity to deliberate obfuscation. So it goes.

Cora Currier reports apparent censorship by Al Jazeera.

The corporate headquarters of Al Jazeera appears to have blocked an article critical of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record from viewers outside the United States. The news network, which is funded by the government of Qatar, told local press that it did not intend to offend Saudi Arabia or any other state ally, and would remove the piece.

The op-ed, written by Georgetown University professor and lawyer Arjun Sethi and titled, “Saudi Arabia Uses Terrorism as an Excuse for Human Rights Abuses,” ran on the website of Al Jazeera America, the network’s U.S. outlet. It comments on reports of 50 people recently sentenced to death for alleged terrorist activity and criticizes the U.S. government’s silence on Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

The article ran on December 3, and is still available in the United States, but people attempting to view the link in other countries were given an error or “not found” page. (For international readers, we’ve reprinted the full text of the article here.)

Al Jazeera said in a statement that it’s “investigating what the source of the problem may be.”

Last week, the Saudi Arabian newspaper Okaz quoted a director of Al Jazeera apologizing for the article and saying that it would be removed. Another news story, from a Bahraini website, shows a tweet from Al Jazeera America’s account with the article’s headline. That tweet appears to have been deleted. A spokesperson for Al Jazeera America would not comment on the tweet or on the discrepancy between the parent company’s statement to The Intercept and the comments in Okaz.

There’s nothing unusual about Sethi’s article, and he says Al Jazeera America commissioned it from him.

A few days after publication, Sethi’s Twitter feed was flooded with attacks from pro-Saudi accounts. David Johnson, senior opinion editor at Al Jazeera America, retweeted many of the attacks. (He declined to be interviewed for this piece.)

Scuzzy. It all looks very scuzzy.

While Al Jazeera’s international coverage has been praised — particularly in the years after the 9/11 attacks — this is not the first time that the network has appeared to cater to the interests of Qatar and its Gulf allies. (Disclosure: prior to joining The Intercept, I wrote an article for Al Jazeera America as a freelancer.)

It has been criticized for lack of coverage of protests against the government of Bahrain, for example, and in 2012, several journalists complained that they had to edit coverage of Syria to feature the emir of Qatar’s position. In 2013, staffers in Egypt resigned in protest of the network’s bias toward the Muslim Brotherhood after the military deposed the president, Mohamed Morsi.

But staffers at Al Jazeera America say this kind of blocking is new.

Julie Bindel talked to some secular feminist women in Paris about the current situation.

The Left has allowed its tendency to blame the West for everything to offer a justification for terrorism as resistance to colonialism, imperialism and capitalism. As a lifelong feminist, and firmly of the Left, I have long been bitterly disappointed with those who supposedly campaign for women’s rights yet capitulate to Islamofascist men. Such women, in the UK, France and other European countries, have given their support to Sharia courts, the wearing of the full-face veil, arranged marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM), and gender segregation in public places. Supporting traditional Islam flies in the face of feminism, and even of basic equality between men and women.

Ana Pak is an Iranian secular feminist who works with refugees arriving in France from Iran, Afghanistan and Syria. Pak grew up during Khomeini’s rule. “The word Islamophobic comes from 1979 when [Ayatollah] Khomeini came to power and women went to the streets and marched to be free of the veil,” she says. “Khomeini and the Islamists obliged them to wear the veil, and that’s when they started calling these women Islamophobic.”

Pak had to leave Iran for France because of the whole secular feminist thing – that’s not what Khomeini had in mind.

Having escaped prison, she expected to be able to continue her anti-Islam activism in the democratic, secular country of her exile. “I was shocked to find that the French Left was capitulating to the Islamists, and that I was soon labelled as Islamophobic for resisting its doctrine. I have never stopped working against or fighting Islamists, in Iran first of all, and then in France. In Iran I was involved with the Left, but the Left has lost its raison d’être. Now the Left use the same words that the Islamists have used in their own campaign.”

Pak was dismayed by the reaction of some French citizens to the Charlie Hebdo attacks. “Immediately following the attacks at Charlie Hebdo I went in the evening with some feminist friends to the Place de la République, where we assembled to support the people who were killed. Two of my friends had banners with typical feminist slogans, like ‘No to the veil’ and ‘No extremism’, but the French people that were already there asked them to remove them because they could cause offence.”

This was immediately after the slaughter at Charlie Hebdo.

“After the Hebdo killings, a common reaction was to blame the journalists who ‘dared’ to criticise Islam, saying they were guilty of blasphemy. Now Islamists are killing those who drink wine and who go to concerts. Tomorrow it will be people who march in the streets. Islamists are taking power in France, and what they want once they are in power is to achieve absolute submission.”

Those who use the history of French colonialism to justify the massacres are misguided, she says. “Islamists have taken power in Iran against Iranians, in Syria against the Christians, in France against those who go out and drink wine. So the people who blame colonialism are wrong.”

I want to know Ana Pak.

There’s a lot more: read on.

In the news: the pope “confirmed” a second “miracle” by “Mother Teresa” so the church will be able to go ahead and declare her a “saint.” In the spirit of my hostile scare quotes, Slate republished a 2003 piece by Christopher Hitchens on the Albanian fanatic.

As for the “miracle” that had to be attested, what can one say? Surely any respectable Catholic cringes with shame at the obviousness of the fakery. A Bengali woman named Monica Besra claims that a beam of light emerged from a picture of MT, which she happened to have in her home, and relieved her of a cancerous tumor. Her physician, Dr. Ranjan Mustafi, says that she didn’t have a cancerous tumor in the first place and that the tubercular cyst she did have was cured by a course of prescription medicine.

And a miracle.

During the deliberations over the Second Vatican Council, under the stewardship of Pope John XXIII, MT was to the fore in opposing all suggestions of reform. What was needed, she maintained, was more work and more faith, not doctrinal revision. Her position was ultra-reactionary and fundamentalist even in orthodox Catholic terms. Believers are indeed enjoined to abhor and eschew abortion, but they are not required to affirm that abortion is “the greatest destroyer of peace,” as MT fantastically asserted to a dumbfounded audience when receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. Believers are likewise enjoined to abhor and eschew divorce, but they are not required to insist that a ban on divorce and remarriage be a part of the state constitution, as MT demanded in a referendum in Ireland (which her side narrowly lost) in 1996.

She did harm.

MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit.

She said pain was Jesus kissing you.

She was not someone to admire, much less to emulate.

The rich world has a poor conscience, and many people liked to alleviate their own unease by sending money to a woman who seemed like an activist for “the poorest of the poor.” People do not like to admit that they have been gulled or conned, so a vested interest in the myth was permitted to arise, and a lazy media never bothered to ask any follow-up questions. Many volunteers who went to Calcutta came back abruptly disillusioned by the stern ideology and poverty-loving practice of the “Missionaries of Charity,” but they had no audience for their story. George Orwell’s admonition in his essay on Gandhi—that saints should always be presumed guilty until proved innocent—was drowned in a Niagara of soft-hearted, soft-headed, and uninquiring propaganda.

Which the church is perpetuating, naturally.

iknklast made this very important point in a comment:

When I was in Texas, the divide between the money spent on educating minorities and educating the white citizens was notable. I had students of color in my classroom who struggled to keep up because they had less preparation. This fed into the preconception of people who assumed they were not as smart. Because they had less opportunity earlier in life, they came to college with less preparation, therefore they typically did worse (especially at first) than white students. Ergo, they were less capable by nature.

…

Sometimes it required a little extra work on my part when teaching a student from a poorer school, usually a person of color, and for a lot of people, that proved their prejudice. It never occurred to them that this was the work that had been done with the other students earlier on in life, and being three steps behind everyone else meant it was an amazing feat when the students finished even.

A few minutes after I read that comment, I opened this article by Roberto A Ferdman at Wonkblog at the Washington Post, and read:

Wealthy parents aren’t just able to send their kids to top pre-schools—they can also purchase the latest learning technology and ensure their children experience as many museums, concerts and other cultural experiences as possible. Low-income parents, on the other hand, don’t have that opportunity. Instead, they’re often left to face the reality of sending their kids to schools without having had the chance to provide an edifying experience at home.

That might sound foreboding if not hyperbolic, but it’s a serious and widespread problem in the United States, where poor kids enter school already a year behind the kids of wealthier parents. That deficit is among the largest in the developed world, and it can be extraordinarily difficult to narrow later in life.

Especially in a country that, collectively, frankly doesn’t give a fuck that poor people are held back by poverty, and in fact think it serves them right for being poor.

This is one of the key takeaways from a new book about how United States is failing its children. The book, called Too Many Children Left Behind, is written by Columbia University professor Jane Waldfogel, a long-time researcher of poverty and inequality. And it will force almost anyone to reflect on the impact of unchecked inequality on children.

Waldfogel says the massive achievement gap in the United States is a blemish for a country that aspires to be the greatest in the world. In her book, she shows that achievement gap is pronounced to a startling degree in the first years of life.

And then it’s made even worse by people like Scalia who conclude that poor people are just stupider than rich people.

Ferdman and Waldfogel had a conversation about the issue.

How serious is the achievement gap between poorer and wealthier children in the United States?

It’s pretty frightening.

We find that for both reading and math, the children whose parents had low levels of education—meaning they only got a high school education or less—are lagging behind the children of more educated parents by a full standard deviation at school entry. A standard deviation is huge—it’s a big gap; it’s at least an entire year of development.

By comparison, in the other countries we looked at, the gap was closer to half a standard deviation. So the gap is substantially and significantly larger in the United States.

Wow. And we’re talking about kids who are only four years old. So four years in to life they are already a full year behind?

Yes, it’s terrible.

And we do a crap job of catching them up, and we’re an outlier in both of those ways – the bad start and the bad finish.

The United States is somewhat exceptional in this regard. Can you talk a little about how the size and shape of the achievement gap in this country is distinctive?

Where the United States really stood out was in having significantly more inequality at school entry and at the end of school compared to peer countries we found around the world—those are Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. For most of the things we looked at, the U.K. was in second place behind the U.S. in terms of the level of inequality. Australia and Canada really stand out as having much more equality of outcomes among kids than the United States. And this is carried through as kids go to school. The achievement gap grows as kids go to school in the U.S., but it doesn’t really elsewhere.

And…what’s more important? Apart from climate change and continuing to have a planet that can sustain life? What’s more important than doing everything possible to give everyone an equal chance in life?

Jedidah C. Isler sets Scalia and Roberts straight on some things.

The truly damaging part of Chief Justice Roberts’s question is the tacit implication that black students must justify their presence at all.

Black students’ responsibility in the classroom is not to serve as “seasoning” to the academic soup. They do not function primarily to enrich the learning experience of white students. Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do; they love physics and want to know more. Do we require that white students justify their presence in the classroom? Do we need them to bring something other than their interest?

No, we don’t, and you know what that does? It frees up white students to learn and do physics. (The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to people from other categories that are expected to justify their presence in the classroom.)

By suggesting, and sadly litigating, that diversity — and more important, inclusion and equal opportunity — aren’t paramount to the production of new scientific information, we wrongly imply that the most important part of scientific discovery is in the classroom.

The purpose of the classroom is to build a tool kit and to understand what we know in the hopes of uncovering something that we don’t. It’s the door through which we create new physicists. Closing that door to students of color unless they can justify their presence is closing the door to the kinds of creativity that can be shown only after a student has mastered basic skills.

A physics class should interrogate and transfer the canon of scientific knowledge. Those students will go on to consider the many unanswered questions at the frontiers of what is known about the universe.

If we limit the physics classroom to white students, or students whose presence in a classroom we leave unquestioned, we also limit the production of new information about the world — and whose perspective that world will reflect. If that’s the case, then we all lose.

So let’s don’t do that.

Peace talks. Paris. The table. See the table.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Notice anything?

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was in Paris on Monday for a ministerial meeting with his counterparts from France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Qatar, and Turkey to discuss possible solutions to the ongoing crisis in Syria. Take a good look at the photo above. Noticeably absent are … you guessed it … women. Sure, there are a few in the room, but not one woman is seated at the table in a position of power — because not one of the above countries has a woman foreign minister. Such an abject lack of gender parity at high-stakes talks like these is shameful.

It’s shameful the same way it’s shameful there are no women in the hierarchy of the Catholic church. The crisis in Syria affects women, to put it mildly, yet there is not one woman taking part in that discussion.

In a 2012 report on women’s participation in peace negotiations, U.N. Women observed that a “limited but reasonably representative sample of 31 major peace processes between 1992 and 2011 reveals that only four percent of signatories, 2.4 percent of chief mediators, 3.7 percent of witnesses and 9 per cent of negotiators are women.”

The report adds that “the underrepresentation of women at the peace table is much more marked than in other public decision-making roles, where women are still underrepresented but where the gap has been steadily narrowing. This includes the roles that typically dominate peace talks: politician, lawyer, diplomat and member of a party to armed conflict. Women’s structural exclusion from peace talks has significant consequences for the extent to which issues of concern to them — such as violence against women or women’s citizenship rights — are addressed.”

Women aren’t just bystanders. Women aren’t passengers or baggage. Women aren’t Roombas or Siris. Women are real people, just as men are real people. Women should be included in these discussions.

From last month at the Huffington Post blog – The Troubling Erasure of Trans Parents Who Breastfeed.

When we think about breastfeeding, the image that comes to mind — the one pushed on us by society, medical professionals and the media alike — is that of a mother nursing her newborn baby. Brochures, websites and PSAs promote the picture of a woman lovingly looking at her child as the baby suckles at her breast. The language accompanying this imagery is inevitably gendered, specific to cisgender women who are nursing a baby that they themselves gave birth to.

Isn’t that awful? Women are always shoving themselves forward that way, hogging the mic, taking up all the slots, erasing everyone else. Imagine women pretending breastfeeding is something women do. Slags.

For a long time, no one has questioned that language. But in recent years, as acceptance of genders outside the binary grows, our understanding of many things that have long gone unchallenged have needed to shift. There has been a push for gender-neutral language when talking about reproductive justice, from abortion to pregnancy.

Yeah! Because what better way is there to overturn women’s relegation to second-class status than to stop talking about the reproductive realities that are the source of that second-class status? Godalmighty can we please finally stop talking about women? By the way did you know that for every word a man says, a woman says seven hundred million words? Fact.

Despite acknowledgment by many in birthing communities that pregnancy is not limited to women, the language used by most people still hasn’t changed. Jasper Moon, a genderqueer parent who prefers to be called “ren” by their child (short for “parent”), notes that when they hear the term “nursing mother,” they know “that obviously doesn’t apply to me.”

The term “mother” is itself problematic. As J. Kathleen (Jake) Marcus, an attorney in Philadelphia who specializes in parenting and gender legal issues, notes, “Kids are nursed by people who are not their mothers all the time.” While this is less common in Western culture, people have been nursing their friends’ and family members’ kids throughout history.

Yes: wet nurses. They were women though. It wasn’t men who did it. It wasn’t “people”; it was women. Trans people shouldn’t be erased, but neither should women.