jnordell

Really important stuff. Man, Raganwald, thanks so much for this blog post.

I think one important thing for anyone who's struggling to remember is that however you're feeling, it's not permanent. It's temporary. It will change. It might feel like things are never going to get better, but they will. It might feel like you're never going to feel better, but you will. You just have to hold tight to that fact, and trust it, even if it seems impossible. Then, six months or a year or three years from now, you'll be so glad that you hung on.

I recently learned that a former student of mine committed suicide, and I think about him all the time. I wish I could have told him all this while he was alive.

Thanks again for this post.

I liked Self-Made Man-- really interesting exploration of masculinity and the culture of "manhood" in general. It would have been especially interesting if somehow Vincent could have stayed in her old sort of rarefied world and experienced life there, rather than having to leave that world and join bowling leagues so she wouldn't be recognized.

Ben Barres (formerly Barbara Barres) wrote a great piece in Nature ("Does Gender Matter?") after the Larry Summers debacle. There's an interview with him here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/science/18conv.html?pagewa...

Pretty convincing stuff on the role gender plays in our interactions with each other. To me, what's so fascinating about the experience of transsexuals is that they literally have controlled experiments going on-- they're the only people who can experience life in two different bodies. What a useful perspective to have-- I'll never know what life is like as someone of another gender/race/ethnicity, but I imagine it would be incredibly mind-expanding if I could.

Mitch Kapor also has an interesting take on this: http://mkapor.posterous.com/beyond-arrington-and-cnn-lets-lo...

I'd suggest changing "Got Cheap Books?" to "Want Cheap Books?" Got suggests you're in a position to sell; "want" suggests you're in a position to buy.

Cool project. My $.02. :)

Fascinating discussion. In fact, the reasons people do or don't rock certain fields are (like people themselves) incredibly complex. The blind orchestra auditions to which Eric refers are just one drop in a sea of quantitative data about the effects of unconscious bias.

There's Robert Rosenthal's study that showed that others' belief that you are "gifted" actually results in an IQ increase. There's the famous "McKay" study, in which test subjects evaluated identical academic papers by "John" and "Joan" McKay. And on and on.

What's really interesting is the experience of post-op transsexuals, like biologist Ben Barres (who was Barbara Barres until he was in his 40s). These folks are the true secret shoppers of gender-- and the ultimate control group in terms of understanding how gender affects one's experience of the world. It would be really interesting to find a comparable race test case (an updated "Black Like Me").

A few years ago I wrote about this phenomenon in Slate-- I looked at women and ambition in general. Check out the piece if you're interested in a more generalized analysis: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_gist/200...