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Mad Science — Deconstructing bunk reporting in five easy steps
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Mad Science
Deconstructing Bunk Reporting in 5 Easy Steps
British scientists have uncovered the truth behind one of modern culture’s greatest mysteries: why little girls play with pink toys. Is it because toy companies flood whole store aisles with the color? Or because well-meaning relatives shower girl babies with pink blankets and clothing? Nope. According to the men in lab coats, it’s purely biological.
Continue reading »Hard Times
At the New York Times Book Review, all the misogyny is fit to print
The New York Times Book Review has never exactly embraced passionate advocacy—unless it was promoting Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s place in the postmodernist canon. Even worse, it has become the place where serious feminist books come to die— or more accurately, to be dismissed with the flick of a well-manicured postfeminist wrist.
Continue reading »RIP, yet again
I am hoping that the B-sides blog won't become a weekly RIP to independent publications - but then again, maybe it will wake us all up, myself included, to the reality that independent media is becoming increasingly more difficult to produce and that we can create opportunites to do something about it, otherwise we'll wake up and it will all be gone. That all sounds fine and good to say and think about and then five minutes later we are all back to our green teas and talking about what happened on Lost last night.
Continue reading »When in New Jersey on February 28th...
....check out this lecture by the awesome Jennifer Pozner, Executive Director of Women in Media & News:
Even though the human, environmental and economic impact of Hurricane Katrina are all still deeply felt throughout the regions that were ravaged by the disaster, the ongoing personal and political tolls of Katrina have fallen away from the headlines and out of public debate. This is just one of many ways media have failed the American people their treatment of one of the worst natural disasters in the history of our country.
Continue reading »Grassroots media: Evolving beyond survival
Please spread the word about the Allied Media Conference!
Since 1999, the AMC has been bringing together grassroots media producers and organizers, educators, students, and artists to build an independent, participatory media movement.
Alternative Media Expo in New Orleans
We are happy to be sending some magazines and love down to the Antigravity Alternative Media Expo in New Orleans next Saturday, February 23rd.
Here is the scoop in their own words,
Continue reading »When Tyra Met Naomi
Race, Fashion, and Rivalry
One of the last places I expected to hear an engaging antiracist and feminist critique of the fashion industry was on The Tyra Banks Show. But on a January 2006 episode, there was Banks, sitting couch-to-couch with supposed archnemesis and fellow supermodel Naomi Campbell, discussing the forces that years ago had pitted the two women against each other on the assumption that America had room for only one black top model.
Continue reading »Alpha Mom, Omega Journalism
With all the world in strife, one might think the moms of New York would cut each other some slack.... That motherhood, in short, would serve as a safe house where civility and mutual respect rule. Think again. Motherhood, for all its well-documented joys, has become a flash point for envy, resentment, and guilt.
—Ralph Gardner Jr., “Mom vs. Mom,” New York, October 21, 2002
"One might think,” in other words, that mothers could comport themselves in a more seemly manner. Because if we don’t get ourselves under control, we’re going to explode.
Continue reading »Five Conversations About One Thing - Joe Kelly
Years ago, Joe Kelly noticed a Maidenform ad reading “Inner beauty only goes so far” on the side of a city bus, and was horrified to imagine one of his young daughters as the subject of it. As one of the founders, with wife Nancy Gruver, of New Moon: The Magazine for Girls and Their Dreams, an award-winning, youth-edited publication, Kelly was well aware that the relationships between girls and their fathers hold an importance that’s too often dismissed or overlooked.
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Jail Bait
Rethinking Images of Incarcerated Women
It is not my pleasure to remind anyone of the 2001 teen flick Sugar & Spice. Teetering between the black humor of Heathers and the girly glitz of Clueless, it achieves the success of neither, and I bring it up now only because of a single scene.
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