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Friday, September 20th, 2019
- CREDIT CARDS: Prior to the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974, married women couldn’t get credit cards without their husbands' signatures. Single women, divorcees, and widows were often required to have a man cosign. The double standard also meant female applicants were frequently issued card limits up to 50% lower than that of males who earned identical wages.
- PREGNANT WORKERS: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 protected pregnant women from being fired because of their impending maternity. But it came with a major loophole that’s still in need of closing. The language of the 41-year-old law stipulates that the employers must accommodate pregnant workers only if concessions are being made for other employees who are “similar in their ability or inability to work.”
- JURY DUTY: In 1975, the Supreme Court declared it constitutionally unacceptable for states to deny women the opportunity to serve on juries. This is an arena where we've all come a long way, baby. It’s now completely normal for men to be excused from jury duty as the primary caregivers of their young children.
- MILITARY COMBAT: In 2013, former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey announced that the Pentagon was rescinding the direct combat exclusion rule that barred women from serving in artillery, armor, infantry and other such battle roles. At the time of the announcement, the military had already seen more than 130 female soldiers killed, and 800 wounded on the frontlines in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- IVY LEAGUE ADMISSIONS: Those who conceive of elite colleges as breeding grounds for sexual assault protests and Title IX activism would do well to remember that Columbia College didn’t admit women until 1983, following in the marginally deeper footsteps of others in the Ivy League—Harvard (1977), Dartmouth (1972), Brown (1971), Yale (1969), and Princeton (1969). These days, single sex higher education options for women far outnumber those for men, but the networking power and increased earning potential an Ivy League degree confers remains the same.
- WORKPLACE HARASSMENT: In 1977, women who'd been sexually harassed in the workplace received confirmation in three separate trials that they could sue their employers under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1998, the Supreme Court ruled that same-sex harassment was also unlawful. In between was the television event of 1991, Anita Hill’s shocking testimony against her former boss, U.S. Supreme Court justice (then nominee) Clarence Thomas.
- SPOUSAL CONSENT: In 1993, spousal rape was officially outlawed in all 50 states. Not tonight honey, or you'll have a headache in the form of your wife's legal back up.
- HEALTH INSURANCE: In 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act decreed that any health insurance plan established after March of that year could not charge women higher premiums than men for identical benefits. This was bad news for women who got their health insurance through their jobs, and whose employers were grandfathered into discriminatory plans established prior to 2010. Of course, that's all ancient history now.
- CONTRACEPTIVES: In 1972, the Supreme Court made it legal for all citizens to possess birth control, irrespective of marital status, stating "if the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child." (It’s worth noting, however, that in 1972, states could still constitutionally prohibit and punish sex outside of marriage.)
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| 3:00p | Relive 16 Hours of Historic Live Aid Performances with These Big YouTube Playlists: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young & Much More 12 pm - 2 pm | Wembley Stadium, London As Live Aid geared up for its momentous series of concerts of both sides of the Atlantic, famous concert promoter Bill Graham compared it to Woodstock: “What we’re doing now is entirely different. The reason for the event is more important than the event itself.” Three decades later, the memory of the event has eclipsed its reason (and one Queen performance has eclipsed most of the concert). It was a gathering of the best of mainstream ‘80s rock--still trying to justify itself alongside acts from the 60s and the ‘70s--and the zenith of the fundraising telethon: broadcast live in 140 countries to raise $50 million for victims of a relentless African famine. (Fun fact: the concerts raised about $560 million in 2019 money, about two days’ worth of Jeff Bezos’ current earnings!) If you have a day to spare, you can recreate that amazing July 13th in 1985 with this series of YouTube playlists. The day started at London's Wembley Stadium (up top), with the Regimental Band of the Coldstream Guards performing the Royal Salute for Queen and Country and all that, and then things really started with Status Quo, those grizzled ol’ blokes playing “Rockin’ All Over the World.” Yanks might have said “who?” but it was the Brits who either bopped along or said, “Not this bloody Dad rock!” (Okay, not true, the phrase hadn’t been invented, but something similar was uttered.) 2 pm - 4 pm | Wembley Stadium, London The British side was indeed a mixed bag, reflecting the idiosyncrasies of its own singles chart compared to the more steadfast American charts. Elvis Costello sang “All You Need Is Love”; the Style Council sang their hits; Nik Kershaw played his chart-topper. Phil Collins performed “Against All Odds,” then jumped on a Concorde for New York, arriving to sing it again for a different audience. 4 pm - 6 pm | Wembley Stadium, London There’s so much more to explore in these playlists: the Led Zeppelin reunion, The Cars at the height of their powers (RIP Ric Ocasek), Neil Young (and his reunion with Crosby, Stills, and Nash), Bob Dylan, The Four Tops, Run D.M.C., the list really goes on and on. 6 pm - 8 pm | Wembley Stadium, London 8 pm - 10 pm | Wembley Stadium, London 2 pm - 5 pm | John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia 5 pm - 8 pm | John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia 8 pm - 11 pm | John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia Live Aid | 11 pm- 2 am | John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia Live Aid | 2 am - 4 am | John F. Kennedy Stadium, Philadelphia Find a complete list of Live Aid performances here. Related Content: Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW's Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. Relive 16 Hours of Historic Live Aid Performances with These Big YouTube Playlists: Queen, Led Zeppelin, Neil Young & Much More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 7:00p | Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman
The Buddha, it’s said, struggled mightily with three specters of adulthood—aging, sickness, and death—when reflections on mortality harshed his hedonistic life as a prince. His “intoxication with life entirely dropped away,” the stories say, when he reflected on its passing. Nothing cured his fatal unease until a memory from childhood arose unbidden: of stopping time by quietly sitting under a rose-apple tree. In another version of this story, Marcel Proust discovered timelessness baked in a cookie. His potent memories of madeleines also came from childhood. As he recalled “the taste of tea and cake,” he writes, “at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory …. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.” Neuroscientist David Eagleman also invokes a childhood memory in his discussion of time and aging, in the BBC video above. It is also a memory resonant with a remarkable physical detail: red brick pavement hurtling toward him as he falls from the roof of a house, experiencing what must have been a terrifying descent in slow motion. Quite a different experience from communing with trees and eating tea cakes, but maybe the content of a childhood memory is irrelevant to its temporal dimensions. What we can all remember is that along with impatience and distractibility, childhood seems rich with carefree, absorptive languor (or moments of slow-motion panic). Psychologists have indeed shown in several studies that adults, especially those over the age of 40, perceive time as moving faster than it did when they were children. Why? Because time is a “psychological construct,” says Eagleman, and can vary not just between ages and cultures, but also between individual consciousnesses. “It can be different in your head and my head,” he says. “Your brain is locked in silence and darkness inside the vault of your skull.” In order to “figure out what’s going on outside,” it’s got to do “a lot of editing tricks.” One trick is to convince us that we’re living in the moment, when the moment happened half a second in the past. But we can notice that gap when we’re faced with novelty, because the brain has to work harder to process new information, and it creates thicker descriptions in the memory. All of this additional processing, Eagleman says, seems to take more time, so we perceive new experiences as happening in a kind of slow motion (or remember them that way). That includes so many experiences in our childhood as well as emergency situations in which we have to navigate a challenging new reality very quickly. As writer Charles Bukowski once said, “as you live many years, things take on a repeat…. You keep seeing the same thing over and over again.” The brain can coast on familiarity and expend little energy generating perception. We retain fewer detailed memories of recent events, and they seem to have flown by us. The remedy, says Eagleman, is to seek novelty. (You thought he was going to say “mindfulness”?) Wear your watch on a different wrist, change the way you brush your teeth…. Mundane examples, but the point remains: we need new and varied experiences to slow our sense of time. Routine lack of novelty in adulthood may be the primary reason that “our early years,” write psychologists James Broadway and Brittaney Sandoval write at Scientific American,“tend to be relatively overrepresented in our autobiographical memory and, on reflection, seem to have lasted longer.” They can also, for that reason, seem all the sweeter. But nostalgia, however tempting, can’t take the place of going new places, meeting new people, reading new books, hearing new music, seeing new films, and so on and so forth—and thereby effectively slowing down time. via Aeon Related Content: Why Time Seems to Speed Up as We Get Older: What the Research Says Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Why Time Seems to Fly By As You Get Older, and How to Slow It Down: A Scientific Explanation by Neuroscientist David Eagleman is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | Nine Things a Woman Couldn’t Do in 1971
As we barrel toward the centennial celebration of women's suffrage in the United States, it’s not enough to bone up on the platforms of female primary candidates (though that’s an excellent start). A Twitter user and self-described Old Crone named Robyn recently urged her fellow Americans to take a good long gander at a list of nine freedoms women in the United States were not universally granted in 1971, the year Helen Reddy released the soon-to-be anthem, "I Am Woman," above. Even those of us who remember singing along as children may experience some shock that these facts check out on Snopes. Feminism is NOT just for other women. Via Kottke Related Content: MAKERS Tells the Story of 50 Years of Progress for Women in the U.S. Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inkyzine. Join her in NYC on Monday, October 7 when her monthly book-based variety show, Necromancers of the Public Domaincelebrates the art of Aubrey Beardsley. Follow her @AyunHalliday. Nine Things a Woman Couldn’t Do in 1971 is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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