Quickies: The CIA’s Bowling League, Neural Net “Recipes,” and Trump Voters Fear Diversity

• Mike Pence’s Marriage and the Beliefs That Keep Women from Power – “But it’s one thing to avoid a particular situation involving a particular woman who makes you feel a certain way; it’s another entirely to avoid all women as a group and as a rule because of the abstract possibility of sexual temptation. It’s telling, and extremely disheartening, that many people can’t tell the difference—that knowing the best thing to do for your partnership and subscribing wholesale to an idea about gender that calcifies woman as secondary could plausibly seem like the same thing.”
• How Black Female MCs Changed the Conversation Through Hip-Hop – “Unsurprisingly, black female MCs aren’t widely acknowledged for their contributions to feminism throughout the ages. And it’s even more unsurprising that the sexism and misogyny black female MCs faced (and still do) are generally less talked about. We’re quick to minimize black female hardships in hip-hop largely because we’ve never had to put a microscope on what it’s like to be a black female MC in a male-dominated industry.”
• The Complications of Joining an Office Bowling League at the CIA – “To cope with these rather unique challenges, the Agency formed the Employee Activity Association (EAA), which, in exchange for membership dues, would ensure that next weekend’s fishing trip would have a plausible cover story.”
• The Silicon Gourmet: training a neural network to generate cooking recipes – “An even earlier version of the network hasn’t yet figured out how long an ingredients list should be; it just generates ingredients for pages and pages:”
• Fear of Diversity Made People More Likely to Vote Trump – “In short, our analysis indicates that Donald Trump successfully leveraged existing resentment towards African Americans in combination with emerging fears of increased racial diversity in America to reshape the presidential electorate, strongly attracting nativists towards Trump and pushing some more affluent and highly educated people with more cosmopolitan views to support Hillary Clinton. Racial identity and attitudes have further displaced class as the central battleground of American politics.”
• Cancer researchers worry immunotherapy may hasten growth of tumors in some patients – “Of the 155 cases studied, eight patients who had been fairly stable before immunotherapy treatment declined rapidly, failing the therapy within two months. Six saw their tumors enter a hyperactive phase, where the tumors grew by between 53 percent and 258 percent.”
• Tina Fey Calls Out Her White Sisters Who Voted for Trump: ‘You Can’t Look Away’ – ” ‘A lot of this election was turned by white, college-educated women who now would like to forget about this election and go back to watching HGTV,’ the writer and comedian said during a Facebook Live fundraiser for the American Civil Liberties Union. ‘You can’t look away, because it doesn’t affect you this minute, but it’s going to affect you eventually.’ “

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