JOUR 4250

At a "gender reveal" party in Iowa, a woman died when a canister filled with gunpowder and sealed with a metal cap detonated, sending pieces of metal flying into the air that struck her in the head. This device was an intended part of the event, supposed to send blue or pink powder into the air to reveal the sex of a young couple's coming child. These parties have become increasingly popular with young couples, and some have been elaborate, and others have also caused damage. Faulty wiring in a device at an Arizona gender reveal party started a forest fire, causing $8 million in damage and taking over 400 firefighters over a week to put out. Why do this? Even if you ignore the potential for these devices to do damage, because most gender reveal parties don't involve explosives, why have the party? Why announce the child's sex to the world months before they are born, and years before gender roles begin playing a significant part in the child's everyday life?...

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...