Relaxed Focus: "Take a look. It's in a book."

Star Trek Impressions For Patrick Stewart: "Watching Michael Fassbender And James McAvoy do impressions of their future selves in the X-Men movies right in front of the magnificent actors who play said future selves, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, is WONDERFUL."

Levar Burton wins all of the internets forever. LeVar Burton Reading Rainbow Kickstarter Return Interview : People.com: "After 23 years of introducing kids to the power of the written word, Reading Rainbow's final episode aired on November 16, 2006 – but now the childhood favorite is making a big comeback. On Wednesday, host and executive producer of Reading Rainbow LeVar Burton announced the brand's next chapter on Kickstarter. "Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere" is an online campaign started by the Roots actor and his Reading Rainbow team to transform the company's impressive collection of books into an interactive digital library accessible to every child. The project's beginning goal was to raise $1 million in 35 days, with all donations going to help make this virtual Reading Rainbow a real program available free to schools, especially those in need. In less than 24 hours, Reading Rainbow reached its initial goal amount thanks to thousands of backers, and the pledges continue to pour in. Currently, the campaign has garnered over $1.8 million; the donation period continues through July 2. "

Bring Reading Rainbow Back for Every Child, Everywhere. by LeVar Burton & Reading Rainbow — Kickstarter: "Hi. LeVar Burton here. You may know me as Kunta Kinte, from ROOTS, or Geordi La Forge, from Star Trek: The Next Generation. You also may have grown up with me on Reading Rainbow. It was my mother who taught me that, by picking up a book, I could "go anywhere" and "be anything." Ever since Reading Rainbow began in 1983, I have dedicated myself to fostering a love of reading in children, just as my mother did for me. Over the past year, I have watched Kickstarter bring communities together to support artists and inventors. Again and again, I have been inspired by watching like-minded people team up to accomplish impossible dreams, and to change the world. Now, I am hoping you will join me on my mission: to bring Reading Rainbow back for every child, everywhere."

Levar Burton's reaction to reaching $1 million - YouTube

Steven Pinker: US women's rights movement made lawmakers treat rape seriously - The Times of India: " The rampage shootings in the US are less readily explained. Three things go into them - mental illness, low status that triggers a desire for revenge and a desire for fame, even posthumously, killing innocent people the only way of becoming famous. In that way, rampage killers overlap with suicide terrorists."

Elliot Rodger's 'War on Women' and Toxic Gender Warfare - Reason.com: "For one thing, "misogyny" is a very incomplete explanation of Rodger's mindset, perhaps best described as malignant narcissism with a psychopathic dimension. His "manifesto" makes it clear that his hatred of women (the obverse side of his craving for validation by female attention, which he describes as so intense that a hug from a girl was infinitely more thrilling than an expression of friendship from a boy) was only a subset of a general hatred of humanity, and was matched by hatred of men who had better romantic and sexual success. At the end of the document, he chillingly envisions an ideal society in which women will be exterminated except for a small number of artificial-insemination breeders and sexuality will be abolished. But in an Internet posting a year ago, he also fantasized about inventing a virus that would wipe out all males except for himself: "You would be able to have your pick of any beautiful woman you want, as well as having dealt vengeance on the men who took them from you. Imagine how satisfying that would be." His original plans for his grand exit included not only a sorority massacre he explicitly called his "War on Women," but luring victims whom he repeatedly mentions in gender-neutral terms to his apartment for extended torture and murder (and killing his own younger brother, whom he hated for managing to lose his virginity)...

"Some have argued that hating other men because they get to have sex with women and you don't is still a form of misogyny; but that seems like a good example of stretching the concept into meaninglessness—or turning it into unfalsifiable quasi-religious dogma...

Of course, four of the six people Rodger actually killed were men: his three housemates, whom he stabbed to death in their beds before embarking on his fatal journey, and a randomly chosen young man in a deli. Assertions that all men share responsibility for the misogyny and male violence toward women that Rodger's actions are said to represent essentially place his male victims on the same moral level as the murderer—which, if you think about it, is rather obscene. And the deaths of all the victims, female and male, are trivialized when they are commemorated with a catalogue of often petty sexist or sexual slights, from the assertion that every single woman in the world has been sexually harassed to the complaint that a woman's "no" is often met with an attempt to negotiate a "yes."

...A common theme of #YesAllWomen is that our culture promotes the notion that women owe men sex and encourages male violence in response to female rejection. (It does? One could much more plausibly argue that our culture promotes the notion that men must "earn" sex from women and treats the rejected male as a pathetic figure of fun.) Comic-book writer Gail Simone tweeted that she doesn't know "a single woman who has never encountered with that rejection rage the killer shows in the video," though of course to a lesser degree. Actually, I do know women who have never encountered it. I also know men who have, and a couple of women who have encountered it from other women. I myself have experienced it twice: once from an ex-boyfriend, and once from a gay woman on an Internet forum who misinterpreted friendliness on my part as romantic interest. There was a common thread in both these cases: mental illness aggravated by substance abuse...

Yes, virtually all spree killers are male, though there are notable exceptions such as Illinois mass shooter Laurie Dann and Alabama biology professor Amy Bishop; but the number of such killers is so vanishingly small that a man's chance of being one is only slightly higher than a woman's. As for the more frequent kind of homicide feminists often describe as expressions of murderous misogyny—such as killings of women by intimate partners or ex-partners—the gender dynamics of such violence are far more complex. If patriarchal rage and misogynist hatred are the underlying cause, how does one explain intimate homicide in same-sex relationships without resorting to tortuous, ideology-driven pseudo-logic? How does one explain the fact that some 30 percent of victims in such slayings are men (excluding cases in which a woman kills in clear self-defense)? What feminist paradigm explains the actions of Clara Harris, the Houston dentist who repeatedly ran over her unfaithful husband with a car (and got a good deal of public sympathy)? Or the actions of Susan Eubanks, the California woman who shot and killed her four sons to punish their fathers, apparently because she was angry about being "screwed by men" after her latest boyfriend walked out?

...Defenders of #YesAllWomen say that the posts in the hashtag do not target all men. Maybe not; but they push the idea that all women—including women in advanced liberal democracies in the 21st century—are victims of pervasive and relentless male terrorism, and that any man who does not denounce it on feminist terms is complicit. They wrongly frame virtually all interpersonal violence (and lesser injuries) as male-on-female, ignoring both male victims and female perpetrators, and express sympathy for boys only insofar as boys are supposedly "raised around the drumbeat mantra that women are not human beings." And sometimes, they almost literally dehumanize men. A tweet observing that "the odds of being attacked by a shark are 1 in 3,748,067, while a woman's odds of being raped are 1 in 6 … yet fear of sharks is seen as rational while being cautious of men is seen as misandry" was retweeted almost 1,000 times."

I am only Foreign Service Problems adjacent, but I've done all these, at least.

Anthony Bourdain, SHUT UP AND EAT: "A frequent comment on food websites is that I should avoid discussion of politics or social conditions and concentrate on the food. My host, serving me a humble but tasty Lao style laarb could be missing three out of four of his limbs but God forbid I ask the question: “Hey there, fella…what happened to your arm and legs?” The answer might intrude on someone’s vicarious eating experience...

So there should be much rejoicing in chowland that this Sunday’s episode of PARTS UNKNOWN is “all about the food.” Ironically enough, it takes place in one of the most politicized environments on earth: Thailand—where, it seems, every time we go, there are civil actions, military coups, changes of government. I’d like to say that the politics of Thailand are just too complicated, too fast changing, too impenetrable for me to ever understand much less explain, hence my focus on food and drink. I’d like to say it was because the latest military takeover happened after we were there—rather than just before—or during. But that wouldn’t be true.

Fact is, I chose to focus on eating—and specifically drinking in Northern Thailand around Chiang Mai simply because I was fortunate enough to go there with a uniquely qualified guide. Chef Andy Ricker of Portland and New York’s “Pok Pok” restaurants. He may be a farang, but he’s been moving back and forth between Thailand and America for 20 years or more and…well…just eat his food sometime and you’ll know what I’m talking about. Basically, it’s an entire hour of prolonged bender, an increasingly addled tuk-tuk ride from place to place shoving delicious things into my face, washed down with (variously) Thai “whiskey”, moonshine, and beer. Naturally, things ended badly...

Northern Thailand, by the way, offers some of the best reasons for why, when traveling at least, a vegan might consider suspending their restrictions. Because to experience the place without trying the splendiferous variety of pork products would be sad enough. To ignore the end result of a heavily protein based cuisine shaped, over centuries by influences Lao, Chinese, Burmese and Indian, a missed opportunity. But to avoid the deep, ubiquitous, mysterious funk of the local shrimp pastes would be to turn one’s back on the totality of human endeavor. I say this without malice. "