R.I.P RBG
Tippets by Taps #148: RBG, paternity leave, fixing blindness, the worst year ever and more. Enjoy!
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Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the Supreme Court Justice fondly known as The Notorious RBG, died from complications with cancer this week. I’m not going to begin describing all that the 85-pound heavyweight did during her 87 years. I highly recommend watching RBG, a documentary about her life, reading Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, or if you’re in the mood for a more stylized biopic, watching On the Basis of Sex (which my wife and I did last night).
I’m also not going to get into what her passing means for an already insane election year. There is more than enough of that going around. Instead, I’m going to recommend reading this piece by acclaimed journalist Nina Totenberg about her friendship with the judge. My favorite article on RBG that I’ve read over the last few days, it offered a look at the woman behind the moniker, a view that we don’t often get of our heroes.
In November 2000, she performed our wedding ceremony. It was no small thing that she was there. Because of her colon cancer radiation treatments the year before, she had a blockage that had landed her in the hospital the night before the wedding. But as I would learn, a commitment from RBG was about as ironclad a thing as you could get. In typical fashion, she forbade Marty to call me or let me know in any way. "This was your wedding eve, and I was not about to let you be worried," she told me later. In true fashion, she was there, stayed through the dinner, and quietly asked me if it would be OK if she left a little early.
Ruth could be stubborn. Oh my, stubborn. She knew how to play hurt better than most defensive ends. Broken ribs, radiation, chemo — she just soldiered on.
She loved her wine. Confined to one glass a day, she rebelled when my husband, David, brought her a giant glass filled halfway up at break-fast on Yom Kippur. "David," she instructed, "fill it up to the top."
I sometimes was asked how I could remain such good friends with RBG at the same time that I covered her as a reporter.
The answer was really pretty simple. If you are lucky enough to be friends with someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, you both understand that you each have a job and that it has to be done professionally, and without favor.
The world has lost a titan. #riprbg #thankyou
Alexis Ohanian: Why now is the time to destigmatize paternity leave, for good
Becoming a parent was simultaneously the most thrilling and most anxiety-inducing experience of my life. As Agnes Callard writes:
Parenting has a lie built right into its name: we should’ve called it childing, because that’s who is in charge…Parenting is a hostage situation: you’re in the car, but your child is the one driving it—and he doesn’t know how to drive. You can’t get out, because you decided to love him before you knew who he was—before he even was anyone. Your life split at that point into multiple tracks, and one of them is not under your control. The worst part is: you can’t even cover your eyes. You have to keep them open, to try to talk him through it. He needs your help, at least for now. One day, of course, he will stop noticing you sitting there.
The first months of a child’s life are a blur of diaper changes, swaddles, tears (yours or the baby’s TBD), and no sleep. I was fortunate to work for a company with a parental leave policy that allowed me to fully experience this life-changing event, able to fully focus on my wife and son without the nagging feeling of work looming over me. Unfortunately, I am one of the lucky few men who have that opportunity. Less than 10% of US companies offer paid paternity leave, and even in those that do, the stigma associated with taking leave, coupled with a fear of falling behind at work, means many dads don’t take the leave. This puts even more burden on spouses who are also trying to manage through similar situations at work.
This week former Reddit CEO (and spouse to one Serena Williams) talked about the importance of destigmatizing paternity leave for good.
The implication that paternity leave is unimportant sets a dangerous precedent, one that suggests fathers are not an integral part of the child care unit, and perpetuates the antiquated belief that mothers alone should be the primary caregivers. Worse, explicitly (or implicitly) telling a male employee that they’re less of a man for taking time to be with their family after their child’s birth is as stupid as it is outdated. Showing up is exactly what fathers should be doing for their families.
As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 crisis, we’re seeing exactly how fathers can show up when they are at home. Research shows an 11% rise in equal responsibilities shared between mothers and fathers since the onset of the pandemic. Harvard University also found that nearly 70% of fathers across America feel closer to their children now than they did pre-pandemic.
Fathers must feel empowered to take paternity leave, and our society needs to normalize this.
77% of millennial men have or would be willing to change jobs in order to better manage fatherhood responsibilities with career responsibilities.
We need to change the way we as a culture think about paternity leave and empower fathers to embrace it as a right they are entitled to, and not a career choice they have to make.
I’ve written before about the unrealistic expectation that the nuclear family is enough to do the job of raising a child, a task that used to fall to between 4-10 in a household. COVID-19 has exposed the stress in the system, with dads now experiencing the challenges of the “invisible work” of parenting more than before. Dads feeling like they can take the time when a baby first arrives is an important step toward creating more equitable opportunities for all.
Researchers ready world-first vision restoration device for human clinical trials
File this under the “Future is Now” category. This week researchers at Monash University in Austalia released plans to advance to human clinical trials for technology that would quite literally help the blind see again.
This new technology would be able to bypass the damaged optic nerves that are often responsible for what’s defined as technical clinical blindness. It works by translating information gathered by a camera and interpreted by a vision processor unit and custom software, wirelessly, to a set of tiles implanted directly within the brain. These tiles convert the image data to electrical impulses which are then transmitted to neurons in the brain via microelectrodes that are thinner than human hair.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, there is still a long way to go and human trials look very different than animal trials. That said, according to the data published, there is reason for optimism.
But its early studies, which saw 10 of these arrays implanted on sheep, saw that over the course of a cumulative total of more than 2,700 hours of stimulation, there weren’t any adverse health affects observed.
Talk about wow! The nerd in me gets excited about this, wondering when we’ll get the ‘healing devices’ from Star Trek. This story also served as a great reminder of the value in long-term work. Getting to this point was 10 years in the making for the team, with more to come. Seeing those dedicating their life to the promise of something bigger - fits and starts, absurdities, opportunity cost be damned in a world increasingly puts the bright shiny object on a pedestal, magnifying the ‘overnight success’, the silver bullet, the quick fix, is inspiring in itself.
Why every year—but especially 2020—feels like the worst ever
The planet must be worried about us all running out of ice breakers. Why else would it provide us with so much fodder to fill the opening minutes of our Zoom calls as we try to (re)connect with the person on the other side? Tired of talking COVID coping mechanisms? There are murder hornets. Insects not your thing? You can discuss record-setting wildfires that have brought with them terrible air quality and Martian skies. Fires too last week? There’s always politics. Every week seems to bring yet another challenge to add to an already overflowing plate. The lack of escape outlets, whether mini ones like nights at the movie theaters or dinners out or major ones like beach vacations, only makes it harder to reset during a year that could use holding down on the power button for 10 seconds more than ever.
Is this the worst year ever? Or do we just feel that way? According to National Geographic, probably not.
Our ancestors might disagree that 2020 is the worst year on record. Sure, frightening things are happening, but many of those things happened in the past, too, including the 1918 flu pandemic, during which 50 million people died. Plus, the belief that civilization is on the decline is a tradition as old as civilization itself. Even Ancient Athenians complained in the fifth century B.C. that their democracy wasn’t what it used to be. These days, we call that belief “declinism,” or “decline bias.”
Stories of fear and peril pique our anxiety. They put our brains on high alert, an advantage that once protected our early hominid ancestors from predators and natural disasters, but one that now leaves us “doomscrolling,” endlessly refreshing social media and online news to stay abreast of the latest threats.
We yearn to feel prepared, so we become addicted to the updates, coming back for more until the world seems far worse than it ever has before.
In Western culture, people already have a propensity to interpret present events negatively and tend to prefer the past, according to the research of Carey Morewedge, a professor of marketing at Boston University. That is because our autobiographical memories are biased toward positivity. When we think about the past, we tend to remember positive experiences. This is sometimes called “rosy retrospection,” or “nostalgia bias.”
We’re judging the past on its greatest hits, but we judge the present on everything we have available.
Ok, so we may not be living in the worst year ever in the history of humanity. However, I maintain this year has to be up there!
The Flight Goes Nowhere. And It’s Sold Out.
Speaking of desperate times, if you’re looking for a story for just how desperate people are to break out of the rut we have been thrust into with COVID, look no further. In Brunei, Taiwan, Japan and Australia (with more countries to come) people are heading to the airports and jumping on planes that take them…nowhere.
Mr. Harif is one of thousands of people…who have started booking flights that start and end in the same place. Some airlines call these “scenic flights”; others are more direct, calling them “flights to nowhere.”
At a time when most people are stuck at home and unable to travel, and the global airline industry has been decimated by the pandemic, flights that take off and return to the airport a few hours later allow airlines to keep staff working. The practice also satisfies that itch to travel — even if it’s just being on a plane again. Although most people may think of flying as a means to an end, existing solely to get them from one place to the next, some say that it is an exciting part of the travel experience. For those people, flights to nowhere are the salve for a year in which just about all travel has been canceled and people have been fearful of airlines not enforcing social distancing and mask-wearing rules.
On Thursday, Qantas announced a flight to nowhere over Australia. That flight sold out in 10 minutes.
🤪
Quote I’m Thinking About: "Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” - Ruth B. Ginsburg
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