Holy shit finally. I’m a professor and my office is Room 404 of a building that’s a completely impossible maze. Students routinely show up 15 minutes late unable to locate my office, and I have tried so desperately to get literally anyone to laugh at my “Error 404 Room Not Found” jokes with no success.

Important additional context that didn’t make it into this tweet, this donation was explicitly directed toward promoting “free inquiry and expression” at UChicago. Decades ago that was a legit strength of UChicago that really was pretty ideologically neutral, and that history gives them a phenomenal tool for spinning dog whistles and ultra conservative policies as part of “the life of the mind.”

Here’s the announcement email from the University’s president yesterday.

Worth noting that Eman Abdelhadi is faculty at UChicago, speaking out against her own employer alongside hundreds of other faculty. Eman is particularly adept at making sure every time they use “free inquiry and expression” as a conservative dog whistle it gets thrown back in their faces. (She’s also just kind of a badass.)

UChicago admin work very hard to promote this image of the school as a bastion for “sane conservatives” by taking stances diametrically opposed to the what the students and faculty actually stand behind. The real UChicago is anti-genocide, pro-union, and knows that promoting free speech doesn’t mean tolerating hate speech.

This is pretty surprising to me. In my experience (as a woman myself) women are much more likely than men to be vocally supportive of treating sex work like any other service and of breaking the taboo of offering or receiving those services.

I actually can’t think of any woman in my life who would judge someone negatively for seeing a sex worker (assuming full consent from all involved parties including partners). Most men I know would similarly have no issue with it, but a handful would read it as not being able to get laid and see that as something negative.

My social circle isn’t representative of the general population, but I’m still surprised to hear your experience is dramatically different. I wonder if the way the conversations are going make the issue more about consent, cheating, or other non-sex-work-specific ethical questions.

Please tell me “pliers” is the term for “tweezers” outside the US.

Trix and Cookie Crisp I think.

Linguists hate grammarly

I really wasn’t attracted to my now husband at all when we met. I remember also really disliking his smell (not BO, just regular pheromones or whatever).

11 years later we are extremely happily married and he’s sexy as fuck. His appearance hasn’t changed (except that he’s actually a little overweight now and looks a decade older) but every day he’s just hotter and hotter. Not like a “I just love him so much on the inside.” Like I genuinely perceive him to be extremely physically attractive (and equally good to smell) and look back on early days with complete confusion.

n=1 so grain of salt and whatnot, but I’d say if you’re vibing enough to make this a question worth asking then it’s probably worth giving it a shot to see if attraction develops

Edit: Please don’t actually tell them you’re not attracted to them though. That’s weird and unnecessary. You don’t need to lie either, just don’t comment on their appearance until/unless you start to notice those little things that have grown on you.

I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.

Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.

If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.

The article says a lot more than the obvious, and really has very little to do with the topic of placing children in foster care. It’s not claiming infants shouldn’t be removed from unsafe homes or trusted to foster parents as long as those homes remain unsafe. It’s saying the foster system is being manipulated to the detriment of children, birth parents, and foster parents. The main family in this article is a shining example of when placing a child in foster care works perfectly, where the parents expediently turned things around and managed to bond with their child despite the tragic circumstances. The goal of foster care is to reunite families, and even in these ideal cases it’s easy to turn the system against its own goal.

I’m a developmental psychologist, and the biggest thing is people just not knowing what “psychologist” means.

The tl;dr here is:

Most psychologists aren’t therapists. Most therapists aren’t psychologists. If you’re looking for quality mental health care, don’t revere the “doctor.”

A “psychologist” refers to someone with a PhD in psychology (or someone who does psychological research within an interdisciplinary field, like education or human development). Critically, a psychologist is a researcher (and often an educator at the college+ level). Psychology is a massive field, and the most common subfields are cognitive, developmental, social, clinical, and neurobio.

A “clinical psychologist” is a research psychologist is the particular subfield of clinical psychology. Along with research, clinical psychologists usually learn clinical psychotherapy practices and then may (or may not) choose to incorporate offering therapy into their career. A similar path is the “PsyD” (doctor of psychology) which also falls under the “psychologist” heading. Like a clinical psych PhD, a PsyD has had advanced training in research and practice, but the balance of the degree leans much more toward practice. People who opt for a PsyD rather than PhD usually plan to pursue a fully clinical career, but are qualified to do research as well.

A “therapist” is someone who is trained and licensed to provide clinical psychotherapy. Most therapists in the US have a master’s degree in social work (or a few others, like counseling psychology), specialized clinical training in one or more areas or treatments, and additional state licensure requirements. Clinical and counseling psychologists (with PhDs) can act as therapists if they get and maintain licenses, but this is a small fraction of therapists. PsyDs make up another chunk, but the majority do not have a terminal PhD/PsyD.

As a psychologist, I don’t say this because I think my PhD makes me better than someone with an MSW — the reverse! I hear people get advice to not see a therapist if they are “just” a social worker without a PhD. Meanwhile people come up to my dumbass self and think I am qualified to act as a therapist or like I know anything about clinical or abnormal psychology. Like, wanna know how 2-year-olds and 12-year-olds use nonverbal signals like shrugs to facilitate conversational interaction differently from each other and from adults? No? Then I am not the person you’re looking for. Go talk to that extremely knowledgeable and well-trained person with an MA.

…Meanwhile a “psychiatrist” is a whole other thing. They have an MD and can prescribe medication. Very rarely they may also offer psychotherapy, but that’s hard to make happen in the US a healthcare system.

Please introduce me to the woman who is doing IVF without first learning about cycle tracking and timed intercourse.

The idea that someone undergoing IVF has not yet tried everything else first is extremely bizarre. It’s wildly expensive and extremely hard on your physical and mental health.

This makes me want to go back on Reddit just to see what r/infertility and r/IVF have to say.

(I say this as I am currently prepping for my 5th freeze-all IVF cycle to make embryos I can’t even put in my own uterus because a doctor did a thing that left me infertile following a miscarriage years ago. Nobody wants to go through this shit. We do it because it’s the next least-worst thing on the list of things to try.)

That’s a bit different though. We don’t (generally) use “n-word” in place of the slur the way someone might type f!#k or say “frick” in place of “fuck.” We use it to talk about the term. So when someone is censoring themselves with replacement it can feel pointless, since the sentiment is the same: we both know what word you want to use to express yourself, just use it. When you use a censored alternative to a slur, you’re not just swapping one thing in for another leaving your meaning unchanged. You’re communicating an intention to avoid what you know to be a symbol of hate in a context that has no hateful intent.

Local news anchor once ended a segment saying something was “a phallus” instead of a “fallacy. Understandably but hilarious.

I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.

From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.

Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.

One problem my mom did not anticipate was that she would be stuck effectively wearing sunglasses for my brother’s outdoor wedding, where was sitting up with the bride and groom for the whole thing (Indian wedding). She just looked like an asshole, and continues to look like an asshole in the just about every photo of the ceremony. Oops.

I think this point about being discreet is huge. My husband and have been open/poly for a decade (ie from the start). We don’t keep it a secret by any means, but most people I know have no idea — it just doesn’t come up in conversation very often.

We had a very bizarre situation recently where one of my closest friends saw my husband holding hands with his girlfriend at the beach. She texted me frantically, saying she just wants to support me and is here if I need her and she hoped she was doing the right thing by telling me. It was pretty trippy to tell this friend who is close enough to know super specific details about very private parts of my life “oh cool thanks but it’s chill.”

Non-monogamy isn’t for everyone, but it’s for a lot more people than you might think.

He’s kinda been crushing it. Definitely a pleasant surprise. I think putting 50 million of his own dollars towards campaigning for a tax system that would dramatically raise his own taxes was a pretty impressive demonstration that his approach is a bit different from Trump’s.

Also women’s healthcare, refugee support structures, LGBT inclusivity, legal recreational weed, union support, Election Day as a state holiday…the dude doesn’t suck.

Oh 100% absolutely. I mean the gentrification of Hyde Park and Woodlawn with active, deliberate harm to the black community started at the University’s inception in 1898 (1895? 92? They keep changing the “established in” date on all their merch and propaganda, it’s hard to keep up) and continues to this day with no signs of slowing.

I also should have specified that if we’re talking about student/faculty attitudes the “real” UChicago community does not or at least should include Booth and the psychopathic econ department. That’s where all the money comes from (because it’s evil) but everyone except admin hates them. Also I’m pretty sure they would argue “community” means communism and community of any kind should be abolished in favor of a social free market or some shit, whatever garbage they are peddling these days.

Finally playing Dave the Diver after getting recommendations from everyone I know since it came out. “Dive for fish and make sushi.” Seemed pleasant enough but I didn’t get why people talked about it in the same tone as like, Stardew Valley.

I get it now.

Both excellent, but I have to put The Body at the top. I think that’s where I realized how excellent some of the actors in this show were, SMG in particular. Anya’s monologue has stayed with me in a way nothing else from tv or movies ever has. Would I rather enjoy a OMWF singalong? Yes, any day. But The Body felt like a one of a kind thing.