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At the beginning of the year, I posted about my planner set-up for the year which included the Midori B6 Pocket Planner in the Clover design ($23.50, out of stock but a Birds edition is still available) tucked into my leather B6 cover from Bassy & Co ($81 and up) with my Stalogy Editor’s Series 365 Days ($21) everyday planner and note-taking notebook.
Since the beginning of the year, the pockets of my planner have become filled with an assortment of stickers, postage stamps and washi tape. I’ve gotten into collaging on my daily pages so having a few stickers to add along the way is a great option.
I am still loving the B6 size for my planner. It’s not as small as an A6, which I often felt like I needed more than one-page-per-day, but not as intimidating as an A5 which always seemed like too much space and too large a notebook to tote around everyday. If you haven’t tried B6 yet, I highly recommend it as the Goldilocks of notebooks.
This image above shows that I’ve filled about 2/3rds of the Stalogy daily planner and evidence of collage-y bits can be seen from the edge.
I added the Midori pen clip to the back of the Stalogy at the beginning of the year and have managed to keep it for six whole months without losing it. Good news since my rare Sailor ProGear Slim Stargazer has been riding around in the loop all year.
I mark my place each month and each day with the Midori gold Chiratto Index Clips ($8.50 for 8 clips). It makes getting to my current spot fast and easy.
I’m getting some mileage with the monthly pages to keep track of silly holidays like Graham Cracker Day (July 5), travel, pen shows and birthdays and such but I am not using the week-on-two-pages like I thought I would.
I had thought I would utilize the page on the right of the week-on-two-pages in the Midori for work-related tasks and notes but I have ended up keeping a notebook at work for these tasks and the pages go largely unused. Its extra sad because I really like the paper in the Midori Pocket Planner and the little illustrations throughout are cheery.
The only creature in my house that uses the ribbon bookmark is Apple. He thinks it’s delicious.
In the Stalogy, on days without a lot of activities (like a Sunday when you discover you have Covid-19), I have started adding collage elements with washi, stickers and some rubber stamps. I also bought a Polaroid Mint mini-printer to add the occasional photo to my planner.
I often treat my planner more like a log book of what I did, what I ate, where I went, who I saw, what I read, watch or listened to, etc. so adding photos in is a good way to log activities. If you want to be able to add photos to your journal or planner, many people recommend the Canon Ivy which is currently available. The Polaroid Mint has been discontinued. Both the Mint and the Ivy use Zink 2″ x 3″ printer paper. The color output is not great but the printer uses instant film technology and the printers don’t need ink cartridges making it a little easier to use. So, it makes fun, little retro-looking images that add some much-needed personality to my planner.
Usually, on Sundays, I try to pre-decorate a few pages. Since I am doing a (sort of) page-a-day for my planner/journal/logbook I just add a few decorative elements to add some interest for the week but I am not locked into using a whole page for one day. Some days, I might use two or more pages. I’ve found this open method so much easier for me since there is no pressure from day-to-day. Some days are super busy and active, and some days I skip altogether.
I don’t know how to solve for the largely unused Midori Pocket Planner. I thought about removing the monthly pages and pasting them into the Stalogy but I would want the whole year’s worth of calendar pages so where doe I put them? In the back altogether? At the beginning of each month but what about later months?
I would like to streamline a little bit but I haven’t figured out the best way to do that. As it is right now, the book is quite chonky so I suspect I will try to reduce the bulk I carry on a daily basis a bit.
How’s your planning/journal/notebook set-up serving you? Have you needed to switch it up?
Apple insisted on hanging out with me while I photographed this post so he wanted to put his paw stamp on this post. It’s “Apple-approved.”
The post Mid-Year Planner Review appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
The oldest outdoor swimming pool in the UK – the Grade II listed Cleveland Pools in Bath which first opened in 1815 – will reopen during the summer of 2023, after significant restoration. With a new 50-metre outdoor pool having opened in Brighton) in June and a council-funded restoration under way in Hull, the simple pleasure of the public outdoor pool is seeing a return to popularity to the UK.
In the early 20th century, an explosion of new outdoor pools opened across Britain. Taking the name “lido” from the Italian word for coastline, the boom of construction in the 20th century was part of the post-war public works programme, which aimed to create jobs and promote health. While indoor pools had been gender segregated, public lidos were deliberately mixed and became synonymous with fun and socialising.
Lidos at coastal towns such as Scarborough and Blackpool were destinations for residents and tourists. Lido design between the 1920s and 1940s was innovative and drawn from exotic sources, such as European resorts and cruise ships. They incorporated sumptuous sundecks, sophisticated outdoor restaurants and cafes, alongside vast inviting bathing areas. Impressive diving boards challenged those brave enough to leap theatrically and please the crowds. These lidos were able to accommodate thousands of visitors as wholesome, accessible leisure destinations.
Some of the most iconic lidos are the magnificent art deco sites in Saltdean, Plymouth and Penzance in the south of England. These stunning sites have thankfully been saved from demolition, many others were not. Lido lovers remain hopeful that another art deco site, Broomhill in Ipswich, will one day be restored.
Lidos were grand constructions and monuments of civic pride, both for those who created them and for those who frequented them. They reflected times of change in society and great optimism. At their peak, there were more than 300 active public outdoor pools in the UK, with 11 in Liverpool and 68 in London.
The 1960 Wolfenden report, Sport and the Community and the 1968 Sports Council report Planning for Sport were catalysts for the demise of outdoor swimming pools in policy. The mandate was that “as a general rule, [pools] should be indoors”.
Lidos fell into disrepair and were steadily replaced or destroyed, after councils no longer saw them as part of their leisure facilities and reduced or stopped funding. At the turn of the century, only around 130 public outdoor pools remained, predominately in the south of the UK. That number hardly changed in the following two decades.
The steady loss of these lidos didn’t go unnoticed. The Thirties Society’s report Farewell my Lido (1991) and then Janet Smith’s important 2005 English Heritage-funded book Liquid Assets (with a forthright foreword from artist Tracey Emin) document the history and argued passionately for a brighter future for these much-loved public luxuries.
But as local councils faced financial crises in 2008 and central government reduced spending further from 2010, leisure was treated differently. Responsibility for lidos was transferred to charitable trusts. Those that remained were preserved and saved by community groups or trusts and some local authorities, who understood their public value.
During the last two decades – and recently accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic where outdoor swimming was one of the few activities allowed for a while – there has been a steady growth in outdoor, wild and lido swimming.
And there are cultural markers of a resurgence, too. Fashion label Radley created a limited-edition lido handbag in 2016. In 2019, crowdfunding helped create The Lido Guide. The same year, a heart-warming novel, The Lido by Libby Page, beautifully captured the community spirit, history and value of lidos.
Photographer Christopher Beanland paid homage to lidos in 2020 through a global collection of outdoor pools and their stories. And then this year, Brit Pop band Blur choose the iconic 2014 Martin Parr image of a solitary swimmer in Gourock Pool for the cover of their upcoming album, The Ballad of Darren.
Over 30 lido schemes have emerged from 2021 onwards. They’ve been nurtured by the Future Lidos Group and their National Heritage Lottery funded pooling resources project. The design emphasis is once again on innovation, taking the lessons of lido heritage and the human connection which formed in these inclusive sites into consideration.
If Sport England’s policies can recognise the diverse value of lidos to public health and leisure, the next decade could see a further resurgence in restorations. Even more lidos could soon be making a welcome return across Britain, allowing more access to outdoor swimming – whatever the weather.
Michael Wood founded the Future Lidos Group in 2021 and is a volunteer on the steering committee for the Pooling Resources project. The Pooling Resources project received funding from National Heritage Lottery Fund in January 2023 to create a toolkit to support the restoration and creation of lidos. He has been a volunteer with the Friends of Tynemouth Outdoor Pool for 9 years. He has not personally received any fees for any of this work.
This article was originally published by Undark Magazine.
In October 2021, 84-year-old Jim Yeldell was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer. The first drug he tried disrupted his balance and coordination, so his doctor halved the dose to minimize these side effects, Yeldell recalls. In addition, his physician recommended a course of treatment that included chemotherapy, radiation, and a drug targeting a specific genetic mutation. This combination can be extremely effective—at least in younger people—but it can also be “incredibly toxic” in older, frail people, says Elizabeth Kvale, a palliative-care specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, and also Yeldell’s daughter-in-law.
Older patients are often underrepresented in clinical trials of new cancer treatments, including the one offered to Yeldell. As a result, he only learned of the potential for toxicity because his daughter-in-law had witnessed the treatment’s severe side effects in the older adults at her clinic.
This dearth of age-specific data has profound implications for clinical care, because older adults are more likely than younger people to be diagnosed with cancer. In the U.S., approximately 42 percent of people with cancer are over the age of 70—a number that could grow in the years to come—yet they comprise less than a quarter of the people in clinical trials to test new cancer treatments. Many of those who do participate are the healthiest of the aged, who may not have common age-related conditions like diabetes or poor kidney or heart function, says Mina Sedrak, a medical oncologist and the deputy director of the Center for Cancer and Aging at City of Hope National Medical Center.
For decades, clinical trials have tended to exclude older participants for reasons that include concerns about preexisting conditions and other medications and participants’ ability to travel to trial locations. As a result, clinicians cannot be as certain that approved cancer drugs will work as predicted in clinical trials for the people most likely to have cancer. This dearth of data means that older cancer patients must decide if they want to pursue a treatment that might yield fewer benefits—and cause more side effects—than it did for younger people in the clinical trial.
This evidence gap extends across the spectrum of cancer treatments—from chemotherapy and radiation to immune-checkpoint inhibitors—with sometimes-dire results. Many forms of chemotherapy, for example, have proved to be more toxic in older adults, a discovery that came only after the drugs were approved for use in this population. “This is a huge problem,” Sedrak says. In an effort to minimize side effects, doctors will often tweak the dose or duration of medications that are given to older adults, but these physicians are doing this without any real guidance.
Despite recommendations from funders and regulators, as well as extensive media coverage, not much has changed in the past three decades. “We’re in this space where everyone agrees this is a problem, but there’s very little guidance on how to do better for older adults,” Kvale says. “The consequences in the real world are stark.”
Post-approval studies of cancer drugs have helped shed light on the disconnect between how these drugs are used in clinical trials and how they are used in clinics around the country.
[Read: America’s most popular drug has a puzzling side effect. We finally know why.]
For example, when Cary Gross, a physician and cancer researcher at Yale, set out to study the use of a new kind of cancer drug known as an immune-checkpoint inhibitor, he knew that most clinicians were well aware that clinical trials overlooked older patients. Gross’s research team suspected that some doctors might be wary of offering older adults the treatments, which work by preventing immune cells from switching off, thus allowing them to kill cancer cells. “Maybe they’re going to be more careful,” he says, and offer the intervention to younger patients first.
But in a 2018 analysis of more than 3,000 patients, Gross and his colleagues found that within four months of approval by the FDA, most patients eligible to receive a class of immune-checkpoint inhibitors were being prescribed the drugs. And the patients receiving this treatment in clinics were significantly older than those in the clinical trials. “Oncologists were very ready to give these drugs to the older patients, even though they’re not as well represented,” Gross says.
In another analysis, published this year, Gross and his colleagues examined how these drugs helped people diagnosed with certain types of lung cancer. The team found that the drugs extended the life of patients under the age of 55 by a median of four and a half months, but only by a month in those over the age of 75.
The evidence doesn’t suggest that checkpoint inhibitors aren’t helpful for many patients, Gross says. But it’s important to identify which particular populations are helped the most by these drugs. “I thought that we would see a greater survival benefit than we did,” he says. “It really calls into question how we’re doing research, and we really have to double down on doing more research that includes older patients.”
People over the age of 65 don’t fare well with other types of cancer treatments either. About half of older patients with advanced cancer experience severe and even potentially life-threatening side effects with chemotherapy, which can lead oncologists to lower medication doses, as in Yeldell’s case.
There’s a strong connection between the lack of evidence from clinical trials and worse outcomes in the clinic, according to Kvale. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm for these medicines that don’t seem so toxic up front,” she says, “but understanding where they do or don’t work well is key—not just because of the efficacy, but because those drugs are almost toxically expensive sometimes.”
Since the earliest reports of this data gap, regulators and researchers have tried to fix the problem. Changes to clinical trials have, in principle, made it easier for older adults to sign up. For instance, fewer and fewer studies have an upper age limit for participants. Last year, the FDA issued guidance to industry-funded trials recommending the inclusion of older adults and relaxing other criteria, to allow for participants with natural age-related declines. Still, the problem persists.
When Sedrak and his colleagues set out to understand why the needle had moved so little over the past few decades, their analysis found a number of explanations, beginning with eligibility criteria that may inadvertently disqualify older adults. Physicians may also be concerned about their older patients’ ability to tolerate unknown side effects of new drugs. Patients and caregivers share these concerns. The logistics of participation can also prove problematic.
“But of all these, the main driving force, the upstream force, is that trials are not designed with older adults in mind,” Sedrak says. Clinical trials tend to focus on survival, and although older adults do care about this, many of them have other motivations—and concerns—when considering treatment.
Clinical trials are generally geared toward measuring improvements in health: They may track the size of tumors or months of life gained. These issues aren’t always top of mind for older adults, according to Sedrak. He says he’s more likely to hear questions about how side effects may influence the patient’s cognitive function, ability to live independently, and more. “We don’t design trials that capture the end points that older adults want to know,” he says.
[Read: Hiccups have a curious connection to cancer]
As a group, older adults do experience more side effects, sometimes so severe that the cure rivals the disease. In the absence of evidence from clinical trials, clinicians and patients have tried to find other ways to predict how a patient’s age might influence their response to treatment. In Yeldell’s case, discussions with Kvale and his care team led him to choose a less intensive course of treatment that has kept his cancer stable since October 2022. He continues to live in his own home and exercises with a trainer three times a week.
For others trying to weigh their choices, researchers are developing tools that can create a more complete picture by accounting for a person’s physiological age. In a 2021 clinical trial, Supriya Mohile, a geriatric oncologist at the University of Rochester, and her colleagues tested the use of one such tool, known as a geriatric assessment, on the side effects and toxicity of cancer treatments. The tool assesses a person’s biological age based on various physiological tests.
The team recruited more than 700 people with an average age of 77 who were about to embark on a new cancer-treatment regimen with a high risk of toxicity. Roughly half of the participants received guided treatment-management recommendations based on a geriatric assessment, which their oncologists factored into their treatment decisions. Only half of this group of patients experienced serious side effects from chemotherapy, compared with 71 percent of those who didn’t receive specialized treatment recommendations.
This type of assessment can help avoid both undertreatment of people who might benefit from chemotherapy and overtreatment of those at risk of serious side effects, Mohile says. It doesn’t compensate for the lack of data on older adults. But in the absence of that evidence, tools such as geriatric assessment can help clinicians, patients, and families make better-informed choices. “We’re kind of going backwards around the problem,” Mohile says. Although geriatric oncologists recognize the need for better ways to make decisions, she says, “I think the geriatric assessment needs to be implemented until we have better clinical-trial data.”
Since 2018, the American Society of Clinical Oncology has recommended the use of geriatric assessment to guide cancer care for older patients. But clinicians have been slow to follow through in their practice, in part because the assessment doesn’t necessarily show any cancer-specific benefits, such as tumors shrinking and people living longer. Instead, the tool’s main purpose is to improve quality of life. “We need more prospective therapeutic trials in older adults, but we also need all of these other mechanisms to be funded,” Mohile says, “So we actually know what to do for older adults who are in the real world.”
The Rainforest Retro51 ($59) is an exclusive Retro51 design from Luxury Brands of America. Limited to just 500 units, the pen is a partnership with the Rainforest Trust, a leading rainforest and endangered species conservation organization. With each purchase of the Rainforest Retro51, a portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Rainforest Trust to help protect and maintain the animals and habitat for the future.
The design is a multicolor screenprint in lush greens on a black background with animals hidden in the greenery including showy parrots, sloths, monkeys and wild cats (my animal identification might be incorrect so if you know more accurate descriptions, please leave them in the comments).
My favorite part is the frog end cap. He’s such a cute little guy who peers at you every time you open your pen case or sticks out of your pen cup.
The classic Retro51 Tornado design with its Schmidt rollerball refill is always a go-to at the Desk for on-the-go writing and especially for gateway gifts for loved ones. If you have a friend or family member who loves the tropics and rainforest conservation, grab one of these before they are gone.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by Luxury Brands of America for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Mini-Review: Retro51 Rainforest Trust appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Matt Hancock, the former health secretary, has told the recently opened COVID-19 Inquiry that the UK’s pandemic planning was “completely wrong”. According to Hancock, the doctrine was “to plan for the consequences of a disaster” rather than stopping or containing the virus in the first place.
While there is truth in this claim, it doesn’t give us the whole picture. Hancock was repeatedly asked during his appearance about something called Exercise Cygnus. In 2016, the UK government engaged in a series of exercises including Cygnus to assess their preparedness and response to a pandemic outbreak of influenza.
As the global scale of the COVID pandemic was starting to become apparent in the first half of February 2020, the UK applied the lessons from these exercises to plan for a wide range of scenarios. Based on the scientific evidence available at that time, they anticipated that a “reasonable worst-case scenario” could involve up to 80% of the UK population being infected (with only 50% of those infected showing symptoms). However, it was hoped that the majority of cases would have relatively mild disease.
This information was contained in planning assumptions labelled “officially sensitive” that were shared between a range of healthcare authorities and that I had access to at the time. Some of the figures were also published in the media.
The concept of “herd immunity” played a key role in the existing mathematical models. Herd immunity is the idea that once a sufficiently large proportion of the susceptible population is infected and subsequently acquires immunity, the whole population becomes protected. The thinking was that herd immunity for COVID might be achieved once 80% of the UK population had been infected, or perhaps even earlier.
Underlying all this was the assumption that, in the absence of effective vaccines at that time, the case fatality rate from the new virus (the proportion of infected people who end up dying) would not be so high that herd immunity could only be achieved at the cost of many lives.
Unfortunately, the actual COVID mortality figures – first from China, then other east and southeast Asian countries, and by the second half of February 2020 also from Italy – showed that the initial case fatality rate of COVID was much higher than had been modelled in the UK scenarios.
Without effective vaccines, any attempt at herd immunity had to be abandoned as too many people would have died in the meantime.
The assumption that any new viral pandemic would develop along similar lines as previous influenza pandemics was arguably the key flaw in the UK’s planning doctrine.
Countries that had been significantly affected by the severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) outbreak in 2002–2004 – principally China but also other Asian countries – didn’t make the same mistake. Those countries recognised important biological similarities between COVID (or SARS-CoV-2) and SARS (or SARS-CoV-1) and quickly took action against COVID by means of intensive testing and quarantine policies.
In contrast, the UK lost valuable time between mid-February and mid-March while COVID cases and subsequent deaths were rapidly beginning to rise. The effect on older adults and other vulnerable people in UK care homes was especially severe.
In the end, the UK’s first wave of COVID was only slowed and eventually stopped by the introduction of a lockdown in the fourth week of March 2020.
Hancock’s statement raises a key question about the extent to which errors in the UK’s pandemic planning could have been foreseen at the time. Notably, the UK’s healthcare planning authorities could have taken a wider view of the potential nature of viral pandemics.
The earlier Sars outbreak had been largely confined to China, although it spread to more than 20 other countries through worldwide air travel, and was contained within a few short months. Therefore, the risk of future outbreaks of this type in the UK was regarded as relatively low. Nevertheless, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to include the global re-emergence of a Sars-type virus as one of the possible, albeit more extreme, pandemic scenarios analysed in the UK’s planning exercises in 2016.
Even given the wrong assumption regarding the nature of the new virus, some issues could have been anticipated better. For example, it was well known that the supply chain for personal protective equipment (PPE), which is vital for health and care staff, had become increasingly dependent on low-cost suppliers in China. If the UK’s pandemic planning exercises had taken a more global perspective, the breakdown in the PPE supply chain in the spring of 2020, which caused huge financial waste (and apparent corruption), could have been better anticipated.
Other questions, such as when effective COVID vaccines would become available, were much harder to predict.
Read more: How to prepare for a pandemic
In sum, no planning exercise can cover all eventualities. But a key requirement for policymakers should be to learn as fast and effectively as possible while events unfold.
The business concept of “dynamic capability” – that is, an organisation’s ability to configure and reconfigure its assets, processes and capabilities so as to respond effectively to rapidly changing external circumstances – is useful here. Building and strengthening this capability should be a prerequisite for policymakers and planners in government.
In regards to Hancock’s comment that the planning was “completely wrong”, one could say that the UK plans were indeed flawed in their key assumption (of an influenza rather than a coronavirus pandemic), but also that policymakers should have learned the true nature of the new virus more quickly than they did.
Robert Van Der Meer receives funding from NHS Lanarkshire, NHS Golden Jubilee and the Scottish Government.
As we head into July, stationery and pen fans tend take a moment to rest, enjoy the summer holidays and then re-evaluate their planner or other analog set-up. It’s just how we roll. This week, several posts feature reviews and reflections on goals and stationery plans that were set into motion in January. How have your stationery or planner approach changed since January?
Also, two more sites have taken time to play along with our #21penquestions tag. Some great answers!
(although some people — who shall remain nameless– don’t deserve it!)
We need each other. Please support us by joining our Patreon and be sure to shop with our sponsors and affiliates and let them know you heard about them here. Your patronage supports this site. Without you, we could not continue to do what we do. Thank you!
The post Link Love: Mid-Year Reflections appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
When is a Platinum Preppy not a Platinum Preppy? When its a Muji Fountain Pen (price not available online). In the past, I’ve acquired other pens from Muji that were “white-labelled” but none more perfectly fits this description than this Preppy.
The exterior is entirely opaque white plastic with a clear ring at the cap band. The clip is integrated into the cap and is smooth straight line with no embellishment.
The only branding is the classic “p” and the nib width indication of “03” which is the fine nib.
The pen performs just as well as a regular Preppy but with a simple, clean exterior. The Platinum nib, as always, is smooth and the snap cap makes it a great on-the-go pen. If you have access to a Muji store, I would recommend looking for this gem.
This pen was sent to me by a dear friend.
The post Mini-Review: Muji Fountain Pen appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
It is June, and Pride has flooded the world. Pride is on display in the streets, in stores, in schools, and even at the White House. All of the great and the good (or at least the wealthy, famous, and powerful) are affirming the triumph of the sexual revolution, and some even applaud transgender toddlers and sadomasochism on parade. Affirmation is increasingly mandatory; the devotees of Pride are literally taking away lunch money from low-income children because their Christian school dissents from some aspects of the rainbow creed.
Christians should not be surprised when many of the rich and powerful mock God and scorn His people, and boast of indulging their every material desire and sexual whim. We have been warned about the world and its rulers. But this month also offers us encouragement to resist the depredations of the sexual revolution. June 24th is this weekend, and it is not only the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, but also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.
Before he was even born, John testified to the sanctity of all unborn human life. The sexual revolution requires abortion as a backstop against the consequences of the promiscuity it promotes, but John shows why the personhood of humans in utero cannot be denied without embracing grave heresy about Christ’s nature.
John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.
John’s ministry testifying to Jesus began before either was born. According to Luke’s account:
when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”
The unborn John’s recognition of the unborn Jesus was a miracle that demonstrates the value of human life in the womb in several ways. First, the passage shows that the fetal John the Baptist and the embryonic Jesus were human persons congruous with their adult selves, and that both were already participating in their divine missions.
Second, the recognition of Jesus as Lord early in Mary’s pregnancy testifies to His divinity even as He grew within Mary’s womb. This divinity at conception is why Christians honor Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. This title is affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformed Protestant teaching, and is attested to by many ancient sources, such as Ambrose of Milan’s great Advent hymn, “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”), which in verses 3 and 4 declares both Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity in the womb.
Third, this episode demonstrates the full humanity of all unborn persons. To claim that the unborn are not fully human is necessarily to claim that Jesus was not fully human while in Mary’s womb. But the Bible insists that His humanity was like ours in every way but sin. Denying the full humanity of the unborn therefore requires either also denying the full divinity of the unborn Jesus (thereby rejecting the reason for the unborn John’s joy and the teaching of the ancient church) or asserting that Jesus’ full divinity was present without His full humanity. Either is an enormous heresy.
Just as the beginning of John’s life shows us the value of unborn human life, the end of John’s life shows us the importance of marriage. At the end of his life John sacrificed himself to bear witness to the inviolability of marriage. As recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,” because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” John was then executed at the request of Herodias, after Herod promised a favor to her daughter.
John could have kept quiet on this matter, contenting himself with calls to repentance that did not single out the powerful by name. He could have said that Herod’s sexual conduct was not actually a serious sin worth worrying about, that God doesn’t really care about what people do in the bedroom. He could have chosen to recant in the hope of saving himself after he was imprisoned. But there is no indication that John wavered or doubted his declaration that Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife for himself.
John took his stand for marriage and fidelity, and he held to this position to his death. And Jesus allowed this martyrdom. Jesus could have told John to ease up in condemning Herod’s sexual sin—that it was not that bad, or even not sinful at all. But Jesus did not do this. Rather, His teachings contain many hard words for us, including condemnations of the sins celebrated by Pride. Jesus calls us in the condition he finds us, but He also calls us to repent of our sins, including sexual ones.
The lurid details of John’s death highlight how sin grows when indulged. Herod did not really want to execute John, but he found himself so entangled by his sins of lust and pride that he felt compelled to add evil to evil by ordering John’s death. And so John the Baptist, the wilderness ascetic whom Jesus declared to be the greatest man born of woman, died as a martyr for marriage.
This is a reminder of how seriously Christianity takes marriage and sexuality. The union of husband and wife is both a symbol of Christ and the church, and the vocation that most of us are called to. Marriage is the basis of civilization and culture in this world, and a sign of our union with God in the world to come.
This should encourage us as we are beset by the celebrants of Pride. The Christian path is the way of Christ, which is almost always contrary to the habits and desires that prevail in our culture. This often means worldly suffering, rather than worldly celebration. But we know that the defense of life, marriage, and chastity is a service to God, and He will ensure that our labor is not in vain.
The last time math performance was this low for 13-year-olds was in 1990.
Tomorrow I head out for St. Louis for the pen show. Will you be there too? If not, I hope you are having a wonderful summer and maybe I’ll see you somewhere else in the future?
Until then, have fun with this week’s links including Mike of Inkdependence’s entry into our #21PenQuestions project.
We need each other. Please support our sponsors, affiliates or join our Patreon. Your patronage supports this site. Without them, and without you, we could not continue to do what we do. Thank you!
The post Link Love: Meet Me in St. Louis? appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, social media was criticized as a source of misinformation and conspiracy theories and, more recently, as a risk to youth mental health. We do not dispute these claims, but it is important to acknowledge the diverse functions of social media participation, particularly during outbreaks.
As we found in our study of digital emotions during the 2014 Ebola outbreak, people do not simply use social media to share and receive information. They also use social media to participate in what emotions scholar Katrin Döveling and colleagues term “digital affect cultures.” In other words, social media platforms function as socio-emotional spaces where belonging, solidarity, and emotion management take place.Social media platforms function as socio-emotional spaces where belonging, solidarity, and emotion management take place.During a public health threat, many emotions circulate online. Our study on social media discourse during the 2014 Ebola outbreak revealed that humor was the most common response among English-language tweets. Further, we discovered that several of the most popular humor tweets used AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) and referenced Black celebrities and/or cultural moments, forming a part of Black Twitter—an influential community and communicative style that media studies scholar and commentator Marc Lamont Hill describes as a “digital counterpublic.” This led us to ask, what various types of digital humor emerge during an outbreak? And how does humor help negotiate themes of risk, contagion, and connections with others, particularly within Black Twitter?
We analyzed a corpus of 47,955 tweets from the weeks surrounding and following the first Ebola case in the United States. One major category of humor-based tweets emphasized retreat and isolation, with references to moving “to the moon” or “I’m never leaving my house” as well as fatalistic acceptance of death (“I’m going to die,” “goodbye world,” and “Ebola victims rising from the dead . . . ok. Cool”).
By contrast, Black Twitter humor—defined as tweets using AAVE, referencing Black celebrities, and/or Black cultural moments—focused on the tensions that arise when a community places high value on social relationships and is experiencing the added risk of contact with others. For example, the tweet below featuring Marques Houston brought back a memorable cultural moment in which the celebrity was roasted for his strange fashion choice. Underlying the joke is an emphasis on innovative and ridiculous fashion that allows for public life to continue despite the risks.Black Twitter humor focused on the tensions that arise when a community places high value on social relationships and is experiencing the added risk of contact with others.
In another popular example of Black Twitter humor about Ebola, a picture shows a Swisher Sweet blunt cut into small pieces, with the text “From now on there will be no more passing the blunt due to ebola everyone gets a piece of the blunt.” This humor again emphasizes the value of social connections to the point of maintaining collective smoking sessions while introducing modifications to reduce risk.
While our study focused on the 2014 Ebola outbreak, we readily found similar examples of Black Twitter humor in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in some cases following a similar pattern of referring to Black celebrities and innovations to minimize the risk of social gatherings. In one example, an image of R&B singer, Omarion, was circulated anew as the COVID-19 Omicron variant emerged.
There were also examples of COVID-19 humor that included the use of PPE (personal protective equipment) in public spaces:
Similar to the “pieces of the blunt” tweet that circulated during the Ebola outbreak, the same idea would circulate during COVID-19, with two women on Instagram sharing a video in which they cut a joint into two pieces to jokingly minimize risk. As they cut it, they count to three, each holding a side. Both smile and laugh as they take their “mini joint.”
In our analysis of Twitter humor during Ebola, we follow other studies of disaster humor to argue that humor involves more than simply coping with the fears associated with a biomedical threat like an epidemic. Humor allowed communities to share emotional energy, reaffirm values, and redraw the lines between insider and outsider. We see hints that Twitter served a similar function during the more recent global health crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Black healthcare workers used tweets and humor in COVID-19 vaccine campaigns. Together, these findings illustrate how social media can facilitate belonging, solidarity, and emotion management in highly charged times.
Marci Cottingham is in the Sociology Department at Kenyon College. She is the author of Practical Feelings: Emotions as Resources in a Dynamic Social World.
Ariana Rose received her master’s degree in sociology with a focus on social problems and policy from the University of Amsterdam. She currently studies consciousness and neurodiversity.
We have reviewed the classic Kaweco Sport fountain pen many times but we continue to come back to it. It is a great gateway pen and its is inexpensive enough to live in your bag or on your desk at work. So, of course, you need more than one, right?
So, over the past few weeks, I’ve acquired TWO new models into my collection: the Smooth Sage ($29, EF nib) and the Frosted Blush Pitaya ($24.50, B nib).
I must confess that this is the first Kaweco Sport with a B nib and I am surprised how much I am enjoying it. It isn’t as broad and the BB I tested out years ago and preformed like a Sharpie marker.
Needless to say, my recommendation is that if you’ve never purchased a Kaweco Sport, what in the world are you waiting for? There are dozens of color options and you can even upgrade to the AL-Sport if you want a shiny, and more durable version. We like those too.
DISCLAIMER: The items included in this review were provided free of charge by JetPens for the purpose of review. Please see the About page for more details.
The post Mini-Review: Kaweco Sage Fountain Pen (& Frosted Blush Pitaya) appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has threatened to reconsider his state’s relationship with the College Board.
Download the transcript of this interview.
For this episode of Platypod, I talked to Dr. Tanja Ahlin about her research, work, and academic trajectory. She’s currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and her work focuses on intersections of medical anthropology, social robots, and artificial intelligence. I told her of my perspective as a grad student, making plans and deciding what routes to take to be successful in my field. Dr. Ahlin was very generous in sharing her stories and experiences, which I’m sure are helpful to other grad students as well. Enjoy this episode, and contact us if you have questions, thoughts, or suggestions for other episodes.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin, image from her personal website.
Dr. Tanja Ahlin is a medical anthropologist and STS scholar with a background in translation. She has translated books about technology and more. She has a master’s degree in medical anthropology, focusing on the topic of health and society in South Asia. Dr. Ahlin has been interested in e-health/telehealth for a long time, before the recent COVID-19 pandemic years, in which those words became part of our daily vocabulary. Her Ph.D., which she concluded at the University of Amsterdam, has focused on everyday digital technologies in elder care at a distance. Her Ph.D. research is being published as a book at Rutgers University Press. The book will be available for purchase starting on August 11, 2023.
Calling Family – Digital Technologies and the Making of Transnational Care Collectives | Rutgers University Press
In our conversation, we talked about Dr. Ahlin’s blog focusing on the Anthropology of Data and AI. This project—in which Dr. Ahlin writes about the intersection of tech and different fields such as robotics, policy, ethics, health, and ethnography—is a kind of translation work, since Dr. Ahlin is writing about complex topics to a broader audience who are not familiar with some STS and anthropological concepts and discussions. “The blog posts are not supposed to be very long. I aim for two to four minutes of reading … I realized that people often don’t have time to read more than that, right?” says Dr. Tanja Ahlin.
Dr. Ahlin’s book is based on ten years of ethnographic research with Indian transnational families. These are families where family members live all around the world. The reason for migration is mostly due to work opportunities abroad. In her research, Dr. Ahlin looked at how these families used all kinds of technologies like mobile phones and webcams, the Internet, and Whatsapp, not only to keep in touch with each other but also to provide care at a distance. Dr. Ahlin conducted interviews with nurses living all around the world, from the US to Canada to the UK, the Maldives, and Australia. This varied and diverse field gave origin to the concept of field events that Dr. Ahlin develops in her work. In her work, Dr. Ahlin also developed the notion of transnational care collective to show how care is reconceptualized when it has to be done at a distance.
In sum, this episode of Platypod highlights how anthropologists come from different backgrounds and gives an honest overview of how we get to research our topics and occupy the spaces we do. We do not have linear stories, and that does not determine our potential. We at Platypod are very thankful for Dr. Ahlin’s time and generosity.
Voters outside the Alameda County Courthouse casting their ballots in the 2020 election in Oakland, Calif.
Editor’s Note: This essay is the second in a three-part series that, in recognition of Fidelity Month, reflects on the importance of fidelity to God, our families, and our country. You can watch a recording of Public Discourse’s recent webinar on Fidelity Month here.
In the famous story of Penelope from Homer’s Odyssey, we hear about a woman who faithfully waited for her spouse, Odysseus, to return home from war. Despite the attention of more than a hundred suitors, the queen of Ithaca employs diplomacy and cunning to defer their attentions for twenty years, symbolically weaving and reweaving a burial shroud to buy her time. Not until she could confirm that Odysseus had died was she willing to entertain the idea of remarriage. But what about Odysseus? Was he faithful to her?
It depends on how you look at it. During his arduous ocean journey home, he meets up with two separate seductresses. The first, Circe, uses her magic to charm Odysseus into an intimate relationship as she provides for his every desire. After a year of island comforts, however, he asks her to release him and his crew so they can return home.
The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.
Later in the journey, Odysseus is shipwrecked alone on an island, where the obsessed nymph Calypso makes him her amorous prisoner for seven years. She offers Odysseus immortality if he will stay and become her husband forever. But every day, he goes to the shoreline to weep and pray, longing to return to his wife and son. Eventually, Zeus intercedes, and Calypso is forced to free him. He finally makes it home to an epic reunion with Penelope.
My reading of Odysseus’s entanglements is a merciful one, of a hero who falls but ultimately triumphs in the virtue of fidelity. The commitment to marriage is often fraught with difficulties and missteps, but what matters is turning things around, healing wounds, and persevering in faithful married love.
What Is Marital Fidelity?
In modern lingo, marital fidelity is often taken to mean abstaining from sex with anyone other than one’s spouse. However, this involves not only an oversimplification, but a hyper-focus on the sexual aspect of marriage. If marriage is what natural law teaches it is, namely, the union of a man and a woman who 1) give their whole selves to each other: minds, wills, hearts, and bodies; 2) are open to begetting children; 3) agree to a lifelong union; and 4) are exclusive (no side-partners allowed), then it’s not merely about keeping our hands off others, but primarily about being faithful to the whole gift of self being given and received in marriage.
Therefore, we can distinguish among different kinds of infidelity that offend different parts of the marital union. Infidelity of mind and will involves intellectually desiring or wishing for intimacy with another person outside the marriage bond—which includes neglecting to care for one’s spouse, even if no other person is involved. Emotional infidelity, on the other hand, involves misdirecting the heart, allowing one’s feelings to attach to someone else, and/or neglecting our spouse’s emotional needs. And physical infidelity, of course, involves the body and includes succumbing to outside physical, including sexual, acts of affection, and/or neglecting our spouse’s physical-sexual needs.
Essentially, it is possible to cheat not only through sex but in several ways, including by creating intellectual and/or emotional bonds with an opposite-sex friend other than our spouse. Indeed, intellectual and emotional infidelity are often the ladder rungs that lead to the slide down into sexual infidelity. We are body-soul unities, and the sharing of our souls (through our minds and emotions) naturally leads to the sharing of our bodies. So, guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternative appeals, as Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.
It takes concerted effort to avoid indiscretions on all these fronts, but that is where the complete gift of the will matters. When fidelity becomes difficult and a thousand Siren songs are playing in our ears, we tie our will to the mast and take the necessary measures to avoid entrapments. This is made easier by the positive effort to focus on weaving (and reweaving) the two strands of the marriage, man and woman, into one. Committed couples strive toward a more perfect union every day, focusing on daily collaboration, mutual understanding, forbearance, making compromises, patiently bearing each other’s faults, displaying good humor, and making creative sacrifices to add joy to the daily grind. In this way, the lion’s share of romantic energy and attention is already in the right place, and there’s not much of either one left over for others!
Guarding marital love includes directing our most intimate treasures toward our spouse and warding off alternate appeals, like Penelope did. Or after falling, getting up again, like Odysseus.
Modern Criticisms of Marital Fidelity
Clearly, marital fidelity involves a lot of hard work, so it’s reasonable to ask: is it worth it? For decades, we have been hounded with messages that nonmarital sex, easy, no-fault divorce, cohabitation, and same-sex romantic relationships are acceptable, and that we should lighten up on the commitment to faithful marriage as the one and only ideal. Today, we hear new voices calling for society to loosen further, to consider polyamory and support open marriages and polycules, what academics call “consensual nonmonogamous (CNM) relationships.”
Still other (more cantankerous) voices are calling for society to do away with mononormativity altogether (which, like heteronormativity, is used as a term of disparagement—in this case, toward the monogamous ideal). These voices claim it’s discriminatory to put monogamy on a pedestal over and above other romantic relationships.
It’s worth pausing to ask, do they have a point? Or do the cost-benefit scales still tip in favor of fidelity?
Personal Benefits of Marital Fidelity
Social-science research on CNM partnerships is still in its infancy, but the best data to date are not flattering. Participants report lower overall happiness, relationship satisfaction, and sexual satisfaction than monogamous couples. Researchers hypothesize that this is due to minority stress, or the social stigma that still exists toward nonmonogamous partners. If only society were more accepting, the story goes, these groups would experience better outcomes. However, experience-based wisdom suggests other reasons related to the nature of the arrangement itself (and not external social factors). Here are a few of the more obvious hypotheses.
First, a firm marital commitment engenders deep psychological benefits. Once the promise to be faithful, exclusive, and permanent is given, and after some time living that way, couples experience a deep sense of psychological peace. Essentially, they realize they can trust each other. Neither has to worry about whether interest is waning, if the other has his or her eyes on the door, or if there might be a new partner on the side.
Fear of the future is also reduced, as faithful couples have confidence that they won’t be all alone as they face tragedy, illness, old age, and finally, death, especially the longer they stick together through hard times. And fears about parenting and children’s futures are reduced, as mothers can count on the father’s help and fathers can count on the mother’s help. As both sexes pour their unique talents into the parenting enterprise, a great synergy of their strengths gives children the best start in life.
By contrast, consensual nonmonogamy promotes distrust, insecurity, and fear. With no promises to be faithful, exclusive, or permanent, these relationships are unstable and prone to dissolution. Naturally, real or perceived comparisons to other sexual partners will lead to deep insecurities and frail self-esteem. The cluster of relationships will feel unfair; someone will certainly feel less loved and valued than others in the group.
Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing. In the case of a polycule, high-maintenance group members (the ill, aging, depressed) will be let go to fend on their own.
Challenges multiply when children enter the question. Fights over different perspectives on childcare and discipline will increase, as the revolving door of lovers means more adult opinions have to be managed about what to do with kids. And there is, of course, a heightened risk of novel sexual disease transmission, with the accompanying stress, accusations, and blaming.
Those in polyamorous relationships will also be more fearful for the future, as the instability inherent in this arrangement makes for precarious long-term planning and investing.
Second, permanent marital partnerships accrue material and financial benefits. Faithfully married people are better off financially because they pool their resources, with no sharing with additional romantic partners.
They invest together in their own assets, savings, retirement accounts, and education. This investment includes the manual labor that goes unmonetized—time spent helping with children, chores, and upkeep of other material goods—rather than on outside partners unrelated to the primary home.
Married couples can also sign couple-exclusive contracts with confidence, taking advantage of longer-term opportunities including insurance policies, homeownership, and entrepreneurial endeavors.
Nonmonogamous couples, by contrast, experience greater financial confusion and struggle. Myriad questions about how to handle expenses will bring on stifling decision fatigue. In an open marriage, fights will emerge around who pays for what, lives where, and how much can be spent on new romantic pursuits.
Jealousy seems inevitable as partners spend money on outside relationships, making budgeting an emotional minefield. The instability of polyamorous relationships will preclude much long-term financial strategizing.
Third, faithful marriages generate an ethos of unity. To make the relationship last, spouses must learn to negotiate, compromise, and carve out win-win solutions. Compromise strengthens character and builds emotional resilience. Checks on personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society. Mercy and forbearance are required to hang on, giving rise to more compassionate spouses.
Checks upon personal autonomy guarantee growth in selflessness, which leads to more humble service to others, including spouse, children, neighbor, and greater society.
But open marriages and polycules foment an ethos of division. These relationships give primacy to each individual’s self-actualization through subjective feelings rather than to spousal unity, so tensions and disagreements will more likely to lead to standoffs and exits than to compromises.
Each partner will prefer to release tension outside, on new distractions and abatements, further weakening the primary relationship. Open marriages and polycules will be more susceptible to division and divorce and will bring that spirit of separation to their parenting style, being more willing to separate children from biological parents and established relational bonds. Questions of paternity, fatherly responsibility, and abortion have the potential to sow deep discord and bitter conflict.
Public Benefits of Marital Fidelity
Besides the personal advantages that marital fidelity confers, there are numerous public benefits as well—especially to children and lower income families.
Benefits to children. About 25 percent of the U.S. Population is children, and this sizable portion of our society is also the most vulnerable, dependent on us adults for their well-being. Faithful marriages provide these benefits to kids: 1) A more stable home, meaning greater stability for the child, a greater probability of a lifelong home and family. 2) A safer home, by virtually eliminating the number one risk of child abuse: an unrelated adult male in the home. 3) Higher quality parenting, due to the gender-balanced synergy described above. 4) An anchor for the child’s identity, satisfying the human desire to know and be loved by one’s biological kin. 5) Better educational outcomes, as these kids are statistically more likely to achieve higher grades and degrees, which are correlated with higher earnings later. 6) Increased financial resources, as described above, including inheritance and family-owned assets.
Benefits to the poor and to working-class men. Other vulnerable segments of our society include the poor, and working-class men. Marriage benefits them in several ways: First consider the Success Sequence: 97 percent of millennials who follow the success sequence—that is, they graduate from high school, get a full-time job once their education is completed, and marry before having children—avoid a life of poverty. The power of this sequence, which includes monogamous marriage, can catapult many vulnerable individuals upward.
All the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.
Marriage is also associated with better mental and physical health for men. Men faithfully married to a woman are less likely to report depression, and they experience higher levels of happiness. Likewise, men do better financially when faithfully married.
All the above benefits of faithful monogamous marriage ripple out to benefit society as a whole (see graphic). They yield more unified and stable families that strengthen the social fabric. Their ethos of unity generates “a web of trust across generations, giving rise to the acquisition of virtues and immense social capital (pp. 9–10 here).” By contrast, all the instability, brokenness, and infidelity of nonmonogamous unions will pull and tear communities apart, increasing relational anarchy and human harm, especially toward the most vulnerable: children and the poor.
Let us acknowledge that, in our wounded world, brokenness is often inevitable. Life happens, and often we cannot live up to the ideal, no matter how much we might try. With compassionate mercy, we can avoid painful judgments of particular people in particular situations. Nonetheless, we cannot give up on fidelity to the marriage ideal, which is the source of human healing, unity, and flourishing. Only when we acknowledge an ideal for what it is—a gold standard by which all other options are calibrated—can we work to shore up less-than-ideal situations to become the best versions of themselves possible.
Those in stable, intact families bear a special responsibility here to reach out to those who are relationally wounded, to share their relationship riches, and to offer apprenticeships in healthy family formation, so as to promote social healing writ large.
Conclusion
Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.
To all our modern marriage heroes, those facing challenging situations and doing all they can to put the needs of their spouse and children before their own self-centered desires, we salute you. Thank you for your national service. You are walking the path of fidelity, which leads to a brighter future for you, your family, and the entire nation.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has campaigned against what he has described as “woke indoctrination” in the classroom.
Feminist foreign policies (FFP) are considered the latest contribution of feminism to global governance. Eleven countries around the world have embraced FFP, aiming to “systematically integrate a gender perspective throughout” foreign policy agendas.
In recent years, FFP has spread to Latin America: Mexico introduced an FFP in 2020 and the newly elected Chilean and Colombian governments have expressed their intentions of adopting the framework.
This growing interest in FFP across Latin American raises important questions: What exactly is this feminist foreign policy and what is there to gain by naming foreign policies “feminist”? Should Latin American feminists engage, support, critique, or be suspicious of this global trend? What does FFP look like in a Latin American context?
FFP is emerging as a new subfield in feminist international relations. Building on women’s rights and peace movements around the globe, feminism occupies an important position within academic and political spaces since it provides a powerful source of intervention against different forms of discrimination.
The theoretical foundations of FFP, however, are still not clearly defined. What an FFP looks like depends largely on a government’s interpretation of the concept.
Sweden first proposed a general FFP model built on what they call the three R’s: resources, representation and rights. Their model went on to define “six long-term external objectives” centered on policy making with a gender perspective: freedom from different types of gender-based violence; women’s participation in preventing and resolving conflicts, and post-conflict peace building; political participation; economic rights and empowerment; and sexual and reproductive health and rights. This initial Swedish proposal served as a basis for other countries’ policies.
For many foreign policy observers and feminist activists these objectives were still too vague and ambiguous. First, what does foreign policy entail? This question underlies the discussion among academics and activists about feminism being co-opted for neoliberal economic purposes, or if it maintains its potential as a critical proposition. There are also questions concerning contentious topics for feminists. For instance, how is the gender perspective incorporated into defense and security? Given the long tradition of pacifism in the feminist movement globally and its demand for an active commitment to disarmament, how can countries like Canada simultaneously export arms and pursue an FFP?
International organizations have tried to provide definitional clarity. In its most ambitious expression, UN Women proposes that an FFP should aspire to transform the overall practice of foreign policy—including a country’s diplomacy, defense and security cooperation, aid, trade, climate security, and immigration policies—to the benefit of women and girls.
Feminist civil society, however, tends to take a more critical stance. The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in Germany believes that “fixating on the production of a universally acceptable and concrete definition of a feminist foreign policy fails to consider the different and varied political realities that shape our global landscape.” Thus, it proposes five concepts to inform policy development that better accounts for this variation: intersectionality; empathetic reflexivity; substantive representation and participation; accountability; and, active peace commitment. Regardless of the concrete definition, FFP aims to achieve explicit normative and ethical goals. Yet, as Jennifer Thompson notes, FFP is a state invention in which foreign policy goals are often shaped by state interests rather than feminist activists’ normative principles. While civil society often formulates FFP demands, states implement foreign policies. In other words, it is states that ultimately decide what counts as FFP and what does not. As a result, FFPs may not fulfill their ethical promises—particularly in countries without strong accountability mechanisms. Mexico’s attempt to develop an FFP is a case in point.
In September 2022, Internacional Feminista, a Mexican feminist organization that I co-founded, published the first evaluation of Mexico’s FFP. My colleagues and I concluded that there is no clarity as to what the FFP actually entails and no policy roadmap detailing the FFP’s actions, outcomes, indicators, and intended impact. The Mexican FFP has stalled.
Regarding the question of what constitutes foreign policy, the Mexican FFP has a broad and ambitious scope. The Secretariat of Foreign Affairs seeks to mainstream gender perspectives across all foreign policy areas as one of its core objectives, yet we found this does not happen in practice. Discussion of the FFP is most visible in Mexico’s rhetoric in multilateral fora. However, tangible evidence that Mexico is actually considering a gender perspective is largely absent from other foreign policy issues, such as defense, trade, and diplomacy.
One innovation of Mexico’s FFP was prioritizing gender parity within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and its diplomatic corps. Nonetheless, it is not possible to assess whether there is gender parity across the ranks as the Secretariat has no available records of personnel demographic data, disaggregated by gender or rank. The lack of available data disaggregated by gender suggests that this is not as much of a focus area as it’s made out to be.
Another feature of the Mexican initiative was its aim of strengthening the protocols to address and prevent gender-based violence within the foreign ministry. However, there is very little information available regarding how these are implemented and if they have achieved their intended outcomes. The absence of information again suggests that this was not a priority task. In fact, two cases call into question Mexico’s commitment to FFP: one involved failures in consular attention to a Mexican woman victim of gender-based violence in Qatar, and another involved an attempt to appoint a man accused of sexual harassment as Mexico’s ambassador to Panama.
In its FFP plan, the Secretariat also announced funding for intersectionality-related efforts. However, data shows that the budget remained constant from 2018 to 2020. Following the austerity policies of the current administration, no additional resources were granted to support these efforts. Moreover, the budget document labeled these resources as “Expenditures for equality between women and men.” By continuing to interpret “intersectionality” and “gender perspective” as synonymous, the Mexican FFP dilutes the disruptive spirit of intersectionality that accounts for multidimensional identities beyond binary gender categories.
Without clear implementation guidelines and evaluation criteria, Mexican officials have struggled to navigate the contradictions within the government. The most notorious is the lack of support from the president himself who, according to Mexico’s Constitution, is responsible for defining foreign policy objectives. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is openly hostile towards the feminist movement, and a recent leak indicates that the Secretary of Defense spies on feminist activists. Yet, diplomats continue to uphold feminist principles in multilateral forums. The president’s hostility and the mismatch between secretariats obstructs necessary dialogue with feminist civil society and blocks the chances of effective policy accountability.
The Mexican experience highlights the challenges of implementing FFPs in Latin America.
First, it is clear that FFP is not as boundary-pushing as its supporters suggest. It is limited by the lack of accountability mechanisms, broad political support and budget constraints. As a result, FFP is often insufficient to drive change on critical issues. Yet, feminism in the region, as Claudia Korol puts it, “is a rebellious movement in which the plural and diverse bodies and the different struggles seek their place, and demand to be named.” In other words, feminism is in tension with the circles of institutionalized, disciplined and ordered practices, such as government-led foreign policies.
In countries with rampant economic inequality and high rates of gender violence against women, feminist principled policies are sorely needed. Due to institutional resistance, however, policy implementation is far from guaranteed. The design and implementation of foreign policies in the region have historically been a space for male elites and, as the example of Mexico illustrates, the FFP has been insufficient to break this inertia. In the words of feminist scholar Angela Davis, “if standards for feminism are created by those who have already ascended economic hierarchies and are attempting to make the last climb to the top, how is this relevant to women who are at the very bottom?”
After recent elections in Chile and Colombia, leaders are now developing their foreign policies and both countries have declared their interest in adopting an FFP. As consultations develop in Bogotá and Santiago, it is worth remembering that simply labeling a foreign policy as feminist without implementing policies that account for gender perspectives or advance women’s rights creates an illusion of change, while keeping systems of oppression intact and further setting back gender justice.
Genuine efforts to advance gender justice ought to reimagine traditional international relations and diplomacy. As I have argued elsewhere, this can be achieved by more fully considering local dynamics and actors in developing foreign policies. Feminist civil society has been at the forefront of driving successful changes in domestic policies—and we ought to incorporate their strategies and insights into foreign policy development.
Another pen show find is the Nakabayashi Logical Prime notebooks. These are softcover notebooks are stitch bound with a bookbinding tape over the stitches to reinforce.
There are a variety of interior paper options (Point, Graph, 7mm Lined and 6mm Lined) and the notebooks can be found around the internet in a variety of sizes. Yoseka Stationery stocks the Logical Prime notebooks in A5 size ($6 each).
The more unusual B5 size (6.9″ x 9.8″ or 176 x 250mm) was picked up from a vendor at a pen show. Which show? Maybe the California Pen Show. Which vendor? Taccia but they don’t list these notebooks on their web site.
According to the Nakabayashi Global web site, the Logical Prime notebooks are only available in A5 and B5 sizes though in the US market, you are more likely to find an A5 notebook than the larger B5.
All the internal rulings are in a fine dark green line. At the top or each page is a space for writing a title or description and date.
What’s really interesting about these notebooks is the unusual ruling options (I didn’t get one of the standard grid notebooks because after seeing the Point and Lined, the graph was just ho-hum). The Ruled options, both 6mm and 7mm actually feature two additional light dotted lines between each solid rule creating guides for much smaller increments. There are also dotted vertical lines at the same interval as the ruling so the paper can be used as graph if you want or need it to do so. The multiple horizontal lines would be great if you want to practice your handwriting or calligraphy.
At the top and bottom of the page are dots and tick marks indicating the center of the page, 1/3, 1/4 and so on. If you were wanting to grid something out on a page, these marks will help you maintain consistency from page to page. If you were to use these notebooks for bullet journaling, this would help to divide the page for week-on-two-pages, making a monthly overview calendar, etc.
The paper is a soft cream ivory color, not bright white.
There is not a huge difference, obviously, between the 6mm and 7mm lined paper but I know folks have clear preferences. When I was testing the paper, I thought I preferred the 7mm lined because I had a little more space but I was really jumping between the margins in a weird way so I think the 6mm is a bit better for my tiny handwriting.
Then there was the Point style which has dots spaced really far apart. On the back cover it says “12x15pt” which I think is 12mm dot grid (approx 9/16″) or thereabouts. That’s some pretty big grid!
I feel like a grid of this scale is a good compromise for someone who might want blank but needs a little guidance.
Did I mention that this paper shows sheen? Probably should have mentioned that sooner. So, good quality paper, unusual ruling options, and its affordable? You should probably stock up now. I don’t think you’ll regret it.
The post Notebook Review: Nakabayashi Logical Prime B5 Notebooks appeared first on The Well-Appointed Desk.
FreshRSS 