Month: May 2015

Source: The Baffler

At about the beginning of this decade, mass-market mindfulness rolled out of the Bay Area like a brand new app. Very much like an app, in fact, or a whole swarm of apps. Previous self-improvement trends had been transmitted via books, inspirational speakers, and CDs; now, mindfulness could be carried around on a smartphone. There are hundreds of them, these mindfulness apps, bearing names like Smiling Mind and Buddhify. A typical example features timed stretches of meditation, as brief as one minute, accompanied by soothing voices, soporific music, and images of forests and waterfalls. read more

Source: Truthout

I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.

— Dr. Seuss

For a while now, I’ve been banging awake around five o’clock in the morning, but I languish for a time in that warm you’re-comfy-and-you-know-it zone of semi-sleep, until I eventually grab myself by the face and drag myself out of bed. Before I leave the room, I make sure to crack both of my ankles; the small hallway connecting us to my daughter’s bedroom has the acoustic qualities of a finely-crafted orchestra hall, and when those joints decide to thud out there in the pre-dawn gloom, it sounds like a damn car accident. My poor, stupid, oft-broken and oft-sprained ankles have woken my daughter up more times than I can count when they decide to pop on a pivot, so I always try and remember to kick out the jams before I use the door. read more

Source: Al Jazeera

After my family immigrated to Maryland, I internalized the racism that could be turned against me

In February 1968 the Kerner Report, commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson to examine the causes of urban riots, warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.” The report was duly ignored, even as its predictions were borne out just a few months later, when riots broke out in hundreds of cities after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

My family emigrated from India to Baltimore in 1969, the year after a week of deadly and destructive riots swept through the city’s poverty belt. Over the next 20 years we lived in Baltimore County, which envelops the city. In the 1970s, we were the only nonwhite family for blocks, except for two other Asian households. Because my father was an engineer and my siblings and I excelled in school, we were able to benefit from the model minority stereotype. While early on we had to confront open racism, we were accepted into white culture over time. This contradictory experience meant I internalized the racism that I could be subjected to. read more