JOUR 4250

Walt Disney was ahead of his time in that he saw better than any of his contemporaries the importance of branding, and of creating a culture around the products of his studio that devotees could become totally immersed in. When Disney's animation studio in Anaheim, California received letters in the 40s and 50s from people who wanted to tour their facilities, Walt realized that there was a market to be tapped there. So in 1955, Disneyland opens and provides the company's devotees with a place to make a pilgrimage to demonstrate their devotion. Had Disney not died of cancer in 1966, he might have been able to make his original vision for EPCOT in Florida a reality. He wanted the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow to be an actual, real community where real people actually lived and worked. He wanted Disney to have its own city under its control. The original vision for EPCOT proved to be too ambitious for Disney to follow through with, but the idea expressed by Disney...

Senator Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic presidential primary today. For a while, she seemed like she could have been the next Obama; a first-term Senator from a large, diverse state who ran on charisma to weld together a coalition of nonwhite voters and white liberals to succeed an unpopular Republican president and usher in a new period of progressive policymaking. That didn't happen, but why? Well, a few reasons. In 2007, Obama had the specific advantage of having been publicly against the Iraq War when his rivals on the stage had favored it when it started. That war had become unpopular since, and it gave him a particular idea to run on that the other candidates would have had trouble with. In 2019, the field is stratified between progressives that support shifting to a single-payer healthcare system under the banner of "Medicare for All" and moderates who support adding a public option to the ACA's exchanges. Harris tried to strike a middle ground,...

American Sign Language is the language of the Deaf community in America. That statement means that ASL is how Deaf people communicate, but it is not all that it means. Because to Deaf people, sign language is more than just a language. It is a vehicle for the preservation and transmission of a unique Deaf culture, separate from the hearing culture and possessed of its own traditions and customs. ASL originated in deaf education, the result of a French system used in instruction margin with the various home sign systems used by students. This language spread quickly in the early 19th century, but the hearing population thought that it wasn't a full language. They thought that the deaf used such a primitive system because they had no better option. But fortunately, hearing people could give them a better option. Because they can see, they can read lips. And because they can produce sound, they can mimic lip movements, and learn to use spoken language. This "oralist" app...

The behavior of people is the product of the signals provided to them by the society they develop in. Garbage in, garbage out. The ideas and lessons that we learn as children affect the people that we become for the rest of our lives. In recent years, modern society has devoted much attention and thought to the ways we socialize girls to become better women. Teaching them to be confident, to strive towards their own success, to not define themselves in relation to the men in their lives. Not as much attention is paid to how to raise boys to become better men, and this matters because the modes of masculinity that we learn otherwise do real damage to our development. The traditional mode of masculinity we learn is to seal ourselves off from others; that to come to people about our problems is to become like women, and therefore to become lesser than "real men". That being a "real man" means not showing emotions other than anger, to impose your will upon others, mak...

In the 21st century United States, most forms of identity have become bound up in an ongoing polarization that started in the realm of electoral politics but has spread out into almost all aspects of society. Identities that already carried a political meaning; race, gender, sexual orientation, became more rigid as groups that historically did not have the clout to make their demands heard got it, and historically dominant groups responded negatively to having to listen. At the same time, identities that hadn't carried that same weight started to gain it; most notably the shift of college-educated white people into the liberal bloc. But, one type of identity has managed to avoid being bound up in that polarization; disability remains, somehow, independent of other identities. The reason why seems obvious when you write it out; ability changes over time. Unlike race, gender or sexual orientation, it is possible, even likely, that you can be born able and become disabled later in l...

When my brother came out as, well, my brother, I didn't find out from him. Instead, I found out from my mother. He had come out to the parents first, and it didn't go very well then, especially with her. I had come home from my first semester of my freshman year, and one day she's venting to me about my brother, and him having come out to her is just kind of casually thrown into it. He and I never had a big discussion about it, he just sort of gradually realized that I knew. He's told me that he never thought I wouldn't take it well, but that he was so focused on how to come out to the parents that the idea of coming out to me just hadn't crossed his mind. Over the past few years, he's learned that he can trust me to not freak out about it. I had no real idea what being trans meant at the time, but I could tell that this mattered to him, and how the parents had reacted to it was causing him real distress. So I was willing to listen, and to learn. And to be...